Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  The comic tone and unlikely coincidences Adams devised for this novel echo E. M. Forster’s Howards End—which also concerns itself with houses. Her first-person narrator, Daphne Matthiessen (named, we can speculate, for Adams’s Harvard professor, the late F. O. Matthiessen), is neither rich nor a homeowner. Her life so far has been defined by “a series of love affairs that were much more of an occupation than [her] work.” In this she embodies what Lee Upton labels “women’s sense of homelessness and cultural displacement.”4 This novel also celebrates, as Laurie Stone argues, “lust and fleshly joy.” Stone notes, “Adams’s women are every bit as curious and reverent as men are about anatomical wonders, just as delighted sometimes to place the whole person behind his parts… like men, they think about sex—remember it, want it, resist it—most of their waking and sleeping hours.”5 Rich Rewards begins when Daphne comes to the “spoiled and lovely city” of San Francisco because she is “running away from a bad love affair in Boston.” But Daphne is hard on herself. Like Bob McNie, she is a self-trained home decorator who likes to think about houses and how to make them suitable—and livable—for their occupants. Her old school friend Agatha Marshall has summoned her to San Francisco to renovate the house that she purchased with money inherited from her father, the General. Agatha is an unmarried, civic-minded San Francisco pediatrician who still lives in a messy downtown apartment furnished “like a disguise, and maybe that is just what she was doing, hiding herself there among all that blond Danish modern.”

  Introduced to Agatha’s friends, Daphne becomes a witness to violent events in the post-Vietnam, posthippie, post-Watergate city, where gay activist and city supervisor Harvey Milk and Mayor George Moscone were assassinated in their offices at city hall in November 1978 just days after the mass suicide in Guyana of nine hundred followers of local cult leader Jim Jones. She settles temporarily into Agatha’s house and begins to hate and become addicted to the “extreme localness” of the daily newspapers. From the Chronicle and Examiner she learned about random shootings and other crimes in a city that lived in fear of “Manhattanization,” though she “gathered that the term referred to high-rise buildings, not to murder.” Rich Rewards’ love plot develops when Daphne sees an old beau’s name in the Chronicle, just as Alice once saw Bruno Trentin’s there. Adams used Trentin as her model for Jean-Paul, a distinguished French socialist writer whom Daphne loved “permanently” when she was young in Paris. At the end of Rich Rewards she’s met him again and plans to move to Paris with him. To some reviewers this would seem a “tacked-on” happy ending. Laurie Stone located the problem not in Adams’s imagination but in “the myth it’s hooked into.” Jean-Pauls are “as false as the angel/whore myth of women” and “ideals of manly splendor are mucking up women’s minds, not to mention their books.”6 But Adams insisted, “If Daphne is redeemed in the end it is through ideas and politics, not love.”7

  Certainly Alice’s memories of Bruno Trentin were idealized, but Jean-Paul in Rich Rewards is less than perfect. Ella Leffland thought the ending “quiet, totally valid, & horrible”: horrible because the romantic lover of Daphne’s youth with whom she looks forward to living with “exhilaration and apprehension” is now ill with emphysema.8 What if, Daphne asks herself, they move into Jean-Paul’s tiny Parisian flat only to discover that “in a long-run day-to-day way, we just [don’t] get along too well?” Or what if, as Leffland implied, Daphne reunited with her old love only to mourn his death?

  Adams told a reviewer that she’d found Rich Rewards “easier to write than any of the others.”9 Richard Poirier, to whom she dedicated it along with Diane Johnson and John Murray, told her he thought the novel “at every point interesting, and that, as Henry James tells us, is first and last the essential thing… what is made interesting by your writing and your perfect sense of timing, are sights, sounds, odors that together constitute a nearly sacred combination for adults, an opening of the locks of feeling. You only seem to care more for your characters than for the things that surround them… It’s, at last, a book that makes me feel good about my age.”10

