Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  It was also probably not an accident that Alice chose to visit Chapel Hill as she was on the cusp of financial success. After a writers’ conference at Georgetown University, she booked a roomette for her “ceremonial” train journey to North Carolina. Max Steele met her at the station, organized her visit, and gave her a yellow summer dress (“the most exciting color,” she said) that he’d purchased for her in Egypt. Conveniently, Dotsie Adams was out of town. They drove by her parents’ house, now sold. It was painted a new color, and huge trees blocked the view. Six months later, she confessed: “But that freshly painted, viewless house is non-existent in my mind; it is not where I live. I live in a huge, mad house with the loveliest view. With everything in bloom.”27

  While in Chapel Hill Alice saw her childhood friend Josephine MacMillan, now suffering from alcoholism, and wrote her afterward that she “had to get off the sauce.” Adams’s stories “Child’s Play” and “Tide Pools” were probably inspired by that encounter. So much had changed in Chapel Hill that Max suggested touring the Old Cemetery at the edge of the campus. He said he knew more people there than he knew downtown. They remarked on the gravestones of the families she’d known and—of course, how could she have missed them?—the granite stones that marked Agatha’s and Nic’s graves. Adams replicated her walk in that cemetery with Max in another story based on that trip. In “The Visit” an actress named Grace tells her old friend, “Well, they won’t get me in there. Not with them.”

  A year earlier, Alice had written Max: “I do not think we should live together you and I. (I am always afraid that you will think I think that.) I want you my friend for life and then let’s do get a plot together.”28 Eventually, as he was recovering from a long period of depression, Max purchased a gravesite well apart from the Adamses: “It’s like getting into Westminster Abbey,” he said of the process. He planted pink and white azaleas and a dogwood tree near it. “Going there everyday digging and planting and fertilizing and watering and walking around gave me a real feeling of peace and proportion,” he wrote Alice. Naming their future cemetery neighbors, he added, “Now it is beginning to be amusing.”29

  From back in San Francisco Alice wrote Max, “How I loved seeing you, how kind and generous you were,” and added (tongue in cheek), “If only you would ever, just once, say something funny, you’d be perfect.” So it seems that the laughter that Alice and Max had shared in the summer of 1958 continued to unite them. For his part, Max wrote, “Your visit was as exciting and as traumatic as I knew it would be.” He followed up with several phone calls.30

  Soon after this emotional return to Chapel Hill, Alice received a letter that drew her further into reminiscence about her Southern roots. Bryant Mangum, a young professor who was teaching a class about the New Yorker at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond, Virginia, wrote that he’d fallen in love with Adams’s work and especially her woman narrators after reading “An Unscheduled Stop” and other stories in To See You Again. As it turned out, Mangum was a South Carolinian who’d attended the University of North Carolina before completing doctoral studies on F. Scott Fitzgerald back in South Carolina and becoming a professor at VCU. He closed his letter by inviting Alice to have a beer with him. She quickly wrote back that “funnily enough” she’d just passed through Virginia on her wonderful train trip to Chapel Hill. The correspondence that flourished between them gave her needed ballast as she approached her fateful birthday.

  Adams was then writing her story called “Return Trip.” On August 10, she told Steele that she was “stuck in the middle” of it; on August 16 she wrote Mangum that she “was quite lost in a new story—about going back to Hilton, which may be too soon to write.”III At the heart of “Return Trip” is the narrator’s changing relationship to her mother, who, like Agatha Adams, died years earlier: “I thought of my mother with increasing sympathy. This is another simplification, but that is what it came to. She did her best under very difficult, sometimes painful circumstances is one way of putting it.”

