Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Adams tells the story in this swirly, associative manner throughout. There’s seemingly no pattern to the revelations about house, family, and countryside that Jane loves, yet Adams’s now well-established ABDCE format is there, its climax coming when Jane sees “the genteel and opaque surface of that family shattered” by voices raised and words going out of control, exposing a “depth of terrible emotions” that Jane does not comprehend until later.

  Imagining her story from another’s—Judith’s—perspective allows Adams to witness herself as Harriet. Here is her own childhood, seen primarily through love rather than fear. As the youthful friendship once did, “Roses, Rhododendron” enacts a peaceful separation from home:

  I thought Harriet was an extraordinary person—more intelligent, more poised and prettier than any girl of my age I had ever known. I felt that she could become anything at all—a writer, an actress, a foreign correspondent (I went to a lot of movies). And I was not entirely wrong; she eventually became a sometimes-published poet.

  In this roundabout way, Adams could praise herself as never before—though she had already outpaced “sometimes-published” Harriet Farr.

  The New Yorker turned down “Roses, Rhododendron” in 1973 but accepted a revision at the end of the next year. A young fiction editor, Frances Kiernan, did the editing. It appeared in the magazine early in 1975 and was included in Prize Stories 1976: The O. Henry Awards (with third prize) and in Best American Short Stories 1976. It brought fifty fan letters (“a practically perfect story,” according to old acquaintance and professor Bill Webb in Cambridge).7 Alice answered every one.

  Other reactions were more complicated. Alice intended “Roses, Rhododendron” as “a sort of Valentine,” she told Judith in advance of its appearance in the New Yorker, but said, “I know it will be hard for you to read.” Indeed, Judith was not “crazy wild” about the story. Alice’s parents had been idols to her, and she said to Alice, “I really don’t want these idols made human although my caring for you does make me want to see it from your eyes.” Judith was also troubled by the raunchiness of “her” mother, the story’s Margot. Alice replied immediately: “I invented raunchy Margot… in no way like [Judith’s mother] Dorothy.” For the story, she explained the mothers needed to be so different that they would avoid meeting. “But it’s terrible—one makes these distortions, and then one’s favorite friend thinks: God, did she see Dorothy as raunchy? I do see the enormous difficulties in reading something by an old close friend. Bob has something of the same trouble,” Alice concluded.8 Judith understood and her friendship with Alice thrived.

  Another letter came from Willie T. Weathers, a retired Latin professor at Randolph-Macon Woman’s College who described herself as one of Agatha Adams’s best friends. She congratulated Alice on her literary success and on fulfilling Agatha’s “frustrated ambition,” but scolded her for portraying her mother as a “sad and passive figure” in her stories. Agatha, she argued, “combined brains, personal magnetism, a delightful sense of humor, and talents in many fields.” She hoped that sometime Alice would “try to paint her in the round.”9

  That, of course, was the project Adams was undertaking in her continual revisiting of her house and family in Chapel Hill. Weathers seems not to have registered the entirely new—invented, certainly not passive—narrative with which “Roses, Rhododendron” endows Harriet’s mother. Emily Farr, we learn through epistolary gossip, left her husband “without so much as a by-your-leave” and went to work at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington. The narrator imagines the Farrs “happier apart” and approves Emily’s valiant decision. Alas, when Lawrence Farr falls ill, Emily returns as his final caretaker and dies shortly after him. So much for the liberation of Agatha.

  Adams does make “Roses, Rhododendron” a Valentine to Judith by ending the story with a letter to the narrator from Harriet (herself). In it, Harriet recalls the two girls on their bikes at the top of the hill: “Going somewhere. And at first I thought that picture simply symbolized something irretrievable, the lost and irrecoverable past, as Lawrence and Emily would be lost.” But through story and through Judith, Adams has recovered that past. With both her parents dead and the house in her stepmother’s possession, the storyteller has revivified her friendship with Judith. With a neat gambit, Adams wraps it up by having Jane’s husband read Harriet’s letter and say, “She sounds so much like you.”

