Alice Adams
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Alice would have hated “all the folderol” about the new millennium, Wilson commented to Peter after that gathering. Nonetheless, After the War, her last novel, would be published in that epoch, in December 2000. Adams hadn’t polished the manuscript, so Knopf hired Trent Duffy, a friend of Alice’s who had often worked with Billy Abrahams, to go over it. When Duffy turned in corrections to the novel’s time scheme to Knopf’s production editor, she told him she knew that Adams was a little bit careless about things like that and they usually didn’t bother to fix them. For the dust jacket Wilson selected a candid photograph of Alice from “after the war” in 1948. Likewise, reviewers took the occasion to survey Adams’s whole career. Randall Curb, writing in the Raleigh News & Observer, called her final story collection, The Last Lovely City, one of Adams’s finest works. Her “unflagging curiosity about people’s hearts has led some to call her America’s Colette,” he wrote. Then Curb posed a question that first arose with the commercial success of Superior Women and has persisted in discussions of Adams’s work, particularly of her novels. Was she “a gossipy purveyor of the literary equivalent of the ‘chick flick’ ” or an “astute, bemused anatomist of contemporary urban life—a master of the comedy of manners”?6 Like King Lear’s question to his daughters, it was the kind of question that Adams would have disdained. Gossip and romance were serious matters, not to be separated from analysis of contemporary life.
* * *
Thinking ahead, Steele had already purchased a modest upright gravestone for himself, carried it around in his car for a while, and then had it set at the head of his plot. When rumors of his death became a nuisance, he placed a smaller stone that said “HE’S NOT HERE” where his feet would have been if his body were there. When Max ordered that footstone, he also bought a flat marker that said “ALICE ADAMS WRITER” and placed that in his plot. One summer morning in 2005, Steele fell down the stairs in his town house, broke his neck, and died. His ashes were buried under his monument, just to the side of the stone he’d laid there for Alice.
I began to hear about Max Steele soon after I decided to write this biography. One of his sons met me for coffee in San Francisco and showed me a picture of an Adams letter on his phone. (Where was it now? He wasn’t sure.) A few of the letters they’d exchanged were archived among Adams’s papers at the Harry Ransom Center, but their number simply did not account for this long friendship between writers. On my first trip to North Carolina to see where Alice grew up, I interviewed Max’s former wife, Diana Steele. The family renting Max’s town house let me examine Max’s shelves and furniture. Antique desks and cabinets, all with many cubbyholes for papers, were empty. No letters. Still Max’s presence abided, especially on bookshelves that held his full run of the Paris Review, and books dedicated to him by friends, including Alice Adams. I learned that Oliver Steele’s wife, Margaret Minsky, had stored some cartons in a locked closet of the condo. We emailed. There were cartons in the attic as well. Finally, in May 2011, I joined Margaret for a few days of biographical housecleaning in Chapel Hill, which seemed the best way to read any letters from Adams that Max had saved. I accepted Margaret’s offer to stay in the guest room of Max’s house—where Alice had slept in 1998—so I could work late into the night. I hadn’t counted on the musty smells that assaulted us as we dug through boxes that had been stored in a humid climate. For three days Margaret and I talked and sorted, two women who’d just met but had this work in common—page by page, folder by folder, box by box. We found dozens of letters and postcards from Alice to Max, along with letters and other writings by Max.
In the evenings we sat outside in the warm, blossom-scented Carolina evening air that Alice Adams so loved. When Alice wrote stories and novels set in Chapel Hill, she asked Max to tell her what bloomed during a particular month so she could describe it correctly. When we finished going through the papers, a crew from the Wilson Library at the University of North Carolina collected the boxes of letters and manuscripts. But there was still a heavy package that confounded me. It sat on the top shelf in Max Steele’s closet wrapped in silky brown printed cloth. I mentioned it to Margaret, who said, “Those must be Alice’s ashes.”
