Alice Adams
Page 64
22 AA, “My First and Only House,” RT.
CHAPTER 4: DEPRESSIONS
Interviews: Daphne Athas, John Ball, Mary Elizabeth (Jervey) Kilbey, Avery Russell, Tom (Tombo) Wilson Jr.
1 N, April 22, 1999.
2 Daphne Athas, Chapel Hill in Plain Sight (Hillsborough, NC: Eno Publishers, 2010), 117.
3 AA, MEX, 95.
4 AA, “Why I Write,” 273.
5 William E. Leuchenburg, The American President from Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), 146.
6 Athas, Chapel Hill in Plain Sight, 254–73. Abernathy published Langston Hughes, James Joyce, and Samuel Beckett, and reported the local literary news, including this item: “William Faulkner while guest of Contempo was surprised to learn that the University of North Carolina library cannot afford a copy of any of his novels.”
7 Gertrude Stein, Everybody’s Autobiography (1937; New York: Vintage, 1973), 251–52.
8 AA, “Why I Write,” 272–73.
9 PAL to CS.
10 AGA to Tom Wilson, Holt archive, PUL.
11 AA, “At First Sight,” TSYA.
12 Tom Wilson to AGA, Holt archive, PUL.
13 DSA (then Wilson) to NBA, postmarked December 18, 1937, Flushing, New York, PAL collection.
14 AA, “Truth or Consequences,” TSYA.
15 AA to Kay Bonetti.
16 AA, “Truth or Consequences.”
17 ABA to DSA (then Wilson), August 20 [1936].
18 AA, “A Southern Spelling Bee,” TSYA.
19 AA, 1937 diary, HRC.
20 AA, “Ladies in Waiting,” unpublished TS, HRC.
21 “Legacy” by Agatha Adams (from PAL collection): (for Alice)
I cannot give you beauty
Or yet the glow of charm
But I have given you far subtler weapons
The hosts of evil to disarm.
For I have made you free of lake and mountain
The quiet of tall birches is your own…
Secure retreats against the assailing years
Since you will find in loveliness remembered
A sanctuary from all hurts and fears.
22 ABA to DSA (then Wilson), August 20 [1936].
23 AA, “Why I Write,” 273–74.
24 AA, “Child’s Play,” AYG.
25 Interview with AA by Marilyn Scharine, 1987, HRC.
26 AA, “My First and Only House,” 193.
27 AA, “Why I Left Home: Partial Truths.”
CHAPTER 5: GIRLS
Interviews: JCA, Daphne Athas, Doris Dickson, Mary Elizabeth (Jervey) Kilby, PAL, Dougald Macmillan, Ford Worthy.
1 AA, “Why I Left Home.”
2 “very Bostonian manner”: AA, “Why I Left Home”; “I thought anyone”: AA, “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir.”
3 N, May 15, 1965.
4 AA, “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir.”
5 JCA to AA, c. 1990.
6 Athas, Chapel Hill in Plain Sight, 156.
7 AA, commencement address, University of California Berkeley, May 22, 1987.
8 JCA to AA, n.d.
9 Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. Constance Borde (New York: Knopf, 2010), 374–76.
10 AA, “An Unscheduled Stop,” TSYA.
11 “woods as dense” and “We came to”: AA, “Roses, Rhododendron,” BG.
12 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 376.
13 Mary McCarthy, How I Grew (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1987), 27–28.
14 AGA, “Jobs for the Helen Hokinson Crowd.”
15 Mary Elizabeth (Jervey) Kilby recalled that she was urged to learn to like olives in advance of the trip, but not whether Agatha and Alice were also to be part of Nic’s entourage.
16 NBA, The Heritage of Spain (1943; rev. ed., New York: Henry Holt, 1959), 251–67.
17 Brenda Maddox, D. H. Lawrence: The Story of a Marriage (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 364.
18 D. H. Lawrence, Quetzalcoatal: The Early Version of “The Plumed Serpent,” ed. Louis L. Martz (Redding Ridge, CT: Black Swan Books, 1995), 17.
19 ABA, A Journey to Mexico (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1945), 5.
20 ABA, diary, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, UNC.
21 Josephus Daniels’s son, Jonathan Daniels, had just published his bestselling defense of New Deal programs, A Southerner Discovers the South.
22 Jennifer Ritterhouse, “Dixie Destinations: Rereading Jonathan Daniels’s A Southerner Discovers the South,” Southern Spaces (May 20, 2010), Emory Center for Digital Scholarship: southernspaces.org/2010/dixie-destinations-rereading-jonathan-danielss-southerner-discovers-south.
