Lancelot is a dangerous book. I can only imagine some of the reviews it must have received! While I love the book, one cannot read it cold. Without any knowledge of Percy, what he valued, what drove his curiosity, and how he viewed the calling of a novelist, one would be completely lost and certainly scandalized by his protagonist. Lancelot Andrewes Lamar is not an easy character to like. His odd views about society, and his ultimate search for the "Unholy Grail" will not sit well with moralists. Or Percy, but he writes the character so convincingly, one might believe he speaks for the author. ANd therein lies the danger. You must know Percy, and must read all the way to the climatic final scene with Percival to capture the novelist's intent.
Walker Percy was recommended to me by a professor my sophomore year of college. I am in that prof's debt. Once I read one, I had to hunt down all WP's works. After reading a few novels, I read a biography of Percy, Flannery O'Conner, and Thomas Merton entitled "The Lfie You Save Might Be Your Own". I learned Percy contracted tuberculosis after medical school, went to a sanatorium, began reading existentialist fiction, and converted to Catholicism due to the impression made by a college roommate's daily Mass devotion. I read his non-fictional essays, and found that his writing. both non-fiction and fiction, was really a search for the truth about our human condition. He used each genre to move closer to the center of the mystery that is Man, and in the end he answered mystery with mystery, like Job. Maybe that's why I like him.
He claimed, "The novelist writes about the coming end in order to warn about present ills and so avert the end....[but he] is less like a prophet than he is like the canary that coal miners used to take down into the shaft to test the air. When the canary gets unhappy, utters plaintive cries, and collapses, it may be time for the miners to surface and think things over..." I like that. He also noted that novelists, like filmmakers both enjoy "swinging the intellectual cat... doing anything he likes." I like that too.
Walker Percy was born May 28, 1916. He began writing in '62, and wrote Lancelot in 1977. I was born in 1981. In his youth, he became friends with Shelby Foote, destined to become another noted Southern writer, and the two (on a lark) drove to Oxford, Mississippi to meet William Faulkner. According to Percy's account, he lost his nerve, and watched from the car as Foote spoke at length with the famed author on the porch. Reading that, I had the urge in 2000 to drive to Louisiana and find Percy, to sit down with him and ask him only a hundred questions.
Percy died in 1990, a full decade before I discovered "The Last Gentleman" on a dusty library shelf in Winona, Minnesota. So, I never met him, and never drove to Louisiana on a lark. But when I read his works, he speaks. Maybe that's why I like him. Maybe that's why I like books.
Percy's back on the shelf for now, but I have Gilbert Keith Chesterson to keep me company, so no worries!
No comments:
Post a Comment