Following Clover’s death, Henry’s correspondence with Elizabeth Cameron grew slowly in both volume and intimacy. The Letters of Henry Adams cite nearly one hundred printed and omitted notes from Adams to Lizzie prior to his Polynesian travels—only four of which were written while his wife was alive. Several of these communications convey the attitude of a fretting, disappointed lover. In one August 1888 letter dispatched from Quincy he fairly moaned, “I hardly know which is worse,—to hear, or not to hear, from you; for when I do not hear, I am uneasy, and when I do hear, I am homesick.” The following month he wrote directly to Lizzie’s two-year-old daughter, Martha, in words that must have had a very different meaning for Martha’s mother: “I love you very much, and think of you a great deal, and want you all the time. I should have run away from here, and looked for you all over the world, long ago.” Shortly thereafter he ended a note to Lizzie with an aching transparency: “Give Martha my tenderest love. Propriety forbids me to send as much to her mamma, so I remain only conventionally hers.”1
In pushing against convention, however, Henry’s letters threatened to become conspicuous and thus problematic. An overt declaration of love on his part would wreck the unstated arrangement that existed between them. Neither seemed to want this. Lizzie appreciated Henry’s attentiveness, though she enjoyed the interest of other men as well. She considered him a close friend and confidant, but never, even after years of discord and separation, did she seek a divorce from the Don. And even if she had, Henry was temperamentally disinclined to ensnare himself in scandal, particularly of the messy marital kind. Such an affront would have compromised several of his friendships and possibly resulted in permanent exile from Lafayette Square. He could well guess the caustic gossip forever to follow if he made a public spectacle of his stray affections. At some point someone might even meanly opine that a broken heart had prompted Clover’s suicide. Clarence King maintained a secret wife for many years, but Henry, hemmed in by family, self, and circumstances, could never have managed such a deception; he had struggled merely to keep correct his letters to Lizzie.
These missives grew only more elaborate once Adams embarked for Polynesia, a sojourn that allowed him to play the gallant gadabout. He battled seasickness and braved the blue Pacific, watched La Farge “quiver” before half-clad women, and indulged in a series of harmless flirtations. He could be said to have proven himself a man in full; having just come off the triumph of the History, a display of discipline and intellect, he now blazed an unexpected trail to the South Seas in a show of valor and adventure. Perhaps emboldened by distance, Henry drafted lengthy serial communications to Lizzie—filling over two hundred pages of the Letters—that reveal an almost desperate longing. While in Hawaii, his journey just beginning, he all but confessed to a bottled-up love: “Then I must say—what you must understand without saying—that I am something more than dependent on your writing. Now that I am here I find what I expected to find when I came away—that you are my only strong tie to what I suppose I ought to call home. If you should go back on me, I should wholly disappear.”2
The words “wholly disappear” suggest various shades. Perhaps Henry alluded to the posthumous life’s limitations, spending his days in monastic dedication to archives and writing, losing touch along the way with the carnal side of his self. His subsequent and detailed accounts of the sensual Samoan Siva lifted a certain veil of innocence on what must have been, for him, a decidedly erotic experience. His participation in the ceremony—and determination that Lizzie should know about it—could only have advertised the urgency of his romantic readiness. He writes in one letter:
Towards the end, when the dancers got up and began their last figure, which grows more and more vivacious to the end, Fanua, who had mischief in her eyes, pranced up before me, and bending over, put her arms around my neck and kissed me. The kissing felt quite natural and was loudly applauded with much laughter, but I have been redolent of cocoa-nut oil ever since, and the more because Fanua afterwards gave me her wreaths, and put one over my neck, the other around my waist, dripping with cocoa-nut oil.3
Perhaps relatedly, Henry sent photographs of unclothed Samoan girls to Hay, who had developed strong and apparently reciprocal feelings for Nannie Lodge, the wife (and cousin) of Henry’s former student Henry Cabot Lodge. The quietness of Adams’s pursuit of Lizzie found a match in Hay’s proper behavior to Nannie, whom he politely escorted to any number of museums, luncheons, and concerts. In passing the images on to his fellow Heart, Henry recommended that they be circulated to a very select group, not to include Mrs. Hay: “Please show or send the photographs to Mrs Lodge and Mrs Cameron, as I refer to them in my letters. To your civilised eye they may appear a little nude; but here nudity is a dress.”4
