An Interview with Walker Percy

Author(s): John Carr and Walker Percy

Source: The Georgia Review , Fall 1971, Vol. 25, No. 3 (Fall 1971), pp. 317-332
Published by: Georgia Review

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/41396795

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 An Interview with Walker Percy
By John Carr
Walker Percy's first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), 1 von a
National Book Award and his recent novel The Last Gentleman
has received wide critical attention. A native of Alabama, he was
educated at the University of North Carolina and the Columbia
University School of Medicine. He gave up his medical practice
for a career in literature.

CARR: grow
growupuptogether
Shelby together Foote in Greenville? dedicated Shiloh to you. Did you
in Greenville?
PERCY: Yes, from the age of about ... I moved to Greenville
when I was, I think, 13 or 14. He was maybe one year younger.
I remember we started out at the same study hall at Greenville
High School. At the time, I was writing poetry, verse, for a
high school class. I got very proficient. The teacher would
assign sonnets, and I would crank out a sonnet and sell it for
50 cents. Everybody had to write a sonnet, so . . . Shelby saw
me writing poetry, so I really take credit for launching Shelby
on his literary career.
Q: In The Last Gentleman, you say the town was named Ithaca
because the man had a fondness for the classical world and had
had enough of Southern Baptists, or words to that effect. Shelby
has named Greenville Ithaca in his novels. Is this a kind of an
in-joke?
A: No. I liked the name. I wanted to use it, and I told Shelby
I hoped he didn't mind. He said he didn't. It wasn't a joke.
Q: You characterized Greenville in your novel as having a
degree of culture that the rest of Mississippi did not. Do you
think that was true then and is now?
A: I think it was very much true then. Mainly because of my
uncle, who was also my adoptive father. When my parents died,
we went to live with him. Of course, he was a remarkable man.
He certainly had a powerful influence on me. The whole idea
of the Greek-Roman Stoic view, the classical view, was exempli-
fied in him more than in any other person I ever knew.
Q: In another interview, you described the ambience pretty

[317]

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3 18 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

well, with Faulkner coming to play tennis and show

drunk to play, and so on. Did Mr. Percy, your un
influence your decision to write?
A: I think he did. Most certainly he did because
extraordinary quality which only a few good teac
know, have, and that's the quality of making you see
painting the way he sees it. And he could read p
which very few people do well, and he could make
beauty of a passage in Shakespeare; Shakespeare and
his two favorites, and I could see it exactly the way
He could turn you on. And music, too. He owned
a huge monstrous thing. And it was the first tim
anybody play classical music. And so we were ex
these good things- literature and music- for ten yea
that, but he had a great influence in the town it
quite influential, affecting other people like Dav
Hodding Carter.
Q: You started writing late, and you have said else
you were a scientist until you were in your thirties
caught ТВ at Bellevue. There's a question in my
whether you're a philosopher who exemplifies his p
his writing, or a writer who perfected his craft writing
cal essays. How do you feel about that?
A: All I can say is that I was interested first in ph
in writing essays, although I never took a course in
at Chapel Hill. As I told you earlier, I spent most
years in the chemistry lab, biology lab, and so on
began to read philosophy and got interested and deve
agreements and disagreements.
Q: I've noticed that.
A: I've always found . . . my main motivation, the
of my writing, I hate to say it, is usually antagonism
with somebody and wanting to get it right. Somebo
you and that's good, you like something, you don't lik
else. I remember I read Suzanne Langer's book Phi
New Key, which was for me a very, very excitin
I thought it went wrong at the end. And so I jus
would write and say how it went wrong, and I w

