BOOKS
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Adams he had published during his lifetime. It also contains the
most famous of these, "The Expense of Greatness" (1936), already
reprinted several times. In that essay, Blackmur had advanced the
idea that Adams's attempt to find faith and unity, though it led to a
confession of ignorance and failure, was somehow also a testament
which was "as near the actual representation of unity as the
individual mind can come." Adams, "like Spinoza," he said, "was
god-intoxicated, like Pascal god-ridden." Blackmur seems to have
continued to feel that Adam's admiration of the culture of the twelfth
century, which had found centrality in the worship of the Virgin of
Chartres, was part of a many-times-repeated effort to "return" to the
convictions of religion.
It is easy to see how Blackmur himself, writing in the forties and
fifties of this century, felt a neoconservative nostalgia for lost reli–
gious and lost social faiths, and found the "echo" of them in Adams.
But Adams's mind, I believe, was less nostalgic than ironic in his
evocation of the past. Yes, he knew himself to be a "failure," as the
Education
repeatedly says. Unlike his ancestors, who had only been
handicapped by scruple and material circumstances from full
identification with society's total aims, Adams had withdrawn from a
social mass he considered anarchic. He judged his education
to
have
been a failure, and his
Education
a failed work which he had printed
for a few friends who were invited to emend. Above all, he had
"failed" to find unity - or intention - in the universe at large. But the
failure was really society's and Nature's for being, at last, perceived
as formless and directionless, as inadequate to meet the human
dream of meaning. Adams's mind, I think, was more truly contem–
porary than Blackmur allowed himself to perceive . I find him
agonized not so much by the nineteenth century anguish of loss of
faith as by the modern existentialist dilemma which takes one a
further step: if the center is lost and cannot be recovered, what then?
Adams's third-person autobiography asserts an existential sur–
render of the "I" as well as of divine presence. His preface rejects the
example of Rousseau who, in his
Corifessions,
"erected a monument of
warning against the ego" and speaks instead of a "manikin" about
whom "the toilet of education was to be draped." These clothes of
personal existence do not disguise an essential Carlylean self whom
we can hope to discover, but a hollow lay figure which means
nothing without its clothes, without behavior, experience. "Tu n'es
rien d'autre que ta vie," it is said in
Huis Ctos.
If Adams's life is to be
read as containing an essence of aspiration more significant than his
