Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  I’m indebted to Kathleen Lawrence for her generous insights into the Sturgis family, to Nancy Scott for her acumen about art, and to Robert D. Richardson for a brief exchange that guided me in writing about families. Clifford M. Nelson kindly spent an afternoon walking with me through Clover and Henry’s neighborhood in Washington, D.C., teaching me its history, and Wanda Corn spent another afternoon talking with me about photography and fine art painting. For reading early drafts of chapters, I’d like to thank Sharon O’Brien, Melissa Banta, Sarah Chace, and Carol Bundy. Helen Sheumaker encouraged me in my early curiosity about Clover, and Leslie Tuttle responded to a penultimate draft of the manuscript in a way that made finishing it seem a possibility. John Hanson helped me see Clover’s photographs anew, and Jeanne Petit read every version of the story from early grant proposals to final drafts—a steadying friendship. Shawn Michelle Smith early on told me I should write this book, and Megan Marshall did a great deal to make that happen. I owe her more than I can say. Harrison Smithwick and his mother, Frances, gave me a tour of Clover and Henry’s Beverly Farms home, and I give a special thank-you to a descendant of one of Clover’s nieces, who entrusted me with private papers and her family’s history.

  Eric Sandeen told me to write stories twenty years ago; Lewis Dabney showed me the world of biography writing; Ann Schofield introduced me to women’s history; and Barry Shank taught me to pay attention to what moved my heart—great teachers all. I have many colleagues at Hope College to thank, in particular Peter Schakel, David Klooster, John Cox, Kathleen Verduin, Stephen Hemenway, Jacqueline Bartley, Elizabeth Trembley, Heather Sellers, Sarah Baar, Curtis and Lezlie Gruenler, Jeff Tyler, Jane Currie, Fred Johnson, Janis Gibbs, Julia Randel, William Reynolds, Lannette Zylman-TenHave, and the late Jennifer Young Tait. William Pannapacker early on sold me his six-volume collection of Henry Adams’s published letters, saying, “You’ll need these more than I do.” James Boelkins kept the faith that I could do this and provided generous support, and Priscilla Atkins responded with humor and skill to countless research questions. I’ve been very fortunate to have had a cadre of student assistants to whom I’m very grateful, most especially Rebecca Fry, Paxton Wiers, Gray Emerson, and Matt Vermaire; several former students have become dear friends, in particular Dana VanderLugt and Kate Paarlberg.

  I’m enormously grateful to all those at Houghton Mifflin Harcourt for their rousing support for this book. Deanne Urmy’s exquisite taste as an editor and her tough-minded encouragement made my work with her a joy and an education. She sharpened every page. Her assistant, Nicole Angeloro, answered my queries with remarkable speed. I’m indebted to Patrick Barry for a beautiful cover, to Susanna Brougham for her manuscript editing prowess, and to Larry Cooper, Megan Wilson, and Ayesha Mirza for their innumerable skills.

  I’m more grateful than I can say to many friends, in particular Paul Karsten and Julia de Jonge, Nadine Requardt, Uta Walter, Jack and Julie Ridl, and Dick and Ruth Stravers, who have blessed my life with conversation, kindness, and a shelter from the storm. The Dutch Masters Swim Team reminded me to keep moving through the water, no matter what. Many thanks also to Jonathan Earle, Cotton Seiler, Norman Yetman, David Katzman, Kimberly Hamlin, Marni Sandweiss, Cynthia Mills, Jean Veenema-Birky, Anna Raphael, Del and Sally Michel, Jack and Lois Lamb, Wilson and Chris Lowry, Tim Gerhold, and Annie Thompson.

  My father, Loren Dykstra, filled our home with music, and to this day, I never write without a tune playing in the background. My brother Greg Dykstra and his wife, Sabina, many times gave wise counsel, and my brother Stuart Dykstra insisted I not waste time. My sister-in-law Ellen Dykstra picked up her camera in the same years I started writing a book about another woman picking up her camera—our many conversations about picture-taking have guided my thoughts, and I thank her for her friendship and my author photograph. To my sister Ellen Stahl, her husband, Don, as well as my many nieces and nephews, I’m grateful for their forbearance and good humor. I want to thank my nephew Benjamin Dykstra, who saved my computer from destruction, and my niece Sarah Dykstra, whose wit always brings light. Carol Bundy invited me into her Boston world when I needed her invitation and insight most, and Mary Bundy, Tom George, Chris Bundy, and the rest of the family kindly welcomed me into the fold as the family’s newest member.

