Away we go into a Presidential transition, one of the most worrisome since 1860-61, when the unity of the nation hung in the balance. Henry Adams, not quite twenty-three, the grandson and great-grandson of U.S. Presidents, passed that season in Washington, serving as personal secretary to his father, Charles Francis Adams, a congressman from Massachusetts, while making the social rounds and working behind the scenes as an anonymous correspondent for the Boston Daily Advertiser. Adams was also drafting a magazine essay and sending voluminous letters to his brother Charles, in which he promised to supply “all the gossip.” These private letters were nevertheless intended, Adams wrote, to be read “a century or two hence,” as a “memorial of manners and habits at the time of the great secession of 1860.”
Adams’s point of view in his Washington play-by-play remains elusive, since it was deeply vested in personal motives and relations. He wrote about power “from within,” as David S. Brown puts it in his new biography, “The Last American Aristocrat: The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams” (Scribner). Adams approached that winter in Washington as some combination of reporter, satirist, historian, and political operative. In his correspondence, his tone was frequently upbeat (“We’re chipper as can be,” he told his brother), and in his anonymous reporting he often channelled the moderate Republican positions he’d been fed in his father’s parlor. But in the longer essay he was working on, not published until half a century later, Adams was less cautious. “The credit of the Government was tottering,” he warned.
Adams feared that the Constitution, a document that his family had been arguing about for decades, had licensed a “sectional power within the Government,” which had now “raised its hand to destroy that Government.” The corruption of the outgoing Buchanan Administration seemed to him grotesque: “The frauds discovered . . . had begun to assume a vague and astonishing size,” while “public confidence and courage were shattered.” Looking back on the period, in 1907, Adams filled out the picture: the secessionists were “unbalanced in mind,” “fit for medical treatment, like other victims of hallucination,” “haunted by suspicion,” and prone to “violent morbid excitement.”
Adams was an antislavery Northerner with a caste affinity for Southern gentlemen like his college friend William (Rooney) Lee, Robert E. Lee’s son. Adams had made a faster start in politics than even his distinguished ancestors, but his sentences imply that he already envisioned a different form of power. He was constructing a sensibility that could organize a wide variety of information, “a hodge-podge of world-fact, private fact, philosophy, irony,” according to his friend William James. His prose often made intricate beauty out of the ironic arrangement of proprietary facts. It was a style that could be written only from a front-row seat on the sidelines, since it made a show of both its access and its independence.
Henry Adams was born in 1838, “under the shadow of Boston State House,” according to the famous opening sentence of his book “The Education of Henry Adams.” The “nest of associations” that surrounded him from birth put him within earshot of power from the start. He grew up tiptoeing around a man whom everyone in his family called “the President”: John Quincy Adams, his grandfather. He passed summer afternoons reading Sir Walter Scott on a bed of deteriorating congressional documents. His destiny was, he wrote, to be a “stable-companion to statesmen.” Early in his life, he documented their power. In old age, he recorded their inconsequence. Once, during the Wilson Administration, Adams welcomed the Assistant Secretary of the Navy to his home on Lafayette Square, which looked out on the White House. “Nothing that you minor officials or the occupant of that house can do will affect the history of the world for long,” he told his visitor, Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Anyone writing about Adams’s life has to trellis the narrative to “The Education,” written during Adams’s strange, Gnostic last period, under the influence of medieval stained glass and stonework, and not made public until after his death, in 1918. It is an astonishing performance in the key of autobiography, a kind of lucid dream through which historical names and events stray. A theme develops early: “life was double.” Childhood summers in Quincy, “a two hours’ walk from Beacon Hill,” were peonies, the smell of hay, “peaches, lilacs, syringas”; winters in Boston were “cold grays” and “muddy thaws.” Weakened by scarlet fever and smaller than his brothers, Adams noted in his “character and processes of mind” a “fining-down process of scale.” While men like his grandfather had sat in “the best pews” since “the glacial epoch,” he found a kindred spirit in “the Madam,” his grandmother, Louisa Catherine Adams, who kept a quietly appointed life apart, and represented art and interiority:
In these staged contests with the flinty, Adams always sides with the sumptuous. He prefers women to men, the humidity of Washington to the cold of Boston, Paris to London; in some real way that he needed to monitor carefully, he preferred the South to the North. But he seemed to require both sets of values: his sentences mix long clauses with short quips, the leisurely punctuated by the terse, description by maxim.
