CHAPTER FIVE
They arrived in Paris on April 20 and checked into a cheap hotel called the Atlantic. Yates went to the U.S. Embassy and arranged for medical care, which consisted of the usual weekly injections of air to maintain a partial collapse of both lungs. Meanwhile they waited for Benedict’s friend to clear out of his apartment on the Rue du Bac in St.-Germain-des-Prés, and Yates took Sheila and the baby on long strolls around the Left Bank—where as a young GI he’d “walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves.” Five years later the secret was safe as ever, though they did find a café they liked, the Deux Magots, where at least they could be among a fair number of people who spoke English.
Yates was determined to “[grind] out short stories at the rate of about one a month,” and as soon as they were settled he got down to work. While he spent his days writing, smoking, and coughing, Sheila was obliged to find ways of keeping herself and the baby out of the apartment as much as possible—a pleasant-enough occupation, most of the time: She did the marketing, went to museums, shopped, explored, and consoled herself that at least it wasn’t New York. But there were bad days when she felt at loose ends, anonymous—“that awful feeling of not quite being there when people look at you,” she later described it—and the baby served as a constant reminder (if a winsome one) that she’d committed herself to a man, a life, that didn’t seem right no matter what the scenery.
She was free to do as she liked at night, when it was her husband’s turn to look after “the Meat,” and before long she was recruited to act in a “dreadful” play. So negligible was this enterprise that Sheila hardly remembers the rather famous man who wrote and directed (novelist Meyer Levin, who later won acclaim as the author of Compulsion),* and has quite forgotten such matters as title, plot, character, or even how she got involved in the first place (she suspects she was hired with a group of other American and Swedish expatriates who were spotted at certain cafés). It was something to do. The evening rehearsals went on for a longish while, and finally on opening night there was a fairly large audience—then a bit fewer the next night, and hardly anybody after that. The play closed in less than a week. Yates attended one of the more uncrowded performances and seemed rather bemused by the badness of it all.
Sheila’s steadiest companion was a former prostitute named Chantal, who was kept as a mistress by one of Yates’s Avon acquaintances, a dull rich person whom everyone avoided as much as possible, and whose name is lost to posterity. Neither Chantal nor Sheila spoke the other’s language, though they were compatible in other ways and managed to communicate quite effectively after a fashion. Once the play was over and Sheila again found herself with too much time to think, Chantal enticed her to explore some of the more raffish aspects of Paris—particularly the bals musettes where poor people went to amuse themselves on weekends, and where Sheila occasionally found herself in “sticky situations” with tough-looking laborers who wanted more than a dance. But Chantal knew how to handle such fellows, and in general their nights made for an exhilarating change.
As for Yates, he felt tired and ill at the end of the day, and apart from the odd drink at the Deux Magots he wasn’t up to doing much or asking questions about whatever his wife was doing. He was happy to stay home with the Meat and consider his progress as a writer, and at least in this respect he must have felt gratified. Two stories he wrote in Paris, “A Last Fling, Like,” and “The Canal,” give a sense of his range and growth at this time.
The first is little more than a well-done pastiche of the Lardneresque monologue wherein a stock vulgarian reveals herself as such in some unwitting way. The “fling” in question is a trip to Europe the narrator takes prior to going ahead with her marriage to some nonentity named Marty. As she tells it to a girlfriend, she spent the vacation flirting with a number of lackluster men (evoked with Salingerian pathos: “[He] looked a little bit like Richard Widmark, but he was sort of on the plump side and his hands were always wet”) and having random misadventures, until she feels nothing but relief to be back in her familiar office-girl routine. Europe, in short, is a bust, though it does afford her a delicious chance to put Marty in his place when he protests that he wouldn’t have gone gadding off to Europe before their wedding; as the narrator gleefully reports her riposte to the girlfriend: “‘Listen, brother, don’t kid yourself.’ I says, ‘You’d do it quick enough, if you had the money.’”
With “The Canal” Yates began to find his own voice, as well as a vision to go with it—indeed, the story is such an advance over “Fling” that one can hardly believe they were written within months of each other. That “Canal” is a far more personal story may explain its relative success, up to a point: That is, such an exercise served to steer Yates away from secondhand characters and situations, though it would be a long time before he got over the worst of his squeamishness toward what he feared was subjective, “unformed” work. Perhaps he was also uncomfortable casting such a cold eye on, say, his marriage and the sustaining illusions thereof—as when Lew Miller, in the frame-story of “Canal,” imagines how his wife perceives him at an awful party where he waxes reticent while a more prosperous man boasts about the war:
Miller realized uneasily that for Betty there was a special kind of women’s-magazine romanticism in having a husband who never talked about the war—a faintly tragic, sensitive husband, perhaps, or at any rate a charmingly modest one—so that it really didn’t matter if Nancy Brace’s husband was more handsome, more solid in his Brooks Brothers suit and, once, more dashing in his trim lieutenant’s uniform.
But the wife’s “women’s-magazine romanticism” is not so pronounced that she’s immune to exasperation with her “modest” husband’s dull refusal to discuss his own wartime heroics: “Darling,” she says after the party, “why do you let an ass like that eclipse you so in a conversation?” The answer, of course, is that Lew Miller is deeply ashamed of his relative failure as a soldier—a secret he’s kept from his wife—and while he’d rather not admit as much, he refuses to tell self-aggrandizing lies about it either. Thus, while Miller’s final outburst at his wife (“‘Will you shut up? Will you please for God’s sake shut up?’”) is somewhat derived from similar moments in famous stories by Salinger and Hemingway,* it also faithfully represents the reality of Yates’s life with Sheila, in a way that probably made both uneasy. He would have to find a way to distance himself from such material.
* * *
In October they moved to Juan-les-Pins, near Cap d’Antibes and Cannes on the Riviera—where the Fitzgeralds had frolicked with the Murphys and Hemingways, with Isadora Duncan and Picasso and Dorothy Parker (later a fan of Richard Yates); the very place where Scott had written much of Gatsby, and the place he evoked so elegiacally in Tender Is the Night.
It was a different story for Yates. By the time he arrived, le beau monde was long gone, and their shabby apartment at La Monada was a far cry from Gausse’s Hotel in Tender. Nor were there any wacky waterskiing antics behind whooshing hydroplanes, or swimming in a “choppy little four-beat crawl,” or lounging on a raft where laughing expats sat clinking martini glasses. There was none of that: Yates was too sick to swim and didn’t like the outdoors anyway. He couldn’t even do the few things he’d enjoyed in Paris—walking around city streets, talking to English-speaking people in cafés—since they were almost two miles from town, and he was damned if he’d ride a girl’s bicycle (with a child seat fixed to the back) to get there, even if he had the stamina to do so, which he didn’t.
Instead of becoming some lesser, latter-day version of Scott and Zelda, Rich and Sheila reverted to a pair of homely alter egos they dubbed “Pinner and Shirley”: Pinner was a clinging, doe-eyed invalid who resented his wife’s unabashed enjoyment of the beach, the countryside, the long bike rides into town with the baby in tow for a pleasant day’s marketing; Shirley was the caustic scold who tended to return from these outings wondering why on earth a man on death’s door should keep smoking like a chimney and leaving ashes all over the place and couldn’t he at least go for a walk now and then and get a little fresh air? And Shirley it was who put her foot down, finally, refusing to fetch her husband’s cigarettes from Cannes anymore, no matter how pathetically he begged or threatened in her pedaling wake (“[Pinner’s] old broken espadrilles slapping the dust,” as he recalled the scene). What made matters worse was that Sheila herself liked to have the odd smoke after dinner, and went right on having it (“I wasn’t going to quit! There wasn’t anything wrong with me!”) while her husband sat glowering but quiet because of the baby. Later he’d root her butts out of the trash and smoke them down to the last spark, but resented having to do so. “This was the principal source of friction,” Sheila recalled, with marvelous understatement.
Thankfully Yates had better luck with his art. Sheila’s brother Charlie had sent a copy of Yates’s latest story, “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” to an old show-business friend of the family, the agent Monica McCall, and on January 15, 1952, she replied:“Yates is without question a writer. There is an old cliché: ‘The ink is in the hair,’ and he definitely has it.” And with that Yates made the single most important contact of his career, a woman whose support—professional, moral, and otherwise—would never flag, no matter how rocky the road became.
Monica McCall was one of five sisters born of Scottish parents in Leicester. Often described as “a perfect English lady,” sweet and devoted to her clients, she was also tough as nails and never to be trifled with. A grande dame who resembled “a pretty version of Margaret Rutherford” (as her protégé Mitch Douglas put it), McCall inherited the same quirky, determined nature that had spurred one of her sisters to leap off London’s Waterloo Bridge after a failed love affair and another to become a nun who vanished at a tender age into a vow of silence. But Monica was nothing if not worldly, and her career is the stuff of legend in the publishing world. She was born in 1899 but refused to reveal that fact to anybody, not even to company insurance representatives, choosing rather to do without coverage. And when she and her longtime partner, the poet Muriel Rukeyser, were arrested with a crowd for lying down in the Senate visitors gallery to protest the Vietnam War, McCall insisted the police take her to jail along with everybody else, no matter what her age. On the other hand, she wasn’t averse to acting enfeebled if it fit her purpose, as when she’d commandeer wheelchairs at airports, the better to sail through the crowd to her flight. She brought the same wily righteousness to her professional conduct—an elusive quality indistinguishable from tenderness with regard to her clients’ interests. When Esquire wanted to put her at the “Red-Hot Center” of its “Literary Universe,” she declined, as she thought it beneath the dignity of herself and her authors. It was this sort of integrity that commanded Yates’s respect and even love, such that he named his second daughter after her, a gesture McCall never forgot. She often inquired after her namesake, and once sent the child an antique brooch with “Monica” engraved on it.
