by Walker Percy
But to admit my infirmities is not necessarily to discredit my discoveries, which stand or fall on scientific evidence. After all, van Gogh was depressed and Beethoven had a poor time of it. The prophet Hosea, if you will recall, had a bad home life.
Some of the best psychiatrists, it is hardly necessary to add, have a few problems of their own, little rancors and terrors and such.
Who am I? you well might wonder. Let me give a little dossier.
I am a physician, a not very successful psychiatrist; an alcoholic, a shaky middle-aged man subject to depressions and elations and morning terrors, but a genius nevertheless who sees into the hidden causes of things and erects simple hypotheses to account for the glut of everyday events; a bad Catholic; a widower and cuckold whose wife ran off with a heathen Englishman and died on the island of Cozumel, where she hoped to begin a new life and see things afresh.
My afflictions attract some patients, repel others. People are generally tolerant. Some patients, knowing my frailties, calculate I’ll understand theirs. I am something like old Doc in Western movies: if you catch old Doc sober, he’s all right, etcetera. In fact, he’s some kind of genius, I heard he went to Harvard, etcetera etcetera.
Not that I make much money. Sensible folk, after all, don’t have much use for a doctor who sips toddies during office hours. So I’m obliged to take all kinds of patients, not merely terrified and depressed people, but people suffering with bowel complaints, drugheads with beriberi and hepatitis, Bantus shot up by the cops, cops shot up by Bantus.
Lately, however, I’ve discouraged patients in order to work on my invention. I don’t need the money. Fortunately for me, my wife, who left me and later died, either didn’t or wouldn’t change her will and so bequeathed me forty thousand shares of R. J. Reynolds stock she inherited from her father.
Loose bark from the pine is beginning to work through my shirt. My scalp is still quilted, my throat is whistling with hives—albumen molecules from the gin fizzes hum like bees in the ventricles of my brain—yet I feel quite well.
Where is the sniper? Shading my eyes, I examine every inch of the terrain.
A flag stirs fitfully on its pole beside the green rectangle dug into the slope of the near ridge like a step. It is the football field of the Valley Forge Academy, our private school, which was founded on religious and patriotic principles and to keep Negroes out. Earlier today—could it have been today?—the Christian Kaydettes, our champion baton-twirlers, practiced their twirling, little suspecting what dread misadventure would befall them.
Beyond the empty shopping plaza at my foot rise the low green hills of Paradise Estates. The fairways of the golf links make notches in the tree line. Pretty cubes and loaves of new houses are strewn among the pines like sugar lumps. It is even possible to pick out my own house, a spot of hot pink and a wink of glass under the old TV transmitter. By a trick of perspective the transmitter tower seems to rise from the dumpy silo of old Saint Michael’s Church in the plaza.
Here in the old days I used to go to mass with my daughter, Samantha. My wife, an ex-Episcopal girl from Virginia, named our daughter Samantha in the expectation that this dark gracile pagan name would somehow inform the child, but alas for Doris, Samantha turned out to be chubby, fair, acned, and pious, the sort who likes to hang around after school and beat Sister’s erasers.
The best of times were after mass on summer evenings when Samantha and I would walk home in the violet dusk, we having received Communion and I rejoicing afterwards, caring nought for my fellow Catholics but only for myself and Samantha and Christ swallowed, remembering what he promised me for eating him, that I would have life in me, and I did, feeling so good that I’d sing and cut the fool all the way home like King David before the Ark. Once home, light up the charcoal briquets out under the TV transmitter, which lofted its red light next to Venus like a ruby and a diamond in the plum velvet sky. Snug down Samantha with the Wonderful World of Color in the den (the picture better than life, having traveled only one hundred feet straight down), back to the briquets, take four, five, six long pulls from the quart of Early Times, shout with joy for the beauty of the world, sing “Finch ’han dal vino” from Don Giovanni and “Holy God We Praise Thy Name,” conceive a great heart-leaping desire for Doris, whose lip would curl at my proposal but who was nonetheless willing, who in fact now that she thought of it was as lusty as could be, her old self once again, a lusty Shenandoah Valley girl, Apple Queen of the Apple Blossom Festival in Winchester. Lead her by the hand beyond the azaleas where we’d fling ourselves upon each other and fall down on the zoysia grass, thick-napped here as a Kerman rug.
