* * *
In the end, Raney could not get his editor in chief, Ted Amussen, to sign on to “The Impersonators,” but he sent the manuscript over to Harold Strauss at Knopf with a note suggesting that Adams could “develop into a damned good slick, popular writer.” Strauss scratched his contrary opinion on the back of a manuscript evaluation form: “I think [Raney’s] nuts. This flaccid stuff lacks insight, style and structure. Reject fast. —HS.” Mercifully, Adams never saw Strauss’s comments, which lie with thousands of similar rejection records (labeled “Rags”) in the Knopf archive at the University of Texas’s Harry Ransom Center.
Adams reacted to the rejection with a sort of shrugging passivity and shape-shifting that one suspects might be a typically female and fifties way of stepping aside from her ambitions: “I can’t care very much about the book. I’ve been working on some stories from time to time, and I like them but magazines don’t. I sometimes wish that writing wasn’t what I wanted to do, or really that I had both more drive and more talent. I have just enough of both to make me uncomfortable.”9
Their friend Norman Mailer found it difficult to write novels in the early fifties. Barbary Shore, which the Linenthals “found bad enough” when they read an early draft, was declared a failure (Time cited the author’s “sophomoric fatalism”). Both Alice and Mark were staggered when they read it in published form: “Incroyable… I think he has gone off his rocker,” she said. Mailer told the New York Times early in 1951: “To be a novelist today is absolutely a bonecracker.… In the past, a novelist could create a world view, a whole thing in itself. It is different today because knowledge is broken down, departmentalized.” By summer the Linenthals heard that Bea had fled to Mexico with her daughter and a Mexican lover.10 Norman was living with Adele Morales in New York and his close friendship with the Linenthals had dwindled. Bea Silverman married Salvador Sanchez, became a doctor, and practiced psychiatry in both Mexico and Florida.
* * *
With the baby’s due date approaching, the Linenthals moved to a three-bedroom house with a room for the baby and a study for Mark. Alice doesn’t mention where she will write. Her father, as Alice “more or less expected,” was depressed again and “back with Malcolm, his crazy doctor.” Nic spent another seven months in Pinebluff, making himself welcome at the Kemps’ home but refusing to follow Dr. Kemp’s orders or pay his bill.11
About this time Alice resumed her friendship with Judith Clark, who had moved to San Francisco after she graduated from George Washington University and become the assistant advertising manager for the Joseph Magnin Company, then renowned for high-style clothing and sophisticated ads. She married Chronicle reporter Timothy Adams, son of the popular satirical columnist and Information Please radio show panelist Franklin Pierce Adams. Timothy Adams had been called up for the Korean War and was editing Stars and Stripes in Japan when he met an AP reporter from Chapel Hill, Sam Summerlin. The gossip they exchanged somehow put the two old friends—now Judith Adams and Alice Linenthal—back in touch. Soon Judith took the train to Palo Alto for dinner with the Linenthals: “I wore a light grey fitted wool coat with, of course, white gloves, small grey hat with veil—oh, those were so becoming—and a sensational black leather purse I wish I had right this minute.”
Judith Adams remembered what she wore because Alice Adams reprised a lot of that evening in her 1974 novel Families and Survivors. There she portrayed herself as “pregnant, stoop-shouldered, and rather shabby” Louisa in contrast to “erect and stylish” Kate, who works for an elegant department store.
Looking at Families and Survivors alongside Alice’s letters from the early 1950s reminds us that her fiction, despite inventions, excavates her own conflicting emotions. It’s impossible to say if unhappy Louisa in the novel is more accurate than the cheerful writer of the letters. Over dinner, Kate criticizes Louisa’s husband, Michael, for asking talented Louisa to work in a dull clerical job while he studies. “Louisa’s femaleness makes me feel more male. You don’t believe in sexual polarity?” Michael asks Kate. She retorts, “I believe in a man and a woman living together, being friends. I don’t think it matters who does what… who does dishes or stays at home with kids.” Louisa remembers that her husband once thought of her as a bulwark against his mother, so she is thrilled to defend him again in this scene. Nonetheless, Kate’s view expresses her own discontent as a submissive wife.
