Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  III. Mary Catherine Bateson in Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom: “It was confusing in adolescence to be flooded with hormones, and it is confusing again as they dwindle; confusing in adolescence to discover zits on one’s face and confusing again to deal with wrinkles; confusing to become an object of sexual desire and confusing again to be invisible.” (New York: Knopf, 2010, 79.)

  IV. For comparison, see Fawcett Crest’s paperback of John Updike’s Couples (1968), also hot pink, also slathered with juicy quotes, but reprinting the gracefully seductive image of William Blake’s watercolor Adam and Eve Sleeping from Knopf’s hardcover edition that emphasizes the artfulness of Updike’s explicitly sexual novel.

  V. Alice rejected the art director’s wish to photograph her by a swimming pool.

  PART FIVE

  NOT MIDDLE AGE

  CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

  Things Fall Apart

  — 1987–1989 —

  I was getting toward being 60 myself… it struck me that 60 is not middle-age. I do not know a lot of people who are 120. So I began to think in a conscious way about what I hope will be the last third of my life… and I began looking at people who are 10 to 15 years older.

  —Alice Adams, speaking about Second Chances1

  In January 1987, the owner of the New Yorker forced seventy-nine-year-old William Shawn to step down as the magazine’s editor in chief. His replacement would be Robert Gottlieb.

  Alice was in Zihuatanejo when someone in New York called to tell her. “She came running out of the water toward me just as the sun was setting and told me, ‘Mr. Shawn is gone,’ ” Jay Schaefer recalled. Schaefer, the San Francisco–based founder and editor of Fiction Network who was also vacationing in Zihuatanejo that week, realized Alice was eager “to tell somebody who would know what this meant.”2

  No one really knew what Shawn’s exit would mean for the magazine and its writers. Alice, along with most of the New Yorker’s several hundred staff members, was shocked by the decision to hire someone from outside of the magazine. While Gottlieb had backed Victoria Wilson’s publication of Adams’s previous seven books, Alice lacked confidence that the New Yorker would buy her stories under his reign. At the magazine’s offices on West Forty-Third Street, the question of a successor to Mr. Shawn (as he was always called) had been roiling for several years as Shawn considered and declined internal aspirants. In the end publisher S. I. Newhouse hired Gottlieb and most of the staff stayed.3 A few months later, when Frances Kiernan left to take an editorial position at Houghton-Mifflin, Alice had more reason to worry. “The Drinking Club,” which appeared in August, was Adams’s last appearance in the New Yorker during the 1980s.

  Despite the news from New York, being in Zihuatanejo aroused Alice’s imagination. She made pages of notes on cats who’d been accidentally poisoned at the resort one previous year, dogs “more innocent than cats, funnier, frisking after new friends or waves,” black butterflies and amber bougainvillea, all of it “too beautiful to leave—the sea so bright.” She outlined “The End of the World”—a story about two married women characters who contemplate changes in their lives in the “unreal warmth” of the Mexican beach and under the distorting influence of a ferocious tropical rainstorm that attacks the roof “like bullets.” This was Alice and Bob’s thirteenth trip to their beloved Zihuatanejo. They still missed the dignified Calvins; cruise ships disgorged boatloads of tourists in gaudy clothes who despoiled their quiet cove with raucous volleyball games; and yet they tried “to live in the sensually perfect present—which is in fact imperfect.”4

  Things were far less perfect back in San Francisco. For about a month after their return Bob suffered from alarming digestive tract symptoms. A colonoscopy showed a mass in his intestine. In late February a surgeon removed a section of his colon. It was the same surgery Alice had undergone in 1986. In Bob’s case, the inflammation proved not to be cancer but rather chronic amoebiasis caused by a parasite he’d picked up in Mexico. He was prescribed a one-month course of Flagyl (metronidazole) to cure the infection. When doctors warned him not to drink alcohol while taking Flagyl, he abruptly gave up his two bottles of wine a day.5

  A severe change in Bob’s mental state ensued, as a side effect of either abrupt alcohol withdrawal or of Flagyl. He was so depressed and agitated that he could not go to his studio or complete projects for which he’d taken advance payments. “The shift was dramatic,” Peter Linenthal said. “He went from life-of-the-party to staring-at-the-floor. The change cannot be exaggerated.” He sank into debt. Alice had understood that the things Bob brought in to redecorate 2661 Clay were bargains he’d had lying around his studio or found about town. Now he informed her that he’d spent his savings to beautify their home. She loaned him money—$40,000 to $60,000, reportedly—but he was still unable to get back to work.

