CHAPTER 22
THOUGH FEW FRIENDS attended the funeral, two of the “Five of Hearts” wrote Henry immediately in a rush of sympathy and a desire to share his burden. Clarence King sent a note from New York as soon as he heard: “I think of you all the time and lament that such great sorrow as yours cannot be more evidently and practically shared by those who love you. But I know too well the indivisibility of grief.” John Hay, also in New York, sent a message to Henry the day of the funeral. “I can neither talk nor keep silent,” Hay wrote, saying that Clover’s death was a loss to him as well. “The darkness in which you walk has its shadow for me also. You and your wife were more to me than any other two. I came to Washington because you were there. And now this goodly fellowship is broken up forever.” He closed with a tribute to Clover. “Is it any consolation,” he asked, “to remember her as she was? That bright, intrepid spirit, that keen intellect, that lofty scorn of all that was mean, that social charm which made your house such a one as Washington never knew before, and made hundreds of people love her as much as they admired her?”
In the days and weeks after the funeral, Henry immersed himself in the tragedies of Shakespeare, sometimes reciting passages aloud to friends. He saddled up for long horseback rides alone, following the same paths through city streets and wooded trails that he and Clover had so prized. He recalled in a letter to Anna Barker Ward her great kindness to Clover those many years ago on the Nile, saying how much Clover had admired the older woman—the “peace that you have reached in this world was a delight to her.” He reminded Mrs. Ward that she’d been “closely associated with the heaviest trials and keenest pleasures of our life,” an acknowledgment of what seemed now the all-too-clear link between Clover’s troubles on the Nile and her last months of misery. Though the “great calamities in life leave one speechless,” as Henry admitted to Mrs. Ward, he tried to ease his burden by connecting his experience to the wider human scene. After receiving many “messages from men and women whose own hearts were aching,” he was learning that he “did not stand alone in my extremity of suffering.” When the wife of Thomas Bayard, then secretary of state under President Cleveland, died suddenly of a heart attack, Henry reached out to him. Admitting his doubts about whether to say anything at first, he decided to do so because, as he told Bayard, “sympathy has been a relief to me; and in all the world I doubt whether another person exists, beyond your family, who sympathizes with you more keenly than I do.” To Henry Holt, he wrote simply, “What a vast fraternity it is,—that of ‘Hearts that Ache.’”
Though Henry assured John Hay three days after Clover’s death, the day of the funeral, that he would “come out all right from this,” Henry’s friends worried about him. Henry James told E. L. Godkin, since 1883 the editor in chief of the New York Evening Post, that he was “more sorry for poor Henry than I can say,” adding that he was “too sorry, almost, to think of him.” John Hay told Henry that “we are anxious about you. Tell us, when you can, how it is with you.” Then, in an effort to build up his friend’s courage, Hay observed: “You have a great sorrow, but no man should bear sorrow better than you.” By mid-December Hay wrote again, saying, “You are never out of my mind but I do not write, for lack of language to express my sorrow and sympathy. If I came to you I could only sit with you in silence, like the friends of Job.”
What Henry wanted most of all, as Whitman Gurney recounted, was to set “his face steadily towards the future.” On December 30, Henry fled from the house he had shared with Clover into his new Richardson-designed house next door, at 1603 H Street, where he spent weeks sorting books and hanging pictures. If Clover had lived only weeks longer, she and Henry would have moved into their new home together. Now, in the wake of her death, Henry promised Lizzie Cameron he would live “henceforward on what I can save from the wreck of her life.”
But Clover’s suicide, with its poison of despair, cleaved Henry’s life into two parts, before and after, and like the biblical wife of Lot fleeing destruction, he couldn’t resist the backward glance. On January 8, 1886, a bitterly cold Saturday, Henry wrote a searching letter to Clover’s closest friend, Anne Palmer Fell, now living with her husband in Florida. In it, he confessed that “I should have written to you before, but have put it off from day to day as a thing that could better wait till I had found out what had happened to me, and where I was.” He found himself confused, disoriented, waiting for Clover to somehow return. “Even now,” Henry wrote, “I cannot quite get rid of the feeling that Clover must, sooner or later, come back, and that I had better wait for her to decide everything for me.” The sensation was “growing weaker” each day, but “the wrench has left me like a child, amusing myself from day to day, without a plan or an interest that grown people commonly affect to have.”