Adams’s writing can be understood as his lifelong attempt to draw out the implications of his famous name. Late in life, trying to escape himself, he travelled to Samoa. But even there the locals, fondly recalling a visit from the U.S.S. John Adams, knew who he was. Adams may be the first American writer to have checked his privilege, as we would put it. Brown’s term “American aristocrat” would have struck Adams as an oxymoron, but he took for granted a social position so fixed that it could be wielded against itself. He enjoyed both what he called the “safeguards” of the Adams pedigree and the spoils of a large fortune inherited from his mother. Brahmin was the name given by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., around 1860 to members of Boston’s Old Guard families, who, wealthy from industries whose economic miracle depended on free or exploited labor—the China trade, the railroads, manufacturing—began to supply themselves with heraldry and property. More statesmen than merchants, the Adamses were secure enough in their status to break many of the Brahmin codes, but Adams concluded that he was “held up solely by social position and a sharp tongue.” That “solely” is a classic Adams note of overstatement: those two ingredients not only held him up but fed a lifelong literary project of situating a single human imagination inside concentric rings of historical time, a presence at once puny and, since it spoke so grandly of its inconsequence, huge.
The title “The Education of Henry Adams” recalls novels like “The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling.” But its structure reverses the classic formula of a charismatic nobody rewarded, in a final turn, with his rightful wealth and pedigree. “Probably no child, born in the year, held better cards than he,” Adams writes of himself. Just like that, one very useful narrative structure, that of adversity overcome, is ruled out. Instead, Adams tells the story of failing up: he notes, with each unearned success, the bankruptcy of the very distinction between winning and losing. At Harvard, he carouses with Virginians, graduates in the middle of the pack, and is chosen as class speaker. He meanders through Europe, fails to master German, loses interest in studying law, and is made his father’s chief Washington aide. When Lincoln then appoints his father minister to the Court of St. James’s, Adams heads to London and plays a role in keeping the British government neutral during the Civil War, while his brother Charles stays and fights with bravery in the Gettysburg campaign. After a brief turn as a pundit calling for government reform, Adams is invited to teach medieval history at Harvard. He protests, very honorably, that he knows nothing about the subject; he is given the job anyway.
The pace of the book in its early chapters implies an even distribution of these life incidents across its length, as in a conventional autobiography. But “The Education” is not conventional, and not even quite an autobiography. Adams usually refers to himself in the third person, adding a grand study of failure to the library of volumes written about his family’s legendary statesmen. Adams saw himself as a passenger in his life, riding his own name. “He accepted the situation,” he wrote, “as though he had been a party to it, and under the same circumstances would do it again, the more readily for knowing the exact values.” At times this Henry Adams resembles a persona, a little like the feckless antihero whom T. S. Eliot called J. Alfred Prufrock.
The sense that your life is happening not to you but to a kind of emissary dispatched into social and historical space is something many writers have felt. Henry Adams writes sentences; “Henry Adams” goes to soireés. Adams’s choice makes “Henry Adams” the subject of gossip between the writer and the reader; even more than before, Adams could claim to be the ultimate insider. “I am trying to persuade myself that there is any such thing as me,” he wrote to a friend in 1915.“More and more I am forced to admit that the whole show is a piece of idiocy.”
He published as a game of peekaboo—by half measures, back channels, and guises. The obvious differences aside, he recalls Emily Dickinson, his contemporary, in the ways that he constructed alternative platforms for publication within an eager coterie. His writing was sometimes cultivated, like a hobby farm, as a wealthy man’s pastime. When he published a novel, “Democracy” (1880), anonymously, and another, “Esther” (1884), under a pseudonym, their authorship fuelled speculation among readers, which Adams clearly enjoyed. A serene book about the Middle Ages, “Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres,” was initially written as a gift to his nieces and privately distributed. Adams’s strangest book was “Tahiti: Memoirs of Arii Taimai,” dictated to him by a Tahitian queen during his late-in-life travels. His name appears nowhere on it or in it: he calls himself Tauraatua I Amo, the honorific given him by the clan. “The Education” was initially circulated only among a small group of Adams’s friends; when it was officially published, in 1918, it appeared with a preface written by Adams yet signed by his old student and friend Henry Cabot Lodge. The preface concluded that Adams, a “small” artist, had failed to find sufficient “literary form.”
