HENRY ADAMS

by R. P. Blackmur ‧ RELEASE DATE: May 15, 1980

Long fragments of a critical-biographical study left incomplete at Blackmur's death in 1965: as an entity, much of it stimulating, some of it striking, but not the major achievement its editor claims. Blackmur valued Adams not just as a brilliant artist, a fertile thinker, and an archetypal tragic individual, but also, and perhaps foremost, as an alter ego. He couldn't get Adams out of his mind: he published eleven articles on Adams over a 24-year period (1931-55), and, as this collection shows, he kept returning to the Education and Mont-Saint-Michel and Chartres, to wrestle with Adams and to refine his own thinking in the process. Still, he withheld the bulk of his manuscripts from publication--including the book-length excerpt ""The Virgin and the Dynamo""--and with reason. Except in the previously printed essays there's not much orderly argument, just a series of paraphrases and explications du texte. Blackmur makes no reference at all to secondary sources on Adams, not even to Ernest Samuels' monumental biography, and he sometimes writes in a gnomic, elusive style--as if he were talking to himself. Nonetheless, readers with a modicum of patience will find some admirable things in these remains, In ""The Expense of Greatness"" Blackmur speaks eloquently of Adams' life as a failure. (""A genuine failure comes hard and slow, and, as in a tragedy, is only fully realized at the end."") The quality be especially prizes in Adams is his ""scrupulousness,"" i.e., his combination of creative belief in, and critical distance from, his ""unifying notions and the human aspirations he was able to express under them."" In the strongest sustained piece, ""King Richard's Prison Song,"" Blackmur gives a moving description of Adams' last years, concentrating on his passion for medieval French music and in particular for the poem written in prison by Richard Coeur de Lion, which Adams came to view as an ""objective and actualizing symbol of his own suffering."" A noble, if imperfect, example of old-fashioned humanistic scholarship.

Pub Date: May 15, 1980

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1980

Categories: NONFICTION