Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Another California writer, Ella Leffland, was virtually homebound for ten years while she wrote her monumental novel about Hermann Göring, The Knight, Death and the Devil, and cared for her invalid mother in her apartment. When most of their friends switched to email, Alice and Ella resolutely mailed letters across town to each other, sharing news of cats and men (Leffland had a long companionship with an engineer who lived upstairs from her) and praising each other’s recent publications. The stories Leffland singled out for praise, Alice noticed, were usually the ones she’d had the most trouble publishing; Alice regarded that as evidence of her friend’s superior taste.8

  Alice’s long working relationships with her editor at Knopf, Victoria Wilson, and with her former New Yorker editor Frances Kiernan had grown into rich and enduring friendships. Wilson joined Alice on occasional trips but was usually occupied by her editorial job; by renovation of her farmhouse in Sullivan County, New York; and by work on a biography of Barbara Stanwyck that she called “a cultural history of her time.”9 Kiernan, then researching her documentary biography of Mary McCarthy, and her husband met Alice in Mexico and San Francisco, and she visited them in New York. One summer Alice stayed in the Kiernans’ Upper East Side apartment for two weeks while they were away. She found herself worn out by the city after ten days.

  * * *

  During her single years Adams befriended many younger writers. As a judge for an Avery Hopwood Award in the early 1980s, she selected short stories by Mary Gaitskill and then provided a comment—“Ferocious, terrifying stories, skillful as they are scary. Gaitskill’s voice and talents are wonderfully new, as honest as rain, and as welcome in a long, dry season”—for her first collection, Bad Behavior. When Gaitskill moved to a cottage in Marin County in 1989, she and Alice became friends. “At the time when I came to live there,” Gaitskill reminisced, “a lot of people I met, not all from the same milieu, seemed kind of crazy—neurotic, reactive, second-guessing everybody, aware of social hierarchies and ready to judge people about where they were in that hierarchy.” She found Alice refreshingly beyond such concerns. “She had that ability to look at people and see who they were underneath that.”

  Gaitskill was drawn to Adams “partly because she seemed sane.” They met for lunch or dinner every few months and talked on the phone more often. “I do think she thought I was a little crazy, but she was very tolerant, very kind. She could be critical, but I never saw her be gratuitously nasty.” Gaitskill found it reassuring that a successful writer thirty years her elder “seemed very interested in dating and having relationships,” noting, “She had men around her and she seemed ambivalent about that, too. She was probably looking for somebody that she could love, but I didn’t have the impression she was really happy with any of the men she was with.”

  Alice’s elegance also impressed Gaitskill. “I went to a party at her house. She must have been 70, and she was wearing leather pants and they looked really good on her! They weren’t skin tight, they weren’t meant to look sexy, they were sort of loose-fitting, very expensive, not black, some kind of cream-colored, and she was wearing a sweater with them. And I remember thinking wow.” The way Alice presented herself, Gaitskill wrote later, reflected her “intense elegance, grace, and an organic mental integrity that was distinctly feminine in nature.”10

  Thaisa Frank met Alice when they were reading together at a Bay Area college and both read stories about animals. Adams invited Frank to go out to dinner with her—a thrill for the younger woman that soon turned into a challenge. “We got together about five or six times and basically just talked about our lives and people we knew. I think she was lonely and things were waning for her and she was used to being catered to,” Frank reflected. “Many of the stories she told me about people were about depression or nervous breakdowns. It was dark,” Frank thought. She talked about her marriage and her divorce from Mark Linenthal, Bob McNie’s breakdown, and other men she’d known. “Her conversation about men was a mix of disparaging the men she’d been with and at the same time being lonely and a little needy. I think she confided things to me that she would not have confided to, say, Diane Johnson. The person she was positive about was her son. She thought he was wonderful. She was open about his being gay.”

