Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  After that dinner, Robbie distanced himself from Alice. “I wanted to cut her throat,” he said. “I mean, if he’s not going to be expressive about my brother’s death—a suicide at that, and I express some feeling of myself… and I meet with HER retort, which was duplicated by him. That just fried me. Fucking fried me.” But Alice had her own observation: “Robbie: the swollen presence of murder,” she wrote in her journal.46

  * * *

  Other deaths also shadowed Alice during this decade. Her adored literary agent, Cyrilly Abels, died of cancer late in 1975. The success Abels had brought Adams was certified only weeks later when the National Book Critics Circle nominated Families and Survivors for the best fiction award. Authors of the other nominated books—all men—included her old friend Saul Bellow (Humboldt’s Gift), Larry Woiwode (Beyond the Bedroom Wall), William Kotzwinkle (The Fan Man), and the winner, E. L. Doctorow (for Ragtime). The NBCC award, a new award that year (easily confused with the National Book Award), garnered little publicity. In fact, Alice later had to ask Victoria Wilson who’d won. With a referral from Wilson, Adams soon secured representation from Lynn Nesbit, then a principal at International Creative Management. Wilson’s sister, Erica Spellman, worked there and took care of magazine submissions.

  Ginny Berry, Alice’s Radcliffe friend who taught at the University of San Francisco, was just forty-nine when she died of cancer early in 1976. Her death prompted Alice to write “What Should I Have Done?,” a story she insisted came straight from Berry’s life, as did some aspects of Cathy’s character in Superior Women. Both versions tell of a passionate woman whose long love affair with a priest results in a pregnancy and in either a red-haired daughter (in the story) or a son (in the novel) or twins (as Alice wrote in a letter to Wilson) given up for adoption. After Berry’s death Alice felt “grief—rage—anguish… and some guilt at never having called her” and wondered, “Just when did that start, that malevolent process of her cells?”

  “Maybe I wrote that story out of too-strong feelings. You know that whole thing actually happened including the twin sons… and if I ever see that fucking priest again…”47 The story’s forbidden subject and harsh attitude made it difficult to publish until Alison Lurie, who had become an editor for Cornell University’s Epoch, accepted it for that journal.

  * * *

  Another of Alice’s friends, who is unnamed here at the request of her children, became the centerpiece of her story “Beautiful Girl.” In the 1950s this witty, sharp-tongued widow from a southern city had been a featured debutante in a Life magazine spread on the custom of presenting “eligible daughters to polite society.” She moved to Alice’s San Francisco neighborhood after her husband’s suicide. She was a good writer who was discouraged by rejection notices but, with help from Alice, published an essay in the Virginia Quarterly Review. She and Alice shared a sense of humor and an understanding of growing up in the South and the expectations of women there; like Alice, she spoke of having a handsome black lover—“It was part of making a statement,” one of her daughters thought. Alice and Bob became good friends with her daughter and Alice’s most cherished of many cats was a little Manx given to her by this friend.

  By 1976, Alice was deeply worried about her friend; she had changed “from an acerbic, amusing sometime-drunk [into] a rich mean alcoholic, barely ambulatory.” To Staige Blackford, the VQR editor who’d published the essay, Alice confided that her friend’s alcoholism was now so acute that you couldn’t have a conversation with her after eleven in the morning. “I know a lot about heavy drinkers, having grown up among them, but this is something else,” Alice told Blackford as she realized her friend should be hospitalized.48 Perhaps Alice hoped that publishing “Beautiful Girl”—it came out in the New Yorker in 1977—would convince her friend to accept help. But her friend, whom Alice didn’t alert in advance of the publication, was devastated that Alice would hurt her in this way. She never spoke to Alice again after “Beautiful Girl” appeared.

