Faith in a Faithless World : PILGRIM IN THE RUINS: A Life of Walker Percy by Jay Tolson , (Simon & Schuster: $27.50; 519 pp.)

I met Walker Percy in New Orleans in 1977. It was a cool autumn afternoon. The city glowed in soft golden sunlight and deep blue shadows. There was, I remember, a chilly wind blowing off the river. I had moved to the city less than a year before, after graduating from college, and had gotten a job writing for Figaro, a weekly newspaper. As it turned out, Percy was a fan of the paper, read it weekly, and happened to see my review of his latest novel, “Lancelot.”

Percy was waiting on the steps of the bookstore. He was smiling. His smile, once seen, became unforgettable, at once shy, brooding and menacing. We shook hands, sat on the steps of the bookstore in the cool shade, talked and talked. His sky-blue eyes flashing as he spoke of the death of the Old South and the stillbirth of the New South, of the malaise of modern man and the Mississippi Delta, of Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Saul Bellow and his lifelong friend Shelby Foote. He was one of the most engaging, complex and enigmatic men I have ever met.

Reading Jay Tolson’s new biography of Percy, who died in May, 1990, has happily reminded me of those years. Literary editor of the Wilson Quarterly, Tolson is at his best in weaving together and exploring the details of Percy’s early life--a rich and haunted legacy of family and history that included being from one of the Delta’s last great aristocratic families with its swelling burden of decaying honor, languishing prestige and unspoken miseries.

Both Percy’s grandfather and father committed suicide. Not long after his family moved to Greenville, Miss., and settled into the wonderfully eccentric household of his Uncle Will Percy, his mother was killed in an automobile accident. Will Percy, a successful lawyer, Delta farmer, poet and author of “Lanterns on the Levee,” adopted and raised Walker and his two brothers. Tolson carries the reader painstakingly through every year of Percy’s youth, from his birth in Birmingham, Ala., in 1916 through his years in medical school in New York City, noting his good times and bad, always monitoring the vein of sorrow and loss, longing and tragedy that pulsed relentlessly through Percy’s life.

Although he would become known as a philosopher, a Southern Christian existentialist novelist in search of moral meaning in a world out of joint, in his youth Percy was as devoted a nihilist as he would later be a passionate Roman Catholic. As a young man, Percy first found solace in science, an interest that would carry him on to medical school. As he readied to embark on a career as a doctor, though, Percy developed tuberculosis. While recovering, he finally rejected the uncertainties of science altogether and decided to abandon medicine. Once again, he found himself adrift.

After meandering from Greenville to New Mexico, Percy sank in and rose out of depressions and at one point, Tolson suggests, considered taking his own life. In one of those pure moments of revelation, however, Percy decided to return to New Orleans, embrace the Catholic faith, marry the woman he loved, settle into a life of self-imposed isolation and anonymity and work at becoming a writer.

Tolson candidly admits that this biography is an attempt not only to examine but also to celebrate what he considers a heroic life, an exemplary life marked by “an intellectual and spiritual bravery,” as Percy struggled through his writing to touch the essence of what it means, simply and finally, to be a human being. While Tolson’s unrestrained admiration for Percy and the narrow focus of that admiration bring much detail and insight to these pages, they also lead to a heroizing that would have made Percy wince. The Percy I knew was a man almost completely free of pretense and hubris . Percy considered himself but another flawed and failed human being searching for some fabric of truth, of moral meaning in a world gone mad. For him, it was a search, a pilgrimage, he had to make, had to endure. It was that or an acceptance of existence as finally absurd.

Tolson’s adulation also mars his timid attempts to assess Percy’s work. Quite suddenly, the narrative fades into flat and uninspired documentation as Tolson moves through Percy’s six novels in the same uninspired voice, parading out the considerable praise heaped on Percy’s fiction while brushing over or simply dismissing the often sharp and pointed criticism Percy, his ideas and his writing sparked. In particular, Tolson spends too little time considering that it was in his fiction that Percy jousted with the madness of the world, poked about in the ashes of modern secularism for some trace of untainted truth, for some smudge of sanity, for some remnant of tolerance, for some reason even to hope.

Percy’s fiction has always amounted to more than the sum of its parts. While he tried desperately to distance himself from the violence and intolerance and ignorance of the Old South, he found the emptiness of the New South, of the modern world, even more offensive. And even though he disliked being called a Southern writer, it was through his life as a Southern writer that he sought to reach out and feel the tremble of the human soul.

While Percy often tried to cut himself loose from the South, from his time and his history, in the end he could not; his fiction is a reflection of this personal agony and despair, this endless struggle over the South as pretense and myth, hubris and fake glory, of defeat, lost grace and honor, of hypocrisy, failures of faith, of manners and dignity, all wrapped in a maddening literature of dark face. Tolson is awed by what he believes was Percy’s uncommon and extraordinary personal heroism. Nowhere was Percy braver than in his fiction. It was his life’s map, its measure, its meaning, its madness and its hope.

If “Pilgrim in the Ruins” is not a brilliant appraisal of Walker Percy’s work, its admirable, evocative detail still outclasses earlier biographies, which have tended to be Gordian Knots of academic pedantry, obscuring more than they reveal. Its faults aside, this warm and generous assessment of Percy’s life opens the door to a greater and deeper knowledge of Percy’s enduring literary legacy.

After several readings of Tolson’s biography, I thought again of my first meeting with Percy on the steps of the Maple Street Book Shop years and years ago, and realized that, at long last, some of the mystery had faded from my memory of Walker Percy’s sad blue eyes, from that brooding, menacing, shy smile, and that the mystery had been replaced with understanding.