Louis Armstrong’s swing jazz was considered old-fashioned in the years Trummy Young played with him. But when Arkansas governor Orville Faubus used National Guard troops to block nine black children from attending Little Rock Central High School in September 1957, Armstrong stepped boldly into the controversy. President Eisenhower had stalled for two weeks when Armstrong told a reporter Eisenhower had “no guts” and threatened to cancel his State Department goodwill tour of the Soviet Union. “The way they are treating my people in the South, the government can go to hell,” he said. “The people over there ask me what’s wrong with my country. What am I supposed to say?” When Eisenhower sent soldiers from the 101st Airborne to escort the children to school, Armstrong wired him: “DADDY IF AND WHEN YOU DECIDE TO TAKE THOSE LITTLE NEGRO CHILDREN PERSONALLY INTO CENTRAL HIGH SCHOOL ALONG WITH YOUR MARVELOUS TROOPS PLEASE TAKE ME ALONG… MAY GOD BLESS YOU.”12
* * *
As the pall of the 1950s began to lift, San Francisco State was a new and expanding star in the constellation of California’s four-year public colleges. Herbert Blau turned down job offers from Princeton and Yale to stay there, while also founding the Actor’s Workshop theater in downtown San Francisco. Mark Linenthal got involved in the Poetry Center, which sponsored readings by Kenneth Rexroth, Karl Shapiro, Muriel Rukeyser, Allen Ginsberg, and dozens of others. Mark is a “marvelous critic of poetry,” Alice wrote Deming. “I wish I didn’t write prose.”III As an unpublished faculty wife, Alice got little respect. Later, in a review of Joyce Carol Oates’s Unholy Loves, she wrote that faculty wives “have even less control over their lives, no choice as to location, than do the wives of corporate executives, and God knows much less money.”13
The artistic heart of San Francisco in the 1950s was in North Beach, lower Telegraph Hill, and the Fillmore District. Allen Ginsberg’s first reading from Howl at the Six Gallery, mythologized in Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums, is considered the beginning of the Beat or San Francisco Renaissance movement. On that night the little gallery on Fillmore was filled to the rafters. Ginsberg was just one of five poets who read. Kerouac drank from a gallon of Burgundy and repeated lines after Ginsberg. Mark and Alice weren’t there that night, but Mark was drawn to the scene and two weeks later heard Ginsberg read an expurgated version of Howl at the Poetry Center. Ginsberg substituted the word “censored” for the poem’s transgressive words. Thus “who let themselves be fucked in the ass by saintly motorcyclists and screamed with joy” became “who let themselves be censored in the censored by saintly…” etc.14
Lawrence Ferlinghetti and Peter D. Martin (a San Francisco State sociology professor who rented a room from the Linenthals for a while) had begun the all-paperback City Lights bookstore in North Beach. In 1957 bookseller Shigeyoshi Murao sold a copy of Howl and Other Poems (published by City Lights) to undercover police officers for seventy-five cents and was arrested, along with Ferlinghetti, for disseminating obscene literature. Mark Linenthal was one of the nine experts called to speak for the defense at a trial that drew national attention. “Howl seems to me a tremendously powerful indictment of a number of elements in the modern world, violence, greed, wastefulness, and it is cast not in the form of a modern prose indictment but in the form of a howl,” Linenthal told the court. “The only way in which he feels in this situation it can be expressed is in language which, shall we say, exceeds the bounds of gentility.” Judge Clayton Horn found the defendants not guilty, thus saving San Francisco’s reputation as an open city and paving the way for other trials that permitted publication of Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley’s Lover in the United States.
