Books: After Us the Deluge

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After seven years, Henry Adams vaulted out of that chair into marriage and out of Boston to Washington. His wife's tragic suicide in 1885 (in a depressed state she took potassium cyanide) sent him barreling off to the ends of the earth: Japan, Samoa, Ceylon. "Positively everything in Japan laughs. The jinrickshaw men laugh while running at full speed five miles with a sun that visibly sizzles their drenched clothes. The women all laugh, but they are obviously wooden dolls, badly made, and can only cackle, clatter . . . and hop or slide in heelless straw sandals across floors . . . I believe the Mikado laughs when his ministers have a cabinet council." One Japanese item was no laughing matter for a Bostonian: "I was a bit aghast when one young woman called my attention to a temple as a remains of phallic worship; but what can one do? . . . One cannot quite ignore the foundations of society."

Pai-Pai Show. In Samoa, Henry Adams found it even harder to keep the mental fig leaf in place. He got mildly squiffed on a coconut brew called kawa. Assured that he wasn't a missionary, the native girls put on a dance. "Five girls came into the light, with a dramatic effect that really I never felt before. Naked to the waist, their rich skins glistened with coconut oil. Around their heads and necks they wore garlands of green leaves in strips, like seaweeds, and these too glistened with oil, as though the girls had come out of the sea. Around their waists, to the knee, they wore leaf-clothes, or lava-lavas . . . They swayed about, clapped their hands, shoulders, legs." Later, Adams was introduced to a local version of the striptease called the pai-pai: "In the pai-pai, the women let their lava-lavas . . . or siapas seem about to fall. The dancer pretends to tighten it, but only opens it so as to show a little more thigh, and fastens it again so low as to show a little more hip. Always turning about and moving with the chorus, she repeats this process . . . showing more legs and hips every time, until the siapa barely hangs on her, and would fall except that she holds it. At last it falls; she turns once or twice more, in full view; then snatches up the siapa and runs away."

The Russian Flail. In Europe, the foundations of society were shaking in a different way. Speculating on strained relations between England and Germany in 1898, Adams winged off one of his many arrows of insight: "So we can foresee a new centralization, of which Russia is one pole, and we the other, with England between." Later, on a visit to Moscow, he concluded: "The sum of my certainty is that America has a very clear century of start over Russia, and that western Europe must follow us for a hundred years, before Russia can swing her flail over the Atlantic."

A polarized world scared Adams less than an atomized one. As early as 1862 he wrote: "Man has mounted science, and is now run away with . . . Some day science may have the existence of mankind in its power, and the human race commit suicide by blowing up the world." By 1901, he was saying: "After us the deluge—or even before!" In February of 1918, he was 80 years old and very tired of "a new society and a new world which is more wild and madder by far than the old one . . ." One month later, he left it.