Waldo Emerson’s Literary Offenses

December 24, 2022 at 2:45 am (Literary Criticism)

I owe my title to Mark Twain’s humorous essay “Fenimore Cooper’s Literary Offenses”

I am re-reading Emerson’s essay “Nature” and finding myself mostly annoyed by it. I have long admired Emerson, the writer once referred to as the “indispensable man” in American letters, having studied him a little in both undergrad and grad school, visited his house in Concord back in the 70s and again in 2018 with Russ, and admired and partaken of his Unitarianism as a teenager. I came to love the gestalt of Concord, inhabited by Emerson, Thoreau, Bronson Alcott, Louisa Mae Alcott, and Nathaniel Hawthorne. It became a town of my imagination, its winters, springs, summers, and falls all easily summonable. For me, Walden Pond was the hub of this “hub of the universe,” Thoreau being, for me, the true central figure whose present and continuing fame seems to have slightly eclipsed the seventeen-years-older Emerson. Emerson, the Unitarian minister, speaks to God in prayer; Thoreau, imbibing all the deified nature around him in four-hour daily walks, does so in conversations. Emerson was an essayist and poet, but no single work of his quite captures the enduring impact of Walden, and I wonder if any of his essays—as famous as “Nature,” “The Divinity School Address,” “Self-Reliance,” “The American Scholar,” and others are—has had the continuing appeal and especially the real-world impact of Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.”

So, despite my greater affinity for Henry, why does this other man I admire annoy me with his “Nature”? It is true that I have drifted a bit toward Mencken’s opinion of meta-physics, in which the meta is that vast unseen world and universe which provide much room for philosophical speculation and for mischief. Being good Transcendentalists, both Thoreau and Emerson enjoy the interplay of the material, concrete world and what they see as the meta-physical world. But where Thoreau, in the introductory “Economy” chapter of Walden, anchors his grand Transcendentalist vision of living an “economical” life unencumbered by a thousand superfluous objects and (for him) frivolous diversions in the prosaic business of buying a few nails and boards to build his cabin, Emerson flies higher, and thus is less appealing and more obscure. I get lost in the empyrean sublimity of his prose. One might think of Aristophanes’ portrait of Socrates, hovering over the earth in The Clouds, holding forth with his speculations and queries, a slightly fatuous old man whose un-sandaled feet don’t touch the ground.  Magically teleported forward twenty-two centuries to Emerson’s day, would Aristophanes put the Concord sage on an even higher plane, looking down and jousting with Socrates?

Emerson is capable of concision, but his attraction to spirit and God and soul call him to Olympus. His prose teeter-totters between rapturous metaphor and an anthropomorphic nature-spirit bordering on the incomprehensible. Take this barbarous sentence suggesting the latter:

“We learn that the highest [truth] is present to the soul of man; that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, throughout nature, spirit is present; one and not compound it does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves: therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old.”

This, for a fellow like me chained to the soil, is flying high indeed. We do have a nice simile at the end, but it is swimming against a fierce meta-physical current to get there. I love a comma as much as anyone, but dear Waldo, the period is not the harbinger of the bubonic plague. True, some of Jeremy Bentham’s sentences crush your mere 120 word-storm for sheer volubility, but his is a dubious prize. Yes, a contemporary critic must avoid the fallacy of presentism and not scorn the author for a style no longer in vogue—in this case sometimes  horizonless sentences floating in the stratosphere. The same may be said for his use of whence, whereto, whilst, even saith. But I don’t recall those words in Thoreau (despite a couple of methinks and fains), even though the last sentence of Walden does aspire to that empyrean sublimity Emerson both achieves and is guilty of.

