Two 'lectures' by Shelby Foote

a fat, balding Petruchio

A few weeks ago someone sent me a nice note saying they’d enjoyed my essay on Shelby Foote from a few years back (an era when I was briefly interested in ‘Southern writing’, as a category including the gays Ernest Mickler, Cal Yeomans and Andrew Holleran) which reminded me 1. that essay is full of typos 😭 2. I have a couple of lectures Foote gave in 1967 while writer-in-residence at the University of Memphis, which I’m posting below.

I love the writing in Foote’s Civil War history. On the level of the sentence, the paragraph, the chapter, the whole, there’s a masterful, strong and delicate organization that puts Foote, I think, at the level of the best 19th-century stylists—and it’s no shame, indeed even more of a feat, to have been one of those a hundred years later. Other than his early agon with Faulkner, Foote was quite isolated (living in Memphis—let me tell you, I was born there—is no way to get to the center of culture) both from his contemporary rivals and from academia (except for his stint at the UofM, which technically but only technically qualifies as a university), which enabled him to be a great writer of an un-contemporary kind.

Foote was a great talker, great at playing himself (as I argue in the essay, he’d learned how to do that by living into the invented persona of planter aristocrat, and hiding his mom’s Jewish family) even before he became a semi-professional raconteur in Ken Burns’ Civil War series giving Confederate apologia in buttery voiced anecdotes (years after he’d stopped writing); he can talk in some of the periodic sentences of his best prose. But he had no reason to be a great lecturer. So to get his paycheck from UofM, he had a few tricks that we’d all be wise to learn.

Take his lecture on “Creative Writing.” Foote says the subject can’t be taught. The best advice about writing he’s found is from Robert Louis Stevenson, who said find a writer you admire and then imitate him. It’s something Foote did himself for many journeyman years copying Faulkner and Proust (who has a whole book of early stylistic pastiches of the Goncourt Brothers and other targets of his own emulative drive) before combining them into something more original and successful.

After having said this, which only takes a minute, Foote then reads a Maupassant story aloud so that students have something they can imitate at home. He tells them what to admire about it (“it’s not an attempt to hoist anything up… he doesn’t overlook anything that could possibly arouse your interest… but it’s not sentimental or dishonest… a lack of inflating things out of proportion… the mechanics of it should interest you all… it’s all prepared very carefully”) and then takes questions. An easy way to earn a paycheck! He also tells them to read Maupassant’s wonderful dark novel Bel Ami, which we remember best today as a gay porn studio.

Some of the questions and answers are pretty dumb (discussion of ‘showing and not telling’ or how literature ‘tells the truth’—perennial humanist slop-talk). But there are some interesting moments, like Foote saying how much he enjoyed “this boy McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper” although he otherwise found American literature exhausted (Capote, Mailer, etc., the other members of his age cohort, all seemed to him to have crapped out—and of course, Foote himself had failed to become the novelist he wanted to be).

And some table-talk sort of opinions, or takes:

“Good women writers are the least soft at the core. George Eliot and Jane Austen, there’s no softness in those little ladies’ hearts; those are hard, hard diamond-sharp hearts. And they write with them. And they are very great writers.”

“Memphis never really produced a creative talent… It is kind of strange to me that here’s Memphis a city of half a million… and Memphis has produced nearly none [writers]”

There’s also a guest lecture in a Shakespeare course, in which Foote again skips doing any work: “I had thought that for once I would prepare a text for delivery to this gathering, and I really intended to do so… however… I realized that what I would have to do is sort of compose a flowery poem or paean of praise” so he’ll just read aloud and then field questions. His answers have a few gems, such as:

“I took part in a production of Taming of the Shrew… Nobody did what I wanted to do… I want a fat, balding, middle-aged man who really understands women. Nobody wants that. They want him young, carrying a bullwhip, and with a beautiful mustache. He should be a fat, slightly bald man who really knows women. And all this business about bullwhips and spankings, that’s not in Shakespeare… he’s a man who understands women, and hears this girl going on and he knows, he knows that she’s a sweet beautiful nice girl if she’d just stop this foolishness.”

Foote was twice divorced.