Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  Mrs. Jack’s toughness, her refusal to adhere to social convention, and her sense of style and élan had earned her acclaim in the papers—a local reporter called her “one of the seven wonders of Boston.” A friend remembered her “gliding walk, like a proud ship under full sail.” She had already begun amassing the art that would one day fill her magnificent Boston palazzo. Clover was fully aware of Mrs. Jack’s reputation, may have even envied it a little. She also knew that the “breeziest woman in Boston,” as a New York gossip magazine would later dub Mrs. Jack, expected obeisance. Once, while at her desk writing to her father, Clover put down her pen and went outside, walking over to Mrs. Jack and another woman “who were smiling and bowing” at her from across the street. She explained to her father, “We have asked them to dine on Wednesday and as Mrs. Jack wants to see diplomats I’ve sent for the German minister—the Turkish ditto—and Count de Suzamet (French). Three diplomats and terrapin ought to make them happy.” Henry James treated Mrs. Jack as she wanted to be treated, as a queen. One gets the sense that Clover found this harder to do.

  If Paris was the second act of their trip, Spain was its third. After Henry figured out he wouldn’t be able to gain access to the archives he needed without more negotiation, the Adamses had decided to leave Paris, planning a return visit nearer to Christmas, and arrived in Madrid by overnight train on October 19. Henry found the city “without exception the ugliest and most unredeemable capital I ever saw.” But they were besotted with “a sky so blue that one can scoop it out with a spoon.” Clover raved, “The sun seems to drive out the damp and cold of London and Paris and the air is delicious.” The Prado Museum was a feast of art. “Day after day we stroll into the gallery and gorge ourselves with Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Velásquez,” Clover exclaimed, adding that a Titian oil of “seventy babies with small turquoise wings” seemed as if it had been painted with “powdered jewels soaked in sunshine.” When they traveled to southern Spain at the beginning of November, Granada left “nothing to wish for—sky, trees, flowers, air are simply perfect.” She and Henry stayed at an inn on a hill under the fourteenth-century Moorish castle the Alhambra, less than a mile from the city, under towering elms and golden poplars that seemed “like enormous lighted candles.” They lived “out of doors” with a wood fire in the evening, reading aloud in Spanish from Don Quixote. Spending a day in nearby Córdoba, they “poked about for hours in the winding little streets, peeking into house after house, with their marble vestibules as clean as a Shaker could wish; a door of iron lacework in quaint Moorish patterns, and behind a cool patio or open court round which the house is built, with orange trees, roses, blue jasmine, heliotrope, and other gay flowers in masses of colour—it was the Arabian Nights come to life again.”

  They took a steamer ship across the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta at the northernmost tip of Morocco, where Clover wrote, “We are having a beautiful time.” From there, they embarked on an all-day trip by donkey caravan to Tetuán, like Ceuta, a city governed by Spain. They left early in the morning, together with the postman, several guides, and a rabbi with an enormous white beard, and traveled south along the Mediterranean coast, over long sandy beaches, and then across “plains of heather in bloom” and low palmetto trees. Henry wrote that the “ride was almost the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” Clover gushed that it was the “most enchanting road all the way for nine hours,” feeling proud that she was the first American woman ever to visit the ancient city. She proved her mettle when the donkey she was riding spooked at an imagined snake and fled, with her astride, into nearby bushes, bringing her into “abrupt contact with the soil of Africa,” which, she added, “did me no harm.”

  Clover and Henry returned north in late November, in a rush to get to the archives in Seville, where Henry wanted to study diplomatic dispatches made by the Spanish minister in Washington during President Jefferson’s administration. During a train trip to Córdoba, Clover had talked, in her novice but effective Spanish, with a woman whose husband knew someone in Granada who could introduce Henry to the archivist. Once in Seville, Clover took charge, convincing officials to open the archives despite a four-day celebration of the marriage of King Alphonso XII, for which all city offices had closed. During the three hours that Henry combed through bundles of documents, Clover talked with the tottering archivist, who had “one lonely tooth” and proudly showed her the papal bull given to Christopher Columbus, “allowing him to go in search of America.” In playing such a significant part in advancing Henry’s research, she couldn’t have been happier: “It’s a great satisfaction.”

