1987
Robert Gottlieb replaces William Shawn as editor of the New Yorker; Alice Adams and Robert McNie separate.
1988
Second Chances published; George H. W. Bush elected president.
1989
After You’ve Gone (story collection) published; Amanda Urban of ICM becomes Adams’s primary literary agent.
1990
Mexico: Some Travels and Some Travelers There published.
1991
Caroline’s Daughters published.
1992
Alice has surgery for cancer in her sinuses; Alice receives Literature Award from American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters; Alice’s stepmother, Dorothy Stearns Adams, dies in Santa Rosa, California; Tina Brown becomes editor of the New Yorker; Bill Clinton elected president.
1993
Almost Perfect published.
1995
A Southern Exposure published.
1997
Medicine Men published.
1998
John Updike selects “Roses, Rhododendron” for The Best American Short Stories of the Twentieth Century; Alice completes manuscript of After the War, her eleventh published novel.
1999
The Last Lovely City (story collection) published; Frances Jaffer Linenthal dies, January 20, 1999; Alice Adams dies at home in San Francisco on May 27.
2000
After the War published posthumously.
2002
The Stories of Alice Adams published.
2005
Robert Kendall McNie dies in San Francisco; Max Steele dies in Chapel Hill.
2007
Norman Mailer dies in Manhattan.
2008
Peter Adams Linenthal and Philip Anasovich marry in San Francisco.
2010
Mark Linenthal dies in San Francisco.
2011
Daniel Simon dies in Berkeley.
2015
Derek Parmenter dies in Mill Valley, California.
1.
2. Nicholson Barney Adams and Agatha Boyd, both scholars of languages, married in Virginia in 1920, after Nic returned from World War I. Their daughter, Alice Boyd Adams, born August 14, 1926, grew up in their farmhouse on a hilltop south of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill, where Nic was a professor of Spanish. Unwelcome to teach at the all-male university, Agatha became Nic’s research assistant but simmered with frustrated ambitions.
3. In “My First and Only House,” Adams wrote that her parents chose this old house with a lovely view over “the convenience of a smaller lot, a tidier house in town.” Here young Alice plays with her grandmother beneath the pink and white climbing roses she celebrated in her story “Roses, Rhododendron.”
4. Even before she graduated from Radcliffe College at nineteen, Alice was drawn to the tiny, smoke-filled jazz clubs on Fifty-Second Street in New York. There she heard Billie Holiday and other great musicians of the era and met and loved trombonist Trummy Young, who would become her model for the character of Jackson Clay in her bestselling novel Superior Women.
5. Alice met Mark Linenthal during her final year of college after he was released from a German prisoner-of-war camp. They married precipitously in November 1946 with Alice resplendent in a gold lamé dress. Both sets of parents attended (left to right): Mark Linenthal Sr., Agatha Adams, Mark and Alice, Anna Linenthal, and Nic Adams standing in front of a portrait of Agatha’s ancestor.
6. Peter Linenthal was born in California in 1951. By the time the family of three moved to San Francisco in 1955, where Mark became a college professor, Alice—still an unpublished writer—was deeply unhappy with the marriage.
7. Alice had a love affair with the writer Max Steele when she separated from Mark to spend the summer of 1958 in her childhood home in Chapel Hill. Max became a lifelong friend who urged Adams forward in her writing career. He struck a professorial pose when he returned to Chapel Hill with his family a few years later to head the University of North Carolina’s writing faculty.
8. Before Alice returned to San Francisco in 1958, she and Peter vacationed with her father and his second wife at his summer cabin on the shore of Lake Sebago in Maine. Adams received news of her first short-story sale at the end of that summer and made up her mind to divorce Mark Linenthal.
9. Beloved professor and Hispanophile Nic Adams and his second wife, Dotsie, dressed for a costume party in Chapel Hill. Alice’s conflicted relationships with her father and stepmother became subjects of some of her best fiction.
