Civil War author, Shelby Foote - Stars in Their Courses - The Gettysburg Campaign - 1994 Interview

shelby foote on the battle at gettysburg and his book stars and their courses this lasts about an hour shelby foote author of stars and their courses the gettysburg campaign where did you get that title it comes from the bible the stars and their courses fought against cicero when deborah whoever was drove this tent peg in his temple freeing the jewish people from his tyrant she explained that he had been led into this terrible tragedy that happened to him by the stars in other words fate had brought him there and the title ties in with robert e lee being led into defeat of pickett's charge by success after success after success until finally uh fate decided to hammer him down and they did pick its charge gettysburg was fought when it was fought on three days of the first second and third of july what year 1863 almost in the middle of the war and this is called the modern library of the world's best books right why did you decide to do this book i mean is this the only one you've done in this series yes it's the only one in that series i'm on the advisory board of the modern library and they asked me what of mine i'd like to have there and this is a chapter from my three-volume civil war narrative and it is a central chapter of the central volume so it's sort of if i might say so the capstone of the arch of that whole narrative of the war and why did you want to pick that it uh it is more a complete story in itself than any other section this narrative is woven in and out of other things but this chapter better than any other that i know of tends to stand by itself and could be a book of its own if someone could someone buy this book and not have read your others and be comfortable reading this i think so it's one of the few instances of an excerpt of 90 000 or so words that you could do that with out of that narrative over what span of time did you write your three volume set i began it in 1954 under a contract with bennett surf at random house for a short history of the civil war and i sat down to outline this short history and saw that i would be simply writing a summary and wouldn't be interested in doing it so i wrote and told them at random that i'd be willing to go whole hog spread eagle on the thing three volumes and there was some hesitation i presume but in about a week i got word to go ahead and i went ahead for the next 20 years i finished it in 74. i began it in the spring of 54 and finished in the spring of 74. and i did not do anything else during that whole time of any import i didn't write a novel i didn't do any of those things just work on the wall where were you living in 1954 i was living in memphis i had just moved there from my home about 150 miles down river in greenville mississippi in the mississippi delta day and i'd moved up to memphis and one of the reasons i accepted this job offer the right civil war thing was that i just finished five novels and they were more or less related to each other and i was looking forward to writing another set of five but i thought it might be nice to take some sort of vacation to break the time between the two of them and i was going to spend this year or maybe a year and a half writing this this civil war piece and the next thing you knew i was ended up to my neck and happy the whole time i have a strong belief that novelists have a great deal to teach historians about plotting about character drawing about other things especially the concern about learning to be a good writer which many historians don't bother to do and i was happy the whole time i never felt really different right in the history from what i'd felt writing novels the 11 part series i think it's 11. correct me if i'm wrong on the civil war on public television the burn series your face is on there a lot right how many hours did they tape it was kind of strange i had two sessions at my house with with ken and his crew and i took them to shiloh and i took them to vicksburg and we did a little filming at shiloh and a little at vicksburg but most of it was done right there in the sitting room at my house and i think he had maybe four hours of tape out of which he took what he wanted how has that changed your public uh purse well i mean that that's what it did change is my public thing it uh it vaulted me into the public detention which had uh been menescue before that and uh i had all kind of reactions to that happening but it sold books that's a glorious thing about it the the war had come out it stayed in hardcover but it also came out in vintage which is a softback subsidiary around them and uh it took off like a skyrocket after this television program up till that program do you know how many copies were sold it sold rather well it it did well it got good reviews for all three volumes and was selling well but it uh it really took off after the television any idea how many uh volume one is in its 21st edition now i think it's uh it's a huge number would that mean hundreds of thousands of books yes for the three volumes so what what's happened to you since you've been seen by so many people uh i i i get this strange star quality reaction from people which i find rather unpleasant really crossing an airport or going somewhere to deny something there are people who come over and say how much they enjoyed the war i i haven't yet had anyone come up to me and take the trouble and say they didn't enjoy it but they do tend to come over and say how do you deal with it i tell them that i'm glad to hear it uh and one reason i'm so glad to hear it aside from personal vanity is i'm always pleased to know that i might have had something to do with people beginning to understand the american civil war which i think is enormously important for every american citizen somebody told me that you didn't like to sign books i don't sign books except for close friends and i do it for two reasons one is i think it makes it mean something that way when you do sign it and the other is i'm saving myself and awful lot of other people a lot of trouble not fooling around that autographing business i think it's ridiculous when did you decide to do this early