As the uber Transcendentalist, as well as Platonist, theist, and mystic, Emerson has no particular objection to the senses except when they blind us to what is beyond or behind them, namely, God, spirit, Ideas, and the all-encompassing Over-soul (a term not mentioned in “Nature”). Which apparently is often. He approvingly quotes an unnamed poet: “The foundations of man are not in matter, but in spirit.” He refers to “this despotism of the senses”—a Platonic idea for certain—and wishes to “build science on ideas,” presumably rather than building it on observed facts. “Empirical science is apt to cloud the sight, and by the very knowledge of functions and processes to bereave the student of the manly contemplation of the whole.” Such a fate “leaves me in the splendid labyrinth of my perceptions, to wander without end”—a gorgeous metaphor, meant to warn. I wish that he could acknowledge that in climbing out of the labyrinth he might also see chimeras, intuiting things that might not exist. Of course finding the supernatural behind the natural and the sublime in the minuscule is the Transcendentalist’s stock-in-trade, and the minister’s too. It is what they do. We can appreciate his search for the divine in the material, the meta beyond the physics; but both Emerson and his admirers (of whom I am one) should take care not to let the fruits of that search devolve into dogmatism or self-delusion.

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Notes on Mencken

January 21, 2022 at 7:53 pm (Literary Criticism, Political Commentary)

I have been reading H. L. Mencken’s Notes on Democracy, for the primary reason that it is now out of copyright and thus appeared through a link from Lapham’s Quarterly on my computer, along with other works of 1926. I have commented on ol’ Henry before, an almost unpigeonhole-able character who broadcast his humor-laced misanthropy far and wide and in perhaps the most brilliant razor-edged English prose of the 20th century. He was congenitally of no political party or social improvement organization; he skewered 99% of America with courage and abandon and bile; he was atheist; and he was as obstreperously anti-democracy as any Louis XVI facing the National Razor. He was also, as I have noted elsewhere, a vicious torturer of Wilson, and in later works FDR and Truman for their alleged demagoguery and what he appears to consider their unwarranted war-mongering and unjustified participation in two wars against the nation of his origin. Despite such vilification, and to his discredit, I wrote then, he never offers even a sotto voce critique of the genocidal uber demagogue Hitler. He is a Germanophile, dangerously close to a Nazi in sentiment, but temperamentally incapable of joining the Party.

But could he write! It is not just his immense vocabulary, sending the intrepid reader to the dictionary on almost every page, but the blistering portraits of the braying, self-important, mentally deficient, cowardly “homo vulgaris” whom he depicts in language sardonic, ironic, and humorous. To a modern reader he bears—to use a metaphor he himself used with others—most of the stigmata of racism, sexism, classism, elitism, and any other ism that contemporaries, and especially liberals, would apply to all those with anti-egalitarian dispositions. There is a chapter here on liberty and democracy, but not a whiff of comment about equality—except to excoriate it as the reductio ad nauseum of democracy, advocated by those incapable of honor, character, courage, or good sense. But he entertains, even occasionally when he offends, and there are intimations of truth if one can penetrate the dense foliage of his vituperation. So let the man speak:

“The Puritan is surely no ascetic. Even in the days of the New England theocracy it was impossible to restrain his libidinousness: his eyes rolled sideways at buxom wenches quite as often as they rolled upward to God. But he is incapable of sexual experience upon what may be called a civilized plane; it is impossible for him to manage the thing as a romantic adventure; in his hands it reduces itself to the terms of the barnyard. Hence the Mann Act. So with dalliance with the grape. He can have experience of it only as a furtive transaction behind the door, with a dreadful headache to follow. Hence prohibition. So, again, with the joys that come out of the fine arts. Looking at a picture, he sees only the model’s pudenda. Reading a book, he misses the ordeals and exaltations of the spirit, and remembers only the natural functions. Hence comstockery” (p. 156). Do Jimmy Swaggart, Jim Bakker, and Franklin Graham come to a contemporary’s mind?

“Yet both [Senators], under pressure, performed such dizzy flops that even the Senate gasped. It was amusing, but there was also a touch of pathos in it. Here were men who plainly preferred their jobs to their dignity. Here, in brief, were men whose private rectitude had yielded to political necessity—the eternal tragedy of democracy” (p. 128). How can we not immediately think of McConnell, Graham, and Kevin McCarthy, who ignominiously “flopped” from condemning Trump after January 6 to embracing Trumpism as the heat of that day slightly cooled? Of course one must be careful in assuming there was any “private rectitude” among those three to begin with.

