Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  It is the good fortune of those who did not know him that his singular charm, the unique flavor of the man, transmits with high fidelity in Lanterns on the Levee. His gift for communicating, communicating himself, an enthusiasm, a sense of beauty, moral outrage, carries over faithfully to the cold printed page, although for those who did not know him the words cannot evoke—or can they?—the mannerisms, the quirk of mouth, the shadowed look, the quick Gallic shrug, the inspired flight of eyebrows at an absurdity, the cold Anglo-Saxon gaze. (For he was this protean: one time I was reading Ivanhoe, the part about the fight between Richard and Saladin, and knowing Richard was one of Uncle Will’s heroes, I identified one with the other. But wait: wasn’t he actually more like Saladin, not the sir-knight defender of the Christian West, but rather the subtle Easterner, noble in his own right? I didn’t ask him, but if I had, he’d have probably shrugged: both, neither …)

  There is not much doubt about the literary quality of Lanterns on the Levee, which delivers to the reader not only a noble and tragic view of life but the man himself. But other, nonliterary questions might be raised here. How, for example, do the diagnostic and prophetic dimensions of the book hold up after thirty years? Here, I think, hindsight must be used with the utmost circumspection. On the one hand, it is surely justifiable to test the prophetic moments of a book against history itself; on the other hand, it is hardly proper to judge a man’s views of the issues of his day by the ideological fashions of another age. Perhaps in this connection it would not be presumptuous to venture a modest hope. It is that Lanterns on the Levee will survive both its friends and its enemies; that is, certain more clamorous varieties of each. One is all too familiar with both.

  The first, the passionate advocate: the lady, not necessarily Southern, who comes bearing down at full charge, waving Lanterns on the Levee like a battle flag. “He is right! The Old South was right!” What she means all too often, it turns out, is not that she prefers agrarian values to technological but that she is enraged at having to pay her cook more than ten dollars a week; that she prefers, not merely segregation to integration, but slavery to either. The second, the liberal enemy: the ideologue, white or black, who polishes off Lanterns on the Levee with the standard epithets: racist, white supremacist, reactionary, paternalist, Bourbon, etc., etc. (they always remind me of the old Stalinist imprecations: Fascist, cosmopolitan, imperialist running dog).

  Lanterns on the Levee deserves better and, of course, has better readers. Its author can be defended against the more extreme reader, but I wonder if it is worth the effort. Abraham Lincoln was a segregationist. What of it? Will Percy was regarded in the Mississippi of his day as a flaming liberal and nigger-lover and reviled by the sheriff’s office for his charges of police brutality. What of that? Nothing much is proved except that current categories and names, liberal and conservative, are weary past all thinking of it. Ideological words have a way of wearing thin and then, having lost their meanings, being used like switchblades against the enemy of the moment. Take the words “paternalism,” “noblesse oblige,” dirty words these days. But is it a bad thing for a man to believe that his position in society entails a certain responsibility toward others? Or is it a bad thing for a man to care like a father for his servants, spend himself on the poor, the sick, the miserable, the mad who come his way? It is surely better than watching a neighbor get murdered and closing the blinds to keep from “getting involved.” It might even beat welfare.

  Rather than measure Lanterns on the Levee against one or another ideological yardstick, it might be more useful to test the major themes of the book against the spectacular events of the thirty years since its publication. Certainly the overall pessimism of Lanterns on the Levee, its gloomy assessment of the spiritual health of Western civilization, is hard to fault these days. It seems especially prescient when one considers that the book was mostly written in the between-wars age of optimism when Americans still believed that the right kind of war would set things right once and for all. If its author were alive today, would he consider his forebodings borne out? Or has the decline accelerated even past his imaginings? Would he see glimmerings of hope? Something of all three, no doubt, but mainly, I think, he’d look grim, unsurprised, and glad enough to have made his exit.

