CHAPTER SIX
Yates and Sheila had planned “a sort of honeymoon” after his return, and perhaps this came to pass in one form or another; but it wasn’t long before Remington Rand had lured him back on a rather feverish “freelance” basis. Yates began to report twice a month to a man named Andy Borno (the physical model for the squat, balding Laurel Players director in Revolutionary Road), who gave him new assignments in the form of so-called case histories, to wit: Yates would visit companies that had purchased Remington Rand products and interview the relevant engineers, systems analysts, and salespeople, then ghostwrite articles under the name of whatever executive made the purchase. Such puff pieces were placed in business magazines by Remington Rand, which paid Yates $125 (plus expenses) per job. “All this was very boring stuff,” Yates said in 1981, “but it occupied only about half of my working time and so financed the whole of my first novel.” For the next seven years, then, Yates devoted the first half of each month to PR work and the second to fiction (it was necessary to segregate the tasks as much as possible)—a routine that resulted in one novel, a handful of stories, at least five hundred ghostwritten articles, many executive speeches, and almost every word of Remington Rand’s internal house organ, perhaps the only writing Yates ever did drunk.
His particular beat was the UNIVAC, to which Remington Rand had recently acquired exclusive rights. The first electronic computer designed for business use, the UNIVAC had made a splash in 1951, when it predicted an Eisenhower landslide based on less than 1 percent of the vote.* But talk of an impending “computer revolution” continued to leave most people cold, and the UNIVAC, at eight tons per unit, was hardly an easy sell. That Yates was entrusted with much of its promotion attests to the quality of his work. Not only was he able to translate esoteric technological jargon into chatty Babbittese for the layman, but his articles were also effective in soothing worries over “the broad economic and social implications of what was then the new and controversial phenomenon of ‘automation,’” as Yates noted in a later résumé. Such was his known expertise on the subject that he was hired to write the UNIVAC entry for Funk & Wagnall’s Encyclopedia. Nor were the rich “implications” of automation (economic, social, metaphorical) lost on Yates as a fiction writer—hence Frank Wheeler explains to his wife, on the morning of her suicide, how an electronic computer works: “‘Only instead of mechanical parts, you see, it’s got thousands of little individual vacuum tubes…’ And in a minute he was drawing for her, on a paper napkin, a diagram representing the passage of binary digit pulses through circuitry.” Flaubert himself might have coveted those “vacuum tubes” and “binary digit pulses”; as for Yates, he thought it the best scene he ever wrote.
Now that Yates was making $850 a story, he and Sheila thought it high time to distance themselves from the Cains and Bialeks of the world, the better to meet some of those “young, poor, bright, humorous” golden people they’d always dreamed of knowing. They made a start when Yates renewed his acquaintance with Tony Vevers, the English painter he’d met during that roisterous furlough in London eight years before. Vevers and his wife Elspeth had recently moved to New York, where they led a life of romantic squalor in a Lower East Side loft. Yates was impressed by the painter’s sincere indifference to his own poverty: Vevers, who supported himself with a number of menial odd jobs, seemed the very embodiment of the idea that one’s art was what mattered most and wages were simply a means to that end. That both he and his wife came from posh families made it all the more impressive.
Yates also became friends with Robert Riche, who was dating Vevers’s sister at the time. In a letter he wrote Yates many years later, Riche described himself as “no different than I ever was: somewhat naive, somewhat boisterous if encouraged, occasionally funny, generally a bit apprehensive about my position in life, but holding to a basically decent value system, I think.” By the time he wrote those words, Riche had been portrayed in Young Hearts Crying as the naive, boisterous, occasionally funny, basically decent, and utterly preposterous Bill Brock; that Riche was aware of (and angered by) this lampoon, but could still write Yates with such candor, attests to the verisimilitude of his fictional counterpart’s more amiable traits.
The two had met at a gallery opening a few weeks after Yates’s return from Europe. Yates was wearing his tailored English suit, and Riche thought he resembled a young T. S. Eliot (perhaps the desired effect; years later, at any rate, in the midst of a typical round of banter between the two, Riche told Yates he looked like an “English fag” in that suit). They were the same age and seemed to have a lot in common. Both had left-wing sympathies, and Riche went so far as to call himself a “revolutionary” (he’d worked in a factory and served as a labor organizer). Also, Riche had gone to Yale (as had Tony Vevers), and Yates wished he’d gone there. Above all Riche vaguely aspired to be a writer and both were involved in what they wryly called the “PR dodge”; such mutual disdain for their bread and butter was itself the basis for immediate camaraderie. Or so it seemed to Riche when he was invited, on the spot, to a big Halloween party on Perry Street—though in retrospect he realized both Yateses were more taken by his date, the attractive young Pamela Vevers.*
As for Tony Vevers, he found Yates much changed from the rambunctious, “Mammy”-singing nineteen-year-old he’d known in London. For one thing the older Yates drank more, minus the boyish joie de vivre: “He’d become sharp-tongued and bitter,” Vevers recalled. “One got the impression he wasn’t as successful as he wanted to be.” Bob Riche, who hadn’t known Yates as a younger man, simply found him a good drinking companion—a “riot,” even—though Yates’s abrasive side was hardly lost on him. In fact, both he and Vevers remarked on what struck them as Yates’s peculiar attitude toward women: “He expected them to drink a lot and be beautiful all the time,” as Vevers put it. Riche remembered a typical outing to his father’s cottage in the country, when he and Yates and a man named Larry Fleischer stayed up drinking and telling dirty jokes long after their wives had gone to bed. Fleischer’s wife got fed up with all the laughing, shouting, and coughing, and more than once stuck her head in the door and asked her husband to call it a night. Yates waved her off with increasing contempt, and when the weekend was over the two were no longer speaking. As for Sheila, she seemed to defer to her husband as a matter of choice on social occasions, though sometimes she’d silence him with a frown or a nudge, especially if he got to singing too much.
More than ever Yates’s greatest scorn was reserved for his mother, about whom he was almost compulsively disparaging—and this, ironically, at a time when she was most deserving of his esteem. “You know where my mother works?” he asked a friend while in his cups. “She’s the fucking cloakroom lady at the City Center gallery.” A more jaundiced view of Dookie’s employment would be hard to imagine. She may obligingly have offered to stow the wraps of certain theatergoers who stood in her gallery during intermission, and the long corridor that comprised the gallery (actually the emergency exit from the Fifty-fifth Street auditorium) might easily have been taken as a lounge of sorts, but Dookie was no cloakroom lady. In fact, as the gallery’s director, she was a colleague of George Balanchine and Jean Dalrymple, who headed the ballet and theater companies at what was then called New York’s “temple for the performing arts.” It was through Dookie’s efforts that painters such as Robert Motherwell, Larry Rivers, and Franz Kline served as jurors for the traditional, centrist, and avant-garde shows that alternated at the center, and it was Dookie who raised money for her impoverished gallery by helping to organize the annual Easter Bonnet Tea Dance in the main ballroom of the Plaza Hotel, where such celebrity judges as Celeste Holm and Helen Hayes gave prizes for “Prettiest Bonnet,” “Best Dancers,” and “Grandmother with the Loveliest Outfit.” (This event was later abolished in the wake of criticism that it was “too society” for the “people’s theater.”) Dookie not only knew such luminaries as Holm and Hayes et al., she had lunch with them and called them Celeste and Helen, to say nothing of Bob, Larry, and Franz. Indeed, the gala opening of the gallery on September 29, 1953, was less than two weeks after Yates’s return from Europe; perhaps his mother’s curious ascendancy was a bit too much to digest, as well as a bit too good to be true.
