John Adams His Bowl

by CATHERINE DRINKER BOWEN

I

THE bowl sat on a pedestal in the middle of the auction gallery. There was no glass over it, no lock or key. Big and round and fragile and cobalt blue, with the shield on one side. “Diameter 14 inches,” the catalogue said. “Script initial J [for Jefferson, surmounted by a helm, and having a banderole with motto Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God. Lowestoft pitcher en suite. Both bowl and pitcher are understood in the family to have been given by Thomas Jefferson to President John Adams.”

There was no need for me to consult the catalogue. I knew it by heart. Had I not studied it over and over while stretched on a bed of influenza? I was writing a life of John Adams, second President of the United States. Every object pictured in that catalogue, from the genealogy on page one to the Early Federal Mahogany Card-Table on page thirty-nine, had been a matter of passionate interest. Two ladies, it seems, living in the environs of Boston and bearing names in which figured the words Adams and Quincy — these ladies were selling off, at a whack, a big crowded roomful of stuff that would cause a watering in the mouth of every antiquarian, collector, and museum director from here to what John Adams would have called the Western Waters,

For two years, by day and by evening I had been pursuing Adams J. and Adams J. Q. with all their relatives, connections, and ramifications. My book would open with John Adams’s birthday in 1735 and I would carry him through (God helping) to his most glorious death in Quincy on July 4, 1826 — the very jubilee, the fiftieth anniversary, of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Thomas Jefferson died, as all the world knows, on that same day. For a year, this dramatic coincidence had threatened fair to overwhelm me. When the hour should come that I must face that scene, what guarantee was there, what hope even, that I could write it — telling it quite simply, with no slightest trick of embroidery? Wie es eigentlich gewesen, old Ranke had said — tell history as it actually happened.

I had read that death scene a dozen times, and never without weeping. Even the stilted rhetoric of Adams’s grandson brought a dampness to the eye: “The setting sun spread its rays over the dispersing vapors only to give a more serene majesty to the golden splendors of the sky. . . . Mr. Adams’ last words . . . so far as they could be gathered from his failing articulation, were these: ‘Thomas Jefferson still survives.’”

Survives? John Adams never said “survives.” He said lives. He wasn’t writing a book. He was dying. And besides, he was always a bluff talker. Not a man of taste. Not “refined” except, as he would have said, in morals. A blunt man, passionate, willful, vain. Honest to the very farmer-Puritan marrow of his well-covered bones. And a patriot “as disinterested,” Jefferson had said, “as the being who made him.”

For two years I had scarcely read a piece of print that had not to do with John Adams. And it seemed to me that nearly all these commentators, these Fourth of July orators, and even the historians, missed the point of John Adams, overlooked his greatness entirely. Especially the ones who wrote before 1900. Or they slid off into outright dislike of the man; they twisted his words, misquoted him to his ruin. The most recent of these writers called it “strange” that Jefferson, recommending Adams to a friend, described Adams as “so amiable, that I pronounce you will love him.”

Strange? In heaven’s name what was strange about it? I know exactly why Jefferson wrote those words. I too could not but have loved John Adams, this short, plump, anxious, cocky, fearless man who said what he thought and said it much too quickly with a tongue that rasped and cut.

“But why Adams?” my friends had been asking all along. “Why that old reactionary? Wasn’t he a monarchist? Why don’t you write about Jefferson or Franklin?” The answer would, I hoped, be found in my book.

The trouble was, I had been too much shut in libraries. It was time to push out, begin the field work, the second phase of biography writing. I must see the Adams houses in Braintree and Quincy. I must see what was left of Abigail Adams’s house in Weymouth. I must go to Worcester, where John Adams taught school. And I must begin now, next week, and visit every monument, every museum and gallery, every local library and historical society that possessed Adams relics, Adams prints, Adams furniture, Adams anything. I would get out my fat folder marked Things to Do, and start at the top of the long, scribbled lists.

It was an exhilarating thought. I could begin on Monday with this heirloom sale in New York. I wouldn’t go to the actual auction. I would buy a stopover ticket for Boston, and on the way I would see this preview. Beforehand I would study the catalogue so that when I walked alone into that room, I should not be a mere admirer among objets d’art: I should know and recognize and there would perhaps be stirrings within me.

