A far cry too from the frustrations of the past twenty years. “My new conclusion is that unmarried living together is the best of all possible worlds—everyone feels more free (although in actuality is probably more bound),” Alice told Lucie Jessner.27
Had she found it at last, that rare thing for a woman artist, a relationship with a man that nourished her self and her art? In her notebook for 1967, she wrote, “They lay together as close as 2 spoons, her breasts mashed against his back, his buttocks against her lower belly. This was incredibly fulfilling to Avery; his body against her thus atoned for all loss, his strength became hers.” Alice’s childhood longing for “bodily family warmth was fulfilled.”28
I. “Can’t imagine that you found a heterosexual decorator in S.F. Maybe that’s why he’s alcoholic. Used to be a heterosexual decorator in Houston but he went broke,” Jack Boynton wrote Alice on January 14, 1965.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
The A B D C E Formula
— (1966–1969) —
“I took a writing course one summer vacation, at home in Chapel Hill, from Phillips Russell. He said that most short stories could be divided into three, or sometimes five sections, or acts. He wrote outlines for both methods on the blackboard.”
—Alice Adams, “Why I Write”
If domestic comfort gave Alice strength in her writing career, she certainly needed it. The month after Careless Love appeared, she sent David Segal a revised section of a new novel. He declined it. “The new book appears to be your effort to rear back and throw the high-hard one or, if you don’t follow baseball, write a big, serious and important novel. It just doesn’t appear as though this is your metier.” This manuscript has not survived. Adams’s notebooks suggest that with titles such as “Mother’s Will” or “The Witch Is Dead,” it was about a family based on Nic and Agatha that appears again in the Todd stories in Beautiful Girl. Segal wondered if Adams was frightened of this new material because he sensed “strain and lack of confidence in the writing.” His observations were likely correct, but his prescription that she give up that book and return to her forte of “the wry look at contemporary manners and morals,” may have been wrongheaded.1 Alice reacted to Segal’s letter with relief, “something like: thank God, now I won’t have to write that bloody book.”2
Notwithstanding, Alice did need to write about this family material and she continued working on it. A year later Segal, now at Harper & Row, responded to a revised version called “Mothering” with the devastating comment that Adams might have been “a highly intelligent and gifted amateur who managed to pull off a successful book once.” More specifically, Segal complained—insightfully—that Adams seemed “rather bored and bitter about intellectual life in SF and that this feeling permeates and deadens” her book. He missed the “light touch” of Careless Love.3
Thus instructed, Adams rewrote the novel as “A Spell in San Francisco,” but Matson did not show it again to Segal.I Peter Kemeny at Viking turned down the San Francisco novel two years later with extended regret and detailed suggestions for making its older woman narrator more “acerbic, wise, cantankerous” as a way to deepen the novel’s view of fashionable San Francisco.4 Another year passed as Adams revised and changed titles again, this time with help from Billy Abrahams, who had moved to Palo Alto with his partner, historian and now Stanford professor Peter Stansky, to be Atlantic Monthly Press’s West Coast editor. Matson was satisfied with the new version and reported, in January 1971, that Stein & Day were about to buy it. They did not. The manuscript has not survived.
* * *
As she came to loathe writing that novel, Adams much preferred writing stories. And, because she was now a published novelist, Peter Matson had some luck selling those stories to the women’s magazines that then carried several pieces of fiction per issue. In Cosmopolitan, Helen Gurley Brown’s reconfigured magazine aimed at single women, “Sea Gulls Are Happier Here” appeared alongside a story by Iris Murdoch. “Henry and the Pale-Faced Indian,” a spoof of a Jewish man who pretends to be Native American or Negro to impress liberal Californians, also found a berth in Cosmo, while “Young Couple With Class,” the story about her prosperous neighborhood, garnered $1,000 (with which Alice bought “a pretty little brown Austin” sports car)5 and a full spread and author photo in Redbook. Those sales brought nice checks, but Alice considered the stories negligible and never collected them in books. Worse, her agent typecast her as a writer who appealed just to “the ladies,” as women’s magazines were known.
