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The BookBrowse Review
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
The BookBrowse Review
Published January 24, 2024
ISSN: 1930-0018
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Ulysses S. Grant reflects on the crucial moments of his life as a husband, a father, a general, and a president while writing his memoirs and reckoning with his complicated legacy in this epic and intimate novel from the author of the "masterly" (The New York Times Book Review) novel Marley.
Barely able to walk and rendered mute by the cancer metastasizing in his throat, Ulysses S. Grant is scratching out words, hour after hour, day after day. Desperate to complete his memoirs before his death so his family might have some financial security and he some redemption, Grant journeys back in time.
He had once been the savior of the Union, the general to whom Lee surrendered at Appomattox, a twice-elected president who fought for the civil rights of Black Americans and against the rising Ku Klux Klan, a plain farmer-turned-business magnate who lost everything to a Wall Street swindler, a devoted husband to his wife Julia and loving father to four children. In this gorgeously rendered and moving novel, Grant rises from the page in all of his contradictions and foibles, his failures and triumphs.
Moving from blood-stained battlefields to Gilded Age New York, the novel explores how Grant's own views on race and Reconstruction changed over time. Another work of "must-read modern literature" (Charles Frazier, New York Times bestselling author) from historical fiction master Jon Clinch, this evocatively crafted novel breathes fresh life into an American icon.
CHAPTER 1: 1843
The Canary
How large a box shall be required?
The canary is the smallest of creatures, three inches long if that. To take its precise measure would be indelicate regardless of his good intentions. So he bends to it upon its bed of linen, and he touches its cool, dry, brilliant feathers with his finger, and he subtly gauges its length against the count of his knuckles. That will be measurement enough.
What is its color? The very shade of a lemon.
How much does it weigh? Little more than its own last breath.
Birdie's sudden passing breaks her heart. At sunup he was his usual cheery self, welcoming the morning to her bedroom with his repertoire of peeps and chirps and burbles. His song, his color—indeed, his very pulsing presence—were all so lovely and so familiar as to be utterly beneath notice. Now their absence pains her. His cage hangs empty, its black shadow a ragged latticework stain upon the blue wall.
Her father looks up from his soup plate, notes the little cloud of linen on the sideboard, and fixes it with a furious eye. "Jule," he barks in the direction of the kitchen, "come here and dispose of that wretched bird."
But before the slave girl can pass through the kitchen door, his daughter stops her, touching a hand to her upturned arm. In this position the colors of their skin are nearly indistinguishable.
"Did you hear me, Jule?" says the father, old Frederick Dent. "Are you bringing my tray? Will you dispose of that bird at last? I swear, it's put me off my appetite."
"Yes, sir," says Jule, with a desperate glance at the hand that blocks her without exerting even the slightest pressure. The intent alone is enough.
"Jule has her hands full," says his daughter. "I'll see to Birdie myself."
"I require no excuses for that girl's shortcomings. Especially from you." The old planter—known in these precincts as "the colonel," although he has never served in any army known to God or man—coughs around the stem of his pipe. "Birdie," he mutters into his mustache, giving his head a little shake, as if the poor lump of feathers and flesh does not even deserve a name. It won't make a meal, so it had best be disposed of before it draws vermin.
He shakes his head again. Birdie. Ridiculous.
The colonel is no native to these parts. He comes from Maryland, where as a young man he found employment in the fur trade and forged a deep and unexamined sympathy with the Southern cause. White Haven is the name he gave this rich tract of Missouri farmland, and a white haven it is. Its acres yield up wheat by the bushel and corn by the wag along with every fruit known to grow upon twig or vine or bush. Its population of chickens and sheep and milk cows is constantly in flux and thus without accurate number. The Gravois Creek runs sparkling through its heart, teeming with fish. To maintain this Eden requires the ceaseless toil of thirty-six black slaves, to say nothing of the colonel's occasional contributions in the way of general oversight.
The daughter and the slave girl are nearly the same age, and by coincidence they are both named Julia. The black girl goes by "Jule," the last two syllables of her Christian name having been lopped off in the service of clarity. She makes now for the head of the table where the colonel waits, his lower lip jutting and his round belly keeping him a few inches farther from his plate than is entirely convenient. He puts down his pipe and harrumphs in her direction as she draws near, and then he harrumphs once more toward Julia as she approaches the sideboard. Jule takes up the colonel's empty soup plate and replaces it with his entrée—fried chicken, biscuits with gravy, quivering slices of some kind of aspic—while Julia takes up the linen bed holding Birdie and squares it bravely at the level of her heart.
"So when did the creature expire?"
"Shortly after dawn. Suddenly."
"We should expect no miracles from it, I suppose."
"Father?"
"No resurrection, I mean. After three ...
Excerpted from The General and Julia by Jon Clinch. Copyright © 2023 by Jon Clinch. Excerpted by permission of Atria Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Ulysses S. Grant is not one of the most famous U.S. presidents—especially compared with Abraham Lincoln, whose legacy Grant continued into the post–Civil War Reconstruction era. But novelist Jon Clinch has a habit of shining a spotlight on figures, historical or fictional, who have previously been overlooked. In The General and Julia, he depicts Grant as a kind, pensive man who won followers in wartime and peace, and whose love for his family outweighed declines in money and health.
Although Grant, the general of the title, is very much the focus of the novel, the narrative opens and closes with Julia. In 1843, Lieutenant Grant visits his old West Point roommate in Missouri, but his eye is caught by his friend's seventeen-year-old sister, Julia, whose pet canary has just died. Grant conducts a sincere Christian burial service for the bird. This first chapter is echoed in the Postlude, set forty years later, in which Julia is again grieving a loss—this time of her husband, dead at age 63; his New York City funeral cortege draws some 1.5 million mourners.