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 AN INTERVIEW WITH WALKER PERCY 319

review and sent it to Thought Quarterly , and lo and

it was published.
Q: Was that the first thing?
A: It was the first thing I had ever published.
Q: Let's go back for a moment. Not in time, though. H
you react now, now that you're about the age he was wh
was publishing, to Will Percy's Lanterns on the Levee ?
A: Well, as I told you before, I think it's a minor cl
its way. That and the W. J. Cash book that came ou
same time, expressing two very different points of view
greatly influenced by it, of course, and sympathetic to m
it. In the end, there's an ideological division between the
saw it and the way I see it. A lot of it may have to
time. The times are different now. In those days, believe it o
he was considered a liberal. But now it seems that Lanterns on
the Levee really expresses a paternalism, a noblesse oblige, and a
rather dark view which is based on stoicism, Greco-Roman
Stoicism, in which a man doesn't expect much in the world and
does the best he can and tries to make one place a little better
and knows in the end . . . knows that he'll probably be defeated
in the end. I became a Catholic and accordingly I have a different
view of how things should ... of attitudes of whites towards
blacks and blacks towards whites. I have probably, I think, more
hope.
Q: Why have writers, and both Cash and your uncle were
professional writers, found it so hard to write about the South?
Presumably, people accustomed to handling the language as well
as being among the brighter minds of their region could do it,
but neither book totally convinced me.
A: The South is a very complicated place to write about.
Faulkner had Quentin Thompson telling his roommate, "I don't
hate the South." And any writer, any Southern writer, is stuck
with this ambivalence, I think, this hate and love. I don't know.
A couple of people suggested I write a book about the South.
What does that mean? Look at the difference between Atlanta
and Birmingham, between this place here and New Orleans, or
between North Louisiana and South Louisiana. I sometimes think
that some parts of the South are more like the North than the

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3 20 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

North itself. There are more Cleveland suburbs in the South than
there are in Cleveland.
Q: If you don't mind my asking, when did you become a
Catholic?
A: I think it was 1946, twenty-four years ago.
Q: Was that after you'd gone through the Bellevue thing?
A: Yeah, right.
Q: Did that have anything to do with it, or is that unfair?
A: Well, it came as a result of being ... I was ill and I quit
medicine, and I was laid up for a couple of years, and I was
doing a lot of reading. I could get into a long thing there. I don't
know whether you want to go into it.
Q: Yeah, I'm interested.
A: Well, just in general terms, what I got interested in was
anthropology, in the European sense of the word, in a view of
man as such, man as man. My orientation up until that time had
been strictly scientific, in the then-prevailing naturalistic scientific
mode, which very much attracted me at North Carolina and also
at Columbia. Later it troubled me, because it amounted almost
to behaviorism.
Q: Behaviorism?
A: I remember at North Carolina that classical behaviorism
in the psychology department was running very strong. And at
Columbia, it was the idea of the mechanism of disease, which is
very valuable, the idea that disease is a mechanism of response
in the body to the disease agent. So I began to be interested in
a view of man as such, man as man. And I saw one day . . .
maybe it was something of a breakthrough, something of a turning
of a corner, that science can say so much about things, objects
or people, but by its very method, by its own definition, by its
own self-imposed limitation, the scientific method can only utter
a statement about a single object, a glass or a frog or a dogfish-
or a man- only insofar as it resembles other things of its kind.
If you want to make general statements- which scientists recog-
nize, that's the nature of science insofar as one dogfish resembles
another dogfish- that is what science is interested in, making
general statements about certain kinds of things and certain kinds
of responses and reactions and changes. Well, I suddenly realized

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 AN INTERVIEW WITH WALKER PERCY 32 1