A flutter of white in the motel window. The sniper? I tighten my elbow against the carbine belt No, it is one of the girls’ rooms. Moira’s. Moira washing her things out and hanging them out to dry as if it were any other Tuesday. A good omen, Moira washing her underwear. Her I always think of so, standing barefoot in her slip at the washstand, legs planted far apart and straight, even a bit past straight, so that the pad at the back of her knees stands out as firm as rubber; yellow eyes musing and unfocused as she puts her things to soak in Lux.
Lola, on the other hand, I always see playing the Dvořák concerto, hissing the melody with her tongue against her teeth, straddling the cello with her splendid knees.
Ellen Oglethorpe appears in my mind as in fact she is, a stern but voluptuous Presbyterian nurse, color high in her cheeks, eyes bright with disapproval. I think of her as having her fists planted on her hips, as they used to say, akimbo.
All quiet in front. Could he, the sniper, have gotten behind me? I turn around slowly, keeping under the low spreading limbs of the longleaf.
Beyond the hump of the interchange rise the monoliths of “Fedville,” the federal complex including the hospital (where I’ve spent almost as much time as a patient as doctoring), the medical school, the NASA facility, the Behavioral Institute, the Geriatrics Center, and the Love Clinic.
In “Love,” as it is called, volunteers perform sexual acts singly, in couples, and in groups, beyond viewing mirrors in order that man might learn more about the human sexual response.
Next door is Geriatrics Rehabilitation or “Gerry Rehab,” a far-flung complex of pleasant low-lying white-roofed Daytona-type buildings. Here old folk from Tampa to Tucson are treated for the blues and boredoms of old age. These good folk, whose physical ailments are mostly cured nowadays, who at eighty-five, ninety, even a hundred, are as spry as can be, limber-jointed, smooth-faced, supple of artery, nevertheless often grow inexplicably sad. Though they may live in the pleasantest Senior Settlements where their every need is filled, every recreation provided, every sort of hobby encouraged, nevertheless many grow despondent in their happiness, sit slack and empty-eyed at shuffleboard and ceramic oven. Fishing poles fall from tanned and healthy hands. Golf clubs rust. Reader’s Digests go unread. Many old folks pine away and even die from unknown causes like victims of a voodoo curse. Here in Gerry Rehab, these sad oldsters are encouraged to develop their “creative and altruistic potential.” Yet mysterious deaths, and suicides too, continue to mount. The last Surgeon General’s report named the nation’s number-one killer as “Senior Citizens’ anomie,” known locally as the St. Petersburg Blues.
To my left, white among the cypresses, are the old frame buildings of the Little Sisters of the Poor. During the week the Little Sisters run a school for poor children, black and white, feed and clothe them, and on weekends conduct religious retreats for Christian folk. The scientists help the sisters with the children during the week. On weekends Christians come to make retreats and pray for the conversion of Communists.
The scientists, who are mostly liberals and unbelievers, and the businessmen, who are mostly conservative and Christian, live side by side in Paradise Estates. Though the two make much of their differences—one speaking of “outworn dogmas and creeds,” the other of “atheism and immorality,” etcetera etcetera—to tell the truth, I do not notice a great deal of d
ifference between the two. Both sorts are generally good fellows, good fathers and husbands who work hard all day, come home at five-thirty to their pretty homes, kiss their wives, toss their rosy babes in the air, light up their charcoal briquets, or perhaps mount their tiny tractor mowers. There are minor differences. When conservative Christian housewives drive to town to pick up their maids in the Hollow, the latter ride on the back seat in the old style. Liberal housewives make their maids ride on the front seat. On Sundays Christian businessmen dress up and take their families to church, whereas unbelieving scientists are apt to put on their worst clothes and go bird-watching. As one of my behaviorist friends put it, “my cathedral is the blue sky and my pilgrimage is for the ivory-billed woodpecker,” the fabulous and lordly bird that some say still inhabits the fastness of the swamp.
Beyond the cypresses, stretching away to the horizon, as misty as a southern sea, lies the vast Honey Island Swamp. Smudges of hummocks dot its savanna-like islands. The north-south interstate, crossing it on a causeway, flies due south straight as two lines drawn with a ruler to converge at a point on the horizon.
