Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Alice Adams’s direct ancestor was George Plater Tayloe (1804–97), who graduated from Princeton and took over the family ironworks in central Virginia. In 1833, he built his Buena Vista Mansion near the railroad hub of Big Lick in the Blue Ridge Mountains (now Roanoke) and helped found St. John’s Episcopal Church and a seminary there. As a representative to the Virginia General Assembly, he was “a strong Union man who voted against secession.” But when the secession resolution passed, he hung a copy of it on his wall. Most of the other Tayloes also opposed secession, reasoning, as Benjamin Ogle wrote, that dissolving the Union “would touch the pocket book too acutely,” and that New York abolitionists posed less threat to the Union than did South Carolina, which was “proud & poor—having been rich.”14 William Henry, at Mount Airy, worried, “What will become of the Human Beings under us? Owned by us. Humanity demands their care. I have done my duty as Man sees, but not in the eyes of God.”15

  The end of the Civil War marked the end of wealth for many of the Tayloes and their class. George Plater Tayloe lost his slaves and sold his ironworks but retained some property in Roanoke; William Henry lost some $250,000 worth of slaves and hoped to get the freedmen and freedwomen—“poor deluded creatures, I feel sorry for them”—to continue working his lands. At sixty-six, “whipped and ruined,” he consoled himself that by promoting “cleanliness, domestic comforts and religious tendencies on his plantations,” he had done much to ameliorate the condition of Negroes on his own and neighboring properties.

  From these new-world aristocratic forebears, Agatha inherited a baroque silver teapot and some antique furniture but little money. Nonetheless, a sinister heritage of pride, gentility, and guilt affected descendants of the wealthy Southern gentry who owned larger plantations worked by black slaves. Robert Hughes, touring Mount Airy in the PBS program American Visions, summarized the cultural and moral contradictions of those who built the Southern dynasties as a “defiant illusory desire… to imagine themselves as a full extension of English culture” whose “genteel surface of hierarchy was stretched over a fabric of brutality supported by slave labor.” Such was the shadow that followed people like Alice Adams’s mother.

  Born in Roanoke in 1893, less than three decades after the Confederate surrender at Appomattox, Agatha Erskine Boyd disapproved of Southern women who “scramble about frantically in the moldering leafage of family trees” but was not immune to family pride.16 Her mother, the Tayloe descendant, was daughter to Brigadier General Thomas T. Munford, who, after notable service in the Confederate Army, lived on until 1918 as a grand commander of the Grand Camp of Confederate Veterans and operator of ironworks in Lynchburg, Virginia.17

  Agatha’s father’s antecedents engaged in a more typical moral and economic struggle.III Her grandfather William Watson Boyd, an Episcopal clergyman and a representative to the February 1861 Virginia Convention, which sought peace with the Union, received a postwar pardon from US president Andrew Johnson, along with exemption from the rule that would have stripped him of property valued at more than $20,000. Her father, James William Boyd, became an ordained Episcopal deacon in midlife, after a first career as a lawyer, but never became a priest or took his own parish because his “health broke” in 1905, when Agatha was barely twelve. He died nine years later, likely of a heart condition, at age fifty-six.

  Agatha completed her degree at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College in Lynchburg, Virginia, the first college in the South to offer a four-year college education for women. “We were soundly taught and the curriculum carried no hint that we were young women and not young men,” remembered Pearl Sydenstricker, who was in the class ahead of Agatha’s and became Pearl Buck, the Nobel Prize–winning author of The Good Earth. Even though “no girl thought it possible that she might not marry” and students repeatedly petitioned for courses in home economics, the faculty maintained that “any educated woman can read a cookbook or follow a dress pattern. It is the brain that needs education and can teach the hands.”18

  Like her classmates, Agatha wore “flouncy frocks over boned corsets, and bouffant hairstyles bulked out with artificial curls and pads,” and submitted to a strict daily regimen of study and worship. Gentlemen approved by the college could visit on two Saturday evenings each month. Still, college was liberating for Agatha. She “made the acquaintance of Horace as a living personality, a wit, a gentleman, and a poet” and chose Latin as her major. As a sophomore, she published an uncanny and naturalistic short story, “The Haunted Deacon,” in the campus annual, Helianthus. She joined Am Sam, the college’s oldest, most prestigious secret honor society (Sydenstricker was also a member) and the Zeta Tau Alpha sorority.19

