The mad rush of dinners, conversation, and intrigues continued through the spring of 1878. Clover’s brother, Ned, came to stay for several weeks early in the year, and her father arrived for a two-week stay in mid-April. Clover made no mention of whether her sister, Ellen, visited or declined to do so, as she would the following spring when Ellen sent Clover only “a laconic line” of regret. The sisters spent much of every summer living only a short distance from each other at Beverly Farms. They exchanged occasional letters, though very few survive. From time to time, Clover communicated with her sister through her father, asking him to pass on tidbits of gossip or requests. But it is also true that she mentioned Ned more frequently than her sister in her letters to Dr. Hooper.
That summer of 1878, Clover and Henry again stayed on the North Shore at their beloved Pitch Pine Hill, spending the months, as Henry said, “icing ourselves by the sea-side, and wondering whether Washington really exists.” But on moving back to “winter quarters” the next fall, Henry wrote to Gaskell that Washington was now home, “where we find ourselves on the whole more contented than anywhere else.” Clover reported to her father that they found everything in order; the dogs were “wild with joy to see us.” Eighteen months after their arrival, Clover and Henry proved their “experiment,” as they called it, a shining success. Theirs had become one of the most coveted invitations in the capital. They’d made good friends and, except for the hubbub with Henry’s parents (which Henry didn’t protest much), they’d avoided major social embarrassments. So much of it had been thrilling.
They’d lived the first years of their marriage, including these months in Washington, as Henry said, “very much together.” He had told Gaskell it was one consequence of their not having children, a fact their friends and family had begun to note. Gaskell had married Lady Catherine Henrietta Wallop, daughter of the fifth earl of Portsmouth, in late 1876. When Henry heard that the Gaskells were expecting their first child, he wrote to his long-time friend, “I have myself never cared enough about children to be unhappy either at having or not having them, and if it were not that half the world will never leave the other half at peace, I should never think about the subject.” But Henry did think about it. If what he said on the occasion of Gaskell’s announcement was something of a dodge, a way to hide his true feelings, he was reconciled enough with the situation to forthrightly mention their childlessness. In these years, Clover probably never did this, and certainly not to her father. She liked children, took care of her five nieces every summer, and enjoyed their antics. Clover’s life with Henry had an extraordinary fecundity of another sort—love, productive work, friends, wealth, lively conversation, entrée to much that was best. But she may have also felt a sense of loss and feared that she had disappointed Henry. Perhaps, at thirty-six years old, she still held out hope that motherhood might yet be in her future. Perhaps not.
“Of ourselves I can, thank Heaven, give you only pleasant news,” Henry wrote to Gaskell at the end of 1878. “I have worked hard and with good effect. My wife has helped me.” Henry had found his stride in his work. By the spring of 1879, he’d sent the publishers his Life of Gallatin and finished editing the three volumes of Gallatin’s papers. When the publisher’s indexer made a mess of things, he had to write his own index to those three volumes, which together numbered three thousand pages. When he finished in mid-May, Clover observed that her husband’s shoulders were at last “springing back to their normal position.” With Clover’s help, Henry had launched his new writing career as a historian and biographer. He also had a clear idea of what his next project would be. He and Clover would need to return to Europe. Archives in London, Paris, and Madrid held documents and correspondence that would help him better understand the administrations of Presidents Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. This research and writing would turn into a massive endeavor, ultimately producing Henry’s “prose masterpiece,” History of the United States During the Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, in nine volumes. The first two would not be published for ten years.
After taking care of “900,000,000 things,” Clover and Henry left Washington on May 19, stayed a week with Dr. Hooper in Boston, and on May 28, 1879, boarded their ship, the Gallia, in New York. They were bound for England.
Unless otherwise indicated, illustrations are reproduced courtesy of the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Ellen Sturgis Hooper, Clover’s mother, as a young woman.
MARY BUNDY COLLECTION, STURGIS LIBRARY, BARNSTABLE VILLAGE, MASS.
Clover’s aunt, Caroline Sturgis, younger sister of Ellen Sturgis Hooper.
MARY BUNDY COLLECTION, STURGIS LIBRARY, BARNSTABLE VILLAGE, MASS.
Dr. Robert W. Hooper, Clover’s father.
SWANN FAMILY COLLECTION
Clover’s older brother and sister, Ned and Ellen Hooper.
SWANN FAMILY COLLECTION
Clover at two or three. Her mother called her “Clovy” or “my blessed Clover.”
Clover at eight or nine, near the time of her Aunt Susan’s suicide.
Tintype of Clover at ease on her horse, taken in October 1869 at the Hooper summer home in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts. She had just turned twenty-six.
Clover added this sketch to a letter to her father, depicting the newlyweds’ seasickness aboard the steamship Siberia, on their ocean crossing to England in July 1872.
Henry in the stateroom of the Isis, the boat he and Clover leased for their honeymoon travels on the Nile in 1872. Clover may have taken the photograph.