Her curious mixture of warmth and savvy was evident from the start of their relationship. Two weeks after she remarked to Charlie Bryant that his brother-in-law had ink in his hair, she wrote to Yates directly and asked if she might “please call [him] Dick”: “Since I have known your fine Sheila since she was two years old, I don’t believe I can address you as ‘Mr. Yates’!” That said, she then deflated the jubilant Dick by making it clear she hadn’t, in fact, told Charlie that she was willing to handle him solely on the basis of “A Really Good Jazz Piano”—though in fact she had: “I’m delighted to read any other stories that you care, or he cares to send in,” she’d written Charlie in that first letter, “and furthermore to represent him.” (She later apologized for the error when Yates pointed it out to her.) She was, however, “very interested” to read more of his work, and would then decide whether or not to take him on as a client.
Yates sent his seven best stories in the order he’d written them, and a month later McCall responded with a thumbnail critique of each and a definite decision to offer at least two of the stories for sale, and hence become his agent. Manifest in her letter is an all but infallible sense of what sold in the so-called literary fiction market, and in the future when Yates chose to ignore her advice he’d generally come to regret it. McCall noted that Yates’s work showed a “good build”—i.e., that his more recent stories were better than his early ones, a good augury, but for now most of them didn’t pass muster. A brief anecdote titled “Bells in the Morning” was a “promising beginning but not saleable,” and “A Last Fling, Like” lacked everything from a strong story to a “vivid or interesting or moving character.” Two other stories Yates sent in the batch, “The Misfits” and “Shepherd’s Pie on Payday,” are no longer extant in any form—and no wonder, given the awful verdict McCall passed on each: The first was “out of focus,” and the second was “nothing more nor less than two rather briefly etched characters having a conversation which leads nowhere” (to which she tactfully added, “Don’t forget that every good writer has an occasional lapse, and forgive me for thinking this one of your lapses!”). The only stories she thought potentially saleable were “The Canal” and “No Pain Whatsoever”—and though she had little apparent hope for the former (“I will do my best to place it”), her estimate of the latter was prescient as ever (“best story of the lot … deeply touching, beautifully characterized”).
Most telling was her ambivalence toward that early draft of “A Really Good Jazz Piano”; though she thought it a “great improvement” over most of Yates’s other stories, its ending was “unprepared for and obscure”—that is, in this version the two protagonists, Carson and Ken, erupt in weird laughter over their cruelty toward Sid, the black jazz pianist, and on that note the story ends. “Do you want to think about the end at all,” McCall inquired, “or let me know what you were trying to do, or is that too dreary for you?” Yates replied that he thought the ending “honest” and wanted to keep it, and McCall agreed to offer the story as is. It would take Yates six years to accept his error.
* * *
In April the Yateses moved into Stephen Benedict’s former apartment at Palais Beau Site in Cannes, once the place had finally been vacated by a navy wife who’d lived there after Benedict (she later became fodder for Yates’s story, “Evening on the Côte d’Azur,” about which more below). Before the war Palais Beau Site had been a rather stately hotel and, whatever its subsequent decline, was a vast improvement over La Monada in Juan-les-Pins. The new apartment was a compact arrangement of two rooms plus kitchen and bath, with pleasant ceramic-tiled floors and a little balcony in back that afforded a stunning view of the Mediterranean. “At its best and sunniest,” Benedict recalled, “it was paradise.”
Yates would have agreed in at least one respect: Now that he was closer to town he could buy his own cigarettes, the procurement of which was about the only thing that coaxed him outside. Occasionally he’d walk on the beach, but mostly he was content to stick to his old routine of writing, smoking, and coughing. As for Sheila, she was sick of the whole business, and chose to go her own way as much as possible. A letter she wrote in 1962 alludes to their “semi-separation in Cannes,” and one can only guess what this entailed, since she now remembers the time as “tranquil” relative to later years. True, she was tired of “fussing about cigarettes” and so forth, but as for the rest of it she’d come to accept (at least in retrospect) that her husband was simply a “city person”—and citymeant New York, Paris, or London, and not some overheated tourist trap like Cannes, where he’d just as soon stay at his desk.
Meanwhile the news from Monica McCall suggested that Yates wasn’t headed for overnight success. Within a month both “The Canal” and “No Pain Whatsoever” were turned down by the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, and The New Yorker. “Yates has a lot of talent,” wrote Esquire (returning “Canal”), “but we just aren’t using much fiction with a World War II angle.” The Atlantic thought “No Pain Whatsoever” was “bogged down in the wasteful conversation which seemed to fill far too much of the first two-thirds of the story.” And while Harper’s was “impressed” and willing to see more—they did, and declined—The New Yorker dispatched both stories with a standard rejection slip.* A few months later “No Pain Whatsoever” was also rejected by a new literary magazine called Discovery, whose editor would someday become a friend and colleague of Yates. As Vance Bourjaily wrote McCall, the story was “perfectly handled,” with “only one thing missing … some feeling of why the author has chosen to write it”; as far as Bourjaily could tell, the narrator “never develops an attitude” toward Myra, the adulterous protagonist, and hence one doesn’t know “whether tragedy’s involved or simply animal pathos.” An elaborate way of saying, perhaps, that the reader can’t tell whether Myra’s supposed to be good or bad.
That a fine writer and reader like Bourjaily could render such a judgment suggests something of what Yates was up against. Of course there was less tolerance for moral ambiguity in those days, but that goes only so far in explaining the discomfort and even outrage that Yates’s work (throughout his career) aroused in certain readers: “Why does he have to write so unpleasantly that one feels there’s just no good in anybody?” wrote a Harper’s editor in rejecting “A Really Good Jazz Piano”—and really, the saga of that story alone (assuredly a classic; Yates’s own favorite as late as 1974) might serve to encapsulate the kind of reception his early work, in particular, received. “What a good story this must be for us to be going on about it so!” wrote Monica McCall in April 1952, as she remonstrated with Yates over that problematic ending. A few months later “Jazz” was turned down by both New American Writing and New World Writing, and the next year Argosy followed suit: “[T]he playboy setting and depressing ending rule it out for us.” In 1955 the writer Peter Matthiessen, then an editor at Paris Review, rejected the story for a familiar reason, which he saw fit to frame in aesthetic rather than moral terms: “The cruelty which forms its climax is incredible, not in itself, but in terms of these characters and this situation.” When Esquire also called the ending a “let-down” in 1957, Yates finally got the point and revised the story into its present superlative form—whereupon The New Yorker promptly rejected it with what must by then have seemed an almost mocking refrain: “Hope you [McCall] will let us see other stories from him.” Esquire agreed to have another look at the revised version, and this time accepted it—only to reject it again when they learned that Yates would be including the story in the 1958 Scribner’s volume Short Story 1 (“Rust Hills did have the grace to say that he was distressed and apologetic about the manner in which they handled ‘the matter,’” McCall wrote bitterly). The New Yorker offered to reconsider yet again, but this time found it “too pat and neatly contrived” (as opposed to lacking believability, an earlier charge), and other rejections followed from Harper’s, the Atlantic, and Saturday Evening Post (“for fairly obvious reasons”). Finally—almost a decade after Yates had finished that draft on the Riviera—the story made its magazine debut in Vance Bourjaily’s Discovery. To this day Bourjaily feels proud of having published one of Yates’s best and most representative stories: “I’m a jazz snob like Carson,” he said, “and by the end of the story I understood his offense, and saw it in myself, even if Carson didn’t.” That Bourjaily and other good readers tend to see themselves in Yates’s characters is perhaps a clue worth remembering.
Meanwhile back in Cannes, 1952, the waves shushed outside and the sunlight dazzled the tiles and Yates lit another cigarette and got on with his work. He now had a superb agent, and several magazine editors thought he was talented (if misanthropic) and wanted to see more. Given that on a good day the most he could write was maybe half a polished page, or just over a hundred words, there was no time to let up—though he still had a lot to learn, and the quality of his work wavered. “Foursome,” the next story he finished after “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” was rejected without fanfare and doesn’t survive.
“Thieves” is interesting as an early variation on one of Yates’s favorite themes: the depths to which people deceive themselves into thinking they’re somehow special, set apart from the herd. Protagonist Robert Blaine is the abrasive sage of a TB sanatorium, and for much of the story he holds forth on the meaning of “talent” (“knowing how to handle yourself”), and offers himself as a good example—as when he swaggered into a swanky Madison Avenue clothing store and conned the clerk into thinking he was a bigshot. Well in advance of Blaine’s bleak epiphany, though, the reader is given a nudge: “All the stories whose purpose was to show Robert Blaine as a seasoned man of the world were laid in ’thirty-nine or ’forty, when he had first come to New York, just as those intended to show him as an irrepressible youth took place in Chicago, ‘back in the Depression.’” Finally Blaine tells how he “stole” a woman named Irene from her well-heeled husband, whose money they spent for six months: “‘[She] thought I was going to be another Sherwood Anderson. Probably still does.’” The disparity between his past and present “promise” occurs all at once to Blaine, and his breathing becomes “shallow and irregular”; but when a concerned patient seeks help for Blaine’s “nerves,” the matter-of-fact nurse delivers a blunt coup de grace: “Oh, honestly, that Blaine. Nerves, for God’s sake. Big baby, that’s all he is.” Monica McCall was kind in her estimate of “Thieves”: “It is a good story, beautifully characterized, but I think not any better selling bet than the stories on which I am working”—a tactful way of saying that it was little more than a few characters having a conversation which leads somewhere, perhaps, but nowhere interesting enough to justify the overall lack of drama.
