Quote of the Day (Ulysses S. Grant, on His Simple But Grand Ancestry)

“My family is American, and has been for generations, in all its branches, direct and collateral.”—Ulysses S. Grant, Personal Memoirs (1885-1886)

The Civil War defined irrevocably what it meant to be American. Characteristically, the man who more than any other was responsible for winning the conflict set out the theme of his own life with this opening line. The statement does not beg to become an aphorism, but like the tone of the rest of the book, it is steady and winning. Its glow of quiet pride is unmistakable. Above all, it is credible—a fact lost on Larry McMurtry, who reviewed Bill Clinton’s My Life favorably in contrast with that of the man the novelist condescendingly called “dear, dying General Grant’s.”

Ulysses S. Grant was born on this date in 1822. Nearly 12 years after his death, on what would have been his 75^th birthday, over 1 million people attended the parade and dedication ceremony of his tomb—the largest in North America--in New York. Over the next century, this mausoleum, funded by 90,000 donors and modeled on one of the ancient wonders of the world, would be allowed to deteriorate disgracefully—a situation in direct contrast to the final resting place of Grant’s great adversary, Robert E. Lee, in Lexington, Va. (The Confederacy might have lost, but die-hard adherents to the Lost Cause knew how to preserve their sacred monuments.)

It took the vigorous efforts of a Columbia University student, Frank Scaturro—and a threat by the general’s descendants to relocate his remains and those of wife Julia elsewhere, where they could be taken better care of—for the National Park Service to provide, in time for the centennial of the tomb's dedication, a necessary $1.8 million facelift for a site that at one point had more visitors than the Statue of Liberty. Every one of those dollars was well-spent, considering the general's enormous service to his country. When he was dying and working desperately to complete his memoirs, a stranger sent him a $500 check with an attached note: “'General, I owe you this for Appomattox.''

(By the way, though the 1997 work helped, much of the area around Grant’s Tomb remains badly in need of repair, as frankly acknowledged on its Web site.)

Grant produced his Personal Memoirs under harrowing circumstances, trying to rescue his family from the bankruptcy into which he had been plunged a couple of years earlier by an unscrupulous business partner. (That was another thing that makes him especially American to us: his Wall Street brokerage firm was fleeced by a swindler.) He completed it only four days before he succumbed to cancer, and during much of the writing he refused medication that would dull the pain but leave him too mentally groggy to write. His publisher, Mark Twain, compared the book favorably with Caesar’s Commentaries.

Edmund Wilson must have had in mind the opening line—and many others—when he wrote:

“Grant's Memoirs are a unique expression of the national character... The book conveys Grant's dynamic force and the definitiveness of his personality. Perhaps never has a book so objective in form seemed so personal in every line. The tempo is never increased, but the narrative, once we get into the war, seems to move with the increasing momentum that the soldier must have felt in the field. Somehow, despite its sobriety, it communicates the spirit of the battles themselves and makes it possible to understand how Grant won them.”

Quote of the Day (John Adams, on His Sacrifices on Behalf of Freedom)

“Is it not intollerable, that the opening Spring, which I should enjoy with my Wife and Children upon my little Farm, should pass away, and laugh at me, for labouring, Day after Day, and Month after Month, in a Conclave [i.e., the Continental Congress], Where neither Taste, nor Fancy, nor Reason, nor Passion, nor Appetite can be gratified?

“Posterity! You will never know, how much it cost the present Generation, to preserve your Freedom! I hope you will make a good Use of it. If you do not, I shall repent in Heaven, that I ever took half the Pains to preserve it.”—John Adams, letter to wife Abigail Adams, April 26, 1777

This Day in Naval History (Farragut Captures New Orleans for Union)

April 25, 1862—With the Confederacy caught unawares and unprepared, the Union achieved a critical step in one of its major objectives—securing control of the Mississippi River. After a day of peril running his ships past the forts guarding New Orleans, Flag Officer David Glasgow Farragut occupied the Crescent City and demanded that civil authorities surrender lest he turn his fleet's guns on them. It was the first in a series of victories that led this old sea dog—who had joined the Navy as a nine-year-old midshipman in the War of 1812, and was 60 when conflict broke out between North and South—to become the greatest naval commander of the Civil War.

