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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
The Michael Berry Show.

Speaker 2 (00:02):
Earlier this week, Mailman Vaughn called the show on the
Black Line, and Jim Mutter, our creative director, thought he
sounded like a black version of Civil War historian Shelby Foot.
We played clips of both men, and as it turns out,
Jim has a pretty keen ear, and we were all

(00:25):
we were all amazed at how astute his hearing was
to catch that audio. Some people also said he sounded
like Alan Tousson in the fourteen minute rendition of Southern Nights.

(00:50):
If you ever go to YouTube and look up Alan
tusson so Other Nights, the fourteen and he's behind a
piano and he tells you the story about how he
wrote that song that you know of as a Glenn
Camel song. Anyway, So we played audio of both of
these men, Mailman Vaughn on the Black Line and Civil
War historian Shelby Foot, who I love. We got a
lot of people out there in our listening audience who

(01:12):
really enjoyed Shelby Foot as well, and I heard from
so many of you. So we found an interview from
nineteen eighty three featuring Shelby Foot. This was about a
decade before he was on Ken Burns's PBS documentary Civil War,
which is when most people came to find out about him.
If you haven't seen the documentary, go find it. It

(01:35):
is a very very good watch. Anyway, here is that
interview with Shelby foot who I love enjoy.

Speaker 1 (01:45):
Shelby Foote is the author of several novels set in
the South. He spent twenty years researching and writing a
three volume history of the Civil War and has now
returned to writing fiction.

Speaker 3 (01:57):
My great grandfather was from Making, Mississippi. His name is
Heze Kyle William Foot, and my grandfather was his youngest son.
He came to the Delta around eighteen seventy five something
like that, and I managed h three plantations down in
the Lake Washington region, Rolling Fork and the Lake Washington region.

(02:21):
My father was born on at Mounds Plantation down there
Rolling Fork Wastbury now and where I'll someday be buried.
But my grandfather's favorite of the places was a place
called Mount Holly on Lake Washington, there about twenty miles
or so south of Greenville, and that's where my father
grew up. I I doubt if my grandfather read five

(02:43):
books in his life or my grandmother for that manter.
But I they did have remarkable qualities. My grandmother, for instance, Uh,
that house at Mount Holly has thirty two rooms, and uh,
whatever her limitations were, uh, she certainly managed to run
a thirty two room house, uh, which I would hate

(03:05):
to undertake uh had they had rather formidable abilities When
you look back on it, Tradition is one of the
things that a person deals with in his life. It's
one of the things that's found the interest or writer
in writing about the people who live with it. Uh.
Most often, I I suppose, certainly in my case, it's

(03:28):
the failure to measure up to the tradition that makes
the tragedy. Sometime that involves an examination of the tradition itself,
which you find out is false or inflated. Those those
are the things well worth writing about. Without that tradition, Uh,

(03:49):
you wouldn't have a skeleton to hang the meat on.
A That's true of a lot of things. I was
singularly fortunate in being present at an annoying almost tragedy
and injustice. The treatment of blacks as who were called
in those days was a dreadful thing to have happening,

(04:10):
But an absolutely invaluable thing to be in the middle
of when you're a writer. When they talk about American
ideals and the nobility of justice and all that, I
had to counteraction to that right present in front of
my eyes throughout my growing up years, and it was
a great value to that. That's one of the reasons
I believe that a writer who is also a Southerner

(04:33):
has a huge advantage. He doesn't have to be taught
about injustice. He sees it all around him. You have
memories out of your childhood and the things are not
all bad. The Blacks in Greenville sometime in the middle
thirties had I've forgotten what the festival as they called
it was called. It was something like one hundred Years

(04:54):
of Progress or something, and the main speaker was George
Washington Carver, who came over from Tuskegee and spoke, and
it was a week long thing, and it was wonderful.
I was a newspaper put on the paper at home,
and it was a wonderful thing to be around. Doctor
Carver gave him unshirted hell. He said, I go into

(05:16):
houses where you can study botany through the floorboards and
astronomy through the roof, and there's a Buick automobile in
the driveway. He said, don't do that. Fix your house up,
don't get that Buick automobile. He was a wonderful old man,
one of the finest men I've ever known in my life.
It was a good place to grow up. It was
a splendid place to see all these different pushes and

(05:41):
pulls in a society that was badly torn, and yet
had erected such defenses against the tearing that it seemed
almost idyllic. You had to look below the surface to
see anything wrong with it. They were enormous wrongs just
immediately below the surface. But it had both of these things,

