Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  * * *

  By spring The Naked and the Dead and its author were on the verge of celebrity. Alice and Mark read the book in galleys and thought it was “a great book.” Mark, who was reading Stendhal at the time, told Mailer his book was better than The Red and the Black, a remark that Mark thought Norman “hugged to himself.” In advance of the publication, Norman’s parents arrived in Paris, along with his sister, Barbara, and Barbara Probst, whom they’d met on the ship. At Radcliffe Alice and Barbara Mailer had run in different crowds but in Paris they formed a lasting friendship. In fact, Alice explained to Barbara now, she hadn’t really liked her apparent best friend, Rosalyn Landon, whom she considered anti-Semitic, and sometimes she wished to be Jewish herself. When the Mailer clan gathered, Alice was the only gentile in the room. “People would say things in Yiddish, and Mrs. Mailer would translate for me,” she recalled fondly.30

  Soon Norman and Bea Mailer purchased a Peugeot for $1,095 and began skipping their Sorbonne classes in favor of travel. For a weekend trip to Normandy, Alice and Mark squeezed into the backseat of the Peugeot with Barbara. Mont Saint-Michel floated beautifully above the fog as they approached it on a causeway connecting the mainland to the ancient fortified abbey on a tidal island. “Hardly anybody was going there then,” Barbara Mailer Wasserman recalled. “Restaurants lined the streets and we were accosted by people who wanted us to come in and eat.”31 On a beach they enacted scenes from The Naked and the Dead, each playing a character. They didn’t ask Mailer if any of the things in the book had happened to him. “It’s a question I would never have asked,” Adams insisted vehemently when Mailer biographer Peter Manso interviewed her. “No! Still wouldn’t. As a writer, I think it’s none of one’s business. I mean, I hate it when people ask me how much of what… you know.”

  With the excitement of his incipient publication, Mailer tried to compare his own cohort to the writers of the 1920s: “If my generation is a lost generation it is lost in harder basically more cynical terms which it will take my generation of writers to define. I don’t know if any good books will come out of this period, but… there seem to be more young people wanting to write now than I can ever remember in my short career.”32 The aspiring American writers who’d come to Paris, unlike the 1920s generation, “felt the army owed them a year in Paris,” Mailer wrote in the Paris Review’s jubilee issue. The French were proud of their culture and resisted the sizable new American presence. “One of the reasons we Americans hung together and didn’t like the French is that they didn’t like us,” Mailer said.

  The Linenthals were sympathetic to French socialists and to the campaign of Henry Wallace, the progressive candidate for US president. In Paris Stanley and Eileen Geist introduced the Linenthals and Mailers to the noncommunist leftist writer Jean Malaquais, a Polish-born Jew who wrote in French but had become an American citizen during the war. As a boy in the Warsaw ghetto Malaquais became “forever suspicious of all authority” when he saw Russian mounted police beheading people with their sabers. His novel Les Javanais portrayed stateless, homeless lead and silver miners in Provence whose expressive multilingual speech was the basis of Malaquais’s literary style. At twenty-nine, Malaquais was a celebrated, prizewinning author. Mailer was enchanted by Malaquais, who influenced his political thinking and became the translator of The Naked and the Dead into French.

  Before they left Paris, the Mailers treated the Linenthals to a celebratory dinner at La Tour d’Argent. “That was a gas,” Mark recalled. “It’s way up high and had a great view.” The menus listed no prices. Mark ordered a mushroom dish that prompted the waiter to write “on a piece of paper how much it was to warn me off of it… it was astronomical, so I didn’t order it.” After trips to Spain and Italy, Norman and Bea Mailer returned to New York. The Naked and the Dead was a bestseller. Barbara Mailer and Barbara Probst stayed longer in Europe, using the Peugeot to drive two escaping Spanish prisoners to the French border.33

