The Five of Hearts

by Patricia O'Toole

  In mid-July, when Adams and La Farge took up residence amid the shrines of Nikko, Henry scoffed that Nikko’s celebrated temples looked like toys and sarcastically noted that the only thing Japan took seriously was its tea ceremony, a long, complicated ritual that ended with the presentation of a brew he found undrinkable. Anticipating as much, he had brought his own tea from Washington, along with bedsheets, flea powder, tins of Mulligatawny soup, and acid phosphate for stomach upsets. The last, he told Theodore Dwight, “is now my steady tipple.” Adams and La Farge planned to spend a month at Nikko, where La Farge wanted to sketch the landscape in search of inspiration for a major mural he had contracted to paint in New York. With no such occupation for himself, Henry grimly pledged to “make excursions and kill time.”

  Adams scraped bottom a few days later. In need of a confidant, he turned not to one of his fellow Hearts but to an old friend far from the gossipy drawing rooms of Washington and New York. “I do not know whether you heard that I ran away from America,” he wrote Sir Robert Cunliffe in Wales. “Life there had become intolerable. My own existence was knocked to pieces, and I could do nothing with it. My father and mother were suffering under a variety of trials, very different from mine, but not easier to bear. Add to this that my brother-in-law Gurney had broken down, and that the greatest anxiety was felt on his account; and that I could do absolutely nothing for any of them, while I was in a fair way to break down myself. You will see from all this, why I am now writing to you from Nikko … where I see as little as possible to remind me of myself, and can gain three or four months of hardening to my difficulties.” After reciting his long list of grievances against Japan, Henry volunteered that he no longer cared about the political questions he had once passionately debated with Cunliffe. “The world seems to me to have suddenly changed, and to have left me an old man, pretty well stranded and very indifferent to situations which another generation must deal with…. I have been thrown out of the procession, and can’t catch up again.”

  The letter proved a wonderful purgative. Three days later, writing to Hay at eight o’clock “of a sweet morning,” Henry sang the joys of Nikko. While he could not yet appreciate the art of tomb and temple, he was captivated by the meticulous gardens and the natural beauty of towering evergreens and steep mountainsides. As La Farge sketched, Adams photographed. In all, he decided, Nikko could be classed “very high among the sights of the world.”

  La Farge was feeling “delightfully lazy.” Everything in Nikko “exists for a painter’s delight, everything composes or makes pleasant arrangements, and the little odds and ends are charming, so that I sometimes feel as if I liked the small things I have discovered better than the greater which I am forced to recognize.” He reveled in the little waterfall outside their house, the fringe of purple iris around the pool at the base of the falls, the moss-carpeted stone stairways in the forest.

  La Farge had been an aficionado of Oriental art since the 1850s, when he bought his first Japanese woodcuts. One of the earliest American artists to use Japanese techniques, he was particularly attracted to the works of Katsushika Hokusai, who signed himself “The Old Man Crazy about Painting.” Bigelow and Fenollosa considered Hokusai pedestrian, but La Farge admired his passion for perfection, and he was ecstatic on discovering the same “secret beauty” in the architecture of Japan. From the most ornate temple to the plainest house, exquisite care had been taken with finish and detail. The Japanese insistence on simplicity sometimes resulted in interiors that were overly severe, La Farge felt, but on the whole he preferred this “civilized bareness” to the clutter of American homes.

  Reflecting on all that he had seen, La Farge felt himself in a “strange nearness” to the feelings of Japanese artists. He had the sensation that he had always known Japan; it was America that seemed “queer, strange, and often unreasonable.” But when he tried to paint from his feeling of kinship with the Japanese, he failed. His pictures of fountains and statues emitted a stale, documentary air. In the clouds and rugged hills of Nikko he thought he had found an appropriately mystical background for the mural of Christ’s ascension he was to paint in New York, but the ethereal delicacies he savored with his eye eluded his hand.

  Part of La Farge’s trouble was the heat, which Henry estimated to be somewhere “between 90° and 200°.” Even under a parasol La Farge dripped with perspiration and could not keep his spectacles from fogging. Shedding his Western suit for a light Japanese robe, Henry spent the scorching afternoons stretched out on their shady veranda, reading Dante’s Paradiso and writing letters. “Shall I bring you an embroidered kimono for a dressing-gown, or would you rather have a piece of lacquer? or a sword?” he asked Lizzie Cameron, his comely young neighbor on Lafayette Square. “I am puzzled to know what to bring home to please myself. If I knew what would please you, I would load the steamer with it.”

