Washington in 1887 oscillated between the pretentious and the primitive. Sewers were in short supply, but a surprising number of the carriages clattering along the streets of Lafayette Square sported silver fittings and liveried footmen as members of the Millionaires’ Club competed in the new game of conspicuous consumption. Spring Rice’s instinct for the comedy between these poles made him entertaining company for Henry Adams, whose self-imposed seclusion had not quelled his interest in society or his appetite for gossip. But the greatest value of Springy’s companionship was the distraction it gave Henry from Lizzie Cameron. What had begun as infatuation had ripened, with her encouragement, into a deep, vexing love. Lizzie did not consider divorce an option, and she and Henry seem to have agreed not to have a sexual relationship.* Acutely sensitive to the damage that even the most scrupulous attentions might inflict on Mrs. Cameron’s reputation, Adams calculated his every move. To keep tongues from wagging, he made a point of seeing her in the company of others, often at his breakfasts. In March, when he sent her a decorative Japanese screen, he imagined her awkwardness in explaining the present and offered to let her pay for it. “I would rather you should take it as a gift,” he told her, “but if you are tired of gifts, I am willing you should take it on what terms you like.”
The breakfast establishment closed for the summer of 1887, when Henry went up to Quincy to work on his history and watch over his mother, who at seventy-nine possessed a full complement of the infirmities of old age. The Camerons were only thirty miles away, in Henry’s house at Beverly Farms. Lizzie invited him for a visit, but he could not face a return to the scene of Clover’s collapse. Separated from Lizzie, he nonetheless managed to shower her with discreet signs of affection. Fresh fruits and vegetables could be had by sending express to Quincy Market, he informed her. She was to watch the sea for signs of his Adams nephews, who had been instructed to take her for a ride in their new boat. Toward autumn, when the Atlantic air turned chill, he exhorted her to use the furnace. When Senator Cameron arrived in Beverly after devoting much of the summer to politics, Henry sent his best regards and inquired, “Can I do anything for him?”
Cecil Spring Rice, an amusing young Englishman assigned to the British legation in Washington. He quickly became a regular at Henry Adams’s breakfast table.REPRODUCED FROM ROMAN SPRING, BY MRS. WINTHROP CHANLER
In September, Lizzie, chaperoned by their mutual friend Rebecca Dodge, paid a call on Henry at his mother’s house. “You are, of course, the nearest reasonable approach to an angel—assuming angels to be like you,” he wrote Lizzie two days later. But expressions of tenderness alternated with darker outbursts, welling up from the hurts of their covert, incomplete love. Knowing that Lizzie dreaded his departure for China, he could not stifle a malicious impulse to tell her about the typist who had come to Quincy to speed his work: “I am victim to a female called a caligraphess, or some such classical title … whom I am slowly killing with five hours a day of typewriting, in order to hurry my journey to the Celestial Empire. Human victims should always be sacrificed before beginning a journey.”
Henry’s last weeks in Quincy were so filled with yearning for Lizzie that he fastened on an absurd plot for seeing her before they returned to Lafayette Square. At his request, Lizzie had shipped the Beverly Farms table linens to Washington for his breakfast table, which meant he would have to replenish the stock at Beverly. Both he and Lizzie would pass through New York en route to Washington in October, and he hoped Lizzie would help him shop in Manhattan. When the Camerons left New York just as Adams arrived, Henry sank into a gloom he had not felt in months. “I am sorry,” he wrote to Lizzie, “for time does not seem to clear away the wreckage of life, or to show how to climb over it.”
A plan to dine in New York with La Farge also fell through, spurring a tirade against the heap of “might-have-beens which make life an incessant delusion.” Back on H Street, Henry soon had one more might-have-been to blacken his mood: La Farge refused a commission to paint Lizzie’s portrait. “I am too sensitive to my sitter’s influence,” the artist explained. “I am not incapable of making a likeness—every painter can do that—but everything affects me to the extent of a paralyzing result.” Lizzie’s constantly shifting expressions presented “all sorts of difficulties,” he said. “There is a distinct interior which contradicts the exterior at moments—or rather there are changes which make one wonder whether they are not really most important. All this is stupid as an explanation—but I wish I were a portrait painter who learns to be very cool as he is most interested.”