Though Henry often changed the topic—to a land deal in Florida, rattlesnakes, and lemons—he kept turning back to memories of Clover, revealing to Anne how his grief had cracked him wide open. He was determined to reclaim his happiness with Clover, at least in memory.
The only moments of the past that I regret are those when I was not actively happy. As one cannot be always actively blissful, one must be contented with passive content, but it is a poor substitute at best, and makes no impression on the memory. My only wonder is whether I would have managed to get more out of twelve years than we got; and if we really succeeded in being as happy as was possible. I have no more to say. The world may come and the world may go; but no power yet known in earth or heaven can annihilate the happiness that is past. I commend this moral to your careful consideration. As you once said, the worm does not turn when he is trodden on hard enough. I am one of those worms. I don’t turn. I don’t complain. I don’t tear round. But I had my twelve years, and have them still.
Clover and Henry had been married thirteen years at the time of her death. He did not include in his count their last year together, the year he lost her to a grief and depression he could not assuage.
Suicide is “the impossible subject.” It defies explanation even as it obligates survivors to try to find possible causes. Like a rock dropping in a still pond, the consequences of Clover’s suicide would ripple out in widening circles of anguish, bewilderment, loss, curiosity, and a sense of mystery.
Initially, Henry James offered what would become, by and large, the most widely accepted interpretation of what happened. In a letter to a friend, James stated simply that Clover had “succumbed to hereditary melancholia.” It was well known that Clover’s grandmother, Elizabeth Sturgis, had abandoned her husband and five daughters after her son’s accidental drowning, and the subsequent suicide of Clover’s Aunt Susan only confirmed the family’s reputation. Henry’s brother, Charles, had long thought Susan Bigelow’s death had left a particularly “dangerous impression” on Clover; believing the rumors that Clover had been present at the Bigelow house when her Aunt Susan died, Charles had warned Henry against marrying her. Clover’s final self-destruction, Charles concluded, was clearly due to the fact that she had “inherited a latent tendency to suicidal mania. It was in the Sturgis blood.”
The Washington Critic stated in its report that Clover “had been suffering from mental depression.” Whitman Gurney, who saw Clover frequently during her last summer, assessed her condition likewise as “general depression,” employing a diagnosis that had entered the lexicon in midcentury and was used almost interchangeably with older terms, melancholy and melancholia.
Others weren’t so certain. Eighty years after Clover’s death, her niece Louisa Hooper Thoron, by then ninety-one years old, still searched for clues as to what had engulfed her Aunt Clover. On a printed copy of a sermon entitled “When the Well Runs Dry,” given at Boston’s Trinity Church on February 7, 1965, Louisa jotted down her family history of debilitating depressions. One of her sisters had had “a bad nervous break-down in 1906 at 31 years old,” Louisa began, careful to confine her comments to the sermon’s margins. Comparing her sister’s story with her Aunt Clover’s a generation before, Louisa wrote that her sister’s breakdown “was handled by . . . taking her . . . to Switzerland where she was fed up and rested from the set of responsibilities and the kind of daily life that had broken her down. In her case and era Europe was [more] successful in doing this for her than America [in] 1885 for Aunt Clover.”
And yet the “curious impregnability of so many suicides,” according to A. Alvarez, is the person’s “imperviousness to solace.” This aptly describes Clover. All her wealth and advantages—none of it at the end could comfort or save her. “Like sleep-walkers,” in Alvarez’s evocative phrase, her life was “elsewhere . . . , controlled by some dark and unrecognized centre.”