  The unknown ailment Lizzie had suffered during the winter turned out to be pregnancy, and the baby, a girl, was born a few weeks after Adams left for Japan. Adams learned of the birth from John Hay, who forwarded a letter Lizzie had written to Clara. On a sheet of her husband’s U.S. Senate notepaper, Lizzie explained that she and Don had wanted to call the baby by Clover’s given name, Marian. But “Mr. Adams was so far away there was no means of knowing whether he would like it or not. So Mr. Cameron, to gratify his father, gave her the old fashioned name of his grandmother,—Martha Cameron—which I like very well, but which has no association such as the other would have had.” Declaring himself “rather upset” by this news, Henry informed Hay that he had no intention of discussing the matter with Lizzie. Apart from his comments on Esther, Henry made no references to Clover in his letters from Japan. The act of photographing gardens and temples must have filled him with thoughts of his wife, but he did not voice them, and he expected his friends to observe the same silence.

  On the eve of Henry’s departure for Japan, Clarence King had talked knowingly of the transports to be found in the arms of Oriental women, whom he considered gloriously free of the inhibitions of their American sisters. But it was Henry’s opinion that sex did not exist in Japan, “except as a scientific classification.” Not even the geishas he and La Farge twice engaged would change his mind. As he told Hay, “I am lost in astonishment at this flower of eastern culture…. Absolutely the women’s joints clacked audibly, and their voices were metallic.” Henry’s intense aversion may well have been a sign of the sexual turmoil of a forty-eight-year-old man who saw himself as “too young to die and too old to take up existence afresh.” Caught in this limbo, with his natural self-consciousness painfully exaggerated by the circumstances of Clover’s death, Henry might have found it easier to reject the exotic, submissive women of Japan than to entertain desires that seemed to dishonor the memory of his decidedly unsubmissive wife. The most congenial female Adams encountered in his travels was the wife of Ernest Fenollosa, whose ministrations delivered him from the “oily nastiness” of the local cuisine and spared him the labor of negotiating with innkeepers and ricksha drivers.

  La Farge expressed no strong attraction to the women of Japan but did not share Henry’s antipathy. Fascinated by the diminutive bodies of the Japanese, male and female, he sketched appreciatively as a group of working girls sponged the day’s sweat from their bare arms and breasts, and he admired the ruddy glow of female flesh on hot afternoons, when villagers slept nude in the shade.

  At the end of August the travelers left Nikko and headed south. “We have worked conscientiously as mere sightseers until all is confused,” La Farge reported from Kyoto. From a blur of temples, tombs, and gardens, he could summon up no vivid scenes but that of the soft dawn. “Before the city wakes and the air clears, the crows fly from near the temples toward us, as the great bell of the temple sounds, and we hear the call of the gongs and indefinite waves of prayer.” The sight inspired one of his finest watercolors, Sunrise in Fog over Kiyoto. With its dreamy streaks of pale pinks and blues and greens, it owed less to his Japanese
travels than to the Impressionist-style experiments of his youth.

  As their October 2 sailing date approached, both Adams and La Farge were overcome by a sense that they had not made the most of their three months in Japan. La Farge felt “perpetually harassed” by the obligation to sketch the superabundance of artistic details he wanted to remember. Adams’s disappointment centered on bric-a-brac. In the three decades since Commodore Matthew Perry had opened Japan, much of the country’s art had been carried off by foreigners like Bigelow and Fenollosa. After examining uncountable bronzes, lacquers, screens, fans, kimonos, scrolls, swords, chests, ivories, paintings, prints, and porcelains, Adams managed to spend $2,000, but he doubted that he wanted a tenth of his purchases. To Hay, who had put up $1,000 and charged Adams with the mission of shopping on his behalf, Adams wrote that he had acquired “some good small bits of lacquer and any quantity of duds to encumber your tables and mantles; but nothing creditable to our joint genius.”

