Subject: Re: The Importance of Ernest Being
From: Richard Warren (RWarren@BCCB.COM)
Date: Fri Jul 16 1999 - 12:41:36 EDT
Here I sit...against a young pine tree, broken out in hives and
waiting for the end of the world. Safe here for a moment though, flanks
protected by a rise of ground on the left and an approach ramp on the right.
The carbine lies across my lap.
Walker Percy, Love in the Ruins
In view of the discussion on the list on Hemingway, I have been looking back this week at William Rodney Allen's book on WP and after seeing Farrell O'gorman's post I thought that I would share some of Allen's insights. In his effort to demonstrate that American antecedents were at least as strong an influence on WP as the European ones that Percy frequently acknowledged, Allen quotes the opening paragraph of LITR and observes that it is an obvious allusion to the final scene in For Whom the Bells Toll in which Hemingway's Robert Jordan sits resting against a pine tree on a small hill in a forest, his leg broken, refusing to kill himself with his rifle despite his great pain, and awaiting his certain death ("the end of the world") at the hands of the Spanish fascists (Walker Percy: Southern Wayfarer, p. 83). Allen asserts that both novels are about "a man's
struggle to resist surrender in a world about to be overrun by evil," and goes on to state that both novelists had a "thematic obsession with suicide."
Allen had the opportunity to discuss his conclusions with Percy, whom Allen says acknowledged the conscious allusion between LITR and For Whom the Bells Toll and confirmed that he had created characters in several of his books modeled after Hemingway, including Sam Yerger in The Moviegoer, Mort Prince in The Last Gentleman, and Bob Merlin in Lancelot, each of whom stand in opposition to the protagonists in those stories (Binx Bolling, Will Barrett, and Lancelot Lamar respectively). A footnote indicates that Allen explored this more thoroughly in the article Farrell referenced, All the Names of Death: Walker Percy and Hemingway, Mississippi Quarterly 36 (Winter 1982-1983) 3-19.
Once focused on these characters, the parallels seem too obvious to miss. Aunt Emily*s friend, Sam Yerger, shares her stoic philosophy, has served as a war correspondent in Europe, then lived with his wife in Paris and Mexico (well, Key West and Cuba might have been a little too much), and has a story to tell that sounds suspiciously like "The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Allen observes that Bob Merlin in Lancelot fought in Spain, is associated with film making, loves Africa, and thinks that the only two things in life that make it worth living are hunting and sex. He also notes that Walker makes use of Hemingway's geography (bad low
country and good mountains) and cites the passage from Lancelot (p. 203) that Farrell recalled. It would earn at least second runner-up honors in a Bad Hemingway contest ("I'll say to her: Let's go back to Tanzania. We were there once. We lived in a Land Rover. We saw leopard....She*s a good girl, a comrade. She*s a comrade, brother, daughter, lover to me....What do you think about a film about a man and a woman who are good comrades, go on a hunt, and then have good sex together?"
Allen pulls out all the stops in establishing Percy*s connection to
American literature, noting the reliance on All the King's Men in TMG and Huckleberry Finn in The Last Gentleman (plus the Divine Comedy in Love in the Ruins), but he makes it clear that he believes that one American author "haunted" Percy and that was Hemingway. Allen sees the structural allusions to Hemingway in Percy's writing "as unbroken as in Saul Bellow*s writing," (any Bellow fans on the list want to comment on that?) but notes that Percy is alternately complimentary and censorious of Hemingway (that old interior dialogue Walker obviously felt between the stoic humanism of his father and Uncle Will and the Christianity that he adopted as his own credo) but ultimately critical of a stoicism that he found inadequate to live by.
