Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  Clover could barely contain her excitement. She had found what she’d been waiting for. Henry was brilliant, gallant, and from a family of lustrous repute. Best of all, she enjoyed his pursuit of her. She assured her childhood friend Eleanor Shattuck that their bond of friendship would not suffer because of her impending marriage, revealing how her relationship with Henry had made her feel more, not less, connected with others: “I love you more because I love Henry Adams very much.”

  A letter to her sister that same spring revealed, in metaphors more powerful than she may have recognized at the time, her awakening sexuality, a feeling of emerging into a world of sunshine and love and connection, a lifting of long-held sorrows. In early March, a week after announcing the engagement, Clover wrote to Ellen about a “horrid dream” she’d had for many years. In the dream, Clover and her sister sat “side by side with a high wall of ice between us & very often I tried to look thro’ it I saw something in you that was so like myself that it made me cold all over.” But with Ellen’s marriage to Whitman, the “sun began shining on your side of the wall that it began to thaw,” making it possible for Clover to have a “nice time with you.” Clover, however, remained enshrined in ice. But during the winter, “the sun began to warm me,” despite how she “snapped my fingers at it & I tried to ignore it,” fearful of what the thaw might bring. Then, on the afternoon Henry proposed marriage, “the sun blinded me so that in real terror I put my hands up to my face to keep it away and when I took them away there sat Henry Adams holding them and the ice has melted away and I am going to sit in the Sun as long as it shines thro’ as Whitman [Ellen’s husband] says.” Clover found it terrifying to emerge from a cold but protective shell, one that had kept other people at a safe distance, and move toward connection. “I am a ‘Hooper,’” she wrote to her sister, “and if a feeling is very pleasant I feel as if it were wrong.” But falling in love was also a source of hope; it was not effortful or difficult; it had happened though she and Ellen had “done nothing at all.” It was Whitman and Henry who “have waked us up.” Connection, love, being awake—it was what she wanted. “You tell me it grows better and peacefully all the time . . . I’ve learnt that in less than a week,” Clover wrote proudly. “I always was quick at languages, when I put my whole heart into it—.” Learning the language of love was no different.

  Henry too was thrilled about his choice. But he could be awkward, defensive, and sometimes of two minds about Clover, and he tried to sort out this ambivalence and confusion. His report of his engagement in a letter to Charles Milnes Gaskell, for instance, seems oddly disloyal for a man who professed to be so in love:

  One of my congratulatory letters further describes my “fiancée” to me as “a charming blue.” She is certainly not handsome; nor would she be quite called plain, I think. She is 28 years old. She knows her own mind uncommon well. She does not talk very American. Her manners are quiet. She reads German—also Latin—also, I fear, a little Greek, but very little. She talks garrulously, but on the whole pretty sensibly. She is very open to instruction. We shall improve her. She dresses badly. She decidedly has humor and will appreciate our wit. She has enough money to be quite independent. She rules me as only American women rule men, and I cower before her. Lord! How she would lash me if she read the above description of her!

  Though proud that Clover knew several languages, Henry feared that her intellectual interests and competence also made her a “charming blue,” or “bluestocking,” a derogatory term used for women who had ambitions beyond proper female conventions, particularly those who were thought to compensate for a lack of womanly beauty with a surfeit of manly brains. Two months later, in another letter to Gaskell, he recorded Clover’s own resistance to the nickname “blue,” once more admiring Clover’s intelligence even as he undermined it.

  My young female has a very active and quick mind and has run over many things, but she really knows nothing well, and lights at the idea of being thought a blue. She commissions me to tell you that she would add a few lines to this letter, but unfortunately she is unable to spell. I think you will like her, not for beauty, for she is certainly not beautiful, and her features are much too prominent; but for her intelligence and sympathy, which are what hold me.

  Henry would never be as talkative about Clover as he was during the days leading up to the wedding, when he was weighing his feelings and coming to terms with his choice. But the way his genuine love for her was marbled with a persistent turning away, a covert withdrawal hidden within overt approval, would persist throughout their marriage.

