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

shelby

foote

on the battle of

gettysburg

and her book the

stars

and

their

courses

this lasts about an hour

shelby

foote

author

of the

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 she was, drove this stake into her temple freeing the Jewish people from their tyrant, she explained that the stars had led him to this terrible tragedy that happened to him; In other words, fate had brought him there and the title relates to Robert. Lee was led to defeat Pickett's charge by success after success after success until finally fate decided to defeat him and they chose to impeach him.

He quarreled at Gettysburg when he quarreled on three days of the first second and third of July of which year. 1863 almost in the middle of the war and this is called the modern library of the best books in the world. Why did you decide to make this book? I mean, is this the only one you've done in this series? Yes, it is the only one in that series. series I'm on the modern library advisory board and they asked me what of mine I'd like to have there and this is a chapter of my three volume

civil

war narrative and it's a center chapter of the center volume so it's something like this like, if I may say so, the cornerstone of the arc of that whole war narrative and why did you want to choose it?

It's more of a complete story in itself than any other section this narrative is woven into. other things, but this chapter, better than any other that I know of, tends to stand on its own and could be a book in itself if someone could buy this book and not have read the others and feel comfortable reading it, I think that's one of The few cases of an excerpt of about 90,000 words that you could do that from that narrative. How long did you write your three-volume set? I started it in 1954 under a contract with Bennett Surf at Random House during a short history of the

civil

war and I sat down to outline this short story and I saw that I would just be writing a summary and I wouldn't be interested in doing it so I wrote to them and said random who would be willing to go The whole pig was spread out heavily over the three volumes and I suppose there was some hesitation, but within a week or so I figured out to go ahead and kept going for the next 20 years.

I finished it in 74. I started it in the spring of 54. and I finished it in the spring of 74. and I didn't do anything else during all that time of importance I didn't write a novel I didn't do any of those things I just worked on the wall where you lived in 1954 I was living in memphis, I had just moved there from my home about 150 miles down the river in greenville, mississippi, on mississippi delta day, and I had moved to memphis and one of the reasons I accepted this offer work, the right thing about the civil war, 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 series of five, but I thought it would be good to take a kind of vacation to break up the time between them two and me.

I was going to spend this year or maybe a year and a half writing this piece about the civil war and the next thing you know I ended up up to my neck and happy all the time. I firmly believe that novelists have a lot to teach. historians about plot, character drawing, other things, especially worrying about learning to be a good writer, something many historians don't bother to do, and I was happy the whole time. I've never really felt any different in history than I've ever felt. writing novels the 11 part series I think there are 11. correct me if I'm wrong about the civil war on public television the burns series your face is there a lot true how many hours did they film?

It was a little strange, I had two sessions at my house with Ken and his crew and I took them to Shiloh and I took them to Vicksburg and we filmed a little in Shiloh and a little in Vicksburg, but most of it was done right there in the living room of being from my house. and I think you had maybe four hours of tape from which you took what you wanted, how has that changed your public bag? Well, I mean that's what changed, it's my public thing, it led to the public arrest that I had.

I'd been in Menescue before that and I had all kinds of reactions when that happened, but it sold books. That is a glorious thing. The war was out. It stayed in hardcover, but it also came out in a vintage edition, which is a softcover subsidiary around it. and it took off like a rocket after this TV show until that show, do you know how many copies were sold? It sold quite well. It went well. It got good reviews for all three volumes and sold well, but it really took. After watching TV, do you have any idea how many volumes there are in its 21st edition?

Now I think that's a huge number. That would mean hundreds of thousands of books. Yes, for all three volumes. So what's happened to you since they saw you? because of so many people uh I get this weird star quality reaction from people that I find quite disgusting, walking through an airport or going somewhere to deny something, there are people coming up and saying how much they enjoyed the war. I haven't had anyone yet. come up to me and take the trouble and tell me they didn't enjoy it but they tend to come and tell me how you handle it.

I tell you, I'm glad to hear it, uh, and one of the reasons why I'm so happy. I'm glad to hear it, my personal vanity aside, I'm always glad to know that I may have had something to do with people beginning to understand the American Civil War, which I think is enormously important for all American citizens. Someone told me that you don't. I don't like signing books, I don't sign books except for close friends and I do it for two reasons: one is that I think it means something like that when you sign it and the other is that I'm saving myself a lot. from other people a lot of trouble not to waste time on the matter of autographs I think it's ridiculous when did you decide to do this when I was writing my first novel?

