Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  Careless Love

  — 1963–1966 —

  It seemed to me the point of the book was precisely that: his lack of orthodox attractiveness. This is one of the reasons that I originally wanted to call the book NEVERTHELESS—fat [but] nevertheless the most attractive man in the world.

  —Alice Adams to David Segal, 1965

  In the fall of 1963 Adams had completed at least half of her novel about a divorcée and her married Spanish lover. After seeing Mailer and meeting Howe, she planned a trip to New York City. Her goal was to find a new agent who could get her an advance for her novel in progress. Her former agent, Marie Rodell, had sold only the one story.

  Alice also expected to see old friends—and Howe. He made her a hotel reservation but then found himself too busy to offer to pick her up at the airport. Instead Norman Mailer welcomed her with “an extremely high-powered literary party” attended by famous people she had been anxious to meet when she was twenty-five, including Lionel Trilling and Norman Podhoretz. Feeling ill from jet lag, Alice had hoped for a quiet dinner. When she turned down drinks at the party, Mailer “beat her up.”1 Later she explained to her son that Mailer had used a judo move on her.2

  More parties organized by Mailer filled the weekend; after one of them Alice reported in a letter to Boynton that Howe had “raped” her. There’s no determining if Howe used force to have sex with Alice or if she felt compromised by him in some other way. Six months later, Adams asked him to write in support of her fellowship application to the Ingram Merrill Foundation. He replied, “I’ve already written the letter praising you enthusiastically and expatiating on many of, but not all, your talents.” By then Howe was involved with Arien Mack, and Alice joked snidely that he had found his “Aryan,” though in fact Mack, then a graduate student and later an esteemed professor of social psychology, was Jewish. Mack recalled (after their divorce) that Howe had courted her by sending her reprints of articles he’d written.3 Howe’s redeeming virtue, almost everyone eventually agreed, was his undeviating devotion to anti-Stalinist democratic socialism. Screenwriter Jeremy Larner, who was friends with both Howe and Adams, said, “Irving was the kind of guy who was very brilliant but missed a lot of things about people—and he didn’t know it. I think he must have underrated Alice in some way that stuck with her. I could tell by her tone of voice.”

  A heat wave hit New York that October, which made Alice miserable in her “terrific new dark red wool suit” bought for the trip: “I lost 10 pounds, I remember, mostly perspiration.”4 That heat drove Norman Mailer and Beverly Bentley to Vermont, so Alice moved into their house in Brooklyn Heights.5 During her stay she saw Jacqueline Miller Rice, an old friend from her Stanford days, who lived in the Village with her new husband, Dan Rice, a painter who’d played trumpet with Benny Goodman and Tommy Dorsey before beginning to paint and collaborate with the poets, dancers, and musicians at Black Mountain College. One of Jackie Rice’s closest friends was novelist Dawn Powell, who made Rice her literary executor when she died in 1965. Alice also renewed her friendship with Vida Ginsberg Deming and her husband, Dr. Quentin Deming.I Alice found that she liked both Jackie Rice and Vida Deming better than ever and was encouraged that “their already good marriages had improved.”6 Perhaps unpropitiously, she failed to telephone Jack Boynton’s friend Donald Barthelme, then living in the Village and years from becoming, as Lorrie Moore would dub him, commander in chief of the American short story.7

  Overall the trip to New York was “fantastically strenuous” and made Alice sorry to return to San Francisco.8 To Beverly Bentley and Norman Mailer, she complained, “One picks up so much in NY simply through osmosis, while here all you pick up is weather.”9 She was impatient with San Francisco, she told Dick Poirier, because “the local image is so swollen; reading the local papers one might think we had the best theatre, writers, entertainment in the country. When all we have is scenery and restaurants.”10

  Alice accomplished the purpose of her trip, signing with a new agent, John Dodds, the son of a California cattle rancher who then worked at McIntosh, McKee & Dodds and was married to actress Vivian Vance, known for her role as Ethel Mertz in I Love Lucy.11 Alice gave Dodds pages of her novel-in-progress. When President Kennedy was assassinated shortly after her return from New York, Alice immediately wrote a short story in response to the event and sent it off to Dodds. He turned it down flat—too “current and so hooked on an event”—and Adams discarded it.12

