Walker Percy's “The Centerfielder”: A Manuscript of an Unpublished Short Story

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Notes

¹The two major bibliographies were published in 1986 and 1988 (Wright; Hobson). Jay Tolson does not cite the story in his 1984 biography.

²The citation reads as follows: “‘The Centerfielder.’ (Received May 1994, #243) (Formerly II:D:Folder D:15).”

³Between pages 5 and 6, a page is inserted with a brief addendum of one sentence.

⁴The only known professional baseball league for women here in the United States was the All-American Girls Baseball League, the topic of the 1992 motion picture A League of Their Own. The inaugural season was in 1946 (Heaphy and May 9). The league was based in the Midwest; however, traveling rookie-teams were fielded in the summers of 1949 and 1950, touring the eastern United States with stops in Southern cities, including New Orleans (Macy 51).

⁵Didrikson played on an all-male professional baseball team in the 1930s and even pitched against major leaguers in exhibitions (Cayleff 107–9). In 1952, Didrikson had a cameo role in the motion picture Pat and Mike, a movie similar in theme to “The Centerfielder.” In the movie, Katharine Hepburn is a professional athlete who struggles to reconcile her athleticism with her femininity, particularly in relationship to her love interest, played by Spencer Tracy, who at one point calls Hepburn's character “some kind of Frankenstein monster” (Cayleff 211).

⁶Although there have been no formal studies of voyeurism in Percy's work, the theme pervades his writing. For example, in The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling secretly leers at his secretary Sharon Kincaid with the fascination of a Peeping Tom (66–8), not to mention his overriding infatuation with watching movies; in The Last Gentleman, Will Barrett is described as a “watcher” as he peers through his telescope at the people in Central Park (11, 16); and in Lancelot, Lancelot Lamar rigs cameras in his own home in order to film the filmmakers (and his wife and daughter!) in their illicit affairs (197–206). Lamar asks ironically at one point, “Was it a kind of voyeurism?” (255).

⁷“Racial issues too, […] figure prominently in the psychological and moral experience of Percy's heroes” (Hardy 5). On racism and Love in the Ruins, see Kobre 129; also, see Brannon Costello's chapter, “Super Negroes and Hybrid Aristocrats: Race and Class in Walker Percy's The Last Gentleman and Love in the Ruins” (123–59).

⁸See Tony Badger, “Fatalism, Not Gradualism: Race and the Crisis of Southern Liberalism, 1945–65” (Ward and Badger 67–95). Among others, Badger addresses the position taken by William Faulkner (70, 72), which was arguably much like Preston's.

⁹For Percy's use of Girardian concepts about scapegoating, see Gary M. Ciuba's chapter, “No More for Azazel: Victimizing the Sign and Signifying the Victim in Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome” (Ciuba 200–45). Also, it is interesting to note that some have theorized about a connection between lynching and voyeurism (Lightweis-Goff 126–7).

¹⁰Similarly, Lancelot confesses, “My quest was for a true sin—was there such a thing? Sexual sin was the unholy grail I sought. It is possible of course that there is no such thing and that a true sin, like the Grail, probably does not exist” (147).

¹¹The edition (New York: Vintage Books, 1956) is housed in the Rare Books Collection at UNC. The description reads, “Contains annotations: Percy/very heavy, Corners folded.” The call number is Percy 2612.