Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Alice told an audience at UC Davis that her novel about doctors was “mean and angry” and that a lawyer warned her that she might be sued by one of the doctors when it was published. If that happened, she replied, she would just sue the doctor back for malpractice.26 Friends of Dr. Mark Singer’s did suggest he sue Adams because, as he recalled, she had barely changed his name, used something close to the name of one of his residents, named Mount Zion Hospital, and “concocted a story of malpractice.” Singer said, “Alice was my patient for about three days. I made the diagnosis and she and the guy she was living with, an internist, were upset and they fired me.” In the end no lawsuits were filed.27

  * * *

  When Adams was finishing Medicine Men, Don Terner, the husband of her good friend Deirdre English, was killed in the crash of a US government plane in Croatia. That tragic incident also found its way into the novel with the death of “wild and handsome and funny, intelligent and sexy” filmmaker Paul West, Molly’s second husband, in a helicopter accident. Paul’s recently purchased accident insurance makes Molly rich; her knowledge that Paul wished for a divorce when he died—“Paul did not like being married; they were both too young, he said”—makes Molly miserable with moral confusion and regret, as if she does not deserve her wealth. In that Molly resembles Alice herself, who still worried that she did not deserve and could not afford the house she had purchased partly as an investment and partly to please Bob McNie.

  Although Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, and other review outlets cautiously warned that Medicine Men was unfair to doctors, many independent reviewers and readers responded with whoops of recognition. The novel still has tremendous value as a critique of the indignities suffered by patients in the medical system and the mystique that doctors have acquired in American society. “Doctors in Medicine Men seem rather like supermen or alpha males, embodying everything that’s most alien, mystifying and appealing to the women they have contact with,” Francine Prose wrote.28 In this passage, Adams portrays an archetypal cancer patient:

  An elderly man in a wheelchair. A patrician head with fine thin hair, a broad lined brow, and wide pale eyes. But dressed in the awful greenish hospital garb, and some terrible slippers. And there he was, in his wheelchair. Those old eyes avoided Molly’s eyes as though from shame at his situation, certainly not of his choosing. His reduction—to this. In all the time that she spent, hours and hours in those corridors, Molly saw that same look again and again, a look of embarrassment, of wondering, What terrible thing have I done to be brought so low, to this place of punishment and pain?

  It was as if Alice Adams had started a support group for sick people. Her mailbox filled with confessions and testimonials from readers. “I was a fragile child, raped in a hospital,” one began. “The personal is political. This time you gave the creeps what they deserve,” wrote another. Lynne Sharon Schwartz told Alice, “At last someone has done it, not just alluded briefly or indirectly to these guys… but really dug in. Especially the terrible procedures of making you wait half-naked in chilly rooms, dealing with the nurses, not returning calls… I not only enjoyed it gleefully but admired it too: it’s your smoothness, but the knife is more unsheathed, even serrated.”

  Author Gish Jen wrote that Adams’s attack on the behavior of doctors was “unfailingly on target.” Cyra McFadden, author of a popular illustrated satirical novel about Marin County yuppies, The Serial, was intrigued by a question Adams raises: “Which came first, the ego or the doctor?” Adams turns the tables on the female patient–doctor relationship by patronizing and infantilizing the doctors in just the way her novel’s doctors patronize their patients. Indeed, Molly wonders if all doctors start out as “smart little boys who liked to play doctor with little girls, who retained a lingering interest in poopoo, in the form of fecal jokes.” Vogue called Medicine Men a “lean mean work,” and Millicent Dillon called it her friend’s “most daring book” and praised her for taking risks on every page.29

  The heroine of Medicine Men ends up on her own, feeling a year after her surgery “extremely well, healthy and strong, walking fast in that euphoric, brilliant air. She did not need to be ‘involved’ with anyone at all. She needed sunshine, and long fast walks in this clean fresh lively wind.” Molly is a survivor, and the only relationship she counts on in the end is her friendship with Felicia.

