Friends in deed

“When I put my pen to the paper I did not know the first word that I should make use of in writing the terms [of surrender]. I only knew what was in my mind, and I wished to express it clearly, so that there could be no mistaking it.”

The writer is Ulysses S. Grant, the quote is from his “Personal Memoirs” and the occasion is Appomattox. Grant’s account of Robert E. Lee’s surrender on April 9, 1865, which includes these revealing sentences, is the climax of “Personal Memoirs,” a stolid two-volume tome that once upon a time in America (at least in the pro-Union part of it) was as familiar a sight on the family bookshelf as Will Durant’s “Civilization” series or Alvin Toffler’s “Future Shock” would be a century later. The autobiography of the Union hero and 18th president of the United States -- he also happened to be one of the greatest horsemen ever to attend West Point and an able watercolorist -- was a whopping bestseller, earning Grant the stoutest royalty checks in the history of publishing, drawing comparisons to the Commentaries of Julius Caesar and rescuing the Grant family from bankruptcy. (Grant had been suckered by one of the countless Wall Street swindlers of the Gilded Age. Enron, anyone?) Grant’s account of Appomattox is one of unvarnished intimacy: We see him suffering from a headache, rushing amid the lumbering tangle of the Army of the Potomac to reach his appointment with Lee, showing up in the “rough garb” of a private’s uniform, digressing into convivialities with his vanquished opponent, and pretty much spacing out on the terms of surrender until a pen is thrust into his hand. Yet the terms themselves -- generous, humane and well considered -- came quickly and smoothly, just as Grant’s written orders tended to flow on the battlefield.

So, too, did Grant’s “Personal Memoirs” flow, all 275,000 words in a mere 10 months. The Appomattox passage is remarkable not only in the way it humanizes for us a crucial -- and myth-prone -- moment in American history but also as an example of writerly fortitude: Those sentences were written in June of 1885, when the 63-year-old former president, who had recently left Manhattan for the Adirondacks, was in the final excruciating throes of throat cancer, which was treatable only by the topical use of cocaine. (Every swallow, Grant said, was like downing “molten lead.”) The old general would succumb a month later, having virtually starved to death because of his inability to take solid food.

The Grant of “Grant and Twain,” Mark Perry’s armchair history of the celebrated soldier’s acquaintance with an American literary lion, is as much writer as general, president and cancer victim. Twain, of course, is Mark Twain, the celebrated creator of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer,” who -- in 1881, during a battlefield-worthy lunch of baked beans at the former president’s Manhattan brownstone -- suggested to a reluctant Grant that he write his memoirs. In late 1885 Twain published them, a feat he ranked as one of his life’s high points: Not only did Twain relish the warm glow from this blockbuster publishing event -- and a share of the profit, which he then squandered on developing the Paige Typesetting Machine -- but he also helped deliver the Grant family from penury, thus preserving Grant’s cast-bronze image (at least until later historians bumped the hero off his pedestal and installed Lee as the Civil War’s enduring idol). So tickled was Twain by his proximity to Grant and his involvement with “Personal Memoirs” that his daughter Susy wrote in early 1886, “Mamma and I have both been very much troubled of late because papa since he has been publishing Gen. Grant’s book has seemed to forget his own books.”

Curiously, Perry makes the opposite point in “Grant and Twain,” a book entwining -- often willfully and superficially -- the fates of these two boldface Americans, who were both called Sam and yet on the surface couldn’t have been more dissimilar. In Perry’s view, it was Grant, the taciturn soldier from Ohio raised by an abolitionist father, who helped the expansive humorist from Missouri (a short-tenured lieutenant in the Rebel army who skedaddled to Nevada early in the conflict) remember a very important book indeed: “In the midst of his friendship with Ulysses S. Grant,” Perry writes, “he finally realized what ‘Huck Finn’ was really all about.” Twain had set aside “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in 1876. When, in 1882, he took a nostalgic voyage down the Mississippi, his new friend’s victory at Vicksburg was fixed in his mind, superimposing itself on the shoals and eddies Twain recalled so well from his days as an antebellum riverboat captain in the slaveholding South. The result was a resolve to see Huck and his slave friend Jim through to the end of their Mississippi journey -- one that reflected America’s own -- amid the shifting currents of race, slavery, sectional divide, war and eventual freedom. “It is unlikely,” Perry goes on, “that he could have finished it at all, were it not for Ulysses S. Grant.”

