Segal’s interest in the novel was now equal to Adams’s own. After a honeymoon of mutual praise and good humor, editor and author got down to the business of completing the book. Naturally, arguments ensued, most of which were resolved by means of some thirty mostly good-humored letters air-mailed between coasts. They particularly disagreed about what Daisy was “like” and whether Pablo was or should be “likable.”
Segal insisted that he’d known some Daisy Dukes and that they were “characterized by a combination of hysteria and hopelessness generated by their sense of emptiness in their lives.” Quickly Adams rose to her character’s defense: “I know what you mean, but I thought Daisy was less hopeless, empty etc than those girls. She certainly isn’t tragic like Mr. Styron’s Peyton [in Lie Down in Darkness]. I wanted to emphasize her capacity for survival, what I like about her is a kind of life force quality, more action than introspection (she’d never do anything so neurotic as write a book)… I really mean to show that she could survive anything—up-and-down Daisy.”
If Daisy isn’t a Peyton Loftis, Segal proposed, perhaps she is more like Sally Bowles in Christopher Isherwood’s Goodbye to Berlin. Not at all, Alice replied, her Daisy is not “epicene” like Bowles. Perhaps Alice went on, she is “a sophisticated Molly Bloom, a witty Emma Bovary—but all these references go very wrong for me. There is something in Mailer’s new girl, Cherry [in An American Dream], but still not.”
Regarding Pablo, Segal noted that Adams made it “overly clear that he is a bit of a poseur, a bit of a rake, and more than a little bit dishonest.” He wanted Pablo to be attractive so he could believe in Daisy’s love for him. Startled, Adams protested, “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.” But Adams was a reasonable author, if not a sensible lover, and she admitted she’d “overdone the underplaying of his charm” and didn’t want Daisy to look like an idiot.30
For all the resemblances that Daisy bears to her author, she remains an imaginary construct of her author’s hopes and fears. Daisy is tall and large boned with no children; she is neither intellectual nor artistic nor self-reliant. She lives for love alone and the novel’s story is one of resilience despite the damage love has done to her.
* * *
Segal accepted Adams’s revised manuscript in September, but the novel still lacked a title. Adams sent dozens of suggestions. He turned hers down and sent back others. She turned his down. The one she hated most was “Love and Anxiety,” which Peter Linenthal said sounded like a musical that just flopped. She held out for The Fall of Daisy Duke, the title under which the book would appear in England. But Segal preferred Careless Love and she learned to like it, surprised that no one had used the popular jazz-standard song title before. In a 1925 blues version by Bessie Smith, it’s love itself that “brought the wrong man into this life of [hers].” Helen Merrill released her version of the song in 1965, but Adams was probably more familiar with W. C. Handy’s “Loveless Love” lyrics sung to the same tune by Billie Holiday.
Other decisions quickly followed. Alice dedicated the novel to Diana and Max Steele. She went to Imogen Cunningham—whom she described as “an extremely good local photographer,” though Cunningham had a national reputation—for her author photo, and hated the result: “[She] tends to take pictures of one’s soul and mine was in bad shape just then.”31 Page proofs reached Alice on Christmas Eve.32
Once while teaching a writing class, Saul Bellow had blurted out to writer Bette Howland that he couldn’t stand women writers who “wore their ovaries on their sleeves.”33 When he received proofs of Careless Love, Bellow said that he felt that personal contact disqualified him as a critic because he assumed that Daisy was Alice. “But I suppose that’s proof of quality, since you came forward very clearly as a very charming woman, no nonsense, level-headed… It’s an excellent portrait within its limits.” The limits: “Women like your heroine do seem to live completely in relationships and think of very little apart from their own feminine happiness.” The problem with that was that men were just as unreliable as in “poor Emma Bovary’s time.” He urged Alice to write “the last book in Bovary series. The woman who does that will be gratefully remembered.”34
Norman Mailer read the book straight through when he got the proofs, then dallied over his response, then praised Alice for bravely overcoming her natural discretion to write about personal, painful events—“exposing the story must have opened at the same instant the desire to anesthetize the wound.” But he complained that she’d failed to give any sense of whether Pablo was “a shit or a tragic man.” Next, he told her, she must “start something which will enable you to explore into your biting sense of what is socially comic and maybe get it far enough away from yourself so that you don’t have to hold back. You’re a lady, dear prune-face, and lady writers were not meant to hold back their knowledge, because they don’t know that much to begin with.”III
With such friends, Alice needed her comic sense, and she used it to find flattery in Mailer’s criticism: “What you’re asking me to do, old friend, is either what James did or what no one else but you is doing now. As a matter of fact I don’t agree with you as much about the lack of social milieu as I do about the depth—you’re right, not probed, nowhere near final levels.” Indeed, she said, it had not been painful to write the book: “As a matter of fact [it was] easy, which may explain deficiencies, so I don’t even get points for courage.” Her new novel would be “much more exacerbated” and more to Mailer’s liking, she insisted.
