Louisa (34 page)

2

L
OUISA
WAS
fifty-one
years old when she began “Record of a Life” in 1825. Writing an autobiography was an unusual thing for her to do, a kind of claim for importance. She hedged at the start—even in the title. It was
a
life, as if it could have been anyone's. She justified her motivation as she often did when putting her pen to paper: she was a mother. “Someday or other,” she wrote, “my children may be amused with it.” At the very least, she added, a look back at her past “may have a good effect upon myself.” But she was quick to add that she had no special talent, only a “Cacoëthes Scribendi”—a mania for writing—that sometimes gripped her. She had “no desire to appear any thing more than a mere commonplace personage with a good memory and just observation enough to discover the difference between a man of sense and a Fool, and to know that the latter often do the least mischief of the two.” There was that characteristic turn: self-denigration followed by a sly, slightly bitter smile.

Though she would not have known it at the time, her memoir was part of a growing interest in life writing, as Romanticism's attention to the peculiar emotional experiences of individuals spurred a craze for memoirs. She was, in fact, a great reader of court memoirs, mostly of
unhappy French queens and duchesses. But the result of her retrospection at this point was not a typical heroic narrative. It was a tragedy. It was a story of the corruption of innocence—a story modeled on the Fall.

Her history, her
“Record of a Life,” began thousands of miles away, in London. Her idol was not John Adams but Joshua Johnson, “noble in his sentiments; noble in his acts.” She described him as a hero of the American Revolution, a man who personified patriotism: “Many were the Americans that he saved from imprisonment while residing in London at his own risk furnishing them with clothes money and passage on board vessels owned by him or his friends which convey'd them safe from danger either to their homes or to France,” she wrote. He had exalted the name of George Washington to his children. He had taken a pair of tongs to place a pen used by Benedict Arnold into the fire. Joshua Johnson was, she was suggesting, as ardent a patriot as anyone—as any Adams.

As she indulged in a reverie, she retreated from the prostrating heat and lassitude of the President's House into a buoyant, golden past. In her parents, she saw an idealized model for a marriage, as if out of a romantic novel. The father she described was not an indebted, anxious, charming but insecure merchant. Instead, he was strong and loving, and ostentatious in his affection for his wife. When Catherine was sick, he would roll papers around the handles of her knife and fork and heat them on the hearth. When she was weak, he would cut her food and feed her like a child. In the evening, he would ask his daughters, his three little graces, to perform an aria from Handel, and on a good day, they would roll up the carpets and he would join their dance. Louisa also described her mother in florid terms. She dwelled on Catherine's beauty, her tenderness, her vivid spirit. Her childhood, as she told it, was prelapsarian, like Eden. “All the scenes of my infancy come with such faint recollections,” Louisa wrote, “they float upon my
fancy like visions which never could have any reality yet like visions of delight in which all was joy and peace and love.” Sometimes the kaleidoscopic dreamscape of her first memories snapped into focus, and her childhood past existed as if it were present. She could remember being a girl in Nantes and witnessing a flood, seeing boats slip past the grand mansion, the roads turned to rivers. She could feel the cold stone floors on her knees as she kneeled in the cathedrals she had visited with the nuns at her convent school. She could trace the shape of a wrought-iron balustrade at Le Temple du Goût.

In the middle of her story, she burst into verse:

Oh halcyon days of bliss long past

Too good too happy long to last . . .

With blighted hopes to sorrow soon a prey

Wrecked on a foreign ruthless shore

They sunk subdued to rise no more.

She added, “Do not my children read this as romance for every word is true.”

As in any story about the fall, there came the loss of innocence. As she told the story in “Record of a Life,” the fall occurred at the time of her marriage.

 • • • 

H
ER
MARRIAGE
, as she saw it
now, was the prologue to the disaster. She brooded over the misunderstandings and the misinterpretations between herself and John Quincy during their courtship. She had been unsure; he had been harsh; she had felt vulnerable; he had wavered. It was not love at first sight. It was hardly love. She barely tried to massage their relationship into something that might have lasted, as it had, for thirty years: “Without a particle of affection at the
time I suffer'd myself to be coaxed into an affection that lasted probably much longer than would have done love at first sight,” she wrote in 1825.

The circumstances of her marriage had not been ideal; she had been hesitant, confused by John Quincy's mixed signals, and a little scared at the prospect of separating from her family. She had been under immense pressure. But to put it that way was not only exaggerated; it was not entirely true. She dwelled on the coaxing by others, and not her own desire; she said she suffered, when in fact she had also delighted in his tenderness and attention. He had courted her, promising her love and protection, and she had responded with promises of love and affection. He had been clear about his priorities. He had given her, even late in the game, a chance to withdraw from the engagement. She had made her own calculations when she did not. Some of them, surely, were practical and financial and due to the influences of her family. But at least part of her desire to marry him seems to have been something that comes through in her letters that were written at the time: she wanted to be in love, and in a very recognizable way, she was.

