Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  By the time they re-met in Paris all the Americans were swearing equally, according to Kenneth Lynn: “The sexuality and the frank talk was sort of the style of all of us, men and women alike, as opposed to the way we talked in Cambridge.”13

  Even though almost every American in Paris that year, including Bea Mailer and Mark Linenthal, wanted to be a writer, Norman took note of Alice’s determination and talent. In December he sent two of her stories to his editor, William Raney at Rinehart, writing that he thought “The Hills” (a story about a Jewish family in Chapel Hill who are pressured by their white Southern friends to hire a black maid, then criticized for treating her too well) was just about a perfect short story. Raney agreed and asked his “magazine expert” to send it to the New Yorker. “But please, please—tell sweet Alice that these things take time.” All too soon the New Yorker rejected both of Adams’s stories, adding that the author had submitted “The Hills” to them twice before. Mailer apologized, awaiting Alice’s “horror” when she learns how he “screwed up.” Raney persevered with submissions to Harper’s and the Atlantic.14

  The Mailers struck both Alice and Mark as being happy together in those months before Norman became famous. “I thought that marriage was made in heaven,” Mark told Peter Manso, while Alice said they seemed “tremendously, enormously fond of each other,” but also issued a caution: “I was already beginning not to be happy, so I may very well—this would be typical—I may quite easily have overestimated their happiness.”15 Phyllis Silverman Ott also believed Norman was happy with her sister until the fame of The Naked and the Dead upended him. Despite appearances, Norman was restless in his three-year-old marriage. In a letter written aboard ship en route to Europe, he speculated that no couple could live together very long without boring each other, adding that he no longer found Bea exciting in bed.16

  Alice felt similarly about her marriage. In the Left Bank’s Bar Montana she met unmarried couples who lived together and she later speculated (without giving her reasons) that this seemed to her “an interesting and possibly ideal state.” Given that both Alice Adams and Norman Mailer later wrote openly about sexual freedom, rumors have suggested that Alice and Norman might have had an affair in Paris. If so, they left no evidence. According to her, except for the mornings when Mark went to the Sorbonne and she wrote, she and Mark were “almost always together… as though separate activities might lead to trouble, which was very likely true—in my case it was. Mark was young too, but he seemed to like being married.”17

  There are reasons to think the two writers consummated their friendship in bed. Alice’s friend Blair Fuller claimed certain knowledge that Alice had an affair with Mailer: “I think she was unfaithful to Linenthal with Norman Mailer in Paris in that winter. I feel sure because of things that she said, I can’t quote any but she would do it with an expression, sort of winkingly.” Likewise, Doubleday editor Gerald Howard noted that “a certain tone came into Alice’s voice” when she mentioned Mailer and others who had been her lovers. And San Francisco novelist Ella Leffland, in whom Alice later confided freely, said Alice several times mentioned Mailer as one of her lovers, “but the only thing I remember specifically is that she said he was not very well equipped.” His name, however, is not on the list of lovers Alice kept at the back of her notebook in the 1990s.18 Alice and Mailer remained friends until the 1970s, and he held an important place in Adams’s literary imagination. She sent him a fan note for every book he published before 1973 and portrayed him in Superior Women. Megan Greene (her double) and Adam Marr (her Irish Mailer) are friends who love to argue with each other. Megan becomes the reluctant confidante to whom Marr confesses that he’s been sleeping with a French girl named Odette, but history remains mum about any connection between that character and women the Mailers and Linenthals knew in France.

