Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  But witnesses aren’t needed to see the importance of Adams’s relationship with Young for her evolution as a woman and writer. Trummy Young’s music, charm, and sensual appeal reconciled many dichotomies in her life. With him she crossed the boundary between black and white that dominated her Southern childhood. Half a generation older than she, he gave her the fatherly approval and support she needed without the complications she’d met in Dr. Kemp; as the relationship plays out in Superior Women, for instance, Jackson Clay pays taxi fares for Megan and tries to give her money for better clothes and housing: “This small cheap room simply does not coincide with Jackson’s view of her. To Jackson she is a superior woman, who should therefore live in grand surroundings. And while Megan does not necessarily agree, she is touched by his concern. Jackson is one of the nicest men she has ever known, if not the nicest.”

  Part of what makes Jackson nicer than other men in Superior Women and other men Adams knew is his capacity to appreciate an intelligent and beautiful (i.e., “superior”) woman without envy or jealous possessiveness. With Young, Alice broke through what had become for her a frustrating opposition of love and sex. After they make love for the first time in Superior Women, Jackson tells Megan that he was “real careful” not to impregnate her but would gladly marry her if his care has failed. His offer represents a lack of defensiveness that Adams’s alter ego Megan has never encountered before. Thus Megan thinks about “the mysteries of their connection” that escape usual definitions: “Certainly none of the current concepts of ‘in love’ quite apply, although in their ways Megan and Jackson do love each other. But they are not jealous or even curious about other people in each other’s lives, as people in love are supposed to be.”II

  * * *

  American, Canadian, British, and Free French soldiers were fighting their way across western France in July 1944 when Adams enrolled in a pair of popular courses at Harvard called “Fundamental Issues of the War” and “Philosophical Problems of the Postwar World” with an optimistic red-haired professor named Donald Cary Williams. “He had a sort of bantam self-assurance and he was of great good cheer about the world,” Adams recalled. “Democracy and Communism, Russian Communism, had much more in common than either had with fascism, was one of the points he made, with an incisive, affirmative gesture of his small square hands. And, therefore, the postwar world would bring a new era of harmony, the USA and the USSR joining hands in celebration of their joint defeat of fascism. No trouble at all. No problem.”24

  Allied troops liberated Paris just after Alice’s eighteenth birthday in August; when her classes ended in October, the troops’ advance into Germany was stalled at Aachen. The following April 12, Franklin Roosevelt, who had been president for almost as long as Alice Adams could remember, died at his retreat in Georgia. Then on April 30, 1945, Adolf Hitler committed suicide in Berlin. The next day, Russian soldiers began liberating POW camps in Germany, and some 7,500 other American survivors flew home. After Hitler’s defeated generals surrendered to General Eisenhower, V-E Day, May 8, was celebrated across Europe and North America. Though the war continued in the Pacific, the national mood of emergency was passing. Rationing had ceased months before. Shiploads of soldiers returned to the United States. Many were reassigned to the Pacific, while others returned to their jobs, farms, or families. Some, supported by the GI Bill, made plans for college.

  As the spring term at Radcliffe and Harvard ended in June 1945, Americans were still worried that it might take another year and another million American lives to defeat Japan. Nonetheless, the Eastern Seaboard of the United States felt safe and triumphant. Alice took the summer off to contemplate her future. Her college scholarship had not been renewed because of increasing competition from returning soldiers, nor did the downward trend of her grades help her case. She stayed with friends in New York and applied for a job with Bell Telephone in New York City, but the Radcliffe dean’s office took weeks to reply to the phone company’s request for a recommendation. By the time they declared Alice “a quiet, attractive, and well-mannered girl of dependable character,” her New York dream had to be put on hold.

  American atomic bombs dropped on two Japanese cities ended World War II in early August. When Alice celebrated her nineteenth birthday on August 14, 1945, the postwar era and the nuclear age had begun. Profound changes were in store for the American survivors of that war, especially for a generation of women who had glimpsed independence and opportunity for themselves during the pressurized years of war.

