Our greatest need in the present historical moment is people who make God credible in this world by means of the enlightened faith they live…We need men whose intellect is enlightened by the light of God, men whose hearts are opened by God, so that their intellect can speak to the intellect of others and their hearts can open the hearts of others. It is only by means of men who have been touched by God that God can return to be with mankind.
Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, Christianity and the Crisis of Cultures (2005), p. 52
Having just had cause to re-examine the example of Walker Percy (1916-1990)—a medical doctor, adult convert, brilliantly successful novelist, and essayist/philosopher—I am reminded of how fine an example he is of the kind of Christian witness that Ratzinger describes in the passage above. Like his fellow Southerner Flannery O’Connor, Percy was a devout Catholic who thought his fiction was “transparently orthodox”, and yet his writings were widely read and acclaimed by the secular public, who embraced the lives and misfortunes of Percy’s decidedly un-saintly characters, from philandering stockbrokers and mental patients to self-described “bad Catholics” and pervert scientists. His ability to speak through the medium of fiction about the truths of human existence to the thoroughly secularized mind of 20th century man without explicitly referencing Catholic dogma guaranteed him a wide readership that would have been closed to him had he attempted to be an apologist or theologian.
Percy’s accomplishment—in getting myriads of non-Christians to read his slyly and accessibly Catholic fiction—is perhaps analogous to that of Tolkien, in whose books there is not one mention of Father, Son, or Holy Ghost, and yet through whose writings millions of unsuspecting hippies, Goths, eco-freaks, and ordinary semi-pagans have been exposed to as sure a dose of Catholic metaphysics as they would get from the Summa contra gentiles. When the Pope addresses the German parliament, or when you tell your agnostic friend to read Chesterton, the audience knows that they are in for some Christianity, and prepare themselves accordingly; with Walker Percy, not so much—some piece of the Gospel is in there, but hidden inside romance, satire, horror, and drama, the way that a fat nightcrawler can conceal the sharp steel barb of the fishhook. There is in Percy’s work plenty to intrigue or entice the modern reader, but always something more than meets the eye to prick his heart and bind him to a long, invisible, spiritual high-test line.
Filmmaker Win Riley seems to be a modern seeker in a Percian vein, attuned to the longings and sadness of materially-satiate postmodern man. His new work Walker Percy: A Documentary Film, screened by Catholic Phoenix on Saturday night before a crowd of 150 at Xavier’s Piper Center, is a beautiful and sometimes melancholy mediation on 
Percy as an understated and gentle man who suffered much, cultivated a number of deep, lifelong friendships, and who also happened to be a great novelist. In its tone, the film seems clearly influenced by Percy’s first two novels, The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman, books characterized by their gentle melancholy, restrained and ironic humor, and deep sense of yearning.
Against a haunting, minimalistic piano soundtrack, we hear in Riley’s film powerful selections from Percy’s works, read by the filmmaker himself as well as by American author Richard Ford (Independence Day). We hear professional reflections and personal reminiscences of Percy by notable persons such as the always-appealing late Shelby Foote, earnest child psychologist and author Robert Coles, Paul Elie (whose The Life You Save May Be Your Own treated in one single volume Percy, Flannery O’Connor, Thomas Merton, and Dorothy Day), Percy’s younger brother Phin, and colorful New Orleans attorney Ben C. Toledano, who gets several of the film’s best lines.
(Other amusing touches include clips from period commercials and televangelists that Percy himself, who was a savage critic of media and consumerism, would have found illustratively silly. The film’s funniest scene, though, is a brief 1972 clip of a classically-disheveled Bill Buckley with Percy on Firing Line, drawling a cerebral intro while intermittently looking into a camera other than the live one.)
There are tantalizingly few film clips of Percy giving interviews—there seems not to be that much archival material of him out there in the vaults–, but generous selections from family home movies of Walker as a loving husband and gentle father of two daughters, one adopted and the younger hearing impaired. Anyone who has read Percy’s essay
“The Delta Factor”, inspired by Helen Keller’s famous childhood encounter with language at the water pump, will particularly appreciate Riley’s selection of a silent clip of Walker holding his baby Ann at a fountain, splashing water on her hand and arm while his lips move in speech to her deaf ears.