  * * *

  As winter closed in, weak and intermittent electrical service darkened Paris and made New Yorker Mailer long for “the ballsy kind of noise and size and excitement of America.” Arthur Miller, who also came to Paris in 1947, found a city “finished” by the war: “The sun never seemed to rise over Paris, the winter sky like a lid of iron graying the skin of one’s hands and making faces wan. A doomed and listless silence, few cars on the streets, occasional trucks running on wood-burning engines, old women on ancient bicycles.”19

  For Alice the meals were a compensation. Madame Boissaye cooked for them or they ate in “marvelous cheap local student restaurants” like Chez Benoît (“excellent food, with a carafe of red wine, for about a dollar for the two of us”) or Le Bouillon, where Nicolette in “The Impersonators” eats an omelette, bread, salad, cheese, and “un quart de rouge” for about fifty cents. Adams’s description of that restaurant is one of many passages that show her delight in Paris:

  The restaurant was a low narrow room, with a combination cashier’s desk and bar on one side of the door and the great wood stove on the other. The owner, Maria, stood at the stove.… Her red-brown hair was pushed back from her forehead, black eyes bright in her perspiring face. Her body, one arm settled against her hip was massive, seeming an expression of all potential energy, all violence unexplored. With one huge sweep of her arm she could extinguish the flames that sucked at the rim of the stove.

  “My little girl,” in a deep and gentle voice. “Where have you been, Nickie? You’re getting much too thin. You should eat here, with me.” Above her head the row of over-sized copper pots gleamed in the flame light, and she turned back to the crackling meat in the pan.

  In Paris, Alice and Mark encountered Enrique Cruz-Salido, one of the Spanish exiles they’d met at Salzburg. Cruz-Salido, who spent his childhood safely in Mexico during the civil war and came to Paris for his education, was a dedicated Spanish Republican who worked to smuggle propaganda into and political prisoners out of Spain. Alice found him “small, dark, incredibly intense.” Through him they met Paco Benet-Goitia, whose passport allowed him to cross the officially closed border between France and Spain. These Spanish Republicans (in opposition to Franco’s fascist government) drew their American friends into efforts to assist Spanish political prisoners and antifascist organizers. Americans with cars were particularly useful to their project.

  In January 1948, the Linenthals and Kenneth Lynn purchased an American car—a Nash—from George Ritter, another person they’d met in Salzburg. Ritter assured them they’d make a big profit selling the car in Spain. “We were extremely broke and we got really greedy,” Alice recalled. They were also “wildly sympathetic” with the plight of the Spaniards and determined to see the inside of a fascist country even though many liberals then boycotted Spain.

  The threesome drove south carrying names and addresses of resistance contacts and a cache of extra pesetas hidden in shaving-cream tubes to deliver to them. They handed over their contraband but were unable to sell the car. “George Ritter was a crook. He was well informed that selling the car was absolutely out of the question,” Adams fumed later. “We were stuck with this fucking sky blue Nash.”20

  As their money ran out, the three Americans raced back to the French border with a sense of having escaped from jail. Hidden in their car seat was a manila envelope filled with forbidden poems and reports from resistance organizers that Cruz-Salido, Benet-Goitia, and their Parisian supporters planned to publish, including the poems of Pueblo cautivo by Eugenio de Nora with its preface by Pablo Neruda (“Treacherous generals: / see my dead house, / look at broken Spain: from every house burning metal flows / instead of flowers”).21 Norman Mailer recalled that when the Linenthals returned from Spain they were “indignant about the economic conditions, they fulminated at the atmosphere of police oppression, and they spoke with enthusiasm of the Spanish people.”22

  Skeptical about an impression their friends had formed so quickly, the Mailers made their own trip to Spain a few months later with the intention of helping some imprisoned resistance fighters escape to France. That failed. But Norman Mailer concurred with the
Linenthals that there was “not another nation in the world where oppression [was] so palpable as in Spain.” He observed that the barren terrain and the open layout of the cities made it easy for the police to conduct surveillance and impossible for the resistance to act covertly. Nonetheless, Mailer wrote hopefully, “Every day spawns new revolutionaries, and there are youths in the Spanish underground who were children when Madrid was under siege.”23 Franco remained in power until his death in 1975.

