Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Nic’s association with the integrationist minister Jones suggests he was not a bigot or outright racist, but he did appear distinctly Southern and old-fashioned, and he strongly disapproved of Alice’s living arrangement with Robert McNie. Once when he came alone to San Francisco, Alice invited all three McNie children to meet him, apparently to display herself en famille. Morissa never forgot this “amazing apparition”: “He wore a light linen suit to dinner at Alice’s, and was the picture of the Southern professor from 1860. I didn’t know that this kind of propriety or arrogance still existed. His relationship to Alice was not exactly warm, like shaking hands practically.”

  Friends saw Nic as a “connoisseur of good food, poetry, and Spanish wines… an expert on Spanish dances, given to limericks, many of which he composed himself.” A younger colleague recalled watching him “put his pipe into his coat pocket, still lit, while placing his martini glass, half-filled, in the other pocket.” Before he retired from UNC, colleagues collected Hispanic Studies in Honor of Nicholson B. Adams. In an introduction, John Esten Keller praised Dorothy Adams (Dotsie) for her “immense capacity for life and mirth, for culture and gentility, for homemaking and companionship, and for deep, true, humanity of spirit [that] joined together to make the latter years of his career happy ones indeed.”6

  Alice suspected that her growing success as a writer had irritated her father. He had a “curious inability to find any magazine in which I was published,” she said.7 Morissa McNie also noticed, “There was something odd about his attitude toward Alice becoming a writer—whether he didn’t think she could be one or what, I’m not sure.” In her notebook three years before her father died, Alice wrote, “Nic always slapped me down like an irritable, self-absorbed brat.” Another scrap of manuscript notes that a father’s habit of telling his family “Do what you want” is really a passive-aggressive patriarchal assertion that means “he would do what he wanted to and everyone else would maneuver around his whims.”8

  When Nic Adams died, Alice was still at work on the novel that became Families and Survivors. In it, her alter ego Louisa describes her father as a man whose “ill-understood and violent emotions often seem hurled at his head from space, rather than arriving from within.” Upset because her father must undergo shock treatment, Louisa “wonders if it is an idea, the idea called Father, that moves her to tears.”II

  * * *

  Bob McNie was “the most incredible kind support” to Alice when she was upset about Nic’s death.9 She and her stepmother, Dotsie, tried to comfort each other by letter, though Dotsie’s phrasing—“the Agony is more agonizing than the Ecstasy was ecstatic,” for instance—put Alice off. Nevertheless she took the role of a good daughter, invited Dotsie to visit, and offered to help answer correspondence pertaining to Nic. In reply, Dotsie complained that the lawyer was very slow in filing necessary papers.

  While the lawyer dallied, Dotsie mailed Alice a suitcase packed full of her mother’s silver. She explained that Alice should have had all Agatha’s things years ago but Nic would not let her send them. Now her Christmas gift to Alice was “a full day’s work on same: polishing, packing, postage.” It seemed to Alice that all Dotsie’s gifts came with one of her “velvet barbs.”III And was it true that her father hadn’t wanted Alice to have her mother’s things?

  * * *

  Just before Christmas, Alice received a copy of the will. Nic had left everything to his wife with no bequests to Alice other than “certain articles of furniture and silver.”10 While she understood that Dotsie would remain in the Chapel Hill house, Alice had expected that she would inherit it after her stepmother’s death. She regarded Nic’s failure to designate it for her in his will as a “disinheritance.”

  On the day Alice read Nic’s will, she and Bob were to dine at the home of new friends Elaine and John Badgley. Artist Elaine and architect John had recently spent a pleasant weekend with Bob and Alice in Truckee, so Elaine optimistically included them in her plans to entertain a French friend who was a renowned chef. Elaine elaborately planned her menu and dress for the evening. “Bob and Alice were late, and when they did come my stomach dropped. Alice was drunk. She couldn’t really look at anybody, and Bob said that her father had cut her out of his will,” Elaine remembered of the “wonderfully terrible” meal.

