A Concluding Walk with Shelby Foote: Ken Burns’ “Civil War” and the Future of Literature

Last month in Crisis, novelist and Civil War historian Shelby Foote reflected upon the study of history, Walker Percy, and the life of writing. Here we conclude our conversation with ruminations about the Civil War’s hold on the American imagination and Ken Burns’ panoramic treatment of the conflict. Foote also discusses the present state and future of contemporary literature: What part does education play in the development of the writer’s craft? And where will tomorrow’s deepest expressions of the human spirit come from?

 

You played a central role in Ken Burns’ Civil War series for PBS, but you had little to do with the production itself. What did you think of it?

It’s fine work, of course. But there are imbalances, sometimes serious ones. For example, there’s a great deal about Andersonville, and even pictures of the poor fellows who were rescued from Andersonville. But there’s no attention to Camp Chase or any of the northern camps. And that’s wrong. They were almost as bad. And less forgivable, because those prisoners in Andersonville got the rations the Confederate soldier was getting. The southern prisoners in northern camps did not get the rations northern soldiers were getting. Many of the deaths in northern camps were due to cold weather at Lake Michigan and other places where they didn’t have blankets to cover themselves with and so forth. So I thought that was wrong, to give so much attention to Andersonville and none at all to the other camps. And another thing was that the navy didn’t have enough share in the picture, particularly the total dropping of the fight between the Alabama and Kearsarge, one of the most dramatic things in the Civil War. But it really was a good series nonetheless.

What was said about slavery was true so far as I could tell, but there seemed a problem with focus.

There was. It made it look like the war from the start was a war against this black thing called slavery, and it wasn’t.

And Lincoln would have told you that.

Lincoln did tell you that, when he was walking easy. And there was no emphasis on how many of the northern troops, especially in the western army, were wanting to leave the army once the Emancipation Proclamation came out. It neglects what a huge problem Lincoln had on his hands in making slavery the issue.

But, as I say, the series did a good job, and when I criticize it for things it left out, that’s a rather specious criticism because it’s only 11 hours long. It would take a hundred hours to include so many things that got left out. Ken did try for a balance. There are various factors to consider when you’re making television; for instance, the western campaigns. There’s more of that in there than in most things on the war, but not nearly enough. My main concern was to get a balance, east and west. My thesis is this: the common opinion is that the war was fought in Virginia while there were these various skirmishes going on out in the west. I don’t claim that the opposite is true, but I claim that the opposite is closer to the truth. Anyway, the material, especially the paintings and photographs, are so much more plentiful in the eastern theater, and very few in the west. So when you’re going to make a television thing, you naturally have to tilt toward the east because that’s where your material is.

Have you and Burns discussed this?

Yes, we have. He agrees. He said another nice thing — that this by no means replaces books, and if you really want to find out about the Civil War, that’s where to go.

I dare say that you became a kind of cult figure after the series was first shown on TV. When did you begin to get the sense that that was going to happen? Or did it take you totally by surprise?

Before it was ever on television, they had some private showings of it. The reactions were just what they were when the public showings came out.

Did you watch it on television at the time?

I watched it. And the damn ‘phone wouldn’t stop ringing. But I had gone to an earlier showing in Washington, and it was clear from the reaction there that Ken had a big hit on his hands and that I was fixing to become some kind of star. I was wary. But I really didn’t know how disruptive it would be.

Walker Percy died the May before the public showing in September. Was he aware of the project?

I had the whole set here, and I wanted Walker to see it. But he was sick by then, and he didn’t have a VCR anyhow. I even thought about getting Walker’s son-in-law to rent one so Walker could see it, but I didn’t do it. One of the chief regrets of my whole life is that Walker wasn’t around during all this hoorah — he would have hooted with delight and would have had great fun with me. [Laughter] He would have really enjoyed it.

Do we have a greater sense now of why there is this continuing fascination with that war?

I think that the Civil War in our history corresponds to a horrendous event that happened in your adolescence. You may even forget it, but anything that comes up to bring it to mind, it’s there. So people, even though they don’t know a thing about the Civil War, it’s in their blood somehow. And anything seriously and well-done about it will immediately call up all this unconscious memory. It’s sort of a Jungian thing.

And to think of the personalities that seemed to spring from nowhere. Lincoln, for example.

