Grant: A Novel

by Max Byrd

  Those who were admitted—Mark Twain was a daily visitor, also Adam Badeau, said to be helping Grant write his book—were besieged by shouting reporters as they left. On March 1 Senator Jerome Chaffee, Buck Grant’s father-in-law, caused a sensation by quoting the General as saying, “I am not better. I am going to die. Every moment is a week of agony.” But General Horace Porter the next day denied that Grant ever complained of his illness at all, and General “Black Jack” Logan declared that Grant’s suffering had wonderfully cleared his mind for writing.

  On March 3, the day before Grover Cleveland was to be sworn in as President, the House of Representatives had still not managed to reconsider Grant’s pension. Under heavy pressure from Cump Sherman and the press, the Speaker of the House announced at the last possible moment that they would convene again on March 4, but date all business as having been transacted on March 3. Trist caught the earliest train of the day from New York and raced up the steps of the Capitol well before nine A.M., but the House, despite the glowering presence of Sherman in the gallery, was still debating a series of minor questions—a change in rules, a disputed election in Iowa. A coterie of disgruntled Confederate veterans blocked all other matters.

  At noon the House would be constitutionally unable to act. Grant supporters crowded the gallery, muttering ominously, and filled the corridors outside the chamber’s doors. At quarter past eleven one of the Iowans abruptly took the floor and, pointing at the clock, declared that he would never stand in the way of the welfare of the country’s Greatest Living Patriot—at which point a wild, tumultuous cheer broke out, the Speaker hammered the vote, and the whole room shook with repeated cries of “Aye!”

  But the Senate had not yet convened that day. Worse still, the Capitol building was now in a state of roiling chaos, thanks to the inauguration ceremonies set to begin at noon, in the Senate chamber itself. Those Senators already inside scrambled for their seats, others fought their way up the steps and through the hallways in a mad rush—the President pro tem chased away carpenters still building the inaugural platform just below his podium, then banged his gavel and signaled for a voice vote on the amended retirement list for the army, just received from the House, and moments later, at exactly five minutes till twelve, at a desk in an adjacent room, outgoing President Chester A. Arthur signed the last bill of his administration. In New York, Mark Twain told reporters waiting on the stoop that Mrs. Grant had read the telegram to the General herself and then cried, “Our old commander is back!” and the whole household (the stern old commander excepted) had let out a whoop of joy!

  Trist’s story for the Post that day, featuring a rare interview with the journalist-hating Sherman, was picked up and reprinted by two hundred papers across the country, almost as many as his “Rum, Romanism, and Rebellion” story of the previous fall—when he reached New York again next morning he was greeted with champagne in the basement on Madison Avenue and, a few hours later, an invitation to interview Grant himself later in the week.

  The invitation was Mark Twain’s doing, and less an act of cordiality, Trist thought cynically, than of publicity for Grant’s book, and in any event it was immediately postponed for a week, and then delayed indefinitely by Grant’s fluctuating health.

  By the middle of March, he was writing a daily report for the Post and two European press services, and the scene along East Sixty-sixth Street had settled into a colorful permanent uproar. Three or four times a day delivery carts fought their way through the crowds on the pavement and the parked carriages and unloaded crate after crate of gifts for the General—horse blankets, war bonnets, old swords, dozens of mailbags of letters with home remedies and herbal extracts. A fanatic named “Java John” tried to wrestle his way in the front door, and when the police pulled him away, he screamed to the press that Grant would be saved only if he stopped drinking coffee. Another man, dressed in a faded blue sergeant’s uniform, dropped to his knees on the doormat and prayed at the top of his lungs till he, too, was hauled away. A reporter for the Tribune fell out of a tree in the yard next to Grant’s and broke his arm and had to be treated by Grant’s own doctors.

  Yesterday [Trist wrote on March 17] in a kind of symbol of national reconciliation, the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston, the Confederate general who died at Shiloh, came to offer their best wishes to General Ulysses S. Grant.

