Booknotes

SHELBY FOOTE: It comes from the Bible. The stars in their courses fought against Sisera. When Deborah or whoever it was drove his tent peg in his temple, freeing the Jewish people from this 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 at Pickett's Charge by success after success after success, until finally fate decided to hammer him down, and they did at Pickett's Charge.

FOOTE: It was fought on three days, the first, second and third of July.

FOOTE: 1863, almost in the middle of the war.

FOOTE: 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 this central volume, so it's sort of, if I might say so, the capstone or the arch of that whole narrative of the war.

FOOTE: 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.

FOOTE: 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.

FOOTE: I began it in 1954 under a contract with Bennett Cerf 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. 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 '74.1 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 worked on the war.

FOOTE: 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 there. I'd moved up to Memphis, and one of the reasons I accepted this job offer to write the Civil War thing was that I had 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 year and a half writing this Civil War piece. The next thing you knew, I was in it 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. I was happy the whole time. I never felt really different writing a history from what I'd felt writing novels.

FOOTE: It was kind of 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 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. I think he had maybe four hours of tape out of which he took what he wanted.

FOOTE: Well, that's what it did change is my public thing. It vaulted me into the public attention, which had been minuscule before that, and I had all kind of reactions to that happening. But it sold books, and that's the glorious thing about it. The war stayed in hardcover but it also came out in Vintage, which is a soft back subsidiary of Random, and it took off like a skyrocket after this television program.

FOOTE: It sold rather well. It did well and it got good reviews, all three volumes, and was selling well. But it really took off after the television series.

FOOTE: Volume one is in its 21st edition now, I think. It's a huge number.

FOOTE: Yes, for the three volumes.

FOOTE: I get this strange star-quality reaction from people, which I find rather unpleasant, really. Crossing an airport or going somewhere to dinner or something, there are people who come over and say how much they enjoyed the war. I haven't yet had anyone come up to me and take the trouble to say they didn't enjoy it, but they do tend to come over and say ...

FOOTE: I tell them that I'm glad to hear it, 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

FOOTE: 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 an awful lot of other people a lot of trouble in not fooling around with that autographing business. I think it's ridiculous.

FOOTE: Early on. Way back when I was writing the first novel, I did it that way.

FOOTE: 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

FOOTE: Any Deep South boy, anyhow, and probably all Southern boys have 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. 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. I think that the Civil War had the nature of that kind of experience for the country. Anybody who'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. The Revolution provided us with a constitution; it broke us loose from England; it made us free. But the Civil War really defined us. It said what we were going to be, and it said what 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.

FOOTE: I can't help but think -- I usually don't like "what ifs," but I think that if Douglas had been elected, it simply would have postponed the problem. I think the problem was there. Seward called it an "irrepressible conflict" and I think it 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 Whigs 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 that I'm almost willing to believe that with all our genius for compromise, there still wasn't anyway to settle this thing except by fighting. The most regretful thing is that the thing went on for four years with an incredible savagery. 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, that need not have been. Something should have stopped it before that

FOOTE: There's a good deal of argument about that. I've forgotten the exact figures. There probably were a million and a half Union and possibly as many as 800,000 Confederates. Maybe those figures will hold.

FOOTE: The deaths totaled about 650,000. Two things might bring home to you how savage it was. All the American wars combined -- now, this is somewhat unfair because I'm only talking about American casualties in 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'd 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. It lasted two days. There were 25,000 casualties there, and that's the total casualties of all the American wars up until then.

FOOTE: 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, and it wasn't until after the Civil War that they put the railroad in and could get the trees out and then dig the drainage ditches that 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 Grant's attack on Vicksburg.

FOOTE:1916.

FOOTE: My father came from a long line of illustrious Mississippians. His grandfather, my great-grandfather, commanded a 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. His own father short-circuited that by pushing his fortune across a poker table and lost the plantation. So my father had just married my mother and scarce knew what he was going to do with himself, and her father got him a job as a shipping clerk at Armour & Co. there in Greenville.

In the next six years, somehow or another he changed everything about himself and wound up managing Armour branches in Pensacola, Jackson. He'd just been transferred to Mobile, where he was the head man in the Southern region, and he died of septicemia from a operation on his nose. I was just short of 6 years old. I often look back on it. If he had lived, it's pretty clear he would have wound up in Chicago with Armour & Co. and I'd have been a Chicago kid going to prep schools and living in some suburb, and I consider that a great deliverance. I'm sorry I had to sacrifice my father to do it, but it's strange what accidental things like septicemia can do to people's lives.

