Eve Adams
Tropic of Cancer was published in September 1934 with a marketing campaign that seemed destined to bury the book in obscurity. Jack Kahane, proprietor of the Obelisk Press, had pre-emptively banned the book from reaching its largest potential audience by printing “Not to be imported into Great Britain or U.S.A.” on its cover. A second label warned French bookstore owners not to place the book on open display stands or in store windows. It’s fifty franc price was also exorbitant—especially for a first novel from an unknown writer and an obscure publishing company. Henry Miller took the problem of marketing his novel into his own hands by conducting a fevered letter writing campaign and sending free copies of the book to a host of notable intellectuals including Ezra Pound, Richard Aldington and Blaise Cendrars.1 Help with getting the book into the hands of a general audience came from the unlikely source of a roaming bookseller in Montparnasse named Eve Adams.
Eve Adams (or Addams) was the gender-blending pseudonym of Eva Kotchever, a Polish Jew who had immigrated to New York where she opened a lesbian speakeasy and tea room in 1925 called Eve’s Hangout—at 129 MacDougal Street in Greenwich Village. At the Hangout, Eve organized weekly poetry readings, musical performances and salons where sexual topics were freely discussed. A sign on the door announced, “Men are admitted, but not welcome.” Eve was a well known figure in the Village at this time. The famous anarchist Emma Goldman was one of her personal friends and a number of radical activists could be counted among her tea room clients. Eve was hailed by her admirers as “the queen of the third sex” and vilified by detractors as a “man-hater.” One Village newspaper reported that her establishment was “not very healthy for she-adolescents, nor comfortable for he-men.”2
The popularity of Eve’s Hangout soon drew the attention of police, who in the mid-1920’s launched a crackdown on gay and lesbian clubs in the Village. On June 17, 1926 an undercover female police officer entered the tea room where Eve showed her a collection of short stories she was writing called Lesbian Love. Eve was promptly arrested on the charge of “disorderly conduct”—for allegedly making homosexual advances toward the officer—and her manuscript along with twelve other “objectionable” books in her possession were seized as obscene material. Eve was sentenced to a year in the workhouse and was deported in December 1926.3
Paris was the natural refuge of forbidden intellectuals in the 1920’s and it was here that Eve began the next phase of her life. Back in New York it was rumored that she had opened a lesbian club in Montmartre. However, Eve was impoverished and it appears that she eked out a living solely by wandering Montparnasse, selling newspapers, magazines and pornographic books to the expatriates who clustered about the terrasses of popular cafés. Eve peddled the daily editions of the Paris Herald and Paris Tribune as well as avant-garde literary journals such as Samuel Putnam’s New Review. On his 1928 trip to Paris, Henry Miller bought a copy of Fanny Hill and a set of dirty postcards from Eve, who was described around this time by James Farrell as a small, thin, and girlish-looking woman in her thirties.4
Miller and Adams’ proper acquaintance seems to have began in 1931, following the publication of Miller’s story, “Mademoiselle Claude”—about a well-known Montparnasse prostitute and her pimp—which appeared in the August 1931 issue of New Review. Alfred Perlès recalled that Eve usually sold few copies of such highbrow literary magazines: “She used them, chiefly, to conceal the pornographic books from the vigilant eyes of the police,” he wrote. But when a review of “Mademoiselle Claude” appeared in Wambly Bald’s “La Vie de Bohème” column in the Chicago Tribune, Eve’s customers started requesting copies of Miller’s story. Eve decided that Miller was a hot property and began pointing him out to her customers on the terrasse of the Dôme.5
According to Perlès, Eve “was very fond of Henry, who treated her with great gentleness and listened to her tales of woe.” They spoke principally of Eve’s friend Emma Goldman, whom Miller greatly admired. Miller was also pleased to learn that Eve could always be relied upon to lend him a few francs when he turned up at the Dôme with empty pockets.6
When Tropic of Cancer was published, Miller acquired copies at the author rate and consigned them to Eve for sale in the cafés.7 In December 1934, while Kahane was selling around 20 copies a month, Miller wrote to Anaïs Nin that Eve Adams was “still selling a few now and then.” The only problem, he noted, was that he had “to keep away from Dôme and other places because I am constantly being introduced to jackasses who read the book and whom I don’t care to know.”8 A few years later Miller enthused to Lawrence Durrell that Eve was now selling his watercolors at fifty francs apiece.9
In her peregrinations about the Montparnasse cafés, Eve Adams became something of a Paris institution. Other authors such as Anaïs Nin, James Farrell, and Bob Brown specifically sought her assistance in promoting their books.10
Eve–June Connection?