Yates’s next story, “The Comptroller and the Wild Wind,” is an even broader repository of the themes and tendencies that would reappear in his later work, as well as a few he’d subsequently discard—Joycean lyricism, for instance: “A long time ago, he had married a girl with splendid long legs and a face that was described as pert (in the blue half-light of dawn she whispered, ‘darling, darling, darling,’ and the legs were strong, the face was wild and lovely).” With a further nod to Joyce, the latter’s poem “Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba” is quoted in full here, as it would be more than thirty years later as the epigraph to Young Hearts Crying, whose title it supplied. And that poem, with all it suggests of the lost illusions of youth, is very much to the point in “Comptroller” and elsewhere (less blatantly) in Yates’s work. Another gambit that would become almost a signature is the opening line(s) that foreshadows doom: “The morning after his wife left him, George Pollock, comptroller of the American Bearing Company, had breakfast at a counter for the first time in twenty years. He destroyed three paper napkins trying to remove one, whole, from the tight grip of the dispenser, and nearly upset a glass of water in an effort to keep his briefcase from sliding off his lap.” Hence the bungling Pollock—a dull man judging by his job description and surname—is left utterly helpless by the desertion of his wife, the “Wild Wind” of the title, who was not so wild that she was unwilling to fix him breakfast every morning for twenty years. But no more: “‘Oh, how can anyone hate you,’” she tells him on the eve of her departure with a man who shares her fondness for poetry; “‘you’re not hateful—you’re just a pompous, posturing fussy little man!’” Just so: The decent Pollock is a lot less hateful than, say, Frank Wheeler (to whom the same sentiment would be applied in Revolutionary Road), such that one wonders, really, what the man has done to deserve so many humiliations in a single narrative day. “Close, but no cigar—I’m not sure why,” wrote an Esquire editor in rejecting the story. “I think it’s because there doesn’t seem to be any occasion for so much bitter handling, and just a little contempt for the nonintellectual.” To be sure there was compassion as well as contempt, but in terms of basic effect other editors agreed in toto.
Monica McCall was patient and duly encouraging: “You are progressing well from the more anecdotal character sketch type of story into the fuller, more rounded story.” And Yates continued to make progress with his next story, “Nuptials,” an early draft of one of his masterpieces, “The Best of Everything.” McCall responded that it was a “swell story” and submitted it for consideration as an Atlantic “First”—the magazine’s prestigious showcase for previously unpublished authors. But the Atlantic declined without comment, as did The New Yorker and Esquire a few weeks later, and when McCall proposed sending it to the somewhat obscure Botteghe Oscure, a plainly frustrated Yates dismissed the magazine as “an esoteric little tea-party journal.”
By now Yates was badly in need of a success, even if it meant some sort of artistic compromise. After all, his hero Fitzgerald had written any number of hokey, formulaic stories for the Saturday Evening Post, and gotten rich in the bargain; why not Richard Yates? The result of such professionalism was “A Convalescent Ego,” a story that turned the raw material of his illness and shaky marriage into a wacky Walter Mitty–like farce. Those who wonder what it must have been like for Sheila when Yates returned from the TB ward (or just on a daily basis for that matter) need look no further than “Convalescent Ego”:
The porcelain soap dish had given way under his brush, dropped from the wall and smashed, breaking the cup and saucer he’d just washed.… Things like this had been happening nearly every day since he came home from the hospital. First there had been the discovery that he’d left his silver fountain pen behind, in the locker beside his hospital bed, and [his wife] had to make a special trip back to get it from the nurses. Then on the second or third day, when he’d insisted on helping with the housework, he had shaken the dust mop out the window so hard that the head of the thing fell off, five stories down into the courtyard, and left him absurdly shaking the naked stick over the windowsill.
Let that image of Yates’s alter ego “shaking the naked stick” linger as a kind of endearing emblem of his domestic life. As for the rest of the story, it offers a number of fine moments such as these, and reflects the kind of frustrated escapism into which the high-strung Yates may well have lapsed whenever Sheila’s “elaborate kindliness” or “tight-lipped silence” had implied what a hopeless bungler he was (hence the protagonist daydreams of various ways in which to redeem himself—e.g., heroically going back to work despite his illness, buying champagne for a bravura celebration, and so on). But as a narrative it doesn’t go anywhere in particular except an ending so sappy and artificial that Yates must have held his nose to write it: “Oh Bill, I have been awful since you came home, haven’t I?” says the nagging but now miraculously reformed wife. “Oh Bill, you ought to break all the dishes, right over my dumb head.”
Monica McCall, who knew what Yates was up to, wrote that she might be able to sell the story to the “slicks” if he’d revise it in order to dramatize the Mittyish reveries—“[they] should be more acted out, rather than imagined in his mind”—and appended a list of notes to that purpose. But as it turned out, the “slicks” were no more interested than The New Yorker et al., though Collier’s found the story “readable and amusing” and commended the author’s “remarkable ear for dialogue.” Yates appreciated the compliment, though wondered that it should be made “on the basis of ‘Convalescent Ego,’ for God’s sake.”
Perhaps to get the taste of “Ego” out of his mouth, Yates returned to his former manner with a vengeance. “Evening on the Côte d’Azur” seems almost pitiless in its treatment of the meager resources, mental or otherwise, available to a middle-class Everywoman such as Betty Meyers, a navy wife living in Cannes. Betty’s days pass in a nausea of boredom: Oblivious to the beauty of the sea and beach, she resents her children, her absentee husband, her faded looks, the snotty French, and longs to be back in Bayonne, New Jersey, of all places. Inevitably she allows herself to be seduced by an affable officer named Tom, whom she immediately imagines she loves; as she lies “at peace” in the afterglow, her husband all but forgotten, the narrative point of view switches to that of her departed lover, who cruelly ridicules her for the benefit of two young sailors. “Son, any man couldn’t make that oughta turn in his uniform.” Nor is there any danger of a contretemps with Betty’s husband, as one of the sailors seems to expect: “Oh, Jesus Christ, Junior,” the crafty old officer tells the kid. “When’re you gonna grow up? Whaddya think—I told her my real name?”
“Evening on the Côte d’Azur” was turned down by The New Yorker, Harper’s, the Atlantic, and Esquire, whose editor wrote that it “suffers from a confusion of styles. Sometimes the story is seen by its heroine—stupid and adolescent—sometimes by its author, in rather rich prose.” This is unjust. The third-person narrator who mimics the diction of the viewpoint character (“Oh, she knew the Sixth Fleet was supposed to be a good deal, and everything”) is a valid approach, and one that Yates would refine to more subtle effect in his later work; moreover, the quick objective bridge between Betty’s and Tom’s points of view is hardly written in “rather rich prose”—but no matter. While the story falls a bit short of Yates’s mature outlook and voice, he was clearly on the brink of finding a way out of the wilderness, at least as a writer.
* * *
Palais Beau Site became rather expensive in high season, and late that summer Yates suggested that Sheila write to her English aunt, a woman she hardly knew, and inquire about lodgings in London. The aunt replied that her own apartment in South Kensington had a basement flat that she’d be happy to rent for a nominal sum, two pounds a week, as long as they didn’t mind her using the bathtub each morning. They didn’t mind at all, and in October they moved.
For the first time in Europe, Yates was relatively happy. He liked almost everything about London, including Sheila’s aunt—a bluff seventy-year-old widow who’d changed her first name, sensibly enough, from Bevin to Mary (Fagin). The frail, gentlemanly Yates seemed to excite the woman’s maternal instinct, and before long they were thick as thieves: Aunt Mary was full of stories about London show-business types (her husband had been a theatrical producer), and Yates loved to listen as a way of unwinding after the day’s work. Also, with what they saved on rent they could afford a good nursery school for Mussy, who’d grown into a charming but noisy two-year-old. Not only did this make for a more tranquil writing environment, but left Yates with enough energy in the evening to play games like “Ready for a Girl” and “Dup-dup-dup.” The first, as his daughter recalls, was “some sort of running-chasing game,” and the second involved putting her on his lap and singing “Dup-dup-dup” to the tune of an English martial jingle until, with great hilarity, his knees would part and she’d splash to the floor. “What are you doing on the floor?” Yates would say mock sternly; “I asked you to sit in my lap!” Another benefit of nursery school (Mrs. Pierce’s Academy) was that it left Sheila free during the day—and so, contrary to their Paris arrangement, she agreed to stay home at night with the toddler while Yates went off to the pubs, an activity he enjoyed and she didn’t.
In fact she didn’t enjoy much of anything by then, almost as if her and Yates’s respective levels of contentment were inversely related. In a letter she wrote him a year later, Sheila wondered why she’d gotten so “snarky and sick” in London, even though life there had been “perfect … in all its outside aspects.” This was mostly a matter of lonely, wishful revisionism on her part, as their life in London (or hers anyway) had been far from “perfect,” on the outside or in. By the time they’d come to live in that cozy, claustrophobic basement flat, Sheila was sicker than ever of Yates’s vagaries—his moody scribbling, fecklessness, and self-neglect—and what made it even more intolerable was her hatred of London per se. As Yates evoked her views in the story “Liars in Love”:
[London] was big and drab and unwelcoming; you could walk or ride a bus for miles without seeing anything nice, and the coming of winter brought an evil-smelling sulphurous fog that stained everything yellow, that seeped through closed windows and doors to hang in your rooms and afflict your wincing, weeping eyes.
Sheila made a fine distinction between the lesser of two evils and decided to stay inside the flat all day, amid a pall of cigarette smoke and seeping fog. Occasionally her cousins Gemma or Barbara—sweet but conventional—would visit, but that was about it. And though it was true that she and her husband didn’t quarrel much anymore (“quarreling had belonged to an earlier phase of their marriage”), the thick awkward silences were hardly an improvement.
