To treat Henry Adams as the usual fin-de-siècle, slowly dying scion of a defunct American dynasty, à la ‘Marxian’
interpretation of literature, is obviously a mistake. The great regret is that Adams did not live ten years more than eighty to write down such a force as Lenin.
—Louis Zukofsky The nineteenth century saw a succession of historicizing revivals, of which the assorted Gothic ones were only a few. Adams’s embrace of the Middle Ages represented a
104 The Juggler of Notre Dame and the Medievalizing of Modernity: Volume 3
conscious turn from the neoclassicism, born of the Enlightenment, that cocooned him in Washington. The city around him had already advanced far on its way to being the theme park of pseudoancient architecture that it remains today. A crux of the age was to straighten out whether the antiquity was that of republican or imperial Rome.
Government buildings demanded authorization through association with the epochs in which the institutions they embodied had supposedly been invented. Hence the Federal-period architecture, in which torchbearers such as Thomas Jefferson sought inspiration from the classical ages of Greece and Rome for creating and authenticating an identity for the republic that they had founded and endeavored to perpetuate. To take only three examples, consider the domed Capitol that was expanded periodically, from 1793 through the mid-nineteenth century; the dagger-pointed Washington Monument to honor the founding president, begun in 1848 and completed in 1884;
and the classical Doric temple to commemorate another head of state, the Lincoln Memorial, initiated in 1914 and dedicated in 1922. This threesome helped to define the capital as it took shape during Adams’s time of residence there.
Like John Ruskin and William Morris before him, but in his own distinctive fashion, Adams prospected in the Middle Ages for difference. In it he sought a different past, a different set of values, and a different architecture to inspire and guide him. His choice of a period upon which to model his present may seem paradoxical, and he took a likewise contrarian approach to publication. Bucking the process of commoditization by which the medieval era was being purveyed to mass audiences, he clung instead, with the impracticality of a knight on a quest, or a jongleur in an abbey, to self-financing a limited edition for distribution without charge. In forswearing notoriety, he once again feigned that he was a medieval monk. Like Gautier de Coinci or the anonymous poet of Our Lady’s Tumbler, he worked unpaid for the Virgin.
Adams’s response to the transition from Romanesque to Gothic was colored by his atavism. In imagining the builders of the medieval churches and the folk who had once worshiped in them, he fantasized that he could detect his forebears. In the process, he played at being a Norman of the twelfth century. Ruskin too had flashes of pride in the architectural past of his nation or region. The Englishman enjoined his readers to look within, where they could find the Middle Ages, by “tracing out this grey, shadowy, many-pinnacled image of the Gothic spirit within us; and discerning what fellowship there is between it and our Northern hearts.” Adams transplanted Ruskin’s identification with the Gothic past into the radically different soil and society of his own country.
Adams’s moony identification with the English and Normans of old is at once romantic and right wing. It rests upon historical misconceptions that may have appeared ill-considered already in his time and that certainly look that way today. His conception of feudalism fails to spot everything that is not benign about that system.
Even uglier is the relationship between his ethnic nostalgia about the past and his racial and religious blinders about the present. The high-principled qualities that
he ascribed to Englishness and Normanness are all well and good. Yet his gusto for these supposed past races grew in direct proportion to his dyspeptic distrust of actual modern-day outsiders. Looking at his own nation, he succumbed to nativism. In his doomsaying, he expressed the opinion that recent immigrants, such as Irish and Jewish ones, posed a threat to the integrity of the United States. He aired his anti-Semitism more overtly as he aged. At least once he drew a likeness between aspects of the high Gothic style that he disliked and qualities of financial cupidity and speculation that he ascribed to Jews.
If Mont Saint Michel and Chartres foundered, it capsized owing to the peculiarities of Adams’s circumstances. He came by his disposition naturally and perhaps even hereditarily. Whatever the cause, his character combined an ambition for proximity to the highest political offices with a predisposition to take inherently impolitic stands.
He moved to Washington less like a white knight than like a hermit or anchorite, who set up house across from what would be regarded later fleetingly as Camelot. He had the tragic misfortune to lose his wife to depression-driven suicide, and subsequently to become lovesick for a woman who despite coyly disingenuous signals to the contrary would never accept him as lover or husband. Then again, he found the means within himself to channel the initial loss and the subsequent deprivation into meditations.
The resultant ruminations can enthrall us more than one century afterward. I, for one, hesitate to consider such a payoff as promise unfulfilled.
Adams had inherited personal characteristics and undergone unique vicissitudes that rendered him too idiosyncratic to typify his times or represent his contemporaries.
For all that, he had a lucidity of insight, breadth of knowledge and experience, and intensity of expression that enabled him to draw penetrating comparisons between his own days and those of seven or eight centuries earlier. He regarded all societies as resting upon fictions that ultimately came up short. Yet he numbered the figments upon which twelfth-century France was built among the best that humanity has ever devised.
Let us comb through the cultural forces that led to the making of the American Middle Ages in which Henry Adams participated. Boston had seen the start of a revolution once already, and now its Gothic revivalists made it the seedbed for a medievalizing revolt. In their rebellion, literature and architecture went hand in hand. From the days of romanticism down to the present, the fates of literature and architecture have seldom if ever intertwined as they have done in Gothicism. The Gothic arrival in the first three decades of the twentieth century may have been flawed sometimes in its motivation, but the buildings remain an important component in the landscapes of cities and campuses through the North American continent. The story deserves a fuller telling.