CHAPTER 9
THE OVERSEAS TRIP to England was trouble-free. Clover and Henry experienced little of the seasickness that had plagued the honeymoon voyage seven years before. On arriving in London, Clover announced to her father she agreed with the great English polymath Dr. Samuel Johnson when he wrote, “‘He who is tired of London is tired of life.’” Henry reported that they dined out incessantly. Clover would later muse to her father that the “vastness of this London society strikes you more every day,” but added, “We always drift into the same set here—respectable—mildly literary and political.” Clover and Henry rented and settled into a large sunny house at 17 Half Moon Street, north of Buckingham Gardens. They went to concerts at nearby Westminster Abbey, scoured print shops to add to their growing art collection, and traveled through the countryside north of the London. There, Clover found the “gardens and great trees and old cottages . . . so beautiful” that seeing them exhausted her. It was as if, she joked with her husband, “this English world is a huge stage-play got up only to amuse Americans. It is obviously unreal, eccentric, and taken out of novels.”
In mid-July they attended a private dinner and showing at the new Grosvenor Gallery, which had opened two years before in the fashionable shopping district on New Bond Street. Lady Blanche Lindsay, whom Clover described as “young and not pretty,” hosted social gatherings at the gallery, which she and her husband, Sir Coutts Lindsay of Balcarres, had established as a “refuge of the Pre-Raphaelites” whose work had been rejected by the Royal Academy. Dinners at the gallery had become the social invitation of the summer season. Clover admired the new building’s long paneled rooms lined with crimson brocade and frescoes. She was less enthusiastic, with few exceptions, about the art on display that season, which included works by George Frederic Watts, Edward Burne-Jones, John Everett Millais, and William Holman Hunt. Upon seeing James McNeill Whistler’s large portrait of Connie Gilchrist, Clover thought it a “joke,” agreeing with John Ruskin’s view that Whistler’s paintings were overly abstract and seemed somehow unfinished, as if he had flung “a pot of paint in the face of the public.” The aesthetic movement, with its doctrine of “art for art’s sake,” didn’t hold Clover’s attention as much as the virtuosity of the Old Masters and the early-nineteenth-century Romantics.
Henry spent most of his days “pegging away” at the London Records Office. Sometimes Clover joined him, reading through old British newspapers. Or she found other ways to occupy her time. She often “loafed with” Anne Palmer, who’d taken an apartment just four doors away on the same street. She and Anne had met two years before through Carl Schurz’s daughter, Agatha, while attending the theater together in Washington. Earlier in the year, she had invited Anne to travel along with her and Henry to the famed Niagara Falls, and while there, the two women had dared to walk across the ice bridge between Canada and the United States, jumping crevasses beneath the “sparkle and glitter” of a “warming sun.” Despite an age difference of fourteen years, Clover and Anne shared a spirit of adventure, and by the time they met again in London six months later, they were friends. With Anne, Clover relaxed. Anne had grown up in New York, outside the “whispering gallery” of Boston and Washington that often made Clover behave cautiously, especially around other women. Though Clover stayed in contact with her women friends from before her marriage, including Adie Bigelow, Eleanor Shattuck (now Whiteside), and the Agassiz sisters, her friendship with Anne had a heightened intimacy. Anne, a striking, slender woman with large, dark brown eyes and wavy brown hair, shared Clover’s passion for art as well as a quick sense of humor. Both had known a full measure of loss: before Anne’s tenth birthday, three of her younger siblings had died, and her youngest brother, Oliver, was severely handicapped. Anne felt close to her father and brother, but not to her mother and sister, a family dynamic Clover understood. Clover could be Anne’s friend and protector, providing nurture and fun. Together in London, they attended dog shows and flower exhibitions, once rowing on the Thames River to Twickenham. Whatever they did, they often found themselves laughing till all hours.
