Clover Adams

by Natalie Dykstra

  When Catherine, just arrived from Colorado and in need of someone to look after her, begins visiting Esther in her art studio, Esther paints her portrait. It proves good enough for Wharton to ask Esther to paint Catherine again, this time as Saint Cecelia, for one of the undecorated transepts at Saint John’s. On completing this second portrait, Esther becomes “a little depressed”—she doesn’t want the experiment to end. She likes the company of the other workmen, the conversations, the work, and “above all, the sense of purpose.” She complains of what she calls a “feminine want of motive in life,” explaining to Wharton that he couldn’t “know what it is to work without an object.” But she knows her options. “Men can do so many things that women can’t,” she demurred. And when she critiques her finished Saint Cecelia, she agrees with Wharton’s judgment—she has failed. Wharton had earlier declared “she is only a second-rate amateur and will never be any thing more.” Now she exclaims in sheer frustration, “I am going home to burn my brushes and break my palette. What is the use of trying to go forward when one feels iron bars across one’s face?”

  The novel never answers Esther’s plaintive question. Instead, it closes at the dramatic setting of Niagara Falls, where Esther flees for refuge after breaking off her engagement to Hazard, telling him, “I am almost the last person in the world you ought to marry.” Esther escapes to the West, to nineteenth-century Americans the most resonant symbol of Nature. Here she finds an absolute claim that soothes her hurt and restless spirit. Henry, who had many times witnessed Clover recover her spirits when on horseback and who remembered their own trip to Niagara in midwinter four years before, brought a sharp intimacy to his description of Esther sitting in her rooms, with a full view through her window of the roaring Niagara Falls:

  The sea is capricious, fickle, angry, fawning, violent, savage and wanton; it caresses and raves in a breath, and has its moods of silence, but Esther’s huge playmate rambled on with its story, in the same steady voice, never shrill or angry, never silent or degraded by a sign of human failings, and yet so frank and sympathetic that she had no choice but to like it . . . She fell in love with the cataract and turned to it as a confidant, not because of its beauty or power, but because it seemed to tell her a story which she longed to understand . . . She felt tears roll down her face as she listened to the voice of the waters and knew that they were telling her a different secret from any that Hazard could ever hear.

  Grand, implacable Nature gave Esther—and Clover—spiritual solace. Nature and art were all she wanted of submission and worship.

  If Nature calms Esther, the narrative never resolves her quandary. Her future as a painter is impossible, foreclosed by Wharton’s judgment and her own—she will be never more than a “second-rate amateur.” And by refusing to submit to a religious faith that would violate her sense of integrity, Esther loses the chance of sharing life with a man she loved. She learns (as the novel’s readers are intended to) that a woman—as imagined by Henry Adams—cannot both enjoy love and be truly herself in her creative ambition or beliefs. The opinion of Esther’s Aunt Sarah is practical but deeply pessimistic: “Women must take their chance. It is what they are for. Marriage makes no real difference in their lot. All the contented women are fools, and all the discontented ones want to be men.” The novel concludes with both Esther and Hazard isolated and alone. When Esther rejects Stephen’s attempts to convince her to stay with him, he cries out, “Do you know how solitary I am?” Esther too faces an unknown future, finding herself unmoored and “in mid-ocean” with “plenty of rough weather coming.” Their mutual love proves no match for the relentless isolation deeply buried in the novel and its origins.

  In early September of 1883, Clover wrote to Clara Hay from Pitch Pine Hill that the weather had been unusually cool—“we being chilly folks keep fires going in parlor, study and bed rooms.” Two days later, Henry characterized their summer to Charles Gaskell as the “remotest of existences,” reporting that he wrote “history five hours a day.” Though he didn’t tell Gaskell of his novel, he reported he and Clover had been reading aloud the “dolorous letters” of the wife of Thomas Carlyle. The two-volume Letters and Memorials of Jane Walsh Carlyle, published earlier in 1883, unveiled the complicated, uncomprehending marriage between the Scottish writer, famous for his three-volume history, The French Revolution, and the brilliant Jane Walsh Carlyle, a woman who with great resentment enabled her husband’s career through her dedication to his domestic ease, vigilantly protecting him from noise and unwanted visitors. Now Clover had begun adopting Jane Carlyle’s sobriquet for Thomas Carlyle, addressing her own husband as a “man of genius,” as Henry told Gaskell, “after the example of that painfully droll couple.” Perhaps Clover saw something of herself in the self-sacrificing wife whose own abilities deferred to the ambitions of a “man of genius.” Perhaps she’d been inspired to do so upon reading the manuscript pages of Henry’s Esther.

