Clover’s death initiated what Henry occasionally called his “posthumous” life. Hardly passive, he sought solace in his scholarship, in his uneven performance as an American Buddha enduring beyond desire and attachment, and in his regime of ambitious wanderings—trying on Asia and North Africa, Europe and Russia. These and other sojourns became a regular feature of Adams’s “new” existence. He displayed a taste for the exotic, traveling throughout the South Seas, to select parts of Latin America, and to the sites of ancient civilizations. In such remote places the impeccably correct social face that he wore in Washington could for a season be relieved. Henry’s ancestors too had traveled extensively if conventionally in Europe, though always in the service of their country and their careers. Adams seemed intent during his journeys, rather, to step aside, to temporarily elide the self-imposed strains of living his last decades saddled with the objectionable identities of the pitied widower and the chaste tame cat.
Other activities, of course, vied for Adams’s posthumous time. He showed real affection for his numerous nieces, the five daughters of his older brothers and an equal number belonging to Edward Hooper. Over the years, as these girls matured, his relationships with them became increasingly important and, if their warm letters and affectionate memoirs are any indication, mutually valued. His friendship with Elizabeth Cameron also grew during this period. Locked in a loveless marriage, she appreciated (and may have felt flattered by) the passion that she so easily aroused in Adams. In time, the unrequited nature of the relationship—she seemed to find him physically unattractive—produced on Henry’s side a long-standing frustration that only rarely rose to the surface. Most of their contact occurred within correspondence, and what stands out in these lengthy letters are the unsaid things, the sentiments that pass in brooding ambiguities. In the immediate months after Clover’s suicide, however, Lizzie’s presence provided Adams with a much-welcomed diversion from his grief. Days before settling into the new H Street house he sent Cameron a favorite piece of jewelry from his wife’s collection. “Will you keep it,” he wrote to her, “and sometimes wear it, to remind you of her.”1
Henry juxtaposed the pleasures of female friendships—and those longer standing connections to Hay, Gaskell, Cunliffe, and King—with a defiant “afterlife” attitude of renunciation, by which he presumed that nothing in the world much mattered. He swore off neither money nor the pleasant things that money could buy—mere materialism, after all—but went out of his way to relinquish the false hopes of “improvement” and “progress” as proper Victorians properly understood these things. Accordingly, he would pursue a private path to nirvana, reflecting on Japanese brush-stroke art, medieval Rhenish cathedrals, and distant world’s fairs. Clover’s memory, by contrast, Henry kept at bay. For years he maintained an intense silence, ensuring, therefore, the silence of others.
This surface and selective reserve did little to mask his fundamentally restless nature. Aside from the perpetual routine of writing, Adams rode horses, experimented with photography, and indulged in watercolors. He rarely tired of gossip, read omnivorously, and conservatively managed (with assistance) a small investment portfolio that tended to pay decent dividends. Compulsive and skeptical, sometimes depressed, and often tiresomely mordant, he seemed in the wake of Clover’s suicide to expect others to defer to the matter of his tragedy.
At times Adams’s reclusive, world-weary attitude dropped into parody. Writing a niece from overseas in the early 1890s, he praised meteorologically inelegant England as a kind of Gothic paradise preferable to sunny Paris: “London is really tolerable when the fog is thick enough and it rains. At a pinch I can always return there and be fairly comfortable.” Such deliberately cryptic enunciations produced mixed results among the initiated. Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, for one, panned Henry’s fondness for putting on dour airs: “I knew Henry Adams quite well. He had two sides. He had distinction, great ability, and great kindness. When I happened to fall in with him on the street he could be delightful, but when I called at his house and he was posing to himself as the old cardinal he would turn everything to dust and ashes. After a tiresome day’s work one didn’t care to have one’s powers of resistance taxed by discourse of that sort, so I rarely called.”2
Brooks Adams more generally remembered the catholicity of poses as a prominent feature of his brother’s emotional makeup, particularly following the violent end of his marriage. He claimed, “Henry was never, I fear, quite frank with himself or with others.… [He] was always shy and oversensitive and disliked disagreeable subjects.” As a result, Brooks continued, “he would surround himself with different defences, all of them calculated to repel tactless advances, and on these defences few of us cared to intrude.… One of these was that, when his wife died, in 1884 [sic], he insisted that he also died to the world.” The insightfulness of these words need not obscure the more positive facets of Henry’s strategies for self-protection. His sensibility and tastes, as noted, leaned toward the less recognized Maryland side of his pedigree, and he found the Adamses’ ingrained “rough play” off-putting. Their unwillingness to warm to his wife may have quietly erected additional barriers. Brooks’s errant recording of Clover’s death date in the quoted passage perhaps hints at this fundamental inconsideration, as does Charles’s description of his sister-in-law as “an infernal bore.”3 And yet Brooks may be right in suggesting that Henry’s “defences” were multidimensional and that in expressing a conspicuous, even excessive grief over his wife’s death, he arranged matters so as to keep others at arm’s length while simultaneously steering the self-conscious narrative of his posthumous life.
At the core of this performance lies an ironic, agitated, and complicated sensibility. The Cambridge don and the crusading editor now took a backseat to the sage-in-training who wandered a world he no longer loved. Having affected to quit politics he now pretended to quit life. “Do you not know,” he once informed an acquaintance, “that I have been dead fifteen years?”4 Such pronouncements, and there were others of this sort, drew attention to Adams’s pattern of practicing an elegant ritual of grief. The striking Rock Creek memorial that he had installed to replace the simple stone formerly marking his wife’s grave bore evidence of this tendency, as did his refusal to discuss Clover in the Education. The effect is a deafening silence that could only have teased even those readers who knew its desperate meaning.
Though Adams’s “act” put some off, others, particularly younger acquaintances enticed by his conversational verve, were drawn in. The British diplomat Cecil Spring Rice developed a long and fruitful friendship with Henry, whose confident idiosyncrasies intrigued him. Sampling Rice’s correspondence in the second half of 1887, the months that he first encountered Adams, one discovers a sympathetic observer:
I like the one here, who since his wife died has no friends and no absorbing interest and takes an amused view of life.… He found his wife dead on the floor one day.… Since then he has regarded life with a frivolity which rather shocks people who don’t know him well.… He is queer to the last degree; cynical, vindictive, but with a constant interest in people, faithful to his friends and passionately fond of his mother.… He has no cards and never goes out.
Others were similarly struck by Henry’s unconventional orientation. The historian John Franklin Jameson once informed a younger colleague that Adams’s eccentricities were all part of his singular way of negotiating the world: “You will find him a very interesting being—a small bird-like person, whose conversation is always brilliant and entertaining, but full of paradox and of whimsicalities. It seems impossible that he should believe most of the things he says; he has his dialect.”5
The “paradoxes” and “whimsicalities” raised by Henry had positive connotations beyond the ken of either Rice or Jameson. For despite claims to the contrary, the compulsively restless Adams aimed to avoid turning into a living corpse. The move to the new house helped, as did Dwight’s companionship. Still, the old resonances of life among the Hearts would beat against him daily unless he initiated some type of resistance or release. This he did in a grand gesture, chasing restoration abroad. Six months after Clover’s death he left America, severing his immediate associations to Adamses and Hoopers, presidents and Congresses. Seeking a posthumous peace, he sailed to Japan.