To this day, anyhow, Dookie has her defenders and deserves them to some extent, though it’s necessary to point out that such people knew her best during her redemptive City Center phase: Thus they perceived her as “amusing,” “outspoken,” and even “heroic,” while Yates (vis-à-vis his mother at least) was “sarcastic,” “impatient,” and “spiteful.”* Tony Vevers has a number of reasons for taking Dookie’s side, not the least being that she gave him a job soon after he moved to New York. “I said, ‘I know your son,’” Vevers recalled, “and she said, ‘You’re hired.’ Just like that.” And not only was Vevers hired, but so was his wife Elspeth, who was put to work as Dookie’s secretary despite the fact that she couldn’t type. In short, Dookie took them under her wing, all because they were friends of her beloved son. She gave them theater tickets and got them into rehearsals to watch Balanchine and his company; she took them to lunch, where they drank martinis and met famous artists, and City Center paid for it all. “Ruth Yates was an extraordinary person,” said Louise Rodgers, who as a young woman helped Dookie in the gallery. “She was temperamental, yes, and I suppose she drank a lot, but she worked hard, and everybody drank a lot.”
By the time he returned from Europe, though, Yates had seen enough of his mother’s drinking. In fact he could hardly bear her company, especially when friends were present: If she got tipsy and began to talk too much, Yates would roll his eyes and make faces at her while she wasn’t looking, until finally he’d get so agitated that sometimes he’d have to leave the room. Even Sheila—who could understand better than most—thought her husband’s attitude a bit much, though she herself could only take Dookie in moderate doses.
Happily for Dookie’s sake, she had less need of their company or philanthropy. City Center kept her busy and paid her a living wage, and during weekends at High Hedges her grandchildren saved her from the worst of her loneliness. On Saturdays they’d visit her cozy, overgrown garage apartment on the estate (she stored her sculpture below), and Dookie would make them a treat of fried bananas in sugar. Even Yates gave her credit for being a good enough grandmother (despite her old complaint that she couldn’t imagine herself as such), and would leave Mussy in her care for days at a time during the summer. But otherwise Dookie kept mostly to herself at High Hedges, though she still liked to visit Fritz and Louise for sherry in the evening. As for relations with her daughter, they were civil but strained: Ruth, out of loyalty to her husband (as well as grievances known only to herself), had made it clear at the outset that Dookie was not wanted by the younger Rodgerses at High Hedges; she relented when Dookie appealed to Fritz, but both women would nurse the hurt for the rest of their lives.
Ruth’s life was as full as it would ever be: Her children were all at home and she was a happily attentive mother. Twice a week she worked at WGSM in Huntington, where she wrote scripts for radio programs on gardening and local history, and sometimes served as announcer as well. And whatever her differences with Dookie, they were kindred spirits in at least one respect—Ruth’s early involvement with the Willkie campaign had led to a lifelong interest in Republican politics: Ruth was one of the first Republican committeewomen on Long Island, and wrote speeches for Nelson Rockefeller’s gubernatorial campaign. But like her brother—who in time would write a number of political speeches himself (though not at gunpoint would he ever have written for a Republican)—she wanted to be a fiction writer most of all. So great was her ambition to “crack The New Yorker” with one of her “humorous sketches about family life,” that she papered her powder room with the magazine’s covers as a form of hopeful tribute. Fred’s position on the subject of his wife’s diversions was this: They were fine as long as they didn’t distract her from motherhood or cause any confusion as to who the real breadwinner was.
It was understood that Yates didn’t visit High Hedges very often because of the enmity between him and Fred—or rather Fred served as a convenient excuse. The fact was, Yates loved and cared for his sister and would always feel a bond, but found her frankly dull and depressing. He made the trip to Long Island as a matter of duty, and tended to be cordial but distant while there. His niece Ruth (called Dodo by the family) remembers him as “a mellow sort of man” who smiled a lot, but often looked grave when he and his sister sat talking together, particularly in later years. Sometimes he’d spend time clearing brush on the property (hardly a characteristic activity otherwise), and though he was always kind to Ruth’s children, he was rarely attentive or playful. Once he went on a squirrel-shooting expedition with six-year-old Peter (who can’t remember whether “Uncle Dick” was delighted or horrified by the idea) and once he let thirteen-year-old Fred drive his new Chevy around the grounds, but that was about it. No matter how rare and tense his visits, though, Ruth was not a whit resentful: She adored her talented little brother, and always spoke of him with tender pride.
* * *
As anticipated, Yates won the Atlantic “First” award of $750 in December, and a few days later Seymour Lawrence came to New York and invited him to dinner at the Harvard Club. It was the beginning of a long and peculiar friendship. To be sure, things were less complicated in their salad days, when the two got along more or less famously—a bond assisted by their being exact contemporaries (Yates was eight days older) with similar tastes and tendencies. “We would order several Jack Daniel’s on the rocks followed by sirloin steaks, rare please,” Lawrence recalled forty years later. “We would gossip, tell stories, talk about life and letters, who were the good guys and who were the shits.” At the time such meetings were particularly bracing for Yates, who liked being courted at the Harvard Club (“a big deal for me”) and by his own reckoning had no other “literary” friends to speak of.
And Sam Lawrence was almost as monomaniacal and quirky; if he hadn’t existed it might have been necessary to make him up, at least for the sake of Yates and certain other worthy if problematic writers. “The first time I met Sam Lawrence,” a colleague remembered, “he was making an argument on behalf of one of his authors. The last time I spoke with him … he was doing the same thing.” Quite simply, Lawrence’s life and work were indistinguishable. A man with a bad stammer who drank to overcome shyness, Lawrence had gravitated to writers from the beginning—without, it seems, ever seriously wishing to be a writer himself. As a freshman at Columbia he fell in with a “bad crowd” that included Kerouac and Ginsberg, until his mother made him transfer to Harvard, where he founded the magazine Wake and coaxed submissions from the likes of T. S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams. By the time he met Yates he’d been at the Atlantic Monthly Press in Boston for just over a year. By 1955 he was director of the firm, and thereafter would insist “I’m a publisher, not an editor”—that is, while he had sovereign faith in his editorial judgment (whose dictates he was always willing to follow in defiance of conventional wisdom), he wasn’t remotely interested in the hands-on task of editing books. For a hands-off perfectionist such as Yates, this turned out to be an almost ideal arrangement, but most writers were less autonomous. In the latter case Lawrence had a solution—he simply farmed out the editing chores to his own stable of writers: Thus Kurt Vonnegut edited Dan Wakefield, Wakefield edited Tim O’Brien, and so on.* “Lawrence’s writers were a happy little family,” said DeWitt Henry, who made the intriguing point that most of these writers were not only friends but tended to have drinking and realism in common—or, to put a finer point on it, that “alcohol and its vision” informed their themes to a remarkable degree: “the harrowing experience of reality without illusions that drives the pathology,” as Henry put it.
Be that as it may, in 1953 Yates and Lawrence were just a couple of boozy young men swapping gossip and dividing the good guys from the shits. Also there was the matter of mutual self-interest: Yates was a talented new writer whose inevitable novel Lawrence wanted to publish, but in the meantime Yates needed to sell his other work. At their first meeting, then, Lawrence agreed to reconsider a few stories that had been previously rejected by the Atlantic—among them the story of Vincent Sabella, the alienated welfare child, which Yates had retitled “Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern.” Yates thought the story one of his best, but Lawrence demurred: “The psychology did not ring wholly true,” he wrote Monica McCall, though he reiterated that “Dick Yates is a writer whom we respect and want to publish frequently.” That said, he rejected Yates’s other stories a second time too, and his judgment of “Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern” would be validated by every magazine from The New Yorker to Discovery to the Yale Review—until a year later it was finally sent back to Yates by a “heartbroken” and “frankly stumped” Monica McCall.
In early 1954 Yates started a novel that failed to “jell,” and so returned to writing stories. In that genre the level of his work was now consistently excellent, but if anything less saleable than ever. With soul-killing monotony the consensus opinion was expressed by the formula Extremely well-written, but … “Fun with a Stranger” was well-written but inconsequential in terms of its payoff. “Out with the Old” was “a little masterpiece” according to McCall, but a doubtful sell because of the protagonist’s pregnant teenage daughter. “The B.A.R. Man,” she thought, “belongs in The New Yorker, who won’t buy it.” And a story called “Sobel” (later retitled “A Wrestler with Sharks”) was “a beauty as usual, though subject-wise not too easy a one.” Finally in August a rewrite of the two-year-old “Nuptials”—now called “I’ll Be All in Clover” and soon to be called “The Best of Everything”—was bought by the magazine Charm, whose editors also reconsidered in favor of “Fun with a Stranger.” The two stories were Yates’s only sales in 1954.