  Alice encouraged Frank by being a good listener. “I was getting divorced at the time, and Alice told me to go on welfare if I had to in order to get out of the marriage where I was unhappy. I think she told me she’d been on welfare at one time.” Despite that sympathy, Alice wanted to command the logistics of their friendship. She insisted on early dinners even though Frank lived in Berkeley and had a son at home. After one frustrating drive across the bridge at rush hour in rainy weather, Frank arrived to find Alice waiting impatiently: “I have a vision of her: she came down the steps wearing a black-and-white checkered suit with a buttercup-yellow top—and buttercup-yellow galoshes. Very stylish, something you’d get in France—something a teeny bopper would wear but Alice really pulled it off. She had dressed for dinner—it was an event in a lonely person’s life.”

  * * *

  Frances Kiernan came to San Francisco for Alice’s seventieth birthday. She felt her “old reliable birthday neurosis,” but Edwina Leggett hosted a small party of her close friends at her historic Craftsman house above Cole Valley, and Alice deemed it a “good birthday” with only the “smallest paranoia.”11 “You either ignore such a milestone or really splash it up, and I seem to have chosen the latter, though not all my doing,” Alice said of the party. As her friends climbed the stairs to Edwina’s front door, they encountered a poster-sized photo of Alice as a coed in bobby socks and short skirt. “Many people [were] wondering who that was,” Alice quipped.I Peter astounded his mother by turning up in a three-piece suit rather than what she called “his usually terrible” clothes.12

  * * *

  The satisfaction Alice found in close friendships in these years failed to give her one bodily comfort she craved: a man to share her bed. “Bob was at best a genuinely affectionate person, and that’s really something I miss,” she complained to Judith. “It’s good I have my cats, but even Sam shoves me off sometimes. Men.”13

  Alice didn’t recognize Bob when she encountered him in a restaurant late in 1996. His thick, prematurely graying hair was dyed brown. The tall, thin dyed blonde with him showed evidence of a face-lift. Of course Adams fashioned the moment into a story, “The Best Revenge,” published in Boulevard, in which she writes of Bob (here called Frank): “She remembered how it used to take all her strength not to telephone Frank, in the days and weeks she suffered most acutely, when she would have pled with him to come back. And she is moved now again to make a call, although (again) she does not. But this time she would like to say, Frank, I’m sorry your life isn’t better than it is. I’m sorry I didn’t know you.”14

  Alice’s attempts to find a partner were often bedeviled by confusion about affection and sexuality.

  Well past menopause (since her hysterectomy in 1966), Alice used a hormone replacement medication that counteracted some of the sexual limitations of aging. But there was no solution for erectile dysfunction, a problem (less discussed in these pre-Viagra years) that afflicted many of the men in her age group. “Old Love Affairs,” published in the New Yorker on October 23, 1995, frankly discusses male impotence. This story would turn out to be Adams’s last—and her twenty-seventh—in the magazine, then edited by Tina Brown, who took over from Robert Gottlieb.II In “Old Love Affairs,” “sheer sexual starvation” leads the “almost old but lively” narrator, Lucretia, to go to bed with a widowed man named Burt whom she does not really like: “After several long, futile minutes of strenuous efforts on his part, and some effort on hers, Burt said, ‘I’m sorry. I had this prostate surgery, and I was afraid, but I had hoped—’ ” Determined to please Lucretia, Burt moves “heavily, laboriously down her body, positioning himself,” as she thinks, “This is not something he usually does… Oral sex was not on the regular menu with Laur
a, the wife.”

  Lucretia pretends “more pleasure than she actually [feels]” in order to make him stop his cunnilingual attention. Why couldn’t Lucretia simply tell Burt that she didn’t want to see him? Because she does not want to hurt a man’s feelings. Despite professional success and sexual freedom, many of Alice Adams’s midcentury women find themselves confined by outdated terms of engagement in their dealings with men. Their long habit of conflating sex with affection becomes a barrier to finding the affection they need in old age. Or perhaps the century and gender roles had little to do with it. At one point in the story, Lucretia counsels herself, “Enough of sex and love. I’ve surely had my share, and maybe more.” But then she reads an article on “geriatric sex” or encounters a man who reminds her of youthful feelings. Her “very blood would warm and flare, and she would think, Well, maybe. Even as a more sensible voice within would warn her, Oh, come on.” The story has an open ending. Having invited a man she knew years before to dinner, Lucretia asks if he minds eating early:

  “Not at all. It’s a terrible thing about age,” he said, with his attractive, crooked smile. “I find that I’m tired a lot.”