  I. Barbara Mailer faced a similar situation in her engagement to Jack Maher, an Irish Catholic from Minnesota. Her mother feigned a heart attack to induce Barbara to break with Maher. Barbara resented that for years, until she realized that “all [she’d] ever had to do was present her with a fait accompli. Norman of course had always known that.” (Peter Manso transcripts, Norman Mailer Papers, Harry Ransom Center.)

  II. In two of Adams’s stories, her character Avery has an annulled marriage with a black horn player: the magazine version of “Alternatives” reads, “Her first marriage to black trumpet player Paul Blue was annulled: Paul was already married and his wife had lied about the divorce”; “A Southern Spelling Bee” says, “In Avery’s case there was a rumor of a very early annulled marriage to a colored trombone player…” I’ve been unable to find any record of such a marriage or annulment.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Cocktail of Dreams

  — 1946–1947 —

  With a wonderful gesture Billie throws her coat down on the stage, and for a moment she stands there in the spotlight, mouthing the words that are coming from the jukebox—“Will the one I love, be coming back to me?”—as everyone laughs and screams and applauds.

  —Alice Adams, Listening to Billie

  Ignoring Kempton’s advice to quit writing, in her final college year Alice applied for a fiction seminar taught by Albert J. Guerard, who had just returned from service in the army’s Psychological Warfare Division. Guerard admitted just two women—Alice Adams and Alison Lurie—and a dozen men from among more than fifty applicants to his class.

  Lurie, later a successful novelist, scholar, and critic, recalled: “Alice was dark-haired at that time with a very lush figure. She was extremely beautiful, like a not-quite full-blown rose. She was striking looking.” Lurie and Adams didn’t become friends until years later: “When we were in class and before and after and at the break it was impossible to speak to her,” Lurie said, “because she was such a beauty and so popular and so much pursued by men.” For her part, Alice was intimidated by Lurie, who seemed “so New York, so caustic and knowing.”1

  Most of the men in the seminar had just returned from the war and held an advantage of age and experience over both Adams and Lurie. No doubt their values fulfilled Virginia Woolf’s ironic observation in A Room of One’s Own: “This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing room.” Several of the seminar men, including Stephen Becker, Robert Crichton, and John Hawkes, became professional writers. For Adams, Guerard proved a “sophisticated and sympathetic and extraordinarily intelligent” teacher. After the war and his work in psy-ops, he considered his three earlier novels “realistic and conventional” with “too much on the surface.” His later novels, such as Night Journey, show greater interest in hidden motivations, while his critical work considered psychological dimensions of Dostoyevsky, Hardy, Conrad, and Gide. Guerard believed that creative writing could be taught only if the teacher “doesn’t think of it as a matter of techniques to be passed on, tricks of the trade, formulas for success… Every genuine writer has a voice of his own… The experienced teacher listens to that voice, helps bring it out.”2

  Adams wrote stories about quibbling couples for Guerard’s seminar that were remarkably self-aware and observant from someone not yet twenty. Often they are about a college girl named Anne who smokes cigarettes, drinks sweet cocktail
s at the Ritz Bar, and unhappily dates men named Mark or Mike or Don or Dan. In one story she takes her boyfriend to Sebago Lake, hoping that the “surge of confidence that being there always gave her” will spread to their “far from ideal” relationship. In “The Cruelest Month,” a Jewish man drinks alone, distraught because his blond, gentile girlfriend has refused to marry him.

  Guerard was tough. He wrote on the typescript of “Curtains,” early in 1946, “Can’t you find some more ‘serious’ subject matter… some interesting and genuine human situation? This is literary.” Adams’s literariness was in the style of Hemingway’s abortion story, “Hills Like White Elephants,” with a laconic couple struggling to believe they are in love when they probably aren’t. But her couple have nothing at stake except plans for the evening. More often Guerard’s notes praise the simple structure of Adams’s stories (usually single scenes), suggest psychological angles that could be clarified, and propose magazines—Mademoiselle, Story, Woman’s Home Companion—where a story might be submitted.

