This “cluster” of death included her admired older friend Lavina Calvin, with whom she and Bob had become close in Zihuatanejo. After the death of Henry Calvin, eighty-three-year-old Lavina had begun dating a “much younger man, blond, alcoholic, bisexual,” also named Henry, whom Alice intensely disliked. They bickered when Alice and Bob refused invitations to get-togethers that included that man. “I understand about being lonely, the necessity for having a man around,” Alice told Lavina. “However if something should happen to Bob, and I became involved with someone (as I surely would, as soon as possible, I am like you in this) if you didn’t like him, rather disapproved—I would be very sorry but I would not… expect to see you in his company.” Lavina died in July when her pancreatic cancer returned after a fifteen-year remission. “It seemed (to me) a willed death,” Adams wrote. “(I may have only felt that because I so loved her and wanted her to live forever.) But I think she was tired of being old and alone, although she was beautiful still and lived in a beautiful house.” Lavina Calvin left the entire contents of her house to Alice and Bob.11
Death took another person dear to Alice on September 10. Trummy Young, then seventy-two, suffered a cerebral hemorrhage in San Jose, while visiting his daughter on his way back to Hawaii after playing Gibson’s Jazz Party in Denver. Gary Giddins, who met and heard Young there, recalled it was “a relief to hear him playing so strongly after he’d virtually disappeared from jazz, and a tonic to discover that he was the kind of man his music led you to believe he might be. Very relaxed, comfortable in his own skin, quiet spoken, easy to be around. [His wife,] Sally, as tiny as he was tall, was unbelievably sweet. The first time he brought his daughter Arlene to Gibson’s Party, the joke among musicians was: no wonder he’s hiding away in Hawaii, to keep her under wraps. She had his color and her mother’s Hawaiian features, a total knockout.”II
Alice Adams hadn’t seen Young for many years, but she felt the loss deeply. She had resisted Victoria Wilson’s suggestion to cut the Jackson Clay character, who was inspired by Trummy, from Superior Women’s utopian epilogue. In a next-to-final draft of the novel, Megan and Jackson enjoy occasional secret afternoons at a hotel in Atlanta where they “exhaust each other’s bodies and imaginations.” Wilson objected that Jackson’s presence in Georgia was not believable; Adams kept Jackson in Georgia but rewrote the secret afternoons as a “recurring fantasy” of Megan’s. Young’s death in the very week of the novel’s publication had eerily turned her happy memory into a eulogy. “Did I tell you my black lover the trombonist also died,” she wrote Judith Adams as her novel found its place on the bestseller list. “It’s too much.”12
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Superior Women got predictably mixed reviews during this era when books about women’s independence and sexuality often came in for bashings by moralizers and highbrow critics, but it sold well. It rose to twelfth place on the New York Times bestseller list in October and hovered there for the rest of the year.
Novels about women friends during their schooldays and after, Barbara Quart writes in Ms., are a version of The Naked and the Dead—a framework for stories of the battleground women must traverse before finding out “what life after all is going to let [them] have.” Quart felt Adams had not filled out her framework enough to make it deeply engaging because of her preference for quick, revealing sketches and present-tense narrative that suited short stories and slim novels. Nonetheless she achieved something Ms. approved: the diminution of East Coast Lavinia, “the thinnest and blondest of elite dream girls,” and the elevation of sturdy, sensual Megan Greene from working-class Palo Alto is “a redefinition over time of what, socially and morally, constitutes a ‘superior woman.’ ”13
The novel’s title set some people on edge. A few couldn’t resist an impulse to call a novel about superior women inferior. The title is uttered first by Megan, as a question: “Are some men put off by extremes of intelligence or even attractiveness in women—put off by superior women? This is a new thought, highly puzzling, unwelcome, and difficult to digest. And it is true; she is quite sure of that.” Adam Marr, the character Adams based on Norman Mailer, answers that question in a hostile confession later in the novel: “You superior women have a real problem for yourselves, don’t you. Just any old guy won’t do. You wouldn’t like him, and even if you did your strength would scare him, even make him mad. You know, that’s actually one reason I had to dump Janet, though I can’t say I knew it at the time. I began to have some black suspicion that she was stronger than I was.”III
Michiko Kakutani at the New York Times thought Adams had “chosen to exercise neither her ability to delineate a character’s inner life nor her ability to conjure a precise social world.” Jonathan Yardley in the Washington Post deemed it “an inert lump of a book” in his opening sentence and then kept his insults rolling for many paragraphs. Such words probably stung but did not shock Alice. Trent Duffy, an editor who admired Adams’s short stories, recalled that Billy Abrahams asked him what he thought of Superior Women. Duffy answered cautiously that he found it slick and commercial compared to her short stories. And Billy replied, “That was the point!” He meant, Duffy assumed, that Alice “deliberately wrote something that might be less literary and more sell-able.”