From the hummocks arise one or two wisps of smoke. Yonder in the fastness of the swamp dwell the dropouts from land castoffs of and rebels against our society: ferocious black Bantus who use the wilderness both as a refuge and as a guerrilla base from which to mount forays against outlying subdivisions and shopping plazas; all manner of young white derelicts who live drowsy sloth-like lives, sustaining themselves on wild melons and catfish and green turtles and smoking Choctaw cannabis the livelong day. The lonely hummocks, once the haunt of raccoon and alligator, are now rubbed bare as monkey islands at the zoo by all manner of disaffected folk: Bantu guerrillas, dropouts from Tulane and Vanderbilt, M.I.T. and Loyola; draft dodgers, deserters from the Swedish army, psychopaths and pederasts from Memphis and New Orleans whose practices were not even to be tolerated in New Orleans; antipapal Catholics, malcontented Methodists, ESPers, UFOers, Aquarians, ex-Ayn Randers, Choctaw Zionists who have returned to their ancestral hunting grounds, and even a few old graybeard Kerouac beats, wiry old sourdoughs of the spirit who carry pilgrim staffs, recite sutras, and leap from hummock to hummock as agile as mountain goats.
The town where I keep an office is north and to my right. By contrast with the swamp, the town has become a refuge for all manner of conservative folk, graduates of Bob Jones University, retired Air Force colonels, passed-over Navy commanders, ex-Washington, D.C., policemen, patriotic chiropractors, two officials of the National Rifle Association, and six conservative proctologists.
Paradise Estates, where I live now, is another matter. Directly opposite me, between swamp and town, its houses sparkle like jewelry in the sunlight. Emerald fairways run alongside sleepy bayous. Here everyone gets along well, heathen and Christian, Jew and Gentile, Northerner and Southerner, liberal and conservative. The Northerners, mostly businessmen and engineers from places like Kenosha and Sheboygan and Grosse Pointe, actually outnumber the Southerners. But they, the Northerners, have taken to Southern ways like ducks to water. They drink toddies and mint juleps and hold fish fries with hush puppies. Little black jockeys fish from mirrors in their front yards. Life-sized mammy-dolls preside over their patios. Nearly everyone treats his servants well, picking them up in Happy Hollow and taking them home, allowing “totin’ privileges” and giving them “Christmas gifs.”
The Negroes around here are generally held to be a bad lot. The older Negroes are mostly trifling and no-account, while the young Negroes have turned mean as yard dogs. Nearly all the latter have left town, many to join the Bantus in the swamp. Here the conservatives and liberals of Paradise agree. The conservatives say that Negroes always have been trifling and no-account or else mean as yard dogs. The liberals, arguing with the conservatives at the country club, say yes, Negroes are trifling and no-account or else mean as yard dogs, but why shouldn’t they be, etcetera etcetera. So it goes.
Our servants in Paradise are the exceptions, however: faithful black mammies who take care of our children as if they were their own, dignified gardeners who work and doff their caps in the old style.
Paradise Estates, where I live, is a paradise indeed, an oasis of concord in a troubled land. For our beloved old U.S.A. is in a bad way. Americans have turned against each other; race against race, right against left, believer against heathen, San Francisco against Los Angeles, Chicago against Cicero. Vines sprout in sections of New York where not even Negroes will live. Wolves have been seen in downtown Cleveland, like Rome during the Black Plague. Some Southern states have established diplomatic ties with Rhodesia. Minnesota and Oregon have their own consulates in Sweden (where so many deserters from these states dwell).
The old Republican Party has become the Knothead Party, so named during the last Republican convention in Montgomery when a change of name was proposed, the first suggestion being the Christian Conservative Constitutional Party, and campaign buttons were even printed with the letters CCCP before an Eastern-liberal commentator noted the similarity to the initials printed on the backs of the Soviet cosmonauts and called it the most knotheaded political bungle of the century—which the conservatives, in the best tradition, turned to their own advantage, printing a million more buttons reading “Knotheads for America” and banners proclaiming “No Man Can Be Too Knotheaded in the Service of His Country.”