In early June, six months after Clover’s death, Ellen Gurney wrote to E. L. Godkin about Henry. She explained that the “stoic aspect” to Henry’s behavior was only a “thin glaze” and that “the worm never dies—he is restless—hates to be alone.” To escape his gloom, his sense of “being smashed about,” Henry embarked on a train trip west, leaving for San Francisco with a traveling companion, John La Farge. He found the journey “a glorious success,” relishing the chance to see the countryside, La Farge’s company (“who never complains or loses his temper”), and the plush accommodations arranged by his brother, Charles, president of the Union Pacific Railroad since 1884. On June 12, he and La Farge sailed on the SS City of Sidney for Japan. Nikko, with its waterfalls and seventeenth-century temples to the Shoguns, dazzled Henry. To John Hay he wrote that the mountain town was surely “one of the sights of the world.” For six weeks Henry rested, roamed, and spent time contemplating the principles of Buddhist thought, with its balm for restlessness, its call to rise above suffering and self. Tours of Kyoto, Nara, and Yokohama, where he collected bronzes, porcelains, Hokusai drawings, and kimonos, were followed by a trip west of Tokyo to Mount Fuji, which Henry sketched in his notebook. By the time he and La Farge boarded the ship for their voyage home in October 1886, Henry told Theodore Dwight he felt “as ready to come home as I ever shall be.”
But Henry returned to Washington to a cascade of bad news. Ephraim Whitman Gurney, his brother-in-law, had died of pernicious anemia on September 12, 1886. For Henry, Gurney “stood in the full centre of active interests,” particularly in the family. Having no children of his own, Gurney had been particularly attached to the five Hooper nieces, as is evident in a letter, dated July 1883, that he wrote to them in Cambridge when he and his wife, Ellen Gurney, were vacationing in Lenox: “I hope you have all been very well and happy and that you will be half so glad to see us as we shall be to see and kiss you.” His death left his wife, Ellen, utterly bereft. Within the past eighteen months, Ellen had buried her father, sister, and husband. Henry, worried about Ellen, observed in a letter to his old friend Charles Gaskell, “When I married in 1872, my wife’s family consisted of seven persons, myself included. Only three of us are left, and if I survive either of the other two, I shall have to accept some pretty serious responsibilities and cares.” Henry was obliquely referring to his Hooper nieces, who in 1886 were age fourteen, twelve, eleven, nine, and seven.
In mid-November, Henry told Lizzie Cameron he hoped his “harvest of thorns is now gathered in,” but two days later, on November 21, his father, Charles Francis Adams, died at the age of seventy-nine, after a long decline into dementia. To Gaskell, Henry remarked, “If the moon were to wander off to another planet, I should no longer be surprised.” On December 5, the day before the first anniversary of Clover’s death, Henry wrote to Anne Palmer Fell. “During the last eighteen months,” he began, “I have not had the good luck to attend my own funeral, but with that exception have buried pretty nearly everything I lived for.” He was grateful for Anne’s news that she’d given her new baby daughter Clover’s birth name, Marian. He assured her he could “manage to keep steady now, within as well as without,” but admitted that her letter “gave me a wrench. I am more than grateful to you for your loyalty to Clover, and I shall love the fresh Marian dearly.” When imagining what he might say to Marian twenty years hence, he concluded that “nothing is much worth saying between man and woman except the single phrase that concentrates the whole relation in three words.”
The bad news continued in 1887. On a rainy Saturday night that November, Ellen Gurney wandered out of her Cambridge home to a nearby railroad track and stood in front of an oncoming freight train. She was found severely injured by the side of the tracks and died the following morning, November 20, at Massachusetts General Hospital. Ned Hooper broke down two weeks later. Incapacitated by grief and hopelessness, he stayed in bed for six weeks, unable to go to Harvard, where he’d worked as college treasurer since 1876, or to care for his five daughters. Ned recovered but struggled, haunted always by the destruction of his family.
On a Sunday in May 1888, Henry sat alone in his large library. The art he and Clover had collected on their honeymoon hung above generous shelves of books. Washington was blooming and passersby strolled beneath his open window, crossing the street to the leafy green of Lafayette Square—spring had always been Clover’s favorite time of year. His mood was out of tune with the beautiful weather. He had been rereading his old diaries, which he’d kept since a boy, tearing out pages to burn in the oversized fireplace rimmed with polished pink stone. In pages that would somehow escape destruction, he cried out, “I have been sad, sad, sad. Three years!”