I did it that way. Do you find that people get mad at you because I don't do it occasionally someone gets mad but mostly when I tell them why they say I understand yeah that's right they even approve of it yeah when did you first get interested in the civil war? Any guy from the deep south anyway and probably the entire south. guys who know they've been familiar with the civil war as a kind of thing in their consciousness going back. Honestly, I think it's in our entire subconscious that this country was in its adolescence at the time of the civil war, that's what it really was like.

It was really formulated as an adult nation and the civil war did, and like every traumatic experience you've had in your adolescence, it stays with you for the rest of your life, certainly in your subconscious, probably in your consciousness as well, and I think The civil war had the nature of that type of experience for the country that we now recognize. Anyone who has looked at it realizes that it really is the most notable event in American history insofar as it makes us the kind of country we are. the war is not about the revolution the revolution gave us the constitution that got us freed from England made us free made us men but the civil war really defined us uh it said what we were going to be and it said well we're not going to be either moved away from the influence of the South, primarily Virginia, toward the influence of New England and the Midwest and we became that kind of nation instead of another kind of nation.

What would have happened if Stephen Douglas had won the presidency in 1860? Can't. I can't help but think that I usually don't like what ifs and such, but I think if Douglas had been elected he would have just postponed the issue. I think the problem was there. Sue had captured an irrepressible conflict and I think he was there and I think he would have been there while Douglas was there or certainly after Douglas was gone all these divisions were happening the wigs were dissolving or had dissolved there were problems that were very bitter between the abolitionists of New England and the fire-eaters of South Carolina and several other places in the South I am almost ready to believe that with all our genius for compromise there was still no way to settle this matter except by fighting, the most unfortunate thing is that The thing lasted four years.

It was incredible savagery, uh, that's the great shame, there had to be a fight, but for it to be the fight it was, with literally over a million American casualties, that didn't have to have been something that should have stopped it. before that, how? There is a lot of discussion about that. I have forgotten the exact figures. There were probably a million and a half unions and possibly as many as 80,80,800,000 confederates perhaps. Those figures will contain how many died, the deaths total around 650 thousand. There might be two things that make you realize how wild it was, uh, all the American wars combined.

Now this is kind of unfair because I'm only talking about American casualties and those other wars. I'm not including foreign casualties, but there were more American casualties in the American Civil War than in all the wars we've been involved in in the Revolution, the War of 1812, the Mexican War, put together, there weren't as many casualties as there were. that there was in shiloh the first big battle of the war lasted two days there were 25,000 without cash there and that is the total number of ATMs in all the american wars up to there what was greenville mississippi like greenville mississippi barely existed at the time of the war civil where I m is called the alluvial delta of the yazoo of mississippi and it was only populated along the yazoo and the mississippi the entire interior was a large swamp full of alligators and moccasins it was not until after the civil war that they put in the railroad and were able get the I removed the trees and then dug out the drainage dishes and it became habitable, but Greenville was bombed during the war.

It was a small town on the river and was bombed as a distraction for Grants' attack on Vicksburg. You were born in 1916. 1916, where were your parents? What did you 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 hoped to live a quiet life, mostly related to shooting dice. and cards and whiskey and flying around and his own father short-circuited that by putting his fortune in a poker tape and lost the plantation, so my father had just married my mother and, scared, he knew what What was he going to do with himself and her father stayed.

He got him a job as a shipping clerk at the Armored Company there in Greenville and over the next six years, one way or another, he changed everything about himself and ended up managing Armor Branches and Pensacola Jackson and was just transferred to Mobile where he He was the boss. man in the southern region and died of sepsis from my nose operation. I was just under six years old, so I often remember it. If he had lived, it's pretty clear that he would have ended up in Chicago with Almond Comes and would have been a Chicago kid, going to prep schools and living in some suburbs and I consider that a great liberation.

I'm sorry I had to sacrifice my father to do it, but it's strange to have accidental things like septicemia. What can he do in people's lives? Do you remember it at all? I do. It's a good test for me or how bad people can remember in general. I remember almost clear snapshots when I was four and five years old. But I'll tell you a strange thing about Memory, uh, fades. I am 77 years old. Now your memory is fading and I will remember my father very clearly and then he will fade and then for another five years when he has almost faded I will have a very vivid dream about him. the memories are fresh in my consciousness again that is a strange phenomenon to me that is your mother my mother never remarried and I was an only child and uh her devotion to me meant a lot to me because I was a child who was I was in trouble all the time from the time I went to the high school newspaper and gave the principal a hard time and when it came time to go to college I applied to Chapel Hill and got a letter saying that We were sorry that there was no room.