  Clover and Henry married at noon on Thursday, June 27, 1872, at her father’s summer home in Beverly Farms on the North Shore, attended by just thirteen people, mostly family. Henry’s parents were not present. His father was still in Europe and his mother did not want to come without him. The brief ceremony took place on the lawn, with an easterly breeze bringing to shore the salty smell of the sea. Roast chicken and champagne were served afterward at an indoor luncheon. Henry’s brother Charles found the ceremony “peculiar,” but the newlyweds were quite pleased with it. Clover thanked her father, saying, “We think our wedding and the lunch went off charmingly thanks to your cheerfulness and care and we shall always remember how you did everything in your power to make our engagement and marriage smooth and pleasant.” Henry concurred, writing on the back of Clover’s letter, “I most heartily endorse every word Clover says on the last page, and that I cannot express warmly enough the feeling I have of your kindness and assistance.”

  The newlyweds stayed a week with Anne and Sam Hooper, Clover’s aunt and uncle, at their summer house in Cotuit on Cape Cod. There they yachted, rowed, caught bluefish, and walked in the woods, despite an intense heat wave. Wedding gifts inundated the new couple: a pearl and diamond breast pin, silver and gilt candlesticks, Dresden coffee cups, an amber necklace. Clover wrote to Ned and Fanny, asking them to come say goodbye before she and Henry pushed off for their year-long honeymoon overseas. But they did not. Perhaps Ned dreaded the scene of parting with his younger sister on the Boston docks. On Tuesday, July 9, Clover and Henry Adams boarded the steamship Siberia, bound for England. After a short stay there, the couple planned to go to Geneva to visit Henry’s father, who was finishing up his work on the Alabama claims, then on to Berlin, to Italy, and to Cairo by early December for a three-month float down the river Nile. The opening pages of their guidebook, Murray’s Handbook for Travellers of Egypt, recommended touring between December and February to take advantage of the steady north winds, stating that the least amount of “time for seeing Egypt conveniently and satisfactorily is three months.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Down the Nile

  CLOVER AND HENRY ARRIVED at the Liverpool docks on July 20, a clear, cool Saturday night, with a full moon shining on the Mersey River, a sight Clover found “very beautiful.” The eleven-day voyage across the Atlantic, traveling at 250 miles a day, hadn’t been easy. Both Clover and Henry got horribly seasick, though Henry more so than Clover. They complained in alternating entries in a daily diary, which they eventually sent back to Clover’s father. Only two days into their journey, Henry “cursed the sea and life in general,” and the next day wrote, “Long fight with seasickness. Clover quite upset. Wishes she had staid at home. Much sleep.” By day four, Henry was incredulous: “Deadly sick and a calm sea.” But Clover reclaimed her humor, writing, “Cold and fog. Deck too exposed. H. and I lie and gaze at each other. Wonder if life has anything in store for us. Swallow beef tea. Think it may have.”

  The tedium of life on board the ship was somewhat broken up by the companionship of other passengers, who happened to be friends: John Holmes, Wendell Holmes’s younger brother; Francis Parkman, a historian of American exploration; and James Russell Lowell, then a professor of modern languages at Harvard, who was taking a two-year European tour with his wife, Frances. They played shuffleboard on deck when the weather cleared, which wasn’t often, and Henry gloated when he beat Lowell a
nd Parkman at the game. Clover and Henry read and talked and read some more. As an engagement present, Henry had given Clover Their Wedding Journey, William Dean Howells’s just-published first novel, a lightly told “gossamer-like web,” as Henry called it in his review in the North American Review, that follows Basil and Isabel March on their honeymoon tour from Boston to New York City, Niagara Falls, and Montreal. But mostly periods of boredom alternated with queasiness, so much so that Clover resolved to “see all we want this time” because this was going to be their “last trip to Europe.” By the end of their journey, she imagined her family summering in Beverly Farms and wrote to her father, “Often think of Beverly and long to hear how you are faring. Write me everything.” She enclosed with her letter a quick pen sketch showing her and Henry, prone on their respective beds in stateroom 35, laid low by seasickness and heaped with blankets; Clover’s hair is mussed.