“But now and then there appears one [a loser in an election] whose wounds are too painful for such devices, or for whom no suitable [post defeat] office can be found. This majestic victim not infrequently seeks surcease by a sort of running amok. That is to say, he turns what remains of his influence with the mob into a weapon against the nation as a whole and becomes a chronic maker of trouble” (p. 139). Who could possibly read those lines and not consider it the very definition of Donald Trump, whom Mencken would have considered both the epitome of homo vulgaris and simultaneously the pinnacle of what he considered a debased political system, democracy, would produce?

“The truth is that the common man’s love of liberty, like his love of sense, justice and truth, is almost wholly imaginary. . . . He longs for the warm, reassuring smell of the herd” (p. 157). Along with a proclivity for violence, doesn’t that pretty well capture the January 6th insurrectionists?

I will forever wince at many of his judgments, but I will continue to smile at his decapitative humor and wicked misanthropy. The alleged last words of this good atheist were “Bring on the angels!”

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It Could Be Worse

March 27, 2020 at 7:46 pm (Lagniappe, Literary Criticism)



While hanging around the house in quasi-house arrest, I thought perhaps it was finally time to storm the castle and read Robinson Crusoe author Daniel Defoe’s other, less well known historical novel A Journal of the Plague Year—you know, for comparison purposes. It’s his grim (reader beware) account of the bubonic plague—aka the distemper, the infection, or the visitation—that consumed London in 1665. There was a lot of social distancing going on, which was good, since you could catch it via airborne transmission, including the “breath” or “fumes” or “stench” of an infected person, or, as the physicians called it, “effluvia.” But also, unknown to Londoners or the rest of the world, you could catch it by a flea bite if that flea had bitten a rat carrying the virus. And there were a lot of rats.

During the worst weeks “these objects [dead bodies] were so frequent in the streets that when the plague came to be raging on one side, there was scarce any passing by the streets but that several dead bodies would be lying here and there upon the ground. . . . At first the people would stop as they went along and call to the neighbors to come out on such an occasion, yet afterward no notice was taken of them,” and people would simply “go across the way and not come near” the corpse. London, “I say, was much altered; sorrow and sadness sat upon every face. . . . All looked deeply concerned; and, as we saw it apparently coming on, so every one looked on himself and his family in the utmost danger. . . .Tears and lamentations were seen almost in every house, especially in the first part of the visitation; for towards the latter end men’s hearts were hardened, and death was so always before their eyes, that they did not so much concern themselves for the loss of their friends, expecting that themselves should be summoned the next hour.”

And summoned they were. As the plague spread, house arrest became literal. If anyone in a house were known to have the plague or have died, the entire household was imprisoned, with a watchman day and night to prevent escape of the rest of the household, who themselves often thus became infected. House doors were painted with a red cross; doors were padlocked from the outside. Defoe records escapes, bribery, even murder of watchmen. “Nor, indeed, could less be expected, for here were so many prisons in the town as there were houses shut up; and as the people shut up or imprisoned so were guilty of no crime, only shut up because miserable, it was really the more intolerable to them. . . .They blew up a watchman with gunpowder, and burned the poor fellow dreadfully; and while he made hideous cries, and nobody would venture to come near to help him, the whole family that were able to stir got out at the windows one storey high, two that were left sick calling out for help.”

“Idle assemblies” were prohibited, as were plays, feasting, and “tippling houses.” “Disorderly tippling in taverns, ale houses, coffee-houses, and cellars [will] be severely looked unto, as the common sin of this time and greatest occasion of dispersing the plague,” in the language of the multi-page “Orders Conceived And Published By The Lord Mayor And Aldermen Of The City Of London Concerning The Infection Of The Plague, 1665.” But social distancing wasn’t enough.