  * * *

  Another trip took Alice and Mark and Kenneth Lynn to a village on the Côte d’Azur called Cagnes-sur-Mer. In this “really mad place,” as Alice called it, they stayed in a house in upper Cagnes near a château where Auguste Renoir had spent his last years. Their hostess was artist Mary de Anders Diederich, the first wife of a sculptor named Hunt Diederich. Diederich had installed Mary (Marushka) and their two children in Cagnes when he divorced her in 1922, married Countess Wanda van Goetzen, and purchased a castle near Nuremberg. Though Diederich spent World War II in New York, he remained pro-German. In 1946 the National Institute of Arts and Letters expelled him for using its letterhead to mail out anti-Semitic propaganda.24

  Alice and Mark came upon some of these “terrifying tracts” in Cagnes. Also in Cagnes, Alice “became somehow involved with a leather fetishist who predicted that [her] marriage wouldn’t last,” as she wrote much later to a rediscovered Harvard friend, adding, “Well, that can’t have taken terrific insight.”25 Cagnes-sur-Mer captivated Alice Adams as a writer and became the setting for part of “The Impersonators.” Hunt Diederich became the model for Carl Weller, the father of her protagonist, Nicolette—called Nic—who brings her friends to this bohemian enclave in the hilltop town for an encounter with their own identities. Two American men accompany Nic to Cagnes when she asks her father for money. They are Ralph Levin, a Jewish ex-GI from Boston who is postponing his return home by studying in Paris, and Henry Potter, an International Herald Tribune reporter. Ralph Levin and Nic Weller resemble Mark and Alice. Through their courtship, Adams seems to be analyzing her relationship with her husband, being hard on both him and herself. For instance, Ralph “was beginning to be annoyed by the way she managed to keep him on the defensive. She had, it seemed, a series of poses to which he was supposed to suitably respond: the lost child; the brave gay bohemian; now the somewhat nervous cynic.”

  Ralph has the very limitations that Alice was beginning to find in Mark. Realizing that most of his friends are leaving Paris, Ralph thinks, “he could get a lot of work done during the winter, and then—and then he stopped, his imagination never able to go further, to go beyond the immediate, the arranged.” Nic Weller’s imagination, on the other hand, “always fled from the immediate, the possible, and her dreams included nothing of the present in their golden aura.” Differing styles of imagination can seem like an unbridgeable chasm to a young woman who is just realizing the degree to which marriage has elevated her husband’s ambitions in relation to her own.

  The way sexual attraction between Nic and Ralph emerges—and falters—may offer another clue to the workings of the Linenthal’s new marriage. Nic believes that with Ralph, she “would be completely protected and safe and loved.” She wants to marry Ralph and “live always with him somewhere away from everyone that she had ever known.” He answers that he must return to Paris. She cries, thinking he does not love her. He wipes her face and tries to kiss her, but she objects that he only kisses her when she cries: “You think I’m four years old and that if you kiss me it will be all right.”

  It is impossible to say that Mark did not love Alice in 1947. But chances are good that he did not love her in the way she wanted. Age difference, cultural difference, gender difference—as well as Alice’s sense of unrequited love for her father and her longing to be swept off her feet—played their roles. As she writes of Nicolette Weller, “she could only conceive of her affair… having for its locale a place of impossible and unknown romance.” For Alice, the man she’d already married would not seem right. And for him? He’d gone against his mother’s wishes to bring a sexy, smart, Southern shiksa into his domestic life. He simply had not considered that she would be a complicated human being with problems of her own.

  * * *

  In “The Impersonators” the concerns of these privileged Americans contrast with stories about people in Cagnes-sur-Mer who are recovering from the calamities of the war. In Paris, Nicolette (like Alice) had been surrounded by Americans like herself, and her acquaintance with real French life was limited by the scrim of language and street life. In the bars and cafés and homes of upper Cagnes she found an intimate microcosm of recent European history. Here were Jojo, who had a pizzeria on the Piazza di Spagna in Rome before he was run out by fascists;IV an elderly Polish-born lady known as la Contesse who tells Ralph with marvelous aplomb that she “spent the season in Auschwitz”; and an old soldier who pretends to be la Contesse’s suitor as he looks after her in her decline. He calls himself the Duke of Gamberini and speaks of going to fight in Palestine. For them, Cagnes was a place where “the past was left to take care of itself. There were to be no questions as to what one had been or done before.”

