Alice Adams
Page 35
Sheliah Wilbert was a black woman of about twenty who lived in public housing in the Fillmore District, the former “Harlem of the West” that had been torn up by a redevelopment agency to make room for the Geary Street expressway and the housing project. “After the middle-class home owners and business operators were forced out, all that was left was a crime-ridden ghetto,” historian David Talbot writes.30
Alice liked Wilbert very much and feared that her life would end tragically. In Listening to Billie, Sheliah became Miriam, a character who serves as a contemporary foil for the Billie Holiday of the title. Eliza befriends Miriam but is disappointed to realize that Miriam admires her in return for dressing well and living in a nice apartment—for being “rich” in Miriam’s eyes. She’s uninterested in Eliza’s talk about civil rights and black power: Miriam’s “ambition was to be a Secretary, not a File Clerk. She had never heard of Billie Holiday. She was crazy about Elvis Presley.” While Alice and Looney sometimes went to lunchtime rallies in support of the Black Panthers, Wilbert was “avid for outfits and boots and coats and velvet sofas and bedroom sets.”31
Over time, Alice learned more about Sheliah Wilbert’s life. A random shooting had killed her first boyfriend right before her eyes when she was sixteen and pregnant. She lost the baby. In the novel, the shooting is not random: a white friend playing with a gun accidentally shoots Miriam’s boyfriend, and Eliza is frustrated by Miriam’s passivity:
This was the sort of thing that could happen, any time. At any moment the friend you love could get blown up right in front of you. Miriam even seemed anxious not to make too much of it.
“I felt real bad for a long time after that,” she said. “I don’t know—”
“Christ, Miriam, of course you did.”
In Listening to Billie, the white boy who shot the gun is acquitted. Both Miriam and Eliza understand what would have happened if Miriam’s black boyfriend had been the shooter and his white friend the victim.
The emotional attraction that Alice felt toward black women was rooted in her upbringing in Jim Crow North Carolina and particularly in the fact that she had been most lovingly cared for by Verlie Jones. “When I was young and even more foolish I wanted to be Billie Holiday,” Alice confided once.32 Her notebook and letters describe Sheliah Wilbert as a young woman trying to survive in a dangerous urban racial environment with few marketable skills.
In the novel, Miriam lives with her light-skinned mother, who derides her for being black and mean like her father. Adams takes Miriam’s point of view: “Quarreling with her mother, in those small crowded rooms, with her brothers and sisters watching, filled Miriam with need. She needed to scream and hit and cry, and she wildly wanted everything in the world that was not her mother, not the Project.” For Miriam, as for Sheliah, there were temptations to escape that world. A man stopped her on the street with promises of fine clothes if she would model for him. Others offered drugs.
Other stories Wilbert told Alice also informed the novel. To Peter in Europe, Adams wrote:
Sheliah has been telling me about the funeral of a pimp that she went to last week: He used to have a green Cadillac with pale tan leather lining, and in his casket he was wearing a green knit suit with pale tan leather collar and cuffs, and all his whores were there in green outfits with tan leather boots and belts. She said the whole church was full of pimps and whores and the pimp’s parents, and the preacher preached a sermon about how children should obey their parents. You probably think I made that up but I really couldn’t, although I may use it somewhere.
Use it she did, actually distancing it from the funeral Wilbert attended by making it one that Miriam in Listening to Billie just hears about:
One time, she had heard about the funeral of a pimp, and she had to laugh, it was so funny. Jimmy, the pimp, used to have this green Caddy with pale brown leather inside, and at the funeral there were all his whores, three black and two blond white girls, all wearing these green outfits, with pale brown leather trim. Still, Jimmy was dead, shot dead by the brother of a girl he’d pulled, one of his whores.
Alice and Sheliah Wilbert continued their friendship with occasional phone calls after they’d both left their medical jobs, though Sheliah was “usually high so conversations didn’t make much sense.” Alice worried about her. She was not surprised to receive a call from Sheliah’s brother in 1985 informing her that Sheliah had died of a drug overdose.