The film dwells on the motif of the author as a self-described “ex-suicide,” an orphan who lost his father to suicide at 12, and his mother in a car accident at 15. We hear poignantly through the trembling words of Percy’s now 90-year-old widow Mary Bernice (interviewed at length just for this film), interspersed with period pictures of mid-century sanatoria, how his bout with tuberculosis in the mid-1940s took his will to live and brought him to the brink of death.
Riley’s film has somewhat less to say about Percy the Catholic, and this is perhaps understandable–for Percy the author (perhaps wisely?) never attempted to write his Confessions, and, as a public figure, he seemed more comfortable with the role of “successful author” than of “public Catholic”. The film stays away from explicit examination of Percy’s faith, telling us briefly of his 1947 conversion in the context of his disillusionment with his vocation as a medical doctor, his deep reading in the modern “literature of the alienated self”, and his shattering illness–before cutting to a clip of the charming-yet-irascible Shelby Foote recalling with fondness his disapproval of the Church and of his friend’s assent to it.
"Of course I totally disapproved..."
The film goes on to say little of the faith that shaped the remaining 43 years of Percy’s life, but it does suggest a fairly significant implicit statement about it: that this was a man whose conversion marked not the end of his creative life, but the very birth of it out of a decade of adult gloom and sterility; that Percy’s embracing of Catholic Christianity, far from an intellectual abdication, opened the door to his development and fulfillment as one of the great artists and intellectuals of the late 20th century, a man whose heart and mind were transformed by faith, and were, as a result, capable of speaking to the minds and hearts of millions of readers, with or without that same Christian faith.
It is my distinct impression that Win Riley’s film wants us to consider this relationship between Percy’s faith and his art. But the film is gentle with us, as Percy himself could be in The Moviegoer.
The very Catholic audience at Saturday night’s event that took in Riley’s film and then more or less respectfully peppered him with questions for 20 minutes afterwards may have been expecting a more explicitly Catholic film, or subject. Perhaps some, unfamiliar with Percy’s work, were not expecting the kind of understated and implicit Catholicism that characterizes his greatest novels and which Riley’s film respects at a distance without attempting to dissect.
Several of the post-screening questions for the director inclined more towards the theological than the artistic or cinematographic. “Some of us Catholics are basically born into the faith,” went one, “but converts like Percy kind of jump in late. What did he do later in his life to develop his faith?” Another dealt with Percy the Southern convert: “If Percy felt ‘weighed down’, as the film says, by the history of the American South, then any thoughts about why he turned to the Catholic Church, the oldest and most history-laden institution in the world?” One questioner couldn’t have been more blunt: “Why did he convert?”
I don’t know how Percy himself could have given a quick and satisfying public answer to that question, and while the film did say something about it, Riley tried to reiterate: “Well, as I tried to say in the film, he was seeking something, something that science couldn’t give him,” began Riley, sounding appropriately tentative about heading out onto the deepest waters of his film’s subject.
At that point, a slightly impatient member of the audience, perhaps hoping for a ringing and militant affirmation of Catholic orthodoxy, shouted out “BECAUSE IT’S TRUE”. Such an expression of orthodoxy, while spirited, misses the point particularly badly in the case of Walker Percy. It is analogous to saying that the reason why Newton discovered the law of gravity is because it is correct, or that Columbus set sail because he wanted to find America: the object of discovery is wrongly assumed to be evident, and the search becomes trivialized. Modern Christians who desire to share the gospel with their fellow moderns can ill afford to come across as insensitive on this point, and to shout dogmas, however true, at the modern world is to give answers to questions that aren’t being asked, which is really to give the WRONG answers to the questions that are.
