CHAPTER TWELVE
A month or so after the wedding, Yates overcame his aversion to the outdoors and rented a picturesque stone cottage about four miles north of Iowa City near the Coralville Reservoir. Their landlady was the same woman who owned the Victorian house where Yates had had his breakdown, and perhaps she understood his needs better than most. Save for a single neighbor in the vicinity—a “chummy, bubbly, tolerant” woman in her mid-thirties named Jill Van Cleve, who became a good companion to the couple—they were pretty much on their own, and both seemed to like it that way. The cottage was a former soap factory that had been moved stone by stone from the Mennonite colony in nearby Amana: Apart from a small bedroom it was all one space, the most arresting feature being a large fireplace with wrought-iron arms that pulled out. The house had a furnace, too, though it pleased the wistfully masculine Yates to chop wood on cold days and build roaring fires. Soon they inherited a dog named Cindy, who accompanied them on long walks and seemed to complete the household.
Except for his work, these were happy days for Yates. Around this time he grew a permanent beard whose relative tidiness (particularly later) was a telling indicator of his well-being; it lent a certain somber dignity to his features and solved the problem (as he saw it) of a weak chin and effeminate mouth. Life was starting over, and he was eager to leave behind the bewildered-looking bachelor who for years had lived in one anonymous den after another, eating restaurant meals and drinking too much. Now he had a pretty wife who was content to cook and clean and trim his whiskers for him, and he was anxious never to go back.
His daughter Monica was especially pleased with the change: In the old days her father’s odd, transient life had made her too nervous to enjoy her visits, but Martha created a cheerful environment even when Yates was grumpishly stalking about with a pencil in his mouth. Also, the girl relished the company of handsome, robust graduate students such as Bob Lehrman and Jody Lowens, who were frequent guests at the cottage and assumed the role of attentive big brothers. One night Lowens put Monica on his shoulders so she could pry open a mysterious door above the fireplace, where she found an alcove filled with squirrel droppings. She promptly appropriated the space as her own, and Yates (who enjoyed such projects) provided a rope ladder and helped her clean it out. More than ever, father and daughter were a curious pair. “Monica always wanted him to shape up,” said Martha. “It made her mad when he didn’t live up to his own ideals. She’d get disgusted with him, but she loved him dearly.” Almost from infancy the girl had gotten used to being hard on her father, often brazenly so, and as she got older her barbs became more incisive and somewhat less adorable. “Oh, babe, give me a break here!” Yates would bristle, or “Yeah yeah, I know”—this when she’d nag him about smoking, say, which only unnerved him into smoking more.
Meanwhile the world continued to wait patiently for another novel by the author of Revolutionary Road. With the help of his friend Styron, Yates was awarded a Rockefeller grant that winter for eleven thousand dollars, even while he agonized over the merit of the project that continued to attract such lavish subsidy. Styron himself had taken seven years to write his latest novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the 1968 Pulitzer and left Yates “almost wiped out with admiration and envy”; he wondered whether he’d keep such a man’s respect, much less the world’s, once his own tardy opus was revealed for what it was. The problem—and his editor Gottlieb agreed—remained one of structure: that is, whether to stitch the new material (i.e., Prentice’s childhood with his mother) into the main narrative as so many intermittent flashbacks, or lump it all into a long discrete bridge in the middle; either way was far from seamless, and Yates couldn’t help but suspect that he’d essentially written two novels which didn’t go together and yet couldn’t stand apart.
He was more vulnerable to criticism than ever. That spring he was invited to give a reading at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where his friend Robin Metz had taken a teaching position. The visit got off to an awkward start when another Workshopper-turned-Galesburgian, Murray Moulding, had Yates over for dinner. Yates seemed somber and out-of-sorts, and when the seat of his lawn chair broke and he hit the ground, he didn’t crack a smile amid the nervous laughter that followed. The next day he was scheduled to give a public reading for students, then meet with faculty from various disciplines to discuss his story “Builders,” which they’d been given to read in advance. The first part of the agenda went fine; the faculty session, however, proved a kind of moral equivalent of that pratfall Yates had taken the night before. Such meetings were meant to be relaxed but scholarly, and usually the work under discussion was somewhat more abstruse than Yates’s story. “I felt like I’d led Dick to slaughter,” said Metz. Yates sat glowering as one academic after another implied—or seemed to imply—that the story was a bit sentimental and overly autobiographical (and really was it fiction at all? and really what does one mean by “fiction”?). Finally a math professor from the Orkney Islands, trying to be kind perhaps, wondered aloud how one does go about distancing oneself from one’s work and hence avoiding sentimentality? Yates slumped so low that Metz thought he might put his head down on the table; on top of everything else, the math professor had a funny accent and that seemed the last straw for Yates. “I don’t have to answer the goddamn question!” he suddenly erupted. There was a silence, and then the meeting was adjourned. Yates remained in his seat until he and Metz were alone. “Fucking sons of bitches!” he resumed. “Why do I come to these goddamn academic conferences?”
