Alice Adams

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Alice Adams Page 36

by Carol Sklenicka


  * * *

  During her year of not working at a job and not having a literary agent, Adams made progress on a novel about the drama of the generations that she now witnessed squarely from the middle. She had time for lunches with her friend Billy Abrahams and frequent correspondence with Max Steele and Lucie Jessner. With Nic Adams dead, Peter Linenthal across town, and Bob McNie sharing her life, she had finally attained something like the perfect writing situation. Jane Kristiansen, the graphic designer whom Bob considered his “little sister,” saw that Bob was proud of Alice and applauded him for that because she’d seen that “some men absolutely cannot take the success of a female partner.”

  Bob McNie’s brand of eccentric decorating and being the “only not-gay” decorator in town was bringing him more lucrative jobs.IX His clients included department store magnate Cyril Magnin (brother to Joseph), both Ernest and Julio Gallo, trial lawyer Robert Barbagelata, and developer Angelo Sangiacomo. When Bob and Alice returned from Italy in 1972 he took a job decorating a suite of offices in the new pyramidal Transamerica building. “It’s interesting how much better and better at our work we rather simultaneously become,” Alice wrote. On weekends they put their cats in the car and drove across the Sacramento Valley to Bob’s mountain house, the scene evoked in “A Pale and Perfectly Oval Moon,” “The Break-in,” “Snow,” and “Favors.” In “The Break-In” Adams’s protagonist decides not to marry Roger, the owner of a beautiful house near Lake Tahoe, after the tensions surrounding a burglary there reveal class and political differences between them; Cynthia fears that Roger cares more about his house than he does about any of the women to whom he’s been married (all of whose names begin with C). She also fears that she cares more about the house than she does about Roger.

  In real life, Alice was thrilled to show Max Steele “Bob’s incredibly beautiful house” and spend a day with him when he taught a summer workshop at the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley conference, directed by Blair Fuller. Always strong in her judgments of friends and foes, Alice shunned the conference and its lead novelist, Herb Gold, but adored Steele: he looked “terribly well, a little fat but sort of jolly.” She worried that he’d written little fiction since becoming a professor in Chapel Hill. “He really has the greatest face, doesn’t he?” she wrote Jessner. One of Max’s gestures especially amused her: “He leans back and narrows his eyes, as though very wise, and speaks from the side of his mouth, giving terrible advice—about real estate or something that he knows nothing about.”46 Max said his wife, Diana, was sometimes jealous of Alice. Years later, having survived them both, Diana said, “Alice could be utterly stupid about love, but I think she was wise in the distinctions she made about friends and lovers, really not discarding anyone except the few she had totally finished with, like Mark Linenthal.”

  Disposable income and grown-up children allowed Alice and Bob to travel, and many places they visited appear in her fiction. They went somewhere tropical every January, and to Europe if they could get away in the spring or fall. Stories that take place in Hawaii, Dubrovnik, coastal Mexico, Venice, and Rome were one result. They visited the Northwest in the fall, admiring scarlet maple trees and the dark, wooded San Juan Islands. They saw Morissa McNie in Seattle and rode the ferry to Victoria, British Columbia, for high tea at the Empress Hotel, from which Adams constructed a scene in Families and Survivors. Winter found them happily resting at a “rather shabby and very private” resort on Kauai, followed by less perfect days at a hotel on Maui. En route home, Alice thought Waikiki was “less horrible” than she had imagined because they found a “good museum, good Chinese food, and good swimming.”47 She doesn’t mention that her old flame Trummy Young then led a quartet that played the Hanohano Room atop the new Sheraton Waikiki.48 So perhaps it’s pure imagining that the heroine of Superior Women, Megan Greene, goes alone to Hawaii and calls her old flame Jackson Clay, who spends a few days in bed with her in a hotel in Lahaina on Maui. After all, Alice was traveling with Bob, and Young was married to Sally. Not only that, Young was by then a practicing Seventh-Day Adventist and teetotaler, certainly not the Jackson Clay who smokes dope and pops mysterious green pills and plays in a ghastly club in Lahaina. Whatever Adams imagined for Megan, it seems possible that Alice did witness and feel some of what she writes in Superior Women:

  But up there on the stage is Jackson, with his horn… playing: his fantastic powerful always new sounds! his wild inventions, lovely lyric sweetness, his pure sounds of sex. Suddenly sane, Megan thinks, as she listens, I’m really all right, then. In some ways Jackson is okay, and so am I. Her eyes fill, at her awareness that he is playing for her; his horn slides toward her, his wide dark brown eyes on her, he is talking to her, saying everything. And that is the moment that her trip was all about, she is later, slowly, to realize. She came there to hear Jackson play.

