Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  Henry felt uncertain as to whether he should send the letter, but then decided to do so. “To the last moment I doubt the wisdom of sending this letter; but Kismet! Let fate have its way.”

  Henry’s chaste romance with Lizzie would in some ways prove a trap, insofar as it deepened his emotional withdrawal and isolation. It kept tidal feelings of loss awfully close—he wanted more than Lizzie could give. When she urged him to move on and marry again, he foreclosed the suggestion with the clearest declaration: “Marry I will not.” When Henry had fallen most deeply in love with her, Lizzie backed off, and if she didn’t exactly turn away from him, she imposed discipline. She was in an impossible corner—separated from her husband most of the time, raising Martha alone, she loathed letting go of Henry’s attention and friendship. But she kept in mind the price paid for indiscretion in a world—to borrow Edith Wharton’s phrase—“without forgiveness.” Lizzie was, above all, practical. She had sacrificed much for her social position and likely knew the consequences of losing it. She knew too that her unavailability made Henry’s worshipful longing only more romantic for them both, and if she was never fully his, he could also never really leave her.

  After almost thirty thousand miles of traveling, Henry returned to Washington on February 11, 1892. He quickly set off for Rock Creek Cemetery to see, for the first time, the somber bronze statue of a seated figure that now marked Clover’s grave. It had been more than five years since her death. He visited the gravesite again the next month with Clover’s brother, Ned, and her cousin Sturgis Bigelow, the only son of Susan Sturgis Bigelow. Afterward Henry wrote that he’d given the memorial his “final approval,” adding that his “old life” was now “closed around me.”

  Henry had commissioned America’s leading sculptor, Augustus Saint-Gaudens, to create the memorial. Using John La Farge as intermediary, Henry instructed the artist to be inspired by only two sources: Michelangelo’s frescoes of the five seated Sibyls in the Sistine Chapel and photographs of Buddhas, in particular Kwannon—he’d been fascinated by statues of the Buddhist goddess of mercy during his travels in Japan. In a burst of inspiration, Saint-Gaudens wrote a list in his notebook: “Buhda [sic]—Mental repose—Calm reflection in contrast with the violence or force in nature.” But not much happened until two years later, when Saint-Gaudens began sketching on paper and experimenting with clay; he employed both men and women as studio models. Wanting to capture nirvana or a “philosophic calm,” he intended the statue to somehow rise “beyond pain, beyond joy.”

  A massive hooded figure, measuring just over six feet in height, sits on a rough-hewn granite rock, deep in contemplation, with downcast eyes; a heavy cloak drapes everything but the face. The right hand is lifted, hovering near the face. Framing the figure is a large slab of polished red marble, capped by a classical cornice, which forms one side of a hexagonal plot designed by Stanford White, an associate of H. H. Richardson. A spacious three-sided marble bench is positioned at a distance from the statue, with loose pebbles covering the space between and a grove of holly trees providing shade and sanctuary.

  An idealized portrait of Clover? A requiem of grief? A dream of peace? John Hay was among the first of Henry’s close friends to see the statue after it was installed in March 1891. “The work is indescribably noble and imposing,” Hay assured Henry. “It is, to my mind, St. Gaudens’ masterpiece. It is full of poetry and suggestion. Infinite wisdom; a past without beginning and a future without end; a repose, after limitless experience in this austere and beautiful face and form.” The memorial, both nuanced and extraordinarily self-assured, inspired many responses. Henry was immensely pleased, going often to sit on the benches in front of the statue. He once called it “The Peace of God,” but he placed no identifying plaque or nameplate on the grave. He wanted nothing to get between the viewer and the statue. Once, in response to a letter asking what the statue meant, he explained that everyone “is his own artist before a work of art”; he expanded on this position later when he wrote, “The interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of the observer . . . Like all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more.” Perhaps Henry had done with the memorial what Clover had done with her photographs—turned personal loss into something haunting but beautiful. In this way he paid tribute, however belatedly, to his wife’s artistic longing.

