Books, Arts & Manners: Pilgrim’s Progress

Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy, by Jay Tolson (Simon & Schuster, 544 pp., $27.50)

CAROLINE GORDON, the novelist and wife of Allen Tate, was mentor to both Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, whom she considered the most promising writers of their generation. Miss Gordon believed that the end of what she called “the Protestant mystique” in literature was at hand, owing to the fatal tendency of the Protestant artist to assume “the responsibility of setting up a new heaven and a new earth,” whereas his Catholic counterpart knows that “God has already created the universe and that his job is to find his proper place in it.” For Shelby Foote, himself an accomplished novelist as well as an historian and Percy’s lifelong friend, religious doctrine in general and Catholic dogma in particular could only serve as a straitjacket to the literary artist, compelling him to see and to render according to a narrowly conceived formula. The falsity of this view is proved by the careers of Percy and O’Connor, whose respective work, while inspired by a common faith, is utterly dissimilar in sensibility, form, and content. Miss O’Connor, in speaking of her own writing, suggested a fundamental difference: “one reason why I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic believers . . . [is] because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which is obvious enough for me to catch. I can’t write about anything subtle.” Whereas Percy’s specialty, particularly in the earlier novels, is rendering Angst experienced by lapsed or proto-Catholics for whom action, let alone dramatic action, is almost impossible. A second difference is a function of the first: every character of O’Connor’s is finally either saved or damned, while the fate of Percy’s men and women remains indeterminate. Flannery O’Connor represents the modern Catholic artist of resolution, Walker Percy that of irresolution.

CW

About the Author

Chilton Williamson Jr.

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Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy, by Jay Tolson (Simon & Schuster, 544 pp., $27.50)

CAROLINE GORDON, the novelist and wife of Allen Tate, was mentor to both Walker Percy and Flannery O’Connor, whom she considered the most promising writers of their generation. Miss Gordon believed that the end of what she called “the Protestant mystique” in literature was at hand, owing to the fatal tendency of the Protestant artist to assume “the responsibility of setting up a new heaven and a new earth,” whereas his Catholic counterpart knows that “God has already created the universe and that his job is to find his proper place in it.” For Shelby Foote, himself an accomplished novelist as well as an historian and Percy’s lifelong friend, religious doctrine in general and Catholic dogma in particular could only serve as a straitjacket to the literary artist, compelling him to see and to render according to a narrowly conceived formula. The falsity of this view is proved by the careers of Percy and O’Connor, whose respective work, while inspired by a common faith, is utterly dissimilar in sensibility, form, and content. Miss O’Connor, in speaking of her own writing, suggested a fundamental difference: “one reason why I can write about Protestant believers better than Catholic believers . . . [is] because they express their belief in diverse kinds of dramatic action which is obvious enough for me to catch. I can’t write about anything subtle.” Whereas Percy’s specialty, particularly in the earlier novels, is rendering Angst experienced by lapsed or proto-Catholics for whom action, let alone dramatic action, is almost impossible. A second difference is a function of the first: every character of O’Connor’s is finally either saved or damned, while the fate of Percy’s men and women remains indeterminate. Flannery O’Connor represents the modern Catholic artist of resolution, Walker Percy that of irresolution.