The Lost Pilgrims: Richard Ford, Walker Percy, and the Substance of Hope
Both Richard Ford and Walker Percy write novels of modern man struggling with a world devoid of meaning—but the journeys their characters take lead them to altogether different destinations.
By Jeff Reimer
In his book on the theological virtues, Josef Pieper identifies two essential characteristics of hope: futurity and arduousness. Hope, to be hope, must remain oriented to a future fullness without ignoring the difficulty and strenuousness of endurance through suffering. The virtue of hope is thus suspended between despair and presumption. Hope neither presumes it has reached life’s destination nor abandons the pilgrim path. Hope, in other words, claims that to be human, to be alive, is to maintain the status viatoris—“the condition or state of being on the way.” Any philosophy of life that “denies the ‘pilgrimage’ character of the status viatoris, its orientation toward fulfillment beyond time,” Pieper says, “fails to recognize the true nature of human existence.” It is this understanding of hope and pilgrimage that illuminates the commonalities between Walker Percy and Richard Ford, and at the same time distinguishes them from each other.
Much has been made of Walker Percy’s influence on Richard Ford’s early fiction. Ford has frequently mentioned his indebtedness to and admiration of Percy, and Percy admired The Sportswriter when it came out, calling it “a stunning novel” and recommending it for an award. The Moviegoer and The Sportswriter are both narrated in first-person present tense. Both stories feature solitary, intelligent wanderers reflecting happily, if ironically, on their downgraded expectations of life. Both protagonists, Binx Bolling in The Moviegoer and Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, give private, existentially loaded names to their various life statuses and periods and experiences. Both of them direct their longings at a series of superficial love affairs. And both of them take ill-begotten, stunted trips to the Midwest. Even the titles echo.
Most importantly, the two protagonists struggle to stay alive to the world as it discloses itself to them, stumbling through their lives with eyes half-open, turning away from deeper awareness of life and themselves, reconsidering, turning again. Latent despair creeps. Suicide hovers at the edges of their awareness. They are intermittently aware of their open resistance to the various significations of experience.
Whatever the complexities of influence, Ford in his subsequent novels moved beyond Percy’s perimeter. Percy indirectly helped Ford establish Frank Bascombe’s voice in The Sportswriter, enabling Ford to move out from under the suffocating Southern brilliance of Faulkner and Welty. But in finding a voice for himself, Ford left Percy behind too—as any writer must, to a degree. Charting these similarities and differences reveals that, though the terrain the two writers navigate is similar, the territory is different, and it leads them to altogether different destinations.
Much is still at stake.
For all its willfully prosaic subject matter and its self-conscious literary plotlessness, The Sportswriter is a delight to read. Humming along through the suburbs with Frank Bascombe watching the world unfold in real time is an exceedingly pleasant way to spend an afternoon. It is Ford’s particular gift that simultaneous to Frank’s lighthearted ruminations, the novels—especially The Sportswriter—manage to feel existentially urgent. In fact it is Bascombe’s lightheartedness that should alert us to something more serious going on underneath the surface. Even though The Sportswriter begins after Frank Bascombe has failed both as a novelist and as a husband, there is a sense that Bascombe’s life is opening out on something new, and that Bascombe is being honest with himself for the first time in years. He is thirty-eight, almost thirty-nine, just on the cusp of middle age. Much is still at stake.
He has emerged from a period of abstraction that enveloped him after his son’s death and his subsequent divorce. He calls it dreaminess, “a state of suspended recognition.” He is now able to hold that sense of himself at arm’s length and speak with a new insight about those experiences. But he is still self-enclosed, unable or unwilling to address his still unresolved grief. Instead he settles in for a life that holds less expectation, and thus less risk.
Hence the appeal of sports and sportswriting; an athlete’s job is to be unreflective. They are “happy to be what they do,” Bascombe says. Athletic training teaches them “the necessity of relinquishing doubt and ambiguity and self-inquiry in favor of a pleasant, self-championing one-dimensionality.” And so, he confesses that “if all this makes it seem that being a sportswriter is at best a superficial business, that’s because it is.” Life’s deeper meaning and significance must either be addressed or deadened. Frank’s choice is clear: “How more easily assuage the life-long ache to anticipate than to write sports?” Sportswriting for Bascombe is a way of giving up on the search, in the same way trading stocks is for Binx Bolling.
Bascombe, in other words, is in a mode of reduced acceptance, willing to interpret the signals of life at a weaker frequency if it means he is able to get by. In a way, he has accepted a form of life that incorporates failure as a necessary part of human experience. This is good! But though he accepts that truth with one hand, with the other he pushes it away. “Too much truth,” Bascombe says, “can be worse than death.” It is this suspension between despair and affirmation in The Sportswriter that leaves open the possibility of hope. “You don’t have to go to the movies to be a moviegoer,” Ford has said of Percy’s novel. “You have to be in the condition of seeking.” Bascombe is in the condition of seeking.
