CHAPTER SEVEN

A Glutton for Punishment: 1959-1961

For a week or so Yates floated among his few friends in the city, sober only for such intervals required to skim the classifieds and look at the odd apartment. For a couple of nights he stayed with Bob Riche on Jones Street, where he ended up vomiting on the rug. In later years the unfading stain never failed to remind Riche of Yates, who for his part would occasionally refer to “the time [he] ruined Bob’s rug” in a doleful voice, as though it had been a very dark time indeed.

The basement apartment Yates rented near Sheridan Square on the corner of Seventh Avenue South and Bedford Street was a prototype for the various places he’d inhabit as a bachelor in the years ahead. It was cramped, dark, bare, roach-infested, nicotine-stained, and deeply depressing to his friends and children. Yates came to accept their perception of his new apartment as accurate (though he’d go on living there, on and off, for five years), but when he first discovered the place he could hardly believe his luck: It was dirt cheap and conveniently located near the New School and his old haunts. There was even a small street-level window where he could relieve his claustrophobia by watching the feet of fellow Villagers pass to and fro. All he had to do was move in a few wan belongings—bed, sling chairs, bookcase (small), desk, typewriter, gooseneck lamp, map of London—and get back to writing his novel. Visitors were struck by certain awful details to which Yates himself seemed oblivious: the bloodstains on his deskchair cushion (from piles), the calm roaches in plain sight, nothing but bourbon and instant coffee in the tiny kitchen. Peter Najarian, one of Yates’s New School students, was haunted by the memory of 27 Seventh Avenue South; later, when he learned of Yates’s death, he thought of “thirty-three years ago when Richard lived in that basement studio”—as he wrote in The Great American Loneliness: “‘Love Genius,’ Blake said, ‘it is the face of God.’ But why the cigarettes and bourbon … why the misery for the sake of a line, what kind of love was it that shoved a man into a basement and made him want to escape through art?”

Escape of one sort or another was much on Yates’s mind. He had deep misgivings about being a teacher, given his furtive conviction that writing couldn’t be taught, or at any rate that he wasn’t the person to teach it. Within days of moving into the basement he was clearly panicking at the prospect; he asked Cassill and Sam Lawrence to recommend him for an immediate place at the Yaddo and MacDowell colonies respectively, where perhaps he could finish his novel that very fall and forgo the trauma of teaching altogether. Yates would later make a practice of escaping to such places (particularly Yaddo) at troubled times in his life—but not now. Though Cassill and Lawrence were happy to oblige with glowing letters in his behalf, no spots were available on short notice, and Yates had little alternative but to report to the classroom as planned. “My New School class began yesterday,” he wrote a friend, “after a semi-sleepless night of certainty that I’d make a Hopeless Fool out of myself”—this in regard to his first class of the Fall 1960semester; one can only imagine how he’d felt the year before.

But Yates was desperate enough to put aside his anxiety and give teaching a try. He could think of no more demoralizing prospect, after all, than an indefinite future of PR work—insipid, time-consuming, exhausting, and damaging to one’s talent, not to mention sanity. To be sure, the New School per se (where he was paid all of $450 per class a semester) wasn’t going to liberate him from Remington Rand, but graduate writing programs were becoming a kind of cottage industry, and Yates knew he’d have to build his credentials in order to get a secure footing at places that paid real money (e.g., Iowa). The New School, then, was the ground floor, but even at that humble level Yates was daunted—indeed, could hardly believe a man with only a high school education had any business teaching at all. Whatever else he lacked, it wasn’t humility.

For a number of reasons, the New School was perhaps the ideal place to start. The program, founded by editor Hiram Haydn (who continued to watch Yates’s career with interest), managed to attract a number of good writers who happened to be down on their luck. “If you were teaching at the New School, you acknowledged you weren’t making it,” said Sidney Offit, one of Yates’s colleagues along with Marguerite Young, Anatole Broyard, and Seymour Epstein. The upside of such tacit failure was that very few demands were made—no lesson plans, no meetings, no scrutiny. The head of the program, Hayes Jacobs, was a witty, easygoing man whose own writing had been almost entirely forfeited to the exigencies of teaching and hackwork (including Remington Rand); far from insisting that others follow his lead, Jacobs had become all the more laissez-faire toward his betters on the faculty. He and Yates got along famously.

