7
The Southerner talks music.
—MARK TWAIN
Soon after the Wilderness battle, I headed south again to keep an engagement of a different sort. From the start of my journey, I’d thought about contacting Shelby Foote. This proved surprisingly easy to do. His number was listed in the phonebook. But after picking up the phone a few times, I decided to type a long letter instead, requesting an interview. He responded with a succinct message, handwritten on delicate white notepaper. “I’ll be glad to talk with you if we can find the time.”
I took this as a summons to Memphis. Foote lived in a 1930s Tudor ringed by blossoming plum, dogwood and magnolia trees. A maid showed me into a handsomely appointed den with a pitched timber ceiling, dark wood flooring and liquor bottles set on a trolley. The setting wasn’t quite what I’d expected: suburban baronial, more Henry the Eighth than William Faulkner.
The figure who strode briskly into the room a moment later also surprised me. Wearing trim gray trousers and a polo shirt, the silver-haired sage of Ken Burns’s Civil War documentary looked as though he might have played a few sets of tennis before breakfast.
He also seemed more aloof than the grandfatherly figure on television. Without so much as a handshake or hello, Foote led me into a study with a throw rug at the door that said, “Go Away.”
A bed occupied most of the study and Foote pointed me to a chair on one side of it. He took a seat across the bed, as far away as he could get. Angled with his back half-turned to me, he reached for one of a dozen pipes scattered across the desk behind him, tamped tobacco into the bowl, and said by way of small talk, “What can I do for you?”
I wasn’t exactly sure. Foote’s mellifluous drawl and folksy stories on television had captivated me, as had his three-volume narrative history of the Civil War, still a hot-selling classic twenty years after its publication. The seventy-eight-year-old writer had become a curious phenomenon—a Civil War celebrity—and I’d somehow imagined that my cathode-tube acquaintance with him would make it easy to just chat about my travels, and to get his views on some of the impressions I’d formed.
Instead, I found myself groping for one of a dozen Big Theme questions I’d rehearsed just in case on the taxi ride over. When I finally lobbed one across the bed—why was memory of the War so enduring?—Foote smashed it straight back. “Because it’s the big one. It measures what we are, good and bad. If you look at American history as the life span of a man, the Civil War represents the great trauma of our adolescence. It’s the sort of experience we never forget.”
Foote lit his pipe. I lobbed another one: Why did the South in particular cling to remembrance of the War? “It was fought in our own backyard,” he immediately replied, “or front yard if you will, and you’re not apt to forget something that happened on your own property. I was raised up in a rough-and-tumble society. I was in a lot of fistfights, maybe fifty in my life. The ones I remember with startling clarity are the ones I lost.”
How did the experience of defeat define the post-War South?
“It gave us a sense of tragedy, which the rest of the nation lacks. In the movie Patton the general talks about how ‘We Americans have never lost a war.’ Well, Patton’s own grandfather was in Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia. He damn well lost a war.”
We went on like this for half an hour, each question prompting a perfect sound bite of the sort Foote had mouthed for interviewers a hundred times before. I felt as though we were working our way through a responsive liturgy. I also felt like a jerk for wasting his time. It was a relief when the telephone rang.
“You’re speaking to him,” Foote gruffly told the caller, who, like me, must have been surprised to reach the Great Man so easily. As Foote answered a question about rebels in Missouri, I looked around his study. The room appeared as though it hadn’t changed much in the thirty years since Foote began writing there. The phone had a rotary dial. There was no computer, printer or modem. I’d read that Foote wrote longhand, using an antiquated pen dipped in ink. He regarded even the fountain pen as a “mechanical intrusion” and a concession to a modern era of which he didn’t wholly approve.
Foote hung up the phone. “It’s a nightmare, ever since that Burns thing,” he grumbled. “I’m trying to write a novel but mostly I work at answering that phone.”
I asked him why he bothered answering it. “Stupid stubbornness,” he said. “I’ve worked my whole life without a secretary or research assistant. I will not let all this hoorah make me hire one, or take my name out of the book. I don’t want to live in a different way.”
Then, leaning back in his chair, Foote began to speak a bit more personally, as I’d hoped he would. “It’s been a helluva century,” he went on. “I was born during the First World War, spent my adolescence in the Depression and came of age in the Second World War. This is the bloodiest century there ever was.” He paused, smiling into his pipe. “Now I’m living to see another terrible thing—the South joining the party of Lincoln.”
