Adams had come to the South Seas hoping to indulge his interest in anthropology, and the villagers cheerfully allowed him to wrap his tape measure around their heads, arms, chests, waists, hips, calves, and ankles. As he recorded his findings, he was surprised to discover that the women’s heads, with a circumference of twenty-three inches, were as large as his own. He was struck by the strength of the women as well as the similarities between male and female physiques. “Often in walking behind them I puzzle myself to decide from their backs whether they are men or women, and I am never sure,” he told Hay. The gestures of the women were “free and masculine,” and they went into battle with the men. As physical specimens, Henry concluded, the people of Samoa were the ultimate aristocracy, and aristocracy was their highest art. They had done “what in theory every scientific society would like to do,—they have bred themselves systematically,” he explained to Lizzie. “Love-marriages are unknown. The old chiefs select the wives for the young chiefs, and choose for strength and form rather than beauty of face…. The consequence is that the chiefs are the handsomest men you can imagine, physically Apollos, and the women can all carry me in their arms as though I were a baby.”
La Farge watched in admiration as the amateur anthropologist diligently probed Samoan laws and rituals. “Web after web I have seen him weave around interpreter and explainer, to get to some point looked for, which may connect with something we have already acquired,” he wrote to his family in Newport. “As many times as the spider is brushed away, so many times he returns.” After several weeks of fruitless questioning, Henry was convinced the Samoans had “an entire intellectual world of their own, and never admit outsiders into it. I feel sure that they have a secret priesthood more powerful than the political chiefs, with supernatural powers, invocations, prophecy, charms, and the whole paraphernalia of paganism…. I never imagined a race so docile and gentle, yet so obstinately secret.” Henry accepted his defeat, but he did not like it. “They’ve no business to exist unless they mean something, and they won’t let me know what they mean,” he grumbled to Hay. “One cannot live permanently on purple mist and soufflé.”
Adams and La Farge were also puzzled to find that the voluptuous bodies and perfect climate stirred so few signs of emotion. To La Farge it seemed that the Samoans had facts but no thoughts, and as far as Adams could tell, they possessed “no longings and very brief passions.” Nor could La Farge understand why their idyllic existence had inspired no art apart from their exquisite straw weaving. Searching for an explanation, he wondered whether the development of art required oppression and rebellion: perhaps before the artist felt driven to create a new world, he had to feel himself in opposition to the machinations of priests and kings. In their Eden, only recently invaded by the white man, the Samoans had had little to rebel against.
“Après nous les artistes,” Adams wryly assured his friend.
Hay was thrilled by Adams’s letters from Samoa, particularly with his observations on the guileless sexuality of the islanders. Writing to Adams, he recalled a moment when King had said, “in one of his exquisite tirades against women, as a climax of contempt, ‘Sex is such a modern affair, after all.’ You seem to have come upon it at a moment when it is purely a matter of structure. What a parallax you have got upon it—seeing it as a wholesome fact in Polynesia, as an instrument of mere perversity in Paris, as a sentimental reminiscence in the etiolated society of Washington. A man would need two or three lifetimes to do justice to the impressions you have received.”
But Henry’s decorum among the old-gold girls filled Clarence King with exasperation. “How detached from this world Henry’s letter sounds; the ravelled sleeve of care knitted up into a garment of quieted nerves and softened temper,” he wrote to Hay after reading the first Samoan dispatch: “It is too late for him to get a rise from his solar plexus—The girls stir only his gray matter. It is no envy which makes me so assured, it is one of the most startling pieces of apposition I ever heard of—Henry a mere cerebral ganglion vis-a-vis with one of the initial centres of human heat. I know these women well enough to realize [their] puzzled wonder as to where the rest of him has gone. When the ganglion has done a-gangling he loves to lie a-writing in the sun and how well he does it—a new response to all fresh stimuli, an art which has become nature, a nature which has become art.”
