cover image Always Straight Ahead: A Memoir

Always Straight Ahead: A Memoir

Alma Neuman. Louisiana State University Press, $29.95 (165pp) ISBN 978-0-8071-1792-7

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.)