“goes nowhere”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, November 4, Letters, vol. 2, 633; “my wife”: HA to CMG, November 8, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 635.
“best love”: HA to JH, November 4, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 634.
“very low” . . . “before long”: John Field to Theodore F. Dwight, November 7, 1885, Field Family Letters, MHS.
“I saw the Adamses”: John Field to Theodore F. Dwight, November 12, 1885, Field Family Letters, MHS.
[>] “much improved”: H. H. Richardson to JH, December 8, 1885, as quoted in Chalfant, Better in Darkness, 499.
Maréchal Niel roses: Lizzie Cameron’s mother, Eliza Sherman, wrote to her sister, Mary Sherman Miles, on December 21, 1885: “Mrs. Adams called here to see Lizzie on Friday evening, and sent her a gorgeous boquet [sic] of Marchineil roses.” Quoted in Letters, vol. 2, 641–42, n. 1.
The next morning: Chicago Daily Tribune, December 6, 1885.
“more patient” . . . “back to life”: This retelling of Clover’s death is based on her sister’s long letter to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot. EHG to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, envelope dated January 1, 1886, Swann. Some biographers, such as Ernest Samuels, cite the next day’s edition of Washington Critic, which contended that Henry had met a visitor at the door who wanted to see Clover, and that when he returned to her rooms to see if she was receiving visitors, he found her dead. But Ellen did not include this detail in her letter, and there is no information about the source for the newspaper account. See Middle Years, 272.
[>] When Henry returned: The exact room in which Henry found Clover is not known.
“Wait till I have recovered”: HA to Rebecca Dodge Gilman, December 6, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 640.
Neighbors reported seeing him: General Anderson wrote his son, “Until his family arrived he saw, as far as I can learn, no one whatever, and I can imagine nothing more ghastly than that lonely vigil in the house with his dead wife. Poor fellow! I do not know what he can do.” Nicholas Anderson to Larz Anderson, December 9, 1885, in Letters and Journals of General Nicholas Longworth Anderson, ed. Isabel Anderson (New York: F. H. Revell, 1942), 252. See also Middle Years, 281.
“God only knows”: EHG to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, envelope dated January 1, 1886, Swann.
Rock Creek Cemetery: The vestry of Saint Paul’s Church, Rock Creek Parish of the Episcopal Church, owns and operates Rock Creek Cemetery. It is the oldest religious institution in the District of Columbia, established as a mission in 1712. It is a nonsectarian cemetery.
“spring comes early”: EHG to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot, envelope dated January 1, 1886, Swann. The internment is listed as December 12, 1885, in the records of the church; copy in Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“a terminal inner loneliness”: A. Alvarez, The Savage God: A Study of Suicide (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1990), 121. Alvarez cautions that suicides present a “profound ambiguity of motives even when they seem clear-cut” (132). If one can often identify the “local and immediate causes” of suicide, he observes, these “say nothing at all of the long, slow, hidden processes that lead up to it” (121). The real motives and reasons belong, instead, to “the internal world, devious, contradictory, labyrinthine, and mostly, out of sight” (123).
[>] Creativity can be compensatory: The biographer Hermione Lee argues that Virginia Woolf’s art grew out of her sense of loss, the shocks of her childhood, and the early deaths of her parents. While Lee is careful not to narrow Woolf’s accomplishments to this, even so, Woolf found deep consolation in her writing, a means of healing, and a way for her to find the “pattern hidden behind the ‘cotton-wool’ of daily life.” Hermione Lee, Virginia Woolf (New York: Vintage Books, 1999; originally published 1996), 170. The trope of art’s debt to suffering is as old as Sophocles’ Philoctetes, the Greek warrior whose festering wound empowered the speed and accuracy of his bow. Philoctetes, for Edmund Wilson, dramatizes how Sophocles thought “a superior strength” was always “inseparable from disability.” See Wilson, “The Wound and the Bow,” in Literary Essays and Reviews 1930s & 40s, ed. Lewis M. Dabney (New York: Library of America, 2007), 271–473.
Things can sometimes go: “For the artist himself art is not necessarily therapeutic,” Alvarez warns. “By some perverse logic of creation, the act of formal expression may simply make the dredged-up material more readily available” to the artist so that in dealing with dark themes—sadness, grief, isolation—the artist may discover she is “living it out.” Alvarez, The Savage God, 53–54.
“go to the Louvre”: MHA to EC, July 26, 1883, Adams.
