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1 Walker Percy A Brief Biography Ralph C. Wood William Buckley once wittily remarked that all future presidents should be made to take a double oath of office. They should swear not only to uphold the Constitution of the United States of America but also promise to read, mark, learn, and inwardly digest Walker Percy’s novel of 1971, Love in the Ruins. “It’s all there in that one book,” Buckley declared, “what’s happening to us and why.”1 Such extravagant praise is meant to echo the extravagance of Percy’s satire. Yet the outrageousness of such an accolade, far from silencing further consideration of Percy, prompts us to ask what kind of man stands behind such a book. Much of what follows is not original with me but a précis of Jay Tolson’s fine biography, Pilgrim in the Ruins, but will serve to orient the reader to the chapters that follow mine.2 Walker Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on May 28, 1916, to a very distinguished family. He had French Catholic ancestors on his mother’s (Martha Susan Phinizy) side, and on his father’s side the family could trace its ancestry back to the Percys of Northumberland, who appear in Shakespeare ’s plays. Funeral monuments honoring the Percy family can still be seen in the cathedral at Beverley in Humberside. Walker Percy’s father, Leroy Pratt Percy, had graduated from Princeton University and Harvard Law School with honors, and he had taken up a career as an attorney and general counsel for Tennessee Coal, Iron and Railroad. Birmingham was known as the “Magic City” because it had grown so rapidly and prosperously since its founding in 1870. Yet the Percys were not newcomers to Birmingham. In fact, Walker Percy’s grandfather (also named Walker) had settled there in 12 Ralph C. Wood 1886 after graduating from the University of the South (“Sewanee”) as well as the University of Virginia Law School. Thus did the Percys rise rapidly to social and civic prominence in the raw and bustling city. Yet theirs was not a typical southern milieu but a decidedly multicultural place, with a large population of Jews, Greeks, Italians, and Russians coming to operate the new coal mines, steel mills, businesses. Walker Percy’s father, like his forebears, had been imbued with the ancient ideal of noblesse oblige, a secular version of the biblical claim that “to whom much is given, of him will much be required” (Luke 12:48). The Percy family believed that the “nobility” who have achieved great material and social success are not meant to live in idle luxury; they are obliged, instead, to devote themselves to the commonweal. Thus were the Birmingham Percys active in various civic clubs, even as they were vigorous opponents of bigotry and narrow-mindedness, especially when it was directed against Catholics, Jews, and Negroes. They were also members of the Independent Presbyterian Church, a congregation whose pastor had been ousted from an older Presbyterian church because he was a humanist who denied the existence of miracles and the divinity of Jesus. (Such moralistic Presbyterianism is satirized, by the way, in the figure of Ellen Oglethorpe in Love in the Ruins.) Walker Percy described his Birmingham childhood as having many occasions for happiness. Together with his two younger brothers, he enjoyed hunting and fishing with a black caretaker named Elijah Collier (“Lije”), and the Percy brothers spent theirs summers at boys’ camps in cool Wisconsin . The three Percys attended a small, select academy called Birmingham University School, where Walker was known as quiet and studious, but also as somewhat sickly, since he was afflicted with allergies. Though he was a much better student than athlete—excelling chiefly in Latin and math but also sending off short stories to various boys’ magazines—he was not an insufferable little egghead. On the contrary, nearly everyone found him funny. Yet nearly everyone also noticed something distant and aloof about young Walker, as if he were too vulnerable and frail a creature to be suited for the rough-and-tumble of ordinary life. In this regard Percy very much resembled his mother, who was also rather delicate and remote—indeed, an almost otherworldly figure. The boys were never close to her. In 1924 the Percys left the Five Points neighborhood at the commercial hub of Birmingham for a new suburban life. They moved over Red Mountain to a grand new home next to the Mountain Brook Country...

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