Jeff Shaara, author of the Civil War book 'Gods and Generals,' is making appearances today in Fredericksburg. His novel is the prequel to 'Killer Angels,' the Pulitzer Prize-winning book written by his father, Michael Shaara.
Posted on 11/23/2002 7:15:16 AM PST by stainlessbanner
Jeff Shaara, author of the best-selling "Gods and Generals" and other historical novels, makes swing through town.
FREDERICKSBURG has been good to him, and now he's returning the favor.
That is one way of looking at today's visit to town by Jeff Shaara, author of the best-selling "Gods and Generals" and other historical novels.
His feelings for the Fredericksburg area took root, by surprise, on a drive north from Richmond in 1994. He'd just paid a visit to the Museum of the Confederacy in Richmond, doing research for "Gods and Generals."
A lot was on the line. His late father, Michael Shaara, had won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for "Killer Angels." His you-are-there novel about the Battle of Gettysburg earned huge popular acclaim, years later, after Ted Turner turned it into 1993's big-screen epic "Gettysburg."
Now, Shaara--who'd never written a book, who'd been estranged from his father the last 15 years of his life, and until recently had been a rare-coin dealer in Florida--was trying to continue his dad's work with a Civil War prequel of his own.
So when, heading up the highway, he saw a sign for the Stonewall Jackson Shrine in Caroline County, it seemed sensible to turn off and see what that was all about. He followed the winding country lane to quiet Guinea Station and the tiny historic site along its railroad tracks heralded by the road sign.
"I was stunned by the impact the place had on me," Shaara recalled in an interview last week.
In the early summer of 1863, Guinea Station bustled. It was the rear line of the Confederate army, to which Lt. Gen. Thomas J. "Stonewall" Jackson, wounded by his own troops in the Battle of Chancellorsville, was brought to recover after the amputation of his arm. There, in a small plantation outbuilding, the tactical military genius of the Confederacy--Robert E. Lee's right arm--died.
When Shaara chanced upon it, the hamlet was perhaps the least visited of the major historic sites in Fredericksburg & Spotsylvania National Military Park.
At the shrine, Shaara found only the park ranger on duty there. "He was very polite, gave me the tour and left me alone, courteously, in the room where Jackson died," the author said.
"That moment changed my life. Until then, I wasn't really sure who the [novel's] characters were going to be. I'd thought they would be Lee and Longstreet. But after that visit, I knew, this is the story that matters."
He remembers studying the room's many original artifacts and furnishings, and listening to its clock ticking in otherwise absolute silence--"the same sound the people in the room heard when [Jackson] stopped breathing."
His father had had the same kind of epiphany on a casual family visit to Gettysburg, which so moved him that he spent the next seven years researching and writing "Killer Angels."
"I was sharing an experience he'd had," Jeff Shaara said he realized. "That was a very special time for me."
He understands one can't go looking for such moments. So, in many of his public talks, he mentions his visit to Guinea Station, knowing that it's an especially evocative place for people.
Shaara, 50, said he is "amazed" that the Central Rappahannock Regional Library has built a series of programs around the book informed by his experience at the Jackson Shrine. That months-long effort, which has included a concert, a quilting bee, a walking tour, lectures, and a communitywide discussion of the novel, culminates in the author's public appearances this afternoon and evening at the headquarters library on Caroline Street.
"I love the Fredericksburg area, have been there many times, have taken my wife [Lynne] there as a tourist," Shaara said. "And to have it happen there, well "
The author, who divides his time between Missoula, Mont., and New York City, said he appreciates how passionately people feel about Civil War history, especially here--an area with four major battlefields--and works hard to get the history right in his novels. Without accurate facts to frame and inform the fiction, the work would lose credibility, he said.
Of course, Shaara sometimes meets readers or encounters reviewers who just can't abide historical fiction, no matter what.
He still remembers one critic whose reaction to "Gods and Generals," Shaara said, was "Who is this guy, without any history credentials, to tell us this stuff?"
On another occasion, "in your neighborhood, I met someone who asked me 'How dare you put words in the mouth of Robert E. Lee?'"
But he also remembers the advice of historian James McPherson, author of the best-selling "Battle Cry of Freedom," who warned that he'd better develop a thick skin to defend against those resentful merely because Shaara is, in their view, selling too many books.
And he has empathy for people he calls "classroom captives"--students who will never touch a work of history unless there is something about it that engages and excites their imagination.
"A lot of historians appreciate what I do," he said. "They get it--that because of what I do, it's good for everyone. It raises all boats."
Jeff Shaara ended his first Civil War novel where his father's only historical novel, "Killer Angels," began.