The American novelist Henry James, who had moved to London in 1876 and was living nearby, thought Clover and Henry to be “launched very happily in London life,” as he wrote in a letter to his family. James was staying in a modest apartment two blocks away from the Adamses, on Bolton Street, and in the late afternoons, after he finished writing, he often stopped by for some of Clover’s tea and gossip. They were the same age, and having grown up together in Boston and Cambridge, knew many of the same people. He thought Clover had “intellectual grace.” She called him Harry. At thirty-six, Harry had—in the words of Cynthia Ozick—“become Henry James,” the celebrated author of the best-selling Daisy Miller. The novelist, who cut an impressive figure, was solidly built, with a beard and receding brown hair, a strong profile, and a quiet, self-absorbed manner. One friend remembered how he “banishes all expression” from his enormous gray eyes. He was in the midst of an intensely creative period, having already written The American, The Europeans, and a biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, among other essays and short stories. He finished Washington Square in the freezing winter of 1879 and laid plans for drafting, the following spring, what he called his “wine-and-water” novel, The Portrait of a Lady.
Did Henry James talk with Clover about what he was writing? Neither one said. But surely these two confirmed raconteurs exchanged stories, chitchat, turns of phrase—at one point James promised to bring her “plenty of anecdotes—if your store has got low.” James considered Henry Adams “a trifle dry,” but he found Clover “conversational, critical, ironical,” with a wit distinguished by “a touch of genius.” Clover thought James talked a lot, but fussed over him and fretted over his extended absence from America and his literary reputation. She couldn’t comprehend what made him stay away from his own country for so long. She found James’s fascination with London, which he once called “the most complete compendium of the world,” perplexing, and mused, “what it is that Henry James finds so entrancing year after year we cannot understand . . . A man without a country is one to be pitied in ten years.” And later, when American critics accused James in “savage notices” of giving short shrift to American culture in his biography of Nathaniel Hawthorne, Clover worried. “It is high time Harry James was ordered home by his family.” While she realized the critics were “silly and overshoot the mark in their bitterness,” she also reasoned that her friend “had better not hang around Europe much longer if he wants to make a lasting literary reputation.”
But if these two Bostonians had a close friendship, and they did, a kind of coolness defined its center, with each observing the other, each taking notes. James’s attention flattered and entertained Clover, but nothing more. She resisted the magnetic pull of his all-consuming imagination. Her self-containment demanded little from him. They both managed life by deflection—she with her fierce humor, he with a distancing charm—a tactic each must have understood in the other. “He comes in every day at dusk and sits chatting by the fire,” Clover wrote her father, but added that she thought him “a frivolous being” for dining out as much as he did. After reading A Portrait of a Lady, which James would later send to her, she wrote to her father, “It’s very nice, and [there are] charming things in it, but I’m aging faster and prefer what Sir Walter [Scott] called the ‘big bow-wow style.’” It wasn’t that her friend “bites off more than he can chaw,” she concluded, “but he chaws more than he bites off.”
Clover reported to her father that Henry James, on hearing that she and Henry planned to spend the next months in Paris, felt “half disposed to go with us.” Whether they all traveled together, no one said, but the three turned up around the same time in mid-September of 1879 in the City of Light.
“The second act of Innocents Abroad is now beginning,” Clover reported upon arriving in France. She thought Paris less welcoming than London and would later call it little more than “a huge shop and restaurant.” But early in the fall of 1879, the city shone under luminous skies, its seductions in full view. While driving in her carriage through its most stylish park, the Bois de Boulogne, Clover found everything better than in London: “better horses, better liveries, and of course the women immeasurably better dressed.” Henry planned to work on his research into Jefferson and Madison in the archives, but these institutions were closed until October 1, so Clover and Henry had some leisurely days together—“We have quiet mornings to study, noon breakfasts, and Bohemian dinners.” She already knew French from her lessons at the Agassiz School and had started learning Spanish in preparation for travels in Spain. Henry James came by every day at six-thirty, after which they dined out and attended the theater several times a week. On September 13, for her thirty-sixth birthday, they went to the Louvre, where they feasted on the Old Masters; Clover discovered that “every time one comes back to the good pictures they seem better.” Afterward, they met with James for dinner at an open-air café and went to the Paris circus, followed by ice cream on the wide boulevard of the Champs-Élysées.
