Though the climate was ideal—“the air bracing and soft, the sunshine almost incessant”—Clover started to feel bewildered in a place completely foreign to anything she had experienced before, and she found it hard to get her thoughts in order. On December 5, while still anchored near Cairo and busy with final preparations for their long tour down the Nile, Clover complained to her father that she had “tried to write in the past ten days but gave it up in despair . . . for a long time past I have found it impossible to get my ideas straightened out at all.” After leaving Cairo on the southward journey, she found the slow travel and the sameness of the scenery disorienting: “One day is so like another so far that we do not even remember the names of the days.” And she began to feel self-conscious. She told her sister-in-law, Fanny Chapin Hooper, “letter-writing is not my forte.” A week later, she pleaded with her father not to “show my letters to anyone” because “they sound so silly and homesick.” She felt keenly that she had not yet found a way to communicate her impressions, her feelings, what she found interesting. At times, she could appreciate aspects of the scene. She noted with delight the young girls who came down to the river’s edge to fill earthen jars, “which they balance most gracefully on their heads.” Beneath their only garment, “a long dark blue cotton mantel which covers their head and falls to their ankles,” Clover spied their “silver bracelets” and she envied some of the girls—“they are so becoming.” But she recoiled from what she called the “ugly and miserable” towns that lined the Nile valley.
By the time she arrived in Thebes in the New Year, the discomfort caused by her surroundings was turning into true self-loathing and paralysis. “I must confess,” she confided to her father, “I hate the process of seeing things which I am hopelessly ignorant of, and am disgusted by my lack of curiosity.” And later in the same letter, she despaired. “I have become utterly demoralized about writing . . . I cannot write except to you who are used to my stupidity and shortcomings.” Two days later her senses had gone numb: “I never seem to get impressions that are worth anything, and feel as if I were blind and deaf and dumb, too.”
It was as if the blinding sun of Clover’s vivid dream after her engagement to Henry was now shining down on her from the Egyptian sky. She felt overwhelmed by all she was experiencing: the sights, smells, and sounds of the Nile, heightened by the heat, by confinement on the boat, and by the physical intimacy of married life. She had longed for a new life throughout the six years between finishing at the Agassiz School and meeting Henry. But she must have felt that much of what had defined her was now superfluous. Also, the anchoring love of her father must have seemed a million miles away.
Was Clover’s paralysis making her markedly more withdrawn? Was it difficult for her to carry on ordinary conversations? Henry must have noticed a change, given the close quarters of the boat and their daily travels on shore. He may have felt alarmed, though he said nothing in his letters. As Clover observed some time later in the trip, “How true it is that the mind sees what it has means of seeing.” Protecting Clover, protecting his marriage, protecting himself, Henry’s silence wagered that whatever troubled Clover would blow past like a desert wind.
By the end of January 1873, they anchored near the tiny island of Philae. Considered the jewel of the Nile, Philae is situated near the first cataract, where the Nile widens on the border of what had been ancient Egypt and Nubia (now Sudan). Clover and Henry strolled amid ruins dating from the time of the pharaohs and the caesars. And they had company. Also anchored near the tiny island were the Wards. Thoughtful, magnetic, and extraordinarily well read, Mrs. Ward had been known for her exquisite beauty—when she was young the American sculptor Hiram Powers asked to have a cast made of her face because he deemed her an ideal American type. Emerson wrote of her in his journal, “The wind is not purer than she is.” Perhaps the two women talked of old times and of everyone they knew in common: Clover’s parents, the Sturgis aunts, the Hooper cousins, Catharine Sedgwick, and the rest of the social circle on Beacon Hill and in Lenox, where the Wards had a farm they called Highwood next to what would be Aunt Cary’s Tanglewood estate. Mrs. Ward had tried to comfort Clover’s mother during her long illness, inviting her for extended summer visits at Highwood, writing in 1848, the last summer of Ellen’s life, “Dear, sweet Ellen Hooper, I want to see you,” and assuring Ellen the trip from Boston to Lenox would be easy, “just a day’s journey to spend a week or two with the two people who love you.”