  “She was totally smashed. Bob was not nearly as far gone. He was one of the best-looking men that ever walked the planet. He led her to a chair, and she sat next to my husband, John. When John started to talk, Alice said, ‘John Badgley, you are the most boring man I have ever met in my life!’ That was before dinner. And John just deflated. She struck him in the balls, which she really could do very well.” At the table, Bob passed out and Alice “sat running her fingers through her very short hair. She had a fake, forced smile through this episode—she had a lovely smile when it was real. Bob awoke after they’d finished a main course of sweetbreads and oysters in puff pastry and said, ‘Alice, we should go.’ Alice was weaving back and forth with this strange hair and strange smile and they both staggered off down the stairs.”

  When Alice called Elaine the next day to say what might have been a routine thank-you, Elaine quoted to her from Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, which they were all reading at the time: “¿Le gusta este jardín? ¿Que es suyo?” Elaine intended to remind Alice that she had trampled her garden, but Alice repeated her criticism of Elaine’s husband. They didn’t see each other again for ten years. “Alcohol did do that,” Elaine said, “but Alice had fire within, this anger that was there almost all the time.”

  With Dotsie, Alice was more direct: “I told Dotsie I was quite hurt by Nic’s will, but haven’t heard from her since, so I assume she’s working out one of her distortions,” she wrote Jessner, who had dared to suggest that Nic felt Alice could stand on her own feet and Dotsie could not. Alice felt hate in her father’s decision, even after learning that a separate written agreement stated Nic and Dotsie’s intention to bequeath to her what remained of Agatha’s Lake Sebago camp. That Dotsie had been her father’s wife and mistress of the Chapel Hill house for fifteen years did not count with Alice. In a reply to Jessner she said, “[Nic] always saw me as a threat to his supplies, as someone who might get things he needed—attention, friends, intellectual prestige—he always had to fight me off. That was how I always felt him—it’s liberating to… have this confirmed.”11

  Alice took another step toward releasing herself from her past when her father’s cousin Frank Jervey and his wife visited from South Carolina in March. Invited to dinner, they spent part of the evening telling Bob how mean six-year-old Alice had been to their daughter, Mary—she whom Frank had asked to spell “cat” when he demanded “Constantinople” of little Alice. Thus Alice realized that “like most guilty neurotics, I grew up believing that the others in my surroundings were nice; in fact they were a bunch of crazy shits.” Almost the next day Alice began “A Southern Spelling Bee,” which investigates the abandonment and loneliness she felt during the weeks she stayed with the Jerveys as a child. She felt now that Frank Jervey, whom she once thought “the most marvelous, glamorous man alive,” was a rude, bigoted hypocrite.12

  Some years later, Adams told an interviewer: “My father died and I was disinherited. I was wretchedly deeply hurt and I wrote a great many stories about being disinherited. It sounds simple-minded but that was my way of coping with it.”13 By writing these stories, Adams learned that she did not actually want the house but was grieving for what it represented to her. “Berkeley House” locates the drama in the Bay Area but offers two revelations: one, that the house is the site of her mother’s pain in marriage that she could never ease; and two, that she had hoped to inherit money from her father: “The realization that something as concrete as money figured in her pain was comforting; it made her feel less blackly doomed—less crazy.”

  “The deaths of parents, dreadful and sad as they are, to an extent free writers,” Adams came to understand.14 Men besides Nic who had influe
nced—and constrained—Alice also moved out of her firmament in the early seventies. Peter Matson, her literary agent, broke with her in April 1971. Her revised manuscript of the novel called “Mothering” had been rejected several times, and her correspondence with Matson devolved into quibbles about whether characters must be “likable” in order to be interesting.15 Matson, Adams told Max Steele, “really has no idea what to do with anything that won’t sell to Redbook.”16 She had insisted on sending stories to the New Yorker and now had a direct relationship with Bob Hemenway there.IV

  Then there was Norman Mailer. Through four wives Alice had been his friend, loyal fan, and defender—at least he was never boring, she said. That all ended when Mailer came through San Francisco in January 1971 to promote Of a Fire on the Moon. Alice was first on Mailer’s invitation list for what she dubbed a “sheer ambition” party at the home of socialite Grace Kennan Warnecke and her then-husband, renowned architect John Carl Warnecke. As the party ended, with Alice at one end of the room and Norman and Bob chatting with an attractive woman at the other, Norman suddenly turned on Bob and picked him up and threw him on the floor. Host Warnecke prevented Bob (“who’s been known to break jaws,” Alice bragged) from retaliating and Alice called Mailer “an impotent prick.” The scene over, Bob and Norman shook hands and they all went to dinner at the Mandarin in Ghirardelli Square.

