Books: After Us the Deluge

THE SELECTED LETTERS OF HENRY ADAMS (279 pp.)—Edited by Newton Arvin —Farrar, Straus & Young ($3.50).

As every American boy knows, he may grow up to be President. But very few boys plan on it; only one, perhaps, ever took it for granted. Young Henry Adams thought that being President was the family trade. It was an easy mistake for him to make. His great-grandfather, John Adams, had been the second President of the U.S., his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, the sixth. His father, Charles Francis Adams, was a distinguished Ambassador to Great Britain (1861-68), but barely came within flirting distance of the White House. The only political mandate little (5 ft. 4 in.) Henry Adams ever received was for an occasional dinner with Theodore Roosevelt, whom he half scornfully dubbed "Loonatic Teddy."

Jilted Lover. A proud man from a proud clan, Henry Adams never quite reconciled himself to the fact that he and his were through setting up White Housekeeping. He adopted the tone of the jilted lover and always spoke through the mask of failure.

It was a bit of a pose. With his fine and nimble mind, he copped enough of life's prizes to satisfy half a dozen ordinary men. As a journalist, he tossed off articles lively as hand grenades. As history professor at Harvard (1870-77), he launched the first graduate studies in history in the U.S. As a practicing historian, he wrote a classic, nine-volume study of the Jefferson-Madison administration. He hobnobbed with the great, picked every first-rate brain of the Victorian era, traveled from the South Seas to the Arctic Circle, and finally totted up the findings of a lifetime in his pessimistic masterpiece, The Education of Henry Adams.

Even if Adams had done none of these things, one other achievement would stamp him with the stripe of genius: his wonderful letters. To those who automatically pigeonhole Adams as a crotchety Cassandra, Biographer-Critic Newton Arvin's springy sampling of the voluminous correspondence will come as an eye opener. Tart as alum and economical as Japanese prints, the letters also spill over with sensuous responses to life as scandalous in a proper Bostonian as living on capital.

Boston's Blight. Secretly, Henry Adams yearned to be an improper Bostonian. He dragged the ball & chain of his birth with him wherever he went, but he always recognized it for the burden it was. "Boston is a curious place. Its business in life is to breed and to educate. The parent lives for his children; the child, when educated himself, becomes a parent, or becomes an educator, or is both . . . Nothing ever comes of it all. There is no society worth the name, no wit, no intellectual energy . . . Everything is respectable, and nothing amusing. There are no outlaws. There are not only no convictions, but no strong wants. Dr. Holmes* . . . is allowed to talk as he will—wild atheism commonly —and no one objects. I am allowed to sit in my chair at Harvard College and rail at everything which the college respects, and no one cares."