The dead-carts trundled through the streets and alleys every night, collecting the dead, the collectors throwing them in piles in the carts. How desperate would one have to be to take that job? Huge pits were dug, sometimes in churchyards. The cart would approach the pit under the light of lanterns, turn around, lean backward, and “the bodies shot into the pit promiscuously,” with dirt thrown over them as quickly as possible. Young Daniel was a venturesome soul, or a foolish one:

“A terrible pit it was, and I could not resist my curiosity to go and see it. As near as I may judge, it was about forty feet in length, and about fifteen or sixteen feet broad, and at the time I first looked at it, about nine feet deep, but it was said they dug it near twenty feet deep afterwards in one part of it. . . . Then they made larger holes wherein they buried all that the cart brought in a week, which, by the middle to the end of August, came to from 200 to 400 a week [in his parish alone]. . . . People that were infected and near their end, and delirious also, would run to those pits, wrapt in blankets or rugs, and throw themselves in, and, as they said, bury themselves.”

By late October, the contagion began to recede. Sixty-eight thousand, five hundred and ninety deaths in London and immediate environs were documented: “for about nine weeks together there died near a thousand a day.” Defoe estimated the real number to be closer to 100,000. Londoners, at least the ones who by good fortune or escape to the country were not infected, along with the few who managed to survive infection, breathed a little easier. But their woes were not at an end. The next year, 1666, would bring the greatest fire, before or since, in London’s long history.

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The Awakening of Miss Jean Louise

August 29, 2015 at 7:16 pm (Literary Criticism)

One might be forgiven for wondering if Harper Lee’s formerly lost novel Go Set a Watchman just might be the equal of To Kill a Mockingbird. For fifty-five years we have had just one volume of the companion set, as if we only knew Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer but not his The Mysterious Stranger. Watchman was written first, the story of Jean Louise Finch’s return to her hometown of Maycomb, Alabama after a few years of escape in New York City. Was the return a mere visit to see her elderly father or was it permanent? We do not know, nor does the novel tell us, but we do know that Lee herself did eventually return to Monroeville, where at eighty-nine she lives today in a nursing home. Her New York editor in the mid-1950s seemed unenthusiastic about Watchman but saw possibilities in the novel’s frequent and sometimes lengthy flashbacks to Jean Louise’s childhood and a rambunctious young girl’s 1930s-era evocation of free-roaming summers and invented games, but also Southern life, manners, and the color line.

So Lee returns to her typewriter. In a fine, easy prose, sparkling with tidbits of humor, she creates a Southern small town world as seen by Scout, the nickname of the young Jean Louise, as she navigates ages six through nine, along with her older brother Jem, her father Atticus, their black housekeeper Calpurnia, her playmate Dill, and a cast of lesser but well-drawn dramatis personae. Indeed the language is a little too fine for the six-to-nine year old narrator, a fact which invites a legitimate criticism of the novel. But on that point a willing suspension of disbelief is justified, given that even the precocious Scout could not otherwise reward us with scores of little gems such as:

Atticus had urged them to accept the state’s generosity in allowing them to plead guilty to second-degree murder and escape with their lives, but they were Haverfords, in Maycomb County a name synonymous with jackass. The Haverfords had dispatched Maycomb’s leading blacksmith in a misunderstanding arising from the alleged wrongful detention of a mare, were imprudent enough to do it in the presence of three witnesses, and insisted that the-son-of-a-bitch-had-it-coming-to-him was a good enough defense for anybody.

But Mockingbird is not solely a story of Southern rhythms of the mid-1930s as seen through the innocent eyes of a very young, tomboyish girl ever willing to scrap with the local boys and averse to all impositions of femininity. Lee goes straight to The Great Forbidden in the catalogue of white racial fears: black men raping white women. That particular miscegenation is for whites de facto rape; the idea that interracial sex between black men and white women could be consensual is too abhorrent to be conceived, while that between white men and black women is almost an entitlement, though mentioned only in whispers. The only acceptable outcome to this affront to white sensibilities is lynching, whether judicial or extra-judicial.

