Library of America, Southern style trio
Flannery O'Connor; Walker Percy part one; Civil War by those who lived it
This handsome series early on released Flannery O’Connor, as #39. I’d gifted that Collected Works—in its publisher’s blurb: “all of her novels and short-story collections, as well as nine other stories, eight of her most important essays, and a selection of 259 witty, spirited, and revealing letters, 21 published here for the first time”—to a fetching co-ed who’d been my UCLA T.A, summer of ‘88, following my first sudden, unwanted singlehood. I owed her for all the boo-hoo I laid on her, but the token failed to rouse reciprocation. She advised me not to date the Jewish gal I’d recently chatted with on the phone, brought me up to date on her beau and their night when the rubber broke, drank her coffee, and after a half-hour or less, left me with my tea and the check. The second gal became my wife; this remains a keepsake of that liminal time, as I’d bought my own, recognizing a bargain in the collection and in her.
Given Sally Fitzgerald had compiled The Habit of Being, Flannery’s correspondence, she brings to this ideal knowledge. However, her endnotes often seemed compressed, probably as 1300 pages surely stretched the limit of a single-volume compendium. Yet I prefer it to the FSG Stories, for the LoA includes essays that Fitzgerald and her husband, Robert, had included in the Mystery and Manners occasional prose anthology.
Next up, it took until this past spring to get around to Flannery’s fellow writer, Walker Percy struggling as was she to get ahead, a convert to her cradle Catholicism. I’ve critiqued on Goodreads her collected correspondence, including much between them, which nearly avoids duplication from Habit of Being, but which therefore has to roam beyond Flannery, and devote more attention to her friends, and their letters in turn.
Good Things Out of Nazareth: The Uncollected Letters of Flannery O'Connor and Friends. Edited by Ben Alexander. (Three stars on my Goodreads.)
Contents: 4/ Editing: 2. I wish I could give this more stars, but I'm split between the eclectic letters themselves, many more with the "friends" around Miss Flannery than you might expect, as she gets full type on the cover and spine, naturally. Yet, following her within her milieu of Caroline Gordon, Allen Tate, Fr. McCown, Walker Percy, and Katherine Anne Porter among other lesser-knowns, it's useful to combat the "backwoods Georgia" stereotype of the 1964 obit in Time Magazine, and the general condescension heaped upon the author by those ignorant of the Catholic intellectual influences which were at their most intense, tellingly, just before Vatican II rather than after, as it's all too apparent. I liked seeing how O'C praised JF Powers, who qualifies to be her peer.
The editing is perhaps the most idiosyncratic I've encountered, at least for a publisher in the major leagues; the imprint is under Penguin Random House. Prof. Alexander airs his opinions on presidential golf, the 2016 election, banter he engaged in at faculty parties, and, admittedly not always off target, the teaching of Southern literature. I get his intent to correct the stereotypes, and one might be surprised to see the Agrarians lauded or Lincoln chided, but--in hindsight maybe it's a blessing, as who knows if it'd have been issued afterward--all this appeared a few months before the summer of 2020, which saw biographer Paul Elie's New Yorker article in that same June asking if O'Connor was racist. (Yes is the consensus among those on the Hudson.) I only heard of this collection, of mostly not-published before letters (a few were in Habit of Being to add continuity), and admittedly Alexander arranges them in readable sequence, rather than strict chronology, to allow one to see how correspondences played off various recipients over a few years. It's a little confusing. Nevertheless, that rationale holds, as narrative strands and overlaps emerge.
Plus, patience pays off with rewards as to the sheer amount of thought herein. Tough questions, hard-sought answers, Christian ambiguity, love or grace that can be violent. Yet if you want to know who [Sister] Mariella Gable was (mentioned twice but indexed once), Mr Santos (more than one mention, no index), or the enigmatic "Eel Lopez Hines" O'C conjures up, no dice. The quirky inconsistency between the space allowed the editor--likely a perfect guy to chat with over drinks to avoid a dull conference panel to be sure--for his musings, and the paucity or absence of thorough commentary that would inform the reader who in tarnation is being referred to, or what's such-and-such mean, is disappointing. Those of us who admire the period in which Flannery and her pals flourished deserve more. However, this got me to go re-read Habit of Being, Percy and O'C...