Despite her bohemian leanings and love of jazz, Adams felt little solidarity with the Beats who were enlivening her city. Those “starving hysterical naked… angelheaded hipsters” Ginsberg howled about were men, and a lot of them were gay. The few women who identified with the Beat movement were poets or artists or musicians. Their wives and girlfriends, as the reports of Carolyn Cassady, Joyce Johnson, and others testify, rarely enjoyed the independence claimed by their male peers. Yet the Beats’ celebration of individual freedom probably touched Alice. These artists’ “sole interest is in creating,” Henry Miller noted. “Indifferent to reward, fame, success… these young men… are roaming about in our midst like anonymous messengers from another planet. When the smashup comes, as now seems inevitable, they will know how to get along without cars, without refrigerators, without vacuum cleaners, electric razors…”15
Miller’s “smashup” refers to the anticipated nuclear war that would wipe out civilization as they knew it. As a mother, Adams worried about nukes, but not with that apocalyptic fervor bordering on desire the Beats cherished. The smashup that concerned her was closer to home: the end of her marriage to Mark, which she regarded as inevitable—and impossible. In those days, as she observed later, “divorce was very much not the thing to do… being unhappily married was an indication of poor moral character.”16 More practically, Alice worried about how a divorce would affect Peter and about how she could support herself. Like most unhappily married mothers of young children in the 1950s, Alice did not see a way out of her marriage and made the best of it—hoping Mark would change or some other man would rescue her, or that she could sell her work.
Since Agatha had died, Nic Adams had been in and out of mental hospitals for his alcoholism and depression, financially strapped and barely hanging on to his position at the University of North Carolina. Then, in December 1955, he married Dorothy Stearns Wilson—Dotsie—the woman he’d fallen in love with twenty years earlier at Lake Sebago. Her second husband had walked out on her a year earlier, and Nic located her in California with the help of mutual friends. Alice, Mark, and Peter attended the wedding in a small church in the Marin County town of Mill Valley. Nic baked their wedding cake, a pound cake with bourbon frosting, as four-year-old Peter well remembered because he got a bit drunk on the frosting. The honeymoon trip Nic planned was beset with obstacles but Nic’s manic energy carried them forward. After they missed the departure of the City of San Francisco, Nic chartered a plane to catch up with the train in Reno. That plane was delayed in Stockton by a heavy snowstorm in the Sierras, but their train plowed on ahead. The newlyweds finally caught up with their train in Omaha.
Nic’s remarriage was a relief to Alice: “His wife is marvelous, & he seems saner, happier than ever in his life—after all this time we speak,” Alice wrote.17 In the summer she and Mark flew to Boston for a brief visit to Mark’s parents before spending three weeks in Maine with Nic and Dotsie. Despite a poor lobster season, they enjoyed swimming and hiking. Dotsie greeted Peter as her grandson and sewed shirts for him with little tags that read, “Made especially for you by Dotsie.”
The repressed flirtations of Nic Adams’s youth had come to this, a marriage to a woman who adored him. The example was not lost on Alice. “My father moves me so,” she wrote to Deming. “We are so like that he breaks my heart, and I can’t look at him.”18
* * *
As Peter completed first grade, Mark Linenthal completed his PhD from Stanford. He would stay at San Francisco State College for a long career as a beloved professor and the Poetry Center director. For most of those years he was the critic who team-taught poetry workshops with one of the poets. “I was a spectacular teacher,” he reflected in retirement, “because I had a captive audience and I turned them all into members of my community—that’s how you teach poetry—you act out your relation to the poem and teach them their own relation to the poem—by using yourself as a kind of intellectual shill.”
Since kindergarten Peter had attended Town School for Boys. He’d resisted going there at first because the school had no girls but he received a scholarship and his parents overruled him. The private school in Pacific Heights was considered the best in the city. Again, he excelled in art. To his mother he was “tall, thin, blond, incredibly articulate.” Also, she added thankfully, he was “more controlled” than before.
The Li
nenthals celebrated Mark’s PhD with a trip to Mexico, in a new Chevrolet convertible. It was a jazzy car, aqua and white with vinyl upholstery. En route they swam in the “embracing, clear green water” and “subsisted mostly on shrimp and beer” at Guaymas and shopped for (as Peter recalled) “inexpensive cool stuff in the marketplaces—puppets, hats, shirts.”19 In the old silver city of Alamos, in Sonora, they stayed in a colonial-era hotel by the cathedral. This was Adams’s first visit to a country she came to love. Her unpublished story “Coin of the Realm” portrays Nina, a woman in search of herself, who is driving with her husband across northern Mexico from California to Boston. She worries neurotically about money. In a town like Alamos, they meet an old, crazy American woman who hires workers to search the old mines and greedily hopes for a lost hoard of silver. The episode so upsets Nina that in the end she tells her husband she is turning their travel budget over to him.