  The joys of sunny Spain ended with the couple’s mid-December return to Paris. They traveled by train for forty hours during the fiercest cold snap on record, with temperatures reaching far below zero. “Bitterly cold,” Clover reported on arriving in Paris, with “streets piled with eight days’ snow . . . yellow fog like cheese.” The newspapers told how officials set open-air fires to help people keep warm while walking in the streets. Paris remained frozen for most of their six-week stay; the sun hung “like a white frost-bitten ball in the sky.” More than the weather had changed. Henry left every morning for the Musée National de la Marine, not returning to their hotel on the rue de Rivoli until dark. Henry told Henry Cabot Lodge that he was working hard, but progress was slow: “Manuscripts are clumsy things to read, and there are few slower occupations than taking notes.” After reading “hard all the evening,” Henry returned in the morning to his “blessed archives,” as Clover now called them. She was lonely and the acute cold made things worse. There was little for her to do except hover by the fire and read. Even the Louvre stayed closed. By Christmas week, Clover’s unhappiness spilled over in her letters. “I hate Paris more and more,” she complained. “It grieves me to think of the cakes and ale we are missing in Washington,—sun, saddle horses, dogs, friends, politics.” All she could think about was their travels in Spain and Morocco, “a full feast,” not only because of the Mediterranean sun and sky but because she and Henry had been together, side by side, and the memory filled her with “so much pleasure.”

  Three weeks later, Clover and Henry arrived back in London, where the dense fog and smoke made it seem as if they walked “under a big yellow gray umbrella.” Henry James resumed his afternoon teas at Clover’s fire, reporting to Isabella Stewart Gardner that “the Adamses are here, and have taken a charming house.” Twenty-two Queen Anne’s Gate was located in central London just south of Bird Cage Walk, not far from where they’d lived the previous summer on Half Moon Street. The house, with “every detail charming,” had been pursued, as Clover reported, by the poet laureate Lord Tennyson, but the Adamses had gotten there first. With old mantelpieces, a cozy kitchen that would “make a picture for one of Caldecott’s books,” and an expert cook-housekeeper and under butler arranged for by Henry James, the household made Clover feel as if she and her husband had “lighted on our feet like two old cats.” She looked forward, as she said, to “six months of peace and plenty.”

  Henry put himself on a strict work schedule; a month before, from Paris, he had written that he faced a “mountain of papers and books” to read through before summer and felt as if he hadn’t “an hour to lose.” Many mornings he went to the British Museum to work. When not accompanying Henry, Clover spent time with her old friend Adie Bigelow, who was in town with her family, as was the gossip-prone Alice Mason, with her twenty-year-old daughter, Isabella. Clover had tea with her one-time idol, the famed English actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, now approaching seventy, who lived in the fourth-floor apartment of a nearby Queen Anne mansion. The meeting had been set up by Henry James, who’d first met Kemble in 1873 and thought her a woman of rare insight—she had “no organized surface at all,” James wrote his mother, but was “like a straight deep cistern without a cover.” Perhaps Clover reminisced with Kemble about the time Caroline Sturgis Tappan had introduced them at the Sedgwick estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, almost twenty years before. In
any case, Clover found Kemble “gracious and agreeable” and hoped for a return visit.

  There were other diversions. On a “lovely spring day” in early February of 1880, she and Henry went to watch Queen Victoria open Parliament, “a pretty show” she wished her nieces could see: “lots of gilt coaches with horses weighed down by brass trimmings and coachman and footman,” and the last coach, drawn by eight bay horses “nearly smothered in brass,” carrying the queen. She was dressed all in white, with an ermine cloak, and wore as a brooch the enormous Koh-i-Noor diamond, which had been given to her when she was pronounced the empress of India in 1877. The queen, Clover wrote, was “fat and red faced and ducked her old head incessantly from side to side.” When a “Mrs. Houkey” invited Clover to watch a debate in the House of Commons, she couldn’t refuse. The two women sat “as if in a harem,” looking through “a lattice screen from the ladies Gallery” and listening to the speaker, Henry Brand, with his long robes and “hornet’s nest wig.” During the numerous long prayers that opened the proceedings, the “Tory side bow their heads while advanced liberals show impatience.” The sight made Clover laugh.

