Yankee Gothic

By R.Z. Sheppard

CLOVER by Otto Friedrich Simon & Schuster; 381 pages; $12.95

One of the more opulent souvenirs of the Bicentennial was educational television's $6.7 million, 13-part series, The Adams Chronicles, a generational saga of early America's most distinguished family. From the patriarchal John and the vigorous John Quincy, viewers could follow the thinning of bloodlines and the refining of sensibilities. In Part 12, young Henry Adams (1838-1918) meets his future wife Clover Hooper at the Harvard Library. "Plato! In the original!" exclaims Henry as he glimpses the spine of Clover's book. "Well," she replies, "I don't like translations."

Neither does Otto Friedrich, a senior editor of TIME and chronicler of such endings as the last days of the Saturday Evening Post (Decline and Fall) and the Weimar Republic (Before the Deluge). The source of Henry and Clover's meeting, he notes, is not to be found in historical documents but rather in the histrionic imagination of a scriptwriter. Friedrich is uncompromising in his refusal to create drama where there is no supporting evidence. When the situation warrants it, however, he is not above melodrama. At noon on Dec. 6, 1885, Henry Adams entered Clover's bedroom to announce a caller:

"He found her lying on the rug before the fire. Clover? She must have fainted. Henry knelt down. There was a strange smell. One of the chemicals that she used for her photography. Potassium cyanide. From the bottle lying there. Henry picked up the body, still warm, soft, heavy, and dragged it over to the sofa. Clover did not open her eyes. Did not answer him. Did not explain. Did not move."

Until now, no one has attempted to explain why Clover killed herself. Adams never writes about his wife in his autobiography. From outward appearances, theirs was a childless union of matched temperaments enjoying similar tastes, opinions and well-bred friends in Boston, Washington and London. Friedrich fills that gap with a fresh supply of letters, observations and a perceptive linkage of occurrences that could have turned Clover's basic melancholia into self-destruction.

Faced with the mysteries of suicide, Friedrich tentatively offers such explanations as Freud's death drive and Emile Durkheim's theory that with the decline of Christian faith in the 19th century, suicide ceased to be a damnable act. The author seems to share Henry Adams' preference for the European 12th century and its security of belief as expressed in the glory of Gothic architecture. He does not assert that descriptions of the dark side of the Yankee mind, the haunted battlefields of the Civil War and the avarice of the Gilded Age as the disturbing context of Henry's and Clover's lives suggest a climate of deepening despair. It is the climate of this richly allusive book, whose central characters are part of the nation's root and fiber, though they lived against the American grain.

-- R.Z. Sheppard

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