Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  * * *

  Judith’s parents may have been as much a revelation to Alice as their daughter was. During their first year in Chapel Hill, Jimmy Clark bought a lot near the Adamses’ enclave. He designed a modern house and hired two black laborers who were both named Charlie to build it. Influenced by Frank Lloyd Wright’s Jacobs I house in Madison, Wisconsin, the Clarks’ multilevel house was set into a hollowed-out hillside. Dorothy Clark collected art and antiques and painted bright murals in all the rooms. A game room—something no one else had in Chapel Hill—on the coolest, lowest level, opened out to a flagstone terrace. That room, equipped with a couch and record player, became a perfect place for parties as the girls got older. Unlike Agatha and Nic, Judith’s parents were affectionate with each other when they were happy and openly hostile when they fought. Both of them adored Alice and engaged in conversations with her when she visited. Dorothy Clark drew twin charcoal portraits of Alice and Judith, and Jimmy Clark played guitar and sang, often performing with Nic Adams at parties.

  Alice Adams and Judith Clark, by Judith’s mother.

  On the other hand, the elegance and gentility of the Adams household was “terribly important” to Judith. The living room, with Agatha’s desk on one side, was full of beautiful old furniture. There was polished silver in the dining room. Most of all, Judith remembered the scents that lingered in the hot summer air: roses baking in the sun beneath open windows, the furniture and silver polishes, Nic’s pipe smoke, something from Agatha—lavender perhaps?—and Verlie’s lemon cake. Alice’s room had wood floors and rag rugs, a rocking chair, and low bookshelves beneath the windows. Often Judith spent the night on a cot beside Alice’s walnut four-poster bed. On sweltering summer nights, the two girls would climb out the sewing room window to sit on a slanted roof facing the woods.

  Sitting on that roof would become a scene in “Roses, Rhododendron”: “There was a country smell, invaded at intervals by summer country sounds—the strangled croak of tree frogs from down in the glen, the crazy baying of a distant hound. There in the heavy scent of roses on the scratchy shingles, Harriet and I talked about sex.” Most of their talk was hearsay, but the freedom Alice felt in her friendship with Judith is remarkable. In “Roses, Rhododendron” a girl who has moved to North Carolina from Boston narrates how she “fell permanently in love with a house, with a family of three people and with an area of countryside.” That family comprises Harriett, Emily, and Lawrence Farr, who live in what is essentially the Adams house and carry on the lonely motions of Adams’s family story. The story’s perspective exemplifies how becoming intimate friends with Judith allowed Alice to expand her sense of possibilities for her own future.

  * * *

  Agatha Adams also began a dramatic change in her life in 1937. That autumn she persuaded a skeptical committee to admit her as an undergraduate in UNC’s Library School, even though she was ten years past the upper age limit for admissions and already possessed degrees in other subjects. It helped that her husband had “permitted” her to “work on vocabularies of Spanish texts and do a little proofreading and editing,” she wrote. “The distrust with which they finally admitted me was only surpassed by my own distrust of my ability to make the grade,” she added. But she felt she had no choice. At forty-four, still observing the decorum of the patrician-class and Southern womanhood to which she was born, Agatha could not decide to divorce Nic Adams—nor could she rely on him to support the family. Her fellow Randolph-Macon alumna Pearl Buck had just won the Nobel Prize in Literature, while Agatha’s literary aspirations had come to naught.

  In her Library School classes, Agatha considered herself “an old woman in a class of college youngsters,” but she finished her ten necessary courses in five trimesters, receiving her bachelor’s degree in library science in April 1939. Immediately she took a position with the Extension Library at UNC, where she provided reference services to people all over the US. “Whether the requests are stimulating, or amusing, or merely annoying,” she told the alumnae at her alma mater, “they guarantee that no day’s work will be monotonous.” She also wrote study guide booklets for extension courses with titles ranging from “Nature Writers in the United States” to “Contemporary Negro Arts.” Agatha found her new profession more satisfying than her previous one, which she described as “learning to keep house… and helping a child along from cod liver oil to dancing school.”14