Did Eve know Miller’s wife June in Greenwich Village? I haven’t found any direct confirmation of this, but given June and her friend/lover Jean Kronski’s penchant for visiting lesbian bars in the Village around 1926-27, Eve and June may well have known or at least known-of each other. Eve’s Hangout was just one door away from the corner of MacDougal and Third Streets where June opened her own nightspot called the Roman Tavern in 1927. It was also just around the corner from the Pepper Pot (146-150 Fourth Street) where June was sporadically employed between 1925 and the early 1930’s. Whether or not they were personally acquainted, the two women would come to observe a strange parallel in that just as June had once sold Miller’s “Mezzotints” from bar-to-bar in 1920’s Greenwich Village, Eve later sold Miller’s Topic of Cancer and watercolors from café-to-café in 1930’s Montparnasse.
In-conclusions
I haven’t been able to determine when Eve immigrated to America. As a personal friend of Emma Goldman, who was imprisoned in America in 1917 and deported in 1919, Eve likely arrived prior to 1917. However, Goldman spent time in Paris in the late 1920’s, so it’s possible their friendship began there,—meaning Eve could have arrived in America as late as 1925. I also have been unable to find references to Eve’s life after the 1930’s. (Miller painted a watercolor of “Eve Adams Miller” in 1956, but this is presumably a portrait of his then-wife Eve McClure). Anaïs Nin writes of meeting with Eve Adams in 1939, shortly before WWII began. A Jewish lesbian would have found life in Nazi-occupied Paris extremely inhospitable, but having already been deported from the US and with her native Poland occupied, Eve’s options for fleeing Paris would have been quite limited.
Notes
- Neil Pearson, Obelisk, 442
- George Chauncey, Gay New York, 240
- Jennifer Terry, An American Obsession, 269-270
- Edgar Branch, A Paris Year, 32-33
(Description of Eve and her wares)Robert Ferguson, Henry Miller: A Life, 177
(Miller’s purchase of Fanny Hill and a set of postcards) - Alfred Perlès, My Friend Henry Miller, 42-43
- Ibid.
- Mary Dearborn, The Happiest Man Alive, 173
- Henry Miller, A Literate Passion, 248 (Letter to Anaïs Nin, December 11, 1934)
- Henry Miller, The Durrell-Miller Letters 1935-1980, 107
- Anaïs Nin, Nearer the Moon, 345
(In 1939 Nin enlisted Adams’ help in distributing her novel, The Winter of Artifice.)Edgar Branch, A Paris Year, 120
(Farrell wrote to Brown that he would try to get Eve to sell his book, The Readies—a kind of manifesto on the need for cinematic reading machines.)
10 comments on "Eve Adams"
Great post–I’d been meaning to look into Eve’s story, so I’m glad to see it so thoroughly explained on your blog!
Thanks for the post, Kreg. This a a rich, informative site. If you are ever interested in drafting something for ‘A Cafe in Space: The Anais Nin Literary Journal,’ let me know. We’re always looking for Millerania. Also, just to let you know, we have a new Nin blog (http://anaisninblog.skybluepress.com/) which includes a good amount of material on Miller, and also Paris with much more to come. Give us a visit.
Thanks, Paul.
I’ve put a link to the Nin blog in my sidebar. Some very interesting posts there and it’s great to see all of those original documents coming online. I just may take you up on writing for A Cafe in Space! — and will be ordering the new issue soon.
Fascinating stuff. Thanks for sharing it.
Victor J. Banis
http://www.vjbanis.com
One might add that the building (129 MacDougal) received landmark designation in 2004.Additional b&w photographs of it, ranging from 1938 to 1978 can be found by googling “129 MacDougal Street House Designation Report”.
Interestingly, the same author (George Chauncey) whom Kreg cites for Eve Adams at this address, also states elsewhere (in “Greenwich Village: Culture and Counterculture” ed. Rick Beard. 1993: Rutgers Univ. Press), that Adams ran the Black Rabbit “one of the Village’s gay stamping grounds, popular with the after-theater crowd and apparently as well known for its lesbians as for its rum concoctions.”
The Black Rabbit was at 113 MacDougal St. And guess what – it was here that in 1923 De Witt Wallace got the idea of founding Reader’s Digest! In 1937 this location became – the Minetta Tavern, hangout for many writers & bohemians, and still at this location today.
