Signposts in a Strange Land

by Walker Percy

  Meanwhile, Mississippians shrugged their shoulders.

  Would you care to say something about your own novels?

  No.

  What about your last novel, Lancelot?

  What about it?

  What do you have to say about it?

  Nothing.

  How would you describe it?

  As a small cautionary tale.

  That’s all?

  That’s all.

  It has generally been well reviewed. What do you think of reviews?

  Very little. Reading reviews of your own book is a peculiar experience. It is a dubious enterprise, a no-win game. If the review is flattering, one tends to feel vain and uneasy. If it is bad, one tends to feel exposed, found out. Neither feeling does you any good. Besides that, most reviews are of not much account. How could it be otherwise? I feel sorry for reviewers. I feel sorry for myself when I write a review. Book reviewing is a difficult and unrewarding literary form and right now no one is doing it. The reviewer’s task is almost impossible. A writer may spend years doing his obscure thing, his little involuted sexual-theological number, and there’s the poor reviewer with two or three days to figure out what he’s up to. And even if the review is good, you’re in no mood to learn anything from it. The timing is all bad. You’re sick to death of the book and don’t even want to think about it. Then, just when you think you’re rid of this baby, have kicked him and his droppings out of the nest forever, along come these folks who want to talk about him.

  Do you feel bad about a bad review?

  Moderately bad. One likes to be liked. The curious thing is, I always expect people to like me and my writing and am surprised when they don’t. I suffer from the opposite of paranoia, a benign psychosis for which there is no word. I say “curious” because there is a good deal of malice in my writing—I have it in for this or that—but it is not personal malice and I’m taken aback when people take offense. A rave review makes me feel even more uneasy. It’s like being given an A+ by the teacher or a prize by the principal. All you want to do is grab your report card and run—before you’re found out.

  Found out for what?

  Found out for being what you are (and what in this day and age I think a serious writer has to be): an ex-suicide, a cipher, naught, zero—which is as it should be, because being a naught is the very condition of making anything. This is a secret. People don’t know this. Even distinguished critics are under the misapprehension that you are something, a substance, that you represent this or that tradition, a skill, a growing store of wisdom. Whereas, in fact, what you are doing is stripping yourself naked and putting yourself in the eye of the hurricane and leaving the rest to chance, luck, or providence. Faulkner said it in fact: writing a novel is like a one-armed man trying to nail together a chicken coop in a hurricane. I think of it as more like trying to pick up a four-hundred-pound fat lady: you need a lot of hands to hold up a lot of places at once.

  There are four kinds of reviews, three of which are depressing and one of which is, at best, tolerable.

  The first is the good good review. That is, a review that not only is laudatory but is also canny and on the mark. One is exhilarated for three seconds, then one becomes furtive and frightened. One puts it away quick, before it turns into a pumpkin.

  The second is the bad good review. That is, it is the routine “favorable” review that doesn’t understand the book. The only thing to say about it is that it is better to get a bad good review than a bad bad review.

  The third is the bad bad review. It is a hateful review in which the reviewer hates the book for reasons he is unwilling to disclose. He is offended. But he must find other reasons for attacking the book than the cause of the offense. I don’t blame this reviewer. In fact, he or she is sharper than most. He or she is on to the secret that novel writing is a serious business in which the novelist is out both to give joy and to draw blood. The hateful review usually means that one has succeeded in doing only the latter. The name of this reviewer’s game is: “Okay, you want to play rough? Very well, here comes yours.” A hateful reviewer is like a street fighter: he doesn’t let on where he’s been hit and he hits you with everything he’s got—a bad tactic. Or he lies low and waits for a chance to blind-side you. A bad bad review doesn’t really hurt. Getting hit by an offended reviewer reminds me of the old guy on Laugh-In who would make a pass at Ruth Buzzi on the park bench and get slammed across the chops by a soft purse. It’s really a love tap. I can’t speak for Ruth Buzzi, but I can speak for the old guy: all he wants to say is, “Come on, honey, give us a kiss.”

  The fourth is the good bad review, a rare bird. It would be the most valuable if one were in any shape to learn, which one is not. It is the critical review that accurately assesses both what the novelist had in mind, what he was trying to do, and how and where he failed. It hurts because the failure is always great, but the hurt is salutary, like pouring iodine in an open wound. Here the transaction is between equals, a fair fight, no blind-sliding. It makes me think of old-movie fistfights between John Wayne and Ward Bond. Ward lets the Duke have one, racks him up real good. The Duke shakes his head to clear it, touches the corner of his mouth, looks at the blood, grins in appreciation. Nods. All right. That’s a fair transaction, a frontal assault by an equal. But what the hateful reviewer wants to do is blind-side you, the way Chuck Bednarik blind-sided Frank Gifford and nearly killed him. Unlike Chuck Bednarik, the hateful reviewer can’t hurt you. He gives away too much of himself. The only way he can hurt you is in the pocketbook—the way a playwright can be knocked off by a Times reviewer—but, in the case of a book, even that is doubtful.