The catalogue was full of photographs. Gilbert Stuart portraits — three of them. Josiah Quincy, whom I loved; the third Josiah, the one that was president of Harvard, “at half-length seated in a red upholstered chair.” Mrs. Josiah. How handsome they were and how elegant! “Paul Revere teapot and stand,” enchanting and grave with its shining fluted sides, its honest straight spout. The Tutor Flynt cup. But they couldn’t be selling the Tutor Flynt cup! There it was, photographed back and front. Obverse and Reverse, the catalogue called them. “Domed cover with a series of stepped ring moldings and finished with a knopped urn finial.”

My goodness, I thought, what fancy language. A knopped urn finial. Tutor Flynt surely never heard of one. “With the inscription Donum Pupillorum Henrico Flynt, 1718.” Tutor Flynt was uncle to Dorothy Q. Very odd and very much beloved, he taught at Harvard fifty years; Father Flynt, his students called him. I turned the pages. Miniatures, furniture, laces, autographs.

And at the end, with a full-page picture all to itself, the Lowestoft bowl.

2

ADAMS-QUINCY Sale?” the elevator man said. “Fifth floor.”

For no reason at all I got off at the fourth, and was immediately lost in a forest of Chinese furniture, French furniture, Victorian furniture. Scroll and gilt and tasseled ornament, curly sentimental children looking out of fat gold frames. I found the wide staircase and went up, my damp shoes squeaking. In the whole huge building there seemed to be nobody but me. Maybe, I thought, because it was raining; maybe because it was Monday morning.

At the top of the stairs I turned right, where a long room opened into the hall. And there it was, not twenty paces ahead on its pedestal. Jefferson’s bowl, big and round and cobalt blue, with the shield facing me. I walked slowly to it and stood looking down. At the bottom, in the center, was a little gilded spray, deliciously faded. Round the top edge was a pattern. “Diaper pattern,” the catalogue said. “. . . diaper pattern rim in underglaze cobalted blue pendented with fleur de lis. White lemonpeel glaze. Between the exterior sprays are two shields with blue and gold star borders and script initial J surmounted by a helm, and having a banderole with motto. . . .”

I bent down. There was the shield and there, sure enough, the brave initial J, delicately traced. Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God.

The emotion that swept me was absurd and I knew it was absurd. What right had I to feel this way? I was not an Adams, a Quincy. I was not even a Randolph from Virginia. An attendant strolled in, a pleasant colored boy in a green suit with brass buttons. “Can I help you?" he asked. “No, thanks,”I said, and added idiotically, “Is this the AdamsQuincy room?”

It was a Thurber question, a Stephen Leacock question (Sir, is this the bank?). All round was evidence as familiar to me that Monday morning as the evidence of my own country threshold.

The room was oblong, softly lighted through a glass ceiling. From the wall Josiah Quincy looked down, handsomer even than in the catalogue. Mrs. Quincy young, and Mrs. Quincy old and very distinguished in coat and lace mantilla. A dashing, dark-haired young man whose name I had forgotten as one forgets the names of one’s own cousins a generation past, but whose faces remain familiar.

Beyond the bowl, in a lighted case, were laces, wide adorable flounces of Brussels and Milan. Against black velvet their fragile patterns stood out. A garden with paths leading to a dolphin fountain. Urns and baskets of flowers, all traced with delicate precision. Near me, gravely alone in its glass case, stood the Paul Revere teapot, its curved black handle worn bare. Directly across the room was the Tutor Flynt cup and at my right hand a long case full of silver. Bowls and basting spoons, an egg warmer, a soup ladle with a deep scoop and long, light-colored wooden handle — indubitably the pleasantest thing in soup ladles I had ever seen. I looked it up. Number 31. “George I Silver Rattail Soup Ladle made by Chas. Jackson (?), London, 1724. Length 17½ inches. Fine plain oval scoop with pointed rattail molded upon the reverse, the tapering shank inset with a long pearwood baluster handle.”

I wandered back to the Lowestoft bowl. It drew me, its magic was strong. Rebellion to Tyrants. . . . Was this Jefferson’s own motto or had he borrowed it from Benjamin Franklin? Or did it, perhaps, have something to do with Charles the First ? When I got home I would look it up in Bartlett.

So Jefferson gave this bowl to John Adams. But when did he give it? I could hardly bear not to know. The room was full of burning questions, and where could I find reply? Not from the colored boys in green suits nor the auction woman at the telephone desk. Obviously, the bowl did not change hands early, when Adams and Jefferson were in France, It must have been after 1800, after Jefferson’s administrations, after Mr. Madison’s War. Along in the 1820’s, when the Chinese trade was flourishing. When the two old men had resumed correspondence, prodded by Dr. Rush to a friendship now historic.

