View of The Epistolary Diary. Henry Adam’s Letters from the South Seas

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Abstract

This essay explores how the American author Henry Adams, a practitioner of both diary and letter, developed a hybrid genre, the epistolary diary, and in so doing generated open-ended narratives addressed to a reciprocating transoceanic readership. In the 1890s, having formed an erotic if ever celibate friendship with Elizabeth Cameron, wife of a US senator, Adams combined the diary and letter in locutions that resist fixations of time and space and that engage in a discourse that anticipates the intersubjectivity of electronic telecommunication. This essay proposes that the dream of instantaneous global contact abounds in this writing, and that the technological advances that supported Adams’s abi- lity to correspond regularly with Cameron across oceans and continents are genealogically antecedent to innovations that in our own day have displaced social relations to the metaphysics of cyberspace.

Résumé

Cet article étudie la manière dont l’écrivain américain Henry Adams, auteur de jour- naux intimes et épistolier, a développé un genre hybride, le journal intime-épistolaire. Dans le cadre d’échanges réciproques, cette innovation servait à créer des récits ouverts et flexibles destinés à un public transatlantique. Pendant les années 1890, ayant entretenu une relation érotique mais toujours chaste avec Elizabeth Cameron, épouse d’un sénateur américain, Adams combinait le journal intime avec la lettre dans des locutions résistants aux fixations imposées par le temps et l’espace. Ce nouveau mode de discours préfigure l’intersubjecti- vité des communications électroniques. Cet article souligne que cette écriture foisonne du rêve du contact global instantané. De plus, les avancées technologiques, qui permettaient à Adams de correspondre régulièrement avec Cameron malgré de considérables dis- tances, représentent des précurseurs des innovations qui, de nos jours, ont supplanté les relations sociales par une métaphysique du cyberespace.

William Merrill D

^ecker

The Epistolary Diary

Henry Adam’s Letters from the South Seas

To refer to this article :

William Merrill Decker, “The Epistolary Diary. Henry Adam’s Letters from the South Seas”, in: Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, November 2012, 9, Matthieu

http://www.interferenceslitteraires.be ISSN : 2031 - 2790

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Interférences littéraires/Literaire interferenties, 9, November 2012

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Henry Adams’s Letters from the South Seas

My aim in this essay is to trace how an old-school practitioner of both diary and letter invented for his own purposes a hybrid genre, the epistolary diary, and in so doing generated open-ended narratives addressed to a reciprocating transoceanic readership. Henry Adams, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American author, descendent of Puritan New England colonists and two US presidents, inhe- rited a practice of diary inscription shaped by the daily spiritual self-scrutiny associated with seventeenth-century Calvinist culture. At the same time, as a member of a politically elite family, he corresponded extensively from an early age, taking as his model the urbane and ironic literary epistle cultivated by the eighteenth-century British letter writers. Under a peculiar if perhaps inevitable set of technological, cultural, and personal circumstances, Adams combined the diary and letter in locutions that resist fixations of time and space and that engage in a discourse that anticipates the intersubjectivity of electronic telecommunication. I do not want to suggest that the diary letters of Henry Adams and his friends prophecy contempo- rary online communities, but the dream of instantaneous global contact abounds in this writing, and the technological advances that supported his correspondence are genealogically antecedent to innovations that in our own day have annihilated barriers of space and time, displacing social relations to the sleek metaphysics of cyberspace. Certainly Adams would have been startled by these developments but as a student of his own innovative era he knew that technological empowerment fosters and amplifies human desire and he would have had no trouble comprehen- ding the specific desires that brought the cyber world about.

Before I discuss the practice of Henry Adams in view of what is to follow in the succeeding century, however, let me begin by observing that, as distinct genres, letter and diary exhibit different spatiotemporal and social orientations and that to combine them calls attention to their respective genre distinctions. Letters share with diary entries the condition of dated seriality, but because they are addressed to readers geographically separated from the author they necessarily enlist a spatial and social dimension whereas the diary is more strictly the creature of privacy and time. Attending to the cycles of daily life, the diary is the most rigorously temporal of literary forms. Among the contexts of human time, one day’s inscription may resemble another’s with what seems to be negligible difference, but incremental changes accrue nonetheless and diarists typically seek linearity in their cyclically exa- mined experience. The diary therefore is a kind of clock, one that keeps, tells, and annotates time, but that specializes in discursive rather than quantitative measures.

