CAPPING as they did a decade of intense regional introspection, the early 1940's saw a remarkable proliferation of works by Southerners about the South. In 1942 William Faulkner published his last great work, Go Down Moses, an extended effort at moral and historical analysis. But the year preceding was perhaps even more fruitful, at least in quantity, for it had seen three unique, even idiosyncratic attempts to encompass the Southern present and past: W. J. Cash's The Mind of the South, James Agee's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, and William Alexander Percy's Lanterns on the Levee.
Of these four works Percy's has received the least attention. I would, therefore, like to examine Lanterns on the Levee and the man, Will Percy, whose autobiographical remembrance it is, in the hope that both the book and the man can be placed in proper context.
What the Vanderbilt Agrarians advanced as a relatively untroubled defense of the Southern tradition against the on-slaughts of modernity was by 1941 to become in Percy's Lanterns on the Levee a melancholic reflection on a time out of joint, an elegy for a lost ethos by a son who mourned the loss of a father and a tradition of the Fathers. Ultimately the Agrarian vision was an academic one, a stance rather than a rooted position. Percy was a serious man, whatever else he was, and attempted to live by a tradition that had been created by the Civil War and destroyed by the First World War; or, perhaps as accurately, destroyed by the Civil War and re-created by the First War. Therein lies the difference and the greater authenticity which Percy embodied.
As a "last gentleman," Percy himself has become rather a monumental figure to be conjured with by those who knew him and by those who seek to understand the varieties of historical consciousness exhibited by Southern writers and intellectuals of the 1930's, particularly that form of memory which mourned the loss of a way of life. To his friends and admirers, Percy was something of a saint, a man of "fastidiousness and delicacy of manner," to quote his fellow Green-villian and intimate friend, David Cohn. Hodding Carter, whom Percy helped persuade to come to Greenville, Mississippi, and found the Delta Democrat, remembered Percy's "giving of self," his willingness to aid those in distress. All remember his capacity for suffering fools. An outsider to the South and to the Delta, anthropologist Hortense Powdermaker, wrote of Percy's kindness in facilitating her access to Indianola, where she studied race relations in the 1930's. John Dollard consulted with Percy while researching his famous study of race and class; and while Percy took strong exception to Dollard's conclusions and would never comment on the substance of Miss Powdermaker's study, he was unfailingly courteous to them when called upon for aid.
II
Will Percy was not a happy man. Walker Percy remembers that his "uncle's" eyes were "shadowed by sadness" and wonders in his The Message in the Bottle (1975) "why he was sad from 1918 to 1941 even though he lived in as good an environment as man can devise . . .?" Cohn struck much the same note when he wrote that Will Percy "was the loneliest man I have ever known." If the message of Lanterns on the Levee is any clue, it is no wonder that Will Percy was possessed by melancholy: the prophet of decline can hardly be expected to exhibit rising spirits. Yet the most apocalyptic of voices may privately be joyful and the comic jests of the humorist underlain, as is well known, with private sadness.
Still, in Percy's case, the private man did seem to reflect the essential pessimism of the cultural critic. Where the Agrarians had sought to re-evoke (even re-instate) a past cultural ethos, Percy had no confidence that the old order could be restored nor did he try to suggest a way of doing so. He was the melancholic Roman to the end—rarely the joyous and tragic Greek—and found a provisional solace only in the Stoic maxims of Marcus Aurelius and the ethical precepts of the Gospels. And though he presided over his own small realm in the Delta, he felt no more sense of freedom in the world at large than that experienced by the other great Stoic, the slave Epictetus.
Thus Lanterns on the Levee seems to present the Will Percy whom his friends knew and cherished. According to Cohn, Percy had begun his autobiographical reflections in the late 1930's, but he had put the manuscript aside when several friends discouraged him from completing it. Cohn found the fragments scattered throughout the Percy living room and upon reading them urged his friend to continue.Lanterns on the Levee was published in 1941; and not long thereafter, in January of 1942, Percy died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Percy had never been physically robust, and his memoirs reflect his own impending mortality. It is then a work in which personal fate, cultural vision, and historical development coalesce to produce a work in which death and the intimations of mortality preside.
Despite its melancholy tone, Lanterns on the Levee is anything but depressing: it is often charming, ironical, and informed by a winning self-deprecation. Despite his own angle of vision, W. J. Cash thoroughly enjoyed the book and forgave Percy his biases, while James Agee was fond of reading aloud to his friends those portions of Lanterns on the Levee which had to do with Sewanee. If the South's fate boded forth a "sideshow Götterdämmerung," as Percy suggested, it was a twilight of the Gods—and the quite mortal man, Will Percy, full experienced and contemplated it with the equanimity of a man who knew that he and his vision would surely die. But never is it morbid or whining. Not for nothing did Percy consider himself a Stoic.
Nor did Will Percy seclude himself to await his inevitable end. To Walker Percy, his uncle was the best teacher imaginable, introducing him and his brothers to the rich cadences of Shakespeare and the heavy mournful strains of Brahms and Wagner. And just as Walker Percy paid homage to his adoptive father as a teacher, so is Lanterns on the Levee, particularly in its early pages, a remembrance of those who had guided his own Bildung. What Will Percy seemed to remember from his various mentors, most of them lonely and eccentric in their way, was a way of living with loneliness, a quiet valor which provided an heroic but ultimately futile protest against an unfeeling world and death which presided over it.
