Lancelot

by Walker Percy

I think I see now what I am doing. I am reliving with you my quest. That’s the only way I can bear to think about it. Something went wrong. If you listen I think I can figure out what it was.

  It was a quest all right and a very peculiar one. But peculiar times require peculiar quests.

  We’ve spoken of the Knights of the Holy Grail. Percival. Do you know what I was? The Knight of the Unholy Grail.

  In times like these when everyone is wonderful, what is needed is a quest for evil.

  You should be interested! Such a quest serves God’s cause! How? Because the Good proves nothing. When everyone is wonderful, nobody bothers with God. If you had ten thousand Albert Schweitzers giving their lives for their fellow men, do you think anyone would have a second thought about God?

  Or suppose the Lowell Professor of Religion at Harvard should actually find the Holy Grail, dig it up in an Israeli wadi, properly authenticate it, carbon date it, and present it to the Metropolitan Museum. Millions of visitors! I would be as curious as the next person and would stand in line for hours to see it. But what difference would it make in the end? People would be interested for a while, yes. This is an age of interest.

  But suppose you could show me one “sin,” one pure act of malevolence. A different cup of tea! That would bring matters to a screeching halt. But we have plenty of evil around you say. What about Hitler, the gas ovens and so forth? What about them? As everyone knows and says, Hitler was a madman. And it seems nobody else was responsible. Everyone was following orders. It is even possible that there was no such order, that it was all a bureaucratic mistake.

  Show me a single “sin.”

  One hundred and twenty thousand dead at Hiroshima? Where was the evil of that? Was Harry Truman evil? As for the pilot and bombardier, they were by all accounts wonderful fellows, good fathers and family men.

  “Evil” is surely the clue to this age, the only quest appropriate to the age. For everything and everyone’s either wonderful or sick and nothing is evil.

  God may be absent, but what if one should find the devil? Do you think I wouldn’t be pleased to meet the devil? Ha, ha. I’d shake his hand like a long-lost friend.

  The mark of the age is that terrible things happen but there is no “evil” involved. People are either crazy, miserable, or wonderful, so where does the “evil” come in?

  There I was forty-five years old and I didn’t know whether there was “evil” in the world.

  A small corollary to the above: Is evil to be sought in violence or in sexual behavior? Or is all violence bad and all sexual behavior good, or as Jacoby and Merlin would say, life-enhancing?

  If one is looking for evil, why not study war or child-battering? Could anything be more evil? Yet, as everyone knows, mothers and fathers who beat and kill their children have psychological problems and are as bad off as the children. It has been proved that every battered child has battered parents, battered grandparents, and so on. No one is to blame.

  As for war, the only time members of my family have ever been happy, brave, successful, was in time of war. What’s wrong with war?

  Look across the street. Do you see that girl’s Volkswagen’s bumper sticker: Make Love Not War. That is certainly the motto of the age. Is anything wrong with it?

  Yes. Could it be possible that since the greatest good is to be found in love, so is the greatest evil. Evil, sin, if it exists, must be incommensurate with anything else. Didn’t one of your saints say that the entire universe in all its goodness is not worth the cost of a single sin? Sin is incommensurate, right? There is only one kind of behavior which is incommensurate with anything whatever, in both its infinite good and its infinite evil. That is sexual behavior. The orgasm is the only earthly infinity. Therefore it is either an infinite good or an infinite evil.

  My quest was for a true sin—was there such a thing? Sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought.

  It is possible of course that there is no such thing and that a true sin, like the Grail, probably does not exist.

  Yet I had the feeling I was on to something, perhaps for the first time in my life. Or at least for twenty years. I was like Robinson Crusoe seeing a footprint on his island after twenty years: Not a footprint but my daughter’s blood type. Aha, there is something going on!

  So overnight I became sober, clear-eyed, clean, fit, alert, watchful as a tiger at a water hole.

  Something was stirring. So Sir Lancelot set out, looking for something rarer than the Grail. A sin.

  “Elgin, how would you like to make a movie?”

  Elgin smiled. “Merlin axed me already.”

  “To be in one. I’m asking about making a movie, not Merlin’s. Mine. I’m going to make a movie.”