CHAPTER 22. “That Bright, Intrepid Spirit”
207 “I think of you all the time”: CK to HA, December 10, 1885, Clarence King Papers, MHS. King went on to tell Henry of his plans to go to Mexico and generously asked if he’d like to come along, to recover and to “hear the waves of the Pacific,” promising that he’d “try to bear you cheerful company.”
“I can neither talk”: John Hay to HA, December 9, 1885, in Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, vol. 2, 98–99.
208 “peace that you have reached” . . . “extremity of suffering”: HA to Anna Barker Ward, December 22, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 644.
“sympathy has been a relief”: HA to Thomas F. Bayard, January 20, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 3.
“What a vast fraternity”: HA to Henry Holt, March 8, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 5.
“come out all right”: HA to John Hay, December 9, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 641.
“more sorry for poor Henry”: Quoted in The Middle Years, 166.
“we are anxious” . . . “better than you”: JH to HA, December 9, 1885, Letters of John Hay and Extracts from Diary, vol. 2, 99.
“You are never out of my mind”: JH to HA, December 15, 1885, Theodore F. Dwight Papers, MHS.
“his face steadily”: Ephraim Whitman Gurney to E. L. Godkin, December 11, 1885, Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, MS Am 1083 (348), Houghton.
209 live “henceforward”: HA to EC, December 10, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 641.
“I should have written” . . . “have them still.” HA to APF, January 8, 1886, Henry Adams letters to Anne (Palmer) Fell, MHS.
210 “impossible subject”: Andrew Soloman, The Noonday Demon: An Atlas of Depression (New York: Scribner, 2001), 246.
“succumbed to hereditary”: HJ to Elizabeth Boott, January 7, 1886, HJ Letters, vol. 3, 107.
“dangerous impression” . . . “Sturgis blood”: CFA Memorabilia, May 3, 1891, Charles Francis Adams Papers, MHS. Charles Francis Adams Jr. had recently visited Clover’s grave to see the Saint-Gaudens statue for the first time. He wrote that Clover was “a mere child at the time” of Susan’s suicide, that she had been with Susan when she took a “fatal dose of arsenic,” and that this “made a dangerous impression on her mind; for she was old enough to have some idea of what it all meant.” But this is the only direct account of Clover’s presence at the Bigelow house at the time of Susan’s death. It was entirely possible Clover was there—she often spent considerable time with extended family during the summer months. Subsequent biographers cite this remembrance in the diary but mention no other corroborating evidence, and nowhere did Charles Francis Adams Jr. indicate how he knew the story.
“had been suffering”: Washington Critic, December 9, 1885; “general depression”: Whitman Gurney to E. L. Godkin, October 16, 1886 [misdated year; letter was written in 1885], Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, MS Am 1083 (350), Houghton.
Current modes of analysis and treatment save many lives and provide a means of understanding experiences that defy reason, but they were not available to Clover. Using them to interpret her condition may be helpful only up to a point. Perhaps interventions of talk therapy and pharmacology would have given her a fighting chance to recover. Perhaps not. Researchers have found that children who lose a parent or a parental figure before the age of eight face a much higher risk for suicide. One study of fifty suicides found in an overwhelming majority of the cases that “‘the death or loss un
der dramatic and often tragic circumstances of individuals closely related to the patient, generally parents, siblings, and mates.’” Alvarez, The Savage God, 130.
Mourning can be exceedingly complicated for children. Rage, guilt, and (in the words of William Styron) a “dammed-up sorrow” overflow later as self-destruction. Styron, Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (New York: Vintage Books, 1992, first published 1990), 80. Styron ties his catastrophic depression in Darkness Visible to “the concept of loss. Loss in all of its manifestations is the touchstone of depression—in the progress of the disease and, most likely, in its origin. At a later date I would gradually be persuaded that devastating loss in childhood figured as a probable genesis of my own disorder; meanwhile, as I monitored my retrograde condition, I felt loss at every hand” (56).
“a bad nervous break-down”: Trinity Church Sermon, dated February 7, 1965, Unprocessed Thoron papers, *93M–35 (b), Houghton.
211 “curious impregnability” . . . “unrecognized centre”: Alvarez, The Savage God, 131–32.
“stoic aspect” . . . “hates to be alone”: EHG to E. L. Godkin, June 9, 1886, Edwin Lawrence Godkin Papers, MS Am 1083 (319), Houghton. In an earlier letter to Godkin, Ellen had copied out for him a portion of Clover’s last note to her, the same passage she also sent to Elizabeth Dwight Cabot.
