The Five of Hearts!

Our book today is Patricia O’Toole’s wonderful 1990 biography of a set, The Five of Hearts, subtitled “An Intimate Portrait of Henry Adams and His Friends, 1880-1918.” The five in question are Adams himself, his wife Clover, John Hay and his wife Clara, and Clarence King, an effusive and flamboyant “entrepreneur” who shines just a touch brighter than the others in this book.

There’s a lot of shining all around, however, thanks to O’Toole’s very lively prose. I’ve found that most multi-part biographies tend to suffer from fatal distractions inherent in their outline – they tend to end up doing nobody much justice. But O’Toole’s book is a very happy exception; she takes this intensely magnetic small cast of characters and manages to imbue each one of them with almost as much personality as they might get in their own solo biographies. Henry Adams, Clover Adams, and especially John Hay stand out in all their multi-faceted glory, but O’Toole’s narrative enthusiasm extends to all parts of her story, even place descriptions, as when she mentions the old State, War and Navy Building, now called the Old Executive Office Building: “Pillared, porticoed, corniced, and capitaled to a fare-thee-well, the edifice looked less like a bastion of state than a playhouse – the sequel, perhaps, to mad King Ludwig’s fairy-tale castle in Bavaria.”

Her quick thumbnail sketches of hosts of secondary characters are also masterful: “Squinting at the world through steely blue eyes, Benjamin Harrison, lawyer and Sunday school teacher, radiated all the warmth of Mount Shasta’s glaciers,” she writes. “A campaign joke had it that everyone who shook his hand went away a Democrat.”

And she takes her readers through all the major scandals and controversies that convulsed the Five of Hearts, again especially Hay, who seemed always to find himself embroiled in spats, as when his masterful negotiations in 1900 about the construction and control of the Panama Canal, met with “a storm of abuse” from the Senate, including one senator in particular:

Senator Henry Cabot Lodge, Hay noted acidly, was “the first to flop.” The American people, Senator Lodge told the secretary, “can never be made to understand that if they build a canal at their own expense and at vast cost, which they are afterwards to guard and maintain at their own cost, and keep open and secure for the commerce of the world at equal rates, they can never be made to understand, I repeat, that the control of such a canal should not be absolutely within their own power.” Despite years of Nannie’s tutelage, Pinky Lodge still could not turn a graceful sentence, but he knew where he stood.

Adams and Hay and their wider social circle lived during a golden age of Lafayette Square personal politics, and although it’s a golden age that’s been chronicled hundreds of times, accounts often miss the peculiar sparkle of the time. O’Toole captures that sparkle perfectly.