Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  “My mom really liked Phil from the beginning,” Peter said. “That was obvious. They both have a sort of precision about them that I’m not sure I have. My mom was pretty specific and had a very sharp memory about things. And Phil is also exact and has great knowledge about history. He’s read a lot and he’s judicious.” At first Phil “envied the kind concern and support Peter received from his mother.” But soon, he said, “I found myself, as most of Peter’s friends did, an object of that kind concern.” Phil also came to appreciate the way Alice could just toss off an opinion or swear to emphasize a point. “I won’t forget the sound of her speaking voice. She’d say, ‘Christ!’ or ‘Jesus!’ or ‘He’s an asshole.’ I’ve never heard anyone swear as elegantly.”

  In public, Alice usually referred to Phil as Peter’s “friend”—this being years ahead of the now-ubiquitous “partner” description—but her fiction bore witness to her deepening acceptance of her son’s sexual orientation. Her novels and stories from Rich Rewards through After the War include gay or lesbian characters, as do a number of her later stories. She was happy that Peter and Phil could live openly, without the closeted identities that had made life difficult and frightening for the gay people of her generation. Indeed, Peter and Phil as a couple were exactly the kind of intelligent, handsome, cultivated people she most enjoyed. They allowed her to overcome her assumption that gay people often lead unhappy lives.

  Peter Linenthal and Philip Anasovich

  * * *

  On the heels of Superior Women, interest in Adams’s short stories surged. Of her third collection, Return Trips, in the fall of 1985, Michiko Kakutani in the New York Times noted that these stories are about “the emotional consequences of dislocation” for characters on the move “from home to home, relationship to relationship, with all the improvisatory skill of veterans of the 60’s.” A sour note came from Chronicle books editor Patricia Holt, who observed (in an otherwise glowing review) Adams’s repetition of modifiers in these stories: “Characters are, for example, ‘violently alarmed’ or ‘violently disapprove’ or smell ‘violently of gardenia perfume’ or have ‘violent feelings,’ walk through a ‘violent green jungle’… The word ‘funnily’ is used at least three times, and Adams’ penchant for turning present participles into adverbs—‘compellingly,’ ‘caressingly,’ ‘blindingly,’ ‘record-breakingly’—is clumsy and amateurish.”18 That closing judgment hurt, so much so that Alice did not speak to Holt again for years. It’s doubtful that any editor could have persuaded Adams to give up the adverb constructions she loved, but why hadn’t a copy editor squelched those repetitions when the stories were collected?

  The Texas writer Beverly Lowry spent days crafting the first sentence of her review of Return Trips for the New York Times Book Review: “Nobody writes better about falling in love than Alice Adams.” The women in Adams’s stories, Lowry continues, know “full well that the man in question might be inappropriate… they do know better. That is the glory of an Adams heroine, she is that smart and still goes on: ‘Ah,’ she says to herself, sighing, ‘this again: love.’ ”19

  Alice and Lowry met later in 1985 when they both served as judges for the PEN/Faulkner Awards. They and a third panelist, Richard Bausch, read and reread dozens of books and shared lists before they convened in Austin. Alice and Lowry and her husband, Glenn, became friends instantly; Alice thought Glenn, a stockbroker, was “old-fashioned and very solid,” and he became her informal financial advisor. Just as immediately, Beverly remembered, Alice took a dislike to Bausch—“She could be very cranky—it was quite wonderful.” Why? Lowry didn’t question Alice (“She was powerful and I was a little cowed, not about to ask her things”) but guessed that Bausch appeared to fit a type of extremely nice Southerner whose niceness Alice just didn’t trust. For the award the panel selected a book that had not been on any of their first-cut lists, Peter Taylor’s The Old Forest and Other Stories.II It can’t have hurt that Alice had met Taylor at the Toronto International Festival of Authors and found him to be “terrific fun.”20

  The PEN awards ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, in May was a splendid occasion, made more so by the moss-green open-lacework dress Alice wore. “You could see a beautiful slip under it and I sensed she was beautiful down to her skin,” Lowry said. “It was all perfect. Glorious.” A photograph from that evening shows Alice with a glowing smile as she takes her seat while Lowry, Grace Paley, and others applaud. From the admiring look on nominee Grace Paley’s face, we can guess that Adams spoke in praise of short stories and those who write them.