Of course! Jefferson must have sent the bowl from Mont icello as a pledge, a token. “ Mr. Jefferson and I have grown old, and retired from public life. So we are upon our ancient terms of good-will. . . . He wished to be President and I stood in his way. . . . But if I should quarrel with him for that, I might quarrel with every man I have had anything to do with in life:

So John Adams had explained it, an old, old man, to young Josiah Quincy, and so Quincy had reported it.

The bowl then, must have made the long journey from Monticello to Quincy, Massachusetts. By stage and coasting sloop and wagon. Or had Jefferson simply sent it by his own private express with a note scribbled hastily, no copy taken? A Negro servant, easy in the saddle, making the journey in summer, following the winding dusty roads northward to where marsh water showed below the blue hills of Quincy.

3

So I stood dreaming, while somewhere a clock struck the hour. It would soon be time for me to go. I turned slowly round. Would I remember this room? Falling in love does not always mean remembering. The satinwood desk and table, the silver, the portraits — could I keep with me all this spare shining beauty? Among it all, not a superfluous line. An elegance and an honesty. A way of living, of valuing, thinking — sparse, austere yet somehow crowned with grace. Remote from Louis XV downstairs, remote from Queen Victoria. And remote — how very far away — from 57th Street in the rain, where I was going.

Extraordinary that the philosophy of a whole century could speak so loudly in the tongues of — things! 1718: Tutor Flynt’s cup was sturdy and plain as befitted an era when plank floors, carpetless, were good enough for anybody. Three generations later, and the Paul Revere teapot is delicately fluted, delicately engraved. Time now for decoration laid on sparely, by a craftsman’s hand still humble with the nearness of a Puritan God. (Behind a Boston window, candles burn late at the desk; men’s voices are earnest. “I see, Mr. Adams, you are determined to explore the constitution . . . in defence of your liberties as you understand them.” A quill laid down, a paper folded, newly dry . . . “with submission to Divine Providence, we never can be slaves.”)

In the gallery someone spoke and I jumped. Two women had appeared from nowhere; they were standing by the Quincy portrait. One of them had a lorgnette in her hand; she leaned close to the picture, peering. She and her companion were tall, dressed in tweeds. They wore low-heeled overshoes and there was that about them which spelled Adams-Quincy.

My heart gave a great bound in my chest. Here, at last, would be the answers to all my questions. These pleasing, distinguished ladies with their lorgnettes would certainly know all about Art in the Eighteenth Century. All about furniture and silver; they could tell me why American Hepplewhite was so much more agreeable than English Hepplewhite.

I myself had decided it was because living was harder here than in England; Massachusetts weather was colder, the mere fight to exist more grim; and grimness chops down ornament. Or had it to do with techniques, with words like knopped urn finial, and brides picotées?

The two women were talking; I caught names familiar to the Adams-Quincy legend. Perhaps — perhaps these ladies were cousin to the fortunate, the fabulous owners of all this magic that surrounded me! The lady with the lorgnette was speaking; her final words emerged clear, clipped with the accents of Beacon Hill, and in that quiet room startlingly decisive. ”. . . so she gave the house to her sister to save taxes.”

Texas, she pronounced it. To save Texas. But these two ladies knew everything! They might even be able to tell me the date when Jefferson gave the bowl to John Adams. . . . The lady with the lorgnette had turned; she walked — oh, dazzling motion — straight toward me. “Can you tell me,”she asked, “where I can find a catalogue for the AdamsQuincy sale?”

Quinzy. Quinzy. I pronounced it that way too, but always with an effort, as when in Boston I had once learned to say Abiel Holmes, to rhyme with style. I smiled eagerly; words poured from me. “Catalogue?" I repeated. “You can have mine. I don’t need it. I — I know these things by heart. How they look, I mean. But I don’t really know anything at all. I’m not from New England. I’m from Philadelphia. I want awfully to know — could you please tell me — there are a lot of questions —" She looked over me, unsmiling. Above me, that is. Not through me but. above me at a point somewhere on the opposite wall. “Thank you,” she said. “But I believe I see some catalogues at the desk, through that door.” She was gone, and her companion with her.

I Could have torn her tongue from her throat and made it into hash for witches. She had hurt my pride — but hurt pride was not what moved me to this muttering fury. I was jealous. Furiously, unreasonably, crazily jealous. That woman had shut me out. Until this moment I had been at home, here in this place. I had belonged; this room was mine, and everything in it. By the grace of heaven, perhaps also by virtue of grubbing in libraries, by hard work, by long clays of search, I, a stranger to the Parke-Bernet Galleries, had walked upstairs to this room and immediately I had been part of it. I had been in, as the children say.

