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For my family, with love
Lisen Caroline Ma
Kai-Ling Eric Ma
Robert Lewellin Ryan
Katherine Snoda Ryan
Hongshen Ma
Richard Matthew Ryan
A GRATITUDE
Oh, grateful heart,
this is the treasure:
to wander starry-eyed
in a world without measure.
—R. M. Ryan
Prologue
In the United States in 1950, many felt there was something presumptuous about a woman who wanted more than twenty-three-year-old Alice already had. She was a beautiful, dark-haired, long-legged woman with an hourglass figure, a Radcliffe graduate married to a World War II veteran with a Harvard degree. They lived in California, where Alice worked a clerical job to pay the bills while her husband finished graduate school. They’d both intended to be writers until he found his calling as a literature teacher. Alice still wrote. But she was bitterly unhappy, unfaithful to her husband, estranged from her parents. She developed chronic digestive problems—“much vomiting… obviously psychosomatic,” she said.1 Her psychiatrist advised her to “Stay married and stop writing.”2
Alice took half of the doctor’s advice. She stayed married to Mark Linenthal—but she kept writing. Then she got pregnant—and she kept writing. A couple months before the birth of her son, hoping that she’d soon have everything she needed to feel happy, Alice submitted the manuscript of a novel to a New York editor she’d met through her famous friend Norman Mailer. She and Mark moved to a three-bedroom house in Menlo Park with a study for Mark and a room they painted lemon yellow for the baby. Alice liked the pleasant neighborhood with live oaks and flowering acacias, the huge kitchen, and the nook with a washing machine. “I could happily stay here for years,” she believed.
A rejection of the novel arrived before the baby.
Alice continued to think of herself as a writer, but her writing became haphazard. Most of the pages she wrote in her notebook during this period are gone, roughly torn out, destroyed.
By the spring of 1958 Alice Adams’s inner life was again a turmoil of hopes and memories and confusions. Her mother, with whom she had a frustratingly distant relationship, had died and her father had remarried. She felt profoundly alone. On a cold, windy spring day, in a dressing room at Joseph Magnin’s department store, she decided to buy some very short white shorts and a full-skirted, bare-shouldered dress with large pink polka dots—summer clothes that were useless in chilly San Francisco.
This time, instead of heeding the psychiatrist’s advice, Alice took Peter and left California for the house where she’d grown up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. She planned to write another novel there, believing that doing so would bring her the money and courage she needed to divorce Mark. She’d avoided that house since before her mother’s death, so this was an odd choice, but her motivations were deeper than common sense. She knew her father and his wife would be departing for Maine. Her new clothes made her dream of the smell of jasmine, and the swimming hole in her father’s backyard, “of sunshine and warmth. Of not being with my husband. Of, maybe, going to some Southern beach. Of possibly meeting someone. Falling in love.”3
When he picked up Alice and Peter from the airport, Nic Adams jokingly offered his daughter and grandson slugs of bourbon from a silver flask and talked so rapidly with his pipe in his mouth that Alice couldn’t understand a word. The apartment she was borrowing for the summer, a wing of her childhood home, was a shambles—“holes in the walls, pieces of floorboard missing.” The first evenings with Nic and his wife, Dotsie, were “alcoholic, boring, quarrelsome.” Already the trip felt like a huge mistake.
Yet in every room “stood bowls of the most beautiful, fragrant roses,” a welcoming gift for Alice from her father’s neighbor, Lucie Jessner. After Nic and Dotsie drove off toward Maine, Lucie introduced Alice to her friend Max Steele. Max was a writer—published and award-winning, though currently at loose ends—with “pale, wide, wise blue eyes, a high forehead, high cheekbones, and a small witty mouth—about to laugh.”4 He invited Alice to a party: “I wore my polka-dotted dress, and we danced a lot in a mildly outrageous way, very sexy and close but at the same time laughing at ourselves.”5
Alice felt young and desired again. With Max around, she “glided through the summer, happily sure that things would work out.” She revised a short story about a love affair she’d had in Europe after the war—a subtle admission that her marriage was doomed even then—and submitted it to a magazine for women with jobs called Charm.
