V. McCarthy continues: “The act did not lead to anything and was not repeated for two years. But at least it dampened my curiosity about sex and so left my mind free to think about other things.” After describing the man, McCarthy continues, “Of the actual penetration, I remember nothing; it was as if I had been given chloroform.”
VI. When Mangum drove Adams to deliver a lecture in Charlottesville in 1984, they circled St. Catherine’s but couldn’t see much because it was dark. “She was not upbeat about St. Catherine’s,” Mangum recalled, “but she was very interested.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
Rumors of War
— 1943–1945 —
I remember coming out of Harvard Hall, from a course with F. O. Matthiessen in the criticism of poetry, and being almost unable to breathe, in that heady Cambridge spring air; I was so bedazzled by the brilliance of his lecture, and by sudden contact with poets I had not read before: Donne, Yeats, Eliot and Auden—to name only a few.
—Alice Adams, “Why I Write”
“I really thought I’d died and gone to heaven,” Alice said of her arrival in Cambridge in the summer of 1943. Only sixteen, she was thrilled “to be as far from St. Catherine’s as possible and to be where the boys were.”1 Going to Radcliffe College was one of the “best and wisest choices of [her] life,” she said when she looked back after fifty years, amazed that she’d had the sense to come to a place that suited her so well.2
The eight hundred women at Radcliffe encountered Harvard men every day of the week. ’Cliffies had always, since the days of famous alums including Gertrude Stein (1897) and Helen Keller (1904), been taught by the all-male Harvard faculty, who, for extra pay, crossed Massachusetts Avenue to repeat their usual lectures for “the girls.” That tradition continued for the freshman class in 1943.
Nonetheless, a landmark change was under way when Alice entered Radcliffe. So many Harvard faculty had taken government jobs or entered the military that there was no spare professorial energy for Radcliffe. After their first year, “girls were allowed to hear the remaining faculty on its home ground,” writes social historian Elaine Kendall. “They filled the empty chairs until the veterans returned, and by then they were too firmly entrenched ever to be dislodged.”3 Some professors remained ambivalent or outright hostile to having females sully the pure virility of their classrooms and kept them out by such dodges as limiting enrollment to students invited by the professor. To Alice’s classmate Alison Lurie, their position was like that of “poor relatives living just outside the walls of some great estate,” where they were “patronized by some of our grand relatives, tolerated by others and snubbed or avoided by the rest.”4
During the war, both Radcliffe and Harvard ran three semesters annually, shortening the usual four-year course by a year. When Alice arrived, the civilian student population at Harvard was a mere 1,082 men—25 percent of its prewar enrollment—but more than 6,000 men in twelve on-campus Army and Navy Schools filled the residence halls. They studied everything from indoctrination and communication to medicine. Among those Alice dated was Leon Harris, a “cute blond sailor” in the V-12 navy program who was also the scion of a Dallas department store family. “I was too high-minded at the time and refused to marry anyone rich,” Alice later said of Harris.5 At Radcliffe the military’s presence included one hundred WAVES ensigns quartered in Briggs Hall, where they evoked “pity and awe” for their “tight, unflattering uniforms and evident discomfort as they drilled on our snowy quad,” writes Lurie.
For the nonmilitary women of Radcliffe, the war produced more inconvenience than fear, but it infiltrated their lives and heightened every mood. Students had to stay indoors, pull down window shades, and turn out lights during air-raid drills because Eastern Seaboard cities feared a German air attack. They wore shorter skirts to save fabric and schemed to get scarce items such as silk stockings and shoes. Butter, meat, eggs, gasoline, tires, and new automobiles were rationed. Students handed over their ration books for restricted food items to their housemothers at the beginning of term. Mary Bachhuber, a friend of Alice’s from Wisconsin, received gifts of butter from home and turned them over to the kitchen so her hallmates could have a reprieve from the detested colorless oleo.