You’re getting into something there that interests me anyhow, about presidents and so forth. The occasion does seem to make the man. Calvin Coolidge was Calvin Coolidge because he was president in the 1920s. And Lincoln was Lincoln because of the requirements. Lincoln had a marvelous, disarming way of being modest — and he wasn’t modest by a long shot. But he really knew how to use it. He is unquestionably our greatest president, and maybe the greatest American. Jefferson’s only rival I know. But he was devious as hell and utterly honest, all at the same time.

Talk about literary ability. When I was a schoolboy, I was required to memorize the Gettysburg Address, which says that if my [southern] forebears had been successful that “government of the people, by the people, and for the people” would “perish from the earth.” They didn’t pay any attention to what he was saying — it was just so beautiful the way it was said. And it’s not true. If my forebears had won, government of, by, and for the people wouldn’t have perished from the earth. But the beauty of the way he said it made us have to memorize it. [Laughing]

Do you have any idea of what kind of reading Lincoln did?

I know he read some awful trash, especially of poetry. But I know he had a consuming love of Shakespeare, and you can see it in his work. And the Bible he knew perfectly well — he could pick up a Bible and find a verse to prove a point. But whether Lincoln ever read Homer I do not know. I imagine his reading was rather restricted. He certainly read the Federalist Papers and all the pertinent things about being a politician.

Why should our Civil War battlefields be preserved? Why we should is not all that obvious to many. The land is for the living, they might say. Is it really worth the effort and expense?

I think once you stand on that hillside and see where the charge was made at Franklin, or you stand by the Lee Monument at Gettysburg and you see where Pickett’s Charge advanced across the nearly mile-wide valley — not to be able to see that would take away from your appreciation of what went on there. Just to stand there and see it. That’s an obvious answer, but I think it’s true.

 

The Life of Writing

You have said before that your own major influences as a novelist were Joyce, Mann, and Proust. How do you differentiate their influence from that of William Faulkner, whom you knew?

The first modern novel I ever read was Faulkner’s Light in August in 1932. That is a hell of a first novel. It fairly burst over me because he was writing about something I knew. He was writing about Mississippi, things I saw all around me. Even the most outrageous things in the book I saw all around me. So it told me that I could write about something I knew about, which is a great discovery. My reading life was absolutely standard. I started out with the Bobbsey Twins, moved on to Tom Swift, and finally to Tarzan. I was always a reader, and I did read a few children’s versions of things like Gulliver’s Travels and Robinson Crusoe along the way, but they didn’t make much of an impression on me. Then — I’m not sure what it was — I think it was a Sunday School prize of some sort. It was David Copperfield. I was about 11 or 12. I read this long book, and it was just marvelous. I think it was my first realization that there was a world outside the world I lived in that was “realer” than the world I lived in. I knew David Copperfield better than I knew my friends. Now, I didn’t immediately go back to all of Dickens — I went back to Tarzan and the rest. But it made a tremendous impression on me so that when later, when I was 16 or so, I could read seriously, and I got a tremendous pleasure out of reading good books that really dealt with a world.

Now for the obvious question. How does one learn to write?

It’s reading that teaches you how to write. The greatest creative writing teacher I know is Shakespeare, with Dickens coming along somewhere, too. Many great writers seem to be a combination of two previous writers. I was talking with Faulkner one time and told him that I had every reason to be a better writer than he was, because his models, as it seemed to me, were Conrad and Sherwood Anderson, and mine were Proust and him. My two writers were better than his two writers, and therefore I was bound to be a better writer than he was. [Laughter] He was very nice about it; he simply laughed. He didn’t point out the fact that the man doing the writing might have something to do with it, too.

How did you come to meet Faulkner?

Walker [Percy] and I were driving up to Sewanee and from Greenville you go through Oxford. I was bound and determined to stop and see William Faulkner — this was about ’38 or so. Walker said, “I’m not going to bother that man, I don’t know him.” I said, “He’s a writer. We have every right to knock on his door.” So we went and Faulkner came to the door. And he and I walked and talked — he had just finished The Wild Palms that morning. Anyway, Walker wouldn’t get out of the car, so I introduced them standing at a distance, looking at each other. The next time was just before Pearl Harbor. I was home on furlough from the army, and Ben Wasson was there — he had been Faulkner’s agent at one time — and he asked me if I would like to go over and have dinner at Faulkner’s house. I said, “My God, I would.” So we went. I got to know him some over the years. I took him up to the Shiloh battlefield, spent the night in his house, so forth. He was perfectly willing to talk, voluble. He would have these silences when we were in the car driving. That never bothered me — it seemed to me that a man with that much talent is entitled to a few silences. But I liked him very much. He was an outgoing, friendly man.

