In 1843, a girl, Clover Hooper, was born to a Boston Brahmin family. Her mother, Ellen Sturgis, was a woman of unusual, formidable character, a poet, transcendentalist, a feminist.
Her poem, “I Slept, and Dreamed That Life Was Beauty,” appeared in the first issue of The Dial.
I slept, and dreamed that life was Beauty;
I woke, and found that life was Duty.
Was thy dream then a shadowy lie?
Toil on, sad heart, courageously,
And thou shalt find thy dream to be
A noonday light and truth to thee.
Margaret Fuller said of Ellen Sturgis, writing from Rome in 1849, “I have seen in Europe no woman more gifted by nature than she.”
Ellen Sturgis married Robert Hooper, of similar provenance. He was an eminent ophthalmologist, but Ellen’s sister, Susan, thought Robert wasn’t interesting enough for her. But they appeared to have made a good marriage, and produced three bright children, the two girls, Clover and Ellen (after her mother), and a boy, Edward (Ned).
Clover’s first and formative tragedy was the death of her poet/feminist mother, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, of TB, when Clover was five. Her mother was buried in Mount Auburn Cemetery, where Clover’s aunt Susan was also buried. (Aunt Susan was a suicide.) Clover was old enough to remember her mother. The trauma of her mother’s early death was one of many, though, in a family of suicides and depressives, not unlike that of Virginia Woolf’s, whom Clover did not resemble (as far as this inadequate, nonobjective biographer can tell). Her brother, Ned, and their sister, Ellen, were also suicides. Ned stayed alive after his beloved wife, Fanny, died of TB, because he had five daughters, whom he raised solo, but then he did himself in.
Clover and her sister, Ellen, and brother, Ned, were raised by their benevolent father. Dr. Hooper educated his daughters best as he could, against accepted fashion, and Clover studied at Louis and Elizabeth Agassiz’s eponymous school in Cambridge, where she was taught Latin and Greek. On her own, she learned German, French, Spanish. I haven’t found out much about Clover’s relationship with her sister, Ellen. (The only sisters I’ve seen in action are Mother and Clarissa.) They kept in touch, weren’t close, it appears, and maybe they didn’t get along, took separate paths, basically, or stayed out of each other’s way.
Clover and her crowd lived through (or died during) the Civil War, her generation overwhelmed, scarred, and shaped by the war’s devastations. (See Louis Menand’s The Metaphysical Club.) More trauma. They all watched sons, husbands, fathers, brothers march off, many returned wounded, physically and psychologically, many died.
Two of Henry and William James’s brothers, Garth (Wilky) and Robertson (Bob) James, served, and survived. All his life, William James suffered from emotional and psychological problems, including depression. When he was a student, William studied the photographic portraits Charcot took of “mad people,” especially women. “Hysteria” distorted their faces and bodies. Not surprising that William James took an interest in mental anguish.
Among the soldiers who never returned, there was Clover’s cousin Robert Shaw, who led the famous Massachusetts Fifty-fourth Regiment of African-American volunteers, and died with his men at Fort Wagner, near Charleston. Clover had watched the parade, when Shaw and his Union soldiers marched out, from Boston, to join the fighting. She was probably living at 44 Summer Street then, the family home. (See 1989 movie, Glory, about Shaw and the regiment.)
A year after the War ended, in 1866, Clover traveled abroad, as it was called then, with her father, another part of her liberal education. She didn’t marry until she was twenty-eight. Henry and she became engaged on February 27, 1872. For their honeymoon, they traveled to Europe, a grand tour kind of thing, and, most significant, to Egypt, where they sailed down the Nile, and where Clover had what might have been her first breakdown, or break from reality. She wrote her father, “Life is such a jumble of impressions just now that I cannot unravel the skein in practical, quiet fashion.”
There isn’t much to go on, but before they sailed, they met up with friends from Boston, the financier Samuel Gray Ward and his wife, Anna Barker Ward, who’d been close with Clover’s mother. Mrs. Ward apparently helped Clover, or ministered to her. Clover wrote of herself to her father, “for a long time past I have found it impossible to get my ideas straightened out at all.” She found it hard to write even him, and didn’t want him to show her letters to anyone else.
