While James wrung his hands and wished that the English mails permitted him to send a crate of foodstuffs from Fortnum and Mason, Adams and La Farge gracefully solved the problem by sending food in advance of their next visit. And to La Farge’s delight, they discovered on arriving that although the Stevenson larder was empty, the wine cellar was not: Louis and Fanny considered Bordeaux an essential of everyday life. La Farge and Stevenson talked shop for hours and found that they shared the pleasure of regarding themselves as craftsmen rather than artists—men with a healthy tolerance for the compromises one had to make in the course of earning a living. Reflecting on Stevenson’s kindness, Adams regretted the shabby portraits he had sent to Lafayette Square and asked his friends not to repeat his remarks. “I never met a man with less judgment,” Adams wrote to King, “and on a venture I would damn in advance any opinion he should express, but he is excessively intelligent, amusing, and, to us, friendly, not to say more. Don’t abuse him.”
Bearing letters of introduction from Stevenson, La Farge and Adams boarded a small steamer for Tahiti on January 29, 1891. As they tossed in the swells of the trade winds, Adams lay on deck in a kimono and tried, without success, to ward off seasickness by reading his way through the stack of novels he had saved for the voyage. Six days and thirteen hundred miles later, he gratefully set foot on the tidy stone quay of Papeete. La Farge was charmed to overhear snippets of French conversation and to see that the shady streets bore names like Rue des Beaux-Arts and Rue de la Cathédrale. To Adams, Papeete seemed “sweetly pretty,” but in the blend of Tahitian and French colonial strains he sniffed “a South Sea melancholy, a little sense of hopelessness and premature’decay.” Compared to the open, good-natured Samoans, the Tahitians struck him as lifeless and sad.
Henry’s greatest joy on arriving in Papeete was finding two letters from Lizzie. “You must imagine what I can’t write, and be sure you imagine it strong as it is,” he told her. She wished he had been in Washington for Christmas, and he shared the feeling. “You can have no doubts on that subject, or, if you have, they must be queer ones. I get no sort of satisfaction from the consciousness that you are much better off to be rid of me.” Though he dreaded the prospect of several idle months in Tahiti, he saw no alternative. Since La Farge felt that he had just begun to work well, Henry thought it only fair “to sit still for months at a time to give him a chance.”
It was a generous decision in light of the doubts Adams had about La Farge’s Polynesian work. La Farge was extremely suggestible, Adams told Hay, and his struggles to capture the scenery usually netted more prose than poetry. As a result of his own mechanical dabbling, Henry could appreciate his companion’s finesse, and he willingly entertained the possibility that La Farge’s paintings might be the best ever done in the South Seas, but he also believed that an artist was doomed to defeat amid the swiftly changing lights and shadows of the tropics. Each day the natives came to study the visiting painters at work, and to Henry’s immense amusement, they saw no difference between his labored watercolors and the work on La Farge’s easel.
In the evenings, the guests were usually invited to hear a himene, a sort of siva with singing but no dancing. Henry thought the hymns more polished than the music of Samoa, but he missed the accompanying movements, which the missionaries had banned. While La Farge hoped to see a secret performance of the old dances, which were said to be more erotic than the pai-pai, Adams was convinced that such practices had long since died out. Looking at the dolorous women in their missionary nightgowns, he could not believe that they knew how to dance. The talk of Tahitian lasciviousness was one more Polynesian hoax, he told Lizzie. Noting that he and La Farge were still waiting for their first sexual proposition, he joked that he was “disgusted, for I expected to be quite besieged by splendid young female savages. They are a fraud.”
The only bigger fraud was the missionaries’ insistence that they had wrought an improvement by introducing Western morality. “I see no use in talking about morals here,” Henry declared. “Morals must be a European invention, for no sooner were they introduced here by three English and French ships only about a century ago, than they swept away the entire population in fifteen or twenty years.” Tahiti’s population had withered from two hundred fifty thousand to ten thousand, and Henry had grave doubts about the survival of the species. Though Clarence King liked to tweak the gentlemen of the Century Club by arguing that miscegenation was the only hope of the white race, the half-breeds Henry saw in Tahiti inspired no such optimism. To his eye, their “whitey-brown” complexions suggested weakness and disease, and Tahitians were in fact susceptible to consumption, rheumatism, and alcoholism. “Rum is the only amusement which civilisation and religion have left them, and they drink—drink—drink,” he told Lizzie.
