By spring of 1950 Alice was nearly finished with “The Impersonators” and felt that “a lot depend[ed] on what happen[ed]” with that novel. She continued her sessions with Dr. Biernoff, though Mark’s father no longer paid for them. Instead she wrote Norman Mailer with a request to borrow $500. The loan would bring her to the point of being “through or nearly so” with her analysis, which now took place three days a week instead of five—“a saving and somewhat less difficult.” She earned $50 a month with a part-time job in the Guidance Center at Stanford and planned to devote those earnings to repaying Mailer. “Please don’t regard this as a desperate demand, because it isn’t,” she added, “but if you could it would be wonderful.” He sent a check right away.24
* * *
On Friday, March 17, 1950, Alice received news that her mother had died in Chapel Hill. Agatha Erskine Boyd Adams was fifty-seven. Her cause of death is reported as a heart attack. “No one knew she had a bad heart and it was a terrible shock,” Alice wrote to the Mailers.25
Verlie Jones found Agatha’s body in bed when she arrived for work at about ten. Nic Adams was “sick at the time with another depression,” as Alice put it, and staying at Dr. Kemp’s sanitarium in Pinebluff. Two doctors from the UNC medical school came to the house and confirmed that Agatha had been dead several hours.
It was probably Alice’s uncle Beverley who phoned or telegrammed Alice, and it was certainly he who informed the coroner of his sister’s death and made arrangements for the funeral held just two days later in the Episcopal chapel. There was little time for Alice to make travel arrangements and she chose not to do so. “It seemed best for me not to go home,” she explained to the Mailers. That curt “seemed best for me not to go” may have been the result of discussions with her husband and her uncle. She wished, it seems, to avoid seeing her father.III Agatha was buried in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery next to the grave of her infant son and Alice’s brother, Joel Willard.
A contrast between Agatha Adams’s private and public lives marks the obituaries and memorials published after her death. Nine trustees and officers of Randolph-Macon Woman’s College drove from Lynchburg, Virginia, to join the large gathering for her Sunday-afternoon funeral, and newspapers across North Carolina regretted that Mrs. Adams would be unable to follow her booklet on Thomas Wolfe with a complete biography of the novelist. A scholarship fund was established in her name at Randolph-Macon; the University of North Carolina gathered one hundred volumes for an Adams Memorial Collection, including a rare edition of Nic’s favorite book, Don Quixote de la Mancha. Agatha’s eulogists list her own accomplishments alongside those of her brothers, husband, daughter (“Radcliffe graduate”), and son-in-law (“a graduate student at Stanford”); the Chapel Hill paper praises her as “a hard worker” who “could be the merriest and most warm-hearted of companions.”26
Agatha had suffered considerably in her marriage to the brilliant, charismatic, and volatile Nic Adams, but in recent years she had rendered herself independent. Her talk at Randolph-Macon in June 1949, titled “Jobs for the Helen Hokinson Crowd”—referencing the popular New Yorker cartoonist—recounted her return to college for her library degree.IV She spoke of the necessity for “women over forty-five or over fifty” to work. “It’s fun to have a job,” she told her sister alums. She also noted the sense of “independence and security” that a job brings, along with “the blessed sustaining quality of routine.”
Between her lines one easily sees Nic Adams’s manic and depressive phases, his flirtations and his hospitalizations. Also there, more visibly to Alice, are Agatha’s ambivalence about motherhood and her resentment of lost years. Trips to college meetings in Virginia gave Agatha an opportunity to rekindle friendships with unmarried friends who had successful careers in education and other fields open to women. A paragraph Agatha quotes from novelist Laura Krey, who became a successful novelist after her children left home, sums up her theme:
For a woman’s life had two parts, one when she must transmit, like stored honey, all that she has to give. Then, unlike the queen bee, she did not die, her work done; but out of the inexhaustible core of her deepest personality, started in again to weave for herself a soul, a being strong enough to face the rigors of eternity. That is, she did if she was wise. She had another choice; she could wither, turning dustier and duller every year, content to have served her biological function and to die.27
“Jobs for the Helen Hokinson Crowd,” which was reprinted in the American Association of University Women’s magazine the summer after Agatha died, is so remarkable and moving that it seems utterly sad that her daughter did not treasure a copy of it or have a good word to say about her mother’s accomplishments in any surviving letters. We cannot even be sure she ever read this essay.