  The travelers ended their stay in Japan with a pilgrimage to Mount Fuji. Gazing at the violet cone, La Farge confessed that he could think of no words to express “the simple splendor of the divine mountain. As [Adams] remarked, it was worth coming to Japan for this single day.” Adams himself did not bother to note this enthusiasm.

  Crossing the Pacific in the company of the Fenollosas, Adams and La Farge arrived in San Francisco on October 20. Henry’s brother Charles was waiting on the wharf, the bearer of bad news. Whitman Gurney had died of pernicious anemia on September 12, and Charles Francis Adams, Sr., was not expected to live out the year. In the velvet opulence of the Union Pacific directors’ car, Henry and Charles tried vainly to cheer themselves with a trip down the California coast, then swung east to their gloomy errands in Boston.

  For La Farge, Japan had been a long, delicious bath of sensation. He wished he might have it all again, this time without the pressure to sketch. Adams was eager to sum up the experience and move on. “Japan and its art are only a sort of antechamber to China,” he told Hay. “China is the only mystery left to penetrate.” Dreading the return to Lafayette Square, he vowed that once he finished writing his history, he would go to China for good. “You will hear of me then only as of a false pig-tail pendant over eighteen colored suits of clothes; which, I am told, is the swell winter dress of a Chinese gentleman…. Five years hence, I expect to enter the celestial kingdom by that road, if not sooner by a shorter one, as seems more likely to judge from the ways of most of my acquaintances at home.”

  * While Mitchell assumed that his rest cure would work for all high-strung women, he believed that their male counterparts could be helped only by highly individualized treatment. “The mental attitudes of the nervous man demand of his physician the most careful attention, nor can we afford to disregard anything in his ways of life or his habits of thought and action,” he wrote in the December 1877 issue of Medical News. “We must determine for him how far and how much he shall use his mind, whether or not it is well for him to continue his work, whatever it be, what his amusements should be. The careful student of such cases will find in the individuality of his cases the need for the most minute of such studies.” (Quoted in David Rein, S. Weir Mitchell as a Psychiatric Novelist, 35-36.)

  PART THREE

  INTIMACIES

  13

  Rebellious Ore

  With the suicide of Clover Adams, the Five of Hearts was reduced to four, and no one would ever replace “First Heart,” as John Hay had called her. In a year or two, the notepaper with the embossed red hearts would disappear from their correspondence, and they would cease to speak of their quintet. One of the last references to the group appeared in a May 1887 letter from Hay to Adams’s old London intimate, Sir John Clark, who had befriended all of the Hearts during their travels abroad. “Once in a great while,” Hay said of the nomadic Clarence King, “he gives us a day—never more than that—in Washington, and then there is Jubilee among the Four of Hearts—even the vacant chair seems less gloomy when he is there.”

  But if the playful trappings of the Five of Hearts slipped away, their friendship did not. In 1886, while Adams wandered in Japan, Hay and King dreamed of establishing a summer colony at Lake Sunapee in New Hampshire, where the Hearts and a few choice friends such as W. D. Howells could vacation together. Explaining the scheme to Adams, Hay encouraged him to sell his Beverly Farms house to Don and Lizzie Cameron, who were spending the summer there at Henry’s invitation. “[C]ome and take your pick of all the land on Sunapee,” Hay urged. “We hold any amount from one to one hundred acres at your disposition.”

  King was even more insistent: “We shall not give anyone a chance to colonize with us till you come home and look over the tract and say if you should like to join us.” He felt sure that Adams would be enchanted by their twelve hundred acres, which rolled down the slope of Mount Sunapee to the wooded shore of the lake. His imagination racing, King asked Adams to “look over the Japan houses and pick out a jewel of artistic design and find out what it could be duplicated for, shipped to Boston and put up.” He had already selected a spot for it—a “dignified grove of aged maples with log docks and shadowy vistas of ferny darkness behind.” While Clara presided over the children, King and Hay and Adams would spend their days in the Japanese house, writing history together. Because of their love of questions with no answers, they could publish their works jointly as “The Impasse Series.”

  Adams, convinced that his life was over, could muster no more enthusiasm for Sunapee than for anything else. Reading King’s architectural dictates, he heaved a weary sigh. “Will nothing short of a house content him?” he asked Hay. What Adams thought of the suggestion to sell the Beverly Farms place, he declined to say. On occasion he would confess that his wife’s death had broken his life in two, but he was not ready to put their past up for sale.

