Walker Percy and the Century of Merde 4 comments

By Andy Whitman

Today is my thirtieth birthday and I sit on the ocean wave in the schoolyard and wait for Kate and think of nothing. Now in the thirty-first year of my dark pilgrimage on this earth and knowing less than I ever knew before, having learned only to recognize merde when I see it, having inherited no more from my father than a good nose for merde, for every species of shit that flies—my only talent—smelling merde from every quarter, living in fact in the very century of merde, the great shithouse of scientific humanism where needs are satisfied, everyone becomes an anyone, a warm and creative person, and prospers like a dung beetle, and one hundred percent of people are humanists and ninety-eight percent believe in God, and men are dead, dead, dead; and the malaise has settled like a fall-out and what people really fear is not that the bomb will fall but that the bomb will not fall—on this my thirtieth birthday, I know nothing and there is nothing to do but fall prey to desire.
                                                                                —Walker Percy, from The Moviegoer

I play the game well for months, sometimes years at a time. I'm a happy little American consumer, which is my purpose in life, and I go to work and earn a paycheck, and then I spend the paycheck on things like roofing shingles, and I keep the American economy humming. It's not humming all that well, and it seems to have lost the tune, but I do what I can.

Then I hit some sort of wall. Not a literal wall; I could buy that, or pay somebody else to scale it for me. But a metaphorical wall where I, like my literary hero Walker Percy, look around and ask the unanswerable questions: Is this it? Roofing shingles? Scrimping and saving and bowing and scraping and wearing a servile, shit-eating Uncle Tom grin—Yassuh, I'd sho nuff love to write 'bout database capacity planning for you—to pay for two college tuitions for my daughters so that they too can one day buy roofing shingles, and carry on in the grand American tradition?

Gauguin sailed off to Tahiti and cavorted with the naked Polynesian women. John Lennon dumped Cynthia and married Yoko. And some of the people I've known—middle-aged-slouching-toward-senility geezers like me—have bought the cherry-red sports car and absconded with their secretaries. I'm not going to do any of those things, mainly because a) they're deeply wrong, and b) I truly love my wife and daughters, I recognize how wonderful I have it, and I'm not stupid.

But I'd be lying if I said I didn't understand the basic impulse to chuck it all, to just walk away from the never-ending treadmill. Some people envision getting off the treadmill. They usually call that retirement. But having lost roughly half the hope for the future I’ve built up for several decades—at least that future—over the past two years or so, I'm fearful that I'll keep on bowing and scraping until the day I keel over of a heart attack.

That's it? Cardiac arrest in exchange for roofing shingles? How about if I respectfully bow out of the proceedings? But that's the wall. And I'm not sure I see any way over it or around it.

I was startled, a couple years back, to learn that Walker Percy had carried something of a fanboy crush on rocker Bruce Springsteen in the late 1980s. He wrote Springsteen; Springsteen never answered, and they never met. But several years after Walker’s death, Springsteen wrote to his widow and talked about his belated discovery of The Moviegoer. It was delightful to contemplate that mutual admiration society; the shy, courtly southern gentleman Percy confessing his love for Born to Run, the flamboyant Springsteen sharing his appreciation for the fragile anti-hero Binx Bolling, who retreats to find reality in the movies.

Percy gave up a promising medical career to become a writer. Doctors in the 1940s were held in much the same high esteem as they are held today, and it must have been dismaying to those who were closest to him to watch him walk away from security, prestige, and the trappings of success.

But Percy surely understood the trap in trappings, and he quickly set aside his stethoscope to plumb the pathology of the soul. Sweating it out on the streets of a runaway American dream wasn’t any more acceptable to the outwardly conventional Percy than it was to the iconically rebellious Springsteen, and he died twenty years ago this month, one of the most venerated novelists of his time. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t be surprised if there aren’t still a few denizens of the shithouse of scientific humanism—former medical colleagues, perhaps, or members of the social aristocracy—who shake their heads at what could have been.

It is, of course, all too easy to focus on the Springsteens and Percys of the world, on those who risked it all for that shimmering vision they glimpsed on the horizon, and who made both transcendent art and a better than decent living. Meanwhile, there are those of us who buy roofing shingles because the roof is leaking. I don’t know what the answer is.

There is inherent nobility in work, my friends tell me. There is nothing, absolutely nothing, wrong with supporting your family. The notion of following your passions is a product of whiny Baby Boomers. Ask a thirteenth-century serf about following his passions.

Some days I listen. But not today. Me? I'll talk to you about Walker Percy and why he had it right. I'll talk to you about why it's all a big, stinking pile of merde without God in the equation, and that even with Him on your side you still might want to hold your nose.