Sometime in the empty months following Clover’s death, Henry decided to cancel his annual summer retreat to Beverly. Neither did he wish, however, to stew in a muggy Washington while H Street’s grandees whispered over his misery. The city, a historian’s oasis, seemed suddenly unable to stir, rally, or waken him; the massive Jefferson and Madison project, only half complete, now languished in labored fits and starts. Clearly its author required a respite—but Adams, the obliging offspring of tireless Puritan generations, lacked the capacity to “do” leisure in any conventional sense. True, he enjoyed the capital’s salons and always delighted in travel, though his inevitable storming of assorted archives, cathedrals, and museums suggested a certain laborious race to chase down and corner culture. Above all, he detested boredom. Determined to avoid the grooved European circuit, he went instead to Japan, in search of diversion, in search of “death.” Easing into a post obitum existence, he sought in Buddhism a philosophical system from which he might elevate his private grief to the status of spiritual enlightenment.
It would be wrong to imply, however, that distress alone or even principally drove Henry to Japan. Restive in Quincy, he had written to Gaskell in 1869, years before his marriage, “I shall go to the Pacific.” A host of subsequent human contacts emboldened that pledge. Aside from corresponding with “Billy Big”—Clover’s cousin William Sturgis Bigelow, a Buddhist convert living in Japan—Adams had befriended both the Chinese envoy Chen Lau-Piu and Yoshida Kiyonari, the Meiji government’s minister to the United States. Yoshida, so Clover had informed her father in 1880, “has given Henry two water colours he brought him from Japan: one about four feet by two, by the best artist there, he says, Run Lin, a winter scene framed with brocade—it covers six feet of our bare wall in the front entry; the other is narrower and not so original, though very nice.”1
Beyond these personal connections, the late nineteenth-century East became for Adams, as it did for many other Westerners, a vivid if largely imagined place. Only a generation removed from the Meiji Restoration (1868), which had inaugurated a period of industrialization and military reform along Western lines, Japan accommodated a growing tourist industry of elites who descended upon the country’s main port cities. The prizes these visitors purchased—bronzes, kimonos, lacquerware, and byōbu (folding screens)—shaped the more refined tastes and fashion sense found in Europe and the United States.2
Victorian New England’s infatuation with Asia in fact built off an existing tradition. Merchants, whalers, and China traders had for generations brought wealth to the region, making Salem, Boston, and New Bedford vibrant centers of commerce. A bit later, the Transcendentalists would invoke Eastern spiritual systems as a counter to Western materialism. “In the morning,” Thoreau wrote in Walden, “I bathe my intellect in the stupendous and cosmogonal philosophy of the Bhagvat Geeta,” while Emerson proposed in a journal, “These colossal conceptions of Buddhism and Vedantism… are always the necessary or structural action of the human mind.” Following the Civil War, some among Henry’s generation of alienated intellectuals, perhaps aching for Old Boston, looked to Old Japan as an antidote to the era’s coarse political and industrial culture.3 They hunted across the Pacific, that is to say, for a peace they could no longer find at home.
One of their number, Edward Sylvester Morse, delivered the well-received Lowell Institute lectures in 1881, attended by several of Henry and Clover’s friends. The son of a Portland, Maine, Congregationalist deacon, Morse, largely self-educated, had collected marine invertebrates in Japan and taught zoology at the Tokyo Imperial University. Taking an interest in Japanese arts and folklore, he was one of America’s first orientalists—his collections of pottery, ceramics, and artifacts are currently held in Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts and at Salem’s Peabody Essex Museum. Not long after Morse’s lectures, the Boston art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, endowed by both birth and marriage with a tidy fortune, ventured to Japan for three months. A Beverly neighbor of the Adamses, she no doubt caught their attention as but the latest wayfarer in a Brahmin exodus east.4
As Henry sought Theodore Dwight’s company following Clover’s death, so he now prevailed upon the traveling companionship of John La Farge, paying for his friend’s passage and various expenses. Of aristocratic French descent and raised Roman Catholic, the Manhattan-born La Farge, bald, bespectacled, and sporting a thick salt-and-pepper mustache, read widely and developed an interest in exotic cultures. A gifted muralist and maker of stained-glass windows, he had met Henry, three years his junior, in one of Boston’s literary-artistic circles, perhaps at Harvard where he briefly taught art composition. He possessed, so Adams said, “the neatest humor, the nicest observation, and the evenest temper you can imagine.” Though responsible for a wife and several children in Newport, Rhode Island, La Farge, committed to professional success, had lived independently in New York since the late 1870s. “He was going to lead his own life,” remembered one relative. Talented, praised, and inundated with commissions, he established the La Farge Decorative Art Company in 1883, but the business soon dissolved following a bitter dispute with his partners over artistic control. Accused of taking designs belonging to the company, La Farge was arrested in May 1885. Though settled out of court with all charges dropped, the case made headlines; the New York World reported that the commotion caused “a decided scandal in both social and art circles and became the general topic of conversation whenever or wherever artists or connoisseurs met.”5 Now, a year later, with his name being gossiped about, a deeply embarrassed La Farge accepted Henry’s invitation to seek his own season of peace.