  Clover and Henry steered through London’s “social rapids.” Dinner invitations often stacked up three and four deep per night—“one misses a large proportion of them,” Clover sighed, at the start of the season. But there were high points. At one dinner, she sat between the British physicist John Tyndall and the French philosopher Ernest Renan, with the poet Robert Browning sitting across from her. She was most disappointed in Browning, telling her father he had the “intellectual apathy in his face of a chronic diner,” but forgave him, given the beauty of his verse. She thought the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer looked “like a complacent crimson owl in spectacles with an assumption of his own science in his manner.” She spied his arrogance: “You are let to imagine that his very first principle of all is belief in himself.” At another dinner, she defended the right of George Eliot, whose Middlemarch Clover had read on her honeymoon, to marry John Cross, a man twenty years her junior. Cross, a banker for an American investment company, was somehow acquainted with Ellen and Whitman Gurney. The news of Eliot’s late-life marriage had “burst like a bomb shell” at an evening party where only Clover, Henry, and the poet Matthew Arnold knew of John Cross, and so they were “beset with enquiries.” “We declare,” Clover declaimed to her father, “that a woman of genius is above criticism.” In mid-July she and Henry escaped to a manor house, Loseley Park, south of the city, along with the politician Sir Robert Cunliffe, whom Henry had always thought was “what a gentleman ought to be.” They met Henry James and his older brother, William James, who was visiting England that summer. Together they took a walk through “fields of wheat and poppies—quaint little byroads with old red tiled cottages half smothered in roses,” followed by tea, a lively dinner, and an evening by the fire, where the entertainment was what Clover enjoyed most: “a spring-tide of anecdotes and stories.”

  But Clover also wearied of the endless round of dinners out, saying “one dinner in six” was worth attending. Most were “sloughs of despond.” Dr. Hooper asked her if she was homesick and wanted to come back home. But she didn’t want to hear it. “Of course, we’re ‘homesick,’” she replied, defending their decision not to return to Beverly for the summer and early fall, as had been their habit. Discipline was in order. Feeling homesick, Clover explained, was “no reason for going home until the object which brought Henry over is accomplished.” And she insisted their six months in London had been a success, reassuring her father: “We’ve had a good deal of pleasure—made many new acquaintances—and stuffed our little minds with new impressions.”

  Henry finished everything he needed to do by the end of July 1880, having collected much of the primary source material for the history of early America, which was now taking clearer shape in his mind. He’d closely studied English politics from 1801 to 1815 and gotten a vast store of French and Spanish papers in order, determining it would take him six volumes to tell the story of the period adequately. “If it proves a dull story,” he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge, “I’ll condense, but it’s wildly interesting, at least to me.”

  Scotland would replace Beverly Farms as a supplier of fresh air and breezes, and the couple left for the north as soon as they closed up the London house. At Matlock Bath, near the Peak District in northern England, Clover gloried in the change of scene, with “air like champagne after London.” She had always wanted to visit the nearby medieval manor house Haddon Hall, and when the keeper said that no one could tour it on Sunday, Clover convinced him to make an exception by pleading they’d “come all the way from America” and offering a half crown to the keeper’s young daughters for the favor. Though “not done up or patched” since 1699, the house was “enchanting.” In one room hung an enormous tapestry picturing Aesop’s fables, which Clover explained to their young tour guides. They left the next day by train for Edinburgh, then north via Perth for the hill country surrounding Dunkeld, where they stayed with friends of Ellen and Whitman Gurney. From there, they traveled fifty miles across the Grampian Hills and Spittal of Glenshee on a “sunny blue day” that Clover would long remember, with its “wild heather covered hills with white sheep and patient collies.” The “crimson moors and blue hills” of the Scottish Highlands, which she found intensely romantic, were “reeking with history and legends.” Henry put it another way in a letter to Gaskell: “My wife is flourishing and delighted with Scotland.”