  But that image of Molly’s renewal is not the closing movement of Medicine Men. Adams jettisons the kind of romantic woman-finds-man happy ending for which she’d often been criticized in favor of a different redistribution of just deserts: revenge. Diagnosed with prostate cancer, the awful sexist, racist famous heart surgeon must go to the hellish hospital in Southern California to receive proton radiation. In the novel’s last chapter Sanderson realizes that radiation will not be enough to cure him. He will have to submit to the hands and scalpels of other surgeons, a surgery that will leave him impotent: “And he thought, as Molly Bonner had before him, This is the worst place I’ve ever been. This is hell.”

  The late works of distinguished artists often break a pattern set in earlier works, challenging their interpreters to place them in context with a different, earlier style. Edward Said, writing about late Beethoven, noticed that “the power of [his] late style is negative, or rather it is negativity: where one would expect serenity and maturity, one finds a bristling, difficult and unyielding—perhaps even inhuman—challenge.”30 With similar unyieldingness postcancer Adams insists on telling what she has seen and knows: cancer and the often futile, always painful and humiliating effort to defeat it are brutal. Medicine Men cannot end as a novel of manners would, with some sort of harmony. It must end as it does, with its most arrogant, godlike doctor, the one who repairs human hearts, forced to see that he is a weak human being consigned to hell on earth.

  I. Alice told a reporter a different version of the episode: Alice had not bitten anyone, and the woman she supposedly bit was not Agatha, just a woman no one liked. Of her visit with Mrs. Berryhill, Alice said her “feelings were quite hurt, I guess my anticipation had been aroused, that finally I am thought to be a nice person here.” Afterward, Alice asked Max, “Does she even know that I write?” He replied, “Yes, but she would rather not think about that.” To the reporter, Adams added, “I cannot tell you what a Southern story that is.” (Joan Smith, “Ask Alice,” San Francisco Chronicle, October 22, 1995.)

  II. Houston authored the bestselling novel The Great Promise, which Alice read and disliked when she was in New York in 1946.

  CHAPTER THIRTY

  The Age Card

  — 1995–1999 —

  He no longer knows where he is. What place is this, what country? What rolling gray-green ocean does he walk beside? What year is this, and what is his own true age?

  —Alice Adams, “The Last Lovely City,” The Last Lovely City

  In late summer 1990, before her cancer, Alice Adams attended an outdoor luncheon party in Stinson Beach, “the strange, small coastal town of rich retirees; weekenders, also rich; and a core population of former hippies, now just plain poor, middle-aged people with too many children.” The meal was served by waiters on white tablecloths in gardens belonging to Barbara Lansburgh Chevalier, the ex-wife of Haakon Chevalier, a man who’d left the United States after he was investigated by the House Un-American Activities Committee for soliciting atomic secrets from J. Robert Oppenheimer. Barbara became an interior designer and maintained her parents’ elegant oceanfront estate.1

  The gathering provided the canvas for one of Adams’s best stories. Among the aging fashionable guests at the luncheon were Pat Silver, the mother of a school friend of Peter’s; author and editor Norman Cousins; and a portly, balding, and gray-bearded Felix Rosenthal—the man Alice quit seeing when she met Bob McNie. Encountering Rosenthal again all these years later engendered an “awfulness” of recalling that she’d once liked “these sleazy people—was flattered by them… underneath all the kisses and the darlings, money lurks and at some time later beg
ins to smell.”2 Rosenthal saved photos of the occasion in an envelope on which he wrote, “Alice Adams, present and seen for the first time since, wrote this party into a short story that promptly appeared in the ‘New Yorker’!”3