Once the ordeal was over, though, Yates made a remarkable recovery. That night Metz gave a raucous party, during which they broke out a twelve-foot collapsible tunnel for children; the idea was to crawl through without spilling your drink, as well as to peek at and poke the behind of the person in front of you. Yates was delighted by the high jinks, and finally transported into laughing, cheering, floor-pounding ecstasy when three pretty coeds did a dance-and-kick rendition of “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.”
* * *
Yates’s sister died in May, three months short of her forty-seventh birthday. Oddly enough, she’d briefly managed to quit drinking a few months prior to that final visit from her brother the summer before; her son Peter had researched a rehabilitation facility in Vermont, and while Fred vetoed the idea, his son’s concern seemed to shame him into making a last effort to “handle” the matter on his own. For a while, then, the goaded Ruth gorged herself with sweets and stayed mostly sober—but Fred kept drinking, and soon she gave up the struggle for good. “With a different husband she might have pulled through,” said her sister-in-law Louise. “But Fred and Ruth had a symbiotic effect on each other—it was a ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ situation.” One night their oldest son, Fred junior, got a call from his father, who was in a drunken stupor and needed the young man to drive Ruth to the hospital: She was sick, he said; she’d taken a fall. Fred junior found his mother more or less sober, though she had a large bruise on one side of her face—hardly uncommon, since she often fell and bruised easily because of liver damage. Three days later she died in the hospital of cirrhosis.
Yates was not surprised by the news (nor was Martha, whose immediate thought on meeting Ruth was “She’s done for”); he professed to be relieved that her “miserable life” was over, and arranged to leave immediately for an early-summer trip to New York. The graveside service in St. James was remarkably similar to Sarah Grimes’s interment in The Easter Parade: Fred Rodgers arrived at the cemetery tipsy and befuddled, supported by a huddle of friends from Grumman, and like his alter ego Tony Wilson he repeatedly “knif[ed] the flat of his hand straight ahead from the temple” and mumbled something like, “Straight ahead: don’t look right, don’t look left, don’t look back.” Later there was a beery gathering at High Hedges, where Fred’s buddies jollied him along with old stories, and his son Peter alertly attended to the other guests. Martha approvingly described the mood as “joyful” (“Ruth had been out of reach for a long time—whatever they’d known of her was gone”). But Fred junior left early that night—“sick, in shock”—and later, after most of the guests had gone, Fred senior sat in the dining room with his sister and broke down crying. “He wasn’t good at communicating deep feelings,” she said, “but in an odd way there was a great love between him and Ruth.” Fred remarried less than a year later but often spoke vaguely of “mistakes” he’d made in his first marriage. He outlived Ruth by twenty-seven years.
“Your brother killed my sister,” Yates said to Louise Rodgers on the train back to Manhattan.* She replied to the effect that the matter was more complicated than that; she’d always regarded Yates as something of a malcontent, particularly where family was concerned. As for Martha, she found it fascinating that Louise, a charming, intelligent woman, had nothing but admiration for Dookie of all people and would only laugh when Yates tried to remonstrate with her. He’d always led Martha to believe that his mother was ridiculous at best, and at worst a monster of feckless egoism.