A true anthropologist would investigate with his heart as well as his mind, King said. The cerebral approach would lead to an appreciation of differences between two peoples, but only through emotion could one grasp similarities. “Now Henry is most impressed by the differences just as he is in history or politics. The interesting limitations of the natives are his theme just as in all probability if there were a philosophical Samoan he would lie under a coconut tree and spend the cool of the afternoon cerebrating over Henry’s limitations, wondering why H. didn’t avail himself of the glorious privilege of drifting with the ebb and flow of his emotions, why he had so slender an equipment of feeling, so very dry a light.”
Nor did King approve of the watercolors La Farge mailed home to his studio in New York. As he told Hay, he found La Farge’s renditions of Samoan femininity memorable only for the “primeval glow” of old-gold flesh.
All in all I don’t care for them and await with feverish impatience the lovely truth Henry’s Kodak will not fail to record. How I sympathize with that Kodak! Somewhere in the sacred coil of its umbilical centre, at this hour lies the faint potentiality of a face waiting to be developed by reagents more sensitive than the vision of either of our friends. A face which will touch and enchant me. Its very barbaric indefiniteness will speak a language to me which Henry’s letters and La Farge’s too counterfeit presentments show they have not begun to learn the first low inarticulate sounds of. The results of their trip will in general only illustrate themselves. I hug this belief for I love primal woman so madly that I should have acted with jealousy had they discerned her.
Unwilling to act out King’s fantasies, Adams impishly sent him long inquiries about Polynesian geology and saved his most sensuous adventures—tepid as they were—for others. To Hay went the details of the pai-pai, and to Lizzie Cameron he told the story of a memorable expedition to a spot known as Sliding Rock. Escorted by a group of young people, Adams and La Farge crossed a mangrove swamp and entered a forest. The horses moved slowly up a steep path, nosing through vines and banana leaves. After an hour of climbing in silence—except for the shrieks and barks of the birds—they heard the rush and felt the swirling cool air of a waterfall. They tethered their horses and followed their hosts to the rim of a cascade that descended in a series of steps, a smooth lava staircase carpeted in green. By the time Adams set up his camera at the base of the falls, the girls were already tumbling over the rocks. Some were bare-breasted, others wore necklaces of banana leaves, and others were clad in the shapeless calico gowns prescribed by the missionaries. As Adams quickly saw, the wet dresses emphasized every mound and declivity they were meant to obscure. He fired away with his Kodak even though the rapid motion and patchy sunlight meant certain failure. La Farge planted himself beside the stream and sketched as fast as he could, hoping to capture enough to make a painting later.
For lunch the girls had prepared Samoa’s greatest delicacy, pollolo, a long, thin seaworm that appeared only once a year, at dawn, at a certain coral reef near Apia. Aficionados took their pollolo raw, but for the visitors it had been mashed and cooked with coconut meat. Adams gamely spread the dark-green paste on bread, tried a bite, and swore to La Farge that it tasted like foie gras. La Farge, whose stomach had not been the same since his epicurean binge in Hawaii, confined his repast to fruit and the shrimp the girls plucked from the pool. After lunch, when a soft rain began to fall, Adams and La Farge settled under their umbrellas for a smoke. The rain stopped, the sun streamed through the trees, and the golden swimmers resumed their games. Sliding Rock was as close to paradise as these two pilgrims would come.
John La Farge’s sketch
of young Samoan women playing in a waterfall.MRS. HENRY ADAMS LA FARGE
Paradise preyed on Henry’s mind for weeks after the excursion to Sliding Rock. His nerves were never steady as the calendar moved toward the anniversary of Clover’s death, and after a sleepless night at the end of November, he rose at dawn to compose a poem for Lizzie. He began by describing the sunrise and musing on the activities of his friends in far-off Lafayette Square, saving his anguish for the last quatrain:
Death is not hard when once you feel its measure;
One learns to know that Paradise is gain;
One bids farewell to all that gave one pleasure;
One bids farewell to all that gave one pain.
Adding to the letter on December 6, his “haunting anniversary,” he told Lizzie that he had slept little the night before and was “not positively hilarious. I rarely am so on this day; but if five years can pass, I suppose I can stand ten.”
