Walker, Uncle Will, and I: A Homophobe and Two Queens

摘要

The noted novelist Walker Percy (1916-1990) endured the suicides of his grandfather, father, and mother during his childhood. His cousin William Alexander Percy (1885-1942) adopted Walker and his two brothers following those tragedies. “Uncle Will” took great interest in the education of his adoptive sons. Walker in particular benefited from this; later in life, Walker and his good boyhood friend, Shelby Foote, who himself was to gain fame as a Civil War historian, speculated that Will Percy's influence played a major role in the incubation of their literary careers. There is an irony in this. Will Percy, a World War I combat hero, published poet of stature, world traveler, member of the Uranian movement, and author of the classic Southern memoir Lanterns on the Levee (1941), led a piquantly gay life. To present-day sensibilities, Will Percy's poetry and his memoir emanate a palpable queerness. Yet, Walker Percy denied his benefactor's homosexuality and indeed, with his brothers, took exhaustive steps to try to conceal that reality. Walker also became a celebrated moralist who expressed a decided aversion to homosexuality. This aspect of the family history exemplifies deletion of queer history in the particular historical context of hereditary Southern gentry with a literary bent in the mid- to late twentieth century.