  Clover and Henry were coming to the close of their trip. The “wandering Americans,” in Clover’s words, were finally going home. In early September of 1880, they arrived in Paris via London to shop for clothes and furnishings in preparation for their return to Washington and the new house they’d leased on H Street. Clover ordered a new wardrobe, including eight gowns by Mr. Worth. She found the task tedious but capitulated to Henry’s dictum of the previous fall: “People who study Greek must take pains with their dress.” Her husband was vain about appearances and continued to dress immaculately. He wanted his wife to look a certain way: “15,361 gowns and other articles of dress have thus far been delivered,” Henry joked to Gaskell, “and there remain only 29,743 to come.” They’d also collected a trove of paintings and drawings during the previous months: the “wee little early Turner” watercolor Clover gave Henry and Henry’s reciprocal gift of a Johann Zoffany portrait to celebrate their seventh anniversary; several works by William Mulready, Copley Fielding, and David Cox; an enormous Moorish cabinet; embroideries from Salamanca, Spain; and much more.

  During their eighteen months abroad, Clover and Henry had established “a wide acquaintance ranging from Tetuán in Morocco to Drum Castle in the Highlands,” which had the paradoxical effect of making “the world seem larger and smaller, too.” Clover had experienced no recurrence of feeling lost, as had happened on the honeymoon journey on the Nile. In Europe she knew exactly who she was. Her experiences had expanded her, deepened her, confirmed in her a keen appreciation for being an American. She had written from Spain that the “more we travel, the more profoundly impressed we are with the surpassing-solid comfort of the average American household and its freedom from sham. They beat us on churches and pictures in the Old World, but in food, clothing, furniture, manners, and morals, it seems to us we have the ‘inside track.’” What distinguished America from Europe was more than comfort—it had something to do with attitude and spirit. “Our land,” she said, “is gayer-lighter-quicker and more full of life.” Henry James would miss his “good American confidents.” They’d had many “inveterate discussions and comparing of notes.” Though James thought Clover and Henry were both sometimes “too critical,” he knew he’d miss their company. “One sees many ‘cultivated Americans,’” James wrote to a friend, “who prefer living abroad that it is a great refreshment to encounter two specimens of this class who find the charms of their native land so much greater than those of Europe.”

  It would be the last time
Clover would travel overseas, and somehow she sensed this, having written her father the previous winter, “As I don’t expect to come abroad again, I want to make the most of this.” Europe was a “pleasant story,” she said, that “began well and ended happily,” but it was one she did not “care to read over again.” In conclusion she said, “I’d rather read a new one which may not end so well but still is new.”

  CHAPTER 10

  Intimates Gone

  ON HEARING THAT Jerome Bonaparte, the great-nephew of Napoleon I, would be wintering in Washington with his wife and two young children, Clover hoped the city would not become “too fashionable,” although she added facetiously that she’d “rather winter in a first class American coffin” than any place she’d stayed during the previous months in Europe. She and Henry signed a six-year lease at two hundred dollars a month for another three-story mansion owned by William Corcoran, this time the “little white house” at 1607 H Street on the northern edge of Lafayette Square, nearer to Sixteenth Street, still known as the Slidell house after the bellicose Louisiana senator who had lived there briefly in the early 1860s. But they had to stay almost two months at the crowded Wormley’s Hotel while workmen finished renovations, including new mantelpieces, built-in bookshelves, a large detached kitchen in back, fresh coats of paint inside and out, and a brand-new stable for their horses, Prince and Daisy. Henry continued to defer to Clover’s skills in such matters. She had by now in their marriage set up or made over four homes, not including several temporary houses in London and Paris. As Henry wrote to Charles Gaskell, “My wife is fairly weary of house-furnishing.” To all of this, she brought a mix of energy and exasperation, acknowledging at one point that the contractor “didn’t realize when he undertook to put the house in perfect order that he would have two driving New Englanders at his heels.” By the first week of December, after hiring servants and the delivery of fifteen wagon loads of black walnut and cherry furniture from Boston, she could finally announce “We are really in.” She was pleased to be home, and Henry’s contentment complemented her own—she reported how he thought “his house charming,” saying virtually the same thing three months later: “Henry hard at work, gloating hourly over his comfortable quarters.”