In Independence Day, the sequel to The Sportswriter, Bascombe is in the flower of middle age. He calls this the Existence Period, “the high-wire act of normalcy, the period that comes after the big struggle which led to the big blow up.” He is now a realtor, not a sportswriter, which becomes an ̉elaborate, book-long metaphor for the aspirations of upwardly mobile Americans, as well as an opportunity for Bascombe (and Ford) to reflect copiously on the mores of late twentieth-century America more generally. Bascombe is healthy and successful and rich, a fulsomeness reflected in the luxuriant sentences Ford spools out across the pages. The set of challenges Bascombe faces are of a different nature, less apt to probe the psychological dynamics of despair and hope. His concern, rather, is to move outward from himself and into the world, to commit to familial and civic obligation. “When you’re young,” he says, “your opponent is the future; but when you’re not young, your opponent’s the past and everything you’ve done in it.”
This sense of purpose, potential, and openness further collapses in The Lay of the Land, the third Bascombe novel. Frank is now almost elderly, nearing retirement. He has moved to the New Jersey coast. His kids are grown. He has remarried. He has prostate cancer—a condensed symbol of the aging American male if there ever was one. He is curmudgeonly.
Near the end of the book, Bascombe’s next-door neighbors are murdered by two fourteen-year-old Russian kids on dirt bikes. A double homicide. Bascombe watches as the husband is shot in the head, and in the process of trying to intervene he is himself shot twice in the chest. This is a traumatic occurrence by any standard. Yet Bascombe, here at the end of this long trilogy of novels, seems oddly unaffected, buffered even from the harsh reality of his shooting by his own long-honed mechanisms of survival. His narration of the aftermath is unmoved and unmoving. He compares his experience to television—“pretty much the way you’d expect on Gunsmoke or Bonanza”—as if he’s watching himself in a detached way. He reflects at length in the novel’s final pages on death and the experience of dying, but much of it seems almost pro forma. “Death,” he says, “can take on a more contextualized importance relative to our nearness to it.” Bascombe seems to have entered back into the dreaminess that enveloped him prior to The Sportswriter. “What I am a proponent of,” Bascombe said then, “is forgetting. Forgetting dreams, grievances, old flaws of character.” By the end of The Lay of the Land, he has succeeded beyond his wildest imagination.
It is hard to tell, however, whether this impassive, resigned outlook is attributable to a failure of Bascombe’s internal life or of Ford’s aesthetic execution. The whole murder-robbery sequence feels put on and artificial, extrinsic to the novel’s drama. After twelve hundred pages of internal monologue, why are people getting shot in the head by Russian thugs on dirt bikes? A more aesthetically successful and satisfying instance of this diminished awareness of life’s significance occurs in Ford’s next novel, Canada.
Canada is an act of partly failed recollection. It is told in the past tense, instead of the present tense of the Bascombe novels. As a fifteen-year-old boy, Dell Parsons witnesses his relative and guardian Arthur Remlinger murder two government investigators, and then he is forced to help bury them. The murders are the second of two events that determine the rest of Dell’s life. The first was his parents’ decision to rob a bank and their subsequent imprisonment. The two acts are both massive betrayals of the innocence and vulnerability of childhood, and the novel is about how Dell has failed to fully process those acts. Though in his adult life he has all the trappings of a quiet life well lived, his memories are drained of emotion. He seems mechanical and detached, like he has deadened part of himself in order to live with the unresolved traumas of his childhood. “I believe in what you see being most of what there is,” Dell reflects as an adult, “and that life’s passed on to us empty. So, while significance weighs heavy, that’s the most it does. Hidden meaning is all but absent.”
It is this muted awareness, this unspoken emptiness in his characters’ lives, that constitutes the moral center of Ford’s stories. A sense of dissatisfaction is an indicator of Ford’s success as a writer. It is a move both perceptive and courageous. Ford is willing to let the reader sit with disappointment in order to faithfully display an incompletely realized life. How do we respond when some fundamental part of us—some dream or aspiration or optimism—is betrayed or corrupted? What are the consequences when we are no longer willing—and are ultimately unable—to recognize or acknowledge a part of ourselves that has failed? These are the questions, it seems to me, that Ford’s fiction poses.