For you, the principal had gone out of his way to write you a letter saying not to let this kid into your school under any circumstances, but I got in the car, drove there, and got in the check-in line when I got to the desk. where they looked. 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 it's 1935 there were empty rooms and dormitories and everything else and they said okay since you're here so So I went to school. Why did the principal feel so strong?

Because I've been giving him a hard time, just like I edited in the high school newspaper. How did you even get interested in writing? That's always difficult for a writer to say. I'm sure. My interest began with an interest in reading which later translated into an interest inwriting. How did this guy do this? I remember at a Sunday school prize or something when I was about 11 years old. After that time I won a copy of David Copperfield. I had read Bobsy Twins and then Tom Swift and the Rover Boys and Tarzan, but since I got this as a prize I decided to read it and found a world that was more real than the world I lived in, unlike these Tarzans and others. books, this was a completely different world and it was a world of art.

I couldn't have defined it like that, but one thing I knew David Copperfield better than anyone in the real world, including myself, and I said to myself, Oh my God, this is it. A whole world in which I didn't read all of Dickens or begin to become a serious reader until three or four years later, but I vividly remember having that reaction to that book. David Copperfield. I think most writers probably have that experience. What year did you leave university? I only went two years. The war was approaching. Hitler. I was in an uproar and I knew we were going to get in and I wanted us to get in, so I came home to spend my remaining year 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 to Poland.

This was to tell me that I couldn't escape. He couldn't get his way. And the guard mobilized in November of 1940. We went down to Camp Blanding and began basic training. go overseas, yeah, I went to office candidate school at Fort Sill, Oklahoma, I think it was January 42nd, right after Pearl Harbor and I ended up there, I went back to Camp Shelby Mississippi and they took me to Camp Boy Texas in Brownwood, near Dallas and Fort Worth, and then went overseas and joined the 5th Division which had been in Iceland since long before Pearl Harbor and crossed paths with a colonel on the staff there who is well known for being someone with who you shouldn't cross and, uh, started to defend me and finally caught me. about falsifying a government document, it was a rule that you couldn't use a vehicle for recreation beyond a distance of 50 miles and we were 54 miles from Belfast, so it was common practice with us just 50 miles away, our battalion was out of those 50-Mile Radio and that was the charge of falsifying the government document and I was court-martialed and sent home.

I stay at home. I worked on a local desk at the Associated Press for about six months and I couldn't take it anymore and went to the Navy. Marine Corps and I was in the Marine Corps for a year and they dropped the bomb and it was over and I came home. The Marines were amused when they said that my fellow Marines had been through boot camp parasite and all that I haven't been a Captain in the military and they told me that you used to be a captain in the army. You could be a very good marine if you work at it.

Enjoy it. I like marines. So, if I'm not mistaken, in 1954 you were about 37 38 years old. old man when you started writing about the civil war right when you went to Europe and you were in the navy and the army you knew something about the civil war so yeah, I took it with me uh in my luggage I had my girlfriend henderson stonewall jackson i I had the freedom of Freeman with me as often as I could carry it and I spent my free time even then finding out what happened during the seven days and drawing maps and things that always fascinated me, you say in this book for the modern library.

At one point, when Robert and Lee were up north, people would stop him from the north and get his autograph. How come there was a general admiration for Lee? It is curious that in the civil war the most hated men were not very dangerous men they were men like Butler and God knows who you name on the south side that they hated so much they were not many murderers the real murderers like Grant Lee were greatly admired by the opposite side There's something very strange about that, but it's uh, it's strange when you started really thinking about writing when you were 37 or so, if you had been in a lot of places in the civil war.

Yeah, it was kind of a hobby of mine. I went, but I was coming and going in New York. three or four times a year driving in those days for us-11 through the Shenandoah Valley and all that and I stopped at the battlefields all the time and did my best to go to them just to see how they felt when visiting battlefields. It is very important that you go at the same time of year, if possible, on the same anniversary of the battle because the place is very different other times of the year to understand the battle of Shiloh.

If you went there when it broke out in early April you would see what it was like if you went there in February or later in July it would be a different field and you wouldn't understand the way the new leaf growth choked everything out so no one knew in what direction was north, southeast or west, so get that thing and you get the weather, you get the soil, you get the coloration of things, you get the real feel of it you said before that the civil war defined what we were going to be right. , but we are not going to be right, what is it?