  At meetings of the Current Events Club, Randolph-Macon women heard speakers for women’s suffrage who stirred their ambitions and planted doubts about the patriarchal hierarchy that shaped their lives. One of Alice Adams’s finest stories includes this yearning thought attributed to her barely fictionalized mother: “those distant happy years, among friends. Her successes of that time. The two years when she directed the Greek Play, on May Day weekend…”20 From her classical studies, Agatha said, she had “received a standard of taste in literature and in human conduct which would make her distrust the shoddy, and turn toward the best.”21

  Agatha’s picture in the Randolph-Macon annual shows a dark-haired, heavy-jawed profile with thick eyebrows and full lips; her large, dark brown eyes, lovely in a hand-colored childhood portrait, are hidden here by her downcast, pensive pose.22 She found the strength to be different in her Latin studies and in her friendships with other intellectual girls. Surrounded by women she considered frivolous, Agatha defined herself by her intellect. No doubt her Roman ideals were difficult to abide in ordinary life.

  World War I had been under way in Europe for a year when Agatha graduated from college in 1915. But President Woodrow Wilson wanted to keep the US out of Europe’s conflict, so there was little reason for Agatha Boyd to believe that this war would much affect her. Instead of returning to her widowed mother and brother Munny in Roanoke, she stayed near her beloved college to teach science and history (her Latin helped with both subjects) at Lynchburg High School.

  That year, when she was twenty-two, her happiness irrevocably changed.

  I. Tarkington was both prolific and admired, and the Alice Adams in his novel is a strong, smart, poor Midwestern girl who bravely enrolls in secretarial school after losing her bid to marry a rich society man. If Alice’s parents thought the book would be forgotten, they were wrong, because Katharine Hepburn made Alice Adams even more famous in George Stevens’s 1935 movie. What fun it surely was for Alice to see her name on posters during the summer of her ninth birthday.

  II. The Tayloes were an elite minority. The US Census of 1860 reported that 104 Virginians owned as many as a hundred slaves each, while half of the state’s fifty-two thousand slaveholders owned fewer than four slaves.

  III. A portrait of Agatha’s great grandmother, Margaret Erskine, hung above the fireplace in Chapel Hill and later in Alice’s own homes. While migrating to Kentucky in 1779, Margaret had been captured by Shawnees who killed her baby and her first husband. Ransomed a few years later, she returned to Virginia and married Henry Erskine. Alice preferred a subversive version of the episode: she told people that the woman in the portrait refused rescue by whites and lived out her “scandalously happy life” with the Indians. (Virgil Anson Lewis, History of West Virginia vol. 2 [Philadelphia: Hubbard Brothers, 1889], 600; Ruthe Stein, “A Southern Belle Who Grew Up Smart,” San Francisco Chronicle, February 12, 1975.)

  CHAPTER TWO

  Agatha and Nic

  Even then not beautiful, and curious, she had wondered why he loved and wanted her; she decided that it must have been that shyness made her appear aloof and difficult of attainment.

  —Alice Adams, “The Green Creek”

  Blue-eyed and dark-haired with a ruddy complexion and Grecian profile, Nicholson Barney Adams, a nineteen-year-old teacher of French an
d Spanish in his first year at Lynchburg High School, was precocious and hardworking. Tall for the era, he drew attention with his quick gestures and speech. He’d become fascinated with languages when his first sweetheart, who’d lived in Brazil with her missionary parents, taught him some Portuguese. He learned phrases in French, German, and Italian from neighborhood immigrants, studied Latin at school, and read the Bible in Hebrew and Greek with his father.1 By the time Nic came to Lynchburg, he possessed two bachelor’s degrees—one from Fredericksburg College, a Presbyterian institution in his hometown, and a second from more prestigious Washington and Lee University, where he’d been elected to Phi Beta Kappa. When he was not quite eighteen, in a gap between his two college enrollments, Nic saved up tuition for his year at Washington and Lee by lying about his age and serving as principal, drama coach, athletic director, and Sunday Bible-class instructor of a school in Ottoman, Virginia.2