on way back when i was writing first first novel i did it that way do you find people get mad at you because you won't do it occasionally somebody gets mad but mostly when i tell them why they say i understand that yes that's right they even approve of it yeah when did you first get interested in the civil war any uh deep south boy anyhow and probably all southern boys who knows they've been familiar with the civil war as a sort of thing in their conscience going back i honestly believe that it's in all our subconscious this country was into its adolescence at the time of the civil war it really was it hadn't formulated itself really as an adult nation and the civil war did that and like all traumatic experiences that you might have had in your adolescence it stays with you the rest of your life certainly in your subconscious most likely in your conscience too and i think the civil war had the nature of that kind of experience for the country we now recognize anybody's looked into it at all realizes that it truly is the outstanding event in american history insofar as making us what we are the kind of country we are emerged from the civil war not from the revolution revolution provided us with the constitution it got broke us loose from england made us free made us men but the civil war really defined us it uh it said what we were going to be and said well we're not going to be it drifted away from the southern mostly virginia influence up into the new england and middle western influence and we became that kind of nation instead of the other kind of nation what would have happened if stephen douglas had won the presidency in 1860 i i can't help but think i i usually don't like what-ifs and and so on but i think that if if douglas had been elected it simply would have postponed the problem i think the problem was there uh sue had caught an irrepressible conflict and i think he was there and i think it would have been there while douglas was there or certainly after douglas left all these splits were going on the wigs were dissolving or had dissolved there were issues that were so bitter between the abolitionists in new england and the fire eaters in south carolina and various other places in the south i'm almost willing to believe that with all our genius for compromise there still wasn't any way to settle this thing except by fighting the most regretful thing is that the thing went on for four years was an incredible savagery uh that's the great shame there was bound to be a fight but for it to be the fight that it was with literally more than a million american casualties is uh that that need not have been something should have stopped it before that how many men fought on the union side and how many on the there's a there's a good deal of argument about that i've forgotten the exact figures uh there probably were a million and a half union and possibly as many as 80 80 800 000 confederates maybe those figures will hold how many died the deaths total about 650 thousand it might two things might bring home to you how savage it was uh all the american wars combined now this is somewhat unfair because i'm only talking about american casualties and those other wars i'm not including the foreign casualties but more americans were casualties in the american civil war than in all the wars we've been engaged in the revolution the war of 1812 the mexican war all rolled in together not as many casualties as there were at shiloh the first great battle of the war lasted two days there was 25 000 cashless there and that's the total cashiers of all the american wars up to there what was greenville mississippi like greenville mississippi just barely existed at the time of the civil war where i'm from is called the mississippi yazoo alluvial delta and it was only settled along the yazoo and the mississippi the whole interior was one great swamp filled with alligators and moccasins it wasn't until after the civil war they put the railroad in and could get the trees out and then dig the drainage dishes and it became habitable but greenville was shelled during the war it was a little town on the river and it was shelled as a diversion to grants attack on vicksburg you were born in 1916 1916 where what were your parents like what did they do my father came from a long line of illustrious mississippians his grandfather my great-grandfather commanded the knoxville cavalry at shiloh and his father was a planter there in the delta and he expected to live a life of ease mainly involving dice shooting and cards and whiskey and flying around and his own father short-circuited that by put pushing his fortune across poker tape and lost the plantation so my father had just married my mother and scared knew what he was going to do with himself and her father got him a job as a shipping clerk at armored company there in greenville and in the next six years somehow or another he he changed everything about himself and uh wound up managing armor branches and pensacola jackson and it's just been transferred to mobile where he was the head man in the southern region and he died of septicemia for my operation on his nose i was just short of six years old so i was uh i often look back on it uh if he had lived it's pretty clear he would have wound up in chicago with almond coming and i'd have been a chicago kid going to prep schools and living in some suburbs and i consider that a great deliverance i'm sorry i had to sacrifice my father to do it but it's it's strange what what accidental things like septicemia can do to people's lives do you remember him at all i do it's a good test for me or how bad people generally can remember i remember very almost clear snapshots when i was like four and five uh but i'll tell you a strange thing about memory uh it fades i'm 77 now your memory fades and i will remember my father very clearly and then it'll fade and then about another five years when it's almost faded out of sight i'll have a very vivid dream of him and the memories back fresh again in my conscience that's a strange phenomenon to me that's your mom my mother never remarried and i was an only child and uh her her devotion to me uh meant so much to me because i was a kid who stayed in