I cursed the Adams-Quincy woman, fluently and long, and then turned again to the room. To the cup, the teapot, the portraits, and the bowl. It was as I feared. They sat staring, speechless, cold, unfriendly. Tagged and numbered: 64, 65, 31. What wild illusion had seized me, to think myself a part of this — to think, indeed, that I could write a book about John Adams, about the eighteenth century? Oh, might that woman burn in hell and all her children’s children with her! Damn her eyes and teeth, her lights and liver!

4

SHE had come back, and brought the colored boy with her. They stood by the Tutor Flynt cup; the boy unlocked the case and the woman took the cup in her hands.

I doubt if I have ever been more surprised in my life. But of course — this wasn’t a museum, this was an auction gallery. We could touch these things, handle them. Why, they were for sale!

I turned and walked — ran — through the next room to the desk. I would take something away from this sale if I had to die for it. The auction woman was telephoning. I leaned across the desk, I could wait no longer. “Number 64,” I said. “Could I have the sale estimate? Adams-Quincy heirlooms.”

The girl nodded, thumbing expertly through a pile of papers, the receiver still quacking at her ear. “Number 64 — here it is,” she said. “Lowestoft bowl. Fifteen hundred dollars. Number 65, pitcher to match. Seven hundred and fifty dollars.”

“And 31,” I added quickly. “A soup ladle. Could you please tell me 31?”

“Hundred and fifty dollars,” the auction woman said.

I thanked her. There was a telephone booth in the hall; I couldn’t get there fast, enough. A few blocks south was the office of my literary agent. I would call him and adjure him to come to this sale on Saturday and buy me that ladle if he had to outbid the Metropolitan Museum and all the AdamsQuincy ladies in New England. My eye was filled with a pleasant picture of my agent — a New Hampshire man himself and very good at trading — outbidding the two ladies with the lorgnettes. What if bidding for soup ladles was not the business of a literary agent ? I dialed and waited. I felt wonderful.

“Hello, Harold!” I shouted. “I’m at an auction gallery. Listen, there’s a soup ladle here. I want you to come up and bid on it, Saturday. It’s Number 31. Have you got a pencil? A hundred and fifty dollars, asking price.”

“Soup ladle?” my agent said. “Soup ladle! Where in God’s name are you? I thought you were in Philadelphia writing your book. You didn’t say a hundred and fifty dollars, did you? You can’t afford a hundred and fifty dollars.”

But I was ready for that one. “A hundred and fifty dollars is nothing at all,” I said loftily. “What I really need here is a bowl. A Lowestoft bowl that costs fifteen hundred dollars. And maybe a pitcher to go with it at seven hundred and fifty.”

There was a pause. “I think I’d better come up there right away,” my agent said. He sounded tired. “Where did you say you were? — Now don’t move from that booth. Just sit quietly and don’t” — his voice rose — “don’t talk to anybody until I get there.”

Talk to anybody! The trouble was, nobody would talk to me. “Oh, never mind,” I said bitterly, and with finality. “Never mind. Just forget the whole thing. I’m catching a train for Boston. Good-bye.”

I hung up and wandered down the hall. There were people coming and going now; the AdamsQuincy room buzzed with talk and movement. Those two men in overcoats were, plainly, commercial dealers. Their talk was swift and professional; they had jewellers’ glasses with which they examined not the portraits but the frames; they ran their fingers over the inlay on the satinwood desk, calling to each other jovially across the room. They paid no slightest attention to anybody. I stood a moment in the doorway, my heavy coat trailing from one shoulder.

The auction woman came in from the desk, walking swiftly, purposefully to the bowl. She had someone in tow, a woman in a beret, with a notebook and pencil in her hand. The woman with the notebook said loudly, “There is a crack in this bowl.”

The auction woman shook her head. “Those are age cracks.”

“No,” the other said. “No! This long crack, I mean. It goes all the way across, don’t you see? The bowl has been broken and mended. Mended all the way through.”

By now I was standing with them. The auction woman reached out and flipped the bowl with thumb and forefinger. And the bowl sang. Sent out a clear, calm protest that died briefly on the air.

“That crack,” I asked. “Will that crack bring down the price?”

