Shelby Foote

“The whole thing is wonderfully human.... In that furnace (the War) they were shown up, every one, for what they were.”

-- Shelby Foote

In this excerpt, we have some discussion on Foote's approach to his Civil War trilogy, bringing dramatic literary technique to historical writing.

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Like Homer, Foote focused on two things: the clash of arms and the lives of the warriors. The grand issues of politics and diplomacy, of economics and culture, mattered less to Foote than re-creating the reality of battle. “The idea is to strike fire,” he wrote, “prodding the reader much as combat quickened the pulses of the people at the time.” Critics took Foote to task for this single-minded focus, but he believed in his approach, and stuck to it. “I think the superiority of Southern writers lies in our driving interest in just two things, the story and the people.” In a way, Foote is one of the little-noted pioneers of the New Journalism, the movement to bring fictional technique to nonfiction subjects, elevating journalism, history, and biography to the level of literature. ... “My hope was that if I wrote well enough about what you would have seen with your own eyes, you yourself would see how those things, the politics and economics, entered in,” he said. “I quite deliberately left those things out. My job was to put it all in perspective, to give it shape. Look at Flaubert: He didn’t criticize Emma Bovary as a terrible woman; he didn’t judge her; he just put down what happened.”

-- Jon Meacham, "Shelby Foote's War Story" in Garden & Gun

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Lorie

Pop is picking up Lorie's medicine, which means that he has her ID, her driver's license, and he got a rude surprise. It was assumed that Lorie must be relatively young, perhaps in her early sixties. I would not have been surprised if she had been in her late fifties. Pop said that he would pester her to learn her age, but she kept fending off his queries. It turns out that she is actually a little older than Pop, in her mid-seventies. They were born in the same year, 1941. Whereas Pop was born at the end of the year, however, she happened to be born at the very beginning of the year in January. Pop is distinctly shocked. I guess that just a good hair-dye will do some wonders. She also carried a touch of an adolescent air about her, with her affected giggle and mannerisms, rather suggestive of the teenage girl. I suspected Pop was courting her hard, preferring her over Kay in terms of raw physical appeal, but Pop now has the taste of ashes in his mouth.

For myself, I wonder why she did not give way to Pop's seductions. I had imagined that she could easily do better, when it was thought that she was appreciably younger, but it now appears that she should have jumped on him liked the last ride out of a hurricane-targeted town. Maybe she really likes being her own person rather than being part of a couple, or maybe she can only accept coupling up with a white man, such as the one she married and whose surname she continues to carry with her - like a badge of honor? Nevertheless, this injury has caught her up with her age. That bone is not healing well, and the stress of all these negative pressures on her life has weighed her down and beaten her up. Still, I will say it again, I wish that I could be as vital in my seventies as Pop and she and others are. As things stand, I do not know how I can make it out of my fifties.