CHAPTER FIFTEEN
What Yates called the “ugly and humiliating” events of that summer had taken a lasting toll. Though he hadn’t been badly disfigured by the fire, his good looks had assumed a rather battered quality: His nose was “red and potato-y,” as his daughter Sharon put it, and his beard’s foremost cosmetic purpose was now to conceal the slight burn scars on his cheeks. Smoke inhalation had further damaged his lungs, and his hacking cough became an even more constant nuisance. Mainly the ordeal seemed to age him: Friends who hadn’t seen him in a while were shocked by the difference. He’d become a peculiarly feeble fifty-year-old man.
The destitute Manhattan of the mid-seventies had always seemed alien to Yates, and the fire served to underline the fact that nothing much was left for him there. The last three years had been one disaster after another, the latest of which had left him even more non grata among old acquaintances, not to mention a disturbing burden on his daughter. Still, as long as he had a roof over his head he could always bear up, more or less, and after the fire he called his friend Edward Hoagland about a possible sublet in WestBeth—a HUD housing project of four hundred apartments in the old Bell Lab Building on Hudson Street, where artists with low incomes could live cheaply. But there was a long waiting list, and as Hoagland tried tactfully to explain to Yates, WestBeth wasn’t really his style. “Dick was an O’Hara-Cheever type,” he said, “and there were too many arty beatniks at WestBeth for someone of his quasi–Ivy League gentility.”
When Sam Lawrence heard that Yates was considering a move to Boston, he was guardedly encouraging: “You know several people here and life in the Boston-Cambridge area is far more pleasant and agreeable than Manhattan. And not as distracting or as expensive. I’ve always found it so, as does Dan Wakefield, Tim O’Brien, etc.” Actually Yates didn’t know all that many people in Boston other than Lawrence himself; he’d been gratified to learn that good writers such as Wakefield admired his work, but in fact he’d never been exposed to that circle.* Dubus lived in nearby Haverhill, and Yates’s old student DeWitt Henry was in the city, but that was about it. And lest Yates get the idea that Lawrence would exert himself socially, the latter made a not-so-subtle point of suggesting that Yates get in touch with Joan Norris—the nice publicist who’d paid him that visit in the hospital—if he did decide to move to Boston after his release from Northport. “[She] would be glad to show you around if I’m not here,” he wrote, adding that he’d be traveling for the next two months except for a brief time in September. Without a doubt Lawrence wanted his disaster-prone friend to find a more congenial place to live and work, but not at his own expense.
By late August Yates and what remained of his worldly possessions were installed at the Sheraton Commander near Harvard Square. “I was a bit taken aback by Dick’s abrupt arrival,” said Joan Norris, whom Yates called his “welcoming committee of one.” He was already in town when he finally got in touch with her, and Norris was struck by the extent to which he seemed dependent on an almost total stranger. Worried that she’d given him the “wrong idea,” she nonetheless did her best to get Yates situated: She helped him find an apartment and buy a few pieces of furniture; she showed him the more notable sights. Within a week or so Yates moved into a two-room brownstone apartment at 473 Beacon Street and learned the neighborhood well enough to fend for himself. But he continued to rely on Norris for companionship, despite the fact that she shrank politely from his caresses and always, always declined his invitation to spend the night.
Sam Lawrence did his part with an elegant dinner party at Locke-Ober’s, where Yates inscribed freshly minted copies of The Easter Parade and finally met Wakefield, O’Brien, and others. Lawrence made the usual display of ordering fine wines and toasting Yates with due ceremony. As a publisher he was good about that sort of thing.
* * *
With one infamous exception, reviews for The Easter Parade were the best of Yates’s career, though in later years he was reluctant to accept praise for it. He suspected it was “too skimpy” to compete with his first novel, and besides he’d “dashed it off in eleven months” because he “needed the money.” Nothing that came so easy could be very good in Yates’s eyes. When a friend tried to compliment him on the novel’s “consistent symbolism” (for example, when Pookie paints the hand mirror with lipstick or Emily is rescued by her nephew the priest), Yates was almost aggressively dismissive—as he put it, the book was “autobiography” rather than “allegory”: “Emily fucking Grimes is me,” he laughed. “I mean it was all there lying around. Peter. My poor pretentious mother.” He did give himself credit for one thing, however: “I’m the one who saw it.”*
During the summer of 1976, though, as advance copies circulated among friends and fellow writers, the word got out that Yates (then a mental patient at the Northport VA) had written a masterpiece. “Ask me about The Easter Parade,” Vonnegut remarked to random people, “and I’ll tell you to ask me about Madame Bovary.” When Grace Paley came to Brown for a reading, she and her host Verlin Cassill compared notes on what made the novel—never mind its craft—so deeply moving: “[W]e murmured together about how very, very, very sad you tell the story,” Cassill wrote Yates, “and certainly that’s it, though it might be said in more flowery critical terms.” Because of the novel’s excellence Yates even seemed on the brink of grasping his two great ambitions—publication in The New Yorker and front-page notice by the New York Times Book Review. “You write so damn well!” exclaimed Michael Arlen, a staff writer for the former. “How bloody difficult it is to write a good novel, and how few writers manage it! Well, congratulations: and I hope it brings you some good money. Damn well should.” So now Yates had a wild admirer on the inside. As for that other business, alas, the scheduled front-page review of The Easter Parade was thwarted by a newspaper strike, ending up on page 4.
It was still a fine review. A. G. Mojtabai called the novel a “wrenching tale,” and singled out the author’s subtle but resonant use of symbolism (perhaps to Yates’s chagrin)—as when Emily realizes her sister couldn’t possibly know how to find Pookie’s building at Central Islip when she herself is locked up there: “The image of mother and daughter locked into separate stone buildings in some vast impersonal construction is never underlined by the author,” Mojtabai noted; “it is nothing spectacular, but its strength is considerable and cumulative.” Ross Feld in the New Republic praised the bravery of Yates’s “depressing” vision: “In four novels now, he’s gone his way, and with each one he’s becoming more unusual and valuable.” Feld thought the modest scope of The Easter Parade was deceptive, that in fact it was “paradigmatic” of a vanishing genre—“the urban WASP novel”—a field all but ceded to Yates by the likes of O’Hara, Cheever, and Updike, who’d ceased to particularize the bewildered “disenfranchisement” of the middle class: “Few writers now use so much unflinching care, skill, and discipline to lay out a vision of dogged existence in life’s despite,” Feld concluded. A few reviewers had qualms with what they considered a rather narrow, brutal determinism, but could hardly deny the book’s overall power. “[Yates’s] characters seldom have a chance to enhance their lot by moral or emotional choice,” wrote Richard Todd in the Atlantic. “But the details of their suffering are exact, indisputable and moving.”