that when you apply this to man, you stop short a

point where it matters to man. Science can say everyt
a man except what he is in himself.
Q: Did you become interested in existentialism
Kierkegaard and Heidegger?
A: I'm trying to remember. I think it was probably
Sartre first, probably through reading Nausea. And t
going back to Kierkegaard and then coming forward to
and Marcel.
Q: In almost every article you've written, there's a reference
to Marcel.
A: I read quite a bit of him some time ago, but Kierkegaard
is probably the one who deserves the most credit. He saw it
most clearly. Although he was speaking of Hegel, you could
say the same thing of the scientific method: that it's a quantita-
tive thing, that science cannot utter one single sentence about
what a man is himself as an individual. Of course, it doesn't
even attempt to do so. And therefore, if a man embraces this
particular view of the world, he is left with a very peculiar view
of things in which he sees the world ordered in scientific
constructions with himself as a great lacuna, a great vacuum.
There's all this business about identity crisis nowadays, and I
think it has a lot to do with this cultural attitude. What I was
protesting during so much of the time you are talking about was
the view of so many, not merely scientists, but also writers and
artists, that only scientists and only science is interested in telling
the truth. Provable, demonstrable truth, whereas art and writing
has to do with play, feeling and emotions, entertainment. I've
always held that art and even novels are just as valid as science,
just as cognitive. In fact, I see my own writing as not really a
great departure from my original career, science and medicine,
because, to get back to what we were talking about, where
science will bring you to a certain point and then no further,
it can say nothing about what a man is or what he must do.
And then the question is, how do you deal with man? And if
you are an anthropologist in the larger sense, interested in man,
how do you study him? And it seemed to me that the novel
itself was a perfectly valid way to deal with man's behavior.

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322 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

Q: I object to philosophical superstruct

joints in a man's writing.
A: I don't believe in writing in enigma
novels that you have to have read so
order to understand. In fact, I think if
philosophical novel or whatever it is, t
French pioneered- is any good, then th
parcel of the novel, and there's no illust
have a thesis and then illustrate it. W
in a certain situation and see what happ
Q: Why weren't you influenced by
never seen a reference to an American w
A: That's true. It had to do with the
began to write. The philosophy I was in
called then existential philosophy. Of co
means much. It still means a concrete
situation, man in a predicament, man's
I believed this view of man could be
novel, and I was interested in phenom
strongly existentialist: the idea of desc
man feels in a given situation. And that's
Q: Does existentialism aim for the salva
the salvation of man, in your opinion?
your and Marcel's peculiarly Catholic ex
A: I think it would be the idea of tran
ness, of transcending being so caught u
that even religious reality, especially re
stereotype and something you go throu
speaks of something he calls "recollec
collects himself, so he can recover thing
of course, here is where the great diver
and the atheistic existentialists like Sart
a certain absurdity and ugliness in the w
tion of man in the world. Of course
reality can be transcended by an I-to-yo
only be transcended by authentic polit
think Sartre already undercuts himse
philosophy disallows any communication

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 AN INTERVIEW WITH WALKER PERCY 323

spends most of his time writing books.

Q: You wrote in your article "Symbol as Herme
Existentialism" that "Sartre is surely mistaken in an
sources of my shame at being caught out in an unw
formance by the look of another. It is the other's ob
me, he says, that makes me ashamed . . . No. I am
what? Not as a something- as nothing, as that w
everything else in the world cannot be rendered as
And, further on, "When Matthieu stops in the midd
Neuf and discovers his freedom in his nothingness-
there is nothing. I am free'- he is after all only hypos
unformulability of self. The tell-tale sign is his
sense of having at last discovered his identity. He is
after all- Nothing! And in so doing, is he not com
same impersonation which Sartre so severely condemn
If the structure of consciousness is intentional, to be of
directed towards the other, a being-towards, then the
of this self-unformulability as Nought is as perverse
impersonation- really a kind of inferior totemism
referring back here to Marcel's "Existence and Human
which Marcel dates from February, 1946, and in wh
"There is perhaps nothing more remarkable in th
Sartre's work than his phenomenological study of th
looking and of himself as exposed, pierced, bared, petr
Medusa-like stare. My subjective reactions to this fo
gression are, in the first place, fear (the sense of being e
by the liberty of another) and, secondly, pride or
sense of being at last what I am, but a distance from
another who is over there)."2
A: I'm sure that I'm indebted to him. That reminds
I remember at the time that one of my objections t
that, although, as I say, I felt a very strong attraction
ter in Nausea was always being revolted by some aspe

iWalker Percy, "Symbol as Hermeneutic in Existentialism/' Phi

Phenomenological Research , XVI (June, 1956), p. 529.
2The article referred to is "Existence and Human Freedom" in the book
The Philosophy of Eosistentialism by Gabriel Marcel (Manya Harari trans-
lation), Citadel Press, NYC, 1968, and the passage is on page 71 of that
volume.

