CHAPTER FOUR
That first year back from the war was a lonely time for Yates. Whether by choice or circumstance, he was drifting away from his old Avon friends. Hugh Pratt, about to be married in Rochester, came home from medical school one day to find that Yates had showed up out of nowhere, left a wedding gift with Pratt’s mother, and departed. Pratt never heard from him again. As for Yates’s other friends, they were mostly busy with college or career, or had become tiresome like Bick Wright. Russell Benedict, too, was beginning to pall; whatever Yates wanted out of bachelorhood wasn’t to be found in Benedict’s company. Yates longed to make new friends who were “young, poor, bright, humorous, very much alive and headed in the right direction”—a direction off the beaten track, to be sure, the sort of path taken by abstract beings whom he really did call “golden people.” The long hours he spent in Village bars (“trying to figure out what was going on”) had proved a fruitless guide, and pretty much always would.
At some point he renewed his acquaintance with one Jeff Macaulay, an Avon classmate known for having coined the word plerb (“a synonym for anything you need a synonym for”); Macaulay is also noteworthy for having introduced Yates to Sheila Bryant, who at the time was having a small party at her mother’s apartment on East Sixty-first. Sheila was not quite nineteen at the time—a tall, severely pretty redhead who’d recently graduated from Katharine Gibbs Secretarial School and now had what she rather defensively called “a good job” at the Cavendish Trading Corporation, where she worked as a stenographer in the accounting department. Before that she’d done a bit of acting at Bronxville High School and was deemed to have talent, though she was far too sensible to pursue it as a career. After a while she and Yates left the party to continue their talk in private—a talk that convinced both they had a great deal in common, which in a way they did.
For one thing Sheila’s childhood was, perhaps, even more luridly awful than Yates’s. Her father was the British actor Charles Bryant, whose one claim to fame, or infamy, was his involvement with the great theater and silent-movie actress Alla Nazimova. For more than ten years, beginning in 1912, the two lived together and claimed to be married, though in fact the union was never legally or physically consummated. Nazimova was a lesbian insofar as she bothered, and hence the burly six-foot-three Bryant served as a credible beard and pleasant, undemanding companion who agreed to be her business manager as well. Nazimova’s friend Patsy Ruth described Bryant as “very pompous, ultra-British, extremely good-looking, or so people thought at the time. He had a self-important managerial air, but did nothing for Madame except spend her money.” When at last Nazimova decided to “divorce” the no-talent Chumps (as she fondly called him), he persuaded his Allikins (as he called her) to sign a phony document, dated 1918, in which she agreed to pay both her and Bryant’s future income tax, lest the IRS discover the true nature of their arrangement and demand back taxes. In return he gave his word as a gentleman never to reveal their secret, but was forced to renege when he married Sheila’s mother, Marjorie Gilhooley, in 1925; as far as the public knew, Bryant and Nazimova had never been divorced, and hence it behooved the wily Chumps to point out that indeed they’d never been married in the first place. The ensuing scandal all but destroyed Nazimova’s career, while Bryant settled into what he hoped would be a pleasantly domestic state of semiretirement.
His wife Marjorie had a bit of money and even a fine pedigree, despite a surname that suggested Irish peasantry. In fact her father was Justice Gilhooley of the New Jersey Supreme Court, but it was her mother, a New York Kendrick no less, who conferred a degree of gentility on the family. Marjorie attended Vassar and had an interest in French literature, in light of which it seems odd that she should end up marrying a washed-up, not overbright, middle-aged actor such as Charles Bryant, whatever his looks and dashing British manner. Perhaps what attracted each to each, apart from similarly polished facades, was their essential vulgarity: Bryant had been a bank clerk from a lower-middle-class family before he turned to acting and blackmail, while Marjorie would go on to become a member of the John Birch Society—a zealous reactionary racist who was known to return letters if they had FDR’s likeness on the stamps. But what this unsavory couple may have had most in common was that both were miserable parents.
Sheila and her older brother Charlie were raised by her mother’s sister—at first because their parents claimed to have no time for them (Marjorie sold real-estate and Charles still took the occasional stage role), and then because they weren’t getting along, and finally because they were divorced (in 1936) and had little interest in caring for children anyway. Also, Charles Bryant had run through their money with the same skill he’d shown as Nazimova’s business manager, and most of whatever was left was lost in the Depression. The caretaking aunt was also somewhat reduced, but still owned property and was solvent enough to move to Miami Beach for her arthritis, or wherever else her fancy took her. In fact they moved so often that Sheila would eventually attend some twelve different schools, though her formal education didn’t actually begin until third grade. At that time they were still living in New York, where she and Charlie were enrolled at the elite Dalton School. Sheila, however, was a poor student (having never been taught so much as the alphabet), and Charlie’s disturbing behavior soon got him expelled.* After that, whenever possible, the aunt would send them away to second-rate boarding schools, where they were invariably the shabbiest and most neglected among their wealthier classmates. Indeed, “shabby-genteel” would later become a favorite epithet of Sheila’s, one that struck a deep chord in Yates as well.
