The conclusion of that story calls for a comment on the Adams coincidence, which is never really a coincidence but rather a fulfillment of an emotional outcome in which Adams deeply believes. The pleasure she took in this brief romance warned her that her marriage to Mark Linenthal was already in danger. Both these men had been imprisoned during the war and both had strong political beliefs, but Linenthal had already become familiar, perhaps tiresome, to her. Trentin awakened her need for autonomy, her need to exist outside of marriage. Alice’s pleasure also translated into enduring curiosity about Trentin.
At the end of the seminar, the Linenthals and Kenneth Lynn traveled together to visit new European friends. Despite reluctant partings, the Americans were happy to leave Salzburg, where a cold rain drenched the bombed-out, roofless train station. They stopped in Venice, where Bruno Trentin then resided. Then, according to several letters Lynn wrote to his parents, the two men continued to Rome without Alice: “Alice hasn’t come down, she just couldn’t bear to leave Venice,” he offered. Later, Lynn explained to his wife that the reason Alice couldn’t bear to leave was because she was having a hot affair with one of the Italians from the seminar. “Ken had become Alice’s confidant,” Valerie Lynn said. “He knew about that affair, and I can’t swear to it, but I think that Mark was oblivious to it!”30
Alice finally did part from Venice—and Trentin—and catch up with her husband in Rome. As her story “A Week in Venice” suggests, Trentin showed her “the Venice of the poor,” emphasizing that “most people in Venice do not live near the Piazza San Marco.” But Alice’s lover probably declined to follow her to Rome because he was expected at political meetings in Paris. Trentin was a member of a small group of former partisans called Action Party (Partito d’Azione, Giustizia e Libertà), which he expected would soon be absorbed by either socialists or communists. It was, in fact, a time of intense consultations and negotiations among independent groups who felt the crosswinds of efforts by both the United States and Russia to influence the future of Europe.
Once in Rome, Mark and Alice and Lynn met up with Americans, including Alfred and Caroline Kazin and Stanley and Eileen Geist, along with distinguished Italians such as Gaetano Salvemini and Mario Praz. Of arriving in Rome Kazin wrote, “It is as if we had crossed the border into another world—so different in weather, in the faces of the people, in the odor of the streets, in the flowers, the wine, the food, that I find myself breathing deeper, rejoicing in every footstep.” Here too, of course, the reconstruction of Europe occupied everyone’s mind. For these Americans, the heroes of the Italian resistance were writers and intellectuals. Kazin listed his heroes: Ignazio Silone in Switzerland; Primo Levi in Auschwitz; Salvemini at Harvard; Carlo Levi exiled in Lucania, then imprisoned in Florence. In Rome, postwar, those who survived celebrated “at the Il Re degli Amici… the café of all good Roman artists, Socialists … The beautiful Italian bedlam and intellectual merriment, people calling and flirting from table to table: all one great family party.”31
Such scenes probably made Alice long for her Action Party lover and ensured her lifelong fondness for Italy. She and Mark stayed in an Italian friend’s home, probably Salvemini’s. “Alice was rather pretty,” Eileen Geist (later Finletter) recalled, “and this Italian writer’s father watched her having breakfast on the sofa, kind of stretched out a little having her coffee. Then the old man said, “Aren’t those wonderful legs?”
Since her precocious adolescence in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1940, Alice’s sensual beauty had been noticed by men and women alike. Beguiled and confused by her own desire for romance and the male’s pressure for sex, she probably hoped that marriage to Mark would be that salve to loneliness that she’d craved while growing up as an only child. Still recovering from his wartime experiences and at odds with his own parents, Mark could not possibly have satisfied all of Alice’s contradictory desires.
They had, nonetheless, Paris to look forward to. They shared the romantic idea of being writers in Paris.
I. In a related early story, Anne’s mother tells her that she lived in an apartment in New York just before she met her father, while Anne listens, “afraid and not sure why.” What she fears is becoming her mother. (“A Room Alone.”)
