The Last Gentleman by Walker Percy

First published: 1966

Type of plot: Comic realism

Time of work: The mid-1960’s

Locale: New York City, the South, and the Southwest

Principal Characters:

• Williston (Will) Bibb Barrett, the protagonist, a humidification engineer at Macy’s and a former Princeton student from the South
• Chandler Vaught, a self-made Alabamian, owner of the world’s second largest Chevrolet dealership
• Kitty, Vaught’s daughter, with whom Will falls in love
• Sutter, Kitty’s older brother, an assistant coroner
• Valentine (Val), Kitty’s sister, who has joined a Catholic order to care for poor black children
• Jamie, Kitty’s younger brother
• Rita, Sutter’s former wife

The Novel

After five fruitless years in psychoanalysis, Will Barrett decides to become an observer rather than the observed. He is twenty-five years old and subject to frequent fugue states; his only gift is “the knack of divining persons and situations.” One day in Central Park he spots Kitty Vaught through his newly purchased telescope. Suddenly in love, he tracks Kitty to a New York hospital where she and her family are tending to Jamie Vaught, her younger brother. The Vaughts take to Will because he adapts to each of them in the manner of the perfect gentleman: To Chandler Vaught, he is the kind of Southern boy an older man befriends; to Mrs. Vaught, he is all courtesy and lightness; to Jamie, he is a fellow technician. Will’s ability to communicate with Jamie leads first Mr. Vaught, then Rita Vaught, to hire Will to accompany the family as they take Jamie back home. Later, after missed connections, Will strikes out for the South in search of the Vaughts. He spots the family’s Trav-L-Aire parked at a motel on the outskirts of Williamsburg, Virginia. Rita tells Will to take Jamie in Ulysses (her name for the Trav-L-Aire) and find their destiny, but Will does not want to stray far from Kitty, whose kisses he finds are nevertheless “too dutiful and athletic,” as if she were auditioning for the part of a proper Southern girl. Will lives for a time with the Vaughts in their mansion in Atlanta, which overlooks a golf course. Valentine Vaught, Kitty’s sister, enters Will’s life, having sought him out to explain that Jamie’s salvation may well be up to him and that he must see to it that Jamie is baptized into the Faith. Ironically, moments later Will is face-to-face with Sutter Vaught, who is pleading for help for his own maladies. Will senses in Sutter something beyond mere possibility, mere courteous existence; Sutter in his unbridled life knows more than anyone else. One day Jamie disappears. He has gone off with Sutter, and Will must take the Trav-L-Aire and bring the poor boy home. There follows a series of misadventures that take Will through his hometown of Ithaca, Mississippi, and eventually to New Mexico, guided by a map which Sutter has left in his apartment. Along with the map, Will finds a steno notebook in which Sutter has entered autopsy reports mingled with journal-like passages and ironic, highly personal philosophical reflections, many of which center on the peculiar power of sexuality in “post-Christian” America. Will takes the notebook with him on his journey and reads from it periodically; thus, at intervals, the narrative includes excerpts from this strange diary—a venerable device which allows Percy to explore novelistically some of the notions that have continued to preoccupy him in such (largely) nonfictional works as Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book (1983). Sutter is now working at a guest ranch in Santa Fe and has put Jamie in the hospital. Jamie is dying of pulmonary edema, yet in the midst of Jamie’s frequent dizziness his friendship with Will deepens. Sutter is an outsider, thankful for Will’s ministrations. In the final passages of Sutter’s notebook, Will learns of Sutter’s suicide attempt a year ago, while in the midst of severe depression at the prospect of Jamie’s unpleasant death. Will is astonished for the first time in his life when he realizes that Sutter again intends to take his own life. Just before his death, Jamie murmurs the words of faith, coached by the hospital chaplain brought by Will. Moments later, as Sutter leaves for the ranch, Will confronts him, imploring him not to leave. Sutter laughs and heads off in his Edsel. Will runs after the car, yelling for Sutter to wait, and the car slowly stops. For the engineer, pure possibility has given way to determined choice, and he will bear it.