* * *
After less than a year on Perry Street, the world and Dookie were too much with the Yateses, and they decided to move to the country. Elspeth Vevers’s mother owned a converted barn in northern Westchester, where the Yateses lived for most of that summer in an awkward communal arrangement with the Veverses and two other couples. The house was big, dark, and hot—a bit too much like a barn, converted or otherwise—and Sheila appealed to her mother to find them a better place. Marjorie Bryant was now one of the region’s most successful real estate brokers, as well as an indefatigable fixer-upper in what spare time she allowed herself; as such, she was almost ominously eager to be of use to her daughter and son-in-law. In no time she found them a lovely A-frame carriage house in Salem, Westchester, on the estate of an affable Cossack named Guirey—a great horseman and drinker who’d known Tony Vevers at Yale. He and Yates hit it off, and for a while the place was almost perfect.
One of their first visitors was Bob Riche, who’d been invited to come out with his then-girlfriend Pamela Vevers. By the time Yates met Riche at the train station, though, the couple had broken up and Pamela was already dating theater director Ed Sherin.*Riche was devastated, and by his own admission had a hard time getting off the subject. Yates tried to console his tearful friend by making fun of the notoriously charming Sherin, whom he described as an “actor type.” But Sheila was less sympathetic. She went out of her way to talk about a delightful recent visit with Sherin and Pamela, and when Riche persisted in licking his wounds, she casually remarked, “Oh Bob, but he’s much better-looking than you.” It began to seem an almost systematic attempt to demoralize Riche, culminating in an episode that haunts him still. As he tried to sleep in an open loft directly over his hosts’ bed, he was disturbed by what struck him as an outrageous act of conjugal derision: “She was giggling and carrying on like a mad sex fiend,” he recalled, “and I always felt it was at the least a bit inappropriate, and more likely deliberate cruelty.” “More likely” indeed, as the Yateses had already turned Riche into something of a private joke; as Sheila later explained, “Bob was the sort of person who gets analysisyear in year out,” and her husband (while fond of Riche) found him every bit as ridiculous.* But it is Sheila’s glee that stuck in Riche’s mind: “She had a laugh that snapped out like a whip,” he said.
Unfortunately the Yateses weren’t able to entertain at the carriage house as much as they might have liked; the place wasn’t heated, and by winter it was time to move on again. At this point the transience of their lives was getting them down again: They wanted their own home in a nice community, where Mussy could be raised in a proper middle-class environment, though Yates wondered if he could handle a mortgage on his rather unstable income. Re-enter Marjorie Bryant, absentee mother turned ubiquitous benefactor: She’d found a lovely little house in the suburban town of Redding, Connecticut, and what’s more she was willing to make the down payment and hold the mortgage herself. Yates loathed the idea of being beholden to his mother-in-law—or anyone, ever—but it was a difficult offer to refuse. Redding provided a pastoral but convenient setting right off Route Seven: The schools in the area were excellent, and the house itself, though not exactly lovely, was suitable—a newish one-story ranch in a broken L-shape, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a big picture window. The latter was a bit of a fright, but on balance they liked the way the cellar had doors on the outside like an old-fashioned farmhouse, and all things considered they decided to take it. Meanwhile Yates arranged to do extra PR work for a firm called Lester Rossin Associates, the better not to miss a single mortgage payment to Marjorie Bryant.
Sheila’s old friend Ann Barker Kowalsky lived in nearby Brewster, and she and her husband became frequent guests. John “Crash” Kowalsky was a discontented engineer who worked for a microwave electronics company in Pleasantville, and drinking was perhaps the one thing he and Yates had in common. For a while it was a formidable bond. Their nights followed a predictable pattern: The two couples would drink and chat for as long as pleasantly possible before the men became unruly—arguing or bellowing army songs while the women receded into an icy silence. Sometimes, too, Yates would lapse into grumpy, drunken boredom and tell Kowalsky to “get the hell out,” whenever the man’s stories about his proletarian childhood began to pall. One night Yates announced that “Crash” was the model for the “engineering square” in his novel-in-progress,* a characterization that made Kowalsky bridle at the time, though he never did get around to reading the book in question.
The odd Walpurgisnacht aside, the overall domestic scene on Old Redding Road was tranquil enough. Sheila (whether happily or not) had always been an excellent housewife, and now at last she had a proper venue for her talents. She kept the little house tidy despite Yates’s presence in it, and the family sat down twice a day to tasty, well-balanced meals—especially on holidays, when Sheila would prepare an Anglophilic feast of juicy rare rib roast of beef, mashed potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding. And no matter how much the couple occasionally chafed in each other’s company, they were at pains to be on good behavior for Mussy, who was calming down into a gentle, ladylike child. When she indulged in occasional naughtiness, the worst Yates would do was send her to her room, and only that after a long series of jocular admonishments: “Stop this clownlike behavior,” he’d order the giggling girl, “or I’ll have to get the stick with the nail in it!”
A drawback of living in the hinterland was that it convinced Yates that he needed to drive a car, and this would become a fresh and fertile source of marital strife. Yates’s lifelong wish to seem “competent as anybody at dealing with the small-change of practical life” was coupled with a terrible awareness that he wasn’t competent, and this made him frustrated and defensive and all but hopeless as a student driver. As he wrote of Bill Grove in Uncertain Times, “He was too nervous and easily rattled ever to handle a car well, and his stubbornness in hating to admit it only made it worse.” Just so. But as Yates would prove time and again, the capacity for knowing thyself in art rarely translates into everyday life. In any event Sheila soon decided she had better things to do than teach her husband how to drive, and so delegated the job to her brother Charlie—a bad choice, not only because Charlie was a long-term mental patient but because Charlie was Charlie: possessed of “an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people’s weaknesses,” as Yates put it.*
One can only imagine the extent to which Charlie brought such insight to his driving instruction, but it wasn’t long before a fistfight erupted between teacher and pupil. Sheila, who witnessed the incident and called it “pretty horrible,” is almost certain it was the direct result of a driving lesson. In later years, though, Yates would tell a different story, which perhaps conflated a number of similar episodes, and anyway seems to shed light on certain aspects of his family life at the time. According to his version, it all began with a typical phone call from his mother-in-law: Charlie was harassing her, she said; would they come right away and take him back to the hospital? As ever the Yateses tried to oblige, but this time Charlie refused to go. “You’re just pushing me around because I’m a mental patient,” he said. “In Connecticut you can put the cops on me, but in New York I could fight back.” The only way he’d go quietly was if they agreed to drive him to the state line and let him “fight back,” so off they went. When they came to New York the men got out of the car and scuffled a bit in the headlight beams, but both were heavy smokers and soon gasping for breath. “God—” said Charlie as they slumped against the car, “can you believe some guys do this for a living?”
Whatever the circumstances, no lingering rift resulted. The same can’t be said for Yates’s marriage once he learned how to drive, as the car proved an apt battlefield for the pair. “When he was really being dopey,” Sheila recalled, “he had this big thing about how he had to drive the car, no woman could help him.” One may recall how Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying feels “humiliated—even emasculated” when his wife makes him ride on the passenger’s side. Yates felt the same way, and for that matter aspired to a rather cartoonish stereotype of masculinity in general, forever threatened on all sides and particularly so when he was behind the wheel of a car. And this, in turn, gave Sheila the irresistible opportunity to get her own back for any number of pent-up grievances. As Bob Riche observed, “Dick bumbled around Sheila, especially in the car. I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, she reinforced his feelings of inadequacy, and he played into it unconsciously.” According to Riche, it was a “nightmare” being in the same car with the couple, and the cycle was always the same: Yates would struggle to remain calm while Sheila needled him (“Oh, be careful! You don’t know what you’re doing!” and so on), until finally Yates would snap and the fight would be on. Nor was their daughter exempt from such scenes. Once she watched them bicker over how to run the car heater; when Sheila turned out to be right, Yates exploded “Well, cut my penis off!” and lapsed into a long brooding silence.
