Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  The only moments of the past that I regret are those when I was not actively happy. As one cannot be always actively blissful, one must be contented with passive content, but it is a poor substitute at best, and makes no impression on the memory. My only wonder is whether I would have managed to get more out of twelve years than we got; and if we really succeeded in being as happy as was possible. I have no more to say. The world may come and the world may go; but no power yet known in earth or heaven can annihilate the happiness that is past. I commend this moral to your careful consideration. As you once said, the worm does not turn when he is trodden on hard enough. I am one of those worms. I don’t turn. I don’t complain. I don’t tear round. But I had my twelve years, and have them still.

  Clover and Henry had been married thirteen years at the time of her death. He did not include in his count their last year together, the year he lost her to a grief and depression he could not assuage.

  Suicide is “the impossible subject.” It defies explanation even as it obligates survivors to try to find possible causes. Like a rock dropping in a still pond, the consequences of Clover’s suicide would ripple out in widening circles of anguish, bewilderment, loss, curiosity, and a sense of mystery.

  Initially, Henry James offered what would become, by and large, the most widely accepted interpretation of what happened. In a letter to a friend, James stated simply that Clover had “succumbed to hereditary melancholia.” It was well known that Clover’s grandmother, Elizabeth Sturgis, had abandoned her husband and five daughters after her son’s accidental drowning, and the subsequent suicide of Clover’s Aunt Susan only confirmed the family’s reputation. Henry’s brother, Charles, had long thought Susan Bigelow’s death had left a particularly “dangerous impression” on Clover; believing the rumors that Clover had been present at the Bigelow house when her Aunt Susan died, Charles had warned Henry against marrying her. Clover’s final self-destruction, Charles concluded, was clearly due to the fact that she had “inherited a latent tendency to suicidal mania. It was in the Sturgis blood.”

  The Washington Critic stated in its report that Clover “had been suffering from mental depression.” Whitman Gurney, who saw Clover frequently during her last summer, assessed her condition likewise as “general depression,” employing a diagnosis that had entered the lexicon in midcentury and was used almost interchangeably with older terms, melancholy and melancholia.

  Others weren’t so certain. Eighty years after Clover’s death, her niece Louisa Hooper Thoron, by then ninety-one years old, still searched for clues as to what had engulfed her Aunt Clover. On a printed copy of a sermon entitled “When the Well Runs Dry,” given at Boston’s Trinity Church on February 7, 1965, Louisa jotted down her family history of debilitating depressions. One of her sisters had had “a bad nervous break-down in 1906 at 31 years old,” Louisa began, careful to confine her comments to the sermon’s margins. Comparing her sister’s story with her Aunt Clover’s a generation before, Louisa wrote that her sister’s breakdown “was handled by . . . taking her . . . to Switzerland where she was fed up and rested from the set of responsibilities and the kind of daily life that had broken her down. In her case and era Europe was [more] successful in doing this for her than America [in] 1885 for Aunt Clover.”

  And yet the “curious impregnability of so many suicides,” according to A. Alvarez, is the person’s “imperviousness to solace.” This aptly describes Clover. All her wealth and advantages—none of it at the end could comfort or save her. “Like sleep-walkers,” in Alvarez’s evocative phrase, her life was “elsewhere . . . , controlled by some dark and unrecognized centre.”

  In early June, six months after Clover’s death, Ellen Gurney wrote to E. L. Godkin about Henry. She explained that the “stoic aspect” to Henry’s behavior was only a “thin glaze” and that “the worm never dies—he is restless—hates to be alone.” To escape his gloom, his sense of “being smashed about,” Henry embarked on a train trip west, leaving for San Francisco with a traveling companion, John La Farge. He found the journey “a glorious success,” relishing the chance to see the countryside, La Farge’s company (“who never complains or loses his temper”), and the plush accommodations arranged by his brother, Charles, president of the Union Pacific Railroad since 1884. On June 12, he and La Farge sailed on the SS City of Sidney for Japan. Nikko, with its waterfalls and seventeenth-century temples to the Shoguns, dazzled Henry. To John Hay he wrote that the mountain town was surely “one of the sights of the world.” For six weeks Henry rested, roamed, and spent time contemplating the principles of Buddhist thought, with its balm for restlessness, its call to rise above suffering and self. Tours of Kyoto, Nara, and Yokohama, where he collected bronzes, porcelains, Hokusai drawings, and kimonos, were followed by a trip west of Tokyo to Mount Fuji, which Henry sketched in his notebook. By the time he and La Farge boarded the ship for their voyage home in October 1886, Henry told Theodore Dwight he felt “as ready to come home as I ever shall be.”