The popular magazine editors rejected many stories but wrote notes to try to explain their decisions—hence, Adams saw them described as “repulsive,” “ugly,” “slight,” “unlikable,” “perverse,” “disagreeable,” “too sophisticated,” and otherwise unappealing to their readers. She saved a dreary file folder full of such letters that Matson passed along to her. From a Saturday Evening Post editor she learned that the majority of Post readers “would feel that any kid that smoked pot deserved to be miserable,” while Leonhard Dowty at Good Housekeeping remarked that Adams’s work belonged at Cosmopolitan: “Eve’s approach for landing a man (spending a weekend with him right after she has met him for the first time),” he explained, “just isn’t our idea of boy-meets-girl.” About a near-miss at the Ladies’ Home Journal, Phyllis Levy hazarded: “I guess the vote went against on acc’t of the old prejudice against divorced women finding Happiness.”6
Once in a while Adams heard an encouraging word. While buying “Young Couple with Class,” Bud Hart of Redbook asked Matson, “Is the author new?… [S]he reminds me of the good John Cheever of a few years ago.” Adams worried that stories tailored or edited to fit the women’s magazines were dishonest because they “glossed over what [she knew] to be horrible” in people’s motivations and behavior. She urged Matson to try her work at the New Yorker, Esquire, or Playboy, suggesting that it might help to use a male pseudonym.7
Matson argued that every magazine favored stories that met its formula, noting that the Saturday Evening Post had just published a story by Margaret Drabble that the New Yorker had rejected as too erotic. “People don’t often go to bed together in the pages of The New Yorker, at least not with pleasure; and, to the literary magazines a well plotted story is looked upon with suspicion,” he explained. Nonetheless, Matson agreed that Adams’s newest story was not for a women’s magazine. He sent “Remember the Night They Drew the Swastika on Our Door?” to the New Yorker.8
The reply was swift and marvelous. Bob Hemenway, a part-time fiction editor at the magazine, liked the story and pushed it through the unpredictable and enigmatic comment process that culminated in approval by editor William Shawn. This was, Adams later said, the first story she’d written that really pleased her, that she “knew to be good.”9 The germ of it came from a quarrel between two of her European friends, Fred Breier and Franz Sommerfeld. “Moved and disturbed” by the quarrel between the two men, who had been close since their days in Berkeley, Adams shaped her distress over the broken friendship into an insightful story. She changed German-Jewish Fred and Franz into Southern brothers named Washington who were history majors at Harvard in the summer of 1943, the year that Adams arrived at Radcliffe. The two brothers, fat Roger and thin, heart-unhealthy Richard, share a room in the Adams House and become isolated eccentrics who speak in the “Polite Southern” dialect Alice so disliked. “It was as though I could not learn to write until I learned to master what was, after all, my earliest language.” Taking the class in postwar problems that Adams herself took in 1944, the brothers opine that “the chief postwar problem is what to do with the black people.” The Washingtons’ sick, semi-ironic jokes win them no friends. Someone chalks a swastika on their door and calls them Southern fascists. The incident justifies, for Richard, “all his sense of the monstrosity of the outside world.” That moment becomes, in Richard’s life and in the story, an emblem of the private world he shares with no one but his brother. It also signifies the moment where their lives
diverge. After the night of the swastika, Roger changes his major to economics so he can become rich; Richard switches to Greek and expects to remain “land poor.”
“The Swastika on Our Door” uses the five-act formula Adams learned in Phillips Russell’s writing class in North Carolina: Action, Background, Development, Climax, Ending. The structure served her well for a long story that covers several decades and four central characters. In the opening action, Roger’s wife of some years, Karen Washington, discovers a photograph of her husband with his brother and a “long-necked beautiful dark girl” whose eyes are “very narrow and long, like fish.” She is Ellen, who was Richard’s girlfriend when he died shortly before Karen married Roger. Tellingly, Roger has never spoken to Karen about Ellen.