Yates was still in New York when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. A month before, he’d written his old Justice Department colleague Barrett Prettyman that the world seemed “more hopeful now than at any time since God knows when—Johnson out, the Paris talks on, and an election shaping up in which Our Side looks likely to win.” By “Our Side” Yates meant liberals in general who opposed the war, not die-hard Kennedy partisans such as Prettyman: “I don’t mean to be disloyal,” he added, “but I’m wearing a McCarthy sticker on the back bumper of my car. It was purchased before RFK declared his candidacy, but I haven’t taken it off yet because RFK hasn’t yet said anything big enough to convince me that he’d be a better President.” Such sentiments notwithstanding, Wendy Sears spotted Yates at the requiem for RFK at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; he made himself conspicuous by proceeding uncertainly up the aisle to take a Communion wafer. Afterward she caught up with him outside the church: Had he converted to Catholicism, or was his interest in the Eucharist just a tribute to his old employer? “Jesus,” said the flustered Yates, “I was just following the crowd!”
He wouldn’t follow it for long, though not even Yates was wholly immune to RFK’s peculiar charm. Later that summer he wrote another, condoling letter to Prettyman, referring to Kennedy’s death as a “hideous loss” and expressing chagrin over the unseemly pro-McCarthy message of his previous letter: “I didn’t realize how ready and eager I was to have my mind changed until it was too late. For whatever it’s worth, let me tell you that McCarthy now seems very pale indeed, as does every other national political figure.” This was somewhat for Prettyman’s benefit, but at the time Kennedy’s death genuinely affected Yates as a sorrow both personal and political. As the years passed, however, he became more and more impatient with any hint of Kennedy hagiography, until he eventually lumped RFK into his general indictment of the brothers as overrated, phony, out for number one, and ruthless.
* * *
Yates spent much of the fall in pencil-chewing seclusion with his manuscript; he’d recently stumbled on the information that more than 50 percent of first novelists never publish a second novel (“that scares the shit out of me”), and more than ever he just wanted to be shut of the thing. In November he mailed what he “hoped was a finished novel” to Gottlieb, who “didn’t like it but came up with three or four very good ideas about how it could be revised and improved”: Apparently Gottlieb suggested that he cut a gratuitous final chapter, as well as tweak the Alice Prentice material in ways that might bring about a slight further refinement of the structure.* For another two months, then, Yates was “up to [his] ass” in further repairs, but finally relinquished the thing for good in February. He’d even come up with a title—A Special Providence—after discarding such recent ideas as A Letter Home and The Wine of Astonishment. Indeed the title may have been the one thing about the book he definitely liked, though he had to concede a heady sense of liberation now that his joyless, eight-year ordeal was over. As he wrote Prettyman, “[The novel] may not be very good—I suspect it is nowhere near as good as my first one—but the beautiful thing about it now is that it’s done and off my back, leaving me free to write other and maybe better novels.” And then there was always the chance his pessimism was misplaced: Not only did Gottlieb profess to like the book, he even went so far as to list by name all the other people at Knopf who liked it—sales and publicity people at that.
What with his regular income and leftover Rockefeller money, Yates found himself rather flush when he received the nine thousand dollars due on delivery of his manuscript. Never mind that he now had a daughter at Bennington, one of the most expensive colleges in the country; it was time to celebrate—the curse of his second novel was lifted (so it seemed), he’d never given Martha a proper honeymoon, and after all, Money is to spend. Thus he decided to take his wife on a grand tour that summer.
They departed at the beginning of June, stopping in New York on the way. A night was spent with the Styrons in Connecticut, and Yates was in high spirits for most of the visit: His hosts went out of their way to put his shy wife at ease, and it may have gratified Yates for Martha to witness his friendship with such an eminent man. Later, however, they had dinner at the home of playwright Arthur Miller, whom Martha described as a “full-time celebrity”: “He was very imposing and gruff,” she recalled. “Everything was Marilyn this and Marilyn that, or else he’d name-drop some other famous person.” Intimidated, neither Yates nor Martha said a single word during the entire meal.
They’d originally planned to rent a flat in London, though Yates may have figured the nostalgia would soon turn sour. Whatever the case, they passed only a few “idle, boozy” days there: Yates visited his old neighborhood in South Kensington, and possibly became as moody as his character Jack Flanders when he encountered his old flat at Two Neville Terrace, or when the bartender at the Anglesea failed to recognize him. Maybe not, though: Martha doesn’t recall any such tiresomeness at that stage of the trip, and in fact Yates received some very heartening news there: His agent in London, Monica McCall reported, was “very high on [his] book.”
