Linenthal felt he had a “guardian angel” who had allowed him to survive the war. The yearbook for his 1939 class at Roxbury Latin School, where he was the only Jew in his class, notes that Mark’s “inborn imperturbability will carry him through this troubled world.” As an undergraduate at Harvard (class of 1941) he’d “majored in Radcliffe”; supported the pro-British, interventionist Liberal Union; and written a column about improvisational jazz for the Advocate, where his fellow staff members included an engineering major with literary ambitions named Norman Mailer. Linenthal was also an instigator of a “Tieless Tuesday Tea” group that met for casual literary talk. Their group included Mailer, Jacob Levenson, and a few Radcliffe women; they scrupulously drank tea until five o’clock, when they switched to martinis. As Levenson looked back on all that, what struck him was Mailer “as the cheerful, unpretentious student, who looked very Harvard in his starched shirt despite the open collar—in contrast with the image he later cultivated”—and the way that Linenthal “loved literature socially.” Another friend, Louis Pollak, vividly remembered Linenthal as “constantly happy and funny” with a “marvelous quality of sustaining those around him.” Despite the “tieless” rule, Linenthal sometimes sported a gleaming white shirt and a necktie when he came to tea.
When twenty-four-year-old Mark Linenthal met Alice Adams, he “thought she was spectacularly attractive.” Photographs show that he was attractive as well, with wavy brown hair, prominent dark eyes, and full, serious lips just on the verge of a laugh. Alice saw him as “a very skinny, wonderful-looking returned prisoner-of-war.”9 His good humor and love of jazz and literature attracted her too—she’d had her fill of anxious intellectuals. Enrolled in the master’s program in English literature at Harvard, Mark was then making a diligent, undistinguished progress through undergraduate surveys in English literature. Tuition ran $200 a semester. He lived at home but owned his own car.
Verifiable details of their early meetings are scarce, erased by later acrimony. Mark turned the memories he had into quips. Of Alice’s attractions, he would say, “She had very large breasts. When she first took off her shirt, I thought, That’s too much!” Too much or not, Mark brought Alice to stay overnight at his parents’ house, where she was offered a third-floor room above his own on the second floor. “In the night, she just came and slept with me. And my mother was horrified.” Mark retold the story decades hence: “My father came to me and said, ‘Mother said that Alice spent the night with you’—he didn’t ask me if it was true, which was nice! And then my father said, ‘I don’t want my house turned into a place of assignation.’ ”III
Mark’s mother was Anna Davidson Linenthal, daughter of Kalman Davidson, the first Jewish doctor in Boston who had German medical training, though he was born in Lithuania. Mark’s father, Mark Linenthal Sr., the American-born son of Russian Jews who became US citizens in 1895, was a Harvard-trained structural engineer whose projects included Suffolk Downs racetrack, the Boston Garden sports and entertainment arena, and buildings at Brandeis University. Though not religious, the Linenthals were sensitive about receiving respect as Jews in quota-era Boston, a city that lacked a long-established Jewish community. During their early marriage, the senior Linenthals had shared a house with Anna’s parents. Mark Senior’s sons saw him as a puritanical man who nonetheless enjoyed his associations with racetrack owners. His own father, called Michael, was remembered as a charming alcoholic married to Yetta, a “capable and modern” woman who smoked and wore rouge. That, the family speculated, caused the straitlaced tendencies in Mark Sr. Anna was also considered stern, critical of others, and impervious to criticism of herself. Though she was anti-Catholic, she hired Irish maids. She used a foot buzzer to call them from the kitchen and refused to speak of anything personal while they were in the room.
The last-born of three children, easygoing Mark especially admired his older brother, Michael, a Harvard law graduate who practiced with the prestigious firm of Ropes & Gray while involving himself in theater. Levenson, who knew Mark in Roxbury, said that Mark prized Michael’s “brightness and sweetness, his living in the kind of cultivated world that we all hoped to grow into.” After the war, Michael confided to Mark that he was gay (the slang then coming into general usage) and eventually moved away from law toward theater. “It certainly didn’t matter to Mark or me that Michael was homosexual,” Levenson added. But when Michael came out to his father, Mark Sr. told him that he expected him to “remain continent.” Mark also had a married older sister, Margaret, who to him represented the kind of confinement by family ties that he hoped to avoid—she phoned her mother every day.
