An Interview with Shelby Foote
(excerpt)
How long have you been working on it?
Off and on for a long time. I first conceived it before I started
The Civil War, over twenty years ago.
The Civil War was quite a detour for you.
If I had known it was going to take twenty years, I never would have begun it. But I’m glad I did it. I enjoyed the history thoroughly, the whole time. I was never the least bit doubtful about whether this is what I should be doing. But it was not an interruption. I found no difference in writing history and writing a novel. The narrative history is very much like a novel. Nothing pleases me more than when somebody asks me whether I made something up in that history. It pleases me greatly. I didn’t make anything up in it.
But do you think that the discipline of writing narrative history is any different from the discipline of writing fiction?
I really don’t. There are differences, obvious ones. You can’t say Lincoln’s got gray eyes, unless you know that he did. And you do. But if he’s a fictional character, I’ll give him any color eyes I want to. But once I give him those eyes, those are his eyes. A good novelist would be no more be false to a fact dug out of his head — and they are facts — than a good historian would be false to a fact dug out of documents. If you’re not true to your facts, you’ve got a trashy book. You can’t go being false to what you’ve laid down as being a man’s nature. You can’t have someone arbitrarily doing something that he just would not do.
In my fiction, I had always decided what color a man’s eyes were, what shape his fingernails were, what kind of tie he wore. Those things were always important to me. In the history, it didn’t bother me the least bit to have to look them up, instead of imagining them. So that I wound up with exactly the same approach doing the history that I had when I was doing the novels. With this added dimension: Who’s going to write a novel that’s got characters like Stonewall Jackson, Robert E. Lee, and U.S. Grant in it?
Real life is richer than fiction at certain times?
Infinitely richer.
Still, there must be plenty of academic historians who criticize your whole approach to writing history.
Oh, sure. Professional historians resent the hell out of the absence of footnotes, for instance. And footnotes would have totally shattered what I was doing. I didn’t want people glancing down at the bottom of the page every other sentence. The professional historians have criticized it, but what they haven’t done is point out any errors. I’m not saying there are no errors, but there are **** few, fewer than most history books that are just loaded with footnotes.
Professional historians resent it and creative writers don’t read it. So I’m falling between two stools, you see. But that doesn’t bother me. The book makes its own claims.
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