  If Alice had gone to New York with any notion of moving there, she abandoned that. It was enough to have an agent to whom she could mail her work. The rented flat on Clay Street, shared with her son and two cats (named Max and Diana), was home. “Peter is the only interesting person in San Francisco,” she boasted to Vida Deming.13

  Peter was at this time “headlong into adolescence,” according to his stepmother, and doing poorly in grammar and math. In letters to her own mother, Frances called Alice “a pretty scared person” who “won’t see Peter clearly.”14 At nearly thirteen, Peter became the focus of what Alice called an “awful crisis.” He was tall, slender, and awkward, and feared that he looked odd—unlike his handsome parents. Frances and Mark Linenthal decided Peter needed to see a psychoanalyst. When Alice broached the idea to him, he “was hurt that they thought there was something wrong with [him], which magnified [his] own feelings that there was something wrong.” After a few sessions with Dr. Shapiro, the father of a boy he knew at school, Peter hadn’t found much to say. Alice realized she felt ambivalent about analysis for children and resisted Frances Linenthal’s wish that Peter continue.II “The only good effect of all this so far,” Alice wrote Lucie Jessner, “is that he’s working much harder, the bad of course is that he sees psychiatry as punishment (evidently I do too).” Then she made a more practical assessment of Peter’s situation: “He thinks he’s Picasso and so why memorize dull things? Also, with so much charm he is something of a con man. But I think he somehow will have a good life.”15

  Frances was mollified after Alice spent a day with both Peter and his youngest stepbrother, Louis: “Alice… called to tell me she thinks Louis is a ‘fantastic’ child, ‘brilliant,’ and a ‘brilliant conversationalist,’ ‘utterly original,’ etc. This will be useful, because up till now I think she didn’t realize how valuable the friendship of both step-brothers is to the other. I think, for some reason, that all these children are quite remarkable.”16

  Alice’s jobs, writing, and social life absorbed her, so she did no volunteer work at Town School beyond bringing cookies to the annual track meet in Golden Gate Park. For his part, nonathletic Peter saved face by winning the sack race—“being tall, I could jump”—and excelling at art. He received the school’s Art Award for the third time at his eighth-grade commencement. His visual precocity extended to encouraging Alice to wear a dress he liked for the occasion: “It had big pink polka dots on it, fitted and flared.” (It was the very dress that inspired Alice to go to Chapel Hill for the summer five years earlier.)

  * * *

  “This unmarried life is only possible if one is either very rich or has a very absorbing and successful career… this novel I’m hurrying through doesn’t seem like any sort of solution, all this writing seems a great mistake,” Alice wrote Barbara Mailer early in 1964.17 She had staked a lot on the pages of the untitled, half-written novel that she’d given to Dodds. He told her it was “sprightly and gossipy” and she immediately worried that “sprightly” implied old age: “an alarming word—(she was 80 but quite sprightly).” John Leggett at Harper & Row liked it but didn’t think it had a strong enough plot going yet to merit a contract. With the kind of assiduous effort that young writers think will help them succeed, Adams sat right down to read Leggett’s own first novel (Wilder Stone, 1960) and found it “so dreary.”18

  In the spring of 1963 Alice had stopped working part-time at the art gallery and taken a new job as a typist at the Child Guidance Clinic of Children’s Hospita
l in San Francisco. She had interesting friends in the office, including Jim Lamm, a psychiatrist who’d trained in Chapel Hill, and social worker Til Brunswick, who had grown up in Vienna, where her mother, Ruth Mack Brunswick, one of the few Americans in analysis with Freud, was a pioneer in analytic research. After a youth buffeted by psychoanalytic theory, world politics, her mother’s early death due to morphine addiction, and some semesters at Reed and Black Mountain colleges. Til had married at nineteen and moved to California. After divorcing her husband, who’d been sent to San Quentin for unarmed robbery, she completed a degree in social work at Berkeley. She devoted herself to the practical aspects of helping people with problems and turned herself into an adult.