  Henry wrote the novel quickly, and within months, page proofs were already on his desk. He told no one except Clover—not even his closest friends—what he was working on. But in a note to John Hay, he revealed something of what he may have aspired to when he quipped that William Dean Howells “cannot deal with gentlemen or ladies; he always slips up. [Henry] James knows almost nothing of women but the mere outside; he never had a wife.” But though Henry Adams wanted his own portrait of a lady to be more authentic, he also wanted to avoid publicity, once again feeling ambivalent about exposing his authorship. He used the feminine pseudonym Frances Snow Compton, asking his publisher, Henry Holt, to print an initial run of a thousand copies and to send the novel into the world without advertising or reviews, as an experiment to see how the reading public might react. Only Publishers Weekly announced the book with a paragraph summary of the plot. Not surprisingly, the book sold just 514 copies in the first year.

  Clarence King would later write to John Hay that “of course . . . Esther is by Henry,” saying he thought it “far more compact and vivid” than Democracy. King also explained how he’d told Henry he should have “made Esther jump” into the Niagara Falls, “as that was what she would have done,” to which Henry replied, “Certainly she would, but I could not suggest it.” Henry had transformed what was preoccupying him into literary form, in particular the anticipated death of a beloved father, the emotional risks of artistic ambition, and the failure of love. But he stopped short of fully imagining what may have troubled him most and what must have been unspeakable between him and his wife—some sort of creeping fear that Clover might one day destroy herself. No wonder Henry would admit to John Hay a few years later that he’d written the novel with his own “heart’s blood.”

  Clover had always been one of Henry’s first readers, and she usually told her father about what her husband was writing. Not this time. Unlike her frequent references to Democracy, it seems she mentioned the novel to no one. What were her thoughts and feelings upon reading Henry’s searing portrait of her? Was she in part flattered? After all, Esther is a woman of enormous emotional and intellectual honesty. What about his luscious descriptions of Catherine, so recognizably Lizzie Cameron, with her translucent complexion and her need to be taken care of? Did Clover see the failed love affair between Esther and Stephen as Henry’s comment on her and their marriage? Did she recognize herself in Esther, with her dependence on a beloved father, and if so, did the vision of Esther’s collapse after his death frighten her? Or did she see it as Henry’s warning to her, his way of saying what he didn’t communicate directly? Perhaps these passages about the experience of grief, which would become a prophetic insight, somehow assured Clover that her husband understood her after all.

  In any case, Clover said nothing. It seems certain, though, that given Clover’s fascination with photography and her pleasure in her many successes, it must have disheartened her to read that her fictional counterpart would never be more than a “second-rate amateur.” Perhaps she read the novel as Henry’s caution to her that she had b
etter not put too much into her photography. Whatever she felt, discouragement most likely lay behind Clover’s refusal, later that winter, to publish one of her finest photographs.

  CHAPTER 16

  Iron Bars

  IN MID-OCTOBER, CLOVER and Henry packed up to move back to Washington from Beverly Farms, but before heading home, they visited John and Clara Hay in Cleveland, whom they’d not seen for some time. The Hays had returned from Europe the previous May to horrible news—Clara’s father, Amasa Stone, had committed suicide. He had never recovered after being held responsible for the collapse of the Ashtabula railroad bridge in 1876 in northeastern Ohio. A jury had determined that Stone, chief engineer of the iron truss bridge, was at fault for the disaster, which killed ninety-two people and injured sixty-four. Though the Hays were “most cordial,” they were also still in “very deep mourning,” so Clover and Henry saw “no society” while in Cleveland.