Republicans had recently won a number of congressional seats across the South, in some cases for the first time since Reconstruction. I asked Foote how the party of Lincoln had been viewed in his youth. He put down his pipe, cleared his throat and recited a tuneless ditty:
Abraham Lincoln was a son of a bitch,
His ass ran over with a seven-year itch,
His fist beat his dick like a blacksmith’s hammer,
While his asshole whistled the Star-Spangled Banner.
Foote chuckled. “When I was thirteen or so, I knew reams of obscene doggerel about Lincoln, but that’s the only bit I remember.”
I threw away the rest of my canned questions and listened to Foote reminisce about his childhood in Greenville, Mississippi. In the 1920s and 30s, he said, the sting of Civil War defeat was still so vivid that Mississippians refused to observe July 4th, the day Vicksburg fell. Only the post office—a federal facility—closed for the day.
“I remember in the 1930s there was a family from Ohio in town, God knows why,” Foote recalled, “and on July Fourth they drove their car up on the levee and spread a blanket and had a picnic. They didn’t set the brakes on the car and it ran down into the Mississippi River and everyone said, ‘It served them right for celebrating the Fourth of July.’” Foote chuckled again, adding, “We despised Yankees, just on the face of it.”
Greenville was more tolerant of other outsiders. The Delta town attracted large numbers of foreign immigrants. Foote’s maternal grandfather, Morris Rosenstock, was a Viennese Jew who emigrated to America in the 1880s, found work as a plantation bookkeeper and married his employer’s daughter. Until the age of eleven, Foote attended synagogue each Saturday with his mother. He didn’t recall any anti-Semitism in Greenville; there were more Jews than Baptists in the local country club. But Foote never took to Judaism, and as he got older he realized the broader society wasn’t so accepting as Greenville. This became painfully obvious at college in North Carolina, when the fraternity his friends had joined turned Foote down because of his background.
“I knew all the trouble I’d have down the line,” he said of his Jewish heritage. “I was always not wanting to take on that kind of trouble. It just added one more problem, an added awkwardness to life.” So in his twenties he was baptised and confirmed as an Episcopalian. But he didn’t take to Christianity, either. “I never had much use for turning the other cheek,” he said. “I always buck back, particularly when any authority leans on me.”
This combativeness cost him dearly. Eager to fight the Germans, Foote joined the National Guard in 1939 and rose to the rank of artillery captain. While stationed in Northern Ireland, preparing for the Allied invasion of the Continent, he tangled with a colonel who he felt had insulted one of his men. Soon after, Foote fudged a mileage report so he could visit Belfast, two miles beyond the fifty-mile limit for weekend trips in army vehicles. The colonel and another superior had him court-martialed for falsifying documents.
Returning to America, Foote enlisted as a private in the marines and went through boot camp. But the war ended just as he was bound for combat again, this time in the Pacific. To paraphrase what he’d said of the Civil War, Foote had missed the great trauma of his own generation’s adolescence.
“I felt cheated, as though I was dealt out of the big adventure,” he said. Foote also wondered if the experience of war might have enriched his later writing. “I often wonder how much I could have learned from being shot at and having others fall all around me—assuming I wasn’t one of the ones who fell.”
What Foote had done instead was marry the Belfast woman he’d gone to visit on the fateful trip that led to his court-martial. This struck me as more romantic than going off to fight, but Foote didn’t see it that way. “I felt as though I’d made a fool of myself,” he said. Foote also felt he’d fallen short of what was expected of him as a Southerner and a descendant of Confederates. “Growing up in Mississippi, they were the embodiment of gallantry and chivalry,” he said. “You were expected to measure up to those standards, most of all with regard to physical and moral courage.”
Foote gestured toward a framed certificate on the wall from the United Confederate Veterans. It was dated 1892 and honored his great-grandfather, Colonel Hezekiah William Foote. Before the War, Hezekiah owned five plantations and over one hundred slaves. “I was given clearly to understand as a child that I was a Southern aristocrat,” Foote said.
