Lancelot du Lac and bourbon on the veranda

I picked up my copy of 'Lancelot' by Walker Percy the other night and began reading it again. I can't remember why I bought the book originally, but it came out when I was a sophomore/junior in college and I remember thinking that the book was delightful. I recommended the book to several of my friends and family and I soon became a 'Johnny Appleseed' for Walker Percy's books. I enjoyed his books so much that I ended up wandering around a cemetery in Covington, Louisiana several weeks ago trying to find his gravesite.

When I reread the first few pages of 'Lancelot', I began to remember why I had loved the book so much. The main character was the owner of an old plantation house in Louisiana, a former football player and lawyer (sound familiar?). In the book the crassness of modern life is surrounding him and we discover early on in the book that he had determined that his wife was cheating on him, that his youngest daughter is not his own and that the 'Hollywood' types who are shooting a movie on the grounds of his home on River Road between New Orleans and Baton Rouge, are deflowering his daughter while he sleeps.

Sitting in his 'pigeoneirre' which his wife had fixed up as an office and study for him, Lancelot sits and broods on the world enclosing him and ultimately sets off an explosion in his house which destroys the house and kills his wife and the Hollywood director. The scene takes place in a storm which racks the house like the tempest in King Lear.

The tale is told from an asylum for the criminally insane in New Orleans to a friend of Lance's who is a priest or psychologist (one or the other or both), who doesn't speak until the end of the novel. There is a passage in which Lancelot speaks a tirade against the modern world toward the end of the book. I remember specifically loving that passage. I suppose I am almost as deluded as Lancelot, or was at the time I read the book.

There is no wonder why I identified with Lancelot and the story in the book. I must say, however, that I am not really sure how much the reader is supposed to identify with Lancelot. After all, he is a murderer serving time in an insane asylum. Is his story ironical or just what you would expect in the world we live in? Percy's protagonists are not always the most trustworthy narrators. The writer lies buried in St. Joseph's Abbey in Covington, Louisiana, so I guess I will never know.

The character of Lancelot exemplifies the perfect knight, Lancelot du Lac, of course, but also represents the cuckolded King Arthur and the raging King Lear, all rolled into one. It is a fascinating story and I am going to try to reread it if my wife will give me a little bit of time during the rearranging of our house over the next few weeks.

I read my calender this morning for the weekend entry and the one for today. I notice that they both talked about drinking, one talking about Martin Luther and his drinking tankard and the other talking about some British admiral who watered down the grog served to his seamen and became famous for spoiling their good times. I don't know why this extended weekend is so coupled with drinking. I didn't have a drink of alcahol this entire weekend.

Of course, I did begin thinking about drinking a tall glass of bourbon on the rocks when I was transported by 'Lancelot' to the world of Belle Isle, Louisiana. I couldn't help it. Just another good example of why I sometimes think I am placed in the wrong era.

I don't think that in these modern times that you are supposed to think whistfully back on times past when the 'white folks' held sway from the veranda of the 'big house.' Even in my boyhood, the last scenes of 'Goldfinger' had James Bond drinking a mint julep with the German criminal mastermind, Auric Goldfinger, on the front porch of Goldfinger's horse farm outside of Lexington, Kentucky. I guess Ian Fleming couldn't help but thumb his nose at the Kentucky 'aristocracy' and place the evildoer comfortably in that environment, offering juleps to his 'guest.' There again, the scene was completed by the best of the Bond heroines, Pussy Galore.

What a great book and movie.