Alice Adams
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Wilson had converted much of the novel from present to past tense, and Adams let that stand except in chapters about Eliza’s half sister, Daria. Wilson noticed that Eliza’s character was cued off of her mother’s and urged Adams to offer more details about the mother, Josephine, who is a biographer. “When I contemplate the work of a biography,” Adams inserted, “hours in libraries and museums (my cold feet in the British Museum, pneumonia in Yorkshire: Charlotte Brontë), the correspondence with uncooperative sources—when I think of all that, poetry seems an almost silly exercise, a childish toying with words.” We can sense Alice’s own mother, the librarian and biographer, as the ideal reader of that empathetic detail.
In the end, Alice revised quickly, despite days out for jury duty during which she realized she missed public contact (“the sheer solitude of writing often gets to me”) and convinced her fellow jurors to award money to a black person injured on a bus. The day after Christmas, as Alice was packing for Zihuatanejo, she heard from Wilson: “You have now put in what you had written to me you wanted the book to be more of—more of a sense of her work life, those friendships, those people who allow you to move and agree to follow you through and those who just can’t. The book is exciting now, and in its own way daring.”10
Listening to Billie was a successful compromise, a collaboration. The “Office Work” chapter, which Adams insisted was the heart of her novel, remained. She had declined to change the ending of the chapter in which Eliza seduces the heart surgeon who is her boss; he is unable to get an erection and fires Eliza when she refuses to give him a second chance. It was and still is a bold scene—written long before the topic of sexual harassment in the workplace became daily news. Adams stood her ground about the character of Miriam, who is based on her friend Sheliah Wilbert. Wilson objected that Miriam was “an old time darky” who wants to be white and not a believable black character in the civil rights era. To senior editor Robert Gottlieb, Wilson confided that Adams was “loaded with pre–Civil War Southern care” and found it “rather amazing how unconscious Alice is about all the attitudes that she still seems to have toward blacks and Jews.”11 At one point Adams promised Wilson she would give Miriam a good job in the novel, but in the final revision she left Miriam as she had written her. She believed that lack of money and self-confidence (due to her racist surroundings) endangered Sheliah. She refused to turn her into a liberal success story.
In the end, Alice dedicated Listening to Billie “to Victoria Wilson with love.” Wilson visited San Francisco in January 1977 and “all went well.” Wilson “is one of those 30-year-old geniuses,” she told interviewer Wayne Warga. “I don’t like editing and we’ve had some rough times, but we’ve worked it through. I feel somehow she’s rescued me and stayed by me.”12 Privately—to Lucie Jessner—Alice explained, “There is a certain problem with her youth (27); and personality type—she finds giving affection and praise extremely difficult, whereas I am really the opposite, terrible trouble with even legitimate anger.”13
The correspondence between Adams and Wilson provides a remarkable record of arduous, fruitful editorial work. Wilson’s accomplishment becomes more impressive if compared with the method used by her colleague Gordon Lish, who moved to Knopf in 1977 and, like Wilson, worked under Robert Gottlieb. Both editors had firm visions of the books they wanted their authors to produce but Wilson explained why she wanted changes whereas Lish made his changes in ink, directly on manuscripts. Still, it’s interesting that both Adams and the author of the first book Lish edited, Raymond Carver, viewed themselves as spineless and even suppliant in relation to their editors. But Adams, unlike Carver, acknowledged her fears of having her book reshaped to friends (Max Steele, Diane Johnson, and Lucie Jessner) before speaking with her editor, thus preparing to stand her ground.14
* * *
Listening to Billie is also Adams’s meditation on—and rejection of—suicide. As Cara Chell writes, “Adams underscores the question of Eliza’s own survival, not the survival of her personality within a family group (as with Louisa and Kate), but her own fight against depression and suicide.”15 Three men commit suicide in the novel: Eliza’s father, Caleb Hamilton; her husband, Evan Quarles; and her lover, Reed Ashford, formerly a student of Evan’s whose beauty made Evan wonder if he was queer. After Reed’s suicide, the sorrow and despair once felt by those men “poured through [Eliza’s] veins like some dark dye, staining her blood and thickening in her heart. Their blind deathward surge became her own. Suicide had caught up with her. Death. Impossible to work. What she felt was all black and destructive. It was not grief for Reed that she felt; it was sheer fear of death, her own private terror of suicide.”
