Wednesday, June 29, 2005
Remembering Shelby Foote[The dates here are correct to the best of my recollection.]
Though it would be wrong to call Shelby Foote's death on Monday night tragic, it does leave your Webmaster with a feeling of sadness. I spent the better part of the summer of 1991 reading Foote's magisterial (what else to call it) The Civil War: A Narrative. I started it in the spring and read through the summer — I'd promised a college classmate of mine I'd finish it all before school resumed in the fall, and I remember thinking, a few weeks before school resumed, that I had to read at least two hundred pages a night to achieve that goal. I did finish the book, and I'm better for it. It was one of the formative reading experiences of my life.
When school resumed, I encountered Faulkner for the first time. That was followed by a romp through Southern literature, but always in the back of my mind was Foote and his War. In the spring of 1992, still flush with the success of The Civil War: A Film by Ken Burns, Foote agreed to come to my alma mater, Christian Brothers University (which was down the street from his home), and do a reading. This I attended. Beforehand, I had asked (and been granted) permission to interview Mr. Foote for the college newspaper. Foote by this point in his career rarely gave interviews, and my questions were for the most part juvenile. The interview, such as it was, took place after the reading and on the way to lunch, a lunch whose guest list consisted of Shelby Foote, CBU's English faculty, and me.
I mention the interview because during the course of the conversation, I asked Mr. Foote who his favorite living American authors were. In part, his answer was, as best as I can remember, "There's a writer whose work I admire very much: Cormac McCarthy. He's written five novels. I just read galley proofs of his new one, All the Pretty Horses; it's very good. He's a very good writer."
That's how I first heard about Cormac McCarthy.
I wrote my senior English thesis on a few specific passages in Foote's fiction work; spending that much time immersed in interviews, reviews, and the like was a luxury I've had seldom since. But oddly, his offhand remark about McCarthy and the then-as-yet-unpublished All the Pretty Horses proved to be the genesis of not only my encounter with McCarthy and his work, both of which continue unabated, but also of this Web site.
In some sense, then, all of this can be attributed to Shelby Foote, who was a long-time and vocal champion of McCarthy's for many years prior to McCarthy's notoriety.
One more thing: since Foote finished the War and a novel called September, September in the late seventies, he'd been working on a novel that he called his "Mississippi Dostoyevsky," Two Gates to the City. Apparently, that novel remains unfinished, unless there's a manuscript hidden away there among the dip-pin-and-ink-on-parchment papers. That book was a sort of talisman; he mentioned it in early interviews, too, before he'd even started the War. I had hoped to read it. It was legendary for its unfinished-ness.
As, I suppose, it always will be.
posted by mp
6/29/2005
Tuesday, June 28, 2005
Shelby Foote, R.I.P.I'll have more on this later, but here's the first news I've seen; this story just appeared on The Commercial Appeal's Web site.
MEMPHIS, Tenn. (AP) - Novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote, whose appearances on a PBS-TV documentary series helped America better understand one of the most defining periods of its past, has died, his family said Tuesday.
Foote's widow, Gwen, said her husband, who was 88, died Monday night.
Foote, a Mississippi native and longtime Memphis resident, wrote six novels but is best remembered for his three-volume, 3,000-word [sic] history of the Civil War.
Relying on a Southern storyteller's touch, he presented that history in a flowing, narrative style. He spent 20 years writing it.
"I can't conceive of writing it any other way," Foote once told The Associated Press in an interview. "Narrative history is the kind that comes closest to telling the truth. You can never get to the truth, but that's your goal."
That work landed Foote a leading role on an 11-hour TV documentary on the Civil War, first shown on the Public Broadcast System in 1990. It was produced and directed by documentarian Ken Burns.
posted by mp
6/28/2005
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