On what we
can all learn from Henry Adams’ European adventures and perspective.
It’s
difficult to overstate how talented and impressive Henry Adams
was. Adams retired from his Harvard Professorship
of Medieval History in 1877 at the age of 39, but not before he had pioneered
the methods of scientific history that would come to define the profession;
later, while doing plenty of other things, he served as president of the
American Historical Association (1893-1894) and wrote a 9-volume History
of the United States of America, 1801-1817 (1891-1896). Upon that retirement
he promptly resumed his pre-Harvard career as one of the nation’s foremost political and
social journalists, and during his time pursuing that career in Washington
also wrote two complex and
important novels (on the second of which more below). And after his wife tragically committed
suicide in 1885, he traveled the world extensively, turning those experiences into
some of the most insightful and significant works of travel and
autobiographical writing in American literary history, including the amazing Education of Henry
Adams (1907).
There’s a
lot that all Americans can learn from Adams’ life, career, and writings, but in
following up yesterday’s post on the Cosmopolitans, and in light of the week’s
overall focus on the Gardner Museum, I wanted to highlight two distinct and
equally valuable sides to his European-influenced perspective. In two of those
later works, Adams makes a clear case for the value of Europe, on its own terms
and for America: Mont Saint
Michel and Chartres (1904) brings together travel writing and poetic
reflections to argue for what these medieval spaces and the communities that
built them have to offer; and Chapter 25 of Education,
“The Dynamo and the Virgin
(1900),” contrasts the Virgin of Chartres with the most famous feature of
the Paris Exposition of 1900, the
Dynamo engine, to argue for the value of remembering historical and spiritual
ideas in a technological and modern age. In neither text is Adams simply or
willfully antiquarian—he admits his own fascination with the Dynamo, for example—,
making his ability to highlight and argue for the best of the past and its
places, icons, and ideas that much more nuanced and convincing.
Adams’
earlier and less overt European influences have just as much to offer
Americans, however. He spent most of the 1860s across the Atlantic, first as a
student and then serving as his father’s private secretary while the
former was Lincoln’s ambassador to England, and his work and writings in
the 1870s and 1880s reflect those experiences and the impact that Europe had
already made on Adams. Take Adams’ second novel, the social and
cultural romance Esther (1884). Many
readers and critics have focused on the similarities between the titular
heroine and Adams’ wife Clover, parallels that of course became more tragic
after Clover’s subsequent suicide. But in many ways Esther is more broadly
representative and exemplary, a type of the “new woman” that
would come to dominate late Victorian fiction and society. She did so more
in English and European works and conversations than in American ones, however—or
at least her rise was not greeted with quite as much hostility across the
Atlantic, as compared for example to the
brutalities directed at American suffragettes. And so what Adams’ novel
really offers is a European-influenced take on a new American woman, one
willing to see her with more complexity and balance than many American authors
of the period could have managed.
Final
Gardner Museum link tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Lessons from Europe, or any international connections, that you’d
highlight?
9/13
Memory Day nominees: A tie between two turn of the
20th century pioneers
in their respective
fields, Walter Reed
and Sherwood
Anderson.
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