Letters likewise keep time and measure change, but given that geographical separation from the addressee is a structural component of the epistolary occasion, the letter genre engages a spatial orientation that is not a standard feature of the diary.

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If the diary is a kind of clock, the letter is a kind of map, and the letter writer’s isolation in space recurs as a fundamental theme. Letters moreover engage a futurity not typical of temporalities associated with the diary inasmuch as a letter is written in expectation of a response, one that will contribute to the arc of the unfolding co- authored text that narrates the interpersonal relationship. The narratives generated by the diary epistles of Adams and his circle conflate themes peculiar to both diary and letter genres. Time in these letters is expressed in global and zonal dimensions and evocations of space immobilize time.

Adams was well versed in the temporal emphasis of the private diary. Born in 1838, he came of age in post-Calvinist New England where the diary had served for generations as an instrument of spiritual timekeeping. An intense conviction of human mortality haunted the New England diary (and Puritan life narratives generally). The soul’s chronic unreadiness to meet eternal judgment exists in this writing as a foundational condition. Although Puritans tended to fill their pages with mundane details of daily life, such details readily assimilated to the incremental allegory of a life’s waning hours¹. Time bore heavily on such writers whereas space, in the sense of geographic location, counted often for comparatively little. To the extent that there is a spatial complement to the narratives generated in this context, it might refer to the soul’s journey to the Celestial Empire: the pilgrim’s progress from this world to the next. The New England diarist, often a highly mobile citi- zen (many had emigrated from England to America)² tended to subsume all mere earthly travel under this trope.

The Puritan era concludes toward the middle of the eighteenth century, but well into the secular nineteenth century the diary persists in New England Protes- tant culture as a mode of daily self-examination and improvement³. Adams perpe- tuated this practice as a matter of course: it would be odd for such a person not to keep a diary. As mentioned earlier, Adams belonged to a family that had been active in Massachusetts public life since the founding of the Puritan colony; he was the great-grandson of John Adams, the second US president, and the grandson of John Quincy Adams, the sixth. Henry Adams’s vocation was literary rather than political:

he is best known as the author of The Education of Henry Adams, an autobiographical narrative written late in life, but his highly eclectic oeuvre includes three biogra- phies, two novels, a nine-volume history of the Jeffersonian era, as well as six large volumes of letters. Through much of his life he was a prolific diarist, a discipline that ultimately merged with his practice as a letter writer, but only a fraction of his private diary survives. In what does survive, Adams the diarist perpetuates the tropology if not the theology of his Puritan heritage. Even after he had discarded the

1. As Lawrence Rosenwald demonstrates in “Sewell’s Diary and the Margins of Puritan Lit- As Lawrence Rosenwald demonstrates in “Sewell’s Diary and the Margins of Puritan Lit- erature” (in: American Literature, 1986, 58, 3, 325-41), the New England Puritans had more than one genre of diary inscription and some were far more oriented to experience as chronos than experience as kairos. My point, however, is that kairos always overshadows chronos and that for subsequent New England generations the tropology survives the theology. As the agnostic legatee of Calvinist culture, Adams characteristically represents the most mundane occurrences as events in time as a kind of deconstructed kairos.

2. This trope preexisted Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, a work that nonetheless reinforced the trope’s dominance in the Puritan and post-Puritan frame of reference.

3. In “Spiritual Journals in France from the Sixteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries,” Philippe Lejeune asks whether in the European context the personal diary should be considered “the child or the cousin of the spiritual journal”. In the New England context one would not hesitate to say

“child.” See: On Diary, Honolulu, University of Hawai’i Press, 2009, 61.

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William Merrill Decker

religious observance of his ancestors, Adams continued the practice of assessing himself as a subject of linear time and viewing himself as a Bunyanesque pilgrim amid a ghostly post-Christian allegorical world.

