Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Back in the Bay Area, Alice and Mark were glad to see Billy Abrahams, who was working as a secretary for the exclusive Bohemian Club in San Francisco, and Judith and Timothy Adams, now parents of Bailey and Peter, who lived in an apartment on Union Street with a view of the Golden Gate Bridge, three other bedrooms, a roof deck, and a darkroom for $185 a month. They also kept in touch with Vida Ginsberg, and she introduced them to her former lover and now sister-in-law Barbara (Bobbie) Deming. This extension of friendships into the city was a welcome variation from their Stanford suburban world.

  That fall, Illinois governor Adlai Stevenson ran for president against General Dwight David Eisenhower and his running mate, Richard Nixon. Peter had a toy donkey named Adlai, but the landlord objected when his parents put an altered poster on their house reading “Nix on Ike.” After a summer sublet with swimming pool and Hawaiian-style bar shack in the backyard, the Linenthals settled into a pleasant house on Leland Avenue close to the Stanford Golf Course. They joined a neighborhood group of couples whom Adams would use as models for characters in her novel Families and Survivors. Their former neighbor Cynthia Scott (now Francisco) recalled, “My first husband and I were very young and naïve—married at 20 and babies right away. There was a lot of electricity in the air and we all were sexually attracted to one another but in the Fifties we didn’t jump into bed quite as quickly as they do today—no pill and it was the Eisenhower years right after the War—such a different time.”

  Families and Survivors exhibits the sexual attractions among the young Palo Alto couples that Scott mentioned. Most of these couples later divorced. Several of the spouses—John Murray, Pauline Abbe, and Don Hall—became Alice’s friends again later.

  Alice was so attractive that the other wives thought of her as a “man-eater.” Scott felt that she “knew Mark better than Alice—we were sort of the stay-at-home moms together” because Mark often took care of Peter. She recalled that “Mark talked about being shot down over Germany and about his brother who was gay—in those days nobody talked about that. He made light of his brother—telling about him picking up sailors. It was quite shocking and titillating to me.” Indeed, Scott was so intrigued by Mark Linenthal that she signed up for a Great Books course he taught at the local high school. Her daughters played with Peter Linenthal, and she thought he was a difficult child: “I think Alice was overwhelmed by Peter! He was an only child and I think she leaned over backward never to say no to him.” Peter’s parents told him later that they would drive him in the car to get him to sleep or calm him with a pacifier dipped in whiskey. And he remembered not being punished when, as a four-year-old, he was caught peeing under a rug in the living room.

  * * *

  Saul Bellow, then living in New York or Princeton, wrote Alice often. He said he loved her face “with freckles, shy teeth, chin and most beautiful eyes.” She had told him, “When we see each other we will be wonderful,” and he agreed. They exchanged limericks. Mostly he wrote her about his own state of mind and the difficulties of finishing The Adventures of Augie March: “I don’t like anything now. Except poetry and music. Everything else is a burden. I don’t read novels, even. I don’t see how I can ever ask anyone to read mine. I know this letter will disturb you…”

  Bellow sent his letters to Alice’s home address, where Mark was likely to see them. They are tender and affectionate but not love letters. Bellow tells her she “is one of the people [he] count[s] on.” Though her letters to him have not surfaced, they seem to have been confiding. Returning from a “harrowing” junket to Greensboro, North Carolina, he wrote that he understood “why [she] had put N.C. behind [her] with perfect sympathy,” saying, “I have never seen the likes of it. I’d sooner live under sawdust, in an ice-house. Why is the massacre of desire more terrible in the South? The more little flowers there are the more heavy the armament?”29

  Even before it appeared in September of 1953, Augie March was a success, with a sale to the Book of the Month Club. It went on to win the National Book Award. Thirty-eight-year-old Bellow was famous and financially solvent. He remained friends with Alice, but their correspondence dwindled. To the Lynns, she confessed that she didn’t like Augie March “on the whole,” but she didn’t say why. She’d been reading and praising big novels by Stendhal, Balzac, Melville, and Tolstoy, so perhaps she held her friend’s ambitious book to their standard. Late in 1955 Bellow wrote Adams again from Reno, Nevada, where he was filing for divorce, asking if she was “miffed” with him since she’d owed him a letter for three years. She brought Peter along when they met for a drink at the Top of the Mark bar and dinner in a Chinese restaurant in November, leaving Mark a note on the back of an envelope: “Saul is here. I’m at the Mark (Top of) avec. Home by 5 or so—A—.”