  “Adams forecast the Yuppie era” in Rich Rewards, Karen Evans wrote in a profile of Adams in 1987.11 Daphne is alarmed by consumerism, although her profession represents “a sort of epitome of crazy spending” because it is dependent on other people’s excess income. Unfairness and corruption in the economic and political systems also figure in Rich Rewards. Adams crafted the dark-money plot that organizes this novel from allegations of CIA schemes to assassinate foreign leaders first published in the New Yorker by Seymour Hersh and later investigated by Frank Church’s committee in the US Senate. In Adams’s novel, Agatha’s inheritance from her father, the General, turns out to be much larger than his military salary would explain. That and a suspicious car accident that befalls a woman who challenges the General’s will make Agatha fear that her father was “involved in the murder of Allende, in Chile, or involved in Korean bribery; having been an influence in the sale of arms to some big oil country.”

  Nor were Alice’s politics restricted to the pen. Proposals to build a nuclear power plant over an earthquake fault in Diablo Canyon near San Luis Obispo, California, had roused her to activism. She dressed in her best clothes to look like “a middle-aged straight lady” and had “a marvelous time” handing out leaflets to “rude businessmen” outside of the Pacific Gas & Electric headquarters. After that she promised “to stop being a closet radical and come out.”12 But when Peter and other friends planned to participate in the Abalone Alliance’s blockade of the plant site, she analyzed the pros and cons of participating—“For: virtue, notice; Against: shyness, time, discomfort sleeping out in bags”—and decided not to go.

  Alice talked about her political views in an interview with Sandy Boucher. “I’m an inactive socialist,” Adams told her. “I feel strongly about poverty, unemployment, women’s rights. I don’t think there should be nuclear plants or nuclear testing. I don’t even think most people need to drive cars.” She cited Friedrich Engels’s belief that “a writer’s function is to present an ideal society” to explain her effort to “create a sort of myth” in which some characters are idealized. Adams admired writers like Grace Paley and Barbara Deming who were more directly engaged but said, “What always stops me is that political activity usually begins in going to a meeting and meetings drive me to some sort of claustrophobic frenzy… but I’m very good at marches. I love marching.”13

  * * *

  Asked if she could separate “Alice Adams, the person, from Alice Adams the writer,” Alice told an interviewer, “Less and less. I am, I would say, extremely motivated.” She carried her confidence into the classroom when she agreed to teach a creative writing class as Diane Johnson’s sabbatical replacement at the University of California’s Davis campus in the spring of 1980. She had trepidations about facing a class but a salary and professional respect appealed to her. With her parents deceased, her son content in his own life, and her relationship with Bob going smoothly, Alice had liberated herself into work. During her sixth decade, in the conservative environment of the Reagan-era 1980s, Alice became more independent even as she continued to live with Bob McNie. When Rich Rewards came out, she asked Knopf to mail a book to Bruno Trentin. She heard nothing in return and “really didn’t expect to,” she told Cornelisen. “He must be a terribly dignified middle-aged Communist by now, not thinking a lot about youthful escapades.”14

  That escapade mattered less to Alice by then too. Nostalgia had served her artistic purpose, and perhaps a personal one as well. Adams’s dispossessed female characters, Upton argues, “turn to their memories as their most volatile, and promising, possessions. These women rechart their lives, actually returning—imaginatively and more often than not, physically—to past landscapes.” The function of such nostalgia is not a conventional escape but rather self-recovery, “a form of imaginative housekeeping” that serves their maturity.15 By reimagining Trentin in Rich Rewards as an aging intellectual with emph
ysema, Adams reaffirmed the choices of her own maturity.

  Adams was at work on a new, big novel she would call Superior Women. She hoped to make more money with it than she had with her previous books. As a result of her successful move into full-time authorship, the fiction she produced almost overshadows the biographical facts of her life in the early 1980s. Her writing days were simple. Most writers complain about chores that impede them in the morning, but Alice said those odds and ends helped her ease into the day. “I work every day for several hours in the morning, a stop for lunch, then I try to work all afternoon.” Her most productive hours often began at about two in the afternoon.16 She wrote first drafts in bold longhand that marched steadily across unlined pages with few corrections. Usually she typed these up herself, though she sometimes gave corrected typescripts to a typist to make fresh, final versions. Of course she made exceptions to that all-day schedule, but even on vacations she always worked on notes and first drafts, copyediting, or whatever she needed to do. She brought a portable typewriter when she and Bob went to the house in Truckee.