"Gods and Generals" follows four primary characters--Winfield Scott Hancock, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, Thomas J. Jackson and Robert E Lee--from 1858 to the eve of the Battle of Gettysburg.
Their stories reflect the paths taken by thousands of Americans on both sides of the war, from the Battle of Fredericksburg in December 1862, where the four men take to the same field, to Chancellorsville in May 1863, where the novel climaxes in Lee's greatest victory and the mortal wounding of his most trusted lieutenant, "Stonewall" Jackson.
Jeff Shaara didn't know it then, but his route to that novel and today's hoopla in Fredericksburg began in 1964, when his family, fresh from visiting the World's Fair in New York City, took a side trip to Gettysburg, Pa.
Shaara, then 12, said "I was the Civil War kid. I had the [toy] soldiers. Our first stop was a souvenir shop; I got a musket."
He recalled how his father led him over the ground of Pickett's Charge, right up to the wall that became known as the "High Water Mark of the Confederacy."
"He was telling me about [Union commander Winfield Scott] Hancock and [Confederate Brig. Gen. Lewis A.] Armistead, and we got across the stone wall and up to the Armistead Monument.
"And he started to cry. I'd never seen him do do that. My dad was a big macho guy."
Michael Shaara was, indeed, a man's man. He'd been a boxer, a sailor, a paratrooper, a policeman, and an English professor at Florida State University. He had a couple of novels and dozens of short stories, published in everything from Playboy magazine to the Saturday Evening Post, under his belt.
His great-grandfather had been wounded at Gettysburg while serving with the 4th Georgia Infantry, and reading that ancestor's letters had prompted Shaara and his family's visit there.
But what happened then, as his son climbed on the cannons and the writer tromped across the battlefields, was entirely unexpected.
"That experience changed him. He really became obsessed with what happened there. My father became obsessed with the story," his son said. "He had no background, no interest, in history. But he knew a good story when he saw one--he was the ultimate storyteller."
Exhaustive research followed. In those days, it was much harder than now to find period source material, and it could take months just to get your hands on one obscure volume.
"I'd never seen him get so caught up in a story," Shaara said. "He had stacks of books, books piled up all over his study."
In 1970, Michael Shaara returned to Gettysburg with Jeff, and they combed its battlefields, gathering details for the father's manuscript.
The elder Shaara shopped the book for two years through many publishers; his advance was $5,000, and the first printing was about 5,000 copies. "The Killer Angels" was published in 1974 to mixed critical reviews and a resounding cultural thud.
It won Shaara a Pulitzer Prize, but no doors opened to him. The novel was hardly a best seller, and he couldn't persuade Hollywood it would make a good film.
"It was the end of the Vietnam War," his son said. "No one wanted to read about a book about generals.
"That was a crushing blow. He knew it was the best thing he'd ever done."
Jeff Shaara believes it triggered what would now be diagnosed as clinical depression, plunging his father--already burdened by disabilities from a 1972 traffic accident--into deep despair.
"He was devastated. I remember my mother saying he would sit down to write, staring at the paper, but nothing came out."
Michael Shaara, 59, died of a heart attack in 1988--"believing he had failed to leave something behind."
In hindsight, what irony that is.
Fourteen years later, "Killer Angels"--now considered by some the most potent Civil War novel since "Gone With the Wind"--has gone on to sell 3 million copies, spawn two other novels and three motion pictures, and inspire filmmaker Ken Burns' heroic PBS series "The Civil War."
It was, of course, many years before Jeff Shaara, who's said he never thought of himself as a writer, decided to try and follow in his father's footsteps.
The screen version of "The Killer Angels" was the catalyst.
As manager of his father's estate, Jeff had developed a friendship with Ron Maxwell, the director of "Gettysburg," serving as a consultant to the film.
Four or five months after the movie's release in '93, Maxwell suggested that Jeff continue the story Michael Shaara had begun. Intrigued and encouraged, Jeff began the long labors as researcher and author that eventually led to "Gods and Generals" and "The Last Full Measure," the third novel in the father-son trilogy.
The Hollywood version of "Gods and Generals" will open in 1,000 theaters nationwide on Feb. 21, which is, coincidentally, Jeff Shaara's birthday.
The Warner Bros. release stars Stephen Lang, Jeff Daniels and Robert Duvall. Director Maxwell hopes to première the film, which runs nearly 31/2 hours and features a new song by Bob Dylan, Feb. 10 in Washington.
Jeff Shaara, author of the Civil War book 'Gods and Generals,' is making appearances today in Fredericksburg. His novel is the prequel to 'Killer Angels,' the Pulitzer Prize-winning book written by his father, Michael Shaara.
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