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324 ГНЕ GEORGIA REVIEW

which was usually described in terms of b

organic, particularly the idea of the home
nest where the children are, the babies ar
mother. These things provoked a kind of h
is all very well, but I think he confuses th
philosophical there. He has an aesthetic r
allows that to become a premise for phi
from it.
Q: In your article "Symbol as Hermeneut
you say, "yet even Sartrean existentialism
empirical mind. For whatever the sins of b
tialism which postulates atheism, it has bee
which the empiricist in his obsessive ques
quantification has lost- the uniqueness of h
A: Well, presumably I meant a philosop
postulating theism or atheism. It's arriving at
setting out from atheism or theism. I thi
atheism and erects his system on that. Not ev
theism. But, of course, Sartre changed c
so many words, repudiated this whole peri
He's rejected that as being bourgeois and i
Q: He's a Marxist now.
A: He's a Marxist. He says at last he's seen
In a way I think he's right, in the sense t
the social dimension. It's not just one m
streets and sitting in the cafés and being re
a chestnut tree. At least he is aware of a s
though it's Marxist. Of course, Marx was
who adumbrated alienation, but he put it s
production, of a man making something-
Q- he had no control over. I detect in yo
certain will toward theism which I suspect
started building your philosophic outlo
feeling about that?
A: Well, I guess we're all what we are.
you can't help but be affected by that orienta

зРегсу, op. cit., pp. 529-530.

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 AN INTERVIEW WITH WALKER PERCY 325

And I'm a Roman Catholic, although many Roman C

don't understand how I could write the novels I do and be a R
Catholic. Of course, that's an interesting subject in itsel
is a Catholic novelist? Is he a novelist who happens t
Catholic, or is he a novelist who is first a Catholic bef
a novelist? All I can say is, as a writer you have a certai
of man, a certain view of the way it is, and even if you
recognize it or even if you disavow such a view, you can'
that view or lack of view. I think your writing is going t
this. I think my writings reflect a certain basic orientation t
although they're not really controlled by, Catholic dogma. A
it's a view of man, that man is neither an organism con
by his environment, not a creature controlled by the fo
history as the Marxists would say, nor is he a detached,
objective, angelic being who views the world in a God-li
and makes pronouncements only to himself or to an elit
of people. No, he's somewhere between the angels and the
He's a strange creature whom both Thomas Aquinas and
called homo viator, man the wayfarer, man the wand
to me, the Catholic view of man as pilgrim, in transit, in
is very compatible with the vocation of a novelist b
novelist is writing about man in transit, man as pilgrim.
it would be a disadvantage, for example, to be a Freudian
novelist. I think a great many novels has been spo
Freudian preconceptions. Or behaviorist preconception
think most Marxist novels are bad.
Q: I think novels that have a basis in radical thought ar
It's just that the novels which try to take the latest "
line" or fall in with the latest New Left fad are so bad.
A: And by the same token, nothing is worse than a bad
Catholic novel. Nothing is worse than a novel which seeks to
edify the reader.
Q: There's a constant refusal to edify anyone in any of your
novels ...
A: This is Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard was always saying . . .
he wrote a wonderful, a very important essay called "The Dif-
ference Between a Genius and an Apostle." It's very, very im-
portant. He said a genius could see the word sub specie etermtatis,

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 326 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