  Though Alice Adams’s childhood sounds middle class to some readers today, it was truly privileged compared to that of many of her Southern neighbors. In the nearby towns of Carrboro and Pittsboro, poverty was severe. The 1940 census reports that Agatha earned a salary of $1,300, a significant addition to Nic’s professorial salary of $3,700 and book royalties of $300. Whether there was also some inherited money is unclear, but a school application Agatha filled out for Alice that year lists bank accounts in both Chapel Hill and Fredericksburg, Virginia. The census values the Adamses’ house, which had not just indoor plumbing but an extra toilet for Verlie, at $15,000. That was probably an overestimate for those times when the South was “the Nation’s #1 economic problem,” as President Roosevelt wrote in 1938. FDR based his statement on a study that showed that half the families of the South had an annual income of less than $300. Statistics don’t always give a vivid picture: consider that one-third of urban Southern homes lacked indoor plumbing, while fewer than 1 percent of farm families had an indoor water supply. Though they were getting along comfortably, Nic and Agatha had again voted for Roosevelt in 1936 as the politician most likely to bring the United States out of the Depression.

  * * *

  During the summer of 1938, Alice went first to visit relatives in Ocean City, Maryland, and then to several sessions at Camp Wabunaki, while Nic and Agatha traveled for two months in Cuba and Mexico. Their trip to Spanish-speaking America was motivated by the impossibility of visiting their beloved Spain since the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War in July 1936. That year, Nic had canceled a trip to Spain he’d planned with his favorite cousin, Anne Jervey, and her daughter, Mary Elizabeth.15

  “Even after all these years,” Nic Adams wrote in The Heritage of Spain (1943), “it is difficult to write of the Spanish Civil War with proper objectivity.” He takes pains to explain that the Spanish Republicans were socialists rather than communists, and that Roosevelt and 76 percent of Americans favored the Loyalists but opted for nonintervention. He’s bitterly clear about his opinion that the democratic nations that now deplore fascist Spain “shilly-shallied and permitted the triumph of Franco, ally of Hitler and Mussolini.”16 The Adamses would have approved of Mexico’s official support to the Spanish Republic. Furthermore, since the end of the Mexican Revolution in the early 1920s, Mexico had become a popular destination for foreigners, especially the “American leftists who had come down to enjoy the revolt of the masses,” as D. H. Lawrence biographer Brenda Maddox puts it.17 Lawrence, himself part of the band of literary tourists who passed through Mexico in those years, made scornful fun of those who were “Bolshevist by conviction but capitalist by practice.”18

  As an adult, Adams claimed that her complicated feelings about her father interfered with her efforts to learn Spanish or read Don Quixote. And yet, in what seems another sort of inheritance, she loved Mexico. Perhaps Agatha influenced that. While Nic didn’t write about Latin America until the 1960s, Agatha used her notes and memories of the summer of 1938 for her extension course guide called A Journey to Mexico. “No one can fully understand Mexico who takes Europe with him or who goes hoping to find there a transplanted Spain,” she warns in that pamphlet.19 Her personal travel diary of Cuba and Mexico is a subtly different document from the one she and Nic kept in Europe in 1922 during a brighter year of her marriage. Her Mexican journal rarely mentions Nic by name (“Aug. 10: Nic went to guitar factory”).20 Nonetheless her notes reveal an inquisitive, responsive woman rarely disturbed by the inconveniences and dangers of travel. Stopping first in Havana, the woman whose daughter saw her as a s
nobbish Virginian-Episcopalian notices “a synthesis of races—all over the city impossible to tell Cuban from Spaniard from negro. Some very black African types, e.g. the big male rumba dancer—more mulattos—and all the intervening creamy golden shades.” She wonders, “Is our cult of sunburn of the past few years a tacit admission that brown skin is more attractive than white?” She is taken with a Negro orchestra “with jungle rhythms in its beat” as well as with “the wriggling flexible brown hips of the golden-skinned dancer, her strong pliant waist, her frank sexuality.”