The three revelers were joined that same evening by Isabella Stewart Gardner and her husband, Jack. Clover had known “Mrs. Jack,” as everyone called her, since her marriage in 1860. The two women, only three years apart in age, had much in common, inhabiting similar social circles both in Boston and on the North Shore, where the Gardners had a summer home in Beverly. They had met in Washington when Mrs. Jack traveled to the capital, and again in London, where they attended a party at the Grosvenor Gallery and critiqued English fashion for “twenty minutes side by side in the vestibule waiting for our respective broughams.” In Paris, Mrs. Jack introduced Clover to her dressmaker, the renowned designer Charles Frederick Worth, famous for his couture and his use of sumptuous materials; he suggested that Clover order a dark green merino dress trimmed in dark blue, similar to a dress he’d designed for the duchess of Würtemberg.
Mrs. Jack’s toughness, her refusal to adhere to social convention, and her sense of style and élan had earned her acclaim in the papers—a local reporter called her “one of the seven wonders of Boston.” A friend remembered her “gliding walk, like a proud ship under full sail.” She had already begun amassing the art that would one day fill her magnificent Boston palazzo. Clover was fully aware of Mrs. Jack’s reputation, may have even envied it a little. She also knew that the “breeziest woman in Boston,” as a New York gossip magazine would later dub Mrs. Jack, expected obeisance. Once, while at her desk writing to her father, Clover put down her pen and went outside, walking over to Mrs. Jack and another woman “who were smiling and bowing” at her from across the street. She explained to her father, “We have asked them to dine on Wednesday and as Mrs. Jack wants to see diplomats I’ve sent for the German minister—the Turkish ditto—and Count de Suzamet (French). Three diplomats and terrapin ought to make them happy.” Henry James treated Mrs. Jack as she wanted to be treated, as a queen. One gets the sense that Clover found this harder to do.
If Paris was the second act of their trip, Spain was its third. After Henry figured out he wouldn’t be able to gain access to the archives he needed without more negotiation, the Adamses had decided to leave Paris, planning a return visit nearer to Christmas, and arrived in Madrid by overnight train on October 19. Henry found the city “without exception the ugliest and most unredeemable capital I ever saw.” But they were besotted with “a sky so blue that one can scoop it out with a spoon.” Clover raved, “The sun seems to drive out the damp and cold of London and Paris and the air is delicious.” The Prado Museum was a feast of art. “Day after day we stroll into the gallery and gorge ourselves with Titian, Tintoretto, Veronese, and Velásquez,” Clover exclaimed, adding that a Titian oil of “seventy babies with small turquoise wings” seemed as if it had been painted with “powdered jewels soaked in sunshine.” When they traveled to southern Spain at the beginning of November, Granada left “nothing to wish for—sky, trees, flowers, air are simply perfect.” She and Henry stayed at an inn on a hill under the fourteenth-century Moorish castle the Alhambra, less than a mile from the city, under towering elms and golden poplars that seemed “like enormous lighted candles.” They lived “out of doors” with a wood fire in the evening, reading aloud in Spanish from Don Quixote. Spending a day in nearby Córdoba, they “poked about for hours in the winding little streets, peeking into house after house, with their marble vestibules as clean as a Shaker could wish; a door of iron lacework in quaint Moorish patterns, and behind a cool patio or open court round which the house is built, with orange trees, roses, blue jasmine, heliotrope, and other gay flowers in masses of colour—it was the Arabian Nights come to life again.”
They took a steamer ship across the Strait of Gibraltar to Ceuta at the northernmost tip of Morocco, where Clover wrote, “We are having a beautiful time.” From there, they embarked on an all-day trip by donkey caravan to Tetuán, like Ceuta, a city governed by Spain. They left early in the morning, together with the postman, several guides, and a rabbi with an enormous white beard, and traveled south along the Mediterranean coast, over long sandy beaches, and then across “plains of heather in bloom” and low palmetto trees. Henry wrote that the “ride was almost the most beautiful thing I ever saw.” Clover gushed that it was the “most enchanting road all the way for nine hours,” feeling proud that she was the first American woman ever to visit the ancient city. She proved her mettle when the donkey she was riding spooked at an imagined snake and fled, with her astride, into nearby bushes, bringing her into “abrupt contact with the soil of Africa,” which, she added, “did me no harm.”
