May 2022 Print

By Paul Guenzel

Clint Eastwood: Well is that it, Major?

Richard Burton: Yes, that’s it, Lieutenant.

Clint Eastwood: Do me a favor will ya? Next time you have one of these things, keep it an all British operation.

Richard Burton: I’ll try, Lieutenant.

So ends Where Eagles Dare, a blockbuster World War II movie from 1968. An impressive Allied team of agents rescue a U.S. general being held captive in a Nazi fortress in the Bavarian Alps and uncover a traitor in the process. Throughout the ordeal, tension is high, death looms around every corner, and people are united, despite the treacherous nature of the mission. With everything accomplished, the film ends happily. Or so it seems. Happy Hollywood ending or not, after reading The Moviegoer by Walker Percy, one wonders if these seemingly felicitous conclusions to films actually reflect reality.

They accomplished the mission, but life is more than an isolated mission. Sure, the major is a brilliant commander. He’s great at his job, so it’s natural that the mission ends on a high note, but his experience of the world has left him cold and cynical. The American lieutenant is a deadly soldier, but he, too, is cold, even grudging in the help he affords his British allies. Only Mary, a crack undercover agent and the major’s love interest, seems rounded enough to be successful at more than a military operation. And yet even her prospects don’t look great side-by-side with a man like the major. If life were nothing but a military operation, these people would win. It’s not, though, and their aggregate life skills are weak.

This question of happy endings looms large in Percy’s award winning novel, The Moviegoer. The protagonist of the novel, Binx (or Jack) Bolling, is a twenty-nine-year-old stock broker of New Orleans. He, like the heroes from movies he spends his nights watching, has had his share of adventure and drama previous to his ordinary life in Gentilly, a middle-class suburb of New Orleans. A World War II veteran who saw active combat and almost died in the Orient, he studied the Great Books, entertained noble ideals, and suffered the loss of both his father and brother at a young age. Like the characters from Where Eagles Dare, he survived the mission. The aftermath is the subject of the novel. Binx becomes a stockbroker, who loves going to the movies. He knows how to make money and likes doing it, and his life is largely confined to a regular cycle of routine duties and pleasures. In a way, he even likes his risk-free easy-going life. Down the road, he’d like to get married, settle down, and have kids. On the surface, his life looks like the American Dream, the happy ending, the reward for his noble ideals. He calls it despair.

Returning home after the war, there was no joy or happiness, as the movies he loves promise. True, he has attained freedom from the physical dangers of war, but not from the greater threat of depression and mediocrity. There’s a void in the happy ending to his war story that robs him of meaning and forces him to settle for a counterfeit. He’s lost his ideals and despairs of achieving anything more. There was no inner fanfare or peace for Binx upon his return. For him, life has become a horizontal plane of work and emptiness, which affords momentary escapes of relief, but not more. Unlike the war, no single triumph promises happiness.

To look for the root of his emptiness solely in the absence of his faith in God would be to miss the point. Indeed, the religious people in the novel have the same despair. The novel features a wide array of characters, and none of them escape it. His aunt is a champion of the Great Books and a philanthropist, his mother’s family are all Mass-going Catholics, and his friends are war heroes and successful businessmen. There is no lack of religion, ideals, or heroism. Yet there is something missing. All have achieved that secure stage of life after the dangerous quest of youth and all of them seem to live a relatively peaceful life, though it is the apparent peace of the gas chamber, not the calm of the saints. Each one of them has attained the “happy ending” the movies promise–family, a good career, even a religious moral code–but none are actually happy. Some are comfortably wealthy, some are just getting by. There is something even more fundamental missing in the lives of Percy’s characters.

Binx himself would still be living that noxious peace in his comfortable little Gentilly if it were not for something he calls “the search,” and it is this search which forces him to realize that he has settled for too little.

What is the nature of the search? you ask.

Really it is very simple, at least for a fellow like me;

so simple that it is easily overlooked.

The search is what anyone would undertake if he were not sunk in the everydayness of his own life.