* * *
Warning Adams about first-novel jitters, David Segal wrote a letter that belongs in the creative writing textbooks:
There has probably never been a human being who has perpetrated a book and not in his or her secret heart been absolutely convinced it would get a front-page review in The New York Times Book Review section. Please repeat over and over to yourself every day until the book is published, “I have produced a product for which there is no demand,” which is, of course, the case. Nobody ever wakes up in the morning and says “Gee, I want to buy a book today.” Of course what is going to happen almost immediately is that our relationship will change drastically. Up until now you considered me bright, sensitive, acute, even lovable. After all, I took the book. But in a few months you will notice there are no dirigibles flying over San Francisco skies writing CARELESS LOVE. Ed Sullivan is not inviting you to do a strip tease on his show; The New Yorker is not profiling you; in fact, almost nothing is happening. But let me tell you about the worst day. The worst day will be when the book is published—there will be no parades, people will not be breaking bottles of champagne over your head, Johnson will not be holding a press conference in your honor. There will be a tiny notice in The New York Times of books published today and perhaps one or two of your close friends will call up and say “Gee, your book is published today.”
However, having painted the bleak picture I must say we do what we can. If you know anybody with a reputation who might be bludgeoned into saying something nice about the book, let me know and I will get galleys to them. They really should be either novelists, poets, or critics.35
Thus it was that galleys had gone out to Saul Bellow, Norman Mailer, and Irving Howe. No one was bludgeoned and no one offered a blurb. The book’s white jacket had nothing on the back but Cunningham’s photo of the author looking a bit frightened and matronly.IV On publication day, Segal sent Alice a telegram and an advance copy of a paragraph in Martin Levin’s omnibus “Reader’s Report” column in the New York Times Book Review. Levin called Careless Love “fetching” and “wry” and “witty” and Daisy “emancipated but sentimental.”36 Other than that, the reviews were local: in the San Francisco Chronicle Maitland Zane called Careless Love the “best written of the rash of novels about this particular milieu” and then gratuitously mentioned
that the author was “the ex-wife of Professor Mark Linenthal of San Francisco State” and opined that “Daisy’s anguished affair with a married Spanish banker sounds all-too-believable.” But could Alice have expected more of a newspaper that captioned a picture of Governor Pat Brown and Cesar Chavez “Gripes among the grapes”? Elsewhere in the same paper a full-page picture of Jefferson Airplane celebrating the first appearance of a rock band at the Berkeley Folk Music Festival reminds us that the counterculture was then transforming San Francisco.37
In Chapel Hill’s newspaper, retired journalism professor Walter Spearman issued a review that called Daisy “warm and vivid, a bit silly, romantic, eager to embrace life but not quite certain what life was except that it must contain a man.” Spearman had an observation about the author photo that probably made Alice cringe: “The picture on the jacket of the book makes her look amazingly like her mother, Agatha Adams.” He noted too that the novel was dedicated to Chapel Hillians Max and Diana Steele.