Dr. Hooper was more enlightened about females than Henry. On March 26, 1872, one month after their engagement, Henry wrote, “She is certainly not handsome; nor would she be called plain, I think … She talks garrulously, but on the whole pretty sensibly. She is very open to instruction. We shall improve her. She dresses badly … She rules me as only American women rule men, and I cower before her. Lord! how she would lash me if she read the above description of her!”
Two months later, on May 30, Henry wrote another friend, from Clover’s father’s home: “In fact it is rather droll to examine women’s minds. They are a queer mixture of odds and ends, poorly mastered and utterly unconnected … She commissions me to tell you that she would like to add a few lines to this letter but unfortunately she is not able to spell. I think you will like her, not for beauty, for she is certainly not beautiful … but for intelligence and sympathy, which are what hold me … I do not fear her separating me from my friends.”
“Clover wants to add that she can’t spell.”
She can’t spell, hot damn, that’s a totally familiar “joke” in minority terrain. She laughs at her own expense, which may be why Henry James found her “conversational, critical, ironical,” her wit “distinguished by … genius.” The Master thought Adams “a trifle dry.”
James thought she was “a Voltaire in petticoats.” Clover and Henry James were lifelong friends, and, in addition to their early lives in Boston, they spent time together in D.C. and in London. In 1880, when Henry and Clover saw the Scottish Highlands, touring around, they visited London, and spent time with both William and Henry James. She called husband Henry and herself “the wandering Americans” and divined differences between Brits and Americans: “Our land is gayer-lighter-quicker and more full of life.”
Their first home together was at 91 Marlborough Street in Boston. Their second in Washington, D.C., was opposite the White House.
Like Henry James, Clover was discriminating; she was also judgmental, a moralist, sometimes moralistic, while adamant about not espousing or having any religious beliefs. She refused to socialize with Oscar Wilde, when he was in Washington at the same time as James in 1882. “I have asked Henry James not to bring his friend Oscar Wilde when he comes; I must keep out thieves and noodles or else take down my sign and go West.” James was visiting the States, because his mother was dying, but was still in Washington, when she died, and rushed to Boston for her funeral.
Clover was very critical of James for abandoning America. “It will be a heavy blow to him, the more so perhaps that he has been away for six years from her and it’s the first time death has struck his family.”
“Dear Pater,” October 30, 1881: Clover wrote about an American friend’s annoyance with an English woman, an aristocrat, and went on to add, the friend “can’t forgive Henry James for his Daisy Miller, and, when I said he was on his way home, maliciously asked if he was coming for ‘raw material.’”
Clover wrote her father every week on Sundays, often more frequently. Her letters to him (published in The Letters of Mrs. Henry Adams) are beautifully written, acute, descriptive of her time, its politics and personalities, newsy, gossipy, insightful, and wry. She spells perfectly, but is self-conscious about her writing, even or especially to her father, and writes: “Oh, for the pen of Abigail Adams!”
Her commentary on the English, for one, shows her wit and sharp tongue. (The Brits were the colonists’ bane for years, right.) “For sordid niggardliness no one can beat a Britisher …
They save on table linen, towels, candles a
nd fires, flowers and underclothes, to put monkey-jackets on their servants.” She could be sardonic, also sarcastic and often caustic.