  Ralph Levin notes “the process of expatriation” in Nicolette Weller. He sees her become less innocent, more wary, less romantic. For Adams, this year of partial expatriation meant giving up the notion that Europe’s problems could be solved by an Allied victory. American innocence was appalled by revelations about death camps, the risk of nuclear warfare, and the intentions of the Soviet Union toward central and eastern Europe. Even Norman Mailer, who was then intensely interested in politics, struck Kenneth Lynn as naïve—“not self-deluding, but ignorant.” When Lynn stated that millions of Soviet citizens had died in a forced collectivization in the Ukraine, Mailer asked how he knew that: “He had never heard this idea before, he was staggered by it. I had known about it half my life.”26

  The so-called Prague Coup on February 20, 1948, made Soviet intentions clear. On that date Communists forcibly replaced the multiparty government of Czechoslovakia, reprising Hitler’s takeover in 1939. Less than a month later, Jan Masaryk, the non-Communist foreign minister who wished Czechoslovakia to participate in the Marshall Plan, was found dead on the stone courtyard below his bathroom window. The Communists claimed he was a suicide. Later investigations concluded he was murdered by defenestration. The loss of hope for democracy and civilized discourse in central Europe was deeply disappointing to the Salzburg conference idealists, especially Matthiessen, who had taught in Prague after he left Salzburg. Thus intellectuals and artists of the 1940s generation were disabused of their American idealism.

  “Here her life would find its form,” Nicolette thinks at the beginning of “The Impersonators.” This making of self is as much personal as political despite the intensely political environment that Europe offered Alice in 1948. Of Isabel Archer, heroine of Henry James’s The Portrait of a Lady, a book Adams knew well, Michael Gorra writes: “What she now learns is simply what the Old World has always had to teach us. She learns that her own life has been determined by things that happened before she was thought of, by a past of which she was ignorant and that she only understands when it’s already too late… [that] America itself has had no separate or special creation.” The theme of lost American innocence was familiar to Matthiessen’s students from their reading of American literature, but the late 1940s made it as current as the news.27

  Perhaps her own loss of innocence drove Adams to give “The Impersonators” an unsatisfying, nonromantic ending. She considered having Nic and Ralph meet up again in America, but in the end she separated them.28 After Nic’s father dies in a car accident, she casts Ralph aside for a cynical marriage to Potter. Though Alice would stay married to Mark Linenthal for another decade, author Adams had already divorced herself from him. But she was far from giving up her belief in romance. That would take new forms for the rest of her life.

  * * *

  In late January 1948
, devaluation of the franc nearly doubled the official value of American dollars, giving them 215 per dollar. Alice and Mark rented “a large, oddly trapezoidal room” in a hotel called Le Welcome that still operates on rue de Seine in the Sixth Arrondissement. Barbara Probst, a young woman from New York who took the room after they left, complained that it had bedbugs. From their upper floor, Alice could hear and see the street market where “fat silver bellies in the fish stall were arranged in opulent piles, while the vegetable stall next door was still a jumble of crates and sprawling heads of lettuce.” Living in a hotel in Paris that year, bedbugs included, was considered bohemian, while having an apartment as the Mailers did was bourgeois. Alice and Mark were unable to cook or set up housekeeping on their own terms in any of the places they lived in Paris, so the year as a whole had a transitional, free-floating feeling about it.

  During that winter Mailer negotiated with his editor, William Raney, over editorial changes, cover art, and other details regarding The Naked and the Dead. The word “fuck” became “fug,” later prompting Dorothy Parker to address Mailer as “the young man who can’t spell fuck.” Nobody knew, during that long winter in Paris, that the novel would be a bestseller. “Norman’s energy and charm and humor was wonderful,” Mark Linenthal said. The combativeness and machismo for which Mailer was known later were then “always colored with a real sweetness.” Not only that, but there was something fortifying about Mailer’s audacity. People felt they were smarter when they were around him. He “ennobled” people and “that was very appealing, especially if you were the one being ennobled,” Adams reflected.29