The summer of 1958 became the endless summer of Alice Adams’s life, the interlude that changed her forever. She and Max avoided declaring love for each other, knowing that writers “can talk a perfectly good love affair to shreds and tatters.”6 Alice’s paradoxical and complicated needs were all met in those brief weeks when she had a lover who admired her and encouraged her to write, a mother-figure who praised her ambitions and desire for happiness, and a respite from a marriage she regretted. This uncanny convergence of relationships allowed her to recover her passion for writing. By reoccupying her childhood home, she allowed herself to imagine a new future.
A week after Alice and Max parted with vague plans to meet in Mexico the following winter, Charm purchased “Winter Rain.” The magazine paid her a then-respectable $350 for that story, enough to allow her to hope that she would easily sell everything she wrote. She made up her mind to divorce her husband.
It would take more than the sale of one story for Alice to get what she needed. Like most women who divorced in the 1950s, she risked poverty; by not staying in the marriage for her child’s sake, she also risked being seen as a loose, oversexed woman and a bad mother. Nor was Alice really foolish enough to believe that all her work would sell. She understood that an attractive woman might not be taken seriously in the male-dominated publishing world.
Adams explained what happened that summer in an image: One night while she and Max were walking in Chapel Hill, “a pair of twin black cats came toward us out of the darkness, the country night—two cats thin and sleek and moving as one, long legs interwoven with each other, sometimes almost tripping. At that we laughed and stopped walking and laughed and laughed, both wondering (I suppose) if that was how we looked, although we were so upright. Then we walked on, hurrying, like people with a destination.…”7 The way Alice Adams understood those two black cats in the hot Carolina night as a picture of herself and a man tells us something about the way she saw her destination—the delights and difficulties it entailed.
“I can’t imagine anyone without a very intense inner life… full of memories and strange confusions,” Adams said after she’d published half a dozen books. “I was never interested in relationships that weren’t complicated. I never had a simple relationship in my life. I even have a very complicated relationship with my cat.”8
She admired the dense novels of Henry James, especially The Portrait of a Lady with its young American heroine named Isabel Archer who wants to choose her own destiny. But James’s treacherous prose and archaic vocabulary would not serve to describe Adams’s characters with their modern ambitions and language. Adams wanted to write beautifully and clearly about the heart’s entanglements.
To do that she
filled her characters’ minds with questions, parenthetical thoughts, and feelings that connect with her readers’ own complex lives. She interrupts her narratives with wise observations like this one from her most celebrated story “Roses, Rhododendron”: “Perhaps too little attention is paid to the necessary preconditions of ‘falling in love’—I mean the state of mind or place that precedes one’s first sight of the loved person (or house or land). In my own case, I remember the dark Boston afternoons as a precondition of love. Later on, for another important time, I recognized boredom in a job. And once the fear of growing old.” Or she jumps about in time and among characters to reveal the workings of desire in two people: Here are Tom (married to Jessica) and Babs, who will marry each other many years later: “But they are not, that night, lying hotly together on the cold beach, furiously kissing, wildly touching everywhere. That happens only in Tom’s mind as he lies next to Jessica and hears her soft sad snores. In her cot, in the tent, Babs sleeps very soundly, as she always does, and she dreams of the first boy she ever kissed, whose name was not Tom.”9
Adams’s subject, which appeared in hundreds of guises, was love—or, more accurately, the value women assign to love and what happens to them as a result. Her characters’ journeys through contemporary life are strenuously sexual and emotional, and yet always mediated by intelligent thought as she uses her lyrical, astute prose to tell her stories of women and men living on the edge of their emotions, embracing the complications of their modern lives.
It’s no accident that Alice Adams’s notebook from the 1990s holds a list of thirty-four men who’d been her lovers followed by a list of thirty-nine magazines that published 115 of her stories and essays. She lived for love and for stories. Her courage and vulnerability, tenderness and tenacity allowed her to break the strictures of her upbringing and transform her intense emotional sensibility into enduring fiction that illuminates women’s lives in the twentieth century.
