Henry Adams As He Lived

...And I know of no other place one can find them together...

...Adams the thinker deserves analytical studies...

...Adams's grave in Rock Creek Cemetery...

...Miss Stevenson's book was apparently not ground through the academic mill...

...But gradually we recognize how wisely she chose her approach...

...But the age refused to recognize even these good works...

...The solid virtues of the book can be neatly exemplified by listing the illustrations that Miss Stevenson so unerringly chose to include: "Henry Adams during the fortunate years": the Old House in Quincy...

...The fruits of these studies have been appearing in the market during the last ten years: learned articles in learned journals, a volume of hitherto unpublished letters, an illuminating account of The Young Henry Adams by Ernest Samuels, a fine study of his thought in William Jordy's Henry Adams: Scientific Historian, and at least two other whole volumes on the man...

...the stern virtues of the Adamses could only be a handicap in politics...

...It is a biography, rather than a study...

...The year after his death, his old student and friend Henry Cabot Lodge gave to the publishers The Education of Henry Adams, that perplexing, revealing, misleading autobiography...

...But a life of Adams we did need...

...Just what that something was he never could discover...

...One expects subtle analyses of Adams's troubled psyche, his layered ironies, his literary devices, his symbols of despair, his dissection of democracy, his predictions of things to come...

...His success, his fame, his power were to be posthumous...

...Miss Stevenson has quietly eschewed anything of that sort, so that at first the reader tends to dismiss her book as a superficial pastiche of the Education, Chartres and Adams's letters...

...Miss Stevenson has recreated his life as well as a sympathetic friend could have done, and we can't ask for much more...

...In the raw days of the great barbecue after the Civil War...

...Henry watched his father being shouldered aside by the new politicos, dabbled just a bit himself, and after a few years of teaching at Harvard settled down in Washington across Lafayette Square from the White House in which his grandfather had once lived, observing the show with a pretense of detachment, analyzing and describing the degradation of the democratic process...

...Indeed it is hard to imagine what a better, more satisfying biography of Henry Adams would be like...

...From desk drawers and library cubicles will emerge more gloomy studies of the Henry Adams who called himself a failure but is now recognized as one of the great figures of American intellectual history...

...One notes the rightness with which she selects telling bits--Adams's first memory of the yellow sunlight on the kitchen floor, his Puritanical discomfort when he discovers early that he somehow is attracted to Washington and the South--while smiling at her obvious interpretative comments: "To know him at any stage in his life, one must know him as a feeling human being, not just a rationalizing one...

...Reviewed by John Lydenberg Professor of English and American Studies, Hobart and William Smith Colleges In his Education, the old Henry Adams recalls that the Irish gardener in Quincy remarked to young Henry Adams, "You'll be thinkin' you'll be President too...

...The inner man can never be known with certainty and can, I suspect, best be captured by a novelist, a novelist of a very particular kind, like Henry James...

...He would not ask for the political power that no one would offer him...

...a drawing of Adams in the later years...

...The point of the recollection was not that Henry actually had had such a thought but that he had automatically considered himself marked for something--if not necessarily for power, then for influence, or at the very least for distinction...

...If she will tell us little that we do not already know about Adams, she will however bring together in smooth synthesis what we might have forgotten or overlooked...

...Conventional, yes...

...Instead, he would exercise his talents, and perhaps exert an influence, by writing...

...but just right...

...The times were apparently out of joint and Adams was destined to be a self-styled failure...

...the statue by Saint Gaudens on Mrs...

...In the Thirties graduate students found him a kindred spirit for a quite different reason: Like them, he had been a caustic critic of industrial capitalism and its fellow-traveling politicians...

...In the Forties, other graduate students found other dissertation topics in Adams and set to analyzing his complex misanthropy, his pseudo-scientific obsessions and pretensions, his apocalyptic visions of Russian-American polarities and atomic holocausts...

...Here he produced his two novels, several biographies, the nine-volume history of the Jefferson and Madison administrations that is generally recognized as one of the greatest of American histories, his ode to medieval unity and his dirge over modern multiplicity...

...The disillusioned intellectuals of the Twenties seized upon it and adopted Henry Adams as their spokesman, the American Cassandra of the decline of Western democracy...

...Dead, Adams began to attain the influence and renown he had missed during his life...

...1603 H Street, Washington, built by H. H. Richardson for the Adamses...

...It is fresh, clear, unpretentious, even simple, and almost unsophisticated -- characteristics so diametrically opposed to those of its subject as at first thought to seem quite inappropriate...

...He lures his critics into erudite investigations and ingenious theories, and then laughs mockingly at the way in which the sophisticated products turn out to mirror their authors while they pretend to X-ray their subject...

...This is certainly not the end...

...By not forcing theories about the relation between Adams's intellect and his emotions, or his proud determination and his nervous hesitations, by avoiding the temptation to "explain" his relation with his wife and the reasons for her suicide, she keeps the mocking face safely at a distance...

...He died alone in his house on the square, eighty years old in 1918, unknown to the public at large, forgotten by all but a few historians and a small circle of close friends...