  Shortly after arriving in Liverpool late in the evening of July 20, they took a train eighty miles south to Much Wenlock in the county of Shropshire to stay with Charles Milnes Gaskell at the Gaskell family estate. Slight, bearded, not yet thirty, and unmarried, Gaskell had gone to the best English schools: Eton, then Trinity College at Cambridge. Born into enormous privilege, he joined his wealth and influence to a sense of social responsibility and an intense interest in the arts, literature, and politics. He had a gentleness and sense of privacy that put Henry at ease. With Gaskell, Henry could relax. In a letter to her father, Clover noted with pleasure how her new husband, together with Gaskell, would “scour” the surrounding hills on foot and “behave like young colts in a pasture.” “We feel,” she declared, “quite at home and welcome.” The immense, ivy-covered ruins of Wenlock Priory, which formed part of the Gaskells’ estate, were surrounded by gardens “full of roses, white lilies, and ferns,” and she and Henry stayed in the eight-hundred-year-old Norman wing of the estate; its lancet windows and old carved furniture made her “feel as if I were a 15th-century dame and newspapers, reform, and bustle were nowhere.” Gaskell gave the couple some books by Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the French architect known for his restorations of French medieval buildings, to read on their travels.

  At the end of July, Clover and Henry took a train to London, where they breakfasted with Francis Turner Palgrave, Gaskell’s brother-in-law and the oldest son of Sir Francis Palgrave, a historian of early England. The younger Palgrave had distinguished himself as an art critic “too ferocious to be liked,” as Henry later noted. Palgrave showed them several drawings he had collected for them to see: one by Rembrandt; one by Van Dyke, depicting the children of Charles I, which Clover found “very charming”; and one by Raphael. As a wedding present, he gave them a drawing by Blake—“Ezekiel, I think, weeping over his dead wife.” But it was a particular image of Blake’s mad King Nebuchadnezzar, “untrammeled by clothing,” that, as Clover put it, would have made her brother Ned “gasp.” She and Henry would later buy it. She was thrilled to view with her new husband the art that she’d first seen during her European tour in 1866 or that she’d read about in the several books on painting that she’d collected, including Hippolyte Taine’s Philosophy of Art, in the original French, and Richard Redgrave’s Century of Painters of the English School. Now she and Henry toured some of Europe’s great museums, where they’d stand for hours looking at art “until brains and legs cry for mercy.”

  After England, they traveled to Brussels, then Antwerp, then Amsterdam, where they saw “pictures in the gallery . . . and enjoyed them much.” “Holland,” Clover observed, “seems like a quaint toy.” From there, they went on to Bonn, where Henry learned that the books he requested would be much easier to purchase in Berlin. “They had never heard of any book Henry asked for,” Clover reported.

  They arrived in Geneva on August 23 to meet up with Henry’s father and mother—Mrs. Adams had joined her husband in the spring, after recovering her health enough to travel. At Geneva, Clover felt ill-prepared for the many parties and dinners, telling her father she didn’t feel she looked half as nice as she did when Betsey, Dr. Hooper’s housekeeper, helped her get dressed. She also felt uneasy in the presence of her mother-in-law. At a party hosted by William Evarts, the counsel for the U.S. delegation that was settling the Alabama claims, Clover and Henry sat out the dancing, playing instead, as Clover wrote to her sister, Ellen, “the role of old married people.” Mrs. Adams, Clover noted, was “quite disgusted with me for having given up waltzing.” All the touring and socializing could be wearing. “Travelling would be quite perfect,” Clover mused to her father, “if only one could go home at night.”

  In Dresden, where the great German Romantic painter Caspar David Friedrich had worked in the early 1800s, they went to the famed city gallery, where Clover found the pictures “so rich that I was quite distracted.” She was relieved not to be let down by her first viewing of Raphael’s “Madonna”—“I did not feel [disappointed] and long to see it again tomorrow,” she wrote her father, exclaiming, “And such Titians and Veronese!” The two art-goers, in Berlin, had “bad luck in the matter of seeing pictures.” Day after day of cold rain made it impossible to see any paintings at the gallery, which depended on sunlight for illumination. There were, of course, no electric lights to dispel the gloom of cloudy days. As the weather cooled and the days shortened, Henry and Clover began reading aloud from Friedrich Schiller’s Thirty Years’ War in the original German, which Clover found “hard” but also “good fun.” She made mention of taking up George Eliot’s latest novel, Middlemarch, which was being published in segments, though she said little about what she thought of Eliot’s sprawling exploration of marriage, class, political reform, and the status of women, except to comment later that “though it’s dreary, I like it.”