At least part of the melancholy Henry saw in Tahiti was his own. He knew it was perverse to feel restless among silver waterfalls and velvet mountains and the most vibrant colors in the world, but he felt powerless to stop himself. “My mind has given way,” he confessed to Lizzie in mid-March. “I have horrors. No human being ever saw life more lovely than here, and I actually sit, hour after hour, doing nothing but look out at the sky and sea, because it is exquisitely lovely and makes me so desperately homesick; and I cannot understand either why it is so beautiful or why it makes me so frantic to escape.”
Henry’s moods proved as changeable as tropical light, and within a week he had found the cure for his ennui. Courtesy of a letter from Stevenson, Adams and La Farge were presented to Tati Salmon, the thirty-eight-year-old ruling chief of Tahiti. They were instantly smitten. Son of a female chief and Alexandre Salmon, a Jewish merchant from London, Tati had the girth and great rolling laugh of H. H. Richardson. Tati prized Henry James above all other writers, and with his keen intelligence and English education, he had managed to retain considerable power over political affairs in spite of the fact that the French flag had flown over Tahiti for fifty years. “Hebrew and Polynesian,” Adams decided, “mix rather well.”
Adams was even more taken with Tati’s mother, Ariitaimai, hereditary chiefess of Tahiti’s oldest and most powerful clan, the Tevas. In deference to Western custom, Tati served Adams and La Farge at table when they came for a meal, but Henry was pleased to see that Ariitaimai, as stately and ladylike as Clara Hay, eschewed this barbarism and sat on the floor. At Adams’s request, she recounted Tahitian legends and crooned ancient melodies. Flattered by the attentions of the Americans, Ariitaimai convened a family council and expressed a wish to adopt them. When the family consented, she bestowed the honor in a solemn ceremony conducted in Tahitian and translated by one of Tati’s sisters. Adams became Tauraatua (Bird-Perch of God), and La Farge was christened Teraaitua (Prince of the Deep). While Henry knew that his Tahitian duchy was not much larger than the lava-lava he now wore every day, the honor was unmistakable. As he explained to Lizzie, the title was “a very real thing, and was borne by Tati’s ancestors, and is actually borne now by his second son.”
La Farge teased that Henry was becoming “more Teva than the Tevas,” and it was true. Having been officially adopted, he now had an occupation: helping the family write its history. “I have at last got them into a condition of wild interest in history,” he bragged to Lizzie. “My interest appears to have captured the old lady, who astonished her children by telling me things she would never tell them; and as they had to act as interpreters, they caught the disease one by one, till at length they have all got out their pens and paper, and are hard at work, making out the family genealogy for a thousand years back.” Before leaving Tahiti, Adams worked sheaves of notes into a lengthy genealogical discourse interspersed with legends and love songs. One of Tati’s sisters was to finish the rest and send it to him for polishing and a private printing. But he doubted that he would ever see the manuscript again. As he told Lizzie, “Energy in Tahiti is a very brief affair.” Whether the book was finished or not, Henry wrote Hay that he loved Ariitaimai “with all my heart, an
d quite admit King’s estimate of the archaic woman, if she is the standard.”
After eight months of annoying King with letters about everything but the women of the South Seas, Adams was ready to render a definitive opinion for his friend. As far as Henry could discern, the Polynesian woman owned a capacity for “vices and nice impulses” but no real intellect or emotion. She was a creature of whim, as happy to run away from a man as to run away with him. Adams said he had found it amusing to make her acquaintance, but she did not inflame him with desire, and he saw no reason to proclaim her superior to her modern sisters. The irritation King must have felt on reading Henry’s appraisal he tactfully kept to himself.
