Hope in the Cosmos: A Look at Walker Percy's and Tom Key's Lost in the Cosmos
ANN MCCORQUODALE BURKHARDT
The following essay originally appeared as a supplement to the program of Key's stage production of Lost in the Cosmos, which premiered February 14, 1996 in Atlanta, GA. Re-printed with permission.
There's a funny anecdote about Walker Percy, award-winning novelist, language theorist, and Southerner. In June 1980, he attended a dinner given in his honor at the Governor's Mansion in Jackson, Mississippi. Percy, shy and not a party-circuit author, usually approached affairs such as these with mixed feelings. He was relieved to see that his dinner partner was fellow-author and friend, Eudora Welty. They were deeply engrossed in conversation throughout the evening. Afterwards, Mississippi writer Willie Morris, seated across from them at the table, asked Welty what she and Percy had been discussing so seriously. "Oh," said Welty, "we were talking about "The Incredible Hulk". Have you ever seen that show?"
For Percy, the search for truth took him not just to the writings of philosophers like Soren Kierkegaard and writers like Albert Camus, but even to the weekly transformation of Bill Bixby into Lou Ferrigno. Percy, in novels like National Book Award-winning The Moviegoer, along with The Last Gentleman, Love in the Ruins, and Lancelot, among others, created enduring art out of his search for truth. Even in death (he died in May 1990), he remains perhaps the preeminent chronicler of the postmodern American soul.
His search began in Birmingham, Alabama, where he was born in 1916, to a proud and distinguished family but one also prone to depression and melancholy. Percy's grandfather and father both died of self-inflicted gunshot wounds. He was only 13 when his father shot himself in the attic of their spacious Tudor-style home on a golf course; his mother would die tragically a few years later in an automobile accident.
Percy and his younger brothers went to live with their father's cousin, William Alexander Percy ("Uncle Will"), in Greenville, Mississippi. This remarkable "bachelor-poet-lawyer-planter" and author of Lanterns on the Levee, adopted the boys and became the most important single influence on the future author's life. Percy was exposed to the world of arts and letters through Uncle Will and the many visitors who passed through the sprawling Greenville home. One important visitor would become Walker's closest lifelong friend: Shelby Foote. Foote who became a writer and Civil War historian went on, shortly after Percy's death, to achieve national notoriety as the historian/raconteur prominently featured in Ken Burn's masterful PBS documentary, "The Civil War". It's too bad that Percy missed his dear friend's time in the spotlight. He would have been proud. And he would have probably teased him mercilessly.
Percy initially was not drawn to the letters, but rather to the world of science, receiving his undergraduate premedical training at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and a medical degree from Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons.
In the midst of internship at New York's Bellevue Hospital in 1941, life threw him another curve. While performing autopsies in the pathology lab, he contracted tuberculosis. It would put an end to his medical career and plans to become a psychiatrist. His sentence of bedrest led him to read many European writers and philosophers and ultimately to a new philosophy of life. The period of intense thought and introspection, coupled with some important friendships with fellow patients resulted in his conversion to the Catholic faith. In hindsight Percy said that "he was the happiest man ever to contract tuberculosis, because it enabled me to get out of Bellevue and quit medicine." But that was hindsight; he confided at the time that he feared he'd be in a sanitorium for the rest of his life.
Percy did recover, however, and soon thereafter married Mary Bernice ("Bunt") Townsend. They had met while they were both working in a pathology lab in Greenville. They moved to Covington, Louisiana, where they had two daughters, one of them all but deaf from birth. Percy began writing, first philosophical explorations primarily concerned with man's use of language. He was encouraged to try his hand at novel-writing and was quickly rewarded: his first published novel, The Moviegoer, won the National Book Award in 1962. His fiction began attracting an ever- growing circle of literary critics and devoted fans alike who responded to his alienated characters' funny and poignant searches for a life with meaning.
His writing, while often witty and profound, was always grounded in his living an ordinary life, "the Little Way," as he called it. It was a challenge for him to get through " an ordinary Wednesday afternoon," but he was determined to remain in touch with the wider world, as boring, petty, and irritating as it often was. He rejected the aloof persona of the intellectual, or the precious world of the artist. He'd rather throw down a couple of bourbons with the good-old Covington boys than to be at a cocktail party of artists. Over the years, he and Shelby Foote maintained a lively correspondence, which was concerned primarily with what they each were writing. But they were also faithful followers of the soap opera As the World Turns, keeping each other informed of the plot twists and turns.
