A Man Without a Handle

In this "community biography," as the author calls it—this oral history recorded on the hunch that the two full-length biographies of Walker Percy leave some good stories out—we are told by the owner of a hardware store in Percy's hometown (Covington, Louisiana) that Percy was "kind of a recluse." We are also told by a neighbor of Percy's, a lawyer, that he "was not a reclusive person" at all. Percy was "reticent" according to a local teacher and "sort of flirty" according to a bookshop owner. A former priest says Percy was never "comfortable as a Catholic" even though the church, according to Shelby Foote, provided Percy with the "kind of authority that gave his life a core." Percy was also apparently an unimpressive teacher and an incredibly good one as well.

Such discrepancies do not worry the compiler of these fascinating interviews. David Horace Harwell, in an effort to "flesh out" Percy "in the context of his community, his closest friends, and his family," records thirteen conversations with, among others, a "tradesman and raconteur," a "fellow citizen," two local teachers, Percy's housekeeper, and both of Percy's brothers. The full effect of this collection is something very like the fleshing out of a character, though, as Foote says, "I don't think anybody will ever really get Walker into a biography."

Harwell claims in his introduction that the "stories are presented with very little authorial interference," by which he may mean to anticipate a criticism—that he permits his interlocutors to speak too much about themselves and not enough about Percy. And in fact he does, but these digressions account for no more than a handful of pages, and any reader impatient with them will come to understand at least this much about the man who was by turns exuberantly at home and anxiously lost in the cosmos: that if he wasn't one thing to all people, he was certainly (as Channing said of Emerson) a man without a handle.

But, unlike Emerson, Percy actually believed in something that didn't originate in the greater Boston area. To Foote that something was "Jesus Christ, the teachings of Jesus Christ, the future life, hell and heaven." Percy, he says, "bought the whole package." He also took up some unpopular positions. His uncompromising stances on other issues, among them abortion and homosexuality, needn't be rehashed. And yet it is interesting to learn here that Percy once threw a man out of his house for suggesting that Uncle Will was a homosexual, even though the general opinion of Uncle Will tended that way. (William Alexander Percy, author of Lanterns on the Levee, was the cousin who raised Percy and his two brothers, and we read here that the aunt in The Moviegoer, Percy's first published novel and winner of the National Book Award, might have been an "analogue for Uncle Will.") And, whereas there is plenty of racial humor in Percy's fiction, the testimonies in this book present a man who worked indefatigably for civil rights in Covington, going so far as to assist in establishing a credit union specifically to help blacks secure loans unavailable to them at local banks.

We are told again and again that Percy was an eminently fair man, unassuming, uncomfortable in a stratified world, though also disinclined to suffer fools therein. The Percys always introduced their black housekeeper (a beneficiary of the credit union) as their "friend," and Percy himself, preferring an old pickup truck to the ostentatious Chrysler he briefly owned (and hated), would sooner accept a speaking engagement in an elementary school classroom than in a metropolitan auditorium, where he might be required to mingle with strangers afterward. His younger brother, Phin, says Percy was the most honest man he knew: "I can't imagine Walker lying about anything," he says. "I don't think he ever did. . . . I just wonder if anybody has ever been...