`His Own Particular Fond Absurdity'

A reader has been quietly urging me to read The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy, edited by Jay Tolson, and though I have no intention of reading it cover to cover I have enjoyed browsing around in it, especially among Foote’s letters. My enthusiasm for Percy, especially for The Moviegoer, was strongest around the time he published Love in the Ruins, in 1971. I lost interest by the late nineteen-seventies, after Lancelot. The novels seemed thin and not humanly compelling, whereas Foote’s three-volume The Civil War: A Narrative feels ripe for a second reading. My preference extends to the letters: Foote’s voice is stronger, earthier, funnier, more profane and opinionated. This comes from a letter he wrote on Feb. 3, 1980:

“Semiotics is an utter mystery to me and is likely to remain so. I can scarcely even comprehend the definition in the dictionary, let alone what’s behind it. I’m much more interested in the way people behave psychologically than I am in what underlies that behavior. Also I don’t much like looking into things that I’m not sure have an answer – like whether God has withdrawn behind the stars. Chaucer and Shakespeare and Donne and Browning and John Crowe Ransom are my kind of writers; plus Proust – always Proust, who just may be the top knocker of them all aside from Shakespeare. Yeats for example is a really good writer but it’s despite his special interests, which have to be ignored before you can really get down to the beauty of what he’s saying. Some of them can only be admired when they are what they would call `misunderstood.’ To understand Yeats is to go along with a lot of hogwash and moonshine. `Byzantium’ for instance is a very great poem if youll [sic] only refrain from understanding what he’s saying, and the same thing is even more true of the earlier `Sailing to Byzantium.’ A goddam mechanical bird, of all things!”

That’s the voice of a man who long ago gave up youthful pretensions, assuming he ever had any. He knows what he likes and doesn’t care if you approve. Of course, he and Percy had been friends for 50 years by the time of the letter. Both would turn 64 that year, and they remained friends until Percy’s death in 1990, the year Foote became a celebrity for his role in Ken Burns’ Civil War television documentary. In a letter written March 3, 1984, Foote congratulates Percy for finally beginning to read Proust:

“Despite the almost twenty-year gap when I was engaged almost exclusively with my War, 1954-74, I have read Things Past eight times from start to finish – six times before the War, twice afterward. In fact, whenever I feel I have earned it (completing a novel, say, or moving into a new house) I immediately reward myself by taking off six weeks and reading Proust again from start to finish, always with a heightened admiration and widened wonder at his talent and his skill in demonstrating it . . . .his primary skill, which is his unalterable concern with moving that story forward; he had it to a degree that matches Dickens’ and Dostoevsky’s, which everybody recognizes (though not nearly enough where Dostoevsky is concerned) but without seeing it in Proust.”

Foote proceeds to offer Percy a 10-point outline of “Budding Grove,” as he calls it, and assures his friend that Proust’s method is not random, “depending on his charm to hold the reader.” Like a cheerleader he writes:

“For these and other reasons it does what all great books do, and does it superbly: that is, enlarges life. Do for God’s sake stay with it to the finish. Dont [sic] be put off by any foolish notion that it seems `loose’ or undisciplined. It’s altogether the tightest, best-constructed and most disciplined novel I ever read. Youll [sic] think so too, if you stay with it, and most of all if youll [sic] reread it as soon as that first reading has had time to sink in.”

I’m struck by the congruence of my tastes and Foote’s. Our most heartfelt admirations are nearly identical – Shakespeare, Proust, Chekhov. This is from a Dec. 27, 1988, letter:

“Chekhov. My God, my God, what a writer! How he does it is a mystery you cant [sic] solve by analyzing it – he just does it; does it out of being Chekhov. You can say of other great writers, even Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, that if they hadnt [sic] come along, someone else would have filled their places. Not him; he landed running and never looked back, a highly individual man with his own particular fond absurdity that enabled him to see it in others when he wrote about them . . .”