Despite those annoyances, much of life around Harvard Square went on as usual, with beers at the Oxford Grille, coffee and muffins at Hood’s, browsing for books in the co-op, and dinners and dances at the various Harvard houses. Some of Alice’s Radcliffe contemporaries came from wealthy or famous families, including Eva Marie Bendix, who was rumored to keep drawers full of money from her family’s manufacturing corporation; a daughter of the Steinway & Sons family who kept a harp in the drawing room; and the famous but then-impoverished Sophie Freud Loewenstein, granddaughter to Sigmund. Alice would have lacked status among her classmates, both because she came from distant North Carolina and because she needed a scholarship to offset her tuition and expenses. From their combined income of between $6,000 and $7,000, her parents, who still helped support Nic Adams’s aunts in Fredericksburg, contributed about a thousand dollars a year to support Alice.
That first summer, Alice shared a dormitory room in Bertram Hall with Rosalyn Landon, but they soon made new friends in Barnard Hall and moved there. Here they formed the group that became the core of Adams’s most lasting college memories: “stray people, an accidental group who’d become intimates.” Among these friends were Virginia Berry, Ruth Jenkins, Mary Bachhuber (later Simmons), Anne Fabbri, and Elizabeth White (later Love). By the time she graduated, Alice was closest to Ginny Berry (who was Catholic) and sometimes stayed with her family in New York. Several of these friends glimpsed one another in Adams’s novel Superior Women but insisted the portraits are not true to life. These women’s friendships ebbed and flowed according to “their somewhat conflicting, erroneous but convenient ideas of each other,” which were often dictated by unspoken considerations of social class. Megan is deeply hurt when she realizes she is not to be invited to Lavinia’s wedding even though “Lavy” has confided every detail of her marriage plans to her handily “admiring, non-censorious” friend. In these pre-feminist days, the situation did not seem unusual to anyone, and Megan learns to see her hurt as a “ludicrous fantasy.”
Except for Ros Landon, most of Alice’s college friends were Northerners with left-leaning political views. Alice herself by this time had nearly shed her Southern accent and identity. “She thought Southern women had too much of a prescribed role to be ladylike,” Anne Fabbri remembered. “She seemed very aware of those cultural restrictions, and said she would never go back to live there.” Though Landon remained part of the group, Alice distanced herself from her St. Catherine’s friend when Ros warned her against going out with Jewish boys because “if [she] did all their friends would take [her] out.” That sounded “swell” to Alice, “though it turned out not to be true.”6
“Everyone knows that Jewish boys are smarter; they have to be if they get into Harvard, what with quotas,” Megan asserts in Superior Women. “And often they like music, even poetry.” During college, Alice said later, she “envied all Jews for being Jewish.”7 Her feeling probably dated back to her coming of age in Madison, when friendship with Jurgen Roetter and his American sponsors, the Salter family, heightened her awareness of European culture and political concerns. If it now seems incomprehensible that someone would envy victims of genocide, bear in mind that Alice was then an impressionable and sympathetic girl in rebellion against the values of her Southern, Protestant childhood. As she rejected identification with slaveholders and Christian oppressors, she sympathized with Negroes and Jews. Her feelings were enhanced by the domestic breed of anti-Jewish sentiment that thrived before and throughout the war, even as Americans were united in fighting Nazis. In Boston, beatings of Jews and defilement of synagogues were almost daily occurrences; polls showed that nationally only a third of the population would back antidiscriminatory laws.
The sixty or so women in Barnard Hall
, Mary Bachhuber Simmons thought, had been assigned there according to numbers of Jews, Catholics, and Protestants: “I am a Catholic so I kind of enjoyed figuring this out—it was maybe 20, 20, and 60 percent. There were quotas, and it seemed that the admissions office was being very careful about what to do with people.” One of the Jewish girls in Barnard Hall was Barbara Mailer, younger sister of future novelist Norman Mailer, who was then in the army in the Philippines. Alice would later explain she and Barbara hadn’t known each other well then because “in those days Radcliffe girls tended to range themselves along a spectrum with Pretty at one extreme, Intellectual at the other. Barbara, though pretty, tended toward the intellectual. [Alice], though intellectual, preferred to be pretty.” Nonetheless, Alice was drawn to Barbara: “Once I borrowed her copy of Ulysses—perhaps to impress her, but I did read it.” In addition, Alice was intrigued by Barbara because she knew her Jewish family objected to her non-Jewish fiancé, Jack Maher, and because her brother intended to be a writer. In fact, Alice noted, “Irish Jack and Brooklyn-Jewish Norman looked somewhat alike.”8
At Radcliffe Alice also met future editor Adeline Lubell (later Lubell-Naiman), future bon vivant and mystic Phyllis Silverman (sister of Norman Mailer’s first wife, Beatrice), future poet Maxine Winokur (later Kumin), and future novelist Alison Lurie. As Megan in Superior Women reveals, Alice had quotidian college friendships with other gentile girls but was fascinated by the unconventional Barbara Mailer (who, along with Bea Silverman, whom she knew later, was the basis for the novel’s Janet Cohen) and by several Jewish men, who were simply more solitary, intellectual, and appealing to her than clubbish, hail-fellow-well-met WASP men. Thus Radcliffe gave Alice a rich canvas for her extended consideration of privileged lives in the mid-twentieth century in her novels and stories.
