Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  From the distance of Massachusetts, Alice maintained a politely cool relationship with her parents, and wartime travel restrictions prevented her from seeing them more than once or twice a year. In the summer of 1944, after Alice had attended three consecutive semesters, an assistant dean at Radcliffe advised her parents against letting her attend summer school. Agatha’s reply leaves the decision to her daughter, mentioning that Alice has “always been quite strong.” Alice loved school, loved Harvard life, and saw no reason to spend time hanging about in Chapel Hill for an undesired rest. Whenever Alice went home she remained distant. “Anne must be in love again,” thinks the mother in a story Alice wrote about a visit home. “She wondered for a minute what he was like, what any of the boys Anne knew at college were like. But then, she thought, a little sadly, I’ll probably never know.”15

  Agatha Adams had other things to wonder about. Dotsie Wilson, for whom Nic Adams still carried a torch, had returned to Chapel Hill with her husband when he came to work at the University of North Carolina Press. While Tom had been in the navy during the war, Dotsie had worked in an aircraft factory near Baltimore with the much-joked-about task of inspecting pilots’ relief tubes. Meanwhile Nic Adams’s recurrent depressions had become so intractable that Dr. Kemp recommended electroshock therapy.

  The twisted skein of Alice’s feelings about her father and his mental problems became more complicated when his psychiatrist seduced her. Less than a decade earlier, Dr. Kemp had been a substitute father who gave Alice a puppy when Nic was ill. She cited him as a personal reference on her college applications. But when Alice was about eighteen, she turned to Kemp for psychological counsel, and the restraints of age and professionalism crumbled. Adams mentioned the episode to at least one friend and in her notebook.16 She elaborated in the story of Louisa Callaway in Families and Survivors, with Malcolm Kemp’s initials reversed in the name of Dr. Kenneth Mills:

  One night (also at Virginia Beach) Louisa went swimming alone with the psychiatrist. (Who on earth allowed that? A nubile eighteen-year-old girl and a forty-one-year-old thickening man.) And in the hot black night, on the hard sand, she revealed to him (since he was a psychiatrist) what was ruining her with guilt and confusion: she had been making love (is that the word she used?—no matter) with a young doctor in Boston, an intern at Mass. General, whom she thinks does not really like her very much, certainly is not in love with her. With that confession she and the doctor fell upon each other wildly. Their passion was not consummated, so to speak, that night—in fact, not until much later (during, in fact, her love affair with Norm Goldman), when he (the psychiatrist) came to Boston and in his room at the Ritz there was a violent hurried collision of their flesh…

  After that “collision” with her father’s psychiatrist, Louisa telephones him “weeping with despair and what she calls love, across all those miles, and he tries to explain to her what electric shock is. Electrodes are placed. Convulsions. Her father asks for this?” Dr. Mills violated professional ethics in sleeping with his patient’s daughter, but Louisa, and presumably Alice, suspects her own motives as well: “Much later, in San Francisco, she tries to tell her own doctor about all this, but it becomes literary. ‘It’s all so Southern, right out of Faulkner, all this incest stuff. Screwing my father’s psychiatrist instead of him.’ ”

  That sort of flippant, literary obfuscation touches upon an essential mystery about Alice Adams. When she turns a critical episode in her life into a wry, multilayered story, one can’t be sure how she feels or wants her readers to feel. So with Louisa and Dr. Mills. Is Adams shocked that her parents allowed their “nubile eighteen-year-old” daughter to swim at night with the psychiatrist? She’d been living away from home for several years—is it likely anyone was even paying attention? Perhaps the scene contains anger about emotional neglect throughout her childhood. That she asked her father’s psychiatrist for advice about her sexuality—specifically the guilt she felt about sleeping with a man who didn’t love her—suggests that she wanted someone’s approval.

  The coupling between Louisa and Dr. Mills is also necessarily ambiguous, its violence both passionate and repellent for Louisa. As we’ve already seen, the stories Adams wrote about adolescent courtship describe uncertainty about the connection of love and sex. Finding love unreliable, Adams sought relief and satisfaction in sex without love. Both Louisa and Megan Greene, Adams’s college-aged heroines, are sexual adventurers whose escapades often end in heartbreak. They are motivated by anger as well as by desire. Likewise when Alice had sex with Kemp she was making a bid for love and understanding. As adult Louisa in Families and Survivors begins analysis in San Francisco, she thinks, “If [her father’s doctor] loved her, all her problems would be solved; that would prove that she is not crazy.”