  In Mexico City the Adamses called upon a fellow North Carolinian, US ambassador Josephus Daniels, whose son they knew at home.21 While they were at the embassy, on August 16, Agatha notes, “A messenger came in to say that the entire Spanish cabinet in Barcelona resigned today.…” A distraught Ambassador Daniels exclaimed that this was “the worst thing that ever happened” and predicted that Spain would henceforth belong to Hitler and Mussolini. Despite his pro-democracy views, the elder Daniels had been a key player in a successful turn-of-the-century campaign to disenfranchise Negroes in North Carolina. A generation later, men like Jonathan Daniels, the son the Adamses knew at home and editor of the Raleigh News and Observer, were considered “liberals” on race in the 1930s because they “desired to see more justice and opportunity for blacks within the segregated system,” writes historian Jennifer Ritterhouse.22 It’s likely Nic Adams shared that position.

  Agatha Adams was politically more progressive. Her views probably moved further left as she corresponded with a variety of people through her work at the extension library, from a soldier who requested the Kinsey report to help him with his homosexuality to a man imprisoned in the North. Agatha owned and studied The Intelligent Woman’s Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism, and Fascism by George Bernard Shaw; more practically, as Adams’s short story “Child’s Play” indicates, Agatha volunteered to drive sick Negro women to see doctors and, against considerable resistance, recruited other faculty wives to do the same.

  Visiting Mexico thrilled Agatha. “The traveller to Mexico crosses psychological boundaries far deeper and wider than the torpid stretch of mud and silt which we call the Rio Grande,” she writes. “He must be ready to go very far back into unwritten history.”23 Now the streets are “an endless variety show. Heaps of fruit, spread out on sidewalks or on small tables often artistically decorated with leaves and piled in rich mounds of color—grapes, big wine-red plums, frosty green cactus pears, pineapple, watermelon, pears, peaches, mangoes, avocadoes… glass barrels full of violently colored fruit drinks—magenta and yellow and green and watermelon pink. Everywhere color—clashing.”

  Agatha’s sense of humor shows too. About an advertisement for Acapulco—“the fisherman’s Paradise, where beautiful women bathe in the sea all the year”—she editorializes, “At last the truth about fishing trips!” Observing that modern Mexico is Indian rather than Spanish, she writes: “the Cathedral on the Zocalo is a tawdry bedizened old grande dame, who has taken to dope, and drags her tarnished velvets in the dust… Here the Catholic church is moribund—the cathedral smells of death.”

  Some people considered Agatha Adams a difficult woman. But, as her daughter writes in “The Wake,” with Jessica standing in for Agatha, “there was another truth, another Jessica who lurked, unbidden and misunderstood…” Her Mexico journal gives glimpses of that freer, more receptive woman. One night in the silversmithing town of Taxco, she (and Nic, presumably) drank tequila almendrado (almond-flavored tequila) with a couple of acquaintances: “Vicento and Tito took us out on a serenata, & played their guitars on the hilltop shrine and the milky way swung up over the mountain behind Taxco.”

  The woman who wrote those words is truly the literary mother of Alice Adams.

  * * *

  While the beautiful woods of Maine and North Carolina and Judith’s friendship were the first forces that liberated Alice from the complicated emotions of her home, the male sex soon became the more urgent. Puberty came upon Alice early and hard. She was crazy about boys, or rather about falling in love with such beings, but her quest to grow up was greatly complicated by the charm of her face, the early maturity of her breasts, the sensitivity of her intelligence, and her painful perceptions of her parents’ marriage.

  Adams later said that she “remembered everything that ever happened to her,” and that almost seems to be true of what she called her “strenuous” adolescence. In becoming an adolescent she was also—unknowingly at that time—entering the great subject of her life and fiction. Adams “threw a different kind of light on women and what they want, or think they want,” the Canadian novelist Mavis Gallant wrote. “They were women whose beauty was part of their dilemma, almost a handicap.”24 If that’s so, Alice’s dilemmas began early. If her father was too self-involved to notice her, there was no shortage of suitors and lovers who did, and she in turn fell in love with many men in her life.

