REVIEW BY Jonathan Potter
Publisher's note: this item reprinted with permission from Christianity and Literature, Vol. 42, No. 4., Summer 1993, pp. 620-622. A paperback version of the book is now available from the University of North Carolina Press.
This first major biography of Walker Percy will be welcomed by Percy's fellow-pilgrims -- those of us for whom Percy's writings have been a unique kind of "message in the bottle" and for whom Percy's death was a tremendous loss indeed. Tolson's work, impressive in both scope and coherence, will also be of value to anyone interested in the changing South, the relationship between art and faith, and again between faith and science. These issues were close to the heart of Percy the novelist and essayist, and Tolson's treatment of them as reflected in the life of the author serves to illuminate them and send us back to Percy's works with renewed interest and insight. It is a pleasure to discover, as Martin Luschei said after meeting Percy, that "the man behind the books" is of the same authentic texture as the books themselves (370).
Tolson's biographical strategy is much in keeping with Percy's novelistic emphasis on the particulars of person and place. The initial chapters of Pilgrim in the Ruins meticulously set the scene -- Percy's "interconnected legacy of family and regional history" (14). The scholarly elegance and craft with which Tolson brings together these disparate elements, at the same time foreshadowing Percy's paradoxical relation to his Southern legacy, mark Tolson's greatest strengths as a biographer; he sifts and teases and weaves all of the available material with remarkable deftness. In spite of this structural elegance, however, the initial chapters are marred by a minor but sometimes glaring deficiency of tone and diction, a kind of Victorian daintiness that is at times distracting. Nevertheless, as his subject emerges, so does the clarity and accuracy of Tolson's prose.
Tolson is not about the business of out-styling his subject, but rather about the humble business of presenting him in all his aspects. The image Tolson formulates for us is informed by a chorus of friends and family, colleagues and students whose anecdotes and recollections show us Percy making his way through life's dim, dazzling vicissitudes. Here we encounter such mundane and curious details as Percy's admiration for the music of Bruce Springsteen (485) and his predilection for "Wendy's" hamburgers (476). Or we hear Percy's distinctive voice, usually wry and engagingly understated (to a colleague while browsing in a bookstore: "I once had a student who discovered James .... Never heard from her again"), sometimes surly and brooding (to his daughter, Mary Pratt, who had remarked on her father's failure to say grace at lunch one day: "I'll say the damn grace if I feel like it") (383).
Tolson also sheds new light on key points in Percy's movement from scientism to Catholicism, a story that had become all but ossified in the distilled and cursory version of it Percy generally related in interviews and essays. Especially interesting is Tolson's account of the arguments Percy had with Arthur Fortugno, a fellow tuberculosis patient who was "a feisty debater, well-versed in Catholic apologetics" (174). A year or so later, while in New Mexico with Shelby Foote, Percy expressed his inclination towards Catholicism -- to which Foote responded contemptuously, "Yours is a mind in full intellectual retreat" (191).
Foote's reaction was an extreme expression of what would nonetheless remain, throughout their life-long friendship, his essential attitude towards Percy's faith. In spite of this opposition (or perhaps, in some dialectical way, because of it) their friendship remained a strong and important one to both men; and Tolson's presentation of their correspondence is perhaps the central thread holding together an impressive biographical tapestry (made somewhat bittersweet by the fact that a good portion of Percy's side of the correspondence has been lost). This in spite of the fact that Tolson's treatment of Foote is not entirely balanced, nor entirely fair to Foote. Tolson is perceptive in seeing the Percy-Foote connection as a kind of crucible for a discussion of two divergent views of art (Percy taking the view that art must submit itself in service of a higher truth, Foote taking the more Joycean view that art is the highest truth). But Tolson takes this too far, in my estimation, and verges on setting up Foote as a kind of straw man who is wrong where Percy is right. It strikes me that the dynamic between Foote and Percy was more complementary and complex than Tolson admits.
This leads to a question of how well Tolson brings into his biography a discussion of Percy's literary production. In general the answer is that Tolson has done well, keeping his discussion biographically pertinent and integrated into the narrative of Percy's life. Though Tolson avoids delving too far into the cobwebs of literary criticism, he does give due credit to what many critics have seen as one of Percy's novelistic strengths, that is, the "dialogic" character of Percy's fictions. In his discussion of The Moviegoer, for example, Tolson acknowledges that "Percy's real work in fiction began when he gave free rein to those daemonic voices raging within him, when he allowed his lack of a central or integrated self to become his real subject" (279). This admission (although Tolson is quick to qualify it) undercuts Tolson's view, perhaps too strongly stated, of Percy's moralistic tendencies.
There is much that is fresh and revealing here, too, especially with regard to Percy's first unpublished novel, The Charterhouse, and Percy's fourth published novel, Lancelot. In the case of the former, Percy's frequent dismissal of his first "apprenticeship" novel is called into question. One's curiosity is whetted, for example, by Caroline Gordon's favorable comparison of The Charterhouse with Flannery O'Connor's Wise Blood (the manuscript of which Gordon read at about the same time) (220). As for Lancelot, Tolson examines the relation of Percy's darkest novel to a dark period in Percy's life, posing a pertinent biographical question: "Did Percy write an infernal novel because he was going through a hellish time in his life, or did he compel himself to go through hell in order to write an infernal novel?" (362). Of Percy's other literary projects, Tolson's examination is generally cogent and well-balanced, integrating a wealth of relevant correspondence, anecdotal material and noteworthy reviews. However, Tolson's treatment of The Second Coming is strangely cursory. Tolson seems to dismiss as a "fairy tale" what is arguably Percy's most technically complex novel. More egregious is the biographer's failure to pursue in any depth the importance of Percy's fictional reflection on the suicide of his father, as filtered through the consciousness of Will Barrett.
Such defects in the fabric Tolson has woven are slight, however, in relation to the beauty of the whole. Percy's life and work were all of a piece and Tolson shows himself equal to the task of chronicling the ways in which Percy's work was "an essay toward understanding what would help him live his life" (11).