  Certainly, nothing would surprise him about the collapse of the old moralities; for example, the so-called sexual revolution, which he would more likely define in less polite language as alley-cat morality. I can hear him now: “Fornicating like white trash is one thing, but leave it to this age to call it the new morality.” Nor would he be shocked by the cynicism and corruption, the stealing, lying, rascality ascendant in business and politics—though even he might be dismayed by the complacency with which they are received: “There have always been crooks, but we’ve not generally made a practice of reelecting them, let alone inviting them to dinner.” All this to say nothing of the collapse of civil order and the new jungle law which rules the American city.

  Nothing new here then for him: if the horrors of the Nazi Holocaust would have dismayed him and the moral bankruptcy of the postwar world saddened him, they would have done so only by sheer dimension. He had already adumbrated the Götterdämmerung of Western values.

  But can the matter be disposed of so simply: decline and fall predicted, decline and fall taking place? While granting the prescience of much of Lantern on the Levee’s pessimism, we must, I think, guard against a certain seductiveness which always attends the heralding of apocalypse, and we must not overlook some far less dramatic but perhaps equally significant counterforces. Yes, Will Percy’s indictment of modern life has seemed to be confirmed by the Holocaust of the 1940s and by American political and social morality in the 1970s. But what would he make of some very homely yet surely unprecedented social gains which have come to pass during these same terrible times? To give the plainest examples: that for the first time in history a poor boy, black or white, has a chance to get an education, become what he wants to become, doctor, lawyer, even read Lanterns on the Levee and write poetry of his own, and that not a few young men, black and white, have done just that? Also: that for the first time in history a working man earns a living wage and can support his family in dignity. How do these solid social gains square with pronouncements of decline and fall? I ask the question and, not knowing the answer, can only wonder how Will Percy would see it now. As collapse? Or as contest? For it appears that what is upon us is not a twilight of the gods but a very real race between the powers of light and darkness, that time is short and the issue very much in doubt. So I’d love to ask him, as I used to ask him after the seven o’clock news (Ed Murrow: This—is London): “Well? What do you think?”

  The one change that would astonish him, I think, is the spectacular emergence of the South from its traditional role of loser and scapegoat. If anyone had told him in 1940 that in thirty years the “North” (i.e., New York, Detroit, California) would be in the deepest kind of trouble with race, violence, and social decay while the South had become, by contrast, relatively hopeful and even prosperous, he would not have believed it. This is not to say that he would find himself at home in the new Dallas or Atlanta. But much of Lanterns on the Levee—for example, the chapter on sharecropping—was written from the ancient posture of Southern apologetics. If his defense of sharecropping against the old enemy, the “Northern liberal,” seems quaint now, it is not because there was not something to be said for sharecropping—there was a good deal to be said—and it is not because he wasn’t naïve about the tender regard of the plantation manager for the helpless sharecropper—he was naïve, even about his own managers. It is rather because the entire issue and its disputants have simply been bypassed by history. The massive social and technological upheavals in the interval have left the old quarrel academic and changed the odds in the new one. It is hard, for example, to imagine a serious Southern writer nowadays firing off his heaviest ammunition at “Northern liberals.” Not the least irony of recent history is t
hat the “Northern liberal” has been beleaguered and the “Southern planter” rescued by the same forces. The latter has been dispensed by technology from the ancient problem, sharecroppers replaced by Farmall and Allis-Chalmers, while the former has fallen out with his old wards, the blacks. The displaced sharecroppers moved to the Northern cities and the liberals moved out. The South in a peculiar sense, a sense Will Percy would not necessarily have approved (though he could hardly have repressed a certain satisfaction), may have won after all.

