Shelby Foote: a Writer's Life.

Shelby Foote: A Writer's Life. By C. Stuart Chapman. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, c. 2003. Pp. xxii, 317. $30.00, ISBN 1-57806-359-0.)

Before 1958, novelist Shelby Foote moved in the second rank of the southern literary renaissance then in full-force march. Author of novels about his native Delta, Foote described feelingly and believably the race relations, class tensions, poverty, old money, and gender strains of the Jazz Age in a place that, as his older friend and sometime mentor, the poet William Alexander Percy, said of some of its inhabitants, had "gone to seed" (Percy, Lanterns on the Levee: Recollections of a Planter's Son [New York, 1941], 23). Foote's correspondence with the poet's cousin Walker Percy makes it clear that Foote worried about critical reception of his work and doubted that he would ever move into the front ranks of the southern renaissance writers. Yet, in that year, he published the first volume of his nonfiction trilogy of the Civil War, and that work gradually brought him notice and acclaim.

Much later, in 1990, with the literary renaissance deep into a third generation of noticed artists, Foote appeared in Ken Burns's epochal Civil War television series for PBS, and the novelist-historian's sage performance made him, as biographer C. Stuart Chapman styles it, a "national icon," of whom "waves of people suddenly wanted a little piece" (p. ix). Indeed, Chapman, press secretary for Congresswoman Barbara Lee of California, was inspired to write this biography after meeting Foote and subsequently reading Jay Tolson's biography of the late Walker Percy, Pilgrim in the Ruins: A Life of Walker Percy (New York, 1992).

Chapman was able to interview Foote in some depth and has succeeded in ferreting out fascinating information about the writer's attitudes and actions. While respectful, Chapman has also been meticulous in pointing out where the great raconteur remembers things in an overly favorable way for himself. Chapman has read widely among recent interpreters of the modern South and is comfortable with theories concerning race relations, sexuality, and modernity proffered by Daniel Singal's The War Within: From Victorian to Modernist Thought in the South, 1919-1945 (Chapel Hill, 1982), by Joel Williamson's William Faulkner and Southern History (New York, 1993), and by some apparently unnamed post-Freudian interpreters of regional patriarchal patterns. Occasionally Chapman seems a bit glib, and some of his grammatical structure could use a seriously wielded blue pencil, but the overall result is a highly readable and attractive volume.

Contradictions, especially of the individual self, emerge as a theme not only in Foote's novels and essays but in Foote himself and his life experiences. There is his simultaneous hatred of racism and longing for the old-style southern gentry; his Jewish heritage, accepted in the famously bigoted Delta but rejected in liberal Chapel Hill; his willful leadership, especially in things physical, that fails stunningly in the U.S. Army during World War Il; and his graceful, gentlemanly demeanor that could become clumsy and boorish when he was drunk. Chapman demonstrates that Foote's liberal ideas about race relations were rejected so thoroughly as to cause Foote to retreat--not unlike Marcel Proust, whom the novelist admires--into a private world of art. Chapman assesses these contradictions as the reason Foote never completed his last literary work, "Two Gates to the City."

Foote wrote his novels looking at the contradictions and describing them without seeming to choose sides--but then novelists can be appropriately detached and still leave readers with clear moral choices and some realistic ambiguity about the complexities of the consequences of those choices. By contrast, Foote wrote his trilogy, The Civil War: A Narrative (New York, 1958-1974), moving adroitly away from the social issues of the nineteenth century, including the slavery that he hated. He came to "stardom" in Ken Burns's documentary because he was the sage figure of the doomed old gentry on a stage that the documentarian had set with furnishings and peopled with characters burdened with the racial issues and the moral enormity of slavery. Burns thus provided the vital sociopolitical context that Foote never developed in The Civil War.

The least tractable of the issues involving a work on a still-living author is determining how Foote rates among the writers of the period 1946-2003. Apparently, Chapman considers Foote to be of some importance both in the ranks of historians and novelists, but it is not clear just how significant the biographer judges his subject to be. After reading this volume and thinking about it, this reviewer concludes that Foote rates still somewhere in the second tier of interesting novelists of the era, though it is likely that critics of another day will be kinder in their literary assessments, especially of the novel Love in a Dry Season (New York, 1951). As to his history, this reviewer believes that Foote's historical work will leave him somewhere in the third rank or behind, largely because his otherwise-magnificent Civil War trilogy does fail to confront the toughest issues of causation in the regional society.

Emory and Henry College 

JOHN HERBERT ROPER