  * * *

  “I really have no imagination at all, just a terrific memory,” Adams once claimed.10 Certainly it was true, and sometimes a liability, that her imagination worked tirelessly upon the materials that memory and friends presented to her. Max Steele, who praised “the ease with which [she went] back and forth through time where time is all one plane and where the past is part of and as important as the present,” credited this ease to Alice’s “astounding memory.” He added a not-unreasonable suggestion: “Sometimes I suspect you make up things and convince the rest of us that it really happened to us and we’ve simply forgot.”11 Be that as it may, Adams had a tremendous recombinant imagination.

  This is nowhere more the case than in the stories Adams wrote about the love she’d felt in the house in Chapel Hill. Another of these, “Home Is Where,” revisits the summer of 1958, when she stayed there and met Steele. Told in the first person by Claire, the story transforms deeply Southern Max into a proper Bostonian psychiatrist with the middle name of Saltonstall. As Claire heads back to San Francisco and divorce, she writes Caleb, “I think you saved my life last summer, I will really always love you.” Under the title of “Learning to Be Happy,” a shortened version of the story appeared in Redbook in September 1976. Max told Alice he loved it but would say no more because he was writing his reaction in his own story.

  Steele’s “reaction” became “Another Love Story” about the same Claire and Caleb, retold from Caleb’s point of view. In a funny, complicated, self-deprecating way, Steele speculates that “Claire” wasn’t really in love with “Caleb” so much as with the landscape of the Piedmont South where she grew up. “Home Is Where” says that Claire and Caleb laughed all through their summer together but doesn’t tell what they laughed about. In Max’s story, Caleb knows “exactly what they… laughed about… not just family jokes about his car but also about Roscoe and the Troll, and grasshoppers and the sensational hiccoughs.” The Troll is a busybody neighbor named Louise Kroll—a familiar type from Adams’s own Southern-town stories—who tries to revenge her thwarted passion for Caleb by spreading a rumor that he is homosexual. Claire champions Caleb against the destructive Mrs. Kroll by letting her know that she is Caleb’s lover.I And Roscoe is a “black athlete and singer” who comes to town to give a concert at the university. As Claire and Roscoe discuss mutual friends, Caleb realizes they have been lovers. After a laughable interlude with the Troll, Roscoe departs to visit his parents in Atlanta. Steele’s account references Alice’s relationship with Trummy Young—whether Alice told Max about that or Young came through North Carolina that summer. Despite a whimper of jealousy, Steele gives a flattering picture of Roscoe, as does almost everyone who knew him: he possesses “the deepest, most beautifully modulated voice in the world” and exhibits “tremendous poise” in the face of Mrs. Kroll’s gaucheries.II Max’s remarkable fiction serves as a bit of shared intimate information between himself and Alice.

  Max sent “Another Love Story” to Alice, wondering if he could publish it and if he should change the names. “If it works,” he joked, “I’m going to answer all stories I read and become more prolific than Joyce Carol Oates: Max Steele’s ‘The Birth of Ivan Ilyich,’ ‘The Fourth of the Three Sisters’ and so on.”12 Alice “adored” Max’s story and urged her editor at Redbook, Anne Mollegen Smith, to buy it.13 It appeared (titled “About Love and Grasshoppers”) in the May 1977 issue, accompanied by a picture of Alice and Max sitting near each other (but hardly together) in Squaw Valley and an explanation that the “fictional fiction writer named Claire Hamilton” in Adams’s
recent story “is also a character in Max Steele’s story.” Let the speculation begin.III14

  * * *

  Adams began what would be her third novel, Listening to Billie, in 1974. As the title suggests, it is threaded with Billie Holiday’s voice and brokenhearted songs. When Billie “died, killed herself, or was killed—one could take any view” in 1959, Adams’s heroine reacts to the death “in a violent, personal way.”

  Racial and economic differences would have made it pretentious for Adams to claim the identity she felt with Billie Holiday. Nonetheless she understood that for herself, as for Eleanora Fagan (Billie’s birth name), the aspiration to elegance and loveliness and ladylikeness had been a trap. Beauty attracted men who made promises. Disappointment followed. Indeed, Adams’s face has a beauty comparable to Holiday’s in its large expressive mouth, less-than-perfect teeth, high forehead, prominent eyebrows, large eyes, and Roman nose. In the 1950s Alice sometimes wore her hair pulled back from her forehead just as Billie often wore hers. Only a lovely face can bear so much light.

