264
PARTISAN REVIEW
Adams's friends found his cosmic pessimism irritating. Adams "could
be delightful" as a companion on a walk, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.
said, "but when I called at his house and he was posing to himself as the
old cardinal he would turn everything to dust and ashes." Adams's older
brother, Charles Francis Adams, Jr., complained that his two younger
brothers-Henry and Brooks-drove him "nearly wild by talking
through their hats on things in general." James, who did not see Adams
again until 1891, also disliked Adams's pessimism. "I like him," James
said, "but suffer from his monotonous disappointed pessimism."
Adams, though, apparently enjoyed James's company, but he wasn't
interested in James's novels . In 1878 he wrote his close friend Charles
Milnes Gaskell: "I am glad you liked Harry James. He has many good
points. I never read my friends' books so that I may express no opinions
about them." Adams did read
Daisy Miller,
which he liked, but he was
most affected by
William Wetmore Story and His Friends
(1903)- a
biography that James dashed off in two months to fulfill an obligation.
The book is less a biography of Story, who was a dilettante expatriate
sculptor whom James held in low esteem, than a series of "recollec–
tions," as James puts it, of the Rome in which Story lived (and James
often visited) and the Boston of Story's, James's, and Adams's youth.
Writing to James about the book, Adams throws in a dash of cosmic
pessimism that is hard to decipher: "We have reached a time of solar
antiquity when nothing matters, but still we feel what used to be called
the law of gravitation, mass, or attraction, and obey it." In the next para–
graph he says something startling: James's book is his book. "Verily I
believe I wrote it. Except your specialty of style, it is me." Adams's point,
which he explains in the next paragraph, is that James's "recollection" is
Adams's own story and the story of their generation: "Harvard College
and Unitarianism kept us all shallow. We knew nothing-no! but really
nothing! of the world. One cannot exaggerate the profundity of igno–
rance of Story in becoming a sculptor, or Sumner in becoming a states–
man, or Emerson in becoming a philosopher." After mentioning several
other names, Adams drives home his point by saying: "So you have writ–
ten not Story's life, but your own and mine,-pure autobiography,- the
more keen for what is beneath, implied, intelligible, only to me, and half
a dozen other people still living....You treat us gently and kindly, like a
surgeon, and I feel your knife in my ribs."
James didn't think he was a failure, and he didn't think Boston had
failed him in the sense that Adams had suggested. He told Adams that
Story's life pushed him "to conclusions less grim, as I may call them,
than in your case." He also said that all biographies tend to make a
