Abrahams was gay and “out” by the standards of the day. He’d written about straight relationships in his published novels and served in the army without difficulty, but his sexual orientation was known to friends. To someone who later praised his bravery in the matter, he replied, “What choice did I have?” Adams elaborated, “It is hard to imagine Billy in the macho pose that most of those [Stanford] Fellows adopted.” Both Linenthals indulged in suspicion of the other writers’ Western-macho attitude. They watched carefully, “especially when everyone was drunk; then, [they] thought, their ‘true natures’ might emerge.” Such attention was rewarded when a “happily married” man approached Mark Linenthal: “As he put it, ‘None of this fairy stuff. I just really like you,’ while heavily attempting an embrace… rich fodder indeed.” That, of course, was long before it had become common for American men to hug one another.8
* * *
In the November presidential election, the Linenthals supported Henry Wallace’s campaign as nominee of the Progressive Party. Wallace had been vice president during Roosevelt’s third term but was replaced by Harry Truman in 1944, thus missing the chance to be Roosevelt’s successor by just eighty-two days. As a candidate Wallace opposed Truman’s foreign policies, declaring that attempting to contain communism would lead to a “century of fear.” He also favored universal health care and full racial integration. In the South he campaigned alongside African-American candidates and refused to eat or lodge in segregated facilities.
Norman Mailer made over thirty speeches for Wallace in New York and Hollywood. To the surprise of Mickey Knox and others who heard him at a fund-raiser for the defense of the Hollywood Ten (entertainment industry professionals who had refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee), Mailer launched into an anti-Soviet tirade that shocked many of the communists and fellow travelers in attendance. “That speech was a turning point,” Knox told Peter Manso. From then on Mailer delivered “the Trotskyist line, Malaquais’s notion that East and West were cold warriors and that the Soviets were as bad as the West.” In the end, Wallace came in fourth in the popular vote—outstripped not just by Truman but also by Republican Thomas Dewey and Dixiecrat Strom Thurmond. Disappointed by the Wallace campaign, Norman Mailer didn’t vote again for twelve years.9
These political episodes affected Alice too. All her life she continued to deplore and analyze the racism she’d witnessed as a child. That and the liberal education she’d received at Harvard led her to idealize people she’d met in Europe who were deeply, sometimes radically, committed to political change. Both she and Linenthal remained firmly progressive as anticommunism became a right-wing cause in the United States and discord in Korea threatened a new war. But she was impatient when she read political theory and always more interested in individuals. She sensed that political idealists were as corruptible as anyone else, and she understood political commitment as an offshoot of background and personality. At the same time, she understood, long before second-wave feminism concentrated on the issue, that money and political power manifested in personal relationships: the political was personal.
* * *
After a Christmas dinner some jazz-loving neighbors named Smith surprised Alice and Mark by confiding they were “perpetual marijuana smokers” who had been high every time they’d met. That, Alice said, hadn’t been on their “list of speculations about people,” which included homosexuality and anti-Semitism. That night they too smoked marijuana, got very sick, and quarrelled with the Smiths, “who think,” Alice told the Mailers, “that anyone who doesn’t smoke isn’t living right and can’t see the world as it is. Ah California.”10
That winter the beautiful apartment in the hills seemed less lovely. In March, the Linenthals rented a two-story house not far from campus. For the next five years they would move to a different house almost every year. The availability of small rental houses with yards was one of their favorite things about life in California—the other being cheap wine. In their suburban neighborhoods they became friendly with other married couples. She flirted with some of the husbands, but told the Mailers that she was resigned to finding the people around Palo Alto “occasionally pleasant—no more.”
