Grant Speaks

PUBLISHERS WEEKLY 29 MAY 2000

Ehrlich's "real" (read, mock) life of Ulysses S. Grant, cast in the form of the protagonist's lost memoirs, is a cheeky lark. First of all, Grant is an impostor: his real name was Hiram Ulysses Grant. The man who originally bore the name Ulysses S. Grant was the fatuous son of the mayor of Georgetown, Ohio, where both Grants grew up. Ulysses is destined for West Point, but a freak carriage accident kills his parents and robs him of his memory. Hiram's father, Jesse Root Grant, swiftly switches the boys' papers. While the real Ulysses wanders off, Hiram becomes the historical figure. At West Point, the striking rigidity and plain imbecility of Northern military thinking are prefigured in Grant's clash with the professor of military science, Henry Halleck, a pedant obsessed with supply lines. More promisingly, Grant meets another cadet, William Tecumseh Sherman, who becomes his best friend. After graduation, Grant serves as a quartermaster in the Mexican War. On the trail, he ingests peyote and has a spirit vision that predicts Ulysses Grant will be a great leader--but which Grant is the vision signaling? Our hero marries Julia, the daughter of a shiftless and conceited Southern farmer, resigns from the army and becomes a civilian failure, but the Civil War rescues him. Ehrlich's accounts of Grant's battles mix the burlesque with the thrilling. Sherman is a cussing lunatic, and most of the Northern generals are timeservers. Ehrlich's broad, cartoonish style is least successful when he portrays Lincoln as a dumb yokel and his wife as a nymphomaniac. Still, the best scenes in the book, like the description of the Battle of Shiloh, retain some of the power of reality. Grant wins the war, of course, and in Ehrlich's telling becomes a weak president and the tool of the Vanderbilts. Ehrlich's alternate Grant emerges from the uneven humor of the book as a skeptical, humane and ultimately sympathetic figure. .