by Max Byrd
“I knew a fiction writer in Paris,” Trist said, “a novelist, who had a wonderful way of writing.” They had reached the corner of Lafayette Square, where both houses and trees seemed dappled in a lazy golden light. American light, Trist thought, looking across to the construction site of Henry Adams’s new house, a brick shell of astonishing bulk and ugliness. “He had the idea”—Trist turned back to McLean and found himself faintly startled to see Emily smiling up at the publisher, her arm in his—“the ideal, really, that a book ought to feel as if the author had written it all at once, in a single blow, so that it seems organic and not mechanical.”
“That’s the way you make good horseshoes,” said General Beale, his mind apparently still on his stables. “All in one blow.”
“So my friend devised what he calls the Thirty-Day Draft—when he writes a book he completes the first draft in thirty days exactly, and each day he gets up at exactly the same time, puts on exactly the same clothes, has the same breakfast, walks the same route to his office, has the same lunch, dinner—everything he does is an unbroken repetition of Day One till he finishes his book.”
“Whom the gods would destroy,” declared Mrs. Beale more briskly than ever, leading them back into the house for tea, “they first make authors.”
On the steps of the house Trist held the door for Emily. She stopped and smiled up at him—a girl of smiles and songs today, he thought—and they paused to look back companionably together at the quiet square.
“Henry Adams has taken ten years to write his History,” she said, “and he’s not finished yet.”
“He changes his clothes too often.”
She laughed easily—a girl of laughter too—and held out her ring to be admired again. “You told me you were going to write a review of that book Esther. So I actually went and read it myself, and I’ve been looking for your review all summer.”
Trist propped himself against the open door and looked down at her curiously. From inside the house someone called to them to hurry in. “Well, I didn’t know what to write about it,” he said finally, not quite truthfully. “It’s a very strange book.”
“It is a book,” said Emily, suddenly somber and showing her mother’s talent for precise summary, “about a homely young woman with an invalid father and her friend, a younger, very beautiful and charming woman, and how the homely woman is filled with despair and doubt because her friend is so lovely.”
“Yes.”
Emily’s smile had now completely vanished. “It made me think,” she said, “of Clover Adams and Elizabeth Cameron.”
EXTRACT FROM A REPORTER’S NOTEBOOK, 1885
General Grant began to write despatches, and I arose to go, but resumed my seat as he said, “Sit still.” My attention was soon attracted to the manner in which he went to work at his correspondence. At this time, as throughout his later career, he wrote nearly all his documents with his own hand, and seldom dictated to anyone even the most unimportant despatch. His work was performed swiftly and uninterruptedly, but without any marked display of nervous energy. His thoughts flowed as freely from his mind as the ink from his pen; he was never at a loss for an expression, and seldom interlined a word or made a material correction. He sat with his head bent low over the table, and when he had occasion to step to another table or desk to get a paper he wanted, he would glide rapidly across the room without straightening himself, and return to his seat with his body still bent over at about the same angle at which he had been sitting when he left his chair. Upon this occasion he tossed the sheets across the table as he finished them, leaving them in the wildest disorder. When he had completed the despatch, he gathered up the scattered sheets, read them over rapidly, and arranged them in their proper order.
–COLONEL HORACE PORTER
Wilderness campaign
CHAPTER ONE
ESTHER WAS, IN FACT, A FAR STRANGER BOOK THAN EMILY Beale’s summary suggested. In the first place, there was no author called Frances Snow Compton, as far as Trist could discover. In New York City, where he now had acquaintances at two or three publishing houses, nobody had ever heard of her. At the Century magazine, Compton was completely unknown. And as for the novel itself, the heroine Esther Dudley was a young woman in her late twenties, and Frances Snow Compton evidently hated her—“She has a bad figure,” the first chapter said by way of introduction. “She is too slight, too thin; she looks fragile, willowy, as the cheap novels call it, as though you could break her in halves like a switch.”
Trist put down the book and pondered the idea of an author who wants to break her heroine in halves.