FOOTE: I do. It's a good test for me of how far back people generally can remember. I remember very, almost clear, snapshots when I was like 4 and 5. I'll tell you a strange thing about memory. it fades. I'm 77 now. Your memory fades, and I will remember my father very clearly, and then it'll fade. Then about another five years, when it's almost faded out of sight, I'll have a very vivid dream of him, and the memory's back fresh again in my conscience. That's a strange phenomenon to me.

FOOTE: My mother never remarried, and I was an only child. Her devotion to me meant so much to me because I was a kid who stayed in trouble all the time. I was the editor of the high school paper, and I dedicated myself to giving the principal a hard time. When it came time for me to go to college, I applied to Chapel Hill for admission and received a lever 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 circumstances." But I got in the car and drove up there and got in tune for registration. When I reached the desk, they looked at me and said, "We told you not to come." I said, "I know you did, but I didn't think you meant it." Now, this is 1935. There were empty rooms in dormitories and everything else, and they said, "All right, since you're here," so I went to school there.

FOOTE: Because I'd been giving him a hard time as editor of the high school paper.

FOOTE: That's always hard for a writer to say. 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 a Sunday School prize or something when I was about 11 years old. I won a copy of "David Copperfield." Up to that time I'd read the "Bobbsey 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. I found a world that was realer than the world I lived in, unlike these Tarzan and other books. This was a whole other 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. 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.

FOOTE: I only went two years. The war was heading up. Hitler was on a rampage, and I knew we were going to get in it 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. Then I joined the Mississippi National Guard when Hitler went into Poland. This was by way of telling him he couldn't get away with that. The Guard mobilized in November 194O. We went down to Carnp Blanding and began basic training.

FOOTE: Yes. I went to officer candidate school at Fon Sill, Oklahoma, in, I think, January of '42 right after Pearl Harbor and finished there, came back to Camp Shelby, Mississippi, and was [sent] out to Camp Bowie, Texas, and Brown wood, near Dallas and Fort Worth, and then went overseas and joined the 5th Division, which had been in Iceland 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. He lay for me and finally got me on falsifying a government document.

It was a rule that you could not use a vehicle for recreation beyond a distance of 50 miles. We were 50 miles from Belfast, so it was a common practice among us to write 50 miles. Our battalion was outside that 50-mile radius. That was the charge of falsifying a government document, and I was court-marshalled and sent home. I stayed home and I worked on a local desk at Associated Press for about six months. Then I couldn't take it any longer and went down and joined 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 -- well, fellow Marines. I went through boot camp at Paris Island and everything, having been a captain in the Army. They said, "You used to be a captain in the Army. You might make a pretty good Marine if you work at hard." I enjoyed it. I liked the Marines.

FOOTE: Right.

FOOTE: Yes. I carried with me, in my baggage, G. F. R. Henderson's "Stonewall Jackson." I had [Douglas South] Freeman's "R. E. Lee" with me as often as I could lug it around. I spent my spare time even then figuring out what happened during the seven days and drawing maps. It always fascinated me.

FOOTE: There was a general 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 [Benjamin Franklin] Butler. God knows who you'd name on the Southern side that they hated so much. They were not much killers. The real killers like Grant and Lee were enormously admired by the opposite side. There's something very strange about that, but it is strange.

FOOTE: Yes. It was a sort of hobby of mine. I was going back and forth to New York three or four times a year, driving in those days up U.S. 1 -- through the Shenandoah Valley and all that, and I would stop at battlefields all along the way 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 of year, if possible on the very anniversary of the battle, because the place is so different other times of years. To understand the battle of Shiloh, if you went there when it was fought, in early April, you could see what it was like. If you went there in February or later on in July, it would be a different field, and you wouldn't understand the way 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 and you get the coloration of things; get the true feel of it.

FOOTE: Well, the Civil War included emancipation, and it was immediately followed by true emancipation. I mean, the Constitution freed the slaves, not just those who were in rebel hands, as Lincoln's proclamation claimed.

FOOTE: "Emancipation" means the setting free of people who were in slavery. 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 1, 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 march somewhere. They couldn't. But the real emancipation, the Constitutional amendment freeing the slaves, freed all the slaves.

Slavery is a huge stain on us. We all carry it. I carry it deep in my bones, the consequences of slavery. But emancipation comes pretty close to being as heavy a sin. They told -- what is its million or 7 million people, "You're now free. Hit the road," and there was a Freedman'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 to learn a new job even, and they drifted back into this peon age system under sharecropping, which was about all they could do.

To this day, we are paying and they are paying for this kind of treatment. I don't mean there should have been a gradual emancipation. I mean there should have been true preparation to get this 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 been living under conditions of slavery, which kept them from living in the world.

