Alice Adams

by Carol Sklenicka

  “What really happened” while Jane Phelps was involved with Ran was a breakthrough in her work. “I had just begun to work in a serious way; I worked furiously, excited about what I was producing… I was just moving from small carved wooden sculptures to larger figures, and in my mind were even larger constructions, the sort of shapes that I eventually achieved.” Likewise for Alice Adams, “what really happened” during the late 1970s and early 1980s—in addition to her involvement with Bob McNie and his busy, alcoholic life, despite much travel and teaching and public success—was a remarkable increase in her writing output. Adams’s larger constructions were longer novels and whole books of short stories.

  * * *

  Alice and Bob entertained family or friends for dinner in the city and for lunch or dinner or whole weekends in the mountains. The fact that Bob often passed out during an evening meal did not prevent them from setting a beautiful table—lots of candlelight and silver. Alice often cooked throughout the day to make a long-simmered stew or baked dessert, but after guests arrived she and Bob seemed to have “worked out some magic combination of who does what, which at the time seems no one is doing anything—until on comes a sumptuous feast,” as Ann Cornelisen remembered after a visit to San Francisco.20 At Bob’s house in the mountains they kept it simpler, but meals were enhanced by the beauty of the house and the dining room’s bay window overlooking the Truckee River.III

  For the most part their cooking was European influenced, simple and hearty, and accompanied by plenty of drink. Anne Lamott, whose first novel Hard Laughter prompted a fan letter “of affection and respect” from Alice, remembered her first visit to Alice and Bob’s apartment in late 1980: “It was like a museum of a still-active literary great, elegant and immaculately organized bookshelves, manuscripts and bound galleys everywhere, lying around on furniture like cats. She and Bob and I got very drunk. She loved gossip, and seemed to hate two out of three writers, agents, etc. and was very funny and brilliant and Southern in her hatred. We were friends forever after that.”

  Lamott, looking back at those years after decades of sobriety, recalled, “Bob was a huge drinker, definitely alcoholic. I was very fond of him but the disease got the best of him.” In Lamott’s view, Alice looked forward to drinks with people but remained in control of her drinking: “She was very disciplined in everything she did—writing, swimming, but of course if she’d had the disease in her, all the discipline in the world couldn’t have saved her… [so] I don’t think she was a drunk.” Nevertheless as Alice aged and the demands of her writing career escalated, she made resolutions like this one in her notebook for 1982: “Resolves—exercise, 2 glasses wine (none at lunch)—(oh, how bleak).”

  Alice’s determination to limit her drinking coincided with a severe depression that consumed Bob. As his son recalled, Bob’s problems were precipitated by the collapse of the interior design cooperative that had provided him and other designers with a financial umbrella. “My father’s whole security base was pulled out from under him about the same time Alice was becoming so successful. Then he lost his North Beach studio, not really a surprise, but he was around 60 and he was losing all this stuff—BANG BANG BANG.”

  Having Bob moping around home during the day interfered with Alice’s work and the depression became “contagious.” It took him months to find a new studio that suited him. Nothing Alice attempted cheered him up. She brought him with her to Alaska for a writer’s conference, adding on a weekend of touring before the meetings in Fairbanks. They viewed wildlife from an Outdoor World Ltd. bus in Mount McKinley (now Denali) State Park, excited to see moose, caribou, and Dall sheep as Alice struggled with acrophobia on the narrow gravel road cut through a steep landscape. Alice was billed as a star at the Midnight Sun writers’ conference in Fairbanks. Host Dave Stark carried a copy of Rich Rewards when he met her and Bob at the airport. “Oh, you have my book,” Alice said, to which Stark quickly riposted, “I carry it everywhere.” But she and Bob were disappointed to find themselves lodged in a crowded student apartment during a heat wave. The hot, brilliant sunshine at four a.m. was “enough to make you crazy as well as exhausted,” a situation made worse for Alice by “a huge bicycle right next to my side of the bed, so that I was entangled in handlebars as well as hot and sleepless.” Soon after the conference began, a tour bus rolled down a cliff from the very road where Alice and Bob had been. Alice’s fear was justified: “Our bus. The very next day. I don’t know what to make of that.” The newspaper reported three killed, twenty-nine hospitalized.