As touched as she was by the verses, Lizzie disputed his dismal point of view. “You are not dead, but very alive,—a living presence by my side in many long hours, and I think, I have to think, that you will come back,” she replied. “Oh, how I wish that it might be soon!” To her immense relief, Don had been reelected to the Senate in November 1890, which meant that they would stay on in Washington, but without Adams and his breakfast table, she rarely saw the Hays or the Roosevelts. Torn between her loneliness for Henry and her sense that she must not burden him with it, she struggled to have it both ways.
I dared not write to you yesterday. It was one of those days when I felt that you must come back. That I could stand it no longer. If I had written I should have said Come, I know. Even Martha felt it in sympathy for she talked of you all day, and at tea wanted you “so bad!” I do miss you more and more, and have horrible revolts now and then when I think how the days are passing by, and our lives drawing nearer their end, and all these months are wasted, lost. It isn’t life without you. And yet not for worlds would I bid you return if you must return to restlessness and unhappiness…. If I could feel that you were happy over there, I would be happy here,—or [happy] alone at least. I must not write in this way, I know…. If you let me unsettle you I shall never forgive myself. Now back to trivialities….
The trivialities of her unhappy winter included country club dances for the new crop of debutantes, the botched assignations with Nannie Lodge and John Hay, and several evenings of theater starring Sarah Bernhardt. Inspecting the legendary actress backstage, Lizzie found “a very much dyed, painted smallish woman, very vivacious, very French, and very common.” After the meeting, Lizzie was flattered to hear that Madame Sarah always asked whether Mrs. Cameron was present and where she sat, but the pleasure was short-lived. To distract herself, she experimented with photography. Though she had neither the gifted eye nor the perseverance that had enabled Clover Adams to triumph over the limitations of the nineteenth-century camera, she managed, with the help of Theodore Dwight and many sessions in Henry’s darkroom on H Street, to make a few prints she considered good enough to send to the South Seas.
If Lizzie meant to please Henry by taking up photography, she need not have bothered. In spite of her interest in the pictures he sent from Samoa, and in spite of Clarence King’s hope that Henry’s Kodak would capture the essence of Polynesia, Henry had decided that “the photograph takes all the color, life and charm out of the tropics, and leaves nothing but a conventional hardness that might as well be Scotch or Yankee for all the truth it has.” Turning violently against the camera—in words that betrayed his fury with Clover for her suicide—he ranted that photographs “kill as dead as their chemicals.”
Still, Lizzie’s photographs and letters filled him with hope. “Perhaps you may cure me after all, and I shall come back contented and in repose of mind, to be your tame cat, after the manner of Chateaubriand, and various elderly English gentlemen, once my amusement to watch,” he told her. “Is it worth your while? Please say yes.” Henry drew the image of the tame cat from a celebrated nineteenth-century French love affair between François-Auguste-René de Chateaubriand and Juliette Récamier. In his old age, Chateaubriand, a diplomat and author known as “the cat,” was satisfied to be the devoted friend of his former lover.
With his heart in Lafayette Square, Henry could give little thought to the politics and history of Samoa. While he vaguely wished that its archaic condition could be preserved and prayed that the islands would escape “the frantic barbarism of the sugar-planter,” he had seen enough to conclude that the old ways would soon disappear. “Gunpowder and missionaries have destroyed the life of the nobles,” he told Hay. In the old days, chiefs had battled only with other chiefs. “The idea of being killed by a common man was sacrilege. The introduction of fire-arms has changed all this, and now, as one of the chiefs said with a voice of horror, any hunchback, behind a tree, can kill the greatest chief of Samoa.”
La Farge was more moved than Adams by their talks with the king, who persuaded the artist that the fate of Samoa lay in the hands of the world’s most powerful nations, including the United States. “One must go abroad and far away to realize that whenever we wish we are one of the main powers of the world,” La Farge wrote in one of his most impassioned letters from the South Seas. “It is on our sleeping that grasping nations like England and Germany depend.” Since the western coast of the United States bordered a long stretch of the Pacific, La Farge considered the ocean the “natural property” of the United States. “We must either give up Hawaii, which will inevitably then go over to England, or take it willingly, if we need to keep the passage open to eastern Asia, the future battleground of commerce.” Most worrisome were the Germans, whose coconut plantations dominated Samoa’s economy. The former German consul had boasted to his American counterpart that Germany feared nothing from the United States because democracies always frittered away their energy in petty domestic squabbles, and because America had neither the army nor the navy to carry out its wishes abroad. “Before you can make up your mind to anything, we shall have taken Samoa for ourselves,” the Kaiser’s envoy predicted.
