Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Jacob Stockinger, a reviewer in the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, also offered a comparison: Colette. Adams sees “events and characters as inner events and beings that unfold through the external world. Insight is the great drama and love is the supreme insight.”6 Stockinger, who’d just completed a doctorate in French literature, could not have come up with a comparison that would better please Adams. Though she’d shrugged when Diane Johnson called Rich Rewards “very Colette,” Alice admired that Colette was “a real woman” who surpassed “her own heroines in courage and energy” and in “unlimited capacities both for work and for love.” In a review of Colette’s letters Adams had praised Colette’s professionalism: her “ability to keep on with one’s work no matter what”—the what including poverty and deprivation, a career in theater, love affairs, divorces, two world wars, her most beloved husband’s incarceration by Nazis, and painful illnesses.7

  * * *

  For the publication week, Knopf brought Alice to New York, meaning they paid her expenses and scheduled her to give four readings and several interviews. She stayed at the Wyndham Hotel on West Fifty-Eighth Street—“both cheap and swell.” Again Bob stayed home because he was “still so far behind from all that time wasted looking for a new studio, moving,” and Alice thought, “It sure will be odd to spend 10 days by myself. Maybe good for my character although I think it’s too late for improvement.”8 Improving of character or not, her ten days were filled by celebrations of which she was the star. She and Diane Johnson shared the stage at the Three Lives & Company bookstore in the West Village; then she joined Johnson at a dinner given by New York Review of Books editors Barbara and Jason Epstein. The guest list, snidely observed Richard Poirier, who bowed out to dine with New York City Ballet director Lincoln Kirstein, sounded “about as much fun as the guest list for Jean Harris’s Christmas party in her cell,” referring to the then-infamous murderer of a Scarsdale doctor. At least in the version of it Poirier wrote down after hearing about it from Alice, the party was a disaster: “fag hags and sexless gays except for Kempton and Lizzy [Hardwick],” dominated by Sontag’s “talking about herself for three hours” and gossip about Lillian Hellman, “who’d made a big thing about not being invited.”II

  Alice loved gossip, but such brushes with New York’s literary scene reminded her that she truly preferred living in San Francisco where, she said, there was “no literary community. There are a few writers. I see a great deal of Diane Johnson… you can sustain yourself if you live with someone you like and have work that you like.”9 In short, New York made her feel rushed and bitchy. As Eve Babitz put it, “There are no spaces between the words” there. “Certain things don’t have to be thought about carefully because you’re always being pushed from behind.”10 Next on Alice’s itinerary was Washington, DC, for a visit with Judith and Timothy Adams as well as Judith’s intrepid elderly mother, Dorothy Funk Clark, “just sitting there full of observations, and wit.” Alice thought Judith looked beautiful and together they saw a marvelous Rodin exhibit.11 This was in many ways a perfect life. Old friends and new, east and west, united in praise of the talented one for whom they’d held high hopes—hopes that were now coming true.

  Alice returned home to freezing rain and hail in San Francisco, which drove her and Bob to the mountains for a weekend, where they found too much snow for cross-country skiing. On Monday she began teaching a graduate seminar at Stanford at the invitation of John L’Heureux, who then directed the writing program. As Mark Linenthal’s wife, Alice had regarded Stanford’s Creative Writers (she scornfully capitalized the words) “with a sort of enraged envy.” She said Wallace Stegner and Richard Scowcroft “would barely speak to her” when she became more successful in the 1970s. “I do still get awful vibrations from that place,” she recalled after lunching with L’Heureux and meeting her students. Nonetheless, she admired L’Heureux and enjoyed her status as a Stanford faculty member with special relish. She befriended several of the students, including Harriet Doerr and Dennis McFarland. Of Alice’s teaching, McFarland recalled, “She was so completely an intuitive writer, almost like a musician who plays only by ear, she was not especially articulate about craft. Still, she was very good at spotting the strong and weak moments in a given story, and that, I think, is generally the most important feedback a writer can get from a workshop. She was kind and allowed the students to do most of the talking; she wasn’t the sort of leader who ever tore anybody’s work apart.”

