IT WAS four o’clock in the morning, and Mark Twain had been up almost continuously for five days. He was writing a letter to William Dean Howells and he paused to think back over the details again: Haverley’s Theater in Chicago, the unfurling of the bullet-shredded flag from Vicksburg, the voices of a thousand soldiers singing “When we were marching through Georgia,” and then the officers’ banquet at the Palmer House and the six hours of toasts that ran into the early morning. It had been the greatest reunion of the Army of the Tennessee since its soldiers had entered Atlanta. Twain thought of Ulysses Grant seated with Sherman and Sheridan, who were back now, in 1879, from decimating the Cheyenne, the Sioux, the Arapaho, and the Piegan, and in his mind he ran through all the tiresome speeches on “The Ladies” and “The Patriotic People of the United States.” As it got later, the speakers had begun to stand on the table so that they could make themselves heard. Twain thought with satisfaction of how, finally, the fourteenth speaker had sat down, and his own turn had come, and he had climbed, deliberately, amid great cheering, onto the table.
Though he had, in fact, served only a few ignominious weeks in a ragtag volunteer brigade, and though this band had in fact been on the side of the Confederate Army, and though he had, quickly taking the measure of the situation, abandoned all thought of service and fled to Nevada and California for the remainder of the war, it was nevertheless true that no one else could have taken the final slot on the evening’s program if he was in the room. He had been asked in advance to pay homage to “The Ladies” but had telegraphed back saying that “the toast was worn out.” If they didn’t mind, might he suggest a subject of his own? Inspired perhaps by the fact that Philip Sheridan’s wife had just had twins, he had proposed: “The Babies—as they comfort us in our sorrows, let us not forget them in our festivities.” Though an unusual choice, this had been deemed acceptable by the committee.
When he gave the speech, Twain, with the warm, domestic touch of a father, reminded the officers of how they got their children soothing syrup when the children cried in the night, and of how the “warm, insipid stuff” tasted when they tested it. They started to laugh. “One baby can furnish more business than you and your whole Interior Department can attend to. . . . As long as you are in your right mind don’t you ever pray for twins.” He hoped his audience was with him as he moved into his riskiest lines. He said that after all, Grant, too, had been a baby:
[S]omewhere under the flag, the future illustrious Commander in Chief of the American armies is so little burdened with his approaching grandeurs and responsibilities as to be giving his whole strategic mind, at this moment, to trying to find out some way to get his own big toe into his mouth—an achievement, which, meaning no disrespect, the illustrious guest of this evening turned his whole attention to some fifty-six years ago.
There was a deep shudder—the audience held its breath to see if Twain would insult Grant in front of his entire army. Twain, relishing the pause, waited, and waited, and then turned to Grant and unleashed his snapper, “And if the child is but the prophecy of the man, there are mighty few who will doubt that he succeeded.”
And Grant, who had sat stoically through six hours of speeches, began to laugh. Then, as Twain told it, the last toastmaker was carried up and down the hall on people’s shoulders while the crowd cheered. “I wish you had gone out there,” Twain wrote to Howells. “Grand times, my boy, grand times. . . . I shook him up like dynamite. . . . [Grant] told me he had shaken hands with 15,000 people that day & come out of it without an ache or pain, but that my truths had racked all the bones of his body apart.”
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Sometimes when he told the story of the banquet, Mark Twain started with how he had first met Ulysses Grant. During Grant’s presidency, Twain, then the relatively unknown thirty-four-year-old author of Innocents Abroad, had been taken to the White House by a senator of his acquaintance from Nevada and had sat, uncomfortable, before the reticent and beleaguered president, who was at that point presiding over the dismantling of Reconstruction and one of the most corrupt and scandal-ridden cabinets to challenge public opinion in many a long day. Twain had finally ventured, “Mr. President, I am embarrassed. Are you?” Twain always recounted these meetings in military language: Grant “smiled a smile which would have done no discredit to a cast-iron image, and I got away under the smoke of my volley.” As Twain told the story, when they met again in 1879 on the day before the banquet, Grant said to Twain, “I am not embarrassed, are you?” Twain was delighted that Grant remembered. At that time, Grant was the man against whom every other man in America measured himself. Sitting in a room with Grant it was hard not to imagine being Lee.