His generation of writers was reticent to talk about their work. How much was Faulkner like that?

Well, Faulkner strictly observed the rule that all the good writers I’ve ever known observed: they do not talk about anything they’re working on at the time. They know the grievous danger of talking it away instead of getting it done. They all knew that.

You have been critical of creative writing programs in American universities. Why?

I think people learn from their mistakes, and I think they should learn about their mistakes by discovering them for themselves, not having someone else point them out to them. That’s a short circuit of this process. Anything that helps you is a hindrance because it keeps you from learning yourself instead of being told.

So what would be the ideal education for a writer?

It would be an absolutely standard curriculum — mathematics, history, science, all that. Some literary courses, of course, but that is the sort of armature on which you put other things. The best course I had in high school was physics; it showed me how the world runs — why is the sky blue? why is the grass green? It was a wonderful course.

Scott Fitzgerald got a letter from his daughter after she went off to wherever she went — Vassar, Smith, wherever. She wrote very proudly that she was taking a course on Milton. She thought she was going to delight her father in taking such a literary course. He wrote back and said, “You don’t need anybody to teach you Milton, you can read Milton. You take astronomy and things like that.” It’s quite true. You ought to get Milton yourself, not have somebody teach you.

All writers are aware of the danger of overdeveloping the critical faculty. You will develop this damn thing that will ride herd on your writing. I read literary criticism the way some people read detective stories. I find it amusing and all, but when I sit down at that desk, that’s all out of my mind, and it had better be. A writer learns by doing, and by reading people who really know how to do it, without didactic methods. That’s what makes a writer. I read in the paper yesterday a story about Mozart. Somebody, a young man, wrote to him and said, “I want to write a truly great symphony. Can you tell me how to do it?” And Mozart said, “You just put your mind on it and do it.” The man said, “But I want to know how to do it.” And Mozart said, “All I can tell you is that I never asked anybody how.” [Laughter]

There’s an awful lot of foolishness out there. John Dos Passos used to say that America is the hardest place in the world to be a serious writer because the temptations are so great — the Ladies’ Home Journal wants a story, or the Saturday Evening Post wants a story — and you have to support your family and the next thing you know, you’re writing junk. I don’t believe that for an instant because I know that there are no temptations for a writer in doing what he wants to do. They never got to me. I never was deluded into thinking that I should go out to Hollywood and make a bunch of money so I’d never have to worry about it. I knew the snare and delusion of that.

You said Faulkner would sometimes talk about his writing. Did he ever talk about yours?

He said a very funny thing to me. When Tournament came out, I sent it to him. No answer. Follow Me Down came out, and I sent that to him, too. Then for some reason he was down in Greenville a couple weeks later. And he said a wonderful thing. He looked very level at me and said, “I read your book. I liked it. Do better next time.” [Laughter] And I said, “I hope I’ll always do my best.” But I knew what he was talking about. He didn’t say it wasn’t good enough. He meant, “Push. Go ahead.”

Do you read much contemporary fiction?

I don’t. I read less and less as time goes by. Cormac McCarthy is the only writer younger than me that I’m really interested in. I’ll read anything he writes. And I’ll read anything friends of mine write. But mostly, the new young writers I don’t read. And therefore I’m able to form the judgment that they’re not very good. [Laughter] I don’t know what’s happened — I think it’s me, not them. Surely they’re as good as writers ever were. But they seem dreadful to me.

Much contemporary fiction is said to be becoming increasingly politicized. Your September September, some say, could fit into that. Yet it’s a solid novel. How does a novelist deal with social issues without writing manifestos?

He writes about people’s experiences. You don’t talk about lynching somebody, you lynch him. You get down to pain and blood.

What was the reaction to September September in Memphis, where the novel was set?

The reaction was good. I thought there’d be a reaction to the sexual aspect, and there was none at all. The racial feelings had simmered down so much that there was no problem. I thought that the character Rufus Hutton would be such a contemptible character that no one would see what I wanted. But they were crazy about him — I thought they’d totally reject him. So many said they liked him best of anybody in the book. That surprised me.

