Book Review

Walker Percy: A life

N Engl J Med 1997; 337:1326October 30, 1997

Article

Walker Percy: A life
By Patrick H. Samway. 506 pp. New York, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997. $35. ISBN: 0-374-18735-5

The life of Walker Percy follows one of the more unusual and brilliant trajectories to have originated in a conventional medical education. Percy was born in Birmingham, Alabama, in 1916, educated as a physician, and then, just as he was beginning his working life, he contracted tuberculosis, which confined him to a sanatorium for more than two years. Much later, he would joke, “TB is the best thing that ever happened to me.” The mordant humor and the truth of this observation are characteristic of the man. With the enforced inactivity of his convalescence, he had time to reflect on his life and read deeply in the philosophers and novelists that attracted him. In the years to follow, he would give up medicine to work as a writer and turn his diagnostician's eye to the metaphysical ills of 20th-century American society. The accounts of his conversion to Catholicism, also undertaken during his convalescence, and of his serious forays into the philosophy of language and symbolism provide further background for an understanding of Percy and his work. When he died in 1990, he left six strange, compelling novels of spiritual searching and social satire, among them The Moviegoer (New York: Avon, 1961) and Love in the Ruins (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1971), several nonfiction books, and numerous essays.

Samway's impressive biography of Percy is full of fact and anecdote, gathered through long association with the writer in his later years and extensive research. It gives a detailed account of the people Percy knew and the surroundings in which he wrote; Samway is intimately familiar with the available texts, having previously edited Percy's correspondence and a book of essays and speeches. He gives as much scope as possible to all the major aspects of Percy's life, but in doing so he encounters an inherent difficulty of the intellectual biography. It would take a book the size of this one simply to grapple with Percy's novels or his semiotic writings alone. As it is, connections between Percy's life and his fiction are noted, but not elaborated on, leaving me curious about what Samway might have done with his discoveries if he had narrowed his scope. In his foreword, he states that his goal is not to write literary criticism from a biographical perspective, but I think that the major works of a writer must be engaged to allow a full appreciation of the life from which they arose. Samway's respect for his subject seems to lead to studious avoidance of topics such as adultery and alcoholism, which feature prominently in Percy's fiction. Nonetheless, the book abounds in insights about the writer. Merely listing some of the authors Percy read in the sanatorium — Kierkegaard, Heidegger, Marcel, Sartre, Camus, Mann, Tolstoy, and Dostoevski — shows the points of departure for his writing. Conscious of an unrecognized despair infecting society, confronted with the possibility of personal extinction, he was yet firmly rooted in the South and continually aware of its cultural traditions and history.

Some of the most enjoyable parts of the book are the bits of correspondence between Percy and his lifelong friend Shelby Foote, the noted Civil War historian and novelist. They met as schoolboys and grew into writers together, with Foote leading the way and alternately cajoling, coaching, and browbeating his friend to get his act together and write. Foote also provides a good external reference to the internal world of Walker Percy, claiming for decades to be totally bewildered by Percy's philosophical writings and teasing him about his religious conversion as well.

This biography is rigorously documented and contains a good index. In addition to being a resource for literary scholars, it is a fine homage to a writer who will continue to intrigue and caution us.

Scott D. Boyd
Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA 02115