trouble all the time i was headed to the high school paper and dedicated myself to giving the principal a hard time and when it came time for me to go to college i applied chapel hill for admission and received a letter back saying we're sorry there's no place for you here the principal had taken the trouble to write them a letter saying do not let this boy in your school under any circumstance but i got in the car and drove up there and got in line for registration when i reached the desk they looked in the file and said they told you not to come and i said i know you did but i didn't think you meant it now this is 1935 there were empty rooms and dormitories and everything else and they said all right since you're here so so i went to school why did the principal feel that strong because i've been giving him a hard time as edited to the high school paper how did you get interested in even writing that's always hard for a writer to say um i'm sure my interest began in an interest in reading which then was translated into an interest in writing how did this fellow do this i can remember in a sunday school prize or something when i was about 11 years old i won a copy of david copperfield after that time i'd read the bobsy twins and then tom swift and the rover boys and tarzan but since i got this as a prize i decided i should read it and i found a world that was realer than the world i lived in unlike these tarzan and other books this was a whole another world and it was a world of art i couldn't have defined it as that but one thing i knew david copperfield better than anybody i knew in the real world including myself and i said my god to myself this is a whole world i didn't then read all of dickens or start becoming a serious reader until three or four years later but i remember vividly having that reaction to that book david copperfield i think most writers probably have that experience what year did you get out of uh college i only went two years uh the war was heading up uh hitler was on the rampage and uh i knew we were going to get in and i wanted us to get in it so i came home to spend the year that was left getting to know my homeland before i got my head blown off in the war and then i joined the mississippi national guard when hitler went into poland this was by way of telling me he couldn't get away couldn't get away with that and the guard mobilized in november 1940 we went down to camp blanding and began basic training did you go overseas yeah i went to um office candidate school at fort sill oklahoma in i think it was january 42 right after pearl harbor and finished there came back to camp shelby mississippi and was carried out to camp boy texas in brownwood near dallas and fort worth and then went overseas and joined the fifth division which had been in iceland for since way before pearl harbor and ran crossways of a colonel on the staff there who's well known for somebody you should not get crossways of and uh he lay for me and finally got me on falsifying a government document uh it was a rule that you could not use a vehicle for recreation beyond the distance of 50 miles and we were 54 miles from belfast so it was a common practice among us right 50 miles our battalion was outside that 50-mile radio and that was the charge of falsifying the government document and i was court-martialed sent home i stayed home i worked on a local desk at associated press for about six months and i couldn't take it any longer and went down the marine corps and i was in the marine corps for a year and they dropped the bomb and the thing was over and i came on home the marines were funny about that they said my fellow marines went through boot camp parasite and everything i haven't been a captain in the army and they said you used to be a captain in the army you might make a pretty good marine if you work at it at all i enjoyed it i like the marines so if i figure right in 1954 you were about 37 38 years old when you started writing about the civil war right when you went to europe and you were in the marines and in the army did you know anything about the civil war then yes i carried with me uh in my baggage i carried gfr henderson stonewall jackson i had uh freeman's r e lee with me as often as i could lug it around and i spent my spare time even then figuring out what happened during the seven days and drawing maps and things it always fascinated me you say in this uh book for the modern library at one point that when robert e lee was up north people would stop him from the north and get his autograph right how come there was an uh a general uh admiration for lee it's curious in the civil war the men who were most hated were not very dangerous men they were men like butler and uh god knows who you name on the southern side that they hated so much they were not much killers the real killers like grant lee were enormously admired by the opposite side there's very something very strange about that but it's uh it it is strange when you started really thinking about writing when you were 37 or so did had you been to a lot of civil war sites yes it was a sort of hobby of mine i went but i was going back and forth in new york three or four times a year driving in those days up us-11 through the shenandoah valley and all that and i would stop at battlefields all along and go out of my way to go to them just to see what they felt like in visiting battlefields it's very important that you go at the same time a year if possible on the very anniversary of the battle because the place is so different other times a year to understand the battle shiloh if you went there when it was fought in early april you would see what it was like if you went there in february or later on in july it'd be a different field you wouldn't understand the way uh the new growth of leaves choked everything in so nobody knew what direction north south east or west was so you get that thing and you get the weather you get the soil you get the coloration of things get the true feel of it you said earlier that the civil war defined what we were going to be right but we're not going to be right what are we well the civil war uh included emancipation and it was immediately followed by true