New School teachers were on their own to the extent of having to compete for students, and this involved writing eye-catching course descriptions, lest a class be canceled for lack of interest. “Write it like a billboard,” Broyard advised Sidney Offit. “Yours is too understated.” The course description Yates wrote for his class (“Writing the Short Story. Thursdays, 10:30 A.M.–12:10 P.M.”) was nothing if not understated, though it managed to convey exactly the type of student Yates wanted, inasmuch as he wanted students at all: “Emphasis is on the craft and art of the short story as a serious fictional form, rather than on its commercial possibilities.” This was meant to warn away what Yates came to call the “dunces,” “clowns,” and “nice-biddy hobbyists” who expected to launch a lucrative sideline writing potboilers for the Saturday Evening Post.

The later Yates who taught at the Iowa Workshop and sometimes liked to end sessions by, say, tossing a copy of All the King’s Men into a trashcan (and kicking it for emphasis) was little in evidence at the New School. “Melancholy” is the first word that occurs to Lucy Davenport when she encounters the Yatesian teacher Carl Traynor in Young Hearts Crying, and the same word came to Peter Najarian’s lips when he recalled his own New School class with Yates. “He didn’t seem into teaching,” said Najarian. “People would read their work and Dick would comment on it. He was intelligent, gentle, but reticent and a little unprepared. He seemed very unsure of himself. It was clear that this was the first time he’d taught.” At the New School, Yates tended to be conciliatory to a fault—like Carl Traynor he’d “try to appease every difference of opinion in the room”—largely because he didn’t think it his business to disparage the dunces, clowns, and nice-biddy hobbyists who populated most of his classes. But even then, students who were serious about writing and sought Yates’s opinion in private could always expect consideration and total candor.

Najarian was perhaps the most noteworthy example of such a student from Yates’s first year. In a letter to Cassill, Yates referred to Najarian as “a nineteen-year-old ex–juvenile delinquent (male) who’s so loaded with talent it’s almost a crime in itself.” As with all students who ever struck him as such, Yates took great pains with the young man: He recommended Najarian’s work for inclusion in Hayes Jacobs’s anthology New Voices, and responded to his stories with typed critiques that were blunt, funny, and generous:

“Theodore Schwertheim” was the only one of these [stories] that really interested me, because it’s the one in which I sense the clearest detachment between writer and material. Theodore is truly poignant because you have taken the trouble to see him in the round; the others tend to be flat—quick illustrations of assorted human traits rather than real people. Your wisecrack about Sherwood Anderson at the end spares me the job of telling you who it derives from, but I’m not sure if I’d have bothered pointing that out anyway. The only way to get over being derivative is to go on writing until your own style evolves, and you’ve got plenty of time and ability for that.

He was also willing to meet informally with Najarian outside class, as it didn’t occur to Yates then (and never would) that as a teacher he should make a distinction between students and drinking companions. An intense young man who desperately wanted to be a writer, Najarian took it upon himself to track Yates down to his subterranean lair, whereupon the latter poured him a tumbler of bourbon and listened gravely to whatever he had to say. Later, when they got hungry, they went to Chumley’s restaurant and bar. “You are worth a thousand professors even though you do not know Latin, German, French, and why T. S. Eliot is god,” Najarian wrote Yates once the class was over.

Yates’s own attitude toward his teaching remained skeptical at best, though at the end of that first year he waxed enthusiastic for Cassill’s benefit: “I’ve had a real ball at the New School and can’t thank you enough for the job,” he wrote with courteous hyperbole, and went on to say that while he hoped to teach the class again next year, he’d been advised that “some clown named Don M. Wolfe might be returning from Europe” to take over the job: “I’m quite prepared for your taking over again in the fall, but I would resent the hell out of being squeezed out by this Wolfe character (and who but a shithead would bill himself as ‘Don M.’ anyway?).” Happily neither Wolfe nor Cassill returned, and the job remained Yates’s for as long as he wanted it.

