Grant: A Novel (42 page)

Cadwallader wiped the tea from his own mouth and thought it sounded like Grant could use a cup or two of the oil of gladness right now, if the
Times
could be believed.

He put down the cup and looked at his desk again. He wasn’t going to publish his goddam book, he thought. There had been a long spell after the war, right through the 1880 Chicago convention, when he was mad at Grant, when he thought Grant as President had been unfair to Rawlins, who was a gifted, selfless man, and ungrateful to Cadwallader too, who could have written up a story or two about Grant’s drinking anytime he wanted—the New York
Herald
would have paid a fortune. But Cadwallader thought then—and thought so now—that U. S. Grant was the only Union general capable of winning the war against Bobby Lee; thought Grant was a mysterious man, weak and lazy in many ways, but with a core of integrity, patriotism—a
hero
, Cadwallader thought, pulling out his filthy handkerchief again; a hero then, and nothing but a sick old man right now.

On the same day halfway across the country, in weather almost as bad as Wisconsin’s, only rain not snow, at 10:45
P.M.
Mark Twain stepped out the back door of Chickering Hall on West Fifty-fourth Street, New York City, and pulled up his coat collar with a scowl.

He had just finished giving a joint lecture with George Washington Cable (“The Twins of Genius”) to a lackluster audience,
and he was, as so often happened on these tours, in a perfectly terrible temper. For one thing, he dreaded the coming weekend, when he would have to stay an entire extra day in Pittsburgh because Cable insisted on respecting the churchly injunction against Sunday travel. That very morning Twain had written his friend Howells that Cable had taught him to abhor the Sabbath-day and hunt up new and troublesome ways to dishonor it. And for another thing, his New York hotel was dreary and uncomfortable, and he likewise abhorred and despised a bad hotel. And for a
third
thing, he had lost his umbrella, stolen no doubt by a boy he had noticed that night in the backstage dressing rooms. Twain squinted up at the dark sky and the falling rain and considered taking out an advertisement in the newspaper, five dollars’ reward for the umbrella, two hundred dollars for the boy’s remains.

The idea put him in a better humor. He held out his hand to test the rain and then started up the sidewalk.

Three blocks farther on, as he later remembered it, in the midst of a watery black gulf between streetlamps, two dim figures suddenly stepped out of another doorway and began to walk just ahead of him in the same direction. He heard one of them say to the other, like a pair of Orphic prophets sent down from above to change his life, “Did I tell you Grant has finally promised to give us his memoirs? He means to start writing this month.”

And Twain stopped dead in his tracks, blessing Providence.

Because in the light of the next streetlamp he recognized the decorous, satanic, three-named profile of Richard Watson Gilder, publisher of the goddam
Century
magazine and common thief.

The next morning, promptly after breakfast, Twain took a taxi up to East Sixty-sixth Street and had himself ushered into the library, where Grant was sitting in one of his leather club chairs, talking with his son Fred; and of course they were polite and greeted him cordially, but the General was also in a businesslike mood, and as Twain afterwards reported to his wife, Grant said in substance something pretty much like: “Sit down and keep quiet over there until I sign a contract.” And he added, apparently so as not to seem abrupt and impolite, that it was a contract for a book of memoirs he was going to write.

This, of course, was what the Orphic prophets had referred to,
and this was why they had appeared in the mystical darkness just when they did.

Twain sat down in his own club chair, lit a cigar, and waved the match imperially in the air to put it out. “Don’t sign it yet, General,” he said. “Let Fred read it out loud to me first.”

Grant looked at Twain, then looked at Fred. When he didn’t say anything, Fred cleared his throat and began to read. After two or three paragraphs Twain waved his hand again.

“They plan to pay you ten percent royalty, General?”

“Ten percent, yes.”

“Fred, strike out ten percent. Put twenty percent instead.” Fred lowered the sheet of paper and rubbed his jaw. “Better still,” Twain said, “put seventy-five percent of the net returns in its place.”

