The vibrant Clover of old would have been pleased—and vastly amused. She had never liked the Transcript. It was too Irish, she had complained to her father—so preoccupied with the doings of O’Haras and Flanagans that it overlooked her Beacon Hill friends.
With public scandal heaped upon private humiliation, Henry vowed to survive by pushing straight on without looking back. “I feel like a volunteer in his first battle,” he told Hay. “If I don’t run ahead at full speed, I shall run away.” Even as he urged Hay to expedite the family’s move to Washington, he stoutly insisted there was no cause for alarm. “Never fear for me,” he declared. “I shall come out all right from this—what shall I call it?—Hell!”
H. H. Richardson realized at once how much it would mean to Henry to have the Cleveland Hearts installed next door. “I am driving your house with all my might and main,” he wrote to John, “and do earnestly hope you and Mrs. Hay will decide to move in this year, even if it does necessitate some little picnicking and even discomfort in the beginning.”
True to his word, the architect stopped only once, for an umbilical hernia. Painting a comic picture of his dilapidation, Richardson told Hay that his massive frame was now “so covered and held together with pads, buckles, straps etc. that when I stretch real hard I’m not quite certain that I’ll come together in the same place again.”
The trusses were the only light moment in a grim season. In spite of Henry’s resolve to focus on the future, he soon found himself thrust into the past. Each day brought a flood of letters from friends, forcing him to think about his wife. Though he destroyed most of them, he welcomed the task of responding, which passed the time and asked of him no more than he was able to give.
To Lizzie Cameron, who was still in bed with an undiagnosed ailment, he wished a quick recovery for his own sake. “All Clover’s friends have now infinite value for me,” he told her. “I have got to live henceforward on what I can save from the wreck of her life, and it is lucky for me that she had no friends but the best and truest.” Sending her one of Clover’s favorite pieces of jewelry as a keepsake, he asked, “Will you keep it and sometimes wear it to remind you of her?”
In a letter to Mrs. Samuel Gray Ward, whom the Adamses had befriended during their honeymoon trip on the Nile, Henry touchingly recalled Clover’s affection for her. “You were closely associated with the heaviest trials and the keenest pleasures of our life. The peace that you have reached in this world was a delight to her, and the memory of our twelve years of perfect happiness will always bring back to me the thought of you.” Having witnessed Clover’s unhappiness in Egypt, Mrs. Ward understood what Henry meant by “heaviest trials,” but she probably did not catch the subtlety of his arithmetic. The Adamses had been married for thirteen and one-half years, not twelve. The calculation was not a mistake. For the rest of his life, Henry would date his tragedy from the beginning of Clover’s breakdown in the spring of 1885, nearly eight months before the horrific, unthinkable day of her death.
Again and again Henry expressed surprise and regret at finding that he did not stand alone in his anguish. As he told Mrs. Ward, “My table was instantly covered with messages from men and women whose own hearts were still aching with the same wounds, and who received me, with a new burst of their own sorrows, into their sad fraternity. My pain seemed lost in the immensity of human distress.” To his publisher, Henry Holt, Adams observed, “What a vast fraternity it is,—that of ‘Hearts that Ache.’ With Mrs. Ward, Adams spoke from his heart, but with Holt, who shared the uneasy secret of Esther, Adams fell into self-conscious bitterness: “How we do suffer! And we go on laughing; for, as a practical joke at our expense, life is a success.”
Across the Atlantic, Henry James had been stunned to hear of Clover’s suicide, which he obliquely described as her “solution of the knottiness of existence.” Sharing the news with a friend, he voiced his sympathy for Henry Adams and mourned the loss of “that intensely lively Washington salon.” If James wrote to Adams—and he almost certainly would have wanted to pay tribute to his “Voltaire in petticoats”—the letter has not survived. A few years later, James would write “The Modern Warning,” a short story about a woman who poisoned herself. Like Clover, the protagonist was intelligent, outspoken, and sharply critical of things English.