In segments headed "Forty Days and Forty Nights," Grant is living out his final days in the Adirondacks. Cocaine and morphine keep the pain of terminal throat cancer at bay long enough for him to make headway on his memoirs, which he hopes will ensure his wife's financial security after he's gone. Clinch intersperses these sections with earlier events from Grant's life, each chapter dated to make it easy for readers to orient themselves in the timeline. Segues are natural, and flashbacks are occasionally presented as if Grant is not just remembering incidents but reliving them through medication-fueled hallucinations.
One key scene from 1856 illustrates the contrast in ideology between Grant and his father-in-law, Frederick Dent. By this time Grant and Julia have three children, and money is tight. Dent and Grant have nearby farms in Missouri (the Grants' is called "Hardscrabble") and both keep slaves. Julia's childhood servant, Julia—nicknamed Jule to differentiate between them—and her brothers, also enslaved, continue to work for the Grants. He and Dent express fundamentally different views on Black people. "I know need when I see it. And I know that a black skin may cover a true heart as well as a white one," Grant says to his father-in-law. He still, however, refers to Black people as possessions: "a man ought to care for his belongings." Here, Clinch shows that although Grant later would sign legislation supporting their civil rights, he did not necessarily believe that Black people were equals.
Famous names crop up frequently, including Samuel Clemens' (see Beyond the Book), but some of the novel's most poignant moments concern ordinary people: Sam Willett, a war veteran who undertakes guard duty for the dying Grant, and Robert Terrell, Grant's valet's son. Late on, the failure of his son Buck's investment company leaves Grant close to bankruptcy—the motivation for the push to finish his memoirs. Clinch gives a balanced portrayal of Grant, making him an Everyman who has achieved great things but also made significant errors—another example being the lifelong cigar-smoking habit that sealed his fate. References to the Bible and to Greek mythology place Grant in the lineage of classical heroes whose flaws threatened their downfall, and Terrell's news of a lynching foreshadows racially motivated violence to come. This, especially, is a timely link to the present day.
My misgivings about the novel arise from aspects I wished had been explored in more depth. The title led me to expect that Julia would play a larger role. In addition, more time might have been devoted to an incident concerning Jule, which could have been an entire subplot, but instead is given only a brief mention. By contrast, much is made of Robert E. Lee's new gray wool suit in two chapters titled "The Package." Here and elsewhere, the focus sometimes felt off.
Nevertheless, the novel presents an affecting portrait of a lesser-known president and his family ties, and Clinch creates an elegant flow between the past and present. The prose style is smooth and inconspicuous, with omniscient third-person narration that sticks largely to Grant's perspective but also gives glimpses into other characters' experience. I would especially recommend this to fans of Geraldine Brooks and Norman Lock. As Clinch writes in a concluding Author's Note, figures from the past can be understood through "genuine moments of attention, imagination, and sympathy." That is the magic of biographical fiction: bringing real people and happenings to life in a way that allows us, as Clinch puts it, to "appreciate the hearts and minds of those who came before us."
Reviewed by Rebecca Foster
Elizabeth Letts, #1 New York Times Bestselling Author of A Perfect Horse and The Ride of Her Life
Robin Oliveira, author of My Name is Mary Sutter, the bestselling novel and winner of the Michael Shaara Award for excellence in Civil War Fiction
As recounted in Jon Clinch's The General and Julia, Samuel Clemens (who wrote under the alias Mark Twain) met President Ulysses S. Grant in the White House, introduced by a senator from Nevada. When the men crossed paths again after the end of Grant's presidency, they developed a friendship. Clemens frequently encouraged Grant to write his memoirs, but Grant always demurred, saying he wasn't a writer. That is, until financial ruin and a terminal cancer diagnosis made him fear for his wife Julia's future. Grant made arrangements with Century Magazine to write articles about Civil War battles, paid at $500 each. Century was also willing to publish his memoirs, but the standard terms of the contract—10% of royalties—were not advantageous.
In the meantime, Clemens and his niece's husband had started a publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company. Clemens offered to publish Grant's memoir on much more favorable terms: 70% of royalties, plus an advance to live off of. He traveled from his home in Hartford, Connecticut to New York City to make his competing offer in person. The story goes that Grant and his son Frederick were reading through the Century contract, and Grant was preparing to sign it, at the moment Clemens arrived. Grant was reluctant to let the Century down so late in the negotiation process, but eventually agreed, a decision that would make his widow's fortune.
Clemens chose a subscription model and had war veterans go door-to-door selling pre-orders of the two-volume memoirs. Pre-sales numbered 100,000, and the first run of 350,000 copies sold out. Julia Grant eventually earned $450,000 (the equivalent of $11+ million) in royalties, making her one of the country's wealthiest women. Clemens sold his own Adventures of Huckleberry Finn through the same subscription model, and Charles L. Webster and Company made millions on these two titles alone. However, the publisher's future projects lost money, Clemens fired his relative, and the company went bankrupt in 1894.
Early on, gossip spread that Clemens was heavily involved in the production of Grant's memoirs—that he was not just proofreader or publisher, but effectively a ghostwriter. Rumors about the memoir's authorship were spread, at least in part, by a disgruntled former U.S. Army staff officer of Grant's, Adam Badeau, who helped Grant remember details of certain battles. Badeau had published his own three-volume account entitled Military History of Ulysses S. Grant and claimed that he himself was the ghostwriter of Grant's memoirs. However, Grant's manuscripts are still extant, and a simple handwriting analysis refutes allegations that Badeau or Clemens was the true author. Grant's book is still in print and well respected among presidential memoirs.
General Ulysses S. Grant writing his memoirs, June 27th, 1885, courtesy of Library of Congress.
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