Much of the moving power of Lanterns on the Levee and its elegiac ambience, which verges on but rarely succumbs to self-pity, lies in the barely suggested inner conflicts and the reticences which make themselves felt throughout the book. Though Will Percy has been scored, and rightly so, for his paternalism and racism, his own social and racial views were not without ambiguity and a sense of ambivalence beneath the surface. In Lanterns on the Levee, he returns repeatedly to the racial theme, as though he had to try to tell it again, so as to convince outsiders such as Powdermaker and Dollard and perhaps even himself. He laughs outwardly, but not inwardly, when his factotum, Ford, for whom Percy shows a quite condescending but real affection, informs him that the tenants on his "Trail Lake" plantation consider Percy's automobile as "us car." When Percy asks him what they mean by this odd phrase, Ford replies that they think the car belongs to them, since it is their labor which has paid for it. That Percy would include such an incident in his book shows something of his inner doubts.
On sharecropping Percy had opinions which jar against our more enlightened sensibilities. It is, he says, a form of "profit sharing. . .the most moral system under which human beings can work together. . . I am convinced that if it were accepted in principle by capital and labor, our industrial troubles would be over. . . . Sharecropping is one of the best systems ever devised to give security and a chance for profit to the simple and the unskilled." Yet he admits as well that the "organic" relationship of planter and cropper is often, even generally, an occasion for rank exploitation and, in truth, depends upon the character of the planter. One suspects that even Percy knew that the personal factor had ceased to play a role, if it ever had, and that the system was exploitative as such.
When discussing race directly, Percy marvels at the existing peace and amicability between the races in the South, since, he claims, they are centuries apart in intellectual and moral development. Yet this rather hackneyed judgment by the Delta aristocrat is balanced by the cogent observation that to live "habitually as a superior among inferiors . . .is a temptation to dishonesty and hubris and deterioration," an observation which shorn of its racial bias offers a truth that critics of colonialism have echoed. More than that, Percy states quite openly another home truth which those of more liberal promptings, then and now, hear reluctantly: "the sober fact is we understand one another not at all." Again, though the important insight is compromised by the racial assumptions, such comments indicate that Percy was not quite the undivided self on race that we would have him be. This is not to say that Percy was a liberal malgre lui, only that he was sensitive to certain aspects of class and racial domination which others downplayed or ignored.
About the "poor whites," however, he was neither reticent nor was his opinion marked by conflicting insights which signalled doubt or inner division. In Lanterns on the Levee, Percy rendered no lip service to the egalitarian ideals of the 1930's; and, unlike Cash, Agee, and some of the Agrarians, he saw no virtue in the common whites, past or present. Reflecting in part the peculiar demography of the Delta, Percy divided his South and that of his ancestors into three categories: the aristocracy, the poor whites, and the blacks. The poor whites were "intellectually and spiritually . . .inferior to the Negro." They were the corrupters of "civil" society, the mob, Demos, whose emergence into the public realm heralded the decline of quality not only in the South, but in Italy, Germany, and Russia. His unmitigated animus against the common whites reflected not only the traditional attitudes of his class; it was given added bite by his experience in his father's bitter Senatorial campaign of 1911 against the champion of the poor whites, James K. Vardaman.
Thus Percy's protest against the world he never made assumed the following shape in his autobiography. First, he equated manners with morals; indeed he went so far as to elevate the former over the latter. The style was the man and the culture: "while good morals are all important between the Lord and his creatures, what counts between one creature and another is good manners." Manners were not, however, the exclusive property of the upper class but could be found throughout the social system. This nod toward equality was only apparent, since manners were those habitual attitudes and actions which preserved the order of things and guaranteed that the bottom rail remained on bottom. Percy, not surprisingly, felt that economics should mirror the social and political hierarchy, and his defense of sharecropping was part of a larger distaste for the cash nexus of capitalism and the levelling impulses of socialism. What was important was that the rational pursuit of profit be incorporated into an ethos of organic solidarity among the classes. Finally, Percy held that politics was an affair among gentlemen to whom the common whites should defer for enlightened guidance. Blacks were excluded altogether from the public realm and to be governed by the time-honored precepts of family relationships as the "younger brother(s)" which he claimed they were. About women he felt much the same.
More generally Percy's cultural vision embodied the "Delta ideal" and was linked in imagination with the early Virginia aristocracy and the feudal order of medieval Europe. The mood suffusing Lanterns was one of cultural pessimism. He felt that he was presiding over the closing time of civilized life; most had forgotten that it "is given to man to behold beauty and worship nobility." "A tarnish," Percy wrote, "has fallen over the bright world; dishonor and corruption triumph; my own strong people are turned into lotus-eaters; defeat is here again, the last, the most abhorrent."
III
How then can we characterize Percy and his vision of the Southern tradition? In his introduction to the paperback edition of Lanterns on the Levee, Walker Percy castigates present-day critics for calling his adoptive father a "racist, white supremacist, reactionary, paternalist, Bourbon" and goes so far as to claim that in the Mississippi of the 1930's and 1940's "Uncle" Will was considered a "flaming liberal" and a "nigger lover." Though one can agree in the abstract with Walker Percy's animadversions against facile name-calling, he seems guilty here of uncharacteristic obtuseness in rejecting these labels for his uncle. If it matters, Will Percy was all that his critics have claimed. But, more important, all of the above labels can be subsumed under a wider rubric to which we will now turn.
To understand Will Percy as a cultural type, we must see him against the background of the modernization of the South. If America was the first modern nation, then the South has historically been a partial exception to the tradition of Locke in politics and Franklin in the marketplace, at least, that is, in its cultural ambitions. In the post Civil War period, the "New South" movement was the cutting edge of the ideology of modernization in the South, but it disguised its full impact by diverting attention toward the glories of the ante-bellum past. By the 1930's, the South stood uneasily between past and future, and it was that decade which saw the emergence of a critical intelligentsia in the region whose divisions can be understood best in terms of various responses to modernization.
At one extreme stood modernizers such as Howard Odum