  Clover, however, had brought along her camera. The Hays’ new two-story stone mansion was “very large” and not much to her liking. “John Hay in his expensive house,” Clover told her father, “has no fireplace in the large elaborately filled up dining room and unsightly steam heaters in every room.” Her photograph of the dining room captures its glittering but somewhat chilly ambiance. She also took pictures of the Hay children. She photographed the youngest, Alice Hay, on her velocipede (a mechanical hobbyhorse), and the two older children, Del and Helen, dressed in Scotch jackets and flanking a tree trunk. To take their portrait , Clover knelt, so that her lens was even with and close up to the children’s delighted faces, putting them on an unexpected equal footing with the photographer and capturing something of their relaxed grace.

  Upon returning home to Washington, Clover continued with her photography. She joined a local camera club that had formed in early 1883. This group of twelve amateur photographers, both men and women, met every Monday evening at seven P.M. at the National Museum to discuss new techniques and show one another their photographs. They went on field trips when the weather was clear, so that members could take “views,” as the Photographic Times reported, and they displayed their work in local shows. This was a significant commitment for Clover. Since her marriage she had shied away from joining groups of any kind. But she felt pride in her work. Though she never mentioned the camera club in her letters to her father, when the Washington Post reported on a show in mid-November, Clover clipped its short review, proudly sending praise of her work to her father: “Mrs. Henry Adams is also very skilful.” She also told her father that after “two good morning hours to develop photographs two or three of my Cleveland [photographs] will be good.” She sent copies of her images of the Hay children to their father, who wrote back, “The children are puffed up with majestical pride over their photographs.”

  On November 26, 1883, the Hays returned to Washington for a quick two-day visit. Clover’s salon quickly filled up: Lucy Frelinghuysen and the southern lawyer James Lowndes “came to dine Monday evening and many people to 5 o’clock tea.” Clover also convinced John Hay to sit in front of her camera, and she took two exposures. In the first, he sits in a chair, holding a copy of the French translation of Henry’s novel Democracy, still a frequent topic of conversation among the friends. Clover was making a visual joke, playing on the misconception that Hay had been the novel’s author. In the second exposure, Hay sits at Henry’s office desk, with folding panels placed behind him to hide bookshelves that would have made the image too cluttered. Clover liked her portraits to showcase the person. What she captured best, especially in the second portrait, was John Hay’s kindness. His expression is warm and direct, and the way he slightly leans toward his photographer communicates something of his fondness for Clover. He had always called her “our First Heart.” Clover declared the first exposure “good” and the second “very good.” Hay was pleased as well, writing a month later to Henry to say that “I sit all day after our photographs a half-Narcissus.”

  The day after their visit with the Hays, Clover and Henry went for tea to their near neighbors George and Elizabeth Bancroft, and Clover brought along her camera. She seated the revered American historian where he most truly belonged—behind his writing desk, with the rattan back of his chair visible just beyond his right shoulder. His books lie open all around him; his left hand holds pages while he takes notes with his right. His white hair and beard glow against the darkened background. He embodies, like Dr. Samuel Gross in Thomas Eakins’s The Gross Clinic (1875), the enlightened mind.

  Clover liked the print she made from the negative. She wrote to her father that the portrait of “Mr. Bancroft is very good sitting at his library table writing history a profile view. His hair and beard came out silvery and soft in the print.” John Hay was also impressed, recommending it to Richard W. Gilder, the editor of the Century, urging that he get a copy of it to put on the cover of the magazine: “Mrs. Henry Adams has made a remarkable photograph of George Bancroft in his study. He is now eighty-three, and one of these days will be gone. I suggest that you get a copy of it and put it in the hand of your engraver—in time.” Gilder agreed, and Hay wrote to Henry five days later, sending along Gilder’s request that Henry write a short biographical essay about Bancroft to accompany Clover’s photograph. Hay asked Henry not to tell Clover about his role—“Please give this [Gilder’s letter of request] to Our Lady of Lafayette Square—and if she be angered at my blabbing of her Bancroft, tell her I did not do it, or some such fiction. I hope you will both think it worth while to comply with Gilder’s prayer.”

