"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."

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.

*Wit, author of The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table, and father of Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr.

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