  “You are?”

  “And you’re going to help me.”

  “I am?”

  “Elgin, listen.” I walked around the plantation desk and stood hands in pockets looking down at him. He sat perfectly symmetrical, arms resting at an angle across chair arms, fingers laced, gazing straight ahead, a slight smile on his lips. “I’m asking a favor of you. I need someone to help me and only you can do it. There are two reasons for this. One is that only you have the technical ability to help me. The other is that you are one of the two or three people in the world I trust. The others are probably your mother and father. I must tell you that it is a large favor because you will be doing it without knowing why. Although what I’m asking you to do is not illegal, it is just as well you don’t know the reasons. Do you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well?”

  “Okay.” Still avoiding my eye, he answered immediately. It was as if he already knew what I wanted.

  “Here’s the technical problem. To tell you the truth, I don’t know whether it can be solved. Certainly I have no idea of how to go about it.” I took out my floor plan of Belle Isle’s second story. “You see these five rooms? Margot’s and Raine’s on one side of the hall, separated by the chimney and dumb-waiter. On the other side of the hall are these three rooms, Troy Dana’s here. Merlin’s here, Janos Jacoby’s here. They’ll be moving back to the house tomorrow as I had anticipated.”

  Elgin’s eyelids flickered once, when I mentioned Margot’s name. Otherwise his expression did not change.

  Elgin didn’t move, but his eyes went out of focus.

  “Now here’s what I want. I want a hidden camera mounted in each room and the events which occur in the room between midnight and five o’clock recorded. For one, perhaps two nights. Three nights at the most.”

  “No way,” he said at last.

  But even as he said it, shaking his head and smiling, he was casting about in his mind—happily. Happy the man who can live with problems! It was this I had counted on of course, that the problem, its sheer impossibility, would engage him immediately so that he would not think two seconds about what I was asking him to do.

  Even as he smiled and shook his head, he was casting about. It was the challenge of the thing. He was like a mountain climber, pitoned, rappeled, looking straight up a sheer cliff. It couldn’t be climbed. On the other hand, perhaps—

  “No way.” He repeated the impossibility, savored it.

  “Why not?”

  “At least three reasons. Not enough light. Camera noise. And no camera will run five hours.”

  “I see.” I waited, watching him thumb his glasses up his nose bridge, scratch his head.

  An odd thought: I remember thinking at the time that nothing really changes, not even Elgin going from pickaninny to M.I.T. smart boy. For you see, even in doing that and not in casting about for the technical solution, he was still in a sense “my nigger”; and my watching him, waiting for him, was piece and part of the old way we had of ascribing wondrous powers to “them,” if they were “ours.” Don’t you remember how my grandfather used to say of old Fluker, Ellis’s father, that with Fluker along on a quail hunt you didn’t need bird dogs, that Fluker knew where the birds were?

  That was part of it s
ure enough—not that Elgin was like a bird dog but that in being smart and through some special dispensation, perhaps by reason of our very need and helplessness, we could depend on them for anything, not just to smell out quail, but to be M.I.T. smart, smarter than we, Jew-smart, no, smarter than Jews. I could hear my grandfather: I’ll put that Elgin up against a Jew anytime, any Jew. Go pick your Jew.

  “Does it have to be a film?” Elgin looked up at me; his tongue went sideways. I knew he had thought of something.

  “What else—”

  “How about a tape?”

  “I want sight not sound.”

  “Videotape.”

  “How does that work?”

  “Just like the closed-circuit TV camera you see in stores. Only—”

  “Only?”

  “Okay, look. How about this?” He swung round to the desk, picked up my pencil. His black eyes danced. It had come to him, the solution! “We use five mini-compact cameras here and here.” He put X’s in the dumbwaiter outlets to Margot’s and Raine’s rooms.

  “I thought of that. But what about the three across the hall?”

  “We’ll use the A/C vents.”

  “The air conditioning?”

  “Sure. We’ll use mini-compacts with twenty-five millimeter lenses—small enough to see through a slot in the grill.”

  “What about camera noise?”

  “No noise. No film. It’s a TV camera.”

  “What about the dark?”