Well, the civil war included emancipation and was immediately followed by true emancipation. I mean the constitution freed the slaves, not just those who gained rebel hands, is Lincoln's proclamation. Before we go to the right, define the word emancipation. What does it mean? Emancipation means liberation. of people who are in slavery uh, Lincoln's Emancipation Proclamation did not free anyone, what it did was declare that all slaves not in union-occupied territory would be free starting January 1, that is, if I can reach out and touch you, you're not free if you're out of my reach you're free well they didn't immediately say I'm free and I'm married somewhere they couldn't but the true emancipation constitutional amendment freed the slaves freed all the slaves and slavery is a great stain on us we all carry it, I carry it deep in my bones, the consequences of slavery, uh, but emancipation is pretty close to being as heavy as sin, they said what it is, the sixth seventh among seven million people, now you are free, hit the road and there.

It was Friedman's office, which was kind of a joke, there were people down here exploiting them, three quarters of them couldn't read or write, they had no jobs, they had no hope of getting a job, there was no way to even learn. to work and returned to this painted situation. under sharecropping, which was all they could do and, to this day, we are paying and they are paying for this type of treatment. Their emancipation, I don't want to say it should have been a gradual emancipation, I mean there should have been a real preparation to prepare these people to live a type of life, they were free and they should have been free all along, but they were not prepared to live in the world they would live in, living in the conditions of slavery that prevented them from living in the world. you also say find what we are not what we were not going to be and what does that mean the loss of the so-called virtues of the south some of which are very real uh the word of a man is his bond uh the business of not insulting each other with impunity some of these things are very small but they are much bigger on the human scale you moved to memphis uh which is in the south why did you decide to leave Greenville to go to Memphis what was the real reason you never left from home when I arrived in Memphis Memphis is the capital of the Mississippi Delta, although it is in Tennessee, it is the city, if you are in the southern delta you go to New Orleans, if you are somewhere above the middle delta you go to Memphis .

Uh, I don't think there's ever been a time in my life that I haven't been in Memphis with my mom, one of my uncles and aunts there shopping and everything, people went there for everything, men bought guns and shoes and things and women bought clothes, it's just that this was before there were malls and designer retailers with designer clothes in small towns, so trips to Memphis were frequent and for shopping you have a family. It was just me and my mother the whole time until right after. the war I was married I got divorced and then I remarried after moving to Memphis I've been married for 36 years I think kids one son 32 year old son what is he doing?

He's a photographer and, uh, become a good one, he did. Does he take any of the photos of you that we ever see? No, he takes photos of me, but for some reason other than that kind of nepotism that I have not been involved in. Where was this photo that was taken at home but was taken? did? by a photographer from denver his name is larry shirkey and that is a cut from a larger photograph were all the photos taken of him deliberately with this without a smile? I think so. I share that with Abraham Lincoln there is only one photograph of Lincoln that has a kind of ghostly smile and that is the last one, the one that was taken shortly before the assassination and when he knew that the war was one, because if you go back and look at your series of three volumes, there are different images in them.

Right at that age and when you consciously decided to always have a serious look, I don't think so, I think that probably a battery of psychiatrists could solve it, I think, but no, no, not consciously, on the one hand, I don't know. I don't like having my photo taken and that's one of the reasons I frown and say 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 waiting for the war to start in 1939 and '40, and then when I returned from the war in '45, I sat down and revised it. and it was still my first novel, it was published by dial in 1949.

How was it? It was called Tournament and it's a story about a planter in the Mississippi Delta about his rise and fall, very loosely based on my grandfather's life, although he died before that. I was born, so it wasn't because of a personal relationship with him, have you written how many novels have I written six novels five before the war and one since how many nonfiction books in total uh, this is my only civil war narrative nonfiction, Do you like one over the other? No, 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 that.

I like it when someone tells me that they like my novels the most, but no, I'm faced with the fact that I'm probably better known for writing this throughout volume history than anything else, by the way, since your The novels that are sold there have fame on television, yes, they are old, they have been released in paperback, those that were out of print have been reprinted and work quite well. One of the things that I found in one of the notes of one of your books was that one of Your favorite historian or your favorite historian is Tacitus, how do you pronounce it?

