Mary delighted Adams as much for her heresies as for her queenliness. Her apse was regal, but “in the nave and on the porch, among the peasants, she liked to appear as one of themselves; she insisted on lying in bed, in a stable, with the cows and asses about her, and her baby in a cradle by the bedside as though she had suffered like other women, though the Church insisted she had not.” (Joseph, Uncle Henry observed, “was notoriously uncomfortable in her court, and always preferred to get as near to the door as he could.”) From the earliest days of Christianity the Virgin had occupied the position of honor in the Church, but as her cult swept France, her devotees “seemed bent on absorbing Christ in His Mother, and making the Mother the Church, and Christ the Symbol,” Adams said.
The reason was easily grasped. In the Church’s hierarchy of supernatural beings, Mary ranked above the saints and just below the Trinity, which made her the ideal mediator—the gentle mother who stood between the prodigal child and the punishing father. With her maternal willingness to shelter and love and forgive, Adams said, “Mary concentrated in herself the whole rebellion of man against fate; the whole protest against divine law; … the whole unutterable fury of human nature beating itself against the walls of its prison-house.” In a world where Church and State ruled as one and where the Trinity signified Unity, Mary represented “whatever was not Unity; whatever was irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race.” Her pity was infinite, and her subjects longed to believe that she possessed unlimited power as well.
The Virgin’s prominence in the Middle Ages corroborated Adams’s theory of female superiority in all spheres—mind, body, and society. To Adams, the splendor of Chartres led straight to the Garden of Eden, where feminine superiority had first appeared. “The woman’s greater intelligence was to blame for Adam’s fall,” he declared. “Eve was justly punished because she should have known better, while Adam, as the Devil truly said, was a dull animal.” Biologically, women also had an edge. “Nature regards the female as the essential, the male as the superfluity of her world,” he insisted. He offered no evidence, but it was a point he had often discussed with Clarence King, who shared his conviction. (As King gamily put it, reproduction was a business in which men played almost no part: “We press the button and they do the rest.”) Socially, Adams believed, man was “a mere rooting grunting hog,” a creature who could be saved from his instincts only by the grace of woman. If the court of the Queen of Heaven taught anything, it was that love made gentlemen “even of boors.” Seeing the Virgin Mary as the finest specimen of the finer sex, Adams proclaimed her “the last and greatest deity of all.”
Summing up the age that worshiped the Virgin, Adams noted that it was the moment in history when men were strongest: “never before or since have they shown equal energy in such varied directions, or such intelligence in the direction of their energy.” And yet “these marvels of history”—the Plantagenet kings, scholars like Abelard and Aquinas, Robin Hood and Marco Polo, architects, crusaders, and monks—“all, without apparent exception, bowed down before the woman.”
At a loss to explain this paradox, Adams dismissed it. But the intensity of his attraction to a world in which men bowed to women opens the question of his own submission to the forces of femininity. Years before, after the painful Paris reunion with Lizzie Cameron at the end of his South Seas journey, he had told her he yearned for “a God to pray to, or better yet, a Goddess” with a child, which he recognized as a substitute for her and Martha. In the Virgin of the French Middle Ages he found the ideal that allowed him to transform his ungratified love into worship and to create a role for himself that was less demeaning than “tame cat.” Mrs. Cameron would be his goddess, he would be her votary. It was a noble resolution of a conflict that had tormented them both, since it seemed to settle, once and for all, the question of sex. In his sixties, he freely admitted his lack of sexual desire, and when he learned that one of his contemporaries took a young bride, he overflowed with disgust. “The sexual period in men and women is well-defined,” he told Lizzie. “It is even a scientific distinction, like infancy and senility.” Goddesses, of course, inhabited a realm beyond physical desire. Or so he hoped.
The Virgin also gave Henry a new prism for looking at his marriage. With her impeccable taste and disdain for convention, the Queen of Heaven was as charmingly defiant as Clover Adams. But the supreme glory of the Virgin was her love, a point Adams stressed so often that he seemed to be trying to persuade himself that her compassion could even encompass a man who had failed to save his wife from suicide. Outcasts in other churches could still hope in hers. To the Virgin, the Last Judgment did not symbolize God’s justice or man’s corruption but her own infinite mercy. The Trinity judged, the Virgin forgave. “The rudest ruffian of the Middle Ages, when he looked at this Last Judgment, laughed; for what was the Last Judgment to her! … Her chief joy was to pardon; her eternal instinct was to love; her deepest passion was pity!” If anyone could commute the sentence Adams feared he deserved, it was the Virgin.
