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The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

Christian Century, Nov 12, 1997 by Ralph C. Wood

Edited by Jay Tolson. Norton, 310 pp., $20.00.

THERE IS A VERY large irony in this splendid collection of letters between two Mississippi-reared writers who were friends for more than 50 years. Except for the late Walker Percy's fame as a novelist, it probably wouldn't have been published, yet Shelby Foote proves to be the far wiser and more memorable correspondent.

Most readers will know Foote primarily from his role as an incisive commentator in Ken Burns's film The Civil Ware. I confess that I have not read Foote's half-dozen novels for his epic three-volume work on the Civil War. Percy, by contrast, is widely honored as the author of The Moviegoer, Love in the Ruins, Lancelot and other novels of brilliant theological satire on contemporary American culture.

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In his excellent biography of Percy, Pilgrim in the Ruins, Jay Tolson showed that the Foote-Percy friendship was an affair of true opposites. Each improved the others' books by constant correction and reproof. This collection provides the evidence for Tolson's argument. Percy the Catholic convert was a man with a message, a writer who worked in the polemical mode, always on the offensive. He warned Foote, therefore, against the dangers of Proutian aestheticism: it would grant art no larger aim than the creation of its own convincingly real world. For his part, Foote feared that Percy was a covert preacher whose faith subverted his art. He declared this fear in a statement that tested the limits of their mutual regard: "I seriously think that no good practicing Catholic can ever be a great artist; art is by definition a product of doubt; it has to be pursued."

The great surprise of this correspondence is that Foote proves not to be a pagan aesthete. Though he seeks coldly and clearly to describe what is--rather than seeking passionately, like Percy, to reveal what's wrong--he is concerned with ultimate things. Foote's artistic doubt entails a very real faith: a willingness to wrestle, Jacob-like, with unseen realities, even if it leaves him with a limp. The truth that artists locate in their long twilight struggle for clarity leads them not to trumpet their findings. It leads them, says Foote, to undertake yet a further search, pushing ever further beyond the limits of the known toward the unknowable:

Most people think mistakenly that

writers are people who have something

to tell them. Nothing I think

could be wronger. If I knew what I

wanted to say, I wouldn't write at

all. What for? Why do it, if you already

know the answers? Writing is

the search for the answers, and the

answer is in the form, the method

of telling, the exploration of self,

which is our only clew to reality.

Though Foote was certainly no conventional Christian, these letters make clear that he regarded his art as the one gift he could offer to the glory of God. Foote likens himself, in fact, to a juggler in one of Anatole France's stories. Wanting to honor the Virgin Mary but having no sacred gifts of tongue or pen, the minstrel offered his Lady the only talent he had--his juggling. This explains why literary proficiency is everything for Foote, as it was not for Percy. Foote's heroes are such pure craftsmen as Proust and Flaubert, John Keats and Henry James. He also reveres Dante and Dostoevsky, but not as Christian partisans so much as accomplished artists.

For Foote, didacticism means the death of art. It provides an illusory shortcut to the mistaken goal of fixed and final truth. The aim of true art, Foote believes, is to enable the reader's own discovery, through the rich unities and complexities of artistic form of the real in all of its slippery elusiveness.

Such a notion of art is not altogether removed from the biblical understanding of God's self-identification in the Jews and Jesus Christ, who shatter all safe and secure conceptions of the truth. Divine revelation is the light that darkens, concealing even as it discloses, ensuring both God's freedom and ours. Given Foote's own revelatory understanding of art, it is not surprising that he should make revealing judgments about matters moral and cultural. As a man of Jewish descent, he finds himself unexpectedly sobbing over a BBC documentary on the Holocaust--not chiefly for the destruction of his ancestral people but in pity for their German executioners: "My grief was for the ones inflicting the indignities and tortures; in other words for myself, that I belonged to a species capable of such action." About the Civil War and the Gilded Age that followed, Foote makes a similarly surprising assessment: "The cause was bad on both sides, and the worst cause won. We freed the Negro into indignity and serfdom, and promptly turned to every golden calf on the horizon. This is not a nation, it's a grabbag, an arena where you pay for any trace of decency with your life or by going bankrupt. Our God isn't Christ, it's that iron Vulcan over in Birmingham."

Percy, with his raucous and ribald humor, plays more than a negligible role in this correspondence that stretches from 1948 to 1989. But it is Foote who is at the center. The discerning voice heard in these letters makes me want to find copies of not only The Civil War: A Narrative but also Follow Me Down, Love in a Dry Season, Tournament, Jordan County and September September.

The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy

Christian Century, Nov 12, 1997 by Ralph C. Wood

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