A Whiff of Something Lethal

Once I filled this entire column with questions that came to mind as I read Walker Percy’s book The Message in the Bottle. I received more mail from that column than from any other, including at least three letters responding to my question, “Why don’t more Christians read Walker Percy?”

“We’ve tried,” said these readers. “His novels are too hard to understand. What’s he trying to say, anyhow?” Walker Percy died in May of this year, two weeks shy of his seventy-fourth birthday. His passing seems a good time to try to answer their question.

Originally Percy had trained as a medical doctor, but during his residency he contracted tuberculosis, probably as a result of performing autopsies on derelicts. The year was 1941, and as Percy’s friends were enlisting for the war in Europe, he was confined to a sanitarium in Lake Saranac, New York.

Percy used his five years of recuperation to read and reflect on the state of the world. How was it that Germany, the epitome of advanced Western civilization, was suddenly acting like a barbarian tribe? Percy read philosophy, especially the modern existentialists, but found the sanest explanations in Søren Kierkegaard, the melancholy Dane who had first protested German rationalism.

Kierkegaard had said, “Hegel told everything about the world except one thing: what it is to be a man and to live and die.” Percy sensed that while the scientific method had superbly analyzed humanity as an organism in an environment, in the process it had lost sight of us as selves in a world. Nietzsche and then Hitler had simply taken the scientific method to its logical conclusion: If humanity merely represents another gene pool, how can we claim such unique properties as reason, freedom, “inalienable rights,” and human dignity? What allows us to grant intrinsic worth to any one individual?

The war ended, and America settled into the comfortable suburban consumerism of the Eisenhower era. Walker Percy married, converted to Catholicism, and began to raise a family. Yet still he fretted over the basic question, “What is a human being?” He never did get around to practicing medicine.

Over the next decade, Percy wrote philosophical essays on the question of meaning (many have been collected in The Message in the Bottle). But soon Percy searched for a way to express his ideas to a wider audience. And that’s when he decided to write novels.

The Moviegoer, written for a $300 advance when Percy was 45, attracted a few favorable reviews but scant attention until it was awarded the National Book Award for 1961, beating out Heller’s Catch-22 and Salinger’s Franny and Zooey. Suddenly the literati had to take note of this “failed doctor” (his term).

Percy wrote slowly, producing six novels in 26 years. Love in the Ruins and The Thanatos Syndrome tell the story of psychiatrist Tom More; and The Last Gentleman and The Second Coming share the main character Will Barrett. Some have termed the novels apocalyptic, and indeed the titles themselves betray a hint of decline and doom. “Malaise” is a more accurate characterization, for Percy’s protagonist is typically a troubled, rootless wanderer. The reader is never sure how reliable, how sane each character is.

Autobiographical elements turn up, especially in the Will Barrett stories. Percy grew up in Birmingham, Alabama, in a new home on the edge of a golf course, a setting not unlike Barrett’s. More poignantly, Barrett is haunted by his father’s suicide—Percy was 11 when his father killed himself.

A Diagnostician Of The Soul

It would be a travesty to view Percy’s fiction as a form of propaganda, an Ayn Rand-like device to communicate personal philosophy. Judged by rigorous literary standards, the novels earned for him a place in the front rank of American writers. On the other hand, Percy himself described his fiction as diagnostic. Something is wrong with society, he said, and one of the novelist’s tasks is to isolate the bacillus and give the sickness a name.

Percy risked his literary reputation by continuing to crank out essays spelling out his diagnosis. In the breezy and funny Lost in the Cosmos, he took on scientism, soap operas, genetic manipulation, Phil Donahue, and pornography. The book playfully promises to reveal, among other things, “how you can survive in the Cosmos about which you know more and more while knowing less and less about yourself, this despite 10,000 self-help books, 100,000 psychotherapists, and 100 million fundamentalist Christians.” To Percy, modern man resembles a castaway on a desert island who tries to interpret the message in a bottle washed onshore—or a prisoner in an isolation cell straining to hear a code tapped out on the wall. Percy believed he had heard those messages, and they were the echoes of orthodox Christianity.

Percy saw grave danger in a modern world that has made technocrats and scientists lord and sovereign. We are told that human problems are being solved, but signs of despair and alienation in the young and in the wealthy suburbanites prove otherwise. In such a world, the artist must function like a canary lowered into the mine shaft to test the air. Walker Percy had caught a whiff of something lethal.

Although trained as a scientist, Percy nevertheless viewed with suspicion the promise of modern technology: “If the first great intellectual discovery of my life was the beauty of the scientific method, surely the second was the discovery of the singular predicament of man in the very world which has been transformed by this science.”

Percy was well aware of the challenge he faced in presenting an alternative: “The Christian novelist nowadays is like a man who has found a treasure hidden in the attic of an old house, but he is writing for people who have moved out to the suburbs and who are bloody sick of the old house and everything in it.”

Why read Walker Percy? The answer to that question is the same as the answer to this one: Why understand the twentieth century? Even Percy’s harshest critics had to acknowledge his skill as diagnostician, although they deplored his old-fashioned prescription. Percy had a comment on that, too. He wondered aloud, “whether, in fact, the preposterousness of Judaeo-Christianity is not in fact an index of the preposterousness of the age.”

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