Storytelling, History, and the Postmodern South

Will Percy and Lanterns on the Levee Revisited

12 Will Percy and Lanterns on the Levee Revisited bertram wyatt-brown William Alexander Percy’s Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter’s Son (1941) remains a memorial to a long-vanished southern culture. In his preface to a paperback edition in 1973, Walker Percy begins a lively and sensitive introduction to the masterpiece written by his “fabled relative.”1 His word for his “Uncle Will,” as he called him, was appropriate. It applied not only to the author but to the actual character of his memoir as well. Both his life in the Mississippi Delta and other places and his most prominent literary work are the subjects of this essay. Lanterns on the Levee has remained in print since 1941. With his antiquated views, the long-dead author is likely to please neither the current gay community nor those involved in civil rights. Yet Lanterns holds our interest by the beauty of its style, the humor it generates , and the profound sense of humanity Percy conveys. Because he was so complex a figure, the confusing nature of his character makes it almost impossible to separate the various threads of his identity. To call him a poet, memoirist, storyteller, bon vivant, world traveler, planter, attorney, civic leader, is only to touch upon his many sides. Furthermore, in 1932 he became a foster father responsible for the care of three young orphan sons of his first cousin LeRoy Pratt Percy, an attorney of Birmingham , Alabama, and his wife, Martha Susan (Mattie Sue). Both had died tragically. Will Percy and Lanterns on the Levee Revisited 13 Inwardly, Will Percy suffered. Thus he remains a curious puzzle to readers as well as, perhaps, to himself. We prefer characters who are deemed either good or bad, but he defies simple categories. Instead, contradictions and ambivalences abound. He lacked a sturdy confidence in his own selfhood but managed to develop a lively social presence. His mother and father did not accord him the respect that a growing lad needs, yet he was a dutiful son who followed the dictates of the Fifth Commandment. He rejected the Christian creed but found in the Stoic tradition of Marcus Aurelius a stirring, warlike replacement. Indeed, for a man small in stature and somewhat womanly in manner, Percy loved war.2 In battle Percy discovered an excitement that made ordinary living seem irrelevant, but the Aurelian principles that guided his war experiences could not adapt to the changing times. Still, they helped to elicit a yearning for a distant, mythical past significant in his thoughts. He had a joyous exuberance about him that was severely compromised by a deep sense of loneliness coupled with depression. Melancholia was a family curse. Despite its effects, Percy explored the creative aspect of his soul as a means to hold the shade of despondency at bay. So often, like other depressives, he found in humor a way to challenge those ill feelings. In terms of racial matters, Percy was far more appreciative of the black race than he was of poor whites, especially the bloodthirsty racists among them. He offered much help to African Americans in trouble—without, however, ever thinking of them as equal to himself. As a wealthy Delta plantation owner, he adhered to the southern faith in white superiority, both in terms of morals and intelligence. While he had a respectable legal practice, he hated litigation. The strain tossed him into emotional turmoil. Percy’s sexual leanings were toward other men. Yet, remaining closeted, he found in art and music a constant source of inspiration and an escape from the frowns of other Mississippians. In that day and that locale, nothing could have been quite so repellent to ordinary folk as homosexuality. It was a source of mortification in the South that persists in its stubborn prejudice to our own time. How could all these selves, as it were, complement each other? Somehow they did. Therein lies the enigma of a man with some of the flaws of the human species but also the gifts of a literary artist. In Lanterns on the Levee Will Percy, as he was known, created a grand southern fable. Throughout his short life he had to negotiate between 14 bertram wyatt-brown the anti-intellectual proclivities and conventions of a rural, hierarchical, southern world and his own far more generous and accepting spirit and cosmopolitanism. Somehow he managed to belong...