William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter and Sexual Freethinker

5. Harvard

73 5. HARVARD I have enjoyed spells of more intense happiness but never three years of uninterrupted happiness as I did at the Harvard Law School. —William Alexander Percy, Lanterns on the Levee On May 20, 1905, Percy boarded the SS Saint Paul in Southampton, England. The Saint Paul was an icon of the Gilded Age—a fast, luxurious steamship that ferried travelers, merchants, and immigrants from Europe to New York City. American and European steamship companies had been competing for decades to make the biggest, most lavish ships to entice “saloon customers ”—travelers other than immigrants—to travel between continents. Families like the Percys paid top dollar for first-class tickets across the Atlantic and enjoyed carpeted berths and saloons on the top deck. But the majority of passengers on these ships between 1880 and 1920 were those crowded in the hull below, “steerage aliens” coming to America—Slavs, Poles, Greeks, Russians, Italians, Armenians, and Estonians who slept in bunk beds in the bowels of the ship. The year 1905 was the first in American history during which 1 million passengers arrived at Ellis Island, most of them coming from southern and eastern Europe.1 On the SS Saint Paul, Percy traveled on the top level, carefully segregated from the people below—people like Catterina Marchetti, a twenty-five-yearold housekeeper bound for Pittsburgh; and Carlo DiGiorgi, a mason with $40 in his pocket who, upon arrival, would be deemed of sound mind and body by the U.S. government and found not to be an anarchist or a polygamist . At Ellis Island, Percy signed his name on the manifest and moved through customs and on to the railway at Penn Station in Manhattan. His luggage would have been handled by porters. Passengers like Marchetti and DiGiorgi may have had to wait weeks at the quarantine for clearance. They carried everything they owned. They were inspected for their cleanliness and their politics.2 Percy took the train south, likely stopping in Sewanee for a visit on his way to Mississippi. He spent the summer of 1905 in Greenville, again wring- 74 : Harvard ing his hands with his parents about his future. “I agreed uneagerly with father that a man should earn his keep,” he remembered, but when he looked within, he found himself without “any quality convertible into cash.” He had a solid knowledge of the classics; he loved poetry and sculpture and painting ; he was possessed of the desire to travel and to read and to experience the beauty of the world. He had many avocations, but no vocation. He had a growing desire to become a writer, but poet was not historically a prosperous career, nor was it one LeRoy Percy encouraged. LeRoy encouraged law school—he had gone, his father had gone, his brothers had gone. His law firm, then called Percy and Yerger, was enormously successful litigating corporate disputes, writing contracts, and overseeing the formation and dissolution of business partnerships. By this time, at age forty-four, LeRoy Percy had established himself as one of the most prominent attorneys in the region. Will Percy, though, had little enough interest in his father’s corporate clients. He was a humanist, he felt, not a moneymaker. But he also felt that his father and others had for years “been pouring out money, skill, time, devotion, prayers to create something out of me that wouldn’t look as if the Lord had slapped it together absent-mindedly.” In the end, he wrote, “I did not choose the law, it chose me.” LeRoy Percy and his brothers had gone to Virginia, but Will Percy chose Harvard. This was his compromise: “I wanted to be near Boston with its music and theatres, which I would miss the rest of my life in my future Southern home.”3 In August Percy and his parents boarded a train in Greenville for the weeklong trip to Boston, a city mythical and romantic in Percy’s imagination: here waited the Boston Symphony Hall and the Columbia and Orpheum and Majestic and Colonial Theatres—the last of which just opened in 1900 and boasted a lobby of mirrors and white marble and Corinthian columns, seats upholstered in dark green leather, and proscenium and pilasters gilded and leafed in gold. Here in Boston waited the opera and the theatre and the symphony, which regularly performed Wagner and Brahms, Bach and Beethoven. Here was the city of painters like John Singer Sargent, pastors like John Winthrop and...