Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Caroline’s Daughters showed up in the Post’s bestseller list after See’s review but stayed there just two weeks. With competition from Danielle Steel’s latest romance on the sleaze side and from a host of fine new novels by the likes of Jane Smiley, Joyce Carol Oates, and Milan Kundera on the literary side, Adams’s novel never touched the New York Times bestseller list.

  Caroline’s Daughters, Adams told one interviewer, is a moralistic book: “I lived through the ’80s with enormous disapproval,” she said. “I hated the Reagans for starters. He seemed to say that greed is good and conspicuous consumption terrific and rich people are swell.”4

  No doubt it’s ironic that Adams’s Trollopian novel about greed and envy completed her million-dollar contract with Knopf. When her affairs were disentangled from Bob’s, she found herself financially independent for the first time in her life. She was familiar with the lust for clothes, restaurants, and houses that drives her characters. At the same time, entering her midsixties, Alice felt pressure to produce and sell work and provide for her old age. After 1987, many of her stories were going to smaller magazines that paid almost nothing. Being solo, riding buses, swimming at a public pool, and taking long walks made her acutely aware of economic displacements and suffering in the city. This novel’s harsh view of yuppies and focus on money and style—“I’ve often wondered, where would Eighties conversations be without food and travel?” one character asks—is complemented by some characters’ earnest wishes to help homeless people and AIDS victims. Her unpublished essay “Street Woman” (sentences of which appeared in Caroline’s Daughters) imagines several tall, strong homeless women, each of whom “was at one time almost all right, and whose life in a gradual way fell entirely apart.” Alice had led a comfortable enough life, always housed and fed, but she saw how a few different events—sexual assault or accidental pregnancy or alcoholism or uninsured illness—might have put her in the street woman’s predicament.

  Alice’s empathy went beyond most people’s, Millicent Dillon thought: “Whenever we went out, she spoke with the black woman who sat in front of the Clay Theater and gave her $20. And I know she was thinking, I am that woman, part of me is that woman, and at the same time she knew she could not imagine the life of that woman.” Alice joined Mark Childress, Ethan Canin, Amy Tan, Al Young, Bharati Mukherjee, and other writers who performed at benefit dinners for AIDS research and local hospices. She read her story about a gay man coming out to an old friend, “Breakfast at Louie’s Café.” The three-evening series raised $77,000.5

  With Caroline’s Daughters, Alice Adams said goodbye to the glamour represented by Bob McNie, goodbye to carefree European trips (with Bob at the wheel), goodbye to hedonistic winter trips to Zihuatanejo. She would continue to live in San Francisco, of course, and to enjoy her beautiful house, rich friendships, and occasional romances there, but the party seemed to be over. With Peter as a go-between, Bob reclaimed his personal things and some of the ornamental items he’d purchased for 2661 Clay Street. Alice kept the dark downstairs rooms with big mirrors just as Bob had decorated them. She hired Scott Massey, who had just lost his partner to AIDS, to take care of the deck and garden. Alice was usually “schlepping around in a housecoat” when Massey came to work, so he barely recognized her when he “saw her up on Nob Hill one day looking like a million bucks in a red suit, with big ring-type earrings.” Massey said that Alice loved blue flowers, “one of the most difficult colors in the flower kingdom—[he] was never able to satisfy her craving for blue flowers.” As they got acquainted, she told him that Bob’s personality was very dark and that was why they had a black bathroom. There was also a plant, a succulent, on the deck, and Massey remembered, “It was black—a dark, flower-type thing on a long stem. As we were rearranging the deck, I would say ‘we’ll put roses here and Bob’s plant here.’ ” After a couple of those conversations, Alice told Massey not to refer to it as Bob’s plant. “It was the only time she ever got cross with me. I never said a word about it again and that plant stayed there, part of the darkness of Bob McNie.”