What about your earlier novels? Were you trying to accomplish particular things with each book?

Each of the books was an attempt to solve a particular problem, mostly stylistic. Also, and I didn’t discern this until it was through, I was examining this mythical country — which isn’t all that mythical at all, it’s Washington County, Mississippi — and I was trying to examine different strata of different kinds of people. Love in a Dry Season is about upper-class people; Follow Me Down is about lower-class people, so on. It was a conscious attempt to look the whole thing over. Jordan County is a novelistic attempt to examine the history of a Mississippi county in reverse — that is, in a series of stories that go back to its beginning.

 

Today’s Literature

Back to what passes for writers’ education today, and about literary pursuits in general. Many writers now, including poets, don’t seem to relish quoting poetry or larger prose passages anymore. We seem to have lost the taste for that kind of memorization.

That’s right. I’ve noticed that about the coming people myself. They’re not well-read.

Do you think that says anything?

It may say that you shouldn’t pray for something because you might get it. I used to be filled with anguish whenever I had to memorize something in school; I just hated it. As it turns out, it was a great thing to have done. I memorize all the time on purpose now, so it can sing in my head. And how strange it is that they’re so much better educated now. That is, they’ve gone to school longer — and better schools, supposedly. It’s a strange business. Leniencies can sometimes result in flabbiness.

One place where the newer writing seems to be less effective than much that went before is memorable description. If you agree with that, what’s missing?

I think that what’s missing — and missing in a great deal of writing that other people admire and I don’t — is a failure to communicate the texture of things, that gritty sense of participation. A great nature writer — D.H. Lawrence, Faulkner — actually gives you that texture. He obeys Conrad’s notion that you should be able to taste, touch, smell, see. That’s what is lacking in this minimalist stuff and many other new forms. Some of the Frenchmen, for instance, are so intent about telling you what’s in a room that you get no sense of the room, only what’s in it. There’s a lamp there, and he’ll tell you what it looks like. But it’s not real, it doesn’t imprint itself.

I guess my favorite poem in the English language is Keats’ “To Autumn.” He doesn’t tell you anything in there, all he does is show you. It is a magnificent poem and it has a great deal of meaning in it. But I can’t say what that meaning is, only what it says to me.

In one place Sheldon Vanauken describes the city of Oxford simply as “river-girt and old.” That seems to have so much more punch than a long paragraph merely describing all the places the river passes.

It does have. Right. The best juxtaposition of words can say a lot of things. Hemingway called them “tricks.” It means skill.

Was there a particular time when you knew you were ready as a writer?

Yes. That’s common. I never had any writer’s block. I wrote five novels in five years and was as happy as a colt in clover the whole time. Because I had a sense that I was doing two things. First — forgive me — I thought I was doing it well. But also I had a sense that I was learning by doing, and that’s a good feeling.

How did you start as a writer?

I was editor of the high school paper. And if I accomplish nothing else for the rest of my life, I was editor of one of the two best high school papers in the United States, Greenville, Mississippi and Greenville, South Carolina. We shared the first prize when I was editor. [Laughter] And I was writing poetry and stories and interviews and editorials. Then, when I went off to Chapel Hill, I wrote short stories for the magazine there almost every month for the two years I was there. I knew then that that’s what I wanted to do. I not only knew it, I acted on it — I took only those courses that I wanted to take. I paid no attention to a degree, was pretty sure I wasn’t going to stay there any four years; sure enough, I only stayed two, mainly because Hitler was stirring up things over in Europe. I knew the war was coming, and I wanted to get back home to be ready for it.

You have said before that, while Faulkner was the most influential writer to you, Hemingway is the one who wrote the “imperishable page.” Would you explain that more?

Hemingway had this marvelous sense of combining simplicity and complexity. He knew that smooth prose, such as Thornton Wilder wrote, would die. He knew how to rough it up, how to put commas in that weren’t needed, how to leave commas out that were needed, to give it this sense of being different of its own accord. You can read the opening page to A Farewell to Arms, which is a pretty lousy novel, and know nonetheless that you’re in the presence of a very, very great writer. You know it. There was a lot of Hemingway in Faulkner, too, I think.

Would Faulkner have admitted that?