  Adams replaced details about her friend’s life with Chapel Hill settings when she created her character “Ardis Bascombe, the tobacco heiress, who twenty years ago was a North Carolina beauty queen” and now sat “in the kitchen of her San Francisco house, getting drunk” at four thirty in the afternoon. The plot concerns a visit to Ardis by Walpole Green, a man who hated Ardis for her popularity in college—until she gave him one drunken kiss. From then on, “he watched her as a lover would.” In San Francisco, Green plans to take Ardis out to dinner but she’s too drunk to go. Instead he concocts a plan to “save” her by taking her to a drying-out facility in Connecticut that caters to senators’ wives. That outcome seems unlikely, but the possibility reveals Adams’s concern about Bob—who, like Ardis, sleeps or passes out at the table—and her dawning recognition of her own risks and involvement.

  In “Beautiful Girl,” Adams also sends a message to her friend’s daughter, who sometimes took refuge at Alice and Bob’s apartment: she “will be more beautiful than Ardis ever was. She will be an exceptional beauty, a beautiful woman, whereas Ardis was just a beautiful girl.”

  The encroachments of age and alcoholism were much on Adams’s mind throughout this decade of personal losses and professional successes. Reviewing Richard Yates’s novel The Easter Parade, Adams notes, “Yates is especially strong on the non-pleasure of too much booze; some pages literally seem to smell of sweet cocktails.”49

  Diane Johnson noticed that “Alice disapproved of Bob’s drinking—he could be loud and obnoxious when he got drunk, which was often, but she also drank and abetted him in other ways.” In writing and publishing “Beautiful Girl” as the story of a woman sinking into alcoholism, Adams does more than appropriate her friend’s story. She recognizes that it may be futile to try to change an alcoholic and makes a pact with herself that she will not be trapped in such a story herself.

  I. Rumors that Steele was gay circulated in later years but no one I spoke to believed them. The notion seems to stem from the fact he never remarried and became somewhat reclusive in Chapel Hill except for his friendships with younger writers.

  II. Trummy Young played at UNC Memorial Hall in 1954 and appeared in the movies The Glenn Miller Story and High Society, so Steele might have seen Young before hearing about him from Alice. (But Young did not have a deep voice.)

  III. Writer Randall Kenan, who first met Alice Adams when he was a student of Steele’s, recalled: “For a couple of months [in the late 1980s] I worked as the receptionist at Knopf. One day Alice Adams stepped off the elevator. I introduced myself and she was very friendly. I mentioned that I had recently read the two stories in Redbook, and she gazed off into the distance and said, ‘Yes, Max still thinks that’s funny, doesn’t he?’ ” About the same time, Alice sent a copy of Max’s story to Bryant Mangum with a note asking him what he made of it, thus hoping he would see the connection between the two stories.

  IV. When their meetings began to draw notice from Chronicle gossip columnists, they began meeting at each other’s homes.

  V. Robert Towers, reviewing for the New York Times, shared this opinion: “But for all its brilliance of insight and characterization, The Shadow Knows is significantly flawed by a basic irresolution, by the failure of the author to track down a sufficiency of the hares she has let loose.” (“Four Days of Four Lives,” New York Times, November 19, 1978.)

  VI. Two stories, actually: “You Are What You Own: A Notebook” in Return Trips; “The Furniture: A True Story.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  Very Colette

  — 1976–1979 —

  Fate, as I should have recognized by now, tends to reward happiness rather than virtue…

  —Alice Adams, “Lost Luggage,” To See You Again

  The charms and excesses of Bob McNie were fully on display for Alice’s fiftieth birthday on August 14, 1976. For the occasion, the “mad person” Alice lived with presented her with fifty presents, each wrapped elegantly in brown tissue paper with darker b
rown ribbons.1 “The fifty presents were not all diamonds—it is hard to think of anything I would like less than fifty diamonds,” Adams said in her essay “On Turning Fifty” for Vogue. “There were a lot of cotton bandanas, all colors, a wonderful spectrum, but also some silk shirts, sweaters, books,” and a Billie Holiday T-shirt. Opening this bounty “took several days (and think of the time it took R. to wrap them all),” she wrote, “with time out for Champagne and pasta feasts and a trip to a jazz place to hear Horace Silver, my favorite pianist.” Even though she enjoyed this birthday more than she did her fortieth, being in her fifties also meant that she thought “about death much more than [she] did at thirty or forty…”2