  * * *

  During the summer of 1972, following Ann Cornelisen’s recommendation, Adams showed five of her strongest stories to Cyrilly Abels. Abels represented a sterling client list of important female writers: Katherine Anne Porter, Carson McCullers, Flannery O’Connor, Christina Stead, and Hortense Calisher. Not only that, but Abels had been bold in her support for controversial writers: James Baldwin, Warren Hinckle (editor of Ramparts magazine and an early editor of Hunter S. Thompson), and Eldridge Cleaver. With Paul Jacobs, Norman Mailer, Joseph Heller, Grace Paley, Elizabeth Hardwick, Barbara Deming, and Gloria Steinem, Abels had been active in protesting violence against the Black Panthers by the Oakland Police Department and in raising bail money for Cleaver.

  Abels seemed immediately to understand what Adams needed emotionally and professionally. “I can’t tell you what a magic person she’s been in my life, and such a graceful, bright, kind, and efficient woman,” Adams said.49 Of approximately the same generation as Agatha Adams, Abels filled a place that had long been vacant in Alice’s life: a demanding but kind motherly figure who was in a position to advance her writing career. Adams had been writing a second novel for years. Though she didn’t save the rough drafts of “Mothering” or “A Spell in San Francisco” or any of its other iterations, the rejections and comments that survive show a discouraging process. Abels changed all that. About the time Gloria Steinem and her coeditors were launching Ms. magazine, Alice Adams also found the nerve to try another novel.

  This time she called the story Families and Survivors, taking her cue from a conversation she’d had with Renata Gaddini in Italy the summer before: “She said that our parents, the parents of our generation, had tried to kill us, but that we had survived.”50 The novel is about two young women who resemble Alice Adams and Judith Clark Adams. It begins with stunning, quiet drama as naked fourteen-year-old virgins Louisa and Kate talk about “sex appeal” by the side of Louisa’s parents’ swimming pool. Abels sold the chapter as a short story to Redbook for “a lot of money” and Adams just kept writing twelve more chapters that leapfrog through Louisa’s life over the next thirty years—an affair with her father’s psychiatrist; marriage to a graduate student in Palo Alto; the birth of her daughter; lovers and divorce; remarriage and a New Year’s party at the communal house where her daughter lives—all threaded by enduring friendship with Kate. Adams wrote the dated sections as if each were a short story.

  This progress did not mean that she liked writing a novel. “Someone (perhaps you) should really stop me when I even mention novels—they make me miserable: working on them, waiting for them to be sold, etc—especially doing both,” she told Max Steele.51

  That misery was soon over. In the summer of 1973 Abels submitted Families and Survivors to Robert Gottlieb, editor in chief at Knopf. He passed it along to a young editor who decided she could help Alice revise her manuscript into a successful novel. Victoria Wilson was twenty-three years old, having been hired by Gottlieb after she’d attended Goddard College and worked a year at Simon and Schuster. Here is the first paragraph of the review of the manuscript that Wilson sent to the other editors, including
Gottlieb:

  I think Alice Adams is an extremely strong writer. There is no question that this is an effective, quite moving novel. Her characters, for the most part, are real and she is able to get at the most subtle feelings in an amazingly short time. But the fact that she is such an excellent short story writer gets in her way. There is almost an impatience with her characters and the movement of the book… she begins something with all the tightness that is needed when writing a story, and with the same tightness needed to develop and complete a short story, she moves her characters in the novel just as quickly.52

  Wilson did not stop with diagnosing a problem. Her five-page, elite-typed, single-spaced offer to accept the novel, dated July 11, 1973, gave excruciatingly detailed suggestions for the rewrite she would require, though an eager reader could find praise there as well.