* * *
Peter Adams Linenthal was born in the morning on March 20, 1951. Alice thought he was “terrific” and “bigger and healthier than most babies,” and she and Mark were both “tired but euphoric.” All that she squeezed on a postcard to the Lynns on the afternoon of Peter’s birth.12
The birth occurred at Sequoia Hospital in Redwood City, and Alice found labor “considerably less than no fun” despite some dulling of the pain with Demerol and cyclopropane.I Otherwise the birth was entirely normal. Having expected her neuroses to interfere with her ability to give birth, Alice was proud of herself for this uncomplicated performance. Peter weighed seven pounds, fifteen ounces, measured twenty and a half inches, and took well to breastfeeding, though he also received bottles at the hospital. He and his mother went home after four days.
Alice said the baby looked like Mark, but photos show a high Adams forehead. They also show extremely doting parents who like each other enough to produce a full album of happy snapshots of themselves with their baby. Peter was, Alice wrote, “really a terrific baby—Mark and I are quite entranced, even at 3 am. He is handsome—all this stuff about babies being universally ugly is for the birds. We spend hours watching him.”13
Peter was a month old and learning to smile when he began vomiting persistently and explosively. X-rays revealed an “acute hypertrophic pyloric stenosis,” or obstruction of the passage from his stomach to his small intestine. Under a general anesthetic, a surgeon made a three-inch incision in the ten-pound infant’s abdomen. A day later, the obstruction removed, his deep wound sutured with catgut and nylon and steel wire, he could drink sterile water. Soon Alice was able to hold and breastfeed him at the hospital, and he was sent home a few days later. It had been all been “a pretty terrifying experience, but now he’s fine,” Alice wrote.
With that first crisis of motherhood behind her, Alice reflected on her fitness for the job. “Knowing as much and as little as I do about depth psychology [the unconscious] does occasionally make me nervous—bringing up a child does seem such an enormous responsibility if you want to do it well, but I usually decide that he won’t be very crazy—at least less so than me and I do manage.” For good reason, fear of mental illness continued to haunt Alice. Her father was in his “padded cell” at Kemp’s sanitarium, and she believed him “so mad at [her] for having a child that he won’t write.” For her part, she disliked him so much that “it [was] hard to feel sorry for him except in a rather abstract way.”14
Not long after Peter’s birth, Alice mailed a note and photo to Dr. Biernoff, who had advised her to stay married and stop writing. “Not that I’m jealous, but it does sound as if having a baby is better therapy than psychoanalysis. You sound like the ‘after’ picture of a testimonial,” he replied. Indeed, it seemed to be true. Peter seems to have been a perfect baby and Alice perfectly happy to stay at home with him. “He sleeps outside in his carriage all day and goes for rides. We’re all getting quite brown,” she wrote. By summer, Peter was sleeping through the night and “quite lively during most of the day.” Alice said, “He laughs and smiles a great deal, pisses in his bath, and tries to crawl. We find him completely fascinating. Also my friends with male children tell me that he has the largest genitalia extant in one so young.”15
Alice continued to read her “usual quota of Freud and related books” and shared her opinions with the Lynns, in part because Valerie was becoming a psychotherapist. She praised Ferenczi’s Sex in Psychoanalysis and a lecture she and Mark had attended by Siegfried Bernfeld, both of which reflect a determination to cure herself of some sexu
al insecurity or aberration and avoid afflicting Peter with the “craziness” that she and Mark saw in their families of origin. She read William Styron’s first novel, Lie Down in Darkness, when it came out in the fall, aware that Styron was little older than herself, had grown up in Virginia, and had studied at Duke University. The novel’s portrait of depressed and alcoholic Milton Loftis; his angry and vindictive wife, Helen; and their beautiful, selfish, alcoholic daughter, Peyton, disturbed and inspired Alice. For all that the Loftis marriage resembled Nic and Agatha’s, Alice could only hope that she was not another Peyton, who is chronically unfaithful to her Jewish husband before she jumps to her death in Greenwich Village.II
Earlier, Alice had joked about choosing to spend money on a cure for her neuroses over surgery to reduce the size of her breasts; she told the Lynns about a friend who’s had her breasts lifted and looks terrific: “The operation sounds quite gruesome—moving nipples around and that sort of thing—but she’s beautiful and delighted. It cost her about 14 hundred bucks, so I’m not considering it, but I am in a way envious. I suppose analysis is a better investment, but it would be nice to be lovely and unneurotic.”16
In pictures Alice looks quite lovely enough as a young mother. Those troublesome breasts make her belted waist look as slender as Scarlett O’Hara’s. Her dark eyebrows and the glossy hair sweeping across her brow emphasize bright, happy eyes. If there’s a note of disparity in these little black-and-white snapshots of picnics and birthday parties, it’s the contrast of husbands wearing business shirts and jackets, even ties, and wives in housedresses or dungarees. Alice seems to prefer skirts and shorts—with her long legs often in the eye of the camera.