Sheila’s tendency to emphasize her husband’s ineptitude was more than idle perversity, as she came to understand better in retrospect. “I hate the thought of mentally calculating the added amount of cooking, cleaning and wash you add up to,” she later wrote Yates, as they considered another reconciliation; “but I think you know from the Remington Rand years … that doing something you hate for someone you love makes for a cancerous kind of grudge.” Which suggests, too, the insidiously reciprocal nature of that grudge, insofar as each resented the other for putting them in a situation they hated—housework and Remington Rand respectively. Because of Yates’s awful efforts to pay the bills, he might have expected his domestic failings to be pardoned; beyond a certain point, though, even an attitude of weary acceptance on Sheila’s part was liable to be taken (accurately enough) as dire reproach. The mounting tension made for some curious scenes, particularly in the eyes of a five-year-old child. One time, Sharon recalls, her parents sat quietly chatting in the living room, when suddenly Yates hurled his glass into the fireplace and stormed bellowing out of the house.
He wanted to be a proper country husband, a productive member of his household and community. He wanted to show he could “pull his weight,” “stay on the ball,” and “cope” as well or better than the most banal bore in Redding, but his efforts had a way of ending badly. One morning while his wife was fixing breakfast he went outside to burn some trash. A few minutes later he let loose an aria of obscenities, but the jaded Sheila simply assumed he’d stubbed his toe and went on with her business. Finally she glanced outside: There was a brushfire in the backyard, on the edges of which Yates gamboled ineffectually. The volunteer fire department arrived in time to save their house, and a penitent Yates agreed to become a member, faithfully attending meetings every Saturday night. According to Bob Riche, he was just lonely: “Dick yearned to have friends. Sheila kept telling him to get out and become a part of the community. So he tried, the poor bastard, and joined the volunteer fire department … and sat around at meetings with local farm types trying to fit in, and crushing beer cans with one hand.”
At last he gave up. His marriage was on the rocks again, everything was wrong, and he blamed it largely on Redding. Or rather: Because he’d accepted the charity of a woman he despised, he was forced into a wholly false and self-defeating position; not only was he obliged to be pleasant to Marjorie (as he was in any case), but also grateful—to visit her and be visited, to mediate between her and Charlie, and above all to work harder than ever at the “PR dodge” to pay off a mortgage and avoid the necessity of even moregratitude, all for the privilege of living in a place where he was lonely and miserable and couldn’t get any decent work done. Sheila tried to remonstrate: They had a nice house in Connecticut where Mussy was likely to get a good education; everything would be fine (or tolerable) if he could just get over his resentment toward Marjorie and accept her good turn.
Yates referred to the whole arrangement as “Gethsemane” and wanted out, period. “He claimed all his problems in every way were caused by Remington Rand and my mother,” Sheila said. “Finally I stopped arguing with him. I thought maybe that was true. I didn’t realize this was an ongoing situation that would go on no matter where we lived or what happened.” They’d lived in Redding for just over a year.
* * *
Yates would always say that when the work is going well, the rest follows. The work was going poorly. For the past three years Monica McCall and Sam Lawrence and everybody else had urged him to write a novel, but what with one thing and another he seemed no closer to getting started in early 1955 than he’d ever been. Meanwhile his other work was not only drying up but in danger of regressing, if one judges by the quality of “The End of the Great Depression”—as it happened, the last short story Yates would write for another six years.
“Depression” is mostly comprised of Walter Mittyish daydreams, much like the earlier “Convalescent Ego”—an ominous similarity. The story, set in 1937, is about a solitary twelve-year-old boy who assumes that the Depression will last well into the future, and hence fantasizes about becoming a hero to the downtrodden and ultimately the president who ends the crisis sometime in the fifties. For a while the boy’s fantasy adheres to the same reassuring narrative, which at one point has him chastely kissing a generic dream-girl.* Eventually, however, the boy’s naive idealism is eclipsed by puberty, and the fantasy is altered when the girl abruptly reveals her breasts and metamorphoses into “Gretchen Sondergaard, at school”: “And he didn’t know it then … but the nature of his dreams was changed forever.” The young George Plimpton at the Paris Review rejected “Depression” with a lengthy critique advising, in effect, that Yates flesh out the frame story lest the reader “get so involved in the text of the daydreams that we forget it is a boy dreaming them and take them at face value.” This Yates dutifully did, adding some dialogue between the boy’s parents wherein they discuss his welfare in terms that are alternately gruff (father) and fretful (mother). It wasn’t much of an improvement, and when Plimpton rejected the revised version he pointed to a more intrinsic flaw: “The Walter Mitty scenes [are] supposed to be ludicrous clichés, but they turn out as slapstick, with little subtlety worked in which might have given them originality.” In other words, neitherpart of this strangely amateurish story worked, and one can only wonder why Yates ever allowed it to be published at all.†
Clearly he was exhausted, and perhaps the banalities of PR work were beginning to infiltrate his imagination. The only hope of escape was to write a successful novel—the raw material of which, he already sensed, would be the stuff of his own predicament. But he wanted to transcend the merely personal, to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment and self-pity. And before he wrote a word he wanted above all to purge the stale residue of PR work from his brain; what better antidote than the great hater of the bourgeoisie and their cant, Flaubert, whose impersonal masterpiece proved the perfect goad at the time. “That was when Madame Bovary took command,” Yates wrote in “Some Very Good Masters”:
I had read it before but hadn’t studied it the way I’d studied Gatsby and other books; now it seemed ideally suited to serve as a guide, if not a model, for the novel that was taking shape in my mind. I wanted that kind of balance and quiet resonance on every page, that kind of foreboding mixed with comedy, that kind of inexorable destiny in the heart of a lonely, romantic girl. And all of it, of course, would have to be done with an F. Scott Fitzgerald kind of freshness and grace.
Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the “objective correlative”—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without laboring the point. In “Masters” Yates cited the green silk cigar case that Charles Bovary finds in the road after the ball, a fetish his wife uses “as a source of voluptuous daydreams”; Yates then referred to a later scene of exquisitely nuanced foreboding: “When the pharmacist’s young apprentice Justin, who is hopelessly in love with Emma, is cruelly reprimanded by his employer, in her presence, for possessing an illustrated marriage manual and for messing around with the jar of arsenic. Wow.” Flaubert also influenced what is known as Yates’s “determinism”—though this was mostly a matter of innate sensibility and life experience.* “‘Fate is to blame,’” says Charles Bovary in forgiving his dead wife’s lover Rodolphe, and Yates had a lively subjective view of what “fate” entailed. “Another thing I have always liked about both Gatsby and Bovary,” he wrote, “is that there are no villains in either one. The force of evil is felt in these novels but is never personified—neither novel is willing to let us off that easily.” Yates’s student Tim Parrish remembered discussing The Easter Parade with its author, who wistfully referred to Emily’s fateful decision not to connect with her sister. When Parrish asked him what might have happened if she had made the connection, Yates replied, “I never thought of that”—meaning that the contingency wasn’t available given who Emily was. Yates’s determinism, like Flaubert’s, was a matter of knowing his characters well enough to know their fates, and making the reader see this, too. Just as one never expects Emma to repent of her infidelity and embrace provincial life, one also figures the Wheelers won’t move to Europe and live happily ever after. Their weaknesses, well defined at the outset, mark them for a bad end.
Flaubert was the catalyst for what became Revolutionary Road, but meanwhile other developments conspired to spur Yates on to the task. Hiram Haydn at Random House—“that absolutely supreme fiction editor,” as Monica McCall described him—was impressed by Yates’s work, and in April 1955 the two met over lunch to discuss the possibility of a book contract. “Like all publishers,” McCall advised Yates prior to the meeting, “I must warn you that [Haydn] is allergic to publishing a book of short stories as an author’s first work.” This posed a problem, since Yates’s “novel” at the time was little more than a notion, though he seems to have persuaded Haydn that something substantial would soon be ready. At any rate he and McCall gave Random House right of first refusal—a rather pointed snub of Sam Lawrence, whose eagerness to publish Yates’s novel had begun to look a bit like complacency in light of his multiple rejections of the stories. But then, McCall would always be wary of Lawrence, and anyway Random House was a more prestigious publisher.
