[percy-l] Percy & Hesse (posted for Rhonda McDonnell) - follow-up comment
Henry P. Mills III
wppdirector at gmail.com
Thu Aug 4 09:44:14 EDT 2022
>From my end it doesn’t look like Henry had any more luck with the Hesse
catalog image than I did. So to clarify: according to the archives at
UNC-Chapel Hill, Percy had a marked-up copy of one of Hesse's novels --
*Steppenwolf*. The annotations in it were Percy's, so we DO know that's a
Hesse work he read. One might need to look at his annotations to get a
sense of what he thought!
Description of the novel: "Steppenwolf is the tenth novel by German-Swiss
author Hermann Hesse. Originally published in Germany in 1927, it was first
translated into English in 1929. The novel was named after the German name
for the steppe wolf. The story in large part reflects a profound crisis in
Hesse's spiritual world during the 1920s." (wikipedia)
Best wishes,
Rhonda
[image: Percy-Hesse.png]
------------------------------
*From:* Percy-L: Henry P. Mills III <wppdirector at gmail.com>
*Sent:* Wednesday, August 3, 2022 12:58:56 PM
*To:* Percy-L: Literary and Philosophical Discussion <
percy-l at lists.ibiblio.org>
*Subject:* [percy-l] Percy & Hesse (posted for Rhonda McDonnell)
Chuck,
I confess to also being a bit of a “lazy" scholar, but one who knows my way
around search engines. I checked the Percy collection at UNC-Chapel Hill
and found the below reference to Hesse in Percy’s papers.
Hope this offers a satisfactory answer to the question of Hesse and Percy.
Thanks for bringing Hesse to our attention again, Jonathan, in sending the
LIR quotes (and Doug and Lauren for their Hesse discussion)!
Best,
Rhonda
On Jul 22, 2022, at 10:00 PM, Jonathan Potter <jopomojo at gmail.com> wrote:
>*From the ebook version of Love in the a Ruins:*
* [images]*
>https://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/2022-July/002550.html
On Sun, Mar 20, 2022 at 2:51 PM Doug Brown <wply1223 at gmail.com> wrote:
Michael,
First, if you were a teenager in the 70s, then you and I are roughly the
same age. I work in technology, so I often find myself surrounded by young
people. I tell them that I am both a time-traveler and immortal. A
time-traveler because I used to live in the 60s and 70s, and now I'm here.
Immortal because ... well ... all the evidence so far indicates so.
Charles Lowry's answer to your question is more thorough, but I'll add a
vague statement that I know Percy refers to Herman Hesse a couple of times
in Love in the Ruins. Unfortunately, I think both references I'm recalling
are not especially flattering to Hesse. I think the character Tom More (not
necessarily speaking for Percy) thinks of readers of Hesse (but not
necessarily Hesse himself) as being a bit too high-minded. Tom More makes
these kinds of observations once in conversation with his former wife and
once in reference to one half of the attendees at a "Pit" scene where
various psychiatrists present ideas in a somewhat competitive manner. But
it's worth pointing out that the character Tom More is notoriously
unreliable - and a bit grumpy.
Not much help, but there you go.
Doug Brown
Walker Percy Loves You and Has a Wonderful Plan for Your Life
<https://www.amazon.com/Walker-Percy-Loves-Wonderful-Plan/dp/B096LS1B7M>
On Sun, Mar 20, 2022 at 3:09 PM Lauren Berdy <lauren.stacy.berdy at gmail.com>
wrote:
To a cultured mind no scenery is
Ordinary.
And
Such a mind will prefer solitude in
An unassuming landscape.
DP lived on the bogue Fayala ( sp)
A porous and certain primeval
Relaxin and releasing
Also
He wasn’t scared to meet the
Crowd and suck crayfishes either
But
He wasn’t dipping into orientalists
He made fun of them with aunt
Emily’s Bagvagita. Too bad
Tom Merton and he never
Dialogued.
Doubt is too
catching.
Thank you,
Lauren
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 20, 2022, at 2:34 PM, lowry.charles at gmail.com wrote:
I am no scholar, heaven knows, but in my laziness I have developed a
million labor-saving workarounds. Although it is only a partial and not a
definitive answer to your question, I can report that Hermann Hesse does
not appear in the indices of the following books I have on my Percy shelf:
—Jay Tolson’s and Father Samway’s biographies of Percy
—John F. Desmond’s Walker Percy’s Search for Community
—Robert Coles’ Walker Percy, An American Search
—Jessica Hooten Wilson’s Reading Walker Percy’s Novels and Walker Percy,
Fyodor Dostoevsky, and the Search for Influence
—Lewis A. Lawson’s Following Percy
—Kieran Quinlan’s Walker Percy, The Last Catholic Novelist
—Lawson and Kramer, editors, Conversations With Walker Percy
Further affiant sayeth naught.
Sent from my iPhone
On Mar 20, 2022, at 12:53 PM, Michael Martin Serafin <
michael_serafin at hotmail.com> wrote:
When I was a teenager in the 1970s, I was a serious reader of Hermann
Hesse, the great German author. I learned about Hesse from an encouraging
essay by Kurt Vonnegut, also a favorite of mine at the time. Did Percy read
Hesse?
Michael Martin Serafin
Chicopee, MA.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20220804/b8682e8e/attachment-0001.html>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: Percy-Hesse.png
Type: image/png
Size: 593443 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.ibiblio.org/pipermail/percy-l/attachments/20220804/b8682e8e/attachment-0001.png>
More information about the Percy-L
mailing list