William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter & Sexual Freethinker by Benjamin E. Wise (review)

BOOK REVIEWS William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter & Sexual Freethinker, by Benjamin E. Wise. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. 368 pp. $35.00 cloth. TO THOSE AMONG US WHO HAVE BEEN BROADLY FOLLOWING RECENT commentary on the issue of the sexual preferences of novelist Walker Percy’s famous “uncle,” the first question that will probably come to mind as we open the pages of Benjamin Wise’s William Alexander Percy: The Curious Life of a Mississippi Planter & Sexual Freethinker will be: did the author have access to the store of relevant letters still held by the family and tantalizingly dangled before an earlier biographer? The answer, revealed near the end of Wise’s engaging narrative, is negative. Nevertheless, Wise’s study represents a major addition to the Percy family archive as it argues persuasively and with steady consistency for its subject’s active homosexuality as a gay man comfortable with, rather than troubled by, his orientation even while living in a time and society hostile to homosexuality. It also convincingly challenges other items of Percy lore in regard to matters of depression and father-son relations. Drawing on a wide range of correspondence between Percy and his presumed lovers, various diaries, an especially close reading of his poetry, and the work of scholars of queer history in the South, Wise painstakingly establishes his case. Here, Will Percy, the “puny” but handsome second son of a distinguished family, early on recognizes his “difference” and finds satisfying male relationships not only during his student days at Sewanee and Harvard but also at home in Greenville. Far from suffering any sense of guilt or shame, Percy sees himself as being in the noble tradition of Greek male erotic culture that celebrated the body and that was ignorantly suppressed with the advent of Christianity (or what Percy came to regard as a distorted version of its doctrines). In spite of the admired Teddy Roosevelt’s fulminations against signs “of gross vice and moral weakness” in 1901, Percy’s reading of the classics and of the homoerotic literature of his day left him in no doubt that “one could be a poet, a fighter and a lover, a man and a homosexual” (80). The famed generational “depression” of members of the Percy family, while acknowledged by the author, does not strike his subject until the death 328 Mississippi Quarterly of his lover from Harvard days, Harold Bruff, when Percy was twenty-six.Percymaintainsaffectionateandrespectfulrelationswithhis somewhat puzzled parents by simply not discussing the matter with them—or they with him. Wise stresses over and over that there was a vibrant gay culture in the repressive South long before World War II and that those belonging to it knew how and where to find companionship. The experience of Oscar Wilde, still fresh in people’s memories, was both a justification for such practices as well as a caution in regard to their consequences. But it would seem that Percy himself never lived in chronic fear of exposure, though his failure to be reappointed as an instructor at Sewanee may have been due to the recognition of such proclivities. Locally, there was similar speculationamongsomeofthetownspeople,thoughPercy’sfamilyname, respect for his bravery during World War I, and, it should be admitted, a degree of unspoken tolerance gave him a pass in the matter. While carefully distinguishing between pederasty and pedophilia —Wise points out that “the historical record suggests his intimates were roughly his own age”—the author nevertheless emphasizes that “the concept of pederasty, which often focused on the love of male youths, was a central feature of Percy’s thinking” and was conceived of as “uplifting” and pure (45). Not that Percy was entirely averse to expressing basic erotic desire: Wise interprets at least one piece of Percy’s creative work as depicting “physical passion enjoyed merely for the pleasure of the body” (211). Wise never forces his arguments, however. The frequent tentativeness of his particular claims even makes them stronger rather than weaker as he rightly chooses to halt at the bedroom door. But he demonstrates clearly how Percy’s language is deeply inflected with the homoerotic discourse of the age and...