Writers Read: D.W. Buffa

The Dark Backward is among D.W. Buffa's more recent novels to be released. The story revolves around not just the strangest case William Darnell had ever tried;

it was the strangest case ever tried by any lawyer anywhere. It was impossible to explain; or rather, impossible to believe. The defendant, who did not speak English or any other language anyone could identify, had been found on an island no one knew existed, and charged with murder, rape and incest. He was given the name Adam, and Adam, as Darnell comes to learn, is more intelligent, quicker to learn, than anyone he has ever met. Adam, he learns to his astonishment, is a member of an ancient civilization that has remained undiscovered for more than three thousand years.

Buffa is also the author of ten legal thrillers involving the defense attorney Joseph Antonelli. He has also published a series that attempts to trace the movement of western thought from ancient Athens, in Helen; the end of the Roman Empire, in Julian's Laughter; the Renaissance, in The Autobiography of Niccolo Machiavelli; and America in the twentieth century, in Neumann's Last Concert.

Here is Buffa's take on The Education of Henry Adams:

Written in 1905, The Education of Henry Adams was printed in a private edition of one hundred copies, limited, perhaps, to that number because it was thought to be as large an audience as it was likely to command. Adams explains at the very beginning the somewhat unusual ambition he had for the book.

“American literature offers scarcely one working model for high education…. Except in the abandoned sphere of the dead languages, no one has discussed what part of education has, in his personal experience, turned out to be useful, and what not. This volume attempts to discuss it.”

Five hundred pages later, in a chapter entitled, “The Abyss of Ignorance,” Adams tells us what he had hoped his education would teach him and why this was a necessary sequel to something else he had written. The century 1150-1250, expressed in Amiens Cathedral and the Works of Thomas Aquinas, was, he believed, “the unit from which he might measure down to his own time, without assuming anything as true or untrue, except relation.” He had written Mont Saint Michel: a study of thirteenth-century unity so that he could, from that point, “fix a position for himself, which he would label: The Education of Henry Adams: a study of twentieth-century multiplicity. With the help of these two points of relation, he hoped to project his line forward and backward indefinitely, subject to correction from anyone who should know better.” Adams was serious. This was not some generalized scheme of historical movement; he had something quite specific in mind: to trace, to “triangulate,” not just the movement, the “acceleration of movement in politics since the year 1200, as he was trying to fix it in philosophy and physics; in finance and force.”

Born on February 2, 1838, Adams had more than the ordinary chances of acquiring the education he needed. His great-grandfather, John Adams, and his grandfather, John Quincy Adams, had both been President, and his father, Charles Francis Adams, was the American minister to England during the Civil War. Henry Adams, however, was never to have anything like the same kind of career. “As it happened he never got to the point of playing the game at all; he lost himself in the study of it….” It was not because he was a particularly good student. He hated school, “and the prejudice became deeper with years. He always reckoned his school-days from ten to sixteen years old, as time thrown away.” There were, really, only four things he thought he needed to know: Mathematics, French, German, and Spanish. “With these he could master in very short time any special branch of inquiry, and feel at home in any society.” It is a mark of how much has changed in what we mean by education, that Adams added, “Latin and Greek, he could, with the help of the modern languages, learn more completely by the intelligent work of six weeks than in the six years he spent on them at school.”

After the wasted years of ten to sixteen, Adams wasted four more at Harvard. Looking back on it, he could only shake his head. “The chief wonder of education is that it does not ruin everybody concerned in it, teachers and taught.” For its part, Harvard, which was then a school of only a handful of teachers and a few dozen students, was “probably less hurtful than any other university then in existence. It taught little, and that little ill, but it left the mind open, free from bias, ignorant of facts, but docile.” When he graduated, the only thing he felt certain about was that “Education has not begun.”

Adams voted for Lincoln in the election of 1860 and finally learned something worth knowing. While no one wanted civil war, or expected it, “Southern secessionists were certainly unbalanced in mind,” and “were stupendously ignorant of the world. Cotton-planters were mentally one-sided, ill-balanced and provincial to a degree rarely known. They were a close society whom the new fountains of power had poured a stream of wealth and slaves that acted like ill on flame.” This, for Adams, was “his first object-lesson of the way in which excess of power worked when held by inadequate hands.” Ignorance was not confined to the South; there was never so much of it as in Washington in the winter of 1860-61. “The few people who thought there knew something were more in error than those who knew nothing.” No one wanted it, but the war came and his father was chosen by Lincoln to become minister to England. Henry Adams went with him as his private secretary.

