Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  * * *

  When Alice wrote Saul Bellow about the end of her relationship with Pereira, he sent his condolences with the proviso, “I always have more to say about life when it’s myself that’s in trouble.” But he praised her vitality—he found her “a woman evidently built to make it.” What puzzled him, he said, was “this feminine belief that one makes it in love, only in love, and that love is a kind of salvation. And then women, and sometimes men too, demand of each other everything—everything! And isn’t it obvious by now that no human being has the power to give what we require from one another.”22 His criticism went to the heart of Adams’s work.V She had told Vasco that she would be a better writer because of the great love she felt for him; as it turned out, she would be a better writer because of the great loss she endured because of him.

  Meanwhile, in late November 1960 Alice’s other famous multimarried friend, Norman Mailer, culminated an ongoing crack-up by stabbing his second wife, Adele Morales, in the chest with a penknife. It seems beyond ironic that Adams admired and sought approval from Bellow and Mailer, two writers who were so incapable of engaging her work. Mailer’s essay “Evaluation—Quick and Expensive Comments on the Talent in the Room,” collected that same year in Advertisements for Myself, stated: “I have nothing to say about any of the talented women who write today. Out of what is no doubt a fault in me, I do not seem able to read them. Indeed I doubt if there will be a really exciting woman writer until the first whore becomes a call girl and tells her tale.”

  * * *

  Getting over Vasco Pereira was a long process for Alice. She wrote him a letter to read later filled with the questions that tormented her: “Why? Why? Did we love each other? Nothing is real any more. Who were you? Did I always love someone else? Please tell me if you are alive still—”

  Alice returned to her analyst, Dr. Biernoff, for counsel. The doctor’s shock that she’d been in love with “a representative of a fascist country” probably made her become more critical of Vasco.23 Rereading Vasco’s letters late in 1962, Alice decided they were more full of excuses than of love. Soon she was making entries in her notebook about the character named Pablo Valdespina and the woman named Daisy who falls terribly in love with him.24

  While the novelized Pablo Valdespina retains some of the charm that Vasco Pereira held for Alice Adams, the book is also suffused with irony and humor—and bitter oversimplification. On the one hand she labeled him a fascist, on the other she retained nostalgic passion for him. Adams generalized her new awareness of that contradiction in an unpublished short story: “My new life had made me increasingly aware of the craziness, the total inexplicability of sex, of sexual attractions.”25 For Peter too, his mother’s breakup with Vasco was confusing. He hadn’t liked Vasco or the moods he evoked in his mother, but he saw her misery. Peter “kept asking when we were going to Paris,” Alice wrote in the letter she sent Vasco to read later. She continued, “I just said we had meant to marry but couldn’t & that’s why I felt badly & why not Paris. He was very nice. Only said ‘Where else could we go?’ ”26

  * * *

  Peter’s confusion was compounded by a new event in his father’s life. Mark Linenthal met Frances Jaffer Pain when she took his poetry class at San Francisco State. She was immediately attracted to her charismatic professor. They married the day after Mark’s divorce from Alice was final, on October 5, 1959.

  Frances Linenthal was the same age as her new husband. Her father had founded Structural Steel Inc., a manufacturer of I-beams, and she received income from stock she owned in the company.27 Frances had been an Anglophile; as an undergraduate at Stanford in 1942 when she married a Scottish-born medieval-history student named Rodney Pain who was descended from the English naval hero Lord Rodney. Marriage to charming but philandering Pain cured Frances of her Anglophilia. In later years Pain became a dentist and local celebrity known for offering free dental treatment to artists and poor people and for playing bagpipes to entertain his patients while he waited for the anesthetic to take effect.28

  Frances had been divorced five years when she met Mark. Her three sons, Lincoln, Duncan, and Louis, thought Mark Linenthal was a godsend. “Our mom had been dating men that none of the kids liked,” Lincoln, who’d been thirteen at the time, recalled. “Then she started dating this cool, exciting guy who lived on a houseboat and actually liked kids.”

