Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Steele had grown up in the “up-country” part of South Carolina, the son of a real estate speculator and a woman whose “manners and courage” had brought his family through the financial reverses of the Great Depression. As a senior at Furman University before the war, Steele was voted the “Wittiest Boy” in his class. The yearbook said he “wielded the sharpest and most acidulous pen” and viewed the world with “joyous and cynical detachment.”

  During the return trip to Chapel Hill, Alice and Lucie Jessner speculated about Steele’s relationship with a French girl who’d been with him at the beach. “She is very nice, but I think Max requires a more difficult, more demanding woman,” Jessner said.7

  * * *

  “If I could relive any four or five days in my life,” Adams wrote later, “I might choose those, and not because I want to change a thing; I don’t—they were perfect. Or why not relive the whole summer while I’m at it?”

  That “whole summer” comprised about four weeks in Chapel Hill. Steele invited Alice to a party and she wore one of those summer dresses. Still tan from the beach, she was “thin, confident, and optimistic.” She and Max danced on a darkened porch. Max began appearing at the Adams home several times a day. He told her, “I can’t believe this is happening to me. I have to keep leaving and coming back to check.” According to Alice, they “almost never used the dangerous ‘L’ word, just acted it out.”8

  Their both being writers is one reason their brief love affair stands out in their lives. Adams wrote two memoir essays and five short stories rooted in that summer. Steele wrote one too. Those narratives cast light back on the summer, fogging the line between fact and fiction more than usual.II Together these writings illuminate the feelings that changed Alice’s relationship to herself, her husband, and her hometown forever.9

  If the “L” word and serious talk were dangerous, these lovers compensated with laughter. Steele described her laughter in “Another Love Story”: “She was laughing as if she couldn’t stop, a startling sight, as if a statue had suddenly laughed and gone on laughing, refusing to be a statue again. Until that moment she looked frighteningly sophisticated, the sort of woman he couldn’t deal with… but then she’d laughed and all her Radcliffe, Rome, and San Francisco poise had gone and she looked ten years younger and, for the first time, he allowed himself to stare at her magnificent legs.”10

  Travel had given them both an ironic distance from their Southern culture and they took verbal aim at it together. Max especially loved puns and wordplay, and they made fun of themselves and their ambitions. Alice recalled, “I was working on a novel that summer, but it was so hot. And I was distracted. One day I wrote, ‘Waves of longing came over her like waves.’ On another, just one sentence: ‘Nobody had mentioned Herbert.’ Max thought they were both great, especially the Herbert one. ‘It tells you a lot about Herbert, right off,’ he said. We laughed and laughed, which tells you something about the level of our humor.”

  For these two humor was catalytic. Steele was at a crisis in his writing career and life. He sensed that “the life of a teacher was far more rewarding than the highly public life of a writer or the totally absorbing life of an editor.”11 His love of teaching frightened him. Living in the South, he no longer heard the nostalgic “song of Carolina” that had inspired his early work or the voice that had written stories about Americans while he was in Paris. He worried that his talent was exhausted. Alice gave him a vacation from himself. As she put it in “Home Is Where,” “We laughed, as all summer we were to laugh, at both the gravest and the most inconsequential matters. We laughed between our wildest encounters of love, and we talked almost not at all—and that, for that summer, for both of us was perfect.”

  Max liked Peter, told him terrible jokes and riddles, taught him to catch fireflies, and became his lifelong friend. But some afternoons while Peter was at camp, Max and Alice had time alone for an hour of love or a drink in a cool, quiet, dark bar. In the evenings Alice cooked dinner for the three of them and sometimes for Lucie Jessner. Adams’s unpublished story “Night Fears” tells a story of Max’s feeling for Peter from the man’s point of view, with the character Clay standing in for Max. To him, the boy is “tall and pale and shy, too close to what Clay had been himself.” After the boy was asleep the lovers swam in the pool in the woods. One night the boy awoke with a scream and his mother sprinted barefoot across rocks and branches to his bed. To the man’s ears, that scream echoes his own needs and fears: “Her love was so headlong and entire, she might have been trying to destroy herself in love. And he was cautious, cautious.” When the child is calm, the man says he must go home. He’s understood something more about motherly love—and he feels “like a guilty intruder.”