  By the end of 1886, the realities of King’s Mexican silver mines had punctured his dreams of Sunapee. Although the mine at Prietas was running at a profit, operations at Sombrerete and Yedras were beset by labor quarrels and a problem known to mining engineers as “rebellious ore”—rock that could not be refined by the standard process. More expensive methods proved successful, but at Sombrerete, where the ore was of middling quality, the higher costs pared profits to nil. While King predicted handsome returns for the high-grade ore at Yedras once the refining obstacles were overcome, he had begun having serious trouble raising capital. The millionaires he knew at the Union League and Metropolitan clubs in New York still considered him a charming dinner partner, but after years of hearing about the promise of the lost treasures of the conquistadors, they had begun to doubt that he would ever deliver. A few days before Christmas, King turned to Adams for a loan, which he secured with a painting by J. S. Cotman, an English landscape artist whom Adams admired. He was also $45,000 in debt to his boyhood friend James Gardiner and John Hay, who together held King’s mining shares as collateral.

  The difficulties could not have caught King by surprise. His own ore had turned rebellious during his sybaritic idyll in Europe, and the discipline, stamina, and sound judgment he had brought to his work on the Fortieth Parallel survey had given way to heedlessness and an optimism that bordered on the fantastic. Whenever his neglect created a crisis, he drove himself to near-exhaustion to resolve it, but he ceased to pay attention the moment the storm passed. Hay wished he would forswear mining, take one of the “roomy, well padded” academic chairs he had been offered, and concentrate on pure science.

  King was not about to give up. Like Mark Twain and Henry Adams’s brother Charles, he despised the rich yet longed for wealth. E. L. Godkin, the editor of the Nation, might have been speaking for all of them when he lamented the “gaudy stream of bespangled, belaced and beruffled barbarians” flooding New York. Plenty of people knew how to get money, Godkin observed, but to be rich properly required “culture, imagination and character.” King, who fancied himself in ample possession of these noble traits, regularly indulged his artisti
c side in the company of John La Farge. When the Century Club closed for the night and other men went home to their wives, the painter often invited the geologist to his studio on West 10th Street. Over candlelight suppers prepared by La Farge’s Japanese servant or a steak grilled in a sauce concocted by King, they spun dreams of a higher life, an existence devoted to art and devoid of Godkin’s barbarians. Sometimes they ventured a few doors down 10th Street to the dingy storeroom where King kept his art collection. La Farge marveled at trunkful after trunkful of paintings, drawings, and bibelots fit for museums. “By the bye I have a Turner or a Millet somewhere here,” King would say, and with a little rummaging the masterpiece would turn up. When the Yedras mine paid off, King planned to build a mansion around his treasures. For the largest room, King wanted a frieze encircling “a large space filled with the most beautiful of stained glass.” La Farge, of course, would do the glass, and each panel would be based on a story from The Divine Comedy.

  As their financial affairs slid into ruin, King and La Farge amused themselves for hours with elaborate artistic schemes, including one for Grant’s Tomb. After a million mourners thronged the streets of New York for Grant’s funeral procession in 1885, a committee of civic notables was appointed to select a design for a memorial to the greatest hero of the Civil War. Ideas poured forth from every quarter. Appalled by the “confused gropings” of the public, King took matters into his own tasteful hands with an unsigned essay in the North American Review. The mask of anonymity gave him the mischievous fun that Adams and Hay had had with Democracy and The Bread-Winners and allowed him to propose a monument uniquely suited to the talents of John La Farge.

  In King’s view, the popular notion that the design should be “strictly American” was absurd since the only monuments fitting that description were Indian earth mounds and the stone tombs of the Mayans. But he was also wary of American efforts to adapt the styles and customs of other civilizations, which seemed to him to have produced only mutilation and burlesque. As proof he offered the Fourth of July. “There were a hundred ways, graceful and grave, in which Independence Day might have been commemorated,” he wrote, but Americans chose the “senseless pandemonium” of “a Chinese jollification by fire-crackers.” The newly completed Washington Monument he found equally preposterous—an Egyptian phallus. The standard European complaint that Americans had talent but no genius was “most unfair,” King scoffed, since it overlooked our “positive and unrivaled genius for the inappropriate.”