  Shortly thereafter, on November 6, 1884, Clover told her father of Gilder’s invitation, telling him she “was amused” to read Gilder’s letter “asking if I would let him have a photo of Mr. Bancroft. Someone had spoken to him of it ‘with a view to its reproduction in the magazine’ and wishing Henry to write an article on papa Bancroft of 7 or 8 pages to go with it.” Clover was clearly glad to be asked, pleased that her reputation with her camera had reached as far as the respected Gilder.

  But then, in the same letter, Clover quickly backed away. She mentioned how William Dean Howells and Henry James had been accused, in the English press the year before, of forming an American “Mutual Admiration Society” after Howells enthused in print too fervently that James was the principal author now “shaping and directing American fiction.” She informed her father that “I’ve just written to decline and telling him ‘Mr. Adams does not fancy the prevailing vivisection’ the way in which Howells butters Henry James . . . The mutual admiration game is about played out and ought to be.” That same day, Henry spoke for them both in a letter to Hay. “We have declined Mr. Gilder’s pleasing offer,” he explained. “You know our modesty . . . As for flaunting our photographs in the Century, we should expect to experience the curses of all our un-photographed friends. I admit also to a shudder at the ghastly fate of Harry James and Howells. The mutual admiration business is not booming just now.”

  But this excuse was also a fig leaf, a way for Henry to change the subject. He dismissed Clover’s opportunity to gain public notice for her work by emphasizing his hesitation to applaud Bancroft in print. Henry did, in fact, think Bancroft’s prose dull. He didn’t particularly want to pretend he thought otherwise. Also, publishing Clover’s photograph along with his essay might have had an effect he dreaded: it could have drawn a popular audience to him. As a descendant of a famous family, Henry both wanted attention and denied wanting it; he both invited and evaded it, as he did in the way he published Democracy anonymously and Esther under a pseudonym. In rejecting Gilder’s offer, Henry tangled Clover in his own ambivalence toward publicity and the public.

  Henry also specifically didn’t want public attention drawn to his wife. He preferred convention. He had a conservative notion of equality between men and women, dependent not on legal rights, but rather on a relationship of mutual respect. He thought the suffragists incomprehensible, “a vile gang,” and saw little reason for a woman to have the right to vo
te. If a man loved his wife sufficiently, Henry surmised, he would seek a kind of equality with her. His only public lecture, given in 1876 at Boston’s prestigious Lowell Institute, presented an investigation of the role of women in primitive society, which he later published as “The Primitive Rights of Women.” Drawing on a wide range of sources—Native American tradition, Egyptian stories and myths, early Christian history—Henry asserted that women in the primitive past were not slaves of their powerful male relatives, but rather enjoyed, by virtue of their fecundity and motherhood, a lofty social position. He countered a long-held claim that Christianity had rescued women from a brutalized past by elevating them to equality in the eyes of Christ. Instead, he argued, the early church had degraded the status of women by relying on rigidly hierarchal power structures to regulate social life. Women and children lost rights under patriarchy, a process espoused and justified by emerging church doctrine.

  Though Henry imagined that women in the primitive past were powerful, he also held that women were utterly different from men—the opposite sex indeed. Equality was based not on what was shared but on profound differences, and could be achieved only by affirming a woman’s essential nature and her role within a separate domestic sphere. In thinking this, he differed little from most members of his generation. Henry failed to recognize that a woman might want a share in what he himself needed—satisfying work to do, social esteem, and the possibility for self-reliance balanced with friendship and love. Henry idealized the qualities of sentiment and spontaneity; he found them in his wife and thought them essential to a woman’s character. Yet he also disparaged these qualities, as he did in a long letter to one of Clover’s nieces: “The woman’s difficulty is that she is fooled by her instincts and her sentiments which are at the same time her only advantages over the man.” Henry’s view of women put actual women at a distance, just beyond his reach.