CHAPTER 15
IN MID-AUGUST of 1883 Clover took her camera to her father’s home in Beverly Farms. She photographed Betsey, her father’s housekeeper, wearing a lace cap and doing handwork on the front porch, as the dog, Doudy, lay at her feet. Clover next took two exposures of her father sitting in his open buggy, holding the reins of his horse, Kitty, harnessed and ready for a ride. She paired a print from one of these exposures with her photograph of Betsey, to form a kind of parental portrait in the album—these were the two people who had most directly raised her. The character of her father is further emphasized in the print that follows. In this second image, Dr. Hooper stands upright, directly in front of a tree. His white hair and mustache frame a distinguished visage; his long legs and slender frame echo the slender trunk of the tree. Still a vigorous man, he anchors the composition, twinned with an equally stabilizing element, the tree. In her portrait of him, Clover made clear what she relied on—her father’s quiet strength.
That August, Clover also took a series of photographs of Henry. In May she had captured his image on the back stairs of their Washington home on the very first day she tried out her camera. Later in the summer, she took two exposures of him holding their dogs Marquis and Possum in the window of the playhouse built for her nieces behind Pitch Pine Hill. She listed these photographs in her notebook and sent copies to Lizzie Cameron but never included them in her albums. Clover’s most well- known portraits of her husband were taken six days later, on the morning of August 19, 1883. She seated Henry at his desk, where he directs his gaze downward to the paper he’s writing on. Light pours in through French doors that faced south and opened out to the front yard. The neatly stacked papers to his left are most likely manuscript pages of the first volumes of his History. In her notebook Clover stated that Henry’s face was “good” in the first exposure, but she didn’t like his black coat. So in the next exposure, Henry now wears a lighter tweed coat, which she likes much “better.” The last exposure of the morning was a self-portrait. She wrote in her notebook that it was a “hideous but good photo”; she hated the way she looked. It is unlikely she made a print from its glass negative, and if she did, she didn’t include a copy in her album.
The portraits of Henry are rather conventionally composed. But Clover chose to display them in an unconventional way. When it came time to put the portraits of Henry in her album, she didn’t place the two prints on facing pages, as she had done with her two exposures of Francis Parkman, or even in sequence, as she had done with her father’s portraits. Nor did she mount her self-portrait next to his, as might be expected. Instead, Clover chose to put Henry’s portraits next to prints of a lone umbrella pine tree clinging to a rocky bank at Smith’s Point, which she had photographed later in August. And she did this not once, but twice, in the album. By pairing her husband with a desolate tree, Clover perhaps portrayed him as holding on to the rocky cliffs of his intellectual pursuits—alone, brave, a survivor in the face of implacable nature. But the doubling also amplifies what’s already apparent in the portraits: the solitude demanded by Henry’s work was of a piece with a pervasive solitariness in his personality.
Clover seems to have understood this aspect of Henry. She didn’t rebel against it in the way that Mrs. Adams had pounded on the closed gates of Charles Francis Adams’s fastidious nature, nor did Clover echo the frustrated complaints her mother-in-law hurled at her father-in-law: “You judge me by yourself, you might not—we feel things so utterly unlike”; “You can’t understand my feelings.” At the same time, Clover made clear that loneliness permeated her life with Henry. She took pictures of him, alone, while she remained behind the camera, and in her album, her image never appears alongside his. Even while alive, Clover made herself a missing presence beside her husband.
Henry found Clover’s continuing absorption in photography unsettling, unnerving. As Clover refined her skills, he began a second novel, Esther, which would be published in March 1884, with a title character, an amateur painter, who “was audacious only by starts” and who had “not the patience to be thorough.” Esther’s struggle to develop her own visual vocabulary, her wanting to know if she could be something more than an amateur painter, matched Clover’s own efforts. Part of what Henry did in the novel was to try to sort out what all this might mean. As with Madeleine Lee in Democracy, only more so this time, Henry borrowed from Clover for his eponymous Esther, beginning with Esther’s looks and comportment. His description of his lead character carries startling similarities to his undermining description of Clover in his letter to Charles Gaskell reporting his engagement, more than ten years before:
She is too slight, too thin; she looks fragile, willowy as the cheap novels call it, as though you could break her in halves like a switch. She dresses to suit her figure and sometimes overdoes it. Her features are imperfect. Except her ears, her voice, and her eyes which have a sort of brown depth like a trout brook, she has no very good points. . . . Her mind is as irregular as her face, and both have the same peculiarity.
