Why did Walker Percy call his second novel The Last Gentleman? I can think of a few reasons, none of them perfectly satisfactory.
A gentleman is a man of no profession. A gentleman is, by the oldest and strictest definition, useless. Williston Bibb Barrett, the hero of this existential picaresque published 60 years ago, is about as useless as a mysterious pathology involving intermittent bouts of complete amnesia and random fugue states can render a young man. To be fair to Barrett, he is not a gentleman in the way a hobo is a gentleman: At the start of the novel, he is employed as a Macy’s maintenance engineer. But this is neither a profession nor a vocation nor, for Barrett, a Princeton dropout in self-imposed exile from the South who has spent most of his inheritance on five-times-a-week psychoanalysis, a job reflective of his real state in life.
Like the similarly, if more remuneratively, underperforming Binx Bolling of The Moviegoer, Percy’s 1961 far better-known, National Book Award-winning debut novel, Barrett is befuddled by his aristocratic southern heritage, except for the one aspect that he fully absorbed and embraced: the principle of expending the minimum amount of exertion necessary at any time to sustain life. (Percy’s heroes always raise the Yankee blood in me — I feel I could cure them with nourishing potato soups and nine hours a day of manual labor.)
A gentleman takes excellence for granted and wears it lightly. Percy’s heroes might default on the expectations that attend their station, but their “good ol’ boy” status is never in danger by reason of incapacity as much as abdication. Bolling, for all his aimlessness, has a knack for the genteel methods of making money. If Barrett is a dropout, he is nevertheless a Princeton dropout, a boxer with an arm like an oak, and a fellow whom men instinctively like. Encountered again today, there is something painful, even quaint about these heroes, these sensitive and drifting young men, one showing his lack of purpose by the fact that he merely maintains gainful upper-middle-class employment unenriched by any deeper investment in his community; the other, in the depths of his avoidance and ennui, keeping up the following athletic regimen: Barrett “punched a sandbag an hour a day, swam forty laps in the pool, or, on cool days, jogged three times around the reservoir in the park.”
A gentleman devotes his leisure to cultured and eccentric pursuits. Barrett visits the Metropolitan Museum of Art, where the “ravenous particles” prevent him from truly seeing the Velazquez. With the schizophrenic insight of a shaman, Barrett encounters the ravenous particles everywhere — they lie in the air, “singing and ravening,” sucking the substance from things and forming a noxious veil between would-be experiencer and experience. He patronizes the philharmonic and putters about with a telescope that he cannot afford. It is through the telescope, indirectly, that Barrett encounters the Vaughts, the family at the center of the story.
The Vaughts are an Alabama family of genial freaks, bursting at the seams with new money — the patriarch’s car dealership is called Confederate Chevrolet — and greatly preoccupied with a terminally ill second son, Jamie Vaught, who is dying of leukemia. His sister Val, a character allegedly based on Flannery O’Connor, is now Sister Johnette Mary Vianney, a Catholic convert and self-described “good hater” who ministers to poor black communities. Sutter Vaught, the eldest, is an erstwhile doctor turned pathologist, a dissector of dead flesh who practices lewdness upon the living as a form of resistance to modern alienation. (He is the kind of man whose analysis of modernity always regretfully finds that religion, unlike chasing tail, is an exhausted social resource.) Sutter’s ex-wife, Rita, is chaperoning another sister, debutante Kitty Vaught, as she studies dance in New York. Watching and waiting for a peregrine in Central Park, Barrett spies Kitty through his telescope. He falls instantly in love.
It is by trailing Kitty from Central Park to Jamie’s hospital bed, in one of the great swoony and maniacal bursts of lovesick ingenuity that makes him so charming, that Barrett becomes entangled with the Vaughts and sets his own story in motion. As Percy puts it: “For until this moment he had lived in a state of pure possibility, not knowing what sort of a man he was or what he must do, and supposing therefore that he must be all men and do everything. But after this morning’s incident his life took a turn in a particular direction.”
The postwar milieu of Percy’s heroes is a world of consolidated wins: material abundance, scientific progress, and diagnosable psyches. The great shipwrecks and agonies of the 20th century are officially behind us. Metaphysics, like the outdoor water closet, is an unnecessary and embarrassing holdover from a less perfect dispensation. But a world of solved problems and dissectible materials dooms us to stand in the antechamber of life, analyzing and perceiving it from the outside, barred from the immanence that real action and experience require.
Barrett is, at the start of the novel, trapped in this antechamber. He conforms himself to whatever he thinks others expect of him. He listens to them as if on a radio and, once tuned to their frequency, is able to answer automatically and retreat back into his own internal world. He stands apart from Kitty even when pursuing her, naming and observing and frequently disapproving of her various attitudes, but never taking hold of her “melon immediacy.” His nervous complaint of going into “fugue states” is merely a more localized and pathological version of this fundamental malaise.
But it would be a mistake to see the hero of The Last Gentleman as a fungible stand-in for a universal problem. His condition has something to do with being a young man of the South, the sort who tends to become “overly subtle” and have trouble “ruling out the possible.” It has something to do with being the son of his own particular father, one who suffered under “the strain of living out an ordinary day in a perfect dance of honor” and eventually took leave of the world by means of suicide. If such a peripatetic and ruminatory novel can be said to have a turning point, it occurs when Barrett’s wanderings bring him back to his ancestral home and the memory of his father’s death. Perhaps this is one reason why maladies of all kinds — nervous breakdowns, dying brothers, suicides — hold such fascination for Percy: It is in our afflictions that we are at our least abstract, our most irreducibly particular.
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But affliction is no substitute for life. The novel’s secondary salvation plot winds up — by the skin of Val and Barrett’s combined teeth, Jamie dies as a baptized Christian — and all of Barrett’s questing and questioning and obsessions boil down to one question: Will he become suicidal, like his father and like Sutter, or will he find a way to live, “from one ordinary minute to the next on a Wednesday afternoon”?
He decides to live. He will go back to Alabama, marry Kitty, take a job, live in a brick house overlooking a golf course. The practice of living will not tell him whether and why he should live, but perhaps this is why Williston Bibb Barrett is, in fact, the titular last gentleman. A gentleman can muddle through and keep up his end, carrying on because he knows there is a way things are done, even if he doesn’t know why. Considered strictly on its own merits, it is a bleak proposition. But that is the thing about life: Once you leave the antechamber and step over the threshold, you find it is a room full of doors.
Clare Coffey is a writer from Pennsylvania.