  Chronicle gossip columnist Frances Moffat drew ire from Adams by reporting that McNie had provoked the altercation and that Mailer had whirled—or was it twirled?—McNie over his head three times, a detail provided by novelist Don Carpenter. In a letter to Peter, Alice called Moffat “that dumb bitch.” Then she told Herb Caen for his gossip column: “I thought Norman behaved quite swinishly. This makes the third physical attack by Norman on either Bob or me—three more than enough despite 23 years of friendship. Who needs geniuses?”V Alice’s friendship with Mailer was never restored. Bob McNie saved all the clippings in a scrapbook. “I used to think I wanted to be a famous writer and all that but now I’m not so sure,” Alice concluded in a letter describing the episode to her son.17

  Except that was not the conclusion. From Frances Linenthal Alice heard about a dinner with a lot of psychoanalysts, “at which Mark stated that Norman had lost all curiosity, and all the shrinks figured out that he is incurious because if he were curious he would discover his own homosexuality. This kind of jargon reductiveness absolutely infuriates me—for one thing Norman is perhaps the most curious person I’ve ever known (I’m sure he was simply bored by Mark); for another he’s been writing and speculating about his own possible homosexuality for 20 years. Anyway, I ended up again admiring if not entirely fond of Norm, and once more furious at Mark.”18 Twelve years later, Alice still regretted the “trashy demise to a what was a long good friendship.” When pressed by Mailer biographer Peter Manso to explain what the fight had been about, Alice recalled that Norman that night looked “tired, old, and seedy” in a dirty, stained dark blue blazer while Bob, in an immaculate dark blue blazer, “was really looking terrific.”19

  Oddly absent from the public brouhaha was any suggestion that jealousy over Alice might have been at the heart of the situation. But Alice sensed exactly that. She wrote Lucie Jessner that Mailer “picked up Bob and threw him on the floor—I suppose to discredit him with me.”20

  Later that spring Mailer took part in a highly publicized dialogue on women’s liberation at New York’s Town Hall, where Germaine Greer and other feminists attempted to put him in his place. Greer expressed feelings Adams would have seconded when she said that in Mailer she was confronting “one of the most powerful figures in my own imagination, namely the male elitist society, the masculine artist, the pinnacle of the masculine elite. Most of my life has been most powerfully influenced by the culture for which he stands.”21

  In California, Alice immersed herself in reading the “women’s lib books” and thought Greer’s The Female Eunuch the best of the lot, saying, “In fact, I think she’s terrific.”22 Adams felt Greer’s call for a feminism that did not shun men: “Those miserable women who blame the men who let them down for their misery and isolation enact every day the initial mistake of sacrificing their personal responsibility for themselves.”23 Alice told a reporter she’d always felt “at odds with the female roles being foisted upon [her]” and welcomed feminism because it “served as clarification and support for what [she] felt all [her] life.”24

  * * *

  Simply by growing up, Peter Linenthal was also moving out of Alice’s daily life. No longer threatened by the military draft, he took time off from the Art Institute; performed in a Halloween show with the Cockettes, a gender-bending psychedelic theater group, in North Beach (mentioned in the last chapter of Families and Survivors); and then flew to Europe. He was in Spain when Alice received the disturbing news about Nic’s will. Judging by the letters and drawings he sent home, Peter was a frugal and perceptive nineteen-year-old traveler. From Cadaqués, he described his fifty-cent-a-night room above an olive press: “best-ever omelette and salad, 60 cents, hot milk and coffee, 10 cents.” He noted that the hippies he met were “spaced-out,” decided not to go to the drug mecca of Morocco, and observed that an Australian nurse he’d met “sounded like one of the sisters out of Howards End.” After some months on the road, Peter found a flat in the World’s End neighborhood of London, gave up drugs and meat, took up Transcendental Meditation, and enrolled in a lithography class at the Slade School.25

  Then a British postal strike prevented Peter from writing home for seven weeks. Alice so much missed conversation with young people that she invited Peter’s housemates to dinner. The baby loved Alice’s sour cream pie,VI she wrote Peter afterward, and Phillip Galgiani told them about cleaning birds after a recent oil spill in San Francisco Bay. Having decided that classes at the Slade were no better than those at the San Francisco Art Institute, Peter arrived home in mid-March. “He looks marvelous and seems most pleased with himself and with his life,” Alice told Jessner. She was especially pleased that he read “an incredible amount” and had moved on from Hermann Hesse to Thomas Mann. Perpetually critical of the city herself, Alice saw native San Franciscans’ “mania for their city… as a sort of trap; they [were] caught and bound in civic affection.” Yet Peter Linenthal was destined to be such a San Franciscan—which gave his mother another reason to remain in the city herself.