In early June the two voyagers embarked from Albany and began a “brilliant run” aboard the Union Pacific Railroad, whose director, Adams’s brother Charles, kindly lent them his private company car. La Farge spent much of the trip sketching the spacious western landscape, while a more academic Henry read up on Buddhism. “Our journey,” he told one correspondent, “was a glorious success.” Arriving in “dusty, wintry, and seedy” San Francisco on the 10th, they briefly put up at the Palace Hotel before setting off on the Pacific Mail Steamship Company line’s City of Sydney. Suffering through his usual mal de mer, Henry complained to Dwight that “the Pacific Ocean is different from other oceans.… It contains nothing but head-winds, chopping seas, rains, cold and seasickness.”6 After three unpleasant weeks of fighting the elements and his stomach, Henry arrived in Yokohama on the second of July.
During the more than two centuries of national seclusion, in which foreigners were directed to Nagasaki (Japan’s “window on the world”), Yokohama remained a sleepy fishing village. The 1853 arrival of Commodore Matthew Perry’s small flotilla of U.S. Navy ships into Tokyo Bay, however, eventuated the opening of select Japanese ports to American vessels. This had the effect of turning Yokohama into a bustling metropolitan center of some seventy-five thousand, complete with gas-powered street lamps and a railway connection to Tokyo. Already an observer of “modernity’s” progress on two continents, Henry would now measure its advance in Asia.
Many Westerners were first introduced to the city via Jules Verne’s popular adventure novel Around the World in Eighty Days (1873). Though he had never visited Yokohama, Verne guessed to his readers’ amusement at the beguiling mixture of Eastern exoticism and Western influence captured in a European section of elegant residences and beautiful peristyles neighboring a Japanese quarter filled with curio shops, restaurants, and teahouses. Predictably, rice plantations, saké, and scented camellias embellished the French novelist’s spell. In a passage packed with clichés, one character walks through a district crammed with “sacred gates of singular architecture, bridges half hid in the midst of bamboos and reeds, temples shaded by immense cedar-trees, [and] holy retreats where were sheltered Buddhist priests and sectaries of Confucius.”7
La Farge, by contrast, recorded his initial impression of Yokohama in language that left little doubt that he sought a journey of the senses: “Arrived yesterday.… We were in the great bay when I came up on deck in the early morning. The sea was smooth like the brilliant blank paper of the prints; a vast surface of water reflecting the light of the sky as if it were thicker air. Far-off streaks of blue light, like finest washes of the brush, determined distances.” Moving about the bay were steamers and men-of-war; an occasional picturesque junk drew the attention of tourists. On land, Henry and La Farge noticed large numbers of Europeans in the port city; Western children were shepherded by Japanese nurses, while Western ladies cut through the oppressive summer humidity on horseback or in phaetons. The contrasting temperaments of the two men clashed after a few days, with Adams desiring a more structured routine than did La Farge. The latter wrote of their differences, “I enjoy, myself, this drifting [attending theaters, observing people, producing watercolors] though A—— is not so well pleased, and I try to feel as if the heat and the novelty of impressions justified me in idleness.”8
Henry’s spirits picked up when, concerned with a cholera outbreak and eager to escape the wilting temperatures (“The thermometer today is anywhere between 90° and 200°”), he and La Farge were taken to Nikko, a charming resort city in the cooler mountains, about eighty miles north of Tokyo. “Who has not seen Nikko,” goes a familiar Japanese saying, “cannot say beautiful.” There, they occupied a two-up two-down that Henry called his “baby-house” in wonder of its fragile “paper” interior.9 Their Nikko neighbors included Bigelow and Ernest Fenollosa, a historian of American and Japanese art then teaching in Tokyo. Born in Massachusetts, Fenollosa studied at Harvard (like Henry), adopted Buddhism (like Bigelow), and placed a considerable portion of his collection at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (like Morse). All of these men withdrew into various fields of oriental aesthetics, seeking something more “authentic” than they could find in their native New England.