  “We’ll use a Vidicon pickup tube, a Philips two-stage light intensifier—you know, it works on the fiber-optics principle, can pick up a single quantum of light.”

  “Then we’ll need some light.”

  “Moonlight will help.”

  I looked at my feed-store calendar. “There’s a half moon.”

  He picked up his glasses. “I might use infrared.”

  “Good.”

  “All I need is a control room. That could be anywhere.”

  “How about my father’s library, here?”

  “Don’t Mr. Tex and Siobhan use that? We have to have a completely undisturbed place.”

  “All I have to do is move the TV set. I’ll put it in Siobhan’s room here.”

  “That’s fine. I could bring in lead-in cables from the dumbwaiter and the A/C ducts by way of the third floor.”

  “And what will you be doing in there?”

  “Recording five tapes. I’ll need a Conrac monitor.”

  “How long will it take you to rig up all that?”

  “Well, I’ll have to go to New Orleans to get the equipment.” He looked at his watch. “Tomorrow. Then it would take the next day to rig it—if nobody was around.”

  “They won’t be. They’re shooting in town the next two days. A courthouse scene and a love scene at the library.”

  “Okay. I guess the best we can do is day-after-tomorrow night—and that’s only if everything goes well and I can get the equipment. But I’m sure I can get it.”

  “I hope so. Because they’ll be shooting at Belle Isle in two or three days. Then it will be too late.”

  “We can do it. All you got to do is clear the house tomorrow and the day after and clear the library at night.”

  “How much will all that stuff cost?”

  “The light intensifier is expensive, maybe four thousand. The whole works shouldn’t run over eight or ten at the outside.”

  “Ten thousand,” I said. “I have that in the house account. I think I’d better get cash for you. The bank opens at nine. You could be on your way by nine-thirty.”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay. Then what will you end up with?”

  “Five tapes. Something like this.” He picked up an eight-track cartridge of Beethoven’s last quartets. During the last months I found that I could be moderately happy if I simultaneously (1) drank, (2) read Raymond Chandler, and (3) listened to Beethoven.

  “There’s only one problem,” said Elgin, turning the tape over and over.

  “What’s that?”

  “Time. Not even this will record five hours. Ah.” He had it, the solution. For him now in a kind of exaltation of inventiveness, it was enough to put the problem into words. Saying it was solving it. He even snapped his fingers.

  “We’ll have to use the new Subiru motion activator.”

  “What is that?” In the very offhandedness of his voice I could catch the excitement, the exhilaration of his knowledge and skill.

  He shrugged. “You know, the voice-activated sound tape recorder? It only goes on when there is a noise.”

  “Like the President had?”

  “Yeah.” He was too happy to notice irony. “Same principle. Transferred to light. The tape only moves when something or someone in front of the camera moves.”

  “Something or someone. You mean it wouldn’t just record a sleeping person?”

  “Only when he or she turned over. All he got to do is move—or talk.”

  When something or someone moved. Yes, that was it. That was what I wanted. Who moved, toward whom, with whom.

  It was necessary to visit the set, something I never did, in order to see how long the shooting would take and to warn Elgin should my houseguests decide to return to Belle Isle early. He must have time to arrange his own “set,” place and wire his cameras.

  I needn’t have worried. They spent all day on one short scene between Margot and Dana. Fifteen or twenty times he had her up against the library stacks performing “simulated intercourse.” He was filmed from the rear doing something to Margot quickly and easily. He was clothed.

  Merlin was surprised to see me, but pleasant and talkative as usual. I told him I had come to make him welcome at Belle Isle and to be sure they had removed from the motel. Though the danger from the hurricane was slight, the motel was built in a swamp and could be flooded.

  “You’re a beautiful guy!” Merlin came close and took my arm. He had a way of making any encounter between us exclude the others. His blue eyes were fond; the white fiber made the iris spin with dizzy affection. “How extraordinary that a real hurricane should be approaching the same time as our make-believe hurricane. Actually though, this scene has nothing to do with the hurricane.”

  “I want to hear the zipper,” Janos Jacoby told Dana.

