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My Secret Hero
by Rich Cohen
When I got to campus freshman year of college, I was lonely and sad and I took it out on my new city, New Orleans, which seemed like it would never have anything to offer me and there was no story it could tell that I had not already tired of. Even the flora seemed hostile. In those first weeks of September, when the suburbs of Chicago, where I grew up, would be turning cold and the kids would be switching to jean jackets, New Orleans was bursting with a kind of swamp life: the grass was as blue as antifreeze and the treetops were as spiky as stiletto heels, and even the shadows were soupy. Mostly, I went out to bars or sat around my dorm, writing homesick letters and racking up debt on the calling card I was to use only in case of emergency. I even came up with a plan to borrow some money and fly home to see my high school girlfrienda plan my father quickly smoked out and killed.
This state of unease, which I had felt in my first days at summer camp and would later feel in my first days in New York City, did not let up until October, when, poking around the Tulane bookstore, I came upon a novel by Walker Percy. I probably picked up the book because I liked the cover, or the sound of the authors name, or who knows? It was just dumb luck, really, the kind that, if you are not careful, can make you believe in fate. To the wider world, Percy was already a notable; a local author, he had written several first-rate novels, including The Moviegoer, his first, not published until he was forty-four, which won the National Book Award and will, in my opinion, stand as one of the great books.
Yet it is one of the gifts that, at that ageI was eighteeneach personal discovery registers as a universal discovery, so to me, stumbling upon Percy was, as he might say, like stumbling unaware upon the Grand Canyon. Just a few times in your life, a writer casts such a spell that you begin to dress and talk like the characters in a book. After reading The Great Gatsby in high school, I bought a pair of pants with pleats and, underage in a suburban bar, ordered a mint julep. After reading On the Road, I stuck my head out of a speeding Camry and shouted, Kicks, baby! I want kicks! Walker Percy sent me wandering campus in a daze, looking for clues to the hidden nature of my life. It started with a book called Lancelot, not considered one of his best, yet to me a revelation. Its not that it cured my homesickness, or put me at ease in the world. Rather, it made me see my loneliness as an appropriate response to the world and myself as someone who, if he kept his eyes open and read the signs, was eligible for a quest. I was also moved by the setting of these stories, which took place in New Orleans and around Tulane, a fact that put these strange streets on the map of significant places and gave me permission to live therea sentiment Percy himself would be familiar with.
In each of his books a young man has come detached, or, as Percy says, un-stuck, from the details of his everyday life. He operates as a kind of amnesiacin The Moviegoer, Percy breaks down the true meaning of the amnesia moviein an ether of pure possibility, pure freedom, and pure sadness. This detachment is matched by the detachment of his prose; reading Percy was the first time I had a sense of writing as writing, of style carrying as much or more of the message as the plot or the lives of the characters. I knew Percy had been a doctor, so it seemed, in his cool, ironical detachment, as if he were speaking as a clinician, filling out a chart after taking the pulse of an especially hard case. His sentences astonished me. Impulses I believed I alone was harboring, emotions, moods, and sensations I believed were no more open to explanation than a flash of light, or a shift in the wind, or the joy that sometimes, in the bleakest moments, rises inexplicably in your chest, were set down in sentences as sharp and clear as cold watersentences that struck me not with a feeling of discovery but with a shock of recognition. By putting them into words, Percy reminded me of what, in some dim part of my brain, I had known all along.
The dilemma of his heroes is often heightened by illness, by some brain wave that sends them swooning into fugue states, mental gaps in which they lead lives completely outside their normal experiencesurreal states that Percy sees as akin to a change of light that allows a young man to see the real world that has otherwise been lost beneath a layer of malaise. Perhaps it was only natural that I recognized in Percy the man who might treat my own malady; back home, I would get drunk and cry for the girls and say, I guess I will consult old Doc Percy. But time and again, I came up with only the diagnosis. It was only much later that I realized that the diagnosis was the cure.
Mostly, Percy described a modern world that had been tortured by a great liethe lie of romantic love, a lie that, those of us who, like the Moviegoer, live in thrall to the movies, is believed with the devotion of religious conviction. Instead of a redeemer, we wait for a clarifying experience, a moment when we meet just the right person, or find just the right joban epiphany that will make everything else clear. But Doc Percy tells us the telegraph is down and the phones were blown out in the storm, so most of us pass our lives waiting in vain for news that will never arrive. And this waiting is the big thing that happens to us. And the melancholy that whispers is the broken connection. It is really a case of having, or seeming to have, too many optionswho can choose with all these choices? Who, amid all this noise, can ferret out the tiny bit of static that might prove crucial? So we just stand around the supermarket like a Russian freed from the Cold War, staring at the dozens of sugar cereals and wondering how to make a choice. This is the key issue in the work of Walker Percy, who stands just beyond the page, shouting, Just choose one! He believes that, at a certain point, you have to throw down your chips and betnot because you have the best information, or an inside track, but because the act of betting, of getting into the game, is the only kind of love there is.
A few weeks ago, I decided to get a dog, and I soon realized that I was again living a Walker Percy moment. There are a million dogs in the world, and I could not examine them all, and even if I could, I still could not know for sure which was the best for me. Yet every day thousands of people narrow all the dogs in the world down to just one, and then take that dog home. Time and again, these people end up with a dog they love, really love, a dog that, after just a few days, seems like the only dog possible, so their haphazard choice is taken as a miracle, a sign of their intuition about dogs, or as proof of a kind of fate that brings the exact right dog to the exact right person. Percy suggests instead that the important choice was not this particular dog. The important choice was choosing to choose a dogall the love comes from that. In other words: You do not choose the dog because you loved itthat is the romantic lie. No. You love the dog because you chose it.
Walker Percy gives you, depending on how you regard such things, either the great gift or the great curse of experiencing your own life with the eyes of an outsider; if you are a certain sort of person, you will form all kinds of harsh, comical judgments before you realize it is your own life you are judging. For me, reading his books was like finding a hidden path, and following it, through a strange forest, through swamps and thickets, into a strange town of foreign customs and confusing signs, only to discover that in fact this was my own street and these were my own friends and I had never been more than a stones throw from home.
Rich Cohen is the author of Tough Jews, The Avengers, and the recent Lake Effect. He lives in New York City with his wife.
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