  * * *

  Alice said her January trip to Mexico in 1980 was the best ever, partly because she arrived sick, tired, and depressed about the Chapel Hill house and the death of Lucie Jessner. She felt “thousands of times better” when she and Bob woke in Zihuatanejo on the morning of the Calvins’ fiftieth anniversary, which they celebrated with champagne and a fireworks show on the beach arranged by Henry Calvin. The older couple, with whom they had “rather formal relations,” made Alice and Bob feel “extremely young.”17 In the spring, Adams wrote another admiring story about them and what she regarded as their very old age—“probably somewhere in their eighties.” In “At the Beach” they appear at the same hour every day “in trim dark bathing suits, over which they both wear white shirts… advancing on their ancient legs, they are as elegant as tropical birds—and a striking contrast to everyone else on the beach, many of whom wear bright colors.” Their nearness to death, Adams implies, makes them “seem highly conscious of each moment.”

  At the beach that year Alice met Doris Dörrie, a young German filmmaker who was traveling with her then-boyfriend, a dentist whose first name was Wulf. To Doris, Alice seemed like a free spirit: “I never would have struck a friendship with a woman of her age in Germany because they were far more conventional.” She admired Alice because she “seemed so completely independent and determined to write. Great discipline. Even on her holidays she’d sit in the shade and write.” On that trip, with Alice as her role model, Dörrie wrote a screenplay about a dentist that became her first feature film, Straight Through the Heart. When Doris and Wulf read in the local paper that a fifteen-year-old boy named EugenioI had been arrested for the murder of the wealthy owner of a coconut plantation, they decided to visit the boy in jail. Reports indicated that Eugenio had “witnessed the murder of his father by this rich owner, a reputed drunk,” Adams wrote. Accompanied by Wulf as their translator, Doris and Alice visited Eugenio in the town jail. Their idea was that two gringas taking an interest might improve the boy’s chance of receiving justice. Wulf introduced Alice as an American journalist and Doris as a German filmmaker, and thus they conveyed “a sense that… anything that happened to Ernesto was being watched, internationally.”18

  Eugenio, a thin, pale boy who had lost a lot of blood when the owner’s guards shot him, was sitting on the dirt floor with other prisoners. He asked for comic books. They visited several times, bringing candy and clothing as well as comics. Once a cousin of Eugenio’s, a law student, confronted them: “He was afraid we were spies for the man who had been killed. We learned from him that there was a contract out on the boy,” Alice recalled. Back at the hotel they took up a small collection from other guests to help Eugenio’s mother, “a small, dark, fearful looking woman” who came by bus from her village to visit her son. Before Alice and Doris left Mexico, they urged other tourists to visit Eugenio. “We all kept writing letters to the local jail after returning home,” Dörrie said. “Somehow we helped get him sent to a juvenile facility, and I know he graduated from school.” At one point Dörrie hoped to bring Eugenio to Germany or convince Alice and Bob to try to bring him to California.

  Adams wrote about this episode twice, as nonfiction in her travel memoir, Mexico, and as fiction in “Teresa,” included in her collection To See You Again. It is one of two stories from that collection that she was unable to sell to a magazine, ostensibly because it was too unlike her earlier work. With the tone of a legend or fairy tale (“At that time, in that small town, there was a young girl named Teresa, about sixteen”), it recounts the life of a woman from a village near Zihuatanejo. She marries Ernesto, who stepped forward to protect her when, as a fearful young girl, she was ogled by the predatory blond plantation owner, Señor Krupp. In an almost wordless marriage, Teresa raises a son and three daughters. Her husband and her son, who both work on Krupp’s plantation, are “dark and mysterious” and “distant.” After a friend of Ernesto’s is found murdered, Ernesto challenges Krupp about working conditions and is himself killed. Teresa’s son, Felipe, is allowed to assume the father’s job. Teresa finds “him increasingly disturbing, with his silences and angry eyes,” and pays less attention to him. Felipe acquires a gun and kills Señor Krupp on the first anniversary of Ernesto’s death.

