Foote's View of History
Shelby Foote offered a unique view on writing history. As a self-proclaimed novelist, he spent much of his career writing fiction, but after his first three novels he decided to try something new. The result was Shiloh: A Novel, a 1952 historical narrative on one of the bloodiest battles in American history. The book provides a first-person narrative of the battle told from the perspective of several fictional Confederate and Union soldiers. More importantly, Shiloh represents a turning point in Foote’s career. It was the first time he combined historical fact with individual experience, a tactic that defined his self-proclaimed title of “novelist-historian.”[1]
In his magnum opus, the three volume trilogy, The Civil War: A Narrative, Foote blended the skills of a novelist with those of the historian. At the end of the second volume, Foote described his unique writing method, stating that his “aim” was to “accept the historian’s standards without his paraphernalia,” while “employing the novelist’s methods without his license.”[2] Foote worked to craft an engaging plot without compromising factual accuracy, opting for a strong narrative style over a list of events and facts.[3] He believed that “not doing the things historians do all the time” (like using footnotes or including a bibliography) would make history more appealing to the common reader.[4]However, in creating a more readable version of the Civil War, Foote’s interpretation “bears the very strong mark of memory as opposed to history.”[5] According to critical voices in the historical academy, the influence of Foote’s ingrained white Southern perspective partly drives his narrative, preventing him from understanding the pivotal role that social and cultural forces played in shaping the conflict.[6]
Foote saw traditional historical writing as narrow, biased, and unsympathetic. To him, many historians’ interpretations are devoid of “straightforward presentation.”[7] This is the idea that many scholars form opinions about a certain person or event without multidimensional examination, and end up only presenting facts that “shore up” their personal views.[8] Foote believed that the novelist’s unbiased techniques are more compelling. He argued that “the proper and effective way to accomplish the destruction of a man is to show him sympathy,” and to “permit the man himself to show that it is undeserved.”[9] With his novelistic prospective, Foote understood the power of putting every character on the same playing field and giving the audience freedom to make their own judgments.
Foote’s unorthodox view of history is evident in his interpretation of the Civil War. In The Civil War: A Narrative, he concentrated almost solely on the military engagements, seeing bravery and honor as the most important themes from the era. In adopting this narrow interpretation of the conflict, Foote was unaffected by the revolution that unfolded in the historical profession as he wrote the trilogy. From the 1950’s through the 1970’s, professional historians embraced a broader interpretation of the Civil War, with a particular focus on contextualizing” the causes and results of the conflict” – themes Foote completely disregarded.[10] However, it was his intention to stray from the norm. He stated, “I deliberately left…things out…my job was to put it all in perspective” and allow “you yourself to see how those [grand issues] entered in.”[11] This came from Foote’s belief in the storytelling power of history. He believed history, like all literature, should appeal to raw human emotion in order to effectively teach a lesson or share a message, and felt that over-complication would only detract from this end. [12]
Footnotes
[1] Stuart Chapman, Shelby Foote: A Writers Life (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2003), 108.
[2] Shelby Foote, The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville (New York: Random House, 1958), 815.
[3] Chapman, 162.
[4] Shelby Foote, The Civil War: Fort Sumter to Perryville, 815; Chapman, Shelby Foote, 162.
[5] Annette Gordon Reed, “History and Memory: A Critique of the Foote Vision,” in American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote, ed. John Meacham (New York: Random House, 2011), 62.
[6] Ibid.
[7] Shelby Foote, “The Novelist’s View of History,” The Sewanee Review Vol. 99 (1991): 441.
[8] Ibid.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Timothy Huebner and Madeleine McGrady, “Shelby Foote, Memphis, and the Civil War in American Memory,” Southern Cultures (2015): 17.
[11] Shelby Foote, interview by John Meacham “American Master,” in American Homer: Reflections on Shelby Foote, ed. John Meacham (New York: Random House, 2011), 6.
[12] Foote, “The Novelist’s View of History,” 439.