Understanding eluded Henry Adams, leaving him with little except a hope for some gentler future in which he and Hay and King might be reunited. “Perhaps some day—say 1938, their centenary—they might be allowed to return together for a holiday, to see the mistakes of their own lives made clear in the light of the mistakes of their successors; and perhaps then, for the first time since man began his education among the carnivores, they would find a world that sensitive and timid natures could regard without a shudder.”
Adams sent the Education to friends for comment and correction but hardly cared whether it inspired praise or condemnation. The book was “a mere shield of protection in the grave,” he explained to Henry James. “I advise you to take your own life in the same way, in order to prevent biographers from taking it in theirs.” To another friend, he explained that the book could be understood by imagining “a centipede moving along in 20 little sections (each with a mathematical formula carefully concealed in its stomach) to the bottom of a hill; and then laboriously climbing in 15 sections more (each with a new mathematical problem carefully concealed in its stomach) till it can get up on a hill an inch or two high, so as to see ahead a half an inch or so.”
Chilled by the cynicism of the Education, Clara Hay urged Henry to turn to the Bible for wisdom and consolation. Without directly challenging the book’s most peculiar silence, she reminded him, “You have said that all the good in your life has come from women. Will you not listen to the least among your women friends?”
As a ruse to avoid writing a memoir of John Hay, the Education stopped just short of success. Instead of a memoir, Clara decided to publish John’s letters and portions of his diary. When she asked Adams to serve as editor, he could think of no graceful way to demur. From the outset he suspected that Clara’s sense of propriety would lead to censorship, but in the two years he gave to collecting and transcribing hundreds of Hay’s letters, he never once imagined the evisceration she had in mind. She cut even the mildest of Hay’s profanities, eliminated whole paragraphs with no sign of ellipsis, and slashed all proper nouns to initials. A typical passage, from a harmless letter to Adams, reported that “Mrs. H----- got a letter from Mrs. L----- yesterday saying Mrs. C----- was leaving B-----. She is expected in C-----, but of course she will not come. We went down to B----- one day to see her. C----- and A----- had a delightful day with M-----. Mrs. L----- came over from N-----, and we talked, mostly about you till train-time.”
Privately printed in November 1908, the three-volume Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary quickly made its way around Washington. The welter of initials deceived no one. T----- R----- and H----- C----- L----- easily recognized themselves, took deep offense, and exchanged letters meant to record their version of events for posterity. In a tirade that filled fifteen typewritten pages, Roosevelt conceded that Hay was “a man of remarkable ability” and the greatest conversationalist of his age but had not been “a strong or brave man.”
He had a very ease-loving nature and a moral timidity which made him shrink from all that was rough in life, and therefore from practical affairs. He was at his best at a dinner table or in a drawing room … his temptation was to associate as far as possible only with men of refined and cultivated tastes, who lived apart from the world of affairs, and who, if Americans, were wholly lacking in robustness of fiber. His close intimacy with Henry James and Henry Adams—charming men, but exceedingly undesirable companions for any man not of strong nature—and the tone of satirical cynicism which they admired, and which he always affected in writing them, marked that phase of his character which so impaired his usefulness as a public man. In public life during the time he was Secretary of State under me he accomplished little…. his usefulness to me was almost exclusively the usefulness of a fine figurehead. He was always afraid of Senators and Congressmen who possessed any power or robustness, this fear being due in part to timidity and nervousness, and in part to a sheer fastidiousness which made him unwilling to face the rather intimate association which is implied in a fight.
Cabot agreed and vigorously defended the actions of his colleagues on Capitol Hill. It was Hay who had abused the Senate, not vice versa, the senator insisted to the president. “The result was that, although when he first came into office he was very popular with the Senate and Senators were most anxious to do what he wanted, as his term of service drew to a close they had become so embittered by hearing what he said of them that they were inclined to defeat anything he wanted.” Cabot disputed Theodore on only one point: the brilliance of Hay’s conversation. Once as dazzled as Roosevelt, Cabot had since decided that Hay’s rhetorical virtuosity probably ranked behind that of Oliver Wendell Holmes and James Russell Lowell.