  This morning telegrams arrived from Jefferson Davis and P.G.T. Beauregard. Later your reporter watched General Ely Parker go up the stairs just after Mark Twain and Senator Chaffee. Parker is a full-blooded Iroquois Indian, whom Grant promoted for bravery at Vicksburg and who stood by the General’s side at Appomattox and was mistaken by Robert E. Lee for a black man.

  The whole country, it might be said, or at least the generation of men who fought in the Civil War, seems to have taken Grant’s struggles as the chance to review their own and the nation’s past. Some days East Sixty-sixth Street looks like American History’s own parade ground.

  WHAT THE HELL EVER HAPPENED TO “GRANT THE BUTCHER”? Stilson Hutchins telegraphed Trist irritably from Washington.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  AND LAST BUT NOT LEAST,” TWAIN SAID WITH THE SUBTLEST possible change of tone, “this is Adam Badeau, the General’s personal research assistant.”

  “And also the friend of Henry Adams.” Trist smiled and held out his hand. “I’ve heard him mention your Washington days together.”

  Badeau wore wire-rimmed glasses, a neat, closely trimmed beard, and slicked-back hair. His air of fussy precision was the exact and chilly opposite of Mark Twain’s casual, cigar-puffing bonhomie. He shook hands with obvious distaste. “I haven’t seen Henry Adams in a decade,” he said.

  “Trist is here to write about how the General writes.” Twain was already holding the door open to Badeau’s cubicle, where Trist could see a collection of reference books, two or three oversized cardboard portfolios of maps, and a typewriter. “Badeau checks facts,” he told Trist, “and goes over the General’s prose every day with a set of pruning shears.”

  This was so clearly not Badeau’s idea of what he did that he turned away without a word and sat down at his desk. Twain was unruffled. He led Trist into Grant’s bedroom, which adjoined the library and was separated from Mrs. Grant’s room by folding doors; then into Fred Grant’s study, facing onto East Sixty-sixth Street and furnished, like Badeau’s, with reference books and maps. And finally, like a genial host in a country house, he took Trist’s arm and opened the door again to the library.

  It was, as Trist later informed his readers in the Post, a spacious, comfortable room, lined with books and paintings of military subjects. Two bay windows, stretching from floor to ceiling, looked down on the street and let in a full measure of afternoon sunlight. There were four or five leather club chairs arranged in one corner, a big globe on a stand, and vases of cut flowers on tables and shelves here and there, a weekly gift from George Childs, the Philadelphia tycoon.

  Grant had placed his desk in the center, under a gas-chandelier, a simple mahogany rectangle bare of everything except stacks of notes in various categories and a green leather-framed blotter. Next to the desk, incongruously, was an old folding card table, rather battered and worse for the wear. On this the General kept manila writing paper, pens and ink, and a little box of children’s wax crayons, which he used to mark Union and Confederate positions on his own set of maps. The only book on the desk or table was a well-thumbed copy of Sherman’s Memoirs.

  “Well, I think I remember you from Chicago,” Grant said as they came up to him. He struggled to his feet, shook hands, and allowed his black valet to ease him back into the chair. “Cold Harbor.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a long, not quite comfortable pause.

  “I believe you’re a friend of Senator Cameron.”

  “The Senator brought me over to report on the campaign in 1880.”

  “And his beautiful young wife,” Grant said. He gestured with a small pale h
and to a chair for Trist.

  “I know her too, of course,” Trist replied.

  “Trist is a social butterfly,” Twain said, sitting down and starting to tap one foot on the carpet. “He also knows Henry Adams down in Washington.” He crossed his legs and waved his cigar in the presumed direction of Washington. “Just reminded me out in the hall. Only man I’m acquainted with, General, that goes harmlessly between Henry Adams and you.”

  Grant turned his head slowly toward Trist. “The Adams family,” he said in a voice raspier and scratchier than Twain’s, “does not possess one noble trait of character that I ever heard of, from old John Adams down to Henry B. I don’t mind if you write that down and print it, Mr. Trist.”