  Mark joined Frances and her sons in her tall, half-timbered house at 33 Jordan Avenue, a few blocks away from Alice’s apartment on Clay Street. Frances welcomed Peter into their household and helped him create his own space on the top floor. Louis, about a year younger than Peter, remembered, “That whole top floor had been an architect’s studio—incredible—with large, mysterious things like a closet for blueprints. And curved corkboard walls. Once we created a house of horrors up there with papier-mâché bodies. Later we made it psychedelic with Fillmore Auditorium posters.”

  “At first I couldn’t believe that Mark would marry so ugly a woman,” Alice told her friend Blair Fuller in the early 1960s. Alice was unfair—it was “as though she took it personally, that no husband of hers ought to marry a homely woman,” Fuller commented. While blond, petite Frances was unusual looking—a botched nose job that her mother had insisted upon to make her appear less Jewish and turned up the tip of her nose in a curious way and a receding chin marred her profile—she was also smart, charming, vivacious, Jewish, maternal, and determined to please Mark. She confided to her mother that she was made desperate by “how complicated and difficult it is for us to manage the ins and outs of our four children and their needs and commitments.” She and Alice got along by phone when they made arrangements for Peter to shuttle between their two homes. Nonetheless, Frances saw herself as the stable arbiter who had to deal with both her ex-husband and Mark’s ex-wife.29

  The novelist Alice Adams was also unkind to the character she put in Frances’s role in Families and Survivors. In the novel, Louisa nastily tells her clueless husband to marry “rich fat” Persephone after he’s divorced—and so he does. Then Persephone devotes her time and money to cooking and her husband soon becomes as fat as she. The blatant symbolism of making her husband’s new wife an unattractive, smothering, manipulative woman seems to come from Alice’s wounded pride. What Frances lacked in beauty, she made up for in her devotion to Mark. At first she accepted a role as his hostess for Poetry Center receptions: “She was inviting, really all-embracing,” poet Linda Chown recalled. “She wanted to know everything about one, would engage guests in conversation, all her guests. She liked meeting students as well as Mark’s colleagues and the visiting poet who was always the guest of honor, and she had a talent for wry remarks and levity that kept conversations from collapsing into intensity.”

  Peter became close to his three stepbrothers and moved easily between his father’s and mother’s residences. To him, during the five years following his parents’ divorce, his mother seemed like “sort of an abandoned person” while his father was part of a happy, busy household just two blocks away.

  What he could not then understand was that Alice, like many another lonely woman writer in those years, could not help choosing the life that would eventually serve her work. “I spent my 30s having love affairs to make up for lost time and writing as a sort of sideline,” Adams told People magazine in 1978. Through those love affairs, Adams was becoming the mature woman and writer who could find form for the problems that engaged her.

  She would soon be making up for lost time again—at her typewriter.

  I. The alimony would be worth about $2,000 a month in 2019 dollars. The senior Linenthals probably paid Peter’s tuition at Town School.

  II. Families and Survivors wasn’t published until 1975, though Adams had been working on its material in her notebook for years. In 1955, Norman Mailer told an interviewer that his own new novel The Deer Park was about sex, “the last remaining frontier of the novel which has not been exhausted by the nineteenth and early twentieth century n
ovelists.” Women’s sexual experience, described by women, remained out of bounds.

  III. Charm ceased publication in November 1959, when its publisher, Street & Smith Publications, known for pulp fiction and dime novels, could no longer compete with television. Condé Nast bought the company and folded Charm into Glamour.

  IV. Jessner reserved her greater appreciation for Adams’s “true and delicate and so perfectly told new story,” “Truth or Consequences” (which would not be published until 1979). For this experienced psychiatrist, work mattered more than romantic love.

  V. Bellow doesn’t seem to have learned his own lesson, as he sought what he required from five wives and several serious liaisons. His difficulties with love began with the death of his mother when he was in his late teens, according to biographer James Atlas. As the youngest brother he sat by her bedside every afternoon, struggling against his desire to be elsewhere. (Atlas, Bellow: A Biography, 35.)