  In 1905 Henry James finally went to see the hooded figure. He was staying in Washington with his old friend but knew Henry didn’t like to talk about Clover. A mutual friend understood James’s hesitation to ask Adams to accompany him to Rock Creek Cemetery and offered to go with him instead. Henry James had always appreciated Clover—her sharp mind and enigmatic surfaces, her deflecting humor, and what he’d once called her “intellectual grace.” They had shared the habits of close observers and were both, in their own way, portraitists. But if James had found the ecstasy of full expression and artistic freedom, Clover had not. When he finally arrived at her grave, he stood still for a long time under dreary skies, holding his hat in his hand, his boots dusted with a January snow.

  Almost thirty-five years after Clover’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt, herself in her early forties, would make her way to Rock Creek Cemetery, where she sat for several hours on the curved marble bench in front of the statue she called by its more common name: “Grief.” She had recently discovered her husband’s affair with Lucy Mercer. Beset with loss and unsure of what to do next, she felt a kinship with Clover, a Washington woman from the previous generation who’d also found herself unmoored in her marriage. Roosevelt recalled to a friend that when she felt “very unhappy and sorry for myself . . . I’d come here, alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away somehow feeling better. And stronger.”

  In later years, when people in Washington and Boston recognized Clover Adams’s name or sat in silence in front of her grave, they knew little about her except that she’d been the wife of Henry Adams and she had killed herself. She would remain as mysterious as the statue erected in her memory, her photographs unseen.

  Epilogue

  IN THE SPRING OF 1901, after several months of erratic behavior, agitated conversation, and a consuming self-hatred, Ned Hooper, Clover’s only surviving sibling, either jumped or fell from the third-floor window of his home at 49 Beacon Street. The only thing that saved him was a clothesline, which lessened the impact of his fall. Admitted to McLean Asylum, he stopped eating and died on June 25 from pneumonia. He was sixty-two years old.

  When William James heard of Ned Hooper’s catastrophe, he was staying at Lamb House in Rye, England, with his brother Henry, preparing to give the first of his Gifford Lectures (which would become the basis of his influential book Varieties of Religious Experience). James tried to stanch the terror and confusion he knew had besieged the Hooper girls; to Ned’s oldest daughter, Ellen, he wrote, “I find it hard to express the sorrow I feel . . . He was such a model of soundness and balance, that this was the last thing I ever dreamed of as possible in his life.” Then, with a distinctive equipoise both in his sentences and thought, James went on.

  But anything and everything is possible for every mother’s child of us—we are all in the same box, and not only death but all forms of decay knock at our gate and summon us to go out into their wilderness, and yet every ideal we dream of is realized in the same life of which these things are part, and we must house it and suffer it and take whatever it brings for the sake of the ends that are certainly being fulfilled by its means, behind the screen. The abruptness of your father’s case shows well how purely extraneous and disconnected with the patient’s general character these cerebral troubles may be. Probably an internally generated poison in the blood which “science” any day may learn how to eliminate or neutralize, and so make of all these afflictions so many nightmares of the past.

  Henry Adams was in Paris when he received a cable with the news of Ned’s death. Devastated, remembering his wife’s affection for her brother, he wrote to Charle
s Gaskell, “For thirty years he has been the most valuably essential friend I have had . . . He was one of those central supports without which a house or household goes to pieces. Another limb is lopped off of me by his death, and if I were a centipede I should soon stop walking, I have already lost so many.”

  And yet in a life of enormous loss, Henry Adams had managed somehow to stay steady, an example of endurance and courage. He turned his attention to the next generation, and the five Hooper nieces adored him. His letters to them were frequent. He avoided their weddings because he avoided all weddings, yet he never lost contact with them and sought out their company, even taking all five sisters with him to Paris in 1897 for the summer. For Mabel Hooper, he was part of the “trinity of fathers”—along with her own father, Ned, and Clover’s cousin Sturgis Bigelow—who “brought us up and educated us.” Several nieces took up semi-permanent residence at 1603 H Street, presiding over daily breakfasts, served always at twelve-thirty, to which guests invited themselves. He remained devoted to Anne Palmer Fell’s daughter, Marian, Clover’s namesake, and he surrounded himself with young people of no familial relation who nonetheless called him “Uncle Henry”—nieces and nephews “in-wish,” he called them. In this way, Henry was flattered, taken care of, diverted.