Who was he? Tastus was a Roman historian just after the birth and death of Jesus. And he is, above all, a style-testing writer. It's just a pleasure to be involved. Whether it's his original Latin, which I can barely understand, or a decent translation, it's very difficult to get a good translation of testicles. A man named Broad Rib did pretty well and there's something about him writing about how I play scoundrels for the most part and trash that Roman empire, some historian said I guess it was Claudius, huh, that he was a successful emperor. who worked hard at everything else and then, unfortunately, fell upon the pen of tasks that always tickled me, but I like testicles. a lot of other historians i really like when you were introduced to tesla probably during high school it was probably when i first met i took latin in high school we didn't have testosterone that's too hard to read you do season and finally virgil but you won't be able to try this until that you continue from there and you also mentioned the Peloponnesian wars, correct cities, is there any relationship between what you read there and what you found about the civil war?

Yes a lot. I'll tell you something interesting from a stylistic point of view. There is a strong belief, I think it is completely true, that given and written, The Decline and Fall was heavily influenced by Fielding's Tom Jones. There is also a strong belief that Thucydides's history of peloponation was strongly influenced by his reading of Aeschylus. and Sophocles, I think artists are at the forefront and have a lot to teach historians about good dramatic writing and composition, which I consider the best history and Aristotle said: "In criticizing great drama, you first learn, you learn to write ". well, a good high school sophomore can make a surprisingly good description of a sunset, then you learn to draw characters that can stand up and cast shadows and the last thing you learn to do is trace, that's the skill that comes to the end, if it comes, and that is where I think historians neglect a great advantage: I think that history has a plot, you don't invent it, you discover it, it isthere Oscar Wilde talks about life imitating art I have noticed that when a man dies it does not matter at what age or why.

Why then does his life have a beginning in the middle and an end and sometimes his death explains his youth? Good friends of mine who died in the war spent their youth exactly as if they knew they were going to be killed for plastic. It's a very strange business, but that's the art of insisting on giving shape to a thing when it seems to have no shape and I think that when you give it that shape and, of course, I'm not talking about super superimposed pose, I discover the shape it has. which is a very exciting reading experience, uh, if you choose your civil war series or this book, well, there's actually in this book a little introduction about Shelby Foot that tells us about you, but your other books you just start from immediate, just like the narrative there is no preface that says that I have debts with this and that you know that everything comes to the end, it begins and in the complete narrative, the sections I never called book chapters in my novels, but in the story I had be careful to call it chapter one chapter two emphasizing its kinship with the novel there are no footnotes or bibliography the subject after 100 years is known enough not to need footnotes the war footnotes civil are extremely useful to other historians and I was writing for historians' enjoyment and hopefully instruction, but mainly I didn't want to interrupt this narrative with this bunch of footnotes at the bottom of the page where your eye leaves the story from time to time forScroll down in the footnote.

I thought the footnotes would cost me more artistically than they would gain me in academic respect. Who is Ralph Newman? Ralph Newman is a Chicago Civil War enthusiast and one of the main people who brought the American Civil War into awareness through something he had called the American Lincoln Bookstore there in Chicago. He was one of the founders of the Chicago Civil War Roundtable, which I think was the first of the roundtables they did long before this period of enormous popularity. They were working on it and doing very interesting things. Brianna brings it up. You also mentioned one of your books.

Your comments at the end indicated that he put out a bibliography that made it so you didn't have to. Him and his friend Pete Long. I published a separate, uh, bibliography that covers everything and I said, if you want to know where I got my books, go go to Newman's bibliography, that's where I got 350 books on the Civil War. That number was the library that I had near me on my desk at all times I worked exclusively with printed sources I did not enter the archives or search among manuscripts Have you read all those books? Yes, I read them and I read them with pleasure most of them one of the other things that What I noticed when reading this is that you will just start with a name.

I mean, there's no explanation of where this person is coming from and he's fine, what I do is I work in development. I don't stop history to tell you who someone was. I post things about his life as the story progresses. I have a long way to go. You see, I have a million and a half words in there and I'm taking my time. You can'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 there and that's where he courted his wife um and he's picking up these pieces to as you go until eventually I hope you get to know these people the same way you know people in real life.

Find out little by little about them instead of just three pages of bio. Where have you physically written all these books? I wrote the first volume on the exact boundaries of the western city. of Memphis because it is on the bluff overlooking the Mississippi River, the second volume was written on the eastern limits of Memphis, where Yates Road was then the eastern limit of that, and the third volume was written where I live now, right in the geographic center from memphis. Three volumes were written, every line of them there in Memphis in a house or an office or a house that I've always worked in in a room where I normally sleep, so I sleep near my desk and the typewriter is here and there's something about it when I go somewhere else like in the summer I go to the coast to something I can't work outside the 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 it never had a home, but for me it's a very deliberate thing five or six hundred words is a good day for me.

