Conversations With series from the University Press of Mississippi

This is one my favorite books, I’m serious.  Shelby Foote is a great interview, obviously, just watch his interviews with Ken Burns.  (“Ken, you made me a millionaire,” Shelby reports telling Burns after the series aired.)  You may not want to read the whole of Shelby’s three volume Civil War, it can get carried away with the lyrical, and following the geography can be a challenge.  But the flavor of it, some of the most vivid moments, and anecdotes, come through in these collected conversations with inquirers over the years.

“You’ve got to remember that the Civil War was as big as life,” he explains.  “That’s why no historian has ever done it justice, or ever will.  But that’s the glory of it.  Take me: I was raised up believing Yankees were a bunch of thieves.  But it’s absolutely incredible that a people could fight a Civil War and have so few atrocities.

“Sherman marched with 60,000 men slap across Georgia, then straight up though the Carolinas, burning, looting, doing everything in the world – but I don’t know of a single case of rape.  That’s amazing because hatreds run high in civil wars…

There were still a lot of antique virtues around them.  Jackson once told a colonel to advance his regiment across a field being riddled by bullets.  When the officer protested that nobody could survive out there, Jackson told him he always took care of his wounded and buried his dead.  The colonel led his troops into the field.”

Finally treated myself to a few more of these editions. These books are casual and comfortable.  They’re collections of interviews from panels, newspapers, magazines, literary journals, conference discussions.  Physically they’re just the right size, the printing is quality and the typeface is appealing.

Why not start with another Mississippian, someone Foote had quite a few conversations with himself?

Wow, Walker Percy could converse. 

Later, different interview:

Do we dare attempt conversation with the father of them all?

I’ve long found interviews with Faulkner, even stray details from the life of Faulkner, to be more compelling than his fiction.  Maybe it’s the appealing lifestyle: courtly freedom, hunting, fishing, and all the whiskey you can handle.  The life of an unbothered country squire, preserving a great tradition, going to Hollywood from time to time, turning the places of your boyhood into a world mythology.

We’ll have more to say about the Conversations with Faulkner, deserves its own post!  Maybe Percy gets to the heart of it in one of his interviews:

Q: Did you serve a long apprenticeship in becoming a writer?

Percy: Well, I wrote a couple of bad novels which no one wanted to buy.  And I can’t imagine anyboy doing anything else.  Yes it was a long apprenticeship with some frustration.  But I was lucky with the third one, The Moviegoer; so, it wasn’t so bad, I guess.

Q: Had you rather be a writer than a doctor?

Percy: Let’s just say I was the happiest doctor who ever got tuberculosis and was able to quit it.  It gave me an excuse to do what I wanted to do.  I guess I’m like Faulkner in that respect.  You know Faulkner lived for awhile in the French Quarter of New Orleans where he met Sherwood Anderson, and Faulkner used to say if anybody could live like that and get away with it he wanted to live the same way.

There’s one of these for you, I’m sure.  They also have Comic Artists and Filmmakers.

only one subject with whom I myself had a conversation

For the advanced student: