Bruce Catton: Grant Takes Command (1969)I met a girl from Paeroa once. It was in Tahiti, where I was living with a family on a student exchange. She didn’t like me.
She didn’t like me to a quite extravagant extent. I must have said something the first time we met which gave her the impression that I was a snobby Aucklander from the Eastern suburbs, looking down on the poor provincial hayseeds.
Nothing could have been further from the truth, but you know how it is once someone takes a dislike to you? Everything you say from then on somehow conspires to back up their original idea. No matter how hard you try to repair it, the damage has already been done.
Anyway, the reason I mention it here is because there is a popular soft drink here in New Zealand called ‘Lemon & Paeroa.’ It’s a kind of lemonade made (originally, at least – it’s now been bought by the Coca-Cola company, and is bottled elsewhere) with carbonated water from the local spring.
For a long time there was a rather funny TV ad campaign listing things which were ‘world-famous in New Zealand’ – concluding with a silent pan across the huge plaster L & P bottle standing at the gateway to Paeroa.
In an unfortunate moment, when some French kids asked me to describe the town, I referred to it as the ‘drinking capital of New Zealand’ – by which I meant (I swear) Lemon & Paeroa. Overhearing this, though, the girl (whose name escapes me) thought – not unreasonably, I suppose – that I was describing people from Paeroa as a bunch of drunks.
Nothing I said to dispute this interpretation of my innocently meant remark had any effect. I had insulted her native soil, and was therefore the worst kind of arrogant big city aggressor.
Paeroa has done quite a bit to jazz up its Wild West image since then. For a while it made a concerted attempt to market itself as the Antiques capital of New Zealand (perhaps because the L & P label was getting a little tired). The main street filled up with shops selling bric-à-brac of various types, and the whole thing went with a bang – at first.
But Paeroa is quite a long way from anywhere else, and there are antique shops in other towns, too, and it’s difficult to restock often enough to attract return custom after a day of junk-shopping there – and this was pretty high-priced junk, too. So one by one, over the years, they’ve folded, until now there are only a few left of the original squadron of shops offering ceramics, fabric, furniture: and scruffy books.
The second-hand bookshops were probably the first to go. On my last visit there, only about half of those I remembered still seemed to be in business. I did pick up one or two little trifles, though, including a hardback copy of Bruce Catton’s American civil war book Grant Takes Command [1].
I actually walked out of the shop without it, then, half an hour later, had to trace my footsteps back. I put it back in the shelves after seeing how assiduously – almost fanatically – it had been underlined and annotated by its previous owner. It was an ex-library book (from Remuera, probably the snobbiest quarter of snobby Auckland), and had extensive pencil markings on virtually every page.
A book in the hand is worth two in the bush, however, so (on maturer reflection) I decided to pay the couple of dollars they were charging for it.
It was hard for me to imagine that there would be much there that was new, given that I’d already pored over the accounts of General Ulysses S. Grant’s Wilderness campaign in Catton’s trilogy of books about the Army of the Potomac, not to mention his magisterial Centenary History of the Civil War. Nevertheless, when I got home I started to leaf idly through it.
You know, I’m rather glad I did.
It’s a pretty ugly book. Of the cover illustration, by a certain ‘Edward Mortelmans’ (sounds like a pun on ‘mortal man,’ doesn’t it?) the less said the better: Blue & Grey kitsch, concocted for the UK edition of a very American book.
The fly-leaf is distinctly more interesting, though: the list of annotations seems to imply some system to the scribbles and underlinings its former owner had undertaken so assiduously.
There are already odd features to be noted. Why, for instance, does he circle and tick the dedication of Catton’s original book? Has he found out who this ‘David’ is? Or is there a David in his own life whom he would like to commemorate similarly?
Somehow I assumed from the beginning that this annotator was a man, though there’s no direct evidence of it. Perhaps we should call him David, in fact, this anonymous commentator on Catton’s work. I thought at first that it might be the first name of Bruce Catton’s son, who collaborated with him on his 1963 book Two Roads to Sumter, but no, that was William Catton.
Moving on to the Table of Contents:
There it is, unequivocally, written in cold print (in capital letters, no less): ‘MY NOVEL.’ Or should it read ‘MY NOVEL starts here’? Three chapter titles are circled: ‘In the Wilderness,’ ‘Beyond the Bloody Angle,’ Roll On, Like a Wave’ and then the final words, ‘Strange Land’ of the final chapter, ‘Stranger in a Strange Land.’
The novel, then, seems to have been intended to cover the period from the two-day Battle of the Wilderness, through Spottsylvania and Cold Harbor, to the end of the War.
There’s an interesting admission on p. 282 of the text. The ‘night of June 13’ (l. 10 from the top) and ‘following morning, June 14’ (l. 3 from the bottom) are circled, and the words ‘150 years ago’ written at the foot of the page.
