Shelby Foote on William Faulkner and the American South
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- Опубліковано 6 лип 2020
- Shelby Foote, great Civil War historian, reminisces about meeting William Faulkner, and also discusses interactions between Black and White Southerners in his hometown growing up.
Shelby was really sick in this interview.
Very generous with his time. He ignored his discomfort and spoke as naturally as if he were well. He wasn't.
Foote-A learned man, passionate about writing and history...RIP
Exactly! I’m STILL working [Grinding would be much more apt!] my way through his complete works: “The Civil War.” These Volumes are #1 - 800-pgs., #2 - Over 900-pgs., & #3 - 1,100+-pgs. One Helluva Effort by this American📚🇺🇸
Love this interview because it’s like being transported to the times he (Foote) is discussing. The 1930s were only one lifetime after the Civil War, and both Faulkner and Foote were young men in a time when the war was actual living memory.
As someone once wrote: “The Past isn’t only Prologue - it isn’t even Past.”
I think that may even be Faulkner himself who made that observation.
I’m an old guy with a faulty memory 😂 …
Foote was amazing in Ken Burns' The American Civil War
Had an English teacher in college who turned me on to Faulkner. Found Foote in my 40s... such good writers and Southern gentlemen.
The honesty of this man regarding the world he grew up in would probably be quite impossible to get anyone to express these days. That to me is not progress, rather just the opposite. The fact that no one is allowed to be honest with one another in respect to these issues is a sort of guarantee that underlying problems will not be truly resolved. It takes a lot of understanding and wisdom, that we as a society do not possess, to see the nuanced and complicated relationship between blacks and whites of that time. We have no idea what we are talking about because we simply weren't there.
Indeed. I find his decency and manifest sincerity very moving and the interviewer is respectful and skillful enough to let him talk and thereby reveal himself and his understanding more fully. The notion of colorblindness is attacked as naive and even pernicious by many on the left. But seeing and respecting the common humanity in each other has to be the goal, I think. Definitely doesn't mean denying the shameful history of racism and it's lingering effects. But it does mean striving to treat everyone as an individual so we can reach a point where race is irrelevant.
@@mortensenegbert6619 Couldn't agree more. Very well put Sir
@@mortensenegbert6619 I'm agreed with a good reason for that "colorblindness. "
Living near, and having friendships with Indigenous/Indians here in Western USA, and some Blacks, myself being white, raised in a totally white culture; I have come to appreciate the importance of differences in the nature of people. The American experience is enriched by the Black people
@@neiluscook2283 Couldn't agree more, especially with your last sentence. Listening to black music liberated me from some of the sterility of my WASP upbringing. Allowed me to - as George Clinton once put it - "dance my way out of my constrictions."
@@mortensenegbert6619 that’s absurd. Black music has destroyed the United States’ cities and the entire millennial and Z generations piecemeal. The Jewish producers could easily change the context of this music, but destruction is the mandate at press-time and ad infinitum. To deny this is the wanton folly of follies, a virtue signal in masochistic jest. Everyone else is markedly encouraged to be proud of their people and history, but after the Jewish communist civil rights movement it is only us who are condemned to kneel in a false shame. I implore you to look into who actually ran the trans-Atlantic slave trade, if you do you will find 3/4 of the slave ships and merchant blocks were owned by Jews. Out of all the slaves ever brought here white Americans at the highest rate only owned 10% of them. No one ever mentions the Barbary slave trade do they? You sir have been bamboozled.
Very nice hearing this deeply thoughtful and civiliized dialogue regarding the south, history, race and the art of writing.
Invaluable content and conversation.
What a great interview. Thank you for sharing!
A fantastic man Shelby Foote....R.I.P. kind sir , and may God bless your honest soul and Heaven be your bed....💥
Could listen that man speak for hours, lovely cadence and admirable honesty.
'It wasn't hard to be ahead of your time in Mississipi in the 1930s.'
Having just read several Faulkner short stories I found this discussion fascinating. Excellent interview.
Great interview. Would be nice to give credit to the interviewer who did a great job in spite of some tough language (not at all with intent to cause offense) and some tough commentary. Invaluable material.
Tough language? Explain
I am trying to determine who the interviewer is. This was a great interview.
Definitely a restrained, skilled interviewer. Please post his name if you find it.
“Yes, we laughed, because I have learned this at least during these four years, that it really requires an empty stomach to laugh with, that only when you are hungry or frightened do you extract some ultimate essence out of laughing just as the empty stomach extracts the ultimate essence out of alcohol.”
I love the writings of both of these men (Foote and Faulkner) but I could listen to Foote talk all day. Sad to hear the rattle in his breathing. Not sure how long before he passed in 2005.