Even though the conflict that drives this story is between the two brothers, Adams’s characterization of Karen and Ellen is critical. For Karen, she probably drew upon her friend Virginia Silverman Breier, who had married Fred Breier in 1960. Virginia Breier was English—“handsome, regular features, sunlighted streaks in her hair, resembled Vanessa Redgrave,” according to Peter, so Adams disguised her life model by making Karen Erdman Washington a “big, dark, handsome” German Jew from an old San Francisco family. Ellen must be the story’s version of Alice Adams; she dates Roger first, and he advises her that with her lovely eyes and legs she could marry a rich man. She resents that reckoning of her exchange value and is instead drawn to the wild intensity and loneliness of Richard: “Ellen experienced with Richard a reduction of the panic in which she normally lived.” Richard has remained an outsider, a teacher of Greek who lives in a hotel, has few friends, and devotes himself to scholarship and music. But he is jealous of Roger’s life with “San Francisco’s very solid merchant upper class: German-Jewish families who had had a great deal of money for a long time.” He cherishes his days at Harvard with his brother, when he and his brother were outcasts—together. At Roger and Karen’s engagement party he makes a scene by asking loudly, wildly, “Say, Roger, remember the night they put the swastika on our door?”
The story climaxes in Richard’s sudden (though not unexpected) heart attack and death. Ellen reacts with equanimity at first, “holding her hands tightly together in her lap, as though they [contain] her mind.” Later, seemingly on Richard’s behalf, Ellen phones Roger to excoriate him: “Horrible fat ugly murdering pig, you killed him with your never time to see him… Richard was all Greek to you and you never tried to learn him, how lovely he was and suffering and you found him not socially acceptable… you and your blubber neck and your compound interest.” Roger offers money to Ellen. Further outraged, she hangs up. A few weeks later she has a nervous breakdown.
Adams ends her story in the day and place where it begins, Karen and Roger Washington’s comfortable but “unwieldy” Pacific Heights home, where the two talk calmly about poor dead Richard and his “mad” (unstable) girlfriend, Ellen. Roger has by now convinced himself that Ellen wanted money because, Adams’s omniscient narrator suggests, he believes “that other people’s motives [are] basically identical to his own.” Karen, the good wife, accepts that explanation and offers her husband more coffee: “Poor darling, you look as though you need it.”
Adams leaves her readers to wonder what Ellen really meant to say to Roger and who, among Ellen, Roger, and Karen, is the more mad. That essential artist’s question had particular weight for Alice Adams because she lived within the margins of the social class where Karen and Roger thrived. Virginia Breier and Alice exchanged letters when the Breiers spent a year in Europe and relied on Alice to care for their cat while regaling her with anecdotes from their travels. Alice admired and perhaps envied the Breiers and was fascinated by many upper-class San Franciscans. But in not glossing over the “horrible” family secrets that compromised a “happy ending”—and in selling this story to the New Yorker—she moved from the “ladies’ magazine” genre into complicated short fiction.