But the resemblance went further. Both women had adoring fathers; both had lost their mothers early on; both were strong-minded, with a quick wit and an interest in and talent for the fine arts; and both relished nature, finding more purpose and meaning there than in conventional religious belief. Esther’s lament—that she could not “hold my tongue or pretend to be pious”—was Clover’s own. Clarence King thought the resemblance between Esther and Clover so complete that he speculated to John Hay that Henry harbored “regret at having exposed” his wife, particularly her “religious experiences.”
As Henry drafted the manuscript in the late summer and early fall of 1883, he in effect composed his side of the coded conversation that he and Clover carried on inside their marriage. He told no one he was writing a second novel—in fact, his authorship would not be publicly confirmed until much later. But Clover knew. While she was making photographic portraits of Henry that made oblique comment on their marriage, he was doing the literary equivalent. These two exchanged few letters over the course of their years together because they were so infrequently separated. But in her photographs and in his novel, each created a portrait of the other, showing each other their thoughts and feelings in eloquent, troubling form.
Esther Dudley is a privileged young woman of New York City, the only child of William Dudley, a widower rich enough from a family inheritance that he can afford to ignore his law practice. Ill with a weak heart, he worries that his daughter, now twenty-five, is not yet married and is pursuing her interest in art and painting instead of seeking an appropriate match. “Poor Esther!” exclaims her father. “If things go wrong she will rebel, and a woman who rebels is lost.” The novel begins in the fall of 1880 at the newly built Saint John’s Cathedral on Fifth Avenue, its decoration as yet unfinished by an artist identified only as Wharton. Esther and her cousin George Strong, a geologist, attend the church’s opening service, interested more in Wharton’s art than the high-minded sermon delivered by the renowned preacher, the Reverend Stephen Hazard, who intones: “You were and are and ever will be only part of the supreme I AM, of which the church is the emblem.” When the impressionable Catherine Brooke arrives in the city from Colorado, she is everything Esther is not: a younger, beautifully composed child of nature, “fresh as a summer’s morning.” As the narrator enthuses, “No one could resist her hazel eyes or the curve of her neck, or her pure complexion which had the transparency of a Colorado sunrise.”
As he had done in Democracy, Henry closely fashioned his characters after his intimates: Esther is Clover; Mr. Dudley is Dr. Hooper; Catherine Brooke is Lizzie Cameron; George Strong is Clarence King. Stephen Hazard at Saint John’s is Phillips Brooks of Boston’s Trinity Church, while Wharton’s battles with Hazard mirror the frequent conversations John La Farge, the muralist of Trinity Church, had with Brooks. But the overarching theme of the novel—the clashing and competing assertions of artistic expression, Darwinian science, and religious faith— obscures the characters, too often making them stand-ins for abstract ideas. As one early critic noted, the characters talk like “embodied doctrines.”
The plot revolves around the romance between Esther and Stephen Hazard, who are introduced by the geologist, George Strong. They begin as friends, talking of art and science, politics and faith. When her father dies of heart failure midway through the narrative, Esther feels “languid, weary, listless. She could not sleep . . . She could not get back to her usual interests.” Her friends and family fear a breakdown. In mourning, she sees only one person besides the members of her family: Stephen, who takes charge and, shortly thereafter, proposes marriage. Esther accepts, now “saturated with the elixir of love.” But conflicts arise almost immediately. Though Esther genuinely loves Stephen, she does not share his religious beliefs. She discovers she is unable to do the one thing that faith, and her marriage, would require of her: submit. “Some people are made with faith. I am made without it,” she laments. The harder Stephen tries to convince her to accept his love, the more she resists, fearing marriage would force him to choose between the woman he loves and the church he serves, and she knows who would win such a contest. Stephen and his profession “are one” and she is honest enough with herself to know that to be “half-married must be the worst torture.”
This conflict between love and religious faith, very much at the center of the novel, was not what most preoccupied its author. Henry was not troubled by Clover’s aversion to Christianity, but by her increasingly obvious artistic ambitions. Like Clover, Esther is stirred by art, while religious faith leaves her feeling at sea, “in mid-ocean.” Though she wants to love and be loved, she also wants to paint. This is the conflict Henry revealed, discussing it most overtly at the start of the novel, but then shunting it off to the plot’s periphery.
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 better 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.