Shelby Foote

News Obituary Article

SHELBY FOOTE / CIVIL WAR HISTORIAN: Southern storyteller dead at 88

By JIM AUCHMUTEY

The Civil War, Shelby Foote used to say, was our "Iliad" --- a well of tragedy, triumph and meaning as deep to Americans as the Trojan War was to ancient Greeks. In that case, we've lost a modern-day Homer.

The writer died Monday night at his home in Memphis, his widow, Gwyn, said Tuesday. He was 88.

Foote was a consummate Southern storyteller best known for his epic, three-volume history, "The Civil War: A Narrative," and his folksy commentary on Ken Burns' celebrated 1990 PBS documentary about the war.

Though he was born more than 50 years after Appomattox, Foote seemed somehow to have been there when Fort Sumter fell, when Pickett charged, when Lincoln slumped in his rocker at Ford's Theater. Long years of research and writerly craft made him a living link to the terrible conflict he called "the crossroad of our being."

Foote's career was a wry commentary on fame. A promising young novelist in the early 1950s, he turned his back on it all for a lingering conversation with the past. It took him 20 years to complete his opus; it took TV 11 hours to make him a folk hero.

Burns knew he had bagged a treasure after he concluded two days of interviews with Foote. "Getting Shelby," he said, "was almost like getting Bobby Lee himself."

Foote was the star of the show. He appeared 89 times, looking like Lee and sounding like sippin' whiskey as he spun his yarns of courage and character. For the 14 million viewers who watched the series, he became the face of the South.

In a typical vignette, he told about a rabbit that popped up in a field during Pickett's Charge at Gettysburg and bounded through the Confederate carnage toward the rear. A Rebel glimpsed it, the writer related with a little chuckle, and called out: "Run, old hare! If I was an old hare I'd run, too."

Foote's limitless arsenal of anecdotes came from years spent with the eyewitness accounts of soldiers and civilians long dead but for words and ghostly images. His book jacket photos suggest the marathon nature of the undertaking.

In the first volume (1958), Foote appears as dark-haired and slick-faced as a drummer boy. By the second installment (1963), he wears a gray-flecked beard and the confident smirk of a dashing cavalry officer. By the final volume (1974), the whiskers have gone silver, the eyes sorrowful, and the writer, pushing 60, has the grave countenance of a general who has seen too much.

Family ties to war

Like most Southerners of his time, Shelby Dade Foote grew up in the war's shadow. Born in the Mississippi Delta town of Greenville, he came from a long line of Southern aristocrats, some of whom had fought the Yankees. They chilled Shelby with their tales.

An only child whose father died when he was 6, he read voraciously and decided early on to become a writer. His closest friend was Walker Percy, the future novelist.

After a couple of years at the University of North Carolina, Foote dropped out and tried his hand at fiction. He had pretty much finished a novel when World War II intervened and he went to Europe with the Army as an artillery officer. His service abruptly ended when he was court-martialed for visiting his girlfriend in Ireland without permission.

Back home in Greenville, Foote began writing in earnest. Starting in 1949, he published five novels in six years, all set in Mississippi: "Tournament," about a Delta planter who gambles away the family fortune (as his grandfather actually did); "Follow Me Down," the story of a farmer who kills his teenage lover; "Love in a Dry Season," about life in a Delta town; "Shiloh," based on the bloody Civil War battle; and "Jordan County," another study of Delta life.

Although none of the novels were best sellers, all were well reviewed, and Foote was building a reputation as "the young Faulkner," in the words of one critic.

Then came his calling.

Bennett Cerf, the Random House editor, admired "Shiloh" and in 1953 asked its author whether he would like to mount a frontal assault on the entire war. Foote agreed and budgeted four or five years for the job, figuring history would be easier than fiction.

Like many a general, he'd badly miscalculated. "It was like swallowing a cannonball," he said years later.

A vivid take on history

Foote read scores of memoirs and biographies. He studied the U.S. government's 158-volume military history of the war. He walked a thousand battlefields and once even staged a solitary charge and loosed a Rebel yell just to see how it felt.

The result of this effort --- 1.65 million words, more than twice as long as the Bible --- was old-fashioned narrative history in the grand style of Edward Gibbon's "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire." Foote had no academic theory to prove. He concentrated instead on telling the story as vividly as possible.

His description of Confederate Gen. A.S. Johnston's bayonet charge into a peach orchard in bloom is a good taste of the intense prose: "As he touched his spurs to the flank of his horse, the men surged forward, charging with him into the sheet of flame which blazed to meet them there among the blossoms letting fall their bright pink rain."

Two paragraphs later, Johnston lay bleeding to death, a femoral artery neatly severed by a Minie ball.

For all its eloquence, Foote's masterwork did draw criticism. Some faulted him for downplaying slavery and not analyzing in more depth the underlying political and economic causes of the war. Others, including James M. McPherson, author of "Battle Cry of Freedom," detected a regional bias. More typically, historians criticized the novelist for not adhering to the rigors of professional scholarship. Why, there weren't even any footnotes!

Foote had little patience for such opinions. He meant to write it like fiction, he explained. "Professional historians think good writing interferes with history, and they're very wrong about that. It's the reason people don't read history."

In 1999, the Modern Library ranked Foote's narrative No. 15 on its list of the 20th century's 100 best works of nonfiction in English.

Fame a bit of a nuisance

When popular vindication came with the PBS series, Foote seemed a bit annoyed by all the fuss. He appeared on "The Tonight Show" with Johnny Carson and gave interviews to any reporter who phoned, but he seemed flustered by the fan mail and especially the women who called to coo about his avuncular charm. He regarded the attention as a well-intended but irritating interruption of his work routine, which was as precise as a rooster's.

Foote lived in a brick Tudor house near downtown Memphis with his wife of 49 years, Gwyn Ranier Foote. (Foote was married three times and is also survived by a son and daughter.) Every morning at 8, he retreated to his study and wrote in longhand with an old-fashioned dip pen, breaking only for lunch and his one mental vice, the soap opera "As the World Turns." By the end of the day, he would have at least 500 words to read aloud to himself, usually over bourbon. When he finished something he liked, he rewarded himself by reading his favorite authors, chief among them Marcel Proust.

Foote produced little writing after "The Civil War." He returned to fiction in 1978 with "September, September," a novel about a white group's plot to kidnap a black child. He spent some of his last years working on another novel about the Delta, "Two Gates to the City," whose plot was outlined on his study wall.

But Foote's reputation was already secure, because he never forgot that history is first and foremost a story. He explained his philosophy by quoting the poet John Kea