Only one substantial portion of Adams’s private diary remains, spared from the flames that presumably consumed the rest, but the writing therein underscores the differences between his inscription of a diary intended primarily for his own future readership and his authorship of diary letters. Both reflect the Calvinist heritage, but in contrast with his letter writing the diary entries confess an unappeased loneliness. The diary that Adams kept for his private use consists mainly of short notations that encapsulate a day’s activity and, in so doing, register a metonymic generalization of mood. In the tight economy of recorded impressions, events exist as fact and emblem. Here are some examples:

Back again after a month of wandering in Florida and Cuba. If it was not happiness, it was at least variety.⁴ (107)

Once more settled into the deadly routine of last year. The acute depression has left me, and I am growing dull and indifferent and selfish. (121)

No change in this dreary existence. I have taken up my Chinese again and find I recover it fairly quick…. Received Thursday telegram that my greenhouse- roof had fallen while rebuilding… (134)

No sunshine since last Sunday, and floods of rain. (144) The world still tedious and flat. (168)

The roses have had their week, and today are beginning to fade. (182)

These excerpts derive from the lone surviving seventeen-month fragment (Februa- ry 12, 1888 – July 7, 1889). Two of these notations represent all that was recorded on a particular day and, for the rest, there is generally little else to the entry. Alto- gether, they present the portrait of a man completing an ambitious twenty-year project (a nine-volume narrative history of the Jefferson and Madison presidencies) while grieving the death of his wife, who had committed suicide during a bout of depression December 6, 1885. If, structurally, the Puritan diary reckons with time and therefore death, it should hardly surprise us that Adams’s practice embraces this heritage under such doleful circumstances. Beyond references to a contemplated sojourn in China, which he fantasized as a terrestrial point of no return, these entries concern ennui, disappointment, and decline as manifested in the common events of daily life.

I cite the religious genealogy of Adams’s diary practice, again, not to suggest his attachment to the past but rather to emphasize his inheritance of a genre deeply striated with theological themes – guilt, shame, redemption, and the ever-ticking clock. Far from constraining his sensibility, the Puritan inheritance, with its fixation on the phases of moral progress, provides him with a vocabulary for the sorts of

4. In-text pages citations refer to J.C. leVenSon, Ernest SamuelS, Charles VanDerSee & Viola HopkinS winner (eds.), The Letters of Henry Adams, volume 3, Cambridge, The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1982, 88.

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threshold conditions his travels will thrust upon him. To be sure, that vocabulary is invoked ironically, but the eschatological structure remains firmly if vacantly intact and Adams recurrently characterizes his travels as a variation of Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), that formal allegorization of the religious narrative seventeenth-century Puritans rehearsed on a daily basis. In October 1886, during the same period of labor and grief that he documents in the diary fragment, he writes John Hay the following in which he characterizes the immediate present – devoted to completing the nine-volume History – and the near future of contemplated travels: “As soon as I can get rid of history and the present, I mean to start for China, and stay there…

Five years hence, I expect to enter the celestial kingdom by that road…” (44). “I will not desert you at Washington as long as our loads are on our backs,” he writes to Hay in September 1888, again drawing on Bunyan, “but when I come to the Delectable Land, or wherever the pack falls off, then – let us wander to the New Jerusalem” (143). In this last remark he articulates explicitly the governing trope of his subsequent travels.

In keeping with the Puritan legacy, time and its mortal implication weigh heavily upon his word, but in Adams’s specifically epistolary practice the serial writing that is both diary and letter became a medium by which he developed what might be called an alternate metaphysics of disembodied friendship, a metaphysics in which one’s existence is not validated by the presumed attentiveness of a god with whom one communicates through prayer, but by postal evidence that one’s person- hood exists in the mind of the distant and intimate other⁵. For the agnostic Adams, such confirmations were not available in the private diary format; his laconic diary entries seek closure and silence whereas his voluble diary letters seek interpersonal engagement. The letter as material artifact brings that distant and intimate other into what might be called a virtual proximity (for the metonymies of virtual presence certainly predate the Internet): the acts of attention the letter sheets embody ground the addressee’s ontological status. One exists because that other has thought – is thinking – of one. Conversely, one ceases to exist when such acts of attention are withdrawn, and for Adams and his contemporaries the delay or miscarriage of mail opens up intervals of excruciating uncertainty. In a period during which transoceanic travel and reliable intercontinental postal services were transforming the parameters of letter writing – during which, that is, it became increasingly possible to maintain a regular correspondence over vast stretches of ocean and land – Adams situated his theologically troped diary writing within an epistolary frame which he proceeded to subject to the extreme tensions of transoceanic and trans- continental exchange. By such means and on such terms he maintained connections with those whose absent presence confirmed his place in the world.