  * * *

  Alice took off the winter term of 1944, spending some of the time in Chapel Hill, where she reluctantly audited a creative writing course with UNC professor Phillips Russell. She was reluctant because Russell was a friend of her parents’ and because she thought that he, at sixty-one, was too old to know anything. Paradoxically, he knew just what Alice then needed. Like most writers at eighteen, Alice felt overwhelmed by impressions that seemed meaningful to her. As she later explained, “I can’t imagine anyone without a very intense inner life.”17 Until then, Alice had tried to arrange her “over-reactions” to life in lyric poems. Phillips introduced her to short stories, which proved to be the perfect genre for her.

  Furthermore, Phillips, who had worked as a journalist in London during the 1920s and taught at the Black Mountain Institute for textile workers before joining the faculty at UNC, gave Alice a fresh view of writing and writers’ lives. As a prolific biographer, novelist, and poet, Phillips understood that writing was as much a performance for others as an expression of self. His brother-in-law, Paul Green, was a successful playwright, so perhaps he’d learned from him too. Short stories, Phillips believed, had either three acts or five acts. For five-act stories he promoted a formula he labeled ABDCE: Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending.

  A related formula of Russell’s, his daughter Avery said, was “Bring on the Bears”: “It meant, if you are going to start a story, start it. Don’t shillyshally around. When he was telling me about Goldilocks and the Three Bears, he kept hemming and hawing and I got very impatient sitting on his lap and said ‘Bring on the Bears!’ ” Most of the 120 short stories Alice would publish in her lifetime began, as Phillips had taught her, in medias res (and some of the unpublished attempts do not). The concept was as old as Homer. But for Alice the practical advice from a popular writer was just the “tranquilizer” she needed.

  Back in Cambridge in the spring of 1945, as the Russians and western Allies conquered Germany and revealed Nazi concentration camps to the world, Alice joined another short-story class with less satisfactory results. The Harvard class was taught by Kenneth Payson Kempton, who wrote stories for popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post and novels set in his native Maine. He required one thousand words a week from each student and a longer piece at the end of the term. Kempton gave Alice a C in his course, and earned her undying resentment by telling her “Miss Adams, you’re an awfully nice girl. Why don’t you stop this writing and get married?” “I think he meant too nice to be a writer,” Alice later explained, “but it may have been a more general idea about women.”18 Nonetheless, during this time Alice began to read contemporary stories by John Cheever (already a New Yorker regular; his collection The Way Some People Live came out in 1943) and Mark Schorer (later her friend), and two women she hadn’t read before, Katherine Anne Porter and Elizabeth Bowen.19

  * * *

  While the names of the men Alice knew during her first two years at Radcliffe are lost, certain types stand out in her fiction. For example, in Families and Survivors, “Norm is the first of a series of those very intelligent, affectionate, and mildly but interestingly evasive Jewish boys who imagine that being gentile makes Louisa str
onger than their mothers.” But that was hindsight. At the time, Alice had no objections to filling the role of desirable and forbidden shiksa. Like Megan Greene in Superior Women, Alice knew the rules and often broke them: “You are not supposed to ‘kiss’ more than one boy at a time, as it were; certainly you are not supposed to spend Thursday afternoons in bed with one boy, and Saturday nights necking with another.” Megan has afternoon trysts with Simon, the Jewish teaching assistant in her philosophy class (whose family-approved Jewish fiancée is in New York), and weekend dates with Stanley Green, who sits next to her in a nineteenth-century-novel course.