  “Illness,” remarked Twain with a grin, “has made the General mellow.”

  Despite his pallor and weakness, Grant looked a little sheepish. “Well, I guess you’d better not print it. Henry’s brother Charles Francis served three years in the cavalry and did just fine.”

  Twain pulled out a child’s watch, attached to his white vest with a piece of blue ribbon. “I told young Trist you could give him exactly one hour for this momentous interview.”

  “I expect,” Grant said after a moment, so softly that Trist could scarcely hear him, “we both of us have our deadlines.”

  But one hour turned into four, including dinner at the family table, and afterwards it was considered one of the most successful articles of the whole long Grant-watch saga. In three separate installments, published two days apart in the Post (but without any Adams reference), Trist described Grant’s library, his weary, cancer-ridden appearance, his methods of composition (dictation to a stenographer in the morning, composition himself by pencil on a yellow tablet in the afternoon). Grant liked to sit sideways at his desk, legs crossed. He was an imaginative speller. He wrote so quickly and steadily that he never dotted his i’s or crossed his t’s. His concentration, despite the ravages of illness, was astonishing—in one day in March he had written fifty manuscript pages. His book, Trist thought—and wrote—was literally keeping him alive. He was bringing to it all the old qualities of his generalship, which had seemed to vanish during the dark days of his presidency—utter clarity, complete mastery of detail, singleness of purpose, a will that could apparently defy the fierce rebellion even of his own body.

  On March 31, four days after Trist’s visit, Grant suffered so terrible a fit of coughing that his doctors were summoned in the middle of the night and the Associated Press actually sent out on its wires a preliminary announcement of his death. But less than a week later he somehow struggled back to his desk and resumed his writing.

  Once in early April Twain bought Trist a drink in a saloon near Webster & Company headquarters on Fourteenth Street. There were more details to add, anytime Trist wanted to write again—Twain had hired a sculptor to make a terra-cotta bust of the General; the preacher who had baptized him on the terrible night of the 31st was eager to have his profile written; even Badeau would be glad to see Trist again.

  Trist listened with amusement—Twain was in a wonderful mood, frantic and buoyant at the same time—almost before they had taken their seats he had managed to curse his incompetent business manager Charley Webster, describe a surefire new invention (his own) for clamping infants in their bedclothes, and sing out loud, beating time on the saloon table with his finger, the words he had written that very morning to the old Methodist hymn “There Is a Happy Land”:

  “There is a boarding house

  Far, far away,

  Where they have ham and eggs,

  Three times a day.”

  He had brought Trist a present—proof sheets from the first volume of the Memoirs. Grant admired the way he, Trist, wrote, Twain added; clean, crisp prose, not like the revolting verbal arabesques of people like Henry Adams.

  “He didn’t say ‘arabesques,’ ” Trist said.

  “Fred Grant told me the other day,” Twain said, ignoring this, “that the General was disturbed and disappointed because I was reading the proofs for him, but I never expressed an opinion about the literary quality. I was as much surprised as Columbus’s cook would have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how his navigation was going.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I went up to the house next day and told him from what I had read so far I would place his book on the same shelf with Caesar’s Commentaries. I told him his writing had the same high merits, it was clear, just, candid, not a word wasted. You know, I carry around in my wallet a copy of his letter to Buckner to surrender Fort Donelson. ‘I propose to move on your works immediately’—that is soldierly, that is frank.”

  Trist listened to his monologue, jotted a few notes on his pad. The truth was, he thought, General Grant and Private Twain wrote alike: both had cleared the arabesques out of American prose. When he ventured something of this to Twain, the humorist was pleased and modest. “Well, maybe. You were right about his bad spelling, though, in the Post. Wonderful writer, can’t spell worth a damn. I’m not any better. He was feeling bad about that the other day, looking at all Badeau’s little corrections on the proofs. I told him sameness is tiresome, variety is pleasing. ‘Kow’ spelled with a large K is just as good as with a small one. Better. It gives the imagination a broader field. It suggests to the mind a grand, vague, impressive new kind of cow. The General was not convinced.”

