Books: Gilded Grandpa

NINE LIVES WITH GRANDFATHER—Stephen Longstreet—Julian Messner ($2.50).

In the spring his oldest daughter-in-law would look the old man in the eye : “Well, Gramp . . . What are you going to wear tomorrow in the Easter parade?”

“Clothing,” the old gentleman would reply. “I’m too old to look good naked.”

Cursing the Vanderbilts, Astors, Goulds and their ilk, as well as the hillbilly Confederate Longstreets who claimed relationship, Grandpa was a tyrant who made Clarence Day’s father seem effete. Whether or not he was actually “the greatest living American,” he did have a variety of attractions: his memories of General Grant, his Russian ballet girl, his box at the burlesque theater, his priceless cellar, his friendships with Mark Twain and numerous quaint characters of Manhattan’s gilded age.

All this might well have made Grandpa Longstreet a character to end all recollections of the Diamond Jim Brady-Stanford White-Harry K. Thaw-Anna Held era. But Nine Lives with Grandfather is not that good a book. At best, it is readable, escapist nonfiction, often amusing but seldom really funny. At worst, it is merely the sixth book in two years by 33-year-old Stephen Longstreet, a prolific writer who also operates under at least four pseudonyms and who draws almost as facilely as he writes.