* * *
Adams’s success in this transition was aided by Robert McNie. She read stories aloud to him and credited his “total aesthetic sense” with helping her find the best order for the elements of a story. He said “large, helpful things” about “Swastika”: “I knew it was better than anything I’d written before, and Bob said ‘Why is that there?’ The sections of the story were in a quite different order, and I changed it considerably.” His interest, combined with the ABDCE five-act structure, was a great boon for a writer who cared more about character than she did about plot.II10
Novelist Rosellen Brown, reviewing Adams’s stories collected in Beautiful Girl (1979), noted that in “The Swastika on Our Door,” Adams boldly adopts what Brown called a “novelist’s prerogative” of giving her characters “all the time in the world: they did not hinge on the decisive move, the irretrievable statement. These are aerial views: the author sweeps in to overhear intimate conversation, then withdraws again.” Adams had been working on such stories for a long time, but “Swastika” confirms her genius for giving the “sense of an entire life compressed and summarized” in a short story. Adams’s Canadian contemporary Alice Munro has been credited for revolutionizing “the architecture of short stories, often beginning a story in an unexpected place then moving backward or forward in time.” Interestingly, both Alices began publishing widely at about the same time, and both eventually won serious attention for short stories with long time frames.11
* * *
In Bob McNie, Alice had a partner who embraced but did not crush her identity as an artist. Under Bob’s tutelage, with short, silver-gray hair and a more sophisticated wardrobe, Alice looked entirely chic. Her Southern flirtatiousness grew into mature charm, while her voice, with its Bostonian accent and traces of patrician Virginia, set her apart in the West. She and Bob together were known as a stylish, talented couple in the city. Alice’s animus against San Francisco’s provincialism and self-congratulatory tendencies faded. Asked why she didn’t live in New York, she said it would be culturally “overwhelming,” but of course she’d remained in San Francisco so Peter could be near his father and friends. After 1966, she also stayed because Bob McNie had his business in Northern California. Nonetheless, Alice continued to lambast San Francisco as “exquisitely beautiful but culturally deprived,” with an affluent class devoted to “vacuous, self-indulgent values… an appalling place to live if you’re not busy and happy.”12
She was both. Like Eliza Quarles at the end of her novel Listening to Billie, Alice now found her work “a source of steady happiness.” And San Francisco, despite its failings, offered a new laboratory for studying the human scene: a counterculture whose epicenter was about a mile from the apartment she shared with her son and Bob McNie.
* * *
Peter Linenthal was a high school sophomore—almost sixteen—when he attended the Human Be-In in January 1967. “I remember the sea of people suddenly visible as I came through the entrance tunnel onto the Polo Fields in Golden Gate Park. I think everyone was a bit shocked there were so many of us. This was where Town School held those annual track meets—and now it was filled with all kinds of people in interesting odd clothes, long hair. There was lots of pot smoking, some dancing, alone and in couples.” Peter wandered along the edge of the crowd “just taking it in.”
The Be-In’s organizers wanted to unite hippies and the antiwar activists in a “children’s crusade that would save America and the world from the ravages of war, and the inner anger that brings it forth, and materialism,” radio host Elizabeth Gips explained. Gandhi and Martin Luther King were their heroes. With the belief that American culture was a dead end, they studied Asian mysticism and metaphysics along with pre-Christian mythologies. At the polo field that day Timothy Leary protested the recent criminalization of LSD and urged listeners to “turn on, tune in, drop out.” Other men on the speaker’s platform included Richard Alpert (Baba Ram Dass), Jerry Rubin, and Buddhist leader Suzuki Roshi. At some point, someone cut the electricity, so there were “no speeches,
no music. Only the murmur of 25,000 people, most of them on LSD, grooving with each other, with the sunshine which had come in the midst of a rainy month, and with the manifest presence of Spirit.”13
The Be-In initiated the movement that eventually brought a hundred thousand young people to San Francisco for the Summer of Love. For Alice’s son, the tidal wave of cultural change was irresistible—and yet he surfed it with excitement rather than rebellion. He came from families where leftist politics and opposition to the war in Vietnam were a given. Allen Ginsberg, warbling East Indian chants and playing his concertina onstage at the Be-In, was the poet his father had defended in court a decade earlier. His mother had lunch with Norman Mailer on the day he delivered his famous “Hot Damn, Vietnam!” tirade against President Lyndon Johnson to a crowd of twenty thousand on a Berkeley soccer field. “The President’s mind,” Mailer said then, “has become a consortium of monstrous disproportions,” torn asunder by the realization that American capitalism “cannot survive without an economy geared to war.”14
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