If pressed to offer an account of oneself in prose, how might one best go about presenting not merely a coherent personal narrative but an insightful one? And going further still, how might one manage—given the existence of countless competing relations of birth, education, infatuation, propagation, degradation, and expiation—to make such an account as individual as the life it means to document?
“Variously,” of course, is the short and uninteresting answer—uninteresting until we recognize how formally verisimilar such accounts tend to be. Whereas The Education of Henry Adams, however much it trues to the conventional in its ticking through the “–ations” listed above, is not a memoir as we modern readers have come to expect. Chapter XXII, say, “Chicago (1893),” begins:
Drifting in the dead-water of the fin-de-siècle—and during this last decade every one talked, and seemed to feel fin-de-siècle—where not a breath stirred the idle air of education or fretted the mental torpor of self-content, one lived alone. Adams had long ceased going into society. For years he had not dined out of his own house, and in public his face was as unknown as that of an extinct statesman. He had often noticed that six months’ oblivion amounts to newspaper-death, and that resurrection is rare. Nothing is easier, if a man wants it, than rest, profound as the grave.
It is easy, reading Adams, while delighting over his epigrams, to forget that the “one” of “one lived alone,” not to say the “Adams” of “Adams had long ceased” (much less the “he” and the “his” one hears throughout) designate not merely the book’s subject but its author. “Je est un autre,” wrote Rimbaud, sensibly, in a letter to a friend. Adams’s version of that four word phrase is considerably longer, but argues, usefully, for the independence of self from all ideas of self, even the most intimate—a notion which most memoirs, confident that confession connotes truth, tend not to worry over, or not so deeply.