  Even if some exaggeration has slipped into Nic’s résumé over the years, he seems to have dazzled Agatha Boyd, so recently bereft of her father and separated from college friends who had moved to Richmond. Nic and Agatha were about as different in background and temperament as two WASP, native-Virginian schoolteachers living in the early twentieth century could be.

  Nic Adams descended from a line of English Puritans who emigrated from Somersetshire to Braintree, just south of Boston, early in the seventeenth century. Five generations of his male Adams ancestors were born in Massachusetts before the Revolutionary War. One of these, Henry Adams II, and his wife, Edith Squires, had eighty-nine grandchildren, including the progenitors of Presidents John Adams and John Quincy Adams, and of historian and autobiographer Henry Adams. Their fifth son, Peter Adams, moved west to Medway, Massachusetts, where he became grandsire to a line of Adams men that included several stern-looking Presbyterian preachers.

  Five generations later, a musician named Joel Willard Adams, born 1823, came to give a concert in Fredericksburg, Virginia, stayed to court and marry a Southerner, and found himself in the midst of the Civil War. After serving as a Confederate soldier, he became proprietor of Adams Book Store on Main Street. His son, Joel Willard Adams Jr., born in 1864, succeeded his father at the store and expanded the stock to include musical instruments, art supplies, and picture postcards of local views. The woman he married, Belle Barney, devoted herself to memorializing the Confederacy. The couple had two children, Nic and his younger sister, Virginia. Belle’s family tree boasted two naval heroes: Commodore Joshua Barney, whose warship defended Philadelphia during the American Revolution, and Commander Joseph Nicholson Barney, Nic’s grandfather and namesake, who graduated first in his class at the US Naval Academy but joined the Confederate naval forces and defended Richmond, Virginia, against the federal fleet. Pardoned by President Johnson after the Civil War, he eventually settled in Fredericksburg with his wife, Anne Dornin Barney, who became a founder of the United Daughters of the Confederacy.

  And yet—to illustrate the complexity of the loyalties within this family—Anne Barney’s parents (Nic’s great-grandparents) took opposite sides during the Civil War. Her father, Commodore Thomas A. Dornin, who was born in Ireland, captured two slave ships on the coast of Africa in 1855 and released the fourteen hundred Africans aboard in Liberia, then continued to fight on the Union side during the Civil War. His wife, Anne Moore Dornin, remained in Norfolk, Virginia, throughout that war, and his two sons fought for the Confederacy.3

  * * *

  The Nic Adams that Agatha Boyd met in Lynchburg in 1915 was thoroughly Southern, “much more of a Barney than an Adams,” according to his sister.4 His abundant charm won the day. Agatha’s intellectual superiority was twined with a strong desire for romantic purpose. As Alice Adams imagined it later in an unpublished story (with faulty chronology but emotional conviction), her parents

  had spoken a rather literary language of love to each other in the parlors and boxwood walks of Sweetbriar College where he had come to see her in his lieutenant’s uniform, back from Europe. Even their situation had been literary and abstract. But she had loved his blue eyes, and their furtively prolonged kisses had seemed real. Even then not beautiful, and curious, she had wondered why he loved and wanted her; she decided that it must have been that shyness made her appear aloof and difficult of attainment.5

  Whether Nic and Agatha fell passionately and secretly into love at first sight or had a long, chaste, decorous Victorian courtship, they could not have dated openly during this era when female teachers were not supposed to keep company with men. The next fall, Agatha took a position at the newly founded Collegiate School for Girls in Richmond’s Fan District, leaving Nic a romantic train ride away in Lynchburg. As America’s entry into World War I loomed, Nic enrolled in an interpreter’s course at Columbia University with intentions of passing the army’s language exam. Agatha told her colleagues and students at Collegiate that she planned to leave her job to join (and marry?) him.6 It was difficult for Agatha and Nic to make any personal decisions as the stalemated conflict and unabated suffering in Europe clouded their future.