Alice was “extremely attractive, very voluptuous. Dark hair. Full breasts, full lips,” Fabbri remembered. When men were invited in, rugs rolled up, and furniture pushed against the walls in the Barnard Hall living room for “Jolly-Up” parties, both Alice and Anne were popular dance partners. Fabbri later heard that “the reason Alice and I were cut in on so often was that the boys liked to feel our breasts against them during the slow dances.” Back then, Fabbri claimed, she and Alice didn’t realize that their generous endowments were such a draw. And yet, she thought, “Alice was always very observant of people, always seem[ed] to be listening and studying everyone.”
“Don’t you know there’s a war on?” was a common conversational refrain in Cambridge then, verbal insulation against the knowledge that millions of their peers were in active service while they were enjoying civilian life. From the trains she took south from Boston, Alice remembered seeing “vistas of sea and seashore, lined here and there with clusters of gray battleships,” and the “industrial cities, all revved up for war.” Indeed the war was closer to home than many people realized. Not until June 1942, after dozens of merchant and military ships had been sunk along the Atlantic coast by German U-boats, were Boston and other cities “blacked out” to prevent silhouetting of the ships against city lights. The year Alice arrived at Radcliffe was the turning point of the war. By mid-1943, after a year and a half of brutal battles and horrific losses in the Pacific, the American forces had taken Guadalcanal and begun breaching the Japanese hold on the Central Pacific. The Americans and the British had defeated Germany in North Africa, the Russians had stopped its eastern assault, and the British and Americans had begun the slow, costly conquest of Italy. But victory was not in sight. If the Allies lost the war, Lurie wrote in her journal, “Cambridge and especially Radcliffe might be doomed, especially considering the Nazi attitude toward educating women.”9
War anxiety drove many women toward courses in political science and psychology, but Alice, who was already telling friends about her “compulsion to write,” signed up for first-year classes in English, French, philosophy, astronomy, and Spanish. She made the dean’s list for the second semester of her first year and thereafter kept up a respectable record of B’s and C’s. By March of 1944, as a seventeen-year-old sophomore on the accelerated calendar, Alice could take classes on the Harvard campus. Officially these were coed, but because so many men were away at war, males were rare in humanities classrooms. Adeline Naiman recalled that the undergraduate men who remained on campus were those who were classified 4-F because of physical problems or declared homosexuality. “It was routine in Cambridge to be tolerant of homosexuality,” Naiman recalled. “There were many more acknowledged homosexuals than was the norm before that. Because they weren’t drafted. And we also knew many immigrants from Europe, teachers as well as students.”
