Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  After her medical ordeals, Alice found solace in working on a novel set in Chapel Hill. “I started writing A Southern Exposure at a time when I wasn’t feeling too great and wanted to get somewhere else,” she told the journalist Joan Smith.13 Alice’s cancer was a very close brush with mortality; even though she’d survived it, she needed to use whatever wisdom she’d acquired to look at her own past with a longer lens. When Peter began doing photographs and illustrations for children’s books, Alice conceived a story about a cat—her Maine coon named Sam—that she hoped they could write and illustrate together. Sam sat in a window and wished he could be outside with the birds. “It was poignant,” Peter said, “and it reflected her loneliness, but it didn’t work as a children’s story.” Then she traveled to Miami (“An eccentric destination,” she said, “but I’ve always wanted to see it—and I need some warmth”) with Bill Brown, Fran and Howard Kiernan, Victoria Wilson, and Regina Tierney—they stayed at the historic Biltmore, and Alice added on a visit to Alison Lurie in Key West.

  * * *

  Completed before her cancer diagnosis, Adams’s “Book of Bob,” titled Almost Perfect, came out in the summer of 1993. She dedicated the book to friends she’d first met through Bob, G. G. (Geraldine) and Larry Green, and to her own dear friend Edwina Evers Leggett and her new husband, Jack Leggett, a writer and retired director of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, all people who’d stood by her during the rupture with Bob. Carol Devine Carson’s stark glossy jacket and Joyce Ravid’s warm, sexy portrait of pre-surgery Alice Adams introduced a book that the Wall Street Journal called “stylish, brittle, and engrossing.” That paper’s reviewer, Merle Rubin, praised the author for telling the story of a “normally sensible woman who falls for a deeply rotten man” with “intriguing suspense without resorting to lurid or cheap melodrama.”

  Always-perceptive Ella Leffland wrote that Almost Perfect was Adams’s “most powerful novel,” especially for its “haunting portrait” of Richard, “that essentially desolate being, awful and yet moving.” Certainly Leffland knew whereof she spoke, having published her novel The Knight, Death and the Devil, a study of Nazi Hermann Göring, whose monstrous egotism and complexity were acted out on a larger scale than poor Richard’s. Out of deference to her health, or perhaps to Bob McNie, Alice did little touring to promote Almost Perfect.

  Quite the opposite. Alice spent part of July at a remote cabin in the Bitterroot Mountains of Montana with Derek Choate Parmenter, a New Englander by birth, recently divorced, whom she’d first met when he was a student at UNC fifty years earlier. Parmenter had come south for college during the Depression. Judith Clark and Alice met him at beer parties at St. Anthony Hall, the Delta Psi house. At that time, Parmenter said, he knew Judith “very well.” More recently Alice and Bob had known him socially through his former wife, Marian Parmenter, the cofounder with Sally Lilienthal of the SFMOMA Artists Gallery, a rental gallery that supports emerging artists. Now Parmenter was retired from his business as a stockbroker with E. F. Hutton in San Francisco. He phoned Alice when he heard she was no longer with Bob and was recovering from cancer surgery.

  That was in April 1993. Alice quickly recognized her vulnerability to a new man, a new romance: “Derek frenzy: a whiff, not much more, of the old addictive substance—and I’m off, really off. It’s not a fun game, since I play to lose—Dan never fit the pattern—too present, too reliable.”14 Immediately their relationship was complicated. “I’ve known Derek Parmenter since I was fifteen,” Judith said. “And I don’t think Derek was particularly good at intimacy. It’s not an important part of his life and it was an important part of Alice’s life.” In addition to native reserve, Derek, then seventy, struggled with health issues and depression. Dan had been out her life for only two months, so she found it “hard… going from [Dan’s] continuous presence to zero.” The problem, of course, was with Alice’s expectations. She recognized her frustration in a haiku: “All my anxious amorous fantasies / flew like birds / to land on his uncertain shoulders.”

  When they first dated, Alice was debilitated by surgery and radiation treatments and not yet permitted to swim. She wanted to get stronger and Derek suggested that they go hiking together. “She was very weak. It took a year or two for her to recover,” Parmenter said, “but then she became a strong hiker. She had the ideal figure.” They settled into a pattern of spending part of their weekends together: “I did the planning, packed a lunch, and chose the route from a guidebook of Marin County. She was very pleased when we were walking uphill that she did so well. What I enjoyed most about her was her brain. She was very sharp. Good sense of humor and great style. Though we didn’t speak about it, we probably were in love.”