* * *
The changes Mark Linenthal and his family might bring to Alice Adams’s life don’t sound foremost in her mind as she writes her mother just before her graduation from Radcliffe and move to New York. She’s preparing for general exams, sure she will pass but resenting the time required. Ralph and Eve Bates have offered her their Upper West Side apartment during their summer vacation, and she plans to be in Chapel Hill for Anne Holmes’s wedding on June 12. She’s so evidently writing a vacuously informative letter to her mother that one suspects something is left out.10
In fact, Alice’s father was again staying at Dr. Kemp’s sanitarium while Agatha managed her large, empty house, worked at the library, and traveled to Randolph-Macon for a meeting. Letters from Agatha to Nic indicate that she’s learned to cope with his absence, though she never falters in her tone of old-fashioned courtesy toward her “dearest” husband. And yet, she has established what one might now call boundaries: “I can come for you with much joy but it would be better for me to come in the afternoon, so I wouldn’t have to take much time out of the office.”
How to calculate the effect of Agatha Adams’s quietly furious stoicism and desperate loneliness on her daughter? Like any happy twenty-year-old, Alice is most excited about the possibilities for her own life. In the midst of setting out for New York, she worries that the people she’ll know there will be too similar to the ones she knows in Cambridge. She’d rather be going to Paris, but she says, “I’m too young and I really don’t speak French very well at all.”
During her college years, Alice lost touch with Judith Clark, who attended Sophie Newcombe Memorial College in New Orleans after she finished high school in Texas, but heard news of her through mutual friends in Chapel Hill. Alice did correspond with her North Carolina beau Jim McMullan, now a naval officer. He was supposed to be part of the D-Day invasion at Normandy but instead spent five days at sea on a landing craft that hadn’t made it to the shore. He and Alice met in New York City after her Radcliffe graduation, when he made his third and last entry in Alice’s Chapel Hill yearbook: “6 June 1946—Still going strong—3½ years to go. I hope we still want to get married then, Darling.” McMullan’s second wife, Doris, recalled a story Jim told her. He took Alice to dine at the Waldorf-Astoria, which they soon realized was “too sophisticated and expensive. Jim signaled the waiter, who winked and allowed them to leave without fuss.” After law school in North Carolina, Jim married a debutante and made a career as a city attorney.
* * *
During the summer of 1946, Alice began working in the advertising department at Henry Holt & Co. near Gramercy Park. In those days, the so-called Publishers’ Row ran from Union Square to Thirty-Fourth Street, housing dozens of independent publishing companies. “The city crawled with writers, Heaven knows,” Jan Morris writes, “but it was richer still in editors, and richest of all in advertising managers.” The area around Union Square was also rich in bookstores of every variety, from the neat and scholarly to the cluttered and musty. It was an ideal neighborhood for an aspiring writer.11
Alice moved into a one-room walk-up apartment on the north edge of Greenwich Village—21 West Twelfth Street. Her room had a bed, desk, chair, typewriter, and hot plate—no air-conditioning, of course; she could smoke a cigarette whenever she liked, as many as three packs a day, she later reported.12 Her re
nt of $15 a week came out of her salary of $45. She wrote a story about that room, calling it simply “A Room Alone.” Walking home at the end of an August day at the office, her alter ego, Anne, dreams of going home to that room in the fall, “arranging leaves to float in a bowl on the table beside her typewriter” and playing Mozart “on the record-player she was going to buy.” She’s been imagining such a room of her own, the story tells us, through years of living in college dormitories and vacationing with her parents. Anne looks forward to sleeping “with the sound of rain on the roof.” But first, she tells herself, she’ll get “a lot of writing done… and finish Howards End.”
Perhaps Mark Linenthal had urged Alice to read the novel that changed his career plan when he was a prisoner of war, or perhaps she put it in her story to please him. Yet, however important Linenthal was to Alice in the fall of 1946, he still competed with an older desire of Alice’s: to differentiate herself from her mother. “A Room Alone” dramatizes Alice’s coldness toward Agatha.