After two semesters of English composition with Theodore Morrison, Alice began her English major in 1944 with two courses from F. O. Matthiessen: “American Literature: Emerson to the Present” and “Criticism of Poetry.” FOM, or “Matty,” founder of Harvard’s American Literature and History program, was known for his passionate leftist Christian political commitment and his enthusiasm for Henry James. His book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941) laid a foundation for the academic field of American literature. When Alice studied under him, Matthiessen was working on his group biography The James Family, which attends to Alice James and her journals along with her more famous brothers, William and Henry. It was an “open secret” in Cambridge that Matthiessen and the painter Russell Cheney resided together in Boston and Maine. Some of his correspondence with Cheney was later published, and Harvard named a professorship in gender and sexuality for him in 1986.10
For Alice, as for her protagonist in Superior Women, obsession with Henry James’s novels had “the magnitude of an actual move to another culture… a move to the climate of Henry James. Her mind… filled with vistas of perfectly smooth green lawns, large houses.” Likewise, Alice admired the Jamesian exaltation of personality, the infinitude of human possibilities, the personal capacity for grandeur.” Under the influence of James, Alice observed her wealthy friend Ros Landon with a detached curiosity that led her, years later, to use her as a model for Lavinia in Superior Women: “Into the mouth of poor Lavinia, I put the words of every anti-Semite I met while at Radcliffe,” Adams said. Another influence was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who was then in vogue. “We used to say anything we really admired was ‘very Fitzgerald,’ ” Adams recalled. “I would hate for you to know how many times I have read both Gatsby and Tender.”11
Even if Harvard professors considered the ’Cliffies “poor relations,” they had a lifelong impact on women like Adams, who aspired to attain for themselves the intellectual clout they’d witnessed at Harvard. These “larger-than-life” teachers were, Lurie writes, “heroic figures who provided not only interpretations of books and events, but dramatic examples of different world views and intellectual styles.”12 The difference between the parental, Southern academic world of Chapel Hill and the cosmopolitan one of Cambridge was critical for Alice.
The sophistication of Cambridge validated her intelligence. “It seemed okay to be bright. In the South, girls are not supposed to be,” she reflected on the occasion of her fifty-year reunion. In college, Alice continued to write poems, but new themes and a looser form replace the nature imagery and rhymes of her childhood verse. “Shake the rum and lemon, not too sweet,” she implores in a 1944 poem addressed to a man who speaks of penicillin and Miller-Abbott tubes. His “stethoscope is nearer flesh than love,” she writes of this man for whom the “straining awful tenderness” of lovemaking is like “cold and leaden grief.” This med student may be part of the nation’s effort to mass-produce penicillin, but for Adams he is the precursor of the money-and-status-minded medical student who betrays Megan Greene in Superior Women.
Away from her mother’s disapproval, Alice discovered it was okay to be sexy as well as bright. Emotional involvement with men drives the poems and short stories that Alice carefully saved from her college years, and she apparently saw no conflict between that inv
olvement and her ambition to write. She refused to regard herself as a bluestocking intellectual like Agatha, who had—at least in Alice’s view—renounced sensuality in favor of mental accomplishment.
* * *
As Alice made her way at Radcliffe, Agatha Adams, then fifty, also flourished. Finally she could put her work on a par with homemaking or assisting Nic. She relished her job at UNC as a researcher for library patrons, authored study guides and brief biographies of local luminaries such as Paul Green and Thomas Wolfe, and renewed college friendships. Letters from the spring of 1946 reveal a woman on the move, happy that new automobile tires are finally available for purchase and full of news about a trip to Virginia, where she’s become a member of the board of trustees for Randolph-Macon Woman’s College. Yet, when she compared herself to the women of her generation who had achieved distinction, Agatha sometimes saw herself as a martyr. Even as Agatha achieved professional respect, so-called womanly contentment eluded her. Her bitterness shows in a speech she gave to the small group of female undergraduates entering UNC in 1949. They were allowed at the university, she said, because “some of [their] unglamorous but sturdy forerunners were willing to be laughed at” and “cared more about great literature than organdy ruffles, preferred chemistry to camisoles, and history to hosiery.”13
Agatha’s attack on her daughter’s generation seems vindictive. It hadn’t been long since Agatha helped Alice with party dresses, at least sometimes proud of her daughter’s loveliness. Maybe Alice’s blooming sexual appeal and queue of suitors had raised her mother’s defenses. Trying to turn her back on the traditions of Southern womanhood had sharpened Agatha’s temper along with her mind, something Alice didn’t understand until later: “She was both a feminist and a socialist—a highly rebellious, intellectual woman… when most of her local contemporaries were perfecting their bridge game and comparing cookie recipes. (There was, of course, considerable anger in all that nonconformity. She was in no way an easy person to live with.) But I am now embarrassed by my own early conformist fever, my lack of imaginative sympathy for my mother…”14
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