  Nic passed the exam and returned south to enlist in Richmond, Virginia, at the end of August 1917. Underweight for officer’s training, he became a private, assigned first to shovel cement, then sent north to train at Camp Mills on Long Island.7 That same summer, Agatha and other Richmond teachers escorted a group of girls to Camp Owaissa in Maine by overnight train. First established early in the century, summer camps offered self-reliant post-Victorian girls the rustic outdoor experience and nature studies that boys had long enjoyed. Despite her earlier announcement, Agatha returned to Collegiate School, where she continued to teach Latin for three more years. She shared a house on Grove Avenue with her mother, an aging housekeeper, and three boarders.8

  * * *

  Nic trained with the Forty-Second (“Rainbow”) Infantry Division for only about a month before embarking for France on October 18, 1917. In a journal begun that fall, he writes with frustrating brevity that he’s been to New York, “where [he saw] Agatha, and late in September [will] get leave home.” As a translator-interpreter, Nic saw little combat but was “tickled with first sample of French cooking.” He met the poet Alfred Joyce Kilmer, who was to be killed in the Second Battle of the Marne. Unwounded himself, Nic witnessed horrifying scenes: in Troche, he noted that he didn’t “care to lie down for fear of lying on dead man or horse. Men of 26th Div. are lying all over fields”; in Bois de Montfaucon, he recorded, “The abomination of desolation. Trees are all cut off or scarred by shells. We cannot find space enough to pitch tent because of old shell holes.”

  When peace arrived on November 11, 1918, just after Nic’s twenty-third birthday, he wrote: “Not much celebration of armistice. We learn that we are to be part of Army of Occupation.” Now a commissioned second lieutenant in the Corps of Interpreters, Nic served out the winter as a translator in a sanitarium for nervous cases in Ahrweiler. Happily discharged in the spring, he spent two weeks going to museums, plays, and operas in Paris. He had perfected his French but longed to escape war-stricken France for Spain, the country that held his imagination.

  Presbyterian Nic was fascinated by Catholic Spain. His most enduring book, The Heritage of Spain, praised that country’s contrasts—a desert for “ascetic and idealistic Don Quixotes” and “a lush land in which the lurid passion of Carmen and Don José reaches ecstasy and tragedy.” A man of fierce internal conflicts, Nic was drawn to both “the emaciated saints of El Greco” and “the rich-fleshed majas of Goya.”9 In spring 1919, he toured Spain for two months, from San Sebastian to Madrid to Seville, before sailing home to enroll as a graduate student in Spanish at Columbia University.

  * * *

  After a five-year, mostly long-distance courtship, Nic Adams and Agatha Boyd married on June 12, 1920, at Christ Church in Roanoke, where her late father had served as deacon.10 Agatha accompanied her husband back to Columbia University. She traded in her beloved Latin studies to begin work on a master’s degree in
Spanish and become an assistant to Nic’s academic work. He completed his PhD with a dissertation on the nineteenth-century playwright García Gutiérrez,11 whose plays provide the Romantic story lines for Verdi’s operas Il Trovatore and Simon Boccanegra. Approaching their thirties, Nic and Agatha still cherished dreams of a bohemian life as writers. They ventured downtown to Greenwich Village and made plans for Europe. With Nic’s dissertation in press as a book, Agatha spent part of the summer codirecting Camp Pukwana, which she now owned and operated with her friend Fanny Graves Crenshaw on Lake Sebago in Maine. The newlyweds sailed together from Hoboken to Cherbourg in September of 1922.

  This would be the mythical year of their marriage, one to look back at with longing. Nic’s sister, Virginia, then in college, admired Nic and Agatha so extremely that her roommate would ask her if she’d heard from the PBs (Perfect Beings).12 Imagining the life her parents had before her own birth, Alice Adams gives this thought to a character like her mother: “It’s wonderful… to have known, to have been sure.”13