  * * *

  Zelda Fitzgerald, icon of the flapper era and modern Southern femininity, died in a fire in a mental asylum in North Carolina in March 1948. In Paris, Mark Linenthal received his certificate from the Sorbonne and wondered what to do next. The ghetto of impoverished intellectuals and American soldiers in St.-Germain-des-Prés was rapidly disappearing. Three thousand Americans arrived to administer the Marshall Plan, bringing with them what seemed ostentatious riches in the form of leather shoes and large cars and cash to rent the city’s best apartments. American writers from James Baldwin and Richard Wright to Saul Bellow and George Plimpton, Blair Fuller, and Max Steele came too, beginning an echo-renaissance of the 1920s that led to the founding of the Paris Review. The return of tourists brought “pre-war floodlighting on monuments for a summer Grande Nuit de Paris” while St.-Germain-des-Prés became “a campus for the American collegiate set,” Janet Flanner reported in the New Yorker. “The Café de Flore serves as a drugstore for pretty upstate girls in unbecoming blue denim pants and their Middle Western dates, most of whom are growing hasty Beaux-Arts beards. Members of the tourist intelligentsia patronize the Rue de Bac’s Pont-Royal Bar, which used to be full of French Existentialists and is now full only of themselves, often arguing about Existentialism.”34

  One of the new arrivals in Paris was Kenneth Lynn’s fiancée, a recent Wellesley graduate from Pittsburgh named Valerie Roemer. That couple soon returned to Harvard, where he embarked on a notable career as a scholar of American literature. Mark Linenthal applied to the program for writers at Stanford University, now directed by the novelist Wallace Stegner, whom Mark had met earlier at Harvard. The prose sample he submitted did not win him one of six places in the 1948 class, but Stegner’s letter of regret included a personal invitation to apply to Stanford’s literature program. “Palo Alto is almost as nice as Paris,” Stegner promised. “It turned out that Stegner had never been to Paris at that time,” Adams wryly commented later. “And so, ill-advisedly, that is what we did.”35

  This move did not seem ill-advised at the time. They were returning home to begin their married adult lives. Mark would continue to receive GI Bill benefits at Stanford. From there he could launch his career as a teacher. Before leaving France, the Linenthals bought etchings from the small Galerie Michel near Quai des Grands Augustins: a Rouault female nude, two heads of Charles Baudelaire by Edouard Manet, and a music sheet cover of “Zamboula-Polka” with a lithograph by Toulouse-Lautrec—all still treasured by their son. And they bought records by Claude Luter, whom they’d heard playing jazz in the caves of St.-Germain. Those records “sounded terrible” when they played them later. But, looking back, Alice missed Paris: “I could have stayed on in that misshapen Welcome room, alone or with some nice man I’d met at the Mephisto, or the Tabou. Spending my mornings on a better novel, and my afternoons exploring the city.”36

  * * *

  Were it not for “The Impersonators” and “Winter Rain” and Superior Women, the year Alice Adams was twenty-one in Paris would be opaque to us. These fictions convey a longing and eagerness for sensory experience and love that defined their author more than her marriage did. They reveal Adams as a young writer with acute observational skills, an accomplished and ambitious prose style, and a deep sense of her inadequacy for the experience she was having. Becoming a wife was a startling change for an only child like Alice. No longer the inventor of the stories of her dolls, she had become an adjunct to her husband, a doll in the dollhouse of Paris and Mark and his friends. If she was unhappy with this, she turned to writing rather than depression. Working quietly at her novel while Mark went to the Sorbonne and Mailer fulfilled his ambition to write the first notable novel about World War II, Alice scrutinized herself through the character of Nic (for Nicolette) in “The Impersonators.”

  Nic, strangely enough, was Alice’s father’s nickname; in choosing that name, Adams takes on the question of her identity and gender. Is she a difficult, romantic person like her father or a difficult, intellectual person like her mother?
Naturally, Nic Weller’s parents are divorced—the mother struggles as an artist in Greenwich Village, the father as a painter and alcoholic in Cagnes-sur-Mer. The father brings nineteen-year-old Nic to Paris, finds her a room on the rue de Seine, and sets her loose among the ex-soldiers and starving French artists of St.-Germain-des-Prés. It’s his idea of what’s best for her, but in almost every way he fails to offer her the support she needs. Nic is surrounded by men who do not understand her, mainly gay French artists and Americans still recovering from the war.