  Twain puffed contentedly on his cigar and watched Trist write it down, word for word.

  “Be sure you spell my name right,” he said with a drawl.

  On April 14, on his way to East Sixty-sixth Street, Trist read in the New York Times that Dr. Robert Hooper of Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, had died the day before of heart failure, after a long illness. The following week he travelled to Washington to call on Clover Adams and pay his respects, but Henry Adams met him at the door and simply shook his head. Mrs. Adams was not yet able to see anyone. The gift of additional Thomas Jefferson letters, found in a family trunk and mailed to Trist by a cousin, was received in grave silence. Adams made one of his nearly imperceptible bows and closed the door.

  Across the Square Elizabeth Cameron was likewise not at home to visitors. Trist stood for half an hour in the gray Washington drizzle, next to the statue of Andrew Jackson, his stepfather’s friend. Then he took the train back to New York, his work.

  On April 29 the World reported under a blazing twelve-point headline that General Grant’s celebrated Memoirs, to be published by the well-known publicity hound and buffoon Mark Twain, were in fact being written by Grant’s former military aide Adam Badeau, from rough notes that the almost illiterate (or unconscious) General had scrawled. Two hours after this story appeared, a steaming, cursing, explosively red-faced Twain sought out Trist in the basement on Madison Avenue and handed him a sealed envelope. He had two things to say, Twain declared, and promptly said three.

  The World was a daily issue of unmedicated closet paper.

  He was suing it for libel.

  Here was the General’s reply, in the General’s own hand.

  The next day the Washington Post ran Grant’s quiet, categorical denial of the story (CHARACTERISTIC DISCLAIMER TO FALSE STORY) and the day after that, in an uncharacteristic act of severity, Grant banished Adam Badeau from his house.

  The weeks wore on. Toward the end of May, Stilson Hutchins decided abruptly that the Post needed a permanent bureau in New York, and not just for the Grant story alone, and Trist, correspondent in chief, was joined by two young staff reporters. He opened an office not far from Edison’s Pearl Street station and began to write more and more about New York, less and less about the General. He mailed Elizabeth and Don Cameron a card with the address of his new rented rooms, another to Henry and Clover Adams. No reply or acknowledgment came back.

  On June 16 Grant was moved by a special train (the loan, once again, of his friend Vanderbilt) to a cottage on Mount McGregor, a summer resort in the Adirondacks near Saratoga Springs, where it was th
ought the cool air would ease his pain, although in truth nobody now expected him to live much longer.

  “He told me,” Dr. Douglas remarked to Trist one day early in July when Trist came to his office in search of a statement, “the World has been trying to kill him off for the last year and a half, and one of these days they’re bound to be right.”

  Trist laughed. “Well, he sounds as if he’s actually better.”

  But Douglas only shook his head. “A hard man to understand, you know. Much humor under all that silence. We have to drain and swab his throat almost hourly, and we’ve cut away a great portion of the flesh in his mouth. Eating or swallowing must be sheer torture. The other day he told me, ‘If you want anything larger in the way of a spatula, there’s a man with a hoe out back.’ ”

  “But he’s still writing his book?”

  “Twain came out to Mount McGregor last week and tried to take the manuscript for volume two away, talked a blue and yellow streak.” Douglas was Scots and disapproving. “The General wrote him he wasn’t satisfied yet, he intended to do it right, so his family would receive the money fairly.”

  Trist had been fumbling for a pencil in his coat pocket and now looked up, surprised. “Wrote him?”

  “Most of the time, the General is in such excruciating pain he can’t speak. It must be like having live burning coals jammed in your throat. How he sits there and writes his book day after day I don’t know. When he can’t bear to talk he writes notes to us. He keeps a little pad and pencil in his lap and communicates that way.” Douglas paused and looked thoughtfully out his window at the bright summer afternoon, then gave a short bark of a laugh. “He says he needs another kind of doctor now, because he’s caught the writing bug.”