At least Yates had his writing to keep him busy, and on that score he was more hopeful than ever: The story he’d finished just before leaving Cannes, “Jody Rolled the Bones”—his fifteenth since moving to Europe (“Number 15 off the production line,” as he put it)—had been gleefully received by Monica McCall. “Oh the new one is an absolute beauty,” she wrote on September 16, “I think it quite the best piece you have done.” A month later it was declined “by the narrowest margin” for an Atlantic “First,” as the editors thought it was “simply a shade too predictable.” But the next day a follow-up letter came from the new twenty-six-year-old assistant editor at the magazine, Seymour Lawrence, who wanted to hold the story for one more week pending the return of his celebrated mentor, Edward Weeks, who was just then wrapping up a lecture tour. Weeks returned and promptly read the story—“far and away superior to the general run of Army material,” he glossed—and on October 21, 1952, Yates received a cable: ATLANTIC BUYING JODY FOR A “FIRST” AT TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MANY CONGRATULATIONS MONICA.
He was on his way at last. The first thing he did was write friends and family,* and naturally he expressed his rather solemn gratitude to Miss McCall, apologizing for the meagerness of her commission—twenty-five dollars after all that hard work—a matter much on his mind, evidently. “Sweet of you to be concerned,” she replied. “The pleasure and excitement in getting a young writer started is far greater than the interest financially, and believe me I never would have taken you on unless I believed that through the years we would all be making plenty of money to pay the rent.”
A heady time, as one thing really did seem to lead to another. Within days of publication in the February 1953 issue, Yates received a promising overture from Frances Phillips of William Morrow: “That was one grand story in the Atlantic.… It would be a great pleasure to hear that you have a novel and that it is free.… If you have an agent, please tell him/her of my interest.” Even more promptly he’d heard from Jacques Chambrun, who represented Somerset Maugham no less, and was known to be a roguish poacher of other people’s clients: “I should like to have the opportunity to handle some, at least, of your future work.” But no agent or editor would prove more persistent than Yates’s young discoverer at the Atlantic, Seymour Lawrence, who even then was scheming to do bigger things in his own career: “I want to tell you how much I enjoyed Jody,” he wrote. “I’m very much interested in your work, and I wonder if you are planning to do a novel. If you are, I should be very glad to offer you any help and editorial assistance I can.” For now, though, Yates had no novel to discuss with him or anybody else, nor the remotest idea for one; he’d exhausted himself on those “big, ambitious, tragic” efforts of his earlier years, and preferred to perfect his craft in the shorter form.
His progress is everywhere apparent in “Jody Rolled the Bones,” a story that fulfills one of the highest criteria of literary excellence: It’s even more rewarding to read the second or third time than the first, as its nuances reveal themselves one after another. “If you’re going to do something,” Yates would later tell his students, “do it well. Stand in the stream and work down through the soft mulch to the rock bottom.” “Jody” is perhaps the first story in which Yates managed to work all the way down to the bottom, beyond the rather easy pessimism that mars his earlier work.
At first “Jody” seems to conform to a conventional formula: the hardboiled sergeant who turns out to have, if not quite a heart of gold, then many lovable qualities. Yates even describes his protagonist, Sergeant Reece, as “typical—almost a prototype,” which prepares the reader all the more for that kind of story. But as a character Reece defies the formula. On the one hand he’s a rather despicable, simple-minded bigot who affects to be incapable of pronouncing foreign names, calls foreigners “gorillas,” and has few human skills apart from those required by the job. On the other hand he’s a superb soldier whose approach to leadership is “classically simple: he led by being excellent”—as when he demonstrates the proper use of a bayonet: “At the instructor’s commands [Reece] whipped smartly into each of the positions, freezing into a slim statue while the officer … [pointed out] the distribution of his weight and the angles of his limbs, explaining that this was how it should be done.” And Yates strikes just the right note of fairness, of benign detachment, in dividing blame between Reece and his recruits: “But if excellence is easy to admire it is hard to like, and Reece refused to make himself likable. It was his only failing, but it was a big one, for respect without affection can’t last long—not, at least, where the sentimentality of adolescent minds is involved.”
One is tempted to go on exploring the craft of this story, from the nicely sustained metaphor of the title (derived from the chant that not only serves to unify the men but suggests the unfairness of army life and life in general) to the resonant ending in which the recruits revert to “a bunch of shameless little wise guys” in Reece’s absence—a collective mediocrity that will haunt them, Yates implies, for the rest of their lives. “You’ve done it with ‘Jody,’” an Atlantic reader from Hico, Texas, wrote Yates. “Better, I think, than Hemingway ever did it, better than you will do it again. But in doing it you have broken the code. A soldier does not write; he soldiers. (Kipling was a genius; you probably are not.)” Yates kept that letter, and twelve years later he got another from Colonel Roger Little of the Office of Military Psychology and Leadership: “Jody,” wrote Little, had long been used “as a reference … because it is such a sensitive portrayal of the basic trainee’s perception of the noncommissioned officer.” Thus Yates had written about a “typical” sergeant after all, in itself something of a novelty.
* * *
Yates’s brother-in-law Charlie had been strange all his life, but as a young man he seemed to pull himself together and even show signs of brilliance: He prepped at Andover, earned a bachelor’s degree in physics at Harvard and a master’s in math at the University of Maryland. Later he held a job at the Bureau of Standards and then at Hughes Aircraft, where he was employed while the Yateses were abroad. For about a year after their departure, Charlie wrote long articulate letters signed with love, full of advice and encouragement about his brother-in-law’s writing career. But one day Yates got a different kind of letter, written in a childish scrawl: “Dear Dick, This is you: a prick with ears!”—and there was an illustration to that effect. One such letter might easily be laughed off, but the ones that followed were even more bizarre: almost totally incoherent, and decorated with all sorts of obscene doodling. From time to time a more normal letter would appear that made little or no reference to the others, which hardly diminished the oddness of it all.
Then, over Christmas, Charlie had a breakdown so severe that he was committed to Fairfield Hospital in Connecticut. What exactly happened is unclear, though apparently Charlie had frightened his mother in some way, and she in turn wrote frantic letters to Sheila begging her to come home.* It would later transpire that Charlie had developed a kind of mania where his mother was concerned, such that he became enraged in her presence—loudly forcing her to sit down and listen to “the Truth” (a word he tended to capitalize all his life). He hadn’t resorted to violence yet, but there was no telling what the future would bring. “If he were free today,” Sheila observed shortly after the breakdown, “it might be only a matter of time before he went for mother.… He might, for instance, only burn [her] house down, but he just might kill or maim her.”
The news came as a mixed blessing to Sheila, but a blessing nonetheless: Naturally she was worried about her brother (less so about her mother) and quite eager to return for his sake alone, but for a long time she’d wanted to leave London on any pretext whatsoever, and this one was pretty well incontestable. To anyone who asked, then, the Yateses explained that Sheila had been “called back to attend to a Bryant family emergency,” and this was true enough; what was less true was that Yates intended to follow “in a month or so,” as soon as he could afford to book his own passage. In fact he and Sheila had agreed to an indefinite “trial separation”—and so matters stood on March 25, 1953, when Yates stood on a Southampton dock and watched his wife and daughter dwindle into the mist aboard the Ile de France. After a while he trained back to London and their basement flat, hauntingly deserted except for a surly Angora cat named Sweetheart.
The next day Yates wrote a loving letter to Sheila, in which he tried to strike a balance between muted desperation (“Talk about missing a person!”) and brave self-sufficiency. Charlie was the most important person for now, he said, and their own problems would have to wait: “Don’t worry about money, because I’m going to make it by the bushel-basket now that I’ve got these long empty days to work with.… Don’t worry even for a minute about my taking care of myself. I’m eating enormous, beautifully planned meals and drinking absurd quantities of milk.” The letter marked the launch of a long campaign to win his wife back, and if that meant contriving an absurdly idealized image of himself—as a conscientious breadwinner who worries about big balanced meals and drinking his milk—then so be it. At the same time Yates couldn’t resist a dig at his wife’s sentimentality and the awful failings implied thereby; when he mentioned that he’d gone to see the movie Come Back, Little Sheba and found it “excellent,” he added that shewould have called it “depressing”: “You’d have been shattered by some of the grislier scenes (like a ward for violent alcoholics) and would have dissolved in tears over the ‘happy’ ending.” That said, Yates ended the letter on a properly desolate, needy note: “I still have a tendency to buy vegetables for three, and tiptoe through Mussy’s room at night, and heart-rending crap like that, but Sweetheart sets me a good example by not giving a damn.”
Sheila found that she was lonely too, despite having wanted nothing so much as escape for the past six months. As she watched the forlorn Yates waving good-bye from that dock, it may have dawned rather heavily on her that, apart from her husband and daughter, there was virtually nobody in her life but a mother she couldn’t stand and a brother who’d gone crazy. “Dear Rich,” she wrote from the ship, “I felt so sad when you faded into the distance,” and she added that Mussy “gets heartrending on the subject of her Daddy at bedtime every night.” She went on to describe a “gala soirée” on the boat as being “the masses in action.”
When they docked in Hoboken, she and Mussy were greeted by the curious threesome of Marjorie, Dookie, and Aunt Elsa, who described the scene in a letter she wrote her nephew a few weeks later: “Sheila and Ruth and Sheila’s mother talked in the lounge while waiting for luggage.… How very unfortunate that Mrs. Bryant could not have had at least one of Ruth’s attributes as a mother.” (She was referring, of course, to Dookie’s positive attributes, such as a loving heart.) “[Mrs. Bryant] has nothing to give, and everything to take. She was cordial enough to me at the pier, but I know her type of personality so well.” One imagines a lightbulb flashing over Yates’s head as he read that suggestive phrase, “nothing to give, and everything to take”—at least a subliminal origin, perhaps, of one of his all-time favorite character names, “Mrs. Givings,” the ungiving mother of the mad John in Revolutionary Road.