More generally, Henry offered in his South Seas correspondence to Lizzie a subtle if unmistakably sincere form of “love making.” The expansive length of these letters, their knight errant quality and self-consciously attentive tone revealed the surprising depth of his distress. There were moments when pretenses were lightly lifted and Adams, still striving for control, offered brief, frank glimpses of his emotions. Ostensibly remarking on the natural beauty of Tahiti, he ventured the following compliment: “I do not think that, outside of London and Paris, I could find a spot even in Europe where I should want to pass more than three days at a time,—unless you were there.” Each fresh setting offered Henry an opportunity to remark on Cameron’s particular importance to him. Naturally Ceylon’s venerable Bodhi tree paled beside a stronger passion: “I sat for half an hour, hoping to attain Nirwana.… Even under Buddha’s most sacred tree, I thought less of him than of you.”5
Lizzie, however, was thinking of others, including John Hay, yet another tame cat candidate. In April 1891, while Adams ambled about Tahiti, Hay, his brief and almost certainly platonic romance with Nannie Lodge now ended, traveled alone to London for an extended period seeking out old friends. A few weeks later Lizzie arrived in England with a small party. Over the next several months she and Hay grew close, though he wanted more. In a January 1892 letter, he wrote to her in some frustration at the courteous but reserved way she now greeted him in society: “Perhaps the fault is all in me: the resentment may be purely personal, because I have lost the place I have held dear. You know you appointed me No. 3. I can remember the day and the hour, opposite the Knightsbridge Barracks.”6 Presumably numbers 1 and 2 were reserved for the Don and Henry. But even at a distant 3 Hay remained over the years devoted to Lizzie. In 1897, while again in London, he walked along Duke Street’s shops and upscale flats thinking forlornly back to their time there together. The remembered neighborhood, swollen with memories, caused him to write her a lovesick letter:
My heart ached with the vision of the beautiful small feet that caressed the pavement on an errand of mercy so long ago. You are a sweet, sweet woman. There is no other word. You are beautiful, and clever, and splendid, and charming and fascinating and lovely. But you are, more than all, sweet. It is a keen, living sweetness that lifts you up above all others in charm; that makes the sight of you, the sound of your voice, the touch of you, so full of delight. One can never have enough of you, never.… You sweet Lizzie; the words are forbidden but I say them over and over.7
There is evidence that Henry guessed or at least sensed Hay’s feelings. In 1900 he wrote knowingly to Lizzie, “Hay got your letter yesterday, and told me your news. I rarely mention your letters to me, because it makes people jealous of me. Too many men still love you.”8
In late September 1891 Henry, with Polynesia now a memory, left Ceylon and slowly made his way to Europe to see Lizzie. His ship, the French steamer Djemneh, crossed the Indian Ocean to the Gulf of Aden and into the Red Sea before negotiating the Suez Canal and entering the Mediterranean. From there it passed between Corsica and Sardinia en route to Marseilles, which it reached on October 9. Henry left immediately for Paris and put up at the luxurious Second Empire–style Hôtel du Louvre, opposite the Louvre Museum. At ten o’clock on the morning of the 11th he sent Cameron a message: “Arrived at midnight, and wait only to know at what hour one may convenablement pay one’s respects to you. The bearer waits an answer.”9
That “answer” left him cold. With La Farge having gone to Brittany to visit cousins, Henry spent an annoying two weeks in Paris being politely put off by Lizzie. Accompanied by her daughter, Martha, a governess, and one of the Don’s daughters from his first marriage, she maintained an ambitious social calendar and perhaps inferred a little nervously Adams’s desire to introduce a more intimate condition to their relationship. From Paris the two parties moved on to London, where Henry stayed at the family-style Bristol Hotel and Lizzie, with her small entourage, lodged in Piccadilly until leaving for America on November 4.10 Hours before her departure they said their awkward, unsatisfying goodbyes in a parked hansom cab on Half Moon Street. The following day Henry, remaining in Europe for most of the winter, composed a long letter confessing to Lizzie all that he had held in over the preceding weeks. He began by allowing that, sensing the rawness of his feelings, she might already suspect the contents of the note: “You, being a woman and quick to see everything that men hide, probably know my thoughts better than I do myself.” He then confessed his desire for what he called “the experiment” of a more amatory relationship, before acknowledging the futility of “running so fatal a risk”:
No matter how much I may efface myself or how little I may ask, I must always make more demand on you than you can gratify, and you must always have the consciousness that, whatever I may profess, I want more than I can have. Sooner or later the end of such a situation is estrangement, with more or less disappointment and bitterness. I am not old enough to be a tame cat; you are too old to accept me in any other character. You were right last year in sending me away, and if I had the strength of mind of an average monkey, and valued your regard at anything near its true price, I should guard myself well from running so fatal a risk as that of losing it by returning to take a position which cannot fail to tire out your patience and end in your sending me off again, either in kindness or in irritation.11