10. Shortly after her divorce from Mark in 1959, Alice met Vasco Futscher Pereira, the Portuguese consul to the United States in San Francisco, at a party to promote Vinho Verde wines from his native country. Their passionate love affair ended when Pereira, along with his wife and young family, returned to Portugal in 1961.
11. Alice, in her early thirties, posed for Vasco Pereira on a weekend trip to Yosemite. Her first published novel, Careless Love, was about her doomed love for a diplomat who was flawed but “nevertheless the most attractive man in the world” to her at the time.
12. With the handsome style of a forties movie idol, creative, self-made Robert (Bob) McNie was a charismatic, self-taught interior designer in San Francisco. He and Alice began living together in 1966. His station wagon, Old Black, was always loaded with items he’d salvaged or purchased for his clients.
13. By 1977, when she and Robert McNie posed for a dual portrait, Alice was a successful literary writer whose short stories often appeared in the New Yorker and whose novels were published by Knopf. After her third novel, Listening to Billie, came out, Alice told People magazine that she and Bob were engaged in a “long-term illicit affair.”
14. Alice, Robert McNie, Peter Linenthal, Morissa McNie, Robert McNie Jr., and Morissa’s young son were a loose, sometimes chaotic family unit for almost twenty years.
15. Almost every January, Alice and Bob spent two weeks at a small resort hotel above a long white beach and shining ocean bay near Zihuatanejo. She described a typical day in a story: “They swim far out into the cove together, in the clear warm green water.… At lunch they drink the excellent Mexican beer, and eat fresh garlicky seafood. They shower and sleep, they make love. They swim again, and shower again, and head up to the bar, which is cantilevered out into the open, starry, flowery night; they drink margaritas, toasting each other and the lovely, perfect place.”
16. At the Community of Writers at Squaw Valley, in 1974, where students, accustomed to hearing literary “stars” showcase their bravado, praised Adams’s quieter style of teaching (left to right): songwriter Joe Henry; Alice’s editor at Knopf, Victoria Wilson; San Francisco bookseller Edwina Evers Leggett (in back); Alice Adams; and Max Steele.
17. Adams judged the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction for 1986. At the awards ceremony at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington, DC, she was seated with (left to right) Grace Paley and Beverly Lowry. “I sensed she was beautiful down to her skin,” Lowry said of the way Alice looked in her crocheted dress over a silk slip. “It was all perfect. Glorious.”
18. Ella Leffland, then working on Rumors of Peace, along with Diane Johnson (who’d just published The Shadow Knows), Sheila Ballantyne (then completing her feminist classic Norma Jean the Termite Queen), and Alice, began a lunch group for women writers. “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 are of the same age, etc.,” Adams said.
19. After Alice Adams and Robert McNie separated in 1987, she traveled often to Mexico with friends and wrote a travel memoir about that country. Novelist Alison Lurie, whom she’d known since college at Radcliffe, took this photo of sixty-two-year-old Alice when they toured Mayan ruins at Palenque. “Southern girls learn how to look cool and fresh even when the temperature is over 90,” Lurie said. “There must be tricks to it that we Northerners haven’t learned.”
20. “I’m sorry,
I have such a terrible headache,” Alice (left) told her friends Mary Ross Taylor and Beverly Lowry (pictured), Judith Rascoe, and Carolyn See, who gathered to celebrate Lowry’s latest book (Crossed Over: A Murder, A Memoir) and Alice’s sixty-sixth birthday. If her beauty or her brains or her emotional intensity frightened men, she balanced that by maintaining many enduring friendships with women.
21. Daniel Simon, a medical doctor who lived in Berkeley, was one of the widowers Alice dated in the early 1990s; he became the strong-minded advocate she needed when she was diagnosed with a rare sinus cancer. She survived the cancer but satirized doctors and excoriated the medical establishment in her 1997 novel Medicine Men.
22. Like the women in her stories, Alice Adams was resilient. She had innumerable love affairs but spent what was to be the last evening of her life in the company of her only child, Peter Linenthal. Here they attend a party in San Francisco to celebrate the publication of the first book for children that Peter illustrated. An enlarged picture from the book hangs behind them.
