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PARTISAN REVI EW
To see just how controversial Byrd's treatment is one can compare it
to, at the other end of the spectrum, Edward Chalfant's biography of
Adams,
Better in Darkness
(1994).
He asserts that reading the novel in
the light of Clover's suicide is "egregiously mistaken, as well as lugubri–
ous." He sees it as a book written by "a happily married person for
another happily married person." In Chalfant's view, after reading
George Eliot's
Middlemarch
and Hawthorne's
The Scarlet Letter,
Adams and Clover were "in a position to imagine his writing a novel
truly Clover's" that would show an American woman rejecting a self–
centered clergyman because of her agnostic lack of Christian belief.
Cha lfant insists, moreover, that though it was "written with her knowl–
edge" and "was designed to express her thoughts and feelings" as an
agnostic, the novel's heroine must be seen as "exclusively and only" the
fictional Esther, not the actual Clover. This claim is excessive, but it is
at least true that whatever the private subtext of the novel may have
been, its public text was a novel of ideas in which the characters (loosely
linked to actual persons whom Adams knew) are engaged in discussions
about science, religion, and art. Neither Byrd nor Chalfant, however,
make anything out of that.
In
191I
Adams told Clover's niece that he was the author of
Esther,
and Chalfant cites her plausible belief that she didn't see how Adams
could have written it without his wife knowing about it. She had, after
all, participated in the secret of his authorship of
Democracy.
Chalfant
has no evidence, however, for his dogmatic claim that Adams and
Clover conceived the novel together, nor can he so clearly separate the
heroine from Clover. Esther's devotion to her father and her depression
after his death can be paired with Clover's attachment to her own father,
whose death precipitated her clinically severe depression. (Perhaps a
genetic trait was involved, for her sister, shortly afterwards, also com–
mitted suicide.) Trist's subtext for
Esther
is supported in
Grant
when
Elizabeth Cameron points out to him that Clover and her father are
inseparable: "It's a wonder Henry isn't jealous." Rather than being jeal–
ous, however, he may have been perceptive enough to foresee in his
novel the psychological danger of her dependence on her father.
Adams's friend Clarence King told him that Esther should have
jumped into Niagra when she visited the Falls, given the conflict
between her love for the minister and her refusal to pretend to a faith
she did not have. King reported that Adams said, "Certainly she would
but I could not suggest it." Chalfant, as if he were telepathic, interprets
this reply as a "half assent" that conceals an actual "disagreement in
fact." Nor does he cite Adams's own statement, made a year after