Clover and Henry returned north in late November, in a rush to get to the archives in Seville, where Henry wanted to study diplomatic dispatches made by the Spanish minister in Washington during President Jefferson’s administration. During a train trip to Córdoba, Clover had talked, in her novice but effective Spanish, with a woman whose husband knew someone in Granada who could introduce Henry to the archivist. Once in Seville, Clover took charge, convincing officials to open the archives despite a four-day celebration of the marriage of King Alphonso XII, for which all city offices had closed. During the three hours that Henry combed through bundles of documents, Clover talked with the tottering archivist, who had “one lonely tooth” and proudly showed her the papal bull given to Christopher Columbus, “allowing him to go in search of America.” In playing such a significant part in advancing Henry’s research, she couldn’t have been happier: “It’s a great satisfaction.”
The joys of sunny Spain ended with the couple’s mid-December return to Paris. They traveled by train for forty hours during the fiercest cold snap on record, with temperatures reaching far below zero. “Bitterly cold,” Clover reported on arriving in Paris, with “streets piled with eight days’ snow . . . yellow fog like cheese.” The newspapers told how officials set open-air fires to help people keep warm while walking in the streets. Paris remained frozen for most of their six-week stay; the sun hung “like a white frost-bitten ball in the sky.” More than the weather had changed. Henry left every morning for the Musée National de la Marine, not returning to their hotel on the rue de Rivoli until dark. Henry told Henry Cabot Lodge that he was working hard, but progress was slow: “Manuscripts are clumsy things to read, and there are few slower occupations than taking notes.” After reading “hard all the evening,” Henry returned in the morning to his “blessed archives,” as Clover now called them. She was lonely and the acute cold made things worse. There was little for her to do except hover by the fire and read. Even the Louvre stayed closed. By Christmas week, Clover’s unhappiness spilled over in her letters. “I hate Paris more and more,” she complained. “It grieves me to think of the cakes and ale we are missing in Washington,—sun, saddle horses, dogs, friends, politics.” All she could think about was their travels in Spain and Morocco, “a full feast,” not only because of the Mediterranean sun and sky but because she and Henry had been together, side by side, and the memory filled her with “so much pleasure.”
Three weeks later, Clover and Henry arrived back in London, where the dense fog and smoke made it seem as if they walked “under a big yellow gray umbrella.” Henry James resumed his afternoon teas at Clover’s fire, reporting to Isabella Stewart Gardner that “the Adamses are here, and have taken a charming house.” Twenty-two Queen Anne’s Gate was located in central London just south of Bird Cage Walk, not far from where they’d lived the previous summer on Half Moon Street. The house, with “every detail charming,” had been pursued, as Clover reported, by the poet laureate Lord Tennyson, but the Adamses had gotten there first. With old mantelpieces, a cozy kitchen that would “make a picture for one of Caldecott’s books,” and an expert cook-housekeeper and under butler arranged for by Henry James, the household made Clover feel as if she and her husband had “lighted on our feet like two old cats.” She looked forward, as she said, to “six months of peace and plenty.”
Henry put himself on a strict work schedule; a month before, from Paris, he had written that he faced a “mountain of papers and books” to read through before summer and felt as if he hadn’t “an hour to lose.” Many mornings he went to the British Museum to work. When not accompanying Henry, Clover spent time with her old friend Adie Bigelow, who was in town with her family, as was the gossip-prone Alice Mason, with her twenty-year-old daughter, Isabella. Clover had tea with her one-time idol, the famed English actress and abolitionist Fanny Kemble, now approaching seventy, who lived in the fourth-floor apartment of a nearby Queen Anne mansion. The meeting had been set up by Henry James, who’d first met Kemble in 1873 and thought her a woman of rare insight—she had “no organized surface at all,” James wrote his mother, but was “like a straight deep cistern without a cover.” Perhaps Clover reminisced with Kemble about the time Caroline Sturgis Tappan had introduced them at the Sedgwick estate in Lenox, Massachusetts, almost twenty years before. In any case, Clover found Kemble “gracious and agreeable” and hoped for a return visit.