  Almost ten days of rain ruined their visit to Venice, and when they got to Florence in early November, they had little time to enjoy the clear weather or see much of the city’s famed art. They were too busy and distracted getting ready for their trip to Egypt, on which they were to embark in a week’s time. Preparations were extensive. They had arranged for their own guide, a dragoman, and intended to hire a boat, or dahabeah. Clover found herself in a flurry “to patch up my wardrobe,” and their Murray guidebook recommended an extensive list of staples for the boat, including coffee, curry powder, dates, figs, flour, ham, jams, matches, night lights, pepper, pickles, salt, sardines, soap, sugar, tea, rice, vinegar, spermaceti candles, candlesticks, brooms, and water bottles made of Russian leather, which were especially good for desert travel. Fresh meat, eggs, fruit, and vegetables could be gotten at the markets along the river.

  Though Clover and Henry were far from home, they stayed in contact with relatives and kept up with news. Some of it was troubling. Boston had erupted in flames on the evening of November 9, near to Summer Street, the neighborhood where Clover had grown up. Though none of the Hoopers or Adamses had been injured, nor had they lost any property, the fire had consumed over sixty acres in the commercial district, killed approximately thirty people, and left over a thousand homeless. Clover also anticipated news from Ned and Fanny, who were expecting their first baby. (Ellen Sturgis Hooper was born on November 12, and when Clover got the news almost a month later, she was greatly relieved, writing that she “rejoiced to hear of it.”)

  The transition to married life for the first several months had been challenging. Clover was often homesick. From Antwerp she wrote to her father, “Beverly is certainly nicer than any other place and I am always homesick for you”; from Dresden, “I miss you all the time, and miss you very much”; and from Venice, “I miss you very, very much, and think so often of your love and tenderness to me all my life.” She was reassuring him, but she was also reassuring herself that her marriage would not break her bond with her father.

  If she feared losing her close connection to her father, if she worried that he would be too lonely without her, she was also finding her way, thriving, in love with Henry and with the expanded world that life with him b
rought her. From Brindisi, their jumping-off port in southern Italy, she communicated both feelings at once: “I miss you and want to see you,” Clover reminded her father, but she was careful to add, “Henry is so utterly devoted and tender.” “I am sure,” she concluded, “that you would wonder at my ever feeling a yearning for the old diggings, which I do very often.” Henry also wrote a solicitous, if somewhat self-conscious, letter to assure Dr. Hooper of Clover’s well-being. “Clover gained flesh and strength so that she was in better condition, I think, than I had ever known her to be,” Henry wrote. But he didn’t want to imply that Clover had severed any bond, adding, “Not that she had or has at all forgotten you, or her home, or has in the least lost her attachment to America. I have no fear that she will ever do that.”

  On November 21, Clover and Henry arrived at Alexandria, where they drove through “dimly lighted streets,” with “ghostly figures wrapped in white stalking past us.” There was, Clover noted, “a strong flavour of the Arabian Nights about us.” The next day they chose their dahabeah, the Isis, which had three single cabins, a double stateroom, a dining room of twelve square feet, a bathroom, and a roomy upper deck, with a table and two sofas shaded by awnings. Because the Nile runs from the south northward, travel downriver had to be powered by rowers (with progress boosted by sail power when a steady breeze came from the north); Henry and Clover hired a crew and also a dragoman, whom Clover would later describe as “competent and faithful.” The following day the couple traveled by train south to Cairo to await the start of their journey on the Nile some ten days later. Roses and jasmine scented the warm, dry air. With their dahabeah anchored near Cairo, Clover and Henry spent several days touring the Great Pyramids and the Sphinx, at one point meeting up with friends from Boston, the financier Samuel Gray Ward and his wife, Anna Barker Ward, who’d been a close friend of Clover’s mother. “We saw them several times and enjoyed them very much,” Clover wrote her father.