  But Henry returned to Washington to a cascade of bad news. Ephraim Whitman Gurney, his brother-in-law, had died of pernicious anemia on September 12, 1886. For Henry, Gurney “stood in the full centre of active interests,” particularly in the family. Having no children of his own, Gurney had been particularly attached to the five Hooper nieces, as is evident in a letter, dated July 1883, that he wrote to them in Cambridge when he and his wife, Ellen Gurney, were vacationing in Lenox: “I hope you have all been very well and happy and that you will be half so glad to see us as we shall be to see and kiss you.” His death left his wife, Ellen, utterly bereft. Within the past eighteen months, Ellen had buried her father, sister, and husband. Henry, worried about Ellen, observed in a letter to his old friend Charles Gaskell, “When I married in 1872, my wife’s family consisted of seven persons, myself included. Only three of us are left, and if I survive either of the other two, I shall have to accept some pretty serious responsibilities and cares.” Henry was obliquely referring to his Hooper nieces, who in 1886 were age fourteen, twelve, eleven, nine, and seven.

  In mid-November, Henry told Lizzie Cameron he hoped his “harvest of thorns is now gathered in,” but two days later, on November 21, his father, Charles Francis Adams, died at the age of seventy-nine, after a long decline into dementia. To Gaskell, Henry remarked, “If the moon were to wander off to another planet, I should no longer be surprised.” On December 5, the day before the first anniversary of Clover’s death, Henry wrote to Anne Palmer Fell. “During the last eighteen months,” he began, “I have not had the good luck to attend my own funeral, but with that exception have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for.” He was grateful for Anne’s news that she’d given her new baby daughter Clover’s birth name, Marian. He assured her he could “manage to keep steady now, within as well as without,” but admitted that her letter “gave me a wrench. I am more than grateful to you for your loyalty to Clover, and I shall love the fresh Marian dearly.” When imagining what he might say to Marian twenty years hence, he concluded that “nothing is much worth saying between man and woman except the single phrase that concentrates the whole relation in three words.”

  The bad news continued in 1887. On a rainy Saturday night that November, Ellen Gurney wandered out of her Cambridge home to a nearby railroad track and stood in front of an oncoming freight train. She was found severely injured by the side of the tracks and died the following morning, November 20, at Massachusetts General Hospital. Ned Hooper broke down two weeks later. Incapacitated by grief and hopelessness, he stayed in bed for six weeks, unable to go to Harvard, where he’d worked as college treasurer since 1876, or to care for his five daughters. Ned recovered but struggled, haunted always by the destruction of his family.

  On a Sunday in May 1888, Henry sat alone in his large library. The art he and Clover had collected on their honeymoon hung above generous shelves of books. Washington was blooming and passersby strolled beneath his open window, crossing the street to the leafy green of Lafayet
te Square—spring had always been Clover’s favorite time of year. His mood was out of tune with the beautiful weather. He had been rereading his old diaries, which he’d kept since a boy, tearing out pages to burn in the oversized fireplace rimmed with polished pink stone. In pages that would somehow escape destruction, he cried out, “I have been sad, sad, sad. Three years!”