  Whether in love or simply loving, Derek became an essential part of Alice’s life. Still, Alice struggled with her “obsession”—her need for the flurry of romance that Derek did not provide. Alone with him in Montana, she made notes about a character (herself) who studied her man’s “moods, needs, whims, neuroses—vulnerabilities—as she did the sky, for the weather—and much more successfully: being intelligent & sensitive, of course she did well, better than most, only at times she wondered: is this—is he worth such a major effort?”15 As Alice resigned herself to Derek’s emotional quietude, she came to value him “as a true gentleman” and “loyal friend,” according to Frances Kiernan.

  Derek Parmenter became her escort for public occasions as well as smaller gatherings. “She had a lot of brainy pals, and from my standpoint it was fun. A well-known writer would come to town and she and the writer would have dinner and I was able to tag along. I remember having dinner with Cynthia Ozick once.” Some friends wondered why Alice was with Derek. Italian-food writer Carol Field found him so “terminally boring” that she dreaded being seated with him at dinner, but her husband, architect John Field, speculated that Derek’s undemanding personality might have been a relief to Alice after Bob’s: “That’s a phenomenon you see often, from complicated to simple, especially if the woman is ambitious.” Edwina Leggett noticed Derek’s anxiety at parties: “He would come with almost a list of things in his mind that he could talk about. He would fire off questions while he sat there crunching up his napkin.” He was more comfortable in one-to-one conversations, Frances Kiernan thought. Once when Alice was sick, Kiernan rode with Derek to Napa County for dinner with Jack and Edwina Leggett. She said, “He was excellent company throughout. A quiet man but a surprisingly bright man. And kind.”

  On another visit to the Leggetts, a black dog, predominantly Lab, wandered onto the deck and attached himself to Alice, who sneaked him slices of meat she’d been served. “He was a joyful dog who belonged to the lady next door, who wanted to get rid of him,” Derek recalled. “So I went up to look at him and try him out, and, you know, you never just try out a dog, you have the dog. So that was Pepper. I had him about five years.” Adams wrote a story of that episode titled “A Very Nice Dog.” She changed most of the human details (Napa became Sausalito, the Leggetts a gay couple rather like Billy Abrahams and Peter Stansky) but celebrated her role in finding a new home for “an aging Lab, slightly grizzled around the jaw,” with “beautiful dark-brown–purple velvet eyes.”

  “A Very Nice Dog” gives insight into Alice’s shyness. Its plot is built upon its first-person narrator’s desire to get acquainted with an older man named Justin that she encounters while walking in her neighborhood: “The appeal was not sexy; he looked to be at least ten years older than I am, and I am too old to be turned on by older men.” In a brief friendly exchange that the narrator wants to repeat, the man confides to her that he’d like to get a dog. She dreams up the more elaborate plan of arranging for Justin to rescue a black dog she saw at a friend’s house. She manipulates the situation so successfully that Justin adopts the dog without ever knowing that it was all the narrator’s idea. Here the story might end—but does not. The narrator wants credit for her matchmaking: “The only missing element for me, and I had to admit this to myself, was m
y own role… Better to be thought a little indiscreet than to remain almost invisible.” Thus the narrator confesses to vulnerability and egoism of a sort considered unseemly for a woman of a certain age. It’s one of the shocking charms of Adams’s later fiction that she wrote boldly about the needs of older women for sexual companionship and recognition.

  * * *

  A year after her surgery, Alice made an ambitious trip east. In “old & familiar & dirty & very beautiful” Boston she had a good visit with her former student Dennis McFarland; his wife, Michelle Blake; and their kids, who were her godchildren. When Dennis and Michelle had learned their son would be born without a left hand, Alice told them: “This is what I think (a quite clear vision)—you will have an absolutely extraordinary, amazing child. Person.”16 In New York City, Alice walked miles, admired the precision and skill of fifteenth-century watercolors at the Frick Collection, spent time with Fran and Howard Kiernan, dined with Amanda Urban, and shopped for a gift for Derek (who favored preppy clothes), and found herself feeling like “a fake rich person.” After a few days of that she boarded a train bound for North Carolina, grateful to hear black voices and see leaves and swamps. Derek joined her for a stopover in Washington, DC, where they stayed with their mutual friend Judith Adams. Still suffering fatigue from her cancer, Alice was critical of everyone: Derek was more affectionate to Judith than to herself, and Judith seemed too loud and opinionated.17

