Depopulating My Library, Part IV: Thank You and Goodbye Walker Percy

I thought I had more Walker Percy books than I found on the shelves. I had four and three of them have gone to Wise Blood, a soon-to-open used bookstore in Westport here in KC in December: The Message in the Bottle, The Last Generation, and Thanatos Syndrome.

I’m keeping The Moviegoer, the novel that put Percy on the literary map by winning the National Book Award for Fiction in 1962. Joseph Heller’s Catch 22 and J.D. Salinger’s Franny and Zoey were also nominees. Percy was a Roman Catholic and many of his books have spiritual themes, but not overtly so. One critic called The Moviegoer “A Catcher in the Rye for adults only.”

By all accounts Percy was also a nice person. The mother of John Kennedy Toole called Percy up when he was teaching at Loyola and persuaded him to read her dead son’s novel, who had committed suicide because of his inability to get published A Confederacy of Dunces. Percy, should read it because, she said “It’s a great novel.”

Percy read it, concurred, and opened the avenue for her son's wonderful book to be published.

During my try-to-get published saga, I reached out to Percy. A friend had interviewed him for literary journal he was editing and had Percy’s home address in Covington, LA. The book I was trying to get published or find an agent for was The 41^st Sermon. I thought it would be up his alley: a middle-aged Episcopal priest finds himself in a mid-life crisis and mid-faith crisis. Every year he goes alone to a fishing resort to fish, drink, and write the outlines of the next year’s sermons. There, he unexpectedly encounters a blonde parishioner who, unbeknownst to him, is there as part of a phony kidnapping plot to extort money from her husband. The priest gets entrapped, too.

So I sent Percy the first few chapters. He sent the cover letter back to me with this written on it: “It reads well – I’d be glad to look at rest, but must tell you I had to give up finding agents or publishers for unpublished writers.—.I’d be doing nothing else. Everybody in the South is writing a novel – Best, W.P.”

It is hard for me to express my joy. Walter Fucking Percy said “It reads well”! Maybe I did have some talent. And so I waited. And I waited. And I….read six months later his obituary in The Kansas City Star. The manuscript never was returned to me. I learned later that soon after he responded to me he was diagnosed with Pancreatic cancer.

When I published The 41^st Sermon I included a photo of my cover letter to him and his response. If you want to read the novel, it’s here.

The other books I sold were a mix of fiction and non-fiction. Among them: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon Vol 1 and Vol 2, Evan Connell’s Mr. Bridge, Larry McMurtry’s Dead Man’s Walk and an interesting, but depressing, book by Daniel DeFoe, A Journal of the Plague Year.

When I used the $15 so earned and spent it on a 12-pack of Warsteiner Octoberfest beer, I was reminded of Robert Heinlein’s price advice. A paperback novel should cost the same as a six-pack of beer.