Throughout his thirteen-year marriage, Henry had obligingly if not always happily shared Clover with her father. And in deciding for her burial at Washington’s Rock Creek Church Cemetery rather than the Sturgis family plot back in Boston, he perhaps struck a belated note of possession. This suspicion is compounded when one considers the prominent memorial he placed at his wife’s grave: Augustus Saint-Gaudens’s brilliant cast-bronze sculpture of a shrouded androgynous figure resting on a granite block. Listed in 1972 on the National Register of Historic Places, the Adams Memorial is an iconic, enigmatic work of art, willfully suggestive in its deep silence. What the statue “meant” Henry refused to say, just as he kept his authorship of Democracy a secret and permitted only a limited print edition of the Education to circulate in his lifetime. In each of these instances he sought to withhold, but did so in ways certain to seed conversation. Despite its surface calm, his mute statue, its cold eyes closed to the world, begged for attention. Far from realizing a solemn, inscrutable anonymity, it endures as an Adams memorial in the fullest sense, as much a part of its patron’s complex legacy as the Old House in Quincy or the voluminous collection of his letters at the Massachusetts Historical Society.
Henry met Saint-Gaudens while the artist, employed by Henry Richardson and serving as something of a draftsman under La Farge, worked on the Trinity Church frescoes. Born in Dublin to an Irish mother and a French father, Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) was raised in New York. After taking courses at the Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design, he studied at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris before embarking on a celebrated career. His major works include the Robert Gould Shaw Memorial frieze in Boston Common, the gilded William Tecumseh Sherman equestrian statue placed at the Grand Army Plaza (in the southeast corner of Central Park) in Manhattan, and the bronze gilt Diana sculpture once raised, as a glittering window vane, high above New York’s old Madison Square Garden and now presiding in the Philadelphia Museum of Art.
The inspiration for what became the Adams Memorial took root while Henry and La Farge toured Japan. Buddhism’s promise to temper suffering through the purging of desire attracted Adams as philosophically analogous to the posthumous life he now affected. As with most matters, he approached his “afterlife” intellectually, eager to absorb through study and travel the history, art, and culture of this new diversion. While in Japan, he discussed Buddha figures with Ernest Fenollosa’s colleague Okakura Kakuzō, a young art historian later to be a curator of oriental art at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and, as noted earlier, stood in some wonder before the immense bronze Buddha statue in Kamakura.
Upon returning to America, Henry went to Saint-Gaudens’s West 36th Street studio, where, in vague terms, he expressed his conception of Clover’s marker—with the majestic Kamakura figure providing inspiration. La Farge attended this meeting and, in a 1910 interview with the Washington Evening Star, related the exchange between patron and artist:
Mr. Adams described to him in a general way what he wanted, going, however, into no details, and really giving him no distinct clue, save the explanation that he wished the figure to symbolize “the acceptance, intellectually of the inevitable.” Saint-Gaudens immediately became interested, and made a gesture indicating the pose which Mr. Adams’s words had suggested in his mind. “No,” said Mr. Adams, “the way that you’re, that is a Penseroso” [melancholic—from John Milton’s lyric poem Il Penseroso]. Thereupon the sculptor made several other gestures until one of them struck Mr. Adams as corresponding with the idea. As good luck would have it, he would not wait for a woman model to be brought in and posed in accordance with the gesture indicated by the sculptor, so Saint-Gaudens grabbed the Italian boy who was mixing clay, put him into the pose, and draped a blanket over him.… “Now that’s done,” said Mr. Adams, “the pose is settled. Go to La Farge about any original ideas of Kwannon [known also as Guan Yin, the Bodhisattva of mercy].”1
After Henry and La Farge left his studio, Saint-Gaudens scribbled in a notebook, “Adams—Buhda—Mental Repose—Calm reflection in contrast with the violence or force in nature.” Two years passed before Henry returned and, following a discussion of the memorial’s scale, announced to Saint-Gaudens that he would offer no further guidance: “I did not think it wise.”2 Over yet another two-year period a restless Adams put the finishing touches on his History, grew increasingly close to Elizabeth Cameron, and methodically sampled the South Seas with La Farge. He also paid Saint-Gaudens some $20,000 (about $560,000 in current dollars) to bring his Buddha to life.