In his notebook he had jotted down dozens of other references to Esther’s homely appearance—she was short, gloomy; dressed badly: “Why, Esther,” drawls one of the men when she appears in a new robe, “take care, or one of these days you will be handsome.”
Nor is she particularly intelligent: “Her mind is as irregular as her face,” remarks a friend. She is only a “second rate amateur” painter, hopeless compared to a male artist. “Esther,” observes the author, “like most women, was timid, and wanted to be told when she could be bold with perfect safety.”
By contrast, the ingénue, young Catherine Brooke, just arrived in New York from the West, is quick and bright and “fresh as a summer morning, pretty as a fawn.” All the men in the book are in love with Catherine. Frances Snow Compton herself is enraptured—“No one could resist her hazel eyes and the elegant curve of her neck,” she trills when Miss Brooke steps onto the stage; “her pure complexion had the transparency of a Colorado sunrise.”
Bilge, Trist thought, and stood up and tossed the book onto his desk. Bilge and syrup, enough to make you gag. Henry West hadn’t wanted Trist’s review for the Post, pointing out that he’d never seen an advertisement anywhere for the book or heard of the author. As far as West knew, nobody in the world but Trist and Henry Adams had ever bought a copy.
And Emily Beale, of course. It was the character of Esther, Emily had said, who first made her think of Clover—homely, fragile Esther with her bad figure, devoted to her invalid father, deeply vexed in a vaguely Bostonian way about matters of duty and religion. Esther was a sad black frump, Emily thought, next to the pretty fawn Catherine; just like Clover and Elizabeth.
Trist picked up the novel again and opened it to the last chapter. Wooden characters, turgid prose, nothing at all resembling the wit of Democracy. Early on in the book Esther becomes engaged to the pompous clergyman named Hazard, but the only discernible theme in their long-winded romance is that marriage is a stultifying prison—“As for bringing about a marriage,” says Esther’s sharp-tongued aunt, “I would almost rather bring about a murder.”
In the end, poor unattractive Esther loses everything—her beloved invalid father dies, her “second rate” art comes to naught, her fiancé deserts her. “I loathe and despise myself,” she whimpers, and Frances Snow Compton, licking her chops, leaves her creation standing miserable and alone at the edge of Niagara Falls.
She should have just pushed her over, Trist decided irritably. Or made her jump. But Compton lacked the authorial nerve, he supposed; or the imagination; or the publisher had interfered at the last moment. It was an angry, frustrated book, there was no denying that; a book that somehow, obliquely but deliberately, sought to cause pain.
Who had written it?
TWO HUNDRED MILES AWAY ON EAST SIXTY-SIXTH STREET, AT almost precisely the same moment, Julia Grant came into her husband’s study on the second floor and handed him a yellowing slip of notepaper that she had found while she was sorting her letters.
The date in the corner, he saw, was May 22, 1875, the last year of his second term in the President’s Palace.
Dear Ulys,
How many years ago today is it that we were engaged? Just such a warm day as this was it not? Julia.
She had given it to a servant to carry to him, and on the bottom he had written two lines in pencil and sent it back:
Thirty-one year
s ago. I was so frightened however that I do not remember whether it was warm or snowing. Ulys.
Grant read it over now and looked up with a wry little shake of his head. Julia leaned down, kissed him, smiled.
That evening, in the sitting room, remarkably bare and uncomfortable since it had been stripped clean of military souvenirs, she laughingly repeated to their guests the story of the “warm day or snowing” note. And then by a kind of leap of association she went on to describe the equally hot day last June when the General hurt himself. “What he did,” she said, “was bite into a peach—”
“It happened at lunch,” Grant explained.
“And then he bounced up from the table in terrible pain and walked around the room as if he’d been stung—”
“I thought there was an insect in it,” Grant told them, and Elizabeth Cameron frowned and nodded with such a charming look of sympathy that he added as an aside to her, not Don Cameron, who wouldn’t care in the least, that the peach was his favorite fruit.
“Well, I hope you saw a doctor,” Elizabeth Cameron told him.