In the elegant hotel room, resting on an “almost baroque” bed, Nina is sure that her marriage is “incredibly right.” Later, watching the orderly procession of girls and boys around the town square, Nina is overcome by an even more definite feeling: “She sensed the verge of discovery, of learning something important. It was for this that she continually hoped: the discovered solution, the answer which, like diamonds or a vein of gold, or silver, would change her life. It was in this hope that she intensely studied, read, observed, questioned, and, finally, traveled.”
And so it was that Alice Adams too, despite moments of contentment and celebration with her family, continued on a quest for an answer to a question she hadn’t yet fully posed to herself.
I. In Families and Survivors, Adams adapted some of Peter’s childhood for the girl named Maude, who was “a startling child” whose favorite book is the misremembered title Crispin’s Crispian (“Crispin was a dog who belonged to himself”).
II. But in 1978 she told People magazine that she wrote “in a spasmodic, discouraged way” during the years of her marriage and Peter’s early childhood.
III. Adams may have been avoiding her husband’s critical gaze. In portraits the prominent photographer John Brook took of them during a 1950s visit to Boston, Alice and Mark stare dramatically in different directions. But, caveat, Brook stated that his art aimed to transmit “the essential loneliness of the human spirit as it is manifest in facial expressions during unguarded moments.”
PART III
INDEPENDENCE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Return Trip
— 1958 —
Once a pair of twin black cats came toward us out of the darkness, the country night—two cats thin and sleek and moving as one, long legs interwoven with each other, sometimes almost tripping. At that we laughed and stopped walking and laughed and laughed, both wondering (I suppose) if that was how we looked, although we were so upright.
—Alice Adams, “Home Is Where,” Beautiful Girl
“My problems were more serious than I could cope with or even think about,” Adams wrote about the summer of 1958, in her story “Home Is Where.” These problems were “a husband, a lover and a landlady, all of whom [she] was terrified of, and a son for whose future, in those conditions, [she] greatly feared. And so, instead, [she] thought about hot river smells, jasmine and hyacinth and gardenias, caves of honeysuckle and live oaks festooned with Spanish moss.”
Adams wrote and rewrote the story of that summer at least seven times. In each version, she changed everything except herself. Always she is a depressed woman who flees San Francisco’s spring—“a season of grayness, cold and wind”—to stay with her young son in her parents’ house in a small Southern town and pass some weeks in love with another visitor. That much is true.
Alice had realized that she and Mark were “making each other very unhappy” but she could not afford to leave the marriage.I Then a neighbor of Nic Adams’s visited Alice in San Francisco while attending a psychoanalytic conference. Lucie Jessner, then sixty-two, was a German-born psychoanalyst with “enormous intelligence and vast charm” and a “beautifully accented voice” who specialized in child psychology at UNC’s medical school.1 Jessner knew that Nic and Dotsie planned to spend the entire summer at Lake Sebago and, sensing Alice’s unhappiness, suggested that a stay within her girlhood landscape would help Alice reorient herself in the world.
Dreaming of hot weather and the swimming pool in the woods, perhaps a summer love affair, Alice packed summer clothes—including the new sundress splashed with pink dots—and her typewriter. Mark gave his blessing. Their finances were already strained, so he rented out two rooms of the apartment at 308 Locust Street where they’d moved recently to escape the difficult landlady. Alice flew east with Peter in early June. They didn’t call this a separation, but both she and Mark understood that some changes were necessary. In one story that summer inspired, Adams writes, “My husband took Simon and me out for a pleasant, noncritical parting dinner, at a good Italian restaurant. He only said, ‘You won’t be eating food like this for a while,’ and I said that I supposed not. Perhaps I did not have to go home after all? But by then I was committed. Letters written, tickets bought. And those clothes.”
Here, as in much of Adams’s work, clothes serve as a trope for female desire and ambition in an era when both operated covertly. She loved clothes, but they also represented self-expression and freedom. She resented, for instance, Mark’s mother’s efforts to dress her in bargains from Filene’s Basement. Later, in the unusually hot Carolina summer of 1958, Adams went to the Little Shop in Chapel Hill, where a lady she’d known all her life offered her an off-white-and-pale-yellow cotton dress marked down to $15: “I had a pleased sense of being, now, in my own small hometown, a grown-up at last, a woman among women.” She could not feel that kind of autonomy as a professor’s wife on a shoestring budget in San Francisco.