He was mercurial and restless, but he toyed with a respectable life in the Boston bubble and among the Washington élite. In 1872, at thirty-four, Adams married Marian Hooper, known to everyone as Clover, a witty “Voltaire in petticoats,” according to her childhood friend Henry James. (Clover famously said of him, “He chaws more than he bites off.”) Soon Adams resigned his job at Harvard and the couple moved to Washington in search of a social life. The scene in Cambridge, according to Adams, was like a “faculty-meeting without business,” so desolate that it would have “starved a polar bear.”
Adams’s life as a Bostonian in Washington, hiding out in the spotlight, is the focus of Ormond Seavey’s “Henry Adams in Washington: Linking the Personal and Public Lives of America’s Man of Letters” (University of Virginia). By 1880, a tight circle of intimates, who christened themselves “the Five of Hearts”—the Adamses, John and Clara Hay, and the eccentric geologist Clarence King—had formed. The group later incorporated officially, even designing its own china pattern. Adams went to work every day at the State Department library, returning in the evening to the large house he and Clover rented on H Street to socialize with friends and famous callers, including Matthew Arnold on a U.S. tour sponsored by P. T. Barnum. The Hays and the Adamses bought a parcel of land facing on Lafayette Square and hired the renowned architect H. H. Richardson, their old friend, to design a conjoined house in the Romanesque style, looking across the square at the White House.
The consuming work of this period was Adams’s nine-volume history of the fifteen years after his great-grandfather’s Administration, “History of the United States of America During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison.” It was traditional for Adams men to lose themselves in the family papers, but Adams chose the careers of his ancestors’ rivals. To many, it is the greatest work of history written by an American. In its opening survey of America in the year 1800, Washington is seen as “a fever-stricken morass,” the “shapeless, unfinished Capitol” backed by swampland. A visitor would see only “a government capable of sketching a magnificent plan, and willing to give only a half-hearted pledge for its fulfillment.”
For pages at a time, Adams’s “History” is a jigsaw design of juxtaposed facts and quotations. It is hard to imagine the archival work necessary to write even a single one of its paragraphs. Very few lay readers have delved in. (When Elizabeth Hardwick was asked whether her divorce from Robert Lowell had been painful, she reportedly replied, “Oh, not at all, except, of course, the usual intellectuals’ quarrel over which of us should get Henry Adams’s History.”) It struck some at the time as a quixotic, monkish endeavor, or merely as a way of keeping a daily appointment with his desk at the State Department, where no doubt many other men of means scribbled their days away. The volumes were published between 1889 and 1891, but Adams’s interest in the project petered out. “As long as I could make life work, I stood by it,” he remarked cryptically, when he was rounding the bend.
Adams alludes to his “History” only once in “The Education,” and only to disparage it:
Indeed, “The Education” leaves out everything from Adams’s busiest and most productive period. He abruptly hops off the time line in 1871, leaping over his marriage to Clover as well as her tragic death, by suicide, in 1885. Clover’s name never appears in “The Education.” The story picks up in 1892, with barely a note of explanation: suddenly, it’s simply “Twenty Years After.” Part of the book’s fascination derives from this twenty-year black hole. Though Adams may have intended “The Education” as a caution against biography, he had to have known the void would be filled. Brown’s “The Last American Aristocrat” follows two multivolume biographies of Adams, by Ernest Samuels and Edward Chalfant, and a recent biography of Clover, by Natalie Dykstra. The Adamses, Brown suggests, could not conceive a child; Adams worked long hours, and Clover’s days settled into tedium. The couple walled themselves off from the world beyond their exclusive set. Their barbs became too severe, their gossip too corrosive, the Five of Hearts too impenetrable.
Suicide and mental illness were so rampant in Boston’s ruling class that secrecy about it sometimes appears to be the key to the entire Brahmin code. Clover once joked to her father, “The insane asylum seems to be the goal of every good and conscientious Bostonian.” (In the years after Clover’s death, her sister, Ellen, threw herself in front of a train, and her brother, Edward, jumped from a third-story window.) Clover broke down on the Adamses’ wedding trip, in Egypt, and again when her beloved father died, in the spring of 1885. Before she killed herself, she had been “off her feed,” Adams wrote, for months. Clover had taken up photography and showed a real mastery of its rapidly developing technology, but her last photos, taken on a trip to West Virginia to buoy her spirits, look vacant when compared with the warm scenes she’d once captured. On the afternoon of December 6, 1885, Adams returned home from the dentist and found Clover dead, a vial of potassium cyanide, one of her darkroom chemicals, drained beside her.
