Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life

332 Pages·2013·7.02 MB·English

by  Dykstra Natalie

Table of Contents
Title Page
Table of Contents
Copyright
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
PART I: A New World
“She Was Home to Me”
The Hub of the Universe
Clover’s War
Six Years
Henry Adams
Down the Nile
PART II: “Very Much Together”
A Place in the World
City of Conversation
Photos 1
Wandering Americans
Intimates Gone
“Recesses of Her Own Heart”
The Sixth Heart
PART III: Clover’s Camera
Something New
At Sea
Esther
Iron Bars
A New Home
Portraits
PART IV: Mysteries of the Heart
Turning Away
“Lost in the Woods”
A Dark Room
Photos 2
“That Bright, Intrepid Spirit”
“Let Fate Have Its Way”
Epilogue
The Sturgis-Hooper Family
The Adams Family
Acknowledgments
Sources
Notes
Index
About the Author
Copyright © 2012 Natalie Dykstra

All rights reserved
For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write
to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park
Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

www.hmhco.com

The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows: Dykstra,
Natalie.
Clover Adams : a gilded and heartbreaking life/Natalie Dykstra
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-0-618-87385-2
1. Adams, Marian, 1843–1885. 2. Historians’ spouses—United States—
Biography. 3. Adams, Henry, 1838–1918. 4. Women photographers—United
States—Biography. I. Title.
CT275.A34D95 2012 770.92—dc23
[B] 2011028562

eISBN 978-0-547-60790-0
v2.1113
In memory of Harriett M. Dykstra, 1930–2005
The moral is to make all one can out of life and live up to one’s fingers’
ends.
—CLOVER ADAMS, JANUARY 1, 1882

