CHAPTER 10: FRUSTRATED AMBITIONS
Interviews: Herbert Blau, Frank Granat, Valerie Lynn, Peter Stansky.
1 AA, “Green Creek, Chapter I,” HRC.
2 Lorna Sage, quoted by Elaine Showalter in Inventing Herself: Claiming a Feminist Intellectual Heritage (New York: Scribner, 2001), 18.
3 AA to Barbara, Bea, and NM, July 19, 1948, HRC.
4 AA to Kenneth Lynn, August 28, 1948.
5 AA to Kenneth and Valerie Lynn, December 5, 1948.
6 Stanford Writers: AA, “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir.”
7 WMA quoted by Joan Smith in “Go Ask Alice,” San Francisco Examiner Magazine, October 22, 1995, 13–15.
8 AA, “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir.”
9 Manso, Mailer: His Life and Times, 129–31; Lennon, Norman Mailer: A Double Life, 110–11.
10 AA to Bea and NM, January 2, 1949, HRC.
11 Ibid., April 27, 1949, HRC.
12 Phyllis Lee Levin, “The Road from Sophocles to Spock Is Often a Bumpy One; Former Coeds Find Family Routine Is Stifling Them,” New York Times, June 28, 1960; Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique: 50 Years (1963; New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 365.
13 AA, “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir.”
14 AA to Lynns, March 19, 1949.
15 AA to Lynns, November 5, 1949.
16 Harvey Breit, “Talk with Norman Mailer,” New York Times, June 3, 1951; reprinted in Lennon, Conversations, 16.
17 Sources on the Mailers in Hollywood: Manso, Mailer; AA and ML to Manso, transcripts, HRC; Lennon, Norman Mailer; Carl Rollyson, The Lives of Norman Mailer.
18 AA to Lynns, March 19, 1949.
19 AA to Scott, December 19, 1981.
20 AA to Lynns, November 5, 1949.
21 AA to Bea and NM, April 27, 1949, HRC; AA to Lynns, May 20, 1949.
22 AA, “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir.”
23 Susan Walker, “Adams can’t avoid battle of the sexes,” Toronto Star, October 16, 1989, C4.
24 AA to NM, March 12, 1950, HRC.
25 AA to Bea and NM, April 1, 1950, HRC.
26 Death of ABA: North Carolina Collection Clipping File, UNC; certificate of death, North Carolina; Old Chapel Hill Cemetery records, Town of Chapel Hill; AA to Mailers, April 1, 1950, HRC. In 1992, Adams told Dr. Ronald Elkin that her mother died of “cerebral hemorrhage”; I cannot account for this discrepancy. (Elkin to Bill Fee, MD, October 15, 1992.)
27 ABA, “Jobs for the Helen Hokinson Crowd”; ABA, “For the Latin Majors”; and Harriet Fitzgerald, “In Memoriam: Agatha Boyd Adams, 1915,” RMWC Alumnae Bulletin 43, no. 3 (April 1950).
28 Charles E. Rush to Mabel Wolfe Wheaton, March 20, 1950, North Carolina Collection, UNC.
29 AA to Mailers, April 1, 1950, HRC.
30 AA, “The Wake,” TS, HRC.
31 AA, “The Grape Arbor,” Crosscurrents: A Quarterly (Spring 1989), 52–69.
32 Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born: Motherhood as Experience and Institution (New York: Bantam Books, 1977), 240–46.
CHAPTER 11: FAMILY OF THREE
Interviews: JCA, Cynthia Scott Francisco, Diane Johnson, John Murray, Peter Stansky.
1 AA, “The Making of a Writer,” TS, HRC, a longer, probably earlier version of “Why I Write.”
2 AA, Superior Women, chapter 1.
3 William E. Cain, F. O. Matthiessen and the Politics of Criticism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988), 111–12; “F. O Matthiessen Plunges to Death from Hotel Window,” Harvard Crimson, April 1, 1950.
4 AA to Lynns, October 18, 1950.
5 Ibid.
6 Valentine Cunningham, “Writer who kept his devotion to republican Spain alive in his novels,” Guardian, December 11, 2000; Martin Douglas, “Ralph Bates, Novelist Who Evoked Spain and Then Fought Franco, Dies at 101,” New York Times, December 4, 2000.