As for Dr. Percy, he had to wait in his posthumous doctor’s office until #380 rang up…
Walker Percy: The Moviegoer & Other Novels 1961-1971: The Moviegoer | The Last Gentleman | Love in the Ruins, Edited by Paul Elie (Four stars on my Goodreads.)
This welcome and long-overdue anthology starts with what early on made its author’s name. Would such an acerbic mix of send-up and deep-dive by an unknown grab any attention six-odd decades on, as publishers excise offense, impose sensitivity and reject imaginative efforts from those audited as liable to spark {outrage} among affinity groups? The Library of America has tallied nearly four hundred volumes before including Walker Percy. Editor Paul Elie, who in the heated summer of 2020 judged that one of the first writers featured in this canonical series, Flannery O’Connor, was racist, now compiles three exemplars of her fellow scrutinizer of her sultry, sullen region’s inheritors of a vexed legacy. Elie’s 2003 biography The Life You Save May Be Your Own integrated O’Connor, Percy, Dorothy Day and Thomas Merton. Elie crosscut between these sharp influencers, at the zenith of Catholicism among the smart set (all but the first of the four were converts). And just before the vows of the Second Vatican Council to open its cloisters to the world resulted in the decline rather than culmination of its convictions. Percy outlived his peers; he died in 1990 unhappy with the Church’s erratic, hubristic trajectory.
His study of a young New Orleans broker documents on its surface this callow fellow’s spare moments in theaters. Examined closely, belying its title’s perhaps intentionally (and never expressed explicitly, so maybe sophomoric) Platonic metaphor, a careful reading of this 1961 work finds fewer scenes in the movie houses, and many more evoking the existential despair of a United States under the shadow of the atom bomb. Walker Percy limns the mentality of a representative of this grim era, while the numbed mass distractions of deadened phrases, cliched small talk, pop-psych babble, what we'd come to call after Vietnam PTSD, glad-handing businessmen and suburban malaise prove relevant contexts for our own blinkered worldviews.
For a short novel, it moves slowly. Binx Bolling, through whose Kierkegaardian sickness of the soul filters the intentionally hermetic mood of this naturally introspective narrative, laments his predicament, speaks too well of, from, and to his generation. It’s doubtful this survives as assigned reading for many literature courses, relegated alongside The Crying of Lot 49 or White Noise into set-pieces now relics of their intolerant creators, rather than our zeitgeist.
Fitting its painfully self-aware, self-deprecating and self-driven main character, Percy's prose forces the reader to perceive Binx' gradual maturation, stripped of sentimentality, life-affirming resolutions and "This I Believe" inspirational radio claptrap. This excoriating content doesn’t cavort or wear out its slot on stage as the puppets of the cave move, across a dim screen.
The Moviegoer demands attention must be paid to nuance, and in his first novel, Percy's grasp of the mechanics for a coming-of-age chronicle, a satire, a love story from a gauche ladies' man (unsettling in a post-Don Draper mode compared to the hire-a-nurse-or-secretary set-up as Binx’ hands-on, definitely touch-non-screen digitized version of IRL pre-Tinder), reveal Percy’s signature, louche tics. Cerebral frat boys turned hypocritical, upper-middle-class scions of country clubs, trade conventions (in more than one sense) and half sports-banter, half-rueful admissions of emptiness amidst plenty. It's not light fare; taken without distractions, with immersion, readers two-thirds of a century on may benefit from Percy's ear for the patter of sales reps, bloated cousins, tiresome stepfamilies and eye for beaten-down stiffs and schmoes.
