I see that my current coffee-break companion, The Education of Henry Adams, heads the Modern Library Board's list of the top hundred works of nonfiction. But the real eye-opener is "the reader's list," which, being largely an Ayn Rand tribute, shares few data points with that of the board. For "readers," the counterpart to Adams's Education is Rand's The Virtue of Selfishness. Two books not by Rand but about her also make it into the readers' top ten, along with Economics in One Lesson (#8) and More Guns, Less Crime (#10). Perhaps the wing-nuts are too busy voting in online polls to have time for more than one economics lesson.
I just finished the chapter on President Grant in Adams's Education. Grant is also the subject of a chapter in Edmund Wilson's Patriotic Gore: Studies in the Literature of the American Civil War. The divergent views of our eighteenth president displayed in these two books would make for a predictable compare-and-contrast essay question for a college course on, say, American Literature: 1860-1920. The only problem is that the task has already been admirably performed by Wilson himself. His thesis is that Grant's life was made of alternating periods of dissipation and intense concentration. After graduating from West Point, he served in the Mexican War, of which he disapproved, and then drank himself out of the army after it had ended. In the 1850s he failed at selling real estate, at working in a custom house, and in a run for county engineer. When the Civil War began, he immediately volunteered for service. It's not real surprising that he should have done so as he was at the time working as a clerk in a leather goods store in Galena, Illinois. The store was run by two of his younger brothers. The history of his performance in the war and his steady rise to the top command of the Union Army is well known and also the reason that, in 1868, the former unsuccessful candidate for county engineer was elected to the Presidency. His two terms in office are widely regarded as a failure--it seems that being president at the start of the first Gilded Age did not qualify as a crisis sufficient to activate his concentration. By 1884, he was broke, the victim of one of the financial swindles that had plagued his Administrations. Also, he was suffering from throat cancer. To raise funds for his family, he undertook the composition of his Personal Memoirs, which he completed in eleven months. A week later, he died. These memoirs, which were praised for their literary qualities by Matthew Arnold and Mark Twain (and by Edmund Wilson too), sold 300,000 copies in the first two years after publication and earned for Grant's family close to a half million dollars.
Given these protracted slumps punctuated by high achievement, estimations of Grant can swing wildly to and fro, depending upon how the estimator knew him. Henry Adams spent the years of the Civil War in London helping his father, Lincoln's minister to the British government, keep England from recognizing the Confederacy. Having returned home after the war, he was cruelly disappointed when President Grant showed himself to be unfit for the challenges of the 1870s. His brother, however, had served under Grant in the war, and revered him. Wilson quotes the almost humorously opposite assessments of the two brothers. The difference, of course, was that Henry knew Grant best during one of his slumps, whereas his brother observed him at the helm of the Union Army, succeeding brilliantly in a role that several predecessors with better resumes could not manage.
Here is a portion of Arnold's review of Grant's Personal Memoirs:
. . . . I found a man of sterling good-sense as well as of the firmest resolution; a man, withal, humane, simple, modest; from all restless self-consciousness and desire for display perfectly free. . . . I found a language straightforward, nervous, firm, possessing in general the high merit of saying clearly in the fewest possible words what had to be said, and saying it, frequently, with shrewd and unexpected turns of expression.
One of Wilson's points is that the characteristics of Grant the writer are the selfsame ones cited by those, such as Henry's brother, who lauded the leadership qualities of General Grant. Arnold in his review seems to have caught both strains.
During World War I, Wilson, feeling he could not participate in the killing, volunteered for a medical unit, and spent much of 1918 first dressing wounds near the front, then patrolling the halls of a military hospital, where his tasks included keeping crazed, wounded soldiers from jumping out of windows or otherwise harming themselves. I mention this because his praise of Grant's Personal Memoirs is tempered by the criticism that the book excluded too much of the human cost, the unspeakable suffering, of the "campaigns." It had never occurred to me before I typed it above, but the title and the subtitle of his book on the literature of the Civil War rhyme, and the rhyming words are: gore-war.