* * *
Alice hadn’t set foot in Chapel Hill in ten years. When she and Peter got off their plane in Raleigh-Durham, her father was waiting at the one-story clapboard airport. Nic Adams still drank—a lot—but apparently he did so in Dotsie’s company without psychological collapse. Dinner was never served that night but Peter happily compiled his own sandwich from the refrigerator. On another night Dotsie was shocked when “Peter was allowed to eat his entire spaghetti dinner with his hands!” After a couple of liquid evenings during which tempers flared and neighbors and old friends came to inspect Alice, the prodigal daughter, Nic and Dotsie left for Maine. Then, Adams wrote, “everything in my life improved astoundingly.”2
Alice and Peter occupied the old wing of her childhood home, the part previously rented to a bachelor named Bill. The apartment was in disrepair—holes in walls, floorboards missing, furniture broken—but Lucie’s garden supplied roses for every room. Alice set up her typewriter on the dining table, enrolled Peter in the YMCA day camp, and worked on her novel, which was set in Chapel Hill and was going to be titled either Green Creek or Weather in the Town. In the afternoons, Lucie Jessner, tired from her clinical duties, came over to swim, and she and Alice grew attached: “If only my crazy father had married you,” Alice thought of the “small, rather bent-over woman (she had scholarly bad posture)” who shyly arrived in a terry-cloth robe.3 Alice’s wish came half-true: Jessner took up the role of fairy godmother to her. She adored Peter as well and invited both of them to join her for a beach weekend in South Carolina. Her friend Max Steele had a house at Windy Hill and would welcome them all.
Henry Maxwell Steele had come to finish college in Chapel Hill after the war, most of which he’d spent as a meteorologist on the island of Trinidad, endangered only by the anger of combat soldiers returning from Europe to learn, while laid over in the Caribbean, that they were being sent to fight in the Pacific. As a UNC student, Steele had been part of what author Daphne Athas describes as a “GI Bill inundation and rapid increase of population” that filled the town with “intellectually serious veterans, real men, older than the beer-frat types before the war.” In the late f
orties, Athas, Steele, and other friends had been finishing novels as they waited for one thing—enough income to get themselves to Europe. They lived in unheated houses and wrote in offices lent by churches. Athas published The Weather of the Heart in 1947, and Steele’s Debby came out in 1950. Debby won the Harper Novel Prize for the best novel by an “unnoticed” writer.4
Lucie Jessner
So Steele went to Paris, where he consulted a Hungarian woman psychoanalyst. He wrote and hung out at Café Tournon by the Luxembourg Gardens, along with George Plimpton, Peter Matthiessen, Mary Lee Settle, William Styron, and Evan S. Connell, and became an advisory editor of the first issue of the Paris Review. The Tournon was also a gathering place for black Americans, including James Baldwin, Ellen and Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison; Duke Ellington gave his first Paris concert there. A bit later Ellen Wright represented Simone de Beauvoir, Nelson Algren, and Max Steele as their literary agent. For some white American Southerners, as for African Americans, the diminished race and class distinctions of expatriate life were liberating. The photo of himself in Paris that Steele preferred shows him seated at a café table—bearded, dressed in a top hat and other flea market finds, grinning widely.5
From Paris, Steele returned to Chapel Hill to teach creative writing in the program directed by Jessie Rehder, who was Agatha and Nic Adams’s friend and neighbor. So Alice Adams and Max Steele had heard about each other before they met. She’d read Debby and his short stories, prestigiously published in Harper’s, Collier’s Weekly, and other magazines. “He was marvelous, I thought, an extraordinary writer,” she said. That much was prologue.
Adams remembered the moment she met Steele, whom she called by his first name in her memoir: “I got out and looked up at Henry, a tall man with a sad witty kind face; we shook hands and fell in love … Since there were a lot of people around… all that attraction was manifest only in a great deal of talk, much laughing at nothing… we knew quite a lot of people in common, from a wide range of places, and we made a great deal of that.”6
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