By late summer Yates was finally under way on a book that gave every appearance of jelling, such that in late October McCall was “daily watching the mails hoping for the beginnings.” Three months later McCall was still waiting: “I hope your silence does not mean that you have been having trouble.” It was generally safe to assume Yates was having trouble of one sort or another, but this time his silence was mostly a matter of keeping his head down and moving forward at his own glacial speed—until, almost a year after that lunch with Haydn, Yates was ready to submit the first 134-page section of a novel titled The Getaway. To this he appended a 7-page synopsis of the second half.
Haydn was persuaded of Yates’s “real ability and the book’s real worth,” though more than a little taken aback by the author’s express intention to end his novel with a fatal, self-inflicted abortion; stated in the pat terms of a synopsis, it seemed a bit much. “I express to you my doubts about his plan for the rest,” Haydn wrote McCall, “and even though he and I have talked it over and he is certainly willing to tone down his tragic plan … there still remains much doubt on our part.” Their “doubt” was hardly misplaced as to the ending, which Yates had no intention of changing. In fact, as he later pointed out, the main theme of the book was abortion in various forms, and the story itself had evolved around April’s literal, climactic act: “I thought of the girl dying in that way, and then the whole problem was to construct a book that would justify that ending.” Yates’s reassurance to Haydn that he would “tone down his tragic plan” was deliberately ambiguous; what he actually hoped was that the completed novel would justify the tragedy in such a way as to make it seem inevitable—and cathartic—an effect that could hardly be conveyed by a simple summary, or indeed by the story and characters as they stood at the time.
Sam Lawrence had a similar response: “Very much impressed with the manuscript,” he wrote McCall in June, “but the synopsis itself seemed to be a disappointment.” Nevertheless he was willing to offer an option payment of three hundred dollars “as a vote of our confidence in his ability and as a way of urging him to go forward with the completion of his novel.” McCall austerely insisted on a proper advance of fifteen hundred dollars, and the rather doubtful Lawrence agreed to recommend a contract to his associates at Atlantic–Little, Brown, who rejected the manuscript as “one of the many imitators of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Lawrence, on sober consideration, seemed to accept this verdict as perfectly valid, and his subsequent letter to McCall reflected little of his initial enthusiasm: Yates’s “narrative competence” was not in doubt, he wrote, but the theme was “somewhat hackneyed” and the minor characters were “not sufficiently developed”—in sum, the author had yet to find “the most suitable subject and material for his talents,” though Lawrence asked to be kept apprised of any further progress.
McCall reassured Yates that this was “no great blow,” that he should simply finish the book as he saw fit, and in fact Yates was undaunted to a surprising degree. A few months later he reported to McCall that he was making good progress, and instructed her to destroy the previous version. Being compared with Sloan Wilson, it turned out, had proved the sort of strong medicine that cures the patient in the course of almost killing him. As Yates later explained:
Most of my first drafts read like soap opera. I have to go over and over a scene before I get deep enough into it to bring it off. I think I’d be a slick, superficial writer if I didn’t revise all the time. The first draft of Revolutionary Road was very thin, very sentimental.… I made the Wheelers sort of nice young folks with whom any careless reader could identify. Everything they said was exactly what they meant, and they talked very earnestly together even when they were quarreling, like people in a Sloan Wilson novel. It took me a long time to figure out what a mistake that was—that the best way to handle it was to have them nearly always miss each other’s points, to have them talk around and through and at each other. There’s a great deal of dialogue between them in the finished book … but there’s almost no communication.
In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one’s characters “in the very act of giving themselves away.” Now more than ever Yates was eager to lose himself in the almost archaeological labor of revision, while Sam Lawrence—whose “vote of confidence” had come full circle—was delighted to learn that such a promising writer remained undiscouraged.
* * *
In the summer of 1956 the Yateses moved to the rural town of Mahopac in Putnam County, New York, where they lived on a private estate called Babaril.* The pink stucco cottage they rented was arguably a step or two down from their sturdy little ranch house in Redding, but the new home possessed a sort of forlorn charm. The ground floor consisted of a low-ceilinged living room, dining room, and kitchen (Yates could hardly stand up straight), with two small bedrooms upstairs, the larger of which opened onto a narrow balcony with a spiral staircase leading to the flagstones below. The balcony was a picturesque feature (the French doors beneath it were another), though it was liable to collapse if anyone actually stood on it. It gave the impression of being held up by vines, as did the rest of the place, which resembled a kind of dilapidated Hollywood dollhouse; the Lilliputian perspective was enhanced by an adjacent hut where drunken guests could, in a pinch, spend the night. The hut had a tiny fireplace that couldn’t be used without igniting the willow tree just above its tiny chimney.
Their landlady was an aging actress named Jill Miller, who with her vanished husband had founded the Putnam County Playhouse, a once-prestigious summer stock theater in the last stages of desuetude. Near the main house was a largely abandoned dormitory for actors, an annex of which was occupied by a local family named Jones. Around the hundred-acre estate were overgrown gardens and crumbling cottages and a weedy old tennis court, but the feature that most appealed to Yates—the clincher, in fact—was a five-by-eight wellhouse at the end of a long winding path. With his landlady’s blessing, Yates installed a table, chair, typewriter, and kerosene stove, and wrote most of Revolutionary Road there.
In keeping with their old dynamic, Yates relished his quirky new venue almost as much as Sheila despised it. “It was the antithesis of Redding,” she said, “so Dick thought it was great. But everything had gone to seed. It was a sad place owned by a sad lady.” Naturally Sheila tried to make the best of things, and perhaps it was fortunate that she could rarely be idle, as her hands were full keeping their cottage in some sort of habitable order. In the summer the cellar flooded regularly, and the roof seemed to leak even when the sun was out. Sheila attended to the caulking and draining and other proprietary chores, while Yates tended to lie low in the wellhouse.
Winters were ghastly cold and the cottage was poorly heated, caulking or no, but at least the bizarre, shifting crowd of summer colonists thinned. The writer Edward Hoagland, who befriended the Yateses around this time, described Babaril as “a place for people at loose ends”—offhand he recalled such tenants as a reclusive Hallmark artist and a man in the middle of a bitter divorce who worked out his anger by firing a pistol. “You never knew who you were going to run into,” Sheila complained, though she noted that some tenants were more permanent than others. There were the Joneses, of course, whose five children became playmates of Yates’s daughters; the father George, a dull but amiable man with a white-collar job in the city, was recruited along with Sheila to perform in the Putnam Playhouse production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By then Sheila had “lost interest in that sort of thing,” but gamely went through the motions as Titania, while George Jones proved a remarkably able clown. A far more illustrious cast member was Will Geer, then a well-known character actor who later became famous as Grandpa Walton. For most of the fifties Geer was blacklisted, and worked as a gardener on the estate. He strolled about in cowboy boots and an undershirt and mostly kept to himself, though occasionally Sharon and the Jones children would stop by his hut at dusk and listen to ghost stories: “Who’s got my arm…?” Geer would intone. “You do!”—and the children would flee screaming to their cottages. Yates, who couldn’t abide homosexuals, took a dim view of the folksy actor.*
Much of this was made bearable for Sheila by the fact that she was pregnant again. It gave her something to look forward to, creaky marriage withal. Sharon had long wanted a sibling, and now that her only immediate playmates were the rowdy Jones children, the matter could no longer wait. And Yates was happy to oblige; Mahopac was a hick town—little more than a laundromat, bank, and ice-cream parlor—and he too wanted Mussy to have company other than the Joneses or whatever urchins she met at school. Besides, he was hoping to add a boy to the family (for the sake of novelty and moral support, perhaps), but it wasn’t to be. Monica Jane was born on April 10, 1957, and when the nurse told Yates he had another daughter, he was surprised to find that he “felt like a million dollars” (as he later wrote a friend): “You can pick girls up and hug and kiss them anytime you feel like it, until they get too heavy to lift—that’s one advantage; another is that they never expect you to teach them how to throw.”