the way things are in general, and he could tell pe

way things are in general- but he did not have th
come to anybody and tell them any news. Or if
the news, he didn't have the authority to make eve
the news. Whereas an apostle is precisely a man
authority to come and tell everybody the news. Kie
well, of course, Kierkegaard had much more cla
authority than I do. He was a preacher. But he was
apostle. A novelist least of all has the authority to
or tell them good news, to pronounce Christ King
Q: You reject that all the way through. You k
back to a funny line, you must have read it som
"Socrates, Jesus, and Buddha were all mature pers
I wondered if that was from some ridiculous pamp
thing.
A: Well, in a way I suppose it's a reaction against my Uncle
Will, whom I loved and admired, but he was always telling us
about the great ones of the earth. He would always list them,
Buddha, Jesus, Socrates, he'd always include Richard Coeur de
Lion, Philip Sidney . . . So, it's sort of a pantheon of the sexless
saints.
Q: Shelby Foote mentioned that he thought Aunt Emily in
The Moviegoer, who gives the speech about the broadsword
virtues, is your uncle in disguise.
A: It's very close. In that particular scene, when she tells
off Binx- and she tells him off in good style, too- that's the way
Uncle Will would have told him off. And of course he'd be
partly right. People in the South think that's the best part of the
book, where Aunt Emily tells off Binx, and they think that Aunt
Emily's point of view represents my point of view!
Q: That must be kind of wild. You said at one point that Binx
was on Kierkegaard's plane of the esthetic, and that's why he lived
in Gentilly.
A: Yeah, that's true, although not at the end. Binx lives in
Gentilly as a kind of ... as a conscious cultivation of a certain
kind of experience, whereas anybody else who comes to New
Orleans or wants to live the free life in New Orleans would
naturally go to the French Quarter and get an apartment in the

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 AN INTERVIEW WITH WALKER PERCY 327

proper dilapidated style with a balcony and so on,

a reaction he does the opposite. But Binx goes in t
This appeals to him simply because it's not like the Frenc
He doesn't want to be down in the French Quarter w
guys who are artists and writers.
Q: The hip young set.
A: They are exactly the kind of people he's tryin
There's also a rather conscious parallel between Bi
Gentilly and Phillip going to thé Gaza Desert. A man
desert to seek something. Gentilly is a desert if ever the
The same thing happened in The Last Gentleman. Th
in the Western desert.
Q: It occurred to me that The Moviegoer's two main
escaped alienation by confirming each other's alie
The Last Gentleman showed a man escaping alienation
A: Well, they overlap and interweave, but they are
Binx lived almost entirely in what Kierkegaard calls
mode of consciously cultivating certain experiences,
a certain place with a certain feeling to it and havin
about being there . . . you walk across the street to t
school, and sit there in the evening looking in the
the movie schedules, very much aware of how it feel
much aware of getting on the bus and going ten mile
across the river, to see a movie. This is to oversim
Kierkegaard calls the esthetic mode of existence. But
we're using Kierkegaardian terminology- in the end
from the esthetic clear across the ethical to the religious
ethical sphere at all. That's what Aunt Emily can't
about him. He just doesn't believe in being the honor
doing the right thing, for its own sake. But at the en
of hints are dropped; for instance, the end is also a c
or gloss, on the end of The Brothers Karamazov. He
the car. Lonnie's brothers and sisters are in the car, a
him about Lonnie, and Binx says, "Well, he's dyin
dead," I've forgotten. One little boy jumps up and
true, Binx, that Lonnie will rise up on the last da
will be a resurrection and Lonnie will be well in the r
not crippled?" And Binx says, "Yeah."

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 328 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

Q: And Kate's mad at him because he's so cold-

A: Well, Kate missed it, missed the whole thing.
Kate said, "You were very sweet with him," and B
at her. She's missed it, you see. But Binx doesn
Alyosha he tells the truth. He wouldn't have said,
didn't mean it. The implication is that . . . you see, in
Karamazov, Alyosha does the same thing with th
of the kids says, "Is it true we're all going to r
last day and be together?" A little boy named K
died. And so Alyosha said, "Yeah, that's true. We'r
to be there." And the kids say, "Hurrah for Karam
this was a salute to Dostoevsky.
Q: Binx always kind of disturbed me. Even kn
the Kierkegaardian esthetic mode, I always felt
holding himself in abeyance, that he was acting in
centered way.
A: It's what Kierkegaard called esthetic damnatio
tioned The Last Gentleman. That was different. Th
Will Barrett, was both a great deal worse off t
better off. He was worse off because he was sick;
sick. He didn't know where he was. Half the time he was in a
fugue of amnesia, and he'd go into a fugue and come out of a
fugue, and he'd wake up somewhere, not knowing where he was
yet. He really existed in what Kierkegaard would call the religious
mode. He was a real searcher. He was after something. He was
clinging to a piece of wood, a floating spar; he's a drowning
man clutching at straws, really on the ragged edge. The abyss
was always yawning at his feet. The book is nothing but a journey.
The question, you see, is whether it is better to be a drowning
man, or alive and well in East Orange.
Q: The journey is rotation.
A: Well first, rotation- he's wandering around through the
South- but then repetition. He goes back home. He goes back to
a place like Greenville, and there he stands in front of his father's
house, he recovers his ... I think Kierkegaard says, "Every man
has to stand in front of the house of his childhood in order to
recover himself." So Barrett is obsessed with this thing that had
happened, his father's suicide. And the whole first two-thirds of