II. Gladstone would be Adams’s model for Norm Goldman in Families and Survivors: “Norm’s touch is soft. He is a thin, dark boy, in khaki pants and a crisp seersucker coat. He is 4-F because of a bad ear.… He is studying architecture at the School of Design.” Gladstone later directed publications at the Museum of Modern Art. Adeline Lubell Naiman described him as “part of the nongay, every-bit-as-good-as-gay, would-be-Oxford-missing-lost-generation, though just a little too late.” (Peter Manso, Norman Mailer: His Life and Times, 72.)
III. Adams gives a different version of these meetings in Families and Survivors, where she also describes Louisa’s fascination with Michael’s language: “Michael says ‘fuck’ a lot (as though he were very sexy) and this, too, seems exotic; it is not a word that Norm would use, and God knows not any of the nice Southern boys at home.”
IV. The room appears again as Megan’s in Superior Women: “In her narrow room there is a single bed, and a table which holds alternately her typewriter and a hot plate.… Her window opens onto a fire escape where she sometimes sits and smokes, on those chokingly hot New York summer nights. From that perch she can peer into what must be a dance studio, on Fifth Avenue (she finds later that it is indeed a dance studio, Martha Graham’s). What she sees are portions of marvelously leaping, prancing bodies, long brown arms and legs, in black tank suits or tights.” Graham’s studio was a block west, but other details were probably exactly as Adams remembered.
V. Books Linenthal saved included a Holt-published collection of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat cartoons with an introduction by E. E. Cummings inscribed “Mark from Alice” on September 26, 1946.
CHAPTER NINE
Impersonators
— 1947–1948 —
Unkindly, Bruno reminded me that if I lived in the Quarter, in a cheap room, I could now be making hot chocolate and serving it in privacy. There was always a sort of European practicality about him—even in love, I thought—and in the phrase betrayed how American was my own romanticism.
—Alice Adams, “Winter Rain,” Beautiful Girl
Three years after the liberation, France still suffered the poverty that had gripped the country during the war. Severe shortages of coal, wheat, fabric, leather, and other goods were exacerbated by political turmoil and strikes as socialists, communists, and Gaullists struggled to gain a majority in the government. Adams remembered the Paris of 1947–48 in her story “Winter Rain,” where her narrator tells of being “colder than ever in [her] life.” It was a “winter of strikes: GRÈVE GÉNÉRALE, in large strange headlines. And everyone struck: Métro, garbage, water, electricity, mail—all these daily necessities were at one time or another with difficulty forgone.”
Parisians were “suffocating and pitiful, taking pleasure in their own sulkiness,” according to Stanley Geist, an acquaintance of the Linenthals who wrote “Memoires d’un touriste: Paris, 1947” for Simone de Beauvoir and Jean-Paul Sartre’s journal Les temps modernes.1 To cope with shortages, the French government reduced bread rations, adding insult to the fact that most of the available bread had a high corn content. Parisians blamed this terrible yellow bread on the United States, believing that some foreign aid director, following British usage, had mistranslated a French request for wheat. The black market controlled prices and supplies of desirable goods. Apartments were scarce too. At first, Alice and Mark lived with Robert Bocquet, a French painter they’d met at the Bal Nègre nightclub, in a working-class neighborhood near Place d’Italie. They exchanged “swear word lessons” with Bocquet, and Alice developed “a minor crush” on him but remained friendly with his girlfriend, Odette. Next they rented a bedroom in a Haussmann block at 179 rue de Courcelles beyond Parc Monceau in the Seventeenth Arrondisement.I2 Their landlady, a widow
called Madame Boissaye, who could no longer afford her flat in the haute-bourgeois neighborhood once inhabited by Colette and Marcel Proust, was most likely “une dame comme il faut” described by Stanley Geist: “She had subleased the larger part of her flat to Americans and she was amassing goods from their Care packages in anticipation of the revolution of 1948.”3
Mark stood behind a thoughtful, slender Alice to photograph her in the mirror above the landlady’s elegant marble mantel. Alice wears a tailored suit and fashionable turban, looking as French as possible and clearly distinguishing herself from American girls abroad who dressed in big sweaters and rolled-up jeans. In the next snapshot pasted in the Linenthal album, their French hostess regards her American guests with composure, with the “heavy gold-blonde hair” Alice remembered coiled atop her head, clearly the mistress of her domain.4
This landlady became Madame Frenaye in “Winter Rain.” In this knowing look at cultural collision, Alice portrayed herself as Patience, a naïve, over-romantic, and inappropriately dressed American student who pays an “enormous amount of money for permission to live at the cold end of the long drafty hall” of Madame Frenaye’s flat. Patience sticks out the winter “to prove that [she] could do better than yellow coats and summer dresses in a cold September rain.” Mme. Frenaye greedily accepts Patience’s rent dollars and her mother’s food packages, giving back a soft bed in a cold room and French conversation over exquisite dinners.II Patience sees that she and her landlady are joined by “dubious motives… to live and eat and talk together throughout those difficult historic months from September until February, until [their] private war became visible and manifest, and [she] left.”