Yates’s old friend Anatole Broyard begged to differ. “These [characters] bow down to the imperatives not of life, but of the author’s sense of craftsmanship,” he sneered in the daily Times. “Craft, in The Easter Parade, resembles a kind of etiquette, which keeps the characters inside the confines of predetermined form.” A promising salvo, this, for what might have proved an adept hatchet job, but the rest reads like the sloppy homework of a peevish schoolboy. To support his thesis, Broyard ticked off a number of random examples in which plausible characterization is allegedly sacrificed to some petty consideration of craft. “Would any normal … father say that to his thrilled little daughters?” Broyard wondered about Walter Grimes’s remark that he’s “only a copy-desk man.” “Or does he say it because the author enjoys its dying fall?” With unwitting humor (humorous to a biographer), Broyard also expressed petulant incredulity over a scene that Yates described almost exactly from life—that is, Emily’s last meeting with the alcoholic, toothless Sarah: “Can we believe that her conventional husband and her grown sons would have allowed her to appear this way? Or is she again being sacrificed to a ‘good scene’?” And though Broyard concluded his diatribe by accusing contemporary novelists (as if Yates were representative of their worst tendencies) of being “unwilling or unable to meet their people on their messy terms,” he’d earlier sniped at the “pointless incongruity” (i.e., “messiness”?) of Yates’s characterizations.
Those who wish Yates ill (for whatever reason) are mostly constrained to a single line of attack where The Easter Parade is concerned: that it’s too perfect, too pat, that its merciless craftsmanship works like a kind of infernal machine to grind its characters down. “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life,” the narrator announces at the outset, “and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.” Immediately the reader is swept up in the current of the story—before one can balk at the dark warning of that opening sentence—and just over two hundred pages and fifty nightmarish years later one suddenly arrives full circle at the ironic counterpoint of that final line: “Would you like to come on in and meet the family?” Ah, the family.
If one likes uplift—believes in the family, believes that people tend to learn from their mistakes and so forth—then clearly The Easter Parade will be a bitter read. But a feat of empty craftsmanship it is not. Life goes wrong for the Grimes sisters not because of some implausible contrivance on the part of a sinister narrator, but rather because “they can’t help being the people they are”—Yates’s explicit vision of tragedy. Emily fancies herself “a stickler for accuracy” and is determined to avoid her mother’s follies and pass through life without illusions—but illusions (of love or God or self-worth or whatever) are simply the way people make sense of inexplicable suffering, and by trying to comprehend things at face value Emily comprehends nothing (“I see”) and ends up alone. Least of all can she comprehend Emily Grimes, and hence her male companions tend to be reflections of her own tenuous self-image, and just as unwittingly false. While Emily strives to be an intellectual at Columbia, she ends up with the flabby philosopher manqué Andrew Crawford, who absurdly affects the “demeanor of an athlete at rest.” Due for a spell of carnality after Crawford’s impotence, she spends a number of luxurious nights with the virile Lars Ericson, who proves to be a narcissistic bisexual given to striking poses à la Michelangelo’s David. As for Emily’s own poses and self-deceptions, the most ruinous by far is that of being essentially independent despite her “unfathomable dread of being alone.” The results are evident in Emily’s forced behavior toward Howard Dunninger, her last bulwark against total isolation. Dunninger—who works for a company that makes synthetic fibers, no less—is a sturdy burgher who can offer, if not love, the sort of security Emily desperately needs. But her bewildered self-doubt is such that she often hesitates to make an intimate gesture, lest the man think her too demanding or needy. Thus the affair is circumscribed by a number of nice calculations on Emily’s part, as she labors to become the precise kind of companion that a prosaic fellow such as Dunninger might want. “As she often told him—and she knew it might have been wiser not to tell him at all—she had never enjoyed herself so much with anyone.”
Might it all have worked out differently? Perhaps, if Yates had been the kind of writer Broyard accuses him of being, and thus willing to contrive a particular outcome by making his characters behave implausibly. But of course the opposite is true: Emily and Sarah “can’t help being the people they are,” and so Emily clings to a mirage of independence rather than saving her sister and perhaps herself (“I don’t want her dragging down my life”), while Sarah, in turn, doesn’t really want to be saved—her marriage is “sacred,” after all, and has given her the only real sense of love and security she’s ever known. “Most people do the best they can,” says Emily’s nephew Peter. “When terrible things happen, there usually isn’t anyone to blame.” The idea runs like a gray thread throughout Yates’s work: It’s bleakly true in a way, but it’s insufficient, and it’s meant to be.
As the Flaubertian writer who is “omnipresent and invisible” in his own work, Yates reveals the pattern of his characters’ mistakes without manipulating their fates; he’s off paring his nails, so to speak, while the characters behave as they must. Some readers express exasperation over the fecklessness of Yates’s people, but how would anyone appear from a wholly objective vantage? However we might “rush around trying to do [our] best” (Yates’s phrase), a certain degree of squalor awaits us all—loneliness, error, death—and reminders of this are woven artfully into every page of The Easter Parade. Sarah is marked for disaster by the “fine little blue-white scar” on her eyelid (“like the hesitant stroke of a pencil”); the main street of St. Charles is dominated by a sign announcing BLOOD AND SAND WORMS; Pookie strives for “flair” but can’t put her lipstick on straight and dribbles spaghetti sauce on her chin, and after all her name is Grimes. Perhaps the most poignant symbol is the eponymous “Easter Parade” photograph of Tony and Sarah—“smiling at each other like the very soul of romance in the April sunshine”—which Emily finds “hanging awry” after Sarah’s funeral, “as if from some heavy blow that had shuddered the wall.”
Groping to explain the greatness of The Easter Parade, Cassill had it right: It arises from the “very, very, very sad” way Yates tells the story, and of course this too is a function of craft. Even the novel’s summary narration serves the larger purpose of emphasizing the characters’ helplessness, as if things are happening to them, suddenly, but with terrible logic. Part Two begins, “For a few years after she divorced Andrew Crawford”—a splendid elliptical leap from the previous line (“I hate your body”); what follows is a bit of deft exposition about Emily’s jobs in the meantime, her two abortions, a representative scene of her struggling to make sense of it all (ABORTION: A WOMAN’S VIEW), and finally her grateful return to the everyday routine of work and parties. “Then suddenly it was 1955, and she was thirty years old.” All in two pages.
The Easter Parade was one of five novels nominated for that year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award (John Gardner’s October Light won, which must have galled Yates), a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book of the Year, as well as one of fifty “notable books” selected by the American Library Association. Delacorte sold more than twelve thousand in hardback and the Book-of-the-Month Club sold a colossal (for Yates) 112,000. The breadth of its appeal was such that Saul Bellow declared it one of the “top three novels of the year,” which may help to explain why Yates himself thought so little of it.
