Percy, Foote, & Faulkner

Connecting more dots between myself, Faulkner & Oxford, and another pair of my favorite southern authors on Walker Percy's birthday.

Percy's early life was marked by tragedy: his grandfather and father both committed suicide with shotguns, and his mother drowned when her car ran off the road into a stream. When his uncle in Greenville, Mississippi, adopted Percy and his little brothers, things took a turn for the better; it was there that he met his lifelong best friend, the neighbor boy Shelby Foote. As teenagers they took a trip to Oxford to meet their hero, William Faulkner — Percy was so overwhelmed that he stayed in the car as Foote and Faulkner talked on the porch. The Joke That Got No Laughs by Hal Sirowitz | The Writer's Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Funny. Last week my traveling companion (my brother-in-law) stayed with the car while I wandered the grounds of Rowan Oak too. But I wandered with the memorial spirit and not the very person of Count No 'count, nearly fifty years since his passing.


This "teahouse" at Brinkwood, near the University of the South at Sewanee, TN was constructed by young Walker Percy and his pal Shelby Foote in the '30s, visited by me in 1996, mentioned in this old post...

Faulkner's niece Dean Faulkner Wells recounts Percy's & Foote's own pilgrimage to Rowan Oak in 1938:

Walker's & Shelby's "teahouse"

Found it, tucked away in a box in a drawer: the Brinkwood "tea-house" near the University of the South at Sewanee, TN, constructed by Walker Percy and Shelby Foote in the '30s, visited by me in 1996, & mentioned in yesterday's post. 


I'm still trying, without total success, to see how the world (or the cove, at least) looks through the eyes of a southern Roman Catholic-Existentialist novelist and a Civil War historian (& star of Ken Burns' "Civil War") who appreciated fine bourbon--  "boih-buhn," in Shelby's mouth. 


It was a cave in just such a cove as lies beneath this perch, Lost Cove cave, into which Percy sent his protagonist in The Second Coming to search for God.


No single point of view is privileged, all contribute to the whole.


But the view from this pavilion is absolutely spectacular. I have that picture somewhere too, I'm pretty sure. I'll keep looking.

lost in the cosmos?

The novelist Walker Percy died twenty years ago today. Twenty! Tomorrow and tomorrow may creep at a petty pace, but yesterday flies.

I was a Percy fan, though I was no fan of his Catholicism or his jabs at my hero Carl Sagan. "Vulgar scientism," really?!

But weird though it may be, Lost in the Cosmos is worth a look if (like me) you're a naturalist and humanist with a "spiritual" feeling for the stars. We need critics like Percy to keep us sharp.

He was a lifelong pal of the Civil War historian Shelby Foote. They built a stone "teahouse" pavilion together on a hill in Sewanee, Tennessee in the 1930s. I'll see if I can dig up the photo I took there, what, fifteen years ago already?