  “I was pleased with your little boy. I like you, too, Alice,” he wrote her afterward. A prolific correspondent (biographer James Atlas calls his subject’s letter writing “a kind of literary profligacy”), Bellow responded to Alice by letter several times in the years ahead.

  * * *

  As Mark Linenthal tried to finish his doctorate at Stanford and the Korean War ground to a stalemate, Alice was a full-time mother and homemaker.

  The years of the midtwenties that were considered critical in a man’s career had been fallow for Alice. The men around her—Mailer, Bellow, Billy Abrahams, Kenneth Lynn, and Mark Linenthal—had made progress toward some artistic or career goal. She remained unpublished and stymied within her emotional landscape, even as she wrote a great deal and sent work to magazines and book publishers, as evidenced by the dozens of completed story manuscripts and pieces of correspondence she saved.

  As a girl, Alice had written poems to please her parents and told stories about her dolls to create her separate world. After she lost her mother to heart failure and her father to depression and found her husband unable to give her all she required, she channeled her energy into motherhood and self-analysis. It was not proving to be enough. She needed to tell stories that would please others. The literary partnership she’d once imagined with Mark Linenthal was barren. Although she told friends his thesis was “extremely good,” she associated critical writing with her parents. Interviewed late in life, Mark complained that Alice had never read his dissertation on Robert Penn Warren and the Southern Agrarians because she disapproved of the academy: “She thought criticism got in the way of writing,” he said, “because critics commented on work but produced nothing [original] themselves.”V Asked in the same interview if he had read Alice’s stories, Mark said, “No. That’s a hard question. I’m not sure why I didn’t read them.”

  I. In Listening to Billie, Catherine tells Eliza that the 1950s version of “natural childbirth” didn’t work because it was “just a guilt trip that some English guy laid on women”—a reference to Grantly Dick-Read’s pioneering Childbirth Without Fear, which suggested that modern women’s neuroses and ignorance prevented them from giving birth without pain relievers or medical intervention.

  II. Of her parents’ 1920s Lost Generation, Peyton tells a boyfriend: “They didn’t lose themselves, they lost us—you and me. Look at Daddy, I love him so. But he lost me and he doesn’t even know it.… I think we’ve got a Freudian attachment. The dear. He’s such an ass. If it just hadn’t been Mother he married, we all might have made out all right. She was too much for him. So we’re lost…” (William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness [New York: Vintage, 1951], 235.)

  III. None of that came up when Alice wrote the Lynns about Bellow at Reed: “He was so strained and/or plastered while here that it was hard to get much of an impression. But we think we liked him. Something like Norman, only brighter, more talented. But the same vigor, and lack of humor about self.”

  IV. Heymish is Yiddish for “homey” or “domestic”; Bellow’s spelling of it varied.

  V. In Careless Love, Jane says dismissively of a man who’s interested in Renaissance history: “You mean that Southern agrarian bit? All those literary sharecroppers? Miss
Daisy, come on.” (“Of course not. The Italian,” retorts Daisy.)

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Feeling Free in San Francisco

  — (1954–1957) —

  In those days, women did not say negative things about their husbands, even to their closest friends. Which made many of us very lonely.