All forms of decay knock at our gate and summon us to go out into their
wilderness, and yet every ideal we dream of is realized in the same life of
which these things are part.
—WILLIAM JAMES TO ELLEN HOOPER, OLDEST NIECE OF CLOVER ADAMS, MAY 10,
1901
Prologue
THE AUTUMN OF 1883 was notably beautiful. Trees lining the streets of
Washington, D.C., seemed to hold on to their leaves, and as the season
deepened, roses and morning glories defied cooler temperatures, refusing to give
up their last blooms. That fall Clover Adams celebrated her fortieth birthday.
Her husband, Henry Adams, the historian and a grandson and great-grandson of
American presidents, had just finished writing his second novel, Esther, and was
again busy at his desk, poring over page proofs for the first section of what
would become his nine-volume History of the United States During the
Administrations of Thomas Jefferson and James Madison. Most mornings,
Clover rode her favorite horse, Daisy, through the streets of the capital to enjoy
what she called the “smiling landscape,” returning home to 1607 H Street with
flowers for bouquets. Their home faced south to Lafayette Square, with a view
of the White House in the background. The Square, also called the President’s
Park, offered a shady retreat from southern heat, a place to stroll through
elliptical gardens on crisscrossing pathways lit by the yellowish glow of gaslight.
At the park’s center a towering bronze of Andrew Jackson reared up on
horseback. Senators, vice presidents, cabinet secretaries, and military leaders
occupied the stately federal-style homes that ringed the park.
Three years before, Clover and Henry had signed a lease for two hundred
dollars a month for what they nicknamed the “little white house,” asking its
owner, William Corcoran, the banker, art collector, and philanthropist, to pay for
renovations, including a brand-new stable and a large detached kitchen in back.
Clover considered it a “solid old pile.” With six bedrooms and a spacious
library, the townhouse, built in 1845, was “little” only in comparison to the
capital’s grander homes, but it suited Clover’s preference for what she called
“coziness in the New England sense.” Hand-carved mantels crowned fireplaces
decorated with ceramic tiles. Carpets purchased on the Adamses’ honeymoon to
Egypt in 1872 covered the floors. An eclectic mix of Asian bronzes and
porcelains were set on tables and shelves, and art, including Japanese hanging
scrolls, sepia drawings by Rubens and Rembrandt, and watercolor landscapes by
the English Romantics, adorned the walls. Elizabeth Bliss Bancroft, a near
neighbor on H Street, once said to Clover, “My dear, I dislike auctions very
much, but I mean to go to yours after you die.”
Clover and Henry had married eleven years before, when she was twenty-
eight and he was thirty-three, joining Hooper wealth to Adams political renown.
In the close quarters of Boston Brahmin society, where they had both grown up,
they were a likely—if not inevitable—match. If Clover could be an
“undemonstrative New Englander,” as she herself admitted, her practicality and
quick wit tempered Henry’s sometimes anxious nature. Together they enjoyed
days of simultaneous fullness and leisure: a horseback ride in the morning,
afternoons set aside for Henry’s writing, tea promptly at five o’clock for visitors,
then dinner and an evening’s ride or a long stretch of reading by the fireplace.
They collected art, traveled, gossiped about politics, supported various causes,
and attended dinners and galas, which during the high time of the social season,
from mid-October until Lent, took up many evenings. Of these years, Henry
wrote, “This part of life—from forty to fifty—would be all I want.”
A wide array of writers and artists, politicians and dignitaries, doctors and
academics made their way to the Adamses’ salon for food and talk. Presidents
and their families made appearances. Elizabeth Adams knew it was her Aunt
Clover “who brought people to their house and gave it its character and
warmth.” Henry James, who liked to stay with the Adamses for weeks at a time,
at one point called Clover, with her satiric humor, “a perfect Voltaire in
petticoats” and thought her an ideal specimen of a particular type of American
woman—practical, honest, quick-thinking, with a streak of independence and
rebellion. She read widely—George Sand, William Dean Howells, Henry James
—and she took up Greek, tackling Plato and the Greek playwrights in the
original language, a passion that never faded. Though Clover sometimes battled
dark moods, she was no neurasthenic who took to her bed. She used her acerbic
wit to maintain perspective and had the will to manage things to suit her.
Athletic but petite, at five feet two inches in height, and her husband just an inch
or so taller, Clover had the legs of all chairs and sofas shortened to better fit their
personal proportions. When offered a seat, much taller guests, including the six-
foot-two Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., later a Supreme Court justice, would
precipitously drop onto the low seating.
Clover reserved Sunday mornings not for church but for writing a letter—
what she called her “hebdomadal drivel”—to her widowed father. Sometimes
she despaired at how her writing failed to express all she wanted to say: “Life is
such a jumble of impressions just now that I cannot unravel the skein in
practical, quiet fashion. Oh, for the pen of Abigail Adams!” But Clover need not
have been intimidated by her husband’s great-grandmother. In fact, her father
found it hard to comply with her request that he not read her letters aloud to
family and friends—she told such interesting stories.
In early November of 1883, Clover reported that “our days go by quietly and
pleasantly.” The lively social season had not yet begun, though it would
commence in the next month, when Congress returned to session. With no
children of her own to take care of, with Henry busy at his desk, and with time
on her hands, she turned once more to what had absorbed much of her attention
during the summer. The previous May, she had started something new: she had
begun taking and printing her own photographs. She delighted in every step of
the process, from selecting a subject, through exposure of the negative, to the
final print. She had shown interest in photography before, by collecting Civil
War stereographs and small commercial photographs of the sights she wanted to
remember from her Grand Tour through Europe in 1866. She’d spent hours
looking at fine art in museums around the world, amassing with Henry a large
collection of watercolors and charcoals, Japanese prints and ceramics. But taking
a photograph was different from looking or collecting. With her portable five-
by-eight-inch mahogany camera, Clover started making art, and the process was
changing her life.
On a warm, windy November afternoon, just after lunch, she decided to
photograph her beloved Skye terriers in the garden behind the townhouse. She
draped a bed sheet over the back fence and positioned three chairs around a
small dark table, complete with tea set—teapot, three cups and saucers, and a
silver spoon. She placed each dog on a chair, somehow perching their front paws
on the table and getting them to stay in position while she scrambled back to her
camera. She took only one exposure with her new “instantaneous” lens, which
didn’t require the extended exposure of the usual drop lens. She made a careful
entry in her small lined notebook where she listed her photographic experiments,
giving the details: “Nov 5—1 P.M.—Boojum, Marquis & Possum at tea in garden
of 1607 H. St. instantaneous, not drop shutter—stop no. 3.” Later, with a
different pen and in larger script, she commented on what she thought of the
result: “extremely good.”
That same afternoon, Clover loaded her black carriage with her camera,
tripod, several lenses, a notebook, and a carefully packed set of glass negatives
called dry-plate negatives because they’d been commercially prepared with
light-sensitive chemicals. She rode out three miles to Arlington National
Cemetery and stopped at a spot within view of General Robert E. Lee’s former
home. The new German minister’s twenty-year-old wife, Madame von
Eisendecker, whom Clover described as a young “Pomeranian blonde,” tagged
along. She had just come to America and wanted Clover, who was gaining a
reputation around town for her portraits, to take her photograph. The two women
arrived at the cemetery in midafternoon, and after setting up her equipment,
Clover took two exposures of General Lee’s house on the hill. But by “some
crass idiocy,” as she later explained, Clover ruined the pictures. After the first