“being smashed about”: HA to CMG, April 25, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 8.
“a glorious success”: HA to JH, June 11, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 12; “who never complains”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, June 28, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 14.
“one of the sights”: HA to JH, July 24, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 24.
“as ready to come home”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, September 16, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 41.
“stood in the full centre”: HA to CMG, December 12, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 48.
212 “I hope you have all”: EWG to Ellen, Louisa, Polly, Fanny, and Mary Hooper, July 24, 1883, Unprocessed Thoron papers, *93M–35 (b), Houghton.
“When I married”: HA to CMG, December 12, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 48.
“harvest of thorns”: HA to EC, November 19, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 46.
“If the moon were to wander”: HA to CMG, December 12, 1886, Letters, vol. 3, 48.
“During the last eighteen” . . . “whole relation”: HA to APF, December 5, 1885, Henry Adams letters to Anne Palmer Fell, MHS.
213 “I have been sad, sad, sad”: HA diary entry, May 20, 1888, reprinted in Letters, vol. 3, 114.
CHAPTER 23. “Let Fate Have Its Way”
[>] “This little trinket”: HA to EC, December 25, 1885, Letters, vol. 2, 645.
She would even try: On April 9, 1891, from Washington, Lizzie wrote to Henry, who was then traveling in the Polynesian islands, that she’d been “much to your house lately, using the darkroom . . . Everything looks as if you ought to be there. It is so clean and neat.” Henry Adams Papers, microfilm edition of the Adams Family Papers, MHS.
[>] Henry’s biographer: Samuels, Middle Years, 326; Samuels, Henry Adams (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1989), 221.
“liked to flirt”: Elisina Tyler, quoted in Tehane, Henry Adams in Love, 74.
[>] “I read your letters”: HA to EC, January 2, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 382; “I need not tell you”: HA to EC, February 6, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 406; “My only source”: HA to EC, June 3, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 482.
“I shall see you”: EC, quoted in Tehan, Henry Adams in Love, 124.
“In another week or ten days”: HA to EC, September 6, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 538.
“wait only to know”: HA to EC, October, 11, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 555.
“A long, lowering, melancholy”: HA to EC, November 5, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 556.
“Mrs. Cameron and Martha”: HA to Rebecca Dodge Rae, December 5, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 582.
[>] “over sodden fields” . . . “Let fate have its way”: HA to EC, November 5–November 12, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 556–61. Henry included lines from Elizabeth Barrett Browning, a favorite poet from his days in college: “Know you what it is when Anguish, with apocalyptic Never / To a Pythian height dilates you, and Despair sublimes to Power?” Then he referred to Bret Harte’s vernacular Gold Rush poem, “The Society upon the Stanislaus,” wherein a miner gets kicked in the stomach by another miner and, Henry said, “curls up . . . and for a time does not even squirm.” The critic Newton Arvin observed that when writing letters “the discomfort that so often afflicted him elsewhere quite fell away and he became simply a man with a pen—a man for whom, moreover, the pen was a predestined implement. Now he was wholly at one with himself and with his perfect audience of a single person, and all his powers as a writer—powers of sharp attention to people and things, of responsiveness to impressions, of insight and judgment, and above all of expression in language—found themselves in free and unembarrassed play.” Arvin, introduction to The Selected Letters of Henry Adams, ed. Newton Arvin (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc., 1951), xiv.
“Marry I will not”: HA to EC, November 14–28, 1891, Letters, vol. 3, 565.
[>] “without forgiveness”: Edith Wharton, The Age of Innocence (New York: The Modern Library, 1999), 34. Henry’s relationship with Lizzie Cameron resembled in intensity and chastity the love story at the center of Wharton’s Age of Innocence (1920). In the “hieroglyphic world” of Old New York in the 1870s, Newland Archer (newly engaged to another woman) and Madame Ellen Olenska renounce their passion for each other, knowing all too well they inhabit a social world that would not forgive impropriety. In fact, the similarities between Newland Archer’s passion for Ellen and Henry’s attraction to Lizzie are striking enough to raise the question as to whether Wharton was in any way inspired by Henry and Lizzie’s relationship when writing her novel. Wharton knew Henry, though the two had never been close friends. She attended social engagements and dinner parties with Henry and Lizzie when they were all in Paris in the early 1910s. Henry wrote to Charles Milnes Gaskell in 1910 that Edith Wharton was “almost the centre” of the “little American family-group” in Paris, which was “more closely intimate, and more agreeably intelligent, than any now left to me in America.” HA to CMG, December 14, 1910, Letters, vol. 6, 394. Wharton was later a close companion with Lizzie Cameron in Paris during World War I. She would have fathomed the subtext of Henry and Lizzie’s relationship, even if Lizzie never laid out its details. See Viola Winner, “The Paris Circle of Edith Wharton and Henry Adams,” Edith Wharton Review, vol. 9, no. 1 (Spring 1992), 2–4.
his “final approval”: HA to Theodore F. Dwight, March 10, 1892, Letters, vol. 4, 4.
