96
PARTISAN REVIEW
We Stand On
that was consistent with his literary talents by being pri–
marily a series of biographical sketches of several influential American
figures, most of whom lived in the eighteenth century.
Since Dos Passos's time, the border crossings have become more fre–
quent and more complex. Max Byrd's historical novel,
Grant
(2000), is
in many ways a descendant of Dos Passos's trilogy in attempting to por–
tray the Gilded Age on a canvas much broader than its title suggests.
Byrd creates a fictional memoir based on an actual one written by a
Chicago reporter, newspaper accounts of Grant, and extracts from his
notes and letters. Byrd's novel, however, follows Lukacs's principle in
that Grant is mainly seen from the point of view of the surrounding
characters. The historical characters are all connected to Grant in impor–
tant ways: Sylvanus Cadwallader, a reporter who wrote
Three Years
with Grant;
Henry Adams, who investigated the scandals in the Grant
administrations and satirized him in
Democracy;
Senator James Donald
Cameron, who managed Grant's unsuccessful third-term campaign; and
Mark Twain, who irreverently joked about him in a speech at a Union
veterans banquet, idolized him, and published Grant's memoirs.
Grant
goes beyond Dos Passos's technique, however, by seamlessly
mingling fictional persons and real persons and events. His crossing of
the literary with the historical can be multilayered. Byrd prints a news–
paper review, supposedly written by the fictional Nicholas Trist, of
Adams's actual novel
Democracy.
Later on, Byrd presents, as an extract
from Trist's notebook, a passage directly quoting word for word a page
of Adams's novel
Esther,
which he wrote under a pseudonym.
Grant was called "the American Sphinx" and has seemed to be a
mystery to his biographers, even to himself. Brooks D. Simpson has
recently declared that "there are no single threads that hold everything
together." He finds Grant to be an enigma: "How to explain both the
depths of defeat and the heights of triumph?" He thus makes a good
subject for a novelistic treatment in which he can be seen obliquely and
through many different lenses.
Byrd's interpretation of Grant's extraordinary hold over the emotions
of Americans after the war is expressed by Cadwallader: Grant's gener–
ous terms at Appomattox were "the first great step toward national rec–
onciliation and forgiveness." As his friend and heir, Grant was "the
country's last true connection to the martyred Abraham Lincoln." "The
two of them had walked side by side down the smoking streets of Rich–
mond in
1865,
the tall and the short of it, as Lincoln had joked." Byrd
also recognizes that Grant and Twain have an affinity as self-invented
men who have risen from obscurity to eminence, and that as writers,