*   *   *

Next to finishing his novel, Yates’s most urgent priority was to find a steady female companion. Night was a time of peculiar dread when he was alone, scarcely less so as a grown man than as a child sitting in the dark waiting for his mother to come home. He drank to get to sleep, and also to control a nervous desperation that threatened to overwhelm him since his marriage had ended. Such instability was hardly conducive to attracting even the most motherly, well meaning, or for that matter unconventional young woman—at least two of whom vividly remember, more than forty years later, their disquieting one-night encounters with the newly single Yates. Betty Rollin was a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate when Bob Riche introduced the two at a Village party.* Yates seemed charming and well spoken (if a bit too old), and Rollin allowed herself to be coaxed back to his apartment for a drink. But the ambience of the basement unnerved her, and she suddenly sensed that all was not well with her host: “There was something broken about the man,” she recalled, “as if he’d been through something. His talk was breezy and he had a good sense of humor, but I got the impression he was covering up a lot of darkness.” Rollin had no further contact with Yates, nor did Gail Richards after a single dinner at the Blue Mill. Richards was twenty-one when she met Yates through Rust Hills at Esquire. At first she was rather attracted by his brooding quality—but something more unsettling emerged at the Blue Mill: “I thought I was witnessing the beginning of a breakdown,” she said. “I wasn’t easily scared off in those days—a certain amount of angst was interesting—but this was outside my comprehension. He had a kind of fractured intensity: distraught, jumpy, anxious, with these very busy gesticulating hands.” And no matter what Yates’s terrible need at the time, neither episode was simply a matter of first-date jitters; the unanimous impression among his acquaintances, male or female, was that he was fighting a losing battle to hold himself together. “It was exhausting to be in his company,” said Warren Owens, who’d met Yates shortly after his separation. “He showed constant signs of strain—smoking, fidgeting, knocking over glasses. I was always happy to see Dick, but just as happy to leave him.”

Yates’s quest for a mate sometimes took him far afield. In November 1959 he and Bob Parker went on a road trip to a Montreal television studio to watch a live performance of “The Best of Everything,” adapted for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The excursion was the basis for a memorable scene in Young Hearts Crying, in which Tom Nelson remarks to Davenport, “You figure there’ll be some nice girl in the show, and she’ll come up to you with big eyes and say ‘You mean you’re the author?’”—and Davenport takes offense, since that was exactly what he (and Yates) had figured. Bob Parker points out that the fictional version of this incident is “accurate in almost every respect,” except for the “insidious motives” attributed to himself in the person of Tom Nelson. Indeed, Parker remembers a rather pleasant outing, quite devoid of friction as far as he could tell at the time. The only abrasive teasing took place at the Canadian border, where Parker made fun of a Mountie’s hat, but the rest of the drive was a cheerful wintry idyll. And then in Montreal, just as the lonely Yates had hoped, there was “some nice girl in the show” who thought highly of his story and writers in general, and she did invite both men back to her house and, yes, it was a little awkward. But as Parker wrote in his essay “A Clef”—a barbed rebuttal to Young Hearts Crying—there was no question of his refusing, à la Tom Nelson, to take the hint and leave Yates alone with an actress ripe for seduction: “Yates was so preoccupied with the whiskey that he didn’t notice the glazed look in her eyes. She finally said to me, ‘I’m going to bed. Tell him to leave some of Daddy’s liquor.’”*

Yates’s ongoing funk may have discouraged romance, but it was rarely without its lighter side. Once, when he and Riche were having a diner breakfast after a long night, Yates wandered off to get cigarettes out of a machine and inadvertently put his quarter into the jukebox instead (after a puzzled moment he selected “Love Me Tender”). And sometimes he’d channel his “fractured intensity” into madcap improvisational shticks, such as the blocked songwriter at the piano: “Baked Alaska! Baked Alaska!” he’d sing to the tune of “K-K-K-Katie,” then scratch his head and mutter, “No no, that’s not it.” Or else he’d invent wacky variations on clichéd movie scenarios, his favorite being A Star Is Born; Yates adored the idea of the washed-up husband dying for the sake of an ascendant, noble wife, and liked to ponder the many diverting ways such a situation might come to pass.

