Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: THURSDAY, November 11, 1993 TAG: 9311100098
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: EXTRA-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: BY BOB ZELLER LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: CHAPEL HILL LENGTH: Long
After a lifetime of toil in the solitary, silent world of the written word, Foote appeared as a historical commentator on "The Civil War," the 1990 series by Ken Burns on PBS that set records for public television viewership.
Foote was the color man. His stories were of Stonewall Jackson sucking lemons and Nathan Bedford Forrest getting 30 horses shot from under him. He told us of Abraham Lincoln's literary skill and Robert E. Lee's majesty in defeat at Gettysburg.
But it was more than the anecdotes themselves. It was his precision in using the language. And it was Foote himself. He gave us a picture, in his old-fashioned Southern reserve, dignity and charm - and his rich Southern accent - of what Robert E. Lee himself must have been like.
Foote's performance was perhaps the most distinctive element of a superbly crafted series. And it changed his life.
The tidal wave of fame washed over him as he was writing his self-described final work - a novel of his homeland, the Mississippi Delta.
"I have it sitting there, but it's the same thing," the 76-year-old author said late last month, at the beginning of a week as a writer in residence at the University of North Carolina. "For the last three years I've been caught in this hoorah of `The Civil War,' with television and mountains of mail and very large royalty checks.
"And it's disconcerting. I've always been a real private person. And the damn telephone is ringing off the wall. I would not take my name out of the phone book and, yet, I have a peculiar affliction. I cannot listen to a ringing telephone without answering it. So I am whipsawed in all sorts of directions.
"Mail was easier. Any requests for autographs you can throw away. And it's nice. They often send postage with it, so you're able to save the postage. The only good thing that came out of it was a piece of foolishness. I got myself a BMW."
There were, in fact, other pleasant aftereffects.
Foote's own three-volume narrative history, also titled "The Civil War," sold enormously, exceeding its pre-PBS sales by 10 or 20 times.
Foote is still much in demand for his speaking skills.
Last month, he was asked to serve as the Kennedys' personal battlefield guide during a family field trip to the Antietam National Battlefield. Sen. Edward Kennedy was there with his wife, as were sisters, Pat and Eunice, and John F. Kennedy Jr. and Daryl Hannah.
"I said I'd be glad to," Foote said. "I enjoyed it. It was fun."
A catered lunch was served in the back yard of the Dunker Church, a major landmark at Antietam.
And recently, Foote, who lives in Memphis, Tenn., agreed to lecture at UNC as the English department's first Morgan Family Writer-in-Residence.
It is a homecoming of sorts, be cause Foote was a student at UNC in 1935 and 1936.
"You're always attracted by any place you spend your 19th and 20th years, no matter where you spend them," he said.
Foote also cherished his North Carolina experience because "you get to see your own homeland better if you get out of it."
"My attitude toward the Delta, where I was born and raised, which I dearly love and also hate, has changed over time as I've seen more of the world.
"We always considered ourselves the aristocrats of Mississippi. All this business about Mississippi hillbillies and rednecks didn't apply to us Delta people. We were several cuts above that. We spent most of our time running around to dances, the girls with their painted cupid-bow mouths, with red rouge on their cheekbones. It was all very upper-class. And it was much later before I even began to suspect how tacky it all was.
"And the other side of it I saw, too. We really did think that blacks in the Delta were the happiest people on the face of the Earth. Never been a one of them that had ulcers. And no protests of any kind, or even the beginning of one. And it was only later that I saw all the misery that all this fun was based on.
"I realized, in time, that there was never a thread of clothing on my back, or a morsel of food, or an hour's education that didn't come out of some black person working very, very hard for a dollar a day.
"It was a strange society. All of it was grist for my mill. That kind of ugliness is very valuable to an artist who grew up in it and can see it. But there's an awful lot of suffering involved."
And what did he love about the Delta?
"It's something about the joy of life, something of the appreciation of hunting and drinking and dancing, something of the appreciation of the amount of reading I did from the time I was 15 until I was 20. I read everything in the world. It was a wonderful, wonderful time, lying on a swing on the front porch, reading all the time."
Foote is hard-pressed to explain how he became interested in the Civil War, but as a Southern boy, "it was always there, and you knew it was there."
His generation is the last that actually gazed into the eyes of the old Civil War veterans themselves.
"Jeff Davis' home down on the coast, Beauvoir, was an old soldier's home at one time, and I remember being there once, and there were 10 or 12 of them there. Most of them had beards in a day nobody had beards. They finally dwindled away to nothing.
"I think all the veterans I saw probably had been drummer boys or something. And even if they had been Marse Robert [E. Lee] or [Gen. James] Longstreet himself, I wouldn't have known what to ask them."
After the success of his novel "Shiloh," published in 1952, Foote was asked to write a short history of the Civil War.
"And when I outlined it, I saw I wasn't interested in writing a little history of the war," he said. "If I was going to do it, I would go spread-eagled. So I told them I couldn't do the short thing they wanted, but I could do a full-length thing. And they wrote back and said go ahead.
"And I did. For 20 years."
For Foote, a good day of writing has never produced more than 500 or 600 words. His three-volume narrative runs to more than 1.6 million words.
"But I never at any time regretted having been involved in it. I did not regret that I stopped writing novels in order to write history. I felt no different writing history than from the way I felt writing novels.
"If you'll go to Gettysburg and stand by the Virginia statue and look across that valley [where Gen. George Pickett charged], it's nearly a mile wide. And imagine all those guns on that ridge across the way - Cemetery Ridge.
"You can't see how you would step forth and walk across that valley with all those cannons firing at you and all those soldiers behind the stone wall shooting at you.
"But if you will have some understanding of the men who were there, you know you would do it. You know it would be a lot easier to go out in that field than to say, `Marse Robert, I ain't going.'
"And that's what a good historian can do."
Foote is no proponent of political correctness. He opposes any efforts to remove Confederate symbols from present-day life.
"It would take extreme ignorance not to see the nobility of many things about the Confederate cause," he said. "And much of it should be preserved, just as much of it was ground down in dust and disappeared with slavery and secession.
"I understand any black person's resentment of the Confederate battle flag. I know what I would feel if I was black and saw that symbol flaunted in my face. But the fault in that is not the flag itself, but people like me who knew better who let those people fly that flag as a symbol of resistance against the civil rights movement.
"The governor of Georgia called me and wanted to know if I would stand with him on having" the symbol of the Confederate flag removed from the state flag, Foote said. "They didn't adopt the thing until the time of the civil rights movement. It was put there in defiance.
"And I said I would not ever stand with anybody removing any Confederate symbol from anything. But I would be anxious for people to know what it really stood for instead of what it has come to stand for."
Works by Shelby Foote: History The Civil War, A Narrative, Vol. 1, Fort Sumter to Perryville, 1958; Vol. 2, Fredericksburg to Meridian, 1963; Vol. 3, Red River to Appomattox, 1964 Novels Tournament, 1949 Follow Me Down, 1950 Love in a Dry Season, 1951 Shiloh, 1952 Jordan County, 1954 September September, 1978 Play Jordan County: A Landscape in the Round, 1964
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