There’s
still a burning desire to read Lancelot
Lancelot by Walker Percy
By Jennifer H Kimball
What does it take to drive a man over the edge to the point
of insanity? And once he’s there,
can he ever come back? These are
some of the issues raised by Walker Percy’s novel about the last of the
knights of the Round Table.
Lancelot Andrewes Lamar has been locked away for nearly a year. The story is obtuse on where, and we the readers are never really given an explanation. At first we may wonder if it’s a hospital for the criminally insane, but the girl in the next room seems to be a trauma victim, not a hardened criminal. We are initially not even sure to whom the book is addressed. Lancelot is the narrator, and speaks directly to someone. We soon learn that the listener is an old friend of his, and the reader is merely eavesdropping.
Lancelot tells his friend that he doesn’t remember what
happened, only the newspaper headlines from a year ago: “BELLE ISLE BURNS.
BODIES OF FILM STARS CHARRED BEYOND RECOGNITION.
SCION OF OLD FAMILY CRAZED BY GRIEF AND RAGE.
SUFFERS BURNS TRYING TO SAVE WIFE.” (Percy 13)
Until seeing his friend jostles his memory and images start coming back
to him.
“As I say, seeing you allowed me to remember the circumstances under
which I discovered that my wife had deceived me, that is, had had carnal
relations with another man.
“Is it this which was so difficult to remember?
It is not that I forgot it but that I found it intolerable to think
about.” (Percy 15)
Lancelot had thought that he had the perfect life, a
lovely, rich wife (his second after his first wife died), daughter and a
beautifully restored Southern house, thanks to his wife’s money.
While carelessly glancing at his daughter’s summer camp application, he
notices that her blood type is O. His
is AB. Looking back at old
receipts, Lancelot remembers that his wife was away at an acting workshop
exactly nine months before their daughter, Siobhan’s, birth.
Between the timing and the blood type, there is absolute proof that
Lancelot has been cuckolded. And he
is fairly sure that it is still going on, if not with the same man, than with
another.
At this time there is a film crew making a movie on Belle Isle, his home. They’re being hosted by his wife, Margot, and include Bob Merlin, the man who ran the acting workshop ten years before. Margot can’t act, but has the monetary support that the film needs, and in exchange gets a role. One of the compromises that Lancelot has made while this has been going on is moving to an out building. Margot claimed it was because she does not get home until late after watching the daily rushes of the film at the nearby motel with the rest of her companions, but it also meant that she could come an go as she pleases, without Lancelot knowing what time she was coming home. This also meant that they had not slept together since the crew had arrived, which would have masked any cheating that may or may not have been going on.
With the discovery of the mismatched blood types, Lancelot
finally wakes up from the slumber he had been in for years.
Drinking too much, working too little, complacent about everything and
not really living. He feels sinned
against and wants to do something about it.
The sexual revolution is blamed. Margot
has a nearly relentless desire for sex and Lancelot begins to blame that.
They had sex the first time that they met, when Margot was dressed up as
a Southern Belle to show his house for the Azalea Trail and they took refuge
from the rain in an out building. They
slept together on their first date; she suggested that they go find a bed soon
after he picked them up. Lancelot
reminisces with his old friend how when they were young, they went to
whorehouses to get laid because the girls that they knew were ladies.
Lancelot wants to start a new revolution, one where men are gentlemen and
women are ladies. And those who are
neither are obvious.
Even with the blaring evidence, Lancelot still has some
hope that he may find his wife to be innocent, or at least wants irrefutable
proof that she is still cheating on him. To
help, he enlists the son of their servants, Elgin to
spy for him. Using the excuse that
he is worried about his other daughter, Lucy, he asks Elgin to go to the motel
to watch the actions of the entire crew and report back all of it.
The results are somewhat inconclusive, so he has Elgin next set up an
elaborate scheme to videotape all of the bedrooms where the crew ends up staying
for their last couple of nights after filming.
Lancelot’s interactions with Elgin are somewhat
troubling. He is a self-proclaimed liberal lawyer who does a great deal
of business helping the NAACP, yet he still acts in a paternalistic manner
towards his servants and their children. He
orders Elgin about and expects not to be asked any questions.
By the end of the narrative, he has realized what his attitude had been:
“Then it was I discovered in myself what I had so often despised in
others. For I had expected Elgin to
do what I told him, be a technological eavesdropper and spy for me but not
listen or look. More than that: I
had expected that somehow he could not
look—just as the hicks I despised believed that through some magical or at
least providential dispensation the Negro bellboy cannot see the naked white
woman in the same hotel room. Cannot
even if he wanted to: she is somehow invisible.
“There is nothing like a liberal gone sour.” (Percy 181)
Yet even acknowledging the fact that he has been treating Elgin in a racist manner doesn’t get Lancelot to stop. “Then he was my n----r after all, and if he could look, wouldn’t, didn’t. Or better, he looked for technical reasons but forbore to see. He was the perfect n----r.” (Percy 181) In an earlier passage Lancelot remembers when the KKK had been bothering the church where Elgin’s father, Ellis Buell, was the part-time preacher. Lancelot went and talked to the Grand Kleagle. Instead of fighting with him, he said “’ . . . he’s my n----r, J.B. He’s been working for us for forty years. . . .’” (Percy 93) Lancelot is ashamed enough to never have corrected the Buells when they tell the story of him calling the Grand Kleagle out and threatening to shoot him if J.B. would not leave them alone.
While Lancelot is raving about the impurity of the world
around him, and the lack of sexual morals in the present, he is also obsessing
about the girl in the room next to him. She
was the victim of a gang rape and initially will not communicate with anyone.
He starts tapping on the adjoining wall, waiting for her to tap back and
acknowledge his presence. At one
point he devises an alphabet in taps, but she does not seem to get it, or at
least does not respond. Lancelot
believes that since she has been through such an awful trauma, she is now pure
and virginal again, like his late first wife.
The girl next door is idealized into the perfect lady with whom Lancelot
decides he is going to spend the rest of his life with after leaving his
hospital. That she has no idea of what he is thinking nor has been
consulted in the issue is rather beside the point. He also equates his tragedy with hers (although killing his
own wife and all of her friends by leaking gas into the house was his own
fault). He doesn’t even bother to
find out that her name is Anna until right before he plans on leaving.
I think that Anna’s silence is interpreted as a blank slate for
Lancelot to write over, his statue to bring to life.
It does not occur to him that she would not agree.
Lancelot tries very hard to justify his actions, but is
never convincing due to the venom spit out with his rules.
He thinks that women should be ladies, and men gentlemen, but it is still
okay for gentlemen to visit brothels to fulfill their lust. He supports the NAACP, but treats his servants like house
slaves. He has double standards for
everyone who is not him, particularly women.
He wants to be a modern Lancelot, but that can never be because Lancelot
was the one to cheat with, not on.
Jennifer
H. Kimball is a graduate student at Georgetown University and occasionally
reviews books for Elle magazine.