* * *
Opinionated Adams pulled no punches when she reviewed books she didn’t like. In fact, she sometimes sought those books out. She reviewed The Widow’s Children by Paula Fox because her old friend Irving Howe gave it advance praise: “One of the best novels written in America these past twenty or thirty years,” he said. Adams countered that it was so “incomparably unpleasant” and that she could think of “no other novel that had left [her] so bored, uneasy and irritated.” Her long review for the weekly Bay Guardian is thorough—she’s found another novel by Fox, The Western Coast, that better meets her standards. It’s hard to decide, finally, if Adams is more disturbed by Fox’s fiction or by Howe’s praise.
Adams also worked a slow takedown of C. D. B. Bryan’s Beautiful Women, Ugly Scenes; regarding the narrator’s description of a desirable woman who has nipples like the “noses of small puppies,” Adams wonders “if a couple of nice live puppies might have done him just as well. He is a very confused little boy, and this is a very confused, long book.”28
More to Adams’s liking was Slow Days, Fast Company: The World, the Flesh, and LA by Eve Babitz, who’d become known for posing nude while playing chess with Marcel Duchamp, being Igor Stravinsky’s goddaughter, and sleeping with Jim Morrison, Paul Ruscha, Stephen Stills, and Harrison Ford, among others. Now Babitz was a writer published by Victoria Wilson. Adams compares Babitz to two male-fantasy characters, Sally Bowles (Isherwood’s Cabaret) and Holly Golightly (Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s). Unlike them, “Babitz is very real indeed—real and infinitely more alive than Didion’s trendily alienated heroines.” Adams quotes Babitz: “I had a collection of lovers to keep me warm and my friendships with women, who always fascinated me by their wit, bravery and resourcefulness… I had a third collection of associates who were men but not lovers.” Adams understood—perhaps envied—the ease with which Babitz sorted her people. Babitz thanked Adams for the review in long, bubbly letters full of funny innuendos: “Erica [Spellman, Eve’s agent] says you are the living end in wonderfulness and even Vicky [Wilson] says so and she never says anything like that, as you may know.” Babitz says she’s in the sky now with everything going so well for her: “The only fly in the sky is my horrible past when I used to be a piece of ass (or piece of Cheese as Linda Ronstadt so darlingly put it for Time’s cover story interview).”29
Adams understood that worry all too well as she superseded her past as a “bachelorette” in San Francisco. “She would say rather harsh things about certain men,” Diane Johnson remembered. “Or she would say, oh, no, I can’t go to that because what would I wear and [X] would be there with his beautiful wife. She went out with a lot of people in that phase before I knew her.”
When Johnson’s Lying Low came out, Adams gave it “a rather simple-minded rave” in the Chicago Sun-Times because she was “truly and absolutely crazy about the book.” She admired Johnson’s whole motley set of dignified, quirky, complex characters who live in a Victorian boardinghouse in a California college town. One of them, political fugitive Marybeth, represents a last gasp of sixties political fervor as the seventies unwind into random violence. Adams particularly endorsed this statement by Theo, the aging ballet dancer who owns the house: “Men are generally more law-abiding than women. Women have a feeling that since they didn’t make the rules, the rules have nothing to do with them. I have this feeling myself. Men, on the other hand, care about rules and forms.”30
There’s a critical analysis of Adams’s poetics of fiction and her evolving professional demeanor waiting to be written out of the forty-eight book reviews she published between 1976 and 1984. Mostly she wrote for Chicago and Bay Area papers—often, in those pre-Internet days, the same review in two papers. She exhibits fierce and justified loyalty to friends who are good writers: Ella Leffland, Evan S. Connell, Laurie Colwin, Alison Lurie, Mark Schorer, John L’Heureux, and Carolyn See. Upon reading a negative review of one of See’s novels, Alice immediately called her friend long-distance to “issue a stunning string of curses about the other reviewer.” Adams also felt curiosity and enthusiasm for younger writers like Bobbie Ann Mason who brought news of people and places, especially “mid-new Southerners” not heard from before, and strong sympathy for non-trendy literary writers like Lynne Sharon Schwartz, who “spells out rather than signals her effects” in novels of “old-fashioned density.”
