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:

muddy maybe

Not quite through with Mr. Percy just yet...

His Will Barrett went to Lost Cove cave (in Second Coming) to pose a God question he thought would have to yield a definitive answer. But a clear yes or no answer may not be forthcoming, after all. The answer may be a muddy maybe. Indeed. And so my colleagues and I are gratefully still  in business.

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?

Gratitude

David Halberstam died yesterday in an automobile accident in California. He was a first-rate journalist and author, best known for The Best and the Brightest. My favorite Halberstam work is The Children, an account of the courageous college students who organized protests in Nashville and elsewhere in the heyday of the Civil Rights movement. I also like his baseball books, especially his account of the 1964 season that culminated in a Cards-Yanks World Series. I'm grateful for Halberstam's life and contribution,.

Halberstam's death seems an appropriate occasion to express my gratitude for another personal hero who left us too soon, Robert Solomon.

I'm on record as being generally unimpressed by the the academic/philosophical/Continental expression of Existentialism, much preferring literary versions like Walker Percy's and Richard Ford's. But I make an exception for Solomon, the University of Texas philosopher who collapsed and died in a Swiss airport in January.

Gratitude was one of Solomon's recurrent themes:
Gratitude, I want to suggest, is not only the best answer to the tragedies of life. It is the best approach to life itself. This is not to say, as I keep insisting, an excuse for quietism or resignation. It is no reason to see ourselves simply as passive recipients and not as active participants full of responsibilities. On the contrary, as Kant and Nietzsche among many others insisted, being born with talents and having opportunities imposes a heavy duty on us, to exercise those talents and make good use of those opportunities. It is also odd and unfortunate that we take the blessings of life for granted -- or insist that we deserve them -- but then take special offense at the bad things in life, as if we could not possibly deserve those. The proper recognition of tragedy and the tragic sense of life is not shaking one's fist at the gods or the universe "in scorn and defiance" but rather, as Kierkegaard writes in a religious context, "going down one one's knees" and giving thanks. Whether or not there is a God or there are gods to be thanked, however, seems not the issue to me. It is the importance and the significance of being thankful, to whomever or whatever, for life itself.
-Robert C. Solomon, "Spirituality for the Skeptic" (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002)

Carlin Romano wrote last week in The Chronicle of Higher Education:
Above all, Solomon exuded appetite, endless appetite, for philosophy that matters, problems, in the Jamesian sense, that make a difference for real people.

Halberstam and Solomon, thankfully, left us a legacy of words and ideas by which we can continue to be instructed and inspired, and for which I am profoundly grateful.

Richard Ford

My old friend at ESU in Alabama (we go way back, to before the Sellars-Quine Kitchen Debate mentioned a couple of posts ago) and I recently were discussing a mutual favorite, novelist Richard Ford. Ford, A. noted, is a masterful chronicler of the often-riveting varieties of ways in which his Everyman heroes (and we) try and fail to lose ourselves in the everydayness of quotidian life. (Like me, I think, A. prefers the Existentialism of fiction to that of philosophy.)

Ford's Frank Bascombe has now taken the stage in three outstanding novels, with the publication last fall of Lay of the Land. He is an older, wiser, more secular Binx Bolling (Walker Percy's "seeker" in The Moviegoer), who comes at last to understand that "a practical acceptance of what's what, in real time and down-to-earth, is as good as spiritual if you can finagle it." And: "Here is necessity... to live it out."

Bascombe, now more-than-slightly past mid-life and momentarily weary of becoming, hungers for necessity ("something solid, the thing ‘character’ stands in for") and Permanence. The trouble is, "Permanence can be scary. Even though it solves the problem of tiresome becoming, it can also erode optimism, render possibility small and remote... down deep inside [to] become just an organism... This you need to save yourself from, or else the slide off the transom of life’s pleasure boat becomes irresistible and probably a good idea."

I met Ford about ten years ago, and expressed to him my admiration for a particular passage in the first Bascombe tale The Sportswriter (1986)--

"Real mystery—the very reason to read (and certainly write) any book—was to them [his teaching colleagues] a thing to dismantle, distill and mine out into rubble they could tyrannize into sorry but more permanent explanations; monuments to themselves, in other words. In my view all teachers should be required to stop teaching at age thirty-two and not allowed to resume until they're sixty-five, so that they can live their lives, not teach them away—live lives full of ambiguity and transience and regret and wonder, be asked to explain nothing in public until very near the end when they can't do anything else. Explaining is where we all get into trouble. . . "Some things can't be explained. They just are. . . . It is better not even to look so hard, to leave off explaining. Nothing makes me more queasy than to spend time with people who don't know that . . . for whom such knowledge isn't a cornerstone of life."

Such a stance is easier to sustain, of course, if you are a former teacher who has achieved subsequent success in other endeavors (fiction writing, for instance). But its wisdom occurs to me in the classroom just about every day, usually smack in the middle of an explanation.

In a future post I'll discuss the middle Bascombe book Independence Day (1995) and its striking parental wisdom -- striking in part because Ford is not a parent himself.