In the spring of 1891 came news that Henry had awaited for months: the Saint-Gaudens sculpture had finally been installed at Clover’s grave. Lizzie Cameron thought the pose of the seated bronze figure “strong and calm,” and Hay confidently proclaimed it Saint-Gaudens’s masterpiece. “It is full of poetry and suggestion. Infinite wisdom, a past without beginning and a future without end, a repose, after limitless experience, a peace to which nothing matters—all are embodied in this austere and beautiful face and form.” Stanford White’s pink granite stonework for the site—a setting and pedestal for the figure and a long, curved bench for visitors—was equally “splendid in dignity and simplicity,” Hay said.
Clarence King considered the statue “far above” any other modern sculpture he had seen, but in the hooded head and downcast eyes he saw bottomless despair. “Would it were not so appropriate, alas, that there is not a ray of faith, not a throb of hope in that gaze,” he told Hay. “The tangled complexity of modern emotions, of unillumined doubt, of icy courage play over its nervous features. It is utter restlessness in complete repose. As if the poor woman was sitting there sheltering herself in the folds of her own shroud, trembling perplexed and tortured over the fate of her own soul.”
Eager for Adams to see the statue, Lizzie Cameron and Theodore Dwight photographed it, and Dwight rushed off a parcel of pictures. “I could knock his head off,” Saint-Gaudens wrote to Adams when he discovered that the pictures were on their way to Tahiti. Upset that Adams would get his first impression of the work from photographs, Saint-Gaudens had hoped to limit the damage by selecting the pictures to be sent, but Dwight, who enthusiastically admired the sculpture, had seen no cause for worry.
As soon as Saint-Gaudens made his vexation known, Lizzie and Henry’s brother Charles wrote Henry that the photographs expressed neither the power nor the majesty of the sculpture. Charles had seen the photos first and was horrified. Reduced to paper and deprived of color, the figure looked like “a discouraged and disappointed mendicant, wrapped in a horse-blanket,” Charles told Henry. But the “instant I saw the figure a great sense of relief came over me; and it grew upon me during the half hour I sat before it…. It is rest,—complete, sudden, painless rest,—after weariness, trial and suffering.”
Henry hastened to tell Saint-Gaudens that the photos had not prejudiced him against the work. He had great confidence in Hay’s judgment, he added, and “if your work approaches Hay’s description, you cannot fear criticism from me.” Grateful for Lizzie’s assurances, Henry told her that he felt as if he had shed his last anxiety. “If the statue is half what you describe it, I can be quite contented to lie down under it, and sleep quietly with her. At the end of all philosophy, silence is the only true God.”
Early in June 1891, as Adams and La Farge prepared to leave Tahiti, Henry faced up to the fact that nine months of separation from Lizzie had given him no clearer understanding of their relationship or their future. For months she had flashed conflicting signals, crying out with loneliness in one sentence and disqualifying her claims upon him in the next. Henry parried adroitly with promises to return—if she thought he should. Unable to lure him back to Washington, Lizzie dangled another temptation. She was spending the summer in Europe and would not sail home until November. Would Henry meet her in Paris?
Aching to see her, Henry decided not to wait for the scheduled steamer from Papeete to Fiji, the next destination on his itinerary. He found a sea captain willing to change course for $2,500 and readily submitted to the extortion. “I am actually starting on a ten-thousand-mile journey to see—you!” the tame cat purred in a last note from Tahiti.
Henry could dredge up little enthusiasm for Fiji, and as soon as he could, he coaxed La Farge aboard a ship bound from Fiji to Australia. In early August they reached Sydney—and winter. Shivering before a coal fire and listening to the din of trams and hansoms beneath his hotel window, La Farge framed a wistful conclusion: “Our South Seas days are over.”