In the end, it’s work, the work of poetry—as Adams insisted—that unifies the novel. Eliza, who has been unhappy in all her relationships, finds joy in vacations with Harry, a filmmaker who is as devoted to his work as she is to hers. As the novel ends, they are both eager to get home and back to work: “For a moment against those thoughts she closed her eyes, and in the dark space behind her vision she saw, or suddenly felt, an urgency of words, a kaleidoscope that stopped to form a pattern. Words, her own work. But stronger, somehow enlarged.”
During the fall of 1977, while Listening to Billie was in production, Alice and Bob spent a few days in New York before flying on for a vacation in Paris and the Dordogne. “I plan finally to brave New York after too many cowardly California years,” Alice confided to her New Yorker editor, Frances Kiernan.16 Sally Arteseros, a Doubleday editor who worked with Billy Abrahams on the O. Henry Prize volumes, hosted a luncheon at La Petite Marmite to introduce Alice to Kiernan, and to Anne Mollegen Smith, the fiction editor at Redbook who’d edited Alice’s stories in that magazine.III “Bob was handsome and charming and seemed to enjoy being the sole man among four women, three of whom he’d just met,” Kiernan recalled. After lunch Alice and Fran walked to the New Yorker’s offices. “My office was across from that of Senior Fiction Editor Roger Angell’s, and I am pretty sure I introduced Alice to Roger, who admired her story ‘The Girl Across the Room’ that the magazine published that very week.”
Kiernan then invited Alice and Bob to spend the coming Sunday with her and her husband, orthopedic surgeon Howard Kiernan. Bob and Alice spent an afternoon with the Kiernans at their rented cottage in Sneden’s Landing overlooking the Hudson River. After the Kiernans drove Alice and Bob back to the Westbury Hotel on East Sixty-Ninth, they had nightcaps at the hotel’s Polo Lounge. The Kiernans’ Himalayan cat, Selima, came too, conveyed in a “very smart looking wicker cage,” thus providing the two cat-loving couples with an anecdotal beginning for their friendship. Both Kiernans liked Alice, but Bob made Fran feel uneasy—“a bit too self-consciously masculine for my taste,” she said. Later in the same season when Howard attended a medical convention in San Francisco, Fran came to Alice’s house for her monthly “lady writers’ lunch” and met Diane Johnson and the others.
With a sweep of white-streaked wavy hair, bright blue eyes, and a lively expression, Kiernan was a generation younger than Alice. She was half-Jewish and considered herself “half-Southern” because she’d spent summers of her youth in her mother’s hometown, Leitchfield, Kentucky, but came of age in New York City. After starting at the New Yorker as a receptionist, Kiernan became secretary to fiction editors William Maxwell and Roger Angell, and eventually a fiction editor herself. She edited, among others, Cynthia Ozick, Peter Taylor, Edna O’Brien, Lore Segal, and Shirley Hazzard. Kiernan’s background helped her understand Alice, whom she thought “quintessentially Southern. Indirect. Very complicated. Much stronger than she might appear to be at times.”