Clover knew the Wards well and had undoubtedly visited their home as a young girl during her summers with Aunt Cary. Now, on the Nile, Mrs. Ward may have given Clover a sense of how to carry herself in foreign surroundings, how to adopt a dignified yet friendly demeanor, and how to be a companion to her husband without the trappings of home. She may have comforted Clover, even helping her remember how much her mother had loved her. In any case, after a week’s time in the company of Mrs. Ward, Clover seemed calmer than she’d been for several months. Her spirits lifted. “I doubt if we find any place as beautiful as this,” she enthused to her father on January 24, 1873. “The scenery in every direction from this island is exquisite.” She even agreed to an expedition of “shooting the rapids” in a rowboat, which she found “quite exciting” though not “half as dangerous as people pretend.”
Henry had bought a photography outfit in London (camera, glass plates, chemicals, developing equipment) and was, according to Clover, “working like a beaver at photographing” at Philae and farther south, at the enormous temples of the colossi at Abu Simbel, what Clover called the “most wonderful thing we have yet seen.” At one point she wrote that “we waited for an hour or two to photograph,” and she may have helped with the complicated printing-out process, which required numerous steps and following detailed chemical formulas—“we have been printing photographs to pass the time,” she noted later during a particularly slow stretch on the river. And one photograph of Henry sitting in their cabin may have been taken by Clover, unless Henry enlisted one of the boatmen to take it. Otherwise, at no point did she indicate she had taken any of the numerous photographs she sent to her father along with her letters. It was Henry’s camera, his photographs, his vision of their trip.
In early February, they rolled up their boat’s sail to prepare for the return trip to Cairo, then Europe. When they got back to Philae, they missed by just a few days the Emersons, the sixty-nine-year-old philosopher and his oldest daughter, Ellen. In Cairo, they went to gold bazaars and “bought many nice things—silk handkerchiefs . . . barbaric necklaces and earrings, Turkish slippers” until they had to make a “vow at last that we should stop.”
By mid-March they were sailing again on the Mediterranean, second-class this time, on a French boat. Now Egypt and Africa seemed to Clover “like a far-off dream.” “Our winter,” she confidently declared to her father, “had been a great success. We feel as if we had had a great bath of sunshine and warmth and rest, and are quite made over new. The charm of the East grows on us.” The fright that had gripped Clover, making it so difficult for her to concentrate and get her thoughts in order, had by this time wholly eased.
In the same week Clover wrote to her father of the “bath of sunshine,” she exclaimed in a four-page letter to Mrs. Ward, “How much we have lived through this winter, we feel as if we went home with a new lease of life and happiness to begin with.” And she added her thanks: “For all that you have done to make our winter pleasant we shall be grateful as long as we have any faculty of memory.” The coming of spring, the imminent return to the more familiar environs of Europe, and the prospect of her arrival home to Boston and her family had restored her sense of well-being. Aided by the sensitive attention of an older woman who “was home to me,” Clover made an important transition on the Nile. She had come to terms with her separation from her father and her marriage to Henry and had overcome a time of panic, finding anew her place in the world. Perhaps at twenty-nine, she had grown up.
As they approached
Naples, Clover got up before dawn to see the “sun rise between the two summits of Vesuvius.” “I perched on top of a pile of trunks and waited” for the sun to appear, Clover told her father, adding, “I shall never forget my first sight of the Bay of Naples, with Capri and Ischia half hidden in the early morning mist.”
It was as if Clover herself had risen to a new dawn.
From spring of 1873 until their return to Boston in August, Clover and Henry retraced many of their travels through Europe, but added several new excursions: to the ruins of Pompeii, to Sorrento, to the Amalfi coast—where they traveled on ponies on a “path lying between stone walls covered with ferns and violets, with oranges and lemons hanging over our heads”—and to Rome. In the Eternal City they visited the studios of the American sculptor William Wetmore Story and the painter Elihu Vedder, also an American, with whom Clover was not impressed—there were too many “stuffs and accessories” in his pictures. The couple also went to the studio of the Spanish painter Mariano Fortuny, whom Clover thought “very clever,” but who had, as she said, “tapestry on the brain.” She didn’t see “any soul . . . in his pictures.” Clover, increasingly confident of her taste, was beginning to make discriminating judgments about art.