Grant probably didn’t enjoy these assaults as much as Twain did. The banquet was an orchestrated political event in Grant’s already dubious campaign to win back the presidency after a hiatus of two and a half years. The Grants—with no house of their own, no pension, and no employment suitably prestigious for the man who had won the Civil War and twice been president—had been globe-trotting. American papers ran carefully chosen photographs of the Grants meeting the emperor of Japan and riding up to the pyramids in Egypt. The Grants were marking time until he could run again. Under these circumstances, reminding the country that the military hero had occasionally behaved like a baby and that his presidency had involved a great deal of putting his foot in his mouth was hardly the most helpful gesture for Grant’s campaign. The Republican party eventually nominated James Garfield. When Twain had come down off the euphoria of his private victory, perhaps he felt the insomniac twinges of having been part of a public defeat.
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Some years later, when the two men had become friends and Grant was living in a borrowed house near Fifth Avenue in New York City and working in an office downtown, Twain would visit Grant. On one occasion Twain took Howells along and the three men had a lunch of bacon and beans in Grant’s office. Later still, after Grant had moved to Mount McGregor, near Saratoga Springs, Twain and Grant discovered that they had very nearly met each other long before. In 1861, in the woods of Missouri, when Twain was serving his abbreviated stint with the Marion Rangers, Grant passed through those same woods en route to his first command. This near miss so stimulated Twain’s imagination that he rewrote his earlier account of his misadventures with the Rangers to include a passage where he shot at and killed a horseman who strikingly resembled Grant’s description of himself at that time. Twain originally titled this piece “My Campaign Against Grant.” After Grant died, Twain changed the title to “The Private History of a Campaign That Failed.”
Twain’s sense of his own failure in the Civil War was complicated. He considered war futile and wasteful, and even in the military atmosphere of the 1870s, when war stories were told at every social gathering, he still sometimes thought he was less culpable for having fled the war after failing to kill a single Grant than Grant had been for staying in the war and ordering the deaths of a thousand Twains. At the same time, Twain was never entirely comfortable with having fought, even briefly, for the Confederate side. After the war, among his quiet gestures of personal reparation, Twain petitioned Garfield to allow Frederick Douglass to continue in his position as marshal of the District of Columbia and paid for a Black man to be educated at Yale.
By the 1880s, though, people wanted to stop thinking about the war and, though the army was still fighting wars against Native Americans, the country turned its attention to business. Railroad companies were laying track as fast as they could, and men were growing rich in oil and coal and steel. Very rapidly, a new class of heroes emerged. Grant and Twain both found themselves struggling against the general feeling that war and writing were of much less day-to-day importance than money. Twain occasionally wrote splendid criticism of greed and imperialism—“The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg,” “To the Person Sitting in Darkness,” “King Leopold’s Soliloquy”—but he and Grant were also friends with the barons of industry and aspired to be like them. Andrew Carnegie sent Twain barrels of scotch from his own private stock, and Henry Rogers, one of the architects of the Standard Oil trust, used to take Twain traveling across the country in his own private railcar. In 1883, Grant—now past sixty and making a last-ditch effort to provide for his family after he was no longer general, no longer president, and no longer employed—invested all his money in the corrupt investment business that his son ran with two other men. When they subsequently lost all Grant’s money, he went to William Henry Vanderbilt to beg, ashamed, for a loan of $150,000 to bail the company out. The loan, together with his subsequent difficulty paying it off, was another sign to Grant of his own failure.
All his life, Twain cherished a hope that he would be able to join the ranks of millionaires with a profitable invention. He was particularly excited about the potential of a history board game, based on an idea he originally laid out in his driveway. In the initial version of the game, his daughters ran up the drive, calling out names of people, dates, and events—the first girl to the house won. Twain stayed up all night laying out the board game. In the end, though, what bankrupted Twain was not his own inventions but those of other people, in which he believed with touching devoutness and into which he poured a fortune—more than $200,000 of his own money. He invested in Plasmon, a miracle powder for the stomach, and, worse still, in the Paige typesetter, a machine dear to his own printer’s apprentice heart, which was to set type at the rate of eight thousand ems an hour but was beaten out by the more reliable Mergenthaler machine. By then, Twain was living in Europe; it was cheaper than America, and his work was popular there. Many Americans first encountered Twain’s work while abroad—Alfred Stieglitz, who was just then taking up photography, became devoted to reading Twain while studying in Germany in the first half of the 1880s, some years after Twain published his account of traveling in Germany and Switzerland, A Tramp Abroad. By the 1890s, the economy was severely contracting, and Twain was beginning to be afraid that he really was just another out-of-work tramp, like the two and a half million men who couldn’t find jobs in the winter of 1893 and 1894, the winter Twain went bankrupt for the second time.
