[percy-l] Percy & Hesse

Doug Brown wply1223 at gmail.com
Sun Mar 20 17:51:21 EDT 2022


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.
>
>
>
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