Books: Great Failure

LETTERS OF HENRY ADAMS 1892-1918— Edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford— Hought on Mifflin ($4.50).

When Henry Adams was 20 years old, he had his future career nicely calculated.

Two .years in Europe, he thought, would be enough, and then, after studying law in Boston, he would move to St. Louis.

“If I know myself,” he wrote exuberantly to his older brother, “I can’t fail.” Meanwhile he thought he and his brother ought to be more respectful to their mother, should quit snubbing their kid brother Brooks (“we ought to try our hardest to tolerate the child”) and that his own allowance should be increased.

That was in 1858, ten months before John Brown raided Harper’s Ferry. And like most plans in that period, Henry Adams’ went up in gunsmoke. He stayed in Washington while the South seceded, then went to London when his father was appointed minister to England. The extent of English hostility to the North stunned him; an army was sent to Canada; Gladstone proudly put $10,000 in Confederate bonds; an invasion from Canada was momentarily expected; and Adams was in such despair that, even as an old man, he grew pale when he thought of that time.

He never practiced law in St. Louis, and he became, in his own eyes at least, a failure. He also became the most puzzling and complex of American men of letters—a politician who was also an expert in medieval architecture, a novelist who wrote under a pseudonym and accused his friends of writing his books, a leading historian who announced flatly that histories were all lies, an amateur geologist, economist, photographer and naturalist, and an author whose two masterpieces were published despite his strenuous efforts to suppress them.

Readers of one masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, know how enigmatic he seems in his autobiography. But readers of his letters get a clearer picture of his wit, the range of his interests, the depths of his despondency. Eight years ago a 552-page collection of them carried his story up to 1892. Last week another collection of 672 pages carried it to his death in 1918.

Because Adams knew everybody, read everything, traveled everywhere and wrote his letters as carefully as he wrote his books, they combined to give an astonishing picture of 60 years of U. S. life.

The first volume covered the Civil War years, Adams’ marriage and his wife’s death, his editorship of the North American Review, his disgust with Reconstruction politics and his travels in the South Seas. The present volume covers the panic of 1893, the Spanish-American War, the Russo-Japanese War. the Bryan campaigns, innumerable Washington anecdotes and scandals, innumerable expressions of fatigue and disgust. It includes explanations of U. S. foreign policy invaluable to future historians, as well as cranky comments about the Jews, weary descriptions of Theodore Roosevelt’s energy (Adams felt tired just thinking about Roosevelt), and descriptions of Adams’ difficulties in learning to drive his Mercedes at the age of 66. It ends on a note of unqualified despair. Adams died seven months before the Armistice. By means of an elaborate mathematical formula, he had calculated that society would collapse in 1917. By 1912 he thought he had given society five years too many. But by 1917 he was sure his first figures had been right.

Adams, who had known 14 out of 25 presidents, complained, “I don’t want to see any more.” For him the White House was “ghastly with bloody and dreary associations”; Cleveland gratified him only by the “astounding denseness” of his intelligence, and as for Roosevelt, “if he tried me ten years ago. he crushes me now.” Dinners at the White House were deadly, with poor food, poor liquor and Roosevelt howling anecdotes about the Rough Riders.

Repeated in letter after letter, his pessimism often seems querulous, disdainful, frequently degenerating to an unpleasant pose. But his last letters, written during the War, when his old friends were dead and he was growing blind, are as sharp as anything he wrote. “I am in a new society and a new world which is more wild and madder by far than the old one . . . and the only difference is that I terribly miss your father’s conversation and his dry champagne. . . . We ordinary people in Washington are no longer permitted to have it. The world is improved! We kill each other by the hundred thousand, without remorse, but “we are denied our dry champagne. … I am sorry for the Germans; I am sorry for myself to be still here, alone, without allies, and blind as well as idiotic. … I am told it is Christmas. The world is just howling with peace and goodwill among men. I don’t think we can stand much more.”