Alice Adams is a woman who grew up in the South -- South Carolina, I think -- and later moved to San Francisco. She writes about characters (mostly women) who live in the South, or in San Francisco, or have moved to San Francisco from the South.
I am not very knowledgeable about the contemporary literary short story. When I was in my twenties, I used to read quite a lot of them, especially stories that appeared in the New Yorker, especially ones by John Updike and John Cheever. For quite a while I subscribed to the Paris Review, but it just never seemed to give me what I was hoping for. I don't think I ever quite understood what it was that one was supposed to get out of a literary short story. Mostly I looked for style, and characterization.
Then there was the long period, starting when I entered graduate school, when I used reading as a drug to deal with the enormous stress I was under, and didn't want to read anything that required much concentration.
Four or five years ago I started wanting to try reading some serious literature again, and to find out what's happening in the literary world now. Taking the graduate fiction workshop here at UH in the spring of 1994 was very helpful in this respect, because Lynne Sharon Schwartz had us buy a wonderful anthology called The Art of the Tale, and each week she assigned two or three stories from this book, to be discussed in class after we finished critiquing the stories we had written ourselves. And I discovered that if I was willing to read a story two or three times, then a story that didn't seem to mean much at first would become more meaningful, especially after we discussed it in class.
But I still don't like a lot of contemporary literary stories, as represented, for instance, by anthologies such as Year's Best Stories. To me, a lot of contemporary literary stories seem very self-indulgent. Writing about well educated, intelligent people has the advantage that it gives the writer an excuse to include a lot of very witty dialogue. But as far as I'm concerned, in many of the stories I have read about academics or otherwise over-educated characters, there is no substance behind the clever dialogue. The characters may be amusing, but they're not interesting, and their problems are boring.
Alice Adams is different. Perhaps it's not reasonable for me to compare her to Alice Munro, because, after all, these two happen to be among the few contemporary literary writers that I know at all well. But I find myself constantly making the comparison in spite of myself. Both these authors seem to write about real women with real problems that are, to me at least, compelling.
I'm not going to write here the sort of review I did for the Alice Munro book. That was done for a class -- a subsequent fiction workshop. And yet in a way, I almost feel that I should write that same kind of review for these stories. Because I feel that I need to study them more carefully. I want to understand what it is in them that makes them so absorbing -- for me, at least.
I find myself feeling that after I return these two books to the library, I need to buy one or both of them, if I can find them in softcover at a price close to $10. This certainly speaks strongly as to how meaningful they have been for me, since with my apartment already stacked pretty much wall to wall with books, the last thing I need to is buy books that I've already read. [Note added later: I didn't find these collections at Barnes and Noble, but I did find three of Adams's novels in cheap mass market editions, which I bought.]
In general, I seem to find most of the stories in the first collection -- Beautiful Girl -- more powerful. But I found myself extremely struck by how very effective some of the openings to the stories in the second collection -- To See You Again -- were. Once I had read the first few paragraphs, I found it almost impossible to postpone reading the rest of the story.
I will conclude these comments by quoting the openings of four of the stories from To See You Again.
At the end of a very long and, by normal standards, ghastly San Francisco party, its host, Josiah Dawes, an ex-alcoholic, ex-philosopher, sits on the floor with two women, Hope Dawes and Clover Baskerville, in an almost empty flat on Potrero Hill. The women are propped up on pillows on either side of Josiah, silhouetted against the long black naked windows; they both face him and, indirectly, each other. In an idle, exhausted way they are discussing the party, among the inevitable debris, the dirty glasses and plates and ashes, in the still stale air. Josiah liked the party; he smiles to himself at each recounted incident.Hope, Josiah's small, blond and very newlywed wife, during the noisy hours of the party has been wondering if she should kill herself. Her mania for Josiah surpasses love -- has, really, nothing to do with love; it is more like an insatiable greed, an addiction, or perhaps a religious fervor. She has just begun to wonder whether they moved to San Francisco to be near this other woman, with her silly name -- Clover. This is Hope's question: if she killed herself, jumped off one the bridges, maybe, would Josiah fall in love with Clover all over again? marry her? or would her death keep them guiltily apart?
Clover, a former lover of Josiah's, of some years back, is a large, dark carelessly beautiful woman, with heavy dark hair, a successfully eccentric taste in clothes. In the intervals between her major love affairs, or marriages, she has minor loves, and spends time with friends, a course that was recommended by Colette, she thinks. This is such an interval, since Josiah who was once a major love is now a friend, and maybe Hope is too; she can't tell yet.
