Clover's Letters

THE LETTERS or MRS. HENRY ADAMS-- Edited by Ward Thoron--Little, Brown ($5).

In addition to having written that painful masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams, Adams ought to be famed as the author of one of the least gallant letters a prospective bridegroom ever wrote about his future wife. On March 26, 1872, the young grandson of John Quincy Adams informed an English friend: "The young woman calls herself Marian Hooper and belongs to a sort of clan, as all Bostonians do. . . . She is certainly not handsome; nor would she be quite called plain, I think. She is twenty-eight years old. She knows her own mind uncommon well. . . . She talks garrulously, but on the whole pretty sensibly. She is very open to instruction. We shall improve her. She dresses badly. . . . She has enough money to be quite independent. She rules me as only American women rule men, and I cower before her. Lord! how she would lash me if she read the above description of her!"

Presumably Marian never read it, for she died in 1883, 35 years before her gifted, disappointed husband and 47 years before the publication of his letters. As he had destroyed in 1885 all that he could recover, as well as his diaries and notes, her collected correspondence, published last week in an imposing volume of 561 pages, threw a clear light on one of the strangest characters in U. S. political and literary life. The strongest impression they communicate is that Adams had stupidly patronized a vital, vivid, unexpected character who wrote almost as well as he did and who had a spontaneous liveliness that matched his dry wit. Marian, familiarly known as "Clover," rattled on in her letters to her father, with all the garrulousness Adams ascribed to her, but with a humor for which Adams did not give her credit, about their visits to great London houses, Washington scandals, political intrigues, trips to Spain, Italy, Switzerland. She was less impressed than John Adams' grandson by many of the famed figures they met. Adams, for instance, described the English poet Richard Monckton Milnes as a gifted eccentric "with a Falstaffian mask and laugh of Silenus." But Clover drew an unforgettable sketch: "As for Milnes, he shows little of the ideal poet. He is old and stout, very scrubbily dressed, his teeth vanish down his throat when he giggles, which is very often, and then, by a most interesting tour de force, he reinstates them; and his method of eating is more startling than elegant, but it all amuses one, and he is kindly and full of life."

Clover's Washington letters are packed with impolite references: Roscoe Conkling "looking more asinine and offensive than ever"; Mrs. James G. Elaine accepting an invitation to the White House in order to insult the President's wife. The biggest excitement of Mrs. Adams' days as a Washington hostess was the assassination of President Garfield. She wanted to go to Guiteau's trial, but as one of the assassin's guards tried to shoot him on one occasion, and a bystander made another attempt a month later, she reported that there was "so much sporadic gunpowder lying round" it seemed wiser not to go. Eventually a doctor examining Guiteau took her and Henry Adams to see the prisoner. She thought the shrewd, long-nosed Guiteau was the jailer, shook hands with him. Born reporter, she painted an excellent portrait of the wily Guiteau who expected to be rewarded for his crime, who bullied and badgered everyone in the courtroom and who boldly announced that the man his crime had put into office would give the country "the best administration we ever had."

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