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In August 1890, Henry Adams boarded a steamship in San Francisco and set off on what would become a fourteen-month voyage involving a circumnavigation

5. For a fuller exploration of such mediated ontology, see my Epistolary Practices: Letter Writing in America before Telecommunications, Chapel Hill, The University of North Carolina Press, 1998, 206-220.

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of the world with extended sojourns in Hawaii, Samoa, Tahiti, Fiji, Indonesia, Aus- tralia, and Sri Lanka. Toward the end of his travels he would pass through the Suez Canal to France and England and then finally cross the Atlantic, in November 1891, back to his home in Washington, D.C. To mark the completion of his nine-volume History he had, as we have seen, originally planned a visit to China, but perceived threats to Westerners in Shanghai induced him to change his plans. In leaving the US for an indefinite period, Adams meant to vacate the scenes he had shared with his late wife, but he was also more urgently imposing a distance between himself and Elizabeth Cameron, the estranged wife of a US senator, with whom he had fallen dangerously in love and to whom he bore what he guiltily regarded as an emotion- ally adulterous relationship. Although Adams had written long diary letters during earlier periods of travel, the recipients (his brother Charles Francis Adams II, his mother Abigail Brooks Adams, his friends Charles Milnes Gaskell and John Hay) were not partners to a correspondence that could be described as intimate, addic- tive, and erotic, adjectives that very much apply to the Adams-Cameron exchange.

By such adjectives I refer not to the letter’s overt content but to the fetishistic place the correspondence (in all its materiality) assumes in the lives of its participants.

Henry Adams and Elizabeth Cameron were parties to an erotic correspondence in the sense that the necessity to be mutually absent violently coexisted with the need to be present by letter-sheet proxy. Drawing on the resources of diary and letter as well as the energy of transgression, Adams produced during his fifteen-month sojourn one of the late nineteenth century’s most distinguished (and least known) South Seas travelogues in English, but the interest of this writing consists as much in the intensity with which Adams and Mrs. Cameron negotiate a relationship as in Adams’s voluminous documentation of colonized, distressed, and marginalized cultures.

This unique literary performance derives in part from the material conditions under which he could maintain a correspondence during his long absence. On average, he was able to post and receive letters once a month, so that his determi- nation to write Elizabeth every day took the form of serial entries, each one reca- pitulating the day’s activities, collected in a single epistle which he would fold and post in the monthly outbound mail. These diary letters, fifty to sixty pages long in autograph copy, resemble diaries rather than letters, as Adams omits salutation and valediction, so that the manuscript Elizabeth receives has the appearance of pages culled from a diary. The entries record everything from the details of ocean travel to ethnological observations of his Polynesian hosts, from geological and climatic data to anecdotes concerning encounters with islanders and fellow westerners such as Robert Louis Stevenson. There are regular accounts of his physical and mental health as well as passages that convey an exotic natural beauty. Nature, for Adams, comprised landscape, seascape, and the undraped human form; not surprisingly, his entries concerning native life perpetuate the Western male’s eroticization of Polynesia. As such, much of the writing might pass for conventional travelogue – a highly erudite travelogue at that, with reference to the literature of travel and exile, Herman Melville, Lord Byron, Robert Louis Stevenson, Pierre Loti. Adams nevertheless interweaves into a day’s narration passages very personally directed to Elizabeth’s private readership and the arrival of her letters with their fund of news constitutes a recurring storyline. As he occasionally reminds her, the diary letters

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are for her readership only, and certain passages in particular are written in strict confidence.