Working toward his doctorate, Mark Linenthal abandoned his wish to be a novelist. He was most engaged by poetry and criticism courses taught by the legendary Yvor Winters, a proponent of metrical verse and rational poetic structure. According to Herbert Blau, an NYU engineering grad who’d grown up among gangs on the streets of Brownsville in Brooklyn and now studied drama at Stanford, Mark enjoyed arguments with and about Winters. Mark became a model for Blau, a measure of his “capacity to be literate.” He admired and imitated Mark’s Harvard background and style—impeccable jackets and ties. After Blau stood up to Winters in class one day, Mark stopped by the cottage by a creek where he lived with his wife, actress Beatrice Manley. Blau felt he’d “sort of made it at Stanford to have Mark’s approval at that time.” In those days Blau thought Alice shy and aloof. She barely talked when the two couples went to a “whoop-it-up kind of place” on a wharf in San Francisco, and Blau had the feeling that she “wondered why we were wasting our time.”
Alice’s letters from Palo Alto display frustration and boredom clashing with her attempt to sound like a happy wife. The ills of her marriage that were manifest in Paris go unmentioned, though she talked about them with Abrahams. For some weeks after arriving at Stanford, Alice worked at a leather factory job where she suffered punctures in her fingers and “loss of faith.” Nonetheless, that venture into working-class life provided her with background for Megan Green’s family in Superior Women. Later Alice found more agreeable jobs on campus, at the college bookstore and in Stanford’s purchasing department. The tasks were tedious, but she liked her coworkers, including a Japanese woman with whom she discussed “intermarriage” and other relationships across what then seemed a racial divide. She complained that Californians are naively lacking in psychological information, but a weekend in Carmel with Nancy and Bill Webb, friends from Harvard who were both in analysis, made her frantic because “every slip of the tongue becomes fraught with subconscious hostility.” She considered going into analysis herself. Meanwhile she and Mark talked about “having kids,” but she said, “It seems impractical at the moment so we don’t do anything about it, or rather we do.”11
Alice didn’t connect her own discontent with being a wife who lacked status in her husband’s world. There was as yet no name for her problem. In 1960, Phyllis Levin published an article headlined “Road from Sophocles to Spock Is Often a Bumpy One” about the anxiety, frustration, and claustrophobia of the educated housewife. Levin noted that “the modern woman” was only forty years old, and lamented her descent from the ivory tower of academia to “push-button kitchens, supermarkets and finished basements.”I12 In letters to friends, Alice described herself as an ardent cook who baked bread and made fancy wine sauces but downplayed her literary pursuits. She said she’d reread all the books she’d “hastily read earlier and been unwisely talking about ever since,” and decided “that less talk and more information would be a Good Thing for me.”
To Alice, Palo Alto was a “lotus land” where “time goes by uncounted, probably because nothing happens to count by.” Both she and Mark preferred San Francisco, where they could go to jazz clubs and ballet performances and fine restaurants, but those entertainments were expensive. They could not afford to travel east for a summer vacation in 1949 and planned to go camping in Yosemite instead.
* * *
Abrahams became Alice’s literary mentor after she showed him pages of her novel—“still the same fucking novel” (“The Impersonators”). His response was both kind and intelligently constructive, and—most important of all, she said—“from then on he talked and behaved as though I were a writer.” When Abrahams learned that she’d never read Proust, he exclaimed, “Oh, how I envy you! A first reading, and you’re just the right age—so young. Start tomorrow.” Al
ice did, and loved it. Indeed, she said, “Reading Proust was rather like talking to Billy: Swann and Mme. de Guermantes, the Verdurins and Charlus, were now included in our conversation.” In this way, Adams later declared, Abrahams saved her sanity during her first year as a wife in Palo Alto.13
Frank Granat, a Stanford undergrad housemate of Abrahams’s, saw nothing of the moody, detached housewife that Blau recalled. The scion of the legendary Granat Bros. jewelers in San Francisco, Granat thought Alice was a “beautiful exotic” who embodied chic and sophistication. “She was older than me, much more worldly,” he recalled. Alice seemed tall to him (as an adult she was five foot six) and he praised her legs and big bosom, noticed that her teeth weren’t aligned perfectly but found that overbite part of her natural attractiveness. “She had a way about her that was unique and I hate to use the word delicious, but she was.” Alice introduced Granat to martinis and French cooking, either at L’Omelette (“Lommies”), a French restaurant on El Camino Real beyond the university’s alcohol-free zone, or at home when the Linenthals invited him and Abrahams to dinner. “Mark always wanted to talk about old English writers I’d vaguely heard of—Alice was the fun! Sometimes when Mark was away it was just the three of us, Alice, Billy, and myself. We’d talk about France right after the war,” he remembered. “Sometimes Alice talked about her sex life but in a very very funny way. Had nothing to do with reality. She was just very funny about it in a way I just can’t really describe. It wasn’t gossip or anything like that.”