I would have been surprised a week and a half ago, when I took the picture here of the Admiral Farragut Memorial in New York’s Madison Square Park, if any passers-by could identify the man depicted. But, when this first great public commission by the famed sculptor Augustus St. Gaudens was unveiled in 1881, it was a far different story. Then, onlookers could have told you that all the highest ranks in the Navy -- rear admiral, vice admiral, and admiral of the Navy—were created by Congress for him; that this native of Tennessee with a wife from Norfolk, Va., had chosen to stay loyal to the Union; and that sometimes the price of this loyalty had been severe.

(One report had it that, as Farragut passed below a New Orleans house, an indignant woman emptied the contents of her chamber pot on his head. That reportedly was the last straw for the city’s Union military governor, General Benjamin Butler, who then issue his infamous order that any woman insulting a Federal serviceman should be regarded as “a woman of the town plying her vocation.”)

The bronze, eight-foot-tall Farragut statue in Madison Square gives an extraordinarily vivid sense of what it must have been like to be this hero at the height of battle—in New Orleans, perhaps, or maybe two years later, at the Battle of Mobile Bay, when, warned that he’d be sailing through a mine-filled harbor, he supposedly barked: “Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead!” In this marvelously naturalistic depiction, the bottom of his long jacket is swirling slightly upward, as if caught by a wind. With his binoculars in his hand and his sword at his side, he is searching the horizon, on the lookout for an enemy. The statue is turned south, where the threat to the Union loomed.

The statue shows a leader impossible to regard as irresolute; the statement for which he’s remembered (perhaps apocryphal) hints at someone dismissive of danger to the point of rashness. The Farragut I’ve read about at New Orleans appears far more concerned about casualties—ready to take a risk, true, but only after a careful consideration of the cost. When told by a subordinate that he expected only 100 Federal casualties, Farragut merely responded that he hoped he was right.

Farragut and the Federals had come to believe that the time was right to make a play for New Orleans, and to pray the damage could be staunched. The prize was certainly big enough. Capturing New Orleans turned out to be “the most important event of the War of the Rebellion, with the exception of the fall of Richmond,” according to Commander David Dixon Porter, Farragut’s foster brother (and, in one of those neat twists of history, the man asked by the Navy Department to vouch for his loyalty and skill when the campaign was being planned). It wasn’t just because the Crescent City was the largest in the Confederacy, or that, with a sizable population of non-Southerners and non-slaveholders, it might prove one of the easier cities to turn back toward the Union.

No, New Orleans was also the financial center of King Cotton, an industrial center that could help maintain the Southern war effort, and a transit point that would allow men and materiel to pass unmolested across the Mississippi from west to the east. That rapid, undisturbed movement, if allowed to continue, would enable  the Confederacy to transfer troops easily to the theater of operations where they were needed most.

Amazingly, the Confederate government didn’t carefully consider how to secure this critical seaport. It believed that an attack on the Mississippi would come further up the river. Thinking it highly unlikely that the Union would try to attack the city from the Gulf Coast, it moved ships and whatever men it could spare to points north.

Farragut, however, thought that an attack from the Gulf of Mexico could succeed, telling Assistant Secretary of the Navy Gustavus Fox, “The forts are well down the river; ships could easily run them, and New Orleans itself is undefended.”

It was a shrewd assessment, and Fox and his boss, Secretary of the Navy Gideon Welles, worked mightily to supply Farragut with all he needed in his attempt.

When it came time to take the two points guarding the approach to New Orleans, Fort Jackson and Fort St. Phillip, the flag officer allowed Porter to try out his idea of bombarding the fortifications from mortar boats. After a week of no discernible effect, however, Farragut decided to run his boats past the forts in the early hours of April 24. 

