Many great artists have had at least intermittent doubts about
their own abilities. But The Education of Henry Adams is surely
one of the few masterpieces to issue directly from a raging
inferiority complex. The author, to be sure, had bigger shoes to
fill than most of us. Both his grandher and great-grandher
were U.S. presidents. His her, a relative underachiever,
scraped by as a member of Congress and ambassador to the Court
of St. James. But young Henry, born in Boston in 1838, was
destined for a walk-on role in his nation's history--and seemed
alarmingly aware of the fact from the time he was an adolescent.
It gets worse. For the author could neither match his exalted
ancestors nor dismiss them as dusty relics--he was an Adams,
after all, formed from the same 18th-century clay. "The
atmosphere of education in which he lived was colonial," we are
told,
revolutionary, almost Cromwellian, as though he were steeped,
from his greatest grandmother's birth, in the odor of political
crime. Resistance to something was the law of New England
nature; the boy looked out on the world with the instinct of
resistance; for numberless generations his predecessors had
viewed the world chiefly as a thing to be reformed, filled with
evil forces to be abolished, and they saw no reason to suppose
that they had wholly succeeded in the abolition; the duty was
unchanged. Here, as always, Adams tells his story in a
third-person voice that can seem almost extranetary in its
detachment. Yet there's also an undercurrent of melancholy and
amusement--and wonder at the specific details of what was already
a lost world. Continuing his uphill conquest of the learning
curve, Adams attended Harvard, which didn't do much for him.
("The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin
everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.") Then, after a
-and-sausage-scented spell as a graduate student in Berlin,
he followed his her to Washington, D.C., in 1860. There he
might have remained--bogged down in "the same rude colony ...
camped in the same forest, with the same unfinished Greek
temples for workrooms, and sloughs for roads"--had not the Civil
War sent Adams père et fils to London. Henry sat on the
sidelines throughout the conflict, serving as his her's
private secretary and anxiously negotiating the minefields of
English society. He then returned home and commenced a long
career as a journalist, historian, novelist, and peripheral
participant in the political process--a kind of mouthpiece for
what remained of the New England conscience.
He was not, by any measure but his own, a failure. And the
proof of the pudding is The Education of Henry Adams itself,
which remains among the oddest and most enlightening books in
American literature. It contains thousands of memorable
one-liners about politics, morality, culture, and transatlantic
relations: "The American mind exasperated the European as a
buzz-saw might exasperate a pine forest." There are astonishing
glimpses of the high and mighty: "He saw a long, awkward figure;
a plain, ploughed face; a mind, absent in part, and in part
evidently worried by white kid gloves; features that expressed
neither self-satisfaction nor any other familiar Americanism..."
(That would be Abraham Lincoln; the "melancholy function" his
Inaugural Ball.) But most of all, Adams's book is a brilliant
account of how his own sensibility came to be. A literary
landmark from the moment it first appeared, the Autobiography
confers upon its author precisely that prize he felt had always
eluded him: success. --James Marcus
- Used Book in Good Condition.