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View ProfilesPublished February 21, 2024 at 10:00 a.m.
At the end of his life, a nearly penniless Ulysses S. Grant sat bundled in blankets in a loaned cabin in the Adirondack foothills, barely able to talk or eat due to metastatic throat cancer. His single aim was to finish his memoirs so he could leave his wife, Julia, and their children and grandchildren money to survive. He managed to pen the last sentence of The Personal Memoirs of U.S. Grant five days before dying.
Southern Vermont author Jon Clinch structures his sixth novel, The General and Julia, around those last weeks of Grant's life — those "Forty Days and Forty Nights," as he titles the episodes that depict Grant's final struggle. Omnisciently narrated, the book intersperses these episodes with chapters illuminating moments in Grant's life, showing him courting his future wife, decimating the Army of the Mississippi at Chattanooga, discussing where emancipated slaves might go during his presidency and losing his fortune in an early Ponzi scheme.
The sympathetic portrait that unfolds is one already familiar to readers of Ron Chernow's popular 2017 biography, Grant, and Grant's own memoirs. (Clinch does not name any sources.) The hero of the Civil War and two-term 18th president is, in Clinch's telling, a brilliant battle strategist and devoted family man who is humble, generous and, when it comes to money, naïve.
Clinch's conceit is a useful one: Already in looking-back mode, Grant is on doctor-prescribed morphine and cocaine, drugs that "have the power to open doors in his mind." They allow the general to dream from the perspectives of other people — rather as novelists write from different viewpoints. One opiate-fueled trip has Grant empathetically imagining life as Julia's longtime maid, Jule, one of 30 or so slaves owned by her father. (Paradoxically, Julia retained Jule while her husband fought against slavery; Jule eventually fled the family in 1864.)
"She considers the fragile barrier between the inside of this cabin and the great world beyond it," Jule thinks in Grant's dream, which occurs at the general's headquarters at City Point, Va., on the Appomattox River. "The general and his wife are sleeping. She could slip out into the night with no one the wiser. This cabin seems to her a soap bubble in the wind, an egg in the ocean, some small and fragile thing afloat within a limitless and powerful one."
The book will keep Civil War and Grant buffs busy determining which parts of Clinch's imagining are based in historical fact, but what makes it a pleasure to read for all is the author's ability to create credible, specific and revealing scenes. When Alexander Stephens, vice president of the Confederacy, arrives at Grant's cabin to talk peace, for example, the disdainful general watches the Southerner shed an enormous overcoat and observes, "The man has proven to be all shuck and no ear."
Clinch's title implies that the book is equally about Julia, but Grant's wife figures chiefly in the opening chapter, when the pair are beginning to fall in love, and at the end, when she encourages him to write his memoirs. In between, there are momentary glimpses of Julia's vexing inability to condemn slavery, but Clinch gives more play to Grant's evolving views on race.
One such shift occurs when Grant's valet, Harrison Terrell, a former slave liberated by Emancipation, welcomes his son Robert, a professor, to the house. At first, Grant congratulates himself on making it possible for both Black men to rise above slavery. But as he interacts with Robert, who was educated at the Groton School and Harvard University, he is surprised to find in him a "refinement both innate and highly polished." It dawns on him that Robert's model in this is Grant's valet.
Clinch describes Grant's reaction: "How has he overlooked it, or denied it outright, until now? These two men, born with deep resources untapped, born awaiting rescue by the rough barbarians of the U.S. Army. The world seems almost upside down for a moment."
In moments like these throughout the novel, Grant struggles with both his own unintentional racism and the sense that even a massive war hasn't changed the nation — something that his rival, Confederate general Robert E. Lee, realizes in an early scene that Clinch imagines from Lee's perspective. At the war's close, Lee predicts, "the institution of slavery will live or die, at least in the law books — but the hearts of the nation will go on as they always have."
Clinch specializes in imagining the lives of both real and fictional characters on his pages, from Huckleberry Finn's father in Finn (2007) to 19th-century explorer Giovanni Battista Belzoni in Belzoni Dreams of Egypt (2014). Mark Twain, creator of Huck Finn, makes a key appearance in this novel, his wit and marketing acuity ably captured.
Written in an episodic manner, The General and Julia lacks the forward momentum of, say, Paul Lynch's Prophet Song — the 2023 Booker Prize winner, which is impossible to put down from first to last sentence — or, more relevantly, the drama of historical novelist Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall (2009). But Clinch's narrative serves a different and rather crucial purpose: The author uses the protagonist's journey toward a complex understanding of his role in the fate of Black Americans to demonstrate the ability to put oneself in another's shoes. Empathy is what allows us to understand history — and to understand why Grant's era lives on in American life, as relevant as ever.
[1867] The slave population has been freed but is by no means free. Its individual members are bound by chains of economic servitude and cultural loathing, and every single government policy established to lift them up is either ignored or subverted outright. In county after Southern county, lone black men and boys, most of them guilty of little more than drawing breath, are terrorized and pursued and viciously murdered by gangs of the very same individuals who once were satisfied to own them body and soul. The killers gouge out their eyes and tear out their tongues and hack away their reproductive organs in fits of gleeful destruction. They hang them from cottonwoods and great live oaks like bled livestock, like tanned hides, like the spoils of some savage conquest.
He reads the dispatches from Washington and shakes his head and sighs. Some days he concludes that the war was either a failure or something much worse: a sham, a charade, a cynical confidence game whose object was to weaken the powers of good and set hell's every last demon free. He himself was surely taken in by the seductive optimism of its promises. He can remember believing that to settle the war would be to reunite the nation, as if peace itself had some power to command men's hearts. As if slogging through the killing fields of Gettysburg or Antietam or Shiloh would somehow set an individual — set an entire nation, in fact — on a permanent course of unbending virtue.
It was not to be. The conclusion rattles him, threatening to take away whatever self-built framework keeps him upright from one day to the next. He says so to Julia one night as he puts out the lamp. "What do you think might have happened," he asks, his voice emerging from blackness as the flame chokes and dies, "if I had been less forgiving of Lee?"
The original print version of this article was headlined "Last Words | Book review: The General and Julia, Jon Clinch"
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