The Walker Percy Weekend
The other night my wife and I had dinner with an old friend. Rod Dreher, a son of St. Francisville whose name will be familiar to many readers, was back in town after a long absence, and on a Saturday night in August we met at the St. Francisville Inn. As you do, we started reminiscing, mostly about the literary festival we had a hand in co-founding: the Walker Percy Weekend. After all, it was how we got to know one another in the first place.
The year was 2013: Rod and his family had recently moved back to St. Francisville after decades away during which he had gained prominence as a critic, writer, and political and cultural commentator. His book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, about his sister’s battle with cancer, had just come out, and Rod was longing to reconnect with small-town life. The book had been a success, but even so, when local matriarch Ms. Nancy Vinci invited us to dinner at Galatoire’s, “… because I have something I want to talk to you about,” we should’ve known a dragooning was in store. No sooner had the appetizers arrived than Ms. Nancy got down to business.
She considered it her life’s work to see St. Francisville’s long-vacant Julius Freyhan School building returned to public life, she said. The building required a multi-million-dollar restoration, and Ms. Nancy intended to establish an event to raise funds toward that restoration. She wanted to know what ideas a couple of media-types could come up with. Rod looked up from the Crab Maison he was trying to hide in long enough to say, “What about Walker Percy?” The rest, as they say, is history.
Who was Walker Percy, you ask? I certainly needed to. Percy was a writer and philosopher working in the Southern Gothic tradition, whose books and essays explored the dislocation of man in the modern age. Born in Alabama, raised in Mississippi, and a North Carolina alum, he graduated from medical school at Columbia University, intending to become a psychiatrist. Shortly after, he contracted tuberculosis—an illness that confined him to a sanitorium in upstate New York for years. While lying around with nothing to do, Percy read: Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Thomas Mann. He came to question science’s ability to explain the mysteries of human existence. His first novel, The Moviegoer (1961) won the National Book Award. In later novels and essays, Percy continued to interrogate the good and the bad of contemporary existence in Southern settings, interweaving personal experiences from his own life—which included visits to Percy family relatives in the Felicianas. Later in life, Percy settled in Louisiana, teaching writing at LSU and Loyola before dying in Covington in 1990.
Before we knew it, Rod and I were making plans to put on a literary festival dedicated to a dead philosopher in rural Louisiana in the middle of summer. Improbable? Yes. Likely to succeed? No. But you try telling that to Nancy Vinci and see how far it gets you.
Molly C. McNeal
The newly restored Freyhan School in St. Francisville
Twenty-five years after Percy’s death, it turned out that interest in his unique brand of existential questioning, delivered with humor, a deep Catholic faith, and a Southern sensibility, was very much alive. For that first festival, hundreds of Percy faithful came from all over the country to discuss his books, sit in on lectures and discussions led by writers and academics, and to marinate in summer heat while eating crawfish and drinking bourbon—both activities which Percy was famously fond of.
In the decade since, the Walker Percy Weekend has continued, hosting influential writers and thinkers, including David Brooks, Walter Isaacson, and J.D. Vance, prominent academics, Percy’s own daughter Mary Pratt, and hundreds of ordinary folks interested in exploring big ideas in a small-town setting. In the process, the event has contributed more than $250,000 towards the Julius Freyhan School restoration. And while it’s undoubtedly Rod’s outsized influence that got the Walker Percy Weekend off the ground, after all these years somehow it continues to float along with a life all its own.
[Read a review of Percy's 1983 meta-satire Lost in the Cosmos: The Last Self-Help Book, here.]
So, this month, Louisiana’s unlikeliest literary event returns for a tenth time. Academics, writers, humorists, and lovers of literature and big ideas will gather to explore the theme “The Last Laugh: Wit, Wisdom, and Ten Years of the Walker Percy Weekend.” As always, there will be spirited literary discussion, lots of laughter, great food, and plenty of bourbon. But here’s the beautiful part: this event will mark the official reopening of the Julius Freyhan School, which emerges from a $4.2 million restoration ready to host both the Walker Percy Weekend and a concert by the Sonny Landreth Trio the weekend of September 19—20. Seventy-five years after the school’s closure to students, how inspiring it is to see the halls, classrooms, and marvelous, light-filled auditorium of St. Francisville’s first public school filled with books, lectures, and music again. Do come if you can, and raise a glass to Walker Percy, Nancy Vinci, and the power of never giving up on a good idea.
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