  The fictions Adams wrote about the forties in Paris are war stories, just as Adams’s marriage was a war marriage. “Women come to writing, I believe, simultaneously with self-creation,” feminist critic Carolyn Heilbrun writes.37 The legacy that Alice Adams the writer took home from Paris is folded into her later work and life. Writing of some American women who came to Paris after World War II, Yale professor Alice Kaplan notes, “They may have looked demure and regimented, but the experience was life altering to them. Their oeuvre consists of their diaries, their letters home, their snapshots… their stories have not had a place in the great American tradition of expatriate literature.”38

  The Linenthals sailed home on the SS America, a vessel that had carried 350,000 troops during naval service throughout the war. Alice was still twenty-one, still unpublished, but far more experienced when she “took the huge and final boat for New York” (as she puts it in “Winter Rain”) than the girl who had sailed east the year before.

  I. Colette had lived at 93 and 177 bis rue de Courcelles from 1901 until she left her first husband (Willy) in 1909; Proust was at 45 rue de Courcelles from 1900 until 1906.

  II. Monsieur Frenaye had been a cotton merchant, and “the only Americans he met were Jewish or from Texas. The Texans, according to Madame, were appalling: they ordered the most expensive champagne or cognac and then got drunk on it. The Jewish families whom she met were quite another story. ‘Tellement cultivées, tellement sensibles.’ ”

  III. Ironically, while Sartre’s philosophical writing seemed more influential at the time (de Beauvoir called herself a midwife to Sartre’s existentialism), her critique of patriarchy has shaped the lives and thinking of millions of women and men.

  IV. Mark Linenthal relished a quip about Jojo in years to come. Asked if it was true that he did not speak English, Jojo would reply, “Yes, boss.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  Frustrated Ambitions

  — 1948–1950 —

  I don’t think anyone who knew her had any idea what [my mother] was like, least of all my father.

  —Alice Adams to Beatrice and Norman Mailer, April 1, 1950

  Alice had lived away from home since she went to boarding school in Virginia at age fifteen. She saw her parents rarely, mostly on summer visits to Maine. They’d supported her financially and encouraged her education but kept, or were kept, at a distance emotionally. Thus she had a false sense of independence that can develop without strong roots of self-knowledge, and her adolescent rebellion against her mother extended into her twenties. As Alice became a sexually active postwar woman, her mother seemed to her like a Victorian relic. The daughter reacted to her mother’s moral valor and intellectual earnestness with guilt: “She arrives like Judgment Day only it’s worse because she’s so quiet, it’s worse to be judged so genteelly,” Adams wrote of the mother figure who appears in one of her early stories.1

  Now in her midfifties, Agatha Adams wore tailored clothing and sensible shoes, and pinned her white hair up in a knot. Her stride was brisk and she held her small, plump body erect with a forward thrust of her chin. If she was matronly—that hated term so often used to dismiss women of a certain age—she was also substantial, prolific, respected by some, and feared by others. She was a leader in a mission to “change southern America through libraries.” Within the all-white, male-dominated University of North Carolina, the Library School had the only female dean and promoted feminist and progressive ideas. Yet Alice seems to have been blind to her mother’s accomplishments. She sometimes referred to her as “a failed writer.” An explanation for this discrepancy is suggested by English critic Lorna Sage’s theory that ambitious women (in the last century) define themselves in opposition to their mothers: “Mother is the key. The women who really nailed patriarchy weren’t on the whole the ones with authoritarian fathers but the ones with troubled, contradictory mothers: you aim your feminism less at men than at the picture of woman you don’t want to be, the enemy within.”2 The mother Alice feared becoming was the one she knew in her childhood. She’d heard her crying behind closed doors and felt her stifled anger at the dinner table; she’d seen her working on her husband’s books or doing homework for undergraduate classes when she was in her forties. She’d seen her mother pretend not to notice Nic Adams’s flirtations with other women.

  * * *

  Alice was young and smart and beautiful, but marriage to Mark Linenthal, for better or worse, and writing were all she saw in her future. Returned from Europe in the summer of 1948, the two of them waited for Mark’s acceptance to Stanford, staying first in a sublet in Cambridge and then spending August at the Adams cabin at Lake Sebago. Alice’s relationship with the elder Linenthals was “better than before but wearing.” Mark’s father was kind but his mother, Anna, seemed so “abysmally stupid” that Alice said, “One tends to resort to her own banalities so that she will understand.”3 At Sebago she and Mark swam, played badminton, and enjoyed warm weather and plentiful food. Celebrating her twenty-second birthday in the place she’d spent childhood summers, Alice sounds content. Her uncle Beverley Boyd, an Episcopal priest, visited and won her approval by being a “real fighting liberal and very nice.” The Mailers visited Lake Sebago too, just as fame was overtaking their lives. The Naked and the Dead had sold two hundred thousand copies in the three months since its publication and would remain on the New York Times bestseller list for another year.