  And that is exactly what Alice was also trying to do as she entered her fifty-eighth year. Her birthday passed without an entry in her daybook. Her stepmother had sent her a battery-lit compact—“so useful for midnight make-up,” she snarkily told Max. She and Bob were still having trouble getting along: he “is very cross with me a lot of the time,” she wrote Judith. “Or maybe [its] my ghastly hypersensitivity—or both. I do think men age much less well than women… They get so mean & nutty.”31

  Alice did not stop working on Superior Women until the week she returned the manuscript to Wilson; her daybook shows she was still developing her characters—changing their names and histories, thinking about Megan Greene as an innocent comparable to Isabel Archer in Portrait of a Lady or Henry Stuyvesant as a man who likes women for their complexity.32 In October she flew east with the finished pages in hand. Wilson took her to the Four Seasons, a posh power-lunch restaurant, to celebrate, but the occasion was ruined by the presence of Henry Kissinger at the next table: “Yuck—that horrible vibrator voice, really awful.” From there Alice made a “strange, rushed” trip to Charlottesville to see her wonderful old, blind uncle Munny Boyd and his wife. It was “all too depressing and sad, in really awful shape, and not much can be done—I mean unless you moved in and took charge.”33

  Shortly after she returned from Charlottesville, Alice and Bob flew to Spain and Portugal. In Barcelona her handbag was snatched in exactly the way she told the story in “Barcelona.” In Lisbon, she noticed that the Ritz Hotel had been built in 1959, the year she met Vasco Pereira, and she imagined meeting one of his later lovers who turned out to be “quite like herself.” Climbing to the “wild ruins” of Castelo de São Jorge and seeing his city, she felt Pereira’s presence everywhere, experiencing “some exceptional, acute alertness; as though layers of skin had peeled away, all her senses [were] opened wide,” as she describes the feeling in “Sintra.”

  Alice probably knew that Pereira had returned to Lisbon to be minister of foreign affairs after finishing his term as ambassador to the United States in Washington. As minister, he had negotiated for the independence of East Timor in its struggle against Indonesia. Married to Malu after Margarida’s death, he spent weekends painting in the country. To Alice, Vasco was emblematic of Portugal, and of course Bob knew about Vasco’s inevitable presence in Alice’s memory.

  In her notebook Alice mentions “the force of never mentioning a name, which the other person repeats, repeats—an excoriating ritual.” Rather than say the forbidden name, Bob joked, “Do you want to call anyone, like Prince Albert?”—referring to the prince of Monaco who made a second home on the “Coast of Kings” at Estoril.

  The weather in Portugal proved to be as variable as Northern California’s, prompting Alice to note that Vasco’s “violently charming, quite unstable” personality must have been due to the weather in Portugal.34 One afternoon Bob rented a car to drive them out to the coastal resorts of Cascais and Estoril, but a “black flood” of rain rerouted them to the town of Sintra, where Pereira then had a home. That detour marked a turning point in her relationship with Bob, though Alice wouldn’t fully realize this until she wrote it into a story she’d call “Sintra.”

  When she got home from Portugal that fall, Alice added “screws up relationships” to a list of “50 Reasons Not to Write” she was keeping in her notebook.35 She was thinking about personal freedom and planned to get a new driver’s license so she’d be less dependent on Bob. Still working to control her high blood pressure and knowing that her mother had died of a heart problem, she cut back her alcohol consumption and began swimming two miles a week at the Rossi Pool a few blocks from her flat. “Swimming makes you look thinner, really stretches you out,” she told friends, “[and] has immensely improved my disposition, it’s so calming for tense types like me—also my blood pressure has shot down to normal, which is cheering.”36

  After mythic journeys to Chapel Hill and Portugal, both repositories of her past, A
lice was making herself anew body and soul.

  I. Robbie McNie came across “Greyhound People” and wrote Alice a mean note: “I didn’t like your article… I thought it was a small piece, unworthy of my time. I hope you will take the bus to real experience. Your shyness is keeping you from feeling. Why don’t you write for a magazine that talks to blacks, like Jet.… Better luck next time.” (Undated, signed “Bob.”)

  II. Guests included Arthur Gold, Robert Fizdale, David Kalstone, Elizabeth Hardwick, Susan Sontag, and Murray Kempton. (Richard Poirier, notes to himself dated March 11, 1982, Columbia University Rare Book and Manuscript Library.)

  III. Hilton was the fictional name Adams often used for Chapel Hill. The story became plural—“Return Trips”—when it was collected in the volume of that title.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Superior Women

  — 1984–1986 —

  Are some men put off by extremes of intelligence or even attractiveness in women—put off by superior women?

