Signposts in a Strange Land
By Walker Percy
Edited by Patrick Samway
Farrar Straus Giroux, 428 pages, $25
The beatification process now begins. As well it should. When Walker Percy, novelist and Southerner and Roman Catholic, died in May of last year, his loss was felt throughout the American literary community, though perhaps even more keenly among those of us writing fiction in the South, and especially among those of us who try not to flinch at the easy scorn of a secular age and continue to understand the novel as a means to explore what can only be called spiritual truths.
Walker Percy never flinched. And this is made abundantly clear with the first major posthumous publication of his uncollected writings. In ”Signposts in a Strange Land,” Patrick Samway, the Jesuit literary editor of America, gathers 44 of Percy`s nonfiction pieces ranging over a broad landscape of topics from a theory of man to an appreciation of his beloved New Orleans, from a primer on semiotics to the methodology of knocking back a shot of bourbon.
The book is strongest on his theories of art, his convert`s loyalty to the Roman Catholic faith, and his assessment of the 20th Century`s unique malaise, which informs both his art and his religion. It is weakest on the creation and explication of the six novels that comprise his surely permanent place in our literary heritage and on the personal aspects of his life.
Words on the novels aren`t really missed, for of course the books stand on their own. But our natural interest in Percy`s life is not quite satisfied by this collection, though there are a couple of pieces that give us glimpses of his emotional self. He remains a personally reticent man, and I suppose one can understand why.
At age 13 Percy lost his father to suicide, and at age 16 he lost his mother in an automobile accident. He and his two brothers were adopted by their second cousin, William Alexander Percy, a Georgia plantation owner, lawyer and poet. ”Uncle” Will, as young Percy and his brothers called him, raised the boys and made sure each received an excellent education, which for Walker led to his becoming a doctor.
But much more important for the nascent novelist was the education in life that Uncle Will provided. In an article written for Architectural Digest, Percy describes Uncle Will`s house:
”His house became a standard stopover for all manner of folk who had set forth to make sense of this mysterious region-poets, journalists, sociologists, psychiatrists. I remember Carl Sandburg, who broke out his guitar and sang, not too well, for hours. A better musician, a black harmonica player, showed up one night from God knows where-he was on the road; it was the Great Depression-and played the blues on his harmonica as I have never heard the blues played before or since. Faulkner came for tennis. Whether distracted by literary inspiration or by bourbon, he never managed once to bring racket into contact with ball. Langston Hughes came for a visit and a speech. Uncle Will introduced him.”
As Percy notes of his life with Uncle Will in the introduction to a reissue of the man`s book of poetry, ”I know what I gained: a vocation and in a real sense a second self: that is, the work and the self which, for better or worse, would not otherwise have been open to me.”
There is strong personal feeling here, but greatly muted by the mind. And if there is any quibble to be had with some of Walker Percy`s books, it is that his powerful intellect and clear philosophical inclination sometimes were too heavily present in his work.
”Signposts in a Strange Land” is rich with Percy`s thoughts on society, metaphysics, language, art and religion. He sees our age, in an essay titled
”Why Are You a Catholic?” as ”the most scientifically advanced, savage, democratic, inhuman, sentimental, murderous century in human history.”
Consequently, he writes, modern man is ”estranged . . . from transcendent being. He has lost something-what, he does not know; he knows only that he is sick unto death with the loss of it.”
In such a world, a novelist, Percy says, must have ”a necessary sensitivity to the hidden dimensions and energies of his characters and of the presence of the mystery which may always erupt in their lives and which, for want of a better word, we may call grace.”
It is appropriate to find those three thoughts fitting together neatly though they come from three different contexts-religion, science and art. Percy`s thinking was lucid and holistic, and he followed the logical implications of his world view into all aspects of his intellectual life.
But the delights of ”Signposts in a Strange Land” are not entirely philosophical or theoretical. Percy can be a refreshingly excoriating critic, whether you agree with him or not, as in his observations on John Irving`s
”The World According to Garp.” And he writes with similar edginess and humor about places as well, as in this description of the city he calls ”mon amour”:
”New Orleans is both intimately related to the South and yet in a real sense cut adrift not only from the South but from the rest of Louisiana, somewhat like Mont-St.-Michel awash at high tide. One comes upon it, moreover, in the unlikeliest of places, by penetrating the depths of the Bible Belt, running the gauntlet of Klan territory, the pine barrens of south Mississippi, Bogalusa, and the Florida parishes of Louisiana. Out and over a watery waste and there it is, a proper enough American city, and yet within the next few hours the tourist is apt to see more nuns and naked women than he ever saw before.”
As with all great novelists, Percy is at his best and ultimately says far more about a savage and sentimental age and about humanity`s loss of grace and need for spiritual transcendence and about the purpose of art when he is dealing the most intensely in the concrete details of life.
In an article about ”the aesthetic of Bourbon drinking in general and in particular of knocking it back neat,” he acknowledges the real health dangers of drinking, but then he says, ”What, after all, is the use of not having cancer, cirrhosis, and such, if a man comes home from work every day at five- thirty to the exurbs of Montclair or Memphis and there is the grass growing and the little family looking not quite at him but just past the side of his head, and there`s Cronkite on the tube and the smell of pot roast in the living room, and inside the house and outside in the pretty exurb has settled the noxious particles and the sadness of the old dying Western world, and him thinking: `Jesus, is this it? Listening to Cronkite and the grass growing?` ” It is this voice that will beatify Walker Percy. And ”Signposts in a Strange Land” will serve its finest purpose if it moves its readers to go back to the real thing, Walker Percy`s art.
