Shelby Foote

The death of Shelby Foote, the Mississippi-born novelist and historian who passed away Monday in Memphis at the age of 88, closes a chapter in Southern letters that began with such literary and cultural lights as William Faulkner and William Alexander Percy, and was carried over the decades by, among others, Flannery O'Connor and Foote's best friend, Walker Percy.

Foote's life at times took a tragic turn: married three times, he drank too much and wrote too little during the early years of his friendship with Percy, as told in their collection of letters, The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy. But he was smart, possessed a vivid historical imagination, and remained a close observer of the culture in which he lived. In his remarkable biography of Percy, Pilgrim in the Ruins, Jay Tolson (also editor of the Foote/Percy letters) described the circumstances under which Foote and Percy met:

"Foote doesn't remember the moment he met Walker, but he recalls the day Uncle Will approached him at the country club swimming pool in the late spring of 1930. "He'd been playing golf -- he was a dreadful golfer, but he like to play occasionally in those days -- [and] he came over and said, 'Some kinsmen of mine are coming here to spend the summer with me. There are three boys in the group and the two older boys are about your age. I hope you'll come over to the house often and help them enjoy themselves while they're here.'" Shelby eagerly obliged. Like most people in Greenville, he knew that Uncle Will's house was a special place, and the prospect of spending time there -- whoever these kinsmen turned out to be -- was exciting.

Uncle Will's intuition about human chemistry was, as usual, canny. Shelby would not have been the first choice of many Greenvillians. He put off many people with his manner -- brash, cocky, sometimes rude. The consensus in town was that his mother and aunt had spoiled him, and there was doubtless some truth to the charge. An only child, he was strikingly handsome, with a shock of dark hair and deeply set eyes, and his easy self-assurance must have struck many adults as insufferable vanity. But Will had good reasons to think that Shelby would make a good companion for his cousins. He was an intelligent boy, for one thing, quick and clever. Though not prematurely bookish, he was certainly alive to the possibilities of good literature. Will was drawn to a boy with such a fine and promising mind, and apparently he thought that his cousins would be too.

There was something else about Shelby that made him seem a likely mate for the Percy boys, and especially for the oldest one. Shelby was a loner, quite content spending time by himself. Never athletic, he enjoyed some of the same solitary activities that Walker favored, particularly model airplane building and reading. A similarity of natures may have owed something to a similarity of backgrounds, for Shelby, too, had experienced the loss of a parent. In 1922, when Shelby was just tow months shy of six, his father died of septicemia. The family was then living in Mobile, Alabama, and the boy could hardly have known his father that well. Yet, in some ways, the fiction that Shelby would one day write would be as much a pondering of his father's fate as Percy's would be of his. The story of Foote's father was somewhat different, though: a turn-about success story cut short by death.

Shelby Foote, Sr., had been a no-count rich man's son, a gambler and a boozer right up to the day he married Shelby's mother, Lillian Rosenstock . . . . Lillian must have had a miraculous effect on Shelby's father. Shortly after they married in 1915, he suddenly turned serious and in seven years worked his way up from shipping clerk to general manager of the Armour and Company meat packing firm. But as fate would have it, he had little time to savor his worldly success. The responsibilities of his new position took him to the coastal town of Mobile, Alabama, and shortly thereafter he succumbed to a bacterial infection that twenty-five years later would have been cured by a few doses of penicillin.

Foote was a great lover of Mozart (as is Benedict XVI). Here's a portion of a letter to Percy from August 10, 1983, typed as it was written, with some misspellings and shorthand:

Mozart's C Minor Mass goes into this same mail and should reach you at the same time. I envy you your early hearings of it, though the fact is I enjoy it more every time I hear it -- hear all kinds of things I never heard before. I inclose the text: not because you arent thoroughly familiar with the Mass, but because this one is incomplete: the text is truncated to include only what is set to music, the Kyrie, the Gloria, and the Sanctus, all comlete; the Credo only goes through the Et incarnatus est, and the Agnus Dei and Dona nobis pacem are missing altogether. . . . Youre likely to have some trouble with the late-18th Century notion of church music, but no more than you have with Bach and Handel, both of whom were influences, Handel in the Gloria and Bach in the Quoniam, where the counterpoint for three voices is damned near incredible. Some say that in the Qui tollis they can hear the whips and smell the vinegar; I dont go that far, but I sure do like it and feel its power. What may give you the most trouble (and what I like about the best) is the Incarnatus est, a soprano aria; she soars like a bird for nearly nine minutes, outdoing herself as she goes along.

Over at Mere Comments, Russell Moore takes note of a central difference between Percy and Foote: religion. Percy was one of the past century's most famous American converts to Catholicism; Foote remained an agnostic throughout his life. Yet, as the Moore says, Foote was a "brave and thoughtful man."

Here is how Tolson describes Walker Percy's death on May 10, 1990, at which Shelby Foote was present.

"Walker's spirit was ready," Shelby Foote later said, "but his body wouldn't let go." On the evening of the twenty-eighth, Foote called the house and got Roy, who was sitting next to his brother. Percy realized who Roy was talking to and asked for the phone.

"I've got an hour, maybe an hour and twenty minutes," he said in a voice that sounded removed, almost disembodied. "Goodbye."

Although he had been expecting the worst, Foote could not restrain himself: "My God, Walker, I'm an only child, and you're the closest thing to a brother I ever had."

But Percy would have none of that. Before handing the phone back to Roy, he said, simply, "Goodbye."

. . . The end had finally come. Knowing that his brother was dead, Phin went out on the porch to tell the others. It was 3:40 P.M., and almost eerily George Riser arrived just as Phin came out. Everybody went into the room to bid the first of the farewells. After paying his respects, Foote returned to the porch so the family could be alone -- so he too could be alone. It was a beautiful spring afternoon, with a clear cerulean sky, and Foote remembered that May 10 was the day that Stonewall Jackson had died. He also remembered that of the many descriptions of Jackson's death that Percy had read, Percy had liked his description best of all. Somehow thinking this made Foote feel close to his closest friend.

Update: The obituary of Foote in today's New York Times is quite complimentary, so I hope it's not churlish to point out three factual errors. 1. William Alexander Percy was Walker Percy's cousin (his father's first cousin), not his uncle. W.A. Percy was affectionately called "Uncle Will" by Walker Percy and his brothers, who were raised by the elder Percy after they were orphaned. 2. Walker Percy died at his home in Covington, Louisiana, not in New Orleans. 3. Louis D. Rubin is an English professor (now emeritus), not an academic historian, as is implied.