Adams quietly filled in the blanks in his copy of Hay’s letters and hid his glee when Clara borrowed his volumes to emend her own. Clara, having concluded her business in Washington (apparently without realizing the futility of her editorial stratagem), left Lafayette Square in 1909. She would spend the last five years of her life building a grand palazzo in Cleveland and reigning over a growing brood of grandchildren.
The disaster of editing Hay’s letters snuffed the last of Henry’s literary desires, but circumstance pressed him into service once again. Bay Lodge died of ptomaine poisoning in 1909, at the age of thirty-five. When his parents decided to publish his poems and plays, they asked Adams to write a brief biography based on Bay’s letters. Adams, loving Nannie even more than he despised Cabot, agreed.
The Life of George Cabot Lodge matters less as biography than as a postscript to The Education of Henry Adams, for when Uncle Henry peered into Bay’s life, he saw his own. Like Adams, Bay proved unamenable to education, loathed puritans and plutocrats, and worried desperately about failure. The Lodges saw nothing to censor, and early in 1911, as the biography and two companion volumes of verse were readied for the press, Cabot came to 1603 H Street to discuss a few last details. “I was beautiful and approved everything, and said that I agreed with everybody,” Henry boasted to Lizzie.
The biography of Bay Lodge was Henry Adams’s last book but not his last act of friendship. Hoping to shape history’s view of John La Farge, he corresponded with and granted interviews to the artist’s first biographer, Royal Cortissoz, and allowed him to reproduce Clover’s portrait of La Farge.* (La Farge had died a pauper in 1910. After decades of poverty and neglect, his wife had exacted her retribution. Pleading a “bilious headache,” Margaret La Farge stayed away from her husband’s funeral. She also ignored his wish to be buried in an expensive plot in New York’s Woodlawn Cemetery. The rest of the family preferred to think that the interment would not have troubled La Farge. He had loved to tell his children the tale of a Chinese painter who entered eternity by stepping into one of his pictures and disappearing.)
Lizzie Cameron and Henry Adams saw little of each other from 1904 to 1908 as Lizzie darted from ballroom to ballroom in Paris, London, Newport, and Washington in hopes of mating tall, shy Martha. The hunt ended in 1909, when Martha married Ronald Lindsay, a Scotsman posted to the British embassy in Washington. Mission accomplished, Lizzie returned to Europe for good.
Mrs. Cameron’s liaison with Joe Stickney had permanently cooled Henry’s ardor, but they continued to write each other weekly, and when he came to Paris each summer, he and his automobile were at her service. Through her, Adams came to know Edith Wharton, whose elegant apartment in the Faubourg St. Germain became the center of his Parisian social life. Drawn to the white-mustached little man with the dark blue eyes and the warm, husky voice, Mrs. Wharton soon adopted him as her Uncle Henry. She joshed about his superabundance of “wives”; he teased her about her expatriate “saloon.” Adams had known and enjoyed Bernard Berenson for several years, and when he discovered that the art historian and Mrs. Wharton held each other in low regard, he went to work at once to right this grievous wrong. Berenson was invited to a restaurant for dinner with Henry Adams. Arriving at dusk, he was led to a dim private room where he found
his host surrounded by guests, including Lizzie Cameron and a woman whose face was obscured by a veil of black lace. Berenson did not recognize the woman’s voice but was captivated by her artistic prejudices, which matched his own. After sundown, when the lights came on, he saw to his astonishment that she was Edith Wharton. By clearing the brambles, Adams started Bernard Berenson and Edith Wharton on the path to a close friendship that would last until her death, in 1937.
In February 1912, shortly after his seventy-fourth birthday, Henry announced to Lizzie that he planned to sail for Europe on April 20. Still fascinated by advances in science and engineering, he had booked passage on the first return voyage of a new English ocean liner, the Titanic. When it sank on April 14, he was deeply shaken, and a few days later he suffered a stroke. In June, as soon as he was well enough to be moved, a private railroad car carried him north to his brother Charles’s estate, Birnamwood, in South Lincoln, Massachusetts.
