Me, Myself and I
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‘The Education of Henry Adams’ (Massachusetts Historical Society: 500 pp., $34.95) is one of the oddest and most wonderful books in American literature -- a memoir, such as it is, of the eminent late-19th and early-20th century historian, who also happened to be the grandson of John Quincy Adams and the great-grandson of John Adams.
What makes the book so revelatory, however, is the way that, more than half a century before postmodernism, Adams deconstructs the autobiographical form. Writing in third person -- ‘Under the Shadow of the Boston State House,’ the book begins, ‘in the third house below Mount Vernon Place, February 16, 1838, a child was born, and christened later by his uncle...as Henry Brooks Adams’ -- Adams tells not so much the story of his life as a fictional re-creation of it. He casts himself as a naif adrift in a world whose rapid changes have, paradoxically, rendered his traditional education obsolete.
The focus here is, to be sure, selective, but that’s part of the point, for Adams has no intention of being comprehensive; among the areas he overlooks is his marriage, which ended with the suicide of his wife in 1885.
Adams originally issued ‘The Education’ privately, in 1907; a general edition, cleaned up and modernized, was published after his death in 1918. It has become an American standard, winning a Pulitzer Prize and selected by the Modern Library as one of the hundred best nonfiction books of the 20th century. Now, to commemorate the book’s 100th anniversary, a new version of the 1907 original has been released.
‘Why would anyone re-edit a book that has satisfied its readers for a century?’ editors Edward Chalfont and Conrad Edick Wright ask in an introduction. It’s a good question, but their answer -- that they meant to restore the book to the way Adams intended it -- lacks the necessary Adamsian gloss.
No, if ‘The Education’ is a book that opens up the territory of autobiography -- suggesting that there is little difference between life and myth -- let’s apply the same standard to this restored edition and identify it, simply, as a labor of love.
— David L. Ulin 4/22/2007