  * * *

  In the guest room of her new house Alice filled two wide shelves with O. Henry Award volumes, and fiction by her favorites, Iris Murdoch and Joyce Carol Oates. She’d been reading Oates since her friend Nancy Webb first recommended her in 1968. “I literally get high reading her… her productivity… it’s literally as though she were possessed by some demons,” Adams told Lucie Jessner when she sent her Marriages and Infidelities in 1972. Ten years later, reviewing A Bloodsmoor Romance, Adams wrote, “I do not believe Oates is generally envied, even, by other writers; she is out of the question, out of range, as is the beauty of Greta Garbo, say, even for the most beautiful people.” Adams compares Oates to Trollope, whose forty-seven books, “much as one may love them, all sound somewhat alike. Whereas Joyce Carol Oates sounds like no one else who has ever written, nor does she sound, from book to book, much like herself—whoever that self may be.”

  Alice remained baffled about who Oates was even after they met. “When you sit next to her talking at a meal, as I did twice, it’s pretty tough going; she is nice—but you don’t feel much real warmth, or intimacy. But then, she gets up on the lecture platform and sounds like your dearest friend over the phone. She can evidently only be intimate with a large audience.” Alice noticed too that Oates was “phobic about grease” and that her husband, Raymond Smith, “sneak[ed] French fries.”21 Nonetheless, a friendship founded on admiration evolved. “I love the adroit and seemingly artless braiding of detail in your stories—and know how much work goes into that smooth-flowing surface,” Oates wrote Adams.22 They also shared a love of cats. The Ontario Review, edited by Oates and Smith, published two pet-centered stories that Adams had not been able to publish elsewhere: “Molly’s Dog” and “The Islands.” Both these stories, apparently sentimental but actually angling in deeper waters, deal with a question Adams poses in “The Islands”: “What does it mean to love an animal, a pet, in my case a cat, in the fierce, entire, and unambivalent way that some of us do?… Does the cat (did the cat) represent some person, a parent, or a child?” some part of one’s self? I don’t think so.”

  * * *

  Self. Parts of one’s self. The topic comes up often in Adams’s mid-1980s work (with and without reference to animals). Her new novel, Second Chances, was well under way before Superior Women appeared in paperback. She wrote this group novel out of her realization that aging brings another identity crisis.III Celeste is based on Lavina Calvin, whom Adams memorialized in her travel memoir Mexico. There too she named her Celeste and named her late husband Charles. In the opening chapter of Second Chances Dudley Venable and Edward Crane discuss their recently widowed friend: “Celeste who—at her age, and with Charles just dead!—has taken on, apparently, a suitor, a beau.” Fussy, critical Edward, who is actually quite worried about his own relationship with a younger man, thinks Celeste’s behavior is silly. More generously, Dudley suggests, “Or is it a question of finding new parts for herself?”

  But of course aging was not just about new opportunities—the “second chances” of the title. “Death, dying, fear” were major themes of this novel about “old folks.”23 The recent deaths of friends and former lovers urged Adams toward the subject, and she tested similar material in a story called “Waiting for Stella,” about a memorial lunch for the first person to die among a group of friends. In that story, one guest thinks, “rancorously, uncontrollably… of y
outh, of obviously taken-for-granted health and sensuality. The condition of youth now seems to Baxter a club from which he has abruptly and most unfairly been excluded.”

  Then, in May 1986, Alice underwent surgery for removal of a malignant polyp in her colon. Dr. Peter Volpe recalled Alice’s “fortitude” in facing the diagnosis.24 She mentioned the episode obliquely to friends, telling Bryant Mangum, for instance, that her new bedroom “has an endless city view, including a lot of sky—I had to spend some weeks there in May—and I did think I couldn’t have been in a better place.” Adams assigned some of her recent medical experience to the character of Celeste, who can barely bring herself to describe her symptoms to a doctor. After a colonoscopy, she thinks “she is much too old and too fragile, really, to have withstood such treatment—nevertheless, withstand it she did, and the bed in which she lies is her own. Her own bed, own room, own beautiful and familiar home. Though her entrails—everything inside her was mauled and pummeled; she feels battered and bruised.” A bowl of consommé that a younger friend served her “cools on her nightstand—impossible even to sip.”