He was in excellent fettle by the time they got to Ireland, where they rented a car and drove around the countryside for two weeks. Yates loved everything about the place—especially the people, who shared his fondness for drinking, singing, and talking (unpretentiously) about literature. Yates made friends at every pub; they valued him as a writer, and laughed when he’d mention, for instance, that his favorite lines of poetry were “Fly/ing too high/with some guy/in the sky…” The only drawback was Yates’s driving—as ever, he refused to let a woman take the wheel, while he himself drove “like he’d never quite caught on”—which made their progress “maddeningly slow” as the white-knuckled Yates negotiated narrow winding lanes. Still, Martha considered Ireland the happiest time of the marriage.
They should have stayed in Ireland. The reasons Yates hadn’t liked Paris almost twenty years earlier still applied: His French was a joke and the Parisians treated it as such, and all he wanted in the way of haute cuisine was a good steak. Also, though Martha herself spoke a little French—ergo a little more than her husband—Yates wouldn’t let her order in restaurants, while he invariably became flustered when a “snooty” waiter seemed amused by his accent, to say nothing of his philistine tastes. Soon—quite like his own Jack Flanders—Yates was “trudg[ing] along with a look of petulant bewilderment in his eyes … the picture of a bumbling American tourist.”
But amid such dreariness he’d at least looked forward to dinner with his French publisher, Jean Rosenthal, a charming man who’d personally translated Yates’s first two books to impressive acclaim. The evening promised to redeem the whole Paris debacle: Rosenthal and his wife took their guests to an excellent restaurant, and far from snickering at Yates’s preference for bifteck saignant (while Martha tried snails for the first time), Rosenthal lauded the author as one of the great hopes of American literature and so forth. Alas, all this was by way of sweetening the pill, and once the plates were cleared the Frenchman got down to business: He regretted to report that Éditions Robert Laffont had decided not to publish Yates’s second novel. Rosenthal had found the book very “moving and sensitive,” and if it had been written by a French author they wouldn’t have hesitated to publish; however.… “Dick was like a deflating balloon,” Martha recalled. When Rosenthal noticed the effect his words were having, he hastily dropped the matter and cast about for happier themes. But the damage was done, and Yates proceeded to get drunker than his wife had ever seen him. Later Rosenthal wrote a letter expanding tactfully on the points he’d deferred over dinner. He discussed the commercial risk of foreign novels—translation costs, sparse reviews, the high retail price of a longish book such as Yates’s—none of which would have mattered, of course, were it not for the following: “I do like the book and I think that the portrait of Alice is excellent and of a vivid accuracy. But as I had begun to tell you in Paris, the war part—interesting as it may be—has not the same stamp of deep originality. To put it bluntly, it is in the same vein as many war novels and it is a long section of the book.”
That was pretty blunt, all right, and for the rest of the vacation Yates was decidedly poor company. Rosenthal, a man whose judgment he trusted, had told him almost exactly what he’d feared all along: He’d be a laughingstock once the novel was published, and everyone would say Revolutionary Road had been a fluke.
Martha tried to cheer him up, but it was no good. “He was a mess. Very depressed: not just flat, but very very sad. Everything was pointless, ridiculous.” While in Cannes—where Yates had written his first publishable fiction as a sickly yet still hopeful young man—the enraptured Martha ventured to remark on the beauty of the prospect: the moonless Mediterranean, the glittering lights of town, the marvelous blackness of the sky. “Don’t give me that poetic bullshit about a black sky!” Yates exploded.
They also went to Rome, Lisbon, and finally Madrid, where all the gifts Martha had bought for her family were stolen out of the rental car. Yates told her to buy more, and kept drinking. The only time he laughed, and then bitterly, was when she worried about how much money they were spending.
* * *
Shortly after their return to Iowa in August, Yates received the rather anticlimactic news that his mother had died. Martha and Monica were on hand when he got the phone call from Central Islip, and both remember his matter-of-fact tone as he agreed to the various funeral arrangements.* But afterward he seemed pensive and remote—“perhaps fretful over the fact that he didn’t feel worse about it,” said Monica. He also might have been somewhat bemused by the way his mother’s death had coincided with the publication (two months later) of a book that would have destroyed her if she had been alive and lucid. His “fair Texan” Carole had once observed that he couldn’t finish the novel “because it is much harder to kill a mother than it is to kill a wife,” and she remarked on how “scared” Yates had looked when she said as much (though it’s possible she misconstrued an exasperated silence on Yates’s part).