This is the scenario Atticus faces as the lawyer for Tom Robinson, wrongfully accused of “ruttin’ on my Mayella” by the much-put-upon white trash lowlife Bob Ewell. Ewell, Scout tells us, “was the only man I ever heard of who was fired from the WPA for laziness,” after which “he resumed his regular weekly appearances at the welfare office for his check, and received it with no grace amid obscure mutterings that the bastards who thought they ran this town wouldn’t permit an honest man to make a living.” As becomes obvious to any objective eye in the courtroom, Mayella has broken the “code” and lured a black man into her shanty house allegedly to move a piece of furniture, kisses the frightened man, and then sees her father at the window and begins screaming as if she has been attacked. Tom runs, and Ewell beats his daughter. Soon enough, father and daughter both easily slip into victimhood and cry rape, and at the trial Atticus coolly eviscerates the mendacious Ewells on the stand, earning their simmering hatred. But reason and facts succumb to the “code,” The Great Forbidden, and so the all white, all male jury comes to its inevitable verdict.

Jem and Scout have been secretly watching the proceedings from the balcony, unknown to Atticus. Scout’s near deification of her father is rooted in her memories of her gentle, loving father who lets her crawl into his lap and reads to her. Despite all Scout’s scrapes, misadventures, and general pugnacity, Atticus is never really angry with her. Though not of an age capable of fully understanding the quiet courage of her father and the esteem in which he is widely held in Maycomb, Scout’s trust in him to know almost everything, to always do the right thing, and especially to always be there for her and Jem form the circumscribed and idealized perspective she has of her father. And she is not far off: reading Mockingbird, one finds a man worthy of imitation—a desire to be more like Atticus, less temperamental, more equable, more laid back.

Two decades later, in Watchman, Jean Louise returns from New York to Maycomb to visit her aging father. Little has changed in Maycomb, and little has changed Jean Louise’s image of her father. The color line is as firm as ever, and Jean Louise’s visit to Calpurnia, quietly grieving over the fate of her grandson who has accidentally killed a pedestrian, is an almost unheard of literal crossing of that line. It does not go well. But it does provide the final chapter in Jean Louise’s awakening. As a girl, she was innocent of the color line’s social mores which enveloped her, and had seen Calpurnia as a mother substitute, dispensing love and discipline with equal fervor. But now, weighed down by age, her grandson’s predicament, and long memory of the unbridgeable divide between white and black, Calpurnia barely speaks, and the realities of the color line rend the cherished memories of Scout’s childhood innocence. Plaintively, Jean Louise asks in parting, “Did you hate us?” After a pregnant moment, Calpurnia shakes her head, but Jean knows that she had a right to.

But the full catastrophe had already begun with Jean Louise’s discovery of a snatch of paper about a meeting of the Maycomb Citizens’ Council. What she now sees as the lie of her childhood crescendos with her clandestinely watching her father introducing white supremacist and state Citizens’ Council leader Grady O’Hanlon, all in the very courtroom where Atticus had so nobly defended Tom Robinson some two decades before. Seeing her father even at the courthouse meeting, much less introducing this reptilian creature, sends her rushing outside, puking her insides out. The disillusionment, the loss of innocence, is almost complete. Her sort-of boyfriend Henry is as complicit as her father. What they and the Citizens’ Councils see as a justifiable defense against the presumed onslaught of the NAACP in the wake of the Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education decision is, to Jean Louise, the howling of the Ku Kluxers railing against the possibility that Negroes might be as human as white folk. And the man she vaguely thought of marrying, and even more importantly, the man she had idolized since before she could walk, were in league with that constellation of odious views up to their armpits. Her faith and trust have been ripped from her, awaiting only Calpurnia’s melancholy head shake to be complete. Jean Louise had simply endured her Aunt Alexandra’s assumptions of class superiority and higher breeding, her supercilious presumption of white benevolence, and all her corseted, self-deluded entitlement that are the poison and ignorance of skin color aristocracy. But her father was pure, the embodiment of racial integrity, the defender of her faith. Yet now, with her own eyes, she had seen that it was not at all so. He was a monster. He may not have burned a cross, but was he not in their camp? It is a small step from radical disillusionment to white-hot anger and loathing, but the step after that is a long one. Finally, through the ministrations of a wise uncle, she comes of age. She takes that long step to a reluctant acceptance. It is not an acceptance of beliefs contrary to her own heart, but an acceptance of her father’s imperfect humanity.

