FROM THE PARTICULAR TO THE GENERAL(S):

By the beginning of the 1950s, with the completion of Shiloh, Foote had written four novels and a collection of short stories, all of which did moderately well in sales and reviews. In late 1951 he felt ready to tackle what he planned in his diary to be a tremendous, multigenerational novel about a Delta family (gentiles) to eclipse Faulkner's own sagas. In a letter to Walker Percy on Dec. 31, he crowed, "I'm among the greatest American writers of all time ... and at the age of thirty-five." The next New Year, after 12 months of uninterrupted writer's block, he confided to his diary, "Bad situation--the kind that leads to suicide with some people." His novel--Two Gates to the City--was going nowhere; another marriage had failed; he was broke.

When a publisher, appreciating the historian's art on display in Shiloh, offered Foote a contract for what was supposed to be a short nonfiction overview of the Civil War, he had little choice but to accept, although it soon became not a quick cash-grab but his 3,000-page, two-decades-long masterpiece, the real work of his life.

Faulkner had been in Foote's way; Proust was the light to his path. He had read In Search of Lost Time several times through before beginning the Civil War trilogy, and it was from Proust he learned the abilities essential to such a long, digressive narrative--which turns apparently meandering and spontaneous but moves only with its author's deliberate, far-seeing and much-remembering care--to its long, digressive sentences, and to the art of characterization by which Foote, following Proust, would supply a telling detail at just the right moment to surprisingly revise the reader's understanding. Here he added something new to his acquired mastery in moving among different perspectives, and became, albeit with found rather than invented characters, a master novelist, one who lets personalities shine out in action and be mirrored in the reactions of others. Foote does this even for the smallest characters who appear only briefly to receive a command or charge across a field.

Volume 3 of the trilogy, for example, begins with Grant, haggard, thin, fairly ugly, unphotographed and thus unfamiliar, visually, to the public, upon his arrival in Washington to receive command of the eastern theater:

Late afternoon of a raw, gusty day in early spring--March 8, a Tuesday, 1864--the desk clerk at Willard's Hotel, two blocks down Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House, glanced up to find an officer accompanied by a boy of thirteen facing him across the polished oak of the registration counter and inquiring whether he could get a room ... Discerning so much of this as he considered worth his time, together perhaps with the bystander's added observation that the applicant had 'rather the look of a man who did, or once did, take a little too much to drink, the clerk was no more awed by the stranger's rank than he was attracted by his aspect. This was, after all, the best known hostelry in Washington. There had been by now close to five hundred Union generals, and of these the great majority ... had checked in and out of Willard's ... The desk clerk ... still maintaining the accustomed, condescending air he was about to lose in shock when he read what the weathered applicant had written: 'U.S. Grant & Son--Galena, Illinois'

This extract condenses the opening paragraph, which occupies more than a full page, wherein Grant's taking command, with all its consequences, is introduced first through the snobbery of character so minor as to be otherwise invisible to history. This is Proust at war.

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