I was skeptical. Weren’t the ashes buried under the granite marker that said “ALICE ADAMS WRITER” in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery? I called Peter Linenthal and asked him how his mother’s ashes had been sent to Max. He described a handmade box and a sleeve of Balinese batik fabric. I told him what we’d found. Peter was astonished, but there was no denying these were the mortal remains of Alice Adams.
I called the writer Daphne Athas, a friend and colleague of Max’s, who was less surprised. “Max did not make a great separation between intentions and actions,” she explained. “I imagine he meant to put her ashes in the cemetery.” Novelist Jill McCorkle remembered, “Max told everyone proudly that he kept her ashes on his dresser. It was well known that he had a great love affair with Alice. He told people. There was speculation in town that Max wanted Alice’s ashes mixed and buried with his own.”
It was too late for that. Strange as it might have been to leave Alice in the custody of a woman who was in some way her rival for Max’s affections, Diana Steele became the caretaker of the ashes while Peter thought through this problem. When Diana moved to a condo, she gamely sent Peter a picture of the wrapped urn—of Alice—at a new address: “You can Google it. Light and airy… She’s there in the cupboard over the refrigerator in the kitchen.”7
On the day after Mother’s Day in 2013, Peter Linenthal and his husband, Philip Anasovich; Adams scholar Bryant Mangum; and I joined Diana at Max Steele’s writers’ corner in the Old Chapel Hill Cemetery. The five of us improvised a ceremony to complete Alice and Max’s old plan “to get a plot together.” Diana brought the batik sack, digging tools, and a basket of loose leaves and petals from her garden. Peter set the “ALICE ADAMS WRITER” stone aside. He dug a deep hole in the soft dirt and poured the second half of Alice’s ashes into the ground. We mixed in some bright, sweet petals and leaves. We added handfuls of dirt to refill the hole and washed our hands in a basin of water that Diana had thought to bring.
Peter replaced the stone marker and set lilies and a vase of roses beside it. Bryant and I added two long-stemmed roses, one red and one white, representing our hopes to write books about the work and the life of Alice Adams. It was a beautiful blue Carolina day with high cumulus clouds, not too hot. One of Max’s azaleas was in full pink bloom. The graves of Alice’s parents, Agatha and Nicholson Adams, were some twenty yards away, marked by similar but widely separated upright stones. A young tree grew between them.
We read aloud from Alice’s childhood poem “Radiant Ghost” and her story “Home Is Where.” We closed with lines from Adams’s essay called “At First Sight: Love and Liking, a Memoir” about the validity of first impressions and her three great friendships—with Judith Clark Adams, Billy Abrahams, and Max Steele—that began with instant love and liking.
In that essay, bringing the story of her life full circle, Alice describes her spring visit to Chapel Hill just a year before she died: “The old town was at its most beautiful—everywhere, white dogwood delicately spreading its branches. Max and I took our customary walk through the cemetery.”
I. The speakers were: Peter Adams Linenthal, Philip Anasovich, Victoria Wilson, Frances Kiernan, Alice Garrett, Theophilus (Bill) Brown, Edwina Leggett, Ella Leffland, Kevin Johnson for Diane Johnson, Orville Schell, Anne Lamott, John (Jack) Leggett, Judith Rascoe for Carolyn See, Millicent Dillon, Mary Ross Taylor, Beverly Lowry, Blair Fuller, Leonard Michaels, Sheila Ballantyne, and Max Steele.
II. Bob lived with Hogan until he died in 2005. Peter stayed in touch with him and made efforts to help his surviving children. Morissa McNie died of lung cancer at the home of her friend Deborah Sparks on Orcas Island in 2010; Robbie died of a heart condition while living in a storage container near the San Francisco waterfront in 2014.
Chronology
1893
1895
Nicholson Barney Adams born November 6 in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
1912
James (Trummy) Young born January 12 in Savannah, Georgia.
1920
Agatha Boyd and Nicholson Adams marry on June 12 in Roanoke, Virginia.
