It’s a mystery to me why Birmingham doesn’t claim Walker Percy, or doesn’t claim him prouder, as its literary son.
When we talk state-wide, there’s Nelle Harper Lee, Truman Capote (loving that those two belong to Monroeville), but ask about Birmingham specifically and it will take most people a sec. Diane McWhorter. Fannie Flagg. Dennis Covington. Sena Jeter Naslund. John Green for sure. But I think Walker Percy doesn’t make most people’s list.
Percy was born right here, at St. Vincent’s Hospital, on May 28, 1916. He grew up and went to school here, lost family and was changed in ways that showed up in his novels.
When the Percys — and they were already a prominent family — came to B’ham in 1886, they married into the DeBardeleben family. Now, Walker Percy the grandfather of our author Walker Percy, got busy representing Birmingham banking and industry, was a founding member of the Country Club of Birmingham (best fried chicken in town, btw), and his portrait still hangs there today, marking his term as club president in 1909, and his son LeRoy (so, younger Walker’s father) was president of the Club in 1925.
CCB, 2023
Now our Walker’s parents, LeRoy Pratt Percy and Martha Susan “Mattie Sue” Phinizy, moved into elder Walker’s beautiful, large Gothic home at the corner of Highland Avenue and Arlington Avenue, and I think that’s mayyyyybe — but don’t take this as fact because I’m not 100% — where the Cadence Bank now stands, across from the Chevron. That’s the intersection with Temple Beth-El. If you know for certain, please tell me.
And as a further aside, just this summer we’ve lost the very nice art deco bank building a few blocks from there to build…probably parking.
Back to the home at Highland and Arlington, when our author Walker was an infant, his grandfather ended things by his own hand, in the attic. It was LeRoy that found him.
They moved to Mountain Brook, close to the CCB, in a home designed by Hugh Martin, who’s to thank for the design of the Linn-Henley, the Bromberg’s store downtown, and Munger Hall at Birmingham-Southern, among others. Walker attended Birmingham University School, which is now Altamont School.
The Linn-Henley Research Library, 2024
In 1929, LeRoy ended his life in the Mountain Brook home, and in the attic, just as his father had. Walker’s mother moved them to Athens, Georgia to be with her family, then she died when her car went off a bridge near Leland, Mississippi, which Walker considered the third of those kinds of intentional deaths in his family.
from 2005, when it was in the Greenville, Mississippi cemetery
Another sidenote: I mentioned this back in May but the LeRoy Percy monument in the Greenville, Mississippi cemetery has been moved to the Mississippi Museum of Art. This isn’t Walker’s father LeRoy Pratt Percy, but William Alexander Percy’s father, LeRoy Percy who went to Sewanee then UVA, then came back to the Delta to be a lawyer and politician.
The Percys are a people who have a penchant for reusing names. There are multiple LeRoys, the mother and son who share the family name Phinizy, the grandfather and our author Walker. Lots of families do this, it’s just important when talking about their family to keep things like “which LeRoy” straight.
Walker was then 13, and he and his two younger brothers, Roy and Phinizy, were taken in by their father’s first cousin, William Alexander Percy, “Uncle Will,” who was at that time a bachelor lawyer and poet living in Greenville, Mississippi. Walker made life-long friends with Shelby Foote and it must have been an incredible literary-social circle. In 1941, Uncle Will published Lanterns on the Levee (here on Bookshop, on Amazon).
One funny story about Walker and Shelby was that they wanted to visit Faulkner so they drove over to Oxford and Shelby Foote had to do all the talking because Walker was so star-struck.
Rowan Oak, 2024
Another bit, from Jim Brown:
One of the amusing stories that circulated around the English Department at Carolina was about Percy taking his freshman English placement test. He had just read Faulkner’s “The Sound and the Fury,” and wrote his entire essay in one long paragraph without punctuation. He was promptly placed into a class for slow learners and was told that he needed a lot of help to pass English composition.
Flying through things a bit, Percy went on to medical school at Columbia, contracted TB, had worlds of time to read philosophy, converted to Catholicism, decided he was better geared to be a writer, and his The Moviegoer won the National Book Award in 1961.
By the 1970s he was teaching in the English Dept at Loyola (brother Phinizy was a law professor for 30+ years at Tulane) and in 1976 was approached there by John Kennedy Toole’s mother Thelma, who was relentless about having her late son — JKT also died the way others in Walker’s family died — published, begging him to read A Confederacy of Dunces (here on Bookshop, on Amazon). Some bits about that from a previous post here.
He didn’t just read it, he was instrumental in having it published, and in 1980 LSU Press released it. Walker Percy went so far as to write the foreward. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1981.
The New Orleans Historic Collection, one of the finest museums, and free, in the city, has one of those first 2500 copies signed: “May 9, 1980. A merited contribution to the Historic New Orleans Collection, John Kennedy Toole’s mother, Thelma Ducoing Toole.”
Walker wrote six novels and several essay collections before he died in 1990.
And with that, a drink.
Now, this mint julep recipe below isn’t originally Walker’s, it’s his Uncle Will’s, who wrote this out in Lanterns on the Levee.
Walker used Will’s directions as a postscript to his 1957 essay “Bourbon, Neat“. That piece is SO GOOD.
The recipe:
You need excellent bourbon whiskey; rye or Scotch will not do. Put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampen it with water. Next, very quickly — and here is the trick in the procedure — crush your ice, actually powder it, preferably in a towel with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remains dry, and, slipping two sprigs of fresh mint against the inside of the glass, cram the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Finally, fill the glass, which apparently has no room left for anything else, with bourbon, the older the better, and grate a bit of nutmeg on the top.
Et voila, we made it. Cheers.
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