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Alone

  — 1961–1963 —

  I had a number of love affairs, most of them serious—in fact I was always serious, I think.

  —Alice Adams, “Why I Left Home: Partial Truths”

  After Vasco Pereira’s departure from San Francisco, Alice realized she had dangerously invested her prospects for happiness in one man. With time and writing, she understood too that she risked becoming, as she put it in a story idea later, “the sort of woman who perhaps is going out of style, whose life is love affairs.”1 Worse, none of the men she met after Vasco could give her the thrill she sought. As she approached forty, Alice knew she should devote herself to “the boring rhythm of honest self examination.”

  In her notebook in 1963, Alice made two lists that outlined her difficulty as a woman and perhaps also a writer:

  REAL:

  IRRATIONAL:

  I am 36

  old & ugly

  Between beaux is lonely

  lonely (?) is forever

  I cope fairly well

  living alone is more & more impossible

  After her divorce in 1958, Alice remained suspended between those two versions of herself. Like most of her generation she was a woman who identified with men, but during these years she became skeptical of what men could do for her and more confident of what she could do for herself. She was taking on the question of how to be an independent woman in midcentury America when such women were considered an aberration. Even though the birth control pill and writers like Helen Gurley Brown promoted sexual freedom for women, it was not until Betty Friedan published The Feminine Mystique in 1963 that public analysis of the unhappiness of women focused on identity and economic autonomy rather than sexual behavior.

  On her own, Alice began to reinvent and esteem herself by turning the story of her love affair with Vasco into her novel Careless Love. Adams wanted to call the novel Nevertheless because, she explained, this affair had been “melodramatic, ‘neurotic,’ a con,” but “nevertheless a love affair.” By transforming her story into that of her protagonist Daisy Duke, she could see admirable strength and wry humor in her suffering and, as she explained, examine “the lack of clear social or conventional rules for divorced or otherwise unmarried people beyond their twenties. What mores there are have to be guessed at, trial-and-error tested.”2

  While Alice was occupied with Vasco, her correspondence with Max Steele had dwindled. On New Year’s Eve 1960 he married his former student Diana Whittinghill, whom he’d known several years. “When I was 21 and not his student anymore, Max deflowered me,” she reminisced. “He was 13 years older than me and I did whatever he suggested. A glass of sherry was involved. Maybe two very small ones.” After they married, the Steeles drove to San Francisco in a VW bus. Diana became a statistician for the California Department of Employment while Max wrote little himself and taught writing at several colleges. “Mostly we were carpenters,” Diana said. They bought and renovated a house in San Francisco’s Western Addition neighborhood, “where [they] were the first hetero white couple,” then did the same with a three-unit building near Golden Gate Park (offering to rent a floor of it to Alice, who declined), and finally took on a big Victorian at 1366 Guerrero in the lower Mission District.

  The Steeles made literary friendships in the Bay Area and invited Alice to their parties. Diana, with her offbeat sense of humor, took her husband’s friendship with his former lover in stride while Alice addressed the younger woman with slightly patronizing archness as “Miss Diana.” Through the Steeles, Alice met Blair Fuller, a novelist and early Paris Review contributor who had been George Plimpton’s roommate at Harvard. After too much drink at a party, Fuller recalled, “Alice and I fell into bed together and had an exciting time but I never wanted to do it again. I felt she was stronger than I was—I feared she would be running the show, and that’s not what I wanted.” They didn’t see each other again immediately, but “then did and were instantly friends.” Indeed, Fuller was one of the handful of people to whom Alice confided that she had been seduced by her father’s psychoanalyst: “She was 15, she said. I think I wondered at the time because of the way she said it, I wondered is she adding a year? Maybe she was 14! She said it very matter-of-factly. She said it as if she had told other people the story. I’m absolutely sure that she said it to me.”