Agatha Erskine Boyd Adams
To Alice her mother’s death seemed “very unreal.” She said the long letters she received telling her about the obsequies she’d missed made it “more remote since I kept thinking how silly Mother would have thought all the fuss. One woman even sent me a flower which she had apparently snatched from the grave.” Charles Rush, director of the UNC library, found all the papers in Agatha’s desk “in perfect assortment, with notations on next steps to be taken” toward a biography of Thomas Wolfe. To Rush, this orderliness proved that Agatha “felt the end for her would come quickly.”28
Agatha died without writing a will. Nic was appointed to administer her estate, which he itemized as real estate in Maine ($1,200) and personal property ($250). In an unpublished novel she called “Mothering,” Alice imagined a mother who fears she will die young, distrusts her husband, and sets aside money to leave directly to her daughter. That was a fantasy of Alice’s that Agatha did not fulfill.
“I don’t think anyone who knew her had any idea what she was like, least of all my father,” Alice wrote the Mailers.29 Agatha’s death marked the beginning of her daughter’s effort to know who she had been. For her the private Agatha would be of greater interest than the community-minded public intellectual. Alice went about her quest most strikingly through her fiction. For the rest of her life she would revise and revise again her girlhood preference for her father. In her stories and novels, her father remained something of a caricature while her mother evolved and transformed into a complex character.
“The Wake” is the first story that transforms Agatha into Jessica Taylor, a primary figure in the dollhouse of her imagination. She speaks from the point of view of “everyone” who attends Jessica’s funeral on a springtime afternoon in North Carolina. Jessica dies exactly as Agatha did, the first to go in her circle of townspeople. They are shocked by the realization of their own mortality. They wonder if Agatha had been warned of a heart problem. One man fatuously declares that this could not happen to him because he has an annual physical at Johns Hopkins.
The Adams family is represented by Jessica’s husband, Ran(dolph), and her son, Devlin, who “had oddly chosen to go to Harvard” instead of the University of Virginia. There is a missing child too: “Martha, the daughter and her father’s early favorite, had quarreled with everyone years ago and then married an unlikely older man and gone to live in New Mexico; no one would have expected her to be there.” With these siblings, Adams represents both herself and her brother who died. The sight of Ran and Devlin together reminds the mourners “that the Taylors were a family; one had tended to think of them as a set of private lives, joined, as by accident, under a mutual roof.”
The climax of “The Wake” occurs when Leslie Rhett, “a giant of a woman with mad red hair and always a square-cut grey flannel suit” (based on writer Jessie Rehder, a Randolph-Macon alumna and the first woman tenured by the UNC English Department), tells the gathering: “You didn’t know her a bit and never tried, but she knew all of you… She hated you, all of you, you women. We used to laugh at you all the time, with your cokes in the morning and shopping trips to New York and herb gardens.” After Leslie is ushered out, the others feel Jessica’s pres
ence among them: “difficult, an unwelcome shade.” They feel guilty for her death, “for their own un-love.”30
In 1989, in the first of a cycle of stories about Lila Lewisohn, Adams again studied her mother in the character of Lila’s mother, Henrietta Macoby. In “The Grape Arbor” we learn that Henrietta was “an exceptionally confusing parent” who always seemed to be “shopping around for some perfect daughter.” She obsessively compared Lila to other girls and women her age. “I’m sure that’s one of the reasons I became a psychiatrist,” Lila believes. But she remembers one great day: “The time I told her I couldn’t stand Little Women. I remember being a little scared, saying that. I was afraid you were supposed to like it. But Henrietta was absolutely delighted. ‘Oh, you’re right, those dreadful self righteous girls and that horrible old martyr, Marmie.’ She positively chortled.… She was so terrifically pleased with me!”31
* * *
“The loss of the mother to the daughter, the daughter to the mother, is the essential female tragedy,” writes Adrienne Rich in Of Woman Born. “There is presently no enduring recognition of mother-daughter passion and rapture,” she argues. “The power of our mothers, whatever their love for us and their struggles on our behalf, is too restricted. And it is the mother through whom the patriarchy early teaches the small female her proper expectations.”32
Against those expectations both Agatha and Alice Adams had rebelled in ways that put them at odds with one another. With her mother’s sudden and early death, Alice lost forever the opportunity to form a mature relationship with the complicated and remarkable woman who brought her into the world.