  Also making a visit to Sebago were Kenneth Lynn and Valerie Roemer, for whom Nic Adams baked a fabulous Sally Lunn cake. They thought Alice was fond and proud of her father even as she disdained what she considered his pretensions. “He insisted on speaking Spanish with a Castilian accent even when pronouncing names of places in California!” Roemer remembered. Nic Adams had even more opportunities to speak of San Franthisco and other California places when Mark learned that he’d been admitted to the graduate program in English at Stanford University. Alice wrote Ken Lynn that she was “extremely happy” about their next move. “We are going west to make our fortunes.”4

  * * *

  In the long-nosed, ten-year-old black Buick they bought, they stopped in New York and Chapel Hill before crossing the continent to Palo Alto. They moved into a “small, cheap house, without a phone or a mailbox or an address,” seven miles west of campus on Page Mill Road, not far from the hilltop where the Stegners were building a house in a remote area of the Los Altos Hills. Alice thought the California hills were the most beautiful this side of Fiesole: “There are sweeps of fields with lovely single trees and wonderful woods and ravines; I continue to be moved every time we drive up or down.” The apartment was really just a room, with the kitchen at one end and the bed in the middle, but they were making it “arty” with burlap curtains and a Lautrec poster mounted on plywood.5

  The writing fellows at Stanford were “not the gilded group we imagined in Paris,” Alice decided after meeting them at the Stegners’. This crowd was more like “Gibbesville, Pa.,” than Cambridge, she bitingly observed, referring to (and misspelling!) the town in John O’Hara’s stories. They were too “Americana”—the category in which she placed Wallace Stegner himself—by which she meant tall, large men from the West and Midwest who dressed in white T-shirts and jeans. Their overriding message, Adams thought, was “We’re writers, but we’re not queer, God knows we’re not.”

  But the new writer friend Alice fell in love with on first meeting did not fit that mold. He was William Miller Abrahams, “a small
, very lively, bright-blue-eyed man instantly amusing and amused.” She and Mark both felt “an immediate rapport” with him. Abrahams—Billy to his friends—was a middle-class Jew from Newton Centre, Massachusetts, who had roomed with poet Howard Nemerov at Harvard and published two novels, Interval in Carolina and By the Beautiful Sea, rendered from his stateside army experiences. “Billy had a wonderful voice, deep and resonant, and his laugh was marvelously responsive,” Adams wrote in a memoir. “He was extremely funny and made you feel that you were too.” He laughed when Alice pointed out that Henry James’s books were at the unreachable top of the Stegners’ two-story bookcase. Alice later remembered a “somewhat drunken argument with Wally about who was the better writer, Jack London or Henry James.”

  Their snideness was unfair to Stegner, who taught James’s novels and probably defended London as part of his program to bring more attention to Western writers. And it was ironic since Alice Adams, Mark Linenthal, and Abrahams would each become part of the story of Western American literature. But for that moment, in the bright, exposing sunlight and open spaces of California, the three felt safer talking together about their Cambridge professors and friends. Billy’s accent was “purest Harvard” and “Harvard was the standard by which [Alice and Mark] judged California and Californians.”

  With Billy Abrahams, Adams felt herself “to be a charming and gifted woman, not a nutty girl in her early twenties who wanted to write but needed a job, any job. Who secretly did not much like her husband.” Another writing fellow, Russian-born novelist Boris Ilyin, walked past the laughing trio of Alice, Mark, and Billy several times before he inquired, “Just what do you three people have in common?” They laughed more, considering outrageous answers to Ilyin’s question.6 “The stereotype of the woman being mildly stupid in order to get ahead in the world never touched Alice,” Abrahams said when he looked back at those first meetings. “And that didn’t always make her especially loved—except by those of us who so dearly loved her. I’m tempted to say Alice was a kind of feminist before her time.”7