  At this point “Teresa” intersects with Alice’s visit to the Zihuatanejo jail in January 1980, but she never brings herself or the Germans into the story:

  In the middle of that room, on the floor, sat a very old man with no legs, on a tattered blanket; he grinned and stared at Teresa in an evil way, so that she shuddered and held to the arm of [her cousin] Aurelia. And the room was so crowded with persons, mostly men, but also some young women, one of them holding a baby, that at first Teresa and Aurelia could not find Felipe. Also it was so dark, no windows at all and one single light bulb, very dim, that hung from the ceiling. They found him in a small room just off the main one. He had been sitting on the floor, but he got up as they came in—still really a boy, not very tall. He embraced his mother, who despite herself was crying, and then his cousin, who also wept.

  Adams’s dark tale again diverges from the known events. “A boy with no money, the son of a plantation worker, could not kill a rich and powerful man, and live,” she writes; eventually the authorities tell the grieving Teresa that Felipe has been killed in a prison fight. After that, Teresa, who “had withstood more than was possible for her,” suffers terrible grief until “in another part of her mind new words [began] to form, new ideas and sentences; she began to think, Now I have no more to fear; now everything has befallen me that possibly could, and for the rest of my days I am safe. I can go to sleep without fear, I could even walk among North Americans, fearing nothing.”

  The way Adams developed a story about a Mexican woman she met only once suggests the intensity of her interest in the existential elements of women’s lives. No longer tied by her husband or son to the unknowable world of men or to the traditions of plantation life, Teresa will move away from the “coconut palms that rattle so fiercely on windy nights” and live in a beach hut with her daughters, where she feels she will “grow old and be safe forever.”

  “Legends,” another short story Adams could not sell to a magazine during this time, also breaks the mold of her previous stories. It is “dense and ambitious and old-fashioned,” Victoria Wilson said. “If the New Yorker were really smart as a magazine and at all watchful of the people they publish,” she continued, “they would see that this story is particularly interesting just because it is so different from what you’ve written and that the richness of it—its old-fashionedness—makes it something important.” Novelist Alice Walker told Adams that these two unpublishables “contain knowledge that women are not supposed to write about,” and we can guess that Walker was talking about the loss of self that may silently occur as a consequence of devotion to a man.19 “Legends” in that way is more cerebral than “Teresa” bec
ause it adopts the point of view of Jane Phelps, whose relationship to a famous, deceased composer has become a romantic legend—a legend that Jane herself feels is false.II Inspired in part by the story of Lillian Hellman (who was close to Alice’s friend Billy Abrahams) and Dashiell Hammett (of whom Diane Johnson was writing a biography), Adams hangs her story on the twin dangers of envy and alcoholism. Jane recognizes herself in the unattractive Candida Heffelfinger, who comes to interview her: “Ugly women as lovers are fantastic,” Jane thinks, because “a beautiful woman would expect to be made love to, we expect to make love.” Then Candida asks Jane a question she’s avoided for many years—about another lover of the famous composer’s: “I began to cough, passionately, as though I were trying to cough up my heart, that sudden cold stone in my chest.”

  Jane sends Candida away, which leaves the middle of the story open to accommodate an account of Jane’s feelings for the composer: “I was obsessed with him in an ugly, violent way that seemed to preclude other softer, gentler feelings.” Jane and Ran fight often and bitterly during the ten years of an affair that lasts until Ran dies of emphysema (the disease that took Lucie Jessner, and Jean-Paul in Rich Rewards). After a night of self-scrutiny during which Jane realizes she suffers from “unshakable, implacable self-dislike,” she invites Candida to return. Quickly they sum up and set aside the topic of Ran. Then—with great relief and joy—they turn to a new subject: all morning and into the afternoon they talk about Jane Phelps’s own successful work as a sculptor.