Percy, while contemptuous and resentful of TV's hypnotic tyranny, was also something of a TV junkie. He kept the TV on a lot of the time, with the volume turned down so he could, as he once wryly admitted, "know if the world suddenly comes to an end." He also did it to stay abreast of the national ideolect. Witness how he pegged Phil Donahue in Lost in the Cosmos long before Phil Hartman's impersonations.
Percy's searches always dealt with authenticity. He exposed many a phony in his writings. He was perhaps the most astute observer of the complex relationship that existed between black and white in the New South. Percy was not a Southern writer, as much as he was a writer using the South as a cultural backdrop for musings about postmodern man. He derisively referred to the many Faulkner wanna-bes and the self-conscious regionalists as "Southron Writers." He may not have been a Southern writer, in the usual meaning of the phrase, but he was certainly a Southern gentleman. When confronted by the little old ladies at garden parties who wanted him to write something more "uplifting" and to stop making fun of "the serious things--things we all believe in," he would listen politely, staring at the ground and squirming in his sportscoat like Will Barrett in The Last Gentleman, and say, dutifully, "Yes, ma'am."
Percy, skilled observer of the landscape and of the subtle nuances that define human interaction, was always writing with a purpose. He and Foote maintained a lifelong disagreement over the ends of art, Foote arguing more that it was an end in itself; Percy on the side that art served a higher purpose. Foote, when he learned of his friend's conversion to Catholicism, accused him of having "a mind in full intellectual retreat." But Percy subtly, some thought not so, wove his message of belief into all his stories. In his words, the artist always needed to be open to the "mystery" that could erupt in any of his characters which for want of a better word is called "grace." Because he was such a deft artist his writing was not polemical, but rather inspired by his deeply held belief that the "heart's desire of the alienated man is to see vines sprouting through the masonry."
Fascinated perhaps, in part, because of his daughter Ann's deafness, language and how it defines our existence was a subject of endless fascination and inquiry for Percy. He wrote highly respected and complicated theories of language, or semiotics. He traced "man's problem" back to the failure of language--we can put a name to everything in the universe except ourselves. It was our crippling self-consciousness with a corresponding inability to know/name ourselves which he dealt with so directly in Lost in the Cosmos.
When Percy looked out and saw America in the early Reagan years, he saw a desperate search to cure all ills by everything from compulsive consuming to pornography to fads of all descriptions. "These fads are about as useful," he said, "as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. We have a science that can tell us about everything except ourselves." In mock tribute to Carl Sagan's wildly popular, slick, and sophomoric PBS series which dismissed anything that couldn't be proved by the scientific method, Percy set about to create "something of more permanent worth," he thought, than any of his prior novels.
In a letter to Shelby Foote he described what Lost in the Cosmos would get at:
First part, list some of the familiar oddities and anomalies of modern times, e.g., the rise of boredom and suicide, ...why people frantically applaud on the Carson show when their hometowns are mentioned,...the desire for bad news (doesn't everyone remember Pearl Harbor? Why?)....As you can see, this is not an entirely serious book, and yet it is serious. What it is getting at is of course my old hobby horse that science is extraordinarily stupid about people as people and the consequence of this stupidity is going to do us all in if we don't do something about it.
The book is a straightforward, poignant, and often hilarious look at what Percy called "the loss of self and a possible means for recovery." Using the various devices of the self-help genre, mostly multiple-choice questions and quizes, he first chronicles the state of despair, and in so doing took no hostages. He admitted that his early draft was "too rancorous and mean and smart- assed in parts," but he left a lot of bite in the finished product. One question he poses: "Who is the most obnoxious, Protestants, Catholics or Jews?" He concludes they're all three equally obnoxious but not as "murderous" as many in the age of non-belief who can kill the useless, enemies of the state, etc., "and do so reasonably, without passion, even decently, certainly without the least obnoxiousness."
With Percy you get despair brought masterfully into sharp focus; but you also get hope. And Lost in the Cosmos does offer post-Apocalyptic choices. He has the black-Jewish Abbot Liebowitz who will help colonize a new human race in Lost Cove, Tennessee deliver the new law of the Cosmos. Actually it sounds a bit like a Percy revision of John 3:16. The Abbot says: "If you're a big enough fool to climb a tree and like a cat refuse to come down, then someone who loves you has to make as big a fool of himself to rescue you."