  Thinking about death at fifty meant wondering whether she or Bob would die first and “which was worse.” Alice learned she had high blood pressure—but she said of the doctor who told her, “[He was] so handsome that I think that is what raised my pressure”—and tried both meditation and biofeedback to lower it.3 She fielded phone calls from old friends with serious illnesses and weighed those against the story of a newer friend, Lavina Calvin, whom she came to know on her now-annual January trips to Zihuatanejo. Lavina and her husband, Henry, were both in their seventies. Alice admired Lavina, who was a survivor of pancreatic cancer, for her determination, intelligence, and taut beauty. The couple’s company, Henry Calvin Fabrics in Jackson Square, imported Belgian linen and other fine upholstery and drapery materials that formed the basis of Bob’s decorating style.I

  Adams celebrated the Calvins in stories. They can be traced in Carlotta and Travis Farquhar in the Zihuatanejo stories “At the Beach” and “The Haunted Beach.” The portrait that most conveys Adams’s admiration for this couple, and for Lavina in particular, is “The Girl Across the Room.” Here Lavina is Yvonne Soulas, a cancer survivor whose strength Adams attributes to her husband’s need of her: “She saw Matthew, so gaunt and stricken that she knew she had to live. It was that simple: dying was something she could not do to Matthew.” That’s the heart of a story that is enveloped by another episode in which Yvonne holds her husband in their marriage when he has fallen in love with a younger woman: (“Je tiens à Matthew,” she thinks in her native French. “Tenir à. I hold to Matthew…”). She does this by treating Matthew “like someone with a serious disease… as though his illness were something that she didn’t want to catch.”

  Alice and Bob liked both Calvins very much and the feeling was reciprocated. When Lavina read of herself in Adams’s stories, it seemed to Alice that Lavina “became the person I had somewhat invented.” The example of Lavina’s quiet strength in her relationship with her husband, an artistically inclined entrepreneur like Bob McNie, may have given Alice hope for a similar rebalancing of power in her second decade of living with Bob. “With Carlotta and Travis Farquhar,” Adams wrote in “The Haunted Beach,” “Charles [a stand-in for Bob] tamed down, drank less, and shouted not at all; he was, in fact, his best, most imaginative, entertaining, generous, and sensitive self.”

  * * *

  Adams had her next novel, Listening to Billie, under way before Families and Survivors came out, and excerpts from it appeared in magazines before Adams submitted the whole manuscript to Victoria Wilson. If her previous novel was “social history,” this one, Adams said, was “mostly about writing.”4 When she finished it early in 1976, feeling that it had been “horrible to write for some dark reason,” she asked friends to read the manuscript before sending it to Nesbit and Wilson.5 Knopf advanced her $10,000 this time, double what she received for Families and Survivors. Nonetheless, the editing process proved arduous. Wilson’s first reading proposed difficult changes in the tone, structure, style, and focus of the book. “I have a hunch this isn’t the book you want to write,” she asserted. “I think you want to be inside of your characters so that we see each of these women as they see themselves…” Wilson felt that the book she wanted to read would sound more like the recently published “Roses, Rhododendron,” which she adored. She thought Adams had instead brought the faster pace and exterior perspectives that worked in Families and Survivors to a story that needed to be “slow and rich in detail.”6