The war between the sexes doesn’t dictate Adams’s opinions. Reviewing a second novel by Marilyn French, whose The Women’s Room was a bestseller, Adams writes, “French is simply too angry to write well or to think clearly… her politics are superior to her fiction.” Her characters fail to “enact rather than talk about the troubles between men and women, as well as the troubles between men-and-women and the world.” When other reviewers came down hard on Berkeley short-story writer Leonard Michaels for his comedic novel The Men’s Club, Adams defended it as “a small masterpiece” that says, “unforgettably, new things about how men and women do and do not get along with each other.” In the club of the title, the men share “stories of male bafflement and failure, of frustrated needs for love,” while also drinking, smoking, breaking things, getting into fights, and eating all the food that the host’s wife had prepared for her women’s group meeting the next day. Alice maintained a friendship with Michaels for years to come.31
Through her heartfelt, demanding reviews Alice met on paper authors she eventually came to know, including Scott Spencer (another of Wilson’s authors), Alice Walker, Joyce Carol Oates, and Margaret Atwood. After Adams reviewed Spencer’s Endless Love, he wrote her, “You are the perfect reader. Truly, had I been able to imagine your reading my novel with such sympathy and perception, I would have been able to write a better book.… [L]ack of a full and interesting critical response is, I think, the loneliest part of writing fiction.” Alice offered her bound galleys of Spencer’s novel to Max Steele with a note that Endless Love made her “more envious than any book since [Styron’s] Lie Down in Darkness.32
I. Adams virtually advertises the shop in Rich Rewards: “The Henry Calvin building, then, contained more beautiful linen samples than I could have imagined… Even the company’s nice brick building had an old-world quality of excellence, of care.”
II. “I had become so bored about pretending to write about a painter when I really know nothing about painting and a great deal about writing,” Adams said in 1980. “I see an affinity between poetry and the short story and thought I could cope with Eliza’s writing poetry.” (Interview with Neil Feineman.)
III. At a San Francisco party Alice learned that Vasco Pereira had become Portugal’s permanent representative to the United Nations: “Can you believe it? That effing swindler—I thought he would be in jail, rotting with other fascists. With my luck I’ll probably run into him in NY.” (Alice Adams to Judith Clark Adams, September 8, 1977.) It cannot have been lost on Alice that La Petite Marmite, called “the kind of place that gives New York its culinary ballast in these trendy and turbulent times” by the New York Times, was a favorite rendezvous of the United Nations community.
IV. Alice shopped for a blue silk suit to go with the rich blues of the cover.
V. It doesn’t seem that Yates ever wrote to Adams about her books. Despite that, she called his next book, Liars in Love, “first-rate stories, by a superior writer.” (Alice Adams, “Seven Brilliant and Grim Tales,” San Francisco Chronicle, November 8, 1981.)
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Beautiful Girl
— (1979) —
Sometimes a male reviewer will choose to review what he takes to be the moral character of the woman writer as evinced by the sexual behavior of her heroines.… What I’m saying is that conversely that doesn’t happen to men. You don’t hear men writers being criticized for sleeping around or leaving women.
—Alice Adams, interview with Don Swaim
For decades Adams had wanted to publish a collection of her short stories. After writing almost a hundred stories, publishing a handful
in the New Yorker and dozens elsewhere, and winning eight O. Henry Awards and several mentions in Best American Short Stories, her goal was in sight. She and Wilson began putting the collection together while Listening to Billie was in production. About half of the sixteen stories they chose are Southern, the rest Californian. Each story was reedited to catch repetitions of phrases from story to story. Wilson suggested grouping the Todd family stories at the beginning of the book, and Alice lobbied to include the not-previously-published “What Should I Have Done?” (printed by Playgirl before the book came out), “Attrition,” and “A Pale and Perfectly Oval Moon.” The advance was a mere $3,500, “the stingiest advance I ever heard of,” Alice told Lynn Nesbit. Alice loved the short-story form and didn’t seem to be aware of the publishing commonplace that story collections don’t sell. Even though the late seventies and eighties would sometimes be called a short-story renaissance, few authors saw large advances for their collections. Ann Beattie, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff, and Donald Barthelme earned a living by teaching or writing novels.