Among the first to congratulate him was Sam Lawrence; that done, Lawrence briskly reaffirmed his great confidence in Yates’s novel-in-progress: “[Y]our best [work has] always indicated the gifts of a natural writer. There are so many writers today who don’t have that unmistakable quality.” Yates needed the encouragement. When he wasn’t gouging away at his novel between long despondent fortnights lost to PR work, he was trying to stay in the public eye as a fiction writer by reworking a few of his more promising stories. The revised “B.A.R. Man” was now being tried on such magazines as Swank, Bachelor, Gentry, and Nugget, none of whose editors chose to introduce Yates to their special readership. Esquire sniffed that they’d “gotten away a bit from woman-hating stories like the BAR Man one,” and also rejected (again) “A Really Good Jazz Piano” and “Evening on the Côte d’Azur.” Meanwhile Sam Lawrence’s latest sop was vitiated somewhat when he returned the revised “Out with the Old” with yet another perfunctory note along the lines of extremely well-written, but. A year later the same story was accepted by the Western Review, which on further consideration rejected it, as did the Dial (“encouragingly”).
Yates was taking things hard. Two years had passed since he’d started his novel, and a satisfactory draft was nowhere in sight; at this rate he’d never be able to support himself as a fiction writer, yet he could hardly bear the thought of indefinite hacking for Remington Rand. The future looked grim, and Yates behaved accordingly. For most of his adult life he’d been a beer drinker who limited himself to the occasional binge, but now he routinely drank almost a fifth of bourbon a day. At his worst Yates was like one of his own characters facing the terrible truth of his limitations: He’d bemoan his lack of progress to anybody who cared to listen, or else lapse into loud opinionated rants on some elusive general theme, or simply fall over the furniture. He also began vomiting in the morning. At first Sheila assumed the obvious, but in fact drinking was only a general factor. For most of his life from Mahopac on, even in times of relative sobriety, Yates’s pulmonary health was such that he’d never again know what it was like to feel good when he started the day. Sometimes the hacking and vomiting would go on for hours before his lungs were clear enough to light a cigarette and get on with his work.
“From the time Monica was born,” said Sheila, “I knew the marriage was going down the tubes.” When work had gone poorly at the wellhouse, Yates would stalk back to the cottage in a foul mood and spend the night soaking under his wife’s censorious or indifferent gaze. Sometimes they’d have dreary repetitive arguments once the children were in bed, but once again (as in Europe) these became rare. Sheila didn’t have the heart to bother anymore. It wasn’t that Yates was a mean drunk, just noisy and stubborn and self-absorbed, and she decided to find better uses for her time. Beyond a point, she began to consider her life as mostly separate from that of her husband, who was fast becoming a rather ghostly presence. After dinner he’d go back to the wellhouse to drink in peace, while Sheila took evening classes at Danbury State College.
The time came when Yates could no longer juggle fiction with drinking and Remington Rand. The deeper he got into his novel, the more of its intricate design he had to keep in his head, and the forced return to hackwork every couple of weeks became a hideous distraction. This of course led to more despair, drinking, and exhaustion, until something had to give. Perhaps the most loathsomely mechanical aspect of his Remington Rand work was writing the internal house organ—sifting through a bulging monthly envelope full of scraps, which had to be converted into sprightly items about regional sales meetings, or companies that had purchased certain products and why, or who had been promoted to what and so on. Yates couldn’t do it anymore. It was all too close to the quiet desperation at the heart of his novel, the sort of thing that taxed his Flaubertian detachment to the utmost. Sheila, however, flatly refused to give up the three hundred dollars a month brought in by the newsletter alone, and so began to write the thing herself. The subterfuge went on for years without a hitch. If anything, the newsletter might have improved somewhat, as it’s hard to imagine Yates putting much thought into a playlet about the invention of the typewriter, as Sheila was glad to do for a special centennial issue.
They socialized more than ever, as company seemed to relieve the strain, and generally they were adept at acting the happy couple. Amid such seeming conjugal peace, their friend Ann Kowalsky was impressed by the vaguely dissonant note struck by the Yateses’ dinner table, a tasteful old refectory piece in the Spanish style: “It was the support for Sheila’s marvelous meals and the numerous bottles—beer, wines, Old Grand Dad and Old Crow.” At the time Yates, too, was a curious compound of courtesy and boorishness, gloom and hilarity—one or the other with rather little in between, all aspects of the same restive temperament. An essential sweetness was in evidence when Kowalsky was about to give birth to twins in 1957; the couples agreed she’d call Yates as soon as she went into labor, as he was bound to be home and could drive her to the hospital in Mount Kisco. When the time came, Yates rushed over at once and waited in jittery, chain-smoking misery while Kowalsky got some last-minute chores done. By the time they pulled onto the Merritt Parkway he was barely capable of speech, and sped obliviously past the Mount Kisco exit. This shattered his nerves further, and when they finally arrived at the hospital he was attracting almost as much attention as his hugely pregnant companion. “Please try to calm down,” an orderly said to the trembling, pacing, deathly pale man whom everyone assumed to be the father. “These must be your first twins.” Yates hastened to deny it, and when Kowalsky began teasing him—“Dick, how can you say that at this point! I’m in labor” etc.—he became even more painfully distrait. Such tortured solicitude was touching, and Kowalsky bore it in mind when Yates later made a drunken pass at her.
Perhaps the best times were with their friends Bob and Dot Parker, whom they met shortly after moving to Mahopac. Robert Andrew Parker was a rising young artist who combined a pawky sense of humor with a pokerfaced fondness for toy soldiers and military clothing.* He was especially receptive to Yates’s rather caustic wit, and the two tended to bring out the best in each other. “I used to get a headache behind my eyes from laughing so hard,” Parker said of their times together. Before long he and Yates were embarking on all sorts of improbable outings around Putnam County and points beyond. Once they rose before dawn so they could stake out a good place on the first day of pheasant-hunting season, which officially began at 8:04 A.M. A few minutes before eight, a cock pheasant alighted some twenty yards away, and the excited Yates couldn’t resist blasting it to pieces. “Who shot that bird?” shouted Parker’s angry neighbor. “Was that you, Bob? You should know better than that!” Another time they spent a tipsy afternoon cruising the suburbs of western Connecticut, laughing at street names; Yates needed to find a title for his novel, and this seemed a good place to start.
One of Parker’s friends, Peter Kane Dufault, seemed to interest Yates from afar. Dufault was a poet who’d gone to Harvard, lost early in the Golden Gloves, and married the wealthy heiress of the Spalding Sporting Goods fortune. Like Parker he was a toy soldier enthusiast, and the two would spend whole days planning elaborate campaigns and photographing the smoky aftermath. Yates hardly knew Dufault, though both were part of a loose, somewhat arty social circle that also included Tony Vevers and Bob Riche, and everyone tended to go to the same parties. Yates would eventually appropriate certain details of Dufault’s life in creating his character Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying—due in part, perhaps, to Dufault’s central role in an incident that inspired two linchpin scenes in the novel.
The bare facts are these: Dufault and Tony Vevers agreed to exchange punches at a drunken party; Dufault went first and landed a blow to Vevers’s solar plexus; the latter congratulated him, stepped back to return the punch, and fell over unconscious. There are, however, any number of Rashomon nuances, depending on who tells the story. Parker says the party in question took place at his house in Croton Falls; Riche thinks it was at the converted barn owned by Elspeth Vevers’s mother; the still-bitter Tony Vevers insists it was at Yates’s cottage in Mahopac. For Vevers the episode serves as an almost perfect narrative catalogue of Yates’s more repellent qualities: First, Yates tended to pressure his guests to get so drunk they couldn’t drive, and those who tried to do so on that particular snowy night ended up in a ditch; second, Yates was ignoring Vevers’s wife, Elspeth, at the party because she was pregnant (“Dick had no use for pregnant women—you had to be skinny and cute”); third, Yates’s overall “mean streak” was peculiarly manifest on this occasion—that is, when Vevers finally came-to after the punch, his wife hysterical, the party and its host had moved on “as though nothing had happened.” Others point out that the muscular Vevers was roaring drunk that night, and in fact had belligerently challenged the affable, reluctant Dufault to punch him in the stomach as hard as he could—also, that chaos, not indifference, had ensued. In any case the memory of this event (colored further by its treatment in Young Hearts Crying) left Tony and Elspeth Vevers with a very dim view of Yates: “Other people were just a source of entertainment to him,” they both insist.