(06:02):
and it was a good place to grow up. I
was talking about Greenville having pretenses to be in Athens
of Mississippi. That was primarily due to Will Percy himself.
Certain influences went into making Will Percy what he was,
but he was the first true literary figure in that
part of the country. I I've often said, and I

(06:23):
believe firmly, that if Will Percy had been in Clarksdale
or Greenwood, it would have been Clarksdale or Greenwood that
turned out the writers instead of Greenville. It was not done,
and I've said this often, it was not done by
having a coterie of literary people. There was none of that.
There was no exchangeing of manuscripts, there was no intense

(06:43):
discussion of this and that and the other. It was
more by example, the example of being himself a cultured
man that you saw and talked with. It was his library,
which he prized high and would almost never lend the
book out. Uh. There was a h example as a
man who would talk to you, say, for thirty minutes

(07:03):
about the poetry of kids, and the effect on you
was to make you immediately want to run home and
read some kids. It was a childhood like any other.
I've always been glad that I didn't get interested in
literary matters until I was about fifteen, sixteen, seventeen years old,
so that I had uh all the normal experiences without

(07:24):
books keeping me from enjoying 'em. When I did turn
to books at about seventeen, I was like a colt
in Clover. I was very happy with that. But I
had all this in the background, and it continued. The
main thing I did between the age of say sixteen
and twenty was read and go to dances, so I

(07:46):
m held on to the to the good part of it.
I had a good time at school. It was as
to the school paper, and I enjoyed that part of it.

Speaker 4 (07:55):
I wanted to get you to talk a little bit
about your first becoming interested in in the Civil War,
reading it and researching it, and later writing about it.

Speaker 3 (08:05):
I always enjoyed the reading of history in part because
you knew what you were reading was true, or at
least you had reason to believe it was true. Working
against that was the quality of the history as it's
taught in schools. It's like Shakespeare. The way it's taught

(08:26):
in schools is the one that anybody ever reads any more.
Shakespeare the rest of his life after being taught at
in high school. And so it was with history. They
made us memorized lists of dates and things like that,
things that they could examine us on later on, rather
than letting us see what history really is. I I
might almost remember the however many steps they were to

(08:46):
the Treaty of Utrek to this day, and I still
wouldn't know anything. But I I always enjoyed reading history,
particularly good history. One of the first books I read
that drew my attention strongly to the war was UH
Colonel Henderson's biography of Stonewall Jackson and the the the

(09:07):
the personality, the character of Stonewall Jackson is a fascinating thing.
And then because of the interest in Jackson, you get
interested in how he fought certain battles and what he did,
and then he went on from that. There were plenty
of others Robert E. Lee, Comps Sherman. By no means
all Southerners, UH. Some some of the Northerners are equally

(09:30):
great interest are almost equally great interests. There are minor
characters that you encounter as you get deeper into the war,
comparatively minor, like Pat Clayburn from over in Arkansas, UH,
Albert Sidney Johnston, Bedford Forrest, UH many many of 'em.
Some of the scoundrels are as interesting as the heroes.

(09:52):
Men like UH Edward Stanton Lincoln Secretary of War, Generals
like Phil Sheridan, whom you personally dislike but find more
were more fascinating. As you look into UH vacillators and
UH men with warped natures like UH Joseph E. Johnston fascinating.

(10:13):
They don't have to be good heroes. They can be
bad heroes and be just as interested, if not more so.
There was not much interest in the Civil War or
in the late twenties and early early thirties. Uh, not much.
And as for veterans, I think I saw about three
of 'em in my lifetime, and they'd probably been drummer boys. Uh.

(10:33):
I was too late to see them, although once I
did down on the Gulf coast, down Biloxi or near Biloxi,
go to Beauvoir when it was still an old soldier's home,
and I saw a number of 'em sitting around on
benches and things down there. They were just old fellas
with beard as far as I was concerned. They tell

(10:54):
funny stories about those old man The story about a
woman going through a Confederate home down there. There was
an old man about eighty years old, had one of
his legs was off just above the knee, and she
stopped in frontman and shook her head and said, oh,
my good man, you've lost your leg. And he looked
down and said, damned if I haven't. They were a

(11:15):
funny old men.

Speaker 4 (11:16):
Can you talk a little bit about Mississippi's contribution to
the war, Uh, in terms of soldiers and in terms
of the destruction and everything inside the state.