Such an upbringing took a grievous toll on Sheila’s brother, a bright but increasingly bizarre young man, while Sheila herself seemed to emerge relatively unscathed. All her adult life she’d briskly admit that she disliked her parents as well as the aunt who’d grudgingly cared for her, but that didn’t mean she wanted anybody to feel sorry for her—least of all Yates, some of whose early stories (as well as parts of Revolutionary Road) were attempts to make sense of Sheila’s inner life as a child. “It was nothing like what he imagined,” she insists. “He made it seem like I was torn apart by my father’s absence, but that’s what he felt as a child, not me.” Which seems plausible up to a point, though evidence suggests that Sheila’s wounds were deep and abiding, however adept she became at hiding them.
She never did catch up in school. At Hunter High she flunked almost everything but English, and ended up at Bronxville her senior year. Her peripatetic childhood had left her socially awkward—like Yates she constantly found herself the only kid in school who didn’t know anybody—and she was desperate for acceptance. At Bronxville there was a clique of girls who called themselves “the Web,” and Sheila’s only ambition was to become a member. “She did all the wrong things,” said her friend Ann Barker. “She tried to suck up and was very gauche about it. And of course she had to smoke, because that was the thing to do.” More than fifty years later, Barker asked Sheila if it still bothered her that she hadn’t been accepted by the Bronxville clique. “Oh, you mean the Web!” Sheila replied, and said she didn’t know why she hadn’t gotten in, since her aunt had written her a recommendation, and so on. “She still felt the hurt,” said Barker, who’d long forgotten the name of the clique until Sheila reminded her.
But at the time she affected not to care, and took to cultivating a jadedly sophisticated manner. Barker had a brother at West Point, and Sheila urged her to get them invited to a dance so they could meet cadets and mingle with college girls; also she insisted they had to have fur coats—a muskrat imitation of mink in Sheila’s case and a “rat paw or rabbit wrapper of sorts” in Barker’s. But at the dance they were not mistaken for college girls. As Barker recalled, “Sheila lit and smoked her cigarettes with great aplomb, and I just shrank, not even knowing how to feign worldliness.” By then Sheila had decided to become a thespian like her father (whom she professed to admire greatly, though she later called him “a silly man”), and certainly her protean personality would seem conducive. When she got the lead in the Bronxville senior play she persuaded both parents to attend, and afterward her father observed that she was “very good at acting the actress.” Whereupon Sheila dropped acting and decided to attend secretarial school, rather abruptly changing her accent from a genteel Westchester drawl to that of a savvy New York working girl. As Yates noted in “Regards at Home”:
… some of her speech mannerisms made me wince. Instead of “yeah” she said “yaw,” often while squinting against the smoke of a cigarette; she said “as per usual” too—an accounting department witticism, I think—and instead of saying “everything” she often said “the works.” That was the way smart, no-nonsense New York secretaries talked, and a smart, no-nonsense New York secretary was all she had ever allowed herself to be.
Not quite “ever,” nor did Sheila entirely relinquish her old persona. She always dressed smartly, with elegant understatement, never wearing patterned clothes because, as she put it, she herself was too “printed” (that is, with a redhead’s freckles) to wear a pattern. Also she refused to refer to her future husband as “Dick,” which was too coarse; for most of their married life he became “Rich,” and for a while that caught on with family and friends as well.
* * *
They were together constantly for the first year of their courtship, and the more they fought, the more they worked to convince each other that they were in love, since “the movies had proved time and again that love was like that.” An early impediment to intimacy was solved when Sheila moved out of her mother’s place (a step she would have taken in any case) and found an apartment on the Upper West Side with two sisters, Mary and Doris Bialek, both of whom were “wowed” by their roommate’s new boyfriend.* Not only was he tall and “terribly good-looking,” as Doris recalled, but also charming in a quiet sort of way; he was somewhat less quiet when he drank (“a bit too much” even then), but still charming and a lot more funny, since he rarely joked when sober.
The couple were torn between the bourgeois white-collar world of their working lives and that of hip nonconformity to be found, they supposed, in certain recesses of the Village and elsewhere. But both were wary of unconventional behavior for its own sake, and felt rather alienated from the whole bohemian milieu—the “half-phoney art talk that [made] the rafters ring at the San Remo,” as Yates put it a few years later. At the time, though, they both seemed to concede the romantic appeal of such a scene, at least in comparison with whatever passed for fun among the Bialek sisters and certain friends from the office. At night, then, they shed their quotidian shells and worked at becoming personages. Before long they were both so comfortable in their newfound freedom that they even managed to shock a few friends, one of whom found the two in bed together and not even embarrassed about it—Sheila picked a pair of panties off the floor, then curtsied and withdrew to the bathroom without so much as a blush. Meanwhile the couple spoke of moving to Europe someday, where perhaps they’d find not only themselves, but others who weren’t mortified by matters such as premarital sex.