Foote was really sick here. Really sick. I could barely listen. 🎉My physician training wants to fix him. To get him on oxygen and mist bonchodilaters. I can't believe Shelby made it through the hour. He describes the South I lived in as an outsider. My mother had a house keeper she paid $3/day in the fifties. She used in the N word frequently. And Mom was a first generation Italian immigrant raised in a New York Italian neighborhood with no contact with black people. In the South she just adopted local customs not knowing differently.
When was this interview?
28:47 is scarily accurate
Mr. Foote you could tell was somewhat frail, but it seemed like he wanted to tell this before he wasn't able. It would have been a pleasure to have spent just one evening with Shelby.
Even the rural north where I grew up in the 60's and 70's had its racist components. This interview is a genuine eye opener and I'm glad to see it.
The inner cities had what would be classed today, as racism - which was really different ethnicities and religious groups busting each other's balls.
Live with stories. It’s a good thing. 👍
Some of us were there. In the fifties and early sixties, it was pretty close to the thirties socially. And your comment is dead on, Michael Knight.
He wrote in interior monologue, and people couldn’t read it and hated him because he was for equality or was jealous of him.
I wonder how old he was when this was recorded. He seems older than when he was on the civil war documentary.
The Civil War interviews with him were conducted no later than 1989 and I think this in the 2000's. I seem to remember seeing 2003 as the year he did this. He died in 2005.
definitely strikes me as recorded after the other interview with him circa 2003 on InDepth
He sure didn't last long with those lungs. I could barely watch and listen to Shelby struggle. Made me sad. But I had to listen to this exchange. Brutally honest, up to Sheby's standards for himself. Sharp as sharp can get, though. Observations of writers and history and society right on.
@@flparkermdpc Yep. I feel the same way.
Shelby REAL DEAL.
i didn't realize this guy was as old as he was
🤔🤨A great Man and 🎓 👍🏻👌🏻👏🏻👏🏻💯❗ G-G.
At 10:30, he lets the old vernacular slip out but I can appreciate where he’s coming from because if I’m right, whites considered themselves as stewards of a people that was once their property and they felt a degree of responsibility for their well being. It’s when equality started to happen that people got uncomfortable with what was changing.
You have that exactly right.
I would like to have had a drink of Old Taylor with them.
Not realizing current ways aren’t the fault of those living in those times. To scold yesteryear ways are nothing but ignoring the humanity.
The past, they do things differently there.
Most of the great American writers come from the South, it’s amazing.
Henry James, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edith Wharton, HP Lovecraft, Herman Melville, James Fenimore Cooper, Fitzgerald, Robert Frost, William Longfellow, John Dos Pasos, Emily Dickinson, Paul Auster, William Dean Howell, Walt Whitman, et al would disagree.
@@SebastianE30But Tennessee Williams, Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Erskine Caldwell. Edna Ferber, Margaret Mitchell, etc have gotten much more attention? Why?
we met completely by my volition
1:36
walk percy and i were driving from
1:38
greenville mississippi
1:40
my hometown up to swanee tennessee
1:43
to spend part of the summer and we led
1:47
through oxford if we wanted to
Is that Robert Johnson in the background?
I noticed that picture too. Pretty cool, right?
@@mortensenegbert6619 for sure!
yes, he loved classical music and the Blues
Robert’s from there.
Does this accent exist anymore in the south? It’s almost old fashioned. He doesn’t speak with that hard R. It’s a lot softer.
It may be a class marker. Foote came from a wealthy family. Courtly manner and posh Southern accent.
@@mortensenegbert6619Thanks that’s what I was thinking, but then someone told me it’s how they talk in the delta or people of his generation. It does have that upperclass Southern gentry sound to it, though, or at least what I’ve seen in films.lol
My father grew up in Greenville and was a one of Foote's classmates and sounded just like him. My whole childhood was in Vicksburg. I haven't been back for a very long time now (I'm 74) so I don't know if the accent still exists. I doubt it, however. Television has had a way of smoothing out the extremes of American regional accents.
He has a distinct non Rhotic Southern Accent, which is very old fashioned nowadays and is not common in people born after the invention of the radio and television. Foote himself would be 108 if he were alive today. My grandmother had a non rhotic accent from Alabama but my Mother retains a very toned down Southern accent. I practically have an undetectable accent that sounds basically like a General American accent. Southern accents these days emphasize the “r” sound rather than drop it like Foote.
“ was he considered a racist?” O Lort, what a dishonest question. 12:11
He said everyone from Mississippi was a racist lol 😂
Of all y'all clapping and praising, how many of y'all have actually read and studied Faulkner ?
A lot of the appreciation here is for Shelby Foote.
@@margaretbenson8526 exactly my point.