After he has been shot, Frank Bascombe says that he keeps the two slugs that penetrated his chest cavity on his bedside table: “I have for the past two weeks studied them for signs of significance and found none.” And at the end of Canada, Dell Parsons visits the place where the two murder victims from his youth are buried. “I stood,” he says, “and tried to make it all signify, be revelatory, as if I needed that. But I couldn’t.” Attempt. Failure. Resignation. The world’s disclosure of itself is no longer manifest through existentially charged symbols. Things just are. They no longer mean. If they ever did.
In Percy’s novels these two things reiteratively pertain: Things are signs; humans are pilgrims.
In a similar way, Walker Percy’s characters move through his novels blinkered and passive, not quite understanding or accepting the reality imposing itself on them. They have shuttered themselves from that larger reality, or some kind of unresolved trauma or grief veils it from them. So far so Ford. But in Percy’s novels, signs and symbols pour into the stories from beyond their pages. Percy’s world possesses a superabundance of meaning, not a lack of it. Things ooze signification. It is there, waiting to be seen, pressing in on the characters, and the dramatic action of his novels pulls them toward acknowledgment and acceptance of it. Presence is encoded in creation; whether the characters perceive the encoded meaning is immaterial to its facticity. There’s always something extra, something gratuitous, something beyond. All this is by design. “In a new age,” Percy says, “when things and people are devalued, when meanings break down, it lies within the province of the novelist to start the search afresh.”
In The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett glimpses this fullness. He has been fumbling through the novel subject to fugue states and amnesia. But after a long journey home to the South, outside the house he grew up in, he remembers that in this very house his father committed suicide. Just then his hand passes over a place where a tree has grown into an iron hitching post, and he perceives something more in it, something deeper and fuller. He sees “in the very curiousness and drollness and extraness of the iron and bark”—something. But at just the moment he “sees” the “extraness,” his perception fails and his mind is pulled away to other things.
In his essay “Diagnosing the Modern Malaise,” Percy identifies this scene as representative of his programmatic novelistic strategy. What Barrett glimpses is the “goodness and gratuitousness of created being.” Even so, Percy says, Barrett “missed it. That was as close as he ever came.” In these moments, when the pressure of the fullness of reality weighs most heavily, what matters to Percy is that the fullness exists and is breaking into the world whether the character grasps it or not.
Percy’s stories make clear, however, that these characters’ blinkered contemplation of reality is plotted, as if providentially, on a graph. They have origins, a destination, an orientation. In short, they are pilgrims. They are on a journey—but a journey implies displacement. They may have forgotten they are on a journey, or they may be lost, but Percy is interested in characters who are just waking up anew to the fact that they are lost. He is interested in how they navigate the terrain of the twentieth century, an age when science and consumerism seem to have obscured the means of signification by rendering the possibility of God either irrational or irrelevant. What mode of expression would apply to somebody who has just become alert to this state of affairs? Answering this question was Percy’s lifelong preoccupation: “In the old Christendom everyone was a Christian and hardly anyone thought twice about it. But in the present age the survivor of theory and consumption becomes a wayfarer in the desert, like St. Anthony; which is to say, open to signs.”
In Percy’s novels these two things reiteratively pertain: Things are signs; humans are pilgrims. The Second Coming, too, is littered with signs, pointers, clues, treasures, ciphers. “Everything he saw became a sign of something else,” the narrator says of Will Barrett, who is again struggling to see his past aright. “This fence was a sign of another fence he had climbed through. The hawk was a sign of another hawk and of a time when he believed there were fabulous birds.” In the course of his journey Barrett becomes attentive to these signs. The question is whether he is going mad. But madness might also itself be a sign, might provide a clue to the extraness inherent within the world. Madness might, in fact, be an indicator that one is a wayfarer, one open to signs.
In Love in the Ruins the ivory-billed woodpecker flits about at the edges of the story. Local folks, protagonist Tom More says, used to call it “the Lord-to-God.” References to it are scattered throughout the book like loose change. The ivory-billed woodpecker is a majestic bird, twenty inches long, and while thought to be extinct, sightings of it in the swamps and bayous of the Mississippi are regularly reported. Even outside of Percy’s writings, the bird carries a mythological, even apocalyptic symbolism. Tom More calls it “the magic bird, the fire-bird, the sweet bird of youth.” Several of the characters are avid bird watchers, and they all thrill to the possibility that this bird might have returned. Tom reflects to himself, “For the ivorybill to return after all these years means—” but like Barrett in The Last Gentleman, that’s as far as he gets. The meaning flits away again.