A far greater concern at the time was his daughter Sharon, who’d flunked out of Bennington after the spring term. In recent years her adolescent rebellion had taken increasingly disturbing forms: In Mahopac she fought constantly with her mother, and broke curfew to attend forbidden parties at the old Babaril estate; she drank, smoked pot, and was rightly suspected of worse. Sheila accused her of becoming unstable “just like [her] father,” which tended to provoke Sharon into a shrill defense of the man as one of the most feeling people she knew. But when Yates himself expressed pique over her “irresponsible, aimless” life, she’d accuse him of trying to “control” her and make her a “carbon copy” of him. Finally, having finished high school a semester early, she ran away from home and joined some “cool creeps” (as Yates called them) in Andes, New York, where they proposed to start a ski lodge but mostly sat around getting stoned and sleeping.
Yates was somewhat mollified when Sharon started college in spring 1968, though he’d hoped for the corrective gentility of a proper “Eastern women’s college” rather than an “arty-farty,” dubiously coed place like Bennington. When Yates heard she had a boyfriend of sorts, he was disgusted: “What kind of guy goes to Bennington?” he remarked to a friend. “And then hangs around! And he’s with my daughter!” Before long an effete boyfriend would be the least of his worries. For her winter work-study interval, Sharon packed off to yet another hippie “ski resort” in Manchester: “With time on my hands,” she wrote her father, “in the hills of Vermont, I’ll be able to work on learning to sit and concentrate on one thing”—a habit she’d admittedly failed to cultivate at Bennington. “My whole generation is running,” she noted in closing, “just as hard as I was, and we all help each other.” At the very least Yates must have rolled his eyes at that particular envoi, and meanwhile his disdain for hippies would have certainly been aroused by the scene in Manchester, which was rather like the scene in Andes the year before.
The bewildered girl bottomed out that summer in Boston, where she’d washed up with one of her classmates. The latter’s boyfriend was a chemistry major from Brandeis who supported himself by making and selling LSD, and Sharon spent much of the summer in a psychedelic haze. It was tolerable as long as she had companions, but in the fall her roommate went back to Bennington and suddenly she found herself stoned among relative strangers, and living in a “horrible flop.” Around this time she was “rescued” by her father—an incident he reluctantly saw fit to fictionalize in Young Hearts Crying, though Sharon claims she wasn’t as luridly strung out as Laura Davenport. “Dad called one morning after a party, and I was a little fuzzy,” she remembered. “He got all worked up: ‘My God, what are you taking? I’m gonna come out and get you!’ I decided maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.” As good as his word, Yates caught the first plane to Boston and brought his daughter back to Iowa with him.
For the rest of that year she lived in the stone cottage with Yates and Martha. At first she remained a bit slow on the uptake, and her father arranged for her to see a psychiatrist; the man diagnosed her as having suffered a drug-induced psychotic episode and prescribed Thorazine, which she soon stopped taking. “I was depressed and found it hard to concentrate,” she said, “but not really psychotic—I felt overwhelmed by reality, not out of touch with it.” Meanwhile her father’s attitude seemed rather inscrutable at times: On the one hand he was glad to have her home and eager to do what he could to help, but often he seemed very irritable about things. Her depressive moping grated on his nerves, and when she confided details of her life in Bennington and Boston, he’d sometimes respond with neutral interest and sometimes with rage. “How could you do something so stupid!” he erupted—understandably—when she mentioned how she’d once spent her entire semester’s allowance on wholesale hash, most of which she’d smoked herself rather than selling at a profit as intended. What seemed odd, though, was that Yates’s responses one way or the other were hard to predict, no matter what was being discussed. “He was never really well even when he was well,” said Sharon, who around this time gained particular insight into her father’s condition. “Just in general he’d often say irrational, irrelevant things.” She once mentioned a roommate who had a black boyfriend, and Yates said the girl was just trying to spite her parents; when Sharon calmly tried to explain (“No, they went to high school together and he’s really a nice guy” etc.), her father snapped “Why else would she do that? Girls like Negroes because they have big penises!” At his best, Yates was incapable of such a benighted remark—but there it was. “I’d blink at him and get quiet,” said Sharon, “and he’d go off and have a drink. He didn’t seem aware of his own strange behavior, though if I got tearful he’d apologize.”