With sly humor and intellectual verve, Percy created in Lost in the Cosmos a satire turned with consummate skill against the idols of the age. If he were around today to write a sequel, it probably would've featured "Internet Addiction" support groups, the Martha Stewart phenomenon and Ricki Lake. Because Percy could make better sense out of our nonsense than any writer of his time. But, alas, he is not here. But, like Percy would say, there's hope. One of the many people who found Percy's message in the bottle decided to give it a new life.
Tom Key thinks his play, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self- Help Seminar, may still be too controversial to produce, even though Percy's book, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book was written almost 15 years ago. Five years ago when Key first began adapting the book into play form the script evoked outrage-- from Baptists and non-believers. It wouldn't have surprised Percy who called his own book, "smart-aleck non fiction." It is true that the ever- wry Percy, and his faithful adapter Key give both groups "the business" in their parodies. Outrage, not just belly laughs, were to be expected, depending upon your point of view. But perhaps playwright Key did get, to coin Mick Jagger, not what he wanted but what he needed--genuine attention.
He proceeded to do readings, here and there, with no real budget for rehearsals, sent the script to theaters all over the country and received profoundly polite and complimentary rejection letters which were all variations on the same theme: Lost in the Cosmos "did not fit with the sensibility of our season." You see, Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Seminar and the book upon which it was based were both written by Catholics.
Essentially, the play is an extract of the book; that is Key pressed out the juicy parts of Percy's not-so-simple parody to make a funny and engaging romp through a self-help seminar. Or, more bluntly, a 40- page explanation of Percy's semiotic theory does not make for gripping theater. Key might actually say it was more like the extracting that's conjured with tooth-pulling to transform the Swiftian serio-comic group of essays and vignettes into a 90-minute play. Lost in the Cosmos, had always struck Key as a lot closer to the mark of who we are than, say, a generation at the dawn of the "Age of Aquarius." It appeared simple: adapt a self-help book parody into a self-help seminar parody. It wasn't so simple.
A curious thing happened at the various readings, something that ended up profoundly altering Key's script. At each reading, a person was plucked out of the audience to read a part, to answer some of the multiple-choice questions presented by seminar hosts. What wasn't anticipated was how the presence of a "real" person from the audience produced a transforming shift of perspective--a rotation as Percy might have said. Key remembers, "suddenly there was a representative of ourselves, the audience, society, taking this crazy and profound seminar for us. It became a play about watching this man's experience of taking a seminar with cosmic consequences."
The audience follows thrice- divorced Harold Pierceson, a dentist from Anaheim, California, who is the quintessential been there/done that consumer of self- help books and courses; who has read Leo Buscaglia but afterwards wanted to commit suicide. He's there, dude, and he's hoping this seminar will indeed be his last. We follow Harold (read Everyman) as he assumes different "improvisational" parts--as a part of a tour at the Parthenon just before a missile attack, as an astronaut who can lead a new civilization to a moon of Jupiter, and hosting the last Phil Donahue show. It starts out as his quest to feel a little bit better about himself, and quickly evolves to offer him much more if he's willing to take the plunge. If Harold proceeds "to a place where no one has gone before" (that is, if he completes the seminar) he can save the human race from impending disaster.
This is the first time any of Percy's works have been adapted for the stage. Several of his works have been bouncing around Hollywood for years but none has made it yet to the big screen. How fitting for Tom Key, like Percy, a Birmingham, Alabama native, and fellow Catholic to make him accessible to the theater-goer. There's an almost mystical connection between novelist and playwright. In the months before Percy died, Key finally mustered the courage to write him a long overdue letter of appreciation for his art and for attracting him and his family into the Catholic Church. He never received a reply. He wrote again, several months later, to request permission to dramatize his book. But the next news was not a response but a front-page article announcing his death in May of 1990.
Key assumed the play wasn't meant to be. And then, as if in a novel by Percy, a month after his death he received word that Percy, just days before he died, had telephoned his agent to extend permission to dramatize Lost in the Cosmos. Key then learned that a mutual friend of his and Percy's, William Sessions, Professor of English at Georgia State University, had, without his knowing, interceded in his behalf. So, while Key never heard directly from Percy, he was extended permission. Maybe Mick Jagger did say it right--"you can't always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you get what you need". Percy and Key would probably call that grace.