  For Bob the ten-day conference in Alaska seemed endless, and Alice was “almost sorry” she’d talked him into coming along to Fairbanks—“probably the Stockton of Alaska, totally dull.” Increasingly comfortable as a workshop teacher, Alice told her students how the ABDCE pattern had helped her tighten up the rather scattered material of her stories and made them easier to publish. She liked the other writers, including the “marvelous” poet Galway Kinnell and a couple of very good students. Early on the last morning a handsome young man approached her in the coffee room. “I really like the unusual occupations of your heroines,” he told Alice, who accepted the compliment. “I especially like the one about the turkey-sorter,” he continued. Alice was so exhausted that she thought she might have written such a story and again said thank you. It came to her later. The story in question was “The Turkey Season”—by that other Alice, Canadian author Alice Munro, whose stories had begun appearing in many of the same magazines as Alice Adams’s stories.21

  Adams worked the bus accident into “Alaska,” a story of two house cleaners, young, white Gloria and older, part-black Mrs. Lawson, who work for a wealthy woman in San Francisco. Gloria, who is obsessively worried about a small lump on her calf, visits her sister in Fairbanks, where she takes the wildlife bus tour and finds the midnight sun coming through foil-covered windows in student housing more panic-inducing than the “thick dark fogs that come into San Francisco in the summer.” Back home, Gloria tells Mrs. Lawson about the headlines in the Fairbanks paper: “ ‘They said, BUS TOPPLES FROM MOUNTAIN, EIGHT KILLED, 42 INJURED. Can you imagine? Our same bus, the very next day. What do you think that means?’ This question too has been rhetorical; voicing it, Gloria smiles in a satisfied, knowing way.”

  A very polite woman, Mrs. Lawson smiles gently too. “It means you spared. You like to live fifty, sixty years more.” Gloria thinks that too, especially because the lump on her leg that has been worrying her for weeks disappeared on the day of the bus accident. Mrs. Lawson, who could have told Gloria that the lump was a knot of muscle if only she’d asked her, now thinks—but does not say aloud—“The truth is, Gloria could perfectly well get killed by a bus in San Francisco, this very afternoon, or shot by some sniper… Or Gloria could find another lump, some place else, somewhere dangerous. Missing one bus accident is no sure sign that a person’s life will always come up rosy, because nobody’s does, not for long.”

  The New Yorker turned down “Alaska” with the explanation that the author seemed “too distanced” from her characters.22 After the story appeared in Shenandoah and was anthologized in a collection from that quarterly, short-story writer Daniel Stern praised it for its difference from Adams’s New Yorker stories: “The author hones a sharp style and uses it elegantly and with passion to create an Alaska of the spirit that comes to stand for both hope and fate. It is, somehow, to the point that although I have read Alice Adams’s stories in The New Yorker, this is the one I have found the most enjoyable and most fully realized.”23 Joyce Carol Oates chose “Alaska” for The Oxford Book of American Short Stories, calling Adams a “superb social observer” like Edith Wharton, John Cheever, and John Updike. “Alaska” is typical of Adams’s “exquisitely wrought fiction, in which dialogue is preeminent, recorded with a flawless ear,” Oates writes, but less typical in its protagonist, “the cleaning lady of a wealthy woman.”24

  Oates was not alone in recognizing Adams as a preeminent short-story artist whose appeal
reached beyond the particular tastes of that era’s New Yorker readers. Her longtime friend William Abrahams considered her a leading short-story writer of her era. She’d already been included in the O. Henry Awards volume ten times when Abrahams selected her for the Special Award for Continuing Achievement, which he’d previously awarded to Joyce Carol Oates in 1970 and John Updike in 1976.IV Prize Stories 1982: The O. Henry Awards announced Adams’s receipt of the Special Award and included two stories she’d written out of her term at UC Davis: “To See You Again,” about the attraction felt by a professor for her “brilliant, beautiful” young student during a time when her husband is severely depressed, and “Greyhound People,” about the people on the bus by which Alice commuted to teach at UC Davis. The latter, Abrahams writes, “beautifully conveys [Adams’s] virtues: her clear, sometimes poignant, sometimes ironic, but always deeply sympathetic view of the complexities of contemporary life.”