  By midspring Bob had lost forty pounds. Suffering from insomnia, decreased appetite, and chronic bowel complaints, he began seeing a psychiatrist in May 1987.

  * * *

  Many a woman—many a woman writer in particular—would have been paralyzed by these setbacks plaguing a loved one in her household. Alice, though, remained optimistic. When Beverly Lowry told her that she didn’t think Bob was suited for the role of “the Patient,” Alice replied: “Robert has done really well. He looks great (when does he not, so unfair) does everything, just gets sort of tired.” Nonetheless, she continued, “The Patient has to go. For one thing it is so damn exhausting for the one who is not. Who is doing all that cooking, etc—hospital duty. And then there’s the overdose of togetherness when they’re home. We actually weathered that better than I would have thought.”6

  During that winter—as always—Alice found both escape and satisfaction in her work. “I think my being at least half concentrated on my novel helped a lot. A whole other element.”7 While Bob recovered from surgery, she finished writing Second Chances and dedicated the book to Judith Clark Adams, Judith’s husband, and Judith’s mother. She sent the novel to Knopf in March of 1987. Wilson called to say she loved it. Alice told Lowry, “[She went] on and on about how wonderful—but I don’t know what she has in mind in terms of dollars… we’re talking big bunches. Bundles I guess I mean.”8 Alice felt anxious while her agent, Lynn Nesbit, and Wilson negotiated a contract. “The differences between projected sums are so huge: 300,000–500,000 or 750,000,” Adams noted. “It’s those differences causing my anxiety.”9 Alice also worried that the negotiations would damage her relationship with Knopf and Wilson. With Robert Gottlieb already moved to his new post at the New Yorker, the decision of how much Adams would receive for Second Chances fell to Knopf’s incoming editor in chief Sonny Mehta, who was moving to New York after a brilliant publishing career at Picador in London.

  In April Knopf offered Alice $1 million for Second Chances and a yet-untitled second novel, to be paid out over several years as the books were published in hardcover and paper editions. This was an unusually high amount for literary novels—over $2 million in 2019 dollars.I For Alice it renewed the ticket to freedom she’d gained with the paperback sale of Superior Women: she could support herself. Even with Bob not working, they might afford their new house. Bob was thrilled too. He sent off another one of his ridiculous not-anonymous notes to inform Herb Caen at the Chronicle that Alice had accepted a “low seven-figure contract for her next novel” (omitting mention of its other conditions). He enclosed a photo of Alice celebrating with Diane Johnson, whose new novel Persian Nights, dedicated to Alice Adams and Barbara Epstein, had just come out.10

  Because of Superior Women, in the words of Carolyn See, being an Alice Adams fan was no longer “an elitist thrill, a frisson of knowing that you and only a few others were initiated, knew that this writer existed.” For both the author and her publishers, the success of Superior Women set an expectation that her next book would also be a commercial success. No doubt that expectation influenced Adams to fill several of her succeeding novels with people whose lives
have been intertwined for years. What these novels gained in scope, they lost in intensity.

  * * *

  Throughout Bob’s recovery from surgery, his depression, and his ongoing battle with intestinal discomforts, Alice tried to manage her own nerves, fatigue, and irritation while keeping up a heavy schedule of professional obligations such as interviews with Kay Bonetti for the American Audio Prose Library and with Karen Evans for a profile in the Examiner’s Sunday magazine; for the latter, she steered the conversation toward talk about her cats. She’d agreed to go to the University of Utah as a visiting writer because she thought Bob would enjoy skiing at Park City. Now she had “to go to the goddam place” alone. She hated the university’s writer’s apartment with its “baskets of stiff dull-colored artificial flowers—small pillows all over, always in the way, fake oil lamps, their switches concealed” but no food except a can of garbanzo beans. She also hated the forced conversations with other faculty. Even the students—the group Alice often enjoyed most—were disappointing: “Someone demanded to know if I was aware that not one of my fictional heroines was morally pure, and I had to say that I was not,” Alice fumed later.11

