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| Ulysses S. Grant at Cold Harbor, June 1864 |
My dad's copy, given to him on his 19th birthday, by his grandparents.
There were several dusty volumes on my parents' bookshelves, some of them by Thomas Mann. Among them was this volume. A few weeks ago I came across one of those lists of 'the books that have influenced you the most' by some celebrity author. And I was surprised to see this old book among them. It was written in the early 1920s, almost a hundred years ago. So it is not the latest. But for a character study of its subject, what the author himself calls an 'inner history', it may still be the one to read. What it has is immediacy: it is mostly written in the present tense, so we follow the impulses, feelings, and plans of its, well, hero, as they evolve and unfold. It is a dynamic history.
Looking back at the end of the life it expresses, the book gives some assessments, and these may be in the past tense. Until that point, it is as excited and immediate as the prose it quotes, in many pages, of the letters and speeches and dispatches - and eventually memoirs - of Napoleon Bonaparte.
And then I turned the last page. And thought, what will I read now. The newspaper. The Economist. The New Yorker. And then what? I looked at the shelves, exhausted. And turned to Morning Prayer.
Later I looked again, and thought: do I want to read about FDR again? Certainly not World War Two. Do I want to read Hamilton? No. Not yet. And I do not want to read about another mythical figure. So no Cromwell, the Lord Protector. I want to read about a good man, arguably a great man. Grant.
Civil War again? The Personal Memoirs of Ulysses Grant are hard to beat; especially in concert with Sherman's. This new (2017) biography gives us things Grant himself could not; and a modern perspective on his troubles, of which he was less than frank, perhaps. So it was good to read a fuller treatment of his northwestern sojourns, at Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, and Ft. Humboldt.
The latter particularly, a place where the state historic park gives you a sense of what the place was like before the Civil War, and what it might have been like for an ambitious (let's face it), bored young officer, with nothing to do but read books, ride, or drink. And drink he did. They all did.
Not so good for a binge alcoholic, which is the diagnosis of the author, and of the hero's friends, notably Rawlins, his aide-de-camp and would-be nanny (what they both needed was a Sponsor).
But then there are flashes of brilliance. When the man is not idle he is great. What Napoleon had was a scheme to be always up and doing, never rested. There was always something going on, something to stir up, until there wasn't any more. With Grant, he waited, for the paths of glory to open. There were idle years, for a soldier, between the Mexican-American War and the War of 1861-1865. And Grant spent those years in frustration: he was no businessman, no farmer, no seller of leather goods.
When the trumpet called the not-so-old warhorse came alive. And that began a transformation, one that I am familiar with ... through the war years. As far as the Memoirs takes me. For the remainder of Grant's career I have historians, and the interpretive ranger at Grants' Tomb ("Who's buried in Grant's Tomb?"). So the, um, rehabilitation, and reinterpretation, of a stained presidential career, will be new.
Ron Chernow was the author of Washington - and of Hamilton. So I expect great things. No musical.
https://www.nps.gov/people/ulysses-s-grant.htm
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