Instead of making the run as planned at 2 am, Farragut’s fleet didn’t launch in earnest for another hour and a half. Once detected, his ships found themselves under fire from the forts: “Imagine all the earthquakes in the world, and all the thunder and lightnings together in a space of two miles, all going off at once,” a participant recalled later. There was another, more unusual menace: fire rafts. In preparation for this possibility, the area around each gun on Farragut's flagship, the Hartford, had been strewn with sand and ashes, so the sailors wouldn’t slip on their own blood. Even so, when the Hartford ran aground, it took all of Farragut's exhorting and all of the ship’s efforts to put out the deathly blaze.

On the 25^th, Farragut surveyed the situation and liked what he saw. The Confederate Navy in the harbor was over as a fighting force. The city’s natives came out in great numbers to shout their defiance, but Farragut knew he had time on his hand, and by the 29^th all resistance in the area was snuffed out.

The loss of New Orleans was a major blow to the Confederacy. Napoleon III of France had been so anxious to dismember the Union that he had been willing to recognize the Confederate government on his own. After Farragut’s victory, however, he would do so only in league with Great Britain, and that became a less and less likely prospect after the Battle of Antietam and Abraham Lincoln’s issuance of the Emancipation Proclamation. 

Moreover, the reign of “King Cotton” was in serious danger with the loss of its great depot; desperately needed beef and supplies could no longer move freely near the coast; and points farther up the Mississippi, such as Vicksburg, were now suddenly, shockingly vulnerable. In another year and a half, Porter and General Ulysses S. Grant would carry out an even more daring collaboration between land and sea forces than the one in which Farragut and Butler had acted to bring down New Orleans. That Vicksburg campaign split the Confederacy again in two--or, as Lincoln so memorably put it, "And so The Father of Waters flows again unvexed to the sea."

Quote of the Day (Kelly Ripa, on a Recent Contender to Replace Regis)

“I admit he might have to finish sixth grade first. But I asked his mom if she’d mind letting him drop out, and she seemed okay with it.”—Kelly Ripa, on 12-year-old “Kevin from New Jersey,” a “natural personality” “interviewed” in the audience last week about becoming her co-host on Live! With Kelly, quoted in David Hinckley, “Co-Host Search ‘Live’ and Well,” (New York) Daily News, April 23, 2012

This Day in Literary History (Death Comes for Willa Cather)

April 24, 1947—Thirteen years after making the cover of Time Magazine, Willa Cather died, age 73, of a cerebral hemorrhage in her New York home, with her critical reputation at low ebb. But her longtime readers hadn’t abandoned her, and nearly three decades later the critics began to respect her again.

It’s more than a bit tempting to compare Cather with another great female writer of the early 20^th century, Edith Wharton. Well, I’ve always found it hard to resist temptation, so let’s have a go at it, shall we?

*Both lived approximately three-quarters of a century.

*Both, as beginning authors, were heavily influenced by Henry James.

* Both hit their literary stride in their early 40s, enjoying a run of brisk sales, then fell out of favor because of their perceived conservatism and male critics' predominant gender bias.

* Both benefited from feminist scholarship and from revelations about their private lives (Wharton’s extramarital affair with Morton Fullerton, Cather’s lesbianism) that suddenly transformed them into racy and fascinating women.

* Both were awarded Pulitzer Prizes in years in which Sinclair Lewis was the favorite (Wharton’s The Age of Innocence bested Lewis’s Main Street in 1920, and Cather’s One of Ours beat out Lewis’s Babbitt two years later). At the time, it was charged, the Pulitzer voters had opted for something safe and genteel over biting satires of American life. Nearly a century later, it’s Wharton and Cather, not Lewis, who’s more likely to show up on high school and college reading lists.

A quote by Cather herself could be cited as a reason why her material garners more attention than ever while Lewis’s reputation has taken a hit: “If the novel is a form of imaginative art, it cannot be at the same time a vivid and brilliant form of journalism,” Cather wrote in an essay called “The Novel Démeublé” in the April 12, 1922 issue of The New Republic.  “Out of the teeming, gleaming stream of the present it must select the eternal material of art.”