  CHAPTER 23

  “Let Fate Have Its Way”

  FOR CHRISTMAS, 1885, ONLY THREE WEEKS after Clover’s death, Henry gave Lizzie Cameron a piece of Clover’s jewelry, saying, “This little trinket which I send you was a favorite of my wife’s. Will you keep it and sometime wear it to remind you of her?” In the months that followed, Lizzie Cameron seemed quickly to replace Clover in key ways. She and Henry could be seen riding on horseback on the same pathways in Washington he’d taken with Clover. Henry refused to return to Pitch Pine Hill in Beverly Farms, the summer home he and Clover had designed together, but he had the house opened and ready for the Hooper family and for friends to use. Lizzie took him up on his offer for her to stay, residing there for several late-summer months in 1886 and again the next summer, writing Henry long letters while looking out to the Atlantic through the upstairs windows of Clover’s bedroom, where Clover had spent many despairing hours not so long before. Lizzie would return to Pitch Pine Hill numerous times. She would even try to learn photography in the 1890s, telling Henry about the process and using the third-floor darkroom, designed by Clover, at 1603 H Street.

  But it was the birth of Lizzie’s only child, Martha, on June 25, 1886, less than seven months after Clover’s death, that accelerated rumors about Henry’s fierce and growing attachment to Lizzie. Henry became completely besotted with the child, having her over for daily visits, getting specially designed toys made for her, making the knee-hole under his enormous desk a secret playroom for her, with a sign in red ink that read MME. MARTHA, MODISTE. The fact that Lizzie had a child at all was surprising, given the deteriorated state of her marriage to Don Cameron, who already had six adult children. Henry’s attachment to the child only amplified speculation that Martha Cameron was actually Henry Adams’s child. Later, even Henry’s biographer, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Ernest Samuels, would fuel suspicion. Samuels, who got very little wrong in his three-volume biography of Henry, unaccountably puts Martha’s birth year as 1887, though he corrected the mistake later in his single-volume edition of the biography.

  Yet ample evidence suggests otherwise. Henry and Lizzie had almost no chance to meet alone when Clover was alive, given how seldom Clover and Henry were physically separated. Henry was a puritan in many respects. Despite his strong feelings, strict social decorum seems to have governed the conduct of his relationship with Lizzie while Clover was alive. Finally, Lizzie and Henry were not in the same place at the time of Martha’s conception. During August and September of 1885, Clover and Henry were at Beverly Farms while Lizzie was in California, traveling with her husband. The Camerons and Shermans apparently did not doubt that Don Cameron was, indeed, the father. Cameron may have hidden his surprise but not his pleasure in having a child in his fifties. Finally, although Henry may have wanted to have Lizzie “carved over the arch of my stone doorway,” Lizzie seems to have been interested in much less. A longtime friend remembered that though Lizzie “liked to flirt and tease, to kiss and cajole, she never went all the way.”

  By early 1890, though, something had shifted between Henry and Lizzie. What had started ten years before as a diverting flirtation and then a more serious infatuation had turned into something more profound, something Henry couldn’t and didn’t want to shake off. He had fallen irretrievably in love. In August 1890, after putting the final polish on the proofs of the last three volumes of his monumental History, Henry embarked on a fourteen-month sojourn in the South Seas. He and his traveling companion, John La Farge, traveled from San Francisco to Hawaii, then to Samoa, Tahiti, and Fiji; they also visited Australia, Batavia, and Singapore. From Ceylon (current-day Sri Lanka), they crossed the Indian Ocean by steamer, proceeded across the Red Sea and through the Suez Canal into the Mediterranean, and landed finally in Marseille, France. The trip was a retreat from his Washington life and an attempt to distract himself from his deepening feelings for Lizzie, to whom he wrote sonnets and lengthy missives throughout his travels. He and Lizzie planned to meet in Paris sometime in mid-October of 1891. From Samoa he wrote, “I read your letters over and over”; from Papeete on the island of Tahiti, “I need not tell you how much I wish I could have been with you at Christmas”; and upon leaving the island in early June 1891, “My only source of energy is that I am actually starting on a ten-thousand-mile journey to see—you!” Lizzie wrote in mid-August, confirming her plans to be in Paris in two months, promising, “I shall see you—and shall take you home.” Sailing to Ceylon, Henry wrote with increasing excitement, “In another week or ten days, if you have kept your plans exactly as I have, you may expect to see me walking into your parlor,” concluding with a flourish, “In a week, look out!” When he finally arrived in Paris on October 10, he breathlessly announced to Lizzie in a note delivered by messenger that he would “wait only to know at what hour one may convenablement pay one’s respects to you. The bearer waits an answer.”