  * * *

  The popularity of Superior Women came with a price tag. The covers of the mass-market Fawcett Crest editions could not have been tackier. A metallic gold cover with metallic fuchsia type and illustrations of overcoiffed women with only slight resemblance to the women in the novel adorned the book. (Where are black Jackson Clay and Jewish Janet Cohen? one wonders.) Promotional folders in the same color scheme included a bumper sticker: “Stay up all night with SUPERIOR WOMEN.” When novelist Gish Jen addressed a Radcliffe alumnae panel on the subject of gendered book covers in 2014, she chose that Superior Women cover as one example. By using “stereotypically feminine signifiers—a lipstick tube, a woman’s naked back”—to seek wider sales, Jen said, a cover “can inadvertently disqualify a novel from the world of serious literature.”IV25 The success of Superior Women emboldened Fawcett Crest to publish mass-market editions of several other Adams books, all glinting with flesh and flowers on their covers.

  Happily, a thirty-something editor at Penguin named Gerald Howard read Rich Rewards and invited Alice to lunch on her next visit to New York: “She struck me as an older women who had style, and she carried herself like somebody who had always been beautiful and knew it. Not that she swanned around but she was confident in her allure to men. I felt it. You couldn’t help having a crush on her. It was one of my earliest author lunches, and I was a reprint publisher who actually cared.” Howard’s great triumph was to pair Adams’s fiction (“her sophisticated, swanky, attractive people”) with paintings of women’s faces by pop artist Alex Katz. Katz’s paintings “look easy, the way Fred Astaire made dancing look easy and Cole Porter made words and music sound easy, but don’t be fooled,” John Russell observes.26 Like Adams’s fiction, Katz’s technique is so “confident” and “crisply articulated” that it “makes us see the world the way he sees it… with all but the most essential details pared away” (in Calvin Tompkins’s words).27 “They really looked good,” Howard said of his covers, “and it was my cheap thrill to go into bookstores and admire these Penguin Contemporary volumes on the front tables. Alice said she liked those covers a lot too.”

  From conversations with Alice, Howard formed the impression that she’d had “flings and more” with most of the New York intellectuals. “A name would come up, like Irving Howe or Norman Mailer, and she’d say ‘Oh, Irving’ or ‘Oh, Norman’—I heard a whole world of implication in her tone. I was too polite to inquire, but it seemed as if she’d come down from Radcliffe and been a shiksa among all the sharpies—that they condescended to her and she took it all in and gave it back in her way in a literary sense.” Howard met Alice again at a party in New York with Bob McNie: “I thought of him as the last straight man in San Francisco. He was an aging matinee idol type, very distinguished, gray hair, rocking a blue blazer. They made a handsome couple.”

  * * *

  Deirdre English, coauthor with Barbara Ehrenreich of For Her Own Good: 150 Years of the Experts’ Advice to Women (now reissued as Two Centuries of said advice) and editor of the San Francisco–based magazine Mother Jones, remembered meeting Alice around town (meaning the Bay Area): “I think of seeing her in over-the-knee boots she was sporting, [which] most people her age wouldn’t wear. Pretty bold statement.” Alice and English formed a friendship that included English’s husband, Don Terner, president of a nonprofit corporation that developed affordable housing. Alice invited the couple to a dinner party to celebrate a special occasion. “I believe it was Alice’s birthday,” English recalled. “I can’t imagine a more glamorous party in San Francisco. There were about a dozen people there. Bob put a tremendous amount of effort into the incredible food and décor—black tablecloth, candelabra with lots of candles, very baroque. We felt like stars ourselves because we’d been invited. Like something in Vanity Fair—this was the top of something.” But any self-flattery English and Terner felt at the beginning of the evening was shattered later as McNie became very drunk. “He became domineering, overly talkative, and bullying; and Alice began to look miserable. She was completely oversensitive to what was happening. You could see in her face that she was embarrassed, humiliated.” To English, Bob seemed “like a child saying ‘I built this castle so I can destroy it.’ ” Both English and Terner felt crestfallen when they sensed that, despite his grand gestures, Bob had some psychological hostility to Alice. “I realized I’d rather have a ham sandwich with somebody than have a fancy dinner party with someone who was jealous of me, who wanted to undermine me or felt threatened by me. Don and I really pondered that, talking about it afterwards. A life lesson for us.”