The Steeles, who with their baby Oliver Whittinghill Steele returned to Chapel Hill in the fall of 1966 when Max became the university’s writer in residence, sent Alice the funniest response to her novel. Her parents’ friend Dougald Macmillan had stopped by, Max wrote, to say that Alice’s book had caused “a great deal of interest and talk around campus.” Max’s report to Alice continued,
I said I can imagine and he gave a wicked smile and said yes indeed and of course there is talk that it may be autobiographical which makes it especially interesting here and I said you should be in S. F. where it is more interesting and causing more talk and he said he could imagine and I said I didn’t think he could and he laughed nicely and said he would like to be able to imagine.
“He does have a wicked smile,” Alice gamely replied.
From Chapel Hill Max again became a congenial correspondent. The Steeles’ San Francisco house had been filled “with such anger,” Alice confided to Lucie Jessner. “It’s nice to be out of target range, which doesn’t mean that I don’t like and in many ways admire them.”38 Max resumed his role as Alice’s conduit for news from Chapel Hill; the letters they exchanged for years to come remind us that gossip as a means of speculation is central to the making of novels of social comedy. Without gossip, as Cynthia Ozick writes, there are no stories and novels, no probing of motive and character, no interiority: “The gossiper strives to fathom the difference between appearance and reality, and to expose the gap between the false and the genuine.”39
After reading Careless Love, Alice’s son told her, “If I wrote your story it would be a comedy, but you would think it was a tragedy.”40
* * *
As Alice approached her fortieth birthday, Peter was a sophomore at Lick-Wilmerding High School, a private, tuition-free boys’ school on Ocean Avenue. She was proud to see that her fifteen-year-old son was “in some kind of creative explosion, paints all the time, enormous gorgeous things, a perpetual experiment.” He took the streetcar across the city to school and, many afternoons, hitchhiked home by way of the Haight-Ashbury neighborhood. By 1966, the previously Irish and Russian immigrant area between Golden Gate and Buena Vista parks was home to a diverse mixture of bohemian, gay, and black residents and San Francisco State students. Activists had killed a redevelopment plan to run a freeway through the Golden Gate Park panhandle. Now the neighborhood included the Psychedelic Shop (head shop), the Straight Theater (concert hall), and the Diggers Free Store.
“You could buy the Mojo-Navigator Rock & Roll News, a mimeographed paper about the music scene,” Peter said. “There was this feeling that something amazing is happening.” Rolling Stone later estimated that there were about five hundred rock groups playing in the city during the late sixties.41 With his stepbrothers Duncan and Louis Pain, Peter attended the first Bill Graham–produced concert in San Francisco. During these early days of San Francisco rock happenings, Peter helped a friend named Peter Kitchell put on light shows. Kitchell called his enterprise Lights by God! “We used an overhead projector and the faces from two clocks with oil and water between the pieces of glass to create that pulsating amoeba effect. We did it for high school parties.” At Lick-Wilmerding their group called SFS—Students for Students—agitated for student power. Chet Helms (the music promoter and so-called father of the Summer of Love) gave the group a fund-raising dance at the Avalon Ballroom with Big Brother and the Holding Company and Quicksilver Messenger Service.
Peter designed a big poster for that dance and helped silkscreen it at a Sacramento Street gallery operated by a gay couple, Raymond Lew and Jim Kelly. “I hadn’t seen a gay couple closely before, and I wondered how that worked,” he said. Raising money for the school, Peter’s friend Phillip Galgiani recalled, “was a way of getting involved in some real world activity, and finding a way to connect with all that neat stuff—the psychedelic shop, light shows, and dope—that was getting into full gear then.”
Alice apologized to friends for Peter’s appearance during what she hoped was just a “Haight-Ashbury hippie phase.” He was six feet one inch or more and “terribly long-haired, ragged, hippy” but so “extraordinarily nice, talented, extremely funny” that she tried not to complain about his appearance. He was also “very politically involved, peace meetings. Like that. And pot.”42
* * *
Alice Adams celebrated her fortieth birthday with Bob McNie, a man she’d known for two years—a tempestuous passage that requires its own chapter, which comes next. They hadn’t been getting along well, and the situation wasn’t helped when he took her on a tour of topless bars in North Beach on her birthday—“not the best possible introduction to being forty,” she stated wryly in her essay “On Turning Fifty” some years later.