Speaker 3 (11:26):
The Mississippi contribution to the war was truly great. My God,
Mississippi contributed to the Army of Virginia one of the
hardest hitting, hardest fighting brigades. Boxdales Brigade in long Street's

(11:46):
Corps is one of the finest body of fighting men
in the Army of Northern Virginia. Mississippi, of course, was
one of those states that had a terrific amount of
fighting within its borders. North Carolina, for example, contributed more
men to the Confederacy than any other state, but it
was comparatively unripped up compared to states like UH Virginia

(12:11):
and even Mississippi. UH Georgia. Except for Sherman's quick march
through it didn't suffer too much in the war compared
to places like Mississippi. One of the statistics that shakes
me up to know is that UH in the first
year after the war, Mississippi's total income of the state

(12:31):
of Mississippi, one fifth I was spent on artificial limbs
for the veterans. They just problems you don't even think
about until you've run across the statistics like that the
women in Mississippi who were widowed or the engaged girls
whose intended husbands were killed in that war changed a

(12:52):
lot of things. Before the war, I I don't remember
the figure, something like eighty percent of far more than
eight eighty percent of the teachers were men. After the war,
eighty percent or far more over, women just weren't any men.
The carnage of that war is just incredible when you
come down to the figures on If you want to

(13:19):
be a good writer, you got to have very early
a notion of being true to what you have learned
out of your personal experience, including your reading, but out
of your personal experience, you've got to be true to that.
You should never be willing to write a scene that
you know is false to these precepts in your own heart,
simply because it will work or somebody will buy it.

(13:43):
Those are the traps that good writers don't fall into.

Speaker 4 (13:47):
Let's talk for a minute about influences. If you can
tell me some of the American writers that influenced you
as as a young man.

Speaker 3 (13:53):
A huge influence on my life was William Falkner. I
didn't know him, but he was over there in Oxford
writing books or among the first modern things I ever read,
and whatever first modern things you read are always very
influential on you. But in this case, it was a
man writing about my home state that made me see
my home state in ways I would not have seen

(14:14):
without his help. Well Fulkner's comprehensible on many levels, including
teenage level, and I think that's proved by the huge
sales he had in paperbacks long before he won the
Nobel Prize. To me, the most unusual thing about Falkner,
the thing I got from him more than any other
one thing, is his ability to communicate sensation. He can

(14:36):
tell you what the texture this claw feels like to
your finger if you read a description of dawn in
the woods in Mississippi, that is dawn in the woods
and Mississippi. Every sensation that he writes about becomes very real,
mostly through the use of highly poetic metaphor, but also

(14:56):
through the accuracy of his observation and the intelligence that
he brings to it. It's not often considered because, probably
because it's too simple to consider how highly intelligent man
Faulkman was. Uh that eye that he had was so
gifted was well informed by his brain behind it. S
Every writer I ever knew started out as a poet,

(15:18):
and it was usually he changed prose after he found
out he couldn't handle poetry. But h y, I was
already writing as soon as I caught fire from these
these people who did it so well. I guess the
first time I settled down to thinking that things could
be done with words above the level of journalism and

(15:42):
poetry and those things was the stories I wrote with
the Carolina Magazine when I was in college at Chapel Hill.
I began to see it there, and then uh when
I left school, and I left it after two years. Uh,
and I was waiting at home for the National Guard
to mobilize because Hitler had gone in Poland. I wrote
my first novel tournament, and that's when I really came

(16:04):
into came to grips with the problem of handling a
larger form. By the time I finished college, and I
was in a class of thirty nine, there had not
been a major American writer who could even pretend to
have been well educated. The only one I know of
who had a master's degree was Thomas Wolf, and I

(16:25):
know he stepped on another he kept on another two years.
So it's to live on his folks, which is a
perfectly valid thing to do. But Falkland Hemingway had never
been to college, Fitzgerald flunked out of Princeton, and so on.
It It is by no means required, And in some
ways I think for the say, the last two years

(16:49):
of college junior and senior year, you really might be
better off out riding freight trains or working in a
sawmill for the experience that you get from it during
those invaluable years. And your brain is like a sponge
and absorbs every experience you have, if your experiences of
college campus experiences, that's pretty meager sto anything that helps

(17:10):
you learn how to write. Any outside thing that gives
you laws and rules, such as a teacher of creative writing,
is short circuiting you. Is keeping you from having some
very valuable experiences. It can only be gained by making mistakes.
What he tells you may be literally true, but you
don't know it on your own skin, and the only

(17:31):
way you're going to know it for yourself is to
discover it for yourself. So anybody who gives you excellent
advice about writing is almost keeping you from learning it.
You can say yes, right, but you can't put it
into practice unless you found it out for yourself. You
can be vitally interested. And I can talk here for