Martha made the situation not only bearable but “pretty jolly.” The better to leave Yates alone during his grouchy working hours, the women enrolled in a typing course and kept each other company. Each acted as a kind of calming buffer between the other and Yates, and there was no friction whatsoever between themselves. (“Will you guys stop fighting already?” Yates wryly remarked, when the two had a laughing disagreement over how to cook mushrooms.) Still, Yates was eager for his daughter to go back to college, and she was only too happy to oblige, as she missed the company of people her own age. Martha advised her to look at small liberal arts colleges—less conservative than Carleton, if a bit more so than Bennington—but Sharon disliked the hassle of ordering catalogs and writing application essays. One day she stopped at the Iowa admissions office and filled out an application (no essays), and was promptly accepted for the following semester. In January she moved to a dormitory.
* * *
Publication was always an unnerving experience for Yates, particularly so in the case of A Special Providence: He remained convinced that the book was an inferior performance, that after the eight-year wait reviewers were bound to be disappointed. What made matters worse (throughout his career) was the baldly autobiographical nature of the work: Though in time Yates would grow convinced that such material—if properly crafted—was not only valid but rather crucial, he never got used to the humiliation of exposing himself in public, of “dropping [his] pants in Macy’s window” as he put it.
His terrible fragility was well known to friends, who did their best to reassure him. “I imagine you are now going through the traditional big sweat in anticipation of the publication of a new book,” wrote Vonnegut, “and I’ll guess that it is tougher for you than it is for most people.… Because you’re you. For you, things are tougher.” Vonnegut urged his friend to keep it all in perspective: “Every good writer I know acknowledges you as a master.… So—carry on. But you’ve already won.” When the book was published in October, though, such personal admiration did little to lessen Yates’s gloom over poor sales and scant reviews. “It is a beautiful book,” wrote Joan Didion, and Styron sent a congratulatory telegram: HOPE YOU SAW EXCELLENT REVIEW CURRENT HARPERS FINE STUFF I FIND CRITIC AND ALL TRUE. Yates may have been relieved to know he still enjoyed Styron’s good opinion, and the Harper’s review was indeed fine (“Yates presents with no sentimentality a story that is all but heartbreaking”), but he couldn’t help dwelling on the fact that, say, the daily New York Times had ignored the book entirely. And still his friends assured him that, far from disgracing himself, he’d written a very good novel—certainly better than what he’d led them to expect. “I remember how many times you called your book … a piece of shit,” wrote Dubus. “So I expected [it] to be a piece of shit, barely and finally released from the anguished bowels of a weeping man.… Not so. I find it a wonderful fucking novel.” But in the meantime Bantam had passed on the paperback rights, and such slights meant to Yates that the novel was no damn good, period. By the end of November he was so despondent that Martha called Robin Metz (and presumably others), begging him to hurry up and finish the book so he could praise it, persuasively, to Yates. This Metz did, addressing what he knew to be the particular concerns of the author: “What do Alice Prentice’s dreams and delusions mean unless we see them juxtaposed against the mud and slop, the weariness of marching?” In short the book held together after all, and wasn’t the mishmash Yates suspected it was.
Because the novel wasn’t widely reviewed, Yates assumed that “a lot of people didn’t think much of it,” which may or may not have been so; nevertheless, the actual reception was by no means the disaster he’d anticipated. There were no outright pans among the major reviews, all of which acknowledged Yates’s skill. Joyce Carol Oates in The Nation noted the novel’s similarity to the “disturbing and prophetic” Revolutionary Road, insofar as both explore “various contemporary delu-sions” such as the common tendency among Americans not to accept “[their] own mediocrity”: “A sad, gray, deathly world,” Oates concluded, “—dreams without substance—aging without maturity: This is Yates’s world, and it is a disturbing one.” John Thompson’s review in Harper’s (the one that caught Styron’s eye) was an almost unequivo-cal rave: He called the novel “straightforward, intelligent, and clearly written,” and referred to the “bad luck” of Alice Prentice as being “so quotidian, so possible, so plausible, that it is more terrifying to read of it than to read of the disasters and massacres of kings.”
