Fast Upward

By Otto Friedrich

THE LETTERS OF HENRY ADAMS Edited by J.C. Levenson, Ernest Samuels, Charles Vandersee, Viola Hopkins Winner; Belknap Press; 3 volumes; $100

"I still would like to think," Henry Adams once wrote to his older brother Charles, "that a century or two hence when everything else about us is forgotten my letters might still be read and quoted as a memorial of manners and habits at the time of the great secession of 1860." Adams was then a bumptious youth of 22, just three years out of Harvard, desperately uncertain about what he wanted to do with his life but just as desperately aware that his grandfather and great-grandfather had both been Presidents of the U.S.

Adams was right. More than a century after he wrote, his letters may still be read and quoted as a memorial of manners--as well as on the construction of a personality. Adams was one of the great letter writers of the English language. Proof is now offered in a major publishing event: the first half of a six-volume edition. The new collection will include virtually all of Adams' 4,500 surviving letters; only about half, many of them prudishly censored, have ever been published before.

In an age when manners are measured by how long it takes someone's secretary to return a telephone call, the art of writing letters may seem obsolete, like designing stained-glass windows or working gold. The Adamses traditionally thought otherwise. All of them believed it their duty to posterity to record whatever happened to them, but of all that high-minded clan, only Henry was an artist.

One of his greatest feats of artistic legerdemain was to convince the world that he really was the crabbed and crotchety misanthrope portrayed in that greatest American autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams. The extended flow of his letters--these three volumes take him from age 20 to 54--portray someone quite different. Even in middle age, he was a man of considerable enthusiasm ("Man is still going fast upward," he wrote to a friend) and considerable charm ("Gum-drops are better than chocolate in hot weather," he advised a two-year-old neighbor).

And unlike the recluse of the last years, the young Henry Adams pushed toward the vortex of events. In Washington in 1869 he wrote brilliant articles on the corruption in the Grant Administration. When liberal Republicans tried to overthrow President Grant by nominating Henry's father, Charles Francis Adams, Henry exulted: "Just now I am engaged singlehanded in the slight task of organizing a new party to contest the next presidential election in '76."

The suicide in 1885 of Adams' mordantly witty wife Clover left him lost in darkness. "Fate at last has smashed the life out of me," he wrote to a friend, "but for twelve years I had everything I most wanted on earth." He labored on to complete the nine volumes of his excellent history of the Jefferson years, then gave a verdict on his own life by burning all the diaries he had kept since college. "In the midst of gloom and depression I have come to the last page of my history," he wrote in one of the few diary fragments that somehow survived the incineration and is included in this book. "I wish I cared but I do not care a straw."

Uncaring, he sailed off to investigate Japan, newly opened after two centuries of isolation, and then took up the study of Chinese. Uncaring, he wandered through the South Seas, one of the first Americans to explore their remote islands as a private citizen. He savored delicacies unknown in Boston ("I like squid, to my astonishment, and rather enjoy banana soup"), and he also savored the half-naked girls who anointed themselves with coconut oil and gyrated around him in a dance called the Siva ("as superb a creature here as the world has to offer").

The correspondent to whom Adams wrote most frequently (908 letters over the course of nearly 40 years) was the beautiful Elizabeth Sherman Cameron. They met in 1881, when he was 43 and she 24. They were both married, she to a stodgy Senator twice her age. Adams had fled to the South Seas partly to escape his increasing need for her, but he ended his voyage by meeting her in Paris. This time she was the one who fled, back to Washington, pursued by an eloquently inarticulate letter. "I am not old enough to be a tame cat; you are too old to accept me in any other character ...," Adams wrote. "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."

Rejected, Adams returns to Washington at the end of this volume in a state of suspension between futility and despair. On the eve of his 54th birthday, he has no idea that he has yet to write Education, the masterpiece on which his enduring fame will rest.

--By Otto Friedrich This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.