Democracy was Henry’s first novel, a satiric roman à clef that took as its subject national values dimmed by President Grant’s corrupt administration and a spoils system that defied reform—a narrative unwinding of the myriad ways by which politics undoes governing. The central character, Madeleine Lee, is in flight from New York to Washington after the catastrophic deaths of her husband and her baby, but “bent upon getting to the heart of the great American mystery of democracy and government.” Madeleine is accompanied in her search by John Carrington, a genial lawyer from Virginia. His rival for her affection is Senator Silas P. Ratcliffe from Illinois, a thinly disguised portrait of Senator James G. Blaine, who personifies all the failings of Gilded Age politicians. Other minor characters include Baron Jacobi, a Bulgarian minister, whose “witty, cynical” banter mimicked the humor of the Turkish minister Aristarchi Bey, and the “mischief maker” Victoria Dare, who “babbled like the winds and streams” while passing on social gossip; she was inspired by Clover’s young neighbor Emily Beale. (Emily recognized herself in the novel’s pages and called the novel “a horrid, nasty, vulgar book, written by a newspaper man not in good society.”) As Madeleine searches for democracy’s first principles, her two suitors—the honest, dull Carrington and the corrupt Ratcliffe—continue their pursuit of her. Finally, on the brink of marriage to Ratcliffe, his acceptance of a $100,000 bribe is revealed. Madeleine is saved from a loveless union, but no closer to understanding democracy or anything else, except her own vulnerability.
Although the final confrontation between Ratcliffe and Madeleine has a spark of vital feeling, most of the characters are not much more than types: a corrupt politician, a southern lawyer, a cynical diplomat, a Boston Brahmin, a president from the Midwest (a blend of both Hayes and Grant) buffaloed by forces he doesn’t understand. Henry James thought the novel “good enough to make it a pity it isn’t better.” But Teddy Roosevelt’s assessment savaged its bitterness and pessimism, its suffocating sense of defeat. Democracy had a “superficial and rotten cleverness,” Roosevelt wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge, not knowing that his good friend Henry Adams had been its author and dismissing the romp as “essentially false, essentially mean and base.”
The only character that resonates is Madeleine Lee, but perhaps not in the way Henry intended. Madeleine is a projection of the author in several respects. Her determination to understand democracy and her tendency to scrutinize her feelings and doubt their authenticity recall her creator’s traits. But Madeleine also has a resemblance to Clover. Like Clover, Madeleine presided over her Lafayette Square home with a flair that made it “a favorite haunt of certain men and women.” Like Clover, she was an American “to the tips of her fingers” who resisted “admitting social superiority in anyone.” She scorned religious piety, doubting its capacity to answer big questions. She said attending church “gave her unchristian feelings.” This sounds so much like something Clover would say that it’s no wonder Dr. Hooper thought his daughter wrote such a quip.
But there is a more evocative echo between Madeleine and Clover. Ratcliffe had not appealed to Madeleine’s “religious sentiment, to ambition or to affection.” Instead, he had seduced her by making her feel that her self-sacrifice in marrying a man she did not love would result in making her important, powerful, of “use in the world.” Sensing how she “atoned for want of devotion to God, by devotion to man,” he appealed to her “tendency towards asceticism, self-extinction, self-abnegation,” which had the effect of blinding her to her own self. She had, in the words of the novel, “not known the recesses of her own heart.” Madeleine escaped a loveless marriage to Ratcliffe with a return to her own principles, but her experiment in Washington was over and her future promised little more than flight and drift. Her attempt to “escape from the torture of watching other women with full lives and satisfied instincts, while her own life was hungry and sad,” had come to nothing.
Many specifics of Madeleine’s story differ, of course, from Clover’s life. Yet Henry’s explanation of Madeleine’s predicament as a woman without family and without focus for her considerable curiosity and intelligence limned aspects of Clover’s own increasing restlessness and solitude. As a woman without children of her own or a focus for her talents, Clover surely asked the central questions posed in the novel: “Was the family all that life had to offer? Could she find no interest outside the household?”
The author of Democracy was doubtful a woman could find such satisfaction.
