Arts and Letters

Born in 1916 in Alabama, Walker Percy lost first his father and then his mother by the time he reached the age of thirteen. An extraordinary blessing followed these tragedies when William Alexander Percy, his "Uncle Will," took him and his two brothers into his home in Greenville, Mississippi, and brought them up as his own. William Alexander Percy was a distinguished man of letters, of classical tastes and classical learning, a published poet, scholar, traveller, and citizen of the world there on his Delta plantation, best known now for his autobiographical book Lanterns on the Levee (republished in recent years with a penetrating and affecting introduction by Walker Percy).

In the home in Greenville—a small, relatively well-endowed and certainly civil town in the Mississippi Delta (which incidentally became, in William Alexander Percy's time, and largely owing to him, home to seventeen nationally published writers), Walker Percy met all his uncle offered, more than halfway. His was already a mind of keen scientific curiosity and appetite. He was a chemistry major at the University of North Carolina, where he graduated; at Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons he earned his M.D. Then, while an intern at Bellevue Hospital in New York, he contracted tuberculosis. It was when his life was thereby changed that, on the way to the practice of medicine, he became a writer.

What remained the same, one feels, was the source of both the dedications, the fundamental passion that was to endure all his life, for searching out, examining closely, the inner man, getting at his truth. Walker Percy's own malaise may in its sinister way have pointed him toward what might cause all malaise in the human spirit. Symptoms were eloquent to his imagination; in human symptoms could lie the start, the seed, of stories. He found his own talent in response to a threat directed at the body and the spirit. Among writers of fiction, perhaps crusaders are the most likely early starters. Walker, always deeply concerned with moral patterns of belief and behavior, was not a crusader; he wrote his own novels with a strong sense of irony. The Moviegoer was followed by five more: The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, The Second Coming, and The Thanatos Syndrome. He published two books of nonfiction, The Message in the Bottle and Lost in the Cosmos. A last collection is to be published in the near future, Signposts in a Strange Land.

In both fiction and non-fiction, in literary explorations of various and unpredictable kinds, he found original ways to perform his work. Those widely ranging imaginative subjects of fiction and fantasy represented ways to go about uncovering and excavating and bringing into recognition human truths wherever they can be found. Last year, in Washington, he gave his Jefferson Lecture the title "The San Andreas Fault in the Modern Mind."

He had a daring mind, and he took its dare. One of the great pleasures to be found in his novels, scene by scene, is the grace and the boldness of his leaps of speculation. His observation of the physical world, the secular world, is diamond-sharp. His ear is faultless; it could tune itself perfectly to the comic in our ways of speech. His dialogue gives it back to us so faithfully that we recognize its inborn hilarity. As we're shown by the comedy too, he was convinced of life's mystery and of our mystery; and its presence reassured a mind like his, a reader feels, rather than causing it alarm.

Walker Percy from the outset commanded respect and admiration for his work. His first novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award. His writing has at the same time remained for the public a sometime source of mystery. "But what is he really up to?" his readers don't mind asking.

No imaginative writer of our times—fantasist, moralist, philosopher, satirist, whatever those readers wish to call him at different times—has been more aware himself of what he was, or better schooled to confront it and give it to us, in a fashion we've not met with before, than Walker Percy. He was really "up to" exactly what we see before us. It comes to whatever could make him best able to confront our common riddle, to encompass the subject before us, always clear to his gaze. We, who are sitting here today, ourselves, we, body and soul, always, were, and still are, himself always along with the rest of us, his subject.

He was a fine artist, and a lovely man.