Author: Alma Neuman

Publisher: LSU Press

Published: 1993

Total Pages: 180

ISBN-13: 9780807117927

Framed as a heartfelt response to a love letter delivered some twenty years late, Always Straight Ahead presents the odyssey of the musician and artist Alma Neuman. In this unforgettable memoir Neuman recounts her rich and varied life, often in subtle counterpoint to her fond reflections on her marriage to the brilliant American writer James Agee. With the sure instincts of a natural storyteller, Neuman brings alive her lonely childhood in upstate New York and her memories of growing up Jewish in a world of Anglo-American gentility. It is in an enclave of WASP high culture that she first meets Agee, a Harvard senior already acclaimed a genius, and soon thereafter they fall in love. Neuman recalls this near-mythic romance with a novelist's eye for scene: a mad week-long journey through the South, with a visit to the Tingle family, the Alabama sharecroppers whose lives would be immortalized in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men; a Godiva-like drive through the New Jersey night; a visit - with two goats - to the apartment of the fastidious Walker Evans. For a while the two enjoy an idyll, enlivened by visits from such talents as the novelist Thornton Wilder, the photographer Helen Levitt, and the poets Muriel Rukeyser and Delmore Schwartz. But the magic does not last. After Agee falls in love with another woman during Neuman's first pregnancy, the couple separate. In 1941 Neuman and her son, Joel, move to Mexico; there she meets a German exile, the Communist writer Bodo Uhse, who is to become her second husband and the father of another son. Neuman recounts in sharp detail these exciting years at the heart of the artistic and expatriate community: the encounters with the muralist Diego Riveraand the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda, the lavish parties, the revolutionary politics, and the first stirrings of the Cold War. With the fall of the Nazis, Neuman, Uhse, and the two children can move to East Germany. They find a bleak, war-ravaged land; there are shortages and censorship, but for a state-approved writer and his family also the comparative privilege that allows Neuman to become a shrewd observer of her surroundings. Ultimately disillusioned with life in the East, she returns to the United States, where she discovers a society very different from the one she had known in the thirties. Neuman learns to make a living, and she enters into her third - and last - marriage. She struggles to make the life of her schizophrenic younger son, Stefan Uhse, bearable to him, but in the end she must come to terms with his death at the age of twenty-seven. Neuman's book and the intimate glimpse it provides into the personality and imagination of James Agee will of course be a treasure for literary scholars; more than that, though, Always Straight Ahead is a memoir that recounts with eloquence and breathtaking candor the life of a remarkable woman of rare and adventuresome spirit.