  So Will Percy’s strong feelings about the shift of power from the virtuous few would hardly be diminished today, but he might recast his villains and redress the battle lines. Old-style demagogue, for example, might give way to new-style image manipulator and smooth amoral churchgoing huckster. When he spoke of the “bottom rail on top,” he had in mind roughly the same folks as Faulkner’s Snopeses, a lower-class, itchy-palmed breed who had dispossessed the gentry, who had in turn been the true friends of the old-style “good” Negro. The upshot: an unholy hegemony of peckerwood politicians, a white hoi polloi keeping them in office, and a new breed of unmannerly Negroes misbehaving in the streets. But if he—or Faulkner, for that matter—were alive today, he would find the battleground confused. He would find most members of his own “class” not exactly embattled in a heroic Götterdämmerung, not exactly fighting the good fight as he called it, but having simply left, taken off for the exurbs, where, barricaded in patrolled subdivisions and country clubs and private academies, they worry about their kids and drugs. Who can blame them, but is this the “good life” Will Percy spoke of? And when some of these good folk keep Lanterns on the Levee on the bed table, its author, were he alive today, might be a little uneasy. For meanwhile, doing the dirty work of the Republic in the towns and cities of the South, in the schools, the school boards, the city councils, the factories, the restaurants, the stores, are to be found, of all people, the sons and daughters of the poor whites of the 1930s and some of those same uppity Negroes who went to school and ran for office, and who together are not doing so badly and in some cases very well indeed.

  So it is not unreasonable to suppose that Will Percy might well revise his view of the South and the personae of his drama, particularly in favor of the lower-class whites for whom he had so little use. In this connection I cannot help but think of another book about the South, W. J. Cash’s The Mind of the South, published, oddly enough, the same year by the same publisher as Lanterns on the Levee. Cash’s book links Southern aristocrat and poor white much closer than the former ordinarily would have it. Both books are classics in their own right, yet they couldn’t be more different; their separate validities surely testify to the diversity and complexity of this mysterious region. Yet, in this case, I would suppose that Will Percy would today find himself closer to Cash in sorting out his heroes and villains, that far from setting aristocrat against poor white and both against the new Negro, he might well choose his present-day heroes—and villains—from the ranks of all three. He’d surely have as little use for black lawlessness as for white copping out. I may be wrong, but I can’t see him happy as the patron saint of Hilton Head or Paradise Estates-around-the-Country Club.

  For it should be noted, finally, that despite conventional assessments of Lanterns on the Levee as an expression of the “aristocratic” point of view of the Old South, Will Percy had no more use than Cash for genealogical games, the old Southern itch for coats of arms and tracing back connections to the English squirearchy. Indeed, if I know anything at all about Will Percy, I judge that insofar as there might be a connection between him and the Northumberland Percys, they, not he, would have to claim kin. He made fun of his ancestor Don Carlos, and if he claimed Harry Hotspur, it was a kinship of spirit. His own aristocracy was a meritocracy of character, talent, performance, courage, and quality of life.

  It is just that, a person and a life, which comes across in Lanterns on the Levee. And about him I will say no more than that he was the most extraordinary man I have ever known and that I owe him a debt which cannot be paid.

  1973

  Uncle Will’s House

  IT WAS A SINGULAR house to grow up in. I doubt if anyone ever spent his youth in such a house. It belonged to my cousin, the poet William Alexander Percy—“Uncle Will,” we called him. There he lived alone, and there my brothers and I, ages eight to fourteen, went to live after our parents died. This man—bachelor, poet, planter, lawyer—was, if nothing else, extremely brave. How many bachelors would take upon themselves the rearing of three orphaned cousins?

  The house and household did not seem remarkable to me at the time. Indeed, nothing seems remarkable to a child, who is programmed precisely not to find things remarkable, but to get used to them.

  But it was not an ordinary house. It was in Greenville, Mississippi, a few blocks from the levee that had broken three years earlier, flooding the town and the entire Delta. For four months the house rose from a fetid brown sea ten-feet deep. Dead mules floated into the front gallery.

