Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  The intent was to squeeze frivolity out of these young women and teach them discipline. “The complexity and general restlessness of society today,” Mrs. Brackett stated in a school catalog, “make it necessary to limit the students’ outside interests in order to secure that atmosphere necessary for sound scholarship.” Nonetheless, popularity with boys determined prestige among the boarders: “Since dates or visitors were not allowed, this was measured by the stories one had to tell after vacations, and concretely, by the number of letters visibly stuffed into a mailbox,” Careless Love says. But maybe Adams exaggerated the monastic nature of St. Catherine’s in her fiction. In winter 1943 an ice storm forced cancellation of an alumnae-senior dance: “The rush to notify dates from as far away as Connecticut blocked school lines,” the Arcadian (St. Catherine’s news sheet) reported. “Some Chapel Hill boys arrived after the dance was postponed.” One imagines Alice knew those boys.

  Despite her dislike of the school’s atmosphere and restrictions, Alice held editorial positions on the literary magazine Inklings and the annual Quair, sang in the choir, worked for the Free French committee, portrayed a fairy in Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical Iolanthe in 1942, and played her flute for The Pied Piper of Hamelin in 1943. She went to Sunday dinners at the home of Elizabeth Robinson, a day girl who sat next to her in English: “We read standard books like Tess of the D’Urbervilles. We practiced the kind of essay that was on the college boards in those days, and were graded on ten things from Grammar to Diction. That came easily to me. I’m sure Alice was good at that too.” The school had “funny old teachers,” one alumna thought, including a lesbian who had been there for years: “I didn’t know what a lesbian was but the girls told me. Everyone just understood that and laughed at times. She wore tweed jackets and straight skirts and men’s-type shoes and was a very good teacher.” The French teacher, believed to be a relative of Charles de Gaulle, taught poorly but had a good accent. During the Depression some teachers had worked in exchange for room and board, but now, with better times, they received salaries “below anything you could imagine,” as history teacher Evelyn Kelley wrote to a friend in Massachusetts.

  Headmistress Brackett objected to weekend trips home by boarders because the girls returned tired or sick and unprepared for class. When wartime travel restrictions began in 1942, she lengthened Christmas vacation and canceled weekend passes. Like any highly motivated girl her age (the word “teenager” wasn’t yet in common use), Alice got around the rule by making a convenient appointment for her precollege physical with the family doctor in Chapel Hill, where she apparently had a boyfriend at the time, and got permission for Barbara Bates to accompany her. “Alice asked me to have a date with her date’s friend, who must have been in his first year at UNC,” Barbara recounted. “That to me was WOW—I didn’t know what to wear or what to say. It was a fraternity party. Luckily I was careful about what I drank. My date was not careful about what he drank and was probably bored with me. Alice was mature and socially at ease—after all she was raised in Chapel Hill.” One conversation from that evening stands out in Barbara’s memory: “They were talking about this gal, and they said, ‘She’s a nymphomaniac.’ And I’m so naïve I wasn’t sure what that was. Then the girl came in, and I said to myself, she certainly looks like a normal person. This is the kind of thing that fascinates you at that age!”

  * * *

  “The throbbing issue at the school was that of virginity,” Adams wrote in Careless Love. “The patron saint had dreamed that she was mystically married to Christ, had awakened wearing a ring.” Alice probably lost her virginity to a man named Hank—that’s the first name on a list of lovers she made decades later. She also mentioned “feeling rather glum about Hank” in a letter she wrote to Judith from Madison.6 Whenever and wherever the deed occurred, Adams brought the details of her deflowering to life in her novel Careless Love and placed it in Chapel Hill.III The Hank who appears there could be an amalgam of boys Alice knew. He’s certainly not a nice Southern boy she’s known forever: a stranger is more erotic. Daisy “abandons” nice, Southern prelaw Hugh at a fraternity party to go off with Hank Cassidy from New York: “black hair, pale skin, and a jutting cleft chin. His eyes were narrow and dark and bored.” Kissing Daisy beneath the columns of the University Baptist Church, Hank says, “You may find this romantic… but I’d give ten years of my life to have you in bed.” She takes the bait but “there was no time, no place: the classic dilemma of adolescent love.” Hank sends a Billie Holiday album to Daisy at school, and “she crie[s] over those songs for the rest of the spring.” The following summer in Chapel Hill Hank finally takes Daisy “to bed—or rather, in a cave of honeysuckle near Laurel Hill. An embarrassing non-success: he told her that she was too conditioned to merely necking… The wilting pink rhododendrons all around them seemed to her symbolic.”