Granat believed that Alice and Mark got along, but his observations also suggest reasons for her discontent. “Mark talked a great deal but he was not a conversationalist—two different things!” Granat thought Mark “was very full of himself—there was no spark. There might have been a literary spark, but there was nothing that would make me want to get together with him and just talk about things. Alice I would have seen every week if I could.”
Granat helped support Abrahams while he completed his third novel, Imperial Waltz, which he dedicated to Granat. In this historical novel about Princess Elisabeth of Bavaria, Abrahams told the story of a girl leaving an idyllic youth to become an adolescent and woman bound by social conventions. Abrahams’s Elisabeth could be a psychological profile of Alice Linenthal: A rebellious, carefree girl roams the woods and write poems. She craves an approving father, but he—a free spirit himself—is too lackadaisical to fill that role. Her mother, having lost her own freedom to marriage, is concerned only for her daughter’s social success. A forced separation from a watchmaker’s son—a version of Trummy Young or Bruno Trentin?—leaves the princess forever dreamy, erratically passive. Her husband, the Emperor Franz Joseph, cherishes her but lives by his mother’s command; he cannot nourish Elisabeth’s soul.
* * *
In January of 1949, Alice began keeping a journal, which she described as “really a fictionalized version of what happens, or what I think happens.”14 The next summer she began psychoanalysis with a San Francisco Freudian, Dr. Joseph Biernoff. Biernoff was regarded as an expert on psychosomatic illnesses, but there’s no record of Alice’s complaints. Or rather, what record there probably was disappeared when she or someone else tore thirty pages from her journal. Her decision to undertake analysis was complicated given her sexual history with her father’s psychiatrist, but it was not an unusual choice for a young intellectual of that era when Freudian ego-centered talk therapy was popular in the United States.
With Mark now teaching two courses at Stanford, Alice quit her full-time job, and they borrowed money from Mark’s parents to afford her analysis. Each time she saw Biernoff, Alice spent part of a day en route to and from San Francisco—perhaps therapeutic in itself. Once she spotted Vida Ginsberg on the street as she boarded a bus. The woman they’d known in Salzburg had married a doctor named Quentin Deming and lived in a city apartment that reminded Alice of Greenwich Village: “High ceilings and small rooms brightly painted, a pleasant clutter of books and pictures, fruit and wine.”15 San Francisco, she was realizing, offered the historic and artistic charm that she missed in suburban houses farther down the Peninsula.
* * *
Hired by Sam Goldwyn to write a screenplay, Mailer had returned to Southern California in 1949. He and Bea lived in a modern “movie star” house in the Hollywood Hills. Alice was so “shaken up” and “self-involved” after her initial sessions with Dr. Biernoff that she considered herself “even less perceptive than usual” when she and Mark visited the Mailers in Hollywood in August. The ménage there included a “huge black maid” (as Alice described her later); Bea was huge too, seven months pregnant with a baby nurse already employed. Alice was touched that Norman threw a party for them and introduced them to Dorothy Parker, as well as John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz, and others of the Hollywood Ten, but both Linenthals thought Bea seemed “a little overwhelmed” by Norman’s overnight fame and financial success.