In some respects Yates’s “second bachelorhood” (as he called it) began to look up when he befriended his New School colleague, Anatole Broyard. For a decade or so, Broyard’s stories had appeared in prestigious little magazines, and Yates had lasting respect for him not only as the author of “some of the finest autobiographical fiction [he’d] ever read,” but also as a wit whose various mots Yates quoted for many years. In the early days, though, the larger part of Broyard’s reputation rested on his being—as the writer Anne Bernays (a former girlfriend) put it—“the greatest cocksman in New York for a decade”; she also called him “a mean man,” and was not alone in thinking so, particularly among women. Cassill, who lived around the corner from Broyard in the late fifties, would often step out to get a morning newspaper and spot his illustrious neighbor escorting a young woman home or to school. As for Broyard’s friendship with Yates, it puzzled Cassill for a while, and then it didn’t: “Dick was forthright, honest, a bit unsophisticated at times. Broyard was the opposite: mendacious, crafty, disingenuous. But he had a success formula with women, and Dick envied that. He’d come to New York to lead a bolder life, and Broyard was a model for this life.”

Certainly Yates needed all the laughs he could get, and Broyard had a nice way of working ribaldry into even the most elevated discourse. Of a writer well-known to both, Broyard told Yates, “Reading him is like the guy trying to fuck his girlfriend on the beach, but his dick keeps falling in the sand. Finally he gets it in and the girl says, ‘Put it back in the sand.’” Broyard was perhaps Yates’s first writer friend for whom literature was a digression rather than the main theme. Some twenty years later, when another of Yates’s friends was wondering whether to circumcise his first son, Yates remarked how Broyard used to brag about the way women liked to play with his foreskin during fellatio. At the time Yates was mostly amused, but also a little appalled: “Anatole goes up to the Museum of Modern Art on Friday afternoons,” he told Cassill, “picks up a nice girl from a good college, takes her home for the weekend—then kicks her out. And they love him for this. I go to bed with one of them and they want to marry me!” But then Yates was grateful for whatever odd success came his way, and Broyard’s example was something of an inspiration.

*   *   *

A month or so after Yates’s marriage ended, Sam Lawrence had come to New York and commiserated with Yates at the Harvard Club (“one of the most fruitful non-literary discussions we have had in a long time,” Lawrence noted a few days later). Yates, perhaps touched by the man’s sympathy, agreed at last to accept an option payment of one thousand dollars giving Atlantic Monthly Press first consideration of his novel, then titled Contemporary Life on the Eastern Seaboard. Such an option, however, was already held by Scribner’s via the Short Story 1 contract, until a disgruntled Charles Scribner agreed to release Yates with the epistolary equivalent of scraping something nasty off his shoe: “This option was very important in our agreeing to publish [your] stories … and we thought this was a commitment in good faith on your part. On the other hand, our Firm does not like to bring out the work of anyone wishing to change publishers.”

In mid-March 1960, after five years of labor that had wreaked havoc on his health and personal life, Yates informed Sam Lawrence that he’d finished his novel. Or rather, almost: On second thought he decided to take another six weeks in order to get “every sentence right, every comma and semicolon in place”—until, on May 5, he was able to write Cassill, “My book is finally done, as of last Monday, and is now being typed by a lovely blonde named Suzanne Schwertley who was a student in your New School class two years ago and says she found it (or you; it’s hard to tell which) ‘fascinating.’ Nice girl, too.”* A week later the freshly typed manuscript was mailed to Lawrence, who in the meantime had recommended Yates for a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference later that summer: “Although you may not learn too much there,” he wrote Yates, “it should be a pleasant break from the New York treadmill.” Lawrence of all people appreciated how badly his friend needed a break.