* * *
For Yates there was no more resting between books (if he could help it). In later years his son-in-law would chide him—“If I were you I’d take off for Bermuda”—but the only rewarding escape anymore was writing. As Bob Lacy noted, “Henri Troyat, the biographer, says of Chekhov that by the time he reached forty ‘life had become an excuse for writing.’ For the Dick Yates I knew, life was always an excuse for writing. He didn’t have much of a knack for living.” Yates would not have demurred, and his life in Boston was almost entirely built around his work; whenever he deviated from his narrow routine, disaster had a way of pouncing.
In a later essay (“A Salute to Mister Yates”), Dubus evoked his friend’s spartan apartment on Beacon Street as a kind of objective correlative for Yates’s total devotion to his craft: “It was … a place that should be left intact when Dick moved, a place young writers should go to, and sit in, and ask themselves whether or not their commitment to writing had enough heart to live, thirty years later, as Dick’s did: with time his only luxury, and absolute honesty one of his few rewards.” Perhaps, but given the way Dubus described this humble shrine, it’s hard to imagine any earnest young apprentice being much daunted by it. He mentioned the L-shaped tables that served as Yates’s desk, covered with a tidy assortment of piles: the legal pads he used for first drafts, a typed manuscript for revision, and galley proofs of other writers’ books; on the shorter table was a manual typewriter and many sharpened pencils. Yates confined himself almost entirely to the room in which he worked; Dubus “never saw him enter” the tiny spare bedroom where Gina slept during her visits. Next to his desk was a sofa where guests would sit, while Yates sat opposite on his narrow bed (“always made,” Dubus pointed out). The rest of his furniture consisted of a bookshelf and a derelict, unplugged TV that the writer Penelope Mortimer had left Yates when she went back to England. (Yates neither watched TV nor went to the movies.) The only decoration on the walls were some of Gina’s drawings; there was a large bay window overlooking an alley. The refrigerator was stocked with three items: instant coffee, beer, and yogurt, the last of which Yates ate for breakfast (yogurt was one of the “great discoveries” of his later life: tastes good, goes down easy). Yates himself was quite content with the place.
The words squalid and depressing appear nowhere in Dubus’s essay, though they almost invariably come up when other friends attempt to do justice to that same apartment. “It was so bare and awful,” said Peggy Rambach, Dubus’s third wife. “It stank of cigarette smoke, the blue velvet curtains had turned brown with dust, the walls were gray with nicotine. I once wrote a poem about a child’s picture on Dick’s empty wall; it was a very affecting sight.” “Dick was the least bourgeois person I ever met,” said Mark Costello, referring to Yates’s disdain for material frippery, which even the most hardened bohemians might have found excessive. As for that particular apartment, Costello summed it up as “fucking grim.” There were only one or two wan lights, and particularly at night the place was so gloomy that hardly anyone but Yates could bear it for very long. Robin Metz remembers staring at the circle of crushed cockroaches around Yates’s swivel desk chair: “I reflected that his life had constricted to this little space, full of dead roaches, around his writing. That was all that was left: his whole life.”
Not entirely. Yates’s “clean, well-lighted place” in Boston was the Crossroads Irish Pub on the corner of Beacon and Massachusetts Avenue, about a hundred yards from his apartment. Except for special occasions, Yates ate almost every lunch and dinner there for eleven years. Usually he sat alone in a particular booth opposite the bar in front, smoking and staring into space; sometimes he’d mutter to himself between coughing jags. The employees affected not to notice. The owner of the place was a kindly, barrel-shaped Boston Irishman named Michael Brodigan, whose experience with quirky, solitary bachelors was extensive. For a while he had no idea that Yates was a writer, much less a rather celebrated one, but it was pretty much all the same to both men: Brodigan would give Yates a friendly greeting and linger if encouraged, though generally Yates preferred to be left alone with his thoughts. In the afternoon he’d go home and nap, then write for a few more hours and return to the Crossroads around seven. By ten o’clock, usually, he’d drunk enough Michelob to face his dark apartment and get some sleep.
Yates was not one to insist on special treatment—if his usual booth was taken, he’d gloomily proceed to the next—but he was clearly a man who wanted looking after, and the waitresses at the Crossroads did their best. At times when he was drinking liquor he liked his Jim Beam served in a particular skinny four-ounce glass with water on the side, but there was only one such glass on the premises; Yates was noticeably crestfallen when it wasn’t available. Soon it was set aside as “Dick’s glass.” Yates also enjoyed horseradish with the Sunday special—a prime rib sandwich—so a jar was kept behind the bar for the one person who asked for it; when a waitress discovered it empty one Sunday, she ducked across the street to the Marlborough Market in her apron. All of which was part of a larger campaign to cheer the poor man up. At his worst Yates gave the impression of being a uniquely despondent street person: beard matted, raincoat and suit rumpled and stained, muttering and hacking and half mad. (One might add that his button-down shirts were generally clean and pressed no matter what; taking these to the dry cleaner was part of an instinctive routine.) “What’re you so happy about?” he’d grumble at his waitresses’ show of compensatory perkiness; then he’d try to muster a polite smile before putting his head back in his hands and resuming his funk. After he’d gone for his afternoon nap, waitresses would prepare the booth for his return a few hours later, wiping down both sides thoroughly to get all the ashes scattered by his explosive coughing.
One of the few companions who continued to meet Yates over the years was Andre Dubus, who every so often made a point of driving (or being driven) down from Haverhill to drink with his friend at the Crossroads. Dubus’s love and admiration for Yates was absolute, though neither man was given to soul-baring intimacies (unless coated in masculine bluster à la “that loneliness shit”), and their talks tended to skim along the well-worn surface of writing and books. Sometimes Dubus would coax his friend to Fenway for a Red Sox game, but Yates was immune to such ancillary enthusiasms and mostly they stayed at the Crossroads. Brodigan noted that the only times he really saw Yates “rowdy”—animated in a happy way—was in Dubus’s company (or, later, Dan Wakefield’s).
Though he cultivated a certain degree of austerity, Yates hated being so alone in the world. Above all he longed for female companionship, and as one of the greatest living writers in America he was not without opportunity. Any number of women admired his work and wanted to meet him, and generally Yates made a good first impression: modest, courteous, quietly amusing—a gentleman. He also drank too much, got incensed at the least provocation, obliviously raised his voice in public, knocked things over, coughed incessantly, and caused searing embarrassment to himself and others. It didn’t require an unusual degree of insight to realize that he couldn’t help himself, and most women were willing to be patient up to a point—an inevitable point when, drained, they’d withdraw to a safe (if sympathetic) distance.
Penelope Mortimer was one of these. Writer-in-residence at Boston University when Yates came to the city, she’d admired The Easter Parade and found the author a kindred spirit of sorts: Both chain-smoked, both were fed up with teaching (Mortimer, like Yates, emphasized the transience of her duties by keeping her office stripped of adornment or personal effects), and both had tales to tell of long blocked spells that occasionally rendered life all but hopeless. At fifty-eight Mortimer was more mature than Yates usually liked, but she was also handsome and formidable and a wonderful writer. Yates referred to her as a personage.