From June through September of 1881, Clover and Henry lived again in Beverly Farms. From the Harvard library Henry requested access to the university’s collection of American newspapers, asking that material dated 1800 to 1809 be boxed and shipped to him there: “A weekly instalment [sic] of six or seven volumes would be all I could manage.” He was drafting the first two of what he now projected would be nine volumes about the administrations of Jefferson and Madison; the opening six sections, or books, would present, as he put it, “the social and economical condition of the country in 1800.” He had also accepted a request from John T. Morse, editor of the American Statesmen series at Houghton, Mifflin and Company, for a short biography of the Virginian John Randolph, a leading proponent of states’ rights and the southern cause who’d been an enemy of both Adams presidents. Henry finished a first draft in little more than a month, working ten-hour days. He wrote to Charles Gaskell, at one point, that “my eyes ache and my hand aches.”
Clover planned to start reading Plato’s Republic in Greek as well as Virgil’s Eclogues that summer. She was also busy with Ned’s five daughters, who were staying at Dr. Hooper’s nearby summer home. The girls were coping with the recent loss of their mother as best they could. In a note to Anne Palmer, Clover mentioned that her nieces had taken her “to their doll cemetery yesterday—it was ‘Decoration Day’—six mangled noses—arms and legless dolls lay in peaces [sic]—‘Sawdust to dust’ with chunks of white marble at their heads—pasteboard crosses and names to mark them and flowers ad libitum.” Though the eerie scene in the woods impressed itself upon Clover strongly enough that she described it to Anne, she didn’t note whether she grasped that the girls might have been reenacting the loss of their mother in their play, as she herself had done at her Aunt Sue’s house so many years before. Nor did Clover report in her letters to Anne news of how Ned was coping without his wife. She mentioned her sister, Ellen, but only in passing.
That fall, Clover and Henry stopped for several days in New York on their way back to Washington from Beverly Farms. They met Anne Palmer and joined John and Clara Hay and Clarence King for a night at the theater, dining together at the famous Delmonico’s restaurant before curtain time. But Clover was relieved to return home in October, writing to Anne, “We found the house as clean as soap and water and brooms can make an old trap ready—fires burning—nice driver, ecstatic dogs—placid horses—blooming roses in garden and gorgeous maples in front and behind—I feel like a field lily.” Politics was once again at the forefront since President Garfield’s shocking death in September 1881 after an assassin’s bullet. Clover approved of the cabinet choices of the new president, Chester Arthur, whom she thought was on the “road to Damascus” regarding civil service reform. Helpful to Henry was the fact that James Blaine was out as secretary of state. Henry had refused to work at the State Department archives while Blaine was in charge there, but with the appointment of his friend Frederick Frelinghuysen as the next secretary, he now felt he could resume that research.
Clover resolved on New Year’s Day 1882, perhaps with the tragedy of Fanny’s death less than a year earlier close in her thoughts, to “make all one can out of life and live up to one’s fingers’ ends.” With the social season in full flower, requiring attendance at countless teas and dinner parties, Clover wrote her father at the end of January that “life is like a prolonged circus here now.” Henry’s youngest brother, Brooks, was their houseguest for several weeks, and Henry James, also in town, was a frequent dinner guest.
She asked her father to write her a postcard with the following prescription: “My dear child: Let me beg of you not to make calls and as few new acquaintances as possible. I know better than you the delicacy of your constitution. Ride on horseback daily but avoid visiting and evening parties. Medicus.”
But she didn’t take her own advice and on one occasion had to explain to her father why she hadn’t had the chance to write her usual Sunday missive: “I really was so driven yesterday by people that not one blessed moment could I get even for a note.” Her father warned her to “be-ware of ‘partisan’ politics” after she’d sent several long letters detailing how Blaine had become the subject of a congressional inquiry regarding his Latin American diplomatic practices. She managed to elude the omnipresent Oscar Wilde, in town in early 1882; she shared the opinion of Henry James regarding this colorful character: “a fatuous fool,” as Clover noted. But she also described with considerable relish how she’d seen him while on a stroll on Pennsylvania Avenue: “long hair, dressed in stockings and tights, a brown plush tunic, a big yellow sunflower pinned above his heart, a queer cap on his head.” When Clover turned to look at Wilde as he passed by, she saw “a large blue card on his back, ‘Oscar Wilde on a wild toot.’”
