Books: Adams & Eve

HENRY ADAMS: THE MIDDLE YEARS (514 pp.)—Ernesf Samuels—Belknap-Harvard ($7.50).

The Education of Henry Adams is not the best place to learn about the education of Henry Adams. The “ironic hindsights” and “note of self-mockery” that dominate that famed autobiography were, in effect, argues Author Ernest Samuels, the verbal spitballs of old age that Adams was throwing at his teacher, life. In his projected three-volume study of the querulous Boston Brahmin of which Henry

Adams: The Middle Years is Volume II, Biographer Samuels, professor of English at Northwestern, is sifting out, with notably nonacademic readability, what Adams actually felt and achieved despite his self-proclaimed “failure.” During the 13-year-period (1877-90) covered by this book. Adams produced two biographies, two novels, and a 4,000-page history of the administrations of Jefferson and Madison. This could be called failure only in the special sense that an Adams was born to expect miracles from any Adams.

The miracle of the middle years that even Adams did not expect, according to Samuels, was his remarkably happy marriage at 34 to 28-year-old Marian (“Clover”) Hooper, a witty, independent-minded fellow Brahmin. Characteristically, Adams says not a word of wife or marriage in the Education, possibly because the twelve-year idyll was to end in Marian’s suicide after her father’s death. But until then Henry Adams basked in the reflected glow of the brightest and most exclusive salon keeper of the Washington of the late ’70s and the ’80s.

Rats in the White House. “I gravitate to a capital by a primary law of nature,” Adams had said, and in 1877 he and Marian settled close by the White House. (President John Adams was Henry’s great-grandfather, John Quincy Adams his grandfather.) Under her 20-tapered chandelier, Marian gathered the famous but never the infamous. Hearing that Sarah Bernhardt, whose private life scandalized the Adamses, was about to embark on a U.S. tour, Marian fired off fair warning to her father in Massachusetts: “See to it that Boston snubs her off the stage.” Marian’s letters to papa were a Sunday ritual, and in them she re-created the Washington merry-go-round of her day with Pepysian verve and caustic charm. She could be gossipy (“The Hayes suffer much from rats in the White House who run over their bed and nibble the President’s toes”), or just plain lethal (“Not until I had seen and heard Judge Drake of the Court of Claims did I know what an ass was & is—he must be self made—it would be blasphemy to attribute him to any other creator”).

To Adams, grubbing in the archives of the State Department to research his historical work, Marian and her salon had the tonic appeal of the latter-day businessman’s double martini before dinner. After Marian’s suicide, grief-stricken Henry Adams drastically curtailed his social activities, often spoke of his own death as coinciding with Marian’s. Author Samuels believes that Adams oversentimentalized his tragedy, but points out that extravagant mourning was a 19th century fashion—Queen Victoria had the dead Albert’s evening clothes laid out daily before dinner; the poet Rossetti buried all his unpublished manuscripts with his wife’s body.

Life’s Inside Story. In response to earlier criticism, Adams in his massive History denied himself those highly colored, stylistic tropes that Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. once called the “Macaulay flowers of literature.” But if the book never enticed the readership he thought it deserved, it may have been because its nine volumes did not show that he had followed his own editorial creed (“Omit! Every syllable that can be struck out is pure profit . . .”). In Author Samuels’ view, Adams’ philosophy of history parallels Tolstoy’s in War and Peace, i.e., history is “a vast irony, a web of paradoxes,” and the hero is merely froth on the crest of all great tidal waves of change. What animated the wave, Adams was at a loss to say, but around it he concocted a mystique of “lines of force.”

Henry Adams had the arrogance of his ignorance. To William James he railed at the failure of man to acquire “a single vital fact worth knowing.” He was obsessed with the American fallacy that life was some kind of inside story that an enterprising philosopher-reporter could crack wide open: “We may some day catch an abstract truth by the tail, and then we shall have our religion and immortality.”

In the middle years, Henry Adams salted the tail of no abstract truth and had not secured the literary immortality of Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres and the Education, but he was subtly acquiring a measure of Socratic greatness. For the answers that man gives to the dilemmas of his time are often interred with his bones, but the questions he asks about life’s eternal mystery live after him.