But it wasn’t long before she was finding reasons to avoid him: “I’m not calling back just now because I’m sunk and no good for you,” she wrote, and gave the rather lame excuse—“this may seem very trivial”—that she’d failed in her latest attempt to quit smoking and was depressed about it. “Richard I’m sorry to be such a near-dead loss at the moment. That’s a real apology, not one of yours which are all needless.” Yates scribbled a draft of his response on the back of this note, which helps put the matter into more definite perspective:
My apologies aren’t “needless”—this last batch was to have been for my dreary outburst at your mention of Edward Albee’s name. I’ll probably get over that sort of thing some day, but nobody should be expected to wait. I’m very, very sorry you’re so low.… Please bear in mind that you’re a lovely … gifted girl, and that I’d rather be [illegible: looks like “quietly” or “quickly”] carried out of your house than welcomed into almost any other I know. Love, Dick
That last statement strongly suggests Yates had already been physically removed from Mortimer’s apartment—whether kicking and screaming or calmly supine, one cannot know.* What might be surmised from certain other epistolary remarks, though, was that Yates had a fascination with the novelty (c. 1976–77) of Mortimer’s answering machine, and tended to leave rambling and probably sodden messages, particularly when she refused to see him. Also, Mortimer was fiercely opinionated but unwilling, it seems, to weather outbursts from Yates as a result of that fact. “While Revolutionary Road is a lot better than a lot of Updike,” she wrote him, “it’s a lot like a lot of Updike too (don’t be MAD at me).” In general she was going through her own bad patch at the time, and while she evidently cared for Yates and empathized only too well with his malaise (she left him her TV after all), such was not the stuff of romance: “Two scared people don’t make one brave one, have you noticed?” she wrote.
Around then too he met a middle-aged divorcée named Lynn Meyer at a cocktail party given by Vonnegut’s ex-wife. Meyer had read Revolutionary Road when it was first published, and was thrilled to meet the “exceptionally courteous” author, to whom she gushed about how much the book had meant to people of their generation. Since she figured Yates was “too shy” to ask for her phone number (emphatic praise of his work tended to make Yates pleased but uncomfortable), she called and invited him to another party a few days later. “It was terrible,” she recalled. “Neither of us knew many people there, and everyone was dressed in these Christmas-colored clothes. It was Martha Stewart’s worst nightmare.” But Yates gracefully endured, and afterward made Meyer laugh by deconstructing the “smug, rich, dumb” people at the party.
During the month or so that they dated, Yates didn’t appear to be drinking much. He offered to keep a bottle of Scotch in his apartment for Meyer’s sake, and assured her it wouldn’t tempt him. And while he often corrected her with the same acuity he’d brought to his critique of the “dumb” nouveau riche, he was generally tactful about it, as if it were simply a matter of mutual interest. When she mentioned a visit to the “beauty parlor,” Yates replied, “You don’t say ‘beauty parlor.’ That’s the wrong class. You say ‘hairdresser.’” Also they talked about Meyer’s children, both in prep school at the time. Yates was intrigued by the general subject of prep schools, but made it clear he’d rather not meet Meyer’s children and bitterly remarked on his mother’s “creepy” tendency to expose her boyfriends to him as a child.
The two rarely met other people, and as a change of pace they’d planned to drive to the writer George Garrett’s house in Maine for a weekend in January. When they met for dinner that Thursday, though, Yates was jumpy and irritable and coughing more than usual: He explained that, as a result of going off his medication, he’d had a seizure the night before and passed out in a snowdrift.* Though he tried to make light of the incident, he was plainly traumatized both mentally and physically; still, he insisted they stick to their weekend plans, and promised to get plenty of rest before their departure two days later.
That Saturday a big snowstorm struck, and Meyer called Yates to cancel the trip. But Yates wanted to talk about something else. Earlier Meyer had mentioned a friend who, when drunk, rode a horse into her house yelling, “The British are coming! The British are coming!”; Meyer had thought it curious how such people became “situational alcoholics”—that is, given to regular benders but otherwise somewhat abstemious. Yates had seemed a touch defensive when the subject first came up, but now he was downright obsessed by it: “Why are you so critical of her?” he snapped on the phone. “I think it’s refreshing! I think it’s a wonderful gesture!” He went on and on and wouldn’t be persuaded to drop it. Finally Meyer told him she was coming over.
She found Yates in very bad shape. “He was drinking and smoking about ten cigarettes at once,” she remembered. “He’d light one, forget about it, and light another. I thought he was going to set himself on fire again.” Yates hadn’t eaten (or slept) since their dinner on Thursday, and Meyer coaxed him out of his apartment to get some food. He never stopped talking for a moment—a “grandiose and strange” monologue about the various people who’d betrayed and abandoned him over the years; when Meyer tried to distract him with happier subjects, he’d become angry (“Why are we talking about this?”). At last she called her psychiatrist for advice, and was told to stay with Yates until he got exhausted. At the moment it seemed a remote contingency. Yates would begin to lie down, then jump back up and start pacing again, or try to write, all the while lighting cigarettes one after the other and talking, talking. Meyer began to worry that she herself would be the one to get exhausted and wake up in flames.
As night fell, Meyer began to panic. She couldn’t hold out much longer, nor could she leave Yates alone like this. “Don’t tell my daughters!” he said over and over. The only two people Yates would allow her to call in the Boston area were Mortimer and Dubus, but Meyer couldn’t get hold of either. Her psychiatrist advised her to take him “somewhere safe”—that is, the hospital—but Yates frowned on the idea. For hours they went back and forth about it, and finally he relented. “I drove him to the walk-in clinic at Massachusetts General,” said Meyer, “which was run by a couple of four-year-olds. They refused to care for him because he had no insurance. I told them he was a famous writer with plenty of money, but it cut no ice.” Eventually the suggestion was made that Yates be taken to the Bedford VA, but the ambulance was long in coming and meanwhile the exhausted Meyer was enjoined to stay with the patient. By then Yates was coming down at last, mumbling dazed apologies as the terrible awareness began to dawn.
When it was over Meyer was on the edge of collapse herself, and arranged to visit friends in Florida to recuperate. Before she left town, though, she wanted to make sure somebody was looking after Yates. She called Sam Lawrence—whom she knew slightly through her ex-husband—and left a detailed message as to Yates’s whereabouts and condition. She called Vonnegut, and listened as the black humorist regaled her with other Yatesian adventures (“like it was all a big lark”). She called George Garrett to cancel their visit. The upshot of Meyer’s laudable concern was that the story of the snowdrift and its aftermath became a cornerstone of Yates’s legend. “I was impressed by the way he persevered,” said the writer Madison Smartt Bell (who eventually heard the story from Garrett). “After burning down his apartment and falling into that snowdrift, I figured, you know, he’d survived both fire and ice.”