I. In The Feminine Mystique in 1963, Betty Friedan asks: “Are [married women] putting into their insatiable sexual search the aggressive energies which the feminine mystique forbids them to use for larger human purposes?… Is that feeling of personal identity, of fulfillment, they seek in sex something that sex alone cannot give?”
II. The two Southern women did not remain friendly. Lois Wilson believed that Alice had an affair with her husband, Graham Wilson—which Adams denied. Alice made Wilson’s affair with Mailer public in 1983 when she mentioned that postgame party for Peter Manso’s oral biography of Mailer. The story did not fully emerge until Wilson talked on record about Mailer to her daughter, screenwriter Erin Cressida Wilson. That version appears—poignantly—in Michael Lennon’s authorized biography Norman Mailer: A Double Life.
III. Another version of not-going-to-the-funeral occurs in Adams’s novel Families and Survivors: When her mother dies, Louisa (based on Alice) stays home because of a flare-up of colitis and because she has learned that her father tried to contest her mother’s will. In the novel, that will left everything to Louisa. Outside of fiction, there’s no record that Agatha wrote a will.
IV. Hokinson (1893–1949) died in an Eastern Airlines midair collision just months after Agatha Adams delivered her talk. The “Hokinson Women” in her drawings were plump, earnest society ladies. When she died, Hokinson was on a crusade to defend her characters from people she felt were unfairly ridiculing them. (Carey Gibbons, “A Hokinson Woman,” www.cooperhewitt.org/2018/04/10/hokinson/.)
CHAPTER ELEVEN
Family of Three
— 1950–1954 —
Stories suggested a possibility of illumination; writing them, one might at least understand what had happened, what people meant by their puzzling, infinitely ambiguous words (and wills).
—Alice Adams, “The Making of a Writer”1
“In the tawny hills that surround the Stanford campus the dark green heavy live oaks barely move; along Palm Drive the asphalt is melting. High up in those palm trees the green-gray fronds are hard, dusty, and dry, they rattle in the slightest breeze, like snakes,” Adams wrote of her first California summers.2 Through the summer after her mother’s death, Alice worked at her part-time job in the Guidance Center, finished writing and typing “The Impersonators,” and went to cool, foggy San Francisco for her analysis sessions.
During this time, Alice felt “hysterical about bombs and the army.” Since the end of World War II, American confidence had soured into anticommunist fervor. The Soviet Union dominated eastern Europe. Mao Tse-tung’s Communist Party had taken over China in 1949, and Russia had detonated an atomic bomb. Soon the United States was developing the hydrogen bomb, about which Albert Einstein warned a television audience, “Radioactive poisoning of the atmosphere, and hence, annihilation of any life on earth, has been brought within the range of possibilities.”
