Tuesday June 28, 2005

Shelby Foote 1916-2005

Shelby Foote, best known as a Civil War historian, has died in Memphis at age 88. Foote was a rare but commanding presence when I lived in Memphis. I wrote him a letter once, hoping to talk to him about an avocational interest I then had in Greenville, Miss., the Delta town where Foote and Walker Percy grew up in the shadow of Will Percy, a poet and Walker’s uncle. I long ago lost the tape, but I remember him telling me—in his archetypical drawl—that he didn’t get “down home” much anymore. “It’s all whittled away to nothing,” he said. “And the young folks don’t have much fun anymore.” He also said that it’s good to be wary of inspiration because that’s where the worst writing comes from.

Foote, a devouted fan of Proust, started out as a novelist but got sidetracked by his mammoth The Civil War: A Narrative, which he conceived as a classical narrative, comparable to Thucydides’ history of the Peloponnesian War. The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy is a must-read for would-be writers, as Foote, a realist and atheist, counsels the late-blooming Percy, a lay philosopher and convert to Catholicism, on developing as a writer, only to be eclipsed—in fiction, at least—by his childhood friend.

Foote is to be admired, however, for letting the book be the boss, as they say, when it came to his still celebrated history, which—he notes with pride in the letters—is as long as Remembrance of Things Past.

Posted by jim at 03:43 PM ||