By April they arrived in Paris, where they stayed for two weeks at a small hotel on the corner of the rue de Rivoli and place Palais-Royal and lived “à la française . . . —early coffee and tea, then a stout midday meal, and dinner at eight at some restaurant. We each buy a paper and get behind it!” And they shopped—bronzes from Japan, linens, a china serving set, and clothes, which Clover found “very pretty here this spring.” In May they were staying in the “swell part” of London, with their own servants, in a townhouse at 28 Norfolk Street, Park Lane. Gaskell’s father had died earlier in the spring, and he had opened up his father’s townhouse as a wedding gift to Clover and Henry. “If I were a boy,” Clover declared to her father, “I should say we are having a ‘bully’ time; being a staid matron I can only say we are enjoying ourselves extremely.” Being the daughter-in-law of Charles Francis Adams had paved the way socially for Clover—she was greeted kindly by many of his colleagues and friends. But she knew that because of her social class her experience of London was unlike that of most people: “England is charming for a few families but hopeless for most.” Clover held on to her American attitudes, though she admitted it had been “an uncommonly nice thing to visit England for a few months, and I like the people and they stand American ‘sass’ very good-humouredly.”
But by the end of July 1873, Clover declared to her father in no uncertain terms that she and Henry had “enjoyed much, but are quite ready to come home and buckle down to hard work.”
PART II: “Very Much Together”
Live all you can; it’s a mistake not to.
—HENRY JAMES
CHAPTER 7
A Place in the World
CLOVER AND HENRY ENJOYED mostly calm seas on their return voyage to America in mid-August of 1873, though Henry reported that Clover had a bad toothache, which “pulled her down” for a few days. They had been abroad for an entire year. Upon returning, the two spent the month of August with Clover’s father in Beverly Farms, “a small Boston world” where friends and family stopped by to welcome the couple home. Her brother, Ned, noticed with relief that Clover seemed “quite unchanged in looks.” For his baby daughter, Ellen, she’d brought a gift of “a silver anklet with bells from Egypt,” which delighted both baby and doting aunt. After much debate about where to live, Clover and Henry decided to buy a two-story brownstone at 91 Marlborough Street, in the newer neighborhood of the Back Bay, two blocks south of Boston’s Public Garden. Set on the corner at Clarendon Street, the house had sunny rooms on both floors and a library with room enough for two thousand books. An added bonus for Clover was that her father lived less than two blocks away, at 114 Beacon Street.
Clover had worried about what she’d need to set up house, at one point turning to her sister, Ellen, for advice. “I want you to send me a full list of your linen outfit,” Clover requested while in Venice on her honeymoon. A motherless daughter, she admitted to feeling “utterly adrift as to how much I need.” She said she had forgotten during her engagement that “things have to be bought and do not come of themselves,” adding self-consciously, “Please don’t let anyone see this—it is private and confidential and not quite what one is supposed to write from Italy.” But back in Boston, Clover seemed more at ease with the idea of running a household. The ship carrying all they’d collected on their honeymoon—twenty-five wooden crates packed with rugs, linens, glass, china, silver, paintings, drawings, and various kitchen things—arrived in mid-October, shortly after they moved into their new home. She and Henry hung many of their watercolors in the first-floor dining room, placing a large yellow Indian rug on the floor to complement the room’s yellow wallpaper. They kept a watercolor titled The Valley of Martigny and an early India ink drawing of an ancient ruin, both by the English master J. M. W. Turner, behind curtains to keep them from fading in the bright sunlight. Henry hung Blake’s startling drawing of the mad king Nebuchadnezzar in the library where, as he joked, it “excites frantic applause.” Henry admired Clover’s energy and skill in setting up their home, managing servants, and decorating, telling Gaskell, “My wife is very well and seems to thrive under a tremendous amount of work.”