The earliest letter in the volume, to her friend Mary Louisa Shaw, describes the grand review of Grant’s and Sherman’s armies, May 23 and 24, 1865, in D.C., not long after the Civil War ended. Lincoln had been assassinated, and Grant was president. The letter is a detailed account, fresh in feeling, and remarkable for its observations and writing:
About nine-thirty the band struck up “John Brown,” and by came Meade with his staff, splendidly mounted. Almost all the officers in the army had their hands filled with roses, and many had wreaths around their horses’ necks. After Meade passed there was a pause. Suddenly a horse dashed by with a hatless rider, whose long golden curls were streaming in the wind; his arms hung with a wreath, and his horse’s neck with one, too. It was General Custer, who stands as a cavalry officer next to Sheridan. He soon got control of his horse and came back at a more sober pace, put himself at the head of his division, and they came riding by, 10,000 men. Sheridan’s cavalry, Custer’s Division, are called cutthroats, and each officer and man wears a scarlet scarf around his neck with ends hanging half a yard long. Among the cavalry came the dear old Second, Caspar Crowninshield looking splendidly on his war horse—then came artillery, pontoon bridges, ambulances, army wagons, negro and white pioneers with axes and spaces, Zouave regiments, some so picturesque with red bag trousers, pale sea-green sashes, and dark blue jackets braided with red, red fezzes on their heads with yellow tassels. Other Zouave regiments came with entirely different uniforms, gay and Arablike. And so it came, this glorious old army of the Potomac, for six hours marching past, eighteen or twenty miles long, their colours telling their sad history. Some regiments with nothing but a bare pole, a little bit of rag only, hanging a few inches, to show where their flag had been. Others that had been Stars and Stripes, with one or two stripes hanging, all the rest shot away. It was a strange feeling to be so intensely happy and triumphant, and yet to feel like crying. As each corps commander and division general rode by, the President and secretaries and generals stood up, and down went the swords as salute, and the colours dipped. Between the different corps there was often a delay of five minutes or so. Then the crowd rushed to the front of the stand, cheering the different generals, who had to stand and acknowledge it. Grant looked so bashful and modest with his little boy sitting on his lap—it was touching to see him. Sherman was nervous and looked bored—talked fast all the time, his hands gesticulating. I like the President’s face—it looked strong and manly.
She was persistent from the start, and found ways to do what she wanted. No one wanted her, a girl, to travel that long way to D.C. to watch the military review, but she wouldn’t be stopped. “I vowed to myself that go I would.”
The married Clover (Mother drummed into me: a marriage contract turned women into their husbands’ property, like sheep) followed wherever Henry went—whither thou goest—he took her places, though, great cities, Paris, Rome, Venice, where the couple shopped ’til they dropped, art and furnishings, and shipped the precious stuff home from Europe. (They built a grand one in D.C.) I’d call Clover and Henry connoisseurs, and also low-grade conspicuous consumers.
The term “conspicuous consumption” is conspicuously absent from contemporary discourse, because the people who contribute to the discourse about aesthetics are themselves conspicuous consumers.
In 1879, the couple again traveled to Europe for Henry’s work. Her letters home about Europeans, her observations of these others, show Clover’s distinctively American POV and her distinctive writing style. To her father, she writes, after having spent some time in Spain: “The Spaniards are the most kindly, sympathetic, childlike, unpractical, incapable, despondent people I ever saw, with a magnificent country which they are utterly unable to develop, a rotten old church in which they don’t believe, a king whom they know and declare to be a mere puppet, a longing for a republic which they can’t manage, and a lurking conviction, which [the couple’s friend] Don Leopoldo frankly avows, that the Anglo-Saxon race is going to crush them out.”
It’s said Clover and Henry knew everyone who was interesting.
When she and Henry moved to D.C. in 1877 for Henry’s work, Clover served daily teas for the Five of Hearts, their close circle. She was named the first heart by others who included John Hay and his wife, Clara, who didn’t say much. But John Hay, and this was a matter of distinction, when he was a young man, his first job in D.C. was as the unofficial private secretary to Abraham Lincoln, right after Lincoln’s first inauguration. He lived in the White House, and when Lincoln couldn’t sleep, the War disturbing him, he’d walk in his sleeping gown to Hay’s room and spend the night talking and joking with him.
The fifth heart: Clarence King. After some wandering, King studied to be a geologist. He was a very religious man, and, it’s said, sexually driven. His first claim to fame was that, while he was director of the Fortieth Parallel Survey, he revealed a major mining fraud, a company duping its shareholders with false claims of precious gems. Plus, he broke social norms: King, who was white, married a woman—it wasn’t a legal marriage but a ceremony—who was black, had children with her, told her he was black, and all of this, his domestic life, was kept hidden from his crowd. He went about “in society” as a single man. Even the Hearts didn’t know, supposedly. Maybe Hay did. They were very close. King, a wild man, totally.
