Always Straight Ahead: A Memoir by Alma Neuman

From the Publisher

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 Rivera and 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 censorsh

Publishers Weekly

When a never-mailed love letter from her first husband, writer James Agee, reached Neuman in 1978--some 20 years after his death and almost 40 years after their divorce--she decided to ``answer'' by penning her memoirs. A musician and artist, Neuman (1913-1988) describes an adolescence she spent trying to overcome feelings of inferiority, which she believes stemmed from growing up Jewish in a WASPy upstate New York environment. More interesting are her struggles to lead a bohemian life with Agee after the birth of their son, when motherhood did not excuse her from deferring to her charming but self-centered husband's every whim. Leaving Agee, she became part of the expatriate community in 1940s Mexico City, where she married Bodo Uhse, a German writer and a Communist, and became acquainted with Diego Rivera and Pablo Neruda. By the '50s, she and Uhse had moved to East Germany; by the '60s, she had left Uhse and returned to New York. Although grieving over the suicide of her schizophrenic youngest son and the death of her third husband five months later, Neuman expresses a continued hunger for experience. An engrossing story. Photos not seen by PW. (Mar.)

Library Journal

In this memoir, the second wife of writer James Agee chronicles a life often marked by shocking events. The narrative opens in the 1930s as Neuman, a Jewish 16-year-old, is taken in hand by a Protestant family, lives through the deaths of her brother and mother, then begins a bohemian life as the lover and later the wife of Agee, whom she leaves after he has an affair during her first pregnancy. In Mexico, Neuman becomes the wife of Bodo Uhse, an exiled German Communist, with whom she returns to the newly created East Germany at World War II's end. A brief epilog chronicles her experiences after she leaves Uhse at age 46 to return to the United States. Given the upheavals she experienced, Neuman's narrative is surprisingly dispassionate; she seems oddly unaffected by both personal and political events, and her lack of reflection detracts from what might have been a rich autobiography.-- Ellen Finnie Duranceau, MIT Lib.

Product Details

• Table of Contents

Table of Contents