Reviews
Peter Berard, Ph.D.
Book Reviewed:
The Last American Aristocrat:
The Brilliant Life and Improbable Education of Henry Adams
David S. Brown
Scribner
464 pages
$30
A certain kind of American pedant — and it’s hard exactly to define, but it is definitely a type — will, given long enough leash, inevitably find themselves (himself, usually, but not exclusively) staring down a Henry Adams preoccupation. The old prick practically lurks in the shadows of eaves in back alleys of American intellectual life, going “Psst! Hey kid! Wanna try some historical pessimism?!”
Like most retail dealers, he’s a lonely type, and few want to linger long with him, even if they take him up on his various offers. From the time of his death in 1918 to our own time various people have taken their shots at defining Adams’s work, his limited but enduring appeal, what the whole artifact of “HENRY ADAMS” means. Arguably, the first intellectual who took the diversion into Adamsiana (a used bookstore in Boston has a section called “Adamsiana” — sure, you can get your Johns and John Quincys and Abigails there, but the real star for the sort of people attracted by that kind of thing is invariably Henry) was Henry Adams himself, as he self-consciously constructed the edifice of HENRY ADAMS.
Perhaps some biography is in order for those who have not made the life choice to learn about this particular intellectual figure. Henry Adams was born in 1838, scion of the Adams political dynasty of Massachusetts which produced two presidents. He had the sort of career made possible by money, pedigree, and the openness of the nineteenth century to men with both (he came to despise money and his times and was quite ambivalent about pedigree, ironically). He assisted his father, who served as ambassador to Britain during the Civil War. He became an important reformist journalist, a novelist, a historian, and an all-around cultural critic. His general theme became the tragic degeneration of American institutions and personalities due to the advance of capitalism and industrialism, which he tied in with the political decline of families like his. He produced his magnum opus, The Education of Henry Adams, a decade before his death — it was only published for mass release posthumously. A statement of historical pessimism and an ambivalent monument to his generation, it entered the American canon.
A little over a century after his death, what does Henry Adams have to offer us? Any intellectual’s legacy risks becoming a whited sepulcher over time, an edifice, an unliving thing. Henry Adams was in the habit of referring to himself as a dead man twenty years before his actual time, and much of his legacy takes the form of unmoving artifacts with few obvious entry points. These include the Adams Memorial in Rock Creek Cemetery, his contributions to the design of the legendarily unchanging exhibits at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, and The Education of Henry Adams, distributed to a handful of