Collecting art was for the Adamses an antidote to the “prolonged circus” of social life. When their dealer, Thomas Woolner, the Pre-Raphaelite sculptor and poet, sent from London a second small painting by the English Romantic artist Richard Bonington as a gift, Clover proudly noted that her collection of Boningtons now numbered four—“we shall at this rate leave fine pickings for our heirs.” To her delight, she received at the end of January a note written anonymously but in “a lady’s handwriting” that said, “‘If you will go to 1905 F Street before January 25 . . . you will see . . . two portraits by Sir Joshua Reynolds which will be sold at reasonable prices.’” Almost ten years before, while on her honeymoon in 1873, Clover had reported her assessment of several paintings by Reynolds: “Sir Joshua’s pretty women and children [are] enough to make your hair stand on end with envy.”
Several days later, Clover took Agatha Schurz, daughter of Carl Schurz, and Henry along to the run-down stucco house, where servants showed Clover photographs of the two portraits. After discussing the matter with the head librarian at the Library of Congress, Theodore Dwight, Clover bought the portraits, a matched pair of a husband and a wife, for $150 each. “They are not first-rate; are very dirty, no varnish, and badly cracked,” she wrote her father. “The lady, snub-nosed and pale, in pink satin with blue gauze scarf and pearl ornaments, hair drawn up over a cushion; Mr. Grover, stout and handsome, in powdered wig, gray brocade coat, and white neckerchief.” She added that she preferred “the woman; Henry the man, though he wished neither and ‘hates portraits,’” preferring to have landscapes on his walls. Clover satirized the difference between them with a rhyme: “Jack Sprat dislikes portraits, / His wife dislikes paysages, / And so betwixt them both / The choice is very large.”
After buying the portraits, Clover wrote to Thomas Woolner in an effort to confirm their authenticity and provenance. He replied in early April that the portraits were of Mr. and Mrs. Groves (not Grover), who had sat for Reynolds in 1755. But before she got Woolner’s answer, Clover had already confirmed that the portraits were “genuine Sir Joshuas,” having been owned for five generations by the Galloway family in Maryland. “Eureka! Eureka!” she exclaimed to her father: “I am their first purchaser!” She hung the two portraits between the library windows, “side by side,” as she told her father. Henry, Clover decided, could “look the other way.” It was the first time she recorded any kind of difference with or defiance of Henry’s tastes and wishes.
As much as Clover enjoyed her adventures in purchasing art, she found herself feeling drained. In March, Secretary Frelinghuysen asked Henry to serve as foreign minister to Central America in Guatemala City. Clover was given the unpleasant task of communicating her husband’s refusal of the unexpected offer—Henry hated doing such things—and she told the secretary it would be “an unwise appointment.” Yet she had regret, telling her father, “I wish we wanted it, it would be so new and fresh.” That same day she wrote to Anne Palmer that most of their friends no longer resided in the capital. Carl Schurz had moved to New York City, John Hay was in Cleveland, Clarence King “had nearly died,” as Henry reported, from a rupture of an old injury. Melodramatically quoting Shakespeare, she wrote how she and Henry sat “in these ‘bare ruined choirs’ where they so lately sang—and try to warm ourselves by burnt out fires.” By May, after unusually cold and wet weather, she told her father, “Every fool becomes a philosopher after ten days of rain, so I spare you the inside view of my heart.”
Summer proved equally trying. Clover had under her care at Pitch Pine Hill, as she reported to Anne Palmer, two of her youngest nieces “during the months when colic and unripe fruit prevail—so that if I cannot boast of maternal joys I can of ditto cares.” She was plagued by a “nightly toothache.” Otherwise, she told Anne, “It’s quieter here than any average grave.” Henry, absorbed in his writing, wrote to Charles Gaskell in June that “nothing . . . disturbs history. I grind on, slowly covering vast piles of paper with legible writing, but without even thinking of the day when it will be read by others.” By the fall, on returning to Washington, he admitted that they’d been “bored by our summer,” though it proved “a good time for hard work.” Clover was sick in bed off and on, with an infected tooth, a bad cold, a roaring noise (“like Boston”) in her ears. She concluded a November letter to her father, saying, “Nerve dead, tooth finished; shall begin tinkering with Eustachian [tube in the middle ear] this week. This drivel will weary and disgust you—never mind.”