1921
Mark Linenthal Jr. born November 12 in Boston.
1922
Vasco Futscher Pereira born in Lisbon, Portugal; Henry Maxwell Steele born in Greenville, South Carolina.
1925
F. Scott Fitzgerald publishes The Great Gatsby.
1925
Robert Kendall McNie born June 12 in Long Beach, California.
1925
Agatha and Nic Adams purchase farmhouse near Pittsboro Road in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, where Nicholson is an assistant professor of Spanish.
1926
Alice Boyd Adams born August 14 in Fredericksburg, Virginia; Judith Walker Clark (later Adams) born February 23 in Madison, Wisconsin.
1929
Thomas Wolfe publishes Look Homeward, Angel.
1931
Death of baby Joel Willard Adams on August 30 in Durham, North Carolina.
1932
Nic Adams hospitalized for a nervous breakdown.
1933
Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) inaugurated president; Adolf Hitler becomes chancellor of Germany.
1935
Nic Adams falls in love with Dorothy Stearns Wilson.
1936
Civil war begins in Spain.
1937
Judith Clark and her parents move to Chapel Hill.
1938
Agatha and Nic Adams travel in Cuba and Mexico while Alice spends the summer at a girls’ camp in Maine. Germany annexes Czechoslovakia.
1939
Billie Holiday first performs and records “Strange Fruit”; The Grapes of Wrath by John Steinbeck is published. Germany invades Poland.
1940
Alice completes tenth grade at Chapel Hill High School and begins eleventh grade at Wisconsin High School in Madison, Wisconsin. FDR elected to third term as president.
1941
Alice enrolls at St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, Virginia. Germany invades Russia. Japan attacks US at Pearl Harbor and US declares war on Germany and Japan.
1943
Alice graduates St. Catherine’s School in May and begins first year at Radcliffe College in the summer.
1944
Mark Linenthal shot down and becomes prisoner of war in Germany.
1945
Mark Linenthal liberated from POW camp and enrolls as graduate student in English at Harvard. FDR dies; World War II ends.
1946
Alice Adams graduates from Radcliffe, moves to New York City, marries Mark Linenthal in Chapel Hill on November 30, and moves with him to Cambridge.
1947–48
Alice and Mark Linenthal sail to Europe for a year, where they become friends with Norman and Beatrice Mailer in Paris.
1948
Norman Mailer publishes The Naked and the Dead; Alice and Mark Linenthal move to Northern California, where he attends Stanford; Harry S. Truman elected president.
1949
Le deuxième sexe by Simone de Beauvoir published in France (first English translation published 1953); Alice begins psychoanalytic therapy in San Francisco.
1950
Agatha Boyd Adams dies in Chapel Hill on March 17.
1951
Peter Adams Linenthal born March 20 in Redwood City, California.
1951
Alice, Mark, and Peter move to Portland, Oregon, while Mark teaches at Reed College.
1952
Alice meets Saul Bellow; Alice, Mark, and Peter move back to California; Dwight D. Eisenhower elected president.
1954
Mark Linenthal joins faculty at San Francisco State College; Alice, Mark, and Peter move to San Francisco.
1955
Nic Adams marries Dorothy Stearns Wilson (Dotsie).
1956
Alice, Mark, and Peter vacation at Lake Sebago; Mark completes his PhD and Peter begins kindergarten at Town School for Boys in San Francisco.
1957
Alice, Mark, and Peter drive through Sonora, Mexico, on a summer trip.
1958
Alice and Peter spend summer in Chapel Hill; Alice meets Henry Maxwell Steele.
1959
“Winter Rain” published in Charm; Alice and Mark Linenthal divorce; Alice meets Vasco Futscher Pereira.
1960
Judith Clark Adams and family move from San Francisco to Washington, DC; John F. Kennedy elected president; To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee published.