  —Alice Adams, “Young Couple With Class,” Redbook, September 1967

  As was then the custom, Mark Linenthal began looking for a professorship before he completed his PhD thesis. When no good offers came from the East Coast, he joined the English Department at San Francisco State College (now University) in the fall of 1954. At last, the Linenthals would leave the Peninsula. Alice described the flat they found in Presidio Heights, at 3587 Clay Street: “[A] marvelous place, elegant, immense. 4 bedrooms, dining room, plus foyers, halls, even a maid’s bathroom, if only we had a maid, and a butlerless butler’s panty.” There was a roof deck perfect for private sunbathing, and a tall person standing on tiptoe could see the Golden Gate Bridge from the living room. “After that box in Menlo Park we feel very free,” Alice wrote Bobbie Deming, who had returned east to live with painter Mary Meigs.1

  San Francisco is a city of fourteen hills almost surrounded by water, and each of its neighborhoods has a particular weather, a microclimate. In Presidio Heights, Adams recalled in a late story, the air “smelled of salt and eucalyptus and lemon, the blue sky, green leaves, glimpses of the soaring red bridge above the billowing, encroaching fog.” She and Mark spent months shopping for used furniture, painting rooms, and waxing floors. Alice complained to Don and Kirby Hall that it was “awful to become thing-ish” but found the neighborhood pleasant, though “rigidly upper middle class.”2 Julius Kahn Playground was just over a stone wall on the grounds of the Presidio, still then a military base. Alice took Peter there for picnics, of which he remembered “big old trees, sandy ground, an outdoor cathedral—a private wonderfulness to it.” He continued to be a self-sufficient child whose favorite book was Mister Dog: The Dog Who Belonged to Himself.I

  In a story rooted in those days, “Young Couple With Class,” Adams analyzed her love for the prosperous neighborhood: “Anne valued substance. Conflict came because she was a rather intellectual girl; her other values were opposed to the pursuit of wealth. Her intellectual values had led her to her choice of Jim, the future poor professor.” As she observed neighbors who were stockbrokers, surgeons, and psychiatrists, and their wives, who were without profession, Adams was finding material for the novels she would write about the interior lives of San Franciscans. “In those days,” the story says, “women did not say negative things about their husbands, even to their closest friends. Which made many of us very lonely. We each sustained the other in our efforts to pass as happy, intelligent young women, not very questioning of our roles.” That isolation also served her art.

  San Francisco was “the best city for a writer, a painter, but I romanticize,” Alice told Bobbie Deming after a year there.3 The city in the 1950s was a sanctuary, “a place where the conservatism and conformity of the McCarthy era weren’t so stifling, a tolerant, cosmopolitan city,” writes Rebecca Solnit, “in many ways like a European city of the past with its Italian cafes, its small, pedestrian scale, its charming Victorian architecture.”4

  Most days Alice drove Peter across the city to Rhoda Kellogg’s Golden Gate preschool on Potrero Hill; Kellogg, a psychologist who studied and collected children’s art, analyzed two hundred of Peter’s drawings of ghosts, whales, and totem poles and concluded he was “a genius,” which scared Alice even though she considered him altogether an “extraordinary” and “incredibly delightful little boy.”5

  In San Francisco Alice began to recognize that she wanted to divorce Mark. To make some get-away money, she “wasted” some months collaborating on a murder mystery with John Deaver, a teacher at Peter’s school. They had hopes of making “riches quickly” but it was “more difficult than one would have thought,” she told Deming.6 That was only part of the story. Deaver also became Alice’s lover for a time. Peter didn’t know that, but he did recall Deaver as his favorite teacher. He and his mom shared little jokes about his name: “Here we are at Mr. Deaver,” they’d say when they passed Beaver Street.

  To ready herself for single life, Alice had the surgery to reduce her breasts that she’d long wanted. A story draft in her notebook explains: “her breasts were gigantic & fallen. She felt them flap against her chest with lovers of the time—1st Jewish colleagues of her husband’s, then stray crazy southern poets—she insisted on remaining fully clothed—or nearly… One of her greatest accusations against her husband was that he liked her breasts. (He loved them!) & a year before leaving him she went to a plastic surgeon who neatly molded them to a semblance of Hollywood youth.”7 Alice also began bleaching her dark brunette hair because it was graying early, as her mother’s had done.

