The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage by Paul Elie

Author:Paul Elie [Elie, Paul]
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Published: 2004-03-09T22:00:00+00:00

At the house on Milan Street, Walker Percy had begun writing a novel. From the start, “Confessions of a Movie-Goer,” as he was calling it, was a departure from his two previous novels and from his philosophical work. It was set in present-day New Orleans. It was told from the point of view of an ordinary man, a small-time stockbroker who was about to turn thirty. It was thick with the quotidian, the small details of a not unusual life. It was written in the first person and in the present tense—written directly at the reader, confided to the reader like a long-kept secret.

There were certain continuities with his previous work. Ever since college he had wanted to write about a moviegoer in one form or another, and all through the fifties he had been tempted to write about New Orleans: “It has everything,” Shelby Foote had told him, “intellectuals, whores, priests, merchant seamen: you could make it boil and bubble.” His philosophical essays, which tipped into the present tense, were about the quandaries of tourists, honeymooners, commuters—ordinary people.

Yet this work was enough of a departure that Percy felt that in beginning it he had started over again. At the house on Milan Street, Patrick Samway has pointed out, he was away from his library: for the first time in his life as a writer he sat down to work without his influences literally surrounding him, and the effect was to relieve him of the weight of the literary past generally. “One begins to write, not as one thinks he is supposed to write, and not even to write like the great novels one admires, but rather to write as if he were the first man on earth ever to set pencil to paper,” he explained. “ … All past efforts are thrown into the wastebasket; all advice forgotten.”

He thought of himself as discarding conventional ideas about plot and character and beginning with the situation of a man unmoored from expectations, “coming to himself in somewhat the same sense as Robinson Crusoe came to himself on his island after his shipwreck, with the same wonder and curiosity.” As with the character, so with the author, who “came to himself” as he finally felt the experience of artistic creation firsthand.

The first few pages of the novel consist of several different openings, as if Percy was searching for a way to begin writing fiction again. Together (in the published novel) they give the telling its sideways, happenstance quality, as Binx Boiling—a shifty character—commences his story again and again, taking a slightly different approach each time. He starts this way:

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