Henry Adams' Creative Years
CHAMBERLIN, WILLIAM HENRY
Henry Adams' Creative Years Henry Adams: The Middle Years By Ernest Samuels. Harvard. 514 pp. $7.50. Reviewed by William Henry Chamberlin THE FAMOUS STORY of his Education marked Henry Adams as...
...Ernest Samuels, Professor of English at Northwestern University, seems well on the way to creating the definitive biography of this most interesting member of the Adams family...
...The present volume is the second of a trilogy and deals with Adams in one of the happiest and most creative phases of his life, abruptly cut short when his spirited and attractive wife, well fitted to share his wide-ranging interests in books, politics and society, killed herself by a self-administered dose of cyanide...
...Reviewed by William Henry Chamberlin THE FAMOUS STORY of his Education marked Henry Adams as perhaps America's most authentic intellectual...
...and his literary style is considerably above the academic average...
...The figure of the former Marian Hooper, like Adams himself the descendant of an old New England family, brightens the first half of the book under the author's sympathetic recreation...
...Few commentators have felt so intuitively the tremendous impact of the accelerating pace of industrialization on human life...
...His source materials are vast and conscientiously worked over...
...Although one might get the impression from The Education that Adams was a dilettante spectator of the human comedy and tragedy, his output of work was very creditable...
...It included a nine-volume history of the administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison, biographies of Albert Gallatin and John Randolph and two novels, very effectively analyzed in this biography, Esther and the more widely discussed Democracy...
...It was that darkest and most mysterious of diseases, mental depression, aggravated by the death of a much loved father, that brought Marian's life to a premature end...
...The Middle Years is one of the most distinguished biographical achievements of the season...
...In this solid, thoughtful and most readable work, as in its predecessor, The Young Henry Adams, there is the happy combination of a sympathetic interpreter and a first-rate personality...
...Adams, who always had a pessimistic streak in his nature, after the passing of his wife sank into a mood of perpetual melancholy, of which this excerpt from his letter to an English friend is a good expression: "I am well, as far as I 'know, with everything in the world except what I want...
...It does not mention his wife, whose tragic suicide sealed up Adams' heart and left him, in one of his own bitter vivid phrases, with the feeling of being "a stray monkey floating down Niagara on a hand organ...
...Henry and Marian Adams seemed to have all the gifts that should have made for long and happy lives together: brains and wit, a congenial circle of friends, freedom from financial care...
...and with nothing to complain of, except the universe...
...Although he strikes a somewhat querulous note of self-pity and cherishes what later events have proved to be a grave error in perspective (he considered his own age, 1837-1918, one of singular violence) his selective autobiography has many elements of grandeur and enduring popularity...
...one feels that Adams, who once uttered the amazing prophecy that the world might some day blow itself up, would be sardonic, not surprised, if he could return to the atomic age...
...his psychological judgments seem sound...
...The Education, despite its merits, left much work for future biographers...
...Along with a deep underlying pessimism there was considerable knowledge of the world, an admirable record in scholarship and a gift of sharp and often acid appraisal of actors strutting on the public stage...
Vol. 42 • March 1959 • No. 13