7 AA to Lynns, October 18, 1950.
8 Ibid., December 1950, and February 5, 1951.
9 Ibid., February 5, 1951.
10 Harvey Breit, “Talk with Norman Mailer,” New York Times, June 3, 1951, 212.
11 AA to Lynns, October 18, 1950, and February 5, 1951.
12 Ibid., March 20, 1951.
13 Ibid., May 15, 1951.
14 Ibid., Ibid. ; medical records, Sequoia Hospital, Redwood City, CA.
15 Ibid., May 15, 1951.
16 Ibid., February 5, 1951.
17 Ibid. November 7, 1951.
18 Ibid.
19 ML to Lynns [spring 1952].
20 AA to Lynns, November 7, 1951.
21 Ibid., May 20 [1952]; James Atlas, Bellow: A Biography (New York: Random House, 2000), 172.
22 Saul Bellow to AA, February 23, 1966, HRC, reprinted in Saul Bellow: Letters, ed. Benjamin Taylor (New York: Viking, 2010), 256–57.
23 Saul Bellow to AA, February 25, 1958, HRC.
24 AA to Lynns, May 20 [1952].
25 Eve and Ralph Bates to AA, May 18 [1952].
26 AA to Lynns, May 20 [1952].
27 Ibid.
28 ML to Lynns, September 10, 1952.
29 Bellow to AA, HRC. Most of Bellow’s letters are undated except by context or postmark.
CHAPTER 12: FEELING FREE IN SAN FRANCISCO
Interviews: JCA, Herbert Blau, PAL, Tom Wilson Jr.
1 AA to Barbara Deming, February 18, 1955, Papers of Barbara Deming, Schlesinger Library, Radcliffe Institute.
2 AA to Don and Kirby Hall, October 5, 1954, Donald Hall Papers, University of New Hampshire.
3 AA to Barbara Deming, July 15, 1955.
4 Solnit, “Fillmore: The Beats in the Western Addition,” FoundSF.org.
5 AA to Barbara Deming, February 18, 1955.
6 Ibid., February 18, 1955.
7 N, July 28, 1960.
8 AA, “Outlining,” unpublished TS, HRC.
9 Blanton Miller to AA, undated, HRC; Blanton Miller guest file, Yaddo papers, NYPL.
10 “The Fog in the Streets,” unpublished TS, HRC.
11 Ricky Riccardi, What a Wonderful World: The Magic of Louis Armstrong’s Later Years (New York: Pantheon Books, 2011), 162–65.
12 Ibid., 70.
13 AA, “A Campus Comedy of Horrors” (review of Unholy Loves by Joyce Carol Oates), Chicago Tribune Book World, September 1979.
14 James Campbell, This Is the Beat Generation: New York, San Francisco, Paris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999), 189.
15 Henry Miller, Big Sur and the Oranges of Hieronymous Bosch (New York: New Directions, 1957), 17–18.
16 Nancy Faber, “Out of the Pages,” People, April 3, 1978, 48, 53.
17 AA to Barbara Deming, October 30, 1956 [dated by recipient].
18 Ibid.
19 AA, MEX, xvi.
CHAPTER 13: A RETURN TRIP
Interviews: JCA, PAL, Diana Steele.
1 The paper LJ read displays the commonsense intelligence that attracted Alice. It’s published as “Some Observations on Children Hospitalized During Latency,” Dynamic Psychopathology in Childhood, ed. Lucie Jessner, MD, and Eleanor Pavenstedt, MD (New York: Grune & Stratton, 1959), 257–68.
2 AA, “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir.”
3 Jessner’s third husband was the late actor and theater director Fritz Jessner. He acted in plays directed by Max Reinhardt and was associated with the Jewish Kulturbund Theatre Company in Berlin until it was forced to close; after a stay in Switzerland, he emigrated to the United States and worked at the Yale School of Drama, Smith College, and Wellesley College until his death in 1946.