James also sent word of Clover’s death to his friend Constance Fenimore Woolson. Though Fenimore did not know the Adamses, she instinctively understood the loss to the Hays. On the day after Christmas, seated before a velvet-framed triptych with photographs of James and Hay and Howells, Fenimore sent her condolences to Hay. Picturing the new houses on Lafayette Square, she imagined that Clover’s absence would make the beginning of their new life together “particularly desolate and sad.” As for suicide, she said, “I have never been able to think that a sudden death is to be deplored for the one who is taken,—I should like to die without warning myself; but for those who are left, it is very terrible.”
By the middle of January, Henry was sufficiently settled in his new house at 1603 H Street to offer the Hays a place to stay until the carpetlayers and paperhangers finished their work next door. Theodore Dwight, the State Department librarian, had moved in to keep Henry company, and the two of them were soon able to take their meals in the second-floor dining room, near the pretty stone fireplace carved with dogwood blossoms.
Henry passed most of his days on the second floor. In his study overlooking the snowy lawns of Lafayette Park and the White House, he answered letters, and in the adjoining large library, he spent hours hanging pictures. “You have no conception what a vast resource this offers,” he told Hay. Intended to serve as a drawing room, the library, dominated by a fireplace of sea-green onyx, would show off the best of the Adamses’ art collection. Turners and Constables were hung on the walls, and jades and porcelains were arranged atop the bookcases. With their fresh varnish, the new wooden floors made gleaming frames for the Oriental rugs. Conspicuously absent were Clover’s great treasures, the portraits of Mr. and Mrs. Grove by Sir Joshua Reynolds. They would soon be donated to the nearby Corcoran Gallery of Art, which promised to hang them in a spot of Henry’s choosing.
Before the month was out, the Hays took possession of 800 Sixteenth Street and made the dismaying discovery that Henry was planning to desert them. Thinking ahead to summer, he knew he did not want to subject himself to the heat and desolation of Washington, but he could not face a return to Beverly Farms, the scene of Clover’s disintegration. Europe was also out of the question—“full of ghosts,” he felt. Ultimately he settled on Japan, hoping, he said, that “where everything is upside-down, I shall find myself in keeping with the rest.” To his pleasure, John La Farge had agreed to come as his guest.
As May drew to a close, Henry said good-bye to the Hays, left his checkbook in the care of Theodore Dwight, and set off for New York hoping to “get out of the rest of life every new flavor it has.” At the Brunswick he found Clarence King in fine form, buoyed by new financing for his Mexican silver mines and confidently predicting that they would pay off at last. Henry worked up enough courage to leave a copy of Esther in King’s care.
The travelers went off on June 3, 1886, “in high spirits,” King wrote to Hay, “La Farge dodging creditors and sheriffs all day and trying to borrow a few thou’ right and left wherewith to paint Japan red.” In Albany they headed west aboard a luxurious private railway car supplied by Henry’s brother Charles, president of the Union Pacific. While La Farge sketched the scenes rolling past their windows, Adams napped and read Buddhism. During a stop in Omaha, a young reporter spotted the special car and inquired about their plans. La Farge, his gray-green eyes twinkling through his thick spectacles, soberly declared that they were in search of Nirvana. “It’s out of season!” the lad shot back.
Beyond a love of cigars and good conversation, Adams and La Farge had little in common. Adams had admired the artist’s stained glass since the early 1870s, when Richardson, La Farge, and Saint-Gaudens col
laborated on Trinity Church in Boston, but La Farge was bored to stupefaction by Henrys passion for American diplomacy in the early nineteenth century. In La Farge’s view, the War of 1812 was “the very dullest affair [Adams] could find! but that is what it means to be an Adams; puritanism must come out in seeking the disagreeable somehow.” At six feet, La Farge towered over his friend. Adams’s sense of fashion extended only to wearing black suits in winter and white in summer. La Farge wore nothing but fine silks and linens next to his skin and had been known to spend an hour donning and shedding shirts and ties before arriving at a combination that met his fastidious standards. Intellectually, both men were extravagantly endowed, but their styles of mind sprang from opposing instincts. La Farge was a sponge, soaking up philosophy, mythology, and literature as eagerly as he absorbed art. Adams was a distiller, a seeker of essences who cared less for particulars than large truths.