After that, Yates became more of a pariah than ever—particularly in Boston, where he was derided in polite literary circles as a drunken joke. “I used to regard Dick as a test by which to judge others,” said Bill Keough, an old Iowa friend whom Yates occasionally visited in West Townsend. “If someone was an ambitious shit, he wouldn’t care about Dick, because his books didn’t sell and people thought him odd, a loser. But if you cared about writing, you cared about Dick too.” Very few people in Boston, it seemed, cared about writing, and it soon became apparent to Yates that most people knew the worst wherever they happened to live. Shortly after his release from the Bedford VA, he got a long-distance call from his old girlfriend Carolyn Gaiser, who advised him to quit drinking. “I was afraid he’d fly into one of his rages,” Gaiser recalled, “but he thanked me for my concern and said he wasn’t ready to do anything that drastic. It was pretty clear he wasn’t eager to stay on the phone.”
As for Lynn Meyer, she returned to Boston in February and had lunch with Yates, who was chastened and gentlemanly as ever. When she mentioned that she’d gotten engaged in Florida, he offered warm congratulations and even came to Meyer’s farewell party a few months later and met her new husband. Around that time, too, a party was given for Penelope Mortimer before her return to England. John Updike attended with his new wife, but he and Yates appear not to have spoken. In fact Yates mostly sat alone nursing his drink while the others danced (the guest of honor had particularly wanted dancing). Mortimer’s final note to Yates was sent from London in June. “Please will you understand how important you are and how necessary both as a writer and a person.… I’m sorry if I didn’t live up to expectations, but it’s a zone I find hard to live in. I’m delighted and honored (American) to know you and to go on knowing you.”
* * *
Yates found comfort where he could, but in most cases he accepted the defection of random women with a kind of desolate equanimity. As he sat in the Crossroads smoking and muttering, it was mostly Martha on his mind, or so he’d tell others when the need to confide became overwhelming. The last few ghastly years had made him miss her more than ever—if such were possible—and as late as 1977 he continued to put off divorce in hope of her return. Martha, meanwhile, had moved to Marin County, California, in order to put as many miles as possible between her and Yates. “He couldn’t grasp that she’d had it with him,” said Yates’s soon-to-be psychiatrist. “He never could see what a burden he put on other people.” Yates blamed himself for the breakup, but the suddenness of it (as he saw it) continued to puzzle him; he could only figure that she’d been taken in by “the Libbers” and what he called “the artsy-fartsy crowd.” “Imagine going to California to make gew-gaws!” he’d say, which was how he’d refer to Martha’s dabbling in art. In moments of particular bitterness he’d point out that he always thought her photography and whatnot was a sham, and wondered why anyone would swap taking care of a real artist for making “gew-gaws.” As for what he imagined to be her motives for moving to Marin County, they were the same attributed to Sarah Davenport in Young Hearts Crying: “Marin County … had now become well known as a lively and inviting sanctuary for recently divorced young women, many of them mothers—and for swinging, stomping, surprisingly nice young men.” She also taught at a Montessori school there.
Yates called to speak to Gina every Sunday morning, and when Martha answered the phone he’d often try to keep her on the line with solicitous inquiries about one thing and another. She’d respond politely, but if he got too personal or began to wax sentimental she’d cut him off, and Yates would be hurt. Finally, when the exasperated woman informed him she was seeking no-fault divorce in California, Yates wrote a letter expressing a forlorn perplexity toward her refusal to talk things over, begging her to explain once and for all her reasons for leaving him. This she did. “I have gotten the impression you would rather believe your own version of things than hear mine,” she wrote. “I resent your request that I be ‘gentle and considerate of my words.’ I did that for far too many years at the expense of honesty.” And so, with what must have struck the hurting man as brutal candor (rather than a remarkably temperate elision of specific malfeasances on his part), Martha explained the gist of her grievances:
You’re the one who wrote Revolutionary Road. You know the torments people go through trying to live out roles, exacting demands from loved ones, secretly longing to be free. But underneath it all I think you don’t believe in freedom. It too is a farce in your view. But I always did guiltily long to be free.… Your statement that ‘most women of your age can be presumed to have found, by now, about as much of themselves as there ever was to find’ is ridiculous to me.… There were many times when I allowed your way of thinking and of seeing things to impose a type of censorship on mine.…
I’m afraid that if I don’t emphasize how difficult you were to live with, how exhausting it was trying to please you, understand you, and finally how huge was my resentment at having given myself away for so many years, you will miss the point entirely. So here is that emphasis.
Emphasis or no, Yates went on talking about “Libbers” and “gew-gaws,” and a year later he’d vent his bitterness in the story “A Natural Girl,” which depicts a more benign version of Yates being callously dumped by a simulacrum of Martha. But at some level he knew better, all the more so over time. As Michael Davenport reflects about his young wife, “Sarah was too nice a girl ever to be charged with ‘torturing’ a man; he had always known that. Still, she had never been the kind of girl who would collaborate in allowing her future to fall apart, and that was something he’d always known about her, too.”
The divorce was finalized that spring, which momentarily seemed to improve Martha’s mood where her ex-husband was concerned. When he wrote asking her, in effect, to remember the good times and all the ways he’d tried to make her happy—enumerating a number of specific material gifts—Martha replied in a way that suggested he wasn’t far wrong in assuming she’d been influenced by certain modish ideas. “Does an apple tree give skirts, does a rosebush give shoes, does the sky give watches?” she wrote, imploring Yates to meditate more on things unseen. Specifically she urged him to get psychoanalyzed: “You’ve always had so many voices, but no one to help you interpret them. This would be called dream therapy, or Jungian therapy—ask among your friends. Accept the obvious gifts of your own psyche.”
Whether because of Martha’s well-meaning advice, or simply because he needed someone to talk to (even a psychiatrist), Yates subsequently arranged to meet for weekly psychotherapy sessions with the thirty-four-year-old Winthrop Burr at the VA outpatient clinic in Boston. “The nicest thing about me is my stories,” he announced at the outset. In a manner that was generally brusque and detached—he was skeptical as ever that airing his pain to a stranger would serve any useful purpose—Yates spoke of his agonizing loneliness since the breakup of his marriage. He mentioned a few people who begrudged him little bits of their time, but really he had no close friends. Also he lived in constant fear of humiliation: People treated him as a “skid-row figure” because, Yates supposed, he coughed and smoked and looked unwell. (That he was often drunk wasn’t emphasized as a factor.) For example, he’d gotten into a number of fights with cabbies who were rude to him; Yates would start yelling and they’d make him get out. Once he tried to meet Sam Lawrence for a drink at the Parker House hotel, but employees wouldn’t let him in the door. Tracing the cause of his alienation and its manifold effects, Yates would speak of his mother with a scathing, obsessive hatred that sometimes brought him to the brink of tears.