Sheila, too, was repulsed as ever by her “knick-knacky and scatter-ruggy” mother (“a mental case, to be sure”), but had to be civil as long as she was living in the woman’s house in Danbury (“like one of those spreads in Better Homes and Gardens”). This, however, was easily done, as Sheila had long ago conquered the worst of her aversion to Marjorie; she only wished her brother could cultivate the same detachment. “Charlie’s hate is making him sick because he loves her, or did,” she wrote Yates in April. “Mother, on the other hand, hates him but it doesn’t violate anything because she has no feeling for him.… She doesn’t feel anything for me either and the fact that she doesn’t has long since stopped affecting me at all. And until Charlie feels as I do about her he’ll be very sick in all departments of his life.” Little wonder that Sheila, in such company, should discover a renewed fondness for her husband.
* * *
Yates was determined to make the most of his “Jody” success, and now he had the further incentive of seeming a worthy provider in Sheila’s eyes. He asked Monica McCall if there was any chance his “more shopworn stories”—terminal cases such as “Foursome,” “Comptroller,” and something called “Stay Away from Liquids”—would sell on the English market. McCall suggested he show them to her colleague Dorothy Daly at the Curtis Brown agency in London, and a month later Daly reported that Yates’s work was “well-written” but “far, far too American in outlook to find a home here.” Yates continued to cast about. He even briefly revived his cartooning career, with particular emphasis on his old specialty, kahts, a portfolio of which he sent to Sheila with instructions to pass it on to McCall. Mussy was delighted by her Daddy’s drawings—“[she] showed everybody the pictures of Sweetheart,” Sheila wrote—but McCall was less so: “I know nothing about placing of pictures,” she tersely replied.
Meanwhile Yates realized his best career move by far would be to write a novel—he might never again have such a bonus of time, money, and freedom. But quite simply he didn’t know how to proceed: “[M]ost of my ideas so far seem better suited to short stories,” he wrote Stephen Benedict, “and before I start a novel I want to be very damn sure I’ve got a grip on a novel-sized theme. But I may take the plunge any day, and the notion of a possible advance from Morrow makes it particularly tempting.” Instead he wrote “Lament for a Tenor,” the sort of exercise in explicit autobiography that always made him uneasy, no matter how well the actual writing seemed to go. In fact he thought the story might turn out to be his best yet in terms of the market, and he found himself envisaging future scholars “trying to explain the streak of sentimentality that spoiled all my work.” With that in mind, his smile may have been a bit on the wry side when he read McCall’s ecstatic response: “Oh that is a wonderful story! If The New Yorker made any sense they would buy it, but if they don’t I swear by everything I know that I will sell it.” As usual, her instincts would prove sound.
Yates’s busy careerism was partly by way of distracting himself from an awful loneliness. Apart from the pubs he had no social life to speak of, and even the pubs were beginning to pall. As he wrote Sheila, none of the regulars “ever seems to talk about anything—never, I mean, say anything worth listening to.… None of them seems to like one another, either—when they get hold of an outsider, like me, they all take turns backing him into a corner and giving him the straight low-down on all the others present.” He also remarked on the gratingly repetitive Anglicisms to which he was subjected: “[T]he favorite adverb for everything is ‘madly’ (This pub’s getting madly smart, you know; I’m feeling madly hungover today) … [and] any sort of neurosis, real or suspected, is ‘really quite mental.’” Nor did he have Aunt Mary to keep him company anymore, since she’d left in April to spend the season at her cottage in Sussex. When he got desperate enough he’d go visit her daughter Gemma, whom he found rather dull and abrasive but well-meaning, and a decent cook besides. It was Gemma who suggested he find a roommate, since Yates had qualms now about paying so little rent but doubted he could afford more. That he thought the roommate idea “pretty good,” rent question or no, says volumes about his state of mind: “[I]t’ll be nice to have someone to share the cleaning and shopping chores,” he wrote, “and once the warm weather is here we won’t necessarily have to be big buddies, because this place is really two separate rooms.” In the same letter he was also at pains to point out that he’d sold their bicycle to Gemma for the lavish sum of thirty shillings (“how’s that for the opposite of kick-me-again?”), that he’d managed to gain weight (“high testimony to my conscientiousness”), and that he was “efficiency personified about the housework.” A changed man, in short, albeit a rather despondent one: “It’s a wrench passing other meats [babies] on the street, and listening to them chatter on busses.”
Whether Yates’s loneliness led all the way to a disastrous affair with a Piccadilly prostitute, à la “Liars in Love,” will have to remain a matter of conjecture. His daughter Monica doesn’t recall his ever admitting as much, and as she points out, “[H]e wouldn’t have not admitted it,” since he was nothing if not candid with her. But as readers familiar with “Liars” will have realized by now, most of its details about Yates’s life in London are almost scrupulously accurate, from the chronology (“It was March of 1953, and he was twenty-seven years old”) to the exact location of the basement flat at 2 Neville Terrace (“where Chelsea met South Kensington along the Fulham Road”) to the English aunt who comes down to use the bathtub every morning, and so on. At any rate, something decidedly fishy appears to be lurking amid the pitiful braggadocio of a letter Yates wrote Sheila in June:
In the past three months.… I’ve learned that women—not just a particular kind of woman (and it’s remarkable how few kinds there really are), but women in general—find me attractive as all get-out. They don’t need any special indoctrination or any apologies, they just like me, and this has come as an enormous surprise. (It will also, I’m sure, give you a badly distorted idea of the way I’ve been spending my time, but never mind that for now.) The value of this is that it has enabled me to relax in a certain fundamental way for the first time in my life. It will make me a much more relaxed, less neurotic and less demanding kind of husband, I can assure you.
One could go on deconstructing this passage, but suffice to say that if the “women in general” who found Yates “attractive as all get-out” were anything like the devious, aggressive whore Christine in “Liars,” then he was probably more eager than ever to return to the relative calm of domesticity. Though perhaps, too, he looked forward to a distant day when he could recollect the “subtler pleasure in considering all the pathetic things about [Christine]—the humorless ignorance, the cheap, drooping underwear, the drunken crying.”
Sheila appears to have enjoyed less exotic diversions, though apart from her family problems she did feel a great relief at being home again. The United States was like “a beautiful sunlit garden” to her, “where it’s even lovely to die or be sick.” Lest her husband take this the wrong way, she added that she wasn’t worrying so much about their separation anymore because “we both miss each other very much [and] know it’s a good idea.” Meanwhile an old childhood friend named Fess was teaching her how to drive (a skill she’d eventually attempt to pass on to Yates with curious results), and poor Charlie was disturbed as ever. The psychiatrist at Fairfield had told Sheila her brother was “completely recessed”—in other words, “acting like a very small child,” as when he caused a brawl on the ward by pulling a chair out from under another patient. Nor did the shock treatments seem to help, and for a while they were stopped in favor of psychotherapy per se, though Charlie was a reluctant analysand at best. He had a way of saying Why? or Prove it, when he bothered to say anything at all.
Oddly enough, Mussy adored her deranged uncle and vice versa; she also proved an excellent go-between in Sheila’s relations with Marjorie and Dookie. The first was “genuinely fascinated” by the child: Once when Mussy passed her grandmother a cookie during tea and topped this with a pack of cigarettes and a polite, “Haf a chicherette, gramer,” the poor woman was stunned. “Did you teach her that?” she asked Sheila, who replied, “No. She does it because she likes to.” Whereupon Marjorie tried to pay Sheila a rare compliment: “I guess I never saw a child that had been handled right.” But no sooner were the words out that she got a “frantic” look and said, “But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t with you two,” and fled the room. As for Dookie, she was quite comfortable as a grandmother, which didn’t require her to be either a role model or a provider. At the time she was supporting herself by sculpting souvenir bunnies and turkeys for the holidays (this while hoping for more dignified employment at the City Center art complex), and by far her favorite audience for that sort of thing was little Mussy, who liked to wear Dookie’s smocks and play with her plasticene animals. Nor was Dookie a bad companion to Sheila, especially now that the nervous old woman was out from under the scrutiny of her exasperated son. In fact she was often amusing and shrewd on subjects other than herself: After a rare gathering of the Maurer family (Ida’s husband had died), Dookie remarked with cold satisfaction that her sisters were “in their second childhoods”; and on the subject of her son’s work, she astutely observed that there were “innumerable things” he didn’t write about because of her. For a while Sheila considered it a “terrific bulwark” to know she could always move in with Dookie if life became intolerable with Marjorie.
* * *
As the weather changed, Yates took long solitary walks and thought what a shame it was that his wife and daughter had never experienced London like this—“a far cry from the drab and grimy town we saw all winter,” he wrote Sheila. Watching other parents with their “meats” was a torment, but one he couldn’t help indulging in; he kept thinking of things he might have done with Mussy, such as taking her out on a rowboat in Hyde Park, and now perhaps he never would. He observed, too, the springtime tradition of “interesting-looking” people who congregated on the terrace of his favorite pub on Sunday afternoons, “like a big outdoor cocktail party,” but he felt less and less inclined to join them. “My euphoria over the pleasures of bachelor life [has] pretty well palled,” he wrote with doleful understatement—though reminders of married life were hardly an unadulterated pleasure: When a doctor at the “air clinic” remarked that he’d once examined Sheila, Yates was at first pleased and then dour as the man seemed to remember the occasion all too vividly (“I got the distinct impression that he wanted to compliment me on the firmness of your breasts”).