emancipation i mean the constitution freed slaves not just those who win rebel hands is lincoln's proclamation claim before you go right define the word emancipation what does it mean emancipation means a setting free of people who are in slavery uh lincoln's emancipation proclamation did not free anybody what it did was it declared that all slaves not then in territory occupied by the union would be free as of january 1st meaning if i can reach out and touch you you're not free if you're beyond my reach you're free well they didn't immediately say i am free and marred somewhere they couldn't but the real emancipation constitutional amendment freed slaves freed all the slaves and slavery is a a huge stain on us we all carry it i carry it deep in my bones the the consequences of slavery uh but emancipation comes pretty close to being as heavy as sin they told what is it six seventh out seven million people uh you're now free hit the road and there was the friedman's bureau which was a sort of joke there were people down here exploiting them three quarters of them couldn't read or write had no job no hope of a job no way of learning a job even and they drifted back into this painted situation under sharecropping which was about all they could do and uh to this day uh we are paying and they are paying for this kind of treatment their emancipation i don't mean it should have been a gradual emancipation i mean there should have been true preparation to get these people ready for living a kind of life they were free and should have been free all along but they were not prepared for living in the world they'd live in living on the conditions of slavery which uh kept them from living in the world you say also to find what we're not what we were not going to be and what does that mean it means the loss of the so-called southern virtues some of which are very real uh man's word is his bond uh the business of not insulting each other with impunity some of these things are very small but they're way larger in the human scale you moved to memphis uh which is in the south right why did you choose to leave greenville to go to memphis what was the real reason i never left home when i came to memphis memphis is the capital of the mississippi delta even though it's in tennessee it's the city if you're in the south delta you go to new orleans if you're anywhere above the middle delta you go to memphis uh i don't think there's been a season of my life that i hadn't been in memphis with my mother one of my aunts and uncles up there shopping and everything people went up there for everything men to buy guns and shoes and things and women to buy clothes it's uh it's just this was before there were malls and designer dealers with designer clothes in small towns so excursions to memphis were frequent and for shopping purposes you have a family i was just my mother and i all the time until right after the war i was married got divorced and then remarried again after i moved to memphis i've been married now for 36 years i think children one child son 32 years old what's he doing he's a photographer and uh getting to be a good one did did he take any of the photos of you that we see ever no he takes photographs from me but for some reason another that that that brand of nepotism i haven't been involved with where was this photo taken that was taken at home but it was done by a photographer from denver his name is larry shirkey and that's a a cut from a larger photograph do you purposely have all your photos taken with this without a smile i think that i do uh i share that with abraham lincoln there's only one photograph of lincoln that has a little bit of a ghost of a smile and that's the last one the one was taken just shortly before the assassination and when he knew the war was one because if you go back and look at your three volume series there are different pictures on them right at that age and and when did you did you consciously decide to have always a serious look i don't think so i i think it probably a battery of psychiatrists could figure it out i think but no not not consciously for one thing i don't like having a picture made and that's one reason i'm i'm frowning saying i don't like this i don't like this experience when did you write your first novel i wrote my first novel i said i left school to come home and wait for the water to start i wrote the first draft of my first novel during that period while i was waiting for the war to start in 1939 and 40. and then when i came back from war in 45 i sat down and revised it and it still was my first novel it was published by dial in 1949. what was it it was called tournament and it's a story about a planter in the mississippi delta about his rise and fall very uh loosely based on my grandfather's life although he died before i was born so it wasn't out of personal acquaintance with him you've written how many novels i've written six novels five before the war and one since how many non-fiction total books uh this is my only non-fiction the civil war narrative do you like one over the other no uh i i suspect i like to think of myself as a novelist because that's what i was for most of my life and that's the way i thought of myself and i haven't changed uh and it pleases me when someone tells me what they like best is my novels but uh no i i i i face the fact that i probably am more apt to be known for writing this this through volume history than anything else ed by the way since your fame from television have your novels sold in it yes they have vintage has brought them out in softback those that were out of print are back in print and they do quite well uh one of the things that in one of the notes one of your books i found was that one of your favorite uh or your favorite historian is tacitus is that how you're pronouncing it who was he tastus was a a roman historian right after the birth and death of jesus uh and he is above all a writer test style is just a joy to be involved with whether in their original latin which i can barely stumble through or in a decent translation it's very hard to get a good translation of testis a man named broad rib did pretty good and uh there's something about him he writes about how i