Grant: A Novel (47 page)

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”:

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 thought 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.”

Dr. Douglas, in fact, had carefully saved and dated every such note that Grant had written him for the last three weeks. On condition that nothing was to be copied or reported, he allowed Trist to read them at his desk, and for the rest of that day Grant, who had been growing more and more remote as a figure in Trist’s mind, suddenly came forward as a presence again, almost a voice.