The gravity of the material gets eased by levity. For those who've already come to know Percy's Southern gentlemen of a certain mien, upbringing, privilege, and hauteur, the likes of Bing will echo within 1977’s Lancelot, and a pair of paired fictions each created years apart, but which reward back-to-back double features when it comes to audiences visiting them in repertoire.
One recognizes in The Moviegoer’s brash debut a protagonist familiar as Dr. Tom More in 1971’s Love in the Ruins, also in this anthology, and 1987’s The Thanatos Syndrome. Who channels its creator's professional training in medical science, and who determines to fiddle with enough knobs and fry a few wires to usher in what Stanley Milgram and Philip Zimbardo would make into infamous household names for postwar experiments during a stint when Percy first researched as a physician and then fictionalized doctors very like collegial professors.
Softer humanism emerges. See Binx’ terminally-ill relative Lonnie. Percy avoids maudlin dangers of an Of Mice and Men buddy script. Such brief, but convincing, conversations attests to talent which would win this rookie a National Book Award. It's a run in the Manhattan-managed majors, with insights enriching The Last Gentleman here and The Second Coming, a tandem, less reached for nowadays than The Moviegoer; Love in the Ruins indicted as “problematic.” (It reminds me of the ongoing speculative fiction series from Karl Ove Knausgaard. I’m relieved to find out that it won’t be the trilogy that I was misinformed about, updating this for Rosh Hash 5785.)
Those two overlooked works engage with a less ornery, more composed and wryly amenable Christian approach which trims the snark. It dampens the libidos of typically Percy-male starring roles. A trait that may not have worn well since dramatizations of Will Barrett appeared in 1966 and 1980 in turn. (Percy’s family on both sides suffered from depression; more than one of his direct forebears committed suicide; his depictions of men and women mired in self-destruction loom as haunting verification in figures throughout his fictions, seekers within recognizable everyday settings where apocalypse hovers. God sulks rather than descends as a light spirit.) These Barrett books expand into a satisfying and downright moving road-trip the search which Binx had embarked upon for meaning in a secularized, bottom-line, tipsy top-down society. And a quest (Percy’s other standalone long-form tale’s titled after an Arthurian hero) that Binx decides to set aside out of reticence once he does the honest thing at its deft, sly conclusion. {Review forthcoming in Spectrum Culture}
I read it in this 1981 printing. I hated its graphics. Gold foil reminded me of when I bought The World According to Garp (1979) in garish paperback “drugstore” format.
As to the War, which erupted exactly a hundred years before The Moviegoer appeared, Percy’s family’s embedded in its roots, tangled in its branches, tripped up by its trimmings. Walker Percy would have benefited much if he’d lived long enough to see this impressive contribution to this must, most perhaps, studied, argued, and bitterest of American conflicts. On the sesquicentennial nearly a decade ago, LoA gave us: “The Civil War Told by Those Who Lived It.” I can’t better their Penguin bird’s iconic words: “Has there ever been another historical crisis of the magnitude of 1861–65 in which so many people were so articulate?” wondered Edmund Wilson in his 1962 classic Patriotic Gore. Reflecting the unprecedented, widespread literacy of nineteenth century Americans, an astonishing number of writers—white and black, male and female, soldiers and politicians, public intellectuals and private citizens—left vivid first-hand accounts of the Civil War.” As a Californian, I’ve long wondered what it was all about. Immersing myself, even in randomly dropping into its pages, it tells me why and how. I continue to marvel and lament the literacy applied to such.
It’s a “four-volume series that orchestrates this symphony of voices to chronicle as never before the full drama of the nation’s most devastating conflict, from Lincoln’s election in 1860 to the Grand Review of the Armies in 1865. Now, in advance of the 150th anniversary of the war’s climactic final months, all four volumes are presented in a beautiful collector’s box. As a special feature, [it} includes four pull-out posters featuring full color maps by expert Civil War cartographer Earl McElfresh.”