The Champion Failure

HENRY ADAMS: THE MAJOR PHASE by Ernest Samuels. 687 pages. Harvard University. $10.

"Self-depreciation has always been my vice," Henry Adams once remarked. A man whose grandfather and greatgrandfather had been U.S. Presidents might be entitled to think himself the "champion failure of all," but Henry was the best writer the Adams family ever produced, and posterity has found him perhaps the most fascinating member of all. In this third volume of a massively detailed biography of Adams, covering the last three decades of his life following his wife Marian's death in 1885, Northwestern University's Ernest Samuels comes closer than anyone else to explaining the enigmatic Adams.

Off to Tahiti. When his wife committed suicide, Adams gave up the life in Washington where he and Marian had played host to a brilliant circle of politicians and scholars, reflecting that he had become "a sort of ugly, bloated, purplish-blue and highly venomous hairy tarantula which catches and devours Presidents, senators, diplomats, congressmen and cabinet officers." After commissioning Sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens to build a memorial to Marian in Washington's Rock Creek Park, he took off on a slow boat to the South Seas. Like any tourist, he drank in the "purple mist and souffle" scenery, ogled the fetching island beauties. One erotic dance called for a kiss. "Mine was a good square kiss," Adams reported, "squarely returned by me." But

Adams refrained from closer contact: "The pervasive odor of cocoanut oil has proved an impassable barrier."

Returning from paradise, Adams shuttled between the U.S. and Europe, enjoying a rather luxurious despair on a handsome annual income from investments. He had given the back of his hand to what he called the "total, irremediable, radical rottenness of our whole social, industrial, financial and political system." Nevertheless, he could not stay away from the "rottenness." Impressed by the Cuban revolt in 1895, he became Washington's fiercest lobbyist for Cuban independence, pressured his close friend Henry Cabot Lodge and other senators to intervene.

The Virgin & the Dynamo. Adams found a replacement for his wife, and a possible mistress, in Elizabeth Cameron, the vivacious wife of the senior Senator from Pennsylvania. "Life is not worth living," Adams once admitted, "unless you are attached to someone." The warmth of their relationship encouraged him to believe that the figure of the Mother is the core of Christianity. In Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, he credited the 12th century adoration of the Virgin with inspiring the building of the great cathedrals and with giving man happiness he has not had since.

"God was Justice, Order, Unity, Perfection," Adams wrote. "He could not be human and imperfect. The Mother alone was human, imperfect and could love. The Mother alone could represent whatever was not Unity; whatever was irregular, exceptional, outlawed; and this was the whole human race." In contrast to the 12th century, the current times seemed increasingly bleak, and in The Education of Henry Adams, he argued that the dynamo had replaced the Virgin as an object of faith.

As Adams grew sourer, his friends avoided him. "When I happened to fall in with him on the street," wrote Oliver Wendell Holmes, "he could be delightful, but when I called at his house and he was posing as the old cardinal, he would turn everything to dust and ashes."

In 1918 Adams died quietly in his bed, in the words of a friend, "kindly, courteous and sarcastic to the last."

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