Alice and Mark both lived in the room on rue de Courcelles, but one would never know that from “Winter Rain,” wherein Adams again describes an affair with an Italian named Bruno in such detail that one feels sure that Bruno Trentin made at least one visit to Paris that year.5 In the story the lovers part with the realization that Patience is “hopelessly domestic and bourgeois.” Patience tells the reader, “He said, finally, that I would not be a suitable companion for an Italian statesman, and of course he was perfectly right.” Like it or not, Alice was in Paris as the wife of Mark Linenthal.
* * *
Post–World War II Paris was a bargain for Americans, much as it had been in the twenties. Living in an afterglow of the more celebrated era, Adams called the novel she began in France “The Impersonators”—meaning that these Americans are imitating the twenties generation in Paris. Adams is unfair to herself. Her book echoes Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but the postwar situation in Paris she describes is particular to the forties, its people deeply demoralized by four years of German occupation. Nineteen forty-seven was, French historians have said, l’année terrible and l’année de tous les dangers. The shadow of the concentration camps darkened everything. In “The Impersonators,” Ralph Levin goes to a Buchenwald survivor to purchase black-market francs with his dollars: “The middle ages in 1947, he thought. Only I’m an American so I go to money-changers like any rich goy. Hitler, Buchenwald, Auschwitz—they had only translated the old business into twentieth-century terms, a new kind of barbarism. A few minutes ago [Levin] had actually detested the man, hated him for the haggling he was forced to do.”
At this time a dawning American empire competed with the Soviet Union to determine Europe’s future. “People talk only of the imminence of war!” wrote Roger Martin du Gard to André Gide. Some French feared a Russian invasion of France, while others thought the United States would attack Russia. The Communist Party exploited the real grievances of the French working class and labor unions to undermine the economy before the Marshall Plan could shore it up. Anticommunists denounced Stalin’s crimes, which were becoming widely known through the French translation of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Leading intellectuals like de Beauvoir, Sartre, and Camus, who were anti-American but not communist, hoped for a socialist France.
Few people in the bars and cafés of the Left Bank realized how soon Europe would be divided by the Iron Curtain. “St.-Germain-des-Prés was unlike anywhere else in postwar Europe,” write historians Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper. After four years of German occupation and a virtual news blackout, Paris after the liberation was a place where intellectuals believed that “ideas would triumph over ‘filthy money.’ ”6 Sartre and de Beauvoir (she just home from a cultural tour of the United States and a torrid affair with the American writer Nelson Algren) published Les temps moderne and held court in the smoky basement bar of the Hotel Pont-Royal. Communist and Gaullist politicians and newspapers fought to influence French elections. Young idealists thought their discussions would shape a peaceful, prosperous world.III
Such cultural exchange had been the impulse behind the Salzburg Seminar. Similarly, the Sorbonne offered a cours de la civilisation française, which proved to be a savvy means to collect American tuition dollars. Young women from Smith College and other prestigious schools took a year abroad in Paris, and former GIs like Mark Linenthal enrolled to make themselves eligible for GI Bill benefits. As a married man, Mark received $120 a month, while single veterans got $90. “Curious arithmetic, that,” Adams noted drily.