Josiah's very erect posture, as he looks from one woman to the other, and back again, suggests that he is somehow judging between them, or keeping them in balance. He is handsome, in a way, with his drained look of saintliness, his sad pale eyes. His hair and his beard, even his skin and all his clothes, are gray.
Josiah and Hope have just moved to San Francisco and taken this flat; thus the lack of furniture. Also, one of Josiah's eccentric theories about parties is that people should be uncomfortable, like prisoners; they are more apt to reveal themselves.
One afternoon in the late Thirties, in Washington, D.C., a blond and handsome man who was to become a World War II hero, a fighter pilot of exceptional daring -- that man got so irritated at a girl of six, his daughter's age, that he decided to get even with her by having a spelling bee. As he told this story over the years, as he often did, he forgot a lot that actually happened, including his own irritation which began it all, and how it ended. It had become just a funny story about two little girls.The man's name was Cameron Lyons, and he was from Charleston, South Carolina, and he always spoke in those soft and unusually slow accents. His wife, Lillian, was from North Carolina, but more and more she spoke as her husband did. He was from a better family, with a better Southern name. Their daughter was called Helen Jane, plump and pretty and blond, and dearly beloved by both her parents. The irritating other child was Avery Todd, and she was a distant cousin, or child of cousins, from Cameron's side of the family; her father, Tom, was in a sanatorium in Virginia, drying out, and her mother was busy with Avery's younger brother, a delicate boy, and with her bookstore. And so Lillian had said that they could take Avery for a while. That was like Lillian; she was always taking people in, even in their narrow Georgetown house, even in the Depression, providing food and shelter for stray relatives. She had a strong sense of family.
Avery was a dark, sharply skinny child, with large melancholy eyes and a staggering vocabulary. She was physically awkward, not good at jump rope or hopscotch or roller-skating, but her mind was exceptional. She read all the time, read grown-up books from her mother's store -- more than was good for her, in Lillian's opinion -- and had been heard to describe Gone With the Wind as ``boring.'' The two children got along pretty well, but that was probably because Helen Jane had an extremely peaceable disposition.
But Cam, who was unexpectedly intuitive, and open to vibrations, felt waves of pure hatred that poured toward his cherished daughter from small Avery. And why?
The very old couple, of whom everyone at the beach is so highly aware, seem themselves to notice no one else at all. Tall and thin, she almost as tall as he, they walk rather slowly, and can be seen, from time to time, to stop and rest, staring out to sea, or at some private distance of their own. Their postures, always, are arrestingly, regally erect; it is this that catches so much attention, as well as their general air of distinction, and of what is either total disdain or a total lack of interest in other people.Their clothes are the whitest at the beach; in the ferocious Mexican sun of that resort they both wear large hats, hers lacy, his a classic panama.
They look like movie stars, or even royalty, and for all anyone knows they are, deposed monarchs from one of the smaller European countries, world wanderers.
Because there is not much to do at that resort, almost nothing but walking and swimming, reading or whatever social activities anyone can devise, most people stay for fairly short periods of time. Also, it is relatively expensive. The Chicago people, who have come as a group, will be there for exactly ten days. The couple who have the room just next door to that of the distinguished old couple will be there for only a week -- a week literally stolen, since he is married to someone else, in Santa Barbara, and is supposed to be at a sales conference, in Puerto Rico.
But the old people seem to have been there forever, and the others imagine that they will stay on and on, at least for the length of the winter.
This morning, when I read in a gossip column that a man named Carstairs Jones had married a famous former movie star, I was startled, thunderstruck, for I knew that he must certainly be the person whom I knew as a child, one extraordinary spring, as ``Car Jones.'' He was a dangerous and disreputable boy, one of what were then called the ``truck children,'' with whom I had a most curious, brief and frightening connection. Still, I noticed that in a way I was pleased at such good fortune; I was ``happy for him,'' so to speak, perhaps as a result of sheer distance, so many years. And before I could imagine Car as he might be now, Carstairs Jones, in Hollywood clothes, I suddenly saw, with the most terrific accurary and bright sharpness of detail, the schoolyard of all those years ago, hard and bare, neglected. And I relived that fatal day, on the middle level of that schoolyard, when we were playing truth or consequences, and I said that I would rather kiss Car Jones than be eaten alive by ants.