As a convert, Walker Percy understood this well the pathos of the search, and gave it profound artistic representation in his novels and lucid analysis in his essays. The drama of the search for truth remained real to him long after he had found what he was seeking; there is nothing in his work or life that suggests he ever took truth for granted, and that is a great part of his appeal far outside of Catholic circles.
In a justly well-known and celebrated passage from The Moviegoer, read aloud and given due prominence near the opening of Riley’s film, Percy wrote: “To become aware of the possibility of the search is to be onto something. Not to be onto something is to be in despair.” Walker Percy’s writings speak especially well to modern souls who are, like the protagonists of his novels, beginning to become aware of such a possibility; they show a glimpse of truth dimly visible in the distance, giving a glimmer of hope to those who had been on the verge of giving up, despairing of getting anywhere.
Win Riley’s beautiful Walker Percy: A Documentary Film captures the spirit of the Percian search, and is worthy of its subject matter. It deserves to be seen widely, and one can only hope that such exposure—it will be broadcast on PBS this month—will lead a new generation of 21st century seekers into contact with Percy’s uniquely Catholic art and mind.
Thanks to the board of Catholic Phoenix, to Anthony DiStefano and Xavier College Prep, to Win Riley, and to all who attended CP’s inaugural public event.
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{ 10 comments… read them below or add one }
Lovely article, Denys. It’s good to read you again after a long absence. One quibble, though: I disagree that the audience member who shouted out “Because it’s true!” missed the point. On the contrary, I think it perfectly captures Percy’s reasons for having faith in the Faith.
As mentioned in the movie, when Percy was asked about why he was a Catholic, his response was repeatedly, “I believe all that the Catholic Church proposes for belief.”
Someone once said that life is not a problem to solved, but a mystery to be lived. This aphorism strikes me as both true and dangerous. It rings true because there is more to this world than meets the eye; it is dangerous because it can be (and has been) used to deny ultimate truth in a “the journey is our destination” sort of way.
I think Percy would certainly agree that life–i.e., being human–is mysterious, but it’s precisely because the problem of man’s existence has been solved for Percy that he can live the mystery and not be overly overtly Catholic in his writing.
I am that “slightly impatient” person in the audience who answered the question about why Percy became a Catholic. What I said was, “I have read many times that Percy said he became a Catholic because he believed the teachings of the Church are true.” Perhaps you didn’t hear my whole response to the question. My impatience came because the film maker was not able to answer the question about why Percy converted, saying aloud, “I don’t really know why he converted. Perhaps some of you do…” It seemed surprising to me that a person who had spent so much time on the life of Percy would not be able to answer this question with Percy’s own words, as I did. I was not making a pronouncement on the truthfulness of Catholic teaching. I was simply answering the question the way Percy himself did many times in his life.
Gayle, in fairness, Win did point to Percy’s frequent answer that he “believed what the Catholic Church proposes it true.” It was only when pressed for more information (which really no one but Percy could give) that Win asked whether anyone in the audience had more insight.
Thanks for coming on Saturday!
Will, I don’t remember it that way. If Win had said those words, then I would never have gotten impatient, because that is the only answer to the question. He certainly referred to Percy’s conversion often and how important it was in his life, but when the pointed question came, “Why did he convert?”, he said he didn’t know. That’s when my impatience kicked in. After I responded, he did say that he had read that many times as the reason for Percy’s conversion. Perhaps he was reluctant to give that answer when asked directly because it seemed too simple. And so it is!
Gayle, unless you have gotten a LOT huskier, you are definitely NOT the person whose baritone shout-out was audible from the top rows….
I stand by my reporting on this matter: that an audience member shouted out, without any qualification, the three words I quoted. And it clearly wasn’t you.
But the who doesn’t matter: if we look at any conversion with the eyes of faith, as both you and I do, then the answer that Percy gave and that you (and Rob both) cite is a perfectly satisfying one: to believe is to assent, to accept a body of truths offered as revealed. Viewed in one sense, the Faith is as simple as can be, just as God is simple.