  On November 5, less than three weeks later and once again separated from Lizzie, Henry wrote to her in a much-altered mood. “A long, lowering, melancholy November day,” his letter begins. Henry’s time with Lizzie in the City of Light was over, and things had not gone well. He presumably had hoped for time alone, a tête-à-tête during which he could declare his feelings for her and learn—at last—what was really in her heart. But their days were taken up by distractions and other people, including Lizzie’s daughter, Martha, and her step-daughter, Rachel Cameron. As Henry would later rather ruefully admit to Rebecca Dodge, “Mrs. Cameron and Martha were a great comfort to me as long as they stayed, though I saw much more of the two Miss Camerons than of Mrs. Cameron.” Apparently, Lizzie had again eluded him.

  After Henry, Lizzie, and the two Cameron daughters traveled from Paris to London, Lizzie sailed for America and Henry traveled to stay with his friend Charles Gaskell at Wenlock Abbey. It was from there that he started writing Lizzie on that “melancholy November day” a letter that took him a week to finish as he sorted out his feelings. He was miserable, spending afternoons riding “over sodden fields, in the heavy air, talking with Gaskell in our middle-aged way about old people, mostly dead.” He felt haunted by his days in Paris with Lizzie and their awkward parting in London, reminding her that she “saw and said that my Paris experiment was not so successful as you had meant it to be.” He doubted himself: “Perhaps I should have done better not to have tried it, for the result of my six months desperate chase to obey your bidding has not been wholly happy.” A part of him wanted to apologize for inflicting his feelings on her: “I ought to spare you the doubtful joy of sharing my pleasures in this form.” A larger part wanted her to share in his misery, which he justified: “But you, being a woman and quick to see everything that men hide, probably know my thoughts better than I do myself and would trust me the less if I concealed them.”

  Henry tried all kinds of tactics but got surer of his feelings as he wrote, even as he hurled himself at their mutual impasse. “No matter how much I may efface myself or how little I may ask, I must always make more demand on you than you can gratify, and you must always have the consciousness that, whatever I may profess, I want more than I can have. Sooner or later the end of such a situation is estrangement, with more or less disappointment and bitterness.” That was the central conundrum—Henry wanted more of Lizzie than she wanted to offer, and he could find no path through. “I am not old enough to be a tame cat,” he declared, but “you are too old to accept me in any other character.” He felt self-conscious about their dilemma, admitting as much when he gave Lizzie permission to “laugh at all this, and think it one of my morbid ideas.” But he also didn’t care to pose: “So it is; all my ideas are
morbid, and that is going to be your worst trouble, as I have always told you.” What he wished for was one chance to “look clear down to the bottom of your mind and understand the whole of it.”

  Henry concluded his long missive to Lizzie with some of the most gorgeous sentences of his entire canon—they are direct and emotionally transparent. At fifty-three, he finally found a voice for the desiring heart and dropped his guise of irony and self-defeat. As he had learned in the years following Clover’s death, to hold back and not speak of his feelings was far worse than being seen as a fool.

  I lie for hours wondering whether you, out on the dark ocean, in surroundings which are certainly less cheerful than mine, sometimes think of me and divine or suspect that you have undertaken a task too hard for you; whether you feel that the last month has proved to be—not wholly a success, and that the fault is mine for wanting more than I had a right to expect; whether you are almost on the verge of regretting a little that you tried the experiment; whether you are puzzled to know how an indefinite future of such months is to be managed; whether you are fretting, as I am, over what you can and what you cannot do; whether you are not already a little impatient with me for not being satisfied, and for not accepting in secret, as I do accept in pretence, whatever is given me, as more than enough for any deserts or claims of mine; and whether in your most serious thoughts, you have an idea what to do with me when I am again on your hands. I would not distress you with these questions while you were fretted, worried and excited by your last days here; but now that you are tossing on the ocean, you have time to see the apocalyptic Never which has become yours as well as mine. I have dragged you face to face with it, and cannot now help your seeing it. French novels are not the only possible dramas. One may be innocent as the angels, yet as unhappy as the wicked; and I, who would lie down and die rather than give you a day’s pain, am going to pain you the more, the more I love.