* * *
The wedding at the Adams home in Chapel Hill looks like a happy occasion in the black-and-white snapshots that Mark saved. Alice chose sophistication over bridal white. Her gold lamé dress clings to her large, conical breasts, wasp waist, and slim hips. Her dark lipstick matches her fingernails and her dark hair is pulled back from her face and topped with a small, black-feathered hat. Alice’s dress was “tight across the ass,” Mark recalled late in his life. “It jiggled because she was nervous. I liked it. Agatha and my mother disapproved—not the kind of dress to wear for a wedding, they said. Alice was daring, provocative and a little scary.” Mark looks equally sophisticated in a three-piece suit. If they were not a couple in love and lust, they were doing a brilliant imitation of one. Though the gaze they exchange over champagne glasses also carries a note of complicity—somehow, against all the odds, they have reached this moment. Maybe they think they are fooling the adults, forgetting that now they must be adults too.
These wedding pictures offer other insights. Agatha’s white hair is elegantly coiffed and she looks older than Nic, but in photos of them together they smile and gaze with some shared emotion—parental pride, perhaps old affection. Dangerous as it is to read a whole marriage into a few snapshots, one wants to say that Alice’s parents were not always as unhappy as Alice chose to believe, or that, at least, Southern gentility had its merits. As for the senior Linenthals, if Anna objected to this marriage she surely didn’t boycott it. Her dark wool dress, stout figure, and tiny wire-rimmed glasses project an old-world European aspect. She’s clearly taking in every detail of the day, even pointing a finger toward the wedding cake to show her daughter-in-law where to make the first cut. Other wedding guests seem to be directly from the casts of the many stories Alice Adams would later write about her hometown. Verlie Jones poses serenely between a uniformed maid who could be her daughter and a harried but lovely Ginny Berry, who’s looking for something in the next room.
* * *
Alice and Mark returned to New York, where a professional photographer caught them at a table in the Stork Club in formal dress with cigarettes and martinis and a look of stunned youth on their faces. Then they settled into a small apartment at 60 Brattle Street in Cambridge, where Mark continued his studies at Harvard. He took Matthiessen’s graduate seminar in lyric poetry along with courses in American and Irish literature. What Alice did for the next six months is unclear. She may have worked in a bookshop. Her St. Catherine’s friend Barbara Bates visited their “very modern” one-bedroom Cambridge apartment: “I met Mark. He was very intelligent, very personable, very attractive. He was obviously very much in love with Alice. I think she was in love with him too. They were cute together.” Adams gives a darker view of that half-year in Cambridge in Families and Survivors: Louisa and Michael Wasserman live in a dim, dirty, messy attic room on Brattle Street where books and papers are “piled in small stacks, like the droppings of an animal.” Louisa suffers from colitis, and Michael makes “laboriously unfunny” remarks to cover his panic and eagerness to please.
* * *
Mark passed his written exam for his master’s in English in May 1947 and received his degree at Harvard’s June commencement ceremony, along with more than two thousand other men (three times the number of graduates during war years) and luminaries such as T. S. Eliot, Robert Oppenheimer, and Secretary of State George C. Marshall, who accepted honorary doctorates. Also on that June day, Secretary Marshall announced his proposal for massive American economic assistance to combat “hunger, poverty, desperation and chaos” in Europe, where the population had just endured the coldest winter of the century without adequate fuel or food. The Marshall Plan, as it became known, intended to prevent the economic collapse and communist takeover of western Europe but it had to appear to be managed by the Europeans. Rebuilding a wrecked, stagnant economy in the fractious and rivalrous political environment would be delicate.
Harvard rejected Linenthal’s bid to finish a PhD in literature there. He’d worked hard to fill gaps in his undergraduate training with courses that “could not have been fun,” Levenson said, so this was a setback. Competition from returning veterans on the GI Bill was limiting the privileges usually awarded to Ivy League alumni.
