Preface: Influence, Wayfaring, and the Catholic Novelist

Abstract

PrefaceInfluence, Wayfaring, and the Catholic Novelist David Paul Deavel This past June marked the sixth annual Walker Percy Weekend held in St. Francisville, Louisiana, part of the West Feliciana Parish that was the fictionalized "Feliciana Parish" setting for some of Percy's greatest novels. Limited to four hundred tickets, the two-day festival starts with registration at a bookstore, a casual conversation with organizer Rod Dreher (of The Benedict Option fame), and an opening night party in the cemetery at Grace Episcopal Church, shaded by beautiful oak trees. The second day is the day of substantive intellectual engagement about Percy with nationally known speakers. Past Percy Weekend lecturers include Percy scholars Ralph Wood and biographers Jay Tolson and Patrick Samway, SJ. This year's speakers were perhaps even more up-market, with New York Times columnist David Brooks, best-selling Hillbilly Elegy author J. D. Vance, and journalist Walter Isaacson, best-selling biographer of Leonardo DaVinci, Benjamin Franklin, and Steve Jobs. The final events of the festival are—in the spirit of an author whose celebrated essay "Bourbon, Neat" proposed a few [End Page 5] bourbon shots in order to "warm the heart, reduce the anomie of the late twentieth century, to cut the cold phlegm of Wednesday afternoons"—a "progressive front porch and bourbon-tasting tour" and a "crawfish and craft beer celebration."1 With such a lineup of speakers, culinary offerings, and alcoholic delights in a romantic locale, selling four hundred tickets isn't hard. One could sell out four hundred tickets with a generic literary festival without mention of Percy. But my guess is that the hard-core enthusiasts who come to the Walker Percy Weekend would also consent to spending their weekend in the public library in Paducah, Kentucky, or a bomb shelter in Sheboygan to talk about Percy's life, work, and importance. For Percy is one of those writers who is valued not just for the purity of his art—like Homer, he nodded at times—but for the purity of his search for truth. Chesterton observed that one of the problems with news is often that we read about the death of persons we never knew lived. My own discovery of Percy was this way. I had begun reading Flannery O'Connor in high school and happened to read an article in my denominational magazine about another southern Catholic author who had just died in May 1990. While the author, later a professor of mine at Calvin College, "had me at 'Flannery O'Connor,'" I was doubly intrigued by the story of the writer who had come from a family of suicides, survived, and found strength in a Christian faith that didn't simply solve his problems but made them understandable as part of a journey. Given that my own father had a history of mental health issues, some of which had flared up again around the same time Percy died, my adolescent concern was that I too would inherit them. At one point in that summer of 1990 I had had a kind of small breakdown about my sanity that lasted several days. My Christian Reformed pastor, a saintly World War II veteran named Charles Terpstra, came over to the house on the second day with some information about mental health issues and some stories about his wife's family, who also had a history of mental illness. Pastor Terpstra's help got me out of the house on the third day. I was [End Page 6] ripe, however, for Percy, who, in the article I read, struck me as the kind of man and author who had faced down the crazy in the world and the crazy within. I immediately went to the library and picked up the Percy on hand, his 1980 novel, The Second Coming. Given that my own father's long-time diagnosis was schizophrenia, it was perhaps providential that I came upon this volume. The main character, Will Barrett, a retired widower who has tasted of life's successes but finds them wanting, is haunted both by the suspicion that life is meaningless, because God either doesn't exist or doesn't care, and...