23 ABA, A Journey to Mexico, 5.
24 Mavis Gallant to PAL [1999].
25 AA, “Balcony Scenes.”
26 Willie T. Weathers to AA, April 22, 1975. In “Balcony Scenes” and “Return Trips,” AA gives her autobiographical characters parents who are divorcing.
27 N, November 11, 1954. AA later developed this sketch into her Todd-family story titled “Are You in Love?”
28 “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir”; Alice’s Otis IQ test, reported on her CHHS transcript, was 133.
29 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 321.
30 Letters from camp courtesy of JCA and PAL.
31 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 372.
32 AA, “An Unscheduled Stop,” TSYA.
33 Doris Dickson to CS, April 24, 2013.
34 University Archives, University of Wisconsin.
CHAPTER 6: NORTH AND SOUTH
Interviews: JCA, Elizabeth Robinson Buttenheim, Barbara Bates Guinee, Bryant Mangum, Tyler Paul, Jean Salter Roetter.
1 AA described her year in Madison in several sources: letters to JCA; a five-page untitled manuscript, HRC; “The Nice Girl;” “1940: Fall,” AYG; “Balcony Scenes;” N, July 10, 1987, and August 17, 1987. Background information: Madison Capital Times, and Wisconsin High School records, Steenbock Library, University of Wisconsin.
2 AA to JCA, December 26, 1940.
3 Ibid., May 22, 1941.
4 Ibid., “Wednesday” [July 10, 1941].
5 Ibid., July–August 1941.
6 Ibid., December 26, 1940.
7 De Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 391.
8 Ibid., 397.
9 McCarthy, How I Grew, 75–78.
10 AA to Richard Carr, September 28, 1981.
11 Hugh Morton Collection of Photographs and Films, UNC.
12 “Allies Describe Outrages on Jews, United Nations Office Here Releases Report on Fate of 5,000,000 in Europe, Extermination Is Feared, Situation in Each Country Held by Germans Is Analyzed in Summarized Form,” New York Times, December 20, 1942.
13 St. Catherine’s School archives; Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe.
14 N, February 15, 1982.
CHAPTER 7: RUMORS OF WAR
Interviews: JCA, George Avakian, Barbara Bates Guinee, Anne Fabbri, Alison Lurie, Adeline Naiman, Phyllis Silverman Ott, Mary Bachhuber Simmons, Barbara Mailer Wasserman, Betty Love White.
1 AA to Barbara Bates Guinee, March 1, 1998.
2 Elizabeth S. Zuckerman, “A ‘Very Romantic’ Native of Chapel Hill Pursues the Literary Life,” Harvard Crimson, January 2, 1997.
3 Elaine Kendall, Peculiar Institutions: An Informal History of the Seven Sisters Colleges (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1976), 154.
4 Alison Lurie, “Their Harvard,” in Diana Dubois, ed., My Harvard, My Yale: Memoirs of College Life by Some Notable Americans (New York: Random House, 1982), 34.
5 AA to Laura Furman, August 11, 1981.
6 AA to Barbara Bates Guinee, November 16 [1998].
7 AA to Peter Manso, February 15, 1983, transcript, NM Papers, HRC.
8 AA, untitled MS, HRC folder 19.5.
9 Lurie, “Their Harvard,” 37.
10 Douglass Shand-Tucci, The Crimson Letter: Harvard, Homosexuality, and the Shaping of American Culture (New York: St. Marti
n’s, 2003), 149–55.
11 AA in Jackson R. Bryer, ed., F. Scott Fitzgerald at 100 (Rockville, MD: Quill and Brush, 1996), unpaginated.
12 Lurie, “Their Harvard,” 39.
13 ABA, “The Tradition of Women at the University of North Carolina,” fall 1949, TS, UNC.
14 AA, “A Natural Woman.”
15 AA, “Wonderful,” unpublished TS, HRC.
16 N, 1949–72; entry for July 28, 1960: “—the first man she had ever slept with (really the second: she had been in the midst of confessing the first) had been her manic-depressive father’s psychoanalyst—Malcolm—”
17 Ann Kolson, “She Writes of the Life Within,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 15, 1984.
18 Ibid.; AA in interview with Mildred Hamilton, San Francisco Examiner, January 31, 1975, 22; AA, “A Lesson”; I believe AA was referring to Kempton because of an inscription in a copy of Kempton’s short-story anthology that Bill Mulder gave AA in Salt Lake in 1987: Mulder writes that AA “had a score to settle with Kempton.”
19 AA to Kay Bonetti, American Audio Prose Library.
20 Randall Sandke, Where the Dark and the Light Folks Meet: Race and the Mythology, Politics, and Business of Jazz (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2010), 143.
21 Jan Morris, Manhattan ’45 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), 198–99.
22 For details of how that happened, we have only Adams’s description in Superior Women; for corroboration, we have her lifelong interest in Young and the name “Trummy” on her list of lovers, secondhand recollections of later meetings, and AA to JCA, October 29, 1984.