  —Alice Adams, Superior Women

  The sale of the right to publish Superior Women in paperback profoundly changed Alice’s life. Knopf auctioned these rights in June of 1984, three months in advance of the novel’s hardcover publication day. With the stunning offer of $635,000, publisher Leona Nevler at Fawcett Crest won the prize. “I’M RICH!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!” Alice wrote Max Steele that very afternoon. “So funny, you sit down and write a silly novel about what happened to you and your friends and people pay crazy money for it—why aren’t you here to help me celebrate?”1

  Bob McNie was more than ready to celebrate. Signing himself “Mr. Anonymous” but writing on his business letterhead, Bob sent news of the sale to Herb Caen at the Chronicle. Caen duly reported in his column that Adams “was in the big chips” with a “more than healthy” six-figure sale. Good news kept rolling in as Superior Women was chosen as a main selection by the Literary Guild and sold to publishers in England and Scandinavia. Forecasting the big novels for the fall season, the Chicago Sun-Times featured Adams alongside Norman Mailer, Richard Yates, Joseph Heller, Stephen King, Belva Plain, Helen MacInnes, Arthur Hailey, and her Radcliffe friend Alison Lurie.

  Thus Victoria Wilson shepherded Superior Women into the marketplace as a breakthrough book, potentially a bestseller. Alice’s reaction was mixed. Thrilled and proud, she told Bryant Mangum she was waking up early “with crazy fantasies about taking the Concorde to Paris.” In the meantime, she was engulfed by the “endless and appalling chore” of judging dozens of applications for National Endowment for the Arts fellowships in fiction—the first of many such duties she accepted as a midlist author. “My idea of heaven at the moment is some free time in which to start a new story.”2

  * * *

  Following their publication of “My First and Only House,” Geo magazine offered to pay Alice’s expenses to write a travel piece and she immediately thought of a late spring return to Portugal, where she’d been with Bob the previous autumn and where, she’d recently learned, Vasco Pereira was dying of a brain tumor. She began a story about him in her notebook before she and Bob arrived, remembering their visit to Sintra the previous fall and trying to imagine Vasco elderly, dying: “Impossible to picture thinned hair, eyes dulled, perhaps afraid—once so brilliant & bold, if always melancholy—my elegant one—incontinent?”3 She wondered if she should contact him while she was there. Ultimately she did not, but Vasco’s presence in her mind shaped the trip.

  Beginning in Lisbon, Bob and Alice stopped in medieval Estremoz, then drove south to the Algarve coast, and finally flew to Madeira for a stay at the Reid’s Palace hotel. The commissioned piece that paid for the trip, “The Wild Coasts of Portugal,” gave Adams trouble—“In stories I know what to leave out (I think) but in this I don’t know where I am.”4 The result was as much travel essay as journalism.I “The strands of impulse, mingled desire and indecision, that lead one to travel at last to a particular place have struck me as odd,” she began before confessing, albeit obliquely, to her own impulse: “Many years back a poet friend of mine had a disastrous romantic collision with a Portuguese diplomat. In the wake of that I heard a lot about Portugal.” Adams herself was that poet, and the freshness and emotion the country still held for her makes bittersweet her descriptions of traveling with her “best friend, R… an exceptional driver.”

  Finding half-built condos blighting the Algarve coast, Adams wonders, “Which would be worse, the eventual decay and rot of all those buildings and their return at last to burial in the soil or their eventual completion and occupation by vacation-hungry humans…” Then, just as she so often does in her fiction, Adams gazes beyond the petty human scene with a historical and geographical perspective: “Long green fingers of land spread out into the sea… You imagine the conquering Moorish sailors who came in from the sea and scaled those cliffs some 1,000 years ago—conquerors who saw something commensurate with their capacity for wonder.”5