Frances Kiernan
* * *
Listening to Billie, published in January 1978, enlarged Adams’s reputation. The redoubtable John Leonard of the New York Times praised it as “a little engine that could. It pulls its freight cars—full of people and calamities and disappointments and imponderables—up to the top of the hill, where there�
�s some fresh air,” and noted that Eliza “thinks her way into a new life.” Anne Tyler wrote about the novel twice, once in the Detroit News to discuss how “mothers hang over their daughters” and how Adams reveals that “both fragile and unbreakable” relationship, and later in Quest/78 to praise Adams’s arrangement of “brief and apparently random moments” to create “real life” in the form of “magnificent” characters like Miriam and Eliza herself. Another writer whose career was just beginning, Lynne Sharon Schwartz, wrote in the San Francisco Review of Books, “It is difficult today to pull off a ‘happy’ ending… Adams succeeds for two reasons… she is not afraid of exploiting the quotidian and seemingly banal [and] she spares us none of the intermediate states of Eliza’s indecision, false moves, and failures.”17
Alice herself especially liked her friend Grover Sales’s review in the Los Angeles Times: he called her the “Boswell of our neurotic intelligentsia” and praised her “delicious humor and gift for self-mockery.” But she probably also liked—loved?—Max Steele’s review in the Charlotte Observer; he compared her book’s kaleidoscopic structure to drawings by young children with no horizon line: “the horizon (in fiction, time is the horizon) of before and after is often dim, sometimes lost… the bright design that charms and states the message: all time is now, all love is this love.”18
A review by Barbara Grizzuti Harrison in Gloria Steinem’s Ms. magazine reinforced Alice’s emerging feminism. Harrison argues that women like Eliza Quarles survive because “Adams believes that people who feel in their souls primarily the suffering of others choose bravely to live” while those who are “infatuated with their own suffering” embrace death. Women are the strong survivors in this novel. Harrison found Listening to Billie “disturbing and energizing” as she was “jolted by recognition” again and again. “Recognition” was a buzzword in second-wave feminism, a name for the “click” moments when puzzling indignities revealed themselves as political effects of patriarchal, sexist systems. As if to confirm Adams’s place in the new feminist discourse, the review was sandwiched between one about Frida Kahlo (with Kahlo’s art reproduced) and one of a book called Menopause: A Positive Approach reviewed by activist and short-story writer Grace Paley.19
All in all, the number and variety of reviews gave Adams courage. Some praised aspects of the novel that Wilson had wanted to cut. Almost all recognized a serious literary artist with a unique voice and way of telling a story. To poet Helen Chasin, writing in the Village Voice, Eliza Quarles is a rare, admirable thing—a poet who “is by no means the ambitious, driven, isolated, disturbing genius that Plath was… laid-back and steady are her way of making the distance.”
Chasin might have said that of Alice Adams herself. From now on Alice would be steadfast in her own intuitions. The book Wilson produced, with Richard Diebenkorn’s painting Woman with Hat and Gloves on the jacket, gave the novel the polish it deserved.IV It was selected as an alternate by the Book of the Month Club and issued by Pocket Books as a mass-market paperback. Soon thereafter a reissued paperback of Careless Love sold thirty thousand copies. The Guggenheim Foundation, which had turned Adams down before, gave her a fellowship. And the New Yorker offered Adams a “first-look” contract, which paid her a small fee to submit her stories there before they went to other magazines.
And then there was the People profile. A two-page spread celebrated the sophisticated author of Listening to Billie with no shortage of biographical drama. Here Adams confides her affair with “a married, Catholic, Fascist diplomat” during her thirties when she was “having love affairs to make up for lost time and writing as a sort of sideline.” She talks about her divorce—“very much not the thing to do in the early 1950s”—and her “long-term illicit affair” with Robert McNie, who’s photographed kissing Alice as he leaves for work toting a classy leather briefcase. Alice told People of their first meeting, “We hated each other from the start. I don’t like good-looking men. It’s a common prejudice—one thinks they are going to be extremely dumb. You can imagine how he felt about lady writers. His intelligence has been a sheer joy.”20
Having revealed all that, Adams also explains, ironically, that she and McNie have not married because they “are rather private people who feel our relationship is not the business of the state.” After the People crew departed, Adams worried that the article would be “tackier than tacky.”21 In the event Alice regretted only that “you can’t see the gorgeous face of Robert.”22 For Bob, publicity as a good-looking, intelligent interior designer was icing on the cake of Alice’s success.
Alice looked great herself in these profiles, attired in the clothes Bob had helped her choose. From Paris, which had been so poor and crippled by shortages when she lived there thirty years before, she wrote to Frances Kiernan, “Paris is cool & terrific—prosperous looking, great clothes all over.” In San Francisco she patronized shops where the salespeople knew her and bought good things in fine fabrics; she wore cowl-necked sweaters and dramatic scarves and bold necklaces. The classic styles of the 1978 fall season especially appealed to her and she went to great lengths to order a particular red Ralph Lauren blazer.