4 HMS, “Song of Carolina,” Furman Magazine 39, no. 1 (Fall 1995): 32–37; Daphne Athas, “Max on the Beach,” Chapel Hill in Plain Sight (Hillsborough, NC: Eno Publishers, 2010), 125.
5 The photo is printed in “Postwar Paris: Chronicles of Literary Life,” Paris Review 79 (1981), 303; HMS, “Song of Carolina.”
6 AA, “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir.”
7 Ibid.
8 AA, “Su
mmer, Clothes & Love: A Memoir.”
9 Narratives of summer 1958: By AA: “Summer, Clothes & Love: A Memoir,” San Francisco Examiner/Image, June 10, 1990, 26–31; “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir,” Southern Review 35, no. 3 (Summer 1999): 567–79; “Ladies in Waiting,” “Night Fears,” and “Home Is Where,” unpublished MSS, HRC; “Learning to Be Happy,” Redbook, September 1976, 100+, reprinted as “Home Is Where” in BG; “An Unscheduled Stop,” New Yorker, September 29, 1980, 41–47, reprinted in RT. By HMS: “About Love and Grasshoppers,” Redbook, May 1977, 126+, reprinted as “Another Love Story” in The Hat of My Mother (Chapel Hill, NC: Algonquin, 1988).
10 HMS, “Another Love Story,” 50.
11 HMS, “Song of Carolina,” 32–37.
12 ML to AA, July 21, 1958.
13 Ibid.
14 JCA to AA, early August 1958.
15 ML to AA, August 3, 1958.
16 AA, “Summer, Clothes & Love.”
17 Steele, “Another Love Story.”
18 HMS to AA, August 17, 1958.
19 LJ to AA, August 13, 1958.
20 HMS to AA, September 11, 1958.
21 Knopf papers, HRC.
22 AA, interview with Don Swaim.
23 “Summer, Clothes & Love: A Memoir.”
CHAPTER 14: FREEDOM
Interviews: JCA, Chester Aaron, Ruth Gebhart Belmeur, Margot Sinton Biestman, Virginia Breier, Stephen Brown, Linda Chown, Blair Fuller, Ella Leffland, PAL, Lincoln Pain, Louis Pain, Vera Futscher Pereira.
1 Peter Fimrite, “Frank Werber, charismatic music agent, entrepreneur,” San Francisco Chronicle, June 8, 2007.
2 Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique: 50 Years (1963; New York: W. W. Norton, 2013), 432.
3 Edward Zerin, Images of America: Jewish San Francisco (Charleston, SC: Arcadia Publishing, 2006); Gary Kamiya, “Fleeing Repression, Jewish immigrants found success in Gold Rush SF,” San Francisco Chronicle, August 18, 2017.
4 HMS to AA, November 27, 1958.
5 Ibid., January 25, 1959.
6 Ibid., February 2, 1959.
7 Ibid., July 13, 1959.
8 Ibid.
9 Helen Gurley Brown, Sex and the Single Girl (New York: Bernard Geis, 1962), xiii.
10 Vera Futscher Pereira, Retrovisor: Um álbum de família (Cascais, Portugal: Rui Costa Pinto Edições), 2009.
11 N, October 13, 1961.
12 Vera Futscher Pereira and Bernardo Futscher Pereira found letters and typed manuscripts by AA among their father’s papers. Vera told me that her father’s companion Graziela Lima Leitão told her about Adams’s novel Careless Love, which would seem to indicate that Vasco was also familiar with it.
13 N, February 5, 1961.
14 Alice’s reading list: Saul Bellow, The Victim, Adventures of Augie March; Max Steele, Debby; Robert Penn Warren, All the King’s Men, Brother to Dragons, World Enough and Time; Wallace Stevens, Collected Poems; Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider; Carson McCullers, The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter; Mary McCarthy, The Company She Keeps; Ralph Ellison, The Invisible Man; James Agee, A Death in the Family; John O’Hara, Appointment in Samarra; William Styron, Lie Down in Darkness.