Happily, an immediate opportunity was on the horizon. Three Harvard students had a plan to share American intellectual capital with European students. They wished to “offer the methods and opportunities of an American graduate school to Europe,” where there was “an acute shortage of qualified European teachers in the various fields of American Civilization.” The resulting Salzburg Seminars were the brainchild of Clemens Heller, a doctoral candidate in history at Harvard who was the son of Freud’s publisher in Vienna and a 1938 émigré to the United States. University officials brushed off his proposals, but Heller was resourceful. He persuaded the widow of Austrian theater and film director Max Reinhardt to offer them Schloss Leopoldskron, her rococo castle near Salzburg, which had recently served as a reception facility for Hitler’s Berchtesgaden house. He and two other students raised $25,000, invited prominent professors to teach, and got clearances from the State and War Departments. Linenthal, Kenneth Lynn, Jack Levenson, Carl Kaysen, and other grad students joined the ambitious project as assistants. Both professors and assistants paid their own expenses, which Mark’s parents were happy to do. Alice helped by coordinating orders for English-language books that were not available in Europe.
On June 21, Alice and Mark sailed to France on the Marine Tiger, a refurbished troop ship that charged Mark $127 for a bed in a dormitory with 111 other men; Alice had to pay more but bunked with a mere 30 other female passengers.23 In Paris they instantly fell in love with the food, wine, and culture. Money was not an issue for the Linenthals during the few weeks preceding the seminar. “The dollar was incredibly strong as against the franc—and stronger still, by eight or ten times, if you traded with any of the Arab boys who were so good at spotting young Americans on the street,” remembered Levenson, who arrived shortly after the Linenthals with his wife, Charlotte. “The windfall was so great that, guided by Mark, the most knowledgeable among us in matters of our Paris utopia, the four of us could go one evening to dinner at Maxim’s. He knew to steer us for a first course to their remarkable cold artichoke filled with hollandaise. He also knew that it was lowbrow to ask for house wine, and he knew that Graves was a respectable white wine for us to order.”
By the time Alice and Mark departed on the Augsburg Express for Salzburg in July, they had already canceled their reservation to sail home by troopship in September. After the stint in Salzburg, they would spend a year in Paris with Mark enrolled at the Sorbonne to keep his GI Bill checks coming in.
* * *
In Salzburg the experts from Harvard found themselves in the middle of the hopes, troubles, and chaos of postwar Europe. The seminar students at Schloss Leopoldskron were some one hundred English-speaking students from sixteen European countries, including Czechoslovakia, Hungary, and Greece, as well as two exiles from Republican Spain, Enrique Cruz-Salido and Angel Rizo; seven other displaced persons; and a handful of European professors. Among them were combatants, resistance fighters, concentration camp survivors, and prisoners of war. They paid no tuition. Europeans, after eight years of austerity, were thrilled by the abundance of food and comfort the Americans were able to bring in from Swiss sources, while some Americans complained about the poor quality and variety of food, which was heavy on cucumbers and onions. But that was the least of the differences to be bridged.
Since the Allied victory two years earlier, the political futures of the western and central European countries had been increasingly contested, with communist parties gaining support in the west, and the Soviet Union refusing to give up Poland and the Baltic countries in the east. Many people on both sides of the Atlantic feared that the defeat of fascists had created an opportunity for Stalinists to take over, a theory memorably argued by diplomat George Kennan in Foreign Affairs
in July 1947, the month Alice and Mark arrived in Salzburg. Most of the seminar faculty were liberal Americans, some more inclined toward socialism than others, but all distinctly in favor of democratic government. For many, it was their first opportunity in more than eight years to enjoy discussion with scholars from other countries. The Euro-Americans who joined this well-intentioned project played a “new and unfamiliar role” as conquerors of their parent cultures in Europe. Among them were anthropologist Margaret Mead (who brought her seven-year-old daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson); actor, dancer, and writer Vida Ginsberg; economists Wassily Leontief and Walt Rostow (then briefly at Oxford, before beginning his long career as an architect of anticommunist and Vietnam War policies under Kennedy and Johnson); and literary critics Alfred Kazin and F. O. Matthiessen.