  Alice and Max made no plans for the future. Max was thirty-eight and had already met the woman he would marry two years later. He had recently decided to rededicate himself to writing. For the present he had very little money. Alice was more intent on escaping her past than on looking ahead.

  She’d told Mark Linenthal that she was unhappy before she left San Francisco. He too was unhappy and frightened—of change, of his mother, of the future. He had embraced a non–Ivy League career, but now childhood and financial insecurities resurfaced. During the summer he mailed a dress to Alice and pajamas and socks to Peter and made arrangements for Peter’s return to Town School. Two letters he wrote to Alice that summer tell more about the breakup of their marriage than any bitter recollections they harbored later. He sounds puzzled but sincere. “Being alone this way, facing parents, getting money matters straighter, has been tough, but enormously valuable,” he wrote. “I feel very different, a lot closer to being the sort of person I could enjoy being.” When his parents visited, they agreed to give him $2,400 for the next year, with the possibility of an additional loan and a “hunk of dough for a downpayment on a house.”12

  Friends of Mark’s have felt that Adams was cruel in her portrayals of his mother in her fiction. But Mark’s own take on Anna Linenthal in his July 1958 letter is more damning than anything Adams published. He prides himself on maintaining his identity during his parents’ visit “firmly enough so that [his] father had the guts to chime in on [his] behalf,” observing, “But he needs my lead—he’s pitifully weak and dependent on her and masochistically willing to take her abuse. His bullying: since he can’t play the man with her, he takes it out on his children. It all seems so much clearer to me than it ever did before.”13

  Late in the Chapel Hill summer, Judith Adams came down from her parents’ in Washington, DC, to visit Alice. Having given birth to her fourth child the previous winter, Judith was “totally worn out.” She found the Adams house comfortingly shabby and in every way reminiscent of 1938. Of course their bodies have changed, “and in opposite directions,” Adams writes when she describes them as Kate (Judith) and Louisa (Alice) in Families and Survivors: “Kate’s is fuller, softer, whereas Louisa’s has hardened; she is bony, perhaps too thin.” Their friendship was an island of calm for Alice as she tried to explain recent events in her life.

  “Alice had a manuscript spread out on the table,” Judith recalled, “and several men were buzzing around. She was sought-after. I babysat Peter so she could spend a whole night with Max. By then I understood that she was unhappy with Mark.” Back with her children for the foggiest San Francisco summer in forty-four years, Judith wrote, “Chapel Hill is going to haunt you, Alice. In moments of stress, and there are those in quantity, I close my eyes and dream I’m on my back again looking up at the sky seen through those beautiful trees, cooled deliciously by the green water.”14

  Confiding in Judith and having a night with Max helped Alice decide to start over. This summer out of time, of letting go of her worries, gave her courage for the postponed endeavor of changing her life. She sent Mark a letter that was painful to him, though we don’t know exactly what it said. He replied, “I’ve had some pretty rough moments getting my life liveable” but “I also think that the stronger,
freer, more capable of joy and spontaneity I become, the greater the chances of our loving each other. I seem to see more clearly than I ever have before why things got so bad between us; this ought to help. Maybe it can’t enough.” He believes his financial relationship with his parents is at the root of his difficulties:

  I just wrote a letter to my father about money—not really about money, but about the only emotional context in which I could accept the money I asked for—a blunter letter than I’ve ever written him—in which I said that I would not take the “explaining” role again. I feel that I can no longer afford to allow myself to be called to account. And with this comes some sense of how I cruelly called you to account, or, equally cruelly, “tolerated.” That an autonomous identity gives everything in life its value seems a truth I hadn’t accepted. As a result of all this I think that the chances of our getting together happily are greater than they ever were. And that if we can’t, that possibility would be more tolerable than I had thought it.15

