Henry Adams's America

PAUL A. BOVE Henry Adams's America The tableau is a sitting room in Rye, England. Henry James, stout and vested, throws others' letters into a roaring fire. The time is the turn of the twentieth century. Among the papers burnt, almost all of Henry Adams's letters to Henry James (Epstein 14).' It is a miseen -scène of waste, of barbarism, of substitution. Who can say of Henry James what his motives might have been? The sole immediate consequence ? A heap ofashes where some traces oflines ofthought had once been. Monteiro's edition of the James/Adams correspondence contains "twenty-five letters from Henry James to Henry Adams, four letters from James to Marian Adams, and seven letters from Adams to James" (xii). The lettets of Henry Adams fill not only six Belknap Press volumes but also two supplemental volumes issues by the Massachusetts Historical Society, but James's conflagration makes his own letters the only remnant of one of Adams's more important efforts at intellectual exchange. Given the general disregard in which the two Henrys held William James, Adams's letters to Henry James might well have been a place for Adams to have spoken directly of his thinking. Final judgment ofAdams's career has been consistently and from the beginning quite bad, so sevete and persistent, that thinking along with Adams has become taboo among United States intellectuals. Burning Adams's letters is James's original contribution to the burial of an important project of intellectual activity of a kind rare within modernity and almost otherwise unavailable within the U.S. tradition.2 Almost purely Adams scholarship shows the function of academic work to allocate , determine, and establish. But how does James begin? The condemnation of Henry Adams has become so commonplace Arizona Quarterly Volume 58, Number 1, Spring 2002 Copyright © 2002 by Arizona Board of Regents issN 0004- 1 610 58Paul A. Bow? and facile that one expects those who damn no longer bother to read him: the case has been settled. Let me give a current example: Jonathan Levin, a recently tenured Americanist at Columbia University, in a new book, The Poetics of Transition: Emerson, Pragmatism, & American Literary Modernism, gives us the standard line. Adams was looking for coherence, unity, and wholeness in the world, in the facts of history and science alike. In their absence , he felt the ground slip treacherously beneath his feet. Adams was in search of something like absolute forms of certainty . His expectations, as he acknowledges throughout the Education, perfectly classical. (6) Levin prefers pragmatism to this classical project, finding in the 'apostate pragmatist,' Santayana, a more valuable guide to Adams's intellectual project than Adams himself (6-7). Often otherwise careful readers astoundingly fail to take the time to examine Adams's texts attentively. Levin's unfortunate cliché, "he felt the ground slip treacherously beneath his feet," already demolished in the Education's account ofMadam Curie, really could not have been written by anyone skilled in decoding basic rhetorical games with available topoi. Is there anything more comically created than the image of Adams, lying on the floor of the Paris Exhibition, his 'historical neck broken,' by the discovery ofx-rays? Could the writer of such comedy be as intellectually dead as Levin's compulsive neo-pragmatist desires require? Henry James's conflagration answers, 'yes,' as it has always done, as James always believed even long before he lit that match. American literary history hinges on certain texts which endlessly recur; Jonathan Arac has coined the term 'hypercanonization' to describe this effect in the case of Huc/cieberry Finn. Recursions often occur in the bass, producing the foundation for melody. And so it is with one letter of Henry James which is a small recorso in both the long history of U.S. discussion of Adams and neo-pragmatists' throbbing embraces of their selfconstructed ancestors.3 So, in keeping with all expectations, in the midst of Levin's single page dismissal of the relevance of Adams's entire career, he explains why we Americans should be grateful for the heap of ashes James lets us stand against out ruin: "it is the same misunderstanding ," Levin says of...