That fall of 1873, Henry returned to Harvard College. He taught a general history of Europe for upperclassmen, an honors course on medieval institutions, and, later, a brand-new course on American colonial history. Henry’s Harvard salary of $2,000 a year (roughly $38,000 in today’s terms) made up only a small percentage of the couple’s income. He and Clover had an array of financial resources, including trusts, investments, and generous cash gifts from Dr. Hooper. When Henry’s grandfather Peter Chardon Brooks died in 1849, he left an estate of $300,000 to be divided among his heirs. Likewise, Captain Sturgis, Clover’s grandfather, left a sizable estate, with trust funds for all his grandchildren, after his death in 1863. Clover and Henry were not multi-millionaires on the scale of the industrialists, acquiring riches in a manner wickedly satirized by Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner in their 1873 novel, The Gilded Age, which became a byword for this era. But they were very wealthy. Their yearlong honeymoon had posed no financial hardship. They felt little impact from the financial panic of 1873, which tipped the American economy into a painful six-year recession—in the first two years alone, eighty-nine railroads went bankrupt, eighteen thousand businesses failed, and unemployment ran to 14 percent. Widespread misery prevailed. At that time the government did almost nothing to provide a safety net to help the unfortunate; the largesse of churches, communities, and individual philanthropy were the primary sources of aid. But, except for having to watch their spending more closely—they had lost “nearly all surplus revenue,” Henry noted to Gaskell—Clover and Henry emerged unscathed.
In January 1874, Henry resumed editorship of the North American Review, hiring as assistant editor his star student, Henry Cabot Lodge, who would later serve thirty years as a U.S. senator from Massachusetts. The literary journal, issued four times a year, published a roster of postwar intellectuals and writers: James Russell Lowell, William Dean Howells, Henry James, Francis Parkman, Daniel Coit Gilman (the first president of Johns Hopkins University), and Sarah B. Wister (daughter of the actress Fanny Kemble and mother of Owen Wister, a future writer of westerns and other fiction). In critical notices of new books, which Henry often wrote himself, he chided writers about style, urging historians to “keep the thread of the narrative always in hand.” A historian, Henry declared, “must be an artist.” With good prose, Henry told Lodge at one point, “the reader ought to be as little conscious of the style as may be. It should fit the matter so closely that one should never be quite able to say that the style is above the matter,—nor below it.”
Clover poured her energies and ambition into Henry’s work. It gave her a chance to continu
e learning and to satisfy a hunger to know the world, a deep curiosity she’d always had, even as a young girl. He would read aloud to her from manuscripts submitted to the North American Review and, in the evening, they’d read books of literature, history, and science aloud to each other in front of the fireplace. She made sure the routines of their daily life protected Henry’s time and energy, urging him on. She told one of his students how she inspired her husband by reminding him how many candles the American historian George Bancroft had burned to the quick “while writing before breakfast.” Just before their first wedding anniversary, Henry acknowledged his debt, saying to Gaskell, “I have been hard worked and have deputed to my wife all that I could get her to do.” Whatever Henry may have given Clover to do—grades to compile, bibliographies to check, pages to read—he didn’t say. Nor did she.
The summer of 1874, Clover and Henry escaped Boston’s heat to spend several months in Beverly Farms, with its sparkling light, smooth sandy beaches, and rocky cliffs. The Eastern Railroad had had a depot in Beverly Farms, midway between the larger town of Beverly to the west and Manchester to the east, since 1847. Early residents who had bought up “farm and woodland that drifted and tumbled down to the sea” composed a who’s who of prominent Boston families, including numerous branches of the Lowell, Putnam, and Cabot clans, as well as other notables, such as Captain Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the Civil War hero and later an editor of Emily Dickinson’s poems; Richard Henry Dana, the lawyer and author of Two Years Before the Mast; and Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes. During the first summer after their honeymoon, Henry, who’d been worn out by teaching and editing, liked to walk in the afternoons “into the depths of the forest,” with its dappled light, where he’d find “a sheltered spot” to “lie down on my back till dinner-time.”
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