  Lizzie Cameron held a higher rank. Aileen Tone, herself a niece in-wish who took care of Henry in the last years of his life, remembered that no one ever heard Henry calling Lizzie by any name other than “Mrs. Cameron.”

  Henry never again so openly expressed his romantic longing for Lizzie as he did in the long letter written after their failed rendezvous in 1891. In his later letters to her, readers can sense a lump in his throat, a holding back, a self-denial demanded by decorum, which he both despised and obeyed. He had worried aloud that such renunciation would someday rot into resentment and alienation, and yet the remarkable thing is that he and Lizzie somehow managed to maintain their friendship. Lizzie would fall in love with someone else, to Henry’s unending annoyance, but she took pains not to hide this from him, and he somehow forgave her. They spent many hours together in Washington, going back and forth between each other’s houses; they rode horseback together, and years after the failed rendezvous they accompanied each other to dinners and social engagements while both were in Paris. Henry liked to read aloud to Lizzie from the manuscript he was then working on, which would be published in 1913 as Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres.

  And they wrote many letters back and forth, no matter where they were living or what was occupying their days. From Paris in 1915, Lizzie remembered the years of their long friendship, telling him, “I kept every scrap you have ever written me.” In all, Henry wrote over nine hundred letters to her. The two would be ballast for each other against much that had gone wrong in each one’s marriage, and in a real way she would prove to be his lifeline. When he needed her most, she was there, reminding him again and again—“you’re not dead, but very alive,—a living presence by my side.” Their love for each other, troubled, baffling, fraught with social complications, and marked by a resounding “no” at its very center, endured for thirty-five years, and at a key moment in the dark days of 1885, it had, like Ariadne’s red thread, given Henry a way back from the dark onrush of death.

  For the rest of his life, Henry held to his conclusion that “life is grim.” Pessimistic, at times self-pitying, vain, and self-absorbed, he often felt trapped by a sense that life had passed him by. But he was also bracingly honest, someone people could trust. His insistent search for truth, his deep curiosity about the world, and his capacity for friendship would sustain him and fuel his literary masterpieces: the completion of his nine-volume History, Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, and finally The Education of Henry Adams, which won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize in 1919. His work would win him a legion of admirers and readers, as Elizabeth Cameron noted to Louisa Hooper Thoron in a 1934 letter: “I often wonder how Henry would feel if he could know the immense appreciation of him and his works, which he used to say no one would read if he published them. So he didn’t and wouldn’t, then suddenly he was known—and has become the greatest of the Adams family, full of recognition and appreciation.”

  Every year on December 6, Rebecca Dodge laid a bouquet of white violets, Clover’s favorite flower, on Clover’s grave at Rock Creek Cemetery, and when Henry was home in Washington, she sent him white violets for his desk. In 1896, with Clover eleven years gone, Henry at last thanked Rebecca, saying, “I think that now you and I are the only ones who remember.” He had written to Anne Palmer Fell in the years after Clover’s death that “wisdom is silence,” and, as a rule, he’d remained silent about his wife, most famously in his autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, where he cut the years of their marriage out of the center of the narrative. No matter how many years had passed, Clover’s death remained simply too painful for words.