Things were going about as well as could be expected until it came time to meet the parents. On one side this wasn’t a problem—Yates’s introduction to the divided Bryants went more or less without a hitch: Marjorie would always regard him as a nice-enough young man (never suspecting how intensely he disliked her), while the impressively bulky and semifamous father rather awed his prospective son-in-law, such was the contrast between Charles Bryant and the diminutive, meekly deceased Vincent Yates. It’s possible Bryant might have become a father of sorts to Yates (if not Sheila), but as it happened he died of liver cancer a few months after that first meeting.
Dookie was another matter. In her loneliness she bitterly resented the demands this girl was making on Richard’s time, and her paradoxical sense of delicacy was affronted by the manner in which that time was spent. She hardly saw her son anymore, except when he breezed through in the morning to change clothes for work, and when she finally did meet Sheila—if one accepts the account given in “Regards at Home”*—the dislike was immediate and mutual. “Well, she’s a pleasant girl, dear” (says the mother in the story), “but I don’t see how you can find her so attractive.” As for Sheila, she thought Dookie ridiculous at best, dismissing her as an “art bum.” Dookie apparently tipped her hand (during “one of her uncontrollable rages”) when she referred to Sheila as “that cheap little Irish slut”; and finally, when Yates was hospitalized with pneumonia toward the end of 1947, the two women’s bedside visits seem to have coincided with unfortunate results. Who knows whether Sheila actually made a ribald reference to Yates’s healthy color (“The best part is, he’s the same color all over”), but Dookie’s reaction to some such remark was apt to be that of her fictional alter ego: “[She chose] to take it in silence, slightly lowering her eyelids and lifting her chin, like a dowager obliged to confront an impudent scullery maid.”
Dookie, in short, was like a whiff of ammonia to Sheila, abruptly rousing her from a dream of romantic questing with this handsome but frail young man who wanted to be a writer. There was no future in it, she decided, reverting at once to the level-headed outlook of a no-nonsense New York secretary. Yates’s salary at the UP was hardly enough for him and his mother, much less a wife, and as for his fiction—what was likely to come of that? In a later letter to Sheila, Yates characterized her attitude as follows: “[Y]ou had [my writing] figured as a pleasant but hopelessly unworldly knack which anyone in their right mind would gladly swap for a degree in Accountancy out of NYU.” True enough, though it was only part of the whole dismal picture: Sheila was all of twenty; she wanted to meet other, more practical men; and finally Yates had an obligation to his mother, an aging “art bum” with no other hope of subsistence. Sheila wanted to make a clean break.
After Yates’s latest bout with pneumonia, the doctor advised him that he was highly susceptible to tuberculosis (yet another reason for Sheila to beg off), and for a while he imagined himself heading for an early grave like Keats, minus the literary immortality. Despondent, he tried calling Sheila on the phone, though usually one of the Bialek sisters would answer and say (as instructed) that she wasn’t home; but sometimes Sheila was obliged to pick up and listen, and it eventually began to wear her down. She wasn’t made of stone, after all, nor was she meeting other viable men, and such persistence was flattering in a baffling sort of way. “Dick had a terrible thing with loneliness,” she later observed. “If he formed an attachment, he’d be half-destroyed if it ended. Really I think that’s what did him in. He could never bear the thought of losing close people.”
Meanwhile his evenings were free again, and that meant coming home and keeping his mother company. According to “Regards,” she greeted him one night with a peculiar buoyancy, and Yates thought “for a moment of unreasoning hope” that she might have found a job. But no. As “resident sculptor” at Pen and Brush she’d been asked to contribute a bit of light entertainment to an upcoming party, and she was eager to give her son a preview (“with bright eyes and a brisk little hopping around on the floor of our wretched home”). It was a parody of the old Chiquita Banana jingle:
Oh, we are the sculptors and we’ve—come to say
You have to treat the sculptors in a—certain way …
Yates decided to get out: “I borrowed three hundred dollars from the bank, gave it to my mother … and told her, in so many words, that she was on her own.” Almost immediately life began to improve. He moved to a dark apartment on Jones Street and advertised for a roommate, who proved to be a compatible young man named Blanchard “Jerry” Cain—a mechanical engineer with a rather lurid past. Back in San Francisco Cain had become involved with a married woman named Jessie, who had a young son; when her husband divorced her and sought custody, she’d fled to New York with the boy and gone underground. After a seemly interval, Jerry had changed his name from “Redner” to “Cain” and followed her. Like Yates he was shy and outwardly conventional—an engineer, after all—but with quirky restive depths. According to his adopted son, he was a superb jazz-pianist who occasionally played in “low piano bars of the Village,” which suggested a sort of latent “golden person” status; but what surely appealed to Yates most, at least at the outset, was Cain’s kindred disdain for a “pretentious” and “totally inadequate mother” who fancied herself a poet.* Also the roommates had extreme poverty in common: Cain was new to the city and holding an ad hoc job, while a good part of Yates’s meager wages went toward paying off the bank loan that had bought his freedom. Cain would later remark that his most emblematic memory of this time was when Yates brandished the entire contents of their fridge—a rotten orange—and muttered over and over, “What is to be done…?”