  After a year in the city, Adams was writing “marvelous unpublished short stories,” she told Deming.II One of these, “Winter Rain,” came to her when she was so chilled from a severe case of the flu that she started thinking about the very cold winter she’d spent in Paris with Mark on rue de Courcelles. The story told about a finished love affair, which gave it “a certain form,” she said. Usually she struggled to figure out how a story would end; this time she “knew where the story was going before [she] began it.”8

  Alice had a new lover too, Blanton Miller, who worked at the Drisco Hotel in Pacific Heights. “Blanton was a devastatingly attractive man,” Judith Adams recalled. “He was a writer, and he could quote pages of Thomas Wolfe. Alice was enchanted. I remember I was kind of shocked because she was still married to Mark. I didn’t realize that as a married woman she would carry on with other men. I didn’t blame her except that she was married.” Miller was from Horse Creek, North Carolina, a 1949 UNC graduate who might well have known Agatha or Nic Adams there. Alice’s son remembered him as an animated man who knew how to talk to children, but (again) did not realize he was Alice’s paramour. For a while, Miller’s Southern charm and brooding appealed to Alice’s nostalgia for the South. From the University of Minnesota, where he went next to study with Allen Tate, Miller wrote Alice:

  My poor fantasy-ridden mind… Couldn’t we see each other in some simple way? Today I’ve been wondering what you could have meant when you said you were tempted to say something irresponsible. I should have let you say it. I hope I get this Yaddo invitation. Not since you broke loose have I had much chance to reason things out… I could tramp in the woods and get all this pain and anxiety changed into sorrow. But I know when need is changed to grief, the one needed is gone.

  In a postscript, Miller asked: “Is all your hair silver? Your legs brown?” Miller did spend a winter at Yaddo, where John Cheever commented on his request for an extension, “While it is always difficult to guess what is going on between a man and his typewriter he seems to be absorbed in his work and industrious.” Despite interest from Atlantic Monthly Press, Miller’s promising novel never appeared. He left unpaid phone and doctor bills when he departed Yaddo for a residency at the MacDowell Colony.9

  Meanwhile, inventing freely, Adams wrote “The Fog in the Streets,” a story about an older woman who comes to stay at a hotel in “the lovely unreal city” of San Francisco where her grandson has just been born. Flu prevents her from visiting the new baby, and she forms a connection with a handsome, charming bellboy named Burne from her hometown in the South. Burne is based on Blanton Miller, but the subject of Adams’s deeper exploration is her mother. Putting herself in the older woman’s place, she thinks, “She had wanted everything for [her son], of him, and with her wanting spoiled it all, continually.” With remarkable empathy and compassion, Adams realizes that Agatha’s critical intelligence and anger may have masked more tender feelings. “It’s impossible to be a mother or a wife or both,” Mrs. Blair in the story tells Burne. “Any closeness comes to grief.”

  When Mrs. Blair recovers from her flu, she g
oes to meet her grandson laden with inappropriate gifts, only to be told by her daughter-in-law that her presence upsets her son. As Mrs. Blair departs: “her mind ran hard pounded circles.” She tells Burne the story of her visit, trying to make it comic, but he cuts in to admonish her: “You want your life to make sense, and then you want to do something about it. You even want the truth… There’s not anything true… Soon as you know that you’ll really know something, and you can start out to live.”10

  Adams was rarely philosophical. But Burne’s dialogue delivers a strong dose of postwar existential toughness, exactly the tone Alice was trying to adopt for herself in the mid-1950s. With lovers like John Deaver and Blanton Miller, she looked outside of marriage and found no one who could sustain her, in part because she was attracted to unavailable men. One of these was Trummy Young, who joined Louis Armstrong and His All-Stars in 1952. Replacing Armstrong’s all-time favorite musical accomplice, Jack Teagarden, Young played with a “loud, roaring, all swing” style. He became the backbone of the All-Stars and Armstrong’s closest friend in the band. The All-Stars often played in Northern California, including gigs at the 1958 and 1962 Monterey Jazz Festivals and on New Year’s Eve at the Downbeat in 1954.11 Where and how during those twelve years Alice might again have seen the man who was in many ways her favorite lover is unknown—but the hints in her notebooks, her son’s memory of meeting a tall brown musician in their Clay Street apartment, and her portrayal of him in Superior Women make it conceivable that some meetings occurred.