Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams (review)

Abstract

194 biography Vol. 17, No. 2 honor of rescuing a fallen comrade, however suicidal the risks. If despite his skills he was captured, torture followed" (205). In exchange for his devotion, she sustained his creativity. Her personal authority made possible his "Age of Certainty," as he turned to her for "truth and its accompanying poetic authority" (214). Like Riding's ideal in one of her best poems, "After So Much Loss," Baker has maintained the "difficult balance" between taking Riding at her own word and judging her. Riding emerges as a serious poet who attempted to unite her moral and aesthetic creeds. Baker demonstrates that Riding's life is important because of the poetry she wrote. As Baker's excerpts show, Riding's best poems extract buried meanings from familiar words by using them in unfamiliar grammatical positions. Despite the controlled surface of her rigorous poems, their austerity betrays turmoil below. Her poems express the depth of her feelings by the intensity of the effort necessary to repress them. As Baker shows, Riding's demand that we read her poems "literally, literally , literally" inevitably invites the opposite. Joyce Wexler Loyola University of Chicago Joanne Jacobson, Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1992. xii + 161 pp. $43.50 (cloth), $14.95 (paper) Although he has long borne the status of a canonized figure, Henry Adams has always proved a difficult writer to define. The author of political journalism, scholarly monographs , biographies, novels, a multi-volume national history, a memoir of Tahiti under colonial rule, a lyric meditation on medieval France, poems, autobiography, and speculation in the line of "scientific history," Adams never committed himself to a single major genre and his signal achievements are commonly perceived to divide between disciplinary camps. While historians have justly revered The History of the United States during the Administrations of Jefferson and Madison, literary critics have chiefly focused on Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. Yet Adams specialists have ever affirmed the need to approach his oeuvre comprehensively , and with the publication, in 1988, of the last three volumes of the Harvard Letters of Henry Adams, readers have possessed enhanced opportunity to follow the evolution of Adams's authorship as it appears in the one genre that he practiced continuously throughout his life. By providing an astute réévaluation of that authorship through close analysis of his practice as an epistolarian, Authority and Alliance in the Letters of Henry Adams confirms the centrality of Adams's letters in any consideration of his career. An outstanding contribution to the study of Henry Adams, this book, which also discusses the letter writing of Walt Whitman and Alice James, persuasively urges us to reconsider the importance of the letter to the study of literature and culture. Jacobson explores Adams's letter writing as it develops in the context of his major correspondences—those conducted with brothers Charles Francis Adams, Jr. and Brooks Adams, with his upper-class British friend Charles Milnes Gaskell, with John Hay, Ambassador to England and later Secretary of State, and with Elizabeth Cameron and her daughter, Martha, who figured importantly in Adams's life after the suicide of his wife in 1885. The book examines, in turn, the strategies Adams employed to establish parity with his correspondents, to create alliances through his REVIEWS 195 ability to construct a language of shared attitude, and to generate autonomous private worlds constituted by the text of the letter exchange. Jacobson concludes by considering the relationship Adams's letter writing bears to his more public authorship, especially as the latter is enacted in the novels Democracy and Esther, and in the late masterpieces , Mont Saint Michel and Chartres and The Education of Henry Adams. Throughout the book Jacobson treats the letter as writing fraught with tension, both as a document exchanged within the private world of correspondents and as a text that establishes itself in opposition to a public world outside of the exchange. "Authority" (the assertion of one's text as empowered to "author reality") and "alliance " (the construction of readerships in which that text carries weight) are for Jacobson key terms in the...