“He saw Dr. Da Costa, from Philadelphia.” Julia stood and smoothed her skirt like a nervous bride and started to pass around the plate of chewy after-dinner cakes that she had cooked herself, just as she had cooked the whole meal for the four of them, pork chops, beans, potatoes, stewed tomatoes, everything the General liked, most of which he hadn’t touched. “He comes to Long Branch every summer, and he examined the General’s throat—”
“Right there on the porch,” Grant said, amused at the memory of the dapper little Philadelphia doctor shading his eyes against the bright June sunlight and telling Grant to open wide, while carriages and horses were going by on the street not twenty yards away.
“He said the General should go to his regular New York doctor, Dr. Barker.”
“But Barker was in Europe all summer, so I haven’t got around to it yet. And besides”—Grant looked up at Don Cameron, who had refused Julia’s cakes and was now at the sideboard helping himself to some brandy in the unceremonious fashion of an old friend. “Besides, I’ve been busy, as you may know.”
“Heard about it,” Cameron said.
“You’ve become a writing man,” Elizabeth said in her lively way. “Three magazine articles about the war. We saw them announced in the papers.”
“Well, truly just two and a half.” Of late Grant had developed what he could only describe as a kind of second self or presence in his head that appeared to listen to everything he said and then comment on it. Now, for instance, he heard himself speaking, but inside his consciousness he was remembering how his Secretary of State Hamilton Fish used to tease him for being the most scrupulous and honest man in the world in regard to fact. “One and a half, really. The Century magazine asked me to write a few things about the war, and with everything that’s happened”—he shrugged stoically, Julia looked down at the floor—“I thought I would.”
“How much do they pay you?” Cameron was blunt as usual.
“Five hundred dollars an article.”
“Not nearly enough.”
“That’s what Mark Twain said.”
“Tell them about Mr. Johnson, Ulys,” said Julia, settling back in her chair, and Grant smiled at the prompting because in all the shock of Grant & Ward and the loss of money and the relentless accusations of theft, in all that humiliating “come-down” as his old mother would have said, Julia never stopped thinking of him first, what would please him and lift his spirits. He glanced for a moment at Cameron and his pretty young wife, on opposite sides of the room, and then, to please Julia, he told them all about Johnson.
“Professor” Johnson, he had actually taken to calling him, although he couldn’t be thirty years old. Tactful man, sweet-natured. As the Camerons knew, the Century intended to run a yearlong series of articles called “Battles and Leaders of the War” and then make a book of them. Grant was to start the series off with an article about Shiloh—they paid him money in advance; it went straight to the grocer’s bill—and so he had got out all his old records and letters and sent them a clear four-page essay not all that different from his official report in April 1862, to tell the truth. And two weeks later young editor Johnson showed up at Long Branch smiling and shaking hands all around and sitting on the porch with lemonade in his hand and the folded pages of the article in his pocket, and Grant had known at once there was trouble.
At Shiloh, General, Johnson said casually when all the small talk was done, you were much criticized for not entrenching against Johnston’s troops.
Well, yes, Grant admitted; he had made a mistake, and he went on to explain about entrenching as a tactic and how they had only come to see how important it was in the Wilderness, he and Lee at about the same time.
Shiloh was, to that point in the war, the bloodiest battle ever fought on the North American continent, Johnson suggested.
And Grant had told him, sipping lemonade, such is the contrast between the times of a man’s life, that on the Sunday night after the first day’s battle he had been sitting on the ground at Shiloh, on the mud in fact, nursing a sore ankle; but it was raining so hard that around midnight he limped over to a log cabin about a mile away for shelter. Except, the cabin was being used as an improvised hospital, and it was full of wounded men stretched out on the floor, dozens and dozens of them, moaning and screaming with pain, and there was a farmer’s bushel basket of amputated limbs in the doorway and surgeons covered with so much blood they looked like cardinals of the church, cutting away on a kitchen door they used as a table. Grant had sent those men into battle, his orders were responsible, and there must have been four or five thousand Union casualties, that day alone. “But I couldn’t stand the sight of all that pain,” he confessed to Johnson, “I just couldn’t endure it, and I went back out into the rain instead and spent the night under a tree.”