  Taking aim at postmodern and metafiction writers like John Barth and Donald Barthelme and minimalists such as Ann Beattie and Raymond Carver (as edited by Gordon Lish) in his preface to the volume, Abrahams notes that Adams “is a writer whose achievement is particularly to be valued at a time when spectacular ‘effects’ are too often exploited for their own sake.” He praises Adams for her “art that conceals itself in a deceptive effortlessness—secure alike in what she does and in what she chooses not to do. (One finds it hard to imagine her writing an unintelligible sentence.)”

  The vitality of the short story, Abrahams believed, depends on writers like Adams “who continue to write, year after year, not always achieving the standard of excellence they have set for themselves in their best work, but even in their lesser work unmistakably revealing themselves to be dedicated writers for whom the task is, in the precise sense of the word, a vocation.”25

  I. The boy’s name was Eugenio, according to Dörrie’s letters to Adams. Adams changes his name to Ernesto in Mexico and to Felipe in “Teresa.” Several of Adams’s letters state that Eugenio was fifteen, but he’s older in her travel book and story.

  II. Like Alice’s father, the composer Randolph (Ran) Caldwell has an impenetrable accent. As Jane recalls in the story, “Half the time I hadn’t the slightest idea what he was talking about, but I was excited by his voice, as I was by everything about him, his hair and his sad dark eyes, his cigarettes; his hunting shirts, his shabby tweeds, his snappy car. At worst, you could call it a crush.” Also like Nic Adams, Ran is “a small-town, Southern white Protestant, [with] a Presbyterian conscience.”

  III. Alice sent her “Easiest Chicken for a lot of People” recipe to Judith Adams: “Grind or roll out into fine crumbs some seasoned stuffing, add chopped garlic, Parmesan, and chopped parsley. Roll chicken parts (legs and thighs, breasts, less successful with wings) in melted butter, then in the Parmesan etc mixture. Bake for about an hour in 350 oven, turn off—serve whenever.” (AA to JCA, April 9, 1984.)

  IV. Alice Munro became the fourth (and so far last) writer to receive the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement in 2000.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  A Fateful Age

  — 1981–1983 —

  50 reasons not to write… screws up relationships.

  —Alice Adams, notebook, November 16, 1983

  When sunshine returned to San Francisco in September, Alice was so tired of Bob’s melancholy that she thought about renting an office for herself as a sanctuary where she could write. Instead Bob located a former warehouse space at 63 Bluxome in a reviving area south of Market Street. His prospects continued to improve when I. Magnin invited him to model a double-breasted, white wool sport coat in a newspaper ad for their “totally new Man’s Store.” He sounds like a new man himself as he boasts, “I wear a tie about three days a week, I wear boots most of the time… on weekends I always wear a bandana at the neck. In Tahoe I ski in jeans.”1

  While Bob set up his studio, Alice headed to New York for a few days to meet with Victoria Wilson. Initially apprehensive about traveling alone, she stayed with the Kiernans’ cats in their Park Place apartment while they were away and had a wonderful time. She “walked to the museums, ate and drank a lot, and walked farther.” She dined with Dick Poirier and attended a “horrible” literary party given by her agent, Lynn Nesbit, afterward reporting that she was frozen with “boredom and disbelief” as she listened to a distinguished editor praise Ayn Rand’s Fountainhead; on that same occasion she met author Harold Brodkey, whose long-anticipated, reputedly four-thousand-page novel had recently been purchased by Knopf. Back home, she was still feeling “a sort of New York excitement,” and said, “In fact it’s hard to calm down.” She chewed over the current New York literary scene with Billy Abrahams. When he suggested Brodkey was a “closet queen” she told him “of course” but later called both Brodkey and an unnamed publisher “closet castrati”—“the total lack of sexuality in both those people is quite sinister—which is how I feel about Nixon, come to think.”2 Alice’s impressions of Nesbit’s party found their way into Superior Women, where Megan Greene endures a similar party in an “overheated, overcrowded room, so full of violent conflicting odors: perfume and the sweat of anxiety, liquors, aromatic foods, plus all the smoke from cigarettes, pipes, cigars.”