Lois Gould discerned more: “… the author with a fine, wry logic will make us see that disappointment, bitterness, waste, all come with this territory. Is it the terrible cost of being superior—or wanting to be? But she is at pains to tell us these women don’t feel strong, don’t want to scare away their men, their happiness: it just works out that way.” Finally, Gould wrote, Adams’s book is a Jamesian study of “the severity of America’s class system and the futility of outsiders’ dreams.” Even in 1984, after a decade of second-wave feminism (of which many men had surely tired), “rich, poor, fat, thin—even, perhaps especially, superior—women are outsiders.”14
Poet Carolyn Kizer also saw the novel’s larger significance. Dismissing the idea that Superior Women is a roman à clef comparable to Mary McCarthy’s The Group, she writes: “Megan is the ‘New Woman’ that girls of my generation barely dared to dream of becoming.” For Kizer the other lead women function as “anima figures… aspects of women [we] were afraid of being.…” American women, she concludes, “have such amorphous identities when we are young! We barely know who we are… life—as Adams so bravely and wittily demonstrates in this novel—cruelly teaches us to become ourselves.”15
John Updike also credited the novel’s strengths in a long review for the New Yorker. He noticed that “superficially antithetical” Megan and Lavinia, like the two girls in “Roses, Rhododendron,” become, “somehow, one.” That’s a true biographical insight. Self-centered, manipulative Lavinia and open-minded, sexy Megan both represent aspects of Alice Adams, and the author has designed her plot to allow Megan and her values to triumph over Lavinia’s.16
But Updike is troubled by Adams’s critique of empty WASP values. He argues that Adams denies Lavinia “a fair shake” by making her snobbish, feral, narcissistic, qualities that symbolize “the sterility of the haves.” He notices that “the Wasps are the heavies, with their ghastly clubbiness and haughty prejudices… whereas the blacks are beautiful people: Jackson Clay a great musician, if a little stoned in his later, Hawaiian phase, and Cornelia so loyal and gentle that just a perfunctory sprinkling of money turns her from a cook into a schoolteacher, and Vera, who is Mexican and only looks black,… the Jews, too, are beyond reproach.” And so on. Updike has put his finger on some of the novel’s underpinnings and he doesn’t like them one bit.