  Translating Bob into memory rather than active pain would be the goal of Adams’s eighth novel. By mid-1989, as she was still composing Caroline’s Daughters, a more intimate fiction flickered on her horizon. She outlined three aspects for this story. Her working title was “Book of Bob”:

  For about 20 years I was “madly” (ill-advisedly, mindlessly) in love with a man who does not seem to have loved me very much, & certainly not liked me—but maybe I did not like him so much either—

  For many years I was involved with a man who drank a lot, as I did too in those days. For years almost every night the 2 of us were fairly drunk, which led us from what had begun as violent love to hideous quarrels—

  I lived for a long time with a man who went, finally, quite mad—in retrospect the process was clear, he was always a little crazy, surely one of his attractions—but so was I & the effort of, finally, not being mad myself has been enormous—

  Everything I have said so far is true—but so complicated!—I want to tell this story simply, as it was.6

  * * *

  When Adams agreed to be the guest editor for The Best American Short Stories 1991, the series’ new editor, Katrina Kenison, gave her the choice of reading stories “blind” or with authors’ names attached. Recent editors Mark Helprin and Margaret Atwood had chosen blind; Richard Ford had not and Adams followed his lead. After years of being among the “unchosen” she wished to use any influence she had.7 The volume she assembled comprised stories by both emerging and established writers, twelve women and eight men. It included her favorites, Joyce Carol Oates and Alice Munro; her New Yorker rival John Updike; her former student Harriet Doerr; and two good friends, Millicent Dillon and Leonard Michaels. With refreshing candor, Adams admitted that she found it easy to choose the best stories and that “there should have been more first-rate stories from which to choose.” Why had there not been? Because of “the sheer economics of short story writing,” she argues. In the 1940s, “writing short stories was a plausible full-time trade” but now slick women’s and men’s magazines were publishing fewer serious stories than ever before, leaving the New Yorker as the only magazine paying well for literary fiction.

  In her introduction to BASS 1991 Adams declares that she is “deeply enamored” of short stories. “The form delights me,” she writes before explaining why certain stories win her attention: “On reading these stories, I am seized with a desire to write a story of my own.” Pointedly—and it seems gleefully—she disagrees with a statement by Wallace Stegner, her old Stanford nemesis, that short stories are “a young writer’s form.” She cites her own experience—“I know I am writing better stories now than I did at thirty”—and adds that the “greatest living practitioner of the form, V. S. Pritchett,” is over ninety.8

  Adams was using the pulpit of that introduction to state her commitment to short stories at a time when she earned little money from them herself. She was still bristling from a recent tangle with Redbook, from which she withdrew her story “Your Doctor Loves You” because she found the editor’s questions and requests for cuts disrespectful and irrelevant.9 The New Yorker continued to offer her a first-reading agreement each year, and fiction editor Pat Strachan read Adams’s submissions with care but accepted few. Strachan’s rejection letters mention such problems as “gaps in chronology” and “almost enough material here for a novel”—the kind of thing that typically distinguishes an Adams story—without the editorial suggestions Bob Hemenway and Frances Kiernan sometimes offered for turning such problems into assets. During the editorship of Gottlieb, only two stories by Adams, “Earthquake Damage” and “The Last Lovely City,” graced the magazine’s pages. Nonetheless, ICM and Adams doggedly kept the stories in circulation and most were published. Crosscurrents, a quarterly edited by Linda Michelson Brown in Southern California, published six, including four from the Lila Lewisohn series.

  * * *

  As comme
rcial fiction languished, Adams learned that beauty and home magazines might pay thousands for light, personal essays by a successful novelist. During the nineties she wrote more than a half-dozen whimsical pieces that offer glimpses into her life. In “A Natural Woman” (for which Allure paid $5,000), she ponders the meaning of gray hair. When her dark hair began to gray while she was in her twenties, she experimented with home bleaching and professional “frosting” until a man said her gray hair looked pretty in the sunlight: “I had seen myself as blond, not gray, but on going home to my mirror I saw what he meant: What was not blond, between the streaks, was gray. I had gray hair.”