For Yates, of course, it remained to be seen whether the past five years had been well or ill spent—at least according to the judgment of Sam Lawrence, whose treatment of his work had tended to be capricious at best. But this time there was no room for doubt, nor did Lawrence keep him in suspense: “I spent the entire weekend reading Revolutionary Road,” he wrote Yates on May 17, “and I was impressed and struck with its dramatic force, the dimensions of its themes, and the mature professional control of your narrative.” It was, in short, an “extraordinary performance,” as Lawrence wrote in his two-page editorial report, which emphasized the novel’s universality (as opposed to its derivative Sloan Wilsonish triteness) and recommended immediate acceptance:

Yates is dealing with very real problems of the mid-century American.… Frank Wheeler is the prototype of thousands of young Americans who have been in the war, got married too early, began a family by mistake, taken a job which they are indifferent to, and then try to make their lives and marriages work. Frank is intelligent enough to know he is trapped, but he doesn’t have anything he really believes in or wants instead.… There are a few minor changes to be made—an over-emphasis on what it means to be “a man” and the harangues on what is wrong with American life. But these are minor, and I would be glad to see the book published exactly as it is.… Richard Yates is speaking for his generation, and he is speaking forcefully, and truly, and alas, tragically.

One notes with a cocked eyebrow that little mention is made of April Wheeler—that she too is “trapped,” say, and for that matter the main victim of the tragedy—though Lawrence tags her in passing as “spirited, defiant”; one assumes there were few if any women on the Atlantic–Little, Brown editorial board. As for changing Frank’s “harangues” against America, Yates may have pointed out that these were intended to be somewhat ironic, ditto that stuff about being “a man,” since the book was indeed published almost “exactly as it is.”

For years Yates’s life had seemed a pretty hapless affair, but suddenly he began to get one good break after another. Little, Brown not only concurred with Lawrence’s opinion of Revolutionary Road, they agreed to increase the author’s advance to $2,500 (in exchange for 10 percent of the radio, movie, and television sales). A few days later Lawrence wrote Yates, “Congratulations on your Bread Loaf scholarship! Everything seems to be coming your way, and I hope this establishes a pattern. Now all that’s left is Marilyn Monroe.” The next week Yates traveled to Boston to sign the novel contract as well as a separate contract for a book of short stories, after which he and Lawrence had a “funny evening” on the town that eventually petered out because the latter couldn’t show Yates “more of the night life, [because] there wasn’t any to show.” One matter they seemed to have discussed over bourbon and sirloins was the clinical accuracy of April Wheeler’s abortion technique, as Lawrence followed up by suggesting Yates consult Babies by Choice or Chance by Alan F. Cuttmacher.

All this was good for morale, but the problem of sustenance remained. The advance from Little, Brown was in payment for five years of work, during which Yates’s literary income had been next to nothing—a bit of math that boded ill for a man paying alimony and child support each month. Bob Parker suggested he try for a Guggenheim Fellowship; Yates had invited the artist to the city to discuss the possibility of illustrating his novel’s jacket (in terms of its latest title, An Outrage in Toyland), and when Parker saw the “ugly, damp” basement on Seventh Avenue, he began casting about for ways to extricate Yates. Sam Lawrence was skeptical—“[I]t’s practically impossible for a young writer to win a Guggenheim if he has not already published a book”—but he was also keenly aware of Yates’s bottom line, and urged him to go ahead and apply. For his part Lawrence tried to recruit such eminent sponsors as the critic Alfred Kazin, who doubted he could oblige but agreed to serve as an advance reader of Revolutionary Road. Meanwhile Yates began to draft a Guggenheim statement concerning a novel he wanted to write about World War II: “Owing to its autobiographical nature I was reluctant to start work on it until I had first learned to write a more objective novel. That book is now finished.”

That book was now finished except for a title. After An Outrage in Toyland was scrapped, Yates was tempted to return to Revolutionary Road, but his publisher was adamantly opposed; such a title, thought Lawrence, made the book seem “a work of history and not a contemporary novel.” Lawrence continued: “Several of us did like The Players, but there was no overriding enthusiasm for it. Someone did suggest that perhaps you could keep the word ‘Road,’ but simply substitute another one for ‘Revolutionary.’” Lawrence thought Morningside Road had a nice ring to it, but on second thought liked Generation of Strangers even better. The writer Dan Wakefield remembers visiting Atlantic Monthly Press and being told by Lawrence’s associate, Peter Davison, “We have a terrific novel with a lousy title”; he then showed Wakefield a list of ten alternative titles and asked his opinion.* By August, Lawrence was leaning toward A Connecticut Tragedy, while Yates was reverting back to Revolutionary Road.