November brought a much more serious blow. Clover’s sister, Ellen Gurney, unable to recover from her husband’s death a year before, hurled herself in front of a train. Full of apprehension for Clover and Ellen’s brother Ned, who was prostrate with grief, Adams endured the calamity without a word. He knew too well the unnerving lesson that Ellen’s friend Alice James had just discovered in the violent death: “what paralytics we all are, so remote from our nearest and dearest that we are helpless to save them from such a desecration of their personal sanctity.”
Clarence King and John Hay promised to cheer Adams up with a jaunt to Cuba, but on the eve of the journey King bowed out. Between a mining setback and a “long surgical struggle” with his throat, King said he could not get away. Hay, who was also besieged by throat troubles, decided to accompany Adams only as far as Florida. He was disinclined to expose his inflamed vocal cords to Havana, where a smallpox epidemic was in full bloom. Knowing Adams’s apocalyptic frame of mind, King guessed that Henry would find the pox an added attraction—“a spice of horror and danger.”
The amiable Theodore Dwight allowed himself to be pressed into service as Henry’s traveling companion, and in early March, after leaving Hay in Winter Park, they steamed south from Tampa. “Havana is just my affair,” Henry reported to Hay. “I swagger about in a big straw hat, and wallow in Cuban dirt.” He conceded that the palm trees were more handsome than he had imagined and that the ancient women in black mantillas were “just lovely.” But the gore of the bullfight repelled him, the shops sold nothing he wished to buy, and he soon fell prey to the “jim-jams”—his name for vile moods that he felt powerless to control. In one bleak moment, he could not stop himself from reminding Lizzie of the bitter predicament posed by his love. “I am, of course, eager to return,” he told her, “but probably should come back by way of Panama and New Zealand.”
By the time Adams and Dwight returned to Washington in late March, the mornings were warm enough for rides among the forsythia and bloodroot of Rock Creek Park. Ned Hooper’s nerves had begun to mend. The breakfast table was rarely deserted, Spring Rice kept Adams well stocked with political gossip, and the jim-jams vanished.
Henry also hit upon a satisfying new medium for expressing his secret love. Senator and Mrs. Cameron’s daughter Martha, almost two years old, became a constant caller at 1603 H Street. Sometimes she came in the company of her mother, but just as often a servant carried her over from the cream-colored house at 21 Lafayette Place and left her alone with Adams. In his somber black suits, he crawled on the floor with Martha and showed her how to open the secret panel in his library, which hid a dollhouse. When they tired of playing indoors, they visited his horse in the stable or went around the corner to see the pigeons kept by the Hays’ twelve-year-old son Del. By “incessant bribery and attentions,” Henry boasted to his diary, “[I have] quite won her attachment so that she will come to me from anyone…. Her drawer of chocolate drops and ginger-snaps; her dolls and picture-books, turn my study into a nursery.” The child signaled her affection for her bald, gray-bearded playmate by conferring a pair of pet names: Dordy and Dobbit. Dordy was Martha’s approximation of Georgie (which, for reasons of her own, she preferred to Henry), and a Dobbit, she would later explain, was someone who took care of little girls when their mothers were busy.
Martha also became the recipient of numerous playful love letters intended for her mother. In the summer of 1
888, when Adams returned to Quincy and the Camerons again went to Beverly Farms, Henry wrote Martha, “I love you very much, and think of you a great deal, and want you all the time.” But such bliss was not to be, he said, because “I’ve grown too stout for the beautiful clothes I used to wear when I was a young prince in the fairy-stories, and I’ve lost the feathers out of my hat, and the hat too, and I find that some naughty man has stolen my gold sword and silk-stockings and silver knee-buckles. So I can’t come after you, and feel very sad about it.” Explaining that he was taking care of his mother, he urged Martha to do likewise “for poor mamma does not know very well how to take care of herself, and needs you to look after her, and keep her out of mischief.” Dobbit suspected Martha’s mamma of misbehavior, he said, “because she has not written to me for a month, and I have always noticed that when ladies do not write to me, they are in mischief of some kind.”