  Guerard gave Alice an A on her story about a mother and daughter titled “Wonderful” and called it “cool, firm and sensitive.”3 It opens with a picture of Mrs. Turner (standing in for Agatha Adams) at her desk, trying to write but distracted by her daughter, Anne, who plays love songs on the phonograph in the next room. Then Anne, lounging in a chair with a cigarette, tells her mother that after college she’d “like to live in the Village for a year and try writing.” Anne asks her mother what she wanted to do after college but barely waits for a reply.I The question prompts Mrs. Turner to remember when she and her husband dreamed as Anne does: “ ‘We’ll have a small apartment near Washington Square and know lots of wonderful people and buy all the books and records we want and we’ll both write and be better and happier than anyone else,’ they had said, and it was almost a song.”

  There’s little evidence beyond this story that Alice and her mother talked about their dreams, but here Adams empathizes with her mother. Anne has a boyfriend named Jack who “wants to write too.” The indirect way she tells her plans reveals much about an ambitious nineteen-year-old college girl in 1946. All of her words are about Jack, but she seems to have chosen him because he can move her toward her own dream of writing: “He’s swell; you’ll love him. His stuff is marvelous. I know he’ll be good someday.” Mrs. Turner, strikingly afraid of intruding in her daughter’s life, barely reacts to Anne’s news. Instead she says she’ll have to talk to Anne’s father about her wish to live alone in New York and asks if she should also tell him about Jack: “Oh, no, it really doesn’t have anything to do with my wanting to write. I know I’ll do that anyway.”

  Adams’s later style was richer, less constrained and minimalist than that of her college stories, even when she was published in the New Yorker. Her restrained style here may derive from her fear of becoming her mother. Adams recognized that her mother once held the same shaky, unexamined confidence that she could have a writer’s life by marrying a man who cared about writing. Agatha did write, more than Alice gave her credit for, but her marriage failed to sustain her emotionally.

  At nineteen Alice was trying to find a way to shake up this cocktail of new and inherited dreams while resisting the postwar marriage mania that surrounded her at Radcliffe. “We had a thing when we were seniors,” Mary Bachhuber Simmons said. “The girls who were engaged got little flower rings—it was terrible!”

  During the semester she attended Guerard’s workshop, Alice was “unhappily in love with” a fine arts student named Myron J. (Mike) Gladstone.II She spent her 1946 spring break in New York, away from him, staying first with Ginny Berry’s family and then with her parents’ friends Ralph and Eve Bates. On the train down she encountered a Harvard acquaintance, Philip Mayer (himself in love with Alice, he later told her), who took her to a cocktail party given by the Padraic Colums. She found the Irish poet and his wife so “violently Catholic” that it was hard to talk to them, but they discovered a mutual acquaintance in Alice’s Wisconsin friend Jean Salter’s mother, Katherine Shephard Hayden. At the Colums’ she also saw Rosalind Wilson, who took them all to meet her father. The renowned critic Edmund Wilson came down, Alice recalled, “in a very flashy pair of pajamas and striped bathrobe. He’s funny. He sat twiddling a pack of cards until Padraic asked him what their purpose was and then he started doing the most amazing card tricks.” Later in a memorable night, Mayer took Alice to the 181 Club on Second Avenue, a gay bar renowned for its drag king and drag queen performances.4

  With graduation from Radcliffe three months away, Alice was seeing herself as an adult among people of her parents’ generation during that week in New York. Novelist Ralph Bates, her parents’ friend who’d been an organizer of the International Brigade in Spain and later taught creative writing at New York University, criticized one of her stories, advising her to “take away the soft edges and try to get to the core of her characters.”5 And she met a “boy” who gave her a preview of the devastating review he’d written for the Sunday Times of Chapel Hill writer Noel Houston’s novel The Great Promise. In fact, Houston had sent Alice galleys and she declared the book “awful” in her letter to her parents: “I also heard from that boy that the movies have rejected it. I don’t see why, except that it is pretty much of the GWTW [Gone with the Wind] pattern. How does Noel feel about it now?”6