* * *
Maureen Looney also ended up in Listening to Billie, part of the composite character of Kathleen Mooney, who also embodied aspects of Sandy Boucher. Looney, a supervisor to both Miriam and Alice in the office, was a “good Catholic girl” in her early thirties. When she became pregnant by the musician she dated, she decided to raise the boy alone. Alice took Looney under her wing: “I often went to dinner at her house. I have a picture of my son crawling around the alarmingly large Boston fern that filled her round alcove window.” Looney knew Bob McNie, his kids, and Peter. Alice told her stories about North Carolina, Boston, and Paris. On lunch hours they drove in Alice’s “old beater” car to shop at Macy’s and “she had a positive effect on my clothing choices,” Looney remembered. Through Alice, Looney became good friends with Ruth Belmeur, whose son became a playmate of both Looney’s son and Sheliah Wilbert’s niece and nephew.
Looney celebrated with Adams when “Gift of Grass” appeared in the New Yorker. When Alice was writing “Ripped Off,” which turned out to be her second story published by the New Yorker, she asked Looney to name a song “that would be alarming if an insecure girl heard her boyfriend singing it.” Looney recalled, “I didn’t have to think at all—‘It Ain’t Me, Babe’ by Dylan. I had that exact experience with my son’s father.” When Looney read the story later in the magazine, she “realized that Alice had taken more than the song title from me. My father was killed on Iwo Jima when I was three years old, and Alice had told me what she thought the effects of his death had been on me.” In her story, Adams put the comment in the mouth of a psychiatrist, who tells the girl, “At three, you would have viewed this as a desertion—a deliberate one.”
When Alice bought her brown Austin with earnings from stories, Looney helped her pick out a huge black straw hat to go with it. They shared left-wing political sympathies and attended rallies together. “We had our fists in the air shouting ‘Free Bobby [Seale]! Fuck the pigs!’ when Alice leaned over to say in my ear, ‘I hope we don’t end up on the evening news. Dr. Gerbode might not be pleased.’ ” When Black Panther leader Eldridge Cleaver went into hiding after his arrest on an attempted murder charge in connection with an ambush of Oakland police officers, Alice confided to Looney that she knew Cleaver was in the basement of her friends Ruth and Paul Jacobs, who had helped him raise the bail he forfeited when he fled to Cuba and Algeria.33
Alice and Looney clashed in their attitudes about men. “I always felt like Alice was a very sexual person, in a particular way,” Looney said. “She was always gauging her pull, while I assumed I had none.” After Looney and her son’s father broke up, Alice tried to send her a new lover. “A man she knew came to my house one night. I hadn’t asked to be set up, and I didn’t like him at all. He acted as though I was just frightened and began pawing me all over. I was horrified! Alice just laughed when I confronted her the next day. She had been sexually active in her youth, and I had been brought up conservatively. I think I was a kind of challenge to her! It was the swinging sixties after all.”
When Maureen Looney was offended by a doctor who called to ask her out, Alice asked, “Don’t you consider it a compliment that he is interested in you?’ She thought I was too much a prude. And, to Alice’s credit, I did have two affairs with young doctors while Alice and I were friends. One was brief but pleasant. She and Bob were determined that I should have a settled situation—and a sex life. They even loaned his house at Truckee to me so I could spend a week with an intern that Alice called ‘a Jewish Huck Finn.’ ”
Sandy Boucher,
a writer who’d then published one short story in Antioch Review, also met Alice when she got a temporary job at the medical office. In about 1970, Boucher left her husband, came out as a lesbian, and plunged into the women’s liberation movement. She lived in a collective in Bernal Heights with three other women, two children, and a man, and spent her free time organizing, demonstrating, helping to raise children, and publishing a broadsheet called Motherlode. Their friendship continued after Boucher left that job, driven by common interest in writing and Alice’s curiosity. “What we experienced together was limited, our lives were so different,” Boucher said. To Alice, Boucher’s household seemed a “chaos of posters books pamphlets cats dogs girls—big Sandy, tart Geri, pretty Joan—children.”34 The adults asked the children to call them by their first names and regard them all equally as their parents. Boucher was surprised when she found a description of her collective in Listening to Billie. “I was philosophical about that and never confronted her with it. It seemed she saw what she characterized as our financial poverty and the austerity of our lifestyle, while my experience of those commune years was of tremendous richness and internal growth.” When the novel came out, Sandy Boucher profiled Adams for a city magazine.