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Dickens’ Own Fleurs du Mal

April 21, 2015 at 4:47 pm (Literary Criticism)

Few if any novels have distinctly moistened my eyes, but Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities recently achieved that distinction in its last pages. I had read the novel perhaps forty-five years ago, and I now read the very same paperback copy that I had read so long ago, priced at an astonishing half dollar, marked with occasional underlinings and rare marginalia from that long-ago first read. I remembered that I liked the book, and I remembered a few essentials of its plot, but all of its intricacies and moral implications were long gone.

For some reason, however, I had remembered it portraying a more Burkean view of the French Revolution, that is, a view more from the aristocratic parapets than from the hollow eyes of the oppressed masses. Possibly I unfairly calumniate Burke, not having actually read his history of the Revolution. Twain, by contrast, defended the Revolution by comparing the relative drops of blood it spilled in the 1790s to the “hogsheads” of blood spilled by the church, crown, and nobility in the centuries preceding. Twain’s view would have found much sympathy with French atheist priest Jean Meslier (1664-1729), whose loathing of the unholy confederacy of church and state, especially in their joint barbarous extortion and grinding oppression of the wretched peasantry, was poured out in secret scribblings by candlelight.

This universal and all too human theme of the oppression of the poor by the privileged rich does find its way, as I had forgotten, into Dickens’ historical masterpiece. Most of the plot inevitably focuses on the period of the Revolution and its lust for human heads provided by the National Razor. But only one of the sympathetic characters, Darnay, is aristocratic by birth, and he repudiates that heritage and its cruelties to earn his own way in his adopted England. More poignantly, Dickens eviscerates the aristocracy’s contempt for all of those unkempt and bestial masses who encroach upon the nobility’s privilege and entitlement simply by the masses’ wretched existence. Darnay’s father embodies this contempt in his wholly remorseless though unintended striking and killing of an infant by his reckless coach careening through the narrow Paris streets, condescending to be bought off by flinging a coin on the cobblestones to the child’s distraught but unappeased father. Darnay’s uncle, no less intoxicated by centuries of unearned privilege and entitled importance, rapes a young peasant woman, then kills her brave and youthful brother who presumes to draw a sword on him for the crime. Then father and uncle together, fearing the doctor whom they abduct to tend to both dying victims, conclude that he is not to be trusted with the truth and connive to have him thrown into the Bastille for twenty years.

Dickens is no friend of the guillotine, but he knows its gestation and birth in the long centuries of the highborn tyrannizing the downtrodden, and thus comes the Revolution: “Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious license and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit, according to its kind.” The tumbrils rolling through Paris streets carrying to their execution the newly humbled aristocrats side by side with the lowborn, contrived enemies of the Revolution were only a little while ago “the carriages of monarchs, the equipages of feudal nobles, the toilettes of flaring Jezebels, the churches that are not my father’s house but dens of thieves, the huts of millions of starving peasants!” Evil sown is evil reaped, and the brave Sydney Carton, just before the blade falls, peacefully envisions these “long ranks of the new oppressors who have risen on the destruction of the old, perishing by this retributive instrument, before it shall cease out of its present use.” But rather than an endless cycle of the oppressed supplanting their oppressors, only to become the new oppressors, Carton, and Dickens, see hope: “. . . a beautiful city and brilliant people rising from this abyss, and, in their struggles to be truly free, in their triumphs and defeats through long years to come, I see the evil of this time and of the previous time of which this is the natural birth, gradually making expiation for itself and wearing out.” The feckless and wastrel life of Sydney Carton is wholly redeemed by his love of Lucy and her family and the great sacrifice he makes to save them as he bows down on that “retributive instrument”: “It is a far, far better thing that I do than I have ever done; it is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.”

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Mr. Grant, Meet Mr. Twain

August 17, 2012 at 6:05 pm (Literary Criticism)

Our local library was having a book sale of some of its presumably surplus books, and for a song I picked up Mark Perry’s Grant and Twain, a dual biography of the title characters. While containing enough background to justify the increasingly popular dual biography classification, essentially the book focused on the period in which these two giants of nineteenth century America (though Twain lived until 1910) found their lives intersecting in the interest of literature and history. Perry centers his story on Twain’s tenacious efforts to get a very reluctant Grant to write his memoirs and the near herculean effort required of the dying general and president to do so. While Twain clearly wanted to be the publisher himself—his concern for business matters never being far out of mind—he admired Grant and genuinely felt that Grant’s narrative of the War, particularly given his role as the North’s overall military commander, would not only be handsomely profitable but historically necessary.