Clover and Henry at the Chapter House at Wenlock Priory, July 24, 1873. Left to right: Henry, Lady Eleanor Sophia Cunliffe, Charles Milnes Gaskell, Clover, Lord Pollington, Lady Pollington, Sir Robert Cunliffe. Clover’s right eye is unaccountably scratched out in the photograph.
Undated tintype of Clover holding a Skye terrier that might be Possum, the dog she and Henry acquired in 1881.
Portrait of Anne Palmer painted by the American artist Abbott Handerson Thayer in 1879, the year Anne and Clover became friends.
MEMORIAL ART GALLERY, UNIVERSITY OF ROCHESTER
Frances Benjamin Johnston’s photograph of Elizabeth Cameron, “a dangerously fascinating woman,” taken several years after Clover’s death.
FRANCES BENJAMIN JOHNSTON, LIBRARY OF CONGRESS
Clover wrote to Dr. Hooper on Sundays, usually in the morning. Sometimes she signed her name Clover, but most often M.A. (Marian Adams). He kept every letter she wrote, noting the date on the envelope.
Untitled bronze statue, known as “Grief,” by Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1891), marking the graves of Clover and Henry in Rock Creek Cemetery, Washington, D.C.
PHOTOGRAPH BY THE AUTHOR
CHAPTER 9
Wandering Americans
THE OVERSEAS TRIP to England was trouble-free. Clover and Henry experienced little of the seasickness that had plagued the honeymoon voyage seven years before. On arriving in London, Clover announced to her father she agreed with the great English polymath Dr. Samuel Johnson when he wrote, “‘He who is tired of London is tired of life.’” Henry reported that they dined out incessantly. Clover would later muse to her father that the “vastness of this London society strikes you more every day,” but added, “We always drift into the same set here—respectable—mildly literary and political.” Clover and Henry rented and settled into a large sunny house at 17 Half Moon Street, north of Buckingham Gardens. They went to concerts at nearby Westminster Abbey, scoured print shops to add to their growing art collection, and traveled through the countryside north of the London. There, Clover found the “gardens and great trees and old cottages . . . so beautiful” that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, “this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels.”
In mid-July they attended a private dinner and showing at the new Grosvenor Gallery, which had opened two years before in the fashionable shopping d
istrict on New Bond Street. Lady Blanche Lindsay, whom Clover described as “young and not pretty,” hosted social gatherings at the gallery, which she and her husband, Sir Coutts Lindsay of Balcarres, had established as a “refuge of the Pre-Raphaelites” whose work had been rejected by the Royal Academy. Dinners at the gallery had become the social invitation of the summer season. Clover admired the new building’s long paneled rooms lined with crimson brocade and frescoes. She was less enthusiastic, with few exceptions, about the art on display that season, which included works by George Frederic Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. Upon seeing James McNeill Whistler’s large portrait of Connie Gilchrist, Clover thought it a “joke,” agreeing with John Ruskin’s view that Whistler’s paintings were overly abstract and seemed somehow unfinished, as if he had flung “a pot of paint in the face of the public.” The aesthetic movement, with its doctrine of “art for art’s sake,” didn’t hold Clover’s attention as much as the virtuosity of the Old Masters and the early-nineteenth-century Romantics.
Henry spent most of his days “pegging away” at the London Records Office. Sometimes Clover joined him, reading through old British newspapers. Or she found other ways to occupy her time. She often “loafed with” Anne Palmer, who’d taken an apartment just four doors away on the same street. She and Anne had met two years before through Carl Schurz’s daughter, Agatha, while attending the theater together in Washington. Earlier in the year, she had invited Anne to travel along with her and Henry to the famed Niagara Falls, and while there, the two women had dared to walk across the ice bridge between Canada and the United States, jumping crevasses beneath the “sparkle and glitter” of a “warming sun.” Despite an age difference of fourteen years, Clover and Anne shared a spirit of adventure, and by the time they met again in London six months later, they were friends. With Anne, Clover relaxed. Anne had grown up in New York, outside the “whispering gallery” of Boston and Washington that often made Clover behave cautiously, especially around other women. Though Clover stayed in contact with her women friends from before her marriage, including Adie Bigelow, Eleanor Shattuck (now Whiteside), and the Agassiz sisters, her friendship with Anne had a heightened intimacy. Anne, a striking, slender woman with large, dark brown eyes and wavy brown hair, shared Clover’s passion for art as well as a quick sense of humor. Both had known a full measure of loss: before Anne’s tenth birthday, three of her younger siblings had died, and her youngest brother, Oliver, was severely handicapped. Anne felt close to her father and brother, but not to her mother and sister, a family dynamic Clover understood. Clover could be Anne’s friend and protector, providing nurture and fun. Together in London, they attended dog shows and flower exhibitions, once rowing on the Thames River to Twickenham. Whatever they did, they often found themselves laughing till all hours.
