If You Want to Know: Write
"Most people think mistakenly that writers are people who have something to tell them. Nothing I think could be wronger (sic). If I knew what I wanted to say I wouldnt (sic) write at all. What for? Why do it, if you already know the answers? Writing is the search for the answers, and the answer is in the form, the method of telling, the exploration of self, which is our only clew (sic) to reality."
I am not writing, only "siccing" some of Shelby Foote's admonitions to Walker Percy.* Foote and Percy, united at age fourteen via Percy's uncle in Greenville, Mississippi, emerged during their thirties and forties as exemplars of American writing in the Southern tradition. Foote was praised by Faulkner for the craft evident in his less-than-best selling novels. He persevered and achieved literary notoriety for his three-volume narrative history of the Civil War. Percy's entry into writing was not as studied and direct as for his pal, Percy wandered through medical school, contracted tuberculosis, slogged through psychoanalysis, read Kierkegaard, Hegel, Marcel, and Heidegger, abandoned a career in medicine, and began to think about writing. His boyhood pal became his literary mentor. Percy went on to become a solid contributor to literary and theological journals, authored several novels, one of which (The Moviegoer) landed him the National Book Award.
In this collection of selected correspondence between Foote and Percy, one learns a great deal about the struggle, internal tension, and the occasional exhilaration of writing as a route to knowledge. Foote asserted his role as mentor, presumably because he had experienced a measure of success. His sometimes poignant letters coached, cajoled, and threatened the introspective existentialist into putting pen to paper. We can only guess at Percy's thoughts because Foote discarded Percy's letters until 1970. Percy was not particularly obedient, but was undoubtedly influenced by his friend. Percy's struggle with matters existential preceded the travails of his mentor, Only after emerging from a prolonged downward spiral ("Man, it's dark down there!") did Foote appreciate the grip that was blocking Percy's ability to write. Some of this correspondence had rough edges, but may have moved their relationship from technical matters about writing to a more spiritual plane.
Percy died in 1990 after a struggle with cancer, part of which is documented by included letters, tu a recent interview on public radio, Foote was asked how he missed his close, nearly life-long, friend. He replied that although there was some feeling of loss, the two had been long-time partners in wrestling with matters, banal and profound, to the point that a relatively stable serenity came to predominate their relationship. Thus, he missed Walker, but it wasn't an ache that debilitated.
If you admit to being a reader of this journal, you may be doing so as an attempt to know. As the opening quotation indicates, knowing is probably not a passive activity, Writing (even as a contribution to Pietisten!) may be the best path. Foote's advice to Percy may be the place to start 'The only way to learn to write is write as many hours a day as your hand and brain will let yon it is an instrument that must be forged in the fire of labor."
*The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy, edited by Jay Tolson (1997). DoubleTake Books (www.duke.edu/doubletake/); W.W. Norton, New York