FOOTE: It means the loss of the so-called Southern virtues, some of which are very real -- a man's word is his bond, the business of not insulting each other with impunity. Some of these things are very small, but they weigh large on the human scale.

FOOTE: 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. I don't think there's a been a season of my life that I hadn't been in Memphis with my mother or 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. This was before there were malls and dealers with designer clothes in small towns, so excursions to Memphis were frequent for shopping purposes.

FOOTE: 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 it is.

FOOTE: One child, a son, 32 years old.

FOOTE: He's a photographer and getting to be a good one.

FOOTE: No. He takes photographs of me, but for some reason or other, that brand of nepotism I haven't been involved with.

FOOTE: That was taken at home, but it was done by a photographer from Denver. His name is Larry Shirkey and that's a cut from a larger photograph.

FOOTE: I think that I do. 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 that was taken just shortly before the assassination and when he knew the war was won.

FOOTE: I don't think so. I think probably a battery of psychiatrists could figure it out, but no not consciously. For one thing, I don't like having my picture made, and that's one reason I'm frowning, saying, "I don't like this; I don't like this experience."

FOOTE: I wrote my first novel -- I said I left school to come home and wait for the war 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. Then when I came back from the war in '45, I sat down and revised it, and it still was my first novel. It was published by Dial in 1949.

FOOTE: It was called "Tournament," and it's the story about a planter in the Mississippi Delta and about his rise and fall, very loosely based on my grandfather's life, although he died before I was born so it wasn't out of personal acquaintance with him.

FOOTE: I've written six novels -- five before the war and one since.

FOOTE: This is my only non-fiction, this civil war narrative.

FOOTE: 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've haven't changed. It pleases me when someone tells me what they like best is my novels. But, no, I've faced the fact that I probably am more apt to be known for writing this three-volume history than anything else.

FOOTE: 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.

FOOTE: Tacitus was a Roman historian right after the birth and death of Jesus, and he is, above all, a writer. Tacitus' style is just a joy to be involved with, whether in the original Latin, which I can barely stumble through, or in a decent translation. It's very hard to get a good translation of Tacitus. There's a man named Brodribb who did a pretty good one. There's something about him. He writes about high-placed scoundrels for the most part, and he takes that Roman Empire apart. Some historians said about Claudius that he was a successful emperor, hard-working and everything else, and "then, alas, he fell upon the pen of Tacitus," which always tickles me, as a rule. But I like Tacitus very much. There are other historians I like a lot.

FOOTE: Probably during high school probably was when I first encountered him. I took Latin in high school. We didn't have Tacitus, though. Tacitus is too hard to read. You do Caesar and then finally Virgil, but you don't get to Tacitus until you go on from there.

FOOTE: Right, Thucydides.

FOOTE: Yes, a great deal. I'll tell you something interesting stylistically. There's a strong belief -- I think it's utterly true -- that [Edward] Gibbon, in writing "The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire" was strongly influenced by [Henry] Fielding's "Tom Jones." There's also a strong belief that Thucydides' "History of the Peloponnesian War" is strongly influenced by his reading Chylus and Sophocles. I believe that the artists are out front and have a great deal to teach historians about good writing and dramatic composition, which I consider the best history to be. Aristotle said, in criticizing great drama, that first you learn how to write well -- a good sophomore in high school can do a surprisingly good description of a sunset -- then you learn to draw characters that can stand up and cast a shadow, and the last thing you learn to do is plot. That's the skill that comes last, if it comes at all.

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 and a 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 were going to be killed. It's a very strange business, but that's art taking over, insisting on giving a thing form when it seems to be formless. I think that when you supply that form -- and, mind you, I'm not talking about superimposing it; I'm talking about discovering the form -- it makes that a very exciting reading experience.

FOOTE: So does the narrative. There's no preface saying I owe my debts to this and that and the other. That all comes at the end. It starts and in the full narrative, the sections -- I never called books "chapters" in my novels, but in the history I was careful to call it Chapter One, Chapter Two, emphasizing its kinship to the novel.

FOOTE: 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 glance down at the footnote. I thought that the footnotes would cost me more artistically than they would gain me in academic respect.

FOOTE: 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 Abraham Lincoln Book Shop there in Chicago. He was one of the founders of the Civil War Round table in Chicago, which I think was the first of the roundtables. They, long before this period of the huge popularity of the Civil War, were working away at it and doing very interesting stuff.

FOOTE: Right. He and his friend Pete Long published a separate bibliography that covers everything, and I said if you want to know where I got my books, go to Newman's bibliography. That's where I got them.