15 LJ to AA, August 20, 1960; “I can imagine you”: LJ to AA, November 10, 1960.
16 AA, “The Edge of the Water,” TS, HRC.
17 Ella Leffland to CS.
18 Vasco Pereira to AA, January 28 and March 2 [1961]; AA to Vasco Pereira, March 1 [1961].
19 LJ to AA, “Sunday night” [1961].
20 Vasco Futscher Pereira to AA, February 15, 1961, HRC; AA to Vasco Futscher Pereira, n.d., PAL.
21 Vera Futscher Pereira, Retrovisor: Um album de família; C. Ray Smith, “An Ambassador at Home,” Architectural Digest 79, no. 8 (October 1980) 120–26.
22 Saul Bellow to AA [1961], HRC, reprinted in Taylor, Saul Bellow: Letters, 200.
23 AA to Nancy Webb, March 6, 1967.
24 N, August 7, 1962.
25 AA, “Former Friends,” unpublished TS, HRC.
26 AA to Vasco Pereira, PAL collection.
27 US individual tax return of ML and FJL, 1959, PAL collection.
28 Marcy Bachman, “The Improbable Dr. Pain,” San Francisco Chronicle, September 19, 1971.
29 FJL to her mother and stepfather, Dr. and Mrs. Leonard Greenburg, April 18, 1959, PAL collection.
CHAPTER 15: ALONE
Interviews: Ruth Gebhart Belmeur, Nancy Boas, Sharon Boynton, Virginia Breier, Blair Fuller, Imogene Gieling, PAL, Bernard Rosenthal.
1 N, July 12, 1972.
2 AA, statement about CL for David Segal, HRC.
3 Hal Gilliam, “International House Celebrates 70 Years,” ihouse.berkeley.edu/alumni/times/timesF00/seventy.html.
4 W. H. Rey, Du warst gut zu mir, Amerika! Roman einer gewagten Emigration (Frankfurt am Main: Haag + Herchen, 1999), 88–90, translated by G. H. Hertling.
5 AA to JCA, August 20, 1963.
6 Letters from AA to Franz Sommerfeld, PAL collection.
7 “Prof. Franz R. Sommerfeld of U.W. Dies,” Seattle Daily Times, March 5, 1962.
8 AA to RP, November 11, 1980.
9 FJL to Dr. and Mrs. Leonard Greenburg, January 28, 1963, and April 30, 1963, PAL collection.
10 Sidney D. Kirkpatrick, Hitler’s Holy Relics (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 172–74.
11 Manso, Mailer, 379–381; AA and ML to Manso, transcripts, HRC; Lennon, Norman Mailer, 336–37.
12 NM to AA and Felix Rosenthal, September 10, 1963.
13 AA to JCA, “Tuesday” [1963].
14 Jack Boynton: Correspondence of James W. Boynton, Smithsonian Archives of American Art; Boynton’s correspondence with AA, HRC and private collection of Sharon Boynton; Katie Robinson Edwards, Modern Art in Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014); Helen Moore Barthelme, The Genesis of a Cool Sound (Bryan, TX: Texas A&M Press, 2001).
15 Gerald Sorin, Irving Howe: A Life of Passionate Dissent (New York: NYU Press, 2005), 174–78.
16 Ibid., 181–82.
17 AA, “A California Trip,” TS, HRC; AA to Peter Matson, August 5, 1970, states that “A California Trip” is “about an Irving-Howe-type New Yorker in Calif.”
18 Irving Howe to AA [1963]; AA, “A California Trip,” TS, HRC.
19 Irving Howe to AA [1963].
CHAPTER 16: CARELESS LOVE
Interviews: JCA, Sharon Boynton, Phillip Galgiani, Jeremy Larner, PAL, Lore Segal, Til Brunswick Stewart, Barbara Mailer Wasserman.
1 AA to Jack Boynton [late 1963].
2 AA to PAL, February 5, 1971.
3 Sorin, Irving Howe, 199.
4 AA to Dolly Summerlin, October 5, 1981.
5 AA to LJ, January 6, 1964; AA to Jack Boynton [1963 or 1964].
6 Brian E. Butler, Dan Rice at Black Mountain College: Painter Among the Poets (Asheville, NC: Black Mountain College Museum and Art Center, 2014); Vincent Katz, ed., Black Mountain College: Experiment in Art (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002), 210.