  The set was the small public library in town. Town folk watched, standing, arms folded, sitting on aluminum chairs, on the sidewalk, on the grass, in the doorway. Inside, the library was a mess; it looked as if the hurricane had already hit, everything moved out of the way to shoot Margot and Dana in the stacks. The blue-white lights were brighter and hotter than the sun outside. Heavy cables snaked over the trodden grass like a carnival ground. Between shots Dana zipped his pants, fell back, and cleaned his nails, listened inattentively to Jacoby. As the librarian in the movie, Margot wore glasses around her neck, white blouse, cashmere cardigan, sleeves pushed up. She was not at ease. Her face was cheeky and her movements wooden. She was. I saw instantly, not a good actress. What she was doing was not acting, that is, imitating someone else, but acting like an actress imitating-someone-else. She was once removed from acting.

  Dana was something to see: barefoot, tight jeans with silver conch belt, some kind of pullover homespun shirt, necklace with single jade stone, perfect helmet of yellow hair, perfect regular features, perfect straight brows flaring like wings. He moved well and had grace. He was an idiot but he had grace. He was a blank space filled in by somebody else’s idea. He was a good actor. His eyes had somehow been made up so they seemed to gather light and glow of themselves. The town folk gaped at him as if he were another species. Perhaps he was. Perhaps somewhere on the golden sands of California had come into being a new breed of perfect creatures, young and golden.

  Margot couldn’t see me. The lights were too bright.

  “This is a very short scene but a very critical one,” Merlin explained. “It is the sexual liberation of Sarah.”

  “Sexual liberation?”

  “Yea
h. You remember. Dana is the stranger who wanders into town from nowhere and is so extraordinarily gifted—everyone is immediately aware of it. Thank God for the movies. Dana gifted? He barely had sense not to drown when he fell off his surfboard in Beach Blanket Bingo. But look at him, isn’t he something? We can create him from the beginning like a doll. I created Dana—Dana himself is nothing, a perfect cipher. This character, this stranger is immediately perceived by everybody as somehow different—for one thing his eyes, there’s an inner light, he’s a creature of light. Look at him. His normal temperature is around 101. He actually glows. Most important, he is free. Everybody else is hung up—as in fact everybody is, you’re hung up, I’m hung up. Right? Sarah is a Joanne Woodward type—though Margot is actually a bit too young and good-looking—but she has never known what it is to be a woman. You know. Her husband, Lipscomb, is out of it too. He sits wringing his hands while the plantation goes to pot. She holds things together, makes a pittance at the library. He’s hung up. Everyone is hung up. The sharecroppers, black and white, are hung up in poverty and ignorance. The townies are hung up in bigotry and so forth. Not only is the stranger free, he is also able to free others. There is the sense about him of having come from far away, perhaps the East, perhaps farther. Perhaps he is a god. At least he is a kind of Christ type.

  “He fulfills people. He fulfills the longing of the sharecroppers for their own land—he discovers that Raine’s, Ella’s, family owns the land. He reconciles black and white—who discover their own common humanity during the hurricane. He even gets to the sheriff (God, I wish we could have got Pat Hingle), who despite himself is tremendously moved by this glowing nonviolent vibrant creature—actually there’s a strong hint here of Southern sheriff homosexuality, right? He almost reaches Lipscomb, who has lost his ties with the land, nature, his own sexuality. He does reach Sarah. He walks into the library and while her mouth falls open, he simply goes to the bookshelf, takes down the Rig-Veda, and reads the great passage beginning: ‘Desire entered the One in the beginning.’ Then, again without saying a word, he takes her hand and leads her back into the stacks, where he takes her standing against the old musty books—Thackeray and Dickens and so forth—representing the drying up of Western juices. There’s a lovely tight shot of her face while she’s making love against a dusty set of the Waverley novels. Great? The stranger is the life-giving principle, the books are dead, everyone is dead, Thackeray is dead. Scott is dead, the town is dead, Lipscomb is dead, she is dead, or rather she has never lived. So what we are trying to get across is that it is not just screwing, though there is nothing wrong with that either, but a kind of sacrament and celebration of life. He could be a high priest of Mithras. You see what we’re getting at?”