Henry Adams's Tahiti

In 1901 in Paris Henry Adams had a small number of copies printed and bound of a book he had written about the history of Tahiti. The spine gives a conveniently short form of the title, Tahiti, but a longer form spreads over the title page in a variety of fonts, looking something like this: memoirs / of / arii taimai e / marama of eimeo / teriirere of tooarai / teriinui of tahiti / tauraatua i amo. Tahitians who opened the book would have had no trouble recognizing that as a statement that it contains the memoirs of a very important member of Tahitian society, the chiefess of the Teva clan, who held this bundle of well-known names or titles. Provided that they could read English, as most of the educated could, the Tahitians would have immediately realized that they were holding a most valuable work that promised to give written permanence to the history of their society, which had heretofore existed only in traditional oral form. Most Americans who picked up the volume would have seen the title page as announcing the memoirs of somebody whose name seems to have spilled out of a bowl of alphabet soup and would have dismissed it as unpronounceable gobbledygook.

That's a great shame, for hidden behind that curtain of vowels lies a book written by Henry Adams that in both theme and technique belongs in the company of his best work—Democracy; The History of the United States of America, 1801–1817; Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres; and The Education of Henry Adams. That is exalted company, and I realize that reasonable people might very well be skeptical of such high praise for a book that has never been properly published in English. (A facsimile of the Paris edition, edited with an introduction by Robert E. Spiller was printed by Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints in 1947, reprinted in 1976, and is now available on the Internet. Translations also have been published in both French and German.) Impressed by Edward Chalfant's cogent account of it in Improvement of the World, the final volume of his three-volume biography of Adams, I tackled the facsimile edition on the theory that anybody who could have read Tolstoy and Dostoevsky with deep pleasure without having the faintest notion of how to pronounce Russian names ought to be able to make some sense of a book full of Polynesian ones—especially after I caught on to the fact that vowels are always pronounced as separate syllables. Now, having read it, I can attest first that, with a little patience plus the knowledge that the five vowels of written Tahitian are always pronounced the same way and always as separate syllables, the book is readable. (For example, Arii Taimai is pronounced, roughly, "Ah-ree-ee Tah-ee-mah-ee.") I must further attest that the Memoirs of Arii Taimai, or if you'd rather, Tahiti ("Tah-hee-tee"), is a skillful and persuasive work of history, reflecting on a small scale (196 pages) the methods and ideas that shine on the very large scale of Adams's History of the United States (2,742 pages in the Library of America edition); and further that it possesses the qualities of style and structure that make Mont-Saint-Michel and The Education classics of modern prose. I recognize that my testimony is not likely to convert the skeptical, though the fact that I have read the book and most of the skeptical have not might give them some pause. What might give them a lot more pause would be for them to ask themselves how likely it is that at the very height of his powers, having finished his History and begun his other two masterworks, Henry Adams would have written a dull, clumsy, almost unreadable book for the sake of flattering some people who were nice to him when he was visiting Tahiti? Not very likely, to put it mildly.

Let me begin by putting the work in context. In August 1890 Adams set out to visit a part of the world he had not seen, the islands of the...