Of all the white men in Samoa in 1890, none was more famous than Robert Louis Stevenson. In 1887, after the successes of Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Stevenson and his wife, Fanny, had said good-bye to Henry James and their other London friends and sailed for America. In New York Stevenson befriended La Farge’s good friend Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who sculpted a medallion of the writer at work—in bed, propped against pillows, notebook on knee, cigarette in hand. After touring the United States, the Stevensons moved on to the South Seas and in 1889 decided to carve out a small plantation near Apia.
Venturing up Stevenson’s mountainside in mid-October, Adams and La Farge were wholly unprepared for the sight that greeted them. The illustrious immigrant’s yard was a tangle of burned stumps, the plantation house a mere shanty with an iron roof. The great man was “so thin and emaciated that he looked like a bundle of sticks in a bag, with a head and eyes morbidly intelligent and restless,” Henry wrote home to Lizzie. “He was costumed in very dirty striped cotton pyjamas, the baggy legs tucked into coarse knit woollen stockings, one of which was bright brown in color, the other a purplish dark tone.” Fanny Stevenson, barefoot, had darted into the house as soon as she spied the visitors in the clearing. She had returned a moment later in shoes but no stockings. “She wore the usual missionary nightgown which was no cleaner than her husband’s shirt and drawers,” Adams said. Both husband and wife had wild masses of dark hair, and both were sorely in arrears in the matter of baths. Stevenson recognized La Farge’s name, probably from conversations with James and Saint-Gaudens, but he seemed unacquainted with the house of Adams. (Learning of this gap in Stevenson’s knowledge, Hay urged Adams to be of stout heart: “Bear up under this, like a man, in the interest of science.”)
Stevenson, who had long suffered from consumption, bore all the visible symptoms of his disease—eyes gleaming with fever, o
verly ruddy cheeks, a frantic restlessness. He “perches like a parrot on every available projection, jumping from one to another, and talking incessantly,” Adams told Hay. Fanny was also in broken health, afflicted with rheumatism and the effects of poverty, hunger, and the hard labor of clearing three hundred acres of jungle. The immaculately groomed John La Farge was bound to disapprove of the Stevensons’ haberdashery, but in Fanny’s case, he claimed that his judgment was strictly medical: a woman with rheumatism should not go about without shoes and stockings.
Once they saw beyond the squalor, however, Adams and La Farge were deeply impressed by Stevenson’s energy and his devotion to literature. “For months he has sailed about the islands in wretched trading schooners and stray steamers almost worse than sailing vessels, with such food as he could get, or lived on coral atolls eating bread-fruit and yams, all the time working hard with his pen,” Henry told Lizzie. Stevenson had “seen more of the islands than any literary or scientific man ever did before, and knows all he has seen.” Wondering how the wasted Stevenson could work so tirelessly, La Farge decided he must be an aitu, a Samoan devil spirit not bound by the laws of the flesh.
Stevenson eagerly accepted the Americans’ invitation to call on them in Apia, but afterward he fretted that too many obstacles stood in the way of real friendship. As he wrote to his friend Henry James in London, Adams and La Farge’s guesthouse in Apia was difficult to reach from his mountaintop: “I had to swim my horse the last time I went to dinner; and as I have not yet returned the clothes I had to borrow, I dare not return in the same plight.” He also guessed that the Americans would be reluctant to venture up his mountain again because they suspected “the horrid doubt that weighs upon our commissariat department; we have often almost nothing to eat; a guest would simply break the bank; my wife and I have dined on one avocado pear; I have several times dined on hard bread and onions. What would you do with a guest at such narrow seasons? eat him? or serve up a labour boy fricasseed?”
The Five of Hearts Page 26