In spite of his longing to believe in the redemptive power of the Virgin’s love, she gave him no more serenity than Esther Dudley had found on her spiritual odyssey. To Henry Adams, the outstanding fact of the Virgin worship that created the sublime beauty of Chartres was its impermanence. By the thirteenth century, the universe was growing “more complex and less reducible to a central control,” Adams wrote at the end of his tour. “With as much obstinacy as though it were human, it has insisted on expanding its parts…. Unity turned itself into complexity, multiplicity, variety, and even contradiction.”
Even the unity was an illusion, Adams decided. The essence of the Gothic lay not in the harmonies of its stained glass but in the tension of the masonry—in the “springing motion of the broken arch, the leap downwards of the flying buttress—the visible effort to throw off a visible strain.” Danger lurked in every stone.
The peril of the heavy tower, of the restless vault, of the vagrant buttress; the uncertainty of logic, the inequalities of the syllogism, the irregularities of the mental mirror—all these haunting nightmares of the Church are expressed as strongly by the Gothic cathedral as though it had been the cry of human suffering, and as no emotion had ever been expressed before or is likely to find expression again. The delight of its aspirations is flung up to the sky. The pathos of its self-distrust and anguish of doubt is buried in the earth as its last secret.
It was a telling secret, for the tensions Adams saw in the Gothic were his own. The age in which all energy was bent to the Virgin’s purpose had come to an end because the world “could not remain forever balancing between thought and act.” Henry Adams could. He could humorously berate himself as a “sexagenarian Hamlet,” but he could not live without tension and polarities. For every consoling Virgin he had to find a menacing dynamo, every new joy heightened his own great sorrow, every insight into his feelings became a spur to self-mastery instead of a step toward self-acceptance. He could admire the twelfth century’s success in concealing its doubts, but he could not hide his own. Two decades earlier, when he wrote the ending of Democracy, he dispatched his shaken protagonist to Egypt, where her desire to hide in the Great Pyramid revealed the author’s wish to bury the anxiety created by Clover’s unhappiness on the Nile. In Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams tried once more to bury his anguish. The Virgin, with all her love and forgiveness, was powerless to help him.
Most of the first draft of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres was written during the summer of 1900 in Lizzie Cameron’s Paris apartment. Thoroughly engrossed, Henry stayed in the city even when the temperature rose to 90 degrees. Thomas Aquinas, he told Lizzie, was as fine as “liquid air for cooling the hot blood of my youth.” In October, when she and Martha returned from a summer of traveling in Italy, he was ready to share the manuscript. He hoped that both of them would tell him of any “hitches” in translation of medieval verse, and he counted on Martha, now fourteen, to help by pointing out pas
sages she did not understand. But by the time the Camerons arrived in Paris, Lizzie was too distracted to appreciate the ramifications of Henry’s ties to the Virgin. While he had worked to transform his love into adoration, she had fallen in love with a younger man.
Joseph Trumbull Stickney was an enchanter. He had dark hair, an olive complexion, pensive eyes of deep gray, and he carried his six-foot-four frame with the grace of a Greek runner. A magna cum laude graduate of Harvard, he had enjoyed a short but adventurous career as a newspaper correspondent during the Spanish-American War, after which he settled in Paris to write poetry and study literature at the Sorbonne. He was twenty-six, sixteen years younger than Mrs. Cameron.
Henry Adams knew him well. They had met in Paris in 1899, and Henry immediately adopted him as a nephew. Like the Lodges’ son Bay, another young poet living in Paris, Joe Stickney gave Adams a bracing change from the “mild sort of Euthanasia” induced by too much time in the company of his adoring, compliant nieces. With their agile minds and fierce opinions, Joe and Bay supplied Uncle Henry with the resistance and disrespect he considered essential to mental health.