Henry approved of Nikko, writing to Dwight, “[It] lies high and is cool, with beautiful scenery.” He once again dismissed their domicile, which he described as a “little Japanese toy-house” and “our doll-house with paper windows and matted floors.” The efficacy of this and other such nimble structures erected to meet certain climatic practicalities and decorative preferences eluded Adams. In this, as in other respects, he refused to take Japan on its own terms. His escorted wanderings about its larger cities—including Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Kobe—were attended by an entourage of merchants eager to ply their wares, while visits to museums, temples, and traditional torii gates substituted for human contact; evenings often ended in expensive dinners. Henry spent lots of money, took lots of photographs, and, after ten days of giving the local teas their due, gratefully switched to an American brand that, expecting the worst, he had prudently packed in a trunk.10
Reading their various reflections of Japan in print and in private communications, one is left with the strong impression that La Farge made more of his time abroad than did Henry. Aside from producing dozens of watercolors, he published several incisive essays and a charming book, An Artist’s Letters from Japan (1897). Adams, by contrast, frequently seemed at odds with his environment. Only when encountering the towering Kamakura Buddha, a fifty-foot-high outdoor bronze statue cast in 1252, did he quicken with recognition. The figure gave Henry a marvelously enigmatic example of the sublime anonymity that he now professed to seek for himself. “This remnant of the vanished splendor of Kamakura is about twenty miles from Yokohama,” he wrote to a friend, “…and as La Farge says it is the most successful colossal figure in the world.”11 The statue’s cultural significance struck Adams as transcendent and within a few years he would propose the soulless industrial dynamo as its symbolic heir—science’s triumph over a waning spirituality.
When not contemplating the great Buddha’s meaning, Henry remained otherwise unimpressed with Japan. He complained of its scent: “an oily, sickish, slightly fetid odor,—which underlies all things”; he snubbed its staple food: “Even Japanese rice is unappetizing”; and he made rather crude observations about its women: “They are all badly made, awkward in movement, and suggestive of monkeys.” In this often untranslatable environment Henry struggled to find his footing: the presence of countless open Tokyo privies invaded his senses; a comely woman in a public bath demanded his shy Victorian eye. Unsettled, he ignored the Japanese people—“There is some society,” he informed a friend, “but I have not sought it”—and reserved his praise for the country’s edifying natural beauty. “In many ways nothing in Europe rivals it,” he wrote. “I should class it very high among the sights of the world. If architecture falls short of perfection, nature steps in to give the perfection wanted; and the result is something quite by itself. Sky, mountains, and trees are exquisite.”12
On October 2 Adams and La Farge boarded the iron-hulled steamship City of Peking and sailed for San Francisco. While stalking nirvana they had managed to spend some $7,500, or about $210,000 in current dollars, much of this advanced by Hay, who sought his share of oriental bric-à-brac. “I saw… two large six-leaved screens, painted by Chinan-pin, a Chinese artist who came to Japan about 1680,” Henry wrote his fellow Heart. “I thought you might fancy one.”13 A slightly different financial matter obliged La Farge to recognize Adams’s munificence by attaching his name to the dedication page of An Artist’s Letters from Japan. The tribute is generous even as it recognizes, with a light touch, their private differences and fruitless pursuit of a state beyond suffering.
TO HENRY ADAMS, ESQ.
My Dear Adams: Without you I should not have seen the place, without you I should not have seen the things of which these notes are impressions. If anything worth repeating has been said by me in these letters, it has probably come from you, or has been suggested by being with you—perhaps even in the way of contradiction. And you may be amused by the lighter talk of the artist that merely describes appearances, or covers them with a tissue of dreams. And you alone will know how much has been withheld that might have been indiscreetly said.
If only we had found Nirvana.14
Adams reached San Francisco on October 20, greeted by Charles, who brought bad news: Henry’s brother-in-law and former Harvard colleague Ephraim Gurney had died the previous month of anemia and the ailing Governor was soon to follow. The two quickly returned to Quincy and maintained a vigil until their father’s death on November 21.
The difficult year, filled with loss, ended for Adams in yet another renunciation. On December 27 Harvard president Charles W. Eliot invited Henry to return to Cambridge as the McLean Professor, the endowed post vacated by Gurney’s death. This may have constituted an act of kindness, even mercy on Eliot’s part. From the outside, Adams’s spouseless Washington situation looked uncertain and his father’s passing might be supposed to have sparked thoughts of his coming “home.” But not so. Calling the offer “very flattering,” Henry nevertheless declined on the 30th, giving no reason for his decision. “I think,” he enigmatically observed to Eliot, “there is a certain impertinence in offering reasons at all.”15
Rather than return to Boston, he remained in Washington, determined to push on and complete the History. In abeyance for several months, it appeared to be a casualty of its author’s posthumous approach. But Japan had proven a tonic of sorts, pulling Henry away from the cloistered Washington, London, and Paris worlds that contained so much of his grief. He now began, slowly, to move forward.