  My husband, Michael Bundy, always believed I could write this book, made many nuanced suggestions, and never once complained, though he’s not known me or married life without it. His gentleness, confidence in the future, and abiding love have changed my life.

  This book is dedicated to the memory of my mom, Harriett M. Dykstra, whose fierce love is with us still. She loved books almost as much as she loved her children. I owe to her much that is good in my life, including a fascination with stories of the past.

  Sources

  Clover Adams’s letters to her father, Dr. Hooper, especially those after her marriage to Henry Adams, are an essential source for understanding the shape of her life. Many of these were first published in 1936 as The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, edited by her niece, Louisa Hooper Thoron, and Louisa’s husband, Ward Thoron. The originals of the published letters, dating from June 1872 to July 1873, June 1879 to December 1879, October 1880 to May 1881, October 1881 to June 1882, and October 1882 to May 1883, can be found in the Hooper-Adams Papers, Massachusetts Historical Society (MHS). Clover’s unpublished letters to her family, including her father, written as a child and before her marriage, are archived in the Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS. Unpublished letters she wrote to her father after her marriage, the last of which is dated March 8, 1885, a month before his death, are archived in the Adams Family Papers, MHS. I quote directly from Clover’s published letters, keeping the editors’ minor changes to words and punctuation. My own transcriptions of her unpublished letters follow her writing style more exactly, changing punctuation only when really needed to make her meaning clear.

  Clover enjoyed a close bond with her father, revealing in her letters to him her quick humor, her interests, and the rhythm of her married life. But she also kept things from him, shielding him from her uncertainties and darker moods. What’s more, the other side of their correspondence is missing; none of Dr. Hooper’s weekly letters to his daughter are extant. Missing too are any letters to Clover from her sister, Ellen, and most from her brother, Ned. The Houghton Library at Harvard University does have a collection of letters Ned wrote to his family, including Clover, during the Civil War. Theodore F. Dwight, Henry’s private secretary, preserved some correspondence sent to Clover and Henry, which can be found in Dwight’s papers at the MHS. But most letters to Clover were not saved. The reason why is hard to discern, though Clover may have offered a clue in a statement to John Hay in her letter of June 13, 1882: “I do not keep letters.”

  Clover wrote to her cherished friend Anne Palmer with somewhat more candor than she showed in most of her letters to Dr. Hooper. There are twenty-seven unpublished letters to Anne, written between 1879 and 1885, archived in the Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS. In this collection, letters addressed to Anne were placed in one folder next to another one marked “Mrs. Philippa.” In reading both files together, coordinating dates and matters discussed, I realized that “Mrs. Philippa” was a secret name Clover used for Anne, a discovery that unveiled a far richer, more complete record of an important friendship. This find was complemented by a trove of thirteen letters, recently given to the MHS, written by Henry Adams to Anne in the months and years after Clover’s death.

  My understanding of Clover was further transformed when I met a granddaughter of one of Clover’s nieces, who graciously invited me to her home to look through a collection of family letters, many of which were written by Clover’s mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper. I am grateful for and honored by her trust with this private collection of family papers, much of it unpublished, and for her many remarkable family stories, which brought so much to life.

  Henry Adams’s correspondence is published in six thick volumes, edited by J. C. Lev
enson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, and Viola Hopkins Winner. Secondary sources on Henry and the Adams family fill shelves, but I turned again and again to Ernest Samuels’s three-volume biography of Henry, finished in 1964, awarded the Pultizer Prize in 1965, and a model of biographical imagination and judgment. Patricia O’Toole’s The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (1990) captures the extraordinary friendships enjoyed by Clover and Henry and their social world in Washington, D.C. I want to acknowledge two previous biographies of Clover, Otto Friedrich’s Clover (1979) and Eugenia Kaledin’s The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams (1981), both of which were a great help to me. My enormous debt to a wide array of scholars and writers becomes clear in the acknowledgments and notes, but I want to make special mention of Jean Strouse’s Alice James (1980). Strouse accomplishes the impossible—she makes an invalid’s life extraordinarily vivid and active, retrieving Alice’s story from obscurity caused in part by the glaring fame of her brilliant brothers William and Henry James. Clover and Alice knew each other, but they were not intimate friends. Nonetheless, Strouse’s biography of Alice helped me write Clover’s.