Martha,
Wow – thanks so much for your fascinating notes on Eve Adams! This information helps fill in a lot of holes. The interesting thing I noticed about Eve Adams is that a full picture of her life doesn’t seem to exist. I came across fleeting references to her while researching Henry Miller. But the folks who write on Miller seem to know nothing about her life outside of Paris. I was able to trace back to her life in New York. But the references I found are from people writing on the history of sexuality in New York and who seem to know nothing of Eve outside of that city. Your material provides a connection to her life prior to New York as well as a clue to what happened to her after Paris. Great stuff and very helpful!
I’ve sent you an email with a few other comments on Eve…
Hello Kreg, I last did research which touched fleetingly on Eve Adams in 2000, but today I came across my slim file on her in my “future research” bin. On googling her name, I saw your fascinating blog and post. I have scattered, but supporting details to contribute (if you ever need the citations, please ask).
Eve Adams wrote in desperation from Nice in September 1941: “I need not tell you what life has become here in Europe and I want to desperately come back to the States. I must!” Eve provided detailed instructions to her old friend Ben Reitman in hopes that he would personally make her case to the authorities in Washington. She was broke, and promised to work hard to repay money raised in the states on her behalf.
Best known as a lover and promoter of Emma Goldman, Ben Reitman was also the circus showman of radical bohemia flowering in Chicago before much of its momentum and personalities relocated to Greenwich Village in the 1920′s. According to Kenneth Rexroth, Eve Adams was among them. In his Autobiographical Novel, Rexroth identifies Eve Adams before her departure for Greenwich Village as a proprietress of a bohemian establishment, the Grey Cottage, with painter Ruth Norlander. Rexroth describes Eve as a nomadic book seller who “for years traveled about the country selling Mother Earth, The Masses, and other radical literary magazines.” Eve reminsces in another letter to Reitman of serving virtually as “master of ceremonies” at birthday parties in Chicago for his son Brutus at age four or five. Brutus was born in 1917.
In an unpublished manuscript on “social outcasts,” Ben Reitman included a profile of “Olga,” who was deported from Blackwell Island prison after publishing her “illuminating little booklet called Lesbian Tales.” A (not utterly reliable source) pickpocket in Reitman’s correspondence, May English, wrote Ben from prison that “they led her [Eve Adams] a hell of a life.”
Reitman’s daughter Helen also changed her name (she became known as Jan Gay and her female companion as Zhenya Gay). And she compiled a manuscript with hundreds of case histories of lesbians. Her work inspired the 1941 study, Sex Variants, ascribed to psychiatrist George Henry. Unfortunately, this study pathologizes its subjects to some degree and presumably mangled Jan Gay’s intent.
I do not have Reitman’s response to Eve’s poignant request in 1941. One wonders: What became of her? Of her writings?
Thanks for sharing your interesting work. Best wishes, Martha
I am the grandson of Eve younger brother Yerachmiel.
Eve was born in Mlawa, Poland on 1891 by the name Chava Zlocower – חוה זלוצ’ובר.
You all know about her life in NY more then we did, although she kept her connection with family in Poland by letters and photos.
My gradfather used to talk of her with love and admiration of her wisdom and courage. From his stories I know that during the 30s she spent time in spain, joining the group which fought against Franco. Then she moved to France and studied in the Sorbon.
The end of Chava was on a transport number 63 from Drancy France to Aucwitz on Dec 17, 1943. That I found out only 4 years ago in a book about the deportation of Jews in France.
Yerachmiel himself left the family in Poland and immigrate to Israel by 1932, then changed his name to Zahavy. He tried to convince her to join him with no succes. In 1940 she wrote from Biarritz how she would like to come to Israel, “but there are too many difficults and not enough funds”.
Out of their big family (7 kids) only my granfather and his brother Eliezer survuved the holocaust.
Hi Eran.
Thanks so much for posting your comment. Eve / Chava was certainly a fascinating woman. Martha Reis, who posted above had informed me that Eve’s name was found on the transport list to Auschwitz in the book, “Memorial to the Jews Deported from France, 1942-1944″ by Serge Klarsfeld. I had no idea though that Eve was involved somehow in the Spanish Civil War or that she studied at the Sorbonne.
It’s also quite interesting to learn something of Eve’s surviving family and to know that photos of her may still exist. I have never seen a picture of Eve and the published information on her background is quite sparse. Again, thank you very much for taking the time to fill in some of the missing information about your family member.
Erratum for my previous post.
Chava was the oldest sister of 12 brothers and sisters (not 7).
As the oldest, she use to take care of most of them until she left home to NYC on 1912 when she was 21.