Sales of “Huckleberry Finn” would begin to pick up steam in the spring of 1885, just as Grant was entering his final decline and putting the finishing touches on “Personal Memoirs.” In Perry’s hands, the connections between the two books make for rich stuff, but Perry strains himself finding parallels between Huck and Jim’s fictional adventure and Grant’s 1863 Vicksburg campaign. Grant, we’re told, made eight attempts to capture the besieged city, just as Twain’s protagonists come eight times ashore. Both adventures, remarkably, begin in Cairo, Ill. Perry’s larger points are often a stretch too and seldom argued with the clear-eyed temper (what Edmund Wilson called the “majestical phlegm”) that distinguishes Grant’s best writing. To declare “Personal Memoirs” and “Huckleberry Finn,” as Perry does, “perhaps the finest work of American nonfiction ever written and the greatest of all American novels” is reductionist and hyperbolic -- although it might well encourage modern Americans to actually read these books once cherished by our great-grandparents.

What’s more interesting than assurances of their greatness is the extent to which Grant and Twain shaped the evolution of American prose into the 20th century, a subject barely touched on in “Grant and Twain.” William Dean Howells called Twain the “Lincoln of our literature,” and it is the work of Twain and Lincoln, along with a major helping of the bestselling Grant, that gave us the plain-spoken poetry of American letters -- the tradition of Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, John Cheever and Raymond Carver. Just as Twain bristled at the “wordy, windy, flowery ‘eloquence’ ” of the early 19th century literary imitators of Sir Walter Scott, so did Grant eschew the military showiness of Gen. Winfield Scott, the medal-draped hero of the Mexican War (an opportunistic conquest Grant condemned as “wicked”). He took the unpretentious Zachary Taylor as his soldierly role model, and he presumably favored Lincoln, Twain and the lowly military dispatch in forming his terse prose style. At West Point, Grant spent his idle hours in the company of books: “Much of the time, I am sorry to say, was devoted to novels, but not those of the trashy sort.” The distilled, understated and epigrammatic qualities of “Personal Memoirs” won Grant such highfalutin fans as Henry James (who savored Grant’s “hard limpidity”) and, later, Gertrude Stein.

“He was the most lovable great child in the world,” a mournful Twain wrote, on Grant’s death, to Henry Ward Beecher, the 19th century’s Billy Graham. It’s an eye-opening missive, and you wonder why it doesn’t pop up in “Grant and Twain,” a good-natured and devourable book that subtitles itself “The Story of a Friendship That Changed America” yet is rather light when it comes to story, friendship and change. In the manner of, say, Simon Winchester’s popular “The Professor and the Madman,” “Grant and Twain” is a cobbled-together affair, padded with thumbnail biographies, Gilded Age digressions and unconvincing conjectures. (“American nonfiction

A favorite passage in “Personal Memoirs” relates the meeting in February 1865 between Lincoln and a Confederate peace commission headed by Alexander H. Stephens, the Confederacy’s vice president, a former Georgia congressman known for his slight build. Lincoln visited Grant shortly afterward and, alluding to the moment when the 95-pound Stephens emerged from an incongruously huge overcoat, reported it to be “the biggest shuck and the littlest ear that ever you did see.” (When word of this remark got back to Stephens after the war, Grant writes, Stephens “laughed immoderately at the simile of Mr. Lincoln.”) “Grant and Twain,” which ignores this ripely Twainian episode and so much else, is a whole lot of shuck and precious little ear. *