The Gods Of Gettysburg Jeff Shaara Continues Civil War Story That His Father Started With ‘Killer Angels’
Jeff Shaara’s first experience at Gettysburg seemed fairly typical.
“We were a family,” the Missoula writer says, “and in 1966, just as millions of families do every year, we went to the battlefield.”
He has photos of him climbing cannons at the Civil War memorial, and he can still describe the joy of playing tourist.
But he remembers something else that went on during that trip. Something that involved his father.
There’s a special feeling to some bits of ground, and for Shaara’s father, a Shakespearean scholar and creative writing teacher named Michael Shaara, the Gettysburg memorial was especially meaningful.
“There was something about the field,” Jeff Shaara says, “and he brought it home with him. It infected him and started him on the journey.”
That journey, encompassing seven years of research and writing, would culminate in a novel called “The Killer Angels.” Shaara’s book not only would win the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for fiction, but it would also inspire the 1993 film “Gettysburg.”
And now it has inspired something else. A spin-off novel, a “prequel” in fact, called “Gods and Generals” that Ballantine books is releasing with an impressive hardcover printing of 150,000.
The name on the new book also reads Shaara. But not Michael, who died of heart disease in 1988 at age 59. Instead, it reads Jeff.
Which may surprise him more than anyone.
“I have not been until now a professional writer,” says Shaara, 44. “This is my first book. The most nervous day of my life was the day I sent the manuscript off to my publishers.”
The response, he says, was overwhelming.
But that’s getting a bit ahead of the story.
In 1966, when the Shaara family was visiting that southern Pennsylvania battlefield, father Michael was a member of the faculty at Florida State University. Son Jeff was a gangly teenager growing up in Tallahassee.
After finishing “The Killer Angels,” Shaara wrote another novel - a baseball book that remained unpublished until now, with Ballantine pointing toward a July release - and then he set to work on a project that was even more ambitious than his Civil War book: a life of Shakespeare in the form of “The Killer Angels.”
“But he simply could never get it together,” Jeff Shaara says. “His body just failed him.”
A pack-a-day smoker, Shaara had suffered his first heart attack at age 36. “It was going to catch up to him, that was inevitable, and finally it did. It’s really a shame because what it cut short was the books.”
Jeff had pursued a career in Tampa as a rare coins and precious metals dealer. Upon his father’s death, however, he sold his business and took over as the executor of his father’s literary estate. It was Jeff, working with director Ronald Maxwell, who consulted on the film version of “The Killer Angels.”
And it was Jeff whom Maxwell approached with the idea of continuing his father’s work. “We need another book,” Maxwell told him. “We ought to keep this whole saga going and continue the story in both directions, before and after.”
At first, Shaara had no intention of doing the writing himself. But after a week’s deliberation, he decided to give it a try. To which Maxwell said only, “I was waiting for your phone call.”
“I credit his instincts,” Shaara says. “He sensed something.”
It may have been the same something that worked on his father those 30 long years ago. Whatever, with Maxwell’s encouragement, Jeff picked up his father’s pen and began to write.
The result is a superb achievement, very nearly the equal to “The Killer Angels” in both character and theme.
“What Ballantine said when they sent me a contract was, ‘We believe that you’re a writer,”’ Shaara says. “‘We believe that you need to be doing this. And not only do we want to publish this book, but we want to publish the sequel.”’
If you haven’t read the masterful work that inspired “Gods and Generals,” you’re in for a treat (Maxwell’s film adaptation, by contrast, is only slightly above average). Michael Shaara’s novel is a study of the four-day Gettysburg conflict of 1863 that is seen by many historians as the turning point of the Civil War.
For when the fighting was done, Gettysburg was a disastrous defeat for Robert E. Lee and his Army of Northern Virginia.
Shaara’s book takes us through the entire battle, from the moment that the Union forces capture the all-important high ground to the aftermath of Lee’s final desperate attempt to carry the day - sending 12,000 men across open ground into the face of murderous cannon and rifle fire.
Shaara’s genius was his ability to study this four-day affair and draw from it all the wisdom of the world. Along the way, he gives us riveting portrayals of such unforgettable characters as Lee, James Longstreet and J.E.B. Stuart in gray, Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain, John Reynolds and Winfield Scott Hancock in blue.
It’s a book that probably would intimidate anyone interested in writing a follow-up, if not because of its inherent quality then because of its legions of fans.
“I’ve had people say to me that ‘Killer Angels’ shouldn’t be touched,” Shaara says. “That it should stand alone and that it’s a classic. I appreciate people’s respect for my father’s work, but I also know that if my father were alive, he would not have looked at this book with anything like reverence. He would have looked at it like a story that needed to be told.”
And to tell it further, Maxwell suggested a plan: that Shaara bookend his father’s novel with two novels. One, which turned out to be “Gods and Generals,” would lead up to Gettysburg. The second, which Shaara is working on now, would carry on from Gettysburg to the surrender at Appomattox and the death of Lee in 1870.
And in one sense, at least, Shaara’s task was even more daunting than his father’s. While “Killer Angels” involves only four days, “God and Generals” covers two whole years.
Over that time, we see how the lives of four particular individuals - Chamberlain, Hancock and Lee from the first book along with Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson - intertwine up to the period just before Gettysburg.
And while Lee is omnipresent in both books and Chamberlain emerges as a major player in “Killer Angels,” it is Jackson who becomes the most intriguing character in “Gods and Generals.”
That wasn’t Shaara’s original intention.
“I realized that if my book was going to stand out from ‘Killer Angels,’ it needed to stand apart in one way and that was in whose story I tell,” Shaara says. “When I got into it, I realized that the character of Jackson just jumped out. It was very easy to fall in love with the story of Jackson.”
Deeply religious, more diligent and disciplined than naturally intelligent, a failure as a teacher but a brilliant leader of men, equally able to kill without remorse and yet cry at the corruption of innocence, Jackson represents everything that the book’s title suggests: He was just a man, a general, but to the troops he led, he was purely god-like.
Like “Killer Angels,” “Gods and Generals” uses invented dialogue to fill in its author’s characterizations. But the interpretations, based on Shaara’s studied examinations of letters, journals and official papers, are a scholar’s best guess as to who these men were and how they spoke.
“That’s the wonderful thing about writing a novel,” Shaara says. “By calling this fiction, I can take liberties. Yet I don’t believe any of the dialogue is fictitious in that it couldn’t have happened.”
Shaara, who moved to Missoula a couple of years ago to escape the Florida heat, is sure of one thing: Whatever the loyal fans of “Killer Angels” might think, he was interested only in following in his father’s footsteps - never in usurping them.
“This was never a competition,” he says. “This was never a case of showing Dad what I could do. All I was trying to do was tell the story, to continue the story as he would do it.”
, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: 4 photos (1 color)
MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: READING Jeff Shaara will read from his novel, “Gods and Generals,” at 7:30 p.m. Thursday at Auntie’s Bookstore, Main and Washington, Spokane.