At the end of the book, Tom More encounters a friend, Collie, who excitedly tells him that he and his wife glimpsed the bird, and are returning to the swamp to attempt to photo-document its existence. Collie exclaims, “He’s alive! He’s come back after all these years!” Which prompts the following (silent) meditation from Tom:
This morning, hauling up a great unclassified beast of a fish, I thought of Christ coming again at the end of the world and how it is that in every age there is the temptation to see signs of the end and that, even knowing this, there is nevertheless some reason, what with the spirit of the new age being the spirit of watching and waiting, to believe that—
Again, his meditation breaks off. “Do you realize what this means?” Collie asks him. Tom answers, “No. Yes.” The answer is typical for More, who has been ambivalent about his faith throughout the whole novel. But the order of the utterance, from negation to affirmation, also signals the direction in which he is moving. The day is Christmas Eve. Collie’s wife ponders how wonderful it would be to be able to check the ivory-billed woodpecker off her Christmas list.
A fabulous bird, Godlike, banished by the scientific-industrial encroachment of man, thought to be nonexistent. Everybody on a search for it. Rumors of its return. Sightings of it on the day of Christ’s incarnation. Urgent speculation and inquiry as to its significance. Not one of the characters puts together this near-allegory, though Tom More comes close. But Percy has still placed it there in the story to draw the reader out beyond, to investigate further what this sign might mean.
Despite the texture and the granularity of Ford’s powers of observation, the reader receives a neutered conception of reality in his novels.
Ford’s stories lack these elaborate symbols, and in fact he would probably eschew them. While Percy envisions a sacramental fullness breaking into the world, what Ford describes is a reconceived immanent fullness, an experience of the material world as full without remainder. Frank Bascombe journeys through life more or less without reference to the transcendent. In fact, Ford has quoted Wallace Stevens approvingly that “in an age of disbelief… it is for the poet to provide the satisfactions of belief in his measure and in his style.” What Ford provides—and what Percy provided, according to Ford—is “consolation in language.” Language itself, in other words, is the non-alienating and reintegrating force in literature—which explains why Ford’s praise of Percy is almost exclusively of his prose style, and not of his ideas.
None of this is to say that Ford’s fiction is banal or boring. Ford is a brilliant observer of daily life. His prose isn’t just beautiful, it’s insightful. He doesn’t just have an ear for dialogue, he understands human relationships and the subtleties of their interactions. He perceives that intelligence and honesty can be tools for the obfuscation of one’s own grief, or pain. Even so, despite the texture and the granularity of Ford’s powers of observation, the reader receives a neutered conception of reality in his novels.
The things that don’t get thought of in Ford’s stories—the half-contemplated lives, the ambivalences, the mitigated rejections—create a moral lacuna around which everything left over revolves. The things in Ford’s world that are missed or forgotten nevertheless exert force on the lives of the characters. They are moral in the sense that they are psychological rather than tangible, but they are not supernatural or even metaphysical. They are not signs of the transcendent. The lacuna really is a lack, not a substance or a reality that is unperceived. Frank Bascombe and Dell Parsons half-heartedly interrogate the traumatic events of their lives to see whether they signify something—anything. But neither they nor Ford are much interested in looking harder. There is an implied absence, even a cautionary element in their failures, but in the end even these are subjugated to the brute fact of narration. Though that center of the unthought is what gives Ford’s stories their tension, his characters are not missing the goodness and gratuitousness of created being: it is not available to them, because it is not available to Ford.
In The Sportswriter, Frank Bascombe is at once hopeful for the future and struggling to address his failures. Josef Pieper’s combination of futurity and arduousness colors Bascombe’s experience: Hope is possible, if not operative. But as he moves through the events of Independence Day and The Lay of the Land, the status viatoris turns out to have been a mere stage of life. Bascombe has been not so much been a pilgrim as a tourist. Despair no longer threatens, but neither has he achieved hope’s fulfillment beyond time. The desire, the search, the ache of anticipation are no longer brought to bear on his life. In The Sportswriter, the doomed, despairing character Walter Luckett says to Bascombe, “I’ve quit becoming, is what it feels like. Only I stopped at the wrong time.” The same could be said of Bascombe. It just took him longer, and he didn’t realize it. Seeking, if it is acknowledged at all, becomes a self-referential symbol, a signifier without a signified, a pilgrimage without a destination. “My purpose,” Frank Bascombe says in Independence Day, “was just to have a purpose.”
The ways we miss our lives are life.
This is the poet Randall Jarrell. It is also quoted by Frank Bascombe. It might be that, for Ford as well as for Bascombe, this statement is more true than either of them realizes. The pilgrim path has been forsaken, abandoned, and forgotten. The search has been hollowed out, and the substance of things hoped for is the fading ghost of a memory.
Percy will not leave us there. In his severe wisdom he forces us to look at what it is we have forgotten, points us toward the future, and sets us back onto the pilgrim path, the way of hope.
Jeff Reimer is an associate editor of Comment magazine, and works as a freelance editor and writer in Newton, Kansas. He and his wife, Jess, have four children.