play scoundrels for the most part and he takes that roman empire apart some historian said about i guess was claudius uh that he um was a successful emperor hard-working everything else and then alas he fell upon the pen of tasks which always tickled me as rule but i like testis very much other historians i like a lot when were you introduced to tesla's probably during the high school probably was when i first encountered i took latin in high school we didn't have testosterone that's just too hard to read you do season and then finally virgil but you don't get to test this until you go on from there and also you mentioned the peloponnesian wars right cities are there any is there any relationship between what you read there and what you have found about the civil war yes a great deal uh i tell you something interesting stylistically um there's a strong belief i think it's utterly true that given and writing the decline and fall was strongly influenced by fielding's tom jones there's also a strong belief that thucydides history of the peloponnation was strongly influenced by his reading of aeschylus and sophocles i believe that the artists are out front and have a great deal to teach historians about a good writing and dramatic composition which i consider the best history to be and aristotle said uh in criticizing great drama that you learn first you learn how to write well a good sophomore high school can do a surprisingly good description of a sunset then you learn to draw characters that can stand up and cast shadow and the last thing you learn to do is plot that's the skill that comes last if it comes at all and that is where i think historians neglect a huge advantage i think history has a plot you don't make it up you discover it it's there oscar wilde talks about life imitating art i have noticed that when a man dies no matter at what age or by what cause his life then has a beginning in the middle and an end and sometimes his death explains his youth good friends of mine who were killed in the war spent their youth exactly as if they knew they're going to be killed over plastic it's a it's a very strange business but that's art taking over insisting on giving a thing form when it seems to be formless and i think that when you supply that form and i mind you i'm not talking about super pose superimposed i discover the form it makes that a very exciting reading experience uh if you pick up your civil war series or this book you just well there's actually in this book there's a little introduction about shelby foot tells us about you but your other books you just start right right off so does the narrative there's no preface saying i hold my debts to this and that you know that all comes at the end it starts and in the uh in the full narrative the sections i never called books chapters chapters in my novels but in the history i was careful to call it chapter one chapter two emphasizing its uh kinship to the novel there are no footnotes and no bibliography the subject after 100 years is well enough known not to need footnotes the civil war footnotes are extremely useful to other historians and i was writing for historians enjoyment and i hope instruction but mainly i did not want to interrupt this narrative with this bunch of footnotes down at the bottom of the page where your eye leaves the story every now and then to lance down at the footnote uh i thought that the footnotes would cost me more artistically than they would gain me in academic respect who's ralph newman ralph newman is a civil war enthusiast from chicago and one of the leading persons to make the civil war into the american consciousness through a thing he had called the american lincoln bookshop there in chicago he was one of the founders of the civil war roundtable in chicago which i think was the first of the round tables they during this long before this period of the huge popularity civil war were working away at it and doing very interesting stuff brianna bring it up you also mentioned one of your books your comments at the end that he came out with a bibliography that took made you didn't have to do it he and his friend pete long published a separate bibliography uh that covers everything and i said if you want to know where i got my books go to go to go to newman's bibliography that's where i got 350 books in the civil war about that number was the working library i had near my in my desk at all times i worked from printed sources entirely i did not get into the archives and dig around among manuscripts have you read all those books yes i had i read them and read them with pleasure most of them one of the other things i noticed in reading this is that you'll just start with a name i mean there's not an explanation of where this person comes from and all right what i do is i work in development i don't stop the story to tell you who somebody was i release things about his life as the story goes along i've got a long way to go you see i've got a million and a half words there and i take my time uh you don't find where lee courted his wife until the battle of fredericksburg he's looking through his binoculars across the rappahannock at an oak tree in the yard of a house over there and he that's where he courted his wife um and it picks these pieces up as you go along until finally i hope you get to know these people the way you do get to know people in real life find out little by little about them instead of just three pages of biography where do you where have you written all these books physically i wrote the first volume on the exact western city limits of memphis because it's on the bluff overlooking the mississippi river the second volume was written on the eastern limits of memphis which yates road was then the eastern limits of that and the third volume was written where i live now right in the geographical center of memphis all three volumes were written every line of them there in memphis in a house or an office or in a house i've always always worked in a room uh where i usually sleep so that i sleep near my desk and the typewriter's over here and uh there's something about it when i go somewhere else like in the summer go down on the coast to something i i can't