Walker Percy - The Moviegoer

Explore connection between romanticism and scientific objectivity. Does a scientifically minded person become a romantic because he is a left-over from his own science?

I must reply to Harold, but it is almost more than I can do to write two sentences in a row. The words are without grace.

Dear Harold: Thank you for asking me to be godfather to your baby. Since, however, I am not a practical Catholic, I doubt if I could. But I certainly appreciate—

Certainly appreciate. Tear it up.

AN ODD THING. Ever since Wednesday I have become acutely aware of Jews. There is a clue here, but of what I cannot say. How do I know? Because whenever I approach a Jew, the Geiger counter in my head starts rattling away like a machine gun; and as I go past with the utmost circumspection and with every sense alert — the Geiger counter subsides.

There is nothing new in my Jewish vibrations. During the years when I had friends my Aunt Edna, who is a theosophist, noticed that all my friends were Jews. She knew why moreover: I had been a Jew in a previous incarnation. Perhaps that is it. Anyhow it is true that I am Jewish by instinct. We share the same exile. The fact is, however, I am more Jewish than the Jews I know. They are more at home than I am. I accept my exile.

Another evidence of my Jewishness: the other day a sociologist reported that a significantly large percentage of solitary moviegoers are Jews.

Jews are my first real clue.

When a man is in despair and does not in his heart of hearts allow that a search is possible and when such a man passes a Jew in the street, he notices nothing.

When a man becomes a scientist or an artist, he is open to a different kind of despair. When such a man passes a Jew in the street, he may notice something but it is not a remarkable encounter. To him the Jew can only appear as a scientist or artist like himself or as a specimen to be studied.

But when a man awakes to the possibility of a search and when such a man passes a Jew in the street for the first time, he is like Robinson Crusoe seeing the footprint on the beach.

A BEAUTIFUL FRIDAY morning and a successful excursion into St Bernard Parish with Sharon.

Sharon eyes my MG narrowly. After she has gotten in, she makes it plain that MG or no MG there is to be no monkey business. How does she make such a thing plain and in an MG sitting thigh to thigh and knee to knee? By her Southern female trick of politeness. “This is the cutest little car!” she sings and goes trailing off in a fit of absent-mindedness, hands to the nape of her neck and tilting her head forward so that she surveys the street though her eyebrows and with a cold woman’s eye; then seeming to rouse herself apologetically: “This sure beats typing. Mhm-M!”—as singsongy and shut off to herself as her mammy in Eufala. Southern girls learn a lot from their nurses.

We meet Mr Sartalamaccia and a queer thing happens.

First, some kind of reversal takes place and it becomes natural for Mr Sartalamaccia to show me the place he wants to buy. He becomes the guide to my property and even points out the good features. A far cry from a duck club now, my patrimony is hemmed in on one side by a housing development and on the other by a police pistol range. In fact, my estate puts me in mind of the pictures in detective magazines of the scene where a crime was committed: a bushy back lot it is, tunnelled through by hog trails and a suspicious car track or two. Every inch of open ground sprouts new green shoots and from the black earth there seems to arise a green darkness. It is already like summer here. Cicadas drone in the weeds and the day seems long.

We leave the MG in a glade (a good hard-used creature of red metal and fragrant worn leather; I run a hand over its flank of stout British steel as if it were a mare) and stand on a hummock with Mr Sartalamaccia between us; Mr Sartalamaccia: wagging a limp panama behind him and giving off a bitter cotton smell. He is less an Italian than a Southern country man, haggard and clean as an Alabama farmer come to church.

“The lodge was here, Roaring Camp they called it,” I tell Sharon. She stands blinking and inviolate, a little rared back and entrenched within herself. Not for her the thronging spirit-presence of the place and the green darkness of summer come back again and the sadness of it. She went to Eufala High School and it is all the same to her where she is (so she might have stood in the Rotunda during her school trip to Washington) and she is right, for she is herself sweet life and where is the sadness of that? “I came here once with my father and great uncle. They wouldn’t have beds, so we slept on the floor. I slept between them and I had a new Ingersoll watch and when I went to bed, I took it out and put it on the floor beside my head. During the night my uncle rolled over on it and broke it. It became a famous story and somehow funny, the way he rolled over on my watch, and they would all laugh — haw haw haw — like a bunch of Germans. Then at Christmas he gave me another watch which turned out to be a gold Hamilton.” Sharon stands astraddle, as heavy of leg as a Wac. “I remember when my father built the lodge. Before that he had read the works of Fabre and he got the idea of taking up a fascinating scientific hobby. He bought a telescope and one night he called us outside and showed us the horsehead nebula in Orion. That was the end of the telescope. After that he began to read Browning and saw himself in need of a world of men. That was when he started the duck club.”

“Grow old along with me.

The best is yet to be,” says Sharon.

“That’s right.”

Mr Sartalamaccia has become restless; he works his hat behind him. His fingernails are large and almost filled with white moons. “Your father didn’t build it. Judge Anse was the one that built it.”

“Is that right? You knew them? I didn’t know you—”

Mr Sartalamaccia tells it forlornly, without looking up — knowing no more than the facts pure and simple and hardly believing that we don’t know. Everybody knows. “I built it for him.”

“How did you know him?”

“I didn’t. One morning before Christmas I was just about finished with my store over there and Judge Anse come in and started talking to me. He said — uh—” Mr Sartalamaccia smiles a secret little smile and his head sinks even lower as he makes bold to recall the very words. “—what’s your name? Yes: what’s your name? I told him. He said — uh: you built this store? I said, yessir. We talked. So he looked at me and he said — uh: I’m going tell you what I want you to do. He writes this check. He said — uh: Here’s a check for a thousand dollars. I want you to build me a lodge and come on, I’ll show you where. So I said, all right. So he said — uh—” Mr Sartalamaccia waits until the words, the very words, speak themselves— ”Let’s go, Vince, like him and me, we were going to have us a big time. He never saw me before in his life and he walks in my store and writes me a check on the Canal Bank for a thousand dollars. And he didn’t come back for six weeks.”

“Did he like the lodge?”

“I mean he liked it.”

“I see.” I see. There was such a time and there were such men (and Mr Sartalamaccia smiles to remember it), men who could say to other men, here do this, and have it done and done with pleasure and remembered with pleasure. “Have you always been here?”

“Me?” Mr Sartalamaccia looks up for the first time. “I had only been here three weeks! Since November.”

“Where are you from?”

“I was raised in Ensley, near Birmingham, but in nineteen thirty-two times was so hard I started moving around. I visited forty-six states, all but Washington and Oregon, just looking around and I never went hungry. In nineteen thirty four I come to stay with my brother in Violet and started trapping.”