  The story Rosenthal refers to encapsulates a feeling Alice had often in the 1990s: that her extremely good memory teemed with images from her full life. In her notebook she wrote: “Derangement—too many segments of past: where am I? how old? what year is it?” Out of that feeling she conceived the main character of “The Last Lovely City.” Like many men Alice knew in the 1990s, Dr. Benito Zamora is a recent widower. The successful Stanford-trained physician, who was born in Oaxaca, Mexico, greatly misses his wife: “A problem with death, the doctor has more than once thought, is its removal of all the merciful dross of memory: he no longer remembers any petty annoyances, ever, or even moments of boredom, irritation, or sad, failed acts of love.” For Zamora, who’s known as Dr. Do-Good because of the clinics he founded in Chiapas, the gathering of “rich old gringos” becomes a horror. As Alice was at the Chevalier party, Zamora is disoriented “by ghosts from his past… he feels their looming presences, and feels their connection to some past year or years of his own life. He no longer knows where he is. What place is this, what country? What rolling gray-green ocean does he walk beside? What year is this, and what is his own true age?”

  Zamora’s ghosts are Dolores Gutierrez, “an old lady friend, who’s run to fat,” now with an Anglo married name, and Herman Tolliver, the corrupt lawyer who sold him an interest in Tenderloin-neighborhood tenement hotels where sex traffickers housed preteen Asian girls. “It seems to me now that I was pretending to myself not to know certain things that I really did know,” Zamora tells Carla, the young woman who brought him to the party. Briefly he imagines that Carla will marry him and return light to his beautiful empty house. Alas, Carla is a journalist. She knows some things about that deal that helped make Zamora rich; furthermore, she’s engaged to the son of the party’s host.

  Zamora is crushed and transformed by the evening’s events: “The sun has sunk into the ocean, and Benito’s heart has sunk with it, drowned. He shudders, despising himself.” He will leave lovely San Francisco, now terrible to him, and move to Chiapas to comfort his mother in her old age and “work in his clinics, with his own poor.”

  “The Last Lovely City,” published by the New Yorker in 1991 and selected by Robert Stone for The Best American Short Stories 1992, forecasts themes that recur in Adams’s personal life throughout the decade and make it the perfect title story for her final collection, which appeared in 1999. Like Dr. Zamora, Alice often found herself encountering ghosts from her past. When Mark Linenthal celebrated his seventy-fifth birthday in 1996, she wrote to an old college friend with what seems a hint of fondness, “I remember him best at 25.”4

  * * *

  During the late nineties, San Francisco was further reconfigured by the economic upheaval that had begun in the eighties. As the Bay Area became the center of a technological revolution, housing costs escalated; even as the city celebrated the achievement of civil rights and social freedom for its gay community, its artistic and African-American and Latino communities were priced out. When Lucy Gray created a photography project titled Naming the Homeless (1998) about twenty-eight people without fixed addresses who wanted jobs, “Alice thought it was wonderful. She was not one of the people who worried about how the homeless would spend their money or who said you should give it to an agency instead,” Gray recalled. Contrasting images showed the homeless people first in their current clothing and street setting and then in new clothes and professional settings. Gray paid each subject $300, the going rate for models, and exhibited the photos at Grace Cathedral at Christmastime, including names and contact information for her subjects. Eight of them found jobs and housing as a result of Gray’s show.5

  Although many older, middle-class people she knew were protected by rent control or limits on real estate taxes, Alice was painfully sensitive to changes in her neighborhood. The newly rich undertook ten-million-dollar renovations or bought up adjacent houses just to tear them down and build new mansions. The value of Alice’s house rose too but she worried about keeping up her $2,125 monthly mortgage payments on a house that sometimes felt—like the house she grew up in—too large.

  Without a live-in companion, Alice cultivated her friendships more than ever. “She put time and effort into her relationships,” Penelope Rowlands thought. Even so, she could be judgmental of her friends, holding them to a standard that was difficult to meet. “I think that she liked people of a certain caliber,” Rowlands said. “Alice spoke about her other friends all the time—even ones I didn’t know—and often seemed to be sifting, appraisingly, through aspects of their personalities.”

