The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy
Santella, Andrew
THE EPISTLES OF PALS The Correspondence of Shelby Foote and Walker Percy fay Tolson, editor W. W. Norton, S27.50, .310 pp. Andrew Santella In 1931, Walker Percy began his writing career with a...
...At the same time, Percy was producing two unpublishable nov-els...
...I seriously think no good practicing Catholic can ever be a great artist...
...Foote is also the more provocative of the two...
...European writers like Kierke-gaard and Camus were enormous in-fluences, but he said that existentialism had become a virtually meaningless label...
...Though largely ignored by award committees and academic historians, the book was received by some as a landmark achieve-ment, bridging literature and history...
...In a 1951 letter he suggested Percy write a novel set in New Orleans...
...It is hard to imagine that the strug-gling writer was always happy to see another of his more successful friend's didactic letters in his mailbox...
...Some critics said his achievement ri-valed Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire...
...Foote's advice continued even as Per-cy built a career that established him as a major American novelist...
...It is a tremen-dous bother (and expense) to every-body...
...So are Percy's last letters to Foote...
...He especially loosened up later in his career, when the accolades he was receiving for his massive war narrative seemed to satisfy his ambition and ob-viate the need for self-celebration...
...art is by definition a product of doubt...
...He needled Percy about his work habits, about his reading, even about his conversion to Catholicism...
...When several of Foote's nov-els in translation were up for presti-gious awards in France, in 1978, Percy wrote to his former colleague in scholas-tic journalism, "That ain't bad for a Pica staffer...
...Four more novels followed in the next four years, receiving good reviews, but generating for the most part middling sales...
...Foote, Greenville High's "playboy," earned a reputation of another kind with his sprawling and celebrated three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative, published between 1958 and 1974...
...Fear-ing that Percy's faith would impede his growth as a writer, Foote wrote in 1949, "There is something terribly cowardly (at least spiritually) about the risks to which you won't expose your soul...
...His good humor shines through, just as it did in his role as commentator in Ken Burns's television documentary on the Civil War...
...What is a pain is not even the pain but the nuisance...
...His six nov-els and two books on philosophy and language received the kind of critical at-tention that Foote's work never received...
...When, in 1984, Percy fi-nally gave in and wrote that he would do his assigned reading, Foote was so pleased that his reply is touching to read...
...but you won't follow it...
...This was at least six years before Percy began writing his first published novel, The Moviegoer, set in New Orleans at Mardi Gras...
...He made the earlier head-way as a writer, publishing his first novel, Tournament, in 1949...
...He thought it might earn him the Na-tional Book Award or a Pulitzer...
...Foote, on the other hand, never let up pushing his lists of recommended reading, es-pecially Proust...
...But if they don't call you Gibbon you get a feeling they're holding back...
...That their friendship survived chal-lenges like that was probably testament to Percy's strength of character...
...Andrew Santella In 1931, Walker Percy began his writing career with a stint as gossip columnist for the Greenville (Missi-ssippi) High School Pica...
...The reader, hunting Foote's letters for contextual clues to Percy's whereabouts and activities, may be reminded of that writer's 1976 novel Lancelot, with its silent, mysterious listener...
...But Foote's advice sometimes did hit the mark...
...One of the pleasures of reading the correspondence between Percy and Foote is in seeing these old friends savor success, when it finally comes...
...Foote, though, took his relative obscurity as evidence that he was on the right artistic track...
...At times, he was breezily harsh, pref-acing advice with statements like, "The thing you don't understand (but will when you work harder and come to it yourself) is...
...His notes on the letters are helpful without being too intrusive...
...It survived, in fact, for six decades, until Percy's death in 1990...
...The friendship survived Percy's adolescent wisecracks...
...Their letters show each taking almost as much pride in the other's success as in his own...
...Of that group, Shiloh (1952), a fictional recreation of the Civil War battle, was his only popular success...
...Finishing Shiloh in 1951, he wrote Percy, "This one does it: I'm among the American writ-ers of all time-got there on the fourth book...
...The two argued with, en-couraged, and influenced each other by post almost every step of the way...
...Foote's letters, though, are more than engaging enough to carry the load...
...They call you Gibbon and you know that's silly," he confid-ed...
...Jay Tolson, editor of the Wilson Quar-terly and author of Pilgrim in the Ruins (1993), a biography of Percy, supplies an introduction that nicely summarizes the lives of the two "brothers in art...
...The main thing is for you to plot it care-fully from beginning to end, making it fit a rigid time-scheme: Mardi Gras, for instance, with its climax and the fol-lowing holy day...
...But as disappointing as the loss is, it does give this first sec-tion the feel of a dramatic monologue...
...Indeed, Percy told Foote that it was his work in semiotics that would survive in a hundred years...
...His first item was about the "desperate affair" of his best friend, "G.H.S.'s own playboy, Shelby Foote...
...For the first third of this collection, the reader gets only Foote's words...
...Foote begged off, claiming that "the abstract makes my legs ache and my mind wander...
...It is reassuring to close this collection with Percy professing the faith that had so deeply informed his career as a writ-er...
...The Civil War had taken Foote twenty years to write and ran over 1.5 million words...
...Foote especially seemed to relish his role as mentor...
...Percy ma-tured from high school gossip columnist to National Book Award winner, with The Moviegoer in 1961...
...Unfortunately, Tol-son was working with a handicap: Foote didn't begin saving Percy's letters until 1970...
...And it is reassuring to know that Foote was with Percy at the end, as the two had been with each other in friend-ship for sixty years...
...Percy's faith was a source of real con-flict between the two...
...Still, Percy remains difficult to classify...
...This is where Tolson's explanatory notes are most valuable, filling in the gaps left by Percy's lost letters...
...His novels are set in the South, but he didn't like to be considered a Southern writer...
...Dying, if that's what it comes to, is no big thing since I'm ready for it, and prepared for it by the Catholic faith, which I believe," he wrote ten months before his death from cancer...
...When Percy told Foote, on a trip to New Mexico in the late 1940s, of his plans to join the church, Foote reportedly responded, "Yours is a mind in full intellectual retreat...
...Consistent with this self-ranking, Foote's early letters to his friend took the tone of a master instructing a student...
...Pushed, you'll admit that doubt is a healthy thing, closely connected with faith...
Vol. 124 • February 1997 • No. 4