  Bob and Alice’s fights found their way into the marriage of Dudley and ex-drinker, over-the-hill artist Sam Venable in Second Chances: In their pacified senior years, Sam is haunted by memories of “god-awful” scenes of “big shouting, schoolboy words thrown out like garbage. Not hitting anyone, at least I never hit, but a lot of ugly noise, and then lurching out… Blind crazy drunk.” Dudley and Sam’s love has been addictive, filled with hate and resentment as well as love.

  The day was coming when Alice would have to choose between her hard-earned independence and the comfort and pride of having Bob McNie at her side. Through Al-Anon she was learning that her own sensitivities, her patterns of fear and rage that were rooted in being the child of an alcoholic, contributed to the difficulties she blamed on Bob’s heavy drinking. The permutations of her childhood need to be fed—“unless someone is feeding me I am impoverished,” she wrote in the notebook—and her adult need for love were complex, endless. She should, Dr. Wheelis suggested, think about autonomy, think of herself as “an okay, self-sufficient person.” She was distorting herself by feeling “hurt” or otherwise subject to the emotional roller coaster of an alcoholic: “ ‘Hurt’—a not-true concept—one is not actually hurt by anyone else. HURT—a non-word,” was one of many similar notes she wrote to herself.28

  As Alice’s life widened, it seems that Bob’s narrowed and his resentments grew. When Mother Jones magazine purchased Alice’s story “A Public Pool,” Deirdre English suggested that putting Alice Adams’s picture on the cover would increase newsstand sales. Rock-and-roll photographer Norman Seeff, known for his pictures of Joni Mitchell, caught Adams looking triumphant—scintillating, really—against a nighttime city. Only her imperfect teeth, working hands, and unvarnished nails reveal that this person is not a movie star.V Inside the magazine, “A Public Pool” offers an entirely different persona in its first-person narration by a large, overweight, shy, unemployed nursing-home worker named Maxine who lives with her mother but discovers an alternative self in her daily swims at Rossi Pool. As the story opens, Maxine says, “Reaching, pulling, gliding through the warm blue chlorinated water, I am strong and lithe: I am not oversized, not six feet tall, weighing one eighty-five. I am not myself, not Maxine.”

  Mother Jones’s fact-checker called to ask Adams if
Maxine was based on anyone recognizable who might sue them; Adams declared with a laugh: “Of course not. It’s me!” When English next saw Alice, she told her, “You’re much too thin and self-confident to identify with this character.” But Alice disagreed: “Not in my heart I’m not. I don’t know about men, but women do tend to have notions of ugliness and deformity about themselves.”

  “A Public Pool” is the sort of story that other magazines told Adams they couldn’t publish because it “didn’t sound like her” or would damage her image. “It’s enraging,” Adams told another interviewer. “If there is a perceived story that is mine, I would choose to surpass it.”29

  Like Maxine in the story, Alice was swimming to feel “possessed of powerful, deep energy” that would carry her into an uncertain future.

  I. Wheelis inscribed one of his books to Alice: “We live in a desert, / We are choking on bread. / Where may we find the wind of the spirit? / Where seek for that exultation, / that divine intoxication of which we have so slight a memory?” In another inscription, he quoted Czesław Miłosz’s Nobel Lecture: “… leaving behind books as if they were dry snake skins, in a constant escape forward from what has been done in the past…”

  II. Adams favored some books that did not make the final nominations: Solstice by Joyce Carol Oates; Where She Was by Anderson Ferrell; Honeymoon by Merrill Joan Gerber; and Through the Safety Net by Charles Baxter. (AA to Lowry and Bausch, December 21, 1985.)