[percy-l] Fwd: William Styron on Walker Percy
Charles Lowry
lowry.charles at gmail.com
Fri Aug 7 16:47:56 EDT 2015
And as a brief and clarifying follow-up, let me add that this book does
indeed have what appears to be an excellent index.
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Charles Lowry <lowry.charles at gmail.com>
Date: Fri, Aug 7, 2015 at 4:44 PM
Subject: William Styron on Walker Percy
To: "Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion" <
percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org>
I have been wandering through the recently published *My Generation*, a
collection of non-fiction prose by William Styron. Styron was himself a
Southern writer, though ultimately a Connecticut resident. He mentions
Percy four times, and I thought that these citations may be of some
interest to followers of this list.
p. 132: While Styron objects to Percy's complaints about the
*Connecticutization
*of the South, he nevertheless refers to Percy as "a writer for whom my
esteem is unsurpassed."
p. 366: Styron talks about Faulkner's influence on *Lie Down in
Darkness* and joins
Percy and O'Connor as Southern writers who are apprehensive about working
"in the shadow of such a colossus."
p. 396: Styron was one of the judges who helped to compile the infamous
Modern Library list of the one hundred greatest novels of the twentieth
century. He notes with approval the competing list, composed some weeks
later, by students at Radcliffe College, except that he complains about the
omission of *The Moviegoer* from the Radcliffe list.
p. 450: He discusses Fitzgerald's attitude. "with its implication that the
men of his era produced achievements in prose writing that would cause
those who followed after to feel like sacred epigones." In his list of
writers of his generation aimed at proving Fitzgerald wrong, he includes
Percy.
This is a very rich book, but it comprises 585 pages of text. As
interesting as much of it is, one is reminded of the dictum of the
nineteenth century German classics scholar (be kind, I quote from memory,
and my German was never that good even when I had to pretend to know it),
Fuer mich, ein Buch ohne Index ist keine Buch."
Chuck Lowry
Brooklyn, NY
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