  Alice was “rescued” from the kitschy apartment when poet Mark Strand and cookbook author Julie Strand invited her to stay with them. She thought the poet, then in his midfifties, “so handsome that he [was] hard to look at.” He found Alice lovely for her “stylishness in clothing and manner” and recalled, “She was a very tasteful dresser, very easy socially, she seemed like a grown-up to me, who had been used to frumpy, messily and tastelessly clad academic women.” A friendship ensued and the poet stayed in Alice’s garden-level guest room on future visits to San Francisco. When she sent him Second Chances, he felt “unbelievably moved by it… [he] felt eighteen when [he] began the novel, then just as old as Celeste, Dudley, Edward, by novel’s end,” and found it “so smart about what we choose to disclose and what keep secret.”12

  In May Bob, apparently drinking again, accompanied Alice to a teaching gig at Bates College in Maine. Together they visited the site of her childhood summers at Lake Sebago. Alice’s stepmother, Dotsie Adams, now suffering from an alcohol-precipitated neurological condition called Korsakoff’s syndrome and living in a nursing home in California, was keeping her promise to give Alice the property that had once belonged to Agatha. Alice hoped that the cottage would become a project for Bob, but they found it a shambles: “Even if you didn’t know Nic and Dotsie, you’d know crazy people had been living there,” she wrote Max Steele. Bob had no interest. But the lakefront property was valuable, so Alice gratefully paid the back taxes and completed the transfer. She had at last inherited a house from her parents.

  A visit to Judith and Timothy Adams at his family’s “ravishing” place on Bailey Island was the best part of this trip to Maine for Alice.13 But Alice’s dear old friend was alarmed by Bob: “He came with practically a case of wine—and they were going to be with us for two or three days? And I said, ‘Bob, that’s a lot of wine!’ And he said, ‘Oh we’ll drink it, we’ll drink it!’ Well, Timothy and I are not huge drinkers and I thought, ‘Uh-oh, that’s a lot of drinking.’ But he was a bon vivant, a very dramatic man. He was charming about the fact that Alice had introduced him to a different world. He said he’d been to Europe fifteen times with Alice—that Alice had introduced him to this wonderful sophisticated life and how much he loved it and he fit right in. He was fun! I think he adored Alice and he gave her a glamorous persona.”

  Fun or not, Bob got worse, his condition moving “from severe to acute”—“a suicide watch”—when they got home, Alice told Max and Judith in back-to-back letters. Finally, reading an article in Newsweek persuaded Bob to try a combination of talk and drug therapy. After seeing Dr. Richard Shore, he made a few phone calls to clients to explain why he hadn’t met with them. “Work seems to be the largest block, worst area, whatever, though of course also years of booze, which I’m sure was to mask depression,” Alice wrote.14

  Bob’s depression caused Alice to question her own accomplishments, as if she were starting out again. As the 1987 commencement speaker for the Berkeley English Department, she reminisced that she’d been “in no sense in charge” of her life when she arrived in California in 1948. As a broke, unpublished, unhappily married writer moored in bland, suburban Palo Alto, she’d longed for the complexity, free speech, and subversiveness of Berkeley. That environment, she said, made a good training ground for writers. She urged the graduates to “read enormously” and think subversively: “I have come to believe that people are drawn to writing by an at least unconscious perception of fiction as the place where the unsayable may be said.”15

  For Alice, in 1987, there was still an unsayable: her fear that Bob didn’t love—or had never loved—her and that the vitality of their lives together was depleted. Was she to be, as her mother had been, perpetually tied to a man who was emotionally unavailable to her, either drunk or manically engaged with others or buried under his own despair? Her notes on her dreams and her sessions with Dr. Wheelis say she felt a regressive pull toward her childhood, specifically to the feeling of being unloved. “R. [is] a constant reminder of the distorted failure of my life,” she wrote in late June.16

  That very same week she accepted an invitation to serve on the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction jury—a job not offered to failures. True, she hadn’t won that prize herself, but being on the judging panel with Julian Moynahan (a professor at Rutgers) and Richard Eder (an esteemed book reviewer) was an honor. How much recognition would it take for her to overcome the undertow of her lonely childhood?