Mark Linenthal, who aspired to be a writer, gave the first lecture of his life (on Hemingway and Fitzgerald) at Schloss Leopoldskron with Mead, Kazin, and Matthiessen in the audience. “I was scared shitless, so nervous I could hardly bring the cup of water to my mouth,” he said. “I became a teacher in that hour. I read and read in this beautiful room, and then I looked up and saw everybody was listening. I had them.”24 Alice participated strictly as a wife—Mrs. Mark Linenthal on the roster. Like Charlotte Levenson, she probably listened to lectures and helped with clerical work and with finding quarters for the constant flow of distinguished visitors. There were musical evenings and dances and trips to the countryside. Being married gave Mark and Alice the benefit of a private bedroom in the castle while most of the seminarians were housed in dormitories. What it did not give Alice was autonomy; she viewed and remembered the proceedings with the slightly jaundiced attitude of a critical outsider.
The seminar was an exclusive island in a land of “Austrians and migrants walking up and down in the August heat, the dust stirred up by the wheels of American military cars blowing in their faces.”25 A short distance on foot from Schloss Leopoldskron was a displaced persons camp housing Jews. “We were walking with Mark when we first came upon it,” Levenson recalled. “Mark turned frighteningly pale.” This camp was the exact artillery casern where Linenthal had been held after he was shot down in 1944. “We were in territory that had scarcely changed from the war years and the Nazi years. With shocking frequency we encountered the Bavarian-Alpine Hitler mustache. For Mark, this was visceral.” Several American Jews from the seminar staff who came to visit the camp were rebuffed by a guard who said, “Sightseers we don’t need.” But Linenthal, Vida Ginsberg, Carl Kaysen, Alfred Kazin, and others were eventually given a tour by the camp’s chief of police. Linenthal found his old room, “now inhabited by a woman and a baby—diapers hanging up—it seemed much smaller.” The Americans brought chocolate and razor blades but could do little to relieve the conditions of these fourteen hundred homeless people. “It was like a Passover seder,” Kazin wrote, “one after another reading from the Haggadah, but the tale was not of the escape from Egypt but of the many varieties of hell the Germans devised for anyone marked in face or body or by name Jew Jew Jew.”26
Most of the people remaining in DP camps wanted to emigrate to Palestine. In 1945 President Truman’s representative Earl G. Harrison had inspected refugee camps and reported, “We appear to be treating the Jews as the Nazis treated them except that we do not exterminate them. They are in concentration camps in large numbers under our military guard instead of S.S. troops. One is led to wonder whether the German people, seeing this, are not supposing that we are following or at least condoning Nazi policy.” General Eisenhower had responded to Harrison’s criticisms, but two hundred thousand people were still encamped near Salzburg two years later. “The point is that they shouldn’t be in any camps at all, but in houses,” Harrison said. “Shifting them from one camp to another can hardly be said to be liberation.”27
For someone coming from postwar America, Salzburg was disconcerting. Kazin’s journal mentions visiting the DP camp in the afternoon and hearing Yehudi Menuhin perform with Hitler’s favorite conductor, Wilhelm Furtwängler, at the Salzburg Festival in the evening. (Afterward, people from the camp stormed Menuhin’s hotel to protest.) “Austria today,” Kazin concluded, “is like a W[ater] C[loset]—‘frei’ yet ‘besetzed’ [occupied].” Ironies and clashes occurred within the seminar too. A German was asked to leave when Danish students recognized him as a man whom Nazis brought to teach at the University of Copenhagen during the occupation. Everyone at the seminar studied everyone else, while Margaret Mead “introduced her students to the methods of cultural anthropology by assigning them to investigate the community of the Seminar itself, just as though it were a South Sea island,” Matthiessen recalled. Adams overheard Mead describe the seminar as “a bizarre but predictable group situation” to one of the organizers, who “scowled as the anthropologist tried to explain.” In Adams’s iteration, “groups acted within their assigned national characters. The Danes were noble, high-minded, the Austrians untrustworthy, the Spaniards dark and mysterious. The Italians were sexually active, the Americans foolishly ignorant and the Germans pigs.”28
