Lapsometer Legend

By Martha Duffy

LOVE IN THE RUINS by Walker Percy. 403 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $7.95.

Ten years ago, when he published The Moviegoer, it was clear that Walker Percy had emerged as the first major Southern voice in 30 years entirely free of the Faulknerian inflection. That in itself was good news. Yet the particular glories of the book were a tone of voice that combined modern dryness and irony with an almost wanton tenderness, and a languid young hero who drifted from years of daydreaming about love to a gradual awareness of the real thing. Percy's second novel, The Last Gentleman (1966), was also about a vague young man, this one afflicted with occasional amnesia.

Subtitled "The Adventures of a Bad Catholic at a Time Near the End of the World," Percy's new novel is a rather abrupt departure from the past. The scene is the South. The time is the 1980s, when current polarizations have reached logical conclusions. If the reader's heart sinks upon being confronted with another futuristic novel, it must be said that Percy takes his projections with agreeable lightness. In Love in the Ruins, the population is split into small enclaves of like-minded dissidents: blacks v. whites, knotheads (conservatives) v. liberals. Even the Catholic Church has become a trinity of antagonistic sects. Because no one wants to be a repairman, everything has broken down. Superhighways and shopping centers are enjoying a true "greening"; they are overgrown with weeds.

The bad Catholic of the subtitle is Dr. Thomas More, a collateral descendant of the saint. He is also alcoholic, and, at 45, his health and equilibrium have become very shaky. "At the time that I developed liberal anxiety," he mourns, "I also contracted conservative rage and large-bowel complaints." Much of his time is spent mooning over three dizzy young girls whom he loves equally in a rather abstracted way. Deeply skeptical of human solutions, he nevertheless deludes himself that he can heal the modern soul with an invention which he calls the lapsometer. Like a latter-day Descartes focusing on the pineal gland as seat of the human soul, More constructs a machine that isolates and measures areas of psychic imbalance in the brain.

What he yearns for is a therapeutic attachment for his gadget so that he can cure as well as diagnose. Before long, he is in the hands of an ultramodern devil named Art Immelmann, who claims to be the liaison man for the somehow still-functioning Rockefeller-Ford-Carnegie foundations. Art explains that all three are anxious to fund lapsometer research in return for patent rights. Dr. More signs them over, and in no time at all the device is being used to foment further disorder. As a satire the book has something to offend just about everyone. Conservative Catholics, whose spiritual center is Cicero, Ill., celebrate Property Rights Sunday. Among the Reform Schismatics, several divorced priests are importuning the Dutch cardinal to allow them to remarry. Yet the book's purpose is clearly moral. Near the end Dr. More muses: "What I want is just to figure out what I've hit on. Some day a man will walk into my office as ghost or beast or ghost-beast and walk out as a man, which is to say sovereign wanderer, lordly exile, worker and waiter and watcher." Underlying the satire is a rueful equanimity and a lingering hope, one sometimes found in both Catholics and Southerners, that there may be a point to the working and watching, that there may be one day a kingdom for the exile.

...

Percy's quiet inflections have always been worth listening to, but there have been times when he had hardly any audience at all. The Moviegoer is the subject of one of the publishing industry's favorite heartwarmers. The firm of Knopf evidently thought it had bought something more like Lanterns on the Levee, the classic clarion call to patrician Southern virtue written by Percy's uncle, William Alexander. The publisher did not think enough of the nephew's effort to submit it for the National Book Awards, but it won anyway, after a shaggy-dog sequence of events that began when the late A.J. Liebling picked the book off a New Orleans bookshop table and ended when he touted it to his wife, Jean Stafford, who was a book-award judge that year.

All of Percy's life has seemed to move at a desultory pace. A member of an old Southern family of lawyers and legislators, he was orphaned at 14 and adopted by Uncle William. He graduated from medical school at Columbia and in 1942 interned in pathology at Bellevue Hospital. But at the end of the year, he found he had contracted TB. He never practiced medicine again.

It was during the next few years of enforced retirement that he was converted to Catholicism, read constantly and began writing. The Moviegoer was preceded by two "dreadful" unpublished novels that took five years to write. "The first," he recalls, "was 1,000 pages long. It was would-be Wolfe. The second was life and love in Saranac Lake --another Magic Mountain."

It is tempting to confuse this gentle, mild-mannered man with his heroes. Like The Last Gentleman, he tends to become addled in New York, a city that he generally tries to avoid. He is no longer a compulsive moviegoer, but he leaves the television on--without sound--all evening long. "I'm afraid the world will end when I'm not looking," he says. During lunch he watches .Days of Our Lives. "I love the recurring themes in soap-opera serials. The women get pregnant and the men get amnesia. The perfect fictional character would have progressive amnesia. I might do a novel about that."

Existence is totally unliterary along the serene bayou in Covington, La., where Percy, now 55, lives with his wife and teen-age daughter. There is a stream of adolescents in and out of the house, who think that if "Dr. Percy" tried real hard, he might write something nearly as good as Love Story. Obviously unaware that any publisher in New York would swim Lake Pontchartrain for a novel by Percy, one of them recently confided that she baked him a cake with three candles when his third book was accepted for publication.

That kind of neglect is just fine with him. He enjoyed writing the satire in Love in the Ruins, some targets of which can be found in Covington, but also sees the book as a celebration of sorts. "For the first time in 150 years, the South is back in the Union and can help to save it. After Los Angeles and Detroit, the whole country is in the same trouble. At least there is unity." Percy pointed this out to his Northern liberal audience in a speech at this year's book awards. "Don't give up, New York, California, Chicago, Philadelphia!" he said. "Louisiana is with you. Georgia is on your side." Martha Duffy

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