  Alice continued alone to North Carolina, where she found relief in “laughing happy old Max” (now on friendly terms with Diana, his former wife) and long walks in “the deep old woods.” Of course, nothing’s perfect. Max took Alice to see his neighbor, ninety-two-year-old Norma Berryhill, who had known Alice’s parents. A resulting story, “The Visit,” tells how the old lady (now Miss Dabney) flattered Grace, a famous actress who had grown up in town and returned for a visit: “Miss Dabney leaned forward. ‘You know, we’ve always been so proud of you in this town. Just proud as proud.’ ” Grace is inordinately pleased by this remark. But then Miss Dabney ruins Grace’s triumph by saying that the “proudest” moment was when Grace, as an “adorable little two- or three-year-old” crawled under the dining table and bit her mother right on the ankle.I

  “The Visit” concludes with Grace’s defiance of the rule that “Southern ladies [do] not contradict other ladies.” As Miss Dabney tediously recounts the ankle incident, Grace rejoins: “I guess up to now no one ever told me so as not to make me feel small and bad. I guess they knew I’d have to get very old and really mean before I’d think that was funny.” The last line of the story comes from Miles, the character based on Max Steele: “As Miles thinks, Ah, that’s my girl!”

  That apparently simple anecdote, which Mary Gordon selected for the fiction issue she edited for Ploughshares and Adams included in her collection The Last Lovely City, becomes an artistic short story because it encapsulates Adams’s lifelong struggle to distinguish nostalgia from truth in her memories of her parents’ unhappy marriage and the culture of her upbringing. Adams neatly puts down old Chapel Hill society, allies herself with her mother, and maintains her bond with Max, the former lover and dear friend who mediates between herself and Chapel Hill. In her introduction to the Ploughshares volume, Gordon writes, “The short story is like a wagon wheel: the spokes must be connected to the hub, or graceful movement is impossible.” In Adams’s Chapel Hill stories, the hub is always a lonely little girl who feels she was misplaced in the world but works diligently to redeem herself.

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  Despite her cancer fatigue, by the summer of 1994 Adams had finished the manuscript of her fourteenth book and ninth novel, A Southern Exposure. She’d been thinking about this book for almost four years, since she wrote, “Old Chapel Hill novel? All those people… like Breughel,” in her notebook in mid-1990. She wrote it quickly. This revisioning of her parents’ generation is set just before World War II. Much of the action in her fictional “Pinehill” revolves around the elusive figure of poet Russell Byrd, who is plainly based on Paul Green, a luminary figure in the Carolina Playmakers and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 1927. Alice’s parents knew Green and his wife; Green’s sister Caro Mae was married to the writer Phillips Russell, from whom Alice learned her ABDCE plot pattern. Agatha Boyd Adams wrote a brief biography called Paul Green of Chapel Hill. In it she notes that in Green’s work “details of landscape and folkways are sharply etched”—citing “hog-killings” as one example. Oddly enough, in A Southern Exposure Russell Byrd’s killing of a pig in a car accident causes “an explosion of foulness, a ghastly smell. Fecal—worse than fecal”—that becomes a haunting image for Byrd, who is said to be writing a verse drama about it. The novel’s Jimmy Hightower, who has moved to North Carolina from Oklahoma in hopes of apprenticing himself to Russell Byrd, is modeled on novelist Noel Houston, who similarly came to Chapel Hill to seek out Paul Green.II Then there’s a psychiatrist, Clyde Drake, who irresponsibly socializes with his patients and experiments with shock therapy: clearly a retread of Alice’s father’s unscrupulous psychiatrist Malcolm Kemp.

  While A Southern Exposure captures “this lovely place and golden time, just before things got so damn serious forever,”18 as novelist Lee Smith wrote in a review for the New York Times, it is most interested in how a woman named Cynthia Baird becomes modern. Cynthia is a Northerner—she comes to Pinehill from Connecticut (as did Judith Clark’s parents) because she and her husband can live more cheaply in the South; Cynthia also has a secret wish to know the famous Russell Byrd. By telling the story of the Bairds’ movement into Pinehill society, Adams exposes the intricate rules, scandals, racism, sexism, secrets, hatreds, and loves in a small-town society stranded between the Depression and the coming war. As male characters pursue their ambitions and Southern women mostly cleave to their men, Cynthia evolves to meet her circumstances and opportunities. Beginning as a fashionable social climber whose “golden money seemed an endless stream” before the 1929 crash, she finishes a college degree and aspires to go to law school and work for civil rights when the war is over.

