Our reading this week notes the rise of the novel as a vehicle of enlightened reflection. Walker Percy and Shelby Foote were best friends and novelists, though Foote gained greater notoriety as a historian and Ken Burns star. I've admired them both. It's Percy's birthday...
Walker Percy is still my favorite southern Catholic Existentialist novelist...
It’s the birthday of novelist Walker Percy (books by this author), born in Birmingham, Alabama (1916). He was working as a psychiatrist when he caught tuberculosis and he spent two years recovering from the disease. In bed he started reading existentialist philosophers and decided to become a writer. He later said, “[Tuberculosis was] the best disease I ever had. If I hadn’t had it, I might be a second-rate shrink practicing in Birmingham, at best.” He’s best known for his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), about a stockbroker who tries to get over a nervous breakdown by spending all his time at the movies. WA
And he's still my favorite Tea House co-constructionist. His pal Shelby Foote is still my favorite southern semi-reconstructed southern Proustian Civil War historian and Ken Burns talking head. (Mississippi, for such a benighted state, has produced more than its share of terrific writers. Richard Ford's another favorite on the trail.)
Foote and Percy had a marvelous lifelong friendship [g'r] and (as he told CSPAN) a wonderful correspondence. Percy died in 1990, Foote in 2005.
At the beginning of that CSPAN interview Foote told the humorless Brian Lamb that writers are unhappy people, but near the end of it he had a delightfully different message about the connection between meaningful work and happiness. It's also what he told the Paris Review in 1999:
“People say, My God, I can’t believe that you really worked that hard for twenty years. How in God’s name did you do it? Well, obviously I did it because I enjoyed it. I don’t deserve any credit for working hard. I was doing what I wanted to do. Shakespeare said it best: “The labor we delight in physics pain.” There’s no better feeling in the world than to lay your head on the pillow at night looking forward to getting up in the morning and returning to that desk. That’s real happiness.”
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