Clover Adams
Page 34
[>] This view of the beach: This view was painted by Homer in his 1870 work Eagle Head, Manchester, Massachusetts (High Tide) as well as by the American luminist painters Martin Johnson Heade and John Frederick Kensett. Kathleen Motes Bennewitz, “John F. Kensett at Beverly, Massachusetts,” American Art Journal, vol. 21, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 46–65; Cash, “Singing Beach, Manchester: Four Newly Identified Paintings of the North Shore of Massachusetts by Martin Johnson Heade,” 84–98.
Helen Choate Bell: MHA, August 8, 1883, album #8, 50.66.
“infinite longing”: E.T.A. Hoffman wrote in 1813 that Beethoven’s music “sets in motion the lever of fear, of awe, of horror, of suffering, and awakens just that infinite longing which is the essence of romanticism.” Hoffman, “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” in Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk (New York: W. W. Norton, 1950), 775.
[>] “turned-away figures”: The Rückenfigur, according to Joseph Leo Koerner, is a figure in the landscape that is turned away from the viewer but which locates the viewer within the landscape, and “functions to infuse Friedrich’s art with a heightened subjectivity, and to characterize what we see as already the consequence of a prior experience.” The viewer sees what the turned-away figure sees, but always from a distance behind, as if arriving late to the scene. This is part of how Friedrich’s paintings produce both identification of the viewer with the scene and a simultaneous estrangement from it, and thus the experience of a terrible Romantic longing. Koerner lists key elements of Romanticism, including “a heightened sensitivity to the natural world . . . ; a passion for the equivocal, the indeterminate, the obscure and faraway . . . ; a nebulous but all-pervading mysticism; and a melancholy, sentimental longing.” Koerner, Caspar David Friedrich and the Subject of Landscape (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990), 23, 28.
Though Clover never stated: On her honeymoon, Clover had written to her father that they’d visited Dresden’s famed picture gallery. She remarked that “one-tenth part [of the museum] would be enough to try and take in.” MHA to Robert Hooper, September 8, 1872, LMHA, 36. The gallery catalog published in 1873 lists two paintings by Friedrich, one of which is the well-known 1819 painting of two travelers, with their backs positioned to the viewer, entitled Two Men Contemplating the Crescent. His paintings hung in the “modern” gallery. Complete Catalogue of the Royal Picture Gallery at Dresden (R. v. Zahn: G. Schonfeld’s Buchhandlung, 1873). Clover was conversant in the history of art, having used Horace Walpole’s four-volume Anecdotes of Painting in England as a reference while she and Henry amassed their own art collection; she also owned copies of Richard Redgrave’s Century of Painters in the English School (1866) and Taine’s Philosophy of Art (1865) and On the Ideal in Art (1867). She requested a copy of Walpole’s book from Theodore Dwight, Henry’s private secretary. MHA to Theodore Dwight, February 3, 1882, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
beautifully composed photograph: MHA, August 8, 1883, album #8, 50.65.
“It was charming”: MHA to RWH, February 27, 1881, LMHA, 272.
CHAPTER 15. Esther
[>] She photographed Betsey: MHA, August 10, 1883, album #8, 50.67.
She paired a print: MHA, August 10, 1883, album #8, 50.68.
In this second image: MHA, August 10, 1883, album #8, 50.69.
Later in the summer: Clover also took four exposures of Henry in his study at Pitch Pine Hill on August 13, but judged these either “over-timed” or “too dim” to make prints from the negatives.
[>] seated Henry at his desk: MHA, August 19, 1883, album #8, 50.71.
The neatly stacked papers: Henry told Lizzie Cameron in late July that he had to correct proof sheets. He was privately printing the first three books of his History, both for comments from readers and for safekeeping.
in the next exposure: MHA, August 19, 1883, album #8, 50.52.
Instead, Clover chose: MHA, August 26, 1883, album #8, 50.53 and 50.72. The portrait of Henry, in his light coat, followed by a picture of the umbrella tree, comes first in album #8. Sixteen photographs later, the portrait of Henry in his dark coat is paired in the album with another picture of the same umbrella tree. Clover’s August 26 entry in her notebook reads: “August 26 ‘Umbrella’ tree Smith’s Pt—large stop—1 second—good—same tree other side 2 sec.”