“Budha [sic]—Mental repose”: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, ed. and amplified by Homer Saint-Gaudens, vol. 1 (New York: The Century Co., 1913), 361. See also Cynthia Mills, “Casting Shadows: The Adams Memorial and Its Doubles,” American Art, vol. 14, no. 2 (Summer 2000): 2–25.
“philosophic calm”: Saint-Gaudens, Reminiscences, 356. Homer Saint-Gaudens, in his interpolations in his father’s memoirs, wrote that his father “first sought to embody a philosophic calm, a peaceful acceptance of death and whatever lay in the future”; “beyond pain”: Saint-Gaudens, Reminiscences, 361. Edith Greenough Wendell, wife of the Harvard literature professor Barrett Wendell, recalled standing before Clover’s grave in 1904, when Augustus Saint-Gaudens and John Hay walked up beside her. She asked Saint-Gaudens what he called the bronze figure. “He hesitated and then said, ‘I call it the Mystery of the Hereafter.’ Then I said, ‘It is not happiness?’ ‘No,’ he said, ‘it is beyond pain, and beyond joy.’” Quoted in Augustus Saint-Gaudens, The Reminiscences of Augustus Saint-Gaudens, vol. 1, 362.
[>] “The work is indescribably noble”: John Hay to HA, March 25, 1891, Thayer, The Life of John Hay, vol. 2, 60–61.
placed no identifying plaque: The fifth point of HA’s last will, drafted in 1908, stipulates that “no inscription, date, letters or other attempt at memorial
, except the monument I have already constructed, shall be placed over or near our grave.” Adams-Thoron Papers, MHS.
“is his own artist”: HA to Edgar Dwight Shaw, December 20, 1904, Letters, vol. 5, 619. Shaw, managing editor of the Washington Times, had written to Henry, asking for the meaning of the bronze statue; “The interest of the figure”: Education, 314.
“intellectual grace”: HJ to William James, March 8, 1870, HJ Letters, vol. 1, 208.
When he finally arrived: Chanler, Roman Spring, 302. Chanler does not specify the exact date when Henry James visited Clover’s grave. But James wrote a letter to Edith Wharton, listing Henry’s H Street address above his salutation, which briefly mentioned his visit to Clover’s grave. HJ to Edith Wharton, January 16, 1905, HJ Letters, vol. 4, 340–42. Henry Adams also mentions James’s visit in a letter to Louisa Hooper on January 8, 1905, saying, “La Farge and Henry James have engaged rooms with me.” HA to Louisa Hooper, January 8, 1905, Letters, vol. 5, 625.
[>] “very unhappy and sorry”: Roosevelt, quoted in Lorena A. Hickock, Eleanor Roosevelt: Reluctant First Lady (New York: Dodd, Mead & Company), 92. Blanche Wiesen Cook speculates that in the cemetery’s “unmarked holly grove, [Eleanor] forged a healing bond with a stranger that helped to strengthen her to live the kind of life she wished to lead.” Cook, Eleanor Roosevelt, Vol. 1: 1884–1933 (New York: Penguin Books, 1992), 248.
In 1906, Mark Twain visited Clover’s grave. There is no record that Twain ever met the Adamses, though they would have known of Twain’s writing. After spending time sitting in front of the bronze statue, the author said it was a figure “in deep meditation on sorrowful things.” Twain would always keep a small framed photograph of the monument on his mantelpiece. Albert Bigelow Paine, Mark Twain, vol. 3 (1912; reprint, New York: Chelsea House, 1980), 1351.
EPILOGUE
[>] In the spring of 1901: Ned was attended to first by his private physician for his injuries from the fall, including lacerations, a broken rib, and a punctured lung. But his condition deteriorated. His doctor admitted him to McLean Asylum a month later, where he stayed in a large suite of rooms in the Upham House until his death. The description of what happened in Ned Hooper’s last months is based on a family memo shown to the author by a Hooper family descendant.
Clover Adams Page 36