The conclusion that Allen reaches on Percy's literary relationship
with Hemingway comes in his comments on the Bob Merlin character who cuckolds Lance Lamar (and utters the Bad Hemingway quote above) and is worth quoting at length (pp. 114-115):
Like Merlin, Percy's Hemingway figures are all sad, middle-aged
men who dream of past glories - broken down stoics with an edge of
desperation in their voices. For Percy, Hemingway was a fine writer
trapped in a rigid code that eventually destroyed him. In a conversation
with me, Percy described his embarrassment at the sad spectacle of
Hemingway's trying too hard to relive his youth by returning to Pampalona
in the 1950s; in Lancelot, Lance makes a similar judgment on Merlin: "He,
poor old man, had come to as bad a place as a man can come to. Going
back to Africa to find his youth....An old man should find new things.
Shooting was too good for him" (p. 201). Lance's assessment that
"shooting was too good' for Merlin is an obvious reference to
Hemingway's suicide [which happened the year the TMG was published], and it is Percy*s most personal admission in his fiction of his deep feeling for Hemingway. The phrase is ambiguous, meaning that Hemingway*s addiction to rotational adventures turned him into a miserable self-caricature late in his life, but also that such a brilliant writer deserved a better fate than turning a gun on himself. But like Percy's stoical father, Hemingway did shoot himself, and so confirmed Percy's conviction that stoicism is a dead end. Ultimately, Percy was drawn to Hemingway again and again in his fiction because Hemingway's vision of human experience so contradicted his own.
Other Percy critics have seen Hemingway*s influence on Percy but have not been willing to go quite as far as Allen. Ed Hardy noted in his study that one of the larger themes in Percy's novels is the outline of medieval romanticism (particularly the grail quest story) as modified by various modern artists (he cites Eliot, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, et al), especially evident in Thanatos Syndrome, but a theme that Hardy
claims to be present in all WP's work.
Hardy agrees with Allen that there are significant antecedents in
American literature for the Percy protagonist. In addition to his Southern cousins, Quentin Compson and Jack Burden, Binx is compared to Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway and Hemingway's Jake Barnes. To steal a line from the great American philosopher Jimmy Buffet, "I've read dozens of books about heroes and crooks and I've learned much from both of their style." Hardy goes on to make a telling point. The Great Gatsby and The
Sun Also Rises are first person narratives, but they interpose another
character against the protagonist (Jay Gatsby to Nick Carraway, Robert Cohn to Jake Barnes) who serve an important purpose. As Hardy notes, they serve as reminders "that the narrators are themselves but characters, necessarily fallible, to one extent or another "unreliable," and at no time exclusively and unqualifiedly authorized to speak for the author."
One critique of Percy has been that his protagonists sound to much like the author, railing against the new modern age. Hardy*s observation suggests how some of the authors who Percy admired dealt with this problem.
As a sidebar, we know from the Tolson and Samway biographies that Percy did encounter the two writers whose work he admired but whose stoic worldview he found inadequate. There was no dramatic encounter with either of them. In 1951 Percy and his brother Roy and their wives vacationed in Cuba where they saw Papa Hemingway at La Floridita but WP was too shy to approach him. This is reminiscent of the scene from
1938 where Percy and Shelby Foote drove to Oxford to see Faulkner. After
arriving at Rowan Oak Percy had second thoughts, leaving Shelby to call on Mr. Billy while Walker waited in the car. At the end of the visit Shelby told Faulkner that he had "Will Percy's nephew" in the car, which caused Faulkner to go out and say hello. Those stories make Walker seem very real to me.
I conclude with what I think is a very telling observation from Linda Whitney Hobson in her book Understanding Walker Percy. She notes (p. 166) that although Percy does not acknowledge the influence of the American modernist writers John Dos Passos, Sherwood Anderson and Hemingway) on his work, he makes free use of their "values and methods in prose fiction." Hobson sees Percy as having borrowed their "unsentimental, ironic, clean and sparse style" while condemning their "old sad poetry" for
being abstractions as dangerous as the sentimentality of the nineteenth
century (pre-Howells) fiction against which they had rebelled. Stoicism struck WP as wrongheaded Hobson says, "whether depicted by Faulkner in the South or Hemingway in the North." And so it did.
Richard Warren
Nashville, Tennessee
RWarren@bccb.com
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