  “Oh, I am, too!” and she flashed her answering bright smile, as she thought, Oh good, I won’t have to pretend anymore. And I won’t even think about falling in love.

  But of course she did.

  * * *

  No matter how vividly Adams imagined her characters, the realistic mode of her fiction invited speculations about their identities—was Lucretia Alice and, if so, who were the two men that Lucretia dated? Adams rejected such simple equivalences but sometimes told her friends when she’d borrowed from their lives. Caroline Drewes, an older journalist who was her friend and neighbor and had “large green eyes” and a driftwood-framed mirror like Lucretia’s, believed that “Old Love Affairs” grew out of stories she’d told Alice about her own affairs.15 When Alice published a story called “Great Sex” about why women stay with men who make them unhappy, she gave a copy to Penelope Rowlands. “Alice told me that the character named Alison wasn’t entirely based on me, but that Alison and I had in common a certain sympathy towards men, arising from a sense that women are often unfairly hostile towards them. It seems a rather subtle, and telling, detail to have picked up on. Yet so Alice-like, too.”

  * * *

  Derek Parmenter remained the leading man in Alice’s life throughout the 1990s but she never got over the frustrations she felt with him. “I should lay off ruses to sleep together,” she noted in 1996. Happening to see him with another woman in a restaurant near her house, she was “wildly jealous” and considered ending their friendship after “almost 4 years of terribleness.” A couple of weeks later they’ve been on a beautiful hike and Derek has explained that the woman is just an old tennis partner. “I think [Derek] is rather deficient, Forster’s ‘undeveloped heart,’ ” Alice complained to Judith.16 Nonetheless, she loved days when they hiked, listened to jazz (including an evening of Trummy Young recordings), and cooked together. On a book tour to Seattle she missed him “mildly” as she reminisced about emotional attachments to that city: “Vasco—abortion; Franzl; Bob—missing Bob.”17 Most of all, she adored Derek’s dog, Pepper, and his eighteen-month-old granddaughter, Serena: “the most enchanting tiny girl whom I consider my granddaughter… so odd to fall in love with a baby, I don’t generally like them, but she is so great: she looks at me and bends over double, laughing, the best reaction I’ve ever had, after a long life of trying to be funny.”18

  * * *

  When Richard Poirier read A Southern Exposure, he told Alice the book merited a sequel. Adams took her friend’s idea as a challenge to re-sort her thoughts about Southern culture and began After the War by rereading novels by William Faulkner.19 Her intention was, of course, not imitation but inspiration and avoidance. “Nobody,” as the Irish writer Frank O’Connor said when Faulkner was still alive, “wants his mule and wagon stalled on the same track the Dixie Limited is roaring down.” Her own recent visits to Virginia and North Carolina also fed Adams’s imagination as she demystified the society of her childhood by following the lives of its modern women and younger men; she also continued to reveal the subtle bigotry of native Southerners and the pretensions of Northerners.