  In her first job Til found that the work came naturally to her. “I was interested in what made people tick,” she said. When Alice Adams came to work at the Child Guidance Center, she was hidden in a tiny office; rumor has it she sometimes lifted details for her fiction from the case histories she typed. When Til invited Alice to a party at her house, Alice told her she was “impressed because she’d never heard of another single woman inviting an attractive single woman to a party,” Til remembered. “That started our long friendship.”

  Til Brunswick lived in a cottage on Russian Hill that she’d acquired with help from her grandmother’s life insurance policy. Here she kept the Greek antiquities given her mother and herself by Freud, along with her family’s eighteenth-century Salzburg armoire. Alice later took her friend’s cottage as the model for Eliza’s house in Listening to Billie: “On the eastern slope of Russian Hill… the total effect of the house was generous and comfortable, if a bit disheveled. It overflowed, literally, with books and records and magazines, usually with music and flowers and good smells of food.”

  Til noticed that Alice never went to lunch with coworkers—she was always writing. Despite the social and economic barriers she’d faced as a writer and wife, Alice did not call herself a feminist. “I don’t find being a woman all that difficult, it’s being human that’s hard,” she wrote Billy Abrahams after reading The Golden Notebook by Doris Lessing.19 She was too devoted to love affairs, and too resistant to being like her mother to identify with the nascent women’s movement. Yet, as her reaction to Til’s invitation indicates, she was impatient with stereotypical rivalries between women (though not immune to them, of course). “Alice was just a free spirit,” Til said. “She hadn’t thought about ‘feminism’ yet and she had this aristocratic Southern background. Politically she was a socialist. I think her mother was similar—kind of a snob in some ways, in other ways a complete radical.” But Til was typical of Alice’s women friends in having an unusual, privileged childhood and challenging, independent adult life.

  One of Alice’s Radcliffe friends had also come back into her life. Ginny Berry, who had stood as maid of honor in Alice’s wedding, came to San Francisco in the 1950s to live with two aunts on Stanyan Street and work as an economist at the Federal Reserve Bank. She had a master’s from New York University and next earned a law degree from the University of San Francisco, a Jesuit institution, but worried that she was unmarried at the advanced age of twenty-five. A bit later, Alice learned that Ginny was “tremendously involved” with a man she could not introduce to friends. Alice assumed the beloved was married. “I would have wanted a more complete relationship for her, of course,” she wrote. “By that time I knew about the disadvantages of the illicit myself.” When Ginny became pregnant, Alice suggested an abortion, but Ginny had her babies—twin boys—at a Catholic home in another city. They were adopted and Ginny became an assistant professor in USF’s school of business. Troubled by her friend’s evident loneliness, Alice challenged her for an explanation. Finally, Ginny confided to Alice that her lover, the twins’ father, was a priest. Alice was outraged when she met the priest at a party and he (not knowing that Alice knew he was Ginny’s lover) proposed that Alice help Ginny find someone to marry. Alice passed the priest’s remark to Ginny; after that, “some terrible drift apart began” and their friendship went dormant.20

  Judith Clark Adams and her five children visited San Francisco early in 1966, en route to join Timothy Adams in Bangkok, where he had become the regional director for the Peace Corps.21 At a farewell party given for Judith in Mill Valley, Judith saw that both Alice and the attractive man at her side—his name was Bob McNie—“were drinking heavily, more than others at the party.” Alice’s hair had gone prematurely gray, she smoked, and “she was not svelte. She was beginning to look like Agatha.”

  Alice’s gig at Child Guidance was the first of several part-time jobs she held at the medical institutions on the north side of the city that proved financial lifesavers. If she’d lived in New York she might have worked in editorial offices, but San Francisco was not a major publishing center. Medical jobs proved easier to get—and easier to leave. Peter’s schoolmate Stephen Brown often saw Alice walking down Clay Street en route to work. “It seemed solitary and sad to me,” Brown recollected. “I don’t know if she felt that way. But to me it seemed unusual. I don’t remember ever being in a car with Alice. She took the bus or walked. She was unlike the other Town School mothers—pedigreed and educated way more than they were but she was not one of them! They were society and she was not.”