There were other diversions. On a “lovely spring day” in early February of 1880, she and Henry went to watch Queen Victoria open Parliament, “a pretty show” she wished her nieces could see: “lots of gilt coaches with horses weighed down by brass trimmings and coachman and footman,” and the last coach, drawn by eight bay horses “nearly smothered in brass,” carrying the queen. She was dressed all in white, with an ermine cloak, and wore as a brooch the enormous Koh-i-Noor diamond, which had been given to her when she was pronounced the empress of India in 1877. The queen, Clover wrote, was “fat and red faced and ducked her old head incessantly from side to side.” When a “Mrs. Houkey” invited Clover to watch a debate in the House of Commons, she couldn’t refuse. The two women sat “as if in a harem,” looking through “a lattice screen from the ladies Gallery” and listening to the speaker, Henry Brand, with his long robes and “hornet’s nest wig.” During the numerous long prayers that opened the proceedings, the “Tory side bow their heads while advanced liberals show impatience.” The sight made Clover laugh.
Clover and Henry steered through London’s “social rapids.” Dinner invitations often stacked up three and four deep per night—“one misses a large proportion of them,” Clover sighed, at the start of the season. But there were high points. At one dinner, she sat between the British physicist John Tyndall and the French philosopher Ernest Renan, with the poet Robert Browning sitting across from her. She was most disappointed in Browning, telling her father he had the “intellectual apathy in his face of a chronic diner,” but forgave him, given the beauty of his verse. She thought the social Darwinist Herbert Spencer looked “like a complacent crimson owl in spectacles with an assumption of his own science in his manner.” She spied his arrogance: “You are let to imagine that his very first principle of all is belief in himself.” At another dinner, she defended the right of George Eliot, whose Middlemarch Clover had read on her honeymoon, to marry John Cross, a man twenty years her junior. Cross, a banker for an American investment company, was somehow acquainted with Ellen and Whitman Gurney. The news of Eliot’s late-life marriage had “burst like a bomb shell” at an evening party where only Clover, Henry, and the poet Matthew Arnold knew of John Cross, and so they were “beset with enquiries.” “We declare,” Clover declaimed to her father, “that a woman of genius is above criticism.” In mid-July she and Henry escaped to a manor house, Loseley Park, south of the city, along with the politician Sir Robert Cunliffe, whom Henry had always thought was “what a gentleman ought to be.” They met Henry James and his older brother, William James, who was visiting England that summer. Together they took a walk through “fields of wheat and poppies—quaint little byroads with old red tiled cottages half smothered in roses,” followed by tea, a lively dinner, and an evening by the fire, where the entertainment was what Clover enjoyed most: “a spring-tide of anecdotes and stories.”
But Clover also wearied of the endless round of dinners out, saying “one dinner in six” was worth attending. Most were “sloughs of despond.” Dr. Hooper asked her if she was homesick and wanted to come back home. But she didn’t want to hear it. “Of course, we’re ‘homesick,’” she replied, defending their decision not to return to Beverly for the summer and early fall, as had been their habit. Discipline was in order. Feeling homesick, Clover explained, was “no reason for going home until the object which brought Henry over is accomplished.” And she insisted their six months in London had been a success, reassuring her father: “We’ve had a good deal of pleasure—made many new acquaintances—and stuffed our little minds with new impressions.”