She spent the holiday season of 1882 immersed in George Sand’s Histoire de Ma Vie, written in 1855. The sprawling twenty-volume autobiography of Amandine Aurore Lucile Dupin, which was Sand’s birth name, covers a span of years from her turbulent childhood to the 1848 revolution, a narrative that refrains from, as Henry James wrote in 1884, “an explicit account of the more momentous incidents of the author’s maturity . . . In other words, she talks no scandal.” On Christmas Eve, Clover wrote her father that she felt “glad you’re reading Histoire de Ma Vie,” explaining she found it “pleasant to be enjoying the same book. I’m in the fifteenth volume and think the interest increases.” She spent Christmas Day in bed with a bad headache, but kept reading. By New Year’s Eve, she had raced through another three volumes in the original French, reminding her father of his days in Paris as a young man studying medicine and imagining that he must have passed by the great bohemian woman of French literature. “How are you getting on with George Sand? To me it grows more and more interesting; volume eighteen is charming and I’m sorry it ends with volume twenty. She must have jostled you daily in the Latin Quarter in 1832 in men’s clothes, dining in cheap restaurants.”
Did the prolific Sand, who grew up motherless, who left her marriage, and, in the words of Margaret Fuller, “bravely acted out her nature,” embody for Clover something entirely forbidden but desired: a woman’s liberation? Clover did not say. But Sand’s unruly life, as she told it in her Histoire, was certainly the literary work Clover commented on most in her entire correspondence. Nothing else quite captured her attention as much as the cross-dressing Sand, with her freedom and courage to be, as Henry James observed, “open to all experience, all emotions, all convictions.”
At almost forty, what Clover had found thrilling as the young wife of Henry Adams—fascinating conversations, proximity to political power, access to the most prominent figures of the day—had lost some of its luster ten years later. If Henry’s desire that she stay at his side reassured her she was wanted, his demands also might have inhibited her. She began to think of herself as yoked in a double harness of togetherness and confinement. Her salon was becoming a gilded cage, which “left out on the whole, more people than it took in,” as Henry James described it in his short story “Pandora,
” which includes a fictionalized portrait of 1607 H Street.
She continued to host her usual five o’clock teas and to attend dinner parties and the theater, but, like the fictional Madeleine Lee of Henry’s Democracy, she couldn’t figure out how to be more useful. She knew she’d always be on the sidelines when it came to politics. She didn’t join any women’s organization that might have offered a forum for action, in spite of her experience with reform work in the years after the Civil War and prior to her marriage. She considered women activists dreary and their luncheons worse. As much as she found tending to her wardrobe tedious, when she reminded herself of the drab appearance of two leading Boston activists in the woman suffrage movement, Abby May and Ednah Cheney, she felt inspired to place another order to Mr. Worth’s workroom. Though Clover’s lack of interest in the issue of suffrage would shift somewhat over the coming years, she kept her thoughts and feelings about it mostly to herself. She had built around herself a carapace that had its protections but also foreclosed wider arenas for action and feeling, exactly what she longed for and what she’d found so compelling in George Sand’s Histoire.
Henry’s temperament was cooler, more inward than Clover’s. He wrote eloquent, sometimes moving letters, and his published history remains distinctive for breaking away from dry historical fact to capture the drama and emotion that underlay the founding of the country. But he had a spiky Adams manner—John Hay playfully called him “Porcupinus Angelicus.” His habit of pulling away to look, examine, and understand from a measured distance made him see people as types more than as individuals, no less in life than in his novels. He said one should treat heavy things lightly and light things with gravity, which became a handy witticism, a deflection from strong feeling. As Henry’s writerly ambitions increased, he turned his formidable focus ever more inward, and his detached posture became notable for its thoroughgoing irony. The burden for making the marriage work had largely fallen upon his wife. He depended on Clover’s outgoing liveliness to moderate his own reserve, but when he found her discouraged, when her state of mind turned dark, his gift for irony may not have had enough light and freedom in it to brighten her mood.
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