The old Democrats gave way to the new Left Party. They too were stuck with a nickname not of their own devising and the nickname stuck: in this case a derisive acronym that the Right made up and the Left accepted, accepted in that same curious American tradition by which we allow our enemies to name us, give currency to their curses, perhaps from the need to concede the headstart they want and still beat them, perhaps also from the secret inkling that our enemies know the worst of us best and it’s best for them to say it. LEFT usually it is, often LEFTPAPA, sometimes LEFTPAPASAN (with a little Jap bow), hardly ever the original LEFTPAPASANE, which stood far what, according to the Right, the Left believed in: Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, The Pill, Atheism, Pot, Anti-Pollution, Sex, Abortion Now, Euthanasia.
The center did not hold.
However, the Gross National Product continues to rise.
There are Left states and Knothead states, Left towns and Knothead towns but no center towns (for example, my old hometown over yonder is Knothead, Fedville behind me is Left, and Paradise Estates where I live now does not belong to the center—there is no center—but is that rare thing, a pleasant place where Knothead and Left—but not black—dwell side by side in peace), Left networks and Knothead networks, Left movies and Knothead movies. The most popular Left films are dirty movies from Sweden. All-time Knothead favorites, on the other hand, include The Sound of Music, Flubber, and Ice Capades of 1981, clean movies all.
I’ve stopped going to movies. It is hard to say which is more unendurable, the sentimental blasphemy of Knothead movies like The Sound of Music or sitting in a theater with strangers watching other strangers engage in sexual intercourse and sodomy on the giant 3-D Pan-a-Vision screen.
American literature is not having its finest hour. The Southern gothic novel yielded to the Jewish masturbatory novel, which in turn gave way to the WASP homosexual novel, which has nearly run its course. The Catholic literary renascence, long awaited, failed to materialize. But old favorites endure, like venerable Harold Robbins and Jacqueline Susann, who continue to write the dirty clean books so beloved by the American housewife. Gore Vidal is the grand old man of American letters.
Both political parties have had their triumphs.
The Lefts succeeded in removing “In God We Trust” from pennies.
The Knotheads enacted a law requiring compulsory prayers in the black public schools and made funds available for birth control in Africa, Asia, and Alabama.
But here in Paradise, Knothead lives next to Leftist in peace. On Wednesday nights one goes to a meeting of Birchers, the other to the ACLU. Sunday one goes to church, the other in
search of the lordly ivory-billed woodpecker, but both play golf, ski in the same bayou, and give “Christmas gifs” to the same waiters at the club.
The war in Ecuador has been going on for fifteen years and has divided the country further. Not exactly our best war. The U.S.A. sided with South Ecuador, which is largely Christian, believing in God and the sacredness of the individual, etcetera etcetera. The only trouble is that South Ecuador is owned by ninety-eight Catholic families with Swiss bank accounts, is governed by a general, and so is not what you would call an ideal democracy. North Ecuador, on the other hand, which many U.S. liberals support, is Maoist-Communist and has so far murdered two hundred thousand civilians, including liberals, who did not welcome Communism with open arms. Not exactly our best war, and now in its sixteenth year.
Even so, most Americans do well enough. In fact, until lately, nearly everyone tried and succeeded in being happy but me. My unhappiness is not the fault of Paradise. I was unlucky. My daughter died, my wife ran off with a heathen Englishman, and I fell prey to bouts of depression and morning terror, to say nothing of abstract furies and desultory lusts for strangers.
Here’s the puzzle: what is an unhappy psychiatrist to do in a place where everyone else is happier than he is? Physician, heal thy …
Fortunately for me, many other people have become unhappy of late. Certain psychiatric disorders have cropped up in both Lefts and Knotheads.
Conservatives have begun to fall victim to unseasonable rages, delusions of conspiracies, high blood pressure, and large-bowel complaints.
Liberals are more apt to contract sexual impotence, morning terror, and a feeling of abstraction of the self from itself.
So it is that a small Knothead city like my hometown yonder can support half a dozen proctologists, while places like Berkeley or Beverly Hills have a psychiatrist in every block.
It is my misfortune—and blessing—that I suffer from both liberal and conservative complaints, e.g., both morning terror and large-bowel disorders, excessive abstraction and unseasonable rages, alternating impotence and satyriasis. So that at one and the same time I have great sympathy for my patients and lead a fairly miserable life.