While working at Pacific Medical Center, Adams attended team meetings where cardiologists argued to keep patients on medication while surgeons promoted their newer surgical interventions. Adams wrote and rewrote a story called “An Opened Heart.” Bob Hemenway at the New Yorker said, “We rarely publish stories as clinical as this, or ones that present their characters this coldly. It’s a good story, and I hope another magazine buys it.” No one did. Peter Matson thought the story “heart-rending” but could think of nowhere to send it because it was “oh so down…”35 Adams scrapped it.
When Peter Matson dropped Adams as his client, she took over submitting stories to magazines herself. “As usual, I went into a sort of transition neurosis, but now it all looks much better. I was appalled to find how little he (agent) was doing,” she said. When her job (which had been funded by a grant) ended in mid-1971, she was eligible for a few months of unemployment insurance—another experience that found its way into Listening to Billie as Eliza takes “bus trips to a frightening part of town, Third and Bryant, standing in line with discouraged, tired people… being terrified.” Feeling nervous and guilty, Alice worked hard and productively all summer on her unruly second novel and more short stories, envisioning a collection, but found she couldn’t sleep well. Picking up her unemployment checks fanned her resentments against Nic: “Lack of money = unloved = unworthy of love.”36 She began to look forward to a new job in the fall: “I really prefer having some sort of job—just writing can get very unstructured and lonely,” she wrote Lucie Jessner.37
She feared loneliness but in the event she was too busy to be lonely—1971 became a turning point in her writing life. “The Swastika on Our Door” finally appeared in the New Yorker on September 11, 1971, two years after it had been accepted. Jessner, who had just celebrated her seventy-fifth birthday, thought it was Alice’s best story yet, praising places where “the mot juste gave the essence of these people, eg. that Richard ‘lazily or perversely’ held on to his land or ‘if Roger, for example, had had a bad heart, he would undoubtedly have had it continually in the midst of a crowd.’ ”38 Max Steele apologized that he couldn’t judge the story because he “kept trying to reconstruct it and to imagine the reaction of Freddy and Virginia… Yiddish to Southern is a mad disguise.”39 Despite the disguise, Virginia Breier recognized her husband and herself in the story’s Karen and Roger Washington and didn’t like it one bit. “Luckily Fred never saw it, but it bothered me. I distanced myself from Alice a little after that.”VIII Nonetheless, after Fred Breier died in 1975, Virginia traveled to Mexico with Alice and Bob.
“Gift of Grass” won third prize in Prize Stories 1971: The O. Henry Awards, edited by none other than Adams’s longtime friend and supporter William Abrahams, who took over this task from Richard Poirier in 1967. Included in that volume were Abrahams’s protégée Joyce Carol Oates, esteemed Southerners Eleanor Ross Taylor and Reynolds Price, Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver, and, from Berkeley, Leonard Michaels. In his introduction to the volume, Abrahams regretted the “passion for fact” that dominated magazines and shrank the markets for fiction. He aimed particular scorn at so-called women’s service magazines: “Here, I suggest, is a prime target for the Women’s Liberation movement, for these magazines would seem alike in their conviction that while women are qualified to read excellent recipes… the only stories they are qualified to read are those that trivialize, sentimentalize, and falsify the aspects of life with which they pretend to deal.” Having moved from fantasy to contemporary subjects, these magazines have “grown up into a kind of bogus knowingness and sophistication” that reveals their implicit contempt for women readers. Paradoxically, Abrahams continued, many of the writers who write stories “at the level of art” are women, including Alice Adams and the other five in his selection.40
Almost every year thereafter, Abrahams selected an Adams story for the O. Henry Awards collection. When “Swastika” was included in 1973, Adams found herself in company with first-timers Raymond Carver, James Alan McPherson, and Diane Johnson; with already recognized writers such as Bernard Malamud and John Cheever; and with writers who never achieved enduring national recognition—Curt Johnson, Patricia Zelver, Judith Rascoe. Always Abrahams included a generous selection of stories from small literary magazines and stories by female authors. And he selected more West Coast writers now that he lived in the Bay Area and associated with the Stanford writers.