  Harriet Huntington Doerr had been a Stegner fellow and continued attending seminars with L’Heureux while she worked on the stories that became her novel Stones for Ibarra, published when she was seventy-four. L’Heureux urged her to participate in Adams’s workshop but she found the volume and diversity of comments she heard there overwhelming. She took her dilemma to Adams, who told her, “Listen to Dennis McFarland.” Doerr conveyed the compliment when she met with McFarland. “That was the sort of thing that really boosted my ego at a time when I was beginning to see my contemporaries bring out their first books and I was yet so far from having one,” he recalled.12 Adams continued to mentor both writers after her term at Stanford ended. She gave a party for Doerr when Stories from Ibarra appeared in 1984 and a reading with her in New York in 1990. When McFarland and his wife, poet Michelle Blake, moved to San Francisco, a friendship blossomed between them and Alice and Bob (who seemed “a very polished lout, who wore ascots and loved her cats”). She introduced them to Anne Lamott and to Fran Kiernan, who eventually acquired McFarland’s first novel, The Music Room, for Houghton Mifflin. “You could feel a strong sense of choice in her friendship,” McFarland said, “and it made you feel very chosen. You had the feeling that there was you and Alice and your other friends, and then there was the rest of the world, who didn’t quite come up to snuff.”13

  By now Adams had discovered a teaching method that worked for her. Marjorie Leet (later Ford), one of a handful of women who took a UC extension course from Adams in 1981, recalled: “She had an unusual method of presenting our stories: each would be read aloud not by the author but by another member of the class… Hearing a stranger read your story gave you a sense of how the words flowed, of whether the humor came through, or the tension or the tender parts.” Adams also told the class that “writing was one of the only careers she could think of where it paid to get older. She felt she had a tremendous advantage, being over fifty. Writing, she said, was one field where an accumulation of years made you richer, more and more capable.”14

  * * *

  All spring Alice toured to promote To See You Again. Her dizzying itinerary began with a talk at Boise State University in Idaho, of which she was so scared that she tried to persuade Max Steele to meet her there. When she saw a marquee on campus that said “Welcome Alice Adams” she didn’t realize it was about her until her host explained.15 Scheduled around her teaching days at Stanford were trips to Madison, Dallas, Austin, and Los Angeles. Her story “On the Road” evokes the strangeness of a lecture tour—confusion and exhaustion; endless, often intrusive questions; fantasies of going to bed with someone just met; and fears of simply ordering a much-needed drink alone in a bar. Despite these complaints, she was eager to travel more and asked Steele, “What do you mean Annie Dillard was there [in Chapel Hill] for 2 weeks? Why not me?”16

  Alice’s discontent persisted. Success was separating her from Bob while his difficulties were driving him deeper into alcoholism, which magnified their troubles. They had terrible quarrels; a fight could flare suddenly, “as though all the space around & between them were coated with kerosene.”17 One such fight was going on as they packed to fly to Santa Fe in early July 1982. They were “whispering vileness to each other” all through a performance of The Marriage of Figaro under the stars.18 Alice asked Bob to move out when they got back to San Francisco, but she didn’t really want him to do that because “living alone would be terribly lonely.” A few weeks later Alice confided to Max Steele, “Things are a lot better, Bob drinking
a great deal less—but it all seems rather frail, I don’t think I could take any more eruptions like that—on the other hand they may not happen; he sure knew I was serious about his moving out.”19

  That fall Alice and Bob were having dinner with Carolyn See and John Espy at the Belle-Vue restaurant in Santa Monica. Bob was driving a car borrowed from Alice’s old friend Dick DeRoy, which he’d left with a valet to park and wash. “The four of us sat at a corner booth and Bob, as always, was in a piss-poor mood and Alice was apologetic and smiling,” See remembered. As they were finishing a meal already made awkward by Bob’s mood—it was hard to know if he’d had too much to drink or needed more—the parking attendant came in and told Bob that somebody had run into the car while he was washing it. “Bob had a tantrum,” See said. “He just screamed and hollered and carried on. The poor guy couldn’t do anything, had to stand there and take it in front of all the customers. Of course Bob didn’t want to return a damaged car, but he just didn’t rise to the occasion. He was terrible, and again Alice was apologetic, nervous, smiling in an embarrassed way.”20