  Alice had that remarkable letter from her husband to ponder as she left her childhood home. As it turned out, she would never enter it again. She also had to say goodbye to Max. In several versions of the story of her last night in Chapel Hill, including nonfiction essays, Alice confesses, “In passion, I declared that I would always love Henry (this has turned out to be true, though not in the sense I meant it at the time), along with other statements in that vein. And Henry, while not exactly responding in kind, received what I said with love and great gentleness, thus delicately sparing me possible later shame.”16 In his fictional version, Max retroactively spared her that humiliation:

  “Darling,” she said as they reached the grass beach, turning him toward her, “there’s something I want to ask you.…”

  Now would come the outpouring. All the things unsaid that would demand answers and unsatisfactory explanations from him.…

  “What?” he asked.

  “Did you know.…” she started to confess but then her voice brightened, “there’s a grasshopper on your ear?” It was not what she’d meant to say, but once said it took the place of all seriousness. He had seen her realize that that was all she would say… “Do you mind,” she asked, reaching toward the grasshopper, “if I take it off?” And then they laughed until they were lying down laughing.17

  The interwoven themes of sex and romance and love would occupy Adams throughout her fiction. Women in her novels often want more love than they can have, declare more than is prudent, confuse sex with love, and long for some humorous understanding that will relieve these conflicts. Having found that kind of understanding in Max Steele, Adams began to know him as a friend. He would be the third person, along with Judith Clark Adams and Billy Abrahams, she wrote about late in her life as someone she fell in love with at first sight and liked continuously thereafter. He was the only one of the three who had also been her lover, but all were clear advocates of her fiction, to which she now turned her attention as she faced the end of her marriage and the need to earn a living. “I think you’re going to take a while getting used to being happy,” Caleb tells Claire in “Home Is Where.” For Adams, a new optimism, born of “being happy,” would be powerful.

  Whatever was or wasn’t said that night in August 1958, Max soon wrote Alice to say—in a roundabout way—that no one could understand “what it’s like after being happy to be so suddenly alone.”18 Further confirming that Alice’s feeling for Max was not a private romantic fantasy, Jessner wrote Alice for her thirty-second birthday: “This is to wish you the great happiness you seem so able to experience! Analysts are not supposed to believe in the magic of wishes—but residues remain. So I go on wishing that this veil of sadness you had, attractive as it is, might lift and that the hardships of the near future should not be too heavy.”19

  * * *

  Alice and Peter departed for Maine. Lucie Jessner had already fled the heavy Carolina summer heat and was completing a book with a colleague in New Hampshire. Max Steele was leaving Chapel Hill with no fixed destination. Determined to be a productive writer, he worried that his three years of teaching at the university had been a detour. A month later, he was in Tampa, writing to Alice in San Francisco that “the West seems too far” and he feels “incapable of decisions.”20

  At Lake Sebago, in her mother’s old lake cabin, now occupied and transformed by Dotsie, Alice revisited her grief for Agatha. She dramatized her emotions later in the story “Alternatives” with a confrontation between Avery (Alice), her father (Jack), and Dotsie (Babs). When Avery announces her decision to divorce, Jack confesses “an old-fashioned prejudice against divorce.” Avery retorts, “Christ, is that why you stayed married to mother and made her as miserable as you could? Christ, I have a prejudice against misery!” Turning to Babs for support, she asks, “Don’t you ever wish you’d got married before you did? What a waste those years were.” Babs is startled, as Dotsie might have been, because she “never allowed herself to think in these terms, imaginatively to revise her life.” She replies primly that she’s grateful for the years she has with Jack.