The brooding monotony of his days was broken somewhat by the arrival of a roommate, a fortyish fellow named Bill Bray, who introduced himself as a stage director and theatrical business manager “between jobs.” Yates noted with relief that the man was “decidedly not queer,” but thought it a bad sign that he “seem[ed] to spend most of his time drifting around trying to borrow money while he waits for the big job.” His roommate’s picaresque lifestyle did, however, provide Yates with new material for his letters: He wrote how Bray had applied for National Assistance, but when a state welfare inspector came around to their flat, he found Bray passed out amid a litter of beer bottles; the inspector took a dim view and left, while Bray “spent the rest of the day muttering about the limitations of the bureaucratic mind.” Then Bray had a scheme to get himself hired as an extra in a big American movie about King Arthur being filmed in Epping Forest; he thought that Yates, with his height, would make a perfect stand-in for the actor James Stewart and clear a thousand dollars for nine weeks’ work. Alas, it didn’t pan out, and finally Bray took what he called a “very temporary job” at an ice-cream parlor in Kensington, offering to “work [Yates] in as a counter-man or bus-boy.”
When Yates wasn’t waxing witty or wise or pitiful in his letters, he had a tendency to become bitter—the result of many hours of dark rumination. “Here’s this month’s alimony, with all my love,” he wrote. “And I’ll be damned if that isn’t a masterpiece of a sentence, which could serve as an epigrammatic definition of our marriage.” And such was their odd dynamic that Sheila’s most loving letters tended to provoke the most biting replies. After she received (for the purpose of typing and feedback) the manuscript of “Lament for a Tenor,” she wrote how “proud” she was: “I sort of forgot about being proud of you … and not just because of your work or because you’re good-looking—because you have good taste in life … your coming home now could be nothing but good for me”; Charlie had even offered to loan them money for a boat ticket. For Yates this was surely the answer to his fondest prayer—but the more he thought about it, the more agitated and even enraged he became, or so the crescendo of his response suggests:
Charlie’s offer of the $165 is awfully damn nice, and very touching. Maybe I’ll take him up on it, but let’s give Tenor a chance to sell first, okay? Because I’d rather come home that way if I can. And don’t you think, anyway, that we ought to let a little more time elapse?… When I come home it will probably be our absolutely last damn chance for a good life together, and I want to be sure we’re both ready.… When you are [ready],… you won’t think my coming home might be good for you, as you say you do now—you’ll know damn well it would be … because you’ll be ready to god damn it be my girl, and no crap about it.… I guess I’m the most naive son of a bitch in the world. But there isn’t anything so terrible about being naive, is there? It’s a far more appropriate trait for people our age, and a more fruitful one too … than the kind of sickly, emotion-starved world-weariness you find in the Chelsea pubs. Or to put it another way, I like being “born yesterday,” because it gives me a pretty good chance of being alive tomorrow, when everybody else is dead.
By then Yates was all too familiar with Sheila’s capriciousness and/or ambivalence where he was concerned. He knew that her loving, April Wheeler–like exaltations were temporary at best, and liable to be followed by some squelching matter-of-fact Shirleyism. “God damn it I love you, Sheila,” he wrote, followed by the preemptive appraisal “I have now laid myself wide open for you to say coolly, in your next letter, that you see what I mean and it’s very touching, but that you really don’t feel equal to looking into the future at this point and can’t make any promises, so I must not get my hopes up.” And while he tried to end this letter on a somewhat positive note, with a bit of neutral humor about Bill Bray, it only spurred him on to a last caustic snipe: “You’d probably flirt outrageously with him if you were here.”
Sheila’s response was mollifying: “Everything you say about us is quite right and perfect, Rich”—and with that she pretty much let it go. This was partly an honest concession (“it’s one thing to know where the trouble lies and another to get out of it”) and partly an aversion to argument, even epistolary, with such a tenacious foe as Yates. Besides, she had other things to worry about. As it happened she’d gone ahead and moved in with Dookie, only to find her “still living on the usual financial cliff”: Dookie’s rent (shockingly high to begin with, as she felt she needed extra studio space and never mind how to pay for it) was so badly in arrears that eviction was imminent. And while Dookie spoke of “income just over the horizon” (the City Center job), her older sisters Elsa and Margaret, whose dotage she ridiculed, did their best to provide her with eating money.* But otherwise everything was fine: “Dookie is not bitter about any of it,” Sheila noted, “[and] right now she is busy fixing herself an outfit to wear to a big glamorous affair tomorrow evening.” Nor had Dookie changed in other fundamental respects, bad or good: “She still does a hell of a lot of talking but I’ve learned to tune out tactfully … and she is wonderful with Sharon.” But the bottom line was this: “You should think very seriously about what you might feel to be living again in the same city with Dookie’s finances.”
Yates’s reply reflected his eagerness to make amends for his previous outburst. He assured her that he was equal to coping with Dookie’s periodic duns, however much he used to protest about the “strain” they put on him, which he now dismissed as a “pretty childish attitude”: “If I can’t help her, I can’t—and until I can it certainly shouldn’t matter much how close to her I live.” In the meantime he was glad to know that Dookie’s spirits were high withal, which of course was “the most important thing.”
With Dookie facing another eviction, Sheila went about trying to solve her own living situation. Briefly she considered buying a house amid the dystopian sprawl of Levittown, near their friends the Cains, who admitted the place was a “wasteland.” But then one could hardly beat the price—a GI loan paid for the house, with carrying charges of sixty-three dollars a month—so Sheila figured it wouldn’t hurt to look. She was not impressed: “The Levittown houses are clean and modern and very tempting but the people are simply awful and once the joy of the Bendix had worn off, we’d all go crazy”; besides, she added, the nursery schools in the area were full of “strident Jewish supervisors” and overcrowded to boot. For the time being, then, she decided to find an apartment in the city and get a job, though the idea of buying a place in the suburbs was something she wanted her husband to bear in mind (“if we become a family again”).
Meanwhile Yates awaited news of “Tenor,” and found himself in a “creative slump”: He was still without a good idea for a novel, and was sick of writing short stories and living hand-to-mouth with a “completely aimless, pointless, useless bastard” like Bill Bray for company. Two pieces of bad news had deflated him further: His six best stories were returned in a batch by the English magazine Argosy, whose editor remarked on their “Americanness” and “bitter astringency of tone” (“You certainly shoot to kill, don’t you?”); and the next day he learned that Collier’s had declined “Tenor,” since they “[didn’t] have room for another story about the emotional problems of a young boy.” Monica McCall remained confident, though by then her mood wasn’t contagious.
Yates tried to cheer himself up by observing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth—a “terrific show” whose vast cheering crowds only served to remind him of his loneliness, which in turn suggested how much worse things might have been if Sheila were there: “I know perfectly well,” he wrote her, “that your cop-fear would have kept us home all day in a great family snit, with you redundantly insisting that if I wanted to go there was nothing to stop me, and me bellowing the whole point of the thing would be lost unless you came too. I guess there are certain advantages in bachelorhood after all.” One such advantage was decidedly not his roommate Bill Bray, who got loudly drunk every night and brought home a “grubby, homely Village type who not only Does It but talks about it in clarion tones, almost entirely four-letter words,” Yates wrote. “The sad thing about old Bill is that he has absolutely nothing to show for his forty-odd years, despite what would seem to be all the advantages of breeding, native intelligence and good looks.” If nothing else, the man acted as an impetus for Yates’s getting out of the flat more often. He was even willing to accompany his cousin-in-law Barbara to a quaint choral concert at her club, which involved “about a million print-dress biddies” and other solid citizens singing to her majesty’s health, a spectacle that moved Yates strangely: “It was so painful and so heartbreakingly nice that it was enough to make you fall in love with this country forever.” A couple weeks later he took a four-hour bus trip to visit Aunt Mary in Sussex, and then rode all the way back the same afternoon to catch a “wolloping good party” at the flat of Mrs. Pierce (the nursery school proprietor), where Bill Bray turned up and “got blind, fall-down drunk as usual.”
With such a cautionary figure in mind, Yates proposed that he end his expatriation forthwith and get on with supporting his family in the manner to which they wished to become accustomed. Mussy was soon to be put in a seedy, city-subsidized nursery where “there mightn’t be anyone for [her] to have extra-curricular activities with,” or so Sheila worried (though the situation was saved by the presence of two other “true blue shabby-genteel” parents and their daughters), and that was but a small aspect of the whole intolerable situation. “We’re never going to get rich out of short stories,” Yates wrote. The only “real dough” to be made was in the novel he’d sooner or later write, but until then it was time to face facts: “Don’t you think it might be a healthier idea … if I quitwriting stories, come home and get a really good job of the sort that Monica might be able to help me get, or that I might get myself on the strength of my Atlantic story, and mark time that way until the novel idea comes along?” Yates was desperately ready to “start living a decent upper-middle-class life—car, clothes, house, etc.” And by a “really good job” he didn’t mean Remington Rand: “a moral defeat [that] might put me back in the hospital (Fairfield, if not Halloran).” Nor did he wish for any kind of “physically grueling” newspaper work, but rather some kind of “well-paid” job on the staff of a magazine or publishing firm. And lest this seem a headlong retreat into respectability, Yates reminded Sheila of all the things he’d gained from his two years in Europe: “Monica, the Atlantic, the nibble from Morrow, and a great deal of practical writing experience without which I’d probably never have the guts to tackle a novel, let alone to write a good one.”