  Alice never hesitated to quit office work in favor of writing. In early 1964 she left Child Guidance and began a lucrative freelance job for psychiatrist Meyer Zeligs. Zeligs had a two-thousand-page manuscript analyzing the personalities of accused communist Alger Hiss and his accuser, Whittaker Chambers. Alice found working for Zeligs “extremely interesting” until she had a dream in which Hiss confessed to her! She then decided Zeligs’s project was “preposterous”—which also seems to have been the critics’ view when it was published in 1967.22

  * * *

  Literary agent John Dodds kept the partial manuscript for Adams’s novel moving in a frustrating comedy of errors. At Atlantic Monthly Press in Boston, the pages fell into the slush pile and were rejected outright until editor Peter Davison frantically called Dodds in New York to apologize that he hadn’t read the manuscript. Back to Boston it went, where Davison requested more chapters and an outline. Adams already had five new chapters and banged out an outline within a week. This time, Atlantic responded with an offer of $250 for a right of first refusal on the book. Her editor would be her old friend from her Palo Alto days Billy Abrahams. But she was immediately frustrated by Abrahams’s plan to spend the summer incommunicado in Maine working on his own book with his partner and coauthor Peter Stansky.

  With hope of publication, Adams quit editing for Zeligs and applied to the Ingram Merrill Foundation for a fellowship. The letter Max Steele wrote in support of her application stands as the first coherent appreciation of Adams’s fiction. He begins by admitting he found her work “too intensely feminine” when he was an editor at the Paris Review. But that feminine quality, he finds now, is a unique voice for writing truthful and distinguished fiction “about the physical and instinctual love of a mature woman.” Adams’s gift, he continues, is of “sounding light and frivolous and of being extremely readable while dealing with a bold honesty [with] the situations which envelop so much of the thought and feeling of modern woman.”23

  Adams described her novel in her notebook: “This novel is an on-the-whole amused look at San Francisco—specifically, at an enormous blonde divorcée, Daisy Duke Fabbrini, & her year in the sexual jungle. In the background are the city’s incredible divorce & suicide rate, & rather kitsch social mores—and aberrant weather.”24 By the end of summer, Alice had titled her book The Fall of Daisy Duke and finished a first draft. Dodds thought it was marvelous, and everybody at Atlantic Monthly “adored” it.25

  The euphoria ended when Abrahams and Davison submitted the book to senior editors at Little, Brown, publisher for all Atlantic Monthly books, who were “unrestrained in their dislike.” Alice kept her long-spent advance and Davison, who became her friend during a visit to San Francisco
, assured her that she’d be better off with a “more commercial” publisher; to his credit he also tried to help her find one.26 For the next six months, The Fall of Daisy Duke made the rounds in New York, garnering rejections from Robert Gottlieb at Simon and Schuster, who called it “intelligent and pleasant” but “just didn’t believe it”; Lee Wright at Random House; and other esteemed editors.27

  * * *

  On May 6, 1965, Alice and Peter met Diana and Max Steele for dinner at a Chinese restaurant. Alice told them about a depressing interview she’d had at a job agency and Max had a feeling “which comes when you can look at a person against everything that has ever happened to them or is likely to, when the film, which you’ve seen before, holds still and you can see the fear and isolation under the mascara, the bitterness which lipstick does not quite conceal—anyway it was that with her. The film had stopped. On the way home [he] kept wondering what could save her from becoming a bitter woman. The immediate answer was, of course, a sense of humor, but sometimes that’s the first thing to turn bitter; and all in all it was depressing if you believe that bitterness is the real and maybe worst sin against the gift of life.”28

  The very next morning Alice received a jubilant call from her agent. David I. Segal, a thirty-seven-year-old editor at New American Library, was purchasing her novel for $2,000. Alice called the Steeles, who threw a celebratory party for her that very evening. Still, Alice worried that the phone call might have been a practical joke by Max, who boasted that he could impersonate Dodds’s voice. Within days she had better evidence in a three-page critique from Segal that opened with these welcome words: “I would like to say, first of all, how pleased we all are that we will be publishing your book… it is cool, funny, and touching, and I think furthermore that you have a voice of your own which is original and accurate.”29