One early-November morning, Mark ran into friends from home as he picked up his check at the Veterans Administration office. Norman and Bea Mailer had just arrived in Paris to await publication of his first novel, The Naked and the Dead. What Alice noticed first about Norman was the “hot, hot blue of his eyes… literally burning eyes.”7 That night the two couples enjoyed a “nice congenial drunk together.” Norman wrote his sister, Barbara, that he thought Alice was “an awfully nice dame,” adding that Alice recalled Barbara fondly from Radcliffe and regarded her with awe. The Linenthals and Mailers were delighted to have found each other; they’d felt lonely in a foreign, cold, grayed-out city, even if it was Paris.8
“Of all the people I’ve ever known,” Mark told Alice after she’d met the Mailers, “the two who most wanted to be writers were you and Norman Mailer.”9 Alice proved her determination by writing every morning while Mark attended his classes. At first she worked on stories about relationships among Jews and gentiles, whites and blacks in North Carolina—themes that occupied her all her life. Mailer, with a first novel already sold, inspired her to think about her writing career in addition to being a writer, and she began a novel about a young American woman in Paris. Even though Alice was not published, Mark reflected, “she was certainly a writer and she talked to Norman as a fellow writer.”
In other ways, Alice was inspired by the worldliness and candor of Mailer’s wife. Beatrice Silverman Mailer had been an officer in the WAVES and received GI benefits in her own right. She was a raven-haired, fast-talking girl from Chelsea in South Boston who had put herself through Boston University by waitressing and giving piano lessons. In some photos she looks like a young Elizabeth Taylor, and she was “a feminist, born that way,” her sister Phyllis recalled, undaunted by men because “she went to a camp where men and women used the same latrine.” Alice had met her when she visited the Linenthal home to welcome Mark back from the war while Norman was still overseas. On that occasion, Bea annoyed the senior Linenthals with her informal manners and free use of words like “shit” and “fuck”—which only increased Alice and Mark’s enjoyment of her.
Though Mark and Alice came from educated, comfortable backgrounds, they got no financial help from their parents. With their two GI stipends and Norman’s $1,200 advance from the sale of his novel to Rinehart, the Mailers were comparatively rich. They sailed to Europe on the Queen Elizabeth and rented a room at the Hotel de l’Avenir (Hotel of the Future) around the corner from Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas’s former apartment in Montparnasse. Then they rented an apartment, a middle-class luxury managed by few other ex-GI students in 1947. Their dusty, mouse-infested three-room apartment with red walls and an orange rug at 11 rue Bréa cost them less than a dollar a day. It came with a piano for Bea, and they poa
ched a maid from l’Avenir, though Norman made a point of saying he would not have “allowed” Bea to have a maid unless he knew she was competent to do the work herself. She was, as it turned out, competent at many things, but her main occupation that year, Alice recalled, was “being Norman’s wife.” In fact, she was also trying to sell a novel she’d written about her experience with the WAVES, but publishers called it dull and she gave up writing.10 After the Mailer marriage ended in 1952, some people said she had been shrill, nagging, or envious of Norman’s success. Alice called that “bullshit,” or at least a “revisionary” view colored by Mailer’s prejudices. “This was the middle Forties,” Alice declared. Jealousy of a husband’s success “would not have been considered a reasonable gripe even by Bea who was a fairly ‘liberated’ woman.”11
* * *
During that year, before American tourists descended on Europe, St.-Germain-des-Prés was a neighborhood. “We knew almost everyone we saw on the streets,” Adams wrote, “or at least we knew who they were. I remember standing in front of Brasserie Lipp one day when someone pointed and said, ‘Look, there’s Picasso!’ And it was, those incredible eyes unmistakable, even at that distance.” At nightclubs they saw Irish novelist Liam O’Flaherty and French singer Juliette Gréco. Once, Adams recalled, they listened dumbstruck as Truman Capote spun improbable stories about the American South for Cyril Connolly and a gullible companion.
The Linenthals and Mailers saw each other almost daily, though social life was very unstructured. They met for coffee at places like Café de Flore. Once the Linenthals had a party in their landlady’s apartment on rue de Courcelles, and the Mailers often entertained on rue Bréa. Mark Linenthal thought Bea retained the charms she’d had when he met her at Harvard as Norman’s fiancée: “Her sexiness was camp. She was like a little girl, wide-eyed and playful at the same time… she would make a sexually explicit remark, and Norman would act mock-shocked but was really delighted… her debunking Harvard stiffness appealed to Norman… One felt she was his companion in épater le bourgeoisie.”12
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