  This was a critical moment in an editorial relationship, analogous to the third year of a marriage. In May, Adams welcomed Wilson’s detailed suggestions and spent the summer revising. In July, for instance, while working on chapter 6, she told Wilson, “[I] suddenly saw what you meant about re-writing from the inside out. That’s what I’m doing.” But after a phone call in September during which Wilson told her to cut her chapter about working in a medical office, Adams said, “[I felt] we were talking about different books. I didn’t want to write a mother-daughter book (I think you’re much more interested in that area than I am at this point)… What interested me about Eliza—and actually everyone else in the book—is WORK—and friends.” Wilson answered these objections with a long letter and annotations on the revised manuscript, insisting she did not want to change the novel’s “work” theme but that it had to be realized through the story of Eliza and her mother and half sister.7

  Adams’s outrage crested in the letter she wrote back: “All the time we were working on F&S, I had the most terrific feeling that… you understood what I was doing better than I did. Now I have exactly the opposite feeling, and I cannot tell you how unhappy, upset this has made me. I feel as though a horse had galloped over me… as though someone had wadded up my novel and thrown it back to me as a spitball… it now looks like one of my third grade spelling papers.” With that and more off her chest, Alice felt better: “I’ve often thought I needed assertiveness training, and this may be it.” She would think about the novel while in England for the next three weeks. She even ended this letter with a joke: “Just so there’ll be no confusion as to intent, from the start, my new novel is about circumcision fellatio and communism.”8

  The specifics of this editorial debate show two women intensely committed to their own positions. Wilson contended that Eliza could not be just a poet, she needed also to be an essayist “a la Diane Johnson.” Adams protested, “Eliza is a poet, that is what this book is about. Diane is one of the most brilliantly rational, sanest people I know, not given to flukey intuitions. She would never write poetry, Eliza would never write essays.” Then she added a sarcastic proposal: “(Oh well, what the hell, let’s make her a ceramicist—something I really know about).”II Wilson’s criticism of Eliza’s vocation had merit. Eliza is unconvincing as a poet, probably because the reader is told about her poems but never given one to read, or because most readers know that poetry is not a way to earn a living. (As poet Howard Nemerov observed, poets are sometimes paid to talk about poetry but rarely to write it.) But for Adams, the point was not arguable. In the published novel Eliza is a poet.

  Adams also accused Wilson of “trying to impose a very linear structure on a rather discursive book” and noted that feminist theorists “call a linear structure ‘phallic’ ”—referring, probably, to the metaphor of the pen as a penis. Language, in this formulation adopted from French feminist critics, represents patriarchal law, while imagination represents chaotic bodily instincts. Virginia Woolf’s novels, for instance, were nonlinear in their attempt to portray female protagonists such as Clarissa Dalloway in Mrs. Dalloway and Mrs. Ramsey in To the Lighthouse. As a poetic protagonist, Eliza asserts her history as a female body. Her story begins in pregnancy, followed by marriage to a gay man who commits suicide, years of raising her daughter alone, affairs with men who prove unsatisfactory or unattainable, and satisfying moments such as the Grandmother Dance she performs for herself alone. We can only assume that Eliza’s poems are—as Adrienne Rich writes in “When We Dead Awaken”—“like dreams: in them you put what you don’t know you know.”

  Alice’s assertive letter stunned Wilson. An edited draft of her reply, preserved in Knopf’s editorial files at the Harry Ransom Center, reads: “In the end you must write the book as you see it and if my changes or suggestions are helpful then so much th
e better.”9

  Adams reconsidered: “What upset me most was my feeling that if brilliant terrific Vicky thinks this book is so terrible as to need so much change—obviously she is right.… I have what I’m afraid is called a deficient ego.” She apologized if she’d agreed to suggestions by phone that she later chose not to make. “I do not react well on my feet,” she explained. “PLEASE do call, I love it—but just don’t expect intelligent response to serious questions.”

  After consulting with Lynn Nesbit and Diane Johnson, walking, thinking, and rereading “the bloody ms. AGAIN,” Alice agreed to rework it, though she actually made few concessions, saying, “In general, I agree with where you have fingered something being wrong but less often with your solutions.” What Adams needed—and received—was time to see it anew.