  From that day forward, Adams writes, “I stopped having my hair frosted, or streaked, or anything at all—and thus began a much easier, happier, and, I think, more attractive phase of my life.” She argues that for some women, going gray signifies “giving up” on sexual attractiveness and leads them to forgo good haircuts, diets, and attractive clothes; for others—like herself—it signifies “growing up” to independence and strength.10 Marjorie Leet, who first met Alice in 1981, recalled that her hair was then dark gray, “somewhere between pewter and tarnished silver, and not stylishly cut.” During the eighties, her hair became “polished silver” worn in a gamine cut that Bob approved. After Bob, her hair remained bright silver, but she let it grow longer. Pictures from the early nineties show an elegant sweep of silver crossing her forehead and grazing her shoulders.11

  * * *

  Adams had contracted to write her travel memoir about Mexico for Prentice Hall’s Destinations book series mainly for the money and the opportunity to travel.I In the end she disliked the project: “It became so Alice-in-Mexico, so embarrassing. But no other way to do it ever appeared,” she confided to poet Don Hall. “Doing a book for hire, as it were, is probably a bad idea, don’t you think? A stray article can be fun—but not a whole book.” Reviews were scarce but the Chronicle catches the appeal of Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There as a book “full of pleasant, subtly drawn surprises.” It is infused with the emotional struggles of Alice’s post-Bob years; the chapter on Cuernavaca, where Alice traveled alone, “is darker, the ubiquitous sharp association of place and mood even more accentuated.” In a personal letter to Alice, Carolyn See responded to Mexico’s emotional tenor, writing that the three chapters about Zihuatanejo with Bob “are the most beautiful evocation of lost beautiful Times I’ve ever read… the account of those days took me back to Mazatlán in the 60s and how much Time we had (or thought we had)… God! Also the later chapters are so vulnerable, so full of affection, so sad but so controlled—I was bowled over Alice. I really was.”12

  When Alice gave a copy of Mexico to her neighbor Richard Rodriguez, she told the esteemed essayist that she would be embarrassed by any comparison of her book with his recent Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father. Rodriguez “took it as a kindness more than a compliment” and said, “I had demons in Mexico to contend with—my ‘advantage’ in writing—that she did not have. I wished at the time that Mexico could be for me, as it was for Alice, a serene and beautiful retreat for the soul. My Mexico has been a nightmare place, but also a loving and relentless mother.”

  * * *

  As Alice regained her personal confidence after her break with Bob McNie, she discovered that there were few available men who really interested her. “I seem to be semi-involved in several Relationships,” she confided to Alison Lurie. All three men were widowers. “It’s very interesting about widowers, I find—or, it’s true what everyone says: they are dying to reconnect in some way,” she told Lurie.13

  One widower was Frank Smith Fussner, a historian retired from Reed College whom she’d met forty years earlier when Mark Linenthal taught there. Now Fussner lived on a ranch in the Columbia River gorge. After a visit to his home in Spray, Oregon, Alice reported, “It’s absolutely incredibly beautiful up there. Canyon country—small bare hills and meadows… all just now in marvelous fall shades. And the drive from Portland to there is really breathtaking… BUT: it is four hours from Portland, terribly isolated.” A year later she and Fussner drove together along the Oregon coast, which provided the setting for her story “Up the Coast.” One more meeting, in Seattle, proved to be the last. Adams’s story “Love and Work” sums up that parting with a metaphor about how they handle their luggage: The man waits in the hotel lobby “with a surly, superior expression on his face for someone else to bring his luggage down”; the woman, in contrast, pridefully lugs her own overstuffed carry-on bag, though doing so hurts her shoulder: “At least I didn’t have to wait. And (at least, these days) I am very mobile. Free.”14

  Sidney Hedelman, a physicist from Marin County, asked Alice out weeks after the death of his wife, who had been Alice’s friend too. Though Alice didn’t date him for long, Hedelman named Alice Adams in his self-published Collected Works as “a warm, unaffected companion who laid the foundation for some of my stories.”15

  Alice had already touched on the topic of awkward later-life “dating” in Second Chances and she took it up more explicitly now in new short stories called “Old Love Affairs” and “The Wrong Virginia.”

