Appreciation: Shelby Foote, man of the South
Shelby Foote, the author who died in Memphis June 27 at the age of 88, never imagined fame would come the way it did. As a youth in Mississippi, he dreamed of being a great novelist, like William Faulkner, whom he and his boyhood pal Walker Percy once visited. Foote wrote novels but none as acclaimed as those of either Faulkner or Percy. It was his gigantic piece of nonfiction–a three-volume, 2,934-page, 1.5 million-word history, The Civil War: A Narrative–that convinced critics of Foote's remarkable skills. But despite the 20 years of research and writing he put into his monumental work, most Americans would never have heard of Shelby Foote. That changed over the course of one week in 1990–the week the writer became a talker.
In five consecutive nights in the autumn of that year, Foote made 89 appearances on Ken Burns's PBS series The Civil War. Fourteen million viewers saw him in his Memphis study talking about the war as if it had happened the day before. His detailed knowledge, Delta drawl, and courtly manner helped make the series a smash hit and turned him into a prime-time star, a status ironically that he did not totally enjoy. He lamented "this hoorah" and "this ruckjack," the commotion that brought forth a "horrendous" flow of letters and phone calls, not to mention nosy questions from journalists. When one reporter asked if he had any hobbies, he replied: "Absolutely not." Then he added, "I drink from time to time."
When I first met him in the spring of 1991, he was sitting on a bar stool on the steamboat Delta Queen, a few months into the hoorah and ruckjack. I was among more than 200 Dixiephiles from California to New England enrolled in a grits-and-egghead ride–"the College of Southern Studies on the Water"–down the Mississippi from Memphis to New Orleans. Foote, hired by the University of Mississippi's Center for the Study of Southern Culture, was on board to enjoy the trip with his wife, Gwen, and his son, Huger, and to do a talk on the Battle of Vicksburg.
Just before our bar chat, the Delta Queen had docked in Greenville, Miss., where the levee was festooned with "Shelby Foote Day" banners hailing the city's native son. Foote shook a lot of hands at a riverside ceremony but said little. Back on the boat, he told me how he and Walker Percy were influenced by Percy's uncle, William Alexander Percy, Greenville's planter-poet of the 1920s and '30s. "Mister Will raised Walker, and Mister Will was like a daddy to me," he recalled. "He was not an adviser or even a model but an example. If he could write books, we could write books."
We discussed the exodus of Jews from the small-town South, a subject mentioned in a Delta Queen lecture by Eli Evans, the North Carolina-reared New Yorker who wrote Judah P. Benjamin, the Jewish Confederate. I noted that the synagogue in my Mississippi hometown, Natchez, had hundreds of members in the early 1900s but now barely 15 or 16. A similar decline, Foote said, happened in Greenville. "I remember when we had more Jews than Baptists in the Greenville Country Club," he said. "They were the people who insisted on having good libraries and good schools."
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