Once Dookie was out of the picture, Yates and Sheila were reconciled. The couple spent a lot of time with their new friends Jerry and Jessie, and perhaps that quixotic love affair made an impression. In any event, shortly after the Cains themselves were married, Sheila capitulated to Yates. “I figured ‘Oh well, what the hell…’” she remembered a half century later, and laughed. “God, whatever made me marry that guy in the first place?”
* * *
The wedding took place on June 8, 1948. Mary Bialek was the maid of honor; there was no best man or any other witnesses (the Cains had to work during the day). Because Sheila was under twenty-one the law required a church wedding, so after some calls from City Hall they took their license uptown to a Presbyterian church on Park Avenue, where the minister and his wife were waiting for them. The ceremony was performed with sweetness and dispatch, and before long they were back on Jones Street, where Yates was still on the lam from Dookie. Sheila’s mother stopped by and gave them a cooking pot, a few friends wished them well, and that was that.
With the Cains they soon found a picturesque place on West Twelfth Street near the river: a three-story apartment building with a tunnel leading through the ground floor to a courtyard, in the middle of which was a tiny “Hansel and Gretel cottage,” as one friend described it. The couples flipped a coin for the cottage and the Yateses lost, taking instead a seedy but well-lighted room on the third floor of the outer building. A frequent visitor was Sheila’s brother, Charlie, who’d managed to graduate from Harvard and was now working for a government agency in Washington. Charlie was strange as ever, emphatic and opinionated, but he and his brother-in-law were friendly in a rather combative way. The only person Charlie felt entirely at ease with was his sister, though he admired the fact that Yates wanted to be a writer and was eager to read his stories and help in whatever way he could, which might have caused Yates a ticklish moment or two.
As he’d later admit, Yates’s early publicity and newspaper work (to say nothing of Dookie and other drains) had left him without much time or vitality for writing fiction. What little he did produce seemed barely good enough to keep him going, or rather not bad enough to make him quit. But then he was only twenty-two, and so far he’d managed to live like his idol Hemingway in almost every other respect—he’d gone to war, skipped college, worked for a newspaper, and married young. Now that he was married, though, there was a constant witness to that awkward apprenticeship of his, and perhaps for her sake he tried harder than ever to make good. Each night after dinner—no matter how exhausted after a long day at a job he despised—Yates would retire behind a folding screen, switch on his desk lamp, and impersonate Hemingway at his typewriter. “But it was here, of course,” as he wrote in “Builders,”
under the white stare of that lamp, that the tenuous parallel between Hemingway and me endured its heaviest strain. Because it wasn’t “Up in Michigan” that came out of my machine; it wasn’t any “Three Day Blow,” or “The Killers”; very often, in fact, it wasn’t really anything at all, and even when it was something [my wife] called “marvelous,” I knew deep down that it was always, always something bad.
Let it serve as some measure of his desperation that he really did answer an ad for an “Unusual free-lance opportunity” placed by a cabbie in the Saturday Review of Literature. Readers of “Builders” will know the rest, but the episode warrants a brief summary here. The cabbie proposed that Yates ghostwrite a series of “autobiographical” stories about, of course, a heroic cabbie who changes the lives of his clients with bits of wise advice given in the nick of time. At first Yates took the job because he misunderstood the terms (the man had shown him a canceled check to a previous ghostwriter in the amount of twenty-five dollars, which turned out to be in payment for five stories rather than one), and then kept doing it because he was almost able to believe that the cabbie would sell the stories as planned to Reader’s Digest. Yates also persisted because he took pride in the surprising craftsmanship of his own hackwork. Nothing came of the arrangement, needless to say, except for the boost it gave Yates’s shaky self-confidence as a writer.
But for every boost there were letdowns—a lot of them, as his stories were rejected one after the other. The editors of Harper’s, however, went too far when they attached a flyer for The Art of Readable Writing, by Rudolf Flesch (“author of The Art of Plain Talk”), to the latest in a long series of rejections, whereupon the wounded Yates reacted with a letter of protest. A sympathetic editor hastened to assure him that no offense was intended; it was common practice for mavens such as Flesch to circularize the Harper’sslush pile. “Seriously,” the editor inquired, “does this practice seem to you improper, or were you just having some fun with us?” Yates’s response doesn’t survive, though a second note from Harper’s suggests that Yates had been “very courteous” and perhaps a bit humorous in his initial indignation.