  Alice Adams was that eager reader. On August 3, Adams responded that she was excited and “really turned on” by Wilson’s letter: “I could not be more pleased at the prospect of working on that book with you. And I’ve looked forward to writing you”—while waiting for Abels to complete negotiations that led to a $5,000 advance—“as I’ve looked forward to seeing someone with whom I could talk.”

  Thus began a conversation destined to last for the rest of Adams’s writing life.

  I. Charles M. Jones was a Presbyterian minister when he married Alice and Mark Linenthal in 1946 but resigned from that denomination after he was accused of heresy for hosting racially integrated spaghetti suppers at the church and for advocating that Jesus was fully human. His supporters founded the independent Community Church of Chapel Hill “for people who cannot adhere to the old time dogmas” in 1953.

  II. Adams wrote Lucie Jessner in 1971 that the Partisan Review had accepted her short story titled “Shock Treatment.” She’d rather be published there than in the New Yorker, she told Max Steele, but, sadly, the story never appeared in any magazine. It became chapter two of Families and Survivors.

  III. Adams associated the “velvet barb” with Southern women. One of her favorite examples came from Lucie Jessner: “I always thought this was the special way of Southern ladies to express their feelings—their hostility in the embrace.… Dollie Summerlin once said to me at a party, ‘What a beautiful skirt—I was so sorry when they went out of fashion six years ago.’ ” (LJ to AA, April 16, 1970.)

  IV. A drunken male writer once belligerently muttered something to Adams about her New Yorker connections. “I wonder how he thinks I got New Yorker connections—selling cookies on 43rd Street?” she asked when she told the story later. (Sandy Boucher, “Alice Adams—a San Francisco novelist who is into her third book,” San Francisco [October 1978], 131.)

  V. The second attack occurred when Mailer first met McNie, when he was covering the Goldwater convention in 1964. As Robbie McNie heard it from his father, Norman socked Bob in the stomach and Bob answered, “Gee, Norman, for a minute I thought you were going to hit me.”

  VI. Phyllis Mufson saved Alice’s handwritten recipe: “Cream two 8 oz packages of cream cheese with 1 c. sugar; beat in 3 eggs till smooth (not in blender); pour into graham cracker crust; bake at 350 degrees ½ hour, cool; pour on 1 pint sour cream mixed with 1 tsp sugar; put back in oven five minutes; cool, then chill a few hours.”

  VII. Peter Carnahan described Michael as “middle-aged and gay with an aura of sadness and vulnerability that hung on him like a poncho. Rotund, bald, beak-nosed, it was clearly only his sophistication and money that could attract the sylph-like young things he romantically desired, and he seemed to live in a constant state of heartbrokenness.” (Carnahan, Opposable Lives [Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2009].)

  VIII. Breier’s unease had merit. Adams later said the story was “about heavy-handed capitalist values as opposed to socialist poetic ones… I find I don’t really like very rich people but I keep getting thrown in with them. If they only knew.” (Mickey Friedman, “Alice Adams: Rewriting life into fiction,” San Francisco Examiner, February 5, 1979, 22.)

  IX. Sometimes Bob said things that concerned Alice. In her notebook she recorded a conversation and her reaction: “B[ob]: ‘I fell madly in love with this boy in the Safeway tonight. He was just standing there, so out of it, so miserable… His mouth—I wanted to give him anything—take in—protect… My reaction was very homosexual.’ Really? Why tell me?” Alice wondered if that boy reminded Bob of his sons, or if he spoke out of “self-protection” or was “testing (or trying to emulate?) my sophistication.” (Alice Adams notebook, September 26, 1972.)

  PART IV

  SUCCESS

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Editors and Friends

  — 1973–1976 —

  Suddenly aroused, Ardis raises her head and stares at Walpole. “I am a beautiful girl,” she rasps out, furiously.

