Month: January 2012

This is the third in a series of posts between myself and Jennifer Howard about Henry Adams’ 1880 novel, Democracy. Read her first post.

Jennifer,

Your point about Madeleine’s transgression is right, and, yes, a little chilling: Her mistake isn’t so much getting stuck between two romantic rivals, Ratcliffe and Carrington, but within the politics that drive the competition between them in the first place. Like you, I can try read Democracy as a romance, but recognize that doing so only goes so far because—as you point out, Adams can be so black-hearted. Maybe he’s set the tone for the serious novel about Washington politics, which has to strip itself of optimism lest you come off as a Pollyanna. I’m reading Thomas Mallon‘s forthcoming Watergate—a novel that owes a lot to Democracy, I think, and which also reminded me of the imposing statue that Adams commissioned for his wife’s grave marker. It’s jet black, scoured clean of anything that suggests redemption, and evokes bottomless grief. And yet, when ever I wind up in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, I always make a point to visit the replica there. That’s just the kind of person he was.

So while I want to be reassuring and say that there are points where Adams wants to give democracy a chance, I don’t think his heart was ever in it—there’s no silver lining he can’t find a storm cloud in. But I’ve wondered, perhaps like you, why I found the novel so enjoyable in spite of all that, because I wouldn’t enjoy a novel that simply took whacks at D.C., however cleverly.

I think a couple of things are at play—aside from Adams’ quick wit, which I mentioned in my first post about the book. Adams can also brandish what I suppose you might call slow wit, a way of setting a scene that captures both its beauty and it complexity. Think of the virtuoso opening paragraph of chapter six, when we finally escape the airless gloom of D.C. and head down the Potomac to Mount Vernon. The passage shifts from charming and pastoral—“one is conscious of walking in an atmosphere that is warm, palpable, radiant with possibilities.” Soon enough, though, Adams reminds us that however pretty Virginia might be in February, “at no other season is there so much [guile].… Wealth, office, power are at auction. Who bids highest? Who hates with most venom? Who intrigues with most skill? Who has done the dirtiest, the meanest, the darkest, and the most, political work?” [58]

I won’t try to convince you that this is proof that Adams is an upbeat guy because he can appreciate D.C. in spring just like you and I can. But I do think the scene exists because Adams wants to remind us that he’s operating with a moral compass—by bringing his characters out into the outdoors, he highlights the immorality of what’s going on back in the capitol, and frames the Ratcliffe’s venality as not just as a matter of breaking the law but as a kind of crime against nature.

Madeleine herself exemplifies this kind of push-and-pull, trapped as she is between a culture of corruption and her own better nature. About midway through the novel she makes a crucial observation:

Underneath the scum floating on the surface of politics, Madeleine felt that there was a sort of healthy ocean current of honest purpose, which swept the scum before it, and kept the mass pure. [98]

Of course, later in the novel she’ll make a discovery about Ratcliffe that’s proof that the place is just scummed up again. But I think the fact that she makes that discovery is part of Adams’ point: D.C. is not in a downward spiral so much as a state of constant flux, an ugly but essential process of scumming and de-scumming. For all the criticism people make about reformers throughout the book, nobody suggests that the reformers’ instinct will ever be absent in the capitol.

And that’s the root of Madeleine’s heroism: Adams brings her to the very edge of the corruption she observes, but never lets her fall off the cliff. That feeling is never more clear to me than in the moments after Ratcliffe delivers what may be the most cynical and calculating marriage proposal in all of literature. She’s “fitted better than any woman I ever saw, for public duties,” he tells her. “Your place is there. You belong among those who exercise an influence beyond their time.” [154] Setting aside her eventual decision (and we’ll get to that when we talk about the book’s climax, I suspect), Madeleine is well aware of what she’s getting sucked into, and the dangers inherent in it. Adams describes the question being “presented to her face like a pistol.”[158]

So there’s your bright side, though I admit it’s pretty dim: In Madeleine we’re rooting for an uncalculating intelligence and (to use a word that wasn’t in use in Adams’ time) self-actualization. She’s our hero because, unlike so many around her, she “dissected her own feelings and was always wondering whether they were real or not.” [108]

But we’ve barely gotten past the three characters at the core of the plot. What did you make of some of others swimming around the narrative, like Madeleine’s sister, Sybil, or Lords Dunbeg and Skye, or Victoria Dare, or Hartbeest Schneidekoupon? What role are they playing? Comic relief? Different degrees of striving in a status-obsessed city?

This is the first post in a discussion on Jennifer Howard‘s blog and mine about Henry Adams‘ 1880 novel, Democracy. For more background, you can read my introductory post as well as Jennifer’s.

Jennifer,

So, why did we decide to do this again? Right: We were both talking about the gaps in our reading when it comes to novels about Washington, D.C. Though I’m not the native you are—I moved here in 2007—I’ve tried to catch up as best I can with the city’s literary background. I’m left with mixed feelings. I admire Ward Just, though his fiction mostly sticks to legislators and journalists; Edward P. Jones has written brilliant stories set in the District, so brilliant I keep wishing he’d write a District-set novel to match The Known World; Christopher Buckley can be very funny when he skewers the town, but he does it with a very broad satirical brush. In the same way D.C. has a kind of unstable, not-quite-there status as a non-state, there seems to be a great novel about the District that’s still waiting to be written.