  Perhaps their common Harvard history led Alice to talk candidly to Fuller about her marriage to Mark Linenthal: “Linenthal seemed like a figure out of the distant past. She talked tough about him. I said something about his teaching poetry at San Francisco State, and she said, ‘You call him a poet?’ Cruel. Once I asked her, ‘Did the Linenthals have money?’ She said, ‘Oh, yes, of course, of course.’ I’m not making up the ‘of course.’ ” Fuller took Alice’s remark to mean that “he would have had to have had money for her to have decided to marry him.” She was also indicating that this was what women of her class and education routinely did if they had no money of their own.

  The men Alice dated and the women who were her friends and coworkers in the early 1960s became the warp of the fictions she was weaving and trying to sell. She was actively rewriting her history, transforming herself into someone tougher than she’d been in the past. “I had a number of love affairs, most of them serious—in fact I was always serious, I think,” she wrote in her essay “Why I Left Home: Partial Truths.” The men about whom she was briefly serious included artist Jack Boynton, book rep and reviewer Luther Nichols, literary critic Irving Howe, linguist Franz Sommerfeld, and architect Felix Rosenthal. All of them indirectly contributed to her fiction by telling her about their experiences in the male worlds of war and politics. Another new confidant for Alice in 1961 was the scholar and critic Richard Poirier, a friend of Billy Abrahams’s who spent the summer of 1961 in San Francisco while teaching at Stanford. Poirier was then editor of The O. Henry Prize Stories; Alice’s lifelong friendship with him was rooted in her admiration for his literary intelligence and his for her fiction—as well as in their shared relish for gossip about mutual friends.

  * * *

  Alice probably met Franz René Sommerfeld through Fred Breier, who first knew him when both were students living at the International House in Berkeley during the forties. At the I-House, one resident from those years writes, there were “Americans, Japanese, Germans, Europeans, Asians, Africans, students whose homelands were on both sides of the war—literally and figuratively holding hands in friendship.”3 Born in Berlin in 1921, Sommerfeld left Germany for Belgium and France, and came to Berkeley in 1940 to complete his BA in German literature. At Columbia University he wrote a master’s thesis on Der Ackermann aus Böhmen, a late medieval manuscript considered a precursor of humanism.

  Friends saw Sommerfeld as superintellectual, “quite intimidating, almost a caricature of the refined German man of letters.” His enlarged heart gave him pain and worry and excused him from military service. He lived monkishly in hotels and wore strong eyeglasses that obscured his light blue eyes and emphasized his p
ale face and dark curly hair. He took an academic position at the University of Washington in 1948, but his “demand for perfection paralyzed him and made it impossible for him to publish his research.” His department chair, W. H. Rey, described him as “paradoxically the most talented and most hopeless man in the department.”4 While teaching in Seattle, he often visited friends in the Bay Area. When Alice’s artist friend Ruth Gebhart married an architect named John Belmeur at the Swedenborgian Church, Alice and Franz hosted a champagne reception for them in Alice’s apartment. When Ruth had a miscarriage and was unable to conceive again, Alice complained to Judith that John was “very harsh” with Ruth, adding, “Girls who underrate themselves get into such troubles, don’t we?”5

  Late in 1961, Sommerfeld sent Alice money to fly to Seattle and have her hair dressed in an elaborate beehive-chignon style so she could attend a faculty Christmas party with him. She wore a gold Dior coat that he bought for her. This was an expansive time in Franz’s life: With an inheritance from his parents he’d moved into a house near the university. After years of working as an instructor, he’d finally been promoted to the professoriate even though he still hadn’t completed his PhD. Alice was the arm candy he brought along to celebrate. Afterward, she wrote him: “Every night I listen to Schubert and cry. What a pity you aren’t here to see this—you’d be so cheered.” In these intimately playful letters she gave details about how her hair remained “high as a haystack” after she took the pins out and told him she’d bought “some great new stockings that go all the way up to panties to which they’re attached”—the newly marketed panty hose that soon made miniskirts possible and popular.