150 years added on to 1864 takes us to June 2014. Since I purchased the book in Paeroa on the 9th of January, 2015, this means that sometime in the six months intervening our prospective novelist must have lost faith in his project, bundled up his carefully annotated text, and consigned it to a junkshop.
That’s one theory, at least.
Perhaps the book was stolen. Perhaps he died, and it was the executors of his estate who boxed it up for resale to the highest bidder. Perhaps he actually finished writing the novel he was planning, and thus felt no further need for the research materials so painstakingly gathered along the way.
That last seems unlikely to me, though. I may be more of a packrat than most, but I can’t conceive of disposing of so detailed and important a source just six months after the collection of data for his projected civil war novel had begun. I’m sorry to say it, but a loss of faith in the project – or confidence in his own ability to carry it out still seems the most likely scenario.
It’s not just the 150-year anniversary that appears to have obsessed him, though. Go forward 50 years from 1864, and you arrive at 1914. The ‘pattern of trench warfare’ referred to in Catton’s account of the siege of Petersburg inevitably recall the trenches ‘of WWI.’
Not only that, but if we were to take another fifty-year leap, that would take us to the middle of the1960s, the period of composition of Catton’s book.
There are a number of isolated passages marked with the word ‘novel’ – to be extracted or otherwise drawn upon (presumably) for our annotator’s projected acts of imaginative recreation:
Real, concrete clues as to the nature of the actual nature of the narrative are few and far between, however. We have a number of suggested titles – ‘The Horseman’:
‘That Western Man’:
not to mention ‘A Good Loyal Man,’ all of which might lead us to expect that he meant to write an account focussing on General Grant himself. Perhaps a first-person narrative, even? A little like Richard Adams’ book Traveller (1988), where Robert E. Lee’s horse narrates the tale of his role in the Lost Cause in cod Southern dialect?
The existence of Grant’s own much-praised autobiographical account of the war, completed in the hope of retrieving his family’s blasted fortunes under the shadow of his last heroic fight with cancer, might lead one to see that last plan as somewhat supererogatory, however.
A great deal of underlining has been applied to the very last pages of Catton’s book, where he tries to sum up the effect of the war on those who had fought in it:
One of Sherman’s veterans, going home with all the rest, found that when the armies did melt back into the heart of the people the adjustment was a little difficult. The men had been everywhere and had seen everything. Life’s greatest experience had ended with most of life still to be lived, to find a common purpose in the quiet days of peace would be hard: ‘Old avenues are closed to them, old ambitions are dead, and they walk as in a dream – as strangers in a strange land.’This latter quote is attributed by Catton to F. Y. Hedley’s 1890 memoir Marching Through Georgia (p. 488). The underlying reference is, though (of course) to the Bible: ‘I have been a stranger in a strange land’ [Exodus 2: 22]. As Catton goes on to say: ‘One of these veterans moving along a shadowed new path after living in a world where he had seen the path so very clearly, was General Grant.’
So what did happen to ‘MY NOVEL’ and the bright hopes that motivated so energetic a ransacking of volume three of this biography of General U. S. Grant?
It is, alas, impossible to say – on the evidence I have, at any rate. For all I know ‘The Horseman’ is with a publisher right now, being readied for the Christmas trade. After all, this may be only one of many tomes our anonymous author pored over whilst creating his great work …
Later That Summer is the title of the (imaginary) civil war novel composed by one of the offstage characters in Stephen King’s rather aptly-titled 1994 novel Insomnia. It was supposed to be an account of what happened to Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia after their defeat at the Battle of Gettysburg, and was clearly envisaged as a kind of sequel to Michael Shaara’s classic The Killer Angels (1974): later dramatised (exceptionally poorly), as the four-hour movie epic Gettysburg (1993).
The omni-talented Australian writer Thomas Keneally has also written a civil war novel: The Confederates (1979), about Lee’s first (and equally unsuccessful) invasion of the North, culminating in the Battle of Antietam (or – if you prefer – Sharpsburg).
So there’s nothing inherently improbable or absurd about writing a novel based on the last days of Grant’s campaign in Virginia. Shelby Foote, even, the great Shelby Foote, wrote the single-battle-focussed novel Shiloh (1952) before embarking on his great Homeric trilogy about the civil war.
I may be wrong – very probably am, in fact – but I can’t help wondering if it was the consummate showmanship of Tony Award winner Tony Kushner’s script for the Steven Spielberg film Lincoln (2012) – not released here till 2013 – which put our prospective author off?