Henry’s decision to ignore the statue’s progress forced Saint-Gaudens to fall back upon his own ideas. In finished form the piece resembles an earlier work by the artist, Silence, an 1874 marble figure of a woman with closed eyes wearing a seamless garment with shrouded hood. She has a raised forefinger to her lips, gesturing for quiet. Commissioned by Levi H. Willard for the New York City Lodge of the Masonic Order, it evokes the deep sense of contemplation and even isolation later found in the Adams Memorial. Both works are bereft of inscription and lack elaborate decoration. Their faces are classical and any resemblance to Buddha is largely imputed, prevailing upon viewers to glean their meaning. A much earlier antecedent might be glimpsed in Michelangelo’s Ancestors of Christ series in the Sistine Chapel. In one fresco a woman sits as though immersed in meditation, and the back of her hand caresses her shaded cheek. A similar resting pose, along with folded eyes and hand-to-cheek graze, distinguishes the Adams Memorial.
In defying easy description, Henry’s Buddha attracted considerable attention, and Saint-Gaudens was often asked over the years to reveal its essence. His various responses—“Perhaps ‘The Peace that Passeth Understanding’ ”; “I call it the Mystery of the Hereafter”; and “It is beyond pain, and beyond joy”—are generic and unilluminating. But the statue’s capacity to inspire hinged, as he knew, upon its unfixed premise. “I am certain that my father never of his own volition stamped the monument with that absolute definition so often demanded,” Homer Saint-Gaudens wrote in 1913. “He meant to ask a question, not to give an answer.”3
Others, however, sought to explain the Sphinx’s riddle, and this included pinning down its indeterminate gender. In early 1909, during the final weeks of his presidency, Theodore Roosevelt had described the statue as female on at least two occasions, one of them a public address. Henry enjoyed needling Roosevelt (whose boyish, bullying demeanor irritated him), and he took this opportunity, with a winking self-regard, to set him straight: “Whatever the President says goes!… But!!! After March 4, [TR’s last day in office] should you allude to my bronze figure, will you try to do St Gaudens the justice to remark that his expression was a little higher than sex can give. As he meant it, he wanted to exclude sex, and sink it in the idea of humanity. The fixture is sexless.” The shrine’s neutral gender is consistent with Adams’s urging that it radiate a universal quality, and thus he resisted efforts to tease out its “true meaning.” Like Saint-Gaudens, he replied opaquely to the inquisitive, telling one correspondent, “My own name for it is ‘The Peace of God.’ ”4 To have actually defined the figure would have allowed anyone to claim familiarity. He went out of his way, rather, to keep the memorial allusive and beyond reach—even of presidents. In this way, protecting his secret, guarding his ground, and knocking down errant (that is to say all) assumptions, Henry proved to be the true Sphinx.
One critic of the marker, Julia Stoddard Parsons, a friend of Lizzie Cameron’s, thought Adams had cruelly denied his wife an identity in death. She condemned the nameless shrine as a selfish tribute to his peculiar taste and somber sensibility—less a commemoration of Clover than a paean to her husband’s self-pride. “But to me,” she wrote in a 1938 memoir,
if the sculptor intended everyone to read from it their own impressions—were I lying under such an image of pagan hopelessness—shut in, as it is, by chill cypresses in gloom and dampness, with no letter to mark that it was I, or no inspired or human word to promise for the future, then indeed Nirvana might engulf
“The deep dark vault,
The darkness and the worm.”5
Years earlier Adams had prepared in the Education a powerful and perhaps self-serving response to such critics. He maintained that the statue embodied a dying ideal that puzzled only because contemporary society lacked the patience, empathy, and understanding to grasp its defiant rebuke of the modern world. The curious could not see it because they could not feel it. He seemed in the memoir almost to be baiting those blinkered seekers who dared to look dumbly upon the monument:
As Adams sat there, numbers of people came, for the figure seemed to have become a tourist fashion, and all wanted to know its meaning. Most took it for a portrait-statue, and the remnant were vacant-minded in the absence of a personal guide. None felt what would have been a nursery-instinct to a Hindu baby or a Japanese jinrickshaw-runner. The only exceptions were the clergy, who taught a lesson even deeper. One after another brought companions there, and, apparently fascinated by their own reflection, broke out passionately against the expression they felt in the figure of despair, of atheism, of denial. Like the others, the priest saw only what he brought. Like all great artists, St. Gaudens held up the mirror and no more.6