  But the father, enraged by Avery’s accusation that he made his first wife’s life miserable, insists, “I think I might be in a better position than you to be the judge of that.” At this Avery reveals something she has heard from the housemaid: “You think she [Mother] just plain died of a heart attack, don’t you? Well, her room was full of empty sherry bottles. All over. Everywhere those drab brown empty bottles, smelling sweet. Julia told me, when she cleaned it out.” It may be that during her summer of return to Chapel Hill Alice had a conversation with Verlie Jones or her daughter and heard that Agatha, in the lonely last years of her marriage, had become a secret drinker. It was, at least, an explanation that Alice embraced for reasons of her own.III

  * * *

  Earlier in the year, Adams asked Saul Bellow to write letters in support of the novel she was working on. “Anything I’ve got is at your disposal… the more sex and Negroes the better,” he replied, before telling her about the “African” book he was finishing, Henderson the Rain King. Perhaps he helped her sign on with literary agent Marie Fried Rodell. She sent 114 pages of “Weather in the Town” and an outline to Rodell in July, who submitted it to publishers. En route to Maine, Adams stopped in Manhattan to meet Rodell.

  The news was a letdown. Judith Jones (Knopf editor for John Updike, Julia Child, Elizabeth Bowen, and William Maxwell) thought her pages “an aimless sort of novel about the well-to-do married set in their middle years living in a Virginia town.” Most damning and illuminating is Jones’s remark that Adams has insights about the nuances of her characters but is “too often hinting at things that are disappointing when they finally evolve.”21 In her life as well as her fiction Adams preferred silence to drama, which seems in keeping with the unhappy passivity that kept her married to Mark.

  Nonetheless, 1958 marks a year of progress for Adams. Rodell was an important agent. She and her business partner, Joan Daves, also represented marine biologist Rachel Carson, author of the recent bestseller The Sea Around Us, and Martin Luther King Jr., whose Stride Toward Freedom was soon to be published. She was herself a mystery writer and author of Mystery Fiction: Theory and Technique. Adams had given her a dozen short stories to submit to slick magazines and prestigious journals that paid.

  One day after driving a rough mountain road to visit Lucie Jessner in New Hampshire, Alice learned that Rodell had sold one of her stories. Charm: The Magazine for Women Who Work paid her $350 for “Winter Rain,” her story about living in Paris after the war. Charm promised a December publication, anticipating an issue about European travel for its audience of “business girls.” Alice telegrammed the news to Max. In years to come she would make fun of herself for believing that her agent’s sale of this one story indicated that everything she wrote in the future would sell easily. She knew better even then.22

  Nevertheless, Alice’s pride in this sale made it a major event for her, part of the summer when she be
gan her life over in Chapel Hill, from which she “derived the courage to divorce” Mark.23

  I. About this time Adams wrote “Former Friends,” a story that suggests what was wrong: “I was not at all in love with Gary, my then-husband. In fact I disliked him quite a lot, which I had not as yet admitted to myself—too dangerous… What I minded most about Gary, really, was that he never made love to me—he never wanted to at all. What he most minded, I think, was my unhappy untidiness.”

  II. Years had elapsed before Adams wrote her short stories about the summer; even more years elapsed before she wrote two pieces she called memoirs. In one of those she notes that the writing of fiction shapes the writer’s memory of an event: “Once I wrote a story about such a walk, and I am now unsure whether I am remembering the story or the actual walk.” (Adams, “Summer, Clothes & Love: A Memoir.”)

  III. Alice and Dotsie ended the summer on a sour note. Dotsie said that Swiss renters (friends of Jessner’s) who came after Alice left found the apartment so “filthy dirty” that they refused to move in, forcing Dotsie to hire people to “clean the place up.” Alice said she’d left the apartment as she found it. (Undated note found among personal papers of Dorothy Stearns Adams, Peter Adams Linenthal collection.)

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  Freedom

  — 1958–1961 —

  He took her hand. “You are so brave a woman. You are a true woman.”