While it is true that Lewis still has his adherents (notably, Tom Wolfe, in the 1989 Harper’s essay, “Stalking the Billion-Footed Beast”), Cather’s advocacy of the timeless nature of fiction has largely carried the day. Only the situation, I think, might be a bit more complicated than that.

Lewis rose to fame in the Twenties on the strength of novels that benefited from what might be termed reporting: following people around who would become subjects of his fiction, then capturing their speech patterns and those of others in their environment. Cather’s fiction dealt far more often with the past than Lewis did, but she learned many of her writing skills in a journalistic setting: at the muckraking magazine McClure’s, where she rose to become managing editor. And this could be a particularly hothouse example of journalism, at that: Her companion, Edith Lewis, likened it to “working in a high wind” with proprietor S.S. McClure as the “storm center.”

Before I close this post out, I should mention one other way in which Cather and Wharton resemble each other: their powerful evocation of atmosphere, almost textbook examples of how to create setting. In a prior post, I offered just such an example from Wharton’s physically and morally wintry Berkshire setting from Ethan Frome. Though Cather is associated most with the Nebraska settings of O Pioneers!, The Song of the Lark and My Antonia, her extraordinary ability to evoke place can also be seen in Death Comes for the Archbishop. The following is just one of many amazing descriptions of the Southwest through which her Roman Catholic cleric passes, in a beautiful but haunting landscape that somehow mirrors the emptiness of souls:

“Ever afterward the Bishop remembered his first ride to Acoma as his introduction to the mesa country. One thing which struck him at once was that every mesa was duplicated by a cloud mesa, like a reflection, which lay motionless above it, or moved slowly up from behind it. These cloud formations seemed to be always there, however hot and blue the sky. Sometimes they were flat terraces, ledges of vapour, sometimes they were dome-shaped, or fantastic, like the tops of silvery pagodas, rising one above another, as if an Oriental city lay directly behind the rock. The great tables of granite set down in an empty plain were inconceivable without their attendant clouds, which were a part of them, as the spoke is part of the censer, or the foam of the wave.”

Quote of the Day (Yuja Wang, on Music Criticism)

“Music criticism should be to musicians what ornithology is to birds.”—Tweet by classical pianist Yuja Wang, quoted in Vivien Schweitzer, “Talented, Eye-Catching, Unapologetic,” The New York Times, April 8, 2012

Somewhat like David Helfgott, the pianist whose life was chronicled in the 1996 film Shine, 25-year-old Chinese pianist Yuja Wang has become famous as much for non-musical reasons as for technical skill. In Mr. Helfgott’s case, the question became whether his technique would have brought him attention if he had never been afflicted with mental illness; in Ms. Wang’s, controversy has swirled around her attire. (In fact, as you begin to type her name into Google, one of the first choices seen is, “Yuja Wang dress.”)

Look, there’s a simple test for this: Play a piece performed by Ms. Wang with your eyes closed. Don’t look at her photo on one of her CDs (if you can even find one these days). Or promptly close your eyes as soon as this YouTube performance of her playing Mendelssohn’s Piano Concerto No. 1 begins. Did you enjoy it? Okay, then.

In the meantime, it’s nice to see classical music getting any kind of notice these days, isn’t it? Maybe some of the people eyeing Ms. Wang’s miniskirts might look instead at the program notes for her performances—and actually learn something. Just listen to the music, okay?

TV Quote of the Day (‘30 Rock,’ on an Internet Tycoon)

“I don’t know a lot about business, but he did an Internet and now the computers like him and Wall Street is Google.”—Jenna Maroney (played by Jane Krakowski) on nerd-turned-Internet billionaire Tad (played by Steve Little), in 30 Rock, “Leap Day,” Season 6, Episode 9, air date February 23, 2012, teleplay by Luke Del Tredici, directed by Steve Buscemi