“There was a lot to admire in Yates,” said Burr. “He evoked feelings of protectiveness in others.” Over the years Yates was occasionally gracious in acknowledging the young psychiatrist’s help, though often he was quite the opposite. In retrospect Burr regrets taking him as a patient: “You don’t do psychodynamic therapy with people who are drinking. It doesn’t help them, and it might make them worse [because] it stirs up emotions that make them want to drink.” In the beginning, though, Burr wasn’t aware of the extent of his patient’s drinking, as Yates was at pains to conceal it; but in due course Burr came to believe that Yates’s increasingly frequent breakdowns, indeed any number of woes, were all but entirely caused by alcohol.
* * *
Meanwhile a happy incongruity between Yates’s life and work continued to obtain. As he intensely reflected on his childhood, both for Burr’s benefit and that of A Good School, he felt more and more compelled to write about that seminal episode when his mother had been commissioned to sculpt FDR (as well as a cluster of other memories from that time, such as her drunkenly getting into bed with him and puking on his pillow). At first Yates considered working the material into his novel somewhere, but finally decided to put the book aside for a month or so and write a separate, self-contained account. It was a breakthrough for Yates, whose every attempt to write short fiction over the past fifteen years (more than twenty, really, with the single exception of “Builders”) had come to naught. “I was so pleased with the way [“Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired”] turned out,” he told an interviewer, “that I thought I might try to write six others when A Good School was over and make a book of them.” Writing stories would also enable him to renew his campaign to breach the walls of The New Yorker.
In April, Yates accepted a two-week Visiting Writer stint at Columbia, though in general he was more reluctant than ever to enter a classroom: As always, he was inclined to husband his time and energy for writing, but also the prospect of ridicule and failure had become far more threatening. The Amherst debacle haunted him, and then of course he was morbidly conscious of the way people stared at him on a daily basis, as if he were a curious and disturbing spectacle. “How do I look?” he asked Crossroads owner Michael Brodigan after his ejection from the Parker House. “Is something wrong with me?” Even a chance to visit his friend Geoff Clark at Roger Williams was more than he could face at the time: “Thanks for the invitation,” he wrote, “but I’ll shy away. Every time I meet one of your classes I make a horse’s ass of myself, and that tendency would be rampantly worse if I were given a chance to ‘explain’ The Easter Parade to a roomful of girls.”
Much more welcome was the chance to resume his mentorly role on a private level with his semi-estranged daughter Monica, who’d switched her college major from chemistry to English—a rather momentous decision. In recent years she’d become vexed by an awareness that she was the one most like her father, with all that seemed to portend of potential instability, and hence the pursuit of a science degree had been one way of dodging her fate. Besides, neither parent had ever made much of Yates’s writing, which Monica had come to perceive as so much self-indulgent escapism; throughout her childhood she’d told friends he was a “college professor,” which sounded better. Then a fellow student turned out to be an ardent admirer of Revolutionary Road—indeed, seemed starstruck at the prospect of meeting the author. And Monica’s first creative-writing teacher at the University of Massachusetts was none other than George Cuomo—whose career Yates had helped launch as editor of Stories for the Sixties—and Cuomo made it clear that Yates had a very considerable reputation. Only then did Monica read her father’s entire oeuvre and realize how good he was, which inspired her to be a writer too. “I’m so incredibly lucky to have you!” she wrote him. “As soon as I finish [a story] I really like, I’ll bring it to you—we can talk about everything.…”
And so it came to pass, and for the most part it was good for both. For the next decade or so, among the first things Yates would mention in almost any conversation was the fact that his daughter was a writer, too. It bolstered his self-respect to know that, at least in one sense, he was a good role model; he gave extensive, tactful critiques of her stories (“He figured things out,” she said, “and he was always right”), and recommended her best work to Monica McCall, who accepted her namesake as a client. Candidly, though, Yates’s misgivings were at least as great as his pride: He considered writing fiction “the hardest and loneliest profession in the world,” and knew only too well the kind of dismal toll such a life could take. And then, truth be known (though he was careful not to labor this point in mixed company), Yates didn’t think women were cut out to be serious artists, since such a difficult business interfered with their main function as caregivers. He regarded a handful of female writers as first-rate—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Alice Munro, Gina Berriault, perhaps one or two others—and thought the rest would be better off focusing their energy elsewhere. “Dad thought the best, most fulfilling thing for a woman was to get married and have a family,” said Monica. But meanwhile, in lieu of such a blessed turn of events, he wished her well.
Among his daughters Monica became his closest confidante, the one who understood him best and vice versa, but Gina was his heart. Affectionate, pretty, utterly nonjudgmental where her father was concerned, she was the great solace of his later years; those who knew Yates at his sickest and saddest were struck by the way he’d light up—his color quite literally returning—at the mention of her name: “She was the one he had a crush on,” was how one friend put it. From the beginning they had a breezy rapport. “What’s that over your head but not the ceiling?” he’d say to the giggling toddler over the phone. “Sky.” “What’s that under your feet but not the floor?” “Ground.” Along with the sweetness of Gina’s nature, another reason the relationship never soured was distance, which necessarily limited their contact to brief visits two or three times a year. At such intervals Yates was careful to be on his best behavior. “I was told at a very early age that Dad had a drinking problem,” said Gina. “I remember him always having a beer in hand at his apartments and always ordering lots of drinks at restaurants. However, I don’t remember him as ever acting particularly disorderly, slurring, or having boozy breath or anything like that.” Her earliest memory of Yates was his visit to California in the summer of 1977, when she was five. In his motel room they made up a game called “mow the meadow”: Yates covered his eyes while Gina went around the room with a carton of cigarettes (a make-believe lawn mower) saying “Mow, mow, mow,”—until Yates opened his eyes and exclaimed, “Oh, what pretty flowers!” “He seemed to enjoy the game as much as I did and had unlimited patience,” Gina recalled, “repeating the same silly thing over and over without getting bored. We both remembered ‘mow the meadow’ with fondness over the years.” Meanwhile Yates would discuss the girl’s mother only in the most glowing terms, romanticizing her to the point of rendering her all but unrecognizable—e.g., “Your mother was always very athletic”—which, as Gina points out, simply wasn’t the case.
Friends noticed how Yates continued to pursue Martha, as it were, in the form of other young women of similar body type—“a dancer’s body,” as Robin Metz described it: “lithe, flat-chested, willowy.” Very little is known about a number of these women apart from their first names and whatever else can be gleaned from the odd letter among Yates’s papers.* Some were students or aspiring writers who admired his work; some were simply impressionable young women at loose ends who were flattered by the attention of a semi-celebrity. For a short while in the fall of 1977, for example, Yates was attached to a woman named Bonnie—a waitress who fancied herself a painter and wrote such remarks as, “I am planning to make a cutely decorated box in which I am going to drop neatly lettered clichés about my life—THE REAL STUFF—for example … ‘If you will it, it’s not a dream’ (Henry Winkler, ‘The Fonz’) because this is all that is keeping me going, keeping me painting everyday.” Bonnie had a girlfriend named Tommie, whom Yates also briefly pursued until she moved that spring to New Orleans, whence she wrote him a note commending his “gentle passion.”