The Linenthals’ optimistic postwar liberalism took a personal blow with the suicide of Professor Matthiessen, who had written enthusiastically of his hopes for socialist democracy in Czechoslovakia. Matthiessen had been attacked by Irving Howe, Philip Rahv, and Alfred Kazin for “good intentions” that made him a “dupe” of Stalinism. Two weeks after Agatha Adams died, forty-eight-year-old Matthiessen jumped from a hotel window in Boston. In choosing to defenestrate himself in the symbolically Czech manner, he paid homage to the idealistic friends in Prague that he’d met in Salzburg. “I am depressed over world conditions,” his suicide note read. “I am a Christian and a Socialist. I am against any order which interferes with that objective.”3
The next war was one that most Americans weren’t expecting. North Korean troops invaded South Korea in June 1950, prompting the United Nations to retaliate in what was called a “police action.” Most of the UN troops, commanded by US general Douglas MacArthur, were American. It was supposed to be a quick war, but after the North Korean army retreated above the Thirty-Eighth Parallel, Chinese soldiers arrived in force. World War II veterans were recalled to service, and like millions of others, Mark Linenthal feared a summons.
* * *
Before she and Mark departed on a summer trip east, Alice mailed a complete manuscript of “The Impersonators” to William Raney, now an editor at Henry Holt & Co. During a wearing stay with Mark’s parents in Cambridge and visits with other Boston friends, Alice wondered what the man who had published Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead would say about her novel. When she got to New York she went downtown to meet Raney in the office where she’d worked so briefly in 1946. She thought he was “terribly nice,” especially when he said he “loved” the novel and wanted to give her a contract. Thrilled, Alice told the Lynns, “He seems to want the same revisions that I do.” But, since Raney’s say wasn’t final, Alice was “afraid to be too optimistic”—which made her drag her heels on the revisions.4
While she was at the Holt offices, the editor of Nic Adams’s Spanish textbooks pulled Alice aside to ask what she thought could be done about her father. Nic had been expected to meet Alice and Mark in New York, but a manic spree of “fine food and liquor and trips” since Agatha’s death had made him unpredictable. He didn’t show up until after they departed. “He thinks he’s fine and writes insane letters about how well he is, really insane,” Alice said.5 Ralph and Eve Bates, with whom Alice and Mark stayed in New York, thought Nic’s condition was the result of shock treatments and assured Alice that he “did used to be fairly bright.” But much of the conversation with the Bateses was political. In 1950 Ralph refused to testify to HUAC and published what would be his last book, though he lived until 2000. “His disillusion with the political scene was complete,” his wife, Eve, told the New York Times when he died.6
* * *
Back in Palo Alto and still waiting on a contract from Raney, Alice discovered that she was several months pregnant. She complained of “ill-fitting maternity bras” but felt terrifically strong and healthy throughout her pregnancy and announced her intention to breastfeed the baby and to try “this new natural method” of childbirth. She had doubts that “neurotic women can suddenly relax to that extent,” but the baby doctor scoffed at her Freudian views. “My analyst as usual says nothing,” she reported. For Alice, anticipation of a child displaced marriage problems and grief and confusion over her mother’s death. She was exuberantly proud of her condition. She wro
te a “sexy story about an obstetrician who hates pelvic exams” and joked that Billy Abrahams saw “very little market for this sort of thing.” Mark also looked forward to parenthood and stepped up both his teaching schedule and his preparations for doctoral exams, which he planned to take before the baby was due in March.
Things that had worried Alice before didn’t faze her now. After she listened to a speech given by President Truman on October 17 in San Francisco, her fears of bombs and the Korean War diminished. Truman asserted that American strength derived from a belief in human freedom and political equality. These were revolutionary values, he said, that would inspire the newly formed United Nations to resist the reactionary international communist movement. “Truman last night said annoyingly little,” she wrote, “but it does seem somehow more possible to plan for the next few years. I’ve decided that it would be a good idea to have two children within the next couple of years.” She credited her new attitude to a “state of animal content” and “generally more cheerful frame of mind” rather than to “anything that has happened.”7
For Christmas, Mark gave Alice a “marvelous purple velvet coat… which buttons to look like a dress, and I think I look quite baroque and splendid. The baby’s ass is quite a firm and recognizable lump near the middle of my stomach, and he kicks wildly most of the time. We really don’t care which it is—I’d just like a large healthy baby.”8
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