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The World That Uncle Will Percy Made

I was talking this morning with my friend James, a collaborator on the upcoming Walker Percy Weekend festival we have planned for St. Francisville this June. He found this description of our region (in Percy, “Feliciana Parish”) in the preface to The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy’s last novel, which is set here: Welcomed in the beginning […]

I was talking this morning with my friend James, a collaborator on the upcoming Walker Percy Weekend festival we have planned for St. Francisville this June. He found this description of our region (in Percy, “Feliciana Parish”) in the preface to The Thanatos Syndrome, Percy’s last novel, which is set here:

Welcomed in the beginning by the hospitable and indolent Spanish of a decrepit empire, some of these assorted malcontents united long enough to throw out the Spanish and form an independent republic, complete with its own Declaration of Independence, flag, army, navy, constitution, and capital in St. Francisville. The new republic had no inclination to join French Louisiana to the south of the United States to the north and would as soon have been let alone. It lasted seventy-four days. Jefferson had bought Louisiana and that was that.

As pleasant a place as its name implies, it still harbors all manner of fractious folk, including Texans and recent refugees from unlikely places like Korea and Michigan, all of whom have learned to get along tolerably well, better than most in fact, who watch LSU football and reruns of M*A*S*H, drink Dixie beer, and eat every sort of food imaginable, which is generally cooked in something called a roux.

The downside of Feliciana is that its pine forests have been mostly cut down, its bayous befouled, Lake Pontchartrain polluted, the Mississippi River turned into a sewer. It has too many malls, banks, hospitals, chiropractors, politicians, lawyers, realtors, and condos with names like Chateau Charmant.

Still and all, I wouldn’t live anywhere else.

It is strange, but these Louisianians, for all their differences and contrariness, have an affection for one another. It is expressed by small signs and courtesies, even between strangers, as if they shared a secret.

Percy uses “Feliciana Parish” to mean not only West Feliciana Parish, where St. Francisville is, but Louisiana’s Florida Parishes; he lived in Covington, at the far eastern end of the region. James and I continued talking about this place, and what makes it particular, especially in Percy. We then got to talking about Greenville, Miss., and William Alexander Percy — Walker’s “Uncle Will,” who raised him. Uncle Will was a highly sophisticated Southern gentleman, a highly cultured aesthete who was the last of his line of Southern aristocrats. Uncle Will’s parlor in Greenville was a standard stop important people made on their tours of the South back in the day. Will Percy was a very complicated man, one shaped by his times, and one who was both forward-thinking and archaic.

Thinking of Calvin Trillin’s recent New Yorker essay about Greenville, which discusses its economic and cultural decline in the 20th century, James and I were wondering about the effect men (and women) like Uncle Will had on small Southern towns in their age. Nowadays, the economy being what it is, many, perhaps most, of the sons and daughters of the educated small-town folks migrate to the cities, or further afield, in search of work and cultural opportunities they didn’t have back home. Our own town, St. Francisville, was a more culturally sophisticated place 100 years ago, when the cotton economy was booming.

Does the rise of the Internet economy make it possible for small Southern towns (and small towns period) to experience a cultural revival? What would the Uncle Wills of the 21st century South look like? Are they possible? Do small Southern towns like Greenville and St. Francisville have something particular to offer the world of arts, literature, and culture — and if so, how do we cultivate it in places like this? We all know that there are parts of the world that made Uncle Will, and the world that Uncle Will made, that we are rid of today, and don’t want to have back. But Uncle Will also made Walker Percy, one of the greatest Southern writers of the 20th century. What do Uncle Will and his world have to teach us today?

We are going to have a panel discussion on that at the Walker Percy Weekend, and substitute it for the “Message In the Mosaic” panel, which has been hard to recruit speakers for. If you are an academic who would like to participate in the discussion, drop me an e-mail at rod (at) amconmag.com.  We can’t offer an honorarium (yet), but we can give you a place to stay. Besides, it’ll be fun to spend an early summer weekend here in Feliciana Parish, eating crawfish, drinking beer, and talking about Walker Percy with a mess of his readers.

Any of you readers have anything to say about Uncle Will and his world? About small Southern towns and culture? One of you, I recall, wrote a while back and asked if we could do a panel on Uncle Will. Wellsir, here you go.

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