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Walker, Percy: A Life - Review
Cross Currents, Winter, 1998 by Peter A. Huff
Patrick Samway. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. 506pp. $35.00 (cloth).
Since Walker Percy's death in 1990, the fast-growing Percy studies industry has produced a number of impressive multi-dimensional interpretations of his literary output and his connections with southern culture and the Catholic imagination. New critical studies such as those by Paul Giles, Anita Gandolfo, Ross Labrie, and Kieran Quinlan have contributed to the academic debate over Percy's significance in the modern Catholic republic of letters and the ever-shifting American canon. Insightful biographical works by Jay Tolson and Bertram Wyatt-Brown have added great depth to our understanding of his life in the context of the "old modern age" and a southern family characterized by privilege, imagination, and mental illness. Patrick Samway's book reflects the mounting interest in Percy the man and brings to the increasingly sophisticated secondary literature on Percy a critical biography distinguished by the precision of its prose and the sympathetic quality of its point of view.
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Samway, literary editor of America magazine and a scholar of southern literature, is well acquainted with his subject. Prior to Walker Percy: A Life, he published two volumes of Percy material: Signposts in a Strange Land (1991), a collection of essays, and A Thief of Peirce (1995), the correspondence between Percy and Kenneth Ketner (an authority on the philosopher Charles Sanders Peirce whose work in semiotics deeply interested Percy). In the foreword to the biography (and also in its final chapter), Samway describes his first meeting with Percy in 1978 and narrates the series of events that led to his taking on the task of biographer and to the development of the close friendship between the two men that so evidently shaped the biography.
Samway's text is based on an intimate knowledge of Percy's writings as well as numerous interviews and extensive research in manuscript collections, including the Percy papers in the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina. The book's form is straight historical narrative, and its aim is twofold: to "trace Walker Percy's life and explain the dynamism that gave this life depth, charm, and coherence" (xiv).
The first of these two goals is accomplished in a competent yet conventional manner. Chapters 1-8 proceed in plain chronological fashion, moving from Percy's birth in 1916 to the launching of his literary career in 1961. They treat the major episodes in his life familiar to most students of his work: his childhood in Alabama; the suicide of his father; his youth in Georgia and Mississippi; the death of his mother; the influence of William Alexander ("Uncle Will") Percy; his college years at the University of North Carolina; his medical training at Columbia University's College of Physicians and Surgeons; his psychoanalysis with Dr. Janet Rioch; his contraction of tuberculosis and the three-year period of convalescence; his dual conversion to a writing career and to Catholicism; his marriage and family life in Louisiana; the years of literary apprenticeship; and the publication of The Moviegoer, winner of the 1962 National Book Award for Fiction.
The next chapters (9-14) use Percy's other publications to organize the flow of the narrative tracing his mature years until his death in 1990 from prostate cancer. Samway reconstructs the process of writing the other five published novels, the two books of nonfiction, and the numerous essays, articles, letters, and speeches that established Percy as a critically acclaimed American writer and insightful interpreter of what he called post-Christian America. Here the reader learns much about Percy's work habits, his relationships with family members and friends, his explorations in linguistics and symbol theory, his negotiations regarding editorial matters and movie rights, and his forays into university teaching. One special contribution of the book is the light it sheds on the relationship between Percy and his deaf daughter Ann.
When it comes to the book's second goal (to "explain the dynamism" of Walker Percy), the biography is less successful. To some degree, the book suffers from its unfortunate fate, coming on the heels of Jay Tolson's dramatic Pilgrim in the Ruins and Kieran Quinlan's more provocative Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist. Samway's work shies away from the interpretive gamble risked by these more adventuresome projects. Tolson speaks of a Kennedy-like appointment with tragedy haunting the history of the Percy family, and Quinlan speculates on the impossibility of Catholic novelists after Vatican II.
Samway, by contrast, avoids such metahistorical flourishes. In his commitment to the facts, however, he fails to show the meaning of the life. Percy himself said that his father's suicide constituted the "central mystery" of his life, but what Samway delivers is not at all mysterious. In fact, the Percy who emerges from his narrative is the complete bourgeois, comfortable with a successful writing career, an acceptable golf game, and the offerings of the local Taco Bell. Stephen Oates has described the biographical enterprise as an art form that requires the techniques of fiction to "elicit from the coldness of fact the warmth of a life being lived." Judged by this standard, Walker Percy: A Life fails to perform the highest function of biography.
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