  Holiday’s song “God Bless the Child” articulates a lesson Alice was mastering in the 1970s. Writing income and living with Bob McNie freed Alice from part-time jobs. She was reluctant to identify with the movement then called “women’s lib” but it had a deep effect upon her. The liberation movement, Gloria Steinem believes, “happened not so much by organization as contagion.”15 Exposure to feminist ideas prompted Alice to realize the prejudices that had held her back. Having a woman agent and woman editor changed the entire landscape of publishing for her.

  And that success shook up her friendships. Some friends she’d made in San Francisco over the years were ambivalent about her success as a writer. A few glimpsed themselves in her fictional characters while others simply envied her. Patricia Zelver, an Abrahams protégée whose stories were appearing in Esquire and the Atlantic, refused to understand that Families and Survivors had been purchased by Knopf; she kept saying, “If you sell your novel…,” when she spoke to Alice.16

  Not that Alice was easy to please. Zelver’s husband recalled, “You were always afraid you’d say something and then she’d say she thought you were a shit”; he believed that Alice had dropped Patricia without reason, whereas Alice reported, “The Zelvers have totally dropped us.”17 When a commercial artist gave Alice a gift of stationery with ALICE ADAMS embossed across the top in the New Yorker’s signature typeface, she thought it was too ostentatious—but used it anyway. As a writer in San Francisco she felt lonely: “I seem to have very little in my mind but writing. And I really wish you were around to talk about it,” she wrote Max.18

  Shortly after President Nixon resigned in August 1974, both Max Steele and Victoria Wilson came west for the writers’ conference in Squaw Valley, where Alice and Max were leading a workshop. Wilson stayed with Alice in Truckee and was dazzled by Bob and his house. Alice thought her editor was “very gentle delicate brilliant.” Vicky Wilson was still mourning her father, physicist and novelist Mitchell Wilson, who’d died not long before. Mitchell’s decision not to join Enrico Fermi and I. I. Rabi to do atomic research in Los Alamos because he “knew full well what the bomb would be used for” had led him to become a popular science writer instead, so Vicky grew up around writers and publishers. Max Steele described Wilson afterward as “that nasty little snip from Knopf” (was he jealous?) but Alice saw her new editor as a godsend of whom she felt both protective and possessive. When a sudden squall delayed Wilson’s return from a hike with conference instructors Anne and David Perlman, Alice arrived at the Perlmans’ in a “towering rage.” She accused them of trying to cozy up to Wilson and ended her friendship with them. Alice was terribly nervous about facing the workshop audience, but students praised her as a star and requested more women on the faculty. Wilson thought Alice was “the only serious writer there.”19

  Literary success made San Francisco more appealing in a particular way: it enabled Alice to find new friends. While Families and Survivors was in production, she and four other literary writers, Sheila Ballantyne, Margery Finn Brown, Diane Johnson, and Ella Leffland, formed the nucleus of a group of “lady writers” who met for lunch at the Washington Square Bar and Grill.IV They pointedly avoided Enrico’s, the “too macho” North Beach bar frequented by Richard Brautigan, Don Carpenter, Jeremy Larner, Evan S. Connell, Herb Gold, and Herb Caen. Alice held “a half-baked theory that women writers are less ego-bound than men.”20 Asked by Publishers Weekly to name writers she most admired, Alice loyally mentioned her four lunchmates as well as fiction writer and Gourmet columnist Laurie Colwin, who lived in New York and was edited by Wilson. “I see a movement among all writers, male or female, away from the conventional ‘male stud novel’ toward something far more diversified and exploratory, Alice said.”21

  “One pleasant aspect of women writers getting together,” Alice said, “is that it’s nice to know other women out of true mutual interests, rather than because one’s husbands are in the same business or graduate school—or children of the same age, etc.”22 These lunch group writers wrote books that were subversive in their evocation of women’s lives and characters. Ballantyne’s maudlin, brilliant 1975 novel Norma Jean the Termite Queen was an instant classic in the mad-housewife genre. Like Adams’s heroines, Norma Jean finds salvation by doing significant creative work. Brown, who was older and married to a retired military man, was publishing short stories in women’s magazines and working toward a story collection.23 Leffland’s Mrs. Munck is about a woman taking revenge on the man who seduced and impregnated her years before; her more recent Love Out of Season chronicles a woman painter’s sexual obsession during the late 1960s.When their lunch meetings began, Leffland was writing her most-read novel, Rumors of Peace; Ballantyne was finishing Imaginary Crimes; and Johnson was in the midst of Lying Low.