There does seem to be a suspicious amount of coincidence with the focus of some of the anonymous underlinings in the Catton book: the emphasis on the Confederate peace mission in the first days of 1865 is common to both, as are many other details. After all, he may not have seen it when it first came out. Perhaps he downloaded or rented it sometime in late 2014, and felt that he’d been gazumped …
Whatever the explanation for his abandonment of the project (or at any rate Bruce Catton’s book), I sometimes feel that I’d like to pick up where he left off – re-enter the Gothic dreamscapes of Cold Mountain, The Beguiled and all those other civil war classics – and write my own tale of Grant’s murderous advance on Richmond in the late Spring and Summer of 1864. It would be a kind of homage to a fellow-worker in the field of fiction (however serious his intentions actually were).
I can’t help feeling, though, that it might be taken amiss: outside appropriation of something better left to natives: another innocent remark about L & P which might come across as dismissive or patronising.
Better, perhaps, to dream of another kind of novel, based on a quite different classic of historical writing, James Cowan’s 2-volume The New Zealand Wars (1922), based on his firsthand interviews with the survivors of our own land wars of the 1840s and 1860s.
Paeroa began as a gold-mining town, built in 1875, long after the wars, on land bought from two local Māori Chiefs, Tukukino and Taraia. Nor was the surrounding region particularly associated with the fighting, being too far east for the Waikato war and too far north for the campaigns of the great warrior prophet Te Kooti Arikirangi Te Turuki in the late 1860s.
There is, however, one intriguing reference to Paeroa in Papers Past, the online repository of so much nineteenth-century pioneer journalism. It comes from the New Zealand Herald for 29 June 1883:
Te Kooti was pardoned by the government in 1883, shortly before this visit, but was subsequently imprisoned when he attempted to revisit his old home in the East of the North Island. He was released on the understanding that he should not try to return to his old haunts, a decision upheld by the Court of Appeal in 1890. By then it was clear that he was an incurable alcoholic. He died a couple of years later.TE KOOTI AT PAEROA, OHINEMURI
I am informed that Te Kooti, and about fifty followers, have visited Paeroa, and besides being the ‘lions’ of the place were masters of the situation. They were impartial patrons of the hotels. A guard was mounted at each, and none of the rank and file were allowed more than a pint of beer. Not so, the doughty chief, his rangatiras, and his secretary. They fraternised with a deputations [sic.] of ‘illustrious’ citizens, and champagne and brandy were quaffed right heartily, and of course friendship pledged. As far as concerns the publicans, the most interesting feature to them will be, who is to pay for the liquor consumed? It was deemed not only proper but essential that due deference should be paid to ‘the man of blood.’ The well-known surveyor, (Mr R. C. Long) was smoking his pipe when the secretary intimated that he must cease to do so in the presence of Te Kooti. Mr. Long promptly complied, but whether as a mark of respect or esteem or an act of discretion, the public have not yet been enlightened. [2]
The rather facetious tone the Herald’s Thames correspondent uses about this ‘man of blood’ (a phrase last used, if I’m not mistaken, for King Charles Stuart in the English Civil Wars) is typical of late nineteenth-century European attitudes to Māori. No-one was laughing in 1868, when Te Kooti and his men slaughtered 54 settlers at Matawhero, in response (it is thought) to his unjust imprisonment on the Chatham Islands.
General Grant, too, ended badly. His tour of the world at the conclusion of his second term as president took him to New Zealand in 1879, where he too (alas) displayed ‘intemperance’ at a state banquet, and was even accused by a local newspaperman of ogling some of the young girls present with inappropriate zeal.
Perhaps one could contrive some kind of meeting? Te Kooti’s favourite mode of transportation was on a white charger, and Grant, too, was immensely fond of horses. Could they have met out riding, somewhere in the Hauraki Plains, and shared a libation from Grant’s hipflask? Why not, after all?
Whichever way one plays it, though, it’s a pretty sad story: Grant’s solitary last days out on the veranda, labouring away at his memoirs, as penniless and disgraced as he was when the Civil War began. Te Kooti, expelled by the Māori King from the great 1878 peace conference at Hikurangi for breaking the ban on alcohol, reduced to cadging drinks from strangers in the hotels of Paeroa. ‘David,’ our putative author, starting his civil war novel with such high hopes, then discarding the sedulously annotated ex-library book which had inspired it all in a Hospice shop a few short months later.
Let’s honour them all, obscure and famous, rich and poor, invader and native. Conflict brings strange bedfellows. ‘It is well,’ to quote the great Virginian Robert E. Lee, ‘that war is so terrible – we would grow too fond of it!’
Notes:
[1] Bruce Catton, Grant Takes Command. 1st ed. 1969 (London: J. M. Dent & Sons Limited, 1970), vii.
[2] ‘Te Kooti at Paeroa, Ohinemuri.’ New Zealand Herald, Vol. XX, Issue 6744 (29 June 1883), 5. Papers Past: https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/NZH18830629.2.39.
Olivia Macassey, ed.: brief 56 (2018)[12/9-24/11/2015]
[2796 words]
[Published in brief 56 (2018): 97-107;
Ghost Stories (Auckland: Lasavia Publishing, 2019): 69-78.]
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