  * * *

  In July, Bob was admitted to Mount Zion Hospital with worsening agitation, weight loss, and depression. It seems that he’d disappeared for days at a time during the preceding weeks. He stayed at Mount Zion until September, trying several different medications that failed to alleviate his problems.

  Adams’s story “What to Wear” gives a glimpse of these months as she felt them. The story abbreviates and simplifies what had been an extremely difficult year for both her and Bob. Her character, Sheila, can’t decide what to wear to visit her lover in the psychiatric ward because she “has never known what might please him, might make him laugh, might interest or infuriate him, and the effort of trying has worn her out, or nearly.” Wanting to show the man how important he is to her, Sheila dresses in a new silk shirt, then changes her mind because it might look too conspicuous in the psych ward. Her choice is wrong. He mocks her gray sweater with a tone “so brutally familiar—always, he has bludgeoned her with this heavy irony—that, reeling, Sheila thinks, But he’s really just the same. Has he always been mad?”

  Alice’s notebooks tell us she was mourning her life with Bob: “Mourning: loss, 23 yrs of emotion. Sentiments over childhood.” She was often on the phone with Dr. Shore, who reported that Bob refused his pills. With techniques from the Al-Anon twelve-step program she tried to learn how to break her “total concentration on R” and wrote, “I must detach, he is not my barometer.” She talked often with her younger friend Anne Lamott about her experience of alcoholism and recovery: “Her father’s mental illness was obviously the defining aspect of her childhood,” Lamott said. “It was why she needed to achieve so much, and run so far away from the South. When Bob started coming apart noticeably, it was very familiar, and excruciating, not to be able to save the latest Dad stand-in.” Trying to carry on with her social life, Alice felt “lonely in a world of couples.” She remembered feeling the same way when she was a six-year-old among married adults. “Everyone likes someone better than me,” she had told her aunt then.

  * * *

  At the Galería de la Raza and the Mexican Museum in San Francisco’s Mission District, Alice saw an extraordinary exhibit of paintings by Frida Kahlo: “The overall effect was cumulative, brilliantly powerful, almost overwhelming… only consummate skill could have produced such meticulous images of pain, and love, and loneliness.” She became fascinated by
Kahlo and pursued her interest by contracting to write a piece about her for Art & Antiques magazine. The next year she went to see Kahlo’s and Rivera’s houses in Mexico City with two younger friends, Mary Ross Taylor, a Texas art critic then living in San Francisco, and Beverly Lowry. She hadn’t traveled out of the US without Bob at her side for many years, and every practical aspect of this trip challenged her. Lowry remembered that Alice was afraid to call “this witch of a woman who had control over many of Kahlo’s paintings. She sat there looking at the phone and saying, ‘She’s probably not there. It’s three o’clock. I’m sure she’s taking a nap.’ And I said, ‘Alice, don’t write nonfiction!’ ”

  In the essay about Kahlo she would eventually finish, Adams sees an affinity between Kahlo and Billie Holiday, who “shared a tendency toward extremes—of talent and personal beauty (Kahlo in photographs is more beautiful than the self she painted), as well as addictiveness”—to drugs, alcohol, and love. Both women’s faces, she thinks, combine “almost conventional prettiness & harsh ‘masculine strength.’ ” Why, Adams asks, did Frida adore “a man who was continuously, compulsively unfaithful to her, and who was for long periods of time conspicuously off and away with other, often famous, women?” She offers two answers. First, “Diego entirely supported Frida’s work; he considered her “one of the greatest living painters,” understood the “intensely female, anguished complexity of her work,” and “compared his own painting unfavorably to hers.” He also built a wonderful studio for her—Adams felt she could “forgive Diego a great deal for having built this space for Frida’s work.” Second, “Frida was absolutely addicted to Diego; she could be said to have been impaled on her mania for Diego, as she had been literally impaled in the horrifying streetcar accident that, when she was 18, so painfully, horribly transformed her life. She herself referred to the ‘two accidents’ in her life, the streetcar crash and Diego.”17