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 AN INTERVIEW WITH WALKER PERCY 329

the book is going back to this thing that happened, w

had shocked him so much he'd almost become a h
was deaf in one ear.
At first, there's a repetition back to Ithaca and then he gets
hold of Sutter's diary and he follows Sutter to the desert. There's
an encounter where he meets Sutter in the desert which is some-
thing like the encounter of Phillip with the eunuch in the Gaza
Desert. But at the end, this is different. He knows that Sutter's
on to something. Sutter's got something he wants to know, and
Barrett has this radar. He knows that people know something he
doesn't know. So he fastens on Sutter, because he has to find out
what it is. Sutter leaves him this diary which has all kinds of
clues and such, but he still doesn't know exactly what Sutter's
getting at. So he finally catches up with Sutter, and in the death
scene a baptism takes place, with a very ordinary sort of priest,
a mediocre priest. And here again, Barrett has eliminated Chris-
tianity. That is gone. That is no longer even to be considered. It's
not even to be spoken of, taken seriously, or anything else. But
he still has this acute radar. He knows what people are feeling.
And he is aware of something going on between the dying boy
Jamie and Sutter there across the room and the priest. And he
is aware that Sutter is taking this seriously. So after the boy dies,
they leave and Barrett catches up with Sutter and he says, he
asks Sutter, "What happened there? Something happened. What
happened?" And Sutter brushes him off, as usual. "What do you
think happened? You were there." Well, it ends, unlike The
Moviegoer , with Barrett missing it, like Kate missed it. He misses
it! He says something to Sutter like, "Why don't you come back
to a town in the South and make a contribution, however small?"
So presumably, you see, Barrett, who existed in a religious mode
of search, repetition, and going into the desert, which are all in
Kierkegaard's religious mode, at the end misses it. Whereas Binx,
who exists in the aesthetic mode of damnation, as Kierkegaard
would call it, in the end becomes a believer, in his own rather
laconic style.
Q: A real flip-out. You never look for that. I look and what
has he done? This guy is now a Christian! I didn't see this coming.
A: Well, most people didn't see it at all. In fact, most people

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 ЗЗО THE GEORGIA REVIEW

will deny it's in there. They stand me do

You don't baptize Binx in that book." They
out.

Q: Does it bother you that the death of young boys and their
conversion, or at least a giving of religious significance to their
deaths, occurs in both novels?
A: Susan Sontag said to me, "You've written two novels, both
of which end with a philosopher bending over a dying youth."
My wife said, "Enough of that."
Q: Goodman, reviewing The Last Gentleman in Life, said that
you stand back from sex all the way through the novel.
A: Well, he probably means that I don't describe the
physiology of sexual intercourse, which everybody does now in
novels. And which I have no particular objection to, except that
I don't think it's necessary. I already had physiology in medical
school.
Q: You don't think anything can be learned about people from
the way they approach sex?
A: Well, it's gotten to be such a formality now. The descrip-
tion of sexual encounters is now almost as obligatory as their
avoidance in the Victorian novels. I'll be damned if I'm going to
be dictated to by either style. I do it my own way ... I take
pleasure in turning Freud upside down. Instead of something
being a symbol for sex in the Freudian style, I use sex as a symbol
of something else. Sex here is a symbol of failure on the existential
level.