Binx had settled. Rather than an active search for meaning, for his full potential as a human, he fell asleep in his everyday duties and enjoyments. Interestingly, this former term is fraught with misunderstanding. From the Chestertonian angle, the idea of the common and the everyday has a positive connotation. It refers to the nobility of very humble yet human tasks and joys. In no way rejecting the value of Chesterton’s praise, Percy chooses to highlight a more insidious side to everyday things, more akin to sloth. With age and experience, a stable income and a family, often the tendency is to settle down, or rather, settle for. Whether our days are filled with roses or thorns, we are expert at getting accustomed to a situation in life. Youth naturally strives where age settles, and herein lies the key. The young hope, they have a quest, they search for love, happiness, friendship, and this gives them vitality. With age and experience, however, comes a false sense of completion, a sense that we have quite a bit figured out, even if we wouldn’t admit it. It’s pride, to be sure, but in a most innocent looking form. Who doesn’t have a growing sense of their own savvy about life after a few years? Legitimate growth and self-knowledge granted, the more we perceive ourselves to have, the less we think we need. Why search for something you already have, right? The problem is that the search shouldn’t end until we meet Christ face to face at death. Even if we’ve found the Faith, the Great Books, and a family, the search isn’t over. For Binx, the realization that life is essentially a quest, not a rest, showed him his despair. He had been acting as if he was made for the happy ending of this life that movies promise. This is true of the Christians in the novel, as well, who live as if their little regime of piety and good works were the prize, not the road. Indeed, believers are often just as guilty as non-believers.

 Once we have finished the most formative stages of our youth, and have generally made the transition from the pursuit to accomplish any number of things—build up a career, an apostolate, a family, and we have achieved some success—then little by little, we often cease, unconsciously, the active quest, and begin to rest in what we have achieved. It’s like an early retirement of the soul. As the term goes, we begin to “settle down.” Rather than a strenuous quest to the end of the journey, at a certain point it is just autopilot. It’s a shift in focus, though not a conscious one. As St. John Henry Newman points out, in civilized ages such as our own, the evil one tempts us less directly. Instead of out and out murder, lust, and greed, he gets us to commit the same sins, but masked by different labels. We call greed making a good profit, lust, evolved sexuality, and murder, a responsible choice. So too with complacency. We call it getting older and becoming prudent and realistic, but that doesn’t change what it is.

Timely as Percy’s themes are, a word is necessary on the author himself. He suffered and profited from this search and its lack. Struggling to make sense of his own life, he had a difficult time trying to reconcile his family history with his interests in literature, his gift for medicine, and his knowledge of the ills of the time. His grandfather committed suicide, as did his own father and mother. This left an ominous foreboding on his own destiny. He was reared, however, by the poet-lawyer William Alexander Percy and was a lifelong friend of the celebrated historian of the Civil War, Shelby Foote, and he could not be ignorant of something higher. But who was he? Would he be like his parents or his role models? Like Binx, Percy felt the modern listlessness, and this drove him to the realization that man is essentially a homo viator. He was on an urgent quest, but it seemed it wasn’t to be found where everyone was saying it was. Sex, financial security, health, and career just weren’t cutting it. What many of his peers seemed satisfied with, he couldn’t settle for. He needed more, and eventually found it in the only authentic quest for meaning, the search for the Lord. And then he started writing.

Why, then, one might fairly ask, does a man grown ill from modern culture choose to write about nothing else? Because he wants his sickness to be contagious. Not content to simply lament the hollowness of decadent culture of twentieth-century America, Percy shows it. Far different from the voyeurism elicited from recent romance novels, Percy is not trying to shock us into sin, but to frighten us away from it. Like Dante before him, Percy uses grotesque and sexual imagery to unmask the emptiness and despair of lifestyles that contemporary culture terms liberated and enlightened. Sin always has its draw, no matter what; the young can hear a thousand good sermons about the evils of lust and still see it as attractive. But a day in the empty lives of one of Percy’s alienated characters, and they’ll feel the waste and shame of sensuality.

One shouldn’t start with Percy until late high school to early college, but to neglect him on the basis of his themes would be to deprive oneself of a poet capable of winning our senses away from the modern culture of death. Perhaps even more importantly, he challenges us to think deeply about the nature of being a pilgrim in this life, of being travelers in a foreign land. The Evil One very easily hides the true nature of our sins, and it takes good literature to reorient us. Percy rinses away Satan’s smudge on our vision of this world and this life. Practicing Catholics or not, we often settle for this world more than we actually know. Intellectually, we profess to be only temporary wayfarers on this earth, but we live as if it were our lasting home. We would be hard pressed to be torn from it. Though it is legitimate to have levels of attachment to things here below, such as family, friends, and home, we become too attached. Like Job, were God to take it all away, we must still be able to praise Him, to realize that all of the good gifts we have come to us only through Him. Those who settle for this life, rarely admit it to themselves. How do we know if we have settled? Literature puts flesh on the bones of our metaphysical questions, and Percy’s fiction allows us to ponder on just what the complacent look like.

 

Image: Search, mbird.com/literature/looking-for-a-reason-to-get-out-of-bed-binx-bollings-search/ Percy, npg.si.edu/object/npg_NPG.2009.105