  The most evocative source for Clover’s story is her collection of photographs, which she carefully pasted into three red-leather albums, one image per page, with captions in the bottom corner listing a date or the name of a person or place. By closely reading her small notebook, where she kept track of each image, together with her albums, I discovered Clover put many, if not all, of her photographs in deliberate sequences, as if to tell what she could not or did not say in her letters. Clover never kept a diary. But her albums suggest deeply held feelings and a distinctive point of view, providing evidence for a previously undocumented time in her life that is potent, in no small measure, because it contains clues to the mystery of her death.

  Clover’s notebook is archived in the Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS, and her photographs are archived as Marian Hooper Adams Photographs, Photograph Collection 50, MHS. Those photographs that I specifically discuss will be listed in the notes by date (if available), album number, and photograph number (which is proceeded by the collection number, 50). Clover’s albums, numbered #7, #8, and #9, were originally archived at the MHS in the wrong order; in other words, Clover put together album #8 first, followed by albums #7 and #9.

  Notes

  Abbreviations

  The abbreviations below are used for frequently cited personal names, libraries, archives, manuscript collections, photograph collections, and published sources.

  Names

  CFA: Charles Francis Adams

  HA: Henry Adams

  MHA: Marian “Clover” Hooper Adams

  SSB: Susan Sturgis Bigelow

  EC: Elizabeth “Lizzie” Cameron

  CMG: Charles Milnes Gaskell

  EHG: Ellen Hooper Gurney

  JH: John Hay

  EWH: Edward William Hooper

  ESH: Ellen Sturgis Hooper

  RWH: Robert William Hooper

  HJ: Henry James

  CK: Clarence King

  APF: Anne Palmer [Fell] (Clover knew Anne before her 1885 marriage to Nelson Fell.)

  WS: William Sturgis

  CST: Caroline Sturgis Tappan

  Libraries and Archives

  Houghton: Houghton Library, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts.

  MHS: Massachusetts Historical Society, Boston.

  Manuscript Collections

  Adams: Adams Family Papers, MHS, Boston.

  EWH Letters: Edward William Hooper Letters, MS Am1969, Houghton.

  HA-CK Papers: Henry Adams–Clarence King Papers, MHS, Boston.

  S-T Papers: Sturgis-Tappan Papers, Sophia Smith Collection, Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts.

  Swann: Swann Family Collection, family papers held in private hands by descendants of the Hooper family.

  WS Papers: William Sturgis Papers, Sturgis Library, Barnstable, Massachusetts.

  Published Sources

  Democracy: Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel (New York: Penguin Books, 2008).

  Esther: Henry Adams, Esther: A Novel, ed. and with an introduction by Lisa MacFarlane (New York: Penguin Books, 1999).

  Five of Hearts: Patricia O’Toole, The Five of Hearts: An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880–1918 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990; reprinted 2006).

  HJ Letters: Henry James Letters, ed. Leon Edel (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1975), 4 vols.

  LMHA: The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams, 1865–1883, ed. Ward Thoron (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1936).

  Letters: The Letters of Henry Adams, ed. J. C. Levenson et al. (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1982–88), 6 vols.

  Middle Years: Ernest Samuels, Henry Adams: The Middle Years (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1958).

  Mrs. Henry Adams: Eugenia Kaledin, The Education of Mrs. Henry Adams, 2nd ed. (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994).

  PROLOGUE

  [>] “smiling landscape”: MHA to RWH, April 24, 1881, LMHA, 285.

  [>] “solid old pile”: MHA to RWH, October 31, 1880, LMHA, 229.

  “coziness in the New England sense”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1883, Adams.

  An eclectic mix: Commonplace book of Theodore F. Dwight, Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.