In the White House, though, feeling vulnerable and neglected, those initial feelings of vulnerability and neglect thirty years earlier became magnified; they darkened her view of three decades of a rich and complicated marriage. Feeling left out, she transferred her sense of exclusion to her father, her hero. As she told it now, her union had been battered by her father's bankruptcy and her family's flight. Recounting the old story, Louisa became almost hysterical. She had not spoken of her father's financial failure like this, with such raw pain, in more than a decade. She talked about Joshua Johnson's bankruptcy as the story of a good man wronged, betrayed by his partners, unjustly ruined. She laid it out in the high color of a sentimental novel. Her father was blameless, she insisted.
She
was blameless. Yet it appeared otherwise. She wrote as if it
still
appeared otherwise, as if everyone looked at her, even now, even as she sat in the White House,
and saw a fraud. “Every appearance was against me; actions proceeding from the most innocent causes looked like deliberate plans to deceive; and I felt that all the honest pride of my soul was laid low for ever,” she wrote. She had “forfeited all that could give me consequence in my husbands esteem or in my own mind.” She had lost all her standing, and “the bitter knowledge of real life was acquired in almost all its varied forms of agony and mortification.”

“From that hour,” she declared, the melodrama reaching a high pitch, “all confidence was destroyed for ever in me and mine.”

It bears repeating here that there is no evidence that John Quincy ever blamed her for her father's misfortunes or held a grudge. Certainly, whatever he had said to her in 1797 was long buried by 1825. The elder Adamses, too, had never held her father's fate against her. In fact, they had done everything they could to help the Johnsons. They had considered them as family. They had responded sympathetically, corresponded frequently, welcomed them into their house, and connected them with friends. John Adams had even taken a political risk to find a federal appointment for Joshua so that the Johnsons might have some income. But Louisa's version of the event had remained in her memory like a dormant virus. Her immunity now weakened by her loneliness in the White House, she felt herself attacked. She, of course, had been hurt by her father—she had been abandoned and left to deal with his mess—but she would never blame him. Perhaps it was natural that she would hunt for accusations from her husband and even from herself. Like a guilty conscience, her memory of her shame infected her thoughts. John Quincy could be incredibly self-involved. He could be bullying; he could be imperious; he could make her feel small. Yet he was also tender, at times passionate toward her, and stayed close to her when others would have put distance between them. Still, it was hard for her to see that now.

It did not matter
that her childhood was never the paradise she claimed it to be—that a counternarrative ran through even her own
idealized account, shifting and undermining her claims to perfect happiness, breaking through in revealing moments. She told anecdotes that revealed tension with her siblings, insecurities, and jealousies. Her portrait of her father was as terrifying as admiring: “His eye or the power of his eye was indescribable: its usual expression was sweetness and benevolence; but when roused to anger, or to suspicion; it had a dazzling fixed severity that was absolutely awful.”

If “Record of a Life” was in fact for her sons, she made no attempt to soften the story for them—though no one would have expected her to; in 1825, parents were less concerned with shielding their children. Her language was brutal. Her determination to punish her husband, and herself, overwhelmed her at the end. She concluded that her marriage to him was regretted on both sides. She thought her father's flight must have made her appear corrupted in John Quincy's eyes: “It appeared impossible for him to view me in any other light than as a person who had known all these impediments and who determined for the sake of what is called a settlement to marry him at the expence of honour truth and happiness.” Perhaps it's not a coincidence that she wrote this in 1825, as the cries of corruption against her husband and Henry Clay continued unabated. Appearances seemed so bad. The accusations were so loud.

Clearly, writing did not make her feel better, happier. It did not have a “good effect” on her. The tone when she broke off “Record” is more anguished than it was when it began. Then again, the pursuit of happiness was not her great aim. She was circling something else, something harder to name. She described herself as trapped. With no way out, she turned inward.

The Marquis de Lafayette
arrived in Washington, nearing the end of his grand tour, on August 1. Outwardly, Louisa played the pleasing hostess. Privately, her thoughts ran dark. When she learned a niece, Eliza's daughter, had died, she was equanimous but morbid. “What is death, and why should we fear it?” she wrote to George, who had
become her confidant. “Children almost always meet it without horror and without terror. . . . I know not why it is, but of late my thoughts are ever roving to something far beyond this sublunary sphere and at times they become utterly uncontroulable.” She read of a young Irish girl who had been seduced by her employer and then killed herself on his marriage night. “I saw her remains borne to the grave without a friend perhaps without a pitying tear to mourn her dreadful fate,” she wrote to George, “and my whole soul shuddered at the idea of his reveling in all the enjoyments of life while she was gone to give her last account with the dire crime of suicide upon her head.” She wrote a lurid poem, “The Suicide,” in the girl's honor.

Meanwhile, there were
dinners, events, and excursions to attend to with Lafayette and his crowd. She was careful not to take part in the public ceremonies, since there had been, she told George, “a great sensitiveness” about her not remaining “in the background” in the past, about her being too visible during the election.