I think he would have. He had a lot of admiration for Hemingway. He was in a cab one time with Truman Capote, I think, and someone else. And Capote and his friend were running down Across the River and into the Trees, saying what trash it was. Faulkner stopped them and said, “I have not read that book. But you’re talking about the man who wrote In Our Time, Winner Take Nothing, and I know what you’re saying is wrong.” Shut ’em up. Hemingway had his shortcomings. He was no novelist, God knows he was no novelist. Faulkner had his, too. But in a sense all novels are failures, what Eliot called “a general mess of imprecision.”

Are there any pitfalls in the art of writing you’ve been on guard particularly to avoid?

Well, yes. Sentimentality is the cardinal sin of art, it truly is. Sentiment is all right, but not sentimentality. It distorts everything it looks at — its tears aren’t salty, there’s no real grief. And there’s just no clear vision. My favorite painter probably is Vermeer. There’s nobody weeping over a lost lover in Vermeer; he’s looking at people going about their business. The pictures are enormously dramatic and there are indeed things going on there. But there’s no St. Sebastian stuck full of arrows, or Suzanna bathing.

But many of the letters and songs of the Civil War seem highly sentimental. True?

Yes. But somewhere in the books, though, I say that they earned their sentimentality, and their cynicism. They earned those things. Now, early in the war, they didn’t. But when the blood started running, and the terror moved in, that sentimentality I have a lot of sympathy with. They sang their heads off, around the campfire, on the march. It was all they had.

Did you write much poetry at one time?

Yes, I did. I read poetry first, and I began as a poet, which I think a lot of serious writers do. Walker wrote poetry — reams of it in high school. So did I. In college Walker and I stopped writing it — wisely. [Laughter]

Is it better for a young poet to yield himself to the traditional forms of poetry first, as a matter of discipline?

I know that the [formal] discipline in poetry has produced some of the greatest poetry. And to get even more specific, I’d say that the need for a rhyme has produced some of the greatest lines in poetry. Looking for a rhyme, you can find a great line.

Are we missing something when we start calling the works of writers like Norman Mailer and William Styron “classics” because we can’t know such a thing yet?

That’s crazy. But I maintain that you can know — and Mailer and Styron are not classics, any more than Truman Capote was. I remember well when Capote and Styron and Mailer, and possibly Jones, were considered the big men. And they’re not. Walker Percy came along and left them in the dust. He just came out of nowhere, went right past them.

You were a conscious, serious reader during the 1930s and 1940s. You remember new books by Wolfe and Fitzgerald and Faulkner and so on as they were released. Did that atmosphere push you forward?

Absolutely it did. Each new book that came out was very exciting. The New Yorker had great stories in it. It doesn’t now — although I understand from my wife that a recent one had a fine William Maxwell story, a lovely story. And there was the American Mercury. The Atlantic in those days had good stories. You had good stuff coming out from all directions. Now you look at the New York Times Book Review and there are twice as many non-fiction books as fiction; it used to be the other way.

Does that say anything?

I’m not sure what it says. One thing it may say is that there just isn’t any good fiction — it may say. Although they also review a lot of bad fiction.

I’ll tell you one thing that’s happened — how much importance to put on it I don’t know — but when a little first novel, 200 pages long, costs $21.95, that’s a deterrent in itself, and a strong one. It’s a deterrent first against publishing, second against buying. And even paperbacks cost nine or ten dollars now.

How do you account for so many good writers — meaning prose stylists — starting out wishing to write poetry? And is there a connection between the kind of paleness of much contemporary writing and the decline of the popularity of poetry over the last 30 years or so?

Yes, I think so. I’m not talking about purple patches, but the beauty of good poetry, which comes from poetic rhythms and poetic insight. When you subtract that from the store a writer has there to use, you’re taking out a tremendously important thing. And I think that that is best communicated, particularly when you’re young and susceptible, by poetry. Milton’s style, Marlow’s mighty line. All that has a tremendous effect on a young writer. And it should have.

Author

  • Tracy Lee Simmons

    At the time this article was published, Tracy Lee Simmons was a writer living in Washington, D.C., and a regular contributor to Crisis.

tagged as:

Join the Conversation

in our Telegram Chat

Or find us on
Item added to cart.
0 items - $0.00

Orthodox. Faithful. Free.

Signup to receive new Crisis articles daily

Email subscribe stack
Share to...