  Simon tells Megan that she is “a living sexual fantasy” or “a sex witch.” She embraces the compliment intellectually, seeing her coupling with Simon as the fulfillment of a phrase used by Professor Matthiessen about John Donne: “the breaking through of virginity to wholeness.” But she takes Simon’s comment literally too. Despite the secrecy involved, she can summon little guilt about her sexual enjoyment of Simon and her less fulfilling weekend dalliance with naive Stanley. She doesn’t love either one, but she “has never felt so well, nor has she ever looked better,” as she thrives on the attention of these two men. She decides that “in a sexual way she is indeed different, not quite like other girls.” Later another man puts it more bluntly to Megan: “You aren’t silly about [sex], the way most girls are. You don’t take it too seriously.” Actually both Adams and Megan do take sex seriously, with a confidence in their own bodies and needs that sidesteps conventional morality. Nonetheless, racial and religious prejudices held sway in the 1940s. Several of Adams’s unpublished college short stories involve Jewish boys who won’t marry gentile girls because of their mothers’ objections; in Superior Women, Janet Cohen suffers because her Irish fiancé’s mother will not acknowledge her.I

  * * *

  From Cambridge, Alice went to New York whenever she could. For her, as for Megan Green in Superior Women, home-front New York is dizzying, glamorous, and erotic. She is “headily aware of possibilities, as on the verge of love.” The city of eight million is dramatically focused on wartime production—and pleasure; certain goods are scarce, but the city energetically makes the best of that. Thousands of men in uniform fill the streets, train stations, and restaurants. When Megan comes down from Cambridge for a secret weekend with Simon (who’s hiding from that Upper West Side fiancée), she cannot wait to walk on Fifth Avenue. From her shabby room at the Marlton Hotel on Eighth Street, Simon takes her to the sidewalk café at the Brevoort Hotel on Fifth Avenue, a gathering place popular with Village radicals who can afford the check. The Brevoort is “crowded with uniforms, ribbons and decorations, braid; and with women both beautiful and chic beyond the dreams of San Francisco, the capacities of Boston.” Simon orders lobster salad, a delicacy exempt from wartime rationing. Electrified by the energy of the city, Megan thinks “she would have said yes… to anything at all.”

  Megan’s opportunity to say yes arrives—as we imagine Alice’s did—in one of the shoebox-shaped basement clubs that lined a block of Fifty-Second Street west of Fifth Avenue. On “Swing Street” or “Dream Street,” as that block was known, black and white musicians played together in clubs such as the Onyx, Jimmy Ryan’s, the Yacht Club, and the Famous Door. These clubs were favorites of the musicians themselves, who came to jam after their regular gigs. “Color was no hang-up” on Fifty-Second Street, pianist Billy Taylor said.20 Here distinctions of race and class lost their power. “Every sort of raffish and eccentric character mixed with the swells in those smoky brownstone premises,” writes Jan Morris. “… [T]hey offered the best night out of all—you paid no entrance fee, you were charged no Broadway prices, and over a single beer you could spend half the night listening to some of the best popular music in the world played live before your eyes.”21 In Superior Women, Adams describes an “entirely packed room, what looks to be a hundred people, all crammed around tiny tables, in the din, the smoke, and the wild hot crazy sound of a trombone solo.” She is dramatizing the night she first saw a musician who became an icon in her life and memory. He’s playing out front, in the spotlight: “tall and lithe, swaying, dancing as he plays, thrusting out his long silver horn into the black smoky air—air smelling of gardenias and bad Scotch and mingled perfumes and sweat.”

  The man with “brownish-yellow skin and wide-apart dark slightly drooping eyes” who was “blasting out his passionate sounds” was James Osborne Young, known as “Trummy” from the days when he played with Booker Coleman and the Hot Chocolates in Washington, DC. Born in Savannah in 1912, Trummy Young was fourteen years Alice’s senior. That weekend or not much later, she became his lover for a night, probably for many nights.22

  When Alice first knew Young, he was leading his own sextet, hosting Sunday concerts at Lincoln Square Center, and playing with well-known musicians including Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker and Billie Holiday. His musical experience bridged generations. Since the 1930s, he’d been in big bands led by Earl Hines, Jimmie Lunceford, Benny Goodman, Charlie Barnet, and Boyd Raeburn, but for a brief, frantic period near the end of the war, as big bands were breaking up, he was on his own. “Sometimes I wouldn’t go to bed for three or four days. There was so much to do,” Young told an interviewer. “Once when I was married to my first wife I was living up on St. Nicholas Avenue [in Harlem] and my bedroom window was right beside the sidewalk. This woman was jealous—she didn’t want me to go out and play. So, Billie Holiday and Lester Young would throw a little pebble on the window from the taxi outside and I would put my horn out the window to them while the chick was in the bathroom and sneak out the door.”