There began a regimen of physical therapy and an elaborate, mean-spirited family campaign to prevent Mrs. Cameron from making a visit. Henry’s sister, Mary Quincy, cabled Mrs. Cameron that nothing could be done and that Henry would not recognize her. “I won’t have her,” Mary told Charles. “… There has been disagreeable scandal enough about that affair, and we certainly cannot permit people to say that in his last illness she came from Europe to look after him!” Henry James also advised Lizzie against the voyage, perhaps at the instigation of Brooks Adams, who was in London at the time. “To speak crudely and familiarly they clearly—by all their gestures—‘don’t want you,’” James told her. On learning that she was determined to go, James retreated. Her journey was “heroic,” and she was “magnificent,” he said. “If you do see Henry Adams but once, you will be glad to the last intensity that you have done so.”
Nannie Lodge tried to ease the tension by proposing that Lizzie bring Henry to Nahant for a few days, a suggestion that drew a sharp rebuff. Perhaps this “superannuated honeymoon” would do wonders for the patient, Charles sneered, but “all this time where is Don?—Where?—oh, where?—Henry Adams of Washington, D.C. as ‘co-respondent,’ and your house as the locum in quo will sound good!”
Full of apologies and explanations, Nannie reminded Charles that the idea had come from Henry, who had raised it during the Lodges’ recent visit to South Lincoln. “As you know he spoke first to us of the possibility of his going later to Nahant, in the hope a house could be found for him, and it was that fact alone which emboldened me to write to Mrs. Adams and Mrs. Quincy to tell them that our house was at Henry’s disposition, if the move should at any time be thought advisable. But I don’t wonder that it annoys you to have suggestions of this kind made to Henry, when he is so well off where he is.”
Lizzie arrived at the end of July, settling in Boston and making a few excursions to South Lincoln. Except for a slight limp, Henry had recovered most of his powers, and the pleasure of seeing Lizzie did not trigger the overexcitement feared by the Adamses. But their glacial hospitality soon drove her away. Sad to see her go, Henry set his sights on the following winter, when he hoped to join her for a Mediterranean holiday.
By election day, Henry was back on Lafayette Square with a choice seat for a three-ring circus starring the calamitous Theodore Roosevelt. Unhappy with his plodding successor, William Howard Taft, Roosevelt had bolted the Republicans and formed his own party, the Progressives, to run for president in 1912.
Theodore, Adams snorted, was “a chewed-up cud.” Feeling no fondness for Taft, whom he considered an imbecile, Adams inclined toward Woodrow Wilson, the Democratic nominee. “Mr. Wilson is a College Professor,” he informed Cecil Spring Rice, who was about to come to Washington as British ambassador. “I cannot write a paper to show that a Professor is by essence incapable of acting with other men.” On November 5 Roosevelt won more votes than Taft but not enough to defeat Woodrow Wilson.
Sir Cecil Spring Rice (Sir Springy to his American friends) returned to Washington as Britain’s ambassador in 1913.REPRODUCED FROM THE LETTERS AND FRIENDSHIPS OF SIR CECIL SPRING-RICE, EDITED BY STEPHEN GWYNN
None of it made the slightest difference to Henry Adams. His mornings were spent walking with a niece, and in the afternoons he explored medieval music with the secretary-companion who had been hired after his stroke. A tall, striking young woman who sang and played the piano, Aileen Tone had come from New York with the understanding that she and Mr. Adams would try each other out. Knowing his passion for the twelfth century, she had brought a book filled with transcriptions of medieval French songs, and as soon as she sang a few, Adams issued a heartfelt command: “Tell your mother you’re not going home.”
Charmed by the fluidity and the strangeness of melodies that seemed to end “with their tails in the air,” Adams acquired a Steinway and sent to France for more music. Back came manuscripts and liturgical tomes filled with songs written in clefs and notes that Aileen could not read. With the help of John La Farge, Jr., a Jesuit, she learned to decode the plain-chant notation and mastered enough of the rhythms and phrasing to perform for her new uncle.