  * * *

  Alice fought her own discouragement and anxiety over Bob’s behavior with work and exercise and a surprisingly robust correspondence with new acquaintances and old friends. One of these was her “most beautiful student” from UC Davis, Scott Crawford.21 Crawford held the sort of charm for her that Seth held for the woman professor in “To See You Again.” The fictional professor manages her attraction to Seth by domesticating her “unruly feelings” for him—she imagines his visiting her house and seeing her “sad fat husband, a distinguished architect—and [her] most precariously balanced, laboriously achieved ‘good life.’ ”22 “To See You Again” ends with a muted optimism that is typical of Adams’s midlife work. Even though the professor has just taken her severely depressed husband to the hospital, she thinks hopefully of a future when he “will be completely well, the cycle flat, no more sequences of pain. And maybe thin again. And interested, and content. It’s almost worth waiting for.”

  Alice corresponded with Crawford for a year or so after the story he had inspired appeared in the New Yorker. He wrote a review of Rich Rewards for the student paper; she sent him upbeat reports on her life and wrote him recommendations for graduate school. To Diane Johnson, who had also been his writing teacher, she worried that he would become a “perpetual student.”

  Jeanne Harris became another epistolary confidante for Alice. Harris had been a young mother from Ohio “sitting out the depression” in a rented house on Pittsboro Road in Chapel Hill in 1937 when she first knew “a ten-year-old little girl with glossy hair and bangs” named Alice Adams. She wrote after seeing Adams’s stories with North Carolina settings in the New Yorker. Soon they were exchanging anecdotes about Chapel Hill people as well as about their present lives. Harris wondered why Alice’s father stopped to talk whenever he saw her outside even though they didn’t find much to say. Alice replied that Nic Adams “was always a terrible flirt” and she was a pretty red-head. In another letter Harris recalled seeing Verlie Jones with her car stuck in the mud for the longest time until two black men came to help. “Do you have to be colored to help colored down here?” Harris had wondered at the time.

  Fan letters from strangers also sometimes led to friendships. For instance, a young man named Richard Carr wrote, “I’m a jazz musician who works by night and reads magazines in hotel lobbies, often far away from home, by day.” Carr came across “Verlie I Say unto You” in an old Atlantic Monthly in the lobby of the Château Frontenac in Quebec City. He admired the story’s simple, honest compassion and told Alice, “You’re really kind of a hot shit.” More specifically he praised her for knowing—as a good jazz musician does—“what to leave in and what to leave out.”

  Carr had written to authors before, and his life on the road made him grateful for any replies that landed in his mailbox in Solon, Maine. He hit a jackpot with Alice, who sent a package of books and encouraged him to write to her again. Then he sent her a cassette tape that she and Bob listened to on the way to Truckee: “There we were driving in the bright equinoctial dark, listening to you.” The correspondence went on until 1987. Alice told Carr she’d “much rather be a jazz musician than write… writing is an awful thing to do. Lonely, regarded by most people with deep suspicion—and you don’t ever know if what you’re working on is any good. No instant applause… I especially hate writing novels, and if I were more sensible I would not; you get so bored, they go on forever.”23

  * * *

  In fact, Adams was still far from finishing Superior Women when she wrote that. She’d slowed her progress to teach and to write dozens of book reviews and short stories and then to promote To See You Again. Nor was it just boredom that impeded her. Superior Women was a much bigger project than any she’d undertaken before. She first wrote the title “Superior Women” in her notebook in November 1977. The novel’s four leading characters are white women who become friends at their Ivy League College—Radcliffe—during World War II. A fifth woman, Janet, remains outside of their group because she is Jewish, yet her story is central to Adams’s panorama of their generation. Superior Women covers forty years in the lives of these women with many branch stories of their lovers, spouses, and colleagues. The ambitious novel quickly evolved from its roots in Adams’s college classmates and took on its own life as “an unofficial history of the years I know about.” Although she meant to write a plot outline for it, Adams soon returned to her character-driven method of composition: “I simply acquainted myself with the women, and began to know them so well that I could easily imagine the rest of their lives.”