  The first stage of dating, at least for Alice’s set in Chapel Hill, was the afternoon movie date. “Sex among the barely adolescent was extremely limited in scope; we actually did very little, certainly none of the advanced goings-on that I have since heard and read about,” Adams recalled in 1991. But in the middle of Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon’s 1939 film of Wuthering Heights, a boy named Kurt reached for and held on to her hand, and she later wrote, “It is hard, now, to describe the extreme sensuality of those two warm adolescent hands, closely gripped. I can only say that it was just that, extremely sensual, totally involving. Thrilling is possibly the word.” There’s nothing unusual about that scene. But for Adams, and apparently for that boy, a recent refugee from Germany, holding hands led to an “engagement,” which was necessarily brief because Kurt’s parents soon took him with them to New York. When he broke the news, adding that he’d write but she should feel free to see movies with other boys, Alice was relieved. And excited: because now there would be “other hands to hold.”25

  Some of those hands belonged to boys who walked her the mile and a half home from downtown Chapel Hill. These walks “sometimes came to include a chaste but passionate kiss” on the secluded dirt road. Such a kiss in Families and Survivors tells Louisa she is in love: “Waking on Monday to a thick silent world of snow, and waking in love with Richard (since she loves to kiss him, she must be in love with him, mustn’t she? Of course she is)…” And so it will continue perhaps throughout Alice Adams’s life.

  “I don’t think Alice had a stronger sex drive than the rest of us,” Judith Clark said. “But she loved the narrative of a love affair.” Her experience and her theory of love were modern, somehow bridging Victorian and postsixties moral codes. The Jazz Age was over, of course, but it had loosened the rules. Still, the kind of unattached sexual desire and freedom men are said to enjoy was not allowed to girls when Alice was growing up. To enjoy passion, young Alice wanted to feel emotional attachment—love. And that feeling of love often ran ahead of any reasonable attempt to decide if a particular male, a particular relationship, was what she needed or wanted. Inexorably, her mental agility turned the experiments and misadventures of her love life into remarkable fictional explorations of the subject of love.

  * * *

  Eighth graders in 1938, Alice and Judith, then twelve, were considered freshmen at Chapel Hill High School because CHHS, like most Southern public schools then, did not offer twelfth grade. “We were all very anxious to grow up and get out of our parents’ way,” Judith recalled. There were about 120 students in their class, and Alice had known most of them since she was five. She played flute in the band and was vice president of Junior Hi-Y, a coed social and service club. With Judith, she attended Episcopal confirmation classes at the Chapel of the Cross, mainly because the Macmillan twins and other boys of interest were there. During the summer of 1939, Judith ordered instructions from a magazine for starting a sub-deb club, the purpose of which was to exchange gossip and beauty tips and plan small dance parties. That was probably as trivial as it soun
ds, but it offset the galloping pace of world events that reached them through newsreels, radio programs, and adult discussion. The Munich Agreement, signed by England, France, Germany, and Italy, had led to the takeover of Czechoslovakia by Germany; the mayhem of Kristallnacht made clear to anyone paying attention that Hitler’s intentions toward the Jews were deadly. Judith’s father, James Clark, began raising money for a British war relief organization, something he did so successfully that he soon set aside his doctoral studies and began a new career.

  Agatha’s full-time return to school and work further urged Alice toward adulthood. Agatha owned the book Life Begins at Forty, in which self-improvement promoter Walter Pitkin urged his readers to plan for productive middle years, and Alice sensed that her mother’s work was at least partly motivated by the knowledge that she and Nic might separate. According to Agatha’s unmarried friend Willie T. Weathers, Agatha “stuck things out” for Alice’s sake and felt “loyalty” rather than “duty” toward Nic. Strangely enough, Nic’s problems with severe depression, which were at least partly related to his unconsummated attractions to other women, served to bind Agatha to him.26

  Alice’s discontent with her family intensified her adolescence: “I was eleven, and both my parents were in their early forties, and almost everything that went so darkly and irretrievably wrong among the three of us was implicit in our ages,” she writes in “Return Trips.” In that story a narrator who is “eager for initiation into romantic sensual mysteries” explains: “For my mother the five years from forty-two or forty-three onward were a desolate march into middle-age. My father, about ten months younger than my mother—and looking, always, ten years younger—saw his early forties as prime time; he had never felt better in his life.” (This was true of Nic, who was actually three years younger than Agatha and looked it—at least when he was happy. But there were the depressions.)