(17:51):
endlessly about theories about writing, about what's good and what's bad,
and what you should do and what you should not do.
And I guess it's very well to have all those
notions in your mind, but when you sit down at
that desk, you better get them all out of your mind.
You fly by the seat of your plants when you're writing.
You don't bring these theories with you. That is what
I meant a while ago when I said there are

(18:12):
some dangers attending upon being highly educated for a writer,
not for a critic. He should be, but a writer
doesn't want to develop his critical faculty to the point
where it's riding heard on his work. It's all right
for it to be up there, but it better not
be in command. There aren'ty shortcuts, or if they are there,
to your detriment. A shortcut is a very poor way

(18:35):
to arrive at a precept about writing. The longer it
took you to learn it, the harder you had to
sweat to learn it, the better it'll stay with you
and the more it belongs to you. There's an apprentice
to be served to become a writer, at least as
much as to the apprentices to be served to become

(18:58):
a doctor or anything else. You have to study your craft,
your art, your profession, as much as a lawyer or
a doctor. Lawyers and doctors sometimes goffitt that motion, but
they wrong. There's an awful lot of work involved in
learning how to write. You have to learn how to
make your hand do what your mind is telling it

(19:20):
to do. And the only way your hand can learn
how to do that, and that is right. It's the
same way a tennis player gets good with his racket
or anything else. It's a real process. Not that makes
a difference whether you use a pen or a pencil
or a typewriter. I suppose it does to me, but
I suppose it doesn't really. But you have to learn
your craft. You have to learn it so well that

(19:41):
you're not conscious of it while you're working. And that
takes a very lot of hard work. It's sitting at
a desk facing a blank wall, working many many hours,
day after day after day, until you're able to use
your hand the way your mind wants to put things
down on paper, I it grows out of their natural propensities,

(20:03):
then you have a true story. And I've always believed
that and operated accordingly. The worst possible way to conceive
a book is a situation in which a man does this,
and that near the best possible concept. Best possible conception
is how about a man who in a situation, not

(20:25):
a situation in which a man, but a man who
in a situation. And it's a very different approach, and
to me it separates good from bad writing. I'm the
kind of writer who thinks that it's very dangerous to
take very careful notes. But you have an experience and
you immediately write it all down so that you can

(20:46):
use it. That seems to me a dreadful thing. You
freeze it. That way what you should do, and the
way I've always done is let it move to the
back of your mind and forget it. And then when
it re emerges, as it will in future years, it
comes out with all kinds of incrustations and additions to it,
and the distortions that take place in your back of

(21:08):
your mind make it truer than it was when it
got in there. And I think that taking notes for
such uses is a serious mistake in any sense. I
might put down what I had for breakfast that morning
because later on it might be interested. But as for
material to be used, now that's only my personal thing.
Henry James, for example, kept an extensive journal which he

(21:31):
mined as a mother load, and it was of great
use to him. But I think with D. Lawrence, to
freeze something is to keep it from growing in this
way that I think it'll grow. It best if it's
not specifically fettered. And I found that to be true
time after time again. The changes that something undergoes in

(21:56):
your sub or unconscious of very valuable things, and they
don't occur if you if you pin it down too
tightly before you let it move into your mind. I'm
a slow writer. Five six hundred words is a good
day for me, and I have to work long hours
to do that. But if you can turn out five
six hundred words a day, and can do it three

(22:17):
hundred and sixty days a year, you've got a lot
of manuscript there, a couple of pages of typewritten stuff
a days, or it stacks up. That's a novel a year.
If you can do it, you can hold that. And
I did that. The first four or five years of
my right life. I wrote five novel I don't play poker,

(22:37):
I don't play golf, I don't take rides in the countryside.
I write and read and listen to music. And since
the glorious invention came along, I watched a lot of television.
The glorious thing about television is when you're utterly exhausted
by a day's hard work of writing, you can sit

(22:59):
down in front of the thing and your brain is
totally inactive. There's just something there on the screen, and
you watch it and it doesn't require a thing of you.
There's nothing there.

Speaker 4 (23:12):
Is the younger writer's duty to take what the thing's
going on around him and the way people talk today
around him and translate that into fiction.