“You judge me”: Abigail B. Adams to CFA, December 13, 1876, Adams; “You can’t understand”: Abigail B. Adams to CFA, April 6, 1877, Adams.
[>] “was audacious only”: Esther, 38.
Part of what Henry did: Ernest Samuels cautions readers to “be wary of treating Esther too exclusively as a symbol of his marriage,” contending that the “extraordinary emotional fetish that he attached to the book” should not be confused with his state of mind and feeling while writing. Middle Years, 225–26. O’Toole, by contrast, sees the novel as Henry’s commentary on his marriage, concluding that “in spite of the Adamses’ closeness and compatibility, there remained a gap they longed to close.” The Five of Hearts, 139. But neither of these authors makes explicit note of the connection between Henry writing Esther and Clover taking photographs.
“She has a bad figure”: Esther, 17. Lisa MacFarlane compares Henry’s description of Clover during his engagement to his description of Esther in her excellent introduction to the novel.
“hold my tongue or pretend”: Esther, 128.
“regret at having exposed”: CK to JH, July 4, 1886, Clarence King Papers, MHS.
[>] But Clover knew: Samuels cites a conversation with Louisa Hooper Thoron, Clover’s niece, who “was confident her aunt read the novel.” Middle Years, 460.
“Poor Esther!”: Esther, 25.
“You were and are”: Esther, 7.
“fresh as a summer’s morning”: Esther, 27.
Wharton’s battles: See Lisa MacFarlane, Esther, xviii, and Middle Years, 242–43.
[>] “embodied doctrines”: William Roscoe Thayer, quoted in Middle Years, 237. Patricia O’Toole argues that “the novel reveals less of the author’s concern for the relation of man and God than his lifelong perplexity over the relation of man and woman.” Five of Hearts, 137.
“languid, weary, listless”: Esther, 89–90.
“saturated with the elixir”: Esther, 96.
“Some people are made”: Esther, 159.
“are one” and she is honest: Esther, 161.
“in mid-ocean”: Esther, 17.
[>] “a little depressed” . . . “women can’t”: Esther, 67.
“she is only a second-rate”: Esther, 17.
“I am going home”: Esther, 70.
“I am almost the last”: Esther, 131.
“The sea is capricious”: Esther, 143–44.
[>] “Women must take their chance”: Esther, 25.
“Do you know how”: Esther, 132.
“in mid-ocean”: Esther, 17.
“we being chilly folks”: MHA to Clara Hay, September 7, 1883, Adams.
“remotest of existences” . . . “droll couple”: HA to CMG, September 9, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 510.
[>] “cannot deal with”: HA to JH, September 24, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 513.
But though Henry Adams: Lisa MacFarlane argues that Esther is a hodge-podge of narrative conventions, combining a “roman à clef with a romance, a failed Bildungsroman with a short course in the classics of Western tradition, a novelized debate with an autobiographical confession.” Esther, vii.
Not surprisingly, the book sold: For a publishing history of the novel, see MacFarlane, Esther, viii–x.
“of course” . . . “I could not suggest it”: CK to John Hay, July 4, 1886, Clarence King Papers, MHS.
his own “heart’s blood”: HA to John Hay, August 22, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 34.
CHAPTER 16. Iron Bars
[>] “most cordial”: MHA to RWH, October 23, 1883, Adams.
photograph of the dining room: MHA, October 24, 1883, album #8, 50.89.
the youngest, Alice Hay: MHA, October 24, 1883, album
#8, 50.90.
[>] To take their portrait: MHA, October 24, 1883, album #8, 50.91 and 50.92.
could take “views”: The Photographic Times and American Photographer, vol. 13, no. 145 (January 1883): 658. Meetings were held “on the first Monday of each month,” when an essay was read or “a demonstration made relating to and illustrative of photographic art.” In addition, “each member contributes monthly a specimen of his work by him exposed, developed, toned, and printed.”
“Mrs. Henry Adams is also”: Washington Post, November 11, 1883.
“two good morning hours”: MHA to RWH, November 11, 1883, Adams.
“The children are puffed up”: JH to HA, December 7, 1883, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“came to dine Monday”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1883, Adams.
he sits in a chair: MHA, November 27, 1883, album #7, 50.5.
In the second exposure: MHA, November 27, 1883, album #7, 50.6.