  What does Adams mean by “a non-success”? The elided scene partakes of every cliché of the era regarding female sexual experience. Daisy (a flower) was “taken” and symbolically “deflowered” (those wilting rhododendrons) by a supposedly more experienced man who then “told” her why she had not felt what he intended her to feel. De Beauvoir writes that because “both anatomy and customs confer the role of initiator on the man… a young girl needs a man to make her discover her own body.”7 Unsatisfactorily initiated by Hank, Daisy feels she made a mistake: “Hank represented to her the adolescent stricture: if you like a boy, don’t let him know; play hard to get.”

  As eager as a precocious girl like Alice might have been to shed her virginity, in the 1940s her expectations for that event could not have been realistic, whether they came from gossip, novels, or clandestine study of sex manuals.IV For young women of the early twentieth century, as de Beauvoir writes, “the feminine sex organ is mysterious to the woman herself, hidden, tormented, mucous, and humid; it bleeds each month, it is sometimes soiled with body fluids, it has a secret and dangerous life.”8 Mary McCarthy, another writer of the generation just ahead of Adams’s, described her first experience of intercourse at age fourteen: “I was wildly excited but not sexually excited… I was unaware of there being a difference between mental arousal and specific arousal of the genital organs. This led to many misunderstandings. In my observation, girls tend to mature as sexual performers considerably after puberty… and this is confusing for young men and for the girls themselves, especially when mental development, with its own excitement, has far outdistanced the other.”V9

  Like McCarthy, Adams insists on describing the event as she felt it—even including Hank’s disappointment and criticism. Labeling Daisy’s experience with Hank as a “non-success” is a refusal to romanticize sexual initiation that at the same time blames the myth of love for the confusion. Hank’s appeal as Adams portrayed him in Careless Love is mental. He is exotic (perhaps Jewish, since Adams “disguised” several Jewish men she knew by making them Irish or Italian in her fiction). By associating Hank with Billie Holiday, Adams also connects him with another thread in the history of her love life: “When I was young and foolish I wanted to be Billie Holiday.”10

  * * *

  St. Catherine’s students and teachers alike were enthusiastic Anglophiles during the bombardment of Britain by Germany. “During our daily chapel services, a teacher went to a big world map and talked about the news, especially about the war, for maybe twenty minutes,” Lib Buttenheim recalled. “I was aware of the battles and where the troops were.” The Arcadian published pleas from alumnae who lived in England, and the girls raised money for mobile canteens to feed soldiers. After Pearl Harbor and the United States’ entry into the war, St. Catherine’s contributed to both British and Chinese war relief projects. In Chapel Hill, James Clark, the father of Alice’s friend Judith, had worked for the British War Relief Society so successfully in North Carolina that he took a job doing similar work in New York. That’s when Judith spent a revelatory year at a small girls’ school on the Upper East Side with “marvelous bright girls” in
cluding the future Balanchine dancer Diana Adams. Then a navy friend asked Clark to work for him as an inspector of shipyards in Houston. Except for a visit in New York during the summer of 1942, this move separated Judith and Alice for the next few years.