  —Alice Adams, “Beautiful Girl,” Beautiful Girl

  “I really said it all in Families—Christ that was 30 years of my life,” Adams told Max Steele after the book was published.1 The creative and editorial process that enabled Adams to put three decades into 211 pages that told a coherent story owed much to Victoria Wilson. The “extremely bright” young editor explained that Adams’s tendency toward tight structure and character precision hurt a novel: “I think you have to decide who the important characters are, how they fit in with one another… and how they build the novel.”2 Wilson told Adams to leave the manuscript of Families and Survivors home on her fall 1973 trip to Europe. Rather, she urged her, “let it enter your dreams… you can be sure your mind is typing away even if your fingers aren’t.” Just finishing her first year as a book editor, Wilson found herself working with a mature author who was, nonetheless, willing to be heavily edited even as she sometimes opposed Wilson’s suggestions. Both women typed out their thoughts in lengthy letters, a polite, laborious process that led to exceptional clarity. Thus Families and Survivors became the honeymoon book for a sometimes difficult but ultimately enduring editorial marriage.

  After returning from Europe in October, Alice rewrote many chapters, eliminated and combined characters, and got it all back to Wilson in December. The result, Wilson found, was “at the stage where instead of reading it with the purpose of trying to suggest changes, I just found myself soaking it in… it is simply fun to read.” After that, author and editor spoke on the phone for the first time, beginning a personal friendship that complicated and strengthened their work together. In the end, Adams credited Wilson with an “extraordinarily perceptive understanding of what I’m trying to do.” The cover Wilson planned confirmed that. Greenwich Village artist Joan Hall’s assemblage of timepieces and wedding rings surrounds an image of a couple: “How very odd,” Alice said, “that that girl looks like me at 14 or 18 or something.”3 Families and Survivors was scheduled for publication the following fall.

  * * *

  While Families and Survivors was in production, Adams turned out a stream of new short stories and began a new novel. In a trilogy called The Todds—“Verlie I Say Unto You,” “Are You in Love?,” and “Alternatives”—she boldly explored her memories of Verlie Jones, her parents, and Dotsie. But lest anyone take these stories as pure autobiography, she called herself Avery Todd, gave Avery a living brother named Devlin, and invented characters like the poet Linton in “Are You in Love?” (based on Billy Abrahams) as she needed them. The Atlantic Monthly bought both “Verlie” and “Alternatives.” Alice worried about how these stories would be received in Chapel Hill, even though her stories call the town Hilton—after the place near which the troubled house named Howards End stands in E. M. Forster’s novel.

  Both Lucie Jessner and Max Steele assured Alice that Dotsie could not possibly object to “Alternatives”—“a good deal of tenderness in that story,” Jessner said—but in the end Dotsie felt “hurt” by it and told Jessner so. Alice received such information secondhand. It was probably the character of Tom Todd in “Alternatives” that most upset Alice’s stepmother: Nic, as Alice admitted to Max, came o
ut as a “ghastly old prick.” In Chapel Hill, one person told Max the story showed how “bitterly” Alice regarded her father, while another thought it showed that she regarded him with “so much love.” With smiling irony, Max insisted, “It would be hard to say what your feelings are since artists are, behind the great revelations, reticent people.”4

  For Adams these stories were part of “a curious rethinking” of her mother that began after Nic died.5 A “very moving” letter from Judith Clark Adams after Nic’s death inspired Alice to write her most celebrated story. The letter (lost, unfortunately) made Alice think about what the Adamses had meant to Judith: “It occurred to me to try to write a story about us from her point of view. And, with radical changes of course, that is how this story came about.”6 Looking at her family as an outsider proved “interesting and instructive.” In “Roses, Rhododendron,” Jane Kilgore moves from Boston to a North Carolina town with her “big brassy bleached blonde” mother. Once there, Jane becomes the medium for telling the story of a family, their house, and their countryside:

  The house I fell in love with was about a mile out of town, on top of a hill. A small stone bank that was all overgrown with tangled roses led up to its yard, and pink and white roses climbed up a trellis to the roof of the front porch… the lawn sloped down to some flowering shrubs. There was a yellow rosebush, rhododendron, a plum tree, and beyond were woods—pines, and oak and cedar trees. The effect was rich and careless, generous and somewhat mysterious. I was deeply stirred.

 

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