From
news bulletins from The Chronicle of Higher Education
for Monday, July 3.
MAGAZINES & JOURNALS

A glance at the summer issue of "DoubleTake":
Mark Twain and Ulysses S. Grant's twilight friendship

Rachel Cohen, a writer, offers a glimpse into the sometimes
competitive, sometimes bittersweet friendship between the
irascible Mark Twain and the stoic Ulysses S. Grant. The two
men's relationship began when Twain was brought to the Oval
Office to meet the then-president. Twain -- nervously cracking
jokes until the war hero cracked a smile -- later said of the
encounter, "I got away under the smoke of my volley." The closer
bond grew years later, when the two kept each other's company,
simultaneously failed in their sundry respective business
ventures, and dealt with their fame. But the relationship was
marked by a tendency on Twain's part to mock Grant during toasts
and speeches. Twain, gloating after one such prank during
Grant's failed reelection campaign in 1879, wrote to a friend,
"I shook him up like dynamite. ... I knew I could lick him. ...
My truths had wracked all the bones of his body apart." Though
Grant had laughed along with the rest of the audience during the
roast, the insults were surely not lost on him or the public,
and Twain probably later "suffered the insomniac twinges of
having humiliated a friend in public," notes Ms. Cohen. Grant's
election loss, combined with an inoperable tumor in his throat
and bankruptcy, perhaps further galvanized Twain into helping
his ailing friend land a lucrative publishing contract for his
autobiography (finished just two weeks before the former
president's death) and for eulogizing Grant in Twain's own
memoirs. Writes Ms. Cohen, "In the long summer before Grant
died, they were just two friends, writing. ... [I]n the writing,
they rescued each other." The article is not available online,
but more information about the magazine may be found at its
World Wide Web site, at http://www.duke.edu/doubletake/

Shelley Fisher Fishkin
University of Texas