There was plenty to celebrate in 1966. At last she had published a first novel. On the day before her birthday she learned that Constable would publish it in Britain, using the title she liked, The Fall of Daisy Duke. Her new literary agent, Peter Matson, was bold about submitting her short stories to paying magazines. While many people in San Francisco felt threatened by the surge of counterculture in the Bay Area, Alice was politically sympathetic with the young people and confident of her son’s ability to maintain the qualities she admired in him amid the cultural turmoil. Because her mother had been so harshly judgmental, she was determined not to criticize Peter. She sent pictures of his work to friends like Lucie Jessner and the Steeles.
A few weeks into her fifth decade, Alice had an emergency hysterectomy at Mount Zion Hospital and they took out her appendix as a bonus. “That’s sort of like you take your child to the shoe store and they also give you a balloon,” Fred Breier told Alice in his Viennese accent that so charmed her. Records show that Alice underwent a then-common removal of both fallopian tubes and ovaries, which causes a sudden depletion of hormones, or “surgical menopause.” Alice never wrote about this change, and we don’t know if she immediately took one of the newly available hormone replacement therapies.43
However she got through the changes, it appears Alice flourished in menopause. Nic Adams came to take care of his daughter when she got home from the hospital. “We oddly enough… had an absolutely marvelous time,” she reported to the Steeles. “He is a most elegant old man, I must say—most attractive male nurse I’ve ever had.”44 While he was there, Nic purchased a big new refrigerator for her, primarily, she said, because he thought she needed an automatic icemaker. Perhaps that’s also when Alice mentioned her mother’s anger to Nic and he replied, “Don’t you imagine that I got a lot of that too?” In her mind she responded, “Yes, but you deserved it—having affairs, drinking so much, just being so attractive, but I was just a child.” Alice did not say that to her father then or ever.45
After the surgery, Alice bragged to the Steeles that she’d lost fifteen pounds and permanently given up her three-pack-a- day cigarette habit. In Listening to Billie she would describe months of feeling “lost, deprived” without cigarette in hand, followed by learning to write again.46
Nic’s visit had gone so well that Alice agreed to visit him and Dotsie in Tucson, where he was a visiting professor at the University of Arizona. A newspaper columnist there reported that Professor Adams had hosted a party for friends to meet “his favorite author.” When another Arizona paper interviewed Alice, she joked that she’d finished the book because her friends Diana and Max Steele had “threatened to publish [her] air mail postcards unless [she] wrote a book.”47
“I think I am probably a good example of life begins at 40,” Adams told the San Francisco Examiner in 1975. “Since then—I’m 48—they have all been an improvement. I began to come together after a long period of floundering.”48
I. Quentin’s sister, Barbara Deming, had stopped writing fiction and become an activist for peace and racial justice. Her Prison Notes (1966) chronicles two months she spent on a hunger strike in an Albany, Georgia, jail after being arrested on a walk for peace. She visited Cuba and North Vietnam to protest US policies and wrote extensively about the philosophy of nonviolent protest.
II. According to Peter, “Frances was very pro-psychiatry. If you wanted to be mean”—which of course he did not—“you could call it psychobabble—ideas about this came freely from her. Like many of that generation, she was a true believer.”
III. Alice had seen Mailer when Esquire sent him to San Francisco in 1964 to cover the Republican Party convention that nominated Barry Goldwater for president, and again on May 21, 1965, when he was a keynote speaker at Berkeley’s Vietnam Day Committee teach-in. Nothing Adams wrote would have satisfied Mailer, for whom, as Richard Poirier notes, war “determines the aspects of experience that are to be recorded and therefore the form of his books and of his career.” (Poirier, Mailer [New York: Viking, 1972], 21.)
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