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— (via frenchwelcome) Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. Of course.
— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. I forced my friend to read this book, and now a quote from it is his gChat status about every other day, and it’s like I’m re-reading it. It is one of those few books that is infinitely quotable and also beautiful as a whole.
“Born in Birmingham, Ala., Percy was orphaned as a teen and was raised and influenced by his father’s cousin, William Percy, a literary socialite. While he enjoyed writing in his youth and while he was able to mingle with the likes of Carl Sandberg and Langston Hughes, “in the South, you didn’t set out to become a writer,” said Percy in a 1980 interview.
Percy received a bachelor’s degree in chemistry from the University of North Carolina in 1937 and a medical degree from Columbia University in 1941. Percy began his career by practicing pathology. His medical practice was cut short, however, after he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and sent to an asylum. While in seclusion, Percy studied the writings and philosophy of Soren Kierkegaard, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jean-Paul Sartre, Gabriel Marcel, and others, which inspired him to resume writing and influenced his conversion to Catholicism.”
— Loyola New Orleans News. I didn’t know.
“The long and the short of it is she needs a companion. The very night I left New York she said to me: now you listen here—while you are in your American South, you make it your business to find me a nice Southern girl—you know the kind I have in mind. Of course the kind she had in mind is the Southerner who is so curiously like the old-style Russian gentry. I thought no more about it until last night as I watched Kate go up the steps. My God, I said, there goes Natasha Rostov. Have you ever noticed it?”
“‘Certainly there was nothing wrong when Kate went to bed at two o’clock this morning. On the contrary. She was exalted. We had had, she and I and Em, four hours of the best talk I ever had anywhere. She was the most fascinating woman in New Orleans and she damn well knew it.’
(Aye, sweet Kate, and I know too. I know your old upside-down trick: when all is lost, when they despair of you, then it is, at this darkest hour, that you emerge as the gorgeous one.)”
Why do I feel like Walker Percy gets a little bit lost among the greats? He certainly doesn’t deserve to be.
An aunt, to her nephew-charge: “I did my best for you, son. I gave you all I had. More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women—the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life. Ah well. […] How did it happen that none of this ever meant anything to you?”
The heritage of young Southerners: grace and guilt.
My brother’s copy of The Moviegoer. Though not a first edition, it was printed within the first year of the book being published. Now, an old, resold library book. I can tell you who checked it out from ‘60 to ‘87. This is an example of why I can’t fully get behind the Kindle-led eBook movement.
Knopf’s philosophy:
The Borzoi Credo appeared originally as an advertisement in The Atlantic Monthly, November 1957 as follows:
“I believe that a publisher’s imprint means something, and that if readers paid more attention to the publisher of the books they buy, their chances of being disappointed would be infinitely less.
I believe that good books should be well made, and I try to give every book I publish a format that is distinctive and attractive.
I believe that I have never published an unworthy book.
I believe that a publisher has a moral as well as a commercial obligation to his authors to try in every way to promote the sales of their books, to keep them in print, and to enhance his author’s prestige.
I believe that a review by an incompetent critic is a sin against the author, the book, the publisher, and the publication in which the review appears.
I believe that the basic need of the book business is not Madison Avenue ballyhoo, but more booksellers who love and understand books and who can communicate their enthusiasm to a waiting audience.
I believe that magazines, movies, television, and radio will never replace good books.”
— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. Walker Wells, mail me this book soon or I will kill you.
— Walker Percy, The Moviegoer. I haven’t even read this book yet, and yet, I’m pretty sure it’s already a favorite.
I’ve been reading a lot this weekend.
To start, the eipgraph of course. Which I love and have already quoted here once: “We have shared out like thieves/the amazing treasure of nights and days.” Jorge Luis Borges.
The narrator, appreciating his well-dressed new friends: “They were still far from me, and I watched as those they passed turned admiring heads; they drew near like an advertisement for summer and beauty and healthy American sex. The sun was in their faces, but they neither squinted nor averted their eyes; the light fell against Phlox’s necklace and Arthur’s hair and the hint of silver wristwatch at his cuff. I felt another of those sudden onslaughts of love, the desire to run to them and embrace them both, to be seen in their company, to live my life among men and women who dressed up like this and then went down the sidewalk like cinema kings.” To be surrounded only by people you are proud to be associated with is a luxury and an experience that always seems to be thwarted by one stupid, tacky or embarrassing acquaintance.
On a phone call with his dad: “‘We always have that conversation when I call him at his hotel. It’s my favorite conversation in the whole world.’” The comforts of home.
“Phlox, recognizing early that she lacked a strong sense of humor, or rather that she lacked the ability to make up jokes, had memorized thousands of bizarre passages from books and from here and there, and had developed, in place of humor, an ability to drop these bombs into a conversation, sometimes with incongruous, killer accuracy.” A great elaboration on a character, but if you’ve ever talked to me about books and naming, you have to know what a problem “Phlox” poses for me.
“For some reason, many crews of men with tar-burning wagons were scattered across the rooftops of East Pittsburgh, and the smell of tar made everything seem hotter, more yellow, more intensely summer.” Such a familiar feeling of a summer of construction.
On the country club: “Families were all around us, without their men, and we lay beside each other on chaises lounges, exchanging lazy sentences in the strong sunlight.” Chabon’s good with setting. Although shouldn’t it be “chaise lounges”?
“‘The world of business is built on shit-eating grins.’” And no one knows this better than RJ Yozwiak.
“The more I thought on those things, the more I felt the heavy food sliding slowly and murderously, like pack ice, through my stomach. There are head people, who suffer from sudden migraines, and there are stomach people, like me.” One thing I’m enjoying about Chabon’s writing are his descriptions of sex, stress, hangovers and other movements of the body. He succeeds where so many writers fail (mostly male writers) and avoids making these descriptions offputting or unnecessary. A funnier and equally skilled use of the bowel, from Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, via my brother: “A rumble has commenced in my descending bowel, heralding a tremendous defecation. Nell goes on talking and there is nothing one can do but shift around as best as one can, take care not to fart, and watch her in a general sort of way.” Heh heh.