Tropologically, these letters preserve the Puritan diary’s consciousness of time-bound existence and the intimation of a “next world” beyond temporal experience. At times Adams invokes this trope of death to convey a sort of euphoria or euthanasia: “The weather is divine beyond imagination” he writes during his sojourn in Tahiti: “the scenery, a sort of Paradise for lost souls, the beauty of archangels fallen” (426). “Tahiti is lovely” he affirms a month later”:

the climate is perfect; we have made a sort of home here; and I shall never meet another spot so suitable to die in. The world actually vanishes here” (459). In such passages he fantasizes an easeful transition to an afterlife set in opposition to the punitive theology of the fathers. The excerpts just quoted arise in para- graphs that celebrate the beauty of Tahiti, the kindness of the native families that have arranged for his comfort, and the fascination of an island that affords endless opportunity for botanic and geologic excursions. The letters contain many passages that celebrate the plenitude of what to a European-American is an exotic, end-of-world beauty, and the fact that his traveling companion is the American painter John La Farge – from whom Adams obtains lessons in the art of water-color – contributes to the visual dimension of his verbal renderings. Nevertheless sorrow and guilt underlie this euphoria and despite its moments of rapt impressionism the writing is ever a testimony to loss. As diary, Adams’s daily entries implicitly acknowledge the finitude of time; as letter, it acknowledges the absence of his correspondent, an object in any case of forbidden desire; and as travelogue, it acknowledges his own absence among scenes disrupted by the suicide of his wife and the complication, afterward, of an impossible attachment.

We may form some idea of the depth of that sorrow from Adams’s description of what it is like for him to receive a diary letter Elizabeth has written to him: “Your letter of Jan. 10-24 arrived here yesterday afternoon,” he reports.

“Long as it is, I think I know it by heart already… I know no new combination of love and angel to offer you, and am reduced to sheer bêtise, which, at a seven thousand mile dilution, is exasperatingly stupid; but you can at least to some degree imagine what sort of emotion I might be likely to feel at having you take me by the hand and carry me on with your daily life till I feel as though I had been with you all the month…” (423). One of the most interesting features of Adams’s diary letters is this sustained relationship with the diary letters of his correspondent, as it enables a confidential sharing, a twinning of subjectivities made possible only by the seven-thousand mile separation, a parallelism of lives that affords vivid sensation but that neither offers a satisfactory relationship nor absolves the correspondent of guilt over assuming an illicit if always virtual intimacy. This intrinsically unsatisfactory relationship is nevertheless a relationship, a surrogate for what does not and cannot exist, supported and constituted by an ongoing generation of text – accounts of Polynesian adventure, expressions of longing, and the narrative of Adams’s circuitous “return” to Elizabeth’s presence.

Given the epistolary dimension of this diary, Adams always implicitly entertains the sensation of being in two places simultaneously; and he recurrently articulates this sensation by referring to pen, paper, and the scenes of reading and writing as

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the conjuration of Elizabeth’s virtual presence. “Do you want my impressions?”

he asks in one such typical invocation. “I don’t believe you do, but it is noon; the day is scorching; we have just breakfasted; I am lying on my bed, trying to keep cool, out of the glare; and why should I not talk to you, even if you go to sleep as I should do in your place” (543). Elsewhere he writes, “In an hour, we are to go and see the King. Till then, I shall stay here, with you” (402). “The truth is that I find pleasure in talking to you,” he affirms, “and I go on doing it, even when I think you asleep” (379). Across oceans and time zones, Adams thus preserves the trope of intimate conversation.

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Given the uncertainties of their relationship – for by virtue of this writing it has entered a new phase and neither party knows where it may lead – the sensation of leading two lives is not yet sustainable. At the end of a month of entries with their lush description and accounts of varied adventure, Adams concludes as follows: “I seal and send this long diary letter, all about myself when I want to write only about you. … As the winter approaches I seem to think more and more about you … and long more to see you. The contrast between my actual life and my thoughts is fantastic. The double life is almost like one’s idea of the next world” (299). From the moment of departure the question of destination had been a troubled one. Given the risks of travel in tropic zones for a European-American over fifty, Adams knows that sudden death is always a possibility, but he has also to consider the likelihood that he will not die, in which case his relationship with Mrs.