Lizzie’s silence probably owed less to mischief than bewilderment. Henry himself seemed not to know what he wanted from her. After receiving her last letter, he had told her, “I hardly know which is worse,—to hear, or not to hear, from you; for when I do not hear, I am uneasy, and when I do hear, I am homesick.” He longed to see Lizzie but could not face the house at Beverly Farms. Pondering his mother’s approaching death and thinking that for three years he had been “sad, sad, sad,” he told his diary, “I would certainly be quite willing to go with her.” Unable to alleviate his mother’s pain or his own, Henry shut himself up in the Adams library and worked on his history. “The frenzy of finishing the big book has seized me until, as the end comes nigh, I hurry off the chapters as though they were letters to you,” he told Hay in July. In August, he left his desk only to exercise the horses. Finally, on September 10, 1888, he wrote the last page of his narrative. Like his idol Edward Gibbon, chronicler of the fall of Rome, Adams marked the completion of his great labor out of doors. “I walked in the garden among the yellow and red autumn flowers, blazing in sunshine, and meditated,” he told his diary. “My meditations were too painful to last. The contrast between my beginning and end is something Gibbon never conceived.” Elation, triumph, relief—he seemed to feel none. Writing to Lizzie, he merely noted that he would return to Washington with the “last volume of my history, finished; and I begin at once to print the whole affair. China looms in the distance.”
China might loom in the distance, but that was all Adams knew about it. Apart from learning a few Chinese ideographs, he had done nothing to further his plans. Lizzie loomed in the foreground, as uncertainly as ever. His future in her life promised nothing. Still, Henry found it easier to look forward than back. The act of remembering had become a torture. As soon as he finished his history, he began destroying the diary he had kept since adolescence. (Whether by accident or ingeniously spiteful design, all that remain are entries from 1888 and 1889, which contain several mentions of the destruction.) His past would lie buried until he began remodeling it in The Education of Henry Adams.
Restless after months of hard work and bored by the prospect of correcting and proofing nine volumes for publication, Henry tried to lure Clarence King into joining him for a trip to Fiji. King demurred, and when Henry persisted, King confessed that he could not go because he was “in the deepest water.”
One of the family situations which with frightful certainty avalanche themselves down upon me is now at its height and as my grave is my only escape from them, I must as I have so many many times before, stand by and struggle.
I found myself at 24 years of age with eleven people dependent on me alone…. Not merely their maintenance but their whole affairs have rested on my shoulders ever since. As a consequence the quarter of a million I have earned professionally has gone to them, I had to refrain from marrying the woman I wanted to, and now in middle age I am poor and what is worse so absorbed in the hand to mouth struggle for income that I see the effective literary and scientific years drifting by empty and blank when I am painfully conscious of the power to do something had I the chance….
I often think you must feel as if you were mistaken in my capacities, that you had blundered in fancying me enough above the great democratic level to bother with.
With all the sense of disappointment and the anger at fate there has grown a sense of shyness about being much with the only friends I care for—you and Hay; for in spite of his health and your sorrows you both succeed in your work. I alone seem to fail!
But when King told Hay of his decision not to go to the Pacific, he said nothing of his tribulations: “Henry Adams wants to go to Fiji this autumn and with that tragic way he has of jesting, whets my appetite for the voyage with the promise that we shall drink our enemies’ blood from their empty skulls. He does not seem to know that enemies are impossible to me among archaic peoples.” King vowed that if he were ever overcome by a thirst for blood, he would seek out an American female of the Lizzie Cameron type, whose “liquor sanguine would be thin and cool enough for an August beverage.”
