Grant the Writer

 

The image of Grant from the cover of my 2018 novel is derived from a famous photo of him on the porch of the cottage at Mount McGregor, a few weeks before his death. It was taken by an otherwise unidentified person named Howe, who apparently sold the rights to Mark Twain, publisher of Grant's Memoirs. Here it is below (aged into a brownish color): Grant, as you can see, is intently working on the manuscript of the book which Twain would publish. I think it was taken early in the morning, before Julia was up, as she would probably have preferred to see her beloved husband more properly dressed, in suit and top hat, as he appeared in most of his postwar photos including others taken at Mount McGregor. The earliness of the hour, along with the considerable weight loss Grant experienced as his health deteriorated, might also account for why he was so warmly dressed in summer. But the flap on the right side of his face was not so much as to protect against a gust of wind as to conceal the tumor which was rapidly killing him from throat cancer. Grant's book, his first, turned out to be a masterpiece. Not as long as originally planned, it left out his political career. But he got up to the end of the war, and wrote a conclusion.

This Saturday June 13 is Community Day up at the cottage, with various free family events "to celebrate the 250th anniversary of our great nation." I made arrangements to be a vendor selling my four books, but now that they've put me in the Visitor Center next to the gift store, I realize I can't be competing against that store and selling the two books of mine they have. So I'll just put one copy each of the Grant novel and Gordon Granger biography out, directing potential customers to buy them in the room next door. And I'll sell copies of my two other books, the James Montgomery biography and the new historical novel, The Detective and Dorothy Day. You might think the latter has nothing to do with Grant, but that is not the case. There are a couple of conversations about him in it, and also mention of the Confederate general Nathan Bedford Forrest. There was even more about Grant in the first draft, written almost 40 years ago in the 1980s. But I cut some of it, since the other three books are focused on the Civil War and this one is set a century later, and added the nonviolent radical Catholic activist Dorothy Day. 

Come on up and I'll tell you some stories, maybe of Suye Narita Gambino, who spent most of her long and remarkable life -- as inspiring, in its way, as Grant's -- at the cottage. Her husband Tony gave me and my girlfriend (now wife) Barbara our first tour of the place in 1983, while Suye (as with Barbara's help I figured out years later) was working in the garden. The Gambinos are buried nearby, in Gurn Springs Cemetery on Ballard Road in Wilton.