FOOTE: About that number was the working library I had near my desk at all times. I worked from printed sources entirely. I did not get into the archives and dig around among manuscripts.

FOOTE: Yes, I had. I read them and read them with pleasure, most of them.

FOOTE: Right. What I do is I work at 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. 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 that's where he courted his wife. It picks these pieces up as you go along until finally, I hope, you get to know these people they way you do get to know people in real life, finding out little by little about them instead of just three pages of biography.

FOOTE: I wrote the first volume on the exact western city limits of Memphis because it was 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.

FOOTE: In a house. I've always worked in the room where I usually sleep so that I sleep near my desk, and the typewriter's over here. There's something about it. When I go somewhere else, like in the summer I'll go down on the coast or something, 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 to me it's a very deliberate thing. Five hundred or 6OO words is a good day for me. I write with a dip pen, which causes all kind of problems -- everything from finding blotters to pen points -- but it makes me take my time, and it gives me a real feeling of satisfaction. I'm getting where I'm going.

FOOTE: It's the kind you used to see in post offices all the time when you were a boy. I would love to find one of those inkwells they had in post offices. They had a spring in them. When you pressed down, it would wet the pen point, and then when you lifted it out, it would close it again so the ink didn't evaporate. I can't find one. I'm absolutely certain that right here in Washington there are five million of them in a warehouse somewhere, but I can't find one. But a dip pen, you have to dip it in the ink and write three or four words and dip it again. It has a real influence on the way I write, so different not only from a typewriter but from using a pencil or a fountain pen.

FOOTE: I set it aside to dry; then copy it off on a typewriter, make a typewritten copy of it and then recopy on that until finally the day is over and I'm all the way satisfied with it and I put it on the stack -- make a clean copy and put it on the 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.

FOOTE: No. There's no real need. I may take out a comma or put in an "and" or something, but very minor stuff from then on.

FOOTE: Yes. My editor at Random House for 35 years now has been Bob Loomis. He's a good editor, and our arrangement is that he will encourage me, he will do everything in the world to make me feel that I'm doing well and this and that and the other, but he doesn't mess with the text.

FOOTE: William Faulkner had it. I've seen a Faulkner proof. Somebody presumed to read the galley proofs and make a correction of something and Faulkner scratched it out. The next time he got to one, he saw another correction mark, and he wrote, "Goddamn it, leave it alone!" That's the way I felt about it, too.

FOOTE: A long time. Most writers I know work all morning and then are free in the afternoon and the evening. Some few I know work at night, but very few writers 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. I write about 100,000 words a year, year in and year out.

FOOTE: Mostly in my head. Particular quotations that I want to be sure to keep up with I'll write on a piece of paper and stick on a piece of beaver board that's in front of my desk so I won't forget to get it, but mostly I carry 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, '62, '63, '64, '65, and I had "diplomacy@ "military," "political" and other things 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 and the political situation and the military situation all into a narrative.

FOOTE: You mean Civil War characters?

FOOTE: It's easy to state who your favorites are because they're many people's favorites -- Robert E. Lee, U. S. Grant, Stonewall Jackson, Tecumseh Sherman. But I have some favorites that are grievously neglected. one of them is an Arkansas general named Pat Cleburne, Patrick Ronayne Cleburne from Arkansas. 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 -- he was called the Stonewall Jackson of the West and well-known and adored by his men. He's been largely forgotten today. He's buried right there at Helena [Arkansas] where Crawley's Ridge comes to the Mississippi. I'm very fond of Cleburne. I got the same reaction at Cleburne's death that his men got. I was greatly saddened to lose him. You get a great fondness for these people or a severe dislike for them, and if you have a dislike for them, you lean over backward hoping not to let it show. I'm sure it does.

FOOTE: Well, 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. We were talking about Tacitus and Thucydides. I read them in the Modern Library. The times being what they were, they were 95 cents a copy in those days, not nearly as well-printed or as handsomely bound as now, but for 95 cents you could get all of Thucydides.

FOOTE: He's Bennett's son.

FOOTE: 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 DiSesa, who's an excellent editor, and we decide what should be in there and then sometimes decide what should not. 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, a beautiful book.

FOOTE: Random House. It is to Random House what -- well, Knopf has lately bought Everyman's Library, which I'm sure you remember. Many publishing houses have these things. It's a combination of ancient classics and sort of modern classics, too.

FOOTE: Yes, "What's My Line?"