  That same summer, Jean Salter rode the train from Wisconsin to New York and again stayed with the Adams family in Maine. They lived simply there, Jean said, “having wonderful meals that Agatha cooked, sitting on the porch, going in the canoe, laughing in our cabin, reading books.” Alice and Jean corresponded until college and the war distracted them. Across the ocean, on a single night in mid-July, the horrors Jean’s mother had foreseen were happening: thirteen thousand Jews, including four thousand children, were seized by French police in an operation planned by Adolf Eichmann and delivered to the occupying Nazis in Paris. Almost all would perish in Auschwitz.

  By the time Alice was a senior at St. Catherine’s, Russian and French relief committees had been added to the roster of the girls’ charities. To free laborers for defense work, Student Aid Squads assumed much of the daily cleaning and yardwork on campus. Alice, as literary editor of the class of 1943 Quair, contributed to the book’s foreword: “In planning what we wanted to do after we graduate, we felt that we must consider that we were entering an entirely new world, and that we must subordinate our desires to its needs.” Idealistic jargon, perhaps, but during their last two years of school Alice and her classmates had seen almost every young man they knew along with many of their fathers become soldiers, sailors, or marines. Most of the girls thought about joining the WAVES (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service) or WAC (Women’s Army Corps). When Alice went home to Chapel Hill, she saw half of the men on campus wearing navy uniforms and participating in drills on Emerson Field, next to the university library where Agatha worked. Agatha now served as assistant supervisor of the Information Center for Civilian Morale, providing “up-to-the-minute information on all phases of World War II.” Photographed with stacks of file folders and books in January 1942, Agatha and her colleagues look eager to serve, but the news was overwhelming.11 On December 20, as the first year of American military participation in the war came to a close, the Allied governments told the world that Germany had “transformed Poland into one vast center for murdering Jews, not only those of Polish nationality but those of other European nationalities also.” Five million people were in danger of extermination by “methods utterly foreign to any known standards of human behavior.”12

  The “Senior Statistics” section of the yearbook reveals the following about Alice: Favorite Pastime: Changing colleges. Pet Peeve: Sweetness and light. Ambition: To be a Mata Hari. Admired for: Literary ability. The stats also listed Alice’s ideal man—French actor Jean Gabin, the star of Jean Renoir’s classic World War I film La grande illusion.

  Alice’s first college application was to Swarthmore College, then as now a Quaker-influenced, coed liberal arts college near Philadelphia. St. Catherine’s academic dean Hope Fisher observed in her accompanying letter that Alice was “still young and a little immature, in that her critical ability is sometimes ahead of her constructive ability.” This unevenness, Fisher felt, accounted for Alice’s ranking of ninth in the 1943 graduating class of seventy-nine girls. Nonetheless, Alice was “a superior girl with a very quick mind and fine interests.” What did it mean—if Alice read that letter—to hear herself called “superior” at the vulnerable and stubborn age of sixteen? Certainly the word was lodged in her mind in later years.

  Alice roomed with another superior girl for her senior year. Strikingly pretty, tall, and fair-haired, Rosalyn Marchant Landon from Ruxton, Maryland, “had boyfriends and was more mature” than most of the girls, a classmate said. Ros was named the “St. Catherine” of her class because she typified the school’s ideals. Alice and Ros decided to go to Radcliffe after a former St. Catherine’s teacher, Miss Phoebe Gordon, then secretary of admissions at Radcliffe, lectured Upper School students on “women’s part in the war.” Barbara Guinee, who studied art history at Barnard, said, “My mother said I couldn’t go to Radcliffe because they only graduated teachers and secretaries, but Alice and Ros thought Radcliffe was more modern.” On her application to Radcliffe, Alice declared, “I want ultimately to write but I had thought of some sort of foreign diplomatic work first. I have also considered being a newspaper reporter.”13

  Commencement at St. Catherine’s retained a late-Victorian quaintness. After gatherings that included communion service, breakfasts and teas with parents and alumnae, sermons and speeches by Episcopal priests, and a debriefing by Mrs. Brackett, seniors donned long white afternoon dresses for the actual ceremony. Alice received her diploma and never returned or sent a dollar to the place she would later call “an appalling school, such totally rotten values.”