[>] “I sit all day after”: JH to HA, December 26, 1883, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
revered American historian: MHA, November 28, 1883, album #7, 50.7.
“Mr. Bancroft is very good”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1883, Adams.
“Mrs. Henry Adams has made”: JH to Richard Gilder, December 29, 1883, in Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, vol. 2 (Washington, DC: printed not published, copyright Clara Hay), 86–87.
“Please give this”: JH to HA, January 3, 1884, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“was amused” . . . “to go with it”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1884, Adams.
[>] “Mutual Admiration” . . . “shaping and directing”: Howells, as quoted in Rob Davidson, The Master and the Dean: The Literary Criticism of Henry James and William Dean Howells (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2005), 49. Henry James felt flattered when he first read William Dean Howells’s approbation of his fiction in the November 1882 issue of Century magazine. But the response of the press, first by London papers and then by other publications, discomfited James, who called it a “truly idiotic commotion.” HJ to G. W. Smalley, February 21, 1883, HJ Letters, vol. 2, 406.
“I’ve just written”: MHA to RWH, January 6, 1884, Adams.
“We have declined”: HA to JH, January 6, 1884, Letters, vol. 2, 527.
In rejecting Gilder’s offer: Barry Maine argues that Henry abhorred publicity in all its forms in his “Portraits & Privacy: Henry Adams and John Singer Sargent,” Henry Adams and the Need to Know, ed. William Merrill Decker and Earl N. Harbert (Boston: published by the Massachusetts Historical Society; distributed by the University of Virginia Press, Charlottesville, 2005), 185–86.
“a vile gang”: HA to CMG, August 18, 1874, Letters, vol. 2, 204. Henry had on his bookshelf Horace Bushnell’s Women’s Suffrage: The Reform Against Nature (New York: Charles Scribner, 1869), which argued that men and women were “unlike in kind” (49). In Bushnell’s paternalistic view, women were spiritually superior to men, but grossly unfit for political equality. Suffrage was an “abyss” where a woman “ceases so far to be woman at all” (161).
His only public lecture: The lecture Henry gave at the Lowell Institute on December 9, 1876, was titled “Women’s Rights in Primitive History,” which he changed to “Primitive Rights of Women” for publication in his book Historical Essays (New York: Scribner’s, 1891); David Partenheimer notes that the essay “is an elaborate weave of Adams’s studies in and engagement with legal history, ethnology, and literary studies.” Partenheimer, “Henry Adams’s ‘Primitive Rights of Women’: An Offense Against Church, the Patriarchal State, Progressive Evolution, and the Women’s Liberation Movement,” The New England Quarterly, vol. 71, no. 4 (1998): 635.
[>] Equality was based: Ernest Samuels praised Henry for realizing that the “degradation of women grew out of convenient myth . . . As a descendant of Abigail Adams,” he knew “woman’s capacity for greatness within her sphere.” Samuels, The Young Henry Adams, 261.
Henry failed to recognize: John C. Orr cites certain polarities in Western thinking as a key to Henry’s patterns of thought: “Unity and multiplicity, female and male, body and mind, intuition and reason.” According to Orr, Henry’s thinking “rotated around these oppositions, and while as with any thinker, he occasionally contradicted himself, on the whole he remained remarkably true to this severe split.” Orr, “‘I Measured Her as They Did with Pigs’: Henry Adams as Other,” in Henry Adams and the Need to Know, 281.
“The woman’s difficulty”: HA to Mabel Hooper, May 28, 1898, Letters, vol. 4, 596. In this letter to Mabel Hooper, who had embarked on a serious artistic career, Henry tried once more to sort out his thoughts about women. His earlier pessimism, as expressed in Esther, had by this time settled into an even starker view: “Women go shipwreck, in ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, from two causes: one is that they cannot hold their tongues; the other is that they cannot run in harness with each other.” Instead, he determined that “the woman is made to go with the man,” but that “the better [women] are, the purer in character and higher in tone, the more domestic in tastes, and the more irreproachable in life, the more impossible they are with each other.” Then he made his diagnosis: “It is the feminine instinct which lies at the bottom of the tangle, and a woman, before thirty, has so little experience of her own instincts that she may be regarded as a child. When she loves, when she hates, when she is jealous, she does not know it until someone tells her,—and then she is furiously angry at being told, and won’t believe it. Of course in that respect we are all fools, more or less. The woman’s difficulty is that she is fooled by her instincts and her sentiments which are at the same time her only advantages over the man.”