  Unlike most of Alice’s friends, Leffland was a native Californian, educated at San Jose State College. She lived alone because marriage terrified her: “I thought it would interfere too much with what I wanted to do, which was to paint and write.” She protected herself by choosing already-married or “not marriage material” lovers. Alice described Ella as “serious, dedicated, intense, rather shy, sly sense of humor, quite beautiful.”24 They were amused to discover that they’d both had affairs with Doubleday’s West Coast editor, Luther Nichols. “Neither of us knew he was the biggest skirt-chaser in San Francisco at the time! I don’t think anyone knew because you wouldn’t think it of Luther that way, there was that quality to him. That’s what both Alice and I saw in him.”25 Alice and Ella also confided in each other that they’d had abortions—by the same Tijuana doctor, as Leffland recalled. Alice talked about affairs easily, with a sort of “collegiate flip” in her attitude, Leffland said.

  Johnson was also published by Knopf, where Robert Gottlieb was her editor. Johnson’s husband, pulmonologist John Murray, recalled Alice from twenty years earlier when he and his first wife, Sally, attended summer barbecues with the Linenthals and other Menlo Park friends. When Johnson read Families and Survivors, she was amused to recognize names and personalities from her husband’s family. Perhaps only another fiction writer could accept the strangeness of that coincidence.

  By the time Families and Survivors was published, those first marriages had ended. John Murray and Diane Johnson met later at UCLA, where he was on the medical faculty and she had completed a PhD in nineteenth-century literature and divorced the father of her four children. When she and Murray moved to the Bay Area, she had published two novels and The True History of the First Mrs. Meredith and Other Lesser Lives, her groundbreaking biography of the extraordinary Victorian sexual transgressor Mary Ellen Peacock. “A lesser life does not seem lesser to the person who leads one,” Johnson wrote of the argumentative, beautiful, scandal-marked wife of the famous novelist George Meredith. Not long after she met Johnson, Alice Adams read Lesser Lives and sent her a note of admiration.

  Alice and Bob and Diane and John went out together an
d clicked easily in social situations. Despite the great difference in the men’s vocations, they were united by interest in food, travel, houses, and politics. Pauline and Richard Abbe, old friends of John’s, became close to Alice and Bob. They got together at the Johnson-Murray home in Berkeley, at Lake Tahoe, and at beach houses. When the Johnson-Murray cat had kittens, Alice and Bob took two and named them Black and Brown. As a professor of literature at UC Davis with teenage children at home, Johnson managed an ambitious schedule. Her newest novel, The Shadow Knows, about a divorced woman with four children threatened by real and imagined dangers, was forthcoming at about the same time as Families and Survivors. After reading that novel, Adams praised her friend’s ability to write about depths of neuroticism and fear that she wouldn’t attempt herself. As Adams saw it, you had to be “a very sane, okay person” to write Johnson’s books; “I wouldn’t touch it,” she said. Alice loved the novel but thought Johnson deserved an award for “least satisfactory ending… Christ I have no idea what happened and I wonder if she did.”V26

  Their group was “nothing like a writing group,” according to Leffland. It was a “mixture of talk—gossip—by bright people who were interesting to be with.” An experiment with group critiques of works in progress failed. The writers in this group, later including Judith Rascoe, Millicent Dillon, and Susan Sward, usually completed a work before showing it to others. During an era when many women were participating in “consciousness-raising” sessions to discuss their lives from a feminist perspective, Alice’s lunch group filled a niche: these writers had been raising their consciousnesses all their lives and now valued one another as published writers who understood the peculiarities of their vocation.