23 John Norris, “Trummy Young: An Interview with John Norris,” Coda 11, no. 2 (July–August 1973): 8–11; Charles E. Martin, “Trummy Young: An Unfinished Story,” Second Line 30 (Summer 1978): 30–35; Al Monroe, “Swinging the News,” Chicago Defender, July 31, 1943, mentions that Edith Young, wife of Trummy, has accompanied her husband on tour with the Charlie Barnet band in Chicago; Don Burley, “Back Door Stuff,” New York Amsterdam News, September 11, 1943, March 18, 1944, and December 2, 1944; NAMM Oral History by Dan Del Fiorentino, www.namm.org/library/oral-history/trummy-young.
24 AA to Radcliffe College Alumnae, June 6, 1997.
CHAPTER 8: COCKTAIL OF DREAMS
Interviews: George Avakian, Eileen Finletter Geist, Jacob Levenson, ML, Richard Linenthal, Elizabeth White Love, Alison Lurie, Valerie Roemer Lynn, Doris McMullan, Mary Bachhuber Simmons.
1 AA to Elizabeth Love, July 21, 1996.
2 “Most of the men”: Lurie, “Their Harvard,” 41; “sophisticated”: Millicent Dillon, “Writer Alice Adams Cuts to the Core in Her Fiction and in Her Reading,” Stanford Campus Report, June 9, 1982; Guerard believed: John G. Wofford, “Creative Critic,” Harvard Crimson, December 14, 1955.
3 “Wonderful,” five-page TS, HRC.
4 AA to ABA and NBA [March 1946]; AA to Philip Mayer, June 21, 1976, HRC.
5 Millicent Dillon, interview with AA, Stanford Campus Report, June 9, 1982.
6 AA to NBA and ABA [March 1946]; B. V. Weinbaum’s withering review of The Great Promise ran in the New York Times Book Review, April 14, 1946.
7 AA to ABA and NBA [March 1946].
8 Oral history, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn512420; family archives, PAL; Richard Linenthal to CS, January 31, 2011.
9 AA to Manso, HRC.
10 AA to ABA, “Friday” [June 1946].
11 Morris, Manhattan ’45, 240.
12 Ronald B. Elkin, MD, to Bill Fee, MD, October 15, 1992, Stanford medical records.
13 Carolyn Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life (New York: Ballantine Books, 1988), 118–19.
14 AA, “Book Beat,” 1984, Donald L. Swaim Collection, Ohio University Archives and Special Collections.
15 AA to ABA and NBA, “Tuesday” [October 1946].
16 AA to Allen Tate, November 16, 1946, Archives of Henry Holt & Co., PUL.
17 AA, “Stork Club,” TS, HRC; AA to ABA and NBA, “Tuesday” [November 1946].
18 AA to Allen Tate, November 16, 1946, PUL.
19 AA, “What Should I Have Done?” BG, 225.
20 “curious”: Ibid.; Charles Miles Jones Papers, UNC; wedding photographs, PAL.
21 AA to Peter Manso, transcript, NM Papers, HRC.
22 In Families and Survivors, Maude wonders why her mother ever married her father and decides that “after a lively and perhaps tiring adolescence… she wanted a rest.”
23 Salzburg Seminar Newsletter, May 19, 1947, archives of the Salzburg Global Seminar.
24 ML to Peter Manso, transcript, NM Papers, HRC.
25 Alfred Kazin, A Lifetime Burning in Every Moment: From the Journals of Alfred Kazin (New York: HarperCollins, 1996), 90.
26 Ibid., 88–90.
27 Earl G. Harrison, “Report of Earl G. Harrison,” 1945, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library. https://www.eisenhowerlibrary.gov/sites/default/files/research/online-documents/holocaust/report-harrison.pdf (accessed June 4, 2019); and Harrison’s 1945 journal, United States Memorial Holocaust Museum. collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/irn503791#?rsc=127813&cv=0&xywh=-1191%2C-165%2C4266%2C3281&c=0&m=0&s=0 (accessed June 4, 2019).
28 AA, “Related Histories,” TSYA.
29 Matthiessen recorded his own words as follows: “We have come from many countries and across the gulf of war. Some of you Europeans were in prison camps in my country. One of our American staff was in a prison camp near Salzburg.… I take it for granted also that one thing that unites us is that we are all strong anti-Fascists.” (From the Heart of Europe [New York: Oxford UP, 1948], 13.)
30 Valerie Roemer Lynn had recently read her late husband’s letters to his parents when she spoke with me. Both Lynns maintained a friendship with the Linenthals for another ten years, during which Alice sometimes confided her marital discontents to Kenneth Lynn.