He then proceeded to speculate on her feelings, all the while exposing the cold stone that sank inside his heart:
I lie for hours wondering whether you, out on the dark ocean, in surroundings which are certainly less cheerful than mine, sometimes think of me, and divine or suspect that you have undertaken a task too hard for you; whether you feel that the last month has proved to be—not wholly a success, and that the fault is mine for wanting more than I had a right to expect; whether you are almost on the verge of regretting a little that you tried the experiment; whether you are puzzled to know how an indefinite future of such months is to be managed; whether you are fretting, as I am, over what you can and what you cannot do; whether you are not already a little impatient with me for not being satisfied, and for not accepting in secret, as I do accept in pretence, whatever is given me, as more than enough for any deserts or claims of mine; and whether in your most serious thoughts, you have an idea what to do with me when I am again on your hands.12
In closing, he insisted equally upon the strength of his devotion and its capacity to injure Lizzie: “One may be innocent as the angels, yet as unhappy as the wicked; and I, who would lie down and die rather than give you a day’s pain, am going to pain you the more, the more I love.”13
Over the next several months Adams sulked. He wrote to one correspondent in December of his disappointment at not seeing more of Lizzie in London: “Mrs Cameron is no good. She has too much to do, and lets everybody make use of her, which pleases no one because of course each person objects to other persons having any rights that deserve respect. As long as she lives, it will always be so.” Seeking safe ground, Adams’s letters to Lizzie balanced self-pity (he described to her a “dreary” Paris Christmas alone) with varying degrees of gossip and chat. “She is very intelligent,” he reported of an encounter with Edith Wharton, “and of course looks as fragile as a dandelion in seed.” Still, the ache of his situation persisted into the following summer. That June Lizzie scolded Henry for his long silences, only to receive a sarcastic reply: “How should I write? The first law of tame cats is that under no circumstances must they run the risk of boring their owners by writing more than once a month or so. You never consider that a tame cat’s business is to lie still and purr. I am trying to learn to purr satisfactorily.” In a follow-up letter he blamed Lizzie for his unhappiness, accusing her of “talking so invitingly about my coming to you. Why do you say such things?” Just what things he had in mind are unclear, though she had once written him, while he roamed about the Pacific, “I feel sure now that you will come to Europe.… Of course you understand that if you come here you come home. I’ll use force, if necessary, but home you must come.” Investing unspent emotions in flirtatious exchanges must have offered Lizzie, struggling in a loveless marriage, a respite from her own disappointments. Presumably she counted on Henry’s understanding of that. When he felt too much, pursued too openly, she backed away, protective of her social position and that of her daughter. He understood all of this, ridiculed time and again his impossible romantic ambitions, and once apologized to Lizzie for being “a nuisance to you and myself.”14 Such sharp self-awareness made him a reflective diagnostician of his bruised feelings, but it did not bring him peace.
Henry remained close to Lizzie for the rest of his life. Whatever resentments he may have harbored from being number 2—and Martha’s dutiful “dear uncle Dordy”—he kept to himself. He received for his friendship physical proximity to Lizzie, the pleasure of her correspondence, and her genuine appreciation of his presence, wisdom, and devotion. “The everlasting truth prevails that you are of your sex a specimen apart, and that you are as true as the north star,” she wrote, one might say lovingly, to him in 1894. “I have been doing such a lot of thinking lately about you and what you have been to me. I was in the darkness of death till you led me with your gentle guidance into broad fields and pastures green. Even sorrow and trouble lessen under your light—a light so calm and still. I wonder if any man was ever so big as you.”15
That Henry’s empty pursuit of Lizzie may have altered his interest in other relationships is a matter of conjecture. He never felt strongly for another woman and certainly never considered remarriage. A flock of young nieces provided female companionship over the years, toward whom Adams adopted a politely attentive if politely withdrawn posture. The long season in Samoa, the fugitive passions rehearsed over many months at sea, were now allowed to recede—but this brought to Henry only a limited ease. The safe, chaste letters to Lizzie resumed, though so did the still deeper need to reconcile, question, and account for Clover.