  Hardly distinguished architecturally, the house had been the sort of bastard Greek Revival popular in the late 1800s, a tall, frame, gabled pile with a portico and two-story Ionic columns. Evidently it was somewhat ramshackle even in the 1920s, for Uncle Will’s parents turned it over to a contractor-renovator-decorator to fix up, and departed for a Grand Tour of Europe—they must have had a great cotton crop that year. Upon their return, they found it as I first saw it in 1930: stuccoed (!), the portico and columns knocked off, a large bungalow-shaped porte cochere stuck on one side, and a sun parlor, as it was then called, stuck on the other.

  Children notice things first, people later. People are to be dealt with, accepted, pleased, gotten along with. But things are to be explored. What things there were in that house! It had an elevator. I had never heard of such a thing, an elevator in a house. Most especially, there was the attic, a vast, dusty, rambling place littered with World War I souvenirs: spiked German helmets, binoculars, Springfield rifles, cartridge belts, puttees, and bayonets.

  Downstairs in the great living room was the Capehart, a huge automatic phonograph, one of the first of its kind and surely the only one in town, and an even larger record cabinet packed with albums of 78s, from Bach to Brahms. Uncle Will wasn’t much for twentieth-century music. He would play Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du printemps and shake his head. I welcomed the job of setting up a concert for him, stacking the 78s in proper order and monitoring the marvelous machine. The Capehart would drop a record from the stack, play one side, turn it over and play the second side, then drop the next record; but sometimes it would have a fit, take a dislike to Tchaikovsky and sling records every which way.

  There were dozens of rooms in the house, odd, angled-off rooms serving no known purpose. I found one, and with my friend Shelby Foote set up shop, building model airplanes—Spads, Sopwith Camels, and finally my masterpiece, a flying scale model of the Lockheed Winnie Mae flown by the ill-fated Wiley Post.

  Off the living room was Uncle Will’s library, which began with the eighteenth-century collection of our common ancestor—including a three-volume Wilson’s American Ornithology, wondrous indeed had it not been got at by some later brat-ancestors with crayons and scissors on a rainy day. In his library, too, he barely reached the twentieth century, with Edna St. Vincent Millay and Sara Teasdale, but had not much use for the “moderns,” as he called them, not even his distinguished contemporaries and fellow Southerners, the Nashville poets Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and company.

  What was memorable, of course, was not the house and the things, but the people—visitors, friends, kinfolk, strangers who came there. He was a literary figure and something of a spokesman for the South. As a consequence, his house became a standard stopover for all manner of folk who had set forth to make sense of this mysterious region—poets, journalists, sociologists, psychiatrists. I remember Carl Sandburg, who broke out his guitar and sang, not too well, for hours. A better musician, a black harmonica playe
r, showed up one night from God knows where—he was on the road; it was the Great Depression—and played the blues on his harmonica as I have never heard the blues played before or since. Faulkner came for tennis. Whether distracted by literary inspiration or by bourbon, he never managed once to bring racket into contact with ball. Langston Hughes came for a visit and a speech. Uncle Will introduced him.

  Harry Stack Sullivan stayed for three weeks. Perhaps this country’s most eminent psychiatrist, he explained with some diffidence that he was being paid by a foundation to study race relations in the Mississippi Delta. Canny enough to know that no one can make sense of any kind of human relations in three weeks, he nevertheless and none too seriously made the best of it, and in his own sly way hit upon the best place and the best method for his case studies. The place: the pantry, a large room with bar, between kitchen and dining room, between the white folks in the front and the cook and her friends and friends of the cook’s friends in the back. There in the pantry the traffic was heaviest and race relations liveliest. Uncle Will cannot be said to have run a tight ship, and did not know how many guests were fed in the kitchen or who they were. One encountered total strangers. Dr. Sullivan’s methodology: Early each afternoon he made himself a pitcher of vodka martinis—no one had ever heard of such a drink in Mississippi in the 1930s—and set up shop in the pantry, listened and talked to any and all comers. I never did find out what this brilliant and sardonic upstate New Yorker made of race relations in Uncle Will’s pantry.