I argue that “he converted because he thought it was true” is in one sense not a real answer to the question of “why”, but just a description of the what. The question “why did he convert” really means “what caused him to move from not-believing to believing?”, and “because he believed” does not answer it, for the same reason that we cannot define a term using the term itself.
I stand by the assertion in my essay: that to treat the acceptance of the Faith as something ONLY simple and obvious is to risk presenting the matter badly to thoughtful moderns.
I sat three or four rows above Mrs. Somers and I think the problem is that the original question about the “weight” of the Southern and Catholic traditions was not really about why Percy converted. It seemed to me that, like the first question overall, it was about the way the documentary interpreted Percy’s view of the Southern tradition. This question was not really understood and ended up as a simpler question about why Percy converted. And it was only after Mrs. Somers (and perhaps someone near her) said “because it’s true” that Mr. Riley affirmed that Percy’s response had been similar. However, I don’t see why it’s appropriate to describe that response as “shout[ing] dogmas” or even “unsatisfactory.”
What Mrs. Somers heard in the question had a simple answer: Percy converted because he thought Catholic doctrine was true, “weighted” tradition or not. That answer does not exclude the possibility that he was still Walker Percy after he converted and therefore still in full communion with the “drama of the search for truth.” Any Catholic that has read Percy will realize that acceptance of the truth of doctrine does little to dispel the “noxious” and “ravening” particles of Percy’s “thin gas of malaise.” Similarly, no one expects Charles Ryder to laugh out loud during Mass in exultation at the loss of Julia and Brideshead. For Percy, conversion is not phenomenologically or physiognomically all that different from the “end” of the search that Binx Bolling experiences after reading The Chemistry of Life: “There I lay in my hotel room with my search over yet still obliged to draw one breath and then the next.” That is why Catholic writers have always recognized the difficulty of depicting the gift of grace as anything more tangible than an “invisible thread” that is almost outside the narrative.
Don’t let my shortcomings as a public speaker–they are myriad–lead you to believe that I haven’t thought about Percy’s reasons for turning to Catholicism. For me, Percy’s response that “I’m a Catholic because I believe what the Catholic churches proposes is true” is unsatisfactory– it was a way of silencing impertinent interviewers. I had hoped that my film pointed, perhaps subtly, toward an answer. The Catholic church offered a clear view of suicide, an issue that Percy wrestled with, obviously. It offered moral clarity in a secular world where just about everything seemed unfixed. And it offered community.
It’s important to understand that Percy’s faith was not a fixed thing. In his correspondence, you’ll find that at times he thought about leaving the church. He was constantly searching for answers to questions about life and its significance. At times the church offered the answers. At other times, it did not. I’m paraphrasing Jay Tolson here, when he wrote that Percy knew that faith was not assured. He had to fight for it. He was, in Kierkegaard’s words, a “knight of faith,” locked in battle with other darker, more solitary voices….(Pilgrim In The Ruins)
And, though some readers may not like to hear this, Percy told Doug Marlette, “Faith. You’re trying to figure it out. It’s not something you figure out. it’s a gift.”
Win, thank you for your clarification. I have always found Percy’s response to the question about his conversion to be classic Percy, not unsatisfactory in any way. Indeed, when I first began reading Percy, over 30 years ago, I was not myself a Catholic. I read “Love in the Ruins” and was transfixed–absolutely hilarious because it’s absolutely true, in the human sense. I read all the Percy I could get my hands on, and, eventually, one day came across his response to the impertinent question about his conversion. Having come to love and respect him as a writer, on the spot I declared: “Any church good enough for Walker Percy is good enough for me.” His answer didn’t shut anything down for me. On the contrary, it opened a crack in the door that ultimately led to my entrance into the Church. As for the roller coaster ride of faith in Percy’s life, isn’t it that way for all of us? If we don’t occasionally have one foot out the door, we likely haven’t reflected deeply enough on the mystery of the Catholic Church.
I wish we could have attened this! I am always …always on the look out for the quiet catholic example.
As an African Catholic Bishop I find this interesting.Thank you for the great post.Be with Christ