The monument’s long gestation caused Henry to sometimes doubt its eventual unveiling. Five years elapsed between contract and completion, leaving him to wonder if he had erred in refusing to approve a formal design. “I am not certain,” he once complained to Dwight, “that [the] work will ever be delivered.” Perhaps Saint-Gaudens, taxed with a prominent, complex, and hard-to-read client, awaited a convenient moment to finish the figure before bracing for that client’s uncertain reaction. Only when Henry withdrew to the South Seas did the monument escape the studio. Among early appraisers, Lizzie wrote to assure Adams, “The bronze is most beautiful in color.… The whole pose is strong and calm, full of repose”; John Hay also endorsed the statue, calling it “indescribably noble and imposing. It is to my mind St.-Gaudens’ masterpiece.” Henry’s first glimpse of the figure occurred while overseas, Dwight having sent him several photographs to consider. Unwilling to offer a strong commitment, he laconically informed Saint-Gaudens from Fiji that he thought the pictures “satisfactory”—and that slight nod proved to be high praise compared to his brother Charles’s petulant opinion. Perhaps still nursing his disdain for the “crazy” Hoopers, he tactlessly called the statue “awful,” insisting that it resembled a “mendicant, wrapped in a horse-blanket.”7
Henry’s coy reaction to the monument continued upon his return home. He arrived in Washington in February 1892, but it was not until weeks later that he could write to Dwight of having visited the memorial. He diffidently called the statue “the Rock Creek work” and seemed to regard it as nothing more than a completed task: “I made a formal, and, so to speak, official examination… and gave it final approval.” In later years his remembrance of the day warmed. He claimed in the Education that “every detail interested him; every line; every touch of the artist.” More telling, he began to visit the cemetery regularly, thinking of the memorial as a fitting effigy of his posthumous life. In the most insightful remark he ever made of the marker he wrote, “The interest of the figure was not in its meaning, but in the response of the observer.”8 There were to be many responses.
And in reply to these various conjectures and commentaries, Adams predictably bristled, complaining, “Every magazine writer wants to label it as some American patent medicine for popular consumption—Grief, Despair, Pear’s Soup, or Macy’s Mens’ Suits Made to Measure.”9 But for one regular visitor, the statue presented no mystery at all. In 1918, the year of Adams’s death, Eleanor Roosevelt discovered that her husband Franklin, then assistant secretary of the navy, was involved in an affair with Eleanor’s social secretary, Lucy Mercer. She offered Franklin a divorce and, searching for guidance, went often to Rock Creek Cemetery, brooding before the Adams monument which, like her uncle Theodore, she took to be a female figure. Fifteen years later, in March 1933, the day before Franklin’s first inaugural, Eleanor and her close friend Lorena Hickok walked through the cemetery and approached the Saint-Gaudens figure. There, according to Hickok, Roosevelt said, “In the old days when we lived here, I was much younger and not so very wise. Sometimes I’d be very unhappy and sorry for myself. When I was feeling that way, if I could manage, I’d come here alone, and sit and look at that woman. And I’d always come away somehow feeling better. And stronger. I’ve been here many, many times.”10
The English novelist and Nobel laureate John Galsworthy, author of The Forsyte Saga (1906–21), a penetrating social satire of Britain’s fading high bourgeoisie, also responded thoughtfully to the statue. Galsworthy’s protagonist, the conservative Victorian man of property, Soames Forsyte, wanders about Rock Creek Cemetery with his daughter Fleur and her husband while on a trip to the United States. The following day he returns by himself, drawn to Saint-Gaudens’s striking creation. Galsworthy writes of Soames’s reaction to the statue:
Some called it “Grief,” some “The Adams Memorial.” He didn’t know, but in any case there it was, the best thing he had come across in America, the one that gave him the most pleasure, in spite of all the water he had seen at Niagara and those skyscrapers in New York. Three times he had changed his position on that crescent marble seat, varying his sensations every time.… Easy to sit still in front of that thing! They ought to make America sit there once a week!11
Adams might have enjoyed Galsworthy’s attentive remarks, for the novelist appears to have understood the blue note in the Sphinx’s silence. His Soames is a relic from a bygone era whose aristocratic pretensions—obvious in his impressive collection of paintings and tasteful Georgian mansions—cannot keep a congested, noisy London at bay. If lacking Adams’s distinguished patrimony, he nevertheless shares his sense of being at the end of something—perhaps himself. The 1901 death of Queen Victoria brings to Soames’s mind an awareness of shifting centuries, technologies, and sensibilities. His evocation of a female monarch perishing as the industrial process gained ground recalls Henry’s devotion to Marau Taaroa, the last Tahitian queen, suddenly outdated in the emergent, liberal, scientific, capitalist configuration: “Well-nigh two generations had slipped by—of steamboats, railways, telegraphs, bicycles, electric light, telephones, and now these motorcars.… Morals had changed, manners had changed, men had become monkeys twice-removed, God had become Mammon.”12 Perhaps it is enough to say that for both Soames and Adams, Saint-Gaudens’s splendidly grieving statue is nothing less than a defiantly idealized monument to the history and traditions of a vanishing preindustrial people.