European Stars And Stripes (Newspaper) - August 17, 1977, Darmstadt, Hesse The visions of Percy by Hugh Mulligan associated press it on his Spanish Moss Drupad Patio along the Boguc Malaya with one car cocked for the mating Grunt of a Bull Alligator somewhere amid the Cypress novelist Walker Percy looks like anything but an old testament Scourge calling on the Beha i ousts world to repent before its too he might be mistaken for u kindly country which he after a and a qualified one at always diagnosing asking where docs it Hurt Why dont you feel better or on his Way Home from the Little office in town where he writes for three hours every Percy ambles along like a real life version of Atticus the soft spoken attorney in too kit o mocking stopping to Chat As he often does with the Good old boys waiting under the courthouse live Oaks for the juries to be led out to their that comparison might please All the menfolk in the Percy family were lawyers until he turned to medi and a lot of his writing is concerned with life imitating the with men leading lives of noisy unable to separate the illusion on film and the evening to news from the reality All around now that a Perula Percy identifies one Bird sting among the chorus rising from the Bayou hell be hard to spot in this hazy he unc oils from a wrought Iron and the Clear Blue eyes climb the bars of sunlight shafting through the tall Bogue Malaya Means Kivor of people around Here think its there spooked by some of his neighbors in those who read think there might be something spooky about Walker he seems to know things before they in 1970 Walker wrote a wickedly witty unit in the a futuristic View of the philosophy of the in which american society becomes totally polarized with Whites against hippies against and everybody against everybody the Book opens with a sniper attack by Black guerrillas atop a Howard John sons Motel on a Cloverleaf of the interstate near a City very like new a few aging caddies and avuncular Black retainers Are storming the country it was a fun Book to Percy but the fun ended on a sunday in january three years later when in a novelist addressing the question of something gone the associated press called me up in the Middle of the night to ask if i was watching i said which and they said ail there was a Black sniper on top of the Howard Johnsons hotel in downtown new Orleans and wounded 16 or it was an eerie i was afraid they might find my Book among his they the room was piled with maoist then came the Energy people remembered that in the same Book automobiles ran out of Gas on the Highway and washing machines broke Down with nobody to fix i have absolutely no visionary Percy shakes Bis u i id have taken automobile mechanics in nigh in Selling two cars now that i cant get fixed because nobody wants to be a repairman u id known i could become a successful id Nave taken Percy writes left handed in Pencil on regular Blue horse ring Binder filler sheets bought 300 at a time at the after his ritual three hour grind in his cluttered office in the Covington arts committee he spends the afternoon at Home laboriously pecking out the the typing is but this is an important where i make All my inserts and on Good he rewards himself with a generous Belt of bonded i can Tell when Hes been working real says his Mary known As he sweats like a truck the Percy moved to Covington 25 years ago and there they reared their two Ann and Mary both married now Percy wrote his first the at it won the National Book award and established him As a literary oddity a serious or with something to say and Able to say it in ii prose that is often full of or these excerpts from latest novel giving in shirted hell to Skinner and Behaviourist an Odd thing about new Orleans the comete Here Are More cheerful than the hotels and the fre Tell me Why that should Why two to Sand dead creoles should be More alive than two to Sand Buick dealers the northerner is at heart a he it abstract mind with a genital his soul i a Large abstract locked in sterile univer whose motto is truth but which has not discovers important truth in a Hundred his body fort second 0 what nuns dont Realis is that they look better in clothes than pent deep Percy knows his background Compon add up to a Book Salesman Nightmare a Souther la a satirist and moralist who eve has been used of being a religious thais re he recalls that when he gave Lowro the h the subtitle the adventures of a bad Catholic at a t near the end of the the publishers sales apartment called up and tried to talk me out of Percy is preoccupied with sin and the class stuff of Conrad and Melville that be regret has gone sadly out of almost disappeared in Behaviourist world where Man is just an organism n spending to us environment and not responsible pc any of his theres excuse for Page 14 the stars and stripes t