  Though some people, including his stepbrothers, had assumed Peter was gay long before he’d had any sexual relationships, Peter took longer to settle the question for himself. When he returned home from London, he met with each of his parents to tell them he thought he was gay. He recalled, “I hadn’t always known this. The sixties were so amorphous. It was possible to be gay but I didn’t really know, and I thought I might not be. It seemed like things would be easier if I weren’t.” The life of his uncle, Michael Linenthal, especially made Peter reluctant to come out. “Michael seemed like a very sad case. He was funny, intelligent, with the sort of elevated aristocratic airs some gay people have—theatrical. He played the Old Woman in The Chairs by Ionesco and was excellent as a sort of nervous Jewish mother, his own mother in a certain way I think.”VII

  Mark Linenthal accepted his son’s declaration without drama, saying quickly, “My concern is that you be happy.” Peter mentioned that his uncle Michael wasn’t his idea of a role model. “My father understood that,” Peter said. “As a teacher, that’s just the kind of guy my dad was.”

  As Peter feared, speaking to Alice was more complicated. She had close friends who were gay and she associated gay life with unhappiness. “Gay = melancholy,” she noted once.26 Peter told her that his current involvement was with his best friend from school, Phillip Galgiani. His mom particularly liked Galgiani, and he hoped that would make it easier for her. “She sort of sank further into the sofa, not looking happy. She had a kind of steadiness to her gaze, just straightforward without any guile or anything. This time her gaze was on the negative side.” Alice aske
d Peter if a girl he had also been dating, a law student who seemed “a little difficult,” could be the problem. “I told her, ‘It’s more than that.’ I think the conversation ended uncomfortably, uncertainly. This was a disappointment and she took disappointments hard.”

  Even after coming out to his parents about his attraction to men, Peter wondered if he might yet meet a woman partner. “I did Jewish dating and folk-dancing, and dated a nice woman who went to the Art Institute. But at some point you ask yourself, what’s going to last? Who can I have a future with? It took a long time, and it wasn’t without agonizing, but it was a sensible decision. Luckily I was in San Francisco.”

  * * *

  At this time Alice worked as a part-time clerk in the Cardiac Data Processing and Patient Follow-up department of the Pacific Medical Center, directed by Dr. Frank L. Gerbode, a pioneer of open heart surgery on the West Coast. For about three years, she spent long, dull hours with four coworkers, Sheliah Renée Wilbert, Maureen Looney, Sandy Boucher, and Alyce Denier. Like the doctors, they wore starched white lab coats over their regular clothes—which for the women were short skirts, hose, and heels. Occasionally they watched open heart surgeries, including a transplant, from which Alice took the lesson “stay thin and run a lot.”27 “Alice always worked with a little side of humor or sarcasm about what we were doing,” Denier remembered.

  Though Alice would not begin her third novel, Listening to Billie, for several years, it’s rooted in this particular office job and her struggle to become an independent writer. Alice, like Eliza in that novel, “in a furtive way… liked doctors, was excited by medicine.” The cast of intelligent, underchallenged women and busy, competitive male doctors in the medical center caused Alice to consider the way women spend their lives: “An important fact about that office was that almost nothing was actually done in it,” she writes. The novel tells the story of Eliza Quarles, a poet who begins to sell her work and stops having to take “stupid” jobs. The book’s early working titles were “Work and Friends” and “Getting to Work.”28 Adams believed her novel’s theme was about women finding work to sustain them. She was inspired by a comment she attributed to Elizabeth Hardwick, “most women tend to write about women who are much less interesting than they.” Eliza, Adams claimed, was more interesting than herself.29 With second-wave feminism emerging and her own life stabilized by living with McNie, Adams paid close attention to the younger women, but Denier noticed, “Alice was incredibly approachable but she was stand-offish too. I think she participated in the banter that went on just to make the job tolerable for her.”