Grant’s Fine Lines of Thought

Our current President makes all Presidential biographies about himself. He challenges and flouts so many of the customs and norms of the American President, I can’t help thinking about him when I read about any other chief executive. Each episode in our history provides a study by contrast.

A week ago, I finished Ulysses S. Grant’s Personal Memoirs, which I have since seen cited twice (once on television). Numerous sources ascribe to it the phrase “a masterpiece of the genre.” Now, Grant said very little about his Presidency in his memoirs. Perhaps he wanted to dwell on events that went better for him, like failed businesses. But in his observations about the country, he frequently provides an interesting contrast to the successor who currently occupies the Oval Office.

For instance, Forty-Five likes to talk about traitors. Well, Grant dealt with actual traitors: people who violated their oaths of office and military duty and took up arms against their country. Grant never lets the Confederacy have its way with semantics; he always refers to its “government” in quotation marks. But what does a republic do when it achieves victory over a rebellious army? How does a government "for the people" treat 5.5 million of those people who for four years have been loyal to a rebellious “government” once that rebellion has been quelled? Grant believed that the victory he did so much to bring about made immediate compatriots of these former enemies and abettors to enemies. He couldn’t rejoice over Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. “I felt like anything,” he says, “rather than rejoicing at the downfall of a foe who had fought so long and valiantly, and had suffered so much for a cause, though that cause was, I believe, one of the worst for which a people ever fought, and one for which there was the least excuse.”

In this remarkable observation, Grant walks straightly (and soberly!) along a fine line in which he both praises his fellow Americans for traits he can admire and blames them for taking up an execrable cause. (And by the way, Grant says from the beginning of his account of the war that that inexcusable cause was slavery. No side-stepping the elephant and talking about states’ rights. Grant, having been sentient during the 1850s knew the cause of the Civil War.) I believe he was right in everything that I know he said and felt and did at that surrender, but it took subtlety of thinking, the ability to see both sides of an argument in the best light possible and then to choose on principles, the wisdom to understand that a human being is a mixed bag. I know these are difficult virtues to achieve, but they are too shockingly rare these days. No one can find praise for those who, they believe, take up poor causes. And no one upholding any cause can hear critique of that cause without taking it as a personal attack. We no longer understand the difference between opponents and enemies.

Grant has only a few words to say about his disastrous predecessor as President, Andrew Johnson, and those are to say that Johnson did the wrong thing in trying to punish fellow Americans from the South for having taken up the wrong cause. Grant virtually said, “We need a uniter, not a divider.” I’ve heard too many times in the last twenty years – from friends variously embracing all portions of the political spectrum – that they wish they didn’t live in the same country with those who oppose them politically. This attitude seems to me so completely un-American that I’m tempted to agree with it just long enough to get rid of those who hold it. But, trying not to be a walking oxymoron, I don’t. Part of our country’s ideal is precisely the ability to live in community with people who differ from us politically. We take recourse to the ballot box, we challenge what we see as injustice through the courts, we lift our voices in the street, we post signs in our yard. But we don’t shoot our political rivals, we don’t jail our political rivals, we don’t force our political rivals to leave the country, and we don’t abandon the nation to our political rivals. Yes, it’s an ideal very, very imperfectly realized. But the ideal says that we must shake our rival’s hand (when not in the midst of a pandemic!) and vow to remember that we agree on something really quite astonishing and weird in the history of this weird, old world: laws and debate and free elections cut way down on killing. So now let’s apply those laws fairly, debate honestly, and make our elections equally accessible to all eligible voters.

I started off thinking I would talk about Grant’s other fine lines of subtle thought, but I’ve ranted on the first one for too long. Science fiction next. That couldn’t possibly get political, right?

A Notice to Made-for-TV Movie Producers

I’m writing today about a book that left my mind wrestling with two puzzles when I first read it, in college in the late 1970s. My second reading of Frank Norris’s The Octopus brought a partial solution for one of the puzzles, but I’m still mystified by the second.

I first heard about Frank Norris in an American lit class. He was presented to me as the epitome of the naturalist movement. According to what I was told, in naturalist writing, as exemplified by Norris, descriptions are factual, not interpretive, not emotional. Details that a reader would see as symbolically significant in earlier fiction represent nothing in naturalist fiction. It sounded unlikely to me that an author of any era would want to tell a story without meaning anything by it: surely an author at least means to say, “I like this story” or “I believe the people and events in this piece of narrative worth your time and contemplation.” But my professor said this was the way it was, and I know that humans go for all sorts of fashions now and then, so I accepted the lesson.

Then in an American history class in a later semester, the professor assigned The Octopus by Frank Norris. “Oh, great,” I thought, “400 pages of dry depiction of events that didn’t actually happen told with details about which I’m not supposed to think.” (Hey, I was young. It was hard for me to imagine why anyone would want to do anything in a way that I didn’t understand and approve of.) But, as wrong as my take on naturalism may have been, I can say even now that I was quite justified in being surprised at what the Master of Naturalism in Fiction brought to the table in The Octopus. Biblical symbolism of death and resurrection in the life cycle of wheat? Emotional, referential descriptions of nature? A man calling to people telepathically? (I’m obviously not really clear on my literary-criticism terminology, but if it were up to me, I’d call telepathy supernatural.) Did I remember the lesson correctly? Was this a different Frank Norris? My lit professor got her line about Norris and naturalism right from the author himself, so you can’t much blame her, I guess. But whatever Norris meant by calling himself a literary naturalist, either he didn’t mean that he would never use symbolism, metaphor, and evocative images, or else he simply didn’t end up writing the way he set out to write.

I remembered liking the book a lot, confused as I might have been about what label I was supposed to attach to it. So this time around, forty-some years after my first reading, I was less concerned about whether some label was correct or not and more interested in just experiencing and absorbing the novel for whatever it was. It was every bit as interesting and exciting as I had remembered. Sure, it’s not naturalist the way that word is defined in literature. So Norris changed his mind – or didn’t know his own style. So what? Whatever the style, this book is great! Wheat farmers in southern California in the late nineteenth century contemplate the meaning of life and death. Family businesses struggle with the inexorable forces of the American corporation. Victims of the railroad’s repression debate political solutions: Socialism? Anarchism? Democracy? Democracy with bribes? A poet struggles to write the great American novel. A girl gets called from the dead. There’s a barn dance. There are lots of shootouts. There’s a train hijacking. There’s a rich, respected family who think of themselves as lords of the land until they find out that the railroad company didn’t really mean what they thought it said when it leased them the acreage. And there’s a beautiful love story involving a crusty farmer who falls in love with and is softened by the daughter of his farmhand, a girl who rolls up her sleeves every morning to dip her beautiful arms into milk without realizing what effect the sight might have on her boss.

And all of that brings me to the second, still unresolved, mystery. Why hasn’t this wonderful story of love, drama, action, intrigue, faith, and politics been filmed? When I read it in the 70s, it seemed absolutely perfect for a miniseries. It’s forty years later, and a ten-part Netflix series would be even better. Come on producers! Somebody please rediscover this intelligent, exciting book!