Paying venues for short stories continued to disappear throughout the seventies, leading Abrahams to observe in his 1974 O. Henry collection that the short-story form “thrives in its apparent neglect, perhaps even because of it,” because writers are “freed from any preconceptions and expectations but their own as they begin to write.” Certainly the Adams story he chose that year, “Alternatives,” is a good example of such freedom. Her story spans decades, changes its focus from one character to another partway through, and holds together primarily through language and theme rather than plot.
Not only did Abrahams promote Adams’s work, he also sent her freelance jobs, including a gig as a screener for editorial submissions he received and one as “novelizer” for the script of Two People, a movie written by his former student Richard DeRoy and directed by Robert Wise, starring Lindsay Wagner, Peter Fonda, and Estelle Parsons. The latter was “a bloody ghastly rotten stifling Hollywood job—I would really rather have had a waitress job,” Adams complained. Working on it, she said, kept her from her own work: “I began to feel as though there was a sponge on my brain.”41
But the pay was enough to cover a share of a six-week trip to Italy with Bob in May and June of 1972. They traveled together happily. Bob proved to be agile at driving foreign roads; they stayed in comfortable, unusual hotels—a sixth-century abbey in Orvieto, a nineteenth-century tower in Naples. Both Bob and Alice found travel stimulating for their work, as he accumulated visual ideas and she filled her notebook with character sketches and story concepts. In Rome, Alice met prominent psychiatrists Renata and Eugenio Gaddini, who were friends of Lucie Jessner’s, and had an “absolutely fascinating” conversation with Eugenio about psychoanalysis and creativity.42 Alice also became friends with Ann Cornelisen, one of “Billy’s girls,” as some called the women whose books Abrahams published. She was a Vassar graduate from Rome, Georgia, whose work with Save the Children led her to write about the lives of poor women in the Abruzzi region. At first, Cornelisen thought Alice was “an odd person… terribly unsure of herself, yet not of her writing. Big and rather brash at times, yet timid.” She said, “As you can tell I haven’t straightened out her complexes yet.” But when Cornelisen heard how unhappy Alice had been with Matson as her agent, she recommended her to Cyrilly Abels, a former Mademoiselle managing editor (for whom Sylvia Plath famously worked as a su
mmer intern).43
Back from Italy, Alice felt “culture shock” exacerbated by a presidential campaign that pitted President Richard Nixon, now reviled for his invasion of Cambodia and bombing of North Vietnam, against Senator George McGovern. Immediately she had to rewrite her novelization of Two People, trying to meet editor Peggy Roth’s wish that it feel “as though it were [her] book.”44 It wasn’t her book, and her “beautiful writing” and “tremendous style” (as Roth praised them) weren’t enough to vivify the story of Evan Bonner, an army deserter hiding out in Marrakesh who falls in love with a model as he travels back to New York to turn himself in. Neither the movie nor Adams’s highly readable translation of it into a mass-market novel makes these characters convincing, but her evocations of Marrakesh, where she’d never been, and of Paris, where she had, are sensual and accurate.
Dick DeRoy thought Adams did a classy job on Two People, and they became friends when she attended a sneak preview of the movie in San Jose in the fall. The Dell paperback came out under the name Alice Boyd in 1973, just ahead of the movie, which “turned out to be terrible and bombed big time, terrific script though it was,” according to the screenwriter’s wife, Jewel DeRoy. Movie producer Harry Argent in Listening to Billie is partially based on Dick DeRoy, though the affair of Eliza Quarles with Argent is pure invention. Eliza and Harry’s relationship “is idealized,” Adams told an interviewer. “There’s less dependence in that relationship than I’ve ever seen.”45