work away from home i'd have to stay there for two weeks before i could start writing i'm not like say d.h lawrence who could write anywhere and in fact never had a home but uh to me it's a it's a very deliberate thing five or six hundred words is a good day for me i write with a dip pen which causes all kind of problems everything from finding blotters to pinpoints uh but it makes me take my time and it gives me a real feeling of satisfaction and i'm getting where i'm going what's a dip pen it's the kind you see in post offices all the time when you were a boy i would love to find one of those ink wells they had in post offices they had a spring in them when you pressed down it would wet the pinpoint and when you lift it out it would close it again so the ink didn't evaporate i can't find one i'm absolutely certain right here in washington there are five million i've been a warehouse somewhere but i can't find one but a dip pen uh you have to dip it in the egg write three or four words and dip it again and it uh it has a real influence on the way i write so different not only from a typewriter but from using a pencil or finding pad what do you do with it after it's written the 500 words every day i said it decided to dry then uh copy it off typewriter copy it make a typewritten copy of it and then read copy on that until finally the day is over and i'm always satisfied with it and i put it on the stack make a clean copy and put on stack that way i don't have to engage in something that to me is a particular form of heartbreak which is revision i don't do that my best friend in life for 60 years was walker percy he had exactly the opposite he said if i knew what was going to happen next i wouldn't be able to write i wouldn't be interested in writing if i knew what was going to happen i'm the other way and so you're never edited no there's there's no no real need i may take out a comma or put in a hand or something but very minor stuff you know you have this arrangement with your publisher yeah my editor at random house for 35 years now is has been bob loomis a good editor and uh our arrangement is that uh he will encourage me he will do everything in the world and make me feel about that i'm doing well and this and that and the other but he doesn't mess with my doesn't mess with the text you know many authors that have this kind of arrangement uh william faulkner had it i've seen a fault in the proof somebody presumed to read the galley proofs and make a correction of something the falcon scratched it out the next time he got down to one he saw another correction mark and he wrote god damn it legally long that's the way i felt about it how long does it take you to write the 500 600 words a day a long time most writers i know work all morning and then free in the afternoon evening some few i know work at night very few riders i know work over four or five hours a day which is a long day for a writer i work in the morning three or four hours and then go back in the afternoon and work three or four hours it's because i'm a slow writer i have to do that much to mount i write about a hundred thousand words a year year in and year out do you keep all of these facts and figures in your head mostly in my head uh particular quotations that i want to be sure to keep up with i'll write on a piece of paper and stick on a a piece of beaver board that's in front of my desk so i won't forget to get it but mostly i carried this in my head but by way of preparation for this i did something that i think anybody would find useful i got large cardboard posters and drew columns down it and then put the year 61 2345 and i'd had diplomacy military political and other things and so that at a glance i could tell what was going on at that particular time and that's where the plotting came in so that you weave the diplomatic situation in the political situation and the military situation all into a narrative we hesitate to ask this because i'm not sure which way you'd go with it but because you might not like the question but who are your favorites who are your favorite characters after writing all these words about the civil war you mean civil war characters yes uh it's easy to state who your favorites are who are because there are many people's favorite robert e lee u.s grant stonewall jackson tecumseh chairman but i have some favorites that are grievously neglected one of them is an arkansas general named pat claban patrick ronyan claibon from arkansas and he probably was the best division commander on either side and in his day he was killed at franklin about a year before the end of the war but in his day he was called the stonewall jackson of the west and well known and adored by his men and he's been largely forgotten today he's buried right there at hell now where crawley's ridge comes to the mississippi and i'm very fond of clayman and uh i got the same reaction as clavin's death that his men got i was greatly saddened to lose him you get you get a great fondness for these people or a severe dislike for them and if you have a dislike for them uh you lean over backward hoping not to let it show uh i'm sure it does this is about this particular book is in this modern library series it sells for 1350 i think right what is this syria and you're on this board yeah what is it well uh i'm surprised you would ask because to me being as old as i am the modern library was what i grew up with it was my introduction to everybody gertrude stein william faulkner everybody was in the modern library and that's where you went if you wanted to keep up with that plus the classics the we've talked about tacitus and thucydides i read them in the modern library uh times being what they were but they were 95 cents a copy in those days not nearly as well printed or as handsomely bound as now but 95 cents you could get all of thucydides well ask them because it seems like there's a new something new going on because right you see these now in a lot more bookstores right new uh you know covers right and what what is happening and you're on the board what's the the name of the maya angelou and daniel borsten and uh christopher surf by the way is he related to minutes he's been his son and shelby