  Alice carried this insider confidence when she visited with Gus Jennings and Archibald Shields, editors her parents knew at Henry Holt & Co. They assured her that they’d like to hire her when they opened a new trade department. With a recommendation from Guerard, she also applied for a job at Alfred A. Knopf, but nothing came of that. On the strength of Guerard’s and Holt’s encouragement Alice set her course for New York City. “My big problem now is getting an apartment, and it doesn’t look too good,” she said.7

  Certainly Alice looked good, as her photo in the Radcliffe Forty and Six yearbook attests. Like half the women in the annual, she wore dark red lipstick that, in the black-and-white portrait, made her full lips match her shoulder-length brunette hair and eyebrows. By any standard, her oval face is one of the prettiest in the book, but what does her expression tell us? A hint of a smile—a Mona Lisa mystery if you will—plays at the corner of those carefully bowed lips. Her submissive wide-eyed gaze is alluring, but her sharply angled Lauren Bacall eyebrows suggest she’s nobody’s fool.

  * * *

  Back in Cambridge, on a double date with Gladstone, Alice met Gladstone’s friend Mark Linenthal Jr. Mark was recently back from the war in Europe, and his date for the evening was his cousin. Before the evening was over Mark and Alice had turned their attentions toward one another.

  Tall, thin, and Jewish, the Boston native and Harvard graduate was now a returning war hero with a recently found devotion to literature. Second Lieutenant Linenthal had been the navigator in an army air force B-24 bomber that was disabled by antiaircraft fire on a bombing run over the Focke-Wulf aircraft factory in Munich on September 22, 1944. Untrained in the use of his parachute, Linenthal “just jumped and pulled it and the blessed thing opened with a terrific hit in the groin.” For six weeks, Linenthal’s parents in Cambridge knew only that he was missing in action and presumed dead. The letter they received from the commanding general’s office stated that their son’s “bomber dropped out of the formation with one motor disabled. No parachutes were sighted.”

  Mark Linenthal had landed in a field near the German-Austrian border, where a farmer wielding a hammer escorted him to his tractor and asked if he was Jewish. “Nein,” Linenthal told the farmer, who took him to an internee camp in Salzburg. There his interrogators understood that the H on his dog tags stood for “Hebrew.”8 Eventually Linenthal was taken to Stalag Luft I, a camp for officers on the Baltic Sea, and segregated with other Jewish prisoners. The Red Cross told his parents he was alive. For the next three months, despite rumors that the US was winning the war, Linenthal and his fellow Jewish prisoners expected to be killed. Indeed, the N
uremberg trials revealed that Nazis had plans to execute forty thousand Allied airmen in reprisal for the deaths of Germans in the firebombing of Hamburg and Dresden.

  Stalag Luft I was liberated by the Russians on May 1, 1945. Linenthal was flown into England and back to the States to rejoin his parents, who then lived in a large rented house at 6 Gerry’s Landing in Cambridge. Seven months behind barbed wire, living on brown bread (which he liked) and rutabagas and care packages had changed Linenthal. He’d lost weight and become intolerant of “that yiddisher-mama stuff—‘love me and all the things I do for you’—I thought it was a crock of shit when I got back,” he said.

  Otherwise, it seems that Linenthal returned home without bitterness. He had realized he could survive anything as part of a community. As an undergraduate at Harvard, Linenthal had planned to become a journalist. His POW experience turned him toward more personal goals. From the camp library he acquired a novel that met his needs: Howards End by E. M. Forster, whom he described as a “social progressive and nature mystic.” That book “determined my life,” he said. He began writing; he would study literature and become a teacher. A humanist. But first, of course, like most men who had spent eight months in a prison camp, he was looking to meet beautiful women.