My Favorite Memoirist? You Would Never Guess

I am preparing to teach a seven-week adult education course on Memoirs: Reading Others, Writing Yours. My idea is for students to read and discuss famous memoirs as inspiration and guidance in writing their own.

Students will keep notebooks but they will not be asked to finish writing anything—only to be inspired, only to get started. As a thirty-year professional writer, I know that getting started is half the battle.

Seven weeks is not long enough to write a book about anything. But it is long enough to light a fire.

So in the four months remaining before the course begins, I am reading memoirs by the dozens, intending to select six or seven of these to excerpt for weekly assignments, and several dozen more to be cited as examples. Naturally, I am beginning with memoirs that I already have read and in some cases re-read.

This has brought me to the awareness that the memoirs I feel drawn to say a lot about my own life and how I see it. I imagine that my students will make a similar discovery.

Some examples:

As a sometime publisher of New England regional books at Commonwealth Editions (which I sold in 2010), I have long enjoyed Samuel Eliot Morison’s delightful little account of growing up on Brimmer Street, One Boy’s Boston. This will be on the syllabus.

As a Catholic convert, I have been drawn to stories of other converts, and I will be using one conversion memoir in the course: The Long Loneliness by Dorothy Day. Another favorite, Apologia Pro Vita Sua by John Henry Newman, is too arcane for the purpose.

As a committed husband blessed by a long, happy marriage, I am drawn to writers who celebrate their own marriages. So then our class will be reading About Alice, Calvin Trillin’s short, funny, deeply moving tribute to his late wife. (Just to be clear, my wife is still very much with us!)

And so on.

But then, so why Ulysses S. Grant? Why will I be asking students to read Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant? Why is the Union general my favorite memoirist? Why am I, who was never in the military, drawn to one of the two or three greatest generals in American history? Indeed, why in my personal library is Grant the subject of more books than any other mortal? (Nine.)

That’s Grant in the picture at the top of this post—in an unusual posture, dying of throat cancer while writing his memoirs by hand in 1884-85.  And that’s Grant, of course, at left, in a familiar pose. I do like this military picture because it captures not only the general’s strength but also his concern, his worry about his men and his strategic position.

Personal Memoirs of U. S. Grant was published posthumously by Mark Twain. A personal friend of Grant, Twain was starting his own house in order to issue Huckleberry Finn. Grant had been ruined financially after leaving the Presidency, and Twain offered him handsome royalties. In fact, after Grant’s death his memoirs earned nearly half a million dollars for his widow.

To understand why I admire Grant and his memoir so much, I would have to write my own short autobiographical essay. That essay would include Midwestern roots (Grant was from Ohio, I from Minnesota); a soldier father who loved military history; devotion to my wife (Grant was famously devoted to Julia); a general admiration of the classic manly virtues; a misguided fascination with alcohol (which Grant shared); and a deep belief in the chances of redemption.

Grant was a failure in almost everything before the war, but when the call came he won the war for Lincoln. Then after the war he served two terms as one of the more ineffective Presidents in US history. But when he came to the end of his life and wrote it, he created what many deem the best Presidential memoir ever. Twice a failure, twice redeemed.

Gore Vidal, who would never be mistaken for Grant in a police line-up, wrote, “It simply is not possible to read Grant’s memoirs without realizing that the author is a man of first-rate intelligence.”

Reviewing the book when it was first published The Atlantic said, “The author never poses or attitudinizes; never wavers for an instant from his purpose to tell plain facts in the plainest possible way. . . . He does not even allow himself the luxury of vehemence against fate, or fortune, or inevitable destiny. . . . He is perfectly content to stand for what he was—a combination of plain and almost commonplace qualities, developed to a very high power, and becoming at length the equivalent of what we call military genius.”

“Perfectly content to stand for what he was” is a good guideline for any memoirist, I think.