undefinedWalker Percy and Patrick Samway, S.J., at the Percy home in Covington, LA. ca. 1978.

 

This interview was conducted by mail, from May to October, 1986, at an enormous geographical distance; but the interviewer does cherish the memory of a personal meeting. It was on May 4, 1973, a warm Louisiana evening, at Percy’s home in Covington, a small town at the northern end of the causeway running above Lake Pontchartrain (New Orleans is at the southern end). The house is in a wooded area by the bayou, along the Bogue Falaya River. Percy was a tall, slender, handsome man, with a distinguished and thoughtful mien. His manner that day was unassuming, gracious, and gentle. Even later, judging from our correspondence, he was still the same warm, helpful, generous, and patient person, as the very existence of this interview, carried out under such difficult circumstances, will testify.

 

INTERVIEWER

How did you spend your seventieth birthday?

WALKER PERCY

An ordinary day. I went with my wife and some friends to a neighborhood restaurant in New Orleans. I think I had crawfish. What distinguishes Louisianians is that they suck the heads.

INTERVIEWER

You and your wife recently celebrated your fortieth anniversary. Is it easy, do you imagine, to be married to a writer?

PERCY

Mine has been a happy marriage—thanks mainly to my wife. Who would want to live with a novelist? A man underfoot in the house all day? A man, moreover, subject to solitary funks and strange elations. If I were a woman, I’d prefer a traveling salesman. There is no secret, or rather, the secrets are buried in platitudes. That is to say, it has something to do with love, commitment, and family. As to the institution, it is something like Churchill’s description of democracy: vicissitudinous yes, but look at the alternatives.

INTERVIEWER

What are the decisive moments, turning points, that you regard as the milestones of those seven decades?

PERCY

What comes to mind is something like this: one, losing both parents in my early teens and being adopted by my uncle, a poet, and being exposed to the full force of a remarkable literary imagination; two, contracting a nonfatal case of tuberculosis while serving as an intern in Bellevue Hospital in New York, an event that did not so much change my life as give me leave to change it; three, getting married; four, becoming a Catholic.

INTERVIEWER

If you had the chance, would you decide to be reborn or to flee back into William Blake’s “the vales of Har”?

PERCY

No vales of Har, thank you. No rebirth either, but I wouldn’t mind a visit in the year 2050—a short visit, not more than half an hour—say, to a park bench at the southeast corner of Central Park in New York, with a portable radio. Just to have a look around, just to see whether we made it and if so, in what style. One could tell in half an hour. By “we” of course, I do not mean just Americans, but the species. Homo sapiens sapiens.

INTERVIEWER

Once you said that if you were starting over, you might like to make films. Would there be other decisions that would be different?

PERCY

I might study linguistics—not in the current academic meanings of the word, but with a fresh eye, like Newton watching the falling apple: How come? What’s going on here?

INTERVIEWER

Apropos of your fascination with film, most of it finds its way into your novels on the thematic level, especially in The Moviegoer and Lancelot. Does it happen that film or television influences you in less noticeable ways as well, such as cinematic structuring of material and so on?

PERCY

I can only answer in the most general way: that what television and movies give the writer is a new community and a new set of referents. Since nearly everyone watches television a certain number of hours a day (whether they admit it or not), certain turns of plot are ready-made for satirical use, namely the Western shoot-out, one man calling another out, a mythical dance of honor. In my last novel I described one character as looking something like Blake Carrington. Now you may not know who Blake Carrington is—though sooner or later most Hungarians will. A hundred million Americans do know.

INTERVIEWER

Could you tell me how you feel about your inspiring beliefs, how faithful you have remained to them?

PERCY

If you mean, am I still a Catholic, the answer is yes. The main difference after thirty-five years is that my belief is less self-conscious, less ideological, less polemical. My ideal is Thomas More, an English Catholic—a peculiar breed nowadays—who wore his faith with grace, merriment, and a certain wryness. Incidentally, I reincarnated him again in my new novel and I’m sorry to say he has fallen upon hard times; he is a far cry from the saint, drinks too much, and watches reruns of M*A*S*H on tv.

INTERVIEWER

As for philosophy and religion, do you still regard yourself as a philosophical Catholic existentialist?

PERCY

Philosophical? Existentialist? Religion? Pretty heavy. These are perfectly good words—except perhaps existentialist—but over the years they have acquired barnacle-like connotative excrescences. Uttering them induces a certain dreariness and heaviness in the neck muscles. As for existentialist, I’m not sure it presently has a sufficiently clear referent to be of use. Even “existentialists” forswear the term. It fell into disuse some years ago when certain novelists began saying things like: I beat up my wife in an existential moment—meaning a sudden, irrational impulse.

INTERVIEWER

Is it possible to define your Catholic existentialism in a few sentences?

PERCY

I suppose I would prefer to describe it as a certain view of man, an anthropology, if you like; of man as wayfarer, in a rather conscious contrast to prevailing views of man as organism, as encultured creature, as consumer, Marxist, as subject to such and such a scientific or psychological understanding—all of which he is, but not entirely. It is the “not entirely” I’m interested in—like the man Kierkegaard described who read Hegel, understood himself and the universe perfectly by noon, but then had the problem of living out the rest of the day. It, my “anthropology,” has been expressed better in an earlier, more traditional language—e.g., scriptural: man born to trouble as the sparks fly up; Gabriel Marcel’s Homo viator.