M. Lickona posted about Dauphine Street Books and suggested “Potter had the big find” — so here it is.
The book itself — a nice plastic-protected dust-jacketed copy of Martin Luschei’s The Sovereign Wayfarer, the first major critical treatment of Percy, published by LSU Press in 1972 — was a pretty good find. But what made the find more extraordinary was a little treasure trove evidently laid in by the book’s previous owner and consisting of three clipped and folded newspaper articles and an essay from the South Atlantic Bulletin. An inventory: 1.) “Walker Percy: Politics, Racism & Literature In The New South,” an interview with Percy published in the November 13, 1970 edition of the Vieux Carre Courier. 2.) “Walker Percy: Struggles With Unbelief,” from the September 21-27, 1972 edition of New Orleans Courier. 3.) “Why I Live Where I Live,” which first appeared in the April 1980 issue of Esquire, reprinted here in the May 4, 1980 edition of Dixie, with a picture of Walker extending his left leg in a fashion reminiscent of that picture of him standing in line at a movie theater years earlier. 4.) “Walker Percy: The Physician as Novelist,” Lewis A. Lawson, South Atlantic Bulletin, May 1972.
How’d they fit the bottle of wine in there?
Maybe it’s just a foreshortened/oblique photo (or photorealistic painting) of a wine bottle that was pasted onto cardstock, carefully trimmed to shape, and stuck between the book’s pages, amid the press clippings, for use as a bookmark; which foreshortened/oblique wine-bottle bookmark was lying flat on the table when the above picture was snapped.
Percy’s DNA is on that bottle and we have the cloning technology. How ironic that Percy would be the first person to be fully cloned.
So that’s what you’re getting up to on Guemes Island.
I can’t recall all the details of that particular struggle. Would you be so kind as to refresh my memory?
The title refers to ‘struggles‘, plural. Would you be so kind as to specify which of said struggles you’re having trouble remembering?
Question of perspective, dear boy. The subject experiences me at different times and assumes there are different struggles. But it’s all me, and it’s all one struggle. Only the subject varies.