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A Knight of Faith
| Article
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20544 |
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BOOK WORLD
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| Issue
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11 / 1992 |
2,968 Words |
| Author
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James Thompson
James Thompson, who lives in Nashville, is the author of
several books, the most recent of which is The Church, the
South and the Future. |
PILGRIM IN THE RUINS
A Life of Walker Percy
Jay Tolson
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1992
640 pp., $28.00
Walker Percy's life evinces none of the adventure, excitement, drama, or scandal that a literary biographer pounces upon to enliven the often-dull story of a writer writing. Percy did not, like Hemingway, gun down large mammals in Africa, crawl ount of crashed planes, or run bulls through the streets of Pamplona. Nor did he fling himself into heroic bouts of drunkenness like Faulkner, descend into the caverns of madness like Poe, or ship out on a whaler like Melville. He appears tame alongside such contemporaries as Norman Mailer, Gore Vidal, and Truman Capote, for he never ran for mayor of New York City; never called William F. Buckley, Jr., a "crypto-Nazi" on nationwide television; never capered with the bon ton in the salons and saloons where the rich and notorious congregate.
For most of his adult years, from the late 1940s, Percy toiled at his books and essays while living uneventfully in the poky little Louisiana town of Covington. A broad outline of his earlier life reveals nothing particularly striking, either. Born to a family that combined Old South gentility with a New South knack for making money, Percy spent his childhood in Birmingham, Alabama, and his teenage years in Greenville, Mississippi, where he, his mother, and his two younger brothers went to live with a cousin after Percy's father died in 1929. Educated at the University of North Carolina and Columbia's College of Physicians and Surgeons, he was bound for a career in medicine until he contracted tuberculosis while interning in pathology at Bellevue Hospital. After a long recuperation at a sanitarium in Saranac Lake, New York, he abandoned medicine, drifted aimlessly for a spell, and then married, moved to Louisiana, and started to write.
What does a biographer do with a man who sat quietly at his desk for a large part of his life? If he possesses Jay Tolson's initiative and imagination, he turns Percy inside out and produces a biography of the inner man, or, to put it in old-fashioned terms, he recounts the journey of a soul. "The drama of his life," Tolson asserts, "was less a story of events than an internal struggle--psychological but ultimately spiritual--to find a ground of certainty and security, a struggle to find among his many selves and essential self, a soul." In examining Percy's "fierce anchoritic struggle" to understand himself and the
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