By the time Henry Adams and John La Farge reached Fiji in 1891, Adams wanted only to push on for Paris, where Lizzie Cameron awaited him. La Farge had little time to use the sketch pad in his lap.MASSACHUSETTS HISTORICAL SOCIETY
Adams pronounced the trip a huge success. “To have escaped a year of Congress and high-thinking, by bagging a year of solid Polynesian garlands and materialism, is as sweet a joy as to run away with another man’s wife,” he told Hay, who was sure to appreciate the analogy. But he pretended that the odyssey had come to an end because La Farge was needed in New York. “[He] is no more eager to come home than I am, and we would both gladly give another year to doing the Malay Archipelago and India; but my conscience says that La Farge ought to go, so I have imposed on myself the contract of taking him to England and shipping him home in October.” Nothing was said of the tryst with Mrs. Cameron in Paris.
For two months, as Adams and La Farge hopped westward from island to island, Henry thought of little except Paris, but on his last day at sea, the joy of anticipation turned to anxiety and paralysis. “For the first time I am beginning to feel that the long journey, which seemed interminable, is really ended, and that all the old perplexities, with plenty of new ones, are going to revive,” he told Lizzie. “The pleasure of seeing you once more overbalances everything else; but in the depths of my cowardice I feel more than ever the conviction that you cannot care to see one who is so intolerably dead as I am, and that the more you see of such a being, the more sorry you will be that you ever tried to bring him back to life…. Men are certainly the most successful invention the devil ever made, and when they arrive at a certain age, and have to be constantly amused, they are even harder to manage than when they are young, mischievous and tormenting.”
Landing in Marseilles on Friday, October 9, Henry found several letters from Lizzie, one of which announced that she was enjoying Paris for the first time in her life and another expressing the hope that he would not arrive on Saturday night, when she would be out. “I had to go or to boldly say the reason,” she explained.
Adams and La Farge reached Paris late Saturday night. For a man who was said to be needed in New York, La Farge showed little desire to go there. Quickly sensing that he was not wanted in Paris, he said farewell and headed for the French countryside.
When Mr. Adams presented himself to Mrs. Cameron in her apartment near the Champs-Elysées on Sunday, October 11, 1891, he was, as he had promised at the start of his voyage, “wholly white-haired.” He was also gaunt after fourteen months of living on fish and breadfruit, and his travels had cost him several teeth. Standing before her in his ill-fitting suit, he looked much older than his fifty-three years.
Lizzie, not quite thirty-four, radiated excitement and self-confidence. She had spent the summer whirling from salon to salon, enchanting counts and duchesses, intoxicated by her conquests. With half the world between her and Henry Adams, she had dared to flirt and caress and beg him to come home. He had been wary, but he was not invulnerable, and the idea of her distress was a form of seduction he could not resist. Here he was—impeccable in his conduct but unable to hide the depths of his adoration. Now what?
Neither of them knew. For the next two weeks, Lizzie kept to her round of parties and dinners, paying little attention to the man who had raced ten thousand miles to be with her. Henry played with
five-year-old Martha and tried to distract himself with evenings at the theater. At the end of October they moved on to London, where they saw more of each other but quarreled bitterly. “You took me so by surprise the other night,” Lizzie wrote from the Teutonic, which sailed for America on November 4. “I had no idea that was to be our goodbye. I was furious!”
Henry responded in kind. “I am really annoyed that you thought my good-bye abrupt, and had no idea it was to come then. I thought I had told you in the afternoon that my good-bye was intended to be our last words in your rooms, for, later, I should have no chance for more than a mere word of farewell.” Pondering the confusion, he decided it was “of a piece with my whole visit,—fragmentary, interrupted and unsatisfactory.” He and La Farge had hoped to see each other in London before La Farge sailed on November 11, but Henry was too distraught. After Lizzie’s departure he had gone straight to his old friend Charles Milnes Gaskell at Wenlock Abbey, the ancient manor where he and Clover had spent part of their honeymoon. Shut up in his room on a stormy afternoon, he poured out his hurt.
I ought to spare you the doubtful joy of sharing my pleasures in this form; but you, being a woman and quick to see everything that men hide, probably know my thoughts better than I do myself, and would trust me the less if I concealed them. You saw and said that my Paris experiment was not so successful as you had meant it to be. Perhaps I should have done better not to have tried it, for the result of my six months desperate chase to obey your bidding has not been wholly happy….
The Five of Hearts Page 27