Acknowledgments
An Alfred A. and Blanche W. Knopf Fellowship and an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Research Fellowship from the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas allowed me to spend three months in close daily contact with Alice Adams’s manuscripts, correspondence, travel photos, and childhood books, and even a small collection of her jewelry and clothing. Also at the marvelous Ransom Center are the papers of Diane Johnson, Millicent Dillon, Norman Mailer, and other associates of Alice Adams, as well as the editorial records of Victoria Wilson. I’m grateful to Thomas Staley, Steven Ennis, Richard B. Watson, Eric Colleary, Bridget Gayle Ground, Kate Hayes, Kathryn Millan, Gil Hartman, Selina Hastings, Joanne Ravel, Wanda Penn, Kevin Keim of the Charles Moore Foundation, and Caffé Medici for making me welcome in Austin. In addition, with help from Tim West, I found troves of valuable material at the Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library at the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill. Visits to the Cecil H. Green Library at Stanford University (for William Miller Abrahams papers), the Special Collections at UCLA (for Carolyn See’s papers), the Environmental Design Library and the Graduate Union Theological Library at UC Berkeley, the San Francisco Public Library, and the New York Public Library (where David Smith provided extraordinary assistance) were also essential.
Many other archivists, historians, and institutions provided me with information by email, including: Arielle Orem at Randolph College; Gregory R. Kreuger of the Lynchburg Museum System in Virginia; Julia Randle at Virginia Theological Seminary; Lisa S. McCown at Washington & Lee University; Judith Chaimson at the Central Rappahannock Heritage Center; Bland Simpson at the University of North Carolina; Tyler Bird Paul at St. Catherine’s School in Richmond, Virginia; David Null at the Steenbock Library, University of Wisconsin; staff at the Houghton Library at Harvard University and the Schlesinger Library at the Radcliffe Institute; Katherine Salzmann at Texas State University in San Marcos (for Beverly Lowry’s correspondence); Katrin Kokot at Deutsche Nationalbibliothek in Frankfurt (for Lucie Jessner’s papers); Allan Ochs at the History Center of San Luis Obispo County, California; the Special Collections Research Center, Syracuse University (for Joyce Carol Oates’s papers); the Special Collections Library at Vassar College (for Ann Cornelisen’s papers); and Tim Ronk and Joel D. Drout at Houston Public Library. The Sonoma County Public Library is my home team and I owe particular thanks to the skills and patience of David Dodd and the Interlibrary Loan Department.
During the nine years I’ve worked on Alice Adams: Portrait of a Writer I’ve spoken with or exchanged written messages with hundreds of friends and colleagues of my subject. These conversations are acknowledged at the head of my endnotes for each chapter of the book. Here I’d like to name a few individuals who found time to give me more extensive interviews: Chester Aaron, Philip Anasovich, Daphne Athas, Elaine Badgley Arnoux, Ruth Gebhart Belmeur, Eleanor Bertino, Nancy Boas, Sandy Boucher, Virginia Breier, Stephen Brown, Theophilus Brown, Alyce Denier, Millicent Dillon, Stephen Drewes, Deirdre English, Anne Fabbri, Carol and John Field, Cynthia Scott Francisco, Thaisa Frank, Blair Fuller, Diana Fuller, Imogene Gieling, Lucy Gray and David Thomson, Adam and Arlie Hochschild, George Homsey, Diane Johnson, Robert Flynn Johnson, Frances Kiernan, Jane Kristiansen and Patty O’Grady, Jeremy Larner, Ella Leffland, Edwina Evers Leggett and Jack Leggett, Mark Linenthal, Phillip Lopate, Beverly Lowry, Judith and John Luce, Alison Lurie, Fred Lyon, Peter Manso, Scott Massey, Maureen Looney Mather, Margaret Mayer, Morissa McNie, Robert McNie Jr., Margaret Minsky, John Murray, Nancy Oakes, Phyllis Silverman Ott-Toltz, Lincoln Pain, Louis Pain, Derek Parmenter, David Reid, Christy Rocca, Richard Rodriguez, Jean Salter Roetter, Bernard Rosenthal, Penelope Rowlands, Sandra Russell, Jay Schaefer, Carolyn See, Beatrice Silverman, Deborah Sparks, Anya Spielman, Matilde Brunswick Stewart, Susan Sward, Amanda Urban, Barbara Mailer Wasserman, and Nancy and Thomas Wilson Jr.
