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Politics Foreign Affairs Culture Fellows Program

Bunt Percy, Saint And Martyr

Plus: Walker Percy, Love In The Ruins, Donald Trump, #BlackLivesMatter

Found this last night in Walker Percy’s 1987 interview published in The Paris Review:

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.

I read that out loud to Mrs. Dreher last night, as we were in bed reading, and she began to convulse with laughter. She wouldn’t stop, either, going on for about five minutes. I was ruffled, I tell you what.

Solitary funks and strange elations.
Why, I have no idea what that means. Heh.

We had our first official planning meeting for Walker Percy Weekend 2016 this morning. (Tickets go on sale sometime in March.) I was able to share with my confrères this bit from that same interview. The interviewer tells Percy that he most reminds him (the interviewer) of Saul Bellow. Percy responds:

I take that kindly. I admire Barth, Pynchon, Heller, Vonnegut—you could also throw in Updike, Cheever, and Malamud—but perhaps Bellow most of all. He bears the same relationship to the streets of Chicago and upper Broadway—has inserted himself into them—the way I have in the Gentilly district of New Orleans or a country town in West Feliciana Parish in Louisiana.

That town is ours, St. Francisville.

One more tidbit from that interview, hugely relevant here in 2016, given where American culture and politics are:

Love in the Ruins was a picnic, with everything in it but the kitchen sink. It was written during the Time of Troubles in the sixties, with all manner of polarization in the country, black vs. white, North vs. South, hippie vs. square, liberal vs. conservative, McCarthyism vs. commies, et cetera—the whole seasoned with a Southern flavor and featuring sci-fi, futurism, and Dr. More, a whimsical descendant of the saint. After the solemnities of The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman, why not enjoy myself? I did.

… INTERVIEWER:

Is there any concrete issue that engages your attention most in connection with what is going on in America at the moment?

PERCY

Probably the fear of seeing America, with all its great strength and beauty and freedom—“Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A.,” and so on—gradually subside into decay through default and be defeated, not by the communist movement, demonstrably a bankrupt system, but from within by weariness, boredom, cynicism, greed, and in the end helplessness before its great problems. Probably the greatest is the rise of a black underclass. Maybe Faulkner was right. Slavery was America’s Original Sin and the one thing that can defeat us. I trust not.

INTERVIEWER

In connection with what is going on in the world?

PERCY

Ditto: the West losing by spiritual acedia. A Judaic view is not inappropriate here: Communism may be God’s punishment for the sins of the West. Dostoyevsky thought so.

Hmm. Seems to me that we have to do something at this year’s Percyfest about LITR, given that it’s an election year, and Donald Trump, and Black Lives Matter, and the rest. Yes? Who would be some commenters you’d like to hear talk about Love In The Ruins and Walker Percy, Prophet?

There will be gin fizzes in my Benedict Option bunker. Just FYI.

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