STEPHEN MILLER
269
makes no sense whatsoever. Ernest Samuels, Adams's acute biographer,
says about Adams's generalizations:
"It
is not a question of whether
they are true or not, or even convenient as images, but whether they are
fundamentally intelligible.
In
spite of the prodigious effort of thought
Adams still could not. ..either state his problem or wholly know what
he himself meant."
In
the last decade of his life, Adams still tried to formulate a science
of history and still remained obsessed with Jews. "The atmosphere
really has become a Jew atmosphere," he wrote Gaskell in
1914.
"We
keep Jews far away, and the anti-Jew feeling is quite rabid."
In
1914
Adams wrote Henry James a "melancholy outpouring," as James puts
it, about james's
Notes of a Son and Brother
(1914) .
Adams's letter is
lost, but it probably was similar to the letter he wrote to his friend Eliz–
abeth Cameron: "I've read Henry James's last bundle of memories,
which have reduced me to a dreary pulp. Why did we live? Was that all?
Why was I not born in Central Africa and died young. Poor Henry
James thinks it all real and actually still lives in that dreary, stuffy New–
port and Cambridge with papa James and Charles Norton- and me!"
In
his reply to Adams, James grants that there is an abyss between the
present and the past, but he doesn't see why Adams thereby dismisses the
past and turns away from the present as well. Adams, he implies, is mired
in a sterile pessimism whereas he still takes an interest in things past as
well as present. "I still find my consciousness interesting-under
cultiva–
tion
of the interest... .You see I still, in presence of life (or of what you
deny to be such), have reactions-as many as possible-and the book I
sent you is a proof of them." The generous and endlessly curious mind
of James recoils at Adams's monotonous complacent pessimism.
Addicted to self-pity, obsessed with Jews, and preoccupied with
wringing political and historical answers from science, Adams does not
so much diagnose the twentieth century's diseases as suffer from them.
W E MOURN THE PASSING OF
ELLA WOLFE
1896-2000
A
LONG-TERM SUPPORTER
AND A GOOD FRIEND