“send me photos”: MHA to APF, December 24, 1884, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
She also learned about: William Willis, an Englishman, invented the platinum printing process in 1873. The prints “were made on paper impregnated, rather than coated, with light-sensitive chemicals—in this case compounds of iron rather than silver . . . The intense black colour of platinum formed in this way gave the shadows a very rich tone, while the lighter greys had an almost silvery tone.” The process also gained a reputation for how little the image deteriorated over time—Clover’s platinum prints remain pristine, as if taken yesterday. Brian Coe and Mark Haworth-Booth, A Guide to Early Photographic Processes (London: Victoria and Albert Museum, in association with Hurtwood Press, 1983), 80.
“photograph rooms” . . . “only woman”: MHA to RWH, December 31, 1883, Adams.
[>] “science pure and simple”: MHA to RWH, December 31, 1883, Adams.
“My facts are facts”: MHA to RWH, November 13, 1881, LMHA, 301.
“thin, wiry, one-stringed”: HA to Sir Robert Cunliffe, August 31, 1875, Letters, vol. 2, 235.
“What is the use”: Esther, 70.
CHAPTER 17. A New Home
[>] “unmanageable” . . .“wag their tails”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1883, Adams.
[>] “[John] Hay has bought”: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1883, Adams.
“⅓ the price” . . . “73,800”: Marc Friedlander, “Henry Hobson Richardson, Henry Adams, and John Hay,” The Journal of the Society of Architectural Historians, vol. 29, no. 3 (October 1970): 235.
“put up a modest”: MHA to APF, December 24, 1883, Hooper-Adams Papers, MHS.
“dark and untenable” . . . $27,000 in her trust: MHA to RWH, December 16, 1883, Adams.
“no more jewelry”: MHA to RWH, December 23, 1883, Adams.
“one definite part” . . . “improvements”: MHA to RWH, December 26, 1883, Adams.
No other architect: For a discussion of Richardson’s career as an architect, see H. H. Richardson: The Architect, His Peers, and Their Era, ed. Maureen Meister (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999).
[>] “Richardson was the grand”: Frank Lloyd Wright, as quoted by Kathleen A. Curran in “Architect: Henry Hobson Richardson (Gambrill & Richardson),” in The Makers of Trinity Church in the City of Boston, ed. James F. O’G
orman (Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2004), 61.
“quiet and monumental”: James O’Gorman, quoted in Thomas C. Hubka, “H. H. Richardson’s Glessner House: A Garden in the Machine,” Winterthur Portfolio, vol. 24, no. 4 (Winter 1989): 218.
“How I wish I could”: MHA to RWH, April 13, 1883, Adams.
“Tomorrow your lamp”: H. H. Richardson to HA, February 17, 1883, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“He would charm”: Charles A. Coolidge, “Henry Hobson Richardson,” in Later Years of the Saturday Club, 193.
whom he “valued”: Education, 65.
[>] “can say truly”: MHA to RWH, May 7, 1882, LMHA, 379. Richardson’s outsized personality proved at times a trial for his clients. In late January 1883, eight months before his brick mansion was completed, General Anderson complained to his son Larz that Richardson, who had stayed with them several days at their temporary Lafayette Square address, had been “a great deal of trouble. He bullies and nags everybody; makes great demands upon our time and service; must ride, even if he has to go but a square; gets up at noon; has to have his meals sent to his room. He is a mournful object for size, but he never ought to stay at a private house, because he requires so much attention.” Letters and Journals of General Nicholas Longworth Anderson, 1854–1892, ed. Isabel Anderson (New York: Fleming H. Revell Company, 1942), 207.
“great slabs of Mexican”: MHA to EC, July 26, 1883, Adams.
“Nick Anderson’s new house”: HA to JH, August 10, 1883, Letters, vol. 2, 508.
who forwarded one: Anderson wrote his son, “I send you by the same mail a picture of our house, taken by Mrs. Adams.” Anderson, Nicholas Longworth Anderson, 217.
“excessively” . . . “charming”: MHA to RWH, December 2, 1883, Adams.