I write with a pen which causes all sorts of problems, from finding blotting paper to pointing out uh, but it makes me take my time and gives me a real sense of satisfaction and I'm getting where I'm going. What is a pen? It's the kind you see in post offices all the time when you were a kid. I would do it. I love finding one of those inkwells they had at post offices. They had a spring. When you pressed it, it wet the tip and when you lifted it, it closed it again so the ink wouldn't evaporate.

Can't. Find one, I'm absolutely sure here in Washington there are five million. I've been to a warehouse somewhere but I can't find one except a pen. You have to dip it in the egg. Write three or four words and sink it in. again and it has a real influence on the way I write, so different not only from a typewriter but also from using a pencil or a notepad, what do you do with it after you write the 500 words every day? I said he decided to dry off then. uh, copy it off the typewriter, copy it, make a typed copy and then read, copy until the day is finally over and I'm always happy with it and put it on the stack, make a clean copy and stack it that way.

I don't have to get involved in something that for me is a particular form of anguish, which is revision. I do not do that. My best friend in life for 60 years was Walker Percy. He had exactly the opposite. He said if he knew what he was. what's going to happen next I couldn't write I wouldn't be interested in writing if I knew what was going to happen I'm the other way around and that's why you're never edited no, there's no real need, I can take out a comma or put a hand or something like that, but very minor things, you know you have this agreement with your editor, yes, my editor at Random House for 35 years has been Bob Loomis, a good editor and our agreement is that he will encourage me, do everything in the world and He'll make me feel like I'm doing well and this and that and the other, but he doesn't mess with my, he doesn't mess with the text.

You know a lot of

author

s who have this. kind of arrangement huh, william faulkner had it. I have seen a failure in the test. Someone decided to read the galley proofs and make a correction to something. The hawk crossed it out. The next time he got to one, he saw another correction mark and Damn, I wrote it legally for a long time, that's how I felt about it. How long does it take you to write 500,600 words a day for a long time? Most writers I know work all morning and then off in the afternoon. A few I know work in At night, I know very few cyclists who work more than four or five hours a day, which is a long day for a writer.

I work in the morning for three or four hours and then I come back in the afternoon and work for three or four hours. It's because I'm a slow Writer, I have to do a lot to assemble. I write about a hundred thousand words a year, year after year. Do you keep all these facts and figures in your head, mostly in my head? Particular quotes I want to be sure of. stay up to date, I'll write on a piece of paper and stick it on a piece of beaver board in front of my desk so I don't forget to get it, but mostly I carried it in my head, but in preparation for this.

I did something that I think anyone would find useful. I bought big cardboard signs and drew columns under them and then I put the year 61 2345 and had political military diplomacy and other things so that at a glance I could tell what was going on. at that particular moment and that is where the conspiracy came in to interweave the diplomatic situation with the political situation and the military situation into a narrative. We hesitate to ask this because I'm not sure which way I would go. but since you may not like the question, who are your favorites? who are your favorite characters?

After writing all these words about the civil war, you refer to characters from the civil war. Yes, it's easy to say who your favorites are because there are many people's favorites. robert e lee we give stonewall jackson tecumseh president but i have some favorites that are seriously neglected one of them is a general from arkansas named pat claban patrick ronyan claibon from arkansas and he was probably 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 stone jackson of the west and was well known and adored by his men and has been largely forgotten today.

He is buried right there in hell, now where the Crawley ridge reaches. to Mississippi and I am very fond of Clayman and I had the same reaction that his men had to Clavin's death. I was very sad to lose it, you either get a great fondness for these people or a severe dislike for them and if you don't like them, uh, you lean back hoping it doesn't show, uh, I'm sure it does, this is about this book in particular, it is in this modern library series, it sells for 1350, I think it is true, what is this about Syria and you?

You are in this forum, yes, what is it? Well, I'm surprised you ask, because for me, being as old as I am, the modern library was what I grew up with, it was my introduction to everyone, Gertrude Stein, William Faulkner, they were all in the modern world. library and that's where you went if you wanted to keep up with that in addition to the classics we've talked about about Tacitus and Thucydides. I read them in the modern library. The times were what they were, but they were 95 cents a copy in those days, no. Almost as well printed or as beautifully bound as now, but for 95 cents, you could get all of Thucydides.

