A Ride Through Covington

Last Sunday my wife and I delivered our daughter to a band camp at LSU, which is in Baton Rouge, a couple of hundred miles away on Interstates 10 and 12. Covington, Louisiana, the town where Walker Percy lived for most of his adult life, is just off I-12, and on the return trip Karen suggested that we go and have a look at it.

I haven’t read Percy for a while, and was just a bit surprised a few weeks ago when, having been asked to name five books that have been important to me, I felt that the list really had to include at least one of his books. I chose Love in the Ruins, but The Last Gentleman or Lost in the Cosmos would have served almost as well. I don’t regard Love in the Ruins as his best book, but it’s the one for which I have the most affection. The Moviegoer might reasonably be considered its superior as a novel, and Lost in the Cosmos is the most engaging presentation of Percy’s ideas, but for sheer joy in reading Love in the Ruins tops all his other books, if only just.

I first read it back in the 1970s. If I remember correctly I was only beginning to consider seriously a return to the Christianity of my youth, and the Catholic Church was well out on the horizon. I imagine some of the Catholic ideas in the book went right past me. But I was captivated by Percy’s wry approach to the most serious questions, and most of all by his manifest delight in and love for the world around him. I mean here both the natural world, which shimmers brilliantly on nearly every page of the book, and the human world, including both the immediate milieu of a small Louisiana town and the civilization of which it is a part: the old violent beloved U.S.A. and…the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world

I was also at that time not long recovered from what I now consider to have been a somewhat deranged youthful hostility to the world that had made me, and I think Love in the Ruins helped me come to terms with the mixed emotions I suppose I’ll always feel about my country. Percy could be ruthlessly accurate and precise in diagnosing the psychic and social illnesses of the U.S.A., but his vexations were always rooted in love and delight, and his example encouraged a similar tendency in me which had never quite disappeared even in my most alienated years.

I think it was his way of seeing the natural world that touched me most, though:

It is still hot as midafternoon. The sky is a clear rinsed cobalt after the rain. Wet pine growth reflects the sunlight like steel knitting needles. The grove steams and smells of turpentine. Far away the thunderhead, traveling fast, humps over on the horizon like a troll. Directly above, a hawk balances on a column of air rising from the concrete geometry of the cloverleaf.

We left the interstate for Covington by what may well have been the same cloverleaf where Dr. Thomas More made the above observation, waiting with his rifle, watching the abandoned motel. It came as no surprise to me that Covington is a pleasing little town, although there are indications that it is now becoming self-consciously so, and fashionable. Enormous live oaks grow everywhere, and it seems that most of the smaller streets are shady. One feels that one is entering a dimmer place, and in the Deep South in summer that’s a good thing. Gracious-looking homes sit on deep lawns. There’s an older downtown area which has clearly declined and shows signs of efforts to make it quaint and artsy, while the everyday activity takes place in the automobile zone, outside the older part of town and nearer the Interstate, which of course is exactly like the comparable zone of any other American city.

A river called the Bogue Falaya runs through Covington, and I read somewhere that Percy’s home looked out on it. We made no effort to seek out his address (and saw no evidence that Covington considers itself notable for his presence) but we did drive around in the area near the river looking for the sort of place where we thought he might have lived. He was not poor, and so it seems entirely possible that one of the big serene riverfront houses which would serve me very well as an image of the earthly paradise might have been his.

I’ve never had much inclination to try to make personal contact with writers whose work I love, because I figure that it would just be awkward (and in any event most of them have been dead for decades). But even though I would have made no attempt to see him, I was sorry that Percy was not there. I would have liked to think I was in the same town with him, and that he’s still there, writing. I’ve always thought the words of Job among the saddest in Scripture: He shall return no more to his house, neither shall his place know him any more.

In one of his essays (I can’t remember which one and am relying on memory) Percy describes his search for a place to settle and says that he finally chose Covington because it was a “no-place,” a town of no dramatic tradition, haunted by no personal ghosts, a locale to which he had no doleful ancestral ties. But he’s not fooling anybody. It’s clear that he loved this place.