I’d have tea with these characters. I don’t know about every day. But Adams couldn’t have been such a prim stuffed shirt, the way Henry James thought, if he hung with King. Plus, Clover didn’t do ladies’ lunches, didn’t go to them in D.C. She had her Hearts.
A regular or regulated life includes daily rituals. Even three meals a day ties you to a routine.
The couple looked at contemporary art, including going to the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition of 1876. Clover also went to galleries on her own, or with a woman friend. Viewing pictures in New York in 1881, she might have been “inspired” to begin photographing. (See bio by Natalie Dykstra.) Clover bought or was given—acquired—her first camera in 1882.
Clover must have used Henry’s on their honeymoon in 1872. Sailing down the Nile, she took a stateroom picture of him, he’s reading. It was his camera. Why did he get the equipment, and when did he stop making pix? Did she inherit his camera?
Mathew Brady was an inspiration to her. His Civil War battlefield photographs, especially, affected Clover powerfully. In a way, to her, they may have been from a photo album, an American family album, because the War was a devastating family affair. Interesting that, in 1878 in D.C., Mathew Brady photographed Thomas Alva Edison, making Brady seem closer in time, to me.
With her own camera, Clover photographed friends, visitors, family, grandees, those important in their day. Also, Henry, and their dogs. Clover loved their dog Boojum the way I loved, and love, Mr. Petey.
Funny, by the time I took pictures, I wasn’t playing with Mr. Petey so much, and I don’t know where I put the ones I did take. My classification system must have broken down, before I did. Ha.
Clover kept a journal documenting shutter speeds and development results for each of her photographs. She took her endeavor totally seriously. A few of her pictures were shot to be published in journals, though Henry didn’t like Clover’s doing “public” photography. Poor Clover must have suffered from his attitude toward her sex, though her letters never show that. To the end, she describes him as tender and kind.
She made professional portraits, working when her class of women didn’t: they were hostesses, mothers, charity-ball-givers, etc. No photographs show Clover’s face clearly. In one, she’s on her horse—she loved riding—and half-faces the camera but coyly, and shot from a distance, she’s hiding her face, which is ironic, because she took portraits.
But she was the model of a new kind of woman, and, in that sense, was portrayed by Henry Adams, who wrote two novels, both anon, Democracy:
An American Novel (1880) and Esther (1884), both based on Clover. It’s a little weird and contradictory that he, who denigrated women’s minds, wrote from a woman’s POV, and with sympathy. They’re not great novels, but I liked them OK. The books served as an insider’s view of D.C.
Also, Henry James’s 1884 story, “Pandora,” not his best, was based, I first read, on Clover. But in Henry James’s notebook (page twenty-five), he writes that his “Pandora”—she doesn’t come from an upper-class American family—meets and socializes with a woman, Mrs. Bonnycastle, based on Clover. (Good castle, good home, James had liked spending time with Clover, in D.C.) Pandora is making her way, moving “up,” in this society.
The gist: On a ship from Europe to America, a young German diplomat and aristocrat, Count Otto, meets Pandora, from Utica, and later sees her in D.C., much changed, belle of the ball kind of thing, and he sees that she even has the president’s ear. Otto becomes very curious about this young American woman, because he doesn’t know her “type.” What type is she, he asks again and again of two older women, who know the American scene. She’s “self-made,” he’s told. Maybe, also, James saw Clover as self-made, without a recognizable model, for how she thought, what she did and didn’t do, who she became.
James appropriated the New Woman for his novels and needs (and I’m appropriating the New Man, for MEN IN QUOTES, not kidding). James knew some independent American women, American expatriates, his Boston feminists (see The Bostonians), in action, at tea, on walks. He dined with them, knew their conversation. Famously, he befriended the much younger Edith Wharton, who had the means and the fortitude, the brilliance, to create herself as a creator. He knew Margaret Fuller, the Peabody sisters, but James, like Hawthorne and most of those high-born, intellectual men, mocked Fuller, the exception, Emerson. The new women traveled outside not only their circles but also their native land, and Margaret Fuller found love in Italy. Also Henry’s sister, Alice, who died in England, found a female companion who was with her until her death.
Men and Apparitions Page 17