Q: In the May n, 1962, Commonweal you reviewed A Dream

of Mansions by Norris Lloyd, The Wandering of Desire by
Marion Montgomery, and Judgement Day by Thomas Chastain.
And in that review you said, "A sense of place can decay to the
merely bizarre. A sense of person can be pushed to caricature and
a whole region populated with eccentrics." Do you purposely
stay away from the Southern kind of thing of peopling your
novels with physical and mental eccentrics?
A: I stay away from the Southern novel in several ways.
There's a certain thing everybody always says about the Southern
novel. In almost any interview with a Southern writer, the writer
always says something about, "Well, the reason Southerners can

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 AN INTERVIEW WITH WALKER PERCY 33 1

write good novels is that they were raised sitting on front

listening to people tell stories, and Faulkner sat on a ben
the courthouse in Oxford and heard the people tell
stories. And we're exposed to family sagas and all sorts
and eccentric characters, also inter-relationships." This
true. Yeah, sure it was true, but hell, it's gone, it's all o
Q: Do you think so, really?
A: As far as I'm concerned. Whatever impetus I had t
writing owes nothing to sitting on a porch listening to
tell stories about the South, believe me. I think that th
regional Southern writing is all gone. I think that pe
try to write in that style are usually repeating a phased-
or doing Faulkner badly. I don't think that's the way it
the South is sufficiently corrupted, or at least amalgam
the rest of the United States, so that a young man comin
the South is not so different from a young man coming
Denver or San Francisco. Except the South has certai
tages. I make use of the Southern scenery, the Southern
but just as that, as a place where a young man can r
I think it's just fifty years later than the time of fami
and sagas and histories and so on.
Q: You don't consider yourself a Southern writer, the
A: I'm not sure of that. I do. If I were in Colorado or New
York, I'd be writing something different.
Q: Really?
A: I think what we're stuck with in the South and what's of
value are two things: one is religion and the other is the Negro.
And Flannery O'Connor says there's no way you can be raised
in the South without being affected by the very strong fundamen-
talist Christianity, usually in rebellion against it, but certainly
you bear some kind of relationship to it. Compare yourself or
myself with somebody growing up in Shaker Heights in Cleve-
land. The subject never even arises. You and I have seen Jesus
Saves signs. We were brought up seeing Jesus Saves and Garrett
Snuff signs. And then there is the black thing. Of course, this is
a hideously complicated business, very ambivalent, a very rich
source for relationships because no matter what you say, or how
bad the South is, there's still a long history of viable relationships

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332 THE GEORGIA REVIEW

here, a long history of people getting alon

Q: For one reason or another.
A: Yes, and a certain civility still exists
yourself attacking the South and at the sa
ways of communication which still exist
it's an advantage.
Q: There aren't any very strong women
Rita, who is by turns strong and not so s
pitiful and Kate is weak.
A: I write about women from the exclu
the hero or anti-hero. As such, the view o
may be limited by the narrowness of th
the narrowing, however, I would hope to
Boiling tends to see people oddly, then pe
that people get seen oddly. Accordingl
to flesh out female characters- or any o
style of the nineteenth-century novel. I
knew exactly how it felt to be a horse five
acquaintance with a horse. Presumably th
too. Certainly I am no Tolstoy and cannot
if I could. What interests me is not how it feels to be that
particular horse or that particular woman, but how it feels to be
a particular consciousness, male or female, set down in the world
the way it is now.
Q: Did you read Ellen Douglas' pamphlet about you which
she wrote for the Religious Dimensions in Literature, published by
the Seabury Press?
A: Yes.
Q: What did you think about it?
A: I thought it was quite good in most ways. Very sharp. I
thought she handled my . . . she asked me if I was still a Catholic.
I told her I still was, and she sounded as if she didn't believe me.
She wrote something about the Percys having a tendency to toy
with Catholicism. This does a bit of injustice to both the Percys
and the Catholic Church. I may not be a good Catholic, but I
hope I am not a dilettante.

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