But many considered Yates a capital source of entertainment himself, and perhaps his most appreciative audience was Sheila. The everyday grind of their marriage might have been wretched beyond words, but when it wasn’t just the two of them, and Yates was on a roll, nobody could make his wife laugh harder. In fact—at least while they were married—she came to share his worldview in almost every objective particular. “They seemed to connect very well,” said Dot Parker. “One could start a thought and the other could finish it.” Sheila was even amused (or acted that way) when she herself was the target of her husband’s barbs, as with a routine of his that involved dancing a jig and singing a ribald ditty that began, “Oh my name is Gilhooley…”—nobody remembers the rest, but the gist of it was that Sheila’s Irish background was more shabby than genteel, which (as Yates knew better than anyone) struck at the heart of some rather tenacious pretensions. By then, however, Sheila seemed to know better than to engage Yates in a battle of wit, and was more inclined to sit back and enjoy the show as best she could. “Ever since I first met you,” she later wrote him,
I’ve been so awed by your intellectual and aesthetic quality, that I’ve been dogged by a feeling of never being quite able to make it. Your critical faculties are never suspended, and it never seems to require any effort on your part to keep this going—your taste and judgment seem to operate unerringly and inexhaustibly.… I know you’ll say “Well, hell, I need to collapse, too,” but when you do you go right on thinking and say more witty and observant things about Felix the Cat (or whatever it happens to be) than I could think of in a million years.
One might bear this “quality” in mind when trying to comprehend why Sheila persevered so long in the marriage, and also why it ultimately wore her out: That is, her husband’s acuity—whether witty or vindictive or both, drunk or sober—was “neversuspended.”
The lighter side of this quality is nicely illustrated by the Conrad Jones affair. In 1958 Bob Parker was named one of the “Bright Young Men in the Arts” by Esquire, and subsequently received a letter from one of the “Bright Young Men in Business,” Conrad Jones: “Greetings! I feel a little pale in this select company and obliged to explain … that my inclusion is based probably on being the youngest partner (33) of the largest management consulting firm.… Maybe we ‘bright young men’ should know each other. This, then, is a standing invitation for you to stop in and get acquainted when you are in Chicago.” Parker couldn’t resist showing this exuberant letter to Yates, whose response was startlingly heated: A ruthless reprisal was in order, he insisted; long and bitter experience with such people (and their prose) convinced Yates that Jones was simply trying to wangle a business contact. Thus, while Sheila and the Parkers stood by with the odd suggestion, Yates found a blunt pencil and composed a response on his friend’s behalf: “I surely do say ‘yes’ to finding common interests in our different lines. You say you feel pale Mr. Conrad, well you could of ‘knocked me over with a feather’ when I heard they were going to have me in the esquire [sic] magazine.” As for Jones’s invitation to visit, “it just so happen[ed]” (Yates wrote) that Parker and his wife would soon be in the Chicago area: “Therefore, please write me you’re [sic] home street address number and telephone number (home) in case we get there after the close of business.” He added a postscript: “Say! Do you bowl I could give you a pretty good game if you do!” They crumbled half a cookie into the envelope, addressed it in crayon (marked VERY PERSONAL), and dropped it in the mail.
Jones didn’t reply. “I guess some people think their [sic] better than others,” began Yates’s second note, and went on from there. Apparently Jones couldn’t bear such a charge, and wrote back with the sort of civility and lack of irony that had led to his becoming the youngest partner (at thirty-three) of Booz, Allen and Hamilton. Jones pointed out that he and his family would be on vacation for three weeks in December, and suggested the Parkers visit either before or after; he gave his home phone number in Winnetka. Yates was delighted, and labored over his third and final letter with the kind of loving care he accorded his best fiction; the manuscript is heavily scored with strike-outs, subtle emendations, and long marginal second thoughts. “My dear Jones,” began the flawlessly typed final draft,
How nice to have your second note. And how distressing, alas, to find my calendar so filled with a sudden profusion of commitments here that I’m afraid our plans for a jaunt across the Great Plains must be set aside for a time. I may say that Mrs. Parker’s disappointment is as keen as my own, and that nothing would have given us greater pleasure than to accept your hospitality at Winnetka (such a charming place-name—evokes visions of frosty pumpkins and so on, straight out of Whitcomb Riley).
The letter goes on for two more pages. “I’ve taken the liberty of passing your address to several friends,” Yates wrote, “all of whom do plan western junkets of one sort or another in the next few weeks.” These “friends” included Bertrand Meubles, the lutanist; Bart Pardee, the beat novelist (“One can’t altogether dismiss the charge of incoherence in his early ‘Burn All Your Cities’* and ‘Go, Man, Go!’”); Aubrey Creavey Ewing, the poet (“author of ‘Trembling Shadows’ [Nuance Press, 1956] in which the critic E. E. Toste found ‘some of the most delicately tentative imagery in contemporary verse’”); P. Loomis Llewellyn (“who could be capable of unusual achievement … if his all-but-crippling emotional problem could be transcended”); and Max Klopp, the political scientist (author of “Marx, Man, and the Tyranny of the Middle Class”). One can only imagine what effect this had on Conrad Jones, who perhaps lost some of his innocence along the way.
Of course it’s one thing to bait some faceless Babbitt in Winnetka, another to mock more or less inoffensive people—chiefly female—about matters over which they have no control. One of the more curious paradoxes of Yates’s nature was his almost archaic courtliness toward women on the one hand, and his lifelong tendency to emphasize their physical defects and/or dubious upbringing on the other. “Margaret Truman” was how he referred to a tall, skinny woman whom a friend briefly dated, while another became “the druggist’s daughter” because of her humble background in the Bronx. And once, when Yates was introduced to a young woman who exposed her upper gums when she smiled, he turned around and mimicked her with a precise ugly grimace. “In those days,” said Bob Riche, “he reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Côte d’Azur: an awful pain in the ass, but fun to be around.”
* * *
More so than most, Yates was at his best among people he admired—generally those who combined talent with integrity, particularly other writers—and one explanation for his abrasiveness in the mid-fifties was that he knew very few people who fitted that description. Nor was he quite the sickly, uncertain, and mostly sober young man who’d gone to Europe to teach himself how to write; since then Yates had grown more sure of his own essential talent, and this (plus alcohol) made him less patient with people he regarded as pretentious and self-deluding—who reminded him of Dookie, in short. But in 1958 Yates had the good fortune of meeting a few peers, and all the better that this should come about as the result of breakthroughs in his career.
Esquire had decided to buy “The B.A.R. Man” after all, whereupon fiction editor Rust Hills and his assistant took Yates out to lunch. As he later described the occasion, Yates listened with bored annoyance while the two editors “kept cracking each other up at the table with inside jokes and references that [Yates] couldn’t follow.” At one point, though, they mentioned R. V. Cassill, a name Yates recognized (barely, since he thought it was pronounced “Cassill”) as the author of such excellent stories as “The Prize” and “The Biggest Band.” When Yates expressed his admiration, Hills told him that Cassill and his wife were living in New York and about to give a party, to which an extra invitation could easily be obtained. Yates was delighted, and his subsequent meeting with Verlin Cassill at the man’s “ramshackle” Village apartment was (almost) an unqualified success:
He was the first real writer I had ever met [Yates wrote], though I’d known plenty of the other kind, and he made an excellent first impression: an intense, black-haired man of thirty-eight or so, tired-looking and very courteous, with a voice so deep you had to lean a little forward in the party noise for fear of missing something. And even before that party was over, though his courtesy never flagged, I had found out something instructive about him. When Verlin says “Ah” in a certain way it means you have just said something dumb. It means he has decided to let you get away with it for now, but that if you don’t start watching your mouth, in about a minute he may tear you apart—verbally, of course.