The Characters

Williston Bibb Barrett is handsome, friendly, and intelligent, but unremarkable. His courtesy reflects not a studied culture but the natural adaptability of a person who is pure possibility. Will makes “the highest possible scores on psychological aptitude tests, especially in the area of problem-solving and goal-seeking. The trouble was he couldn’t think what to do between tests.” Will is subject to fugue states that blot out his recent past, yet inklings return in his frequent déjà vus. The omniscient narrator of the novel rarely refers to Will by name; instead, he is called “the courteous engineer” or “the sentient engineer,” an ironic mixing of Will’s gentlemanly nature and keen insight with his inability to engineer his own life. Until the end of the book, his life course is basically determined by others. Sutter Vaught made high grades at Harvard Medical School, but at age thirty-four he does not practice medicine; instead, he writes pathology reports as an assistant coroner. Sutter’s medical insurance was cancelled after he put a depressed patient in the terminal ward of the hospital (where the patient became quite cheerful) and then sent him home to his family and garden after the patient suffered what was to be a fatal heart attack. Sutter does not fit the boundaries of courtesy; in his notebooks he extols the virtues of lewdness. He rails against so-called Christian America for its outward decorum but covert lewdness (as seen in soap operas and in the theater). As overtly lewd, Sutter calls himself the only sincere American. Will needs Sutter as a kind of shock treatment to the soul. Kitty Vaught is twenty-one and pretty, but her life is a performance. After years of ballet lessons she is still not a dancer. Though she accepts Will’s marriage proposal, in their failed sexual encounter, which occurs one evening in Central Park, she is still very much a child trying to act the proper role. Will becomes a father figure as well as courteous suitor. Kitty finds life as a Southern girl in her parents’ home simply boring. Rita Vaught’s seeming devotion to the Zuni Indians and her love of poetry excite Kitty. Rita basks in Kitty’s adoration though it drives Rita and Sutter further apart. Rita calls Sutter selfish; she is most unpleasantly meddlesome, domineering, and patronizing. Val is devoted to the children of poverty. Her faith takes even her by surprise. She tells Will that she is mean, a hater, hoping her enemies fry in Hell. In the outlandishness of her faith, she is self-deprecating. Yet she believes what the Church teaches, and she is especially concerned for Jamie, her sixteen-year-old brother. Jamie is a catalyst for the others. Their lives revolve around his illness. Chandler Vaught is the Old South. Self-made, uncomprehending of Sutter’s strange actions, he is happy to give Kitty in marriage to Will. After all, Will can talk to Jamie; Mr. Vaught has a dealership to run.

Critical Context

The Last Gentleman was Percy’s second novel and was nominated for a National Book Award—a prize which his first novel, The Moviegoer (1961), won in 1962. Percy’s life experiences are mirrored in his works. An Alabamian and an avid film buff, he contracted tuberculosis while performing autopsies. During his long convalescence, Percy began constructing his novels. His stories trace the journeys of people whose selves have been “lost in the cosmos” and how those selves might reenter the world. A life of pure possibility, comprehending all choices, is not the way. Rather, an existential choice must be made to put the self in relationship with other selves. That is where transcendence is discovered. Will Barrett appears again, this time middle-aged, in The Second Coming (1980), and he reflects on the visage of an old priest: “Could it be that the Lord is here, masquerading behind this simple silly holy face?”

Bibliography

Allen, William Rodney. Walker Percy: A Southern Wayfarer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986. Allen reads Percy as a distinctly American, particularly Southern writer, claiming that the formative event in Percy’s life was his father’s suicide, not his reading of existentialist writers or conversion to Roman Catholicism. Allen’s readings of individual novels emphasize the presence of weak fathers and rejection of the southern stoic heritage on the part of Percy’s protagonists.

Coles, Robert. Walker Percy: An American Search. Boston: Little, Brown, 1978. An early but always intelligent and certainly sensitive reading of Percy’s essays and novels by a leading psychiatrist whose main contention is that Percy’s work speaks directly to modern humanity. In Coles’s words, Percy “has balanced a contemporary Christian existentialism with the pragmatism and empiricism of an American physician.”

Desmond, John F. At the Crossroads: Ethical and Religious Themes in the Writings of Walker Percy. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1997. Chapters on Percy and T. S. Eliot; on Percy’s treatment of suicide; on Percy and Flannery O’Connor; on his treatment of myth, history, and religion; and his philosophical debt to pragmatism and Charles Sanders Peirce. A useful, accessible introduction to Percy’s background in theology and philosophy.

Hardy, John Edward. The Fiction of Walker Percy. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987. The originality of this book, comprising an introduction and six chapters (one for each of the novels, including The Thanatos Syndrome), derives from Hardy’s choosing to read the novels in terms of internal formal matters rather than (as is usually the case) Percy’s essays, existentialism, Catholicism, or southern background. Hardy sees Percy as a novelist, not a prophet.

Lawson, Lewis A. Following Percy: Essays on Walker Percy’s Work. Troy, N.Y.: Whitston, 1988. Collects essays originally published between 1969 and 1984 by one of Percy’s most dedicated, prolific, and knowledgeable commentators. Discussions of The Moviegoer and Lancelot predominate.

Percy, Walker. Conversations with Walker Percy, edited by Lewis A. Lawson and Victor A. Kramer. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1985. This indispensable volume collects all the most important interviews with Percy, including one (with the editors) previously unpublished. The volume is especially important for biographical background, influences, discussion of writing habits, and the author’s comments on individual works through Lost in the Cosmos.

Quinlan, Kieran. Walker Percy: The Last Catholic Novelist. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Chapters on Percy as novelist and philosopher, existentialist, explorer of modern science. Recommended for the advanced student who has already read Desmond. Includes notes and bibliography.

Tharpe, Jac. Walker Percy. Boston: Twayne, 1983. Reading Percy as a Roman Catholic novelist concerned chiefly with eschatological matters, Tharpe divides his study into ten chapters: “Biography, Background, and Influences,” “Theory of Art,” “Christendom,” “Techniques,” one chapter on each of the five novels through The Second Coming, and conclusion. The annotated secondary bibliography is especially good.

Tharpe, Jac, ed. Walker Percy: Art and Ethics. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1980. Ten essays by diverse hands, plus a bibliography. The essays focus on settings, existential sources, Martin Heidegger, Percy’s theory of language, the semiotician Charles Sanders Peirce, Percy’s politics, and Lancelot (in terms of his essays, Roman Catholicism, medieval sources, and semiotics).