Speaker 3 (23:22):
Sure, you're onto something there that I haven't mentioned, and
that's the need for a good ear. I've been rereading
John o'harall lately, probably the best ear in American literature,
and what he got from having a good attentive ear
is enormous. The very similitude of O'Hara's work is enormously

(23:43):
heightened by the accuracy of his hearing people speak in
a way that you know is accurate because you test
it on yourself. O'Hara once pointed out that people do
not say, what is the idea of that? What people
say is what's the idea of that? And that kind

(24:05):
of thing put into your dialogue, especially, you know that
it's true because of the accuracy of his hearing. And yes,
it's very important for young people to learning writing, to
sharpen their ears up and listen to what's going on. Remember,
Rocky Graziano taught me a lot about dialogue. He was

(24:26):
kicked out of the army for refusing to pick up
cigarette butts. He said, that's not for me, and asked
him later how he felt about it. He said, I
wish now I picked him up, And that's that's the
way people talk, and you should listen to that. It
can also teach you how to make language strike home.
That's a splendid sentence. I wish now I picked him up,

(24:49):
And you can use that writing many devices and many
things you can learn from listening to people talk. Black
and white, illiterate and highly literate, rich and poor. They
all have their virtues and they're waiting for you to
discover them. And that's what a writer should do. If

(25:11):
I was talking about not playing pok D that way,
I can listen. I do as to advice. If someone
were asking me whether they should become a writer, I
would always say emphatically no, have absolutely nothing to do
with it under any circumstance. And if he would listen
to that, he certainly should not have been a writer.
So there's so many pluses and minuses all over the place.

(25:35):
It just has to be an individual judgment. And it
doesn't do any good to tell them that the satisfaction
of being in print is a waning thing. And by
the time your fourth or fifth book comes along, you're
not getting the kind of thrill you think you're going
to get out of your book coming out. You no
longer think that the public will understand you. They'll never

(25:58):
understand you, and if they did, unders you would probably
be a sign that you had slipped down to some
kind of degree that shouldn't be paid any attention to.
But that's true of all walks of life. It's not
just writers. Everybody knows that how he did what he
does is far more important than how successful or unsuccessful

(26:22):
he was at it. Success shouldn't be scorn, but as
for personal happiness. I'm absolutely certain that it comes out
of the satisfaction that you'd have done your best in
your circumstances, and I think most people do do their
best under the circumstances. Yes, it's a hard life, it's
also the happiest possible life, sometimes depending on a very

(26:45):
simple question as to where the work's going well or badly.
It's a life where, like any self employed person, successive
failure is strictly up to you. Whether that's good or
bad is your decision. Most people say, yes, that's wonderful,
but they wouldn't be so sure about it when all

(27:06):
the blame comes clumping down on them. But to my mind,
it's the best possible life. I don't go with Henley
about being the master of my fate and the captain
of my soul, but that gets about as closer to
it as you can get. I like it, and the

(27:27):
satisfactions are great. I've been all my life not only
apposed to writers being over educated. I've been opposed to
even financial help it's given them. It's a great thing.
If you can't do any more, then pay the light
bill to be able to do it, And if somebody
comes along with a large grant for you that short
circuits that they're depriving you of something. There, he should

(27:51):
do it on his own. He should be wary about
accepting obligations that would require him to do work he
doesn't like. For instance, ideally, unless he could afford it,
he probably ought not get married. If he gets married,
if he can't afford it, he probably ought not have
any children. Well, that's one hell of a restriction to
put on somebody. But the writer knows not out of

(28:14):
selfishness does he concentrate on what matters in his art.
He does it because he knows the whole thing's gonna
blow up in his face if he doesn't. If you're
married and your wife wants a new coat, and you
write some bad fictions so that she can have a
new coat, you and your wife are not gonna get
along very well anyhow, So don't do that. Let her

(28:36):
go cold. The children are hungry, give him a peanut
butter sandwich. Don't go down and buy him some roast
beef by writing bad work, because you're gonna lose those
children anyhow. You'll be so dissatisfied with yourself that the
thing's gonna blow up most writers are gonna blow up anyhow,
so perhaps it doesn't matter. They're self centered people and
well avoided people would do well to stay away from

(28:58):
writers have an interest that sometimes you have to feel
with their I won't say decency, but with their conduct,
be a good idea to stay away from them. They're
not going to tell you anything anyhow. Young people would
do well not to pay any attention to styles and
fads unless they interest them, and concentrate on doing the

(29:21):
very best they can with whatever talent they've been able
to muster. The best thing to do, in all accounts
is go your own way, work very hard at your craft,
be true to whatever precepts you formed, and everything's going
to be all right or it won't. But I know
nothing's going to be all right if you do it
any other way. If you like the.

Speaker 2 (29:40):
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(30:00):
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(30:25):
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(30:48):
we take all the credit for ourselves. God bless the
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(31:13):
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