Grant demurred. He made little motions of discomfort that only served to prove to Twain that he was fundamentally the most modest and unassuming man in America. “They’ll never pay those terms,” he objected.

“Now, General, the
Century
company is a great magazine company, nobody can teach them anything about magazines. But they have about the same experience publishing
books
as I have flying backwards and they’re offering you mighty poor terms in my experience. There’s not a regular book publisher in the country who wouldn’t do better.”

Grant shook his head. They were going to run his articles about the war in the
Century
magazine, he said; they had been extremely kind and patient with him—they had come to him out of the blue, when he was in desperate need of money, and he thought he ought to sign the contract just as it stood.

“Well, the
other
problem I heard”—Twain crossed his legs, puffing smoke like a cannon—“was the clause that charges the publisher’s office expenses against
your
ten percent royalty. They ought to pay that themselves.”

He didn’t want to rob them of their profits, the General said.

“To rob a publisher, bless your heart,” Twain said with a little wink at Fred, “is an impossibility never yet achieved, and
if
achieved it ought to be rewarded with double halos in Heaven.”

Fred put the contract down on the desk. Grant reached in his coat pocket as if for a cigar, but then stopped. “I guess you have a publisher in mind,” he said.

“The American Publishing Company,” Twain replied instantly, “of Hartford, of which your humble servant is a stockholder and director—”

“And a favorite author,” Fred murmured, because the American Publishing Company had published Twain’s first book,
The Innocents Abroad
, and almost all the others after that. He left the contract where it was on the desk and walked over to a row of uniformly bound gray books, lined up on a shelf next to an imported set of Dickens. He picked out one of them at random,
Tom Sawyer
, and handed it to his father.

“They are a subscription publisher,” Grant said, but there was nothing in his tone to indicate disapproval, merely a fact. You could do business with two kinds of publishers in America, the high-toned literary ones like Ticknor & Fields in Boston that published Emerson and Longfellow and sold their books in bookstores only, and subscription publishers like the American Publishing Company that had an army of canvassers going door to door in every small town in the country, selling Bibles and cookbooks and popular writers like Mark Twain. Many ambitious writers looked down on subscription publishing. Grant had no such pretensions, he explained, but he didn’t want to be disloyal either.

“Well, as to that,” Twain said, “I guess you don’t remember
I
proposed you write your memoirs three years ago—”

“He did,” Grant said to Fred.

“At luncheon one day in that reptile den of Ward’s. I said you ought to write it and
you
said you didn’t need the money and you weren’t a literary man.”

Grant looked down at
Tom Sawyer
in his lap; opened it somewhere in the middle.

“And so,” Twain said, “by all rights, General, I was first in the field and you wouldn’t be disloyal in the least to let me telegraph Hartford and get their offer.”

“You ought to have been a lawyer, I guess,” said Fred, shaking his head in admiration.

Twain thought of several jokes he could make in reply, but this wasn’t the time for jokes. One look at Grant’s serious face told him that. His mouth pinched behind the beard, his eyes solemn and distant, the General did not look well, that was a fact; and another fact was that sometimes even Mark Twain, he thought to himself, knew when to be quiet.

“I believe,” said Grant, “I can let this lie for twenty-four hours while we give it some thought.”

T
WAIN WAS SCARCELY ABLE TO WAIT THE TWENTY-FOUR HOURS
. That night he gave another performance at Chickering Hall with Cable, who was even more irritating and incompetent than usual, but aside from the casual remark to a stagehand as he was going on that “Cable’s way of reading would fatigue a corpse,” Twain was in a strangely ebullient state of mind. Two weeks ago in St. Louis, he’d been so vexed by Cable’s tardiness and general air of unforgivable Presbyterian piety, he had actually worked himself into a tantrum and clubbed a window shutter off its hinges with his fists. But this time he only nodded a pleasant good-night, went back to his hotel and drank three Scotches, and turned up precisely at nine the next morning at East Sixty-sixth Street.