This is reassuring, since Yates’s sense of humor was certainly being tried at the time. Almost as soon as he’d reconciled with his mother, she began calling him up “in meekness and urgency” to ask for loans of ten or twenty dollars, until he and Sheila were afraid to answer the phone. Also, being on (relatively) good terms with Dookie meant having her over for dinner, during which she’d talk and drink and finally pass out on the couch.* By then Yates had lost patience with her; at best there was a constant bickering simmer between them, often boiling over into screaming fights. “They were both ‘yelly’ type people,” as Sheila put it, “and Dookie would give as much as she got. She’d burst into tears, but still yell.” The tension was eased for a time when she finally found freelance work sculpting mannequin heads. But it wasn’t long before the National Association of Women Artists offered her a public relations job that—however—required her to work on an indefinite voluntary basis before they put her on salary. “And if she had to spend several months working full-time there without pay”—muses the narrator of “Regards”—“how could she get her mannequin heads done? Wasn’t it ironic how things never seemed to work out quite right? Yeah.”
Meanwhile Yates was “sweating out the ax” at work, since the assistant financial editor had long ago discovered how little this particular rewrite man knew about puts and calls and debentures. A few weeks before Christmas the editor’s hand fell on his shoulder (“right in the middle of a paragraph about domestic corporate bonds in moderately active trading”), and a few days later Yates found himself winding up toy kittens for a Fifth Avenue dimestore. As he wrote in “Builders,” it was “along in there sometime … that [he] gave up whatever was left of the idea of building [his] life on the pattern of Ernest Hemingway’s.” Nor was his next job, at a labor newspaper called the Trade Union Courier, likely to restore his faith in life as a romantic affair. The biweekly tabloid served as the model for the Labor Leader in Yates’s story “A Wrestler with Sharks”—a “badly printed” rag whose employees were either the dregs of the profession or young men marking time until something better came along. At that point Yates may have wondered which category he belonged to.
* * *
And then in April 1949 his luck seemed to change at last, as he began his long intermittent association with Remington Rand, the business machine company that would soon introduce the world’s first commercially viable electronic computer, the UNIVAC. For the exorbitant sum of eighty dollars a week, Yates was hired to write copy for the company’s external house organ, a dismal monthly magazine called Systems. With a man named Dan Woskoff, who designed and illustrated Systems, Yates shared a peaceful cubicle on the eleventh floor and conducted his day in much the same way as Frank Wheeler at Knox Business Machines—chatting, taking long coffee breaks, and writing sales-promotion prose (“Speaking of Production Control, dot, dot, dot”). The best part was that his new colleagues were almost as apathetic and cynical as he, which meant he could goof off with a relatively clear conscience.
It also meant he could go home at night with plenty of energy stored up for his own work, and the results were encouraging. “With Hemingway safely abandoned,” he wrote in “Builders,” “I had moved on to an F. Scott Fitzgerald phase; then, the best of all, I had begun to find what seemed to give every indication of being my own style.” Yates would go on forging his own style, but to some extent he’d never entirely abandon his “F. Scott Fitzgerald phase”—as his friend Robert Lacy put it, Yates was an “unabashed worshiper” of Fitzgerald. And apart from his admiration of the work, Yates found startling biographical parallels with the man: Both he and Fitzgerald were children of eccentric, smothering mothers and ineffectual salesmen fathers, and both were preeminently “shabby-genteel”—poor boys with storied ancestors who often found themselves among the rich, most notably at boarding school, where both endured formative ordeals as the poorest, most unpopular boys on campus. That Fitzgerald had gone to Princeton made Yates even more wistful about missing all that, and his rather mawkish, lifelong sense of the Ivy League derived from the Spires and Gargoyles milieu of This Side of Paradise. Indeed, Yates was quite self-conscious in his cultivation of a Fitzgeraldian mystique, with all that implies of romantic self-destruction—of smoking and drinking and lung ailments and emotional tumult, as well as courtliness (when sober) and a Brooks Brothers wardrobe. Finally, while Yates was at least a head taller than his idol, as young men they resembled each other as closely as brothers.
But it was the work that ultimately mattered, and for Yates The Great Gatsby was holy writ. Encountering the novel for the first time was, quite simply, the definitive milestone of his apprenticeship, without which he might well have found something else to do with his life: Gatsby, Yates declared, was his “formal introduction to the craft.” Both the lyricism of the prose (to his dying day, Yates could hardly read the last page without tears in his eyes) and the peripheral first-person narrator (who is both “enchanted and repelled” by the world of the very rich) were features Yates admired and refined in terms of his own approach. In two other respects, the book’s influence was fundamental. “Every line of dialogue in Gatsby serves to reveal more about the speaker than the speaker might care to have revealed,” Yates wrote in his essay “Some Very Good Masters,” and offered as an example “the awful little party in Myrtle Wilson’s apartment.” But another formal feature was more important still, and arguably became the backbone of Yates’s aesthetic—it would not only prove crucial in his learning how to distance himself from highly personal material, but also provide fodder for a lifetime of teaching spiels:
I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase “objective correlative” until the scene in Gatsby where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explains that they are “the finest specimens of human molars.”