When Anne opens the door to her room, she’s appalled to find that her mother has talked her way past the landlady and commenced making tea on her hot plate. Is it a Freudian slip that Adams typed, “Anne felt herself automatically closing against the affection in her daughter’s voice”? Surely she meant “mother’s voice”? Over drinks on the Brevoort Hotel’s terrace, Anne discovers that her mother once lived in the Village and wanted to write, “just before [she] met [Anne’s] father.” Ambitious, self-involved Anne is appalled by this similarity to her mother. She imagines herself years hence, with a life more successful than her mother’s, when she’ll “have known all the people [she] want[s] to know and have walked along all the streets and have written it all.”IV
And have written it all. Writing was the way out, seemingly a strange rebellion for a girl who didn’t want to be like her mother—who also wanted to be a writer. Her feeling seems mean, but a theory Carolyn Heilbrun states in Writing a Woman’s Life may apply: women in the decades before the 1970s resented their mothers because their “mission was to prepare the daughter to take her place in patriarchal succession, that is, to marry, to bear children… and to encourage her husband to succeed in the world”—in other words, to squash her dreams of personal accomplishment.13 Identifying with Agatha’s accomplishments, which were remarkable for her place and time, would have required Alice to shoulder her disappointments as well. Anne can but react with horror when her mother says, “I wanted to write too, you see. So I hope very much that you will, dear.” Anne’s polite, cold reply is ironic, dismissive: “No more than I do.”
* * *
Alice’s life in Manhattan took a blow in late October when Holt invited her to resign, noting that she did not seem to like her job and did not justify her expense. “I thought all that was required was my presence,” she later said of her “minuscule publishing career.”14 Typically, she told her parents she was happy about this news: the “mustering out pay” she’d received would allow her to live “sans job” for a couple of months and “write like mad.”15 Allen Tate, the Southern poet who’d been editor of belles lettres at Holt, was fired the very next week. Tate promised to recommend Alice for other jobs. He offered to read her poems too, but she got cold feet about that and sent him short stories instead, explaining, “I’m more and more convinced of the tremendous amount of time and work that it takes to be good at all.”16
At first glance, it’s surprising that Alice curried favor with Tate, an influential figure in the Southern Renaissance whose defense of white supremacy clashed with her own progressive outlook and behavior. The simplest explanation is probably that literary ambition makes strange bedfellows, but of course Alice also recognized that every Southern writer wrestles with the topic of race.
Which is certainly one reason why snippets of Alice’s New York life that survive in her fiction derive from nights spent at Fifty-Second Street jazz clubs. That’s where she’d met Trummy Young, and she continued to see him from time to time. She also “hung around with” Norman Granz, an impresario from Los Angeles who was then producing his Jazz at the Philharmonic national concert tours and making himself known as a pioneer in the racial integration of both bands and audiences. This connection of love and race extends to include Adams’s lifelong fascination with Billie Holiday, whom she was thrilled to hear in person at a Fifty-Second Street club on a date with Mark Linenthal. He recalled, “Holiday was disappointing. She didn’t sing many songs and her attitude towards the audience was kind of snotty.” Alice cherished a different memory, which she wrote into Listening to Billie:
And then suddenly she is there, and everybody knows, and they crane their heads backward to see her, since she has come in by the street entrance like anyone else. Or, not like anyone else at all: she is more beautiful, more shining, holding her face forward like a flower, bright-eyed and smiling, high yellow cheekbones, white teeth and cream-white gardenia at her ear. She is wearing a big fur coat, and behind her is a slouch-hatted man with a huge dog, a Dane, that is straining on a leash. The man has a bandage on his hand: he is Billie’s manager, and the dog, Billie’s dog, bit him on the hand on the way to the show, and that is why they are late.
The girl remembering Billie is Eliza, a “very young and pretty small girl” who is terribly worried that she might be pregnant. Should she—could she—find an abortionist, or should she marry the young man at her side? She “knows that she is more in love than he is, but it is he who urges marriage.” Given the uncertain birth control methods available in 1946, it’s likely that Alice did suffer monthly anxieties about pregnancy.
* * *
But that’s probably not why she decided to marry Mark Linenthal.