Yates’s pessimism was somewhat vindicated by Elizabeth Dalton’s belated notice in the December 14 New York Times Book Review: “[A Special Providence] is in some essential ways an honest and intelligent novel,” she began, “and yet it fails, finally, to be a moving or exciting one.” Dalton thought the war sections the strongest of the book, though “the effect of [Prentice’s] mediocrity is to deprive his conflict of urgency and significance.” As for Alice, she is “simply too thin and pathetic a character to support much attention.” Even Yates’s “clarity and precision of detail” was viewed as a lapse of sorts, since “so heavy an air of patient skill hangs over much of the writing that the book seems almost embalmed in good craftsmanship.” And finally one can almost picture Yates nodding his head in masochistic agreement with Dalton’s coup de grace—to wit, that the childhood section “seems remote” to the rest of the narrative, “and its placement in the middle, between the two halves of Robert’s war adventures, gives the novel a queer, broken-backed structure.”
Revealingly—though hardly for the first time—Yates’s craftsmanship was held against him, damned as both excessive and lacking, at a time when a fastidious concern for “structure” and “style” was viewed with suspicion or outright indifference. Somewhere in the subtext of Dalton’s review was perhaps a thought shared by other critics who were too bored by Yates’s latest to bother reviewing it: Namely, if the man insisted on writing a traditional realistic novel—a war novel for that matter, a coming-of-age novel—then it had better have a sound narrative structure, but really, why write such a book in the first place? Hadn’t anyone told Yates that “the true enemies of the novel [are] plot, character, setting, and theme” (as postmodernist John Hawkes had summed it up)? That the so-called New Journalists had usurped the conventions of fiction in order to dramatize a reality that seemed to baffle the imagination, while novelists were left to challenge the very nature of “reality” itself (and hence the authorities behind it) with wacky surrealistic satire and/or formal experiment?
Yates knew all about it, of course, though perhaps even he was startled by how far things had gone. Fred Chappell, in his 1971 essay on Revolutionary Road, noted the “inglorious” literary fads that had helped consign Yates’s reputation to near-oblivion in the space of ten years, and quoted the poet Randall Jarrell to good effect: “It is hard to write even a competent naturalistic story, and when you have written it what happens?—someone calls it a competent naturalistic story.” With A Special Providence Yates had again written such a story, and to detractors he’d chosen an even more hackneyed subject than the suburbs—that is, World War II, about which any number of sensitive young men had been writing for almost a quarter century. Such a novel should at least possess the stylistic verve or the relevance of a Slaughterhouse Five or a Catch-22, whose “black humor” pointed up the absurdity of war at any time or place, and whose “real” subject was of course the contemporary war in Vietnam.
But finally what galled Yates most was that A Special Providence simply wasn’t good enough to overcome current trends; also, that he’d wasted so much time on it. Eight years ago he’d had the idea of writing a “direct autobiographical blowout” about the war—to be exact, about a young man who is disabused of his romanticism by the ordeal of war. But such a story was familiar, to say the least, and whatever had struck Yates as momentous about his own experience seemed less so in retrospect; hence the long struggle to form the material in such a way that made it fresh and avoided what Yates called “the two terrible traps that lie in the path of autobiographical fiction—self-pity and self-aggrandizement.”
The result was a noble failure, at least by Yates’s standards. Jean Rosenthal had it right when he called the war sections “interesting” but not particularly original. Yates remembered his own infantry experience as alternately tedious and terrifying, and he rendered it with a number of vivid details: the “smell of mildew and rubber and his own breath,” as Prentice tries not to vomit in his gas mask; the corpses’ eyes “like dusty marbles”; the soldier Krupka who “sat on the chest of the bespectacled corpse and spooned up his can of dehydrated eggs, which were almost exactly the color of the dead man’s flesh.” But the images of corpses and basic training and war in general had long been exhausted by books and the movies, and their reanimation required a more novel viewpoint than that of a romantic and rather typically self-conscious young man. Yates knew this, and “after much labor and much to [his] chagrin” realized that no amount of polishing and fine writing and craft could quite overcome the fallacy of his approach, to say nothing of the fundamental insincerity at the bottom of it—that is, the fact that Yates himself was not particularly disillusioned by the war, and really had no strongly defined point of view at all, much less a novel one.