After Grant and his son were led into desperate financial straits by a smooth-talking business partner with a good eye for bad investments around 1883, Grant—who had nobly but unwisely given up his military retirement when he became president—was desperate to find a means to support his family and to pay his mounting debts. He thus came to see, with Twain’s and others’ urgings, the as yet unwritten memoirs as a means to his financial salvation. In the mean time, the devoted cigar-smoker was diagnosed with an inoperable cancer of the mouth, with the result that his writing became a painful race against death, which came in 1885. But as Lincoln had said over two decades earlier about this almost preternaturally calm and brave man, “he fights.” (Commander-in-Chief Lincoln had finally found his general, after sputtering attempts with three previous ones, including the vain, contumacious, and ultimately craven George McClellan, to whom Lincoln had tartly said that if the General wasn’t planning to use his army, then he, Lincoln, would like to borrow it.)

Grant, now slowly and painfully dying of cancer, contrived to live up to Lincoln’s appreciative “he fights.” With help from his son and some former military subordinates (one or two of whom had their own possibly competing memoirs), he wrote. His capable doctors managed to relieve his pain with laudanum applied to his tongue. He also dictated, but that became difficult, as did swallowing. Indeed, his doctors eventually attributed his actual death to starvation. He finished the second volume—his final campaign—a few weeks before his death.

I remember reading a single volume American Library version of his memoirs some twenty years ago and being surprised at its high literary quality. Twain noted this as well. But Perry’s dual biography fleshed out Grant’s war narrative handsomely, yielding an impression of a man of longstanding modest and calm demeanor in the face of both catastrophic military consequences and approaching and painful death. His lifelong love for his wife Julia (perfectly paralleled by Twain’s love for his wife Livy), as well as his concern for his personal integrity, particularly in terms of paying his debts and having it known that the prose was his alone, are deeply endearing qualities matched by his quiet courage and sheer doggedness. Though Grant’s less-than-successful presidency, ridiculed by the refined Henry Adams, was marked by scandal (though not his own) and has been seen by historians in stark and invidious contrast to his successful prosecution of the War, it is within bounds to speculate that the War would very likely have been further drawn out without him, and possibly might have turned out differently. Owing to his financial crisis, the importuning of Twain and others, his own integrity, his persistent anxiety for his family’s welfare, and his implacable tenacity allowing him to hold off death just long enough, he was able to leave us a historically necessary masterpiece in the genre of military memoirs.

John Rachal

August 17, 2012

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Ivanhoe Revisited

February 19, 2011 at 1:38 am (Literary Criticism)

From the archives:

I have been reading, and thoroughly enjoying, the adventurous, charming, romantic, and utterly preposterous Ivanhoe by Sir Walter Scott. It is most charming in its antique language, and nowhere more preposterous than in its putting such charming language in the mouths of untutored, illiterate rustics of the twelfth century. Still, it is delightful, and so I proffer a questionable attempt at imitation:

Being homeward bound, two leagues out, I was assailed by a six-legged varlet who, in the manner of a cowardly ambuscade, thrust afore I could parry; and his rapier, though diminutive, did pierce my light armor in that self-same spot as our Lord and Savior received His holy wound upon the Cross. Failing to give a mortal blow, however, the dastard chose not to prolong his visit to the neighborhood, and afore I could send his infidel soul to the nether world, he escaped, true to the cunning and false valor of his race, leaving me to apply to my wound an ancestral poultice of palliative herbs, and thus to re-mount my middling born, yet noble steed, who bravely made his way homeward.

Translation:

Six miles from home, a yellow jacket or wasp stung me. I put some chewing tobacco (which I carried just for that purpose) on the sting, got back on my bike, and rode home.

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