  The idea for the latter story came from her relationship with another recent widower, Daniel Stewart Simon. Diane Johnson invited both Alice and Simon to dinner but never thought they would get together. Simon, then about seventy, had retired from his medical practice to direct the care of his wife, Alice Nison Simon, who had succumbed to cancer after a four-year ordeal. Simon, who was tall and energetic with a forceful smile and thick white hair, reminded Alice of Bob. In a wry, imaginary dialogue in her notebook, she wrote that she was still in love with Bob, “But now we’re calling him Dan.”16

  Dan Simon talked so often to Alice Adams about Alice Simon that, Adams writes, “it is asking too much of me, I think—to be new love and old friend.” Dan’s late wife was such a presence in his mind that Alice felt as if she were “going out with someone who’s married.” But Dan’s inhibitions about being with a new Alice increased Alice’s desire to win his interest for herself—at times she was “turned on by [his] sheer lack of interest.” In southern Mexico with Alison Lurie, Alice talked about Dan, waited for his phone calls to their hotels, and counted the hours till she would see him again. When Lurie asked her, “Who did you love the most?” Alice replied, “Bob, of course.” That, she wrote in her journal, was “the simple answer to 23 years.” Talking freely with Lurie while at breakfast or wandering through the ruins at Palenque was “happiness” for Alice. As she told Lurie about Bob’s “warmth, generosity, lack of meanness, sensitivity, wit, intuition,” she became settled in her intention to write her “Book of Bob.”17

  In San Francisco, Alice and Dan Simon tried to figure out how to have a relationship with each other. Dan studied pictures of Bob McNie that Alice left out in her house, asking Alice if he was still so handsome. That Alice Simon was dead and Bob was still alive made it hard for Dan to understand why Alice Adams still had strong feelings about Bob.18 In “The Wrong Virginia,” Adams put this thought into the mind of the character based on Simon: “Curiously, Fielding thought, the presence of another woman in his life, instead of stilling old longings for Virginia, seemed rather to fuel them. He dreamed of her often, of his Virginia; more than once he woke in tears.” Most likely Alice felt a parallel anomaly: being with Dan made her miss Bob.

  A more practical problem arose too. Dan was not used to a woman who worked, and Alice thought he was too demanding of her time. Her need to be home alone to work and her need to travel to give readings or workshops—which she did often in these years—baffled him. In “The Wrong Virginia,” the new Virginia details a plan limiting their evenings to two nights a week, a glass of wine at her house and dinner at a restaurant on Fillmore. During these evenings Fielding steers conversations away from what he saw as “feminist obsessions” and “psychologizing” and “her intensely protective feelings toward all gay people” before returning to her house, wh
ere “they would or quite possibly would not go to bed together.”

  Peter Linenthal and Phil Anasovich found Dan Simon “slightly obnoxious with no sense of propriety at all. He did what he wanted to do and said what he wanted to say.” Phil recalled, “We gave him a book on Mediterranean cooking—usually when people receive gifts they make some kind of gesture toward acceptance. Not Dan. He said, ‘Why did you give me this?’—strange and embarrassing for us. And we thought he liked to cook.” Peter considered him “creepy.” On a hike in the Berkeley hills, Peter remembered, “Dan told us he liked my mother to be dressed in clothes that reminded him of a little girl. Maybe she was wearing knee socks and shorts? It was just odd that he would share his observation with us, whatever his fantasies were. But he was handsome, like out of an L.L.Bean catalog: thick hair and big white teeth that looked like tombstones. We saw him with my mother for a couple of years, and during that time we and her friends were all kind of trying to tell her, you can do better than this. He had no literary interests, didn’t appreciate the work she did.”