His great-grandfather had opposed secession but fought without hesitation for the South. “Just as I would have,” Foote said. “I’d be with my people, right or wrong. If I was against slavery, I’d still be with the South. I’m a man, my society needs me, here I am. The difference between North and the South in the War is that there was no stigma attached to the Northern man who paid two hundred dollars to not go to war, or who hired a German replacement. In the South you could have done that, but no one would. You’d have been scorned.”
Foote’s retroactive allegiance to the Confederacy surprised me. It was the honor-bound code of the Old South. One’s people before one’s principles. The straitjacket of scorn and stigma. “It’s a bunch of shit really,” Foote conceded. “But all Southerners subscribe to this code to some degree, at least male Southerners of my generation.” In Foote’s view, this same stubborn pride had sustained Southerners during the Civil War. “It’s what kept them going through Appomattox, that attitude of ‘I won’t give up, I will not be insulted.’”
It took almost a century after Appomattox for Confederate blood to cool. Southerners’ “abiding love” for Franklin Delano Roosevelt tempered their prideful regionalism, Foote said; so, too, did the patriotic fervor surrounding World War II. It was in 1945 that Mississippians finally dropped their eighty-year ban on celebrating Independence Day. This was also when many Southerners stopped referring to the Civil War as the War Between the States. “It was a big admission, if you think about it,” Foote said. “A civil war is a struggle between two parts of one nation, which implies that the South was never really separate or independent.”
Nonetheless, Southern identity—Foote’s included—remained fierce. His National Guard unit was known as “the Dixie Division” and its members stood at attention each time the anthem of the Old South was played. As he trained for war against the Germans, Foote devoured books on Stonewall Jackson. He saw a Union monument for the first time in 1946 when he traveled to Santa Fe with his boyhood friend and fellow writer, Walker Percy. “We immediately made plans to dynamite it,” Foote said.
They didn’t, though the idea obviously stuck with Percy, who later used it in his writing to mock the South’s obsession with the Civil War. In his 1967 novel The Last Gentleman, Percy’s young Southern protagonist confides to a doctor: “When I was at Princeton, I blew up a Union monument. It was only a plaque hidden in the weeds behind the chemistry building, presented by the class of 1885 in memory of those who made the supreme sacrifice to suppress the infamous rebellion, or something like that. It offended me. I synthesized a liter of trinitrotoluene in the chemistry lab and blew it up one Saturday afternoon. But no one ever knew what had been blown up. It seemed I was the only one who knew the monument was there. It was thought to be a Harvard prank.”
Like Percy, Foote valued fiction above all else. He never finished college, nor did he ever receive any formal training as an historian. It was only as a break between novels that Foote accepted a commission to write a “short history” of the Civil War—a project that grew to three volumes and consumed twenty years of his career. “It took me five times as long to write a history of that War as it took the country to fight it,” he said.
When he finished in 1974, Foote told Dick Cavett in a TV interview that he was busily “forgetting everything I know about the Civil War” so he could return to fiction. Despite having spent so long on the history, Foote regarded himself as a novelist, not a scholar (many professional historians agreed, sniping privately about his success and his anecdotal style). But the Ken Burns series catapulted Foote back to his historical work, and forward into the strange world of Civil War renown. Five years after the Burns series aired in 1990, Foote still couldn’t go anywhere without having copies of his books thrust at him to sign—something he refused to do.
“When you sign a book for a friend, it means something, but it means nothing if you sign everyone’s,” he explained. “Also, I find autograph-seekers obnoxious, very unmannerly. I rebuff them for that reason, too.”
I was glad I’d forgotten to bring several of his books to sign. I also sensed that Foote’s initial aloofness, which I’d taken for a distinctly un-Southern frostiness on his part, was more akin to gentlemanly reserve: an old-fashioned, rather English sense of friendship and respect for personal space. There are people one knows and people one doesn’t. One shouldn’t cheapen the former by feigning intimacy with the latter. Like so much else about Foote, there was irony here. A private, almost reclusive man who wrote with a dip-pen and distrusted modernity, Foote had gained his greatest fame appearing before millions of television viewers in the guise of a warm and folksy raconteur.
