Walker Percy and Human Sadness in the Twentieth Century
Jeanette Randolph Rollins
January 1, 1995
Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy
, by Jay Tolson (University of North Carolina Press, 1994). 544 pp.
It is a rare book that can treat a life comprehensively without compromising its mystery. Yet this is what Jay Tolson has done in his biography of late novelist and philosopher Walker Percy. As Tolson observes in his preface, contemporary biography frequently chooses the subject's "feet of clay" as either its starting point or destination. Percy's life, moreover, lends itself to the popular habit of psychological interpretation: the family history of depression, starkly manifest in the parallel middle-age suicides of both his father and father's father; the legacy of birth into an accomplished, prominent, and affluent white Southern family; the early loss of his mother in a bizarre accident and the subsequent dearth of trusted women in his youth. Yet Tolson has eschewed the tempting lens of psychology, choosing instead to view Percy's life and work through the dark glass of mystery and grace. In his approach, Tolson is at once thorough and unpresuming.
Although Tolson has done a remarkable work of gathering Percy's formative experiences, significant friends and exchanges, and greater and lesser intellectual influences, he does not claim—with the exception of rare lapses into psychological speculation—to decode the man's inner life or creative process. He renders the emergence and quality of Percy's faith with respectful tentativeness. Of the mysterious moment hinging Percy's past and future, for instance, he concedes simply: "It was something that occurred unexpectedly, like the flowers that pop up overnight after a rare desert rain." This approach is consistent with Percy's own conviction of the human selfs mystery ...
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