Joe had been a fact of Lizzie’s life since February 1900. After one of her first dinners with him, she had informed Henry that Stickney intrigued her. “I do not know how he would wear, but I am willing to try. We have planned some excursions together.” Love poems from Stickney began to arrive in her mail, and she and Martha spent much of their summer holiday in Italy with Stickney and his mother. In the fall, when the travelers reconvened in Paris, Bay Lodge watched in distress as Joe and Lizzie carried on their flirtation in front of Adams. Bay, furious with Lizzie for her refusal to “conceal the fact that she likes the attentions of a young man,” told his parents that “Uncle Henry was very rude to Joe on several occasions. It was quite pathetic.” Bay doubted that there was anything in the relationship “to bring a blush to the cheek of innocence,” but whether the dalliance extended to the bedroom or not, it was clear that Joe Stickney was the recipient of a sexually charged form of affection withheld from Henry Adams.
Though Adams chose to believe that he had outlived sexual desire, he had won no exemption from the pain of jealousy. Faced with a goddess who refused his worship, Adams retreated in stunned silence. As autumn sank into winter, he busied himself with the dynamos on the Champs de Mars and waited for the apocalypse. “I cannot doubt that God will very soon bust up the whole circus, and proceed to judgment,” he wrote to Nannie Lodge in early December. Having made his “arrangement for paradise through the Virgin Mary and the twelfth-century church,” he claimed not to care. In January Adams packed his trunks for America and announced that he would never again return to Paris.
21
A Queer Taste in Fates
Adams was somewhere on the Atlantic when Bay Lodge appointed himself to confront Mrs. Cameron. Impetuous and ardent, Bay undoubtedly expected some sign of contrition, and he was furious to find the accused in a “brutally cheerful” frame of mind. Dismissing Bay’s charges with a laugh, she seized control of the conversation and adroitly changed course. Uncle Henry, she explained, had reached a point in life where he deserved their sympathy. “She even told me he was losing his mind and gave little instances of his lapses of memory,” Bay fumed to his parents. “The whole thing is pretty tragic and I don’t think either Mrs. Cameron or Joe have dealt with him fairly.”
Understanding the contest better than Bay did, Adams also adopted a strategy of brutal cheer. The moment his ship docked in Manhattan, he departed from character and threw himself into a “mad cyclone” of socializing. As he rushed to tell Mrs. Cameron, he had been welcomed “with tender embraces” by two of New York’s most celebrated women—Elsie De Wolfe, an actress-turned-interior decorator, and her friend Elizabeth Marbury, a theatrical agent. By all rights, the parvenus he met in Miss Marbury’s salon should have rasped on his patrician nerves, but to Lizzie he would confess no more than amusement and a passing wish to write another satire. And if America was “fat and greasy with wealth,” so much the better for artists like John La Farge, whose atelier was busier than ever.
Back on Lafayette Square, where vice president-elect Theodore Roosevelt and Senator Henry Cabot Lodge had scaled new heights of pomposity, the cheery pose was harder to maintain. Roosevelt, who had never excelled at listening, now felt entitled to barge into conversations whenever he pleased, pontificating in a high-pitched whine and referring to himself (at unnervingly frequent intervals) by the three-syllable pronoun “Aieeee.” The “very buffalo must run,” Adams shuddered after having him to dinner in February. To a twelfth-century monk it appeared that America had moved “beyond Teddy”—and beyond everyone else, for that matter. “The ball has rolled up so big that no one knows how to steady it.” Roaring at it à la Theodore simply “makes one tired.”
Cabot was a more complicated case. Working quietly in the wings, Secretary of State John Hay had been trying to get Bay Lodge a sinecure at the American consulate in Rome. The diplomatic service had a long tradition of assigning writers, W. D. Howells and Bret Harte among them, to consular posts with light duties, which left them considerable freedom for literary pursuits. In a perverse display of rectitude, Cabot—the same Cabot who wheedled shamelessly on behalf of constituents with diplomatic aspirations—scotched Hay’s plan by striking out the necessary appropriation in Congress. Bay concluded that the secretary did not like him and unfortunately said as much to someone who told Hay. “So Hay feels hurt and wounded and Bay feels hurt and the mothers feel hurt, and Cabot feels virtuous,” Henry wrote to Lizzie. “If you dare lisp this story, I’ll kill you.”
