Walker Percy called his second novel "The Last Gentleman," but that distinction belonged in truth to Percy himself. As the obituaries have pointed out, he was a wonderful writer - a deft and witty stylist, a thinker of depth and originality, a passionate believer in domestic love and other quiet virtues - but he was, if anything else, an even more wonderful human being.
His letters were short, funny and kind. When I sent him a copy of my first book, not in hope of favors but merely as a gesture of friendship, he responded with a note so generous that it made me feel the entire enterprise had been worth all the trouble and uncertainty it entailed; for more than a dozen years that note has hung, framed, above my desk, as prized a possession as any I own.Downstairs, on a shelf in the living room, stands the other cherished memento of this brief friendship that has meant so much to me. It is a paperback copy of "Love in the Ruins" that came quite unexpectedly in the mail one day in the late spring of 1973. On its flyleaf Walker wrote these words:
To Jonathan-
Here is, I swear, the first paperback off the press - "To Jon, best of all judges (of wine anyhow) and books too - then how come, with the 2 best minds in the South, we didn't do better?
Come to Louisiana - Walker.