Two Titans.

Grant and Twain: The Story of a Friendship That Changed America, by Mark Perry (Random House, 294 pp., $24.95)

EIGHTEEN EIGHTY-FIVE was a good year for American publishing. The Century magazine printed an article on grizzly-bear hunting by Theodore Roosevelt, excerpts from three new novels (William Dean Howells's The Rise of Silas Lapham, Henry James's The Bostonians, and Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn), and a portion of a work of non-fiction (Ulysses Grant's Personal Memoirs). Twain's and Grant's works are acknowledged masterpieces, and the stories behind their creation are famous in literary history; the writing of Grant's Personal Memoirs belongs to the annals of heroism as well. Mark Perry's Grant and Twain recounts the twists and turns, and conveys much of the pathos, despite serious limitations.

Mark Twain began Huckleberry Finn in the summer of 1876. The Missouri-born riverboat pilot and journalist had been translated by success as a writer and lecturer into the New England upper class. He called his new project "another boy's book"--its major characters having first appeared in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer--wrote 16 chapters, then stopped. Huck and his companion Jim, a runaway slave, had sailed down the Mississippi to Cairo, Illinois, where the Ohio joins it. Should they turn northeast, to freedom, Jim's goal? Twain couldn't decide, and Perry accepts the traditional view that he let the book languish. In 1882 Twain took a trip of his own down the Mississippi, his first in years, sometimes taking the helm himself. "I had her most of the time on [the pilot's] watch. He would be down and sleep, and leave me there to dream that the years had not slipped away." Reinspired, Twain took up Huckleberry Finn in 1883, sending his characters south. "I haven't piled up MS so in years," he wrote excitedly. "I wrote 4000 words today & I touch 3000 & upwards pretty often."

But he was not simply regurgitating happy memories. The people Huck and Jim encounter as they move downstream are scoundrels or pillars of a dysfunctional society. Huckleberry Finn indicts a culture, while hymning the river and limning a surprising friendship. When the book went on sale in 1884, its rough edges shocked some readers: The Public Library of Concord, Mass., refused to buy it, on the grounds that it was "suitable only for the slums." Twain knew the controversy would sell 25,000 extra copies.

Ulysses Grant took up the pen in 1884. He had fought in the Mexican War, failed in business, won the Civil War, won two presidential elections, and failed in business yet again--this time, bankrupted by a crooked partner. He had also felt the first torments of a fatal throat cancer. Richard Gilder and Robert Johnson, editors of the Century magazine, asked Grant to write accounts of some of his battles. He produced a flat article on Shiloh; they coaxed him to add detail and point of view; Grant found his voice. "Suddenly a battery with musketry opened upon us from the edge of the woods on the other side of the clearing. The shells and balls whistled about our ears very fast for about a minute. I do not think it took us longer than that to get out of range and out of sight. In the sudden start we made, Major Hawkins lost his hat. He did not stop to pick it up." Gilder and Johnson then asked if he might write an entire book. "Do you really think anyone would be interested in a book by me?" Grant asked.

Twain was a friendly acquaintance of Grant's. When he learned of the terms for which Grant was working, he was both indignant and keenly interested: "To offer General Grant five hundred dollars for a magazine article was not only the monumental injustice of the nineteenth century, but of all centuries." Twain offered to publish the book himself, offering Grant a 20 percent royalty, twice what the others were proposing. Grant demurred, saying he did not want to be the "robber of a publisher." Twain said he would make $100,000 in six months.

There is a ready-made theme here, of Grant and Twain as figures of the Gilded Age, when the honey of money trapped even the comic poet and the great commander. Perry gives it a few pokes, but mostly lets it alone, and thank goodness. Since the death of my lord the patron, all writing has been for profit.

Grant went to work, assisted by his son Frederick and by Adam Badeau, a former aide, who supplied him with maps and records. Distractions pelted him. Badeau turned out to be a skunk, threatening to tell the world (falsely) that he was doing the actual writing. And Grant was dying; often he could not eat, drink, or sleep for pain. His doctor's attempts to soothe him are heartbreaking. "'Pretend you are a boy again,' [Dr.] Schrady instructed the ex-president. 'Curl up your legs,' he instructed soothingly, 'lie over on your side and bend your neck while I tuck the covers around your shoulders.' Grant turned over, as instructed. 'Now go to sleep like a good boy.'"

The completed Memoirs can overwhelm readers who are not Civil War buffs. Yet many sections, such as Grant's account of the Mexican War and his discussion of the importance of telegraphy, are riveting. His set piece on the surrender at Appomattox has burned itself into the American mind. The dominant character type of the American military, from Washington to Tommy Franks--laconic, unyielding, yet humane--here reaches its apogee. Grant finished on July 19, 1885, and died four days later.

Each of these stories is a classic, and if you are unfamiliar with them, you might as well learn about them here. But Mark Perry claims there is a deeper spiritual connection between Grant and Twain. He finds it in the Vicksburg campaign of 1863, when Grant broke the Confederacy's hold on the Mississippi. Twain, says Perry, had a "special attraction to what Grant meant and symbolized: For in descending the Mississippi in the summer of 1863 ... Grant had transformed the 'war for the Union' into a 'war to free the slaves'--the political conflict became a social revolution. So, too, after Chapter 16, Adventures of Huckleberry Finn becomes less of 'another boy's book' and more of a symbolic journey."

But that little "So, too" assumes too much. Grant never made the parallel; nor did Twain, even though he survived Grant by 25 years. No critic that I am familiar with has ever made it. The most Perry can find to back it up is an idea Twain toyed with, of writing yet another tale in which Tom and Huck would fight in a Confederate unit, and meet a Union soldier named U. S. Grant. But Twain never wrote that story. Perry's connection exists only in his own head.

There remains the problem of Perry's prose. The form of biography is so compelling that little is demanded of it as an art. We hope for Boswell, but so long as the subject gets born, does stuff, and dies, any old words will do. Our standards shift, however, when biographers take up writers, whom they must quote. To go from Twain and Grant to Perry's too frequent worst is like turning from morning birds to a motel alarm clock. Extolling for exhorting, disinterested for uninterested, single most, "Horses came to Ulysses like money to [his father]," "two rising stars of America's nascent literary tradition"--a pox on them all. If Perry leads some readers back to his subjects, he will make partial recompense.