* * *
Periodical editors often asked Adams to write reviews, and Wilson sent her books she was publishing. Writing about one of these for Harper’s, Adams found Lisa Alther’s Kinflicks “continuously funny” and went on to say more about women’s fiction. She confesses that she used to read The Golden Notebook during unhappy love affairs and Jane Austen during depressions. But Adams and many women of her generation wanted to compete in the wider, supposedly ungendered but mostly male literary world. She objects to the “silly form of put-down” implied by the term “women’s novel” because “surely literary preferences are not sexually determined.” She thinks Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying (the celebrated novel about the “zipless fuck”) “boring and unconvincing,” its heroine, Isadora Wing, an unrealistic “super-stud.”
Adams much preferred “the humaneness” of Alther’s approach to sex, including the portrayal of Ginny Babcock’s discovery of sexual satisfaction in a relationship with a woman: “This is no more a ‘lesbian novel’ than it is a ‘woman’s novel,’ ” Adams insists. Alther’s true and winning message about sex is “we’re all in trouble… and no prizes are given out, no blame attached… when it comes to sex we’re all amateurs.”23
When Adams saw proofs of The Easter Parade by Richard Yates at Billy Abrahams’s, she thought, “If I love it I’ll ask to review it, and then maybe I’ll hear from terrific Richard Yates.” Adams considered Yates’s Revolutionary Road one of the best novels she’d ever read. She also knew, as Richard Ford later wrote, that invoking that novel “enacts a sort of cultural-literary handshake among its devotees.”24 Adams wanted Yates to know she was a devotee and hoped he would read and admire her fiction. In her review for the Sunday paper, Adams promoted her belief—or hope?—that literary skill is gender-neutral: Yates’s “insight into these three women is so powerful and so sympathetic that too much could be made (and probably will be) of the fact that he is a man, writing about women. More to the point is his being a first-rate writer sensitive to women, and to men—and to the many particulars of life in the Thirties and the early Seventies.”
Yates was pleased: “Of all the reviews I’ve seen so far, yours is the one I’d most like to have reproduced in some pocket-sized, laminated-plastic format, like a credit card, for use in helping me out of scrapes with frowning authorities,” he told her. “You seem to have understood the book better than anyone, which leads me to believe that you must be very nice.” He hoped they could meet for a drink when he was next in San Francisco.
The ensuing correspondence was deliciously flirtatious. Alice reminded Yates that they’d met ten years earlier at Max Steele’s house just as Careless Love was coming out. Yates remembered “about eight lovely girls there” but allowed that he’d been drunk and did not recall that one of them was novelist Alice Adams. “My loss as usual,” he said. H
e would get Adams’s novels from the library so that, he promised, “In my very next letter I’ll be able to tell you what a wonderful writer you are. In the meantime, it’s abundantly clear that you are the nicest, kindest girl on the whole West Coast. Oh, Alice Adams, please take care of yourself, and eat your vegetables and brush your hair a hundred strokes a night, and stay away from terrible guys of all kinds.”
Not to be outdone in charm, Alice replied, “I think it’s wonderful that you remember me as eight lovely girls.” Then she told Yates about the dueling stories she and Max were publishing in Redbook, virtually announcing that they’d been lovers, and described the gorgeous Mexican beach town where she was headed for winter vacation—without mentioning that she’d be going there with Bob McNie. “You’re absolutely right—I should always have stayed away from terrible guys; but then what would I write about? Or what would I do at night after I’ve finished brushing my hair.”25
Good as his word, Yates telephoned Alice before he came west in March 1977. By then she’d heard more about him. He “does sound creepy,” she wrote Victoria Wilson.26 Worse, on the phone, he said that he could never understand why Billie Holiday “distorts music the way she does with that whining voice.” Even though Yates offered to extend his trip to accommodate Alice’s schedule, she demurred and they never had that drink. That was probably just as well. “Yates didn’t think women were cut out to be serious artists,” his biographer Blake Bailey writes, “since such a difficult business interfered with their main function as caregivers—in short, as the persons who support serious artists… he regarded a handful of female writers as first-rate—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Alice Munro, Gina Berriault, perhaps one or two others…”V27