I couldn’t be more pleased at the acceptance of your novel, though I had no doubt about it ever since I read the opening pages.  What I hope now is that you’ll come off the notion that you don’t want to go on with the work.  The novel is just what Lawrence called it, “the one bright book of life.”

The recipient is novelist Walker Percy; the novel in question is Percy’s seminal The Moviegoer.  The letter continues thus:

By the end of the month I expect to have killed Stonewall Jackson dead as a mackerel; which makes an excellent stopping place before I tackle the complexities of the Vicksburg Campaign.

The letter’s author, Shelby Foote, was hard at work on his own masterpiece, The Civil War: A Narrative.  His sprawling 3 volume, 1.5 million-word masterwork on the American Civil War took more than 20 years to write and is arguably the definitive work on the subject.  I say “arguably” because critics assail the fact that it reads more like a novel than “proper history,” something I consider to be a success rather than a failing.  If you want a line-by-line breakdown of the conflict, try some Bruce Catton.  Foote, on the other hand, crafts a heartbreakingly beautiful tale of the conflict while avoiding the tacky sentimentality of Ken Burns.

Percy (the adopted nephew of Lanterns on the Levee author William Alexander Percy), on the other hand, spent years honing his fiction and working on what Foote dubbed, “his apprentice novels.”  The Moviegoer, with its portrayal of New Orleans stock broker Binx Bolling’s post-war suburban ennui, would go on to win the 1961 National Book Award.

To be frank, I’m writing this entire piece to recommend Jay Tolson’s The Correspondence of Shelby Foote & Walker Percy.  Though most of the correspondence is from Foote (who, as a friend accurately points out, has the definitive Southern accent — when I imagine what God must look and sound like, it’s Shelby Foote), the collection reveals a deep bond between two masters of their craft and lays bare the anxieties, failings, ambitions, and ultimate successes of two giants of literature, Southern or otherwise.

School friends from Greenville, MS, Foote and Percy keep in close contact for over 40 years.  While Foote labors for decades on what he simply refers to as, “the narrative,” Percy soldiers on and writes Love in the Ruins, Lancelot, and several other novels as well as scholarly articles.

Tolson’s collection is not only valuable as a connecting thread between two sharp literary minds; the book itself is readable from cover to cover, expertly edited and footnoted with explanatory bits for the more ambiguous references.  For fans of either writer, it’s a must.  If you’re new to one or both, it works as a pretty good introduction to the context of the works’ creation if not the works themselves.

Further reading:

UNC: The Walker Percy Project

YHP: There is exactly one way to make a mint julep

Shown here as the Lord intended

And that’s William Alexander Percy’s recipe. From his incomparable memoir Lanterns on the Levee comes the only recipe one will ever need for that perennial summertime cocktail:

Father and General Catchings and Captain McNeilly and Captain Wat Stone and Mr. Everman would forgather every so often on our front gallery. These meeting must habitually have taken place in summer, because I remember Mother would be in white, looking very pretty, and would immediately set about making a mint julep for the gentlemen — no hors d’oeuvres, no sandwiches, no cocktails, just a mint julep. After the first long swallow — really a slow and noiseless suck, because the thick crushed ice comes against your teeth and the ice must be kept out and the liquor let in — Cap Mac would say: “Very fine, Camille, you make the best julep in the world.”

She probably did. Certainly her juleps had nothing in common with those hybrid concoctions one buys in bars the world over under that name. It would have been sacrilege to add lemon, or a slice of orange or of pineapple, or one of those wretched maraschino cherries. first you needed excellent bourbon whisky; rye or Scotch would not do at all. Then you put half an inch of sugar in the bottom of the glass and merely dampened it with water. Next, very quickly — here was the trick in the procedure — you crushed your ice, actually powdered it, preferably in a towel with a wooden mallet, so quickly that it remained dry, and, slipping two sprigs of mint against the side of the glass, you crammed the ice in right to the brim, packing it with your hand. Last you filled the glass, which apparently had no room left for anything else, with bourbon, the older the better, and grated a bit of nutmeg on the top. The glass immediately frosted and you settled back in your chair for half an hour of sedate cumulative bliss. Although you stirred the sugar at the bottom, it never all melted, therefore at the end of the half hour there was left a delicious mess of ice and mint and whisky which a small boy was allowed to consume with calm rapture. Probably the anticipation of this phase of a julep was what held me on the outskirts of these meetings rather than the excitement of the discussion, which often I did not understand.

In short, you don’t make them with syrup, they don’t resemble a damned mojito, and no self respecting Southerner-with-a-capital-S would drink one out of those godforsaken silver goblets they show at the races. Get yourself a highball glass, some mint, and for God’s sake, some bourbon, and enjoy an afternoon as your forebears intended.