It was history repeating itself, as Charles Francis Adams understood. He remembered how his grandfather, John Adams, had taken his eleven-year-old son, John Quincy, when he sailed for Europe in the winter of 1778 during the American Revolution, a voyage that often took eighty days; and how his father, John Quincy, had taken him, as a baby of two years, to Russia when Napoleon was about to invade it. When they arrived in England, Henry Adams “supposed himself, as one of the members of a famous anti-slavery family, to be welcome everywhere in the British islands.” But not long after he arrived, “England recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy,” and taught Adams that power had loyalty only to itself. No one “doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation. Nearly all were glad of it, though not often saying so.” They thought it a good thing if the South won the war: a Southern victory would diminish the power of a country that had become, at least potentially, a “dangerous power.” After the Union defeat at Bull Run, everyone in England, everyone in Europe, expected the American legation in London to close. Adams was not surprised, “Familiar as the whole tribe of Adamses had been for three generations with the impenetrable stupidity of the British mind….”

Adams did learn something of lasting value. “Then, at last, if never before, Adams acquired education. What he had sought so long, he found; but he was none the wiser, only the more astonished.” He met Algernon Swinburne. No one now remembers Algernon Swinburne; it is doubtful his name is listed as anything more than a footnote among the English writers mentioned in American textbooks on English literature, but according to a high British authority at the beginning of the twentieth century, “The service which Swinburne rendered the English language as a vehicle for lyrical effect is simply incalculable. He revolutionized the entire scheme of English prosody.” More than what Swinburne did, it was what Swinburne was that made him irresistible. “The effect of his artistic personality was in itself intoxicating, even delirious.” He had that effect on Adams, and everyone else who was gathered around the table where they had dinner. No one could “believe his incredible memory and knowledge of literature, classic, medieval and modern; his faculty of reciting a play of Sophocles or a play of Shakespeare, forward or backward, from end to beginning; or Dante or Villon, or Victor Hugo….” He could “write a Greek Ode for a Provencal Chanson as easily as an English quatrain.” Adams was mesmerized. “The idea that one has actually met a genius dawns slowly on a Boston mind, but it made entry at last.”

When the war was over, when the Union had won and Lincoln had been assassinated, Adams stayed longer in Europe and became a writer for the North American Review. Though it had a circulation of only three or four hundred copies, it was the leading American literary periodical. An article required three months work, and paid not more than five dollars a page. “Not many men even in England and France could write a good thirty page article, and practically no one in America read them; but a few score of people, mostly in search of items to steal, ran over the pages to extract an idea or a fact….” Having acquired a reputation as a writer, Adams returned to the United States in 1868 and lived in Washington where he began an annual political review. Washington “was rural, and its society was primitive.” In twenty-four hours, “he could know everybody; in two days everyone knew him.” There was no competition; he had the field to himself. “With his sources of information and his several intimacies at Washington, he could not help saying something that would command attention.” Among other things he wrote, he wrote about President Grant.

Everyone voted for Grant in the election of l868, or at least four-fifths of them, and did it because of “the parallel they felt between Grant and Washington.” Both had been great generals; both, being soldiers, represented order. Grant had organized and commanded half a million, or a million, men in the field; he had to know how to administer a government. But then Grant named his cabinet, men so mediocre, so unqualified, so corrupt, that it changed Adams’ “intended future into an absurdity so laughable as to make him ashamed of it.” A friend of Adams who had served under Grant in the war, described him as “an intermittent energy, immensely powerful when awake, but passive and plastic in repose…. The intellect counted for nothing.” Grant taught a lesson to Adams, a lesson that threatened all hope. “The idea that, as society grew older, it grew one-sided, upset evolution, and made of education a fraud. That two thousand years after Alexander the Great and Julius Caesar, a man like Grant could be called - and should actually and truly be - the highest product of the most advanced evolution, made evolution ludicrous. One must be as commonplace as Grant’s own commonplace to maintain such an absurdity. The progress from from President Washington to President Grant was alone evidence enough to upset Darwin.” There was corruption everywhere, and every intelligent man in government prepared to leave. “The system of 1789 had broken down, and with it the eighteenth century fabric of a priori, or moral principles.”