“I talked to Sherman yesterday,” was the first thing Grant said when Twain entered the library. “He told me his profits on his memoirs were twenty-five thousand dollars. Now, do you believe I could get that much from the American Publishing Company, as an advance payment?”

“I want you to forget the American Publishing Company.” Twain beamed at Fred; he sat down in his leather chair and accepted a cup of coffee from Harrison, Grant’s black valet who had a soft Missouri accent that was a comfort and a pleasure to hear. “In the first place, Sherman’s book was published by Scribner’s and it
ought
to have been published by subscription and then he would have made ten times that much. In the second place, I don’t know what I was thinking, telling you to go to the American when I’ve just up and left them myself and started my own firm.”

“Charles Webster Company,” said Fred.

“I started it,” Twain said firmly. “I set up my business manager Charley Webster in it, just to publish my own books on my own terms, that’s all we do. First one comes out in February, called
Huckleberry Finn
, and the next book I want to publish after that is the
Memoirs of U. S. Grant
.”

Grant took his own coffee cup from Harrison and sipped and pursed his lips, as if at the taste, though the taste, Twain thought, was perfectly fine.

“That’s
your
book, General,” he said, risking a little humor.

But Grant’s face was still solemn. He shook his head. He glanced at the tall window where the curtains were drawn back and a few stray snowflakes were starting to drift over the street. “I can’t let a friend of mine take a risk of money,” he said finally, and his voice was so low and scratchy that Twain knew he was thinking of Ward again, and Vanderbilt’s famous Sunday loan, and all the sad, humiliating story of his finances that had been spelled out day after day in the papers. Grant was not outwardly dramatic, Twain thought, that was one of the impressive things about the man, to have accomplished what he had accomplished with so little fuss—but he could appreciate somebody else’s sense of drama. Twain reached in his coat pocket and pulled out his cheque-book with a flourish, then his pen, and although he had originally intended to write $25,000, there was something so fine and touching about the sight of the grand old hero before him brought low by villainy, he doubled the sum on the spot.

There was more convincing to do, of course. Fred Grant wanted to talk with the
Century
again, the General himself insisted on sending for his friend George Childs from Philadelphia, who was an expert businessman, and he had to leave the house briefly in any case for an eleven o’clock appointment with his doctor. Twain waved aside all problems. He had no quarrel with the
Century;
indeed, they were about to run three chapters of
Huckleberry Finn
in the magazine. George Childs could come and pore over Webster’s accounts like a Philadelphia bloodhound. Meanwhile, the $50,000 cheque would sit in escrow and the General could pull out his
own
pen and start the ink flying.

“You’ll stay for lunch,” Grant said as he put on his overcoat and limped to the door. “Lew Wallace is coming, and I’ll be back in half an hour. Julia would like it.”

“I’ll wait right here and give young Fred one half-hour’s worth of free moral counsel,” Twain said.

In fact, he hoped that young Fred might say an unguarded word or two about the General’s visits to the doctor, but all of the Grants, when they wanted, were a tight-lipped clan.

At twelve-thirty Lew Wallace arrived for lunch, former Union general and comrade at Shiloh, author now of the recent novel
Ben Hur
, one of Grant’s oldest friends.

“Did you give Fred any moral counsel?” Grant asked as they all sat down to table.

“I told him a young person should not smoke, drink, or marry to excess,” Twain said.

“Well, I must declare,” said Julia Grant, smiling at everybody in turn, “there’s many a woman in this land that would like to be in my place, and be able to tell her children she once sat elbow to elbow between two such great authors as Mark Twain and General Wallace.”

Twain picked up the cigar he had carried to the table, but out of deference to Mrs. Grant not lighted. He rolled it between his fingers and cocked his face at Grant. “Don’t look so cowed, General,” he said in his slow, raspy drawl. “You’re going to write a book too, and when it’s published you can hold your head up and let on to be a person of consequence yourself.” And winked at Fred.