31 Kazin, A Lifetime Burning, 93, 102.
CHAPTER 9: IMPERSONATORS
Interviews: Blair Fuller, Gerald Howard, Ella Leffland, ML, Valerie Lynn, Phyllis Silverman Ott, Beatrice Silverman, Barbara Mailer Wasserman.
1 Stanley Geist, “Memoires d’un touriste: Paris, 1947,” trans. René Guyonnet, Les temps modernes (1948): 536–47.
2 The address on ML’s French driving permit.
3 Geist, “Memoires d’un Touriste: Paris, 1947.”
4 AA to Doris Dörrie, July [10,] 1981.
5 “I did live with just such a woman although unfortunately I was married at the time, no beautiful Italian lover,” AA wrote Dörrie; but earlier, when editing “Winter Rain,” for Beautiful Girl, she said, “I’ll change the first [name] to Bruno (actual name and now he’s a very famous Communist leader, isn’t that interesting?).” (AA to VW, June 10, 1977.)
6 Anthony Beevor and Artemis Cooper, Paris After the Libertion 1944–1949 (New York: Penguin, 2007), 185.
7 Description of Adam Marr in AA, SW.
8 NM to I. B. Mailer, November 1, 1947, NM Papers, HRC.
9 Peter Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1985), 60.
10 Louise Levitas, “The Naked are Fanatics and the Dead Don’t Care,” New York Star, August 22, 1948, reprinted in J. Michael Lennon, ed., Conversations with Norman Mailer (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1988), 8.
11 AA to Manso, transcript, NM Papers, HRC.
12 Manso, Mailer, 71.
13 Kenneth Lynn to Carl Rollyson, recorded interview, June 28, 1990, Carl Rollyson Collection, McFarlin Library, University of Tulsa.
14 William Raney to NM, January 20, 1948, NM Papers, HRC.
15 ML to Manso and AA to Manso, transcripts, NM Papers, HRC.
16 NM to Francis Gwaltney, October 7, 1947, quoted in Carl Rollyson, The Lives of Norman Mailer: A Biography (New York: Paragon House, 1991), 46.
17 AA, “Postwar Paris: Chronicles of Literary Life.”
18 The undated list is at the back of N, 1991–1997 on page 158.
19 Arthur Miller, Time
bends: A Life (New York: Grove Press, 1987), 249.
20 Car and travel to Spain: AA and ML to Manso, transcripts, NM Papers, HRC; NM to Raney, February 7, 1948; Barbara Probst Solomon, Arriving Where We Started (New York: Harper & Row, 1972); Barbara Mailer Wasserman, “Spain, 1948,” Hudson Review 53, no. 3 (Autumn 2000): 363–84. Contrary to what J. Michael Lennon reports in Norman Mailer: A Double Life (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 105, the Mailers and Linenthals did not travel together to Barcelona in the Mailer Peugeot.
21 Eugenio de Nora, Pueblo cautivo (1946; León, Spain: Diputación Provincial de León, 1997).
22 NM, “Spanish Preface,” unpublished TS, NM Papers, HRC.
23 Ibid.
24 AA to Kenneth Lynn, March 19, 1949; Sandy Pearl and Bernard Goldberg, “William Hunt Diederich (1884–1953): Forging His Noble Beasts,” Incollect, incollect.com/articles/william-hunt-diederich-1884-1953, accessed October 23, 2018; Michel Gaudet, La vie du haut de Cagnes (1930–1980) la bohème ensoleillée (Nice: Mémoire directe Demaistre, 2001), passim.
25 Cagnes-sur-mer: AA to Philip Mayer, September 7, 1976.
26 Kenneth Lynn to Carl Rollyson, recorded interview, June 28, 1990.
27 Michael Gorra, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (New York: Liveright, 2012), 278.
28 N, January 19, 1949.
29 ML and AA to Manso, transcripts, NM Papers, HRC.
30 AA, “Partial Truths”; AA to Manso, transcript, NM Papers, HRC.
31 Wasserman, “Spain, 1948.”
32 NM to William Raney, February 25, 1948.
33 Wasserman, “Spain, 1948”; Solomon, Arriving Where We Started, 65–102.
34 Janet Flanner, Paris Journal 1944–1955, ed. William Shawn (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1965), 91–92.
35 AA, “Postwar Paris.”
36 “sounded terrible”: AA to Lynns, March 19, 1949; “I could have stayed”: AA, “Postwar Paris.”
37 Heilbrun, Writing a Woman’s Life, 117.
38 Alice Kaplan, Dreaming in French: The Paris Years of Jacqueline Bouvier Kennedy, Susan Sontag, and Angela Davis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 5.