Learning to write with Professor Percy
Dear Ruth Laney,
I’d be glad to have you in my novel-writing class - Thanks for sending your “fragment”. I don’t yet know when the class will meet, but if you will check with Warren Eyster and me at registration, we’ll try to work out something.
Sincerely, Walker Percy
That’s not a letter you find in your mailbox every day. Needless to say, I was thrilled to get it.
I was a fan of Percy’s work, particularly The Moviegoer and The Last Gentleman. Now he was coming to LSU, and I was going to be one of his students.
I had published poems and a few articles, but I had never written fiction. Unless you count the “novels” of my childhood, when my idea of a dashing hero was a man named Whit whose pet parakeet sat on his shoulder while he pounded the typewriter keys. (Even then, I idolized writers.)
But if Walker Percy was teaching at LSU, I could write a novel—or try. I sent him a ten-page sample. I called the work-barely-in-progress Stumbling: An Odyssey.
He must not have been too put off by that title, because a few weeks later a small envelope postmarked Covington arrived. Inside was a note in Percy’s scrawl, accepting me into the class.
It was the spring semester of 1975. Eight of us met every Thursday morning for ninety minutes. We also had individual conferences with Percy in his office on Mondays.
On the first day of class, as we took our seats in a conference room in Allen Hall, we were a star-struck crew. Percy, seated at the large rectangular table, looked just as I had imagined him—tall, white-haired, tan, and handsome in a diffident, scholarly way. He wore a white shirt, a figured brown tie, and reading glasses.
He seemed shy, but he set us at ease with his wry humor. “It takes me an hour and a half to drive here from Covington, and another hour and a half to find a parking place,” he told us.
As we described our projects—one woman was writing a romance novel—Percy sat with his hand to his cheek, listening intently and occasionally jotting notes with his left hand. I noticed his accent (very southern) and his off-handedly flippant comments. “It’s a free country,” he said in response to someone’s question or statement. He told us we’d be expected to turn in ten pages a week.
I was amazed when he gave us his phone number. There’s nothing like a famous writer’s private number to make you feel like a peer—not that I ever had the nerve to use it.
He recommended useful books, such as the Paris Review Interviews and Wright Morris’s About Fiction. He told us he had placed on reserve in the library Dostoevsky’s Diary of a Writer and the notebooks Camus had kept while writing A Happy Death and The Stranger. “It’s interesting to study the transformation between the two novels,” he said. (A few classes later, he came bearing gifts—a paperback copy of A Happy Death for each of us. I still have mine.)
Besides Camus, he liked James Agee, Donald Barthelme, Joan Didion, D. H. Lawrence, Flannery O’Connor, Jean-Paul Sartre, and Evelyn Waugh. He praised Kerouac’s “tremendous energy, feeling for people, feeling for nature.” He liked Joyce—especially Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, and Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. He said he reread Huckleberry Finn every two years. “At least, the first hundred pages. The last fifty pages is junk.”
Each week we read copies of each other’s work and discussed it. Many of Percy’s observations covered necessary ground in a class of largely unpublished writers: How does this scene advance the action? How does it reveal character? He advised us to use more economy in dialogue, and more silence.
“It’s a good idea to leave out adverbs,” he told us. And, “Watch out for Latinate words—they are arch, fancy.” Discussing a comic episode in my novel, he suggested I take out a sentence he found “arch.” “This scene is funny enough,” he said. “The trick is to underwrite it.”
He jumped on clichés, rooting out “wended his way,” “vented her wrath,” and “loosed its grasp.”
He chided me for saying a character’s face was “stamped with neurosis.” “It’s better to describe his mouth or eyes.” Then Percy, who underwent years of analysis, warned, “Stay away from Freud as well as adverbs.”
He got me again when I tried to say “the air smelled of nostalgia.” “The reader is led to expect a specific memory, and you’ve got to supply it,” he told me. Then he supplied one of his own—the area around Convent in St. James Parish, especially the Catholic retreat house Manresa, “has a particular smell of grass and grease.” (I would later learn that Percy, a convert, was a regular at Manresa’s silent retreats.)
He liked the name of my character, Regina Pontellier. (I didn’t have the nerve to tell him I had cobbled it together it from characters in Lillian Hellman’s The Little Foxes and Kate Chopin’s The Awakening.) “Why does a name like Regina Pontellier work, but a name like Regina Boudreaux doesn’t,” he wondered.
My fictional Regina worked as a newspaper reporter. “If I were younger, I’d go to work for a newspaper to learn how to write,” said Percy, who was forty-five when he published his first novel The Moviegoer in 1961. He asked me why Regina liked books more than people. “This could be the central problem of the novel,” he said. “This is the problem of the twentieth century.”
He liked a fishing scene in which Regina debates the best way to put a shiner on the hook. “Tell us whether she hooked it through the head or the tail,” Percy said. “The reader wants to know.” He thought I should describe the sacolait she caught and referred me to Agee’s The Morning Watch for its description of a snake. He said he had learned a lot from Agee, especially that snake passage.
He liked my scene of Regina and her boyfriend frying the fish. “You don’t often see scenes in novels where people sit down to a good meal,” he said.
I can’t remember why he once told me, “I think we’re working in the same territory, hoeing the same row, so to speak.” Perhaps it was a reaction to a scene in which I described Regina luxuriating in a hotel room, throwing towels on the floor. “My wife teases me about my love of motels,” he said. “I’m very happy to stay in a Holiday Inn. After a couple of drinks, I don’t care where I am.”
Outside of class and his office, Percy sightings were rare. Once I spotted him in the Plantation Room at the LSU Union. He was having lunch with some other people when his wife Bunt walked up to join them. She stood beside him, and Percy reached out to slip his arm around her waist.
I recently checked in with others who took the only class Percy ever taught at LSU. Raymond Cothern, a retired bookseller in Baton Rouge, published a portion of his novel in the anthology Intro 8 and is now writing plays and a memoir.
Carl Macmurdo recalled that Percy had no patience for dilettantes. “He was a wonderful guy, but he had no time for foolishness,” he said. “I later moved to San Francisco and took a job driving a cab at night so I could write during the day. But then I got a ‘real’ job as a bureaucrat. On a trip home I visited Percy. When I told him I had taken a job, he chastised me and told me to go back and drive that cab. He said, ‘Do you want to be a writer or do you want a damn gold watch?’ Eventually I did go back to driving a cab—and writing.”
Beth Michel, who has since published several novels as Elizabeth Nell Dubus, recalls Percy’s telling her, “You can’t teach people to write.” “Then how do you learn to write?” she asked. “Read,” he told her.
“He told me to never use Mardi Gras in a novel,” said Michel. “I said, ‘Well, you did it in The Moviegoer—the whole thing takes place at Mardi Gras.’ He said, ‘Yes, but that was done from the insider’s viewpoint. I’m talking about the public Mardi Gras. It has too strong an identity in people’s minds.”
Percy’s novel The Second Coming was published in 1980, and Endling’s bookstore in Baton Rouge held an autograph party for him. The small store was thronged with people, including some of the class members. Percy sat at a table in back, patiently scribbling his name. I bought a copy and stood in line to have him sign it. It was the first time I had seen him since the class.
He wrote:
for Ruth with all best from her old professor Walker Percy Ruth Laney can be reached at ruthlaney@cox.net
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