Hay and a few others in the breakfast coterie understood the bond between Henry and Lizzie, but King knew no more about it than Adams knew about King’s life with the “archaic” Ada Todd. King, predictably, had never liked Lizzie, and the disdain was mutual. Aware of King’s taste in women, she icily asked why he didn’t marry his cook. King shot back, “Why this had never occurred to me I cannot conceive, but thank you fervently for the suggestion.” Irked by his broken promises and his habit of bobbing in and out of Washington without notice, Lizzie could not fathom the claims he had on the affections of John Hay and Henry Adams. “If he were my friend, I should hate him,” she once exploded to Adams.
The Fiji adventure gave way to a less ambitious excursion when Henry’s old friend Sir Robert Cunliffe, the Welsh baronet, decided to come to the United States in the autumn of 1888. Courtesy of Henry’s brother Charles, they traveled much of the West in the comfort of the Union Pacific directors’ car, taking in the Great Salt Lake, the Columbia River, and Mount Shasta, whose glaciers King had charted in his youth. In San Francisco, watching a golden sunset, Henry pointed to the rolling Pacific and dared Cunliffe to run away with him to China. “Ignominiously he turned his back on all that glory, and set his face eastward for his dear fogs,” Henry wrote home to Lizzie.
The travelers passed election day among the big trees of Yosemite. Adams preferred President Grover Cleveland to the Republican challenger, Benjamin Harrison, but did not care enough about either of them to cast a ballot. Since America had prospered under Cleveland’s stewardship, the populace was little roused by debates over tariffs and Treasury surpluses. The lower orders of the Republican Party launched an attack on Cleveland’s morals, spreading rumors that he beat his wife. An astonished Cecil Spring Rice described the situation for his friends in England: “[Mrs. Cleveland] is said to have fled from Washington in the summer because he became unsupportable and also to have been obliged by him to send away a maid who interfered in her behalf and got a cut on the head with a broomstick. The fact is that as anyone can see, they are a most devoted couple.” Springy concluded that no other country in the world had “such a base system of politics and politicians.”
Squinting at the world through steely blue eyes, Benjamin Harrison, lawyer and Sunday school teacher, radiated all the warmth of Mount Shasta’s glaciers. A campaign joke had it that everyone who shook his hand went away a Democrat. Not even a partisan as devout as John Hay could work up enthusiasm for him. “Benjamin Harrison got there, and I suppose I must vote for him,” he sighed to Adams after the GOP convention. In the end Cleveland captured almost one hundred thousand more popular votes than Harrison, but Harrison carried the electoral college by a wide margin.
Back home on Lafayette Square after his nine-thousand-mile ramble with the baronet, Henry gazed across Lafayette Square to the White House and penned a bitter valediction to the business of his forefathers. “My heart still reproaches me for being so unsympathetic to you about your political interests,” he wrote to
Cunliffe, “but you ought to reflect that I am positively brutal to my own people about ours…. To me, politics have been the single uncompensated disappointment of life—pure waste.”
March 4, 1889, the raw and windy day when Harrison took office, found Henry sequestered in his study, where he had been for weeks. He proofed pages of his history as they came from the printer, rewrote his final chapters, and bombarded his publisher, Charles Scribner, with instructions reminiscent of the edicts he had issued to H. H. Richardson when his house was under construction. Scribner was to use a particular printer and a paper selected with the advice of John La Farge. He was also told not to mark the chapters with Roman numerals, which struck the author as “rather clumsy.”
As a master of irony, Henry must have savored the joke played by the gods who sent a new generation of politicians flocking to his breakfast table at the very moment he announced his wish to be shut of them. Henry Cabot Lodge had come to the capital in 1887, a freshman congressman from Massachusetts. Tall and spare, Lodge carried himself with the hauteur of the Cabots, who had grown rich trading rum and molasses in the early days of the Bay Colony. His patrician speech, his spike of a beard, and his close-fitting suits with the trouser pockets foppishly cut on the horizontal made an indelible impression on his House colleagues. They loathed “Lah-de-dah” Lodge on sight. Rigid and self-righteous, Lodge believed himself ruled by no passion but the national good. But with his old history professor Henry Adams and other friends, Lodge was known as a genial host, and, when political bêtes noires did not rear their fractious heads, he could work considerable charm as a guest.
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