Henry finished everything he needed to do by the end of July 1880, having collected much of the primary source material for the history of early America, which was now taking clearer shape in his mind. He’d closely studied English politics from 1801 to 1815 and gotten a vast store of French and Spanish papers in order, determining it would take him six volumes to tell the story of the period adequately. “If it proves a dull story,” he wrote to Henry Cabot Lodge, “I’ll condense, but it’s wildly interesting, at least to me.”
Scotland would replace Beverly Farms as a supplier of fresh air and breezes, and the couple left for the north as soon as they closed up the London house. At Matlock Bath, near the Peak District in northern England, Clover gloried in the change of scene, with “air like champagne after London.” She had always wanted to visit the nearby medieval manor house Haddon Hall, and when the keeper said that no one could tour it on Sunday, Clover convinced him to make an exception by pleading they’d “come all the way from America” and offering a half crown to the keeper’s young daughters for the favor. Though “not done up or patched” since 1699, the house was “enchanting.” In one room hung an enormous tapestry picturing Aesop’s fables, which Clover explained to their young tour guides. They left the next day by train for Edinburgh, then north via Perth for the hill country surrounding Dunkeld, where they stayed with friends of Ellen and Whitman Gurney. From there, they traveled fifty miles across the Grampian Hills and Spittal of Glenshee on a “sunny blue day” that Clover would long remember, with its “wild heather covered hills with white sheep and patient collies.” The “crimson moors and blue hills” of the Scottish Highlands, which she found intensely romantic, were “reeking with history and legends.” Henry put it another way in a letter to Gaskell: “My wife is flourishing and delighted with Scotland.”
Clover and Henry were coming to the close of their trip. The “wandering Americans,” in Clover’s words, were finally going home. In early September of 1880, they arrived in Paris via London to shop for clothes and furnishings in preparation for their return to Washington and the new house they’d leased on H Street. Clover ordered a new wardrobe, including eight gowns by Mr. Worth. She found the task tedious but capitulated to Henry’s dictum of the previous fall: “People who study Greek must take pains with their dress.” Her husband was vain about appearances and continued to dress immaculately. He wanted his wife to look a certain way: “15,361 gowns and other articles of dress have thus far been delivered,” Henry joked to Gaskell, “and there remain only 29,743 to come.” They’d also collected a trove of paintings and drawings during the previous months: the “wee little early Turner” watercolor Clover gave Henry and Henry’s reciprocal gift of a Johann Zoffany portrait to celebrate their seventh anniversary; several works by William Mulready, Copley Fielding, and David Cox; an enormous Moorish cabinet; embroideries from Salamanca, Spain; and much more.
During their eighteen months abroad, Clover and Henry had established “a wide acquaintance ranging from Tetuán in Morocco to Drum Castle in the Highlands,” which had the paradoxical effect of making “the world seem larger and smaller, too.” Clover had experienced no recurrence of feeling lost, as had happened on the honeymoon journey on the Nile. In Europe she knew exactly who she was. Her experiences had expanded her, deepened her, confirmed in her a keen appreciation for being an American. She had written from Spain that the “more we travel, the more profoundly impressed we are with the surpassing-solid comfort of the average American household and its freedom from sham. They beat us on churches and pictures in the Old World, but in food, clothing, furniture, manners, and morals, it seems to us we have the ‘inside track.’” What distinguished America from Europe was more than comfort—it had something to do with attitude and spirit. “Our land,” she said, “is gayer-lighter-quicker and more full of life.” Henry James would miss his “good American confidents.” They’d had many “inveterate discussions and comparing of notes.” Though James thought Clover and Henry were both sometimes “too critical,” he knew he’d miss their company. “One sees many ‘cultivated Americans,’” James wrote to a friend, “who prefer living abroad that it is a great refreshment to encounter two specimens of this class who find the charms of their native land so much greater than those of Europe.”
It would be the last time Clover would travel overseas, and somehow she sensed this, having written her father the previous winter, “As I don’t expect to come abroad again, I want to make the most of this.” Europe was a “pleasant story,” she said, that “began well and ended happily,” but it was one she did not “care to read over again.” In conclusion she said, “I’d rather read a new one which may not end so well but still is new.”