During the summer of 1913, Adams transplanted himself and Aileen and two nieces to a chateau near Paris, where everyone indulged his new enthusiasm. He hired two scholars to ransack the libraries of France for more songs, and the travelers returned to Lafayette Square in November with reams of new melodies, many of which had lain undisturbed for centuries.
Reawakened to the joys of the twelfth century, Adams finally consented to the publication of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres. He still refused to sully himself by selling the Virgin, but he permitted the book to be published under the aegis of the American Institute of Architects, with royalties set aside to furnish copies for penniless members of the profession. When the book appeared early in 1914, the author read the reviews and laughed. “[I]t is droll! he told a friend. “Here am I, telling everyone that I am quite dotty and bedridden, and the papers reviewing me as a youthful beginner.” No one seemed to realize that he had written anything else.
From a chateau fifty miles north of Paris, uncle and nieces watched anxiously in the summer of 1914 as Austria declared war on Serbia, Germany marched on Luxembourg and France, and England entered the conflict. Like other foreigners, Uncle Henry and his charges were evacuated to Paris, and toward the end of August, he decided to shepherd his flock to safety in England. They caught the last boat to Folkestone.
Unnerved by the somber crowds and the wounded soldiers he had seen in France, Henry felt he had narrowly escaped from “what verged on Hell.” Martha Cameron Lindsay lent him her country house in Dorset, where he went gratefully to wait for passage to America. Henry James came over from Rye, and Aileen Tone watched the two old friends tumble into each other’s arms and hold fast. Their world had been smashed. For James the war was “horrible, unspeakable, iniquitous.” He tried to tell himself that it might also prove interesting, but it was no use; the thought made him ill. Adams and James talked deep into the night, with James arguing passionately that the United States had a moral duty to join England in the war. The following summer, outraged by America’s continued neutrality, James became a British subject. He died in 1916.
The loss opened a floodgate in Henry Adams. James had not only been a friend for forty years, he wrote to Lizzie, “but he also belonged to the circle of my wife’s set long before I knew him or her, and you know how I have clung to all that belonged to my wife. I have been living all day in the seventies…. we really were happy then.”
Nannie Lodge had died a few months before James, and in the deepening solitude Adams began to imagine himself “a grasshopper in October without legs or wings or song.” He left the house only for his daily walk and occasional rides with Aileen Tone to Rock Creek Church Cemetery, where he sat in the enfolding arms of the long stone bench and contemplated the guardian of Clover’s grave. When Aileen finally summoned the courage to ask about Clover, Adams paused for a suspensefully long moment then turned to her and said softly
, “My child, you have broken a silence of thirty years.” He showed her the portrait of Clover on horseback and spoke of “your Aunt Clover” so often that Aileen began to feel as if she had known her.
If they talked of Aunt Clover’s suicide, Aileen tactfully kept Uncle Henry’s remarks to herself. Judging by the marginal notes he had made a decade earlier in his copy of The Principles of Psychology by William James, the event remained a mystery to him. The most he had deduced was that suicide was the act of “people who detest their own identity.” But he did not understand how nature was served by passions strong enough to overpower the human will. Feelings “ought to be involuntary nervous reactions incident to self-preservation,” he wrote at the end of James’s chapter on emotions. “The mystery is in their astounding sensitiveness to the stimulant. How can a whisper kill? How can an external immaterial suggestion act on a physical organ? How can a thought outside the body, penetrate and kill the body? Why is will powerless to control it?”
In spite of the enigma, telling Aileen about Clover freed Henry to face the most tormenting chapter of his past, and in the spring of 1917 he announced that he wanted to spend the summer in the house at Beverly Farms, which he had avoided since Clover’s breakdown.
Shortly after Clover Adams’s death, Henry Adams commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to sculpt a memorial for her grave in Washington’s Rock Creek Church Cemetery. Henry is buried at her side.U.S. DEPARTMENT OF THE INTERIOR, NATIONAL PARK SERVICE, SAINT-GAUDENS NATIONAL HISTORIC SITE, CORNISH, NEW HAMPSHIRE
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