Several chapters after Adams had written this, he entitled a chapter, chapter twenty-one, “Twenty Years After.” The story of his education has a gap, twenty years, about which he says only, “Education was ended in 1871; life was complete in 1890; the rest mattered so little.” Adams never explains what this means; those who knew him did not need to be told. In 1872 Adams married; in 1885, his wife, Clover, committed suicide. The missing years of education were years of happiness, and then years of tragedy, that taught him everything he wanted, or needed, to know. Happy or heart-broken, he had not stopped working, writing about the most serious things in American history. While his friend, John Hay, who had been one of Lincoln’s two White House assistants, had spent ten years writing his life of Lincoln, Adams had spent close to a dozen years writing his history of Jefferson and Madison. They had, between them, “written nearly all the American history that was to write.”

At the end of the nineteenth century, it had become obvious to Adams that energy had given a new definition to power; that power in its new form was rapidly getting beyond the possibility of control; that the machine was taking over. Adams called this The Law of Acceleration. Between 1800 and 1900, the coal output of the world had doubled every ten years. “An immense volume of force had detached itself from the unknown universe of energy, while still vaster reservoirs, supposed to be infinite, steadily revealed themselves….” At the rate of progress since 1800, Adams concluded, “every American who lived into the year 2000 would know how to control unlimited power.” The effects were not always what might have been desired. “Prosperity never before imagined, power never yet wielded by man, speed never reached by anything but a meteor, had made the world irritable, nervous, querulous, unreasonable and afraid.” The government created by the Founding Fathers, designed to “neutralize the energy of government,” was not equipped to work in “a 20-million h.p. society, where much work needed to be quickly and efficiently done.” Then President McKinley was assassinated and power took on a whole new meaning.

The effect of power, Adams had learned, was on all men “the aggravation of self, a sort of tumor that ends by killing the victim’s sympathies.” The effect of power on Presidents had larger consequences. It “had always been tragic, chiefly as an almost insane excitement at first and the worse reaction afterwards; but also because no mind is so well-balanced as to bear the strain of seizing unlimited force without habit or knowledge of it…” The case was proven by Teddy Roosevelt. “All Roosevelt’s friends knew that his restless and combative energy was more than abnormal. Roosevelt, more than any other man living within the range of notoriety, showed the singular primitive quality that belongs to ultimate matter, - a quality that medieval theology assigns to God, - he was pure act.” The effect of power on Presidents, “the effect of unlimited power on limited mind,” was also seen in the men who had come to control the “masses of power,” the great corporations and industrial trusts that had come to dominate the American economy and give shape to much of American life. They were, in Adams’ judgment, “forces as dumb as their dynamos, absorbed in the development or economy of power.”

The question Adams is left with was whether there is “a necessary sequence of human movement.” The mere sequence of time is artificial; the sequence of thought, chaos. He had turned to the sequence of force, and found himself, “in the Gallery of Machines in the Great Exposition of 1900, with his historical neck broken by the sudden eruption of force totally new.” And then he remembered the year 1200, when the Virgin, the Virgin Mary, and not the Dynamo, was the moving force in the world; when it was understood that “sex was strength.” Goddesses were not worshipped for their beauty; the Virgin was “Goddess because of her force; she was the animated dynamo; she was reproduction - the most mysterious of all energies; all she needed was to be fecund.” This was education. “On one side, at the Louvre and at Chartres…was the highest energy ever known to man, the creation of four-fifths of his noblest art, exercising vastly more attraction over the human mind than all the steam-engines and dynamos ever dreamed of; and yet this energy was unknown to the American mind.”

What then of the question of sequence? The power of the Dynamo, the power, the energy, of the modern age, now appears more a decline than an advance; a power that has made those who have it as dumb as their dynamos, or as excitable, and even insane, as those who, holding high office, attempted to use it. Is the sequence, the history from the thirteenth to the twentieth century, an education that, at the end, teaches nothing so much as the necessity of going back to learn what those who lived in the thirteenth century knew that we have forgotten? Adams does not tell us. Instead, he has given us the history he entitled: Mont Saint Michel and Chartres: a study in thirteenth-century unity. It is up to us to decide whether, like Henry Adams, we are still in need of an education of our own.