PART I
ORIGINS
CHAPTER ONE
Saved by Her Dolls
If writers can go to hell and come back, it’s because part of them does not go. Is watching.
—Alice Adams, notebook, November 9, 1959
The only daughter of parents who sometimes found her a puzzling intrusion in their busy adult lives, Alice Adams entertained herself by making up stories about her dolls. Adams treated her dolls as if they were characters in a novel. She “deduced and accepted their own intrinsic natures,” she said of her favorites. She “could see that some dolls were older and wiser than others were, that certain dolls were simply vain and silly, that others were friendly and kind, that still others would (probably) laugh and have fun.” She much disliked dolls “that came already equipped with names and ready-made stories,” like Raggedy Ann and Shirley Temple. When Alice used a curling iron on the luxuriant red hair of a “sweet-faced” favorite named Madeline, the doll suffered an “unhealable blister” on her pink plaster cheek and was left with scraps of hair too damaged to style. “Shabby, pantalooned and nearly bald,” Madeline remained Alice’s favorite.1
On long drives from North Carolina to Sebago Lake, Maine, where the Adamses spent summer vacations, Alice arranged the dolls she had chosen for the trip on the backseat of the family Chevy while she crouched on the floor to attend to them. When the car slid off a slick, poorly banked curve of the DuPont Highway into a ditch, Alice was “said to have been saved by the dolls.”2
Alice was four, already practicing the art that would supply her vocation as a woman, when the car went into that ditch. The child who was saved by her dolls became a celebrated short-story artist and novelist. Her work, her editor Victoria Wilson said seven decades after the accident, was about “the long pull towards clarity of desire and the ways in which people discover (or keep themselves from discovering) what they really want, can have, can become.”3 The people in her fiction grew from Adams’s own desire for clarity. She made up stories “to make sense of what seemed and sounded senseless, all around us.”4
Alice made “friends and familiars” of her dolls in a house and family where she seldom felt at home. Born August 14, 1926, she was the first child of Agatha Erskine Boyd Adams and Nicholson Barney Adams. Her parents, whose weighty names, of which more later, indicated pride in lineage and expectations about the future, were Virginians by birth. They’d both lived in New York City and studied at Columbia University, where Nicholson—Nic—received his doctorate in Spanish literature. When Alice was born they were newly settled in an old farmhouse overlooking woods at the southern edge of Chapel Hill, North Carolina. As an assistant professor at the University of North Carolina, twenty-nine-year-old Nic Adams was entering the town’s elite. Agatha, with a master’s degree in Spanish, was not only a faculty wife but her husband’s partner in academic projects. She also had writerly ambitions of her own.
With such literary parents and a charming rural seat, Alice Adams might have enjoyed a happy and uneventful childhood, reminiscent of those in the English girls’ novels she loved to read. But such was not the case. Loneliness pervades her descriptions of life within that old farmhouse and within her psyche. Of an early picture, Alice wrote that she and her parents “look rather frightened of each other, and with good reason, as things turned out.”5
Alice’s parents’ legend—“I was said to have been saved by the dolls”—became the true and subversive metaphor of her life. The authorial voice in Adams’s fiction first emerged during her reign over her dolls. “If writers can go to hell and come back, it’s because part of them does not go. Is watching,” she speculated in a notebook.6 Watching and writing saved her, over and over, first from her parents, then from the thrills and treacheries of her own romantic adventures and the entanglements that ensued.
Alice’s loneliness began in infancy. Thirty-three-year-old Agatha gave birth to her daughter by cesarean section, on a Saturday, at Mary Washington Hospital in Fredericksburg, Virginia, near her husband’s family home. The hospital birth may have been routine for Agatha’s age—by the day’s standards, she was old to be a first-time mother—but later medical records for Agatha mention her “contracted pelvis,” so it’s likely that a traumatic labor was followed by a long recovery from surgery.7 To help, both Agatha’s mother and her brother Thomas Munford (Munny) Boyd, blinded by scarlet fever as a child, stayed in Fredericksburg for a month after Alice’s birth.8
In her notebook sixty-one years later during a time she was seeing a psychoanalyst, Alice wrote: “10-20-87: Tears: Not for now but for a hungry baby, in 1926, cold, afraid, who counted on her father to feed her.”
