Andrew Delbanco: Henry Adams, Bitter Old Man

Some people are hard to imagine as ever having been young. When Henry Adams referred to himself in old age as an "octogenarian rat," it was as if he had finally arrived at the role for which he had rehearsed all his life: the superannuated pest. It pleased him to witness age triumphing over youth, as when he explained in a letter to his niece how the financier Levi P. Morton, a man "hovering in or about the nineties," survived a railroad accident, then

crawled out from the dead bodies through an upper window, got a cab nearby, drove two hours, caught another train, and got to Paris at eleven o'clock, while his daughters were turning over all the corpses on the field to find him. There's some style in that--when your daughters are handsome and named Edith Swansneck or something, and adore kings or dukes. The old man knew better than to be killed, and leave his daughters ten million apiece. No Lear about him!

In an earlier letter to the Harvard literatus Barrett Wendell, Adams looked back at how the public had received his writings over his lifetime, comparing himself to a man who throws his dog into the Mississippi River "for the pleasure of making a splash," only to discover that "the river ... drowns the dog."

This is the familiar Adams with whom Robert Lowell felt the special solidarity (in a recently published letter to Elizabeth Bishop) of one disaffected Brahmin for another:

I find the blighting tone of Henry Adams, my old Bible, a terrible bore, coals to Newcastle, though I wouldn't want anyone else to say it.
I guess what is so good about him is that he did too, and knew it was a real illness in him--one he loved to exploit. I think his tone is a state anyone from our background should go through to be honest and alive, and then drop. I suspect anyone who hasn't been that bitter.
Still, staying there is like calling malaria life. I guess what I mean is that there was a real malaria under the jokes, exaggerations, and epigrams, a sort of Baudelairian gallantry. But who could want what Empson says somewhere to learn a style from a despair?...