Faulkner is not easy to read and harder to study? Isn’t he? What part of the Sound and the Fury would you call stream of conscience or internal dialogue the most for example?
what exactly is your point, dingus?
@@lizardman7364 bless your heart. Name calling = ad hominem. i don't expect you to understand that, but your reply tells me everything I need to know about you. Your parents are probably cousins and you prefer to burn books rather than read them. Please, tell me 3 praises and 3 criticisms for the last Shelby and Faulkner book you read and studied. My favorite part of the day here is when i have an expert like you show up to educate us.
Like most others, I admired Shelby Foote and bought his books after the first airing of the Ken Burns documentary in 1989.
Years later, mostly ‘thanks’ to YT, I’ve seem too many interviews with this man to admire him any longer. That’s not to see he wasn’t a giant as an author - but I believe every white human being who was born and raised in the Deep South, especially in the first 50 years after the Civil War, sadly is imbued with an inherent, matter-of-fact casual and familiar racist rhetoric. His very casual ‘N-bomb’ - in front of a black interviewer - is proof of that.
Foote really saw himself as a champion of the black people in the South … but the reality was he also was born with the inherent racism all too prevalent amongst whites still to this day. It is possible to believe you’re a ‘good man’ and a champion of human rights and decency while at the same time also dog-whistling the same racist rhetoric you’ve known since you were a child simply because you weren’t taught anything else.
Shelby Foote professes to have great admiration for black folk in America. At the same time, he was a life long apologist for men like Nathan Bedford Forrest - the first ‘Grand Wizard’ of the Ku Klux Klan. It’s what it is: two things can be true at the same time. He claimed to have no issues with people with a different skin than his, but also had no qualms displaying the racist vernacular still too common in the Deep South even today.
Shelby sounds short of breath .
You are hearing a dying emphysema sufferer.
He is suffering from heart failure as well. COPD, CHF w/ rt sided heart failure. End Stage.
Shelby sounds drunk!
I doubt black people felt racism worked for them. His point of view that 1930’s Delta racism worked well is not true for black people. His point of view is that people helped blacks because they were considered animals. That was the slaver’s argument. Think how cruel animal factories in America.
Fast forward to today and your side has tried everything that can be done to """help""" in the material realm to no effect. Now the Left has moved on to just formulating joke arguments about racist math tests, ancient redlining and generational trauma to explain the disproportionate rates of homicide and destitution. The present system was the work of people with your mindset and it doesn't work any better for them than anything else has
He uses the n-word at around 10:30.
It was a word in his working vocabulary. The context he fails to provide in the discussion of race is that things were rough all over. Mistreating anyone is wrong, of course. But the deep south in the early 20th century was a place where industrial technology routinely mangled human flesh, without regard to skin color. The violence happening between the races was not particularly worse than the violence happening in the workplace between the machines and their operators, etc., except that it was racially motivated and presumably avoidable.
It’s poetic license explaining how people talked and believed.
Shelby was nearly 90 here and dying with emphysema. His use of the N-word was not gratuitous nor sensational. It was part of His conversation in a discussion about race with a black man. Kudos to that interviewer to get Shelby's trust in that short time. Great job.
A great writer of fiction.
Wtf, your bent!
He was there chump
There isn’t really any American “south.” East Tennessee is not southern Louisiana, southern Louisiana is not central Texas, central Texas is not the lowlands of South Carolina, and I could go on.
It’s not much different from the conceptual “north.” Is New Jersey Missouri? Is Missouri Maine?
The whole concept is simplistic.
Yes. Perhaps so. Still, we talk of "The Solid South," "The Southern Strategy," "The Mind of the South". "I'll Take My Stand" a Southern Manifesto. "Somewhere Below the Mason Dixon Line" as Jimmie Rodgers sang. Missouri is a lot more South than North, I'd say. Not just geographically but politically. A continuum rather than a sharp demarcation?
Jibberish
@@johnf8064 Check spelling. Derived from "gibber," "speak rapidly and unintelligibly."
@@mortensenegbert6619 jabberwocky
Missouri is more south than north. Ignorelat/long.
Foote sounds like he's tanked.
Odds are you and I will too when we're his age. If we live that long.
Sounds to me like emphysema. He’s struggling for enough air to talk.
He did drink and probably is here a little.
He was an elderly man, around 80 years old when this was filmed.
He was close to his death at near 90. You are hearing a terminal emphysema victim struggle. Born 1916. Died 2005.
This should be required viewing in schools. An honest, respectful dialog about race.
This is as free and honest a dialog on race as exists in this day and age. Kudos to the interviewer who kept asking hard questions and never flinched. He knew he had a man speaking truth, come what may.
Absolutely agree. But kids today are being sheltered from history. This is potentially social suicide.
What a great interview. Thank you for sharing!