Alice took Wilson’s suggestion to make “Beautiful Girl” her title story, despite the fact that she no longer associated with the woman who’d inspired it. The elegant sienna and beige cover of Beautiful Girl signaled the importance of this volume while Henry Fong’s dreamy portrait of Adams in a cowl-necked sweater caught her arch intelligence and wide-eyed, full-lipped beauty. “One reason I’ve always wanted to publish a book of short stories,” Adams confided to Ann Cornelisen, “is that I want to dedicate it to Billy (this is a secret).”1 The dedication of Beautiful Girl read, “For William Abrahams and Peter Stansky.”
* * *
Alice spent the first two weeks of 1979 with Bob in Zihuatanejo, intentionally being out of the country on the publication day of Beautiful Girl. Before they left, she already knew that Newsweek (“as stirring as the best work of [Katherine] Mansfield”) and Vogue (“a heroine among today’s women writers: personal, but never self-absorbed”) had given the book thumbs-up.
The rest could wait while she and Bob celebrated the Calvins’ forty-ninth anniversary, swam, sunned, lounged, drank, ate garlicky seafood at beachside grills, and enjoyed each other. Alice’s friend Edwina Evers (later Leggett) noticed, “Bob wasn’t up to Alice intellectually at all, but I think it was a very sexy relationship. When they’d come back from Mexico every winter they just looked besotted with sex—just beautifully calm together.” That aspect was marred on the 1979 trip, at least for Alice, by a bachelor friend—Alice assumed he was gay—who kept close company with Bob and her at the resort. He was architect Dmitri Vedensky, who had worked with Bob on projects at Sea Ranch and in the city. “I know you would not allow yourself to be bored for so long,” she told Jessner, “and yet you would never be as rude [to him] as I really wanted to be.”2 Shortly after their return, Alice sent Vedensky a note of non-apology for being cross with him: Bob and I “give an impression of being much more gregarious than in fact we are,” she wrote. “We have enormous needs for privacy, for simply being alone—which was one of the initial reasons we went to Mexico. Having the same needs, the Calvins work out perfectly.” She told Vedensky she hoped he would never again make Zihuatanejo reservations for weeks she and Bob would be there.3
The airline lost Alice’s suitcase on the way home. That small incident prompted “Lost Luggage,” a first-person account by a recent widow whose circumstances differ in almost every detail from Alice’s own. Yet the story conveys Alice’s newly felt optimism and independence: “I knew myself to be a strong woman: surely I could turn my life around?” the widow thinks as she ponders her lack of income and the loss of the notebook she kept after her husband died. “I was not really dependent on a middle-class support system, on certain styles of dress and entertaining, on ‘safe’ neighborhoods. I could even, I imagined, find a big house to share with some other working women… Such prospects excited and to a degree sustained me.” In a new, smaller notebook, this widow chooses not to re-create the memories of her late husband but instead to move “farther back, much farther, to some childhood colors” and says, “I finished that notebook and I bought another small one, and probably I will keep on buying them. And, without really noticing it as something remarkable, I began to feel a great deal better.” It was writing, she realized, the act of writing and not the work thus created, that made her happy.