* * *
When Reed College in Portland, Oregon, offered Mark a teaching position, the family moved for the year. Reed, Alice thought, was the opposite of Stanford, “the best small college [she knew] anything about.” Mark taught a humanities survey, Greeks through eighteenth century, keeping one step ahead of his students and “working his balls off,” not finding enough time to finish his thesis. That Athenian life at Reed nearly ended when the army air corps called Mark for active duty “and something grimly known as ‘processing’ ” (Alice wrote) in preparation for combat in Korea. Luckily, a back ailment rendered him unfit for service. “It was a nasty scare, but what a relief. This still seems to be a very good war not to be in.”17
Portland was conservative, dreary, and of course rainy, “a determinedly dowdy city of homeowners, sans sin, or bright lights, or sun.” Alice found the faculty wives an especially dull lot, “resigned to bad marriages, neurotic children, and dead ambitions.” Jane Spencer Fussner, a Radcliffe grad married to Mark’s “bright and quite sweet” colleague Frank Fussner, struck Alice as “a real dumbunny.” Ironically, Alice and Mark missed those California friends they’d complained about for the past three years.18
Peter was the bright spot, turning out to have “a real comic gift” and “independent spirit.” He became the common ground in the Linenthal marriage, adored by both parents, who could appreciate each other through him. Unlike the stereotypical distant, workaholic father of the 1950s, Mark enjoyed his child. Peter was about a year old when Mark wrote archly of him: “He says da-da very clearly, plays the piano, and rubs cottage cheese and broccoli into his hair. He has a Harvard tee shirt.”19
When Norman Granz’s eleventh national Jazz at the Philharmonic tour stopped in Portland, Alice and Mark went together to hear Ella Fitzgerald, Oscar Peterson, Lester Young, Gene Krupa, and Illinois Jacquet. They ran into Granz in the lobby and gave him their shared opinion that Jacquet’s honking rhythm-and-blues style was “vulgar.” Such high-minded moments were part of the brittle glue of their marriage.20
Another visitor to Portland that year was Saul Bellow. The novelist had recently returned from two years living in Europe and lecturing at the Salzburg Seminars, so he brought welcome gossip about people the Linenthals knew. Bellow’s trip was, Alice said, “one of those terrible exploitive junkets for writers,” but Bellow was on the run from his first marriage.21 Bellow was then thirty-five, the author of two short novels and still discovering the “scholar-gangster” voice (as Edward Mendelson calls it) that narrated The Adventures of Augie March and eventually served to win him the Nobel Prize. Alice and Mark met him at the college events. On Saturday night Mark stayed with Peter while Alice went to hear the novelist she admired. As it turned out, she spent the evening with Bellow in what he described to her later as “that drunken night when you told me that I came on compulsively as a heymish type.”22
It was the first infidelity of Alice’s that Mark suspected. He overlooked it, perhaps understanding that her attraction was as much to the novelist as to the man. Curiously enough, Bellow, whose ancestors were Lithuanian Jews, then resembled Mark Linenthal, with prominent dark eyes, a receding hairline, a Semitic profile, and brooding good looks. Perhaps Mark found a way to be flattered.III
Bellow wrote Alice the next week to apologize for not calling her on the morning after. Bellow was a tireless philanderer known to have lovers in many places. But he continued exchanging letters with Alice over the next thirty years. In 1958, he wrote her, “You have very special standing with me. I guess I have with you, too. You won my heart when you called me a heimisch compulsive.IV That was sheer genius.”23
* * *
Bellow had barely left Portland when Alice was hit by a flurry of letters and long-distance phone calls regarding her father that upset and depressed her. Since the previous summer, Nic had been on a manic spree of spending on “refrigerators, Spanish dancers, and chartered airplanes” and even had plans to remarry—bride unknown to history, but certainly not Dotsie Wilson, who had married someone else in the interim since her divorce in the late 1940s. According to her son, Dotsie still cared for Nic Adams but did not resume their romance after Agatha died because Nic was then in treatment for depression and alcoholism. Instead she moved to San Francisco, worked at the Hotel Commodore, and married her ex-husband’s gay brother’s friend David Cunningham Doster, who was several years younger than she and probably bisexual.