  Bob remained “astoundingly cheerful” through the holidays and their winter trip to Mexico. As happened every few years, in 1982 they gave in to an impulse to explore some part of the country beyond their beloved Zihuatanejo. With Pauline and Richard Abbe they went to the colonial city of Oaxaca, where they stayed in an old convent turned hotel and visited the Zapotec archaeological sites. Everywhere, Adams wrote later, she heard the voices of people who had inhabited that valley for eleven thousand years. In the tombs of Mitla she felt dark premonitions. On the ride back from Mitla their taxi slowed for an accident: “We could all too easily see, stretched there on the highway, two blanket-covered bodies, one large, adult-sized; the other very small, a child. And feet: four feet stuck out from those blankets. A woman’s shabby black shoes, a child’s sandals.” Alice was upset, and Bob told her (she recalled later), “You make too much of things. Two people. It happens every minute. Somewhere every second. New York. Bangladesh.”

  “I know,” Alice replied. “But those two—the feet.” She couldn’t quite explain why she was so upset, but the episode stayed in her mind to become a new story, “Mexican Dust.” There it’s Miriam, a small, dark woman traveling with her three large “blond, full-fleshed” California in-laws, who harbors the “weird science-fiction thought… that all the dust particles in Mexico could be silicon chips, programmed for some violence.” From Oaxaca, Bob and Alice and the Abbes, like the four people in the story, flew to Puerto Escondido, a popular surfing spot, where their hotel was consumed by a noisy New Year’s Eve celebration that no one cleaned up after the next day. They planned to drive to Zihuatanejo but there were no cars to be rented, so they boarded a second-class bus. They missed connections repeatedly as their one-day drive stretched into two days. Adams recounted the miserable trip more than once; what’s interesting in these accounts is that both Alice and the character she identifies with, Miriam, feel like outsiders in the company of other gringo tourists who are relentlessly in pursuit of luxury and willfully ignorant about the Mexican people. “If any of them spoke Spanish it would all have been different, Miriam thinks. They would have understood what was being said in the station about the buses, and even, maybe have grasped a little more about the terrible accident on the road.”3

  Alice persistently tried to learn Spanish, which she found difficult because she associated it with her father. But with cassette player and study she made some progress. Ten years later, when she traveled to the Yucatán Peninsula with women friends, they relied on Alice to manage things. “Her Spanish was fluent enough to hire a car, negotiate with the hotel, and change our tickets if something went wrong. She talked to people in the shops and restaurants,” Alison Lurie recalled.

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  Because Alice’s new novel was taking longer to write than planned, Victoria Wilson had agreed to publish a story collection in the interim. For the most part reviewers applauded To See You Again as they labored to classify and summarize its nineteen stories, nine of which had appeared in the New Yorker. Norbert Blei in the Chicago Sun-Times said these stories placed Adams “at the forefront of American writing with exquisitely rendered stories that explore the tenuous times and conflicts of women,” and Paul Gray in Time noted characters who refuse “to enlist in the war between the sexes” because they sense that both sides “are fighting on different fronts against common enemies—aging, disillusionment, what one character calls ‘the sheer fatigue of living.’ ” In the Richmond News Leader Judi Goldenberg noticed that Adams included more “ordinary people” in these stories—she points to the bus riders in “Greyhound People” and the young waitress in “By the Sea” as examples.I Diana Ketcham, in the Oakland Tribune, mentioned some similarity of subject between Adams’s stories and soap operas but found the stories redeemed by Adams’s “skeptical view of conventional success.”4

  One review made Alice “laugh with sheer pleasure.” Carolyn See, the Los Angeles novelist who later became her good friend, skewered the conventions that reigned in reviews of women’s fiction. Noticing that the book jacket compared Adams to Flannery O’Connor and Katherine Mansfield, See quipped that all Adams had in common with those two was that she was a woman who wrote short stories. Why not compare her to Walter Cronkite, “because you can believe what she says,” or to Norman Mailer, “because she’d knock him out in the first round.” See observed that Adams’s stories ask an essential question: “Whom are we attracted to, and why, and how does that, how should that, affect our lives?”5