Ghost at My Window: A Salute to Walter Sullivan

To the best of my recollection, we were talking about Shelby Foote's The Civil War and in particular the sad endgame of that war. And so it was an easy segue from surrender to the funeral of William T. Sherman twenty-six years later in New York in "raw February weather." Sherman's final opponent, the Confederate General Joseph E. Johnston, then eighty-four years old, attended and stood bareheaded in respect. Urged to put on his hat, the old man replied: "If I were in his place and he were standing here in mine, he would not put on his hat."

Walter Sullivan and I were friends, pretty good friends, all things considered. Both of us had cancer. Walter had already outlived by several months the bleak prognosis of medicos, and I would soon undergo major surgery. Knowing that it was highly unlikely we would ever meet again, at least in this world, we made a little pact. Whichever one of us died first, the other did solemnly hereby agree to come to the funeral. Made sense at the time. We laughed (gallows humor?) and shook hands on it.

Things didn't work out according to plan. I did see Walter again before he died; but, at the time that he died, I was unconscious and, as they say, under the knife. What was left of me after the cutting and carving would not be traveling anywhere for a long time to come, if ever.

Things reversed themselves. During the grim time in the hospital and the chemotherapy treatments thereafter, I was vaguely conscious of the presence of Walter, almost as if he were there, standing near the window. My hospital ironically overlooked a large graveyard where, sometimes while hallucinating, I swear I saw tombstones line up in military formations and march about as if on parade. I was grateful for Walter's presence and thus for the example of his Christian faith and courage, which gave me more courage than I, in fact, have. I was embarrassed, too, thinking that with all his own family and kinfolk, his many friends, it was too much for me to summon him to my hospital room in Charlottesville, Virginia. I was apologetic as could be until it gradually dawned on me that—of course!—in the spiritual world we can be in many places and in many different times all at one and the same time.

My apology now turned into a kind of prayer of thanksgiving.

Thank you, Walter, for honoring our pact and coming to me when I couldn't come to stand by you.

Now housebound and at this writing—midsummer 2007—slowly healing, I have the leisure to rehearse (and revise) many things from my lifetime (so far). One of these must be my relationship with Walter over the years. Things began badly for our possible future friendship. In the late 1950s I didn't know Walter except by reputation, which was that he was a fiction writer of distinction and, as well, a critic of excellent repute. I had read some things by him, probably in the Sewanee Review, and, as I remember it, was favorably impressed and—the curse of all young writers—seriously envious.

Other than that, our paths first crossed in 1961 with the publication of a collection of essays—South: Modern Southern Literature in its Cultural Setting (Doubleday), edited by Louis D. Rubin, Jr., and Robert D. Jacobs. There were twenty-two essays by a goodly number of distinguished critics and writers who included Robert B. Heilman, William Van O'Connor, Frederick J. Hoffman, James Dickey, C. Hugh Holman, and Ray B. West. The final essay in the collection, "The Continuing Renascence: Southern Fiction in the Fifties," was written by Walter Sullivan and was a chronicle of a dozen southern fiction writers who had published books after World War ii. The writers Walter addressed were Shelby Foote, William Humphrey, Madison Jones, Flannery O'Connor, Peter Feibleman, Elizabeth Spencer, Shirley Ann Grau, James Agee, William Styron, Truman Capote, Peter Taylor, and (drum-roll, please) George Garrett. I...