* * *
“Related Histories,” a story Adams first published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1978, states the seminar’s ideals in an opening speech by Professor Harold Stein, who seems to be a composite of Matthiessen and Kazin: “They had all come to this place… from widely divergent histories, geographies, in some cases opposing ideologies, but they were all now united in staunch and sober anti-Fascism, were all opposed to the forces of darkness recently defeated.”29
But Adams’s history diverges from Matthiessen’s written memoir, From the Heart of Europe. According to her, it was, “simply and horribly, not true” that there were no fascists at the seminar. A case in point was Adam Wandruszka, an Austrian who had welcomed the Anschluss and fought in the Wehrmacht before he was captured in Africa and imprisoned in several stateside POW camps. He worked in the furnace room of a Negro servicemen’s club, where, Matthiessen reported, he read American history and replaced his Nazi ideology with admiration for Jeffersonian democracy. He discussed his reading with black soldiers, who gave him cigarettes and warned him not to tell his white captors.
In her story, Adams gave this episode an ending that revealed problems in the seminar: “a supposedly ‘reconstructed’ Austrian, who had spent time in a POW camp in Texas and had been horrified at the Southern treatment of Negroes, announced, when asked, that he saw no relationship between that treatment of a ‘race’ and what had gone on in Germany.”
In debunking the official idealism of the seminar, Adams emphasizes the personal interplay of political ideals. At least some of her story is based on what she regarded as a life-changing encounter with the youngest European student there, a twenty-one-year-old Italian law student from Padua named Bruno Trentin. On the last night of the seminar, after Mark went to bed early with a headache, Alice stayed up to talk, dance, and drink watery white wine.
Trentin had the build of a football player and was curious and vigorous, and really interested in politics, Matthiessen wrote. The son of Silvio Trentin, an Italian antifascist leader whose bookstore in Toulouse was an international resistance meeting center, Trentin spent his fifteenth birthday in a Vichy concentration camp and his sixteenth in a similar camp in Italy. Earlier in 1947 he had been in New York inspecting American schools. Now he studied law and worked to organize southern Italian peasants. At the seminar Trentin studied American government, spoke of his admiration for Henry Wallace, and wrote a paper about the possibility of a third party in the United States. Like his father, he was committed to political life.
For the rest, we must refer to Adams’s story of seduction and its long afterglow in “Related Histories.” Linked by their enthusiasm for Stein’s lectures, a young American wife, Diana McBride, and a young Italian she calls Vittorio Garibaldi tell each other about their plans. His “high seriousness” of intention to find work that will serve his country moves her to declare that she too is thinking of going to law
school. In fact, her only plan is to support her husband through graduate school and then have babies. Diana and Vittorio move naturally from the dance floor to the terrace, past the clearing to a “cave” formed by small pine trees where they make love. He tells her she is thin and “suddenly, for Diana who had always felt scrawny, inadequate, ‘thin’ was the most beautiful word in the world.”
They never see each other again, this fictional Diana and Vittorio, whose divergent histories crossed in Salzburg, but she knows that he became “a hero of his times” as a socialist leader and judge. Diana puts her husband through grad school but feels “rebuked” by the loss of her ideals. Eventually she divorces her husband, goes to law school, marries a civil rights activist (a cousin of Stein’s, in fact), and is elected a district judge. “And she, like Vittorio some five or six thousand miles away, acquired a reputation for fairness, for honesty and kindness—a coincidence all around, which neither of them could possibly have known about, and assuredly, no one could account for.”
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