More Conversations with Walker Percy

Vauthier: Mr. Percy, could we return to the question of time, and could you address the general problem of time in The Moviegoer?

Percy: Time? Well, at the end of the Mardi Gras season, the last scene and the last day of The Moviegoer is Ash Wednesday, so there’s a certain relevance here of the time of the action. The celebration of Mardi Gras is in New Orleans the biggest festival of the year with six weeks of parades and six weeks of parties. It ends with Ash Wednesday which is generally more or less ignored by most people who take part in Mardi Gras.

The role of the writer:

E.O.: Considering this very complicated contemporary scene, what is, to you, the role of a writer today?

W.P.: The role of a writer. Well, it seems to be, for me anyway, to affirm people, to affirm the reader. The general culture of the time is very scientific, one might call it “scientistic” on the one hand, and simply aesthetically oriented, on the other. This does not satisfy a certain reader. So, the reader is left in the state of confusion. The contemporary state of a young American man or woman is that he or she has more of the world’s affluence than any other people on this earth and yet he is more dissatisfied, more restless. He experiences some sense of loss which he cannot understand. For him, the traditional religion does not have the answer. So the role of my kind of writer is to speak to this person about this whole area of experience that he’s at or she’s at. This is what you feel, this is how you feel now. My original example in “The Message in the Bottle” is that you take a commuter, the man on the train. He has everything, he succeeded. He lives in Greenwich, Connecticut. He’s making a hundred thousand dollars a year, and he comes into New York every day. He’s moved into a better house, to a better country club, has a very nice wife and nice kids. He is riding on this train and he wonders: what am I doing? He can open a newspaper, and he can see a column which says something about the mid-life crisis. He can read some popular advice from a popular psychologist who would say why you have your mid-life crisis. But this doesn’t satisfy him. He picks up a book by an American writer, John Marquand, which is about a man like himself, a commuter on the train who has the same sense of loss. So, I say that there is a tremendous difference between a man on the train who is in a certain predicament and the same man on the same train with the same predicament who is reading a book about a man on the train. The role of a writer is very modest. It’s to identify the predicament. The letters I get are from people who say: I didn’t know anybody who talked like that, I know what you mean, you have described my predicament. I get letters from the businessmen (the men on the train), from young men, and from young women, and they’re excited because I’ve named the predicament.

That doesn’t sound like much, that’s a very modest contribution but it’s very important. You see, I agree with Kierkegaard. He said: “I’m not an apostle, it’s not for me to bring the good news. Even if I brought the good news, nobody would believe it.” But the role of a novelist, or an artist, for that matter, is to tell the truth, and to convey a kind of knowledge which cannot be conveyed by science, or psychology, or newspapers.

E.O.: Is this edifying?

W.P.: Edifying. You’ve picked up all the bad words. Well, “edify-ing” is a perfectly good word, but it has very bad connotations in English. Well, in the largest sense, it is edifying, because it’s helpful, it creates hope. At its best it’s affirming, it affirms the reader in the way he or she is. It offers an openness and some hope. And that’s about all a novelist can do.

How about this:

Interviewer: It is clear that once we are dealing with a “post-religious technological society,” transcendence is possible for the self by science or art but not by religion. Where does this leave the heroes of your novels with their metaphysical yearnings-Binx, Barrett, More, Lance?

Percy: I would have to question your premise, i.e., the death of relig-ion. The word itself, religion, is all but moribund, true, smelling of dust and wax-though of course in its denotative sense it is accurate enough.

I have referred to the age as “post-Christian” but it does not follow from this that there are not Christians or that they are wrong. Possibly the age is wrong. Catholics —who are the only Christians I can speak for-still believe that God entered history as a man, founded a church and will come again. This is not the best of times for the Catholic Church, but it has seen and survived worse. I see the religious “transcendence” you speak of as curiously paradoxical. Thus it is only by a movement, “transcendence,” toward God that these characters, Binx et al., become themselves, not abstracted like scientists but fully incarnate beings in the world. Kierkegaard put it more succinctly: the self only becomes itself when it becomes itself transparently before God.

From a profile:

He spent most of a decade writing two never-published novels, though now he swears he never felt discouraged “There was never a moment when I doubted what I wanted to do. It was always writing.” In the mid-1950’s, he began The Moviegoer. “I can remember sitting on that back porch of that little shotgun cottage in New Orleans with a little rank patio grown up behind it, after two failed novels. I didn’t feel bad. I felt all right.

“And it crossed my mind, what if I did something that American writers never do, which seems to be the custom in France: Namely, that when someone writes about ideas, they can translate the same ideas to fiction and plays, like Mauriac, Malraux, Sartre. So it just occurred to me, why not take these ideas I’d been trying to write about, in psychiatry and philosophy, and translate them into a fictional setting in New Orleans, where I was living. So I was just sitting out there, and I started writing.

How he starts:

“My novels start off, almost naturally, with somebody in a predicament and somebody trying to get out of it or embark on some sort of search, some sort of wanderings,” Percy says.

Permission to fail:

Visitor: Some people would rather not face their ordeals. What then?

Percy: I have a theory that what terrifies people most of all is failing to live up to something or other. This terror is the result of television shows, movies, and bad books where things always work out. Even in tragic movies, things are rounded off pretty well; people suffer nervous breakdowns in style and form. But, after all, whenever a movie is filmed, serious moviemakers collect 40 or 50 outtakes or failures, scenes that didn’t work, before they get one that works. So what the audience sees is the one that works. We should approach life that way.

We should give ourselves permission to fail.

My opinion? More Conversations with Walker Percy is even better than Conversations with Walker Percy!