A biography that plumbs the ambiguous life of the gentlemanly novelist
and historian For a biographer Shelby Foote is a famously reluctant
subject. In writing this biography, however, C. Stuart Chapman gained
valuable access through interviews and shared correspondence, an
advantage Foote rarely has granted to others. Born into Mississippi
Delta gentry in 1916, Foote has engaged in a lifelong struggle with the
realities behind his persona, the classic image of the southern
gentleman. His polished civil graces mask a conflict deep within.
Foote's beloved South is a changing region, and even progressive change,
of which Foote approves, can be unsettling. In letters and interviews,
and in his writings, he often waxes nostalgic as he grapples to recover
the grace of an earlier time, particularly the era of the Civil War.
Indeed, Chapman reveals that the whole of Foote's novels and historical
narratives serves as a refuge from deeply ambiguous feelings. As Foote
has struggled to understand the radical shifts brought to his native
land by modernization and the region's integration into the nation, his
personal history has been clouded by ideological conflict. This
biography shows him pining for aristocratic, antebellum culture while
rejecting the practices that made possible the injustices of that era.
Privately and vehemently, Foote opposed George C. Wallace's and Ross
Barnett's untenable segregationist stance. Yet publicly during the 1960s
and '70s he skirted the explosive race issue. Foote is best known for
his dazzling and definitive The Civil War: A Narrative. Written from
1954 to 1974, the three-volume opus was published during years when the
South exploded with racial and political tensions and was forever
changed. This biography recognizes that nowhere are Foote's personal
conflicts, ambivalence, and outright contradictions more on display than
in his fiction. Although Love in a Dry Season, Jordan County, and
September, September are set in the contemporary South, they reach no
firm social resolutions. Instead they entertain, dramatize, and come to
grips with the social, gender, and racial barriers of the southern life
he experienced. While showing how Foote's guarded embrace of the South's
past and present characterizes his identity as a thinker, a historian,
and a writer of fiction, Chapman discloses Foote's reluctance to address
burning contemporary issues and his veiled desire to recall more
gracious times. C. Stuart Chapman is a Massachusetts State House aide
living in Jamaica Plain. His work has been published in the Clarksdale
Press-Register, Memphis Business Journal, the Memphis Commercial Appeal,
Jamaica Plain Gazette, Modern Fiction Studies, and other publications.
