Perfect Damn Fool

Perfect Damn Fool Brooks Adams: A Biography, by Arthur F. Beringause. 414 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $6.00 As a thinker, Brooks Adams already seems very limited. His vision, like Marx’s, or Spengler’s, was typically nineteenth century, subsuming that human history observes patterns of evolution as fixed and inflexible as those of the vegetable or animal king- doms. Law was his keyword. It seems never to have occurred to him that, as a friend of mine once said, God may have so loved the world that He gave it, amohg other things, a sh.a.re in its own historical inevitability. Similarly, Adams could distinguish only two basic human motives: fear and greed. Of the everyday, homely, disinterested incidence of love, he retained a life- long innocence. Nor was he a very likeable man. Though his own brother Henry re- garded him as a genius, he preferred his letters to his conversation. Teddy Roosevelt frequently took his advice, but found it impossible to use him in any personal capacity. He was can- tankerous, snobbish, bullying, saturn- ine, and monumentally self-assured (when a young lady once declined his marriage proposal, he replied, “Why you perfect damn fool!”). Viewing mankind from a chill altitude. he saw the particular decades around him in irredeemable decay, and he expressed his contempt for them so relentlessly that when his wife read his most famous work, she suggested he call it The Path to Hell: A Story Book . His biographer will therefore have to reckon not only with Adams him- self, but with something less easy, his own attitude as a biographer. For the most part, in this very intelligent, scrupulous, minutely documented study, Arthur Beringause keeps his contempt for Adams behind him. But sometimes it bursts vehemently out: Proud of his family and social back- ground, he reverenced the idea of an elite class governing society and the state, and he set out to build his ration- alized prejudices into a philosophic sys- tem. (p. 72) On this foundation Adams was• to erect his Social Da.rwini.sm, justify his aristocratic predilections, and ration- alize his own insecurity in a deslre for order imposed from above. (p. 55) I have not isolated these quotations merely to accuse Mr. Beringause of unprofessorial impartiality. On the contrary, I respect him for declining to be neuter. Further, I am not sure I disagree with him. But in this case, if I reduce everything Adams thought to a matter of “rationalized preju- dices,” then how about my own? For instance: if Adams believed in an “elite class governing society and state,” and reading this, I scowl and call him neurotic, fascistic and inse- cure, have I finished the matter off? Mustn’t I now take a further step and ask myself if my reaction is any more independent of my own “social back- ground” than Adams’ distaste for the mob was independent of his? Mustn’t I acknowledge the extent to which my suspicion and fear of the words “elite class” may originate in the group- minded orthodoxy by which my thirty-three years have been so pro- foundly conditioned? If I am to be contemptuous toward Adams, can I hold my contempt above question? Though Adams’ precepts and per- spectives may not be very useful to us any more, one aspect of his character is exemplary. He was chronically, in- tractably, even tiresomely honest about saying what he thought. If it was unpleasant, unfashionable, un- mentionable-as it usually was to his Utopia-minded contemporaries- he nonetheless dared to speak out. He was never timorously fond of merely sounding nice, cosy, wholesome and uplifting, at the expense of what be truly believed. A great many people today, including myself and Mr. Berin- gause rm afraid, too often prefer sounding liberally com.me il f a.ut, to asking themselves exactly and maybe uncomfortably what they really think. Isn’t this, too, a deeply “rationalized prejudi<:e”? ROBERT Pm:LPS