footson here and and uh barten gregorian from brown university used to run the new york library and edmond morris the biographer of uh ronald reagan and theodore roosevelt arthur schlesinger and william starman and gore vidal right what do you all do we meet and each has books that he would like to see in it and we all decide whether they should be done the head of it is a young woman named susan decessor who's an excellent editor and uh we we decide uh what should be in there and sometimes decide what should not and it's it's a growing list and a good one all the old titles are available too the chaucer for instance is coming out in a month or so come on beautiful book random house it is the random house what uh well knife has lately bought every man's library which i'm sure you remember many publishing houses have have these things it's a combination of classics uh ancient classics and sort of modern classics too um when i was growing up i remember seeing bennett surf on television i don't remember what the show was like what's my line or something like yeah watch my line was that yeah is he still alive no and it's been dead about seven or eight years now he uh he was a very likable man and not many people realized because he was such a pun stun and so forth what a good editor he was he shook up the the whole publishing business in new york with random house he started it on a shoestring and drove it right to the top he got proust he's the one who got hold of proof he got ulysses joyce's ulysses it was bennett surf who did that he did a lot of things did from the books that you've written about the civil war and from your appearance on the civil war series have you learned anything new about the united states and the people's reaction to it uh the the biggest change i've seen is in the the racial problem the blacks and some of it i regret very much quite the opposite of the jews in the case of the holocaust the blacks seem not to want to be reminded of history seem not to want to in this disney project it was announced we will show you what it was like to be a slave but when a great outcry went up we don't want to see that kind of thing almost the opposite of the jews having holocaust museums and all kinds of things uh i regret that uh i i think they ought to celebrate their past the same way the jews did about bondage in egypt they're not ashamed of it they say we came out of it we we we conquered it and i wish there were more of that the civil war there's a great compromise as it's called it consists of southerners admitting freely it is probably best that the union wasn't divided and the north admits rather freely that the south fought bravely for a cause in which it believed and that is a great compromise and we live with that and that works for us we are now able to look at the war with some coolness which we couldn't do before now and incidentally i very much doubt whether a history such as mine could have been written much before a hundred years it elapsed it took all that time for things to cool down when i was a a grade school boy in mississippi i knew obscene dog role about abraham lincoln left over from my parents and grandparents yankees were despised uh when one of them was so unfortunate as to move to greenville mississippi he was he was despised uh all that stopped all that's over now and the the great compromise obtains and i wish my black friends could do the same thing the illinois senator who didn't want the daughters of the confederacy in richmond to have a confederate symbol not the battle flag just a confederate symbol on their stationary got her fellow senators to disallow it i do not understand that that's a violation of the compromise for example and it's a an arousal of bitterness but she along with a great many others do not want to be reminded she has every right to want to hide from history if she wants to but it seems to me she's trying to hide history from us and that's a mistake what do you think of abraham lincoln uh the first word that i have for abraham lincoln is genius there's never been a man function the way lincoln did he had never occupied anything resembling an executive position before he came here to be president he knew almost nothing about the office uh he didn't know how it ran he didn't know about departments like the treasury and so forth he had done the term in congress which familiarized with that he was very active in politics uh the lincoln douglas debates show that a man knew a lot about government but the actual executive job he learned on the job and he was just a miracle at it he was a true genius we are covering a reenactment of the lincoln douglas debates this summer and another person that i want to ask you about in that context is stephen douglas and popular sovereignty an issue we've discussed a lot here right what do you think of that idea well uh douglas is an interesting man because he had a profound influence on history if he didn't do but one thing he ran for office up to then no man would run for the presidency of the united states you couldn't say i want to be president united states so you i should be president united states nobody would say a thing like that it was uh too presumptuous uh you you sat back and other people said you should be president douglas said i want to be president i should be president uh others talked about their theories and everything but douglas was the first to campaign now today they campaign like mad and they do nothing but campaign for two years before the election but it was unthankable before douglas fed by the campaign uh douglas came south he said uh he told his advisors we have to go south try to swing this thing heal this brick break it didn't succeed do you have any sense of what impact the lincoln douglas debates actually had in those days uh i'll tell you one impact it had it kept douglas from being president united states and it made abraham lincoln president united states when he asked douglas that thing you always have to wonder whether some particular thing that lincoln does is done by accident or mistake or through this kind of genius the firing on sumter is the case the decision to reinforce something uh he either thought the south was