  * * *

  “School Spirit,” an unpublished story Adams wrote in 1958, reveals the values that bothered her. In the story, a lonely sophomore at a girls’ school passes a secret note to a popular senior declaring her admiration of the senior. The senior’s obsequious (and jealous) sidekick intercepts the note and takes it to the headmistress, who exerts “awesome” power over the girls. The headmistress, sitting “strained and erect, as though she had been arrested in flight,” plans to expel the sophomore so as to defend the school from rumors of “unnatural activities” (lesbianism). A visiting teacher named Anne Moore represents Adams’s latter-day views of the incident. She points out that “it was characteristic of the emotional tone of the school” that no one questioned the “motives or good sense” of the snitch. Furthermore, she accuses the senior girl, a “perfect girl” who “had everything,” of lacking humanity—a condition she finds more dangerous than homosexuality.

  “School Spirit” encapsulates Adams’s feeling about the school she attended: “Women should not live together; they created intricate trouble for each other with their needs and indirections and complexities. She did not imagine that men were simpler, but at least they were more direct, and trouble between them more open.” Those, of course, would not be Adams’s last words on the subject. But her sense that women without men were incomplete never fully abated.

  Adams’s criticism about what she considered hypocritical and privileged attitudes at St. Catherine’s certainly drew some of its venom from her mother, who had her own complex relationship with Virginia society and history. Thus Alice failed to acknowledge what she’d gained there. But Bryant Mangum, a professor of literature at Virginia Commonwealth University who met Alice several times in the 1980s and had known St. Catherine’s women over many decades, saw “something distinctly ‘St. Catherine’s’ in Alice’s demeanor. She had a Daisy Buchanan–ish charm accompanied by a depth and intelligence and sensitivity that don’t typically accompany Daisy’s charm. Poise is the word that I associate with the St. Catherine’s influence, and Alice had that.”VI

  Radcliffe admitted Alice. Buoyed by the Henry Clay Jackson scholarship of $300, her parents took out a loan against their house to pay for the rest. One evening Alice, Agatha, and Nic sat together by their pool in Chapel Hill and talked about her plans for college—later one of only two happy moments she could remember spending with the two of them.14 Soon she moved to Cambridge to take her place in the accelerated wartime program. The decision transformed her. She would always feel in herself an opposition of the warm South and the colder North, of her demanding body and her strong mind, of love and work. Along with the emotional curiosity that would feed her fiction, the South had given Adams many advantages. But that South, for her so flawed by its hypocrisies about race and class and by the failures of love in her family, was now behind her.

  This superior girl was on the road to womanhood, smart and beautiful, a wide and dangerous world all before her.

  I. Women’s magazines that paid well for fiction in the mid–twentieth century are rarely preserved by libraries. Researchers often turn to eBay to seek the critical stories of women’s told in Redbook, McCall’s, Good Houseke
eping, and the other so-called “ladies.”

  II. Jean Salter married Jurgen Roetter in 1946. On a book tour in 1984, Adams noted in her journal, she tried to locate the Roetters in Madison but by then Jean and Jurgen had long been settled in Massachusetts. It seems unlikely that Adams had a source outside of her own imagination for the encounter with “Egon Heller” that occurs in “Fall: 1940.” And yet, while Jean told me in 2013 that she hadn’t seen Alice since the summer of 1942, an address book from the latter decades in Adams’s life lists Jean Salter Roetter with an Amherst, Massachusetts, address and phone number.

  III. “Never trust the teller, trust the tale,” D. H. Lawrence warned. “The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it.” By trying to reconstruct Alice Adams’s sexual history from a combination of letters and stories, I wish to emphasize that her fiction offers imaginative truths that no amount of factual accuracy would improve upon. I believe Hank existed but cannot be sure whether she met him in Chapel Hill in 1940, later in Madison, or later again in Chapel Hill.

  IV. In Entering Ephesus, Daphne Athas tells about requesting a book about sexuality by Krafft-Ebing from a locked vault of the University of North Carolina library.