  Just as Adams sometimes dropped people who had offended her in some minor way, she actively sought out people to nourish her mental and emotional life. After she broke with Bob, she joined a reading group made up of Deirdre English, Anne Lamott, Orville Schell, Sedge Thomson, Ethan Canin, Larry Friedlander, and Adam Hochschild. When that group dwindled, Alice and Hochschild formed a smaller group with Hochschild’s wife, Arlie Hochschild, and Millicent Dillon. “There was no rationale to what we were reading,” Dillon said. “We read the Greeks, the nineteenth-century Russians, Trollope, Henry James. Adam [Hochschild] approached reading in terms of ‘What is the world out of which this book comes and how does it relate to the world we are in now?’ And I, being analytical, would look at how this work is put together. But Alice would do something else. She would respond absolutely directly to the feeling of what she was reading. It was so intense, so immediate, very direct, no intellectualizing.”

  When they read Heart of Darkness because Adam Hochschild was working on his history of the Belgian Congo, King Leopold’s Ghost, Alice said, “I had a terrible time reading this story again. I could not stand the cruelty to the Africans.” A couple of years later, Alice proposed reading Don Quixote. It had been a favorite of “so many terrible men” in her life, “Nic through Saul Bellow and Vasco.”6 She wanted to conquer her aversion but when the group met she was still having trouble with it. The difficulty, Dillon thought, “was that her reading was so intense and so direct and so connected to her life.”

  When judging a contest for the Bush Foundation in Minneapolis, Alice fell into a new friendship with a fellow juror, the essayist Phillip Lopate, who lived in Brooklyn. When they dined together Lopate’s “eyes, so beautiful and intense,”7 held Alice’s attention as they exchanged stories of their lives. Lopate thought his friendship with Alice “was about one stubborn evolved self meeting another stubborn evolved self and saying no matter what they do to me, they are not going to break me down. There is a great comfort in such people meeting each other.” It helped, he thought, that he was a Jewish intellectual. They enjoyed speculating about mutual friends—“we were like minor Henry James characters, amateur psychologists.” Their friendship continued through later visits when Alice met his family; Lopate came to admire the way Adams’s narrators are “knowers who understand the flow of time.” To him Alice seemed worldly and accepting “of the pettiness, vanities, and so on” of the people she knew, and had come to terms with her “aloneness.” She wanted to be seen as well-read and literary, but she wasn’t preoccupied with her place in literature: “There were none of the rough edges you sometimes find in writer-writer relationships,” Lopate said.

  Changes in her longest friendships also reshaped Alice’s life in the late 1990s. Diane Johnson and John Murray spent much of the year in Paris; beginning with Le Divorce in 1997, Johnson’s popular French trilogy edited by Billy Abrahams brought her bestseller status. Twice Alice visited Diane and John in Paris, staying on the top floor of an old Latin Quarter hotel with no elevator and a steep spiral staircase that reminded her of the hotel where she’d lived in 1947. On these trips she became friends with the Canadian writer Mavis Gallant, whose “serious pleasantness” Alice apprecia
ted. The two began a correspondence and Alice brought an inscribed copy of Gallant’s novel Green Water, Green Sky home to Phil Anasovich.

  Also in Paris, Alice renewed her friendship (begun in Toronto in 1989) with William Jay Smith. Smith and his wife, Sonja Haussmann, gave a cocktail party for Alice and introduced her to Odile Hellier, who then owned the English-language Village Voice bookstore. “Alice was so beautiful, lovely, intelligent, and witty,” Smith said. When they took in an exhibit about Verlaine together at a small museum, Smith realized that Alice read French easily and knew a lot of French poetry. “We talked about it at lunch afterwards,” he said. Since first meeting Alice in Toronto, Smith had recommended her several times for membership in the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. “She didn’t get in because she was living in California. It’s as simple as that,” said Smith. People who live in New York and go to the meetings, they’re the ones who influence everything.”