That complicated trace of memory is a painful picture of oneself to carry through adulthood: Why cold? Why afraid? Was Alice a welcomed or an (unspeakably) unwanted child? We don’t know why Agatha did not breastfeed her firstborn or whether her father managed to be a good substitute. Alice’s lifelong friend Judith Clark Adams (her married name, no relation) speculated, “I don’t think that Nic and Agatha adored Alice. They were older and didn’t know what in the world to do with this baby.”
The name Nic and Agatha Adams chose for their daughter, Alice Boyd Adams, curiously combined the first name of a deaf, old cousin with the tradition of bringing forward the mother’s maiden name as a middle name. But the resulting “Alice Adams” seems to borrow from Booth Tarkington’s novel Alice Adams, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922.I Thus her name offers a microcosm of the complex jostling of tradition and modernity that marked Alice’s entire life and career, a jostling that was well under way before she was born.
Both Nic Adams and Agatha Boyd were white Anglo-Saxon Protestants and well-educated Southerners. Their ancestors on both sides came to North America from the British Isles, but differences of background set them apart to the extent that Adams portrays her mother as “an Episcopalian who secretly believes that she has married beneath her.”9 Indeed, Agatha Boyd’s ancestors had been in Virginia longer than Nic’s, for at least eleven generations: a William Taylo
r who came to America in 1638 changed his name and founded the wealthy, politically influential Tayloe line, to which Agatha was connected through her own mother, whose maiden name was Emma Tayloe Munford. John Tayloe II, a fourth-generation tobacco planter, began building Mount Airy plantation house near the Rappahannock River in the Northern Neck of Virginia in 1758. With twenty thousand acres and more than five hundred slaves (during the revolutionary era he was the third-largest slaveholder in the South), Tayloe built a business empire in Maryland and Virginia.II He protected himself from fluctuations in the tobacco market by building ironworks, then cut forests to make the charcoal needed to operate his smelters. He built ships and annually sent fourteen shiploads of tobacco and iron to England, using the iron as ballast for vessels loaded with tobacco. In 1769, when his daughter Rebecca married Francis Lightfoot Lee, later a signer of the Declaration of Independence, he built the couple the mansion called Menokin, which, like Mount Airy, still stands near Warsaw, Virginia.
In the next century, Eton- and Oxford-educated John Tayloe III saw opportunity in the District of Columbia, then a wooded tract with just a handful of houses. He expanded the Tayloe enterprises with postal services and inns along the route to the new capital and purchased lots in the most promising neighborhoods. At the urging of his friend President George Washington, Tayloe built his Octagon House on Lafayette Square; President James and Mrs. Dolly Madison made Octagon House their official residence after British forces burned the White House in 1814.10
When forests were depleted in Virginia, Tayloe III founded new ironworks all over the South and established cotton plantations in the Deep South, keeping one thousand slaves, many of whom became skilled workers. One of his six sons, Harvard-graduate Benjamin Ogle Tayloe, was one of the few slaveholders on record to condemn the rape of or adultery with female slaves by male slaveowners. Through Benjamin, the Tayloes exerted a defining influence on Whig politics. With stunning hypocrisy, Benjamin received his income from slave-operated plantations in Alabama even after the secession of the Confederate states, all the while residing directly across from the White House and hosting American and European political and cultural figures.11 During the winter of 1861–62, visiting English novelist Anthony Trollope, whose novels would become favorites and models for Alice Adams, spent much of his leisure time at the Tayloe house. Despite his own antislavery views, Trollope felt “more at home” in their genial Southern household than at any other place in the muddy, melancholy, corrupt, and war-straitened capital.12 In his book North America, Trollope wrote that Southerners had “much to endure on account of that slavery from which it was all but impossible that they should disentangle themselves.” Their great sorrow, he said, was “the necessary result of their position.”13
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