Augustus Saint-Gaudens in his studio, painted by Kenyon Cox. When Saint-Gaudens shaved off his beard, Clarence King was surprised to find the artist’s chin “as hard as and sharp as his sculptor’s chisel.”LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
As a moralist, La Farge could be as severe and high-minded as his friend, but he was rarely troubled by the conscience that tyrannized Adams. The artist had long since left his wife and nine children in Newport, claiming that the climate disagreed with him and that his atelier would enjoy more prosperity amid the tycoons of New York. He never lacked for commissions, but his finances were in perpetual disarray. The artist meant well, his wife explained to their children, but sometimes he “forgot” them. On these occasions, which were not infrequent, she had no one to turn to but the Almighty. It was an ironic fate. Margaret La Farge owed her deep faith to her husband, who had insisted that she convert to Catholicism despite his own unwillingness to practice the creed in any remotely conventional manner.
Whatever Henry Adams’s shortcomings as a husband, they paled beside the droit de seigneur of John La Farge. During his courtship of the beautiful Margie Perry in 1859 and 1860, La Farge unashamedly announced that he craved “inequality.” “[Y]ou must love me the most,” he said. “I will exact it from you to the last drop, Margaret.” She must also promise to love him forever, “even if my love for you were to die.” These edicts, issued incessantly, were accompanied by orders to learn to ride and read French and promises to direct her reading for life. As for Catholicism, there was no point in quarreling, he said. “Please yield—as I feel that I am right.”
Eternally at odds with life’s intrusions on art, La Farge in 1883 joined two acquaintances in forming a company designed to free him from business worries. Two years later, the enterprise collapsed in a storm of lawsuits when La Farge discovered that his chief financial partner had put up only half the amount he had promised and had then proceeded to borrow heavily against the company’s assets. In addition to warring over money, La Farge had the delicate mission of retrieving from his erstwhile partners a number of life-size photographs of women who had posed for him in various states of undress. To imbue his church windows with “high character,” La Farge explained to the court, he used models who were “ladies of social standing and refinement.” His partners argued that the photographs were the property of the company while La Farge insisted that to surrender the pictures would violate the “sacred pledge” he had made to protect the ladies’ privacy.
La Farge responded to such distractions by decrying the materialistic spirit of the age. Fuming about the austerity of the budgets for murals and stained glass in churches and public buildings, he said, “You can hardly imagine how absurd it is to realize that you cannot give certain extra folds to a cloak because they will cost so many dollars more, or that an extra angel’s head is worth seventy-two dollars and must be cut out.” But when a generous patron like William C. Whitney gave him carte blanche to do his “damnedest,” La Farge bristled with contempt. The millionaire was acidly informed that “he had not money enough to pay for what I could do,” La Farge told a friend; Whitney would get only what the artist considered “fairly fitting.”
Adams and La Farge were a few days out from San Francisco, gnashing their teeth at rough seas and the hymn-singing missionaries who shared their mail boat, when Clarence King tied up a parcel and hastily penned a note to John Hay. “I send you a novel I have just read called ‘Esther,’ he began. “It has given me a strange, painful interest and I await with some palpitations to hear what you say of it and who you conclude wrote it.” When the book arrived in Lafayette Square, Clara read a few pages and told John that she thought it sounded like him or Adams or King. Hay asked her to read it aloud. When she finished, he immediately wrote King to ask why none of Henry’s friends had ever heard of the book.
From the Sagamore Hotel on New York’s Lake George, where he was passing the Fourth of July, King explained Henry’s “quaint, archaic project” of issuing the book without publicity to see if “a dull world” would notice.
Later came to his mind a second reason why he should let the volume lie where it had fallen in the silent depths of American stupidity and that was a feeling of regret at having exposed his wife’s religious experiences and as it were made of her a clinical subject vis-a-vis of religion as in Democracy he had shown her in contact with politics. Later when Dr. Hooper died of heart failure as the old man in Esther died he felt that it was too personal and private a book to have brought into its due prominence so he has let it die.