Ask them because there seems to be something new going on because you see them in a lot more bookstores now. Now, new covers, you know. right and what's going on and you're on the board what's her name maya angelou and daniel borsten and uh christopher surf by the way is it related to the minutes that your son has been and shelby footson here and uh barten gregorian from brown university used to run the new york library and edmond morris, the biographer of ronald reagan and theodore roosevelt, arthur schlesinger and william starman and gore vidal, right, what do we do?, we know each other and each of us has books that we would like to see in him and we all decide if It needs to be done, the boss is a young woman named Susan Decessor who is an excellent editor and we decide what should be there and sometimes we decide what shouldn't and it's a good, growing list. all the old titles are also available, the chaucer, for example, will be out in about a month, come on, beautiful book, Random House, it's the Random house, well, Knife has bought up every man's library lately, and I'm sure that you remember many editorials.

I have these things, it's a combination of classics, uh, old classics and kind of modern classics as well. As a kid, I remember watching Bennett surf on TV. I don't remember what the show was like, what my line is or anything like yeah, look at my. The line was that yes, he's still alive, no, and he's been dead for about seven or eight years. He was a very nice man and not many people realized because he was a play on words, etc., what a good editor he was. He created the entire publishing business in New York with Random House He started it with very little money and took it to the top He got Proust He was the one who got the proofs He was the one who got the proofs He got Ulysses Joyce's Ulysses It was Bennett Surf who did that He did You did a lot of things of the books you wrote about the civil war and your appearance in the civil war series.

Have you learned anything new about the United States and how people reacted to it? The biggest change I've ever seen. It is in the racial problem that the blacks, and I am very sorry for some of that, the complete opposite of the Jews, in the case of the Holocaust, the blacks seem not to want to be reminded of history, they seem not to want to, in this Disney project, that's how it was. We announced that we will show them what which was like being a slave, but when a big outcry arose, we don't want to see that kind of thing, almost the opposite of Jews having holocaust museums and all kinds of things, uh, I'm sorry.

I think they should celebrate their past the same way the Jews did about slavery in Egypt. They are not ashamed of it. They say we get out of it. We conquer it. And I wish there was more of that. The civil War. There is a The great compromise, as it is called, is for the Southerners to freely admit that it was probably better that the Union was not divided and the North to admit quite freely that the South fought bravely for a cause in which they believed and that is a great commitment and we live with that and that works forWe can now look at the war with a certain coldness that we could not do before and, by the way, I very much doubt that a story like mine could have been written much before a hundred years had passed.

It took me all that time for things to calm down when I was an elementary school kid in Mississippi. I learned about the dog's obscene role about Abraham Lincoln that I got from my parents and grandparents. The Yankees were despised, uh, when one of them had the bad luck to move to Greenville, Mississippi. he was, he was despised, uh, all of that stopped all of that is over now and you get the big commitment and I wish my black friends could do the same. The Illinois senator who didn't want the daughters of the confederacy in Richmond to have a Confederate symbol.

It wasn't the battle flag, just a Confederate symbol on his stationery that caused his fellow senators to shun him. I don't understand how that's a breach of commitment, for example, and it's an awakening of bitterness, but she, along with many others, doesn't want to do it. Remember that she has every right to want to hide from history if she wants, but it seems to me that she is trying to hide history from us and that is a mistake. What do you think of Abraham Lincoln? The first word I have for Abraham Lincoln is. Genius, there has never been a man who functions like Lincoln did.

He had never held anything resembling an executive position before coming here to be president. I knew almost nothing about the office. I didn't know how it worked. I didn't know about apartments. like the treasury and so on, he had fulfilled his mandate in Congress, which let him know that he was very active in politics. The Lincoln Douglas debates show that a man knew a lot about government, but the real executive work he learned on the job and it was a miracle, he was a true genius. We're covering a reenactment of the Lincoln Douglas debates this summer, and another person I want to ask you about in that context is Stephen Douglas and popular sovereignty, a topic we've discussed a lot here.

What do you think of that idea? Well, Douglas is an interesting man because he had a profound influence on history if he didn't, but one thing he ran for office until then no man would run for president of the United States you couldn't say I want to be president of the United States. united states then you should be president united states no one would say such a thing it was too presumptuous uh you sat there 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 he was the First to Campaign now, today they

campaign

like crazy and do nothing but campaign for two years before the election, but he was ungrateful before Douglas fed on the campaign.