A long time would pass before Yates experienced the full effect of failing to heed that monitory “Ah,” and in the meantime he benefited greatly from Cassill’s many kindnesses. From the beginning, though, there were awkward moments, as when Cassill and his wife spent a weekend in Mahopac shortly after that first encounter: “There was a lot of drinking,” Yates wrote, “and Verlin held forth at some length on ‘marriage’ as an abstract idea, which didn’t go over very well with my wife and me because our own marriage was about to collapse, though we knew he couldn’t possibly have known that.” The visit improved when Cassill presented Sharon and Monica with toy airplanes he’d made out of balsa wood and rice paper, which flew for impressive distances with the help of a windup propeller. It seemed to Yates, then as later, that Cassill constructed such planes with the same craft and care he brought to his (and others’) fiction: “He has always understood fine structure and firm surface, the coiling and release of power, and the necessary illusion of weightlessness.… Verlin understands wreckage, too.”
The privilege of meeting his first “real writer” coincided with another encouraging development: Yates and three others were picked out of 250 candidates to be featured in Scribner’s forthcoming Short Story 1, the first volume in a series meant to showcase promising new writers. Four of Yates’s stories were selected for the collection: “Jody Rolled the Bones,” “The Best of Everything,” “Fun with a Stranger,” and (at last) “A Really Good Jazz Piano.” Moreover, Scribner’s contract included an option on his next book—“a happy and peaceful solution to the long drawn-out Sam Lawrence flirtation,” as Monica McCall put it, though Lawrence was not so easily put off. Like a fickle lover whose flame returns with jealousy, he tried to woo Yates back with honeyed words (“I have absolute faith in you as an author”), as well as a proposed two-book contract that would involve the novel-in-progress and a collection of short stories. For the moment, however, all he was really offering was an option of five hundred dollars, and McCall squelched him with the sort of acerbic curtness she reserved for Lawrence alone: “I fully appreciate your longtime interest in Dick Yates, but he does feel that he wants to make no commitments on the novel until the manuscript is finished to his satisfaction.”
Short Story 1 was published in September 1958, and included stories by Yates, Gina Berriault, B. L. Barrett, and Seymour Epstein. Under the headline “Gifted Quartet,” the New York Times commended Yates for his “skill and insight” as well as the “admirable variety” of his stories, but Epstein’s work was more favorably noted, and the reviewer generally deplored an “emphasis on characterization at the expense of plot” and “the preponderance of unlikable character types.” Granville Hicks in the Saturday Reviewcalled the four writers “talented and serious” but thought none was “quite first-rate,” and the New York Herald Tribune was similarly equivocal: “Despite several small drawbacks, it is only fair to say that the trial is off to a distinguished start.” The San Francisco Chronicle, however, picked Yates out of the lineup for a particularly nasty slur: “Yates presents the outward appearances of a bright new talent, but a close inspection of his four stories reveals that his stylistic graces are imitative, in the bad sense, of Scott Fitzgerald and other writers.”
Yates’s own favorite of the four was Gina Berriault, in whose exquisitely gloomy work he recognized a soul mate; he wrote her a fan letter that launched a lifelong mutual admiration. “I can’t remember when I’ve enjoyed a letter as much as I did yours,” she replied, adding that she had to accept his compliments because she had such respect for his work: “[Y]ou’re a subtle, painstaking, warmhearted writer and so it follows that I believe what you say.” Berriault was the same kind of writer, and in Yatesian terms an almost ideal human being: She approached her work with such humility that she was often incapable of doing it, yet cared about little else; unapologetically private, she professed not to know any critics, belong to any societies, or have any unusual anecdotes about herself. Berriault and Yates, a month apart in age, would not actually meet face to face for another eleven years, and rarely thereafter, but kept in touch and forever championed each other as writers and human beings. “Richard Yates is my guardian angel,” she wrote, “one of the few or many who each of us has close by, even though they’re continents away and centuries away.… They look after our conscience as we write just as they looked after their own.” Yates looked after Berriault in more practical ways as well, helping her to get hired at the Iowa Workshop even though, like him, she had no college degree. He also named his third daughter after her, which gives one a sense of what Berriault ultimately meant to Yates, as well as what human qualities mattered in general.
He also became friends with Seymour Epstein, whom he met one day at the old Scribner’s Building on Fifth Avenue. For the next few years they were frequent companions, though it was hardly a matter of deep calling to deep. “Dick was like a Janus head,” said Epstein. “Two different people.” One of these people, he concedes, was “charming and honorable” (“if somebody needed help in the world of writing, Dick would immediately put himself forward”), while the other was an “emotional parasite” who drank too much and went around “bleed[ing] on people.” As for Yates’s view of Epstein, one needn’t look much further than Disturbing the Peace, in which the latter appears (through a jaundiced lens) as Paul Borg, a pharisaic bore.
* * *
As Yates entered his fourth year of obsessively precise labor—as the form of his novel gradually prevailed over chaos—his life deteriorated. Outside the wellhouse he was a sullen, coughing drunk, and Sheila steered clear as much as possible. About the only times he’d pull himself together were his biweekly trips to the Remington Rand offices, from which he generally returned sober. But one night he called home from Grand Central in a state of curious disorientation. “I can’t get home,” he said in a panic. “I don’t know how to get home.” Sheila wasn’t sure what to make of this: He didn’t sound drunk, though he’d been so “saturated with booze” the day before that it seemed plausible he was still affected by it; but that would hardly explain his frantic inability to negotiate a commute he’d made hundreds of times. Sheila finally got him to calm down and listen to careful instructions, and promised to meet him at the train. He was still “not right in the head” when he arrived, and clearly he hadn’t been drinking.
By the beginning of 1959 Yates was a mental and physical wreck. In January he was hospitalized with an inguinal hernia—a congenital defect, made all the more painful by constant coughing fits. As for his being “not right in the head,” it was some measure of how out of touch he’d become that he seemed amazed to learn that his marriage was not only troubled but moribund. Things came to a head when he was offered (through Cassill’s good offices) a part-time teaching position at the Iowa Workshop. As he’d never ceased to believe that Remington Rand was at the bottom of his woes, Yates figured this was at least one solution, however temporary, though in fact he didn’t much like the idea of leaving New York—and neither, to put it mildly, did Sheila.
When she couldn’t find an elegant way to explain why she objected to moving out to the sticks with an unstable alcoholic, Yates accused her of not loving him anymore. Sheila wasn’t inclined to deny it, and Yates decided she was insane. Very much in the manner of Frank Wheeler lecturing April on the definition of insanity, he took the position that her childhood had warped her as surely as Charlie—that she was, in effect, incapable of love. Sheila admitted she’d never been entirely sure what “love” was, but also pointed out that it didn’t really matter in the present case. She was fed up, period. Mostly she was tired of all the roaring, repetitive arguments, eleven years’ worth, and when Yates persisted she finally fell silent and refused to respond. “I wasn’t as glib as he was,” she said. “He could talk rings around me and everyone else, drunk or sober.” In the end he wore her down sufficiently to persuade her that, as a last resort, they should see a marriage counselor.*
These sessions didn’t work out the way Yates seemed to expect. Before long the counselor suggested that his drinking, not Sheila’s emotionally deprived childhood, was the main problem. Yates in turn accused the woman of taking his wife’s side against him, and finally became so belligerent that the counselor refused to see him anymore; she was only a psychiatric social worker, she said, and Yates’s “serious disorders” were beyond her scope. Sheila, however, was welcome to continue and did, though the woman’s advice was simple enough: Unless her husband agreed to stop drinking and get help, the marriage had to end. As for Yates, he was only too happy to discuss the matter further at home: that is, to explain that his drinking was not a relevant issue. “By then,” said Sheila, “I just wanted a good night’s sleep.”
They decided to separate, neither of them in any particular rush to go through the “needless expense” of divorce unless one or the other found somebody else to marry. As for Yates’s immediate plans, he couldn’t bear the thought of being in a strange place without his children; later that summer, then, he wired Paul Engle at the Iowa Workshop that “other commitments” had come up, though he hoped a “similar opportunity may exist at some future date.” Verlin Cassill, who was moving to Iowa in the fall, had arranged for Yates to take over his writing class at the New School for Social Research. In August, Yates moved back to the city.