The American novelist Henry James, who had moved to London in 1876 and was living nearby, thought Clover and Henry to be “launched very happily in London life,” as he wrote in a letter to his family. James was staying in a modest apartment two blocks away from the Adamses, on Bolton Street, and in the late afternoons, after he finished writing, he often stopped by for some of Clover’s tea and gossip. They were the same age, and having grown up together in Boston and Cambridge, knew many of the same people. He thought Clover had “intellectual grace.” She called him Harry. At thirty-six, Harry had—in the words of Cynthia Ozick—“become Henry James,” the celebrated author of the best-selling Daisy Miller. The novelist, who cut an impressive figure, was solidly built, with a beard and receding brown hair, a strong profile, and a quiet, self-absorbed manner. One friend remembered how he “banishes all expression” from his enormous gray eyes. He was in the midst of an intensely creative period, having already written The American, The Europeans, and a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, among other essays and short stories. He finished Washington Square in the freezing winter of 1879 and laid plans for drafting, the following spring, what he called his “wine-and-water” novel, The Portrait of a Lady.
Did Henry James talk with Clover about what he was writing? Neither one said. But surely these two confirmed raconteurs exchanged stories, chitchat, turns of phrase—at one point James promised to bring her “plenty of anecdotes—if your store has got low.” James considered Henry Adams “a trifle dry,” but he found Clover “conversational, critical, ironical,” with a wit distinguished by “a touch of genius.” Clover thought James talked a lot, but fussed over him and fretted over his extended absence from America and his literary reputation. She couldn’t comprehend what made him stay away from his own country for so long. She found James’s fascination with London, which he once called “the most complete compendium of the world,” perplexing, and mused, “what it is that Henry James finds so entrancing year after year we cannot understand . . . A man without a country is one to be pitied in ten years.” And later, when American critics accused James in “savage notices” of giving short shrift to American culture in his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clover worried. “It is high time Harry James was ordered home by his family.” While she realized the critics were “silly and overshoot the mark in their bitterness,” she also reasoned that her friend “had better not hang around Europe much longer if he wants to make a lasting literary reputation.”
But if these two Bostonians had a close friendship, and they did, a kind of coolness defined its center, with each observing the other, each taking notes. James’s attention flattered and entertained Clover, but nothing more. She resisted the magnetic pull of his all-consuming imagination. Her self-containment demanded little from him. They both managed life by deflection—she with her fierce humor, he with a distancing charm—a tactic each must have understood in the other. “He comes in every day at dusk and sits chatting by the fire,” Clover wrote her father, but added that she thought him “a frivolous being” for dining out as much as he did. After reading A Portrait of a Lady, which James would later send to her, she wrote to her father, “It’s very nice, and [there are] charming things in it, but I’m aging faster and prefer what Sir Walter [Scott] called the ‘big bow-wow style.’” It wasn’t that her friend “bites off more than he can chaw,” she concluded, “but he chaws more than he bites off.”
Clover reported to her father that Henry James, on hearing that she and Henry planned to spend the next months in Paris, felt “half disposed to go with us.” Whether they all traveled together, no one said, but the three turned up around the same time in mid-September of 1879 in the City of Light.
“The second act of Innocents Abroad is now beginning,” Clover reported upon arriving in France. She thought Paris less welcoming than London and would later call it little more than “a huge shop and restaurant.” But early in the fall of 1879, the city shone under luminous skies, its seductions in full view. While driving in her carriage through its most stylish park, the Bois de Boulogne, Clover found everything better than in London: “better horses, better liveries, and of course the women immeasurably better dressed.” Henry planned to work on his research into Jefferson and Madison in the archives, but these institutions were closed until October 1, so Clover and Henry had some leisurely days together—“We have quiet mornings to study, noon breakfasts, and Bohemian dinners.” She already knew French from her lessons at the Agassiz School and had started learning Spanish in preparation for travels in Spain. Henry James came by every day at six-thirty, after which they dined out and attended the theater several times a week. On September 13, for her thirty-sixth birthday, they went to the Louvre, where they feasted on the Old Masters; Clover discovered that “every time one comes back to the good pictures they seem better.” Afterward, they met with James for dinner at an open-air café and went to the Paris circus, followed by ice cream on the wide boulevard of the Champs-Élysées.
The three revelers were joined that same evening by Isabella Stewart Gardner and her husband, Jack. Clover had known “Mrs. Jack,” as everyone called her, since her marriage in 186
0. The two women, only three years apart in age, had much in common, inhabiting similar social circles both in Boston and on the North Shore, where the Gardners had a summer home in Beverly. They had met in Washington when Mrs. Jack traveled to the capital, and again in London, where they attended a party at the Grosvenor Gallery and critiqued English fashion for “twenty minutes side by side in the vestibule waiting for our respective broughams.” In Paris, Mrs. Jack introduced Clover to her dressmaker, the renowned designer Charles Frederick Worth, famous for his couture and his use of sumptuous materials; he suggested that Clover order a dark green merino dress trimmed in dark blue, similar to a dress he’d designed for the duchess of Würtemberg.
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