Mailer’s new life fascinated Mark Linenthal: “I was full of Norman, drunk on Norman.” He cited Norman as an authority so often that someone finally asked him, “But what do you think?” Norman urged the Linenthals to read George Orwell’s 1984, just published, for its chastening effect on their liberalism. It showed “the world in which socialism had arrived at its horrible end.” Mailer now believed that anyone serious about writing must become an intellectual, “and yet nothing is harder. Intellectuality vitiates the attempt at large, serious works because you are unable to suspend the critical faculties even at the times when you should.”16 Mailer urged Alice to study original texts by Marx and Engels (“at least Capital”) and Mark remembered, “He wanted to sit around and have formal dialectical discussion… And Alice and I thought, oh, fuck this, it’s dreadful.”
Apparently Mailer liked his wife’s pregnancy better than its aftermath. When Susan Mailer was born, her father felt displaced, complaining to a friend, “[Bea] acts infinitely superior to me now.”17
In September Norman came alone to Palo Alto for the first-ever Harvard-Stanford football game, in which the Indians drubbed the Ivy League visitors 44–0 and Alice, Mark, and Norman formed “a lonely and unloved rooting section.” The two teams have not played each other since. Alice and Mark threw a “huge” party for Mailer, inviting all of Mark’s graduate student colleagues. Alice said the party was “a little bit of thumbing our nose at the academic Establishment, particularly Wally Stegner,” who was probably the only faculty member they invited. Mailer was an impressive visitor in the eyes of the Linenthals’ circle. He made himself “pleasant and available” at the party—particularly to graduate student Lois Mayfield Wilson. She had fallen for him when she read The Naked and the Dead, and she attended the party without her husband. She and Mailer disappeared for a long while during the evening—and remained close for sixty years. Alice said she really liked Wilson, an attractive blond from Kentucky known sotto voce as Miss Maysex, and was glad to give her and Norman the pleasure of meeting.II
Alice’s dislike of Stegner’s writing program hardened when it rejected her application for a fellowship. She’d applied with six revised chapters of “The Impersonators” and Billy Abraham’s blessing.18 Decades later, when she taught a writing seminar at Stanford, she still recalled the “enraged envy” with which she’d regarded the creative writers when she was working to support her husband as “nice young wives did in those bad old days.”19
When the Modern Language Association held its convention at Stanford in September 1949, both Agatha and Nic Adams stayed with Alice and Mark for a week. “We had a shitty time of it too,” Alice wrote. “I was sick the whole time, much vomiting… so obviously psychosomatic as to be quite embarrassing.” After long believing her own neurosis kept her from appreciating her parents, she now “decided that they, particularly [her] father, [were] not nice at all and that [she was] not so neurotic as one would think.” Nic Adams’s personality made his daughter frantic—he demanded sherry in lunchrooms and introduced himself loudly before anyone else could g
et his name out.” Alice declined to specify her more serious reasons for not liking her father: “I’m bored by the subject.”20 She said even less about her mother.
Earlier in the year, Alice had mailed eighty pages of “The Impersonators” to William Raney, Mailer’s editor at Rinehart who’d liked her earlier stories. Mailer put in a word for her, the pages circulated to several editors, but in the end Raney sent “soft words” and no contract. Still, Alice determined to write three pages a day till the book was finished. She was “more pleased than not” by what she’d written. Mark liked it too, she told the Lynns.21 Abrahams remained Alice’s closest confidant. In those days he was drawn to straight men “who were not even especially bright or interesting” and did not reciprocate his undeclared desires. Alice had a similar problem: “a string of crushes on young men of [their] graduate-student circle, men who, married or single, did not want the responsibility of an affair with a nutty married woman who wanted to write. There was quite a bit of kissing in cars, on ostensible trips out for ice or more booze—not exactly satisfactory, and hardly romantic.” About such matters Alice and Billy gave each other comfort with discussions marked by “extreme discretion.”22 All of it was fodder for their friendship and—eventually—for her fiction. When she found no publisher for her novel, Abrahams urged her to write more short stories. She produced more than a dozen during the late 1940s and early 1950s. All remain unpublished, but the occasional encouraging word buried in a rejection letter from an editor was enough. “It doesn’t take much to keep a writer going,” she reminisced to an interviewer years later.23
Alice Adams Page 19
