In his 1977 book Bitterweeds, Malcolm Franklin, the stepson of William Faulkner, wrote the following reminiscence of a conversation with his stepfather:
During one of these discussions Pappy turned to me and said, “Buddy, have you read Shelby Foote’s Shiloh?” I said no, and he told me, “Well, Buddy, you should read it. It’s the damnedest book I have ever read and one of the best.” One day a few weeks later, Pappy said, “I have something for you, Buddy,” and he handed me a copy of Shiloh…. “This is twice the book that The Red Badge of Courage is,” he told me, adding that Shelby wrote as if he had been there himself — “he knows what he’s talking about.”
It’s a recommendation remarkable for its insistence, coming especially as it does from Faulkner, who was not known for his proselytizing. He could probably be expected, though, to recognize a good book when it came along, and he recognized this one.
And so does Vintage Books. Although Shiloh has remained in print in one form or another since its first publication in 1952, Vintage has recently released its own paperback editions of Shiloh and Foote’s 1977 novel, September September. The two books differ greatly in subject matter, but they both carry the stamp of their author’s experimental confidence with narrative voice and his utter mastery of the written word. Yet skillful as they are, these are not books which exist to exhibit the adroitness of an author’s style. There’s no technique for technique’s sake here, as there is with a legion of contemporary novels; to put it pointedly, these books are interesting. This is novel-writing, straight and pure.
Shiloh is Foote’s first effort to evoke the hard reality of the Civil War; it predates the first volume of his histories by six years. It’s an account, or more accurately, a string of accounts, of the great battle that was fought on the bluffs above the Tennessee River for two days in April of 1862. Here we are met with the bright colors and steely textures of battle, and the unrelenting strain of unearthly terror and glory. Real men fought at Shiloh, and Foote has created staggeringly real men to tell the tales. One is Lieutenant Palmer Metcalfe, an aide-de-camp on the staff of General Albert Sydney Johnston, the Confederate general who was killed on the first day of the fighting. Lieutenant Metcalfe provides background to the battle about to be joined by explaining how the two armies had come to meet there. Readers who knew nothing about the battle before reading the book have it all put before them by Metcalfe, who also draws revealing figures of Generals Johnston and Sherman. Next speaks a brave Union officer from Ohio, Captain Walter Fountain, whose story is intermixed with portions of letters home to his wife. He talks to her not of national purpose, but of the small pleasures that soldiers must take on the run:
Charley Gregg has been promoted 1st Lieut in Co G. He bought himself an armored vest in Saint Louis & clanks when he walks…. Ha Ha! You would not catch me wearing a thing like that — it would be like admitting in public you were afraid. The men make jokes about getting him out with tin snips but Charley likes it & wears it all the time clanking.
In the briefest sketches (there are five major ones, plus a smattering of others not as central), Foote manages to create more real — as opposed to sentimentally forced — sympathy than other writers could manage in ten times the space and with twice as much detail.
Private Luther Dade, a rifleman in the 6th Mississippi, conveys one of the most frightful reactions to the heat and splinter of battle since Homer. The armies are moving against each other, a sea of terrified souls, and Private Dade peers up the hill before him:
When we were halfway up the rise I begun to see black shapes against the rim where it sloped off sharp. At first I thought they were scarecrows — they looked like scarecrows. That didnt make sense, except they looked so black and stick-like. Then I saw they were moving, wiggling, and the rim broke out with smoke, some of it going straight up and some jetting toward our line, rolling and jumping with spits of fire mixed in and a humming like wasps in my ears. I thought: LORD TO GOD, THEYRE SHOOTING; THEYRE SHOOTING AT ME! … Their faces were split wide open with screaming, mouths twisted every which way, and this wild lunatic yelping coming out. It wasnt like they were yelling with their mouths: it was more like the yelling was something pent up inside them and they were opening their mouths to let it out. That was the first time I really knew how scared I was.
No political points are made here; there is no partisanship. Lives collide, spirits clash. It’s the stuff of real life, as well as the stuff of real literature: it’s real life, only more so. In his author’s note at the back of the book, Foote cites the works he consulted whilst writing the book, works that would insure the accuracy of every event, quotation, and even weather conditions on those dates. Speaking of the official records he used, Foote says “there you hear the live men speak.” With Shiloh in our imagination’s arsenal, we don’t have to go so far.
September September is another story. On the level where vivid storytelling counts, it’s a piping good one. Set in Memphis against the backdrop of the Little Rock integration crisis in September of 1957, this novel recounts one month in frantic lives lived on the nerve’s edge. Three “roughneck” whites — two men and a woman — drive up from Mississippi to kidnap the young son of a negro family whose patriarch, Theo. G. Wiggins, has distinguished himself as one of the few black men of his day to possess a small fortune with which to pay ransom to free his grandson. The three kidnappers, who have planned the deed to the most paltry of details, count on the integration ruckus going on a couple hours away in Arkansas to frighten the family even more as they watch ghostly black-and-white television images of whites showing up in force outside the Little Rock high school with signs, shouts, and knives.
This is a story about change. It’s a story of racial tension that provides a miniature picture of the American South on the eve of far-reaching social transformations that are to spread into every corner of the country. It’s also about the end of a peculiar kind of American self-assurance as the resolution of the story coincides with the launch of Sputnik in the far-off Soviet Union.
Readers who demand the quickest of paces will grow impatient with September September, but they won’t likely put it down. For like any novel worth one’s time, it is primarily about people: their experiences, widely divergent as they are, forming their responses to circumstances and to each other. Upon the novel’s release in France, a reviewer for L’Express dubbed Foote the inventor of the “thriller au ralenti“: the slow-moving thriller. Foote alternates between third-person observation and first-person sections — called “Voices” — where characters tell their own stories. Such technique slows the story down, but the reader is repaid with amply drawn portraits that make September September a good read, not to mention a memorable one.