1961
Vasco Futscher Pereira leaves San Francisco; Max Steele and his wife, Diana, move to San Francisco.
1962
Franz Sommerfeld dies in Seattle.
1963
Alice working at Child Guidance Clinic in San Francisco; The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan published; John F. Kennedy assassinated; Lyndon Johnson becomes president.
1964
Alice meets Robert Kendall McNie.
1965
New American Library purchases Alice’s novel Careless Love.
1966
Careless Love published. Alice begins living with Robert McNie. American soldiers engage in active fighting in Vietnam.
1967
Peter Linenthal attends Human Be-In in Golden Gate Park, transfers to public high school for eleventh grade; Careless Love published as The Fall of Daisy Duke in Great Britain.
1968
The New Yorker purchases “The Swastika on Our Door”; Alice works at Institute of Medical Science; William Abrahams moves to Northern California; Richard Nixon elected president.
1969
The New Yorker purchases and publishes “Gift of Grass”; Peter Linenthal begins study at San Francisco Art Institute and moves out of his parents’ houses.
1970
Nicholson Adams dies in Chapel Hill on October 2; Alice learns she is not mentioned in her father’s will; Peter travels in Europe; The Female Eunuch by Germaine Greer is published.
1971
“Gift of Grass” wins third prize in O. Henry Awards; Alice collects unemployment insurance.
1972
Cyrilly Abels, Alice’s new literary agent, sells stories to the Atlantic, Redbook, McCall’s; Alice publishes novelization of movie Two People under pseudonym Alice Boyd.
1973
United States military withdraws from Vietnam; Victoria Wilson, editor at Knopf, acquires Families and Survivors.
1974
Families and Survivors published; Alice starts women writers’ group with Diane Johnson, Ella Leffland, and others; Richard Nixon resigns, and Gerald Ford becomes president.
1975
Alice and Robert McNie take their first winter trip to Zihuatanejo; the New Yorker publishes “Roses, Rhododendron”; Families and Survivors nominated for National Book Critics Circle Award; Alice’s Knopf editor, Victoria Wilson, comes to Truckee to meet Alice; literary agent Cyrilly Abels dies and Adams becomes client of Lynn Nesbit at International Creative Management.
1976
“Roses, Rhododendron” wins third prize in O. Henry Awards and National Endowment for the Arts award; John Updike receives O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement; Alice publishes “Learning to Be Happy” (later “Home Is Where”) in Redbook; Saul Bellow wins Nobel Prize for Literature; Joch Allin (Winky) McNie commits suicide; Alice receives fifty gifts from Robert McNie on her fiftieth birthday; Jimmy Carter elected president.
1977
The New Yorker publishes “Beautiful Girl” and Alice meets her fiction editor there, Frances Kiernan.
1978
Listening to Billie published; Alice and Bob profiled in People magazine; Alice wins Guggenheim Fellowship; assassination of Supervisor Harvey Milk
and Mayor George Moscone at San Francisco city hall.
1979
Beautiful Girl (story collection) published; Dorothy (Dotsie) Adams plans to sell the house where Alice grew up in Chapel Hill; Dr. Lucie Jessner dies.
1980
Rich Rewards published; Amanda Urban begins representing Adams’s short stories for ICM; Ronald Reagan elected president.
1981
AIDS recognized as epidemic in San Francisco.
1982
Alice receives O. Henry Continuing Achievement award after her twelfth consecutive appearance in the O. Henry Awards anthology; To See You Again (story collection) published; John Cheever dies; The Color Purple by Alice Walker published.
1983
Alice visits Chapel Hill for the first time since 1958.
1984
Superior Women published; James “Trummy” Young dies in San Jose, California; Vasco Futscher Pereira dies in Lisbon, Portugal.
1985
Return Trips (story collection) published.
1986
Alice and Robert McNie purchase house at 2661 Clay Street, San Francisco; Alice has surgery for malignant tumor in her colon; Joyce Carol Oates receives O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement.