Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  Through Johnson, Alice became friends with Alison Lurie, who had been the other woman in Albert J. Guerard’s writing seminar at Harvard in 1945–46. “She’s a lot warmer and more real than I’d remembered or perhaps has changed: God knows, I’m nicer than I was at 18, not to mention happier,” Alice said.27 Lurie (then Alison Bishop) and Johnson had met as unhappy wives at UCLA in the mid-1960s. Lurie’s fifth novel, The War Between the Tates, garnered acclaim in 1974 when she was a part-time lecturer at Cornell University, where her estranged husband, Jonathan Bishop, was a full professor. On a visit to the Bay Area, Lurie was the guest of honor for dinner at the Johnson-Murrays’ in Berkeley. That evening Lurie asked Alice how she liked Bob’s new mustache. When Alice admitted that really she didn’t care for it, Lurie challenged Bob: “How would you like it if Alice came to bed with a small toothbrush attached to her upper lip?” Alice thought the remark was hilarious and retold it often.28 Undeterred, Bob wore a mustache for the rest of his days.

  As her star rose, Alice sensed complex reactions from other women. She associated these with Agatha Adams: “I am the successful rival of my mother! Anger-fear: Margery, Anne F—Anne P, Connie C, Pat Z, Gail, Ruth B, Mig,” she wrote in her notebook. Success meant getting paid for her work—her next entry in the same notebook is a toting up of recent earnings.29 She was as generous to writers she admired as she was dismissive of those who lost her favor. When Gina Berriault, author of exquisite short stories who lived in San Francisco with Leonard Gardner (revered author of a single novel, Fat City), needed an agent, Alice referred her to Cyrilly Abels. “I think this will enormously improve her life,” Alice told Max Steele after Abels agreed to represent Berriault.30 Likewise, Alice urged Sandy Boucher, her former coworker whom Alice called a “women’s libber,” to send work to Victoria Wilson. By then Boucher had come out as a lesbian and published a collection of stories with a small press. “Alice was open to new ideas,” Boucher felt. “Wedded to her lifestyle, not going to toss that and try something else. But she wanted to know what others were doing, thinking.” They remained friends when Boucher moved to Oakland and became a Buddhist. “Alice asked questions about Buddhism—does-it-help-you-get-through-life? kind of thing.” During this time, Boucher published well-received nonfiction books about feminism and Buddhism—about “American women in that patriarchal religion.”

  * * *

  Publication of Families and Survivors caused tremors in Alice’s psyche. “You possibly don’t think of me as Jewish but I am,” she told Victoria Wilson as she described her condition with a favorite Yiddish proverb: “ ‘A Jew’s joy is not without panic’—things seem to be going so well, I am besieged by cancer phobias, fear of flying etc.”31 On the day Families and Survivors came out, Alice was in Mexico, at the Catalina Hotel in the resort village of Zihuatanejo, which would become her favorite winter retreat and a frequent setting for her short stories. Bob read the novel there and said, “Oh, so that’s what you do!” (He’d “liked it a lot,” he added later.) Others back home were more critical, especially of her characterization of the Wasserman family in her novel. The Wassermans, like Mark Linenthal’s family, on whom they are based, are Jewish. Alice’s lead character, Louisa Calloway, marries into this family with mixed feelings about her future husband: “Her instincts impossibly war; she wants to hit Michael in the face, to run away by herself and cry; she wants to be loved by and married to Michael, and accepted as a Jew by all Jews.” When marriage makes her unhappy, Louisa blames Michael’s domineering mother.

  In the novel’s third chapter, Louisa and a woman named Barbara attend an awkward Sunday dinner at the Wasserman home in Cambridge. Mrs. Wasserman makes anti-Catholic remarks about her Irish maid, describes a nervous young man as “kikey,” and quips tactlessly about her older son’s homosexuality. Louisa and Barbara are appalled by the family dynamic they witness. Later, Barbara remarks that “the first Jews she ever met were horrible (‘unfortunately’)” and is reminded by “more thoughtful friends that the awfulness of the Wassermans has little if anything to do with their being Jewish.”

  Adams had no patience for anyone who suggested she was anti-Semitic. The object of her venom was her former mother-in-law. Nonetheless, because Adams had divorced Mark Linenthal and made no secret of her dislike for him, the novel caused a stir in the English Department—people joked that Mark should call a lawyer, and his friends shunned Alice. The description of Mrs. Wasserman’s nose, for instance, set off alarms: “Her ugliness accuses everyone: her big bulbous nose and small stingy mouth, her pigeon-fat body, her impossible thinning gray hair.” Nor did the damage stop with the Linenthals. “To tell the truth, the anti Jewish things were hard to take,” Lucie Jessner wrote Alice. “I had not thought I was so touchy, but with a wave of such feelings getting stronger here all the time, it did hurt me.”32

  Upset by Jessner’s hurt, Alice quickly replied: “I guess you mean horrible Mrs. Wasserman—but is it really anti-Jewish to describe a horrible person who is Jewish? And one of the most horrible things about her, I thought I said, was her anti-Semitism, her use of that dreadful word, the word I am unable to say. Also, the 2 other most unpleasant people, Jack Calloway and King, are also described as being specifically anti-Semitic. I would have thought it an anti-anti-Semite book… the ‘Wassermans’ were so truly horrible, and so intent on doing me in—that I could not not write about them. And I did hold off until they were dead.”33

  Over at the Linenthal household no one talked about the novel much but it was understood that Alice had been exorcising the ghosts of her first marriage in this autobiographical fiction. When Peter Linenthal told his mother he thought she’d been “a little hard on Daddy,” she talked to him about “people changing, some people being poison to live with for certain other people.”34 When he also asked his mother why she had made the second Mrs. Wasserman very fat (unlike his stepmother, Frances), Alice shrugged that it was “just fiction.” As for the caricature of his grandparents, Peter understood that his mother was “very pro-Jewish, liked Jewish people, maybe even wished she were Jewish.” “But,” he went on, “she really disliked Anna Linenthal and I can see why. Anna was small-minded, clingy, complaining, guilt-inducing, a stereotypical Jewish mother you could say. My mom didn’t like the control Anna had over my dad, and neither did he.”

  * * *

  The Linenthal family underwent changes in the 1970s. Radicalized and disabused of some of his Harvard elitism by late-1960s political events at San Francisco State, Mark Linenthal saw a psychoanalyst. About the same time, Frances Linenthal criticized a friend of her son’s named Judith Freeman for being obsessed with women’s rights. Freeman responded that feminism was worth being fanatical about; she cited Marge Piercy’s essay “The Grand Coolie Damn” for its exposé of sexism in leftist organizations and families in which men got attention and glory while women did the unpaid daily “shitwork.”35 “This was so shocking to my mother that she decided to study it,” Lincoln Pain said. “It started her on a road to feminism.”

  Frances had once been serious about poetry. But she was stymied by a male teacher’s criticism and stopped writing for twenty years. She’d become “Queen of the Dips”—as she styled her hostess role—rather than a poet. At fifty-three, she changed. “She said, ‘I didn’t want to go to sleep in the middle of my life,’ ” recalled the younger poet Rachel Blau DuPlessis. “She was a native intellectual—she had the usual good or decent education and opportunities for travel of her class, but it was as if suddenly everything fell into place. It was, I think, a conversion experience of the kind many women were having at this time.… She wanted ‘ideas going into action’ (to cite Pound). Frances’s intellectual and poetic verve—her sense that it mattered—were a great gift.” HOW(ever), the journal Frances founded with several other poets, nurtured several generations of women artists.36

  Mark Linenthal “was perplexed and not used to being screamed at all the time,” Lincoln Pain said of his stepfather’s struggle with
the changes that feminism brought into his life. “It was difficult to be a man of the ‘greatest generation’ suddenly confronted with this new anti-patriarchy. Those guys believed the patriarchy had just saved the world.” But Frances Jaffer, emboldened with feminist theory and her rediscovered creative energy, insisted on discussion and change. She also defended men, Lincoln remembered, and told friends that criticizing men was “a distraction from what is important about feminism, and, besides, they should raise a few [men] before speaking about it.”

  Nonetheless—however—raising three boys and living with Mark, who was known for his enthusiastic domination of conversations, had silenced Frances long enough. In a radio talk and reading when she was sixty, she explained her idea of female aesthetics: “Since form has inevitable connection with content and since our lives are different and our bodies are different, there may be some formal differences.” After Frances was diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, she and Mark moved to a smaller house on Twin Peaks where she designated a room as her study. When he was younger, Peter Linenthal remembered, Frances had “listened intensely and stood up for anyone at the dinner table who wasn’t being heard (often by my dad).” When discussions of feminist issues dominated the table, he “was not a guy to stick his feet in the cement—he took things seriously and came around.” He took over much of the cooking after the boys were out on their own and became a supporter of his wife’s work.37

  Though Mark learned to appreciate feminist poetry and tolerate feminist ideas, he apparently never stretched his appreciation to include his former wife’s accomplishments during the same era. Living in the small, sometimes chilly literary world of San Francisco, Alice and Mark had few kind words for each other. Money may have been one subtext. A brief exchange of letters between lawyers occurred when Peter moved out of Alice’s house and Mark withdrew child support payments. After Mark Linenthal’s father died in 1976, he and his sister inherited their parents’ estate.

  For Michael Linenthal, who had stopped practicing law and moved to San Francisco to pursue his interest in theater, the moral and financial freedom his parents’ deaths might have provided came too late. He had become paralyzed by a polio virus he contracted in Mexico during the summer of 1973, where he had been enjoying one of his few long-term relationships with a lover. The treatments he needed were extreme, including a sort of corset to assist his breathing. In January 1974 he died. Alice thought his death might have been a suicide: “Very sad all around, and I don’t know why I’m telling you this,” she wrote Max Steele, “except Peter and I were just talking about it on the phone. Poor Peter had to telephone Mark, who with his customary tact was in Mexico himself, and Mark’s father.”38

  Though Peter had long viewed his uncle Michael as a terrifying example of gay life, they’d established a more comfortable relationship in recent years when Michael owned a house on Baker Street and Peter had an affair with a man who lived downstairs in that house.

  With what seems a late-game act of self-assertion against his family, Michael Linenthal passed over his siblings and other nieces and nephews and left his house to Peter, who was supporting himself as a teacher and artist. Peter decided to sell his uncle’s house and seek more for his money in the working-class and artistic Potrero Hill neighborhood. In the meantime, he invited Morissa McNie, who was pregnant, to live in the Baker Street house until her baby was born. Alice gloated with amusement over the whole arrangement: “Missy will be living there, among furniture from the elder Linenthals’ house in Cambridge… wonderfully ironic because those old shits always said that you should buy furniture for grandchildren, and this afternoon I’m putting all this into a new story; may not even change any names.”VI39

  Bob’s daughter’s pregnancy amused and fascinated Alice. “We’re going to be sort of doubly illegitimate grandparents,” she wrote Lucie Jessner, meaning that she and Bob were not married and neither was the mother-to-be. The father was Stephen Webster, son of Alice’s friend and literary fan Ellis Webster; Morissa had no interest in marrying. Alice and Bob were “neither entirely pleased nor the reverse—of course one is struck by the unreality of young girls who’ve never taken care of babies, not to mention young children.” Twenty-seven-year-old Morissa planned to take the baby to work with her at City Lights bookstore.

  Morissa’s embrace of motherhood is behind the character of complacent Catherine in Listening to Billie. As Eliza worries over her daughter’s pregnancy, “Catherine continue[s] with the platitudes of her generation as, silently and uncontrollably, Eliza did with those of hers.” The young woman declines birth control, abortion, and marriage. While migrating between friends from Mendocino to Big Sur, she gestates a dark-haired boy she names Dylan. After Dylan’s birth, Eliza finds herself taken by unexpected joy. Alone, she drinks a bottle of champagne, plays records by her favorite female singers (Billie, Lena Horne, Bessie Smith), and does “a very private swaying little dance.” The story continues, “And she thought I am dancing a Grandmother Dance. Thought, Have I finally gone mad? But of course she had not; what she felt was wonderful—happiness, relief.”

  The birth of Morissa’s baby—“a big fat boy named Jesse”—was another adjustment to new-age social arrangements for Alice. A year later, she declared: “Our grandchild is terrific—what is strange is that he looks a little like me—only much better. Missy is wonderful with him, I think probably better than if she were married.” By then Morissa and baby Jesse Kyle McNie had followed Peter to his building on Potrero Hill.

  The four-story bay-windowed structure had languished on the market because its seller wanted a large down payment. With cash from the sale of his uncle’s house, Peter bought it for $55,000. Morissa, Jesse, and the thrift and recycling business she began occupied the downstairs. Above, rental apartments gave Peter some income; he converted the third floor and a large attic into living and studio space for himself. His kitchen window had a view across the city to Twin Peaks and beyond. “Peter has an interesting quality of knowing and finding and getting what he wants,” Alice said. “I suppose really good instincts. Anyway, he is crazy about his house, his new garden, his views.”40 After Morissa and Jesse moved on and the neighborhood became gentrified, Christopher’s Books moved into the first floor. Forty-some years later, Peter still lives and works there with Alice Adams’s library alphabetically shelved in the attic and the Potrero Hill Archives Project in his basement.41

  During the 1970s, both Alice and Peter were susceptible to the charms of the McNies. Bob was sophisticated and social and, because of his extreme good looks, appealing to both men and women. “I was probably attracted to him,” Peter said later, though he didn’t consider it that way at the time. His elder children, Robbie and Morissa, were also charismatic and “dazzlingly good-looking.” Robbie made his own sheepskin coats and talked about living in the woods; Morissa had her love child, her artwork, her freedom. Alice contrasted her stepdaughter’s sexual freedom with her own generation’s: “Sex: the mistake of seeing it as an absolute, as final as death—whereas, Missy (probably) would see it as something that happens, an interchange between 2 people, more or less pleasurable, or not; having nothing to do with anyone else. The former attitude leads to jealous agonies—Missy’s, not.”42

  In the case of Bob’s youngest son, Joch Allin, known as Winky, nonconformity had a dark side. A year younger than Robbie and displaced by his parents’ divorce and moves, Winky dropped out of high school. He moved to Pacific Grove with his mother, and he talked about being a marine biologist but made no educational plans. Given barbiturates for anxiety, he began to have paranoid episodes. “When he stayed with me when he was seventeen,” Robbie recalled, “I found him at the mirror with a steak knife in his ear all bloodied trying to get the voices out.” He was institutionalized several times and diagnosed with schizophrenia. After accompanying Bob on a visit to Winky at a facility in Napa in 1972, Alice noted, “Once his eyes were vacant. Now [they are] narrowed, confiding meanness. His malice, an awful echo of one
’s own.”

  Joch Allis McNie hanged himself on January 16, 1976, a full-moon night during a winter of severe drought. His mother, Deen McNie, found him, his feet only inches from the floor, in the doorway of a garage behind her house near Agate Beach in Pacific Grove. He was twenty-four.

  Bob and Alice were at Bob’s house in the mountains when they learned about Winky’s suicide. They expected Diane Johnson for dinner and decided not to tell her, but then did. “Curiously, Bob has taken it better than I would have thought, and me worse,” Alice told Max Steele. The young man had been “a miserable kid, hating himself and everyone else, and [they] knew this would happen,” she continued. Whether that was so, whether Bob really wasn’t upset, remains impossible to know. Alice reacted with fear and fascination. “Wink, suicides. The manner of doing it: is hanging more hostile than shooting? Jumping off the Bridge seems least so: no one has to see something terrible—a mess,” she wrote in her journal. A couple of weeks later she dreamed that Vasco Pereira had returned and was taking her to services for Winky. She recognized that she wasn’t grieving for Winky: “I guess I’m so suicide-prone myself that I can’t stand it when anyone does.”43

  Winky’s mother organized a memorial for him. Seven people gathered in the dunes and a Universal Life minister read selections from Robinson Jeffers, who was, they noted, also a suicide. Morissa and Robbie took their brother’s ashes up in a light plane and scattered them over Monterey Bay. Migrating gray whales spouted below them. Bob McNie chose not to be there.44

  A few days later, Alice and Bob invited Robbie and Morissa and her toddler son to dinner. Robbie met silence when he tried to speak about his brother’s death: “They just sat there, frozen, iceberg expression. And then Alice piped in and said, ‘Robbie, this is not appropriate. We’ve dealt with this,’ or maybe she said ‘he’s dealt with this and shared with me privately.’ ” The evening devolved further when Morissa started a food fight with her brother. Winky’s death hit her hard too. She began to drink heavily, moved to Seattle, and fell into a relationship with a man who abused Jesse. Later she moved east and made a new start. When she asked her father to visit her there without Alice so they could get to know each other, he replied that Alice had reacted angrily, then with tears. Morissa only half believed that, confiding to a friend that her “request that he share some of the process of his life” had frightened her father. “Emotional repression was what he taught me, and my confession of love in the letter was a breach of the contract with him… I wanted to relate to him. No go.”45