  In his eightieth year, in the spring of 1917, with World War I raging and summer renters hesitant to live on the North Shore because of concern about attacks from the sea, Henry told Aileen Tone that he wanted “to go back to the old Beverly Farms place.” It was his first return to Pitch Pine Hill since vowing in 1885 never to stay there again. Now, instead of traveling by train for part of the journey, then by horse and buggy for the rest, as Henry and Clover had done years before, Henry and Aileen “dashed off in a motor to Beverly.” After a thirty-two-year absence, Henry returned home to the summer place, still in use by the family, he and Clover had designed together, with its low ceilings, many fireplaces, cozy rooms, and a wide view to the shimmering sea. Again, he walked in the lush gardens and went down to the rocky shore. He wrote to Lizzie Cameron that “I wander every morning through the woods in search of something I formerly knew.” Later in the summer, he attended a party with all the old Beverly regulars at Smith’s Point, and he saw Alice Greenwood Howe, the woman who thirty-four years before had posed for Clover’s camera on the rocks at the seashore.

  Soon after that summer, when the two were visiting Clover’s grave at Rock Creek Cemetery, Aileen Tone got up the courage to ask Henry about Clover. Henry looked at Aileen and said quietly, “My child, you have broken a silence of thirty years.” Going back to Beverly Farms had unleashed memories and emotions long held in check. He would talk of Clover frequently then, showing her photographs and albums to Aileen and remembering their life together with “evident pleasure,” referring to her always as “your Aunt Clover.” After all those years, Henry finally spoke about his life with Clover, what he had called in the weeks after her death “the happiness that is past.”

  Henry Adams died of a stroke the next spring, in the early morning of Wednesday, March 27, 1918. Going through his things later that day, Aileen found a half-empty vial of potassium cyanide in the top drawer of his writing desk—Henry had always kept nearby the means of Clover’s death. In a commonplace book, he had copied out two couplets, one by Matthew Arnold and one by Swinburne, which together expressed his personal creed: “Silent while years engrave the brow / Silent—the best are silent now”; and “For words divide and rend / But silence is most noble till the end.” In a favorite book of Swinburne’s poetry, Poems and Ballads: Second Series, he had marked out these lines from the poem “The Forsaken Garden”: “The thorns he spares when the rose is taken; / The rocks are left when he wastes the plain. / The wind that wanders, the weeds wind-shaken, / These remain.”

  On the Saturday before Easter, a small funeral service was held at the corner house on H Street, presided over by the Reverend Roland Cotton Smith, the rector at nearby Saint John’s Episcopal Church. That afternoon, Henry was buried at Rock Creek Cemetery alongside Clover. Together, they lie beneath the statue that is—like so many people in Clover’s photographs—a figure alone.

  The Sturgis-Hooper Family

  The Adams Family

  Acknowledgments

  Seeing the past in Clover’s photograph albums is—as the past often is—utterly strange and deeply familiar. I would never have b
een able to make sense of what I saw or to tell Clover’s story without the guidance and friendship of many people who helped me find my way.

  There’s no better place to do archival work than at the Massachusetts Historical Society, which generously gave me support with two summer research grants. Over the years, Peter Drummey, Conrad Wright, Brenda Lawson, Ondine Le Blanc, Anna Cook, and Elaine Grublin have answered my many questions and taught me how to navigate the archives. I’m proud to be an MHS Fellow. Research for this book was also funded by a Schlesinger Library research grant and a National Endowment for the Humanities Long-Term Fellowship. Hope College provided numerous summer research grants as well as several leaves of absence, for which I’m very grateful. For all their assistance, I want to thank Lucy Loomis at the Sturgis Library in Barnstable, Massachusetts, and Hope Mayo, Caroline Duroselle-Melish, and Emily Walhout at Harvard’s Houghton Library. Mary Clare Altenhofen at Harvard’s Fine Arts Library at the Fogg Museum gathered a stack of nineteenth-century exhibition catalogs for me to look through, sources that proved especially useful. My research was also aided by materials at the New York Historical Society, the Beverly Historical Society, the Boston Public Library, and the Library of Congress. For permission to quote from their manuscript collections, I am grateful to the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Sophia Smith Collection at Smith College, the Sturgis Library, the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard University, and the Boston Public Library.