  That marriage had ended when Alice encountered Young, but it wouldn’t have mattered, for she asked few questions. As Adams relived the story in Superior Women, Megan believes the trombonist is playing just for her and she responds with a seizure of sexual desire. Pretending to look for the restroom, she follows him backstage and tells him she thinks he’s wonderful:

  Jackson Clay’s dark look takes her all in, his white smile dazzles her, as he reaches for her arm. They start up the stairs together, he guiding, propelling her, until he turns her toward a door, which he opens. An empty room—lockers, chests, suitcases. He closes the door. Pulls her body to his, their entire lengths touching, merging, melting. His mouth and his tongue incredible—all new. Jackson Clay.

  When at last they break apart he is out of breath too; he can barely say to her, “You are some beautiful girl, you know that? Say, when can I see you, you ever free?”

  “Well—” Megan gets out. “Tomorrow—” He grins; in that darkness she can see the white shine of his teeth, just tasted. “Well, tomorrow, that is the greatest. Tomorrow is my night off, Sunday night. How about you meet me here? Out front, say, nine o’clock?” They kiss again. Prolonged. At the head of the stairs at last they separate, touching hands. They both whisper, “I’ll see you tomorrow.” And Megan sees that there is indeed a ladies’ room, where she goes to rearrange her disordered face. She is quite oblivious of anyone else who might be in the room.

  Whether Alice really followed Young into the hallway of that club where she first saw him or somehow met him later is less important than the fact that she did meet him and become his lover. The encounter that ensues in Superior Women is surely the sexiest scene Adams ever wrote, among many scenes that were increasingly explicit over the years: “The most unusual feature of their actually making love, to Megan, is the way Jackson uses his tongue, his tongue all over her, beginning with her hands. He kisses the sensitive palms and in between her fingers. At some point, when she has cried out over a ‘kiss,’ in a gentle way he says to her, ‘And I’d really like it if you’d kiss me too.’ But surely that is what she has been doing?”

  Jackson Clay is a mentor in love to Megan. The image of a tall, brown man playing the ’bone—indeed, being nicknamed for that most phallic and difficult instrument—makes him a shockingly obvious sexual symbol. Young had fourteen years’ more experience t
han she did, which probably added to his appeal for her. Despite every obvious difference of race, age, class, and experience, Trummy Young and Alice Adams had things in common. With an ethnic background that was a mixture of Geechee (the Gullah people of the South Carolina low country, who preserved many African traditions), Irish, and Cherokee, Young grew up hearing jazz played by the local and traveling musicians, including the famed Jenkins Orphanage Band. His schoolteacher mother and railroad-brakeman father sent him to the St. Emma Industrial and Agricultural Institute, a boarding school for Negro boys located on a former slave plantation near Richmond, Virginia. He excelled in his vocational classes but gravitated to the school band: “They had a military part and I hated the rifles and marching under the hot sun, but the band would sit underneath a tree and play. I had a tendency to be lazy so I dug what that band was doing.” He took up the trumpet, then switched to trombone when John Nick of the Jenkins band, “one of the best trombone players [Young] ever met in [his] life,” showed him a few things. Nick “never made it,” but nothing stopped the boy he inspired. As class valedictorian at St. Emma’s, he performed at commencement and then headed straight to Washington, DC, to begin a musical career that lasted more than fifty years.

  For most of those years, Young was a sideman. He was tall, elegant of movement and expression, with an easy smile, almond-shaped eyes, an intimate tenor singing voice, and a moderate Southern accent. He’s best known as cowriter with Sy Oliver of the song “ ’T’ain’t What You Do (It’s the Way That You Do It).” Photographs show Young with a wide, easy smile when he’s not blowing into the mouthpiece of his trombone. Young was “well-spoken, friendly and popular, talkative and articulate,” with a mischievous look, remembered music producer George Avakian. “My money would be on Trummy as a ladies’ man,” Avakian continued. He remembered seeing Young with a dark-haired caucasian girl in the 1940s but couldn’t be sure that her name was Alice Adams.23