Tellingly, in his memoir “On Not Being a Dove,” Updike acknowledges that he disliked the sixties because the peace movement interfered with his comfortable success: “I had left heavily trafficked literary turfs to others and stayed in my corner of New England to give its domestic news. Now along came this movement wanting to gouge us all out of our corners, to force us into the open and make us stare at our bloody hands and confront th
e rapacious motives underneath the tricolor slogans and question our favored-nation status under God.” Updike cites Superior Women as one example of how women writers of his generation recall the sixties as “a wonderful time” and he sees why: “Fists uplifted, women enter history. The clitoral at last rebels against the phallic.… I must have felt challenged.”17
Exactly. Social comedy and concern with women’s lives in Adams’s novel are undergirded by awareness of WASP privilege and government corruption. One of Lavinia’s lovers, a rich, crippled man, has deep connections to the Nixon administration; he brags, “ ‘It’s exciting how few people we’ve managed to get it down to, just a very few, in total control. There’s not much spreading around these days, baby doll, in terms of real power,’ and he laughs, excitingly.” When Nixon was elected, Megan and her almost-husband put off their plans to marry because “they are both so depressed by Nixon that they are stunned into a sort of immobility.” Updike finds that “one of the strangest moments in romantic fiction,” because, having avoided political commitment during the Vietnam era, he simply does not know how the hopes and disappointments of those years affected others.IV
Adams did know. And she also grasps the notion of white privilege, showing just how various and ubiquitous it can be through her ideal alter ego Megan, who distances herself from her family in order to attend the WASP citadel of Radcliffe. Her experience there and in New York City teaches her that the world is bigger than Radcliffe. In the end she brings her mother back into her life, and joins with recovering WASPs like Henry Stuyvesant and Peg Sinclair to try to live in a new social contract at their Georgia farmhouse. The ending of the novel, Adams told Lois Gould, “is almost too unreal. It is a longed-for condition.”
In Superior Women’s forty-year time span reviewer Roberta Smoodin saw the influence of Henry James and Marcel Proust: “[Adams is,] thematically, the most Proustian writer working today. I can think of no one so concerned with the effect of time on character, of duration on relationships, of subtle shadings of personality because of events. Proust’s main concern in his fiction was the combination of time and personality that revolutionized modern fiction; he used memory as his vehicle for examining these phenomena. Adams, since her earliest work, has played with time, but in the reverse way—she is much more interested in the future than in the past (her own basic optimism as opposed to Proust’s hypochondriacal pessimism?) and uses parenthetical leaps of time to clue us in to what the future holds.” For Smoodin, reading the novel was “thrilling… akin to hearing really wonderful gossip or having a dream with obviously good portents.”18
While some wondered if this book was a sellout, Alice learned to bask in invitations to give readings, attend conferences, and judge contests—and travel on someone else’s buck. She absorbed it all, reporting in letters to friends on the surprising beauty of Cincinnati or the ostentatious wealth of Rodeo Drive (“all those clothes—makes you want to try sackcloth and sainthood”). While judging the NEA fiction awards she met writers she admired, such as Walker Percy and Tim O’Brien (“a really dear kid”). At the Toronto International Festival of Authors, she and Alison Lurie swam laps together and became closer friends while enjoying “terrific” hospitality to writers in Canada, “a country that isn’t so nuke-impoverished… not to mention all free doctors, and no handguns.”
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Success also gave Alice energy to become more active politically. The progressive views she embraced in her youth remained strong. In 1985, she signed the Pledge of Resistance sponsored by the Emergency Response Network (ERN). During the early months of 1985, the ERN expected an increase in US military activity in Central America, where the CIA was already involved in supporting the government of El Salvador and Contra guerrilla troops opposed to the Sandinista government in Nicaragua. President Reagan and Secretary of Defense Alexander Haig pushed to increase military aid to the Contras, but Congress was reluctant. Meanwhile ERN staged actions to publicize the violence already taking place in Central America. Signers committed to making a “strong non-violent response” immediately after any incursion by the US military into the ongoing wars in Nicaragua and El Salvador. Members of the group took a six-hour nonviolence training course so they’d be prepared to take direct action in the street.19
Alice became acquainted with Marie Pastrick and Ken Butigan, who coordinated ERN activities in San Francisco, and they recruited her, along with Jessica Mitford and Valerie Miner, to organize the Writers’ Protest at the Phillip Burton Federal Building in San Francisco. She held a planning meeting at her apartment and oversaw the printing of orange postcard invitations that went out to writers she knew. She contacted magistrate judges and ascertained that the usual penalty for the kind of civil disobedience the writers planned was five days in jail or some hours of community service.
Butigan and Pastrick hoped that involving writers would raise the profile of the actions they’d been holding. Both were awaiting trial for participating in a “blood pouring” at the federal building a month earlier: they’d splashed their own blood out of baby bottles onto photographs of people killed by Contras. Later in May, when the Reagan administration imposed a trade embargo on Nicaragua, three thousand people demonstrated at the federal building and six hundred were arrested.