  Moving her setting to the South allowed Adams to study women’s lives from a new angle. As Joan Smith noted in a profile, Adams had been writing about California life so well and for so long that she’d been, in the words of Billy Abrahams, “mimicked to death” by other writers. “It seems to me that Southern women have the problems that all women have of being brought up to be subservient and amused, rather than amusing, only it’s worse in the South,” Adams told Lee Smith. Writing the book caused her to realize that her mother had been critical of her because she “overrated” her daughter’s potential.19 Alice also admitted that she wrote for revenge, and this novel of manners allowed space for that in her analysis of Chapel Hill’s hypocritically genteel racism and narrowness.20 Perhaps surviving a deadly illness gave Alice courage to challenge the hegemony of Chapel Hill society that she’d once run away from but hadn’t escaped in her mind.

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  Because A Southern Exposure was quite different from her previous novels, her agent, Amanda Urban, to whom it was dedicated, offered it to at least one publisher in addition to Knopf in hopes of generating an auction. As Alice waited two months for responses, she worried and felt disloyal to Victoria Wilson. But Urban, whom Alice considered a “realist,” reminded her that this was about getting paid for her work. She asked Alice if she would accept as little as $200,000. She would.21 In the end Nan Talese of Doubleday declined A Southern Exposure, writing that “it is certainly wonderful Alice Adams and no reader will be disappointed, but in this time of high-profile marketing, one needs a ‘hook’ to break beyond the recognition an author has previously enjoyed.” Neither Talese nor Doubleday president Stephen Rubin could find the necessary hook.22 Wilson remained steadfast, and Alice accepted a $125,000 advance from Knopf.23 “Dark day—hangover? (2 wine, & Halcion),” she noted. Her gloom was exacerbated when Republicans swept the midterm elections to elect their first majority in the House
of Representatives since 1946 with Newt Gingrich designated to be Speaker. The only bright spots, she thought, were Senator Dianne Feinstein’s reelection in California and the defeat of Lieutenant Oliver North, architect of the Iran-Contra scandal, for a Senate seat in Virginia.

  Alice weathered her disappointment (and some humiliation too, because the auction had unveiled her willingness to leave Knopf) about receiving a lower advance for A Southern Exposure than she’d received for her previous novels by—what else?—plowing into the composition of a new novel.

  “I’m thinking hard about a doctor novel,” Alice had written earlier in 1994 to poet Donald Hall whom she’d known in Palo Alto in the 1950s. Hall had survived metastasized colon cancer and his wife, poet Jane Kenyon, was then undergoing treatment for leukemia. “I’m very over-involved with doctors,” Alice wrote. “They are awful, don’t you think? Their language—and sensibilities. The last time I complained (mildly, really) one said to me, ‘You don’t know how lucky you are to be here.’ ” When Hall replied that his doctor experiences in New Hampshire had been far better than elsewhere, Alice answered, “I’m STILL going to write a mean novel about them.”24

  * * *

  Medicine Men would be about cancer, doctors, and women’s friendship. Adams dedicated it to her “always kind and often brilliant” psychiatrist, Dr. Allen Wheelis, because he’d helped her find the inner strength to survive her disease. The novel so clearly emerged from Alice’s recent experience that those who knew of her illness read it as a memoir. “I found it impossible to read as fiction,” Mavis Gallant told Alice. “It remained to the end the forced march, over a minefield, of someone I know. I shall have to wait to reread it until it turns into fiction in my mind.”25 Although she’s only forty, Molly Bonner resembles Alice in being a once-divorced, once-widowed Southerner (Alice considered herself a kind of widow after Bob’s mental defection) who lives in San Francisco, where she has worked for years as a medical secretary and formed strong opinions about “medicine men.” Add to that the fact that her novel included a doctor named Dave Jacobs playing almost exactly the ex-lover/good-Samaritan role that Dan Simon played for Alice, while, less glaringly, the ENT specialist who, in the book, is slow to diagnose her sinus cancer is named Dr. Mark Stinger, just one letter off from Alice’s ENT specialist, Dr. Singer. The most despicable doctor in Medicine Men is an abusive heart surgeon named Raleigh Sanderson who has an affair with Molly’s best friend, Felicia; it’s unclear to what degree Sanderson resembles the late Dr. Frank L. Gerbode, about whose sexual appetite Alice gossiped to her friend Ruth Belmeur during the time she worked in his department at the Pacific Medical Center. Less troubling but still unappealing as men are Alice’s caricatures of the Stanford doctors who saved her life. For instance, her surgeon is “a large bluff man with the aggressively swaying walk of a football player—or a surgeon” who greets forty-year-old Molly with the same words every other doctor has used: “Well, young lady, what seems to be the trouble?”