By ANN ST. MARTIN STOUT
Leaves Are Free
I recently finished reading “Clover Adams: A Gilded and Heartbreaking Life.” Often, if a topic comes onto my radar several times over a brief period, I sit up and take notice.
Mary Carter’s story in the Eagle Times about the memorial to Clover sculpted by Augustus St. Gaudens at the request of her husband Henry Adams, coincided with Mount Royal Academy High School students visiting the Saint-Gaudens National Historical Park in Cornish, New Hampshire. The casting of the memorial, which has come to be known as “Grief,” was depicted in Mount Royal’s recounting of their day.
Within a week, our daughter Julia said she came upon a casting of the sculpture at the National Portrait Gallery in D.C. Then, I discovered that Clover is buried in the Rock Creek Cemetery a block from Julia’s campus.
Author Natalie Dykstra portrayed the life of Clover Adam in her well-researched 2012 book, with much of the story shaped by Clover’s own words, as written in letters to her beloved father.
Clover, who grew up in Boston as Marion Hooper, saw her mother die of a lingering illness, early in her life. The aunt who loved and cared for Clover and her sisters for the next several years, died by suicide when Clover was nine years old. Her father, Robert Hooper, was a singular steadying influence in her life.
Clover was cultured and well-educated, including her desire to learn Greek and other languages. At 28, she married historian and Bostonian Henry Adams, a descendant of two presidents. In a letter to a contemporary before their marriage, Henry refers to Clover as a “bluestocking,” a reference to a well-educated woman who does not fear going against the era’s existing male/female roles. This seemed to be part of Clover’s innate character, possibly due to her years of independence before her late marriage, though she did not push the boundaries too far.
From a materially comfortable life in Boston, with a summer home on Boston’s north shore, to an elegant life in Washington D.C, Clover and Henry were popular both as hosts and as guests. Their routines included Clover aiding Henry in his historic research, horseback riding for pleasure at day’s end, and reading books aloud to one another. They took two extended trips to Europe, one 18 months long.
Clover took up photography as a hobby and discipline, while it was still a fairly new science. She learned how to develop her own glass plate negatives. Important people sat for photographs by Clover with the result that others began asking for her to take their likeness as well.
She had a good eye for composition and kept detailed notes about exposure times, lenses used and more. Her photos are held by the Massachusetts Historical Society. There is no doubt that her photography work was publishable and fine enough to be exhibited, but she demurred to her husband’s preference that she not call attention to herself. Several of Clover’s photos are reproduced in Dykstra’s book.
As the book title suggests, Clover’s life did not end well. With an unmanageable bout of depression following her father’s death (a condition foreshadowed by mood swings in her earlier life) and worsened by Henry’s chaste but wandering eye for a younger woman, Clover was brought to the point of suicide. She drank one of her photography developing chemicals containing cyanide. It was December 1885; she was 42 years old.
Henry, who lived to 80, never remarried, and he and Clover had no children. After a journey to the Orient where he experienced the Buddhist ethos, Henry commissioned Augustus Saint-Gaudens to create the memorial. It was placed on Clover’s grave in March of 1891, six years after her death. Though the monument was never titled, it has become known as “Grief.”
The memorial, along with Dykstra’s book, and Clover’s archived photographs, remain to honor a spirited yet melancholy life.
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