  A few statistics about these women: three of five marry, two of those three divorce, four have children; one comes out as a lesbian; one has a love affair (and child) with a priest; two have professional careers. Megan Greene, the daughter of a carhop on the Bayshore Highway in East Palo Alto, is the character who is psychologically closest to Adams. “So much has been done on Easterners who come West,” Adams said. “I thought it would be interesting to approach it from the other way.”24 With that light scrambling of geography Adams freshened her perspective on the other four Radcliffe women and endowed Megan with a naïve openness about class, sex, religion, and even race that had not been available to a young Southerner of her generation.

  * * *

  Adams at last mailed off her “monstrous” 5-pound, 537-page, 80,000-word manuscript to Lynn Nesbit in April of 1983. Joe Kanon, then at E. P. Dutton, wanted it and promised to make it the lead novel for his spring list but couldn’t top Knopf’s offer of $80,000 for the hardcover edition. Alice thought it a “huge fortune” and soon found a financial advisor who set her up in an annuity fund. For the first time in her life she had savings and investments—and was enabled “to meet the requirements of [her] imagination” as James wished for Isabel in The Portrait of a Lady.

  Wilson thought Superior Women “a great leap forward,” and both she and Robert Gottlieb thought the book had a “real chance” to break out into bigger popularity and sales. She praised all the major characters—“so interestingly distinguished from each other”—as well as “how strong and right your sense of place is.” Wilson’s and Gottlieb’s criticisms were minor, mainly to do with Adams’s penchant for coincidences, and she set about working on these “soft spots” with real enthusiasm. They offered little complaint about the epilogue, in which several characters converge to celebrate Megan’s mother’s birthday at an old tobacco farm where they provide shelter for homeless women from nearby cities. Some reviewers didn’t believe this utopian ending but it fits perfectly in the arc of Adams’s biography.

  The novel’s farmhouse, purchased by Peg Sinclair, one of the original Radcliffe friends, mirrors the one where Alice grew up. It “sits on a hilltop, in a grove of oak and pine, overlooking a valley of green cornfields, in the summer, and a brighter green thick border of a creek,” and features “a long, broad porch, with a sloping green-shingle
d roof, now overgrown with thick wisteria vines—and just now, in midsummer, overhung with lavender blossoms, hanging heavily, falling finally to the drying grass below.” To this house in Superior Women, Adams brings characters from different episodes of the novel: Peg and her lover, Vera, and Peg’s drug-damaged daughter; Megan Greene and her mother; two of Megan’s lovers, Henry Stuyvesant and Jackson Clay; and her gay editor friend, Biff. When a workman at the house tells them he’s worried about his sister who is to be released from prison, Peg and Megan take her in. Soon they are hosting other homeless women. The unlikelihood of all these people’s coming together is mitigated by Adams’s utopian vision for her characters and the simple kindness of their effort. In embracing their ideals in the hills of North Georgia, these characters reject the values of Ronald Reagan’s America and strive to save their own souls.

  Poet Carolyn Kizer wrote of Superior Women, “All our lives we have been presented with books that explore the initiation rites that introduce young men to maturity. Now we are hearing the women’s side. The strain of nostalgia, even pathos, in Adams’ book arises from her sensitive awareness of how grown up we have to be before we grow up.”25

  After finishing Superior Women in the summer of 1983, Adams had “grown up” enough to resolve some of the long-shunned issues of her childhood and youth. On August 14 she would reach the fateful age—fifty-seven—at which Agatha Adams had died. Approaching that date, Alice wrote in her notebook, “My mother died long before the long, scarring war between us was in any way resolved, and not quite by accident I chose the year in which I became as old as she was at the time of her death to return to the scene of our darkest, most corrosive hours.”26