Reviews of the Book Grant by Ron Lithgow

T.J. Stiles is the author of "The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt," which won the National Volume Award and the Pulitzer Prize for biography. His well-nigh recent book is "Custer's Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America," which won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for history. He is currently writing a biography of Theodore Roosevelt.

In the essay "The Art of Biography," Virginia Woolf asks, "Is biography an art?" She admits that the question is "ungenerous" only adds, "In that location it is, whenever a new biography is opened, casting its shadow on the page; and there would seem to exist something mortiferous in that shadow."

Woolf's question hovers over all biographers, even the most accomplished. It comes now for Ron Chernow, the author of "Grant," a new account of the Ceremonious War general and two-term president. Recipient of the National Humanities Medal, Chernow won the Pulitzer Prize for his last book, "Washington," and the National Volume Award for his starting time, "The House of Morgan." Lin-Manuel Miranda adapted his best-selling "Hamilton" into a musical, which Michelle Obama chosen "the best piece of art in whatever form that I take e'er seen in my life."

[Ulysses S. Grant: Hero or butcher? Great man or doofus?]

And yet — that shadow. To Woolf, every biographer is "a craftsman, non an creative person. . . . The trouble lies with biography itself. It imposes conditions, and those conditions are that it must exist based upon fact." She argues that only unrestrained imagination can make art. I disagree. Facts are simply the medium, as paint is to the painter. Of class, well-nigh painters succeed every bit artisans, not artists, and and so practise most biographers.

"Grant," past Ron Chernow (Penguin / )

To rise to a higher place craftsmanship, i must piece of work with abundant, varied and complicated facts. Chernow does that, presenting enquiry that bulks Grant to nearly one,000 pages of narrative. It allows him to write a rich and sensitive portrait of the inner Grant — from reluctant Due west Point cadet to civilian failure to triumphant general. He exhaustively investigates Grant's alcoholism and fraught relationships with his family. I adore Chernow's honesty about contradictory evidence equally well as Grant's mistakes.

We read biography to know a life simply as well to ratify our conviction that the individual matters. This forces the biographer to exist researcher, writer and historian simultaneously. How does the world shape the individual, and the individual the world? To what extent are convictions, judgment and personality merely typical, embedded in a larger context — and where does the private wriggle free? A biography that succeeds as art combines scholarly and literary virtues. It explains, interprets and carries a reader fully into a homo existence. It offers illumination and immersion.

As a historian, Chernow proves somewhat uneven. His research into Grant's struggles with alcohol would exist ameliorate if he discussed the scale and intensity of the temperance movement; that would explain contemporaries' obsession with drinkable and Grant's personal shame. Chernow's account of Grant's military career, nonetheless, works well, particularly in exploring his closest relationships. Most of import, the book centers on the story of black liberation, from Grant'south cover of emancipation every bit a general to his enforcement of ceremonious rights every bit president. If African Americans play as well passive a function in this telling (freedom did non progress "ineluctably"), Chernow's accent is exactly right, and his business relationship of Grant's views is revealing.

Every biography is a broken mirror, reflecting the past inexactly. But Chernow shows where a seemingly small distortion obscures something important. In recounting Jay Gould and Jim Fisk'southward attempt to corner the gold market in 1869, for example, he states incorrectly that Wall Street quoted the price of gold per ounce. This is no mere technical error. The "Gilt Room" wasn't a commodity market but an exchange betwixt ii domestic currencies, both confusingly named "dollar": the legal-tender paper greenback and the still-circulating gold dollar. The "gilt premium," or price, was the number of cash required to buy $100 in gold coin. That fact is the door to a chamber of biting controversy. Should money exist a substance with intrinsic value — or tin regime invent it at will and accost crippling deflation of a kind unknown to whatsoever American today? If Chernow had explained this, readers would know why Grant's veto of the Inflation Bill probably cost the Republicans the 1874 midterm elections and why the Greenback Political party emerged as one of history'south most successful independent political movements.

Chernow shows little interest in the West. He writes that Gen. Philip Sheridan dispatched Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer to the Black Hills in the Cracking Sioux Reservation in 1874 to detect gold, defiling a region sacred to the Lakotas. In fact, Sheridan sent him to scout a site for a fort, equally function of a strategy to recoup for the Regular army's manpower shortage. Custer did notice gilded, igniting a rush of squatters. That invasion led to war because, as historian Robert Utley writes, the Blackness Hills were a critical natural resource depository financial institution that sustained Lakota nomadism. Chernow misses the environmental and strategic factors that shaped Lakota national imperatives too every bit federal policies.

Strong research, imperfect history — but what about Chernow'due south writing? British literary critic David Gild notes that nonfiction authors' theft of the novelist'southward tools dates back to the 19th-century author Thomas Carlyle. Telling a story through scenes, the creation of expectations, the techniques of mystery and suspense, not to mention rhythm and lyricism — this belongs in a biography of Tolstoy equally much as in Tolstoy'south "War and Peace." Unfortunately, Chernow makes niggling use of these tools. His design does not delight with artful construction and delivers no pleasures of expectation, revelation or surprise. He rarely opens a chapter with sentences that hum the themes to come. He does not switch the bespeak of view to permit a secondary character to expand the book's scope. He stacks upwards adjectives, cliches and stock phrases. "The quick-witted Grant shell them to the punch and the town vicious without a shot," he writes. With each such sentence, Woolf's shadow grows darker.

["The Human being Who Saved the Union: Ulysses Grant in War and Peace" by H. W. Brands]

As a novel does, the all-time biography creates a fully realized world. That requires non just inquiry but pick. During a fellowship at the New York Public Library's Cullman Center, my colleagues reviewed a chapter of my Cornelius Vanderbilt biography. In a scene that establish Vanderbilt on the edge of death, novelist Nathan Englander noted my reference to a meteor that flamed overhead. "You realize you're connecting Vanderbilt to the universe?" he asked. He was right, but it wasn't the result I wanted. I had just compiled facts, failing to consider their literary implications. I wanted to say that earthy dust saved this unspiritual old sailor, so I took the meteor out. It fabricated me realize how much I had to learn about writing.

In "Samuel Pepys," biographer Claire Tomalin evokes the moment when her field of study commencement bought a notebook for his famous diary: "When Pepys was in Cornhill on 5 December 1659, the day he saw an amateur shot through the caput by soldiers, the shops had their shutters up confronting the violence in the streets. On another solar day before the end of the year he was in Cornhill again, and this fourth dimension he went into the stationer'southward store at the sign of the Globe, where John Cade sold newspaper and pens also as the prints and maps Pepys loved to leaf through; and there he bought himself a newspaper-covered notebook, too fat to become into his pocket, and carried it home to Axe Yard."

Without one "likely" or "possibly," Tomalin connects the facts she knows to create a sense of a scene that no document describes. She sends active verbs skittering and barking through the store to bring alive Pepys'due south anticipation, the prints ready for fingering, the notebook he feels in his hand. It is bright, and information technology is honest. Tomalin shows, in this rare combination of brilliant research, history and literary style, that a biography indeed can be fine art.

However, Woolf herself liked good craftsmanship, which Chernow delivers. He guides the states into the character of a famously reticent man, revealing how he could be both a failure and a conquistador, principled yet surprisingly naive.

Grant

By Ron Chernow

Penguin Press. 1,074 pp. $40

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Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/chernows-portrait-of-grant-as-a-work-of-literary-craftsmanship-if-not-art/2017/10/06/1139cbb2-9c89-11e7-9c8d-cf053ff30921_story.html

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