7 Lorrie Moore, “How He Wrote His Songs” (review of Hiding Man: A Biography of Donald Barthelme by Tracy Daugherty), New York Review of Books, March 26, 2009.
8 AA to LJ, January 6, 1964.
9 AA to Beverly Bentley and NM, “Wednesday” [1963].
10 AA to RP, March 31 [1964].
11 Mutual friends in San Francisco, including Zoe Draper, Ruth Gebhart Belmeur, and John Belmeur, probably introduced Alice to Dodds.
12 John Dodds to AA, January 20, 1964.
13 AA to Vida Deming, Tuesday [1964].
14 FJL to Dr. and Mrs. Leonard Greenburg, February 4, 1964.
15 AA to LJ, January 6, 1964; AA to LJ, December 18, 1964.
16 FJL to Dr. and Mrs. Leonard Greenburg, April 29, 1964, PAL collection.
17 AA to Barbara Mailer (then Alson), January 23, 1964.
18 Correspondence between AA and John Dodds, 1963–65, HRC.
19 AA to WMA and Peter Davison, December 27, 1964.
20 General catalogs, University of San F
rancisco; AA to Max Steele, February 10, 1976; AA to LJ, March 11, 1976; Anne Fabbri, interview with R. E. Jenkins; AA to Victoria Wilson, June 18, 1977; “What Should I Have Done?,” BG.
21 JCA to AA, February 17, 1966.
22 AA to John Dodds, March 21, 1964; AA to WMA, May 30, 1964; the book was Meyer A. Zeligs, Friendship and Fratricide: An Analysis of Whittaker Chambers and Alger Hiss (New York: Viking Press, 1967).
23 HMS to Merrill Foundation [1964].
24 N, June 2, 1964.
25 John Dodds to AA, November 4, 1964.
26 Correspondence between AA and Peter Davison, 1964–67, HRC.
27 Robert Gottlieb to John Dodds, November 10, 1964; Lee Wright to John Dodds, December 10, 1964. These letters are in the AA collection at HRC.
28 HMS to LJ, May 8, 1965, Jessner collection, Deutsche Nationalbibliothek.
29 Correspondence files between AA, John Dodds, and David I. Segal, HRC.
30 Correspondence of AA and Segal, May 14–June 3, 1965.
31 AA to Victoria Wilson, February 13, 1974.
32 Correspondence between AA and David Segal, 1965–66, HRC; correspondence between AA and Peter Matson, 1965–66, HRC.
33 Atlas, Bellow, 311.
34 Bellow to AA, February 23, 1966, HRC, reprinted inTaylor, Saul Bellow: Letters, 256–57.
35 David Segal to AA, October 20, 1965.
36 Martin Levin, New York Times Book Review, May 22, 1966, 39. Books that turned up in this long-running column were said to have been “Levinized” because they had not received stand-alone reviews (“Martin Levin, Prolific Book Reviewer, dies at 89,” New York Times, May 30, 2008).
37 Maitland Zane, “First Novel of Action in Upper Bohemia,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 3, 1966.
38 AA to LJ, July 9, 1969.
39 Cynthia Ozick, “The Novel’s Evil Tongue,” New York Times, December 16, 2015.
40 AA to Peter Davison, December 7, 1965.
41 David Talbot, Season of the Witch (New York: Free Press, 2012), 93.
42 PAL in high school: AA to LJ, December 18, 1965; AA to Steeles, December 1, 1966; AA to LJ, July 5, 1967; AA to Nancy Webb, March 15, 1967.
43 AA to Steeles, “Wednesday” [September 1966]; AA to LJ, July 5, 1967; UCSF autopsy report, May 28, 1999.
44 AA to Steeles, 1966 [September].
45 N, April 22, 1999.
46 UCSF medical records, September 22, 1992.
47 Dorothy Gaines, “In and About Tucson,” Arizona Daily Star, October 6, 1966; Libby Brady, “San Francisco Author Tries Short Stories,” Tucson Daily Citizen, October 13, 1966.
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