At the Writers’ Protest on May 30, participants identified themselves and spoke briefly about the reasons for their protest; they passed out lists naming the participants, including Peter Stansky, Deirdre English, Blair Fuller, and Carolyn Kizer, who’d just won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry. “They wanted to get arrested,” Butigan recalled, “but the police were too smart for us; I think when they realized there were people of some celebrity, they wouldn’t touch it.”
The writers were likewise too polite to cause much disturbance. After they sat in a circle in the lobby for a while, Butigan urged them into “a situation where [they] would be in the way—that really helps.” Mitford and three others stood in front of the IRS’s door; they told those who wanted to pass through that they were “trying to block the doorway” and then stepped aside! The Chronicle reported the event with the headline “Jessica Mitford’s Very Civil Disobedience: Police Decline to Arrest Writers.”20
Having failed to get arrested herself—according to the Chronicle, most of the writers remained “outside the glass doors looking in and smiling”—Adams developed strong curiosity about the prison experience of Pastrick, who was sentenced to forty-five days in a federal women’s prison near Pleasanton, California, for her part in the blood-pouring. Pastrick impressed Alice with her Christian commitment to justice; for Pastrick, pouring her own blood had been a rite of passage, an irrevocable commitment to world peace. Alice sent her books in prison and Pastrick promised to tell her stories from “inside”: “Poignant is too small a term to apply to some of these women’s lives. There’s terrific material in here, trust me.”21
Alice took detailed notes when she met with Pastrick and hoped to write an article for Mother Jones or another magazine.22 Pastrick described meeting Rita Lavelle, a “bright, sharp” Republican who said she’d been screwed by EPA administrator Anne Gorsuch Burford (mother of Supreme Court justice Neil Gorsuch) in the so-called Garbagegate scandal over misuse of Superfund money, and “psycho” Sara Jane Moore, convicted of shooting President Gerald Ford. A year later the Iran-Contra scandal revealed that the ERN had been correct about the American military’s plans for Central America. Ken Butigan, now professor of Peace, Justice and Conflict Studies at DePaul University, believes that his group’s efforts to draw public attention to the situation dissuaded the Reagan administration from taking more direct military action.
Adams used the material she acquired from Pastrick in her short story “Favors.” She turns Pastrick, then in her thirties, into Maria Tresca, an elderly activist just released from prison who comes to rest at her mountain home. Her visit invades the honeymoon privacy of her son’s friend. The irritation he and his new wife feel seems to be the main subject of
the story. But then, after an awkward few days and a frightening thunderstorm, Maria explains:
“The thing about prison… is that they do everything to wreck your mind. ‘Mind-fuck,’ some of the younger women called it.” A faint, tight smile. “But they do. Rushing you all the time. Starting you in to do something, and then right away it’s over. Even eating, even that horrible food I never got to finish. And they mix up everyone’s mail so you think it must be on purpose. And the noise. Radios. And people smoking.”
“Favors” combines Pastrick’s experience with Adams’s thoughts about changes in social relations due to sexual fluidity—in this case, her son’s relationship with a good friend who had once been his lover but was now married to a woman.23 In the story Phoebe (the new wife) wonders at “the strength of the two men’s affection for each other; so rare, in her experience, such open fondness between men. She has even briefly wondered if they could have been lovers, ever, and concluded that they were not.” In resolving the question, “Favors” chooses simplicity. Phoebe forms a bond with Maria (her husband’s friend’s mother) and the question of old sexual histories is muted as they celebrate Maria’s release from prison.
“Favors” also raises the activists’ classic debate over whether it is “better to go to jail, or to stay out and do whatever your work is and send money to your cause.” After Marie Pastrick’s experiences, it became clearer to Alice that she should act upon her convictions on the outside. She also continued to weave her political views into the fabric of her stories and novels.
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