Is Democracy that book? Maybe it’s too old or specific in focus to qualify itself, but it does clear a very high hurdle in making legislative parrying entertaining. Writing about Democracy in 2010, Christopher Hitchens identified one problem with writing about the federal D.C. that trips up a lot of writers (or perhaps prompts them to avoid the subject altogether): “Washington is and always has been irretrievably bogged down in process,” he writes. “And process doesn’t generally make for electrifying prose.” What struck me almost immediately about Adams’ novel is that while it doesn’t exactly make process electrifying, he can often makes it very funny. The tone of the novel seems exactly right for a wonkish culture that functions through scheming and horse-trading but dresses it up in proclamations of egalitarianism and high values. Once you’ve finished it, it’s clear that the first laugh line in the book is the title of the book itself; it ought to be in scare quotes (“Democracy”) to make clear that Adams was mocking anybody who tried to apply the term to America with a straight face.*

Some of the jokes are straight gags that could have come out of Twain. The novel’s heroine, Madeleine Lightfoot Lee, is a widow arriving from New York to understand Washington’s culture in general and its power structure in particular, and we learn early that she “had not entered a church in years; she said it gave her unchristian feelings.” [11] Pondering Ratcliffe, one of the Senators who vies for her attention and affections, Adams writes that “she wanted to understand this man, to turn him inside out; to experiment on him and use him as young physiologists use frogs and kittens.” [20] Later, when Madeleine and Ratcliffe discuss Charles Darwin, she patiently tolerates the Senator’s puffing about how highly evolved legislators are as a class, before demolishing him with one line: “You are rather hard on the monkeys.” [52]

The fact that the protagonist of the novel is a woman matters a lot when it comes to the book’s sense of humor, I think. For one thing, seeing the novel from a woman’s perspective automatically makes it an outsider’s narrative, and as such open to being written as a kind of anthropology report from a strange land. (It wasn’t until 1917 that Congress had an elected female legislator—Jeannette Rankin, who just happened to be born the same year Democracy was published.)

But also, Madeleine being a woman—and an unattached one at that—amplifies the preening and egotism that consume so many of the powerful men in the novel. Part of the fun in that is watching how, over time, these men become more candid about Washington’s machinations in her presence—she hardly has to lift a finger to get these frogs dissected. In one early scene, Ratcliffe and some colleagues are gathered in Madeleine’s home, and she asks the question at the heart of the novel: “Is a respectable government impossible in a democracy?” It’s a formal parlor-chat question, and Ratcliffe responds in kind, diplomatically suggesting that if you “try to purify the government artifically…you only aggravate failure.” Another guest deems it a “very statesmanlike reply,” [37] but Adams notes the “shade of mockery” in his voice—it’s clear Ratcliffe isn’t being honest. A little later, at another party, Ratcliffe will be: “If our virtue won’t answer our purpose, we must use vice, or our opponents will put us out of office, and this was as true in Washington’s day as it is now, and always will be,” [71] he tells a fellow senator. Another guest wants to change the subject—“the conversation verges on treason,” he says. No mocking tones or shades thereof are identified; before the book is half finished Madeleine has cut through the polite gestures and found the cynicism and corrosion at the heart of the place.

There’s more to say about that, especially when it comes to some of the discoveries that Madeleine makes about Ratcliffe and his rival Carrington, and in the romantic subplots involving Madeleine and her sister, Sibyl. But I’ve a typed enough already. Your turn, Jennifer: Did the book make you laugh? Could this story have worked with a male lead?

*Adams, who wrote the book anonymously and wasn’t identified as its author until 35 years after it came out, had reasons to be bitter. Slate ran a fine backgrounder on Adams and the book last year.

I’ve never tried hosting a group read on this blog. That’s partly because I don’t want to apply any more structure to writing-I-do-for-free than I have to, and partly because I haven’t found the a book that seemed right for that kind of project. But starting January 22 I’d like to give it a try: With the help of my friend Jennifer Howard, a reporter at the Chronicle of Higher Education and occasional Bookslut blogger, I’ll be devoting a couple of weeks to posting about Henry Adams‘ 1880 novel about Washington, D.C., politics, Democracy.

Jennifer and I came up with this idea last fall, when were chatting on Twitter about D.C. novels that a) we haven’t read and b) most eagerly wanted to get to. Democracy topped the list mainly because it’s reputed to (still) be among the most spot-on portraits of political maneuvering in the nation’s capital. Having since finished it, I can say there are plenty of other reasons to read it too: It’s wickedly funny, makes observations about D.C.’s nonpolitical life that still apply today, and couches all this in a well-turned romantic tale. (Though, this being a D.C. novel, the romance and the politics tend to get mucked together.)

We’ll post back and forth on our blogs, working with the Library of America’s Adams anthology. Of course, the novel is easily had for free. Questions? Leave ’em in the comments. Regardless, I hope you’ll join us, whether the novel is long familiar to you or completely new.