The auction woman shook her head. “Wouldn’t think so. Historic piece. Belonged to Thomas Jefferson.”She flipped it again, and again the bowl spoke. “Hear that?” she said. “Wonderfully clear, isn’t it?”

She stooped, peering. “Rebellion to tyrants,” she read very slowly, spelling it out. . . . “Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God. . . . No, that crack won’t bring down the value.”

The two women walked away. Nobody stayed long in this place. It was time for me to go too, but I could not go. There was a chair outside the door in the hallway, in full sight of the room. With my coat and umbrella and bag in a bunch on my lap I sat down. People strolled by; the elevator door clanged. The two dealers moved past me, their hats on their heads, the jewellers’ glasses hidden away. At the stairway they stopped. “Bidding’s going to be brisk Saturday,” one of them said. “The portraits will be slow but there’s already been two bids on that Lowestoft bowl. Number 65 goes with it, the pitcher. Personally I think they’ve estimated too low on the pitcher. It’ll bring twelve hundred if it brings a cent.”

5

I FELT sick, defeated utterly. Beyond them, down a brief flight of stairs, I could see the auction room, with the stage and rows of chairs, waiting for Saturday. Oh what, I wondered wearily, was this about possession ? It had never troubled me before. Two hours in this place and I had persuaded myself that I owned the bowl, the pitcher, the soup ladle, Josiah Quincy and his lady, the Paul Revere teapot, the lace flounces with the urns and the fountain.

Why was I so greedy? I had never owned a piece of old Lowestoft in my life. I had never, in fact, especially wanted to own one. Nor had I collected anything, either Hepplewhite or Sheraton; in our house we sat in the chairs that had belonged to Aunt Eliza, or we went out and bought something comfortable. There was no use in taking too high a tone about this. After all, I never owned the Winged Victory, or “Venus Rising from the Sea.”Beauty, the philosopher said, was in the eye of the beholder. Was it not, then, as splendid merely to walk through this gallery or that museum - to look upon beauty and pass on, unpossessing?

No! It was not as splendid. That bowl — that was Jefferson’s bowl. John Adams’s bowl. If I had it I could look at it every day. I would put it in the center of my small dark dining-room table, and each time I passed through the room I could look down into it and see the faded gilt branch in the middle. I could stoop, and under the shield I could read the motto, Rebellion to Tyrants is Obedience to God. If, passing, I put out my hand and touched it, a magic would flow to me.

Sitting in the bleak hallway I argued thus with myself, while downstairs, lights went on in the auction room. Odd, that I had walked right by this morning without seeing that theater; the door on the landing must have been closed. Or was it, I wondered suddenly, my mind that had been closed — my own mind that refused to realize this was a sale? Not a poem or a temple but a sale. These things were here to be dispersed. Somebody needed money and would sell; somebody had money and would buy. And who was I to make an angry moral issue of it?

I had walked into that Adams-Quincy room this morning cautiously, getting off the elevator at the floor below on purpose — I knew it now — so that I could come at these things slowly, find them myself by virtue of recognition, not be led by a crowd. I had hoped merely to recognize a portrait, a bowl, a cup. And I had walked wide-eyed into — what? An illusion, a dream more real than reality. Over that threshold I had stepped into another place, another century — the very place and time I had been seeking month after month, day after day, on the dry shelves of libraries.

Immediately, I had been part of it. It had been mine, with no need to touch or buy. But of course! I saw it now. Does one buy a friend, a daughter? And by that same token, does one lose a friend at the first threat, the first hobgoblin with frosty Boston manners? What I had needed this morning was not an agent to bid on bowls but a philosopher to teach me sense. Possession! It was a difficult concept, not to be defined singlehanded; it raised questions not to be answered by the likes of me. But all the same, if beauty was in the eye of the beholder, might not possession be there also?

I pulled my coat and bag up on my lap and leaned forward, looking straight into the Adams-Quincy room. At this lunch hour it was empty save for the two young colored men in their green suits with brass buttons, smart yellow stripes down their trouser legs. How well they suited the room; they looked just right, standing there. In knee breeches and white stockings they would look even righter. How quiet it was and how beautiful! It was good to sit here alone, with all the people gone. What was it John Adams used to write in his diary back in the 1760’s, before the fighting began, when Britain and America were, as he said, staring at each other? “At home today, thinking, searching . . .”

I got up, put my things carefully on the chair, and made ready to go. I felt fine, walking down the hall to the elevator. I hitched my coat up round my shoulders and rang the bell. There was a lot of work to be done on this Adams book. I’d better get at it, and soon.