THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, December 25, 1994 TAG: 9412210205
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY ALLEN PRIDGEN
LENGTH: Long : 105 lines
THE HOUSE OF PERCY
Honor, Melancholy, and Imagination in a Southern Family
BERTRAM WYATT-BROWN
Oxford University Press. 454 pp. $30.
BERTRAM WYATT-BROWN, a history professor at the University of Florida and author of the highly acclaimed Southern Honor: Ethics and Behavior in the Old South, is one of the most respected scholars in the field of Southern history. Certainly, The House of Percy, a history of the illustrious Percy family of Mississippi, will strengthen Wyatt-Brown's reputation.
The book presents an exhaustively researched and lucidly written account of a Southern family whose accomplishments in business, law, politics, medicine and literature mark it as one of the most important families of the South, and of America.
The American Percys have their origins in Charles Percy, an adventurer from Ireland who arrived in what is now the Natchez area of Mississippi around 1775. His successes in politics and plantation agriculture soon led him into the best social circles in Natchez, a highly sophisticated society in which wealthy plantation aristocrats, linked by marriage and economics, were classically educated, knew the literary fashions of Europe and America, and practiced the manners of gentility. Their sons attended Princeton, their daughters were sent north to Madame Sigoigne's French-speaking academy and their plantation estates were often the temporary homes for private tutors and visiting intellectuals and artists. For the Percys, this life of privilege and education would continue into the present.
The Percys' financial, social and political achievements were to a large extent a function, Wyatt-Brown argues, of the emphasis in Southern genteel culture on personal integrity and honor. In the spirit of noblesse oblige, families like the Percys believed that their aristocratic heritage and social position obligated them to lives of civic duty and leadership. The honorable man was pledged to building a society that was honorable.
Such a moral character, then, was the motivating force behind the Percys' support of Southern ideals during the Civil War, their humanitarian efforts on behalf of displaced former slaves after the war and their sometimes dangerous opposition to the Ku Klux Klan in this century. The honorable gentleman's duty was to seek positions of power in his society and to make his values prevail.
According to Wyatt-Brown, the Percy family has two other dominant traits along with this strong sense of honor: a propensity for melancholy or depression and an attraction to literature as a way of expressing or sublimating that melancholy. The author believes that Catherine Warfield and her sister Eleanor Lee (``The Southern Brontes'') were the first of the line of melancholic Percy writers in the 19th century and that these women used their ``creative energies'' to create fiction and poetry that would provide them with a way to cope ``with the family malady of depression.''
In the 20th century, William Alexander Percy, poet and author of the classic memoir of a Delta gentleman, Lanterns of the Levee, is described by Wyatt-Brown as a writer who was plagued by ``self-dissatisfaction'' and ``self-despising.'' Walker Percy (1916-90) is the subject of the last three chapters of The House of Percy, and he too is diagnosed as another of the melancholic Percy writers, his mental condition exacerbated by the suicides of his father and grandfather.
The preface to The House of Percy promises that the book will be ``straight history'' from the point of view of a cultural ``anthropologist'' who is pledged to examining objectively the economic, political, social and literary accomplishments of the Percys. However, the sections of the book devoted to the literary Percys are far from objective.
While Wyatt-Brown is a brilliant historian, his literary analysis is at times characterized by inaccuracies, misreadings and facile generalizations. His treatment of Walker Percy's fiction is particularly lacking in depth and detail. Trying too hard to support his thesis about the long line of melancholic Percy writers, he maintains that Percy's novels are a sort of therapy in which the novelist ``drew upon parts of his own psyche for creation of figures.''
Such a statement could be used to describe virtually any novelist, and Walker Percy is not any novelist. His fiction presents a unique, intellectually and imaginatively complex vision that defies such easy generalizations. Again, when Wyatt-Brown asserts that all of Percy's novels except Lancelot are thematically marred by an ``artificially imposed salvation,'' he ignores the subtleties of Percy's religious and philosophical themes.
These themes have been the subjects of many scholarly books and essays because they are so intellectually challenging; they are the products of a novelist who, before he published his first novel in 1961 (National Book Award winner The Moviegoer) had earned a degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (Phi Beta Kappa), had completed a medical degree at Columbia and had read for more than 20 years in theology, existential fiction and philosophy, phenomenology and linguistics.
While I wish that the chapters on Walker Percy had been deleted from The House of Percy, the book is a fascinating and intimate portrait of a family that epitomizes Southern genteel culture. It is a portrait that occasionally exposes the ignoble in this culture but more often reveals its moral and intellectual vigor. MEMO: Allen Pridgen is chairman of the English department at Virginia
Intermont College in Bristol, Va. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Betram Wyatt-Brown
by CNB