  Even so, one is still better off with hateful reviewers than with admiring reviewers. If I were a castaway on a desert island, I’d rather be marooned with six hateful reviewers than with six admiring reviewers. The hateful men would be better friends and the hateful women would be better lovers.

  The truth is, all reviewers and all your fellow novelists are your friends and lovers. All serious writers and readers constitute less than one percent of the population. The other ninety-nine percent don’t give a damn. They watch Wonder Woman. We are a tiny shrinking minority and our worst assaults on each other are love taps compared with the massive indifference surrounding us. Gore Vidal and Bill Buckley are really two of a kind, though it will displease both to hear it. Both are serious moralists to whom I attach a high value.

  Do you see the Jimmy Carter phenomenon as a revival of Protestant Christianity or as a renascence of Jeffersonian populism or the Southern political genius or all three, and if so, what is the impact on the Southern literary imagination and race relations?

  How’s that again?

  Do you—

  What was that about race relations?

  How do you assess the current state of race relations in the South?

  Almost as bad as in the North.

  But hasn’t there occurred a rather remarkable reconciliation of the races in the South as a consequence of its strong Christian tradition and its traditional talent for human relations?

  I haven’t noticed it. The truth is, most blacks and whites don’t like each other, North or South.

  But great changes have taken place, haven’t they?

  Yes, due mainly to court decisions and congressional acts and Lyndon Johnson. It was easier for the South to go along than to resist. After all, we tried that once. Anyhow, as Earl Long used to say, the feds have the bomb now.

  Can you say anything about the future of race relations?

  No.

  Why not?

  I’m white. It’s up to the blacks. The government has done all it can do. The whites’ course is predictable. Like anybody else, they will simply hold on to what they’ve got as long as they can. When did any other human beings behave differently? The blacks have a choice. They can either shoot up the place, pull the whole damn thing down around our ears—they can’t win, but they can ruin it for everybody—or they can join the
great screwed-up American middle class. Of course, what they’re doing is both, mostly the latter. It is noteworthy that blacks, being smarter than whites about such things, have shown no interest in the Communist Party. Blacks seem less prone than whites to fall prey to abstractions. Comradeship and brotherhood are all very well, but what I really want is out of this ghetto, and if I can make it and you can’t, too bad about you, brother. But that’s the American dream, isn’t it? It will even make them happy like it did us—for a while. It will take them years to discover just how screwed up the American middle class is. I visualize a United States a few years from now in which blacks and whites have switched roles. The pissed-off white middle class will abandon suburbia just as they abandoned the cities, either for the countryside, where they will live in RVs, mobile homes, converted farms, log cabins, antebellum outhouses, revolutionary stables, silos, sod huts, or to move back to the city, back to little ethnic cottages like Mayor Daley’s, Victorian shotguns, stained-glass boardinghouses, converted slave quarters, abandoned streetcars—while the blacks move out to Levittown and the tracts, attend the churches of their choice, PTAs, Rotary, Great Books. In fact, it’s already happening. The only danger is that this happy little switch may not happen fast enough and the young blacks in the city who have little or nothing to lose may say the hell with it and shoot up everything in sight.

  There is a slight chance, maybe one in a hundred, that blacks and whites may learn the best of each other rather than the worst.

  What is the worst?

  Well, whites in the Western world don’t know how to live and blacks don’t know how to govern themselves. It would be nice if each could learn the gift of the other. But there are already signs in America that blacks are learning the white incapacity for life. For example, they’ve almost reached the white incidence of suicide and gastric ulcer and have surpassed them in hypertension. And some white politicians govern like Haitians and Ugandans. I’ve noticed that more and more blacks act like Robert Young as Dr. Marcus Welby, with that same tight-assed, suspect post-Protestant rectitude, while more and more white politicians act like Idi Amin.

  Can you describe the best thing that could happen?

  No. All I can say is that it has something to do with Southern good nature, good manners, kidding around, with music, with irony, with being able to be pissed off without killing other people or yourself, maybe with Jewish humor, with passing the time, with small, unpretentious civic-minded meetings. Some whites and blacks are sitting around a table in Louisiana, eating crawfish and drinking beer at a PTA fund-raiser. The table is somewhat polarized, whites at one end, blacks at the other, segregated not ill-naturedly but from social unease, like men and women at a party. The talk is somewhat stiff and conversation-making and highfalutin—about reincarnation, in fact. Says a white to a white who has only had a beer or two: “I think I’d rather come back as an English gentleman in the eighteenth century than in this miserable century of war, alienation, and pollution.” Says a black to a black who has had quite a few beers: “I’d rather come back as this damn crawfish than as a nigger in Louisiana.” All four laugh and have another beer. I don’t know why I’m telling you this. You wouldn’t understand it. You wouldn’t understand what is bad about it, what is good about it, what is unusual about it, or what there is about it that might be the hundred-to-one shot that holds the solution.

  Why do you leave Christianity out as one of the ingredients of better race relations?