  In After the War Russell Byrd, the decadent romantic bad boy of A Southern Exposure, suffers a heart attack while riding on the back of a train in Texas. Standing next to him and unable to prevent his fall is a black army sergeant returning from the Pacific front with his separation pay in his wallet. His name is Ed Faulkner. Accused of causing Byrd’s death and stealing his money, Faulkner undergoes a darkly comic journey through postwar America. American communists, eager to have a black hero, break him out of jail. Eventually he survives both Southern racism and the leftists’ misguided adulation to enroll at the University of Wisconsin. Adams brings other black characters to the fore in this novel too, including the maid Odessa and her family, and the janitor’s son, football player Ben Davis, who graduates from Harvard and seems likely to marry Byrd’s daughter Melanctha. On the whole Adams’s postwar world conveys little of the entrapment Alice felt after the war. Rather it’s a novel of retrospect, reconciliation, and hope, a late-stage comedy ending with a wedding, couples reunited, and a warning from Harry Baird that people are going to miss the war: “The heroic certainty of it all. The moral clarity. Hitler was bad, we’re good. And we’ll miss the excitement, the fervor. Wars are sexy—”

  As Alice Adams had done for much of her life, in her last novel she ponders the complexity of sexuality. Harassment about her large breasts drives Melanctha Byrd to leave Radcliffe, while her gay half brother, Graham, finds contentment with a (necessarily) secret lover. Abby Baird finds such complete pleasure in making love to Joseph Marcus that she plans in medical school to “study this enormous and misunderstood difference in orgasms. Freud, she thought, had oversimplified. Clitoral versus vaginal, that was not the issue. Unless, and she smiled to herself, unless what she experienced with Joseph was both at once.” Meanwhile Abby’s mother struggles to understand her own infidelities and her husband’s coming-home impotence.

  Adams worked on After the War from 1995 until the fall of 1998, years in which she also wrote dozens of short stories and personal essays. Even though commercial markets were drying up, magazines from Agni to Redbook, from the Paris Review to Gentleman’s Quarterly, eagerly solicited and accepted work from an established author whose style and form now ranged well beyond the patterns she had honed with the New Yorker in mind. On a notebook page next to the one where she listed men she’d loved, Adams noted every magazine acceptance: altogether sixteen essays and one hundred twenty short stories appeared in thirty-nine different periodicals during her forty-year writing career.

  * * *

  Alice Adams had graduated Radcliffe early with a mediocre transcript and great eagerness to get out into the wider world. She had no plans to attend her fiftieth class reunion until organizers selected her for an Alumnae Recognition Award and invited her to speak at a symposium. For the reunion souvenir book she wrote:

  At this point my life on the whole seems good and most fortunate. I love my pretty San Francisco postcard house, my cats and my garden, and especially my son and my friends.

  I certainly wish that I were a better writer although small successes here and there have pleased me. Some things that I’ve written seem all right and I’m still working at it.

  And I desperately, sometimes despairingly wish that the world were a better place—kinder, fairer, more peaceful.

  Both Peter and Phil, along with Dennis McFarland and Michelle Blake, attended the symposium, where Alice shared the stage with actor Anna Deavere Smith and other younger alumnae. Adams’s award citation declared that readers appreciate her wit, her keen eye for social situations, and her “inimitable style at once brilliant and lyrical.”

  Pulling out big reading glasses and confiding that “the speech and the essay [were] intimidatingl
y unfamiliar forms” to her, Adams addressed the assigned theme of “The 21st Century: Defining the Challenges” by remembering the optimism expressed in the Harvard class she’d taken in 1945 on the subject of the postwar world. In contrast, she felt no joy at the idea of a new century. To prepare something to say to the symposium about “the future of writing” Alice queried Amanda Urban, who predicted that a generation of readers used to sound bites would require brevity but that creativity would survive. Victoria Wilson—“of a darker turn of mind,” Alice said—believed that “what was published would be increasingly determined by the needs (for needs read greed, I think) of the increasingly gigantic corporations that own the publishing houses.” When Alice asked Wilson about the discrepancy between advances given to “best-selling trash” and those given to good poets and novelists, Wilson frowned and said, “In the future there may be no advances.”

  After passing on more gloomy forecasts about publishing, Alice reminded her audience that writers face the same challenge everyone does, “to confront and make even the smallest effort to change the terrible and increasing gap between the overfed and the starving, between any person here and any person in Rwanda or the Congo. We have, somehow, to cope with the greedy spoilage of our planet.”