Douglas came to the south, he said, he told his advisors that we have to go south, try to change. This cured this brick breaking, it was not successful, do you have any idea what impact the Lincoln Douglas debates really had in those days, uh, I'll tell you one impact it had, it kept Douglas from being president of the United States and made Abraham? president of lincoln united states when he asked douglas that, you always have to ask yourself if something in particular that lincoln does is done by accident or by mistake or through this type of genius, the firing of Sutter is the case, the decision to reinforce Something, uh, thought the South was retreating or thought it was going to cause a civil war, there was nothing else that could happen by doing it, so it made a mistake or it had enough foresight to see four years later that it was going to be a reestablished union, It's too much to ask that he did that, but did he really provoke a civil war by doing so well during the Douglas debate?

He asked Douglas a question: if Douglas answered yes, he would win the election if he answered yes. No, he would lose the presidential election two years later or whatever, however many years it was and he had him get on his pitard there and Douglas gave the answer that he won the senatorial election, but we're losing the presidential election it was the civil war. . inevitable I think it was necessary uh I don't think those differences could have been resolved without bloodshed uh the question is the horrendous amount of bloodshed that was not necessary and that could have been stopped at some point God knows but apparently there is what is the difference so deep between the New England abolitionists and the South Carolina fire-eaters who drag the rest of the country into this conflict that I am inclined to agree with Sued, who called it an irrepressible conflict, from what you know now and from your own policy. philosophy if you had a choice and you lived there which side would you be on there is no doubt about it I am from Mississippi I would have been on the confederate side right all evil I would have fought with my people why because they' If it was my people it would have meant the end of my life as I knew it, if I had fought on the other side, it would have been a counterfeit of everything I would live for, even if I opposed it, no matter how much.

Against slavery, he still would have fought for the confederacy, not for slavery, but for other things, like the freedom to get help from the union. Is there still a difference in the way people live in Mississippi? I think I'm saying that the people of Illinois are much less than my childhood much less in my childhood and I'm old enough to go back before radios were common uh there were radios in the cities where there was electricity but remember I mean you , you should know that before rea there was no electricity in the country, some people had Delco generators for electricity and everything, but the name Roosevelt was always Roosevelt.

You never heard it. You see, he was always called Roosevelt and continued until now. There has been a homogenization of accents and voices. I do not speak. exactly like a New Englander does, but I talk much closer to it now than I used to or than my people do today. I remember interrupting zoology class in Chapel Hill talking about earthworms. No one ever says Earth William. He's kind of a New Orleans accent. Do you have any other books you are writing? You say we have a hundred thousand words a year. What do you write about? I write about the Mississippi Delta.

All those novels refer to it being my homeland. It's what I know. No. I don't have to do any research, it all depends on my experience. I really enjoyed researching and getting to know these people well enough. I didn't feel any different working with facts I got from documents than with facts like that. called so I got out of my head they are both facts, you have to be true to them a good novelist is true to his facts like a historian is to his uh, that's right, you can't give Lincoln the eye color you want.

They were blue-gray, but there they are, they're blue-gray and you deal with them, you're going to write more nonfiction, eh, I don't think so. I don't think I do it from time to time. I recently wrote an introduction to The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane and I quite enjoyed doing it, there are about 10,000 words, but I'm a novelist, it's what I am, anything, how often will we see you in the spotlight of the public from now on? I know I'm less and less suspicious why it's too disruptive. I was talking about my work habits.

It also includes working seven days a week if I stop. Steam is coming out of the boiler and I have spent another two days building up. so stopping is very bad, I can't actually work if I go somewhere and do something every 14 days or something, I just wouldn't do it, I would never get anything done. We were talking earlier about your work habits. I want to ask you what you are like when you are around when you write. I don't know because I don't let anyone be around while I write. My wife manages to live with me, my son and my dog, but.

I like to be left alone when I'm working I watch those Hollywood movies where the guy gets up in the middle of the night and says a few thousand words and his little wife comes in to make sure he's comfortable and that's all nonsense . It will never be something like that. In fact, I am privately convinced that most of the really bad writing the world has seen has been done under the influence of what is called inspirational writing, it is very hard work and knowing what you are doing all the time. time and then what kind of effort do you put in if you're just in that writing mode for about a month and then take some time off take a week or somewhere to rest enjoy it get back to it this doesn't mean you don't do it ?

I spend my nights socializing having fun with friends going out to dinner all those kinds of things I do you have a note in one of your books that says thank you to my friends who let me spend a night without talking about the civil war just when you're not talking about the civil war, what are you talking about? Talking about the latest gossip of what's happening on the street and how anyone gets along here and general politics on the national scene. He's a writer like any other, except when 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 who served in the European theater and has written extensively about the Civil War.