Get it? Got it. That’s what Eliot meant.
Around this time Yates also discovered a contemporary with similar debts—“to Fitzgerald and Lardner,” he later noted, “but he’d settled those accounts honorably”—when the story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared in The New Yorker. Yates loved the subtle accumulation of meaningful details, the elliptical dialogue, and above all the revelation of character through action (for example, Muriel Glass’s oblivious manicure as the phone rings, as her husband ponders suicide, which the delighted Yates called “the essence of aplomb”). After “Bananafish” Yates became an even more devoted reader of The New Yorker; each week he looked forward to the day it came out, when he’d rush to the newsstand to see if there was another story by his favorite new writer, J. D. Salinger. Echoes of Salingerian diction are especially audible in Yates’s early work, and linger faintly in his mature style, the result of his reading over and over his five favorite stories in Nine Stories.* “Here was a man who used language as if it were pure energy beautifully controlled,” Yates wrote, “and who knew exactly what he was doing in every silence as well as in every word.”
One thing that Yates’s early idols had in common was their precocity: By the age of twenty-three Fitzgerald was the best-selling author of This Side of Paradise, the Voice of a Generation no less; at the same age Hemingway was the protégé of Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein, and was on the verge of publishing perhaps the most influential volume of short stories by a twentieth-century American; and whether Yates knew it or not at the time, the Salinger who seemed to emerge fully fledged in the pages of The New Yorkerat the age of twenty-nine had in fact been publishing forgettable but polished fiction for almost eight years. At twenty-three Yates himself remained unpublished, unmentored, and largely unencouraged as a fiction writer. Also worth noting: The young Fitzgerald and Hemingway were married to Zelda and Hadley respectively—one a zany, glamorous muse who was gifted in her own right, the other a tenderhearted servant of her husband’s talent.
Yates had Sheila, who wished him well but “wasn’t really interested.” She was happy to type his stories for him, but when it came to giving an opinion—as he’d insist—she just didn’t know quite what to say. Actually, her letters prove that she was a rather shrewd intuitive reader, but “not literary” as she’d protest over and over, and besides she couldn’t win with the guy: If she gave him a glib compliment (“marvelous”), he’d press her to be more specific, and her efforts to oblige him almost always went awry—either she liked the wrong things or the right things for the wrong reasons, or maybe she even disliked something for right or wrong reasons, whereupon he’d usually explode. It was futile, and after a while she became reluctant to say anything but “don’t bother me,” which only made matters worse. Unsupported, plagued with doubt, cut adrift and blocked most of the time, Yates would lapse into what Sheila called “the broods”—an almost catatonic state of crystallized depression, during which he’d sometimes sit bunched in a chair for hours without so much as a flinch, staring glassily at nothing. It was disturbing at first, and then it became tiresome: self-indulgence, she decided. He should snap out of it.
Sheila was almost as miserable, and no wonder. Secretarial work was a bore, and when she came home there were any number of menial things to do before she even got dinner started—mainly the labor involved in keeping their dingy apartment habitable while her husband, a consummate “bubblehead,” left cigarette ashes all over the floor, the furniture, everywhere, and could hardly do any cleaning himself without breaking something. And if she showed her exasperation or even tried to tease him about it, he’d lose his temper and the fight would be on, until finally Sheila would cover her ears and refuse to say or listen to another word. The worst part was the utter hopelessness of it all: When would the drudgery, the screaming, end? When he became a famous writer?
Things had looked up for a while that previous winter, when Sheila decided to use the money she got for her twenty-first birthday to take acting classes at the New School. As Yates wrote in “Regards”: “She would come home breathless with what she was learning, eager to talk without any secretarial rhetoric at all; those were the best of our times together.” And when her acting class gave a public performance at the end of the term, Sheila’s monologue from Dream Girl was such a hit that the New School offered her a full scholarship. Yates was thrilled, but then, after a few days’ thought, she decided to refuse it: The class had been “fun,” she said, a nice break from her work at Botany Mills (where she was secretary to the market research director, her best job yet), but it was pointless to continue; to pursue acting seriously she’d have to study full-time, and of course that was impossible under the circumstances. “Well, Jesus,” says the husband in “Regards.” “You could quit that dumb little job tomorrow. I can take care of—” “Oh, you can take care of what?” snaps the wife.
I loved the girl who’d wanted to tell me all about “the theater,” the girl who’d stood calm and shy in the thunderclap of applause that followed her scene from Dream Girl. I didn’t much like the dependable typist at Botany Mills, or the grudging potato peeler, or the slow, tired woman who frowned over the ironing board to prove how poor we were. And I didn’t want to be married to anyone, ever, who said things like “Oh, you can take care of what?”