Mexicana Airlines did eventually find and return Alice’s suitcase and notebook. By then a suntanned Alice was enjoying the reviews of Beautiful Girl.4
Those reviews praised Adams’s stories for their delicacy, wit, grace, style; a few noted serious themes such as the “mutual loneliness” created by racism, the “mysteries of little girlhood.” Laurie Stone, writing in the Village Voice, pointed out that for Adams “beauty—or the lack of it—is a fundamental matter” that shapes character, often in unpredictable ways. While Stone complained that Adams’s narrators “tend to get sappy” with nostalgia and romance, Susan Wood in the Washington Post noticed that Adams more than any other recent writer extended F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Romantic idealism of the self: “Although the times may not call for characters on the scale of a Jay Gatsby or a Dick Diver, the search for love, for the self in others, goes on, and the characters in Beautiful Girl have not given up the search.” Wood also noted that Adams had “a fine satiric eye softened by a tenderness toward human desire and frailty.”5
* * *
Nothing better illustrates the intricate dance of Romanticism and satire in Adams’s life than her friendship with Max Steele. To friends she criticized him—“I do wish he could get back to writing, and stop taking care of so many people”—and to his face she urged him, “Shove other things and people aside, JUST WRITE.” She knew he was depressed and consumed with teaching, mentoring, and his uneasy marriage. Her letters asked him to visit her and hinted that her recently divorced friend Edwina Evers was looking fantastic, would be glad to see him, and had a fine house that he’d like. Deflecting, Max replied that he loved “leafing through the New Yorker and being startled by [Alice’s] picture looking out from the ad.”6
In the spring of 1978 Steele wrote Alice that his wife, Diana, “is better looking at 43 than she’s ever been in her life: dark hair in a rather Gibson girl hairdo, very thin, much more relaxed. I just wish I liked her.” Alice told Jessner, “I honestly don’t think that marriage has been at all good for him—in fact very likely none would have, don’t you think? His expectations of marriage are so—quaint, really—and then he is drawn to such neurotic women.” Jessner agreed. Then Alice elaborated: “Most people are unsuited [for marriage], just as certainly most people should not have children, and I think I would put myself in both groups. Especially marriage as we have all been brought up to regard it, the total solution.”7
By June the Steeles were legally separated. Max didn’t tell Alice until August and then he expended most of his words to defend their living arrangement: “Chapel Hill real estate is worse in price than S.F. and the only way we can maintain our standards of living (and it is a beautiful house) is to divide it into 2 condominiums.” Their two sons’ rooms would be in the middle. This split-house arrangement disturbed Alice: “I would think separation more important than an expensive life style,” she told Lucie. But Max was sure it would work. “I feel 20 years younger,” he wrote. On the phone, Alice and Max discussed their “shared slowness to catch on” that it was time to leave a relationship:
ALICE: What if we had gotten married that marvelous summer?
MAX: We would probably still be married.
ALICE: Oh, darling Max, don’t be depressing. You know I can’t bear it when you’re depressed.
Adams said that she could not remember who’d said which line. The main thing was that they “had the great good sense to stay close friends.”8
The Steeles divorced after two more years. Writing Alice, Max compared his emotional pain to having “your foot or arm go so completely to sleep it feels missing, non-existent and t
hen hurts like hell before it begins tingling pleasantly and [becomes] bearable. I’m now to the tingling stage but hope I won’t fall in love like a fool.” Alice encouraged him to work on the novel he’d jokingly titled “I Married a Witch” and invited him to San Francisco: “We could have lunch and laugh all day.”9 In Chapel Hill, where he remained a beloved professor of writing at UNC, Max had daily “hours” at a café where students and friends stopped by to talk with him, his son Oliver Steele recalled. He was close to his colleagues Doris Betts and Daphne Athas. Neither he nor Diana married again.
In reality, Alice saw Max infrequently. Though she remained committed to living unmarried with Bob, her letters indicate a flirtatious element in many of her friendships. Women noticed that Alice felt a certain claim on any man she’d ever loved no matter how many years had passed since the conquest. Was it possessiveness or simply intimacy turned to friendship? Perhaps both.
“Old beaux,” Alice told Lucie Jessner after her thrice-married eighty-year-old friend laughingly confessed to wondering what to wear when a man she’d once been in love with came to visit, are “something I have thought about a lot.” A couple of years earlier, Alice elaborated, she had read in a political column that a man she had been in love with in 1947 was now a leading Italian Communist, and admitted, “I have certainly had a lot of fantasies about him.” The man, of course, was Bruno Trentin, now the leader of the Italian General Confederation of Labor (CGIL) and member of the Italian parliament. “If you are in Rome,” she wrote Diane Johnson after seeing the column, “and see that name or the name of that union in a phone book—but then what would I do with it? When I knew him he was a fabulous boy.”10 This news of Trentin inspired the romantic plot of Adams’s next novel, Rich Rewards.
Alice Adams Page 41
