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The Walker Percy Project

Book Review

A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy. Edited by Patrick H. Samway, S.J. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1995. 328 pp. + xix.

Re-published with permission from Southern Quarterly 13.4 (Summer 1996) pp. 146-148, Gary M. Ciuba

To read A Thief of Peirce: The Letters of Kenneth Laine Ketner and Walker Percy is to see triangles upon triangles. Triadicity is the essential subject of this six-year correspondence that began when Ketner, the Charles Sanders Peirce Professor of Philosophy at Texas Tech, wrote a brief letter in 1984 to Percy, the novelist who had been interested in Peirce's work for over thirty years. When Percy replied, the two students of Peirce's semiotic entered into a dialogue about Thirdness. Percy saw such triadic relations most clearly in the moment when Helen Keller discovered in 1887 that the liquid flowing over her hand at the well-house could be signified as water. He called the three-way connection the delta factor and often envisioned it as a triangle joining word, object, and language user. Percy's novels and essays continually explored what difference Peirce's Thirdness made in the life of Homo loquens, the apex of the triangle.

A Thief of Peirce illuminates Percy's complex intellectual relationship with the American philosopher who pioneered the study of Thirdness. Patrick Samway's lucid introduction establishes the context for the correspondence in the life and writings of Percy, and his two appendixes, consisting mainly of essays by Ketner mentioned in the letters, offer a valuable primer on Peirce. Although Percy thought Peirce's work so significant that he planned to make it the basis of a Christian apologetic, he could also be one of Peirce's most discriminating critics. As Percy explained to Ketner in a 1989 letter, "I am not a student of Peirce. I am a thief of Peirce. I take from him what I want and let the rest go, most of it" (130). He bluntly admitted to admiring barely one percent of the edition of Peirce's Cambridge Conference Lectures that Ketner sought to dedicate to him. Indeed, Percy warned that such a tribute "would spin CSP in his grave" (131).

Percy's objections to Peirce provided a self-portrait of the novelist as believer. The fiction writer who viewed language as the celebration of being, faulted Peirce's writing for its obscurity and abstraction. "I wish these goddam semioticists has [sic) taken a course in ordinary writing," he grumbled, — "or had read Hemingway" (24). The critic of Cartesianism doubted whether Peirce's concept of the interpretant entirely avoided the dualism of the past three hundred years in philosophy. And the convert to Roman Catholicism argued that Peirce failed to understand how Judaeo-Christianity was founded not on a set of abstract principles and ethical truths but upon the revelation of news to people in a predicament. Ketner gladly and generously answered Percy's objections — occasionally with a folksiness that now may sound forced — clarified Peirce's thinking and sent the novelist over the years a mini-library of books and articles on semiotic. In particular, Ketner felt that the "distilled Scholastic realism" (135) of Peirce's Thirdness made him much closer to Percy's faith than the churchman recognized. "If CSP is in another camp," Ketner challenged, "how come Father Vincent Potter, now the provost of Fordham, is a top P scholar?" (134).

Writing about Thirdness led to the community that Percy always maintained was made possible by Thirdness. Peirce became the crucial third point that enabled Ketner and Percy to become parts of a triangle. And their letters became "the message in the bottle" which Percy's essay by that named imagined as gracing his Everyman as island castaway. Each found good news in the other — Ketner, the academic in Lubbock glad to share his intellectual passion with the novelist that he felt might make the often-neglected Peirce a powerful force in American culture, and Percy, the self-taught semioticist in Covington who came to depend on Ketner's expertise and library resources. As Ketner acknowledged, their epistolary friendship looked beyond the dyadic relations of cause-and-effect or stimulus-and-response that so many scientists, linguists and logicians limited themselves to studying: "Hell, if the behaviorists and nominalists are right, then our corresponding is a cotton-picking miracle" (64). It participated in the wonder-filled mystery that Percy appreciated in Thirdness.

A Thief of Peirce reveals that the bond between these correspondents was deep but carefully defined. Percy might address Ketner as "my dear Ken" (130) and mail him a drawing done by his daughter. Likewise, Ketner might admit, "I have an unshakable deep affection and devotion toward you" (136). Percy sent Ketner a draft of his Jefferson Lecture so that his friend might comment on it, and Ketner sent Percy student papers from a course on Peirce and Percy that the novelist returned with remarks on each essay. However, the camaraderie was not founded on homey dispatches or diary-like disclosures, especially on Percy's part. As so many who interviewed Percy have noted, the novelist could be gracious but somewhat elusive. Ketner continually wrote of his desire to meet with Percy by some means other than by letter. He proposed telephone calls, invited Percy to Texas and declared his willingness to travel to Louisiana. Ketner, the self-professed "Choctaw Taoist" (66), wanted the immersion in the particular — voice, face, gesture — that attracted Percy both to Christianity and to the novel. Percy repeatedly deferred, sometimes because he was living with cancer, but other times perhaps also because he was determined to protect his cherished solitude. "But I don't like nice long visits from anybody," Percy replied in a 1989 letter (150), even though Ketner had proposed no more than lunch or a lengthy phone call about the biography of Peirce that Percy had encouraged him to write. After the two correspondents finally met for the only time, Ketner commemorated the visit in one of the collection's finest letters. He fondly recounted how he to traveled to Washington at Percy's invitation to hear his 1989 Jefferson Lecture. Although Ketner missed the opportunity to speak with Percy immediately afterwards, the next day the pen pals talked for an hour on a bench in Gompers Park.

If the Ketner-Percy letters generally avoided chatty intimacies, the reticence and reluctance worked to focus and refine the friendship. Ketner told Percy that the best description which he could find of his fellowship with the novelist was in an enclosed volume by Aelred of Rievaulx, De spiritali amicitia. The title aptly suggested the transcendent bond between these two confidants. Percy had such esteem for Ketner that after recommending him for NEH funding, he joked — shortly before his own death — "I gave you a plug fit for an obituary." And Ketner's last letter to Percy ended, "warmest agape from me to dear old you" (162). The Percy-Ketner letters recorded how a community of intellectual interests deepened to become a compelling amiability between souls.

As many readers did not hesitate to tell Percy, a similar sense of connection often resulted from reading his fiction. Ketner rightly claimed in several letters that Percy's novels were themselves examples of triadic relations. The writer created models of the world in his fiction, which readers might enter to discover revealing parallels with their own. Percy appreciated the analysis, for he took pleasure in what Melville called the "ineffable sociabilities" of writing. Writing is "the most social of vocations," Percy affirmed in his essay on Melville. "No matter what the writer may say, the work is always written to someone, for someone, against someone." Percy and Ketner clearly wrote their way into their friendship with each other. A Thief of Peirce, the first of what is hoped will be future volumes of Percy's correspondence, expands that sociability. It enables readers to become the third part of the Ketner-Percy conversation about Thirdness.

Reviewer GARY M. CIUBA, associate professor of English at Kent State University, is the author of Walker Percy: Books of Revelations (U Georgia P, 1991). His articles on Percy and southern literature have appeared in such journals as American Literature, Mississippi Quarterly, Southern Quarterly and Thought.