Sheila professed to be appalled by the idea: “If you had a job that would be the end and in your heart you know it.… What would our crazy marriage be if you came here and made us comfortable with a 9–5 job?… I can find a man easily who can give me that kind of life and be a lot better company than you’d be doing it.” Perhaps, but such shrill insistence that he remain abroad and follow his dream (“Stay in England,” she ordered him; “write and forget about us all”) suggested a rather unflattering subtext—namely, that her husband’s company wasn’t much desired either as a writer or a nine-to-five drone.
Yates agreed to table the matter for the time being, though not before venting his wounded feelings: Her “violent opposition,” he wrote, was rife with the sort of “childishly arbitrary” overstatements that they’d “both have to outgrow” if they were “ever going to be adults, together or separately.” He pointed out that the “social and economic limbo” of their lives was just as inhibiting to creative endeavor as a regular job would be, and the latter was less likely to involve “inadequate housing, illness, family strife, neurotic brooding and frenetic moves around the world.” And really, he wondered, wherefore this sudden precious concern for his writing, which she’d once regarded as little more than a “knack” that distracted him from more worldly pursuits? “You do seem to have funny ideas as to what my talent is all about … now it’s become a sacred flame which must be hovered over and protected at all cost while the world is held perilously at bay.” He assured her that he had no intention of coming home and “demand[ing] restitution of [his] conjugal rights,” though if he did decide to return it would be “altogether [his] business.” He repeated his basic position: “I love you and would like to live with you and Mussy again more than anything, but I will not be Pinner again … and now make it clear again, that the only way you’ll get me back is by wanting me.” He then enumerated, at greater length than ever, the many ways in which he was making himself “a more desirable package than the bundle of raw nerve-tissue” she’d known in the bygone past:
I’ve discovered I am as competent as anybody at dealing with the small-change of practical life.… I can “pull my weight,” “look out for myself,” “stay on the ball” and “cope” as well if not better than the most banal bore in the world, and I can now afford a benign pity—strictly non-violent—for all the millions of people, bless their hearts, who enjoy that sort of thing.… I’ve [also] discovered at long last what you knew from the beginning—that my “broods” do not stem from any dark, Hamlet-like neurosis, incurable and tragic, but from plain laziness.… I have snapped out of countless minor broods, since you left, by suddenly remembering it was time to put the potatoes on, or that the laundromat was about to close, or that there was something good on the radio. And I’ve pulled myself out of several really major ones by the more painful but no less effective method of telling myself to shut up and get back to the typewriter. I’m not saying I’ve overcome them—I had a bad one just the other day—but I’m holding my own against the bastards. They don’t immobilize me any more, and I’m confident it won’t be long before I’ll be able to brush them off like flies. I hope this shrill recital of my little triumphs doesn’t bore you or sound like an old-fashioned “drone.”
Yates appears here as an almost perfect character out of his own imagination—one of those deterministic victims who “rush around trying to do their best … doing what they can’t help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can’t help being the people they are.” Certainly Yates couldn’t help being a practical bungler any more than he could snap out of his “broods” by putting the potatoes on or running off to the laundromat. Indeed, the only durable way of coping with the awful burden of being himself would always be the “more painful” method of “get[ting] back to the typewriter,” though its effect on his marriages would prove neutral at best.
* * *
While Yates was bitterly converting himself into an ideal life-mate, things took a turn for the better on both sides of the Atlantic and tension began to ease somewhat. For one thing, the indomitable Dookie had managed to pry some part-time wages out of the City Center and thus get a “stay of execution” at her beloved apartment-cum-studio. This was a great relief for all, particularly Sheila, who’d had to cope with a sudden drop in Dookie’s high spirits: “She was so low before—we had the real gamut of emotions daily,” she wrote Yates. “Very wearing for the spectator, and impossible to comfort. She is really a person without shading.” But with the promise of a salaried position in September—as director of the new City Center art gallery, no less—Dookie was not only planning to keep her old place in the West Fifties, but also to fix up the garage apartment at High Hedges as a country getaway, courtesy of Fritz Rodgers. “I am praying that it works out,” wrote Sheila, “but the one snag is the Rodgers, Jr., who I gather feel as they always did about having her so near.”
And Sheila knew just how they felt. Another month chez Dookie was simply out of the question, and in late June she moved to an apartment on King Street in the Village, where she and Mussy lived with a widow and her nine-year-old son. The rent was only fifty a month, and Sheila found her housemate pleasant enough. “She’d never stimulate me but there’d be no clashes, I think, and she’s no Bialek. When she has time, she writes stories for the Confession magazines and she gets The New Yorker—I think she knows the difference.” Yates was unthrilled by the arrangement (“If I do come home before August I guess I’ll have to plan on living at the Y”), though he was somewhat appeased by the Mussy angle: That is, the three-year-old was thriving at the subsidized Village nursery they’d thought would be so Dickensian, and even tended to “[kick] up an awful row” when Sheila came to take her home in the afternoon. When informed of such naughtiness, Yates advised his wife to “feed [Mussy] lots of ice cream and let her run around in her [diapers] and that should take care of it.”
Meanwhile Yates had managed to shut up and get back to the typewriter, which made it somewhat easier for him to stop coveting the life of a stable wage earner. In fact his latest story, “The Game of Ambush,” had begun as an attempt to fictionalize the dilemma in some objectified form, and toward this purpose he’d tried (abortively) to adopt a Gatsbyesque first-person peripheral narrator. An early draft begins with the sentence, “For a while when I was nine years old, my friends and I thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance,” and from there the narrator “Al” goes on to tell the story of his friend Walt Henderson, who ends up sacrificing his musical talent to take some idiot job selling plywood and thereby pay for his ex-wife’s psychiatrists. Perhaps this version struck too close to home; in subsequent drafts, anyway, Yates dispensed with Al and wrote in the third person about Walt, developing an entirely different plot from the same nominal premise. Finally, after much exhaustive tinkering, he had a finished story that he could only describe to Sheila as a “pretty good B-plus effort,” though he was proud of his tenacity in reworking it: “[I]t’s technically as good as I can make it, however ‘uninteresting’ the essential idea of the thing may be, and I’m pretty sure it will get by.” A fair assessment: The story was now about a compulsive failure who copes with being fired, and within certain intrinsic limits Yates had succeeded in an admirably B-plus way. And already he’d put it behind him to write another that he thought would be “very damn good indeed”: “So I’ve been pretty happy these last few days, very un-neurotic and in love with all mankind including myself, the way I always am when I’m full of a new story.”
Sheila thought the B-plus effort was “as good or perhaps better in its way than Tenor,” and mentioned that Charlie had also read it while on a weekend pass from Fairfield: “He liked the story very much … though his comments are sometimes a bit over my head. He did say he wondered if his trouble wasn’t the same as Walt in the story.” Yates was pleased that both seemed to like his new title, “A Glutton for Punishment,” and happily explained its origin: “It came to me in a flash one night when I had quit work rather guiltily to listen to the Turpin-Humez fight on the radio—the announcer said Humez was a glutton for punishment and I sprang for the typewriter like a madman.”* Actually he typed less like a madman than a hard-nosed reporter of the old school—in the rapid two-finger method he used all his life—and Sheila retyped his work with secretarial precision; in the case of “Glutton” (and presumably others), she also took it upon herself to make minor changes of grammar and punctuation which Yates retained in the published version.* However, he chose not to accept her rather astute criticism of the story’s ending, which she reluctantly offered when pressed: “I remember thinking that particular cliché was overdoing the parallel a bit,” she observed of Walt’s last remark, “‘They got me,’” which alludes (tritely?) to the cops-and-robbers games of his youth.
Monica McCall had reacted much the same way—“I love the story and absolutely loathe the ending”—though in her case such objections were made with an eye on the market. McCall wanted the hapless Walt to make a “new stand” as she put it, or whatever it took to give the story “a twist, or a fulfillment and a satisfaction.” She wanted a happy ending, in short, or if nothing else a bit of normal character development—but of course nothing could be more inimical to Yates’s basic view of humanity and Walt in particular, and after a bit of brooding he decided to be “stubborn as a mule” about it: “I’m not going to let her turn me into that kind of a writer,” he wrote Sheila. “If I’m going to start switching endings to suit markets I might as well be back at Remington Rand; and I really think there’s a hell of a lot more future in writing my own way.” Whether Yates was right about the “future” depends, perhaps, on how one views the vagaries of posterity. In any case McCall enjoyed the “funny and nice letter” he wrote declining her suggestions, and within a month the story was returned by the Atlantic, Charm, and The New Yorker (the last of which “continue[d] to be interested in Mr. Yates’s work”).
Yates’s social life was hardly a draining distraction, though at the end of the day there was always Bill Bray (“drearier and drearier”), whose “headquarters” were across the street at the Anglesea Pub; thither Yates was dragged when either his roommate or loneliness got the better of him. The clientele tended to be “slightly more rewarding” than Bray, but of course that wasn’t a lavish compliment. The only person who seemed to interest him at all was “a young journalist and writer named Douglas something,” with whom he could talk about books. (“Remarkable how few writers I’ve known,” Yates reflected, and in fact five more years would pass before he’d meet his first “real” writer, a distinction he made only in retrospect.) Douglas-something was about Yates’s age and had lived in New York as an evacuee during the early part of the war (“at the Sherry Netherlands, which gives you an idea of his class,” Yates noted for Sheila’s benefit); but the writing life hadn’t paid off for the once-posh young man, and now he looked “even broker than Bill.” Indeed there was a kind of striving-yet-aimless quality about the whole Anglesea crowd that rather intrigued Yates: Their “established routine” was to turn up at the pub each night, then “shift en masse” to a club on the Fulham Road, and then to coffee shops and diners and so on, looking for a party that generally failed to materialize. “I’m damned if I know how they can stick it night after night and not end up with faintly suicidal tendencies,” Yates mused. Little did he know that he was about to become the darling of that set.
