Jeremiah on H Street

HENRY ADAMS AND His FRIENDS (797 pp.)--edited by Harold Dean Cater--Houghton Mifflin ($7.50).

In his declining years, looking dourly out on the world, Historian Henry Adams thought he was watching the simultaneous decline of civilization at large. A good deal of how he felt he managed to get into The Education of Henry Adams, and more is to be had in the two large volumes of his letters edited by Worthington Chauncey Ford. It might seem like mere academic piety to add further evidence. But readers who miss Henry Adams and His Friends will miss: 1) a hitherto unpublished assortment of more than 600 Adams letters, many of them of first interest; 2) the shrill cackling ofxone of the most gifted and cantankerous of U.S. 19th Century minds.

Editor Harold Dean Cater's title is one way of saying that petulant, sardonic little (5 ft. 4 in.) Adams, for all his quirks and squints, had many friends. His red brick Richardsonian mansion on Washington's H Street, completed, after his wife's death in 1885, was often full of guests (said he: "I run a hotel"). Childless himself, he took great interest in his nieces & nephews, and played "Uncle Henry" and year-round Santa Claus to other youngsters, especially those of his crony, Secretary of State John Hay.

The Lunarium. Yet the older Adams grew, the more he soured and the louder became his mocking. "I bob like a buoy in a seasick ocean," he complained. "I flop and paddle about in my own hyper-spaces. . . . The whole thing here looks like a general Lunarium. ... A queer Byzantine world, it is, and a pure waste of life to live in it."

Adams lived in it for 80 years, until he died in bed in 1918. Most of those years, after his marriage in 1872, were bitter ones. One point at last made clear in this volume is that Marian Hooper Adams, his ailing wife, did not die from natural causes; she killed herself, with potassium cyanide. Says Editor Cater: "From this calamity Henry Adams was never to recover. . . . He was, in spite of his reserved self-possession, an emotional man. . . . [Thereafter] he never mentioned Marian's name, except on extremely rare occasions." Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens was asked to design, a memorial for her grave.* Adams tried to lose himself in the writing of his monumental History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, and in a series of jaunts to the most outlandish parts of the world he could find.

The Parrots. One of these jaunts took him to Samoa in 1890. There he met Robert Louis Stevenson, already nearing the end of his short, tuberculous career. "Stevenson and his wife were perched -- like queer birds -- mighty queer ones too. Stevenson has cut some of his hair; if he had not, I think he would have been positively alarming. He never seems to rest, but perches like a parrot on every available projection, jumping from one to another and talking incessantly. The parrot was very dirty and ill-clothed, being perhaps caught unawares, and the female was inTrather worse trim than the male.

"[He] has bought, I am told, 400 acres of land, at $10 an acre, and is about to begin building. ... I think that 200 acres would have been enough, and the balance might have been profitably invested in soap. ... I shall never forget the dirty cotton bag with its sense of skeleton within, and the long, hectic face with its flashing dark eyes, flying about on its high verandah."

This, like many Adams letters, echoes some of the snobbery of one who never had to earn his own way. Editor Cater notes that Adams enjoyed an inherited income of not less than $25,000 a year; and it is likely that much of his latter-day pessimism was simply that of a frightened rentier. Wagging his patrician white beard, Adams saw mankind marching straight for perdition, with revolution and ruin the only intermediate goal. Western civilization, he croaked in 1893, was "on the verge of a general collapse. . . . Am I-scared? Well, I just am." In 1894 the U.S. struck him as "a grand opera bouffe of absolutely daft or imbecile human beings." In 1900 England looked "bankrupt," France seemed a "lunatic-asylum of gibbering idiocy. ... Oh, cock-a-doodle-doo! If I were not a pessimist and a fatalist, a populist, a communist, a socialist and the friend of a humanist, where would I be at?"

The Law. He fretted about William Jennings Bryan and his free-silver notions, about rich Jews, about trade unions, about President Cleveland ("his Imp. Highness by God's Grace Grover the First"), about Teddy Roosevelt ("he has no mind"). "Except the dear Kipling, literature is dead. ... I read nothing later than the 12th century" -- but in fact he read widely, from Karl Marx to Henry James.

A confirmed skeptic, he wrote from Rome that he hoped to be made a cardinal, but feared the Church had not "energy enough" to accept his services. An agnostic pontiff on his own account, he promulgated a "great, final, universal, commercial law: that it is impossible to underrate human intelligence. ... All the same," he went on, "the world becomes more amusing every year. I am always in greater-hopes of living to see it break its damn neck, which I calculate must happen by 1932."

Adams often guessed wrong, but in his sober, speculative moods, especially, his guesses were alarming. From a letter dated 1901: "Either our society must stop or bust. . . . This is an arithmetical calculation from given data, as, for example, from explosives, or electric energy, or control of cosmic power. . . ."

From another letter, dated 1902: "My belief is that science is to wreck us, and that we are like monkeys monkeying with a loaded shell; we don't in the least know or care where our practically infinite energies come from or will bring us to."

* The famous bronze in Washington's Rock Creek Cemetery, generally called Grief. Adams was buried next to his wife, at the foot of the statue. Characteristically, he was much annoyed when people asked what Saint-Gaudens' seated, hooded figure symbolized. "Every magazine writer wants to label it as some American patent medicine for popular consumption -- Grief, Despair, Pear's Soap or Macy's Men's Suits Made to Measure. [It is] meant to ask a question, not to give an answer; and the man who answers will be damned to eternity like the men who answered the Sphinx."

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