Cameron must attain a new status. Three months into his voyage the temporary solace of exotic scene begins to fade as he contemplates a completed itinerary and commences the long journey toward the familiar worlds of Europe and the United States. As he departs Fiji for Australia and Sri Lanka, the phrase “next world” ap- pears in the diary letters with increased regularity. It is his way of asking: what new pact with my old life can I make, and might not death indeed be preferable? On his long return Adams faces this question daily and in each day’s entry and at every port of call seeks some door of escape. Like many New Englanders of Calvinist heritage and agnostic persuasions, Adams took an interest in Eastern mysticism, and in Sri Lanka he pays a visit to the sacred Bo Tree. In his account of this visit his stated desire to escape from the world’s erotic attraction is not insincere. But Nirwana, as he reports, is not achievable. “Sometimes I think that intellectually I am pretty close to it,” he writes, “if isolation from the world’s intellect is Nirwana; but one or two personal interests or affections still bar the last leap to total absorption and silence”

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The personal interest and affection make him impatient to traverse the space that separates him from Elizabeth and his frustration with the slow pace of travel leads to expressions of despair: “At this rate I need not worry about finding you in England; at a ripe old age I shall die on the ocean, and I trust I shall make a quicker voyage to the next world” (521). If reunion with Elizabeth were a simple matter of completing an inbound trajectory, Adams might content himself with biding his time and maintaining his characteristically robust health.

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Increasingly, however, he writes and posts his letters from a virtual “next world”

from which no return is respectable even if technically possible. “The pleasure of seeing you once more overbalances everything else,” he writes from Marseilles, a mere seven hundred kilometers from Elizabeth, who awaits his arrival is Paris,

“but in the depths of my cowardice I feel more than ever the conviction that you cannot care to see one who is so intolerably dead as I am, and that the more you see of such a being, the more sorry you will be that you ever tried to bring him back to life” (549).

The meeting in Paris did not go well: although Elizabeth showered affection on her old friend and spent much time with him during his two-week stay, at no point did they meet privately – always Elizabeth’s daughter or some mutual friend was present. Nothing like the intimacy and expansiveness of their diary letters was achieved in this face-to-face meeting. The trouble was that Adams in person was far from dead. Reflecting on the awkwardness of their reunion after he had left France for England, he observes what must have been clear to Eliza- beth: “no matter how much I may efface myself or how little I may ask, I must always make more demand on you than you can gratify, and you must always have the consciousness that, whatever I may profess, I want more than I can have” (557). Such in the ordinary ways of relationship is the effective formula of rupture.

The disappointment of the Henry Adams-Elizabeth Cameron reunion did not, however, end the relationship. Rather, it clarified the epistolary and metaphysical terms of their intimacy, and until he died in 1918 the exchange of diary letters would persist. It would persist, moreover, with an intensity reflected in his recurrent reference to time and the imminence of death. Adams maintained numerous correspondences in the course of a long life, several in diary letter format, yet in no other correspondence does he write letters as continuous diary entries. On both sides the exchange would generate ongoing incremental records of daily life, private dairies enabled by a sustained epistolary friendship. Voluminous intimate correspondences have existed for centuries, but I question whether an epistolary friendship such as this could have arisen a half-century before it did, for its peculiar density derives, I believe, from its enabling technologies as well as from the expectations and fantasies those technologies foster, and I will conclude this essay by again citing those innovations that increasingly dismantled the oceanic and continental barriers that formerly confined human intimacy to circumscri- bed zones. Here I refer to transoceanic steamship lines, overland rail networks, and efficient federal postal systems that made the swift and copious exchange of letters a feature of everyday life. But I refer as well as to the telegraph and telephone which, even for those who preferred the hand-inscribed epistolary medium, allowed one to imagine instantaneous communication – a phenome- non associated formerly with visions, hallucinations, and prayer – as a model of normal human contact. As I read the diary letters of Henry Adams and Eli- zabeth Cameron, I am struck by how often they write as though their presence to one another in absentia were mediated by something like the Internet – as though their epistolary language contained the fantasy by which the Internet was subsequently invented. The letter that arrives constantly from one’s distant and intimate other, that brings with it representations of a life in real time, a promise

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of life beyond one’s fixed mortal span: this I think is the dream of the Adams/

Cameron diary letters, such dream as our technology realizes in accordance with a craving for emotional and metaphysical satisfactions similar to their own.

Oklahoma State University william.decker@okstate.edu

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