Cabot and Teddy grated, but King and Hay were cause for genuine alarm. Felled by pneumonia and a racking cough, King had been banished to the tropics for the winter. Hay, looking “pasty and pale, had barely enough wind for the five-minute walk from Sixteenth and H to the State Department. With no clear diagnosis from his physicians, Hay sometimes swore he was dying of angina pectoris and sometimes insisted the trouble was mere “duckfits.” Clara Hay thought that whatever the malady, the cure was a quiet summer at Lake Sunapee. Adams hoped she was right. “So much of Hay’s valetudinarianism has always been nervous that I fully admit he may live to be ninety,” Henry wrote to Lizzie, “but he is no longer fit to be Secretary. Enfin, he is writing his resignation.”
Hay’s letter went to the White House in March 1901, at the beginning of McKinley’s second term. When the president asked him to wait a few months, he agreed, and when his ailments abated, he shelved the resignation indefinitely. “Hay gains strength, and, as the devil gets well, he cares less for religious retreat,” Adams sighed. Henry sympathized with Hay’s fear that he was meant to be a first-rate ambassador abroad rather than a third-rate politician at home, but he had no patience with Hay’s willingness to die in the act of proving himself wrong. After the debacle of the Panama Canal treaty, Hay had set aside his senatorial antipathies and plunged into the work of negotiating a new pact, this time taking care to consult the Senate. He also renewed discussions for the acquisition of the Caribbean island of St. Thomas, and in China he put new energy into holding Russia and Germany to the terms of the Open Door agreement. In Adams’s view, the weight of circumstance—the same big ball that stood in Theodore Roosevelt’s way—would make it impossible for Hay to prevail. “Congress and Europe have combined to sit on him hard, and squeeze his breath out,” Henry told Lizzie.
For all its faults, Washington was where Henry Adams wanted to be. Though he confessed to Lizzie his “very strong wish” that she and Martha were with him, he had no desire to return to Paris. In Washington one could at least enjoy the sensation of being a polyp in clean water, he said, “while elsewhere the water is dead and rather dirty,” like the water in a lagoon. “Paris is at best a lagoon for artistic polyps”—a species that undoubtedly included Joe Stickney.
Henry tried to detach himself from the hurt inflicted by Lizzie and Joe, but he could not resist an occasional barb. Whe
n he sent her his new poem, “Prayer to the Virgin of Chartres,” she must have understood that he was pitting his poetic talents against Stickney’s, and she could not have failed to note the change in his relationship with his beloved goddess. The joy evoked by the Virgin of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres was gone, replaced by utter despair.
In another bit of spite, Henry called Lizzie’s attention to The Sacred Fount, a new novel by Henry James. Set at a house party in the English countryside, the story was told by a James-like narrator who was trying to sort out the secret romances of the guests in order to test a theory that in every relationship one party was fed and the other was fed upon. From the tale and the setting, Mrs. Cameron would have been forced to conclude that James had not enjoyed his time in her ménage at Surrenden Dering.
Lizzie parried with less subtlety, often mentioning Stickney in her letters and blithely ignoring Henry’s jealousy. She said nothing of the tiff with Bay but did note that Bay now found Stickney “very reflective,” which she assumed to mean older. “I have the guilty feeling that I have done it,” she said, almost proudly. “Dear, dear—think of me aging a man when his great attraction is his youth.”
However diminished, Stickney’s magnetism was still strong enough to pull her to Italy in the spring. She was “stone broke,” she told Henry, and could not tell whether Don intended to continue his support. The lease on their Lafayette Square house would expire at the end of April, but Don refused to say what he planned next. “[D]oes Donald mean to re-let the house?” she wondered. “Are we to go home or stay over here? I am tired enough of Europe, but what else is there? Where are we to go?” Don wrote regularly to Martha but offered no clues to their future. “How tired I am of it all. Of course it is Martha who complicates it all. I could cut a straight swathe if it were not for her interests, bless her.”
The Five of Hearts Page 37