Some of Alice’s friends have been such an integral part of this project that I cannot imagine having completed it without them: Alice’s dearest friend, Judith Clark Adams; Bryant Mangum, whose monograph Understanding Alice Adams is the first comprehensive study of Adams’s work; Adams’s editors Frances Kiernan and Victoria Wilson; Peter Stansky, life partner to the late Billy Abrahams; Margaret Minsky, daughter-in-law to Max Steele, and Diana Whittinghill Steele, former wife of Max Steele. Alice Adams’s son, artist and historian Peter Adams Linenthal, with the cooperation of his husband, Phil Anasovich, has been a tireless co-researcher and has generously shared his curiosity about his mother’s life without ever limiting my freedom to write her biography as I’ve seen fit.
I’m grateful to Biographers International Organization, founded in the year I began this book, for being the only organization of its kind devoted to all aspects of the art and craft of biography. Good friends of mine have encouraged me with their questions and theories and simply by becoming readers of Alice Adams and discussing her life and stories with me: Rose Balistrieri, Martha Bergland, Annette DeBernardi Brass, Flora Coker, Cathy Curtis, Kathleen Fenton, Kathryn Madonna, Robert Marshall, Beth Phillips, Laurie Prothro, Mary Anne Sobiereij, and Stephanie Ranger Turner. Others have become comadres of the book by suggesting research angles or reading drafts—especially Sarah Barrow, Anne Heller, Bryant Mangum, Deborah Denenholz Morse, Carol Polsgrove, and Deborah Robbins. At home, R. M. Ryan has been patient and loving while also asking many important questions. In myriad ways Robert Lewellin Ryan, Katherine Snoda Ryan, and Hongshen Ma have offered their perspectives on the subject of how people live and do their work. Lisen Caroline Ma and Kai-Ling Ma have provided wonderful distraction and good cheer.
Sandra Dijkstra, Elise Capron, Andrea Cavallero, and their team at Sandra Dijkstra Literary Agency have been stalwart devotees of the Alice Adams story. At Scribner, the still incomparable Colin Harrison, Nan Graham, and Susan Moldow provided unstinting encouragement from the outset of the project, and Sarah Goldberg has devoted her inexhaustible verve, patience, humor, and intelligence to its completion. Thank you also to Laura Wise, Aja Pollock, Jaya Miceli, and Kyle Kabel.
More from the Author
Raymond Carver
About the Author
©KATHERINE RYAN
Carol Sklenicka is the author of Raymond Carver: A Writer’s Life, which was named of one of the ten best books of 2009 by the New York Times Book Review. She grew up in California in the late 1960s. She attended college in San Luis Obispo, California, and earned a PhD at Washington University in St. Louis, where she studied with Stanley Elkin and Howard Nemerov. Her stories, essays, and reviews are widely published. She lives with her husband, poet and novelist R. M. Ryan, near the Russian River in Northern California.
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Works by Alice Adams
BOOKS
Careless Love (novel). New York: New American Library, 1966. Republished as The Fall of Daisy Duke. London: Constable, 1967.
Families and Survivors (novel). New York: Knopf, 1974.
Listening to Billie (novel). New York: Knopf, 1978.
Rich Rewards (novel). New York: Knopf, 1980.
To See You Again (stories). New York: Knopf, 1982.
Superior Women (novel). New York: Knopf, 1984.
Return Trips (stories). New York: Knopf, 1985.
Second Chances (novel). New York: Knopf, 1988.
After You’ve Gone (stories). New York: Knopf, 1989.
Alice Adams Page 62