Yates’s cohort in this occasional Arcadia was Andre Dubus, who expected “salvation not mere pussy” from very young women and kept an apt Fitzgerald quote (from a letter to his daughter) tacked on his wall: “You’ve heard me say before that I think the faces of most American women over thirty are relief maps of petulant and bewildered unhappiness.” Yates would not have disagreed, and in fact was oft given to the rueful reflection that Martha had gone wrong—“got ideas in her head”—around the age of thirty. This, then, was another respect in which he and Dubus were an abiding, if sometimes rivalrous, comfort to each other. Peggy Rambach was a sophomore at Tufts in October 1977, when she met her future husband at the Boston Globe book fair; later that day she found herself spliced between him and Yates at a seafood restaurant. “I was nineteen years old,” she recalled, “and both of them were putting the moves on me. It was later a joke between them—that Andre had won me. At the time I guess I was dazzled. Here were two well-known writers paying so much attention to me.”
But in Yates’s case they were never dazzled for long, though many remained fond of him. “For fifteen years,” noted the writer Mary Robison, “I was just a lot of disappointment to Dick. Oh, but I loved him. How could I not? He was understanding and knowing and kind.” Robison was in her twenties when she met Yates, and apart from the matter of her considerable talent, she eminently filled the bill in terms of his preferred “body type” and other aesthetic requirements. “There are many things that I should thank you for,” she wrote him after leaving Boston to take a teaching position in Ohio. “I love you, Dick, for what you are, and what you were for me, and the things you did that were nice. Nice.” Among the things he did for her (so he told friends) was help with her writing—those celebrated stories about bleak middle-class lives that placed her at the forefront of so-called minimalism, the general trend back to realistic fiction in the seventies and eighties that was partly influenced by Richard Yates. As Robison’s reputation grew with a run of stories in The New Yorker, Yates would sometimes grumble about how he’d been “used”—but all the while he kept a photo of Robison on his desk, and whenever the two met in Boston or various writers’ conferences he was known to make hopeful passes at her. Finally, in 1986, she wrote him a note from Bennington that expressed a paradigm of the sentiments Yates aroused in women who appreciated his finer points but simply couldn’t bear him for long: “I’ve loved you for a decade,” she wrote, but added that she was “guaranteed” to disappoint him and asked that he not let her “lead [him] on” anymore. “We both know I can’t be with you, Dick.”
To some extent Yates blamed the brevity of these attachments on a persistent problem—toward the end of the seventies, he was less and less able to function sexually. “It bothered him a lot,” said Winthrop Burr, “and he was quite demanding that something be done about it.” Naturally Burr suggested he stop (or drastically reduce) drinking and smoking, but Yates angrily rejected the idea. Burr then referred him to a urologist, who couldn’t find much the matter, which only compounded Yates’s frustration. All Burr could do was advise and readvise that alcohol and tobacco were indeed major factors. The choice was clear: Either abstain from both or settle for a life of “gentle passion.”
* * *
“Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired” was rejected by The New Yorker, which offered the editorial gloss that it was “soft-edged and idealized” (a phrase that often sprang to Yates’s bitter lips in years to come); it was then published in the February 1978 issue of the Atlantic. Its appearance occasioned a number of admiring letters, among them a note from Seymour Krim: “It’s this combination of memoir/fiction, rooted in American history,… which permits the story to go beyond its characters and makes them representatives of a time as well as themselves.” This appeared to be the consensus view, as the story went on to win a National Magazine Award as well as inclusion in that year’s O. Henry volume. More importantly it spurred Yates on to a spate of story writing: By April two stories were in “various stages of partial first draft,” another was “barely emerging in notes-and-outline form,” and still another was “floating around out there in the blue.” At the time Yates was planning a total of five long stories for a collection titled Five Kinds of Dismay. “The trouble with all this,” he wrote a friend, “is that Delacorte doesn’t want to mess with it—or at least, if they decide they do, it’ll be in a very disgruntled and half-hearted way.”
For the moment, though, Yates could afford to call his own shots somewhat. “A Good School is magnificent and your strongest book to date,” Sam Lawrence gushed in February. “The way you’ve managed to create an entire world with such incredible economy impresses me more than I can say.” Others agreed that Yates’s technical mastery was impressive as ever, but what especially struck many were aspects of what Krim called “the mellow Yates”: “[A Good School] somehow turns a corner,” Krim noted, and the writer Hannah Green likewise found the performance “so moving and so perfect” that her letter to Lawrence turned into an almost flustered panegyric: “[Yates is] brilliant, a consummate artist, and it’s his feeling that is so right, sensitive, refined, strong, firm, RIGHT!” Feeling, indeed, seemed the key: Not only had Yates continued to grow as a writer in terms of craft, but also philosophically, salvaging from the ruins of his life a greater degree of compassion for suffering humankind. “I’m moved by a blessed irony that we’ve all watched slowly unfolding,” Cassill wrote Lawrence.
You know, all his life Dick has wanted to be as good a writer as Fitzgerald—and now, by grace of the irony they both should appreciate, he stands out as a better one.… Dick buttresses [his] moral imagination with a craftsmanship that Fitzgerald only displayed sporadically, even in his best things.… I’m as moved to tears by thinking about Dick and his long, lonely haul as by his fine new book. How he’s kept the faith.
Lawrence’s faith as a publisher, meanwhile, was greater than ever: On the strength of such an ecstatic advance response, as well as a preview excerpt to be run in the June 25 issue of the New York Times Book Review (“The best free advertising we could hope for”), he ordered an optimistic first printing of fifty thousand copies.
It was a drastic miscalculation, of course, though reviews offered the usual bit of moral recompense. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in the daily Times, called the novel “thoroughly charming” and noted that while Yates “skirts the edge of sentimentality … he steers clear of that, too, and what we end up with is both funny and touching, both likable and ludicrous.” Julian Moynahan’s lengthy treatment in the Sunday Times examined the deceptive complexity of Yates’s narrative voice, inasmuch as it prepares the reader for a first-person memoir in the foreword only to revert to fictional omniscience throughout the main narrative; what promises to be merely personal, then, is in fact “a first-class work of the imagination marked by an interest in real history, by a sophisticated awareness of the ambiguous relation between any fiction and its ‘real-life’ sources, and by a recognition that no authors, including the Joyces, Flauberts, Jane Austens and Henry Millers, have ever been able to write themselves completely out.” Even The New Yorker tossed the author a sop in its “Briefly Noted” section (“a graceful and articulate narrative”), while Yates’s old student Jonathan Penner used the occasion to make a thorough case in the New Republic for the larger importance of Yates’s work: “In an age embarrassed by story-telling, half-persuaded by chic critics that fiction should repel innocent belief, [Yates] tells stories we believe. In a time when experiment with language is more highly valued than skill with it, he experiments no more than fish do with swimming.”