And the battle next day? Johnson asked.
So fierce, Grant told him, he saw at one time what he had never seen before or since: swarms of musket bullets in flight, overhead and visible to the naked eye, like buzzing insects.
And then, Grant explained to the Camerons, Johnson finally pulled out his article and said that kind of thing was what his readers wanted, and could the General just go over his pages one more time?
“He became your literary tutor!” Elizabeth Cameron declared with a charming little clap of her hands.
“Well, what I wrote at first,” Grant said, “was pretty bad.”
“He told Ulys,” Julia was proud, “he had never seen somebody work so hard and learn so fast.”
“And now I’ve just about decided to write a whole book about my experiences in the war and let the Century publish it.”
“How much for the book?” Cameron had finished his drink and was standing with his hands in his pockets, a sure sign that he was impatient to go.
“I have a meeting tomorrow,” Grant told him, “and then I guess I’ll find out.” And the inner voice reminded him that right after the meeting with Johnson he was to see his doctor at last and have his throat examined again, because the soreness now was such, as Don Cameron had remarked after dinner, the General hadn’t touched a cigar all night, and that was not for reasons of economy alone.
At the door Elizabeth Cameron was telling Julia, at female length, about her summer away from Washington, and Grant was standing by, docile husband, when he heard the name Henry Adams and looked up quickly. One of the things people said about Grant, he knew, was that he possessed a remarkable memory, which he supposed was true, and another was that if provoked, though outwardly calm and nerveless, he could be a ferocious hater.
“Henry Adams the journalist,” he said flatly.
Elizabeth Cameron smiled. “Our neighbor in Lafayette Square.”
“I met Adams once when I was President,” Grant said. “Came over after dinner one night with Badeau.” Badeau was his former aide, who was even now upstairs helping to arrange the material for the book.
“Sneered at me, sneered at Julia.”
“Oh,” said Elizabeth Cameron, flushing. “Oh, surely not.”
“Wrote all sorts of magazine articles attacking me in the White House, after Black Friday he said I was just a pathetic old soldier out of my depth. When my son Buck was at Harvard he took a course in history from Adams, and Adams failed him. Only course Buck ever failed in his life, pettiest thing I ever heard of.”
“Oh, dear.”
“But that’s all right.” Grant smiled and felt at last in his pocket for a cigar. “Now I’m a writer too.”
THE NEXT MORNING, OCTOBER 22, GRANT WENT TO THE OFFICES of the Century for a brief, inconclusive meeting with Johnson and Johnson’s boss, a middle-aged man named Richard Watson Gilder, who was eager to sign a contract but still more eager to talk about the way his artillery unit had taken the wrong road in July ’63 and marched northwest instead of southeast and thereby, somehow, missed the entire Battle of Gettysburg.
When Gilder had finished, it became, in an obvious but unspoken kind of fashion, Grant’s turn to tell a story. And as it happened, that very morning he had been working with Badeau on some of the records from Kentucky and Tennessee in 1862, after Shiloh, and so the name Braxton Bragg was already in his mind.
“Confederate general,” Gilder informed young Johnson, nodding sagely. “Good man.”
Grant sipped the coffee the Century had provided, felt a little sting in his throat but nothing terrible, and thought, as he began to talk, that here was U. S. Grant, “Silent” Grant, in his old age metamorphosed into a raconteur! What would that peerless chatterbox Mark Twain think?
“Bragg,” he said, and noticed that five or six other men, some young, some old, had stopped at the office door and were leaning in to listen. “Bragg was a West Pointer. He fought in the Mexican War when I did. He was always a good soldier, but he was far and away the most argumentative and litigious man I’ve ever known. Before the war he was serving as a company commander in somebody’s division, and also, because we were shorthanded, as the company supply officer as well. One day as company commander he decided to order new rifles for his troops and he passed his requisition slip on to the supply officer, who was, of course, himself.”