When Nic’s spree ended, he crashed so badly that he could barely meet his classes. “In his despair,” novelist Noel Houston wrote to Nic’s cousin Frank Jervey, “he could only pace his living room floor and see State Hospital or death as alternatives.” Chapel Hill friends had taken Nic to Kemp’s sanitarium for a weekend, but Nic refused to take medication or have further shock treatments. He would lose his position at the university if he entered the state hospital. After Jervey located Alice in Portland, she considered flying to Chapel Hill, with a stopover in New York, where she thought to meet up with Bellow. In the end she decided not to make the trip or take over her father’s finances or send him to a new hospital. Nic returned home but could not teach.24
In May Alice received a painfully stern letter from Eve and Ralph Bates in New York, who were in touch with Nic’s Chapel Hill friends:
This is one of those things in life, Alice, that whether we like to face it or not, or whether we asked for it or not, cannot be shirked. The situation can only be a highly disturbing one to you, especially since your relationship with your parents was so abnormal, but you have no alternative but to face it. I gather Nic was never a very satisfactory father to you; you have certainly not been a satisfactory daughter to him. But he is in deep trouble and you are his only surviving close relative.
Eve Bates goes on to warn Alice that she must respond to this crisis in order to “measure up as a woman” before ending her letter, “I’m very, very fond of you and so have the temerity to speak out.”25
Alice complained to the Lynns, “His friends are writing me letters about being a bad daughter. It has occurred to some of [Nic’s friends] that he was perhaps not the best of fathers but no connection has been made. If I sound bitter it’s because I am. I have decided that everyone is insane but me.”26 When a daughter is asked to look after her father as her mother has done, he can no
longer be the prince who reigned over her childhood.
Time passed and Nic neither lost his job nor killed himself. Perhaps Alice’s nonintervention had been the right course. Certainly she saw that Agatha had been correct to pursue her own satisfactions in life.
* * *
Probably with the influence of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s popular Common Sense Book of Baby and Child Care (1946), Alice and Mark were relaxed parents. Peter first walked at fourteen months, later than average, but no one worried: “Yesterday we were reading on the floor of his room, book about some ducks,” Alice wrote the Lynns, “and he all of a sudden got up and walked out, fell down on the bathroom floor and laughed. Has been walking ever since… he gets merrier and wittier all the time.”27
Despite the satisfactions of motherhood, Alice wanted to go back into analysis with Dr. Biernoff. Mark had planned to teach another year at Reed so he would not have a one-year job on his résumé, but he deferred to Alice and accepted courses at Stanford instead. Meeting Bellow and the turmoil over Nic had shaken her, while having a child exacerbated the unspoken conflict she felt between her writing ambitions and being a wife. When Mark’s parents visited them in California for a week, her analysis was kept secret (“They think that silliness is over,” Mark wrote) and Peter charmed them.28 No amount of analysis could repair a cold marriage. The Linenthals did not have a second child. Again, Families and Survivors gives a dark view of their situation: “When did they enjoy love together? Louisa can hardly remember, but with an effort she recalls lunches urgently pushed aside in a rush toward bed… More recently (and more clearly) she sees herself reaching, touching his warm soft flesh, and she hears his sympathetic voice: “Do you feel very sexy, honey?” And the frantic doomed attempts they make. Michael thinks that he is impotent; she thinks that she is frigid. At this stage neither blames the other.”
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