There were a few demurrals. John Skow in Time called Yates “a good but doleful writer” and conceded nothing of the novel’s relatively hopeful outlook: “Staring unflinchingly at bad nerves and loneliness is admirable, but fearing to look at any other sort of human condition is not.” Nicholas Guild of the Washington Post found the novel “well-written and entertaining,” but added that the balance between “boy plots” and “adult plots” amounted almost to a clash of genres and that the tidy resolution of each was hackneyed and artificial. And finally Thomas R. Edward observed in the New York Review of Books that the novel’s “principal events seem more suited to television drama than to serious fiction.”
Impressed by “the mellow Yates” of A Good School, some readers were inclined to overrate it somewhat (not least Sam Lawrence, who doubtless hoped the more upbeat mood would lead to greater sales). The skillful observation and deft pacing of the novel moved Jerome Klinkowitz, an astute critic of Yates’s work, to rank it as his best: “If writing were baseball, this would by Richard Yates’s perfect game.” But this is perhaps going too far. A Good School is an expert performance within its narrow range of substance and length, and serves most notably to indicate that Yates was evolving in interesting ways.
As Moynahan pointed out, the dimensions of the book’s autobiographical material are broadened by the omniscient narrator (an approach that would culminate in the elaborately shifting viewpoints of Cold Spring Harbor), which has the effect of enhancing the protagonist’s coming-of-age story with contrapuntal sketches of his fellow misfits, old and young, at Dorset Academy. Like Bill Grove, almost all the characters tend to be afflicted in some way—whether overtly in the case of the polio-stricken Jack Draper’s “funny little hands” and “funny little feet,” or Terry Flynn’s “elegantly stiff” little finger (a nice objective correlative for his latent homosexuality, as it stands primly erect while he “frown[s] soberly over the task” of masturbating Grove), or psychologically in the case of the aptly named Van Loon (he of the lingering bowel movements) or Haskell, who has a full-blown mental breakdown. As for Grove himself, he is a kind of amalgam of maladjustment, and through the eyes of “Frenchy” La Prade we observe him in all his blue-nailed inadequacy: “The kid was a mess.… He seemed in danger of stumbling over his own legs as he made his way to a chair, and he sat so awkwardly as to suggest it might be impossible for his body to find composure. What an advertisement for Dorset Academy!” An advertisement indeed, since Dorset Academy is a veritable haven for aberration posing as a pretentious brand of “individualism”—a “school for the sons of the gentry” that appears to have been “conceived in the studios of Walt Disney.”
But Yates is not simply making cheap fun of such a place and its people, as witnessed by what novelist Stewart O’Nan called the “complex, generous voice” of Yates’s first-person frame narrator: “His voice here is so inviting in his patience and forthrightness,” O’Nan wrote, “his willingness to both expose his deepest pain and forgive everyone (even himself) for their shortcomings … that naturally other writers have tried to emulate it—Richard Ford most notably in his story ‘Communist’ and myself in my first novel Snow Angels.” Tellingly, one of the most unsympathetic characters at the outset of the novel, Steve MacKenzie—the Dorset bully who derides Bill Grove as a “puddle of piss”—comes off best at the end, when the narrator recalls meeting him circa 1955 and being given a bit of kindly, pertinent advice: “Listen, though: don’t look back too much, okay? You can drive yourself crazy that way.” MacKenzie, then, has grown up to become a decent if unremarkable fellow, as have the rest of Grove’s misfit schoolmates in their own pardonable fashion. A few (it is noted) have died in the war—a fate that loomed over every member of Grove’s class, and lent poignancy and a touch of grandeur to their incidental foibles. But finally, the one person who should have meant the most to the narrator and meant so little—his father—haunts him now, and the novel’s final lines (wherein Grove imagines what he might have said to the man to make amends) linger in the mind like that “pure ribbon of sound” heard fleetingly from some ghost station a thousand miles away:
I will probably always ask my father such questions in the privacy of my heart, seeking his love as I failed and failed to seek it when it mattered; but all that—as he used to suggest on being pressed to sing “Danny Boy,” taking a backward step, making a little negative wave of the hand, smiling and frowning at the same time—all that is in the past.
A Good School is indeed a “thoroughly charming” novel that in a number of writerly ways transcends its genre; superficially, though, it’s liable to strike the general reader as just another coming-of-age story about preppies, and as such it was largely ignored. “I want to reassure you that we will work things out,” Lawrence wrote the anxious Yates, when sales stalled around the usual ten thousand copies. “I’m committed to your work and to you as an author till death do us part and I’m not about to let either of us down.” It was true, and in the meantime Lawrence was building what he hoped would prove a lucrative backlist, while both men nibbled the tidbits of occasional recognition. For A Good School the pickings were rather slim: The Times listed it in their annual roundup as one of the notable books of 1978, and it was nominated for the St. Botolph’s Award for best novel by a New England writer—won, however, by Yates’s old nemesis Maureen Howard, whom he’d made cry some seventeen years before.
A curious postscript were the odd ghosts A Good School flushed out of the author’s past. “Since reading your book,” wrote Yates’s old tormenter Richard Edward Thomas (“Ret”) Hunter, “I have looked a number of times in the mirror at my ‘animal rooting mouth.’” Hunter reported that he was now a lonely and somewhat impoverished widower living in Miami (“If I had been after truffles [that is, with his rooting mouth], I’d now be rich,” he wryly remarked), and Yates was so contrite about his unkind description of Hunter that he wrote the man a long mollifying letter. He was also contacted by a woman named Mary Nickerson, who identified herself as a friend of Bick Wright’s widow, Ann: “She knows that I also read your books, she and Bick having put all their friends on to you.… Ann said she’d wondered if you would like to hear what did happen to Bick.” Yates was intrigued, and accepted an invitation to dine at Nickerson’s home in Brookline with her and Ann Wright Jones. That night he learned that his rebellious, sardonic, mawkish friend Bick had become an English teacher after quitting the seminary, and for all the man’s absurdities (most of which had remained intact over the years) he was a dedicated, inspiring teacher with whom adolescents felt an immediate rapport. He’d died in Houston of a brain tumor at the age of thirty-nine. To the end he remained bitter about the whole privileged ethos of his unhappy childhood.
Yates wanted to hear more, and subsequently invited the widow to meet him at the Crossroads, where he pumped her with questions and begged her to send him a copy of the Avon yearbook (which she did). As Ann Wright Jones remembered the occasion, “I got the impression that Bick’s tragedy applied even more to [Yates]—he could never pull out of the past, his family, and apply his perceptiveness to the larger world. At least Bick found some release in his teaching, by relating to children.”