Adams had given King leave to share the book with the Hays provided they told no one else. King found Esther “far more compact and vivid” than Democracy “but one of the most painful things imaginable. I had the hardihood to say to him that he ought to have made Esther jump into Niagara as that was what she would have done. He said ‘certainly she would but I could not suggest it.’”
Writing to Adams on Five of Hearts stationery, Hay said that he would “owe gratitude to King for making me read such a masterpiece of thought and style—and a little grudge to you for not telling me. It is the first New York story I have ever read in which there is real human talk and feeling—of a grade above that of shop-girls and reporters.” Baffled by the silence that had greeted the book, Hay supposed that critics “read nothing unless they are told: otherwise how could they have helped seeing the best thing that has been printed in ten years.” Lacking King’s fortitude, Hay avoided the subjects of Niagara and Esther’s hysteria.
Weeks later, when Hay’s praise reached Adams, the author was pleased that his “melancholy little Esther” had found a friend. “Perhaps I made a mistake even to tell King about it,” he mused to Hay, “but having told him, I could not leave you out. Now let it die! To admit the public to it would be almost unendurable to me. I will not pretend that the book is not precious to me, but its value has nothing to do with the public who could never understand that such a book might be written in one’s heart’s blood.”
Adams and La Farge steamed into the great bay of Yokohama on July 2. Behind the city, soft green hills rose up to a silver sky. Inundated by new smells and sounds, the travelers watched from the deck as muscular Japanese sailors, their open blue-and-white robes fluttering behind them like scarves, transferred the ship’s cargo to a flotilla of sampans. On the quay, a ricksha sped the newcomers to a hotel overlooking the harbor and the vast, smooth sea, which reminded La Farge of the blank expanses in Japanese prints. Late in the afternoon he and Adams ventured out into the crowded streets to dicker with curio peddlers, watch sumo wrestlers, and glimpse a bit of theater with a dwarf acting the part of a spider trapped in a web.
Based in Yokohama, they would explore Tokyo in the company of two former Bostonians. At thirty-three, Ernest Fenollosa was an authority on the art and architecture of Japan. He had come to Tokyo in 1878 to teach philosophy and political science at the Imperial University, and he stayed on to devote himself to art. William Sturgis Bigelow, a first cousin of Clover Adams, had arrived in 1882. Like Clover’s father, he had studied medicine but felt neither the d
esire nor the need to practice. Drawn to Buddhism, he transplanted himself to Japan to build a life around Oriental philosophy and art. Together Bigelow and Fenollosa had collected thousands of paintings, prints, and ceramics for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
Painter, muralist, and stained-glass artist John La Farge, by Clover Adams.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
From the beginning, La Farge was a happier tourist than his companion. He noted every flower, delighted in the smooth roadbed of the local railway, and rejoiced in the “passionate delicacy and care” of Buddhist paintings. Adams recoiled from the “oily, sickish, slightly fetid odor” he smelled everywhere, and throughout his trip would complain that Japanese women were like cheap dolls—wooden, jerky, mechanical. They were “badly made and repulsive,” he told Hay. Tokyo he found remarkable only for “the stench of several hundred thousand open privies.” He also chafed at the tutelage of Bigelow and Fenollosa, who opined rather strenuously on what should and should not be admired. “I was myself a Buddhist when I left America,” Adams grumbled, “but [Bigelow] has converted me to Calvinism.” Impatient with Bigelow’s determination to reason his way to Nirvana, Adams decided that “the only Paradise possible in this world is concentrated in the three little words which the ewig [eternal] Man says to the ewige Woman.”
In spite of his own dissatisfactions, Henry took pleasure in La Farge’s enjoyment. La Farge could linger in a museum for hours, oblivious of itineraries and train schedules. Through vile smells, dismal accommodations, indigestible food, and a touch of cholera, the artist maintained “the neatest humor, the nicest observation, and the evenest temper you can imagine,” Henry marveled, wishing the same for himself. But his mood had only begun to blacken.
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