But faced with the artistic challenge of posing disillusionment as the defining factor in Prentice’s development—and thus linking the latter’s war experience to his childhood—Yates resorted to the mechanical formula of a movie motif, whereby the reader is reminded every so often that Prentice has yet to cast off his mother’s romanticism: Thus he imagines himself carrying a wounded buddy in the manner of Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front, or labors at seducing a woman by lighting two cigarettes at a time like Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager, and so on. All of which culminates in a labored epiphany devised to meet the needs of Yates’s synthetic theme, however lacking in spontaneity or psychological plausibility. “No account ever really needed to be settled,” Prentice reflects after bravely taking a beating from a bigger soldier;
nothing ever really needed to be proved. Everything would always come right in the end as long as a couple of good guys went up behind the barn and had it out, as long as a mother fell on her knees and offered all her thanks to God and they played the Star-Spangled Banner on the radio. That was what these voices had to say; that was their lying sentimental message, and it all went down as smoothly as the pancakes and jelly.
Whereupon Prentice vomits up the pancakes and jelly, and hence rejects the sentimental values of America, the movies, and his mother—rather patly, not to say sentimentally, as doubtless Yates himself suspected. And so as a kind of corrective he finally asserts that “all [Prentice] knew with any clarity was that he was nineteen years old, that the war was over, and that he was alive.” That was all the nineteen-year-old Yates had known as well.
But he never had to strain after meaning or originality where his childhood was concerned, and the book comes alive whenever it returns to Alice Prentice. The theme associated with the character, that of a “special providence,” is not superimposed for the sake of craft, but rather reflects the essential delusion of people such as Alice-Dookie—that is, that they are gifted, among the world’s golden people, and that God (or somebody) will always provide. Alice’s refusal to face reality leads her and Bobby into disaster time and again, and yet if she were level-headed like her “dreary” ex-husband (“I’ve got a good amateur voice, that’s all”), life would be intolerable. Having committed herself to the fiction that she is “remarkable and gifted and brave”—a noble fugitive from a dull provincial family and husband, from all the dull conventions of average people—Alice would rather endure hardship than resign herself to being merely “reasonable.” And in fact the bland, uncertain rewards of reality aren’t enough for anybody, much less modestly talented people such as Alice, though most of us learn to live with our compromises. Those who don’t are ultimately left with only God to believe in them, and perhaps with the comfort of a cocktail that’s still nearly two-thirds full.
Alice’s self-deception borders on the pathological, so that her striving has both a universal and larger-than-life aspect. Her son Robert, though, is not so compelling: His desire to be a hero, or at least a competent soldier, is surely typical of most young men at war, and hardly requires a fantastically deluded mother as an explanatory factor. Moreover, Robert’s role in the flashback section is rather incidental, while Alice is all but absent (even by implication) from the war section; if the flashback had been given from Robert’s (rather than Alice’s) point of view, it might have related more clearly to the rest of the book, but then those particular scenes would have been weakened in the process. Which is to say, alas, that the two stories really don’t belong in the same novel—not ideally anyway, not in a novel written by a man who believed structure was among the highest virtues of narrative art (“Don’t be seduced by prose, Grace; the point is structure”).
But Alice alone is worth the price of admission, so to speak, and there’s much to commend in every part of the book, whether or not it all works as a whole. In a better world, then, A Special Providence would have been treated as a noteworthy transitional effort by a writer of the first rank, who’d already produced two arguable classics; instead it was all but ignored by reviewers and public alike, dismissed as Just Another War Novel. And meanwhile nobody loathed the book more than its author, who considered omitting it from future pages listing “Other Books by Richard Yates.” At the time he comforted himself with the prospect of writing “better and easier” books, but first he’d have to get his confidence back, and that would prove a long, ravaging process. “Let’s see,” he later said to a friend. “I guess I first got to know you right around the end of the sixties, right? Just about the time I started falling apart.…”