going back down or he thought he was going to provoke a civil war there wasn't anything else that could happen from doing that so did he blunder into it or did he have enough foresight to see four years later there was going to be a re-established union that's too much to ask him to have done that but did he really provoke a civil war doing that well during the douglas debate he posed a question to douglas where if douglas answered yes he would win the election if he answered no he would lose the presidential election two or so years later or whatever however many years it was and he had him hoist on his pitard there and douglas gave the answer that won the senatorial election but we're losing the presidential election was the civil war inevitable i think that it was necessary uh i i do not believe that those differences could have been settled without bloodshed uh the question is the horrendous amount of bloodshed that was not necessary that could have been stopped at some point god knows but there apparently what difference is so profound between the abolitionists of new england and the fire eaters of south carolina that drag the rest of the country into this conflict that i'm inclined to agree with sued who called it an irrepressible conflict uh from what you know now and your own political philosophy if you had a choice and you lived back there which side would you been on there's absolutely no doubt about it i'm from mississippi i would have been on the confederate side right all wrong i would have fought with my people why because they're my people it it would have meant the end of my life as i'd known it if i fought on the other side it would have been a falsification of everything i'd live by even if i opposed it no matter how much i was opposed to slavery i still would have fought for the confederacy not for slavery but for other things such as freedom to seize aid from the union is there still a difference in the way people live in mississippi think than say the people in illinois much less than my boyhood far less in my boyhood and i'm old enough to go back before radios be in common uh you had radios in towns where there was electricity but you remember i mean you you must know that before rea there wasn't any electricity in the country some few people had delco generators for electric lights and everything but the name roosevelt was always roosevelt you never heard it you see it was always called roosevelt and it carried on down now there's been an homogenization of of accents and voices i don't speak exactly the way a new englander does but i speak a lot closer to it now than i used to or than my people nowadays do i remember breaking up zoology class at chapel hill talking about earthworms never anybody say earth william it's a kind of new orleans accent do you have any other books that you're writing say we're at a hundred thousand words a year what do you write about uh i write about the mississippi delta all those novels are concerned with that it's my homeland it's what i know i don't have to do any research it's it's all in my experience i enjoyed very much uh doing the research and getting to know these people well enough i felt no different uh working with facts that i got out of documents than i did with facts so-called that i got out of my head they're both facts you have to be true to them a good novelist is true to his facts as a historian is to his uh it's true you can't give lincoln the color eyes you want to they were gray blue but but there they are they're gray blue and you deal with them you're going to write any more nonfiction uh i don't think so i i don't believe i will an occasional thing i recently wrote an introduction to stephen crane's red badge of courage and rather enjoyed doing it there's about 10 000 words or so but uh i'm a novelist is what i am from anything how often are we going to see you in the public spotlight from now on i don't know i suspect less and less and less and less why it's too disruptive uh i was talking about my work habits it also includes working seven days a week if i stop uh the steam goes out of the boiler and i have spent another two days building up ahead of steam so that stopping is very bad i'm actually unable to work if i'm going somewhere and doing something every 14 days or something i just wouldn't i would never get anything done we were talking earlier about your work habits i want to ask you what you're like to be around when you're writing i don't know because i don't allow anybody around while i'm writing my wife manages to live with me and my my son and my dog but i like to be let alone when i'm working i see these hollywood movies where the man gets up in the middle of the night and dashes off a few thousand words and his little wife comes in to make sure he's comfortable and everything it's all foolishness never be anything like that i in fact i'm privately convinced that most of the really bad writing the world's ever seen has been done under the influence of what's called inspiration writing is very hard work and knowing what you're doing the whole time and so what kind of a stretch do you go that you just you're in that writing mode a month or so then take some time off take a week or somewhere rest up enjoy yourself come back to it this doesn't mean i don't spend my evenings socializing having fun with friends go out to dinner all that kind of thing i do you have a note in one of your books that says thanks to my friends that allowed me to spend an evening without talking about the civil war right right when you're not talking about the civil war what are you talking about talking about the latest gossip of what's going on up the street there and how somebody getting along here and general politics on the national scene it's uh a writer's like anybody else except when he's right this is what the book looks like the modern library series and our guest has been shelby foote author of the civil war and six novels thank you for joining us thank you i enjoyed being with you shelby foote is a world war ii veteran having served in the european theater he's written extensively on the civil war

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Published: Thu Oct 29 2020