After this crushing financial blow, Henry Rogers took over the management of Twain’s financial affairs, and a grateful Twain set off on the lucrative lecture circuit to try to pay off his debts. He went to Australia and South Africa; he was with Rudyard Kipling in India. People said that the distractions of his worries and of the traveling necessary to bail himself out were why he never wrote another Huckleberry Finn, though perhaps no one has two Huckleberry Finns to write.
Twain’s business failures came after Grant’s death, but the gambling side of his nature and the oscillations in his wealth were well established at the time they made their only business venture together. Grant was penniless and he was dying of throat cancer. Twain’s publishing house, Charles L. Webster and Company, was suffering from swashbuckling mismanagement on the part of both Twain and his nephew, Charles Webster, and was threatening to drain all of Twain’s private resources. Grant had recently written an article on the battle of Vicksburg for Century, and the people there were urging him to write his memoirs, offering him a small but attractive fee. Twain heard about the scheme and announced, rightly, that they were cheating Grant. He suggested to Grant that Webster and Company publish the book and sell it through Twain’s subscription business. After much discussion and persuasion, Grant acquiesced. Twain got his subscription forces mobilized, and Grant, steadily, intelligently, with great clarity and the most astonishing exactitude of memory, wrote his memoirs from beginning to end. With the exception of a small section on his childhood and his work as a quartermaster in the Mexican War, Grant devoted the bulk of the work to the Civil War, “a fearful lesson.” It was a magnificent book, the last evidence of his own worth that Grant felt he could put forward, and, twelve days after they took the final proofs from him, he died.
Twain was getting the proofs, and reading them, and going up to Mount McGregor, where the Grant family had, arduously and ill-advisedly, repaired with Grant to await his death. Grant sometimes received visitors on the porch, and Twain sat with him there. The general was pleased by the attentions of the writer. Grant admired Twain’s work—his favorite book on his trip around the world had been Innocents Abroad—and he wondered how his own writing seemed to Twain. Eventually, someone mentioned this to Twain, who, with fine self-satire, claimed to have been “as much surprised as Columbus’s cook would have been to learn that Columbus wanted his opinion as to how Columbus was doing his navigating.” He found an occasion to tell Grant that he had been reading Caesar’s Commentaries:
I placed the two books side by side upon the same high level and I still think that they belonged there. I learned afterward that General Grant was pleased with this verdict. It shows that he was just a man, just a human being, just an author. An author values a compliment even when it comes from a source of doubtful competency.
Grant continued to worry that his book would not sell. By this point, he could no longer speak, and he penciled small notes to his family and doctors. On one visit, he wrote a line to Twain, anxious about what would happen to his wife and family. Twain was able to reassure him that enough subscriptions had already been sold to give his family two hundred thousand dollars, and he expected to more than double this. Grant “expressed his gratification, with his pencil.” Twain proved unusually accurate in his predictions: the book in fact sold three hundred thousand two-volume sets and returned to Mrs. Grant about $400,000. It did pretty well by Twain’s publishing house, too.
Their joint business victory was a sweet one. For once, they had no need of Rogers or Vanderbilt, railroads, machines, or banks. In the long summer before Grant died, they were just two friends, writing. And the writing became more important than the money; in the writing, they rescued each other. Twain, ever careful of his legacy, worked on his own autobiography for thirty-seven years, and allowed it to be published only posthumously. William Dean Howells said that “one of the highest satisfactions of Clemens’ often supremely satisfactory life was his relation to Grant”; Twain understood quite well what he was giving the general.
•
On the day of Grant’s funeral procession, Twain stood, for five hours, at the window of his office in Union Square, watching the men and women and carriages file by. He had not wanted to be part of the public ceremonies. As he stood, perhaps he thought of one of the last times he had seen Grant. They sat on the porch together—Grant, in considerable pain, was very still and impassive, and Twain, a little melancholy, watched him. They were both thinking of the general’s book; Grant penciled a note hoping that he hadn’t forgotten anything. Twain said a few words in reply. He wished he knew how officers spoke of death in their tents, at night, after a battle. He lit a cigar. Someone brought drinks out on the porch. Grant settled his blankets around his shoulders. Evening came on.