Many Southerners I’d spoken to felt betrayed by Foote’s appearance in the Burns series, which diehards regarded as wicked Northern propaganda. Foote disagreed, though he did feel “there is some justice to the claim that slavery was overemphasized.” To Foote, the Confederacy’s avowed commitment to states’ rights wasn’t simply a fig leaf for a defense of slavery. “It’s ridiculous now to talk about the right to secede; it was not ridiculous in 1861,” he said. “Not one of those thirteen colonies would have joined the Union if they hadn’t believed they could get out of it.”
Foote’s views on race were also complex. He’d been raised during a period of frequent lynchings and unthinking bigotry. “Brazil nuts were called ‘nigger toes’ and a sling shot was a ‘nigger shooter,’” he said. But Foote had bucked the Southern trend and supported integration early on. He also quit his Sons of Confederate Veterans’ chapter when it chose to honor George Wallace on a visit to Memphis, and later abandoned plans to build a home on the Alabama coast because of a strong Klan presence there.
Nor did Foote subscribe to romantic Southern views of the Lost Cause. Militarily, he believed, the Cause was always lost. Ideologically, the Cause was easy to mythologize precisely because it was lost. “The Civil War monument in my hometown calls the Confederacy the ‘only nation that lived and died without sin,’” he said. “Well, it’s easy to stay pure if you’re never put to the test.”
The victorious North had been put to the test, and in Foote’s view it had flunked. “Slavery was the first great sin of this nation,” Foote said. “The second great sin was emancipation, or rather the way it was done. The government told four million people, ‘You are free. Hit the road.’ Three-quarters of them couldn’t read or write. The tiniest fraction of them had any profession that they could enter.”
Foote felt the consequences of Reconstruction were still with us. But the fault wasn’t all with the government or with white Americans. “What has dismayed me so much is the behavior of blacks. They are fulfilling every dire prophecy the Ku Klux Klan made. It’s no longer safe to be on the streets in black neighborhoods. They are acting as if the utter lie about blacks being somewhere between ape and man were true.”
Like the obscene ditty about Abraham Lincoln, this was a side of Shelby Foote that hadn’t come through in Burns’s documentary. Foote also displayed an intricate sympathy for the early KKK, which ex-Confederates formed immediately after the War to combat what they regarded as the cruel excesses of Reconstruction. “The Klan takes some careful talking about, it’s easy to misinterpret what I’m fixing to say,” Foote cautioned. “But in some ways the Klan was very akin to the Free French Resistance to Nazi occupation. To expect people who fought as valiantly as these people did to roll over and play dead because there was an occupying army is kind of crazy.”
Foote also admired Nathan Bedford Forrest, the Klan’s first Imperial Wizard, a slave trader before the War, and a rebel commander who allegedly permitted the slaughter of surrendering black troops at a battle called Fort Pillow. Foote regarded Forrest as one of the “two authentic geniuses” of the War (Lincoln being the other). A daring cavalry commander, Forrest was the only soldier on either side to rise from private to lieutenant general in the course of the War, and his lightning tactics later inspired Rommel’s use of blitzkrieg in World War II.
In Foote’s view, Forrest was also “a fine man. My black friends abhor him. They want to take his statue down, dig up his and his wife’s bones, and throw them to the wind. But it is not known generally that he dissolved the Klan when it turned ugly.”
Disbanded around 1870 (owing not only to Forrest, but also to a government crackdown), the Klan revived in 1915 following the success of the movie Birth of a Nation and quickly became a potent force nationwide. “The Klan that people remember today is the Klan of the 1920s,” Foote said. “Anti-Catholic, anti-Jewish, anti-black. Forrest’s Klan was anti-black but not opposed to all black people. It was trying to keep illiterate blacks from occupying positions like sheriff and judge.”
Foote’s views on the Confederate battle flag were equally nuanced. In his view, those who saw the banner as synonymous with slavery had their history wrong. The battle flag was a combat standard, not a political symbol. “It stood for law, honor, love of country,” Foote said, and the banner was revered as such by the veterans who had fought under it.