  Because the Christians left it out. Maybe Jimmy Carter and Andrew Young and a few others mean what they say, I don’t know, but look at the white churches. They generally practice the same brand of brotherhood as the local country club. If Jesus Christ showed up at the Baptist church in Plains, the deacons would call the cops. No, the law, government, business, sports, and show business have done more here than the churches. There seems to be an inverse relationship between God and brotherhood in the churches. In the Unitarian Church, it’s all brotherhood and no God. Outside the churches, the pocketbook has replaced the Holy Ghost as the source of brotherhood. Show me an A & P today that is losing money because it is not hiring blacks and I’ll show you an A & P tomorrow that has hired blacks and, what is more, where blacks and whites get along fine.

  But aren’t you a Catholic?

  Yes.

  Do you regard yourself as a Catholic novelist?

  Since I am a Catholic and a novelist, it would seem to follow that I am a Catholic novelist.

  What kind of Catholic are you?

  Bad.

  No. I mean, are you liberal or conservative?

  I no longer know what those words mean.

  Are you a dogmatic Catholic or an open-minded Catholic?

  I don’t know what that means, either. Do you mean do I believe the dogma that the Catholic Church proposes for belief?

  Yes.

  Yes.

  How is such a belief possible in this day and age?

  What else is there?

  What do you mean, what else is there? There is humanism, atheism, agnosticism, Marxism, behaviorism, materialism, Buddhism, Muhammadanism, Sufism, astrology, occultism, theosophy.

  That’s what I mean.

  To say nothing of Judaism and Protestantism.

  Well, I would include them along with the Catholic Church in the whole peculiar Jewish-Christian thing.

  I don’t understand. Would you exclude, for example, scientific humanism as a rational and honorable alternative?

  Yes.

  Why?

  It’s not good enough.

  Why not?

  This life is much too much trouble, far too strange, to arrive at the end of it and then be asked what you make of it and have to answer, “Scientific humanism.” That won’t do. A poor show. Life is a mystery, love is a delight. Therefore, I take it as axiomatic that one should settle for nothing less than the infinite mystery and the infinite delight; i.e., God. In fact, I demand it. I refuse to settle for anything less. I don’t see why anyone should settle for less than Jacob, who actually grabbed aholt of God and wouldn’t let go until God identified himself and blessed him.

  Grabbed aholt?

  A Louisiana expression.

  But isn’t the Catholic Church in a mess these days, badly split, its liturgy barbarized, vocations declining?

  Sure. That’s a sign of its divine origins, that it survives these periodic disasters.

  You don’t act or talk like a Christian. Aren’t they supposed to love one another and do good works?

  Yes.

  You don’t seem to have much use for your fellow man or do many good works.

  That’s true. I haven’t done a good work in years.

  In fact, if I may be frank, you strike me as being rather negative in your attitude, cold-blooded, aloof, derisive, self-indulgent, more fond of the beautiful things of this world than of God.

  That’s true.

  You even seem to take a certain satisfaction in the disasters of the twentieth century and to savor the imminence of world catastrophe rather than world peace, which all religions seek.

  That’s true.

  You don’t seem to have much use for your fellow Christians, to say nothing of Ku Kluxers, ACLUers, Northerners, Southerners, fem-libbers, anti-fem-libbers, homosexuals, anti-homosexuals, Republicans, Democrats, hippies, anti-hippies, senior citizens.

  That’s true—though, taken as individuals, they turn out to be more or less like oneself, i.e., sinners, and we get along fine.

  Even Ku Kluxers?

  Sure.

  How do you account for your belief?

  I can only account for it as a gift from God.

  Why would God make you such a gift when there are others who seem more deserving, that is, serve their fellow man?

  I don’t know. God does strange things. For example, He picked as one of his saints a fellow in northern Syria, a local nut, who stood on top of a pole for thirty-seven years.

  We are not talking about saints.r />
  That’s true.

  We are talking about what you call a gift.

  You want me to explain it? How would I know? The only answer I can give is that I asked for it; in fact, demanded it. I took it as an intolerable state of affairs to have found myself in this life and in this age, which is a disaster by any calculation, without demanding a gift commensurate with the offense. So I demanded it. No doubt, other people feel differently.

  But shouldn’t faith bear some relation to the truth, facts?

  Yes. That’s what attracted me, Christianity’s rather insolent claim to be true, with the implication that other religions are more or less false.

  You believe that?

  Of course.

  I see. Moving right along now—

  To what?

  To language. Haven’t you done some writing about the nature of language?

  Yes.

  Will you say something about your ideas about language?

  No.

  Why not?

  Because, for one thing, nobody is interested. The nature of language is such, I have discovered from experience, that even if anyone has the ultimate solution to the mystery of language, no one would pay the slightest attention. In fact, most people don’t even know there is a mystery. Here is an astounding fact, when you come to think of it. The use of symbols between creatures, the use of language in particular, appears to be the one unique phenomenon in the universe, is certainly the single behavior that most clearly sets man apart from the beasts, is also the one activity in which humans engage most of the time, even asleep and dreaming. Yet it is the least understood of all phenomena. We know less about it than about the back side of the moon or the most distant supernova—and are less interested.