It was almost certainly after the brawl that followed, or sometime very early that summer, that the couple separated and Yates attempted suicide. One can only speculate about what was going through his head when he decided to cut his wrists: His wife was back with the Bialek sisters and wanted a divorce; the “big, ambitious, tragic novel” he’d begun with such hope that spring was now permanently stalled, and of course nobody wanted his short stories; his health was poor, his job was mindless, and there was little promise of anything better, ever. Plus he was very, very tired all the time, and probably at that moment very drunk as well. So he did it, and woke up the next day having to cope with the mess. Perhaps this episode was what he had in mind twelve years later, when Yates wrote apropos of the critic Alfred Kazin’s remark that Revolutionary Road “locates the new American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage”: “Mr. Yates may understand things very well when it comes to writing fiction, and it’s terribly nice for him that he can locate an American tragedy, but the awful part is that in real life he has come painfully close to participating in one … and being one himself, squarely on the field of marriage.” Arguably he’d have better reason at various times in later life to take such drastic action—but apparently he never did, except in the slow and steady fashion of four packs a day. In fact, he rarely missed an apt moment to denounce suicide as “self-indulgent,” especially when one had obligations to others. That summer Yates discovered he was about to have such obligations, whether he and his wife wanted them or not.
For better or worse, then, she came back to him and even quit her “dumb little job” at Botany Mills; the baby was due in March, and meanwhile Sheila sometimes wondered if she’d imagined what Yates had told her about that episode in her absence. But another glance at his wrists confirmed it all over again.*
* * *
Sharon Elizabeth Yates (aka “Mousemeat,” “Mussy,” or simply “the Meat”) was born on March 22, 1950, and was mostly a cause for celebration. Yates was a doting, playful father, though he was awkward changing diapers and handling the baby in general and tended to stick her with pins. Also his writing (such as it was) had to be interrupted while they adjusted themselves to the baby’s schedule, and the prospect of Europe seemed ever dimmer—which was sad, as the thought of quitting their old grind and pursuing the ghosts of Scott and Ernest amid the cafés of Montparnasse had become more appealing than ever. On the other hand, the most practical reason for going—to put an ocean between themselves and Dookie—had become less urgent, since the latter’s tireless volunteerism had finally paid off: A few months before, Ruth Yates had begun a two-year term as president of the National Association of Women Artists, at a salary equal to what her son was making at Remington Rand. A rather startling turn of events while it lasted.
Soon a new and far graver concern rushed to fill the void. For several weeks Yates’s health had been worse than usual: He coughed constantly and felt exhausted and out of breath; mornings he woke up dripping with sweat. His weight had dropped to 140 pounds. Sheila would stand and wait at the top of subway steps while her twenty-four-year-old husband wheezed behind her like an old man. Finally, a month or so after the baby was born, Yates got his chest X-rayed and learned he had advanced tuberculosis. That evening an official from Bellevue came to the apartment and took Yates away to the crowded TB ward, where he stayed for three weeks until space was found at Halloran, the veterans’ hospital on Staten Island. “[A]ll I knew then,” he wrote, “was how good it felt to be encouraged—even to be ordered, by a grim ex-Army nurse wearing a sterile mask—to lie down and stay there.”
In some ways it would prove one of the best things that had ever happened to him. Halloran wasn’t a bad place—with its remote manicured lawns, its reverie of hushed waiting within the separate, single-story TB building. The hundred or so shuffling or wheelchair-bound patients tended to be friendly with one another in a quiet, diffident way that suited Yates: He could talk and listen as much or as little as he liked, and for the most part he felt a genuine sense of solidarity with his fellow consumptives. As he noted in an early draft of “Regards”: “I think death was on all of our minds in those drowsing, melancholy wards, where the bedside radios droned all day in the very sound of boredom; most of us were in no real danger of dying, but our existence seemed clearly to be something less than life.” Every so often Yates would see a doctor for his pneumothorax treatment—a needle between the ribs to inject air into the lung and collapse it—but otherwise there was little to do but lie there.
He had plentiful means to distract himself from morbid thoughts: A group of his Remington Rand friends had chipped in and bought him a large box of Modern Library books; as his future publisher Seymour Lawrence put it, Halloran became Yates’s “Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” What had hitherto inhibited him most as a writer was a dire sense of his own ignorance; since high school his life had been a hamster wheel of war and work and worry, with Dookie’s demands scotching any hope of repose in between. And while Yates would forever remain a slow, insecure writer with a wildly inflated idea of what he’d missed by way of college, his eight months in the TB ward began a lifelong process of autodidactic recompense. Some of the writers he got around to reading there (“without whose work I might never have put together a halfway decent book of my own”) included Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Sinclair Lewis, and Dylan Thomas; particularly he read (and reread) Chekhov, Conrad, Joyce, Jane Austen, Ring Lardner, and Keats. And Flaubert too, though he wouldn’t accord Madame Bovary the sort of scrutiny it deserved (for his own purposes) until several years later.
