ABSTRACT
Henry Adams was very quiet during the winter and spring of 1886. He kept his misery to himself, talked little, wrote few letters, worked if at all on his History, which seemed to him, as his own life had done, to have broken its neck. San Francisco was dusty and unimpressive to Adams. He hunted feverishly for the novels of Dumas, and did not find them, while La Farge searched for artists’ materials. Adams’s laughter was rather morbid. He wrote to Hay: “Positively everything in Japan laughs. The jinrickshaw men laugh while running at full speed five miles with a sun that visibly sizzles their drenched clothes. Henry Adams’s reactions are more difficult to interpret. He had come to Japan in a state of shock. He was able, off the top of his mind, to compose racy letters to friends and relatives about the surface of the new life he observed in Japan.