FOOTE: No. Bennett's been dead about seven, eight years now. He was a very likeable man, and not many people realized, because he was such a punster and so forth, what a good editor he was. He shook up 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 Proust. He got Joyce's "Ulysses." It was Bennett Cerf who did that. He did a lot of things.

FOOTE: The biggest change I've seen is in the racial problem with 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 what 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. I regret that 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 conquered it." 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 that it's 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. 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 100 years had elapsed. It took all that time for things to cool down.

When I was a grade school boy in Mississippi, I knew obscene doggerel about Abraham Lincoln, left over from my parents and grandparents. Yankees were despised. When one of them was so unfortunate as to move to Greenville, Mississippi, he was despised. All that stopped. All that's over now, and the great compromise obtains. I wish my black friends could do the same thing. The Illinois senator [Carol Moseley-Braun] who didn't want the Daughters of the Confederacy at Richmond to have a Confederate symbol -- not the battle flag; just a Confederate symbol -- on their stationery, got her fellow senators to disallow it. I do not understand that. That's a violation of the compromise, for example, and it's 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.

FOOTE: 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. He didn't know how it ran; he didn't know about departments like the Treasury and so forth. He had done a term in Congress, which familiarized him there. He was very active in politics. The Lincoln-Douglas debates show that the 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.

FOOTE: Well, Douglas is an interesting man because he had a profound influence on history if he didn't do but one thing -- he ran for of fice. Up until then, no man would run for the presidency of the United States. You couldn't say, "I want to be president of the United States" or "I should be president of the United States." Nobody would say a thing like that. It was too presumptuous. You sat back and other people said you should be president. Douglas said, "I want to be president. I should be president" 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 unthinkable before Douglas for anybody to campaign. Douglas came south. He told his advisers, "We have to go south and try to swing this thing, heal this break." It didn't succeed.

FOOTE: I'll tell you one impact it had: it kept Douglas from being President of the United States and it made Abraham Lincoln President of the 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 a case, a decision to reinforce something. He either thought the South was going to 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 reestablished union? That's too much to ask him to have done that, but did he really provoke the 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 however many years it was. He had him hoist on his petard there. Douglas gave the answer that won the senatorial election but would lose him the presidential election.

FOOTE: I think that it was necessary. I do not believe that those differences could have been settled without bloodshed. 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 were differences so profound between the abolitionists in New England and the fire-eaters of South Carolina that dragged the rest of the country into this conflict that I'm inclined to agree with Seward, who called it an irrepressible conflict.

FOOTE: There's absolutely no doubt. I'm from Mississippi. I would have been on the Confederate side. Right or wrong, I would have fought with my people.

FOOTE: Because they're my people. It would have meant the end of my life as I had known it if I fought on the other side. It would have been a falsification of everything I'd lived 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 secede from the Union.

FOOTE: Much less than my boyhood. Far less. In my boyhood -- and I'm old enough to go back to before radio was being common. You had radios in towns where there was electricity, but you must know that before REA there wasn't any electricity in the country. Some few people had Delco generators to put in electric lights and everything. But the name Roosevelt was always Roo-se-velt. You never heard it, you say. He was always called Roo-se-velt, and it carried on down. Now there's been an homogenization 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 a zoology class at Chapel Hill talking about earthworms. They never heard anybody say "ewarthwurum." It's a kind of a New Orleans accent.

FOOTE: I write about the Mississippi Delta. All those novels are concerned with -- that's my homeland. It's what I know. I don't have to do any research. It's all in my experience. I enjoy very much doing the research and getting to know these people well enough. I felt no different 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 as true to his facts as a historian is to his. It's true you can't give Lincoln the color eyes you want. They were gray-blue, but there they are. They're gray-blue and you deal with them.

FOOTE: I don't think so. 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. It was about 10,000 words or so. But I'm a novelist, is what I am if I'm anything.

FOOTE: I don't know. I suspect less and less and less and less.

FOOTE: It's too disruptive. I was talking about my work habits. It also includes working seven days a week. If I stop, the steam goes out of the boiler and I have to spend another two days building up a head 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 would never get anything done.

FOOTE: I don't know because I don't allow anybody around while I'm writing. My wife manages to live with me and my son and our 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. That's all foolishness. I would never be anything like that. 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.

FOOTE: A month or so, then take some time off. Take a week and go somewhere and rest up, enjoy yourself, come back to it. This doesn't mean I don't spend my evenings socializing and having fun with friends, going out to dinner and all that kind of thing. I do.

FOOTE: Talking about the latest gossip of what's going on up the street there and how somebody's getting along here and general politics on the national scene. A writer's like anybody else except when he's writing.

FOOTE: Thank you. I enjoyed being with you.