  Those last seven words, borrowed from The Great Gatsby, indicate the romantic drama in Alice’s mind as she immersed herself in Vasco Pereira’s country. She approached that theme directly in her short story “Sintra,” which drew as much on her recent trips to Portugal as upon the story of her affair with Pereira. In that story a writer named Arden, who is traveling with her current partner, Gregor, “experiences a sudden rush of happiness, as clear and pure as the sunshine that warms the small flowers near her feet,” as she stands in a garden above the city of Lisbon. Her joy emerges during a “demented instant” in which she thinks of telling her former lover (here called Luiz) how much she likes his city, a “memory lapse,” because she has forgotten that he’s dying. Her speculations wander as she fills in the background of an affair in which she once felt “the wildest reaches of joy, but never the daily, sunny warmth of happiness.” During the trip, Arden quarrels with Gregor, who feels excluded as Arden thinks about Luiz. Gregor accuses Arden of using him as a travel companion while cutting him off emotionally. While in Portugal Arden shields herself from her usual “worrying preoccupation” with Gregor and his “lens-like observations [that] make her nervous; they make her feel unattractive, and unloved.” Back home, suspecting that he sees other women—“looking for her replacement”—she is content to let him do so.

  Vasco Pereira was alive while Alice was in Portugal. On July 4, the sixty-two-year-old retired diplomat and amateur painter needed a wheelchair to attend an exhibition of his art entitled Sunday Paintings at a museum in Lisbon. He died on August 20. A week later Judith Adams mailed Alice a two-inch newspaper clipping headlined “Deaths Elsewhere.” The clipping appears almost verbatim in “Sintra,” including the detail that Pereira “was the first Portuguese ambassador to voice strong, public support for the armed forces coup in April 1974 that ended half a century of right-wing dictatorship.”6

  To complete “Sintra,” Adams places Arden alone in a Washington, DC, restaurant to contemplate her former lover’s death. The news that Pereira took an antifascist stance in 1974 becomes a grace note in Adams’s story. Maybe, Arden thinks, the man was genuine. Maybe the man she’d hated for years for being a fascist and for his deception of her was (as he claimed) an antifascist, and maybe—by extension—he had truly loved her.

  And so, in this instance, as we read of Arden transfixed by a “sudden nameless pain. Nameless, but linked to loss: loss of Luiz, even, imminently, of Gregor. Perhaps of love itself,” we can see just how Adams made fiction out of her life, how events were factual and yet transformed to serve her emotional needs and the requirements of the short-story form. “Odd: working on the story is for me a way of not thinking about him. I guess we call that esthetic distance,” she told Judith Adams.7

  When Vasco Pereira’s children sorted his papers they found a fat folder of carbon copies of works by Alice Adams—stories and chapters of a novel about women named Arden or Avery, along with two poems Alice addressed to Vasco after their final parting. Saved too were snapshots, notes, and letters that A
lice sent Vasco during the months of their affair, folded and packed tightly in a white envelope labeled with her name in his handwriting.8

  * * *

  Bob threw a party at his new studio to celebrate the publication of Superior Women in September. Balloons in pink and teal matched the color blocks on the novel’s modernist graphic cover. Old and new friends who came to celebrate included Anne Lamott; Jack Leggett, the former Harper & Row editor who once turned down Careless Love and director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, now married to Edwina Evers; and seventy-four-year-old artist Nell Sinton, now divorced and enjoying her life as a traveling artist and teacher. Peter Linenthal, wearing a full dark beard, was there too.

  Alice headed east for promotional events and parties in Boston and New York that were now de rigueur for authors. In Boston, she met her jazz-musician fan-turned-friend Richard Carr. The young man, still in his twenties, wondered how much his older pen pal would be able to walk! As it turned out they covered at least five miles during an afternoon in the Public Garden and ducked into a coffee shop on Newbury Street. “She gave every panhandler five dollars—her book was doing well and she was feeling the liberation of being able to do that.”

  “The trouble with a book coming out,” she wrote Carr afterward, is “you are impaled on it… it’s hard to get on with anything else. I’m still going around doing readings, all that stuff. And I’m not a performer, for Christ’s sake, just a writer.”9 As this whirlwind commenced, Alice noted, “V[asco] dead—a cluster of death, & money—freedom—but not—still bound.”10