It began on July 14, when he got his first really good news in nine months—as before, from Monica McCall: COSMOPOLITAN BUYING TENOR EIGHT HUNDRED FIFTY MANY CONGRATULATIONS. “How much money can we stand?” the ecstatic Yates wrote Sheila, and reported that he’d “been wandering around in a haze for two days.” His haze was abetted by the inevitable Bill Bray and all the manqué rowdies at the Anglesea, who got “deliriously drunk” in his honor and seemed to regard him “as an authentic and indisputed genius.” Yates’s roommate was particularly disposed to press this claim, and for the soundest possible reason: “[Bray has] figured out that I have earned fourteen cents a word, and can’t get over it. It sounds like a hell of a lot over here, where short story writers traditionally think in terms of twenty-five pounds a story instead of three hundred.” Thus while the two staggered about the neighborhood with red carnations in their buttonholes, Bray roared of his friend’s triumph in terms of three-hundred-quid-a-pop.
But leave it to Yates to seize on what he called the “depressing aspect of the thing”: namely, that Cosmopolitan was a “dead-loss prestigewise.” In those days the magazine pandered to sentimental hausfraus, and Yates worried that the editors would butcher his story beyond recognition. If nothing else he expected them to tone down his dialogue—“make my ‘bastards’ into ‘buzzards’ and stuff like that” (in fact they substituted the only slightly less excruciating “jerks” and “stinkers”). But there was a more troubling problem: “[I]f I’ve got to appear among the cookie recipes I sure would rather have it be with a less personal story than this one. This will sort of be like taking off all your clothes for the amusement of several million Bialeks.”* Such an issue would loom larger in Yates’s later career, as his fiction became more baldly autobiographical (and his mental health more precarious), and whether or not there were cookie recipes or Bialeks in the picture would never matter to his shattered peace of mind. For the present, though, Bill Bray acted as a voice of reason: “Really, old boy,” he told the fretful Yates, “one can’t have jam on it.” Bray planned to spend some of the proceeds on a big party for the “madly smart,” and had little patience for such quibbling.
Yates agreed that a celebration was in order. Misgivings aside, the sale of “Tenor” was a milestone: positive proof that he could actually make a living as a writer. But such a métier was fraught with hazards, the most common of which would bedevil Yates from the outset: “[McCall] has left me in a real jam by failing to send the damn check,” he wrote Sheila ten days after the sale. “I’d already invited about a million people to a party tomorrow night … and it’s been pretty grim hounding the mailbox every day and picturing all the Madly Smart guests arriving with nothing at all to drink.” For the moment he’d been able to persuade Mrs. Capon at the dairy (“who loves me so dearly”) to cash a postdated check, but things were already spiraling out of control: Bill Bray had borrowed five pounds, the party would cost ten, and the phone and gas bills were due. Suddenly Yates found himself eighty dollars in the red rather than eight hundred in the black—“a lousy, painful, Dook-style mess,” he gloomily concluded.
But he was somewhat cheered by the party itself, which turned out to be “a really first-rate job.” With a bar set up in front and a phonograph for dancing in back, the basement flat was converted into a tiny bal musette for the Madly Smart. Along with the wastrels of the Anglesea, Yates reported the attendance of “a bigtime theatrical producer, a French ballet dancer, a bunch of actors and newspaper men, two architects … and about seven beautiful girls.” Also present was the Argosy editor who’d rejected so many of Yates’s stories; eager to make amends, she called him a “terrific writer” (“bitter astringency” aside) and left with his carbon of “Tenor,” which she promised to press on her colleagues. And finally the party peaked when the place was besieged by a pack of less-than-madly-smart Chelsea types, whom Bill Bray (of all people) had sworn to keep out:
The local bohemians got in at last, but only … after their ringleader had floored Bill in the doorway with a right to the nose and held him down in absurdly drunken combat while his followers climbed in over their writhing bodies. Everybody seemed to feel that the brawl was just what was needed to give the party a fine old pre-war flavor, and it ended in a great deal of sentimental handshaking.
Thus was Yates’s launch as a successful author celebrated, and for the moment anything seemed possible—perhaps he’d prove to be a writer like Fitzgerald who could have his cake and eat it too, money and prestige, and be something of a bon vivant in the bargain. “So I am now a famous host,” he merrily noted.
* * *
The Cosmopolitan sale worked wonders for Yates’s marital problems, which seemed to vanish overnight. Both he and Sheila wished the other were present so each could celebrate with the one person who really understood what it meant—a further reminder that, for better or worse, there was nobody else who mattered much in their lives. Nor was there any question about Yates’s coming home now as soon as possible, since Sheila’s long-held ambivalence toward him had suddenly been turned against herself: She conceded “what an odd view of the world and its people” she’d always had, and now it was she, not Yates, who spoke of all the ingenious “little tricks” she was practicing for becoming a better person—such as “hugging Mussy (much against her will) when there are ‘a million things to do,’” and cultivating an easier, more tolerant nature in general. “I do love you so much, Rich,” she declared. “I won’t kid myself about that anymore.” Yates was gratified, if a bit leery of that exalted tone he knew so well: “Absence sure does seem to have made your heart grow fonder,” he wrote; “presence will make it cool off somewhat.” Meanwhile he warned her against turning their marriage into an “intellectual project,” adding that if she just relaxed and loved him, “all the little tricks … will learn themselves.”
For the most part, though, they were too happy to bicker anymore, as they busily prepared to become a family again. After a month of frustrated searching, Sheila had found a “quaint and Villagy” three-room apartment at 96 Perry Street, between Bleecker and Hudson (Dookie had helped close the deal “by throwing her weight around in a realty office when she noticed some very bad paintings on the wall”). By mid-August she and Mussy had moved in, and a week later Yates reported to the American Express that he was ready to return to the States as soon as possible. He was told that a cancellation would probably make a berth available within two or three weeks, which wasn’t soon enough for Yates. At first he considered inventing “some heart-rending emergency” to persuade the American Welfare Service to book a more immediate passage, but on second thought decided “it might be a bit awkward if they got wise.”
While he waited Yates got a good start on a story he called “The Ordeal of Vincent Sabella” (“all about meats in the fourth grade”) and spent leisure hours mulling the future with unwonted optimism. Now that he was making good as a writer, he could even allow himself to consider taking the odd freelance job from Remington Rand; in fact an old coworker had just inquired (“with some temerity,” said Sheila, “in light of your success”) whether they should prepare an account for him. For the moment Yates could afford to make them wait. He was almost a shoo-in to win the Atlantic “First” Award in December—so far there was only one other “First” in competition for that year—and that would mean another $750.
Indeed the only thing that cast a shadow was the prospect of what Cosmopolitan might do to his story: “The main illustration will probably be something very corny with the tenor in full song and the little boy sniveling in the corner,” he wrote. “Shudder to think about it. My next twelve stories are going to be so damn unsentimental that Cosmopolitan wouldn’t touch them with a ten-foot pole.” Sheila noted reassuringly that she’d gone through a whole stack of Cosmopolitans in the ladies’ room at work—the stories were “good,” the illustrations “quite tasteful”—but Yates was not comforted. He even considered running the story under a pseudonym.
Fortunately he was distracted by any number of cheerful errands to run while he waited for a berth. There was the question of how best to transport Sweetheart, the crotchety Angora, whose return Mussy had demanded. Yates solemnly inquired at the American Express about traveling with cats, and was told the law required a proper “basket”: “So I looked into cat-baskets at Selfridge’s and found they are very elaborate damn things costing two pounds five.” He bought one. Also, Sheila sent him a list of toys to bring back for Mussy—“a coloring book with water paints; a little sailboat for the tub; a whistle; a gun (honest to God! but no caps, please)”—as well as “those lovely smelly English soaps” for herself and either a black or “nice antiquey red” pocketbook. Most pressing and intricate by far was the matter of Yates’s new suit, about which he sent almost daily dispatches from Savile Row.* Early in August he’d settled on Oxford gray flannel (“this may not sound very imaginative, but it’s the most useful and best-looking kind of suit I know”), but vacillated as to the right tailor, until at last tradition in its hoariest form won the day: Gieves and Hawkes at Number One Savile Row, he wrote, was “sort of the English version of Brooks Brothers” and the sign outside assured one that “[they’d] been in business since 1066 or something.”
Yates’s giddiness waxed as his departure approached, such that even a bitter end to his friendship with Bill Bray couldn’t dampen his spirits. “Old Bill” had been in a “pout” since Yates refused to loan him more money, and left his debt unpaid when he cleared out of the flat in late August. It was the end of something, to be sure, but Yates felt marvelous: “I don’t think I’ve ever been less depressed about life in general,” he wrote Sheila. “I just don’t see how we can fail to have a damn good time together when I come home, Pretty.* The setup on Perry Street sounds ideal, and the idea of having you and the Meat under the same roof again is staggeringly nice.” By the time his passage was cleared on the Maasdam in mid-September, Yates had wrapped up his affairs with admirable efficiency: He’d obtained a clean bill of health and complete X-ray records from the hospital, run a vacuum over the rug at Neville Terrace, taken his leave of Aunt Mary, and gotten himself and Sweetheart aboard the ship in good time. And in the midst of a pleasant crossing (the food was “wonderful” and little girls were stroking the cat “at regular intervals”), he received a telegram from Sheila: Cosmopolitan had bought “A Glutton for Punishment”—unhappy ending and all—for another $850.
The Maasdam docked at Hoboken on September 19, 1953, and the chipper Yates disembarked with a scowling cat in his arms. This was his daughter Sharon’s first definite memory of her father.