Alice had known Linenthal for a year when Holt asked her to resign that Friday in late October. Theirs was meant to be a sophisticated relationship. They were devoted to literary modernism and distrustful of sentiment. They liked jazz. She gave him newly published books from the mailroom at Holt, and they talked about the avant-garde and “bright young Left Bank men,” according to a poem she dedicated to him called “Stork Club.”V She pledged not to love him “in pulpy words.” On the day after Holt let her go, Alice and Mark hitchhiked together to Woodstock, New York, where Mark’s brother, Michael, owned and managed the Woodstock Players Theater. They went hunting (but saw nothing to shoot), Alice wrote her parents afterward. Still, it was “wonderful” to be out in the country, “misty with all the colors hazed into purple.”17
By November 16 Alice has found that she “really does write most of the time” and dreads searching for or having a new job.18 Little more than speculation and flawed memories bridge our story from that determined young writer’s declaration to this fact: two weeks later, on November 30, 1946, Alice Adams and Mark Linenthal were married.
As Linenthal told it, Alice grasped him as a “haven in a storm” after she lost her job. But an undated fiction manuscript by Linenthal suggests how eager he was to have a girl like Alice. In his story, a prisoner of war dreams of making love to a “long and smooth and firm” girl named Anne. She says she likes him “a hell of a lot” but doesn’t want to limit her freedom. If losing her job made Alice question the benefits of “freedom,” then Mark quickly stepped forward with an alternative. Alice announced her plan to marry by phone to Eve and Ralph Bates at midnight. Bates warned her against being impetuous. Apparently she did not listen.
Trummy Young was waiting with Alice when Mark came to pick her up for a plane flight to Chapel Hill. She “had lipstick all over her face” but Mark didn’t say anything because he “didn’t want to embarrass her, or come on as a big moralist.” Alice later commented in a story, “I knew the marriage was wrong, but while it was taking place I could not admit such a gross mistake. An unhappily familiar story.”19
Hasty as the wedding appeared, it was not an elopement. Nic Adams met Alice and Mark at their plane in Chapel Hill with, as Mark recalled, “a pipe in one hand and a glass of whiskey in the other.” They were ma
rried at the Adamses’ house with Ginny Berry as maid of honor and Mark’s brother, Michael, as best man. Ginny had to comfort Mark in the face of Alice’s “curious ambivalent behavior.” Presbyterian minister Charles M. Jones, who was known for his opposition to racial segregation and for inviting black citizens to his church for meetings, performed the ceremony. Verlie Jones, the cook and maid who helped raise Alice, attended as a guest.20
The senior Linenthals also made the trip south, though Anna Linenthal tried to frighten her son from marriage to the woman who’d had the nerve to sleep with her son under her own roof. For the rest of his life, Mark explained it this way: “My mother said, ‘If you marry that girl, I’ll commit suicide!’ So what choice did I have? But did she keep her promise?”
Mark understood the Freudian interpretation his joke permitted—marrying a beautiful and sexy and intelligent gentile like Alice was a slap in the face to his mother. In Adams’s novel Families and Survivors, Mark’s stand-in, Michael Wasserman, is “thrilled” when his future wife challenges his mother because, “mistaking [her] hysteria for strength, he imagines that she will ultimately protect him from his mother.” Alice was poorly equipped to do that, but she did store up her dislike for Anna Linenthal for years. She found Mrs. Linenthal “incredibly stupid… and selfish in that it never once occurred to her not to say something that came into her mind, no matter what the effect was. And monstrously ugly, I’ve never seen such an ugly woman,” and defended her own outspokenness by adding, “It’s not good for people’s character to be that ugly.”21
The reasons Alice gave for marrying Mark Linenthal changed over the years. From a long perspective, it seems she wanted a safe harbor not just because her job had ended but because her youth had been emotionally strenuous.22 But at the time, there was a near-mania for marriage among her friends, and Mark had literary ambition, intelligence, and affluent parents. With him Alice expected to have fun and enjoy a kind of freedom as a married woman in the late 1940s that eluded most working single women. Later Linenthal put forth a “wild”—and insightful—theory of his own, adding a caution against taking it “literally”: “When we got married I think that Alice thought she was marrying Nic, but she married Agatha.” In other words, Alice craved Mark’s approval and thought attachment to him would be romantic. She underestimated the difficulties that her independent spirit would feel within a social institution that declares that a man and woman must, as de Beauvoir writes, “meet each other’s needs in all respects, at once, for their whole life.”
Alice Adams Page 14
