Walker Percy's The Gramercy Winner: A Memoir of the American Tuberculosis Experience

Abstract

Dr. Walker Percy (1916-90), physician and writer from the American south, is best known for his philosophically grounded writings, both nonfiction and fiction. Among many honors, Percy won the National Book Award for his novel, The Moviegoer, in 1962. Less known is how Percy's experience as a 1940s patient in the American north defined his creative mind-set and how Percy himself documented that turning point in an earlier unpublished novel, The Gramercy Winner. When considered in the pathographic tradition, Percy's early attempt at story telling typifies the way patients reconstruct illness through a blending of nonfictional and fictional narrative. Set in northern New York in the same small Adirondack mountain community where he was treated for TB, his narrative reveals what Maria Montello calls Percy's transition, a journey or pilgrimage from one kind of diagnostic and therapeutic activity to another (qtd. in Elliott 48). In The Gramercy Winner Percy both explores his individual transformation from physician to writer and exposes the culture of an illness that transformed the collective American mindset before the advent of wonder drugs in the early 1950s that promised a chemotherapeutic cure. As David Morris observes in Illness and Culture in the Postmodern Age, tuberculosis was, in short, a lifestyle, a parable, a theater of illness complete with tacit rules, recurrent images, and complex social meanings that came to dominate the imagination of an entire century (Morris 55-56). TB likewise came to dominate the imagination of Walker Percy. The life-altering impact of Percy's bout with during the 1940s comes up repeatedly in interviews with Percy and in critical commentary written about him. Percy's remarks to interviewer John Griffin Jones in 1983 typify the way Percy characterized the experience: contracted working as an intern at Bellevue Hospital doing autopsies on TB deaths. For two years I was, quote 'taking the cure,' as we said, at Saranac Lake in New York, and also working as a doctor up there, which was the best thing that ever happened to me because it gave me a chance to quit medicine. I had a respectable excuse (Lawson, Conversations 262-63). Percy graduated with an MD from Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons in 1941 and began interning at Bellevue in 1942 when the onset of TB forced him to leave Bellevue and follow the accepted treatment of the time. Before the advent of successful drug therapy in the early 1950s, many twentieth-century TB sufferers typically cured at institutionalized sanatoria where patients followed a strict regime based on rest, fresh air, diet and, sometimes, surgery. Patients often preferred sanatoria located in the mountains because of the presumed curative properties of mountain air.1 Saranac Lake, New York, isolated high in the Adirondack Mountains 300 miles north of New York City, was a premier facility especially popular among medical personnel. Dr. Edward Livingston Trudeau, also a Columbia CPS graduate, Bellevue intern, and TB sufferer of an earlier generation, had founded the first successful North American sanatorium in Saranac Lake in 1884, using his knowledge of similar initiatives in the European Alps. Trudeau also founded there the first research facility in North America devoted specifically to tuberculosis. The Trudeau Sanatorium and its research wing, the Saranac Laboratory,2 gave rise to an entire community devoted to curing, and set the standard for clinical practice and research in North America. Doctors especially were drawn to Saranac Lake by its reputation and by the opportunity for continued practice and research because ambulatory patients with medical qualifications were often pressed into service. It was natural for Dr. Percy to follow the Columbia-Bellevue-Trudeau axis (Figure I).3 Saranac Lake was a thriving therapeutic community when Dr. Walker Percy arrived in September 1942 as a young patient in his midtwenties. …