“I was very independent at the time,” said Sheila, a bit of elliptical dialogue that would have made the authors of Gatsby and Revolutionary Road proud. With her husband indefinitely hospitalized on Staten Island, Sheila was for all purposes single again. She farmed the baby out to a kindly old couple in New Rochelle and found a job at the Dobeckmun Company on West Fifty-seventh, where she was secretary to a publicity director whose mission it was to promote the metallic yarn Lurex. Meanwhile a kindly coworker from Remington Rand, who was fond of Yates and fancied herself a photographer, offered to shoot a portrait of Sheila and the baby that would serve to keep Yates company during the lonely intervals between visits. “It was a strained time,” Sheila concedes; what with visiting the baby and doing her job and whatnot, she wasn’t able to make it out to Halloran (“quite a schlep”) more than every week or so. And when she got there Yates was often reticent or surly or both, and always “smoking like a chimney,” tuberculosis withal, which made her wonder even more what conceivable future there was in staying married to such a man.
Her old Bronxville friend Ann Barker came to live with her in the Twelfth Street apartment, and proved a far more congenial roommate than either of the Bialek sisters or for that matter Yates himself. The two young women were a few doors down from eligible bachelors, and whether by chance or design the women’s cat had a way of wandering into the men’s apartment. At first the men simply tossed it out, until a neighbor advised them of its provenance (“that cat belongs to two pretty ladies”); the next time they returned it in person. A propitious visit: Within three months Barker was engaged to one of the men, John Kowalsky, while Sheila flirted with his roommate and several of his friends—an assortment of NYU and Columbia graduates, not a would-be writer in the bunch. When Sheila was overheard remarking that she was a “grass widow,” Barker reminded her that she wasn’t divorced yet; “Oh, that doesn’t matter!” Sheila hissed, as if it were just a bothersome formality.
When her husband was finally released as an outpatient in February 1951, Sheila decided to stay married on a “wait-and-see basis”: As a bitter Yates later described the situation, she’d decided to be “brave,” taking him back “as a partner in a sensible arrangement of joint parenthood.” A bit on the unromantic side, perhaps, though one can hardly blame Sheila: At twenty-three she had little to look forward to but a life of caring for an infirm “writer” who seemed disinclined to care for himself. There was, however, a peculiar sweetness to Yates—a tolerant devotion (or dependency) that Sheila came to appreciate better over time: “You’re the only person who’s ever loved me,” she wrote him later, “no matter how much I played outside the rules.” Another incentive for sticking around was the $207 a month Yates had been awarded for his “service-connected disability,” which was guaranteed for five years as long as his lungs were checked on a weekly basis at VA-approved clinics “anywhere in the world.” And since ten months had passed since his illness was originally diagnosed, he was entitled to a retroactive lump sum of more than two thousand dollars.
To Sheila the next move was clear: Paris. “Because I mean if we don’t do it now” (says the wife in “Regards”), “while we’re young enough and brave enough, when are we ever going to do it at all?” As Sheila recalled, Yates was suddenly intimidated by the idea: Though he’d “talked constantly” about Europe before his illness, “[tuberculosis] had sapped his will” and now he seemed bent on returning to Remington Rand. But Sheila had enough willpower for both of them; the allure of helping her boss promote Lurex had palled—she was ready for a change, the more drastic the better. Like April Wheeler tuning out her weak-willed, equivocating husband, she pressed ahead with the arrangements.
It didn’t take long. Within a week Yates had done his part by getting in touch with Stephen Benedict, who was then living in Paris. They needed an affordable two- or three-room apartment, Yates wrote, and hoped Benedict could help them “steer clear of the conventional Cook’s-Tour-filthy-postcard set.” Benedict replied that a friend’s place would fall vacant within a month or so, and in the meantime they could live cheaply in one of the pensions. For the sake of economy, though, he advised them to settle in the provinces eventually, and Yates assured him they’d probably head south for the winter: “Our only plans are that we want to stay in Europe indefinitely and I want to do an awful lot of writing.”
They sailed on April 14 aboard the United States, where a “cramped farewell party” was held in their tourist-class cabin. While Sheila changed the baby’s diapers on the upper berth, a dapper-hatted Dookie sat below and regaled the guests (the Cains and Bialeks, plus friends from Botany Mills and Remington Rand) with odd bits of esoterica about the National Association of Women Artists. As she went on talking and drinking, her knees sagged apart until her underpants showed (“an old failing”)—but such ghastliness would soon be in the past, and Yates could afford to feel magnanimous: “I had luck, time, opportunity, a young girl for a wife, and a child of my own.”