At the same time, Foote recognized that the flag had become “a banner of shame and disgrace and hate.” But he pinned the blame for this on educated Southerners who allowed white supremacists to misuse the flag during the civil rights struggle. “Freedom Riders were a pretty weird-looking group to Southerners,” Foote said. “The men had odd haircuts and strange baggy clothes and seemed to associate with people with an intimacy that we didn’t allow. So the so-called right-thinking people of the South said, ‘They’re sending their riffraff down here. Let our riffraff take care of them.’ Then they sat back while the good ol’ boys in the pickup trucks took care of it, under the Confederate banner. That’s when right-thinking people should have stepped in and said, ‘Don’t use that banner, that’s not what it stands for.’ But they didn’t. So now it’s a symbol of evil to a great many people, and I understand that.”
Foote paused to answer the phone, as he’d done several times. There had been a request to give a speech (denied), a query about Methodism in the War (answered), a question about slavery in Kentucky (deferred). And always the same curmudgeonly tone, as Foote glared at the phone, then picked it up, wearily telling each caller, “You’re speaking to him.”
Reminded that I was yet another consumer of his scarce time, I moved to the topic I’d most wanted to ask Foote about. I’d enjoyed his novel Shiloh, and also read about his frequent visits to the battlefield, a place he evidently regarded with mystic awe. Shiloh lay several hours’ drive east of Memphis. I wanted to know what Foote found so special about Shiloh, and what I might look for during my own visit there.
“For me, something emanates from that ground,” he said, “the way memory sometimes leaps up at you unexpectedly.” His great-grandfather fought at Shiloh. And it was a landscape Foote had traveled over many times in his literary imagination. “If you’ve drawn a picture or written about a particular historical incident in a particular place, the place belongs to you in a sense. I feel that way about Shiloh, a sense of proprietorship.”
Foote had visited Shiloh over twenty times, and once escorted Faulkner there (stopping en route to find a bootlegger so the bibulous writer could down a Sunday morning whiskey). Foote always tried to visit on the anniversary of battle, if possible at dawn when the battle started, and then follow the fighting through the day. This allowed him to reconstruct the battle and appreciate how everything from the foliage to the angle of sunlight influenced the outcome. “If the light and the leaves and the weather are right,” he said, “I swear I can see and hear soldiers coming through the trees.”
The phone rang again. Hanging up, Foote glanced at his watch. I’d been there all morning and sensed my audience was through. We stepped out of his study and back into the present. For all its faults, the late twentieth century had its rewards, including the Mercedes sports car in which Foote offered me a lift to a hotel downtown.
As we tooled into Memphis, past a hideous strip of franchise outlets, Foote retreated again to the 1860s. He’d recently read several soldiers’ memoirs and been struck, as so often before, by the essential difference between their mindset and ours. “It is the simplicity of the people that fascinates me,” he said. “Their minds don’t seem to have been cluttered like ours, they didn’t have all the hesitations about things being right or wrong. They knew, and they acted.”
Foote pulled over at a small park, almost lost amid the mess of modern Memphis. Disheveled men with brown bags lay splayed across benches. At the center of the park rose a massive equestrian statue of Nathan Bedford Forrest. “They ruined it when they cleaned it,” Foote said. “It used to be a dark green bronze. Now it looks like it’s made out of Hershey bars.” The statue had also been vandalized on several occasions.
Staring at the monument, I tried to understand a little of what drew Foote to Forrest. The cavalryman’s deep-set eyes, narrow face and long, pointed beard certainly matched the sobriquet Sherman had once given him: “the very Devil.” Here was a man who had little hesitation about right and wrong. He knew and he acted. “War means fightin’ and fightin’ means killin’,” Forrest famously declared.
To Foote, Forrest also epitomized certain “antique virtues,” such as cunning and initiative, which had been lost in our own century’s warfare. “A soldier is no longer a thinking bayonet. He’s a blip on a radar screen. You can abolish him by pushing a button.” Forrest, by contrast, almost single-handedly changed the outcome of several battles. He also had twenty-nine mounts shot from under him, while managing to personally kill thirty Yankees—a feat that led Forrest to boast that he came out “a horse ahead at the end.”
There was something else Foote admired about Forrest. The crude and contentious cavalryman offered an obvious contrast to the gentlemanly perfection of Robert E. Lee. “In my day, and I think still to a considerable degree, Lee was a Christ figure, without sin,” Foote said. “Nothing pleases me more than to find some shortcoming in Lee, because it humanizes him.”
We returned to the car and pulled back into traffic. “I abhor the idea of a perfect world,” Foote said. “It would bore me to tears.”