  “My dear”: MHA to RWH, January 25, LMHA, 321. Clover pursued a type of beauty in the home that balanced discretion with distinctive taste, following the advice found in Charles L. Eastlake’s influential Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details, a domestic guide that Clover had kept on her bookshelf since before her marriage. Clover had bought the 1869 edition, signing it “Clover Hooper, 1870.” Eastlake, Hints on Household Taste in Furniture, Upholstery, and Other Details, 2nd ed. rev. (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1869).

  “undemonstrative New Englander”: MHA to RWH, October 20, 1872, LMHA, 50.

  “This part of life”: HA to CMG, January 29, 1882, Letters, vol. 2, 448.

  “who brought people to their house”: HA-CK Papers.

  [>] “a perfect Voltaire”: HJ to Grace Norton, September 20, 1880, in HJ Letters, vol. 2, 307.

  “hebdomadal drivel”: MHA to RWH, March 24, 1878, Adams.

  “Life is such a jumble”: MHA to RWH, November 5, 1872, LMHA, 56.

  “our days go by quietly”: MHA to RWH, November 4, 1883, Adams.

  [>] She draped a bed sheet: MHA, November 5, 1883, album #8, 50.93.

  “Nov 5—1 P.M.—Boojum”: This and all subsequent references to and quotes from Clover’s notebook refer to the single unpaginated lined notebook she kept of her photographic experiments from May 6, 1883, until January 22, 1884. The notebook is archived with the Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.

  “Pomeranian blonde”: MHA to RWH, February 18, 1883, LMHA, 424.

  “some crass idiocy”: MHA to RWH, November 11, 1883, Adams.

  [>] haunting landscape: MHA, November 5, 1883, album #8, 50.94.

  The complicated process: In the back of her notebook Clover kept a sheet of instructions published by Scovill Amateur View Albums, which described “methods of mounting Photographs, so that they will not warp or cockle.” For information on how George Eastman marketed his new camera to women, see Nancy West, Kodak and the Lens of Nostalgia (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 2000).

  “Ich gehe durch”: Translation by Louis MacNiece in The Norton Anthology of World Masterpieces, 5th ed., vol. 2, gen. ed. Maynard Mack (New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1985), 550. I thank Uta Walter for identifying this passage from the first act of Goethe’s Faust.

  she recorded her world: The archives are filled with all kinds of photograph albums, donated by individuals and families to historical societies, university research libraries, and state and local archives. Such albums are neither art nor literature, neither diary nor document. Yet they nonetheless express, often in extraordinary ways, individual lives as well as social practices. I looked through hundreds of photograph
albums dated from 1870 to 1890 at the New York Historical Society, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the Library of Congress, and the Beverly Historical Society; and, at Harvard University, the Fogg Museum Library, the Houghton Library, and the Schlesinger Library. For discussions of photograph albums, see Elizabeth Siegel, Galleries of Friendship and Fame: A History of Nineteenth-Century Photograph Albums (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010); Amy Kotkin, “The Family Photo Album as a Form of Folklore,” Exposure, vol. 16 (March 1978): 4–8; Marilyn Motz, “Visual Autobiography: Photograph Albums of Turn-of-the-Century Midwestern Women,” American Quarterly, vol. 41, no. 1 (March 1989): 63–92; Philip Stokes, “The Family Photograph Albums: So Great a Cloud of Witnesses,” in The Portrait in Photography, ed. Graham Clarke (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1992), 193–205; Martha Langford, Suspended Conversations: The Afterlife of Memory in Photographic Albums (Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2001); Patricia Holland, “‘Sweet It Is to Scan . . . ’: Personal Photographs and Popular Photographs,” in Photography: A Critical Introduction, ed. Liz Wells, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge Press, 2000).

  [>] “pulled down”: John W. Field to Theodore Dwight, November 9, 1885, Field Family Letters, MHS.

  “The Peace of God”: HA to Richard Watson Gilder, October 14, 1896, Letters, vol. 4, 430.

  “Clover’s death”: Eleanor Shattuck Whiteside to Mrs. George C. Shattuck [1885], George Cheyne Shattuck Papers, MHS. This letter is undated but was most likely written shortly after Clover’s death. Eleanor concluded her letter to her mother as follows: “Dr. Hooper’s death and Clover’s make a large hole in early associations and memories. By and by I will write to Ellen Gurney. Not now. If you learn anything more I should like to hear.”