What seemed fairly certain at the time, snappy title or no, was that Yates was on the brink of becoming a somewhat famous writer—perhaps even a Voice of His Generation—and this made him a little less insecure about meeting other famous writers. “He used to stand around at parties of mine, looking sad and wondering what William Styron and William Humphrey were doing,” said Bob Parker twenty-five years later, as he tried to remind a mutual friend who Richard Yates was. This is a bit much, but not without a kind of glancing malicious insight—that is, Yates (at least as a younger man) did seem to harbor a wistful desire to know the writers he admired, and to be admired in turn. But as long as he was little more than the obscure author of a few promising stories, he felt painfully unworthy in the presence of those who’d made it. Kay Cassill remembers that his early “awe” of her husband often bordered on the uncomfortable, and when Yates met the charismatic founder of the Iowa Workshop, Paul Engle, he seemed “shaken by the experience.” Naturally he might have preferred for this sort of thing to work the other way around. Though modest about his work to an almost detrimental degree, Yates didn’t lack a certain Fitzgeraldian zest for fame—for meeting other writers (intellectuals too) on an equal or superior footing. As Orwell pointed out, one of the “four great motives for writing” (indeed the paramount motive) is “sheer egoism”: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One should never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” Yates had any number of demons, one of the more benign of which was a longing to be taken seriously by people who counted.

He was therefore elated on learning that William Styron had read galleys of Revolutionary Road and declared it “A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic.” Styron was akin to being the ultimate golden person in Yates’s eyes: Though the same age, he’d already published three books, including Lie Down in Darkness, which Yates considered one of the best American novels of the postwar era. Not only that, but Styron was rich, charming, and accessible, a friend to the famous and less-than-famous in all walks of life, a man who’d never been reduced to the kind of “grubby little writing for hire” that had left Yates so exhausted at the age of thirty-four. In short—to paraphrase Uncertain Times (in which Styron appears as “Paul Cameron”)—he would have made Yates weak with envy if it hadn’t been clear from the start that he considered Yates a good writer too. “I smoke too much” was the first line out of Yates’s mouth on meeting Styron (“that might have been his last line as well,” Styron remarked at Yates’s memorial service); he then launched into a detailed encomium of Lie Down in Darkness. Styron responded in kind: He had not only read Yates’s novel but several short stories as well, and admired them all. And since both men liked to drink (“Dick was always lubricating his thoughts with alcohol,” said Styron), it was an auspicious meeting. “He’s a great guy,” Yates later wrote a friend, “the least pretentious celebrity I’ve ever met.” Nor would he ever find cause to change that opinion, a rare enough phenomenon in itself.

That summer he also met the poet Marianne Moore at an exhibition of Bob Parker’s work at a posh Madison Avenue gallery. Their chat was engrossing enough for Parker’s mother to feel left out; on the other hand, Moore didn’t have much use for contemporary fiction, and Yates’s interest in poetry was roughly limited to Keats, so there it was. Still, Yates’s tipsy-but-dignified poise in the great woman’s presence was such that it stuck in Parker’s mind, as did a subsequent exchange on a train. Calling Yates’s attention to a tall, bug-eyed conductor, Parker said, “If he took his hat off, he’d look just like you.” Yates was not amused. “I don’t look at all like that guy!” he exploded. Parker was startled: Such ragging was typical of the friendship, and Yates had always taken it (and returned it) in stride. But no more, apparently, and Parker wasn’t alone in noticing this. As Bob Riche remarked, “A self-effacing, insecure, self-denigrating guy suddenly saw himself as different than before. His life changed dramatically (for the worse, I think) from that point on.”

*   *   *

Yates’s coming out as a soon-to-be-celebrated author took place at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference that August. The two-week gathering was in part a pastoral alcoholic boondoggle, particularly so for the designated “scholars” such as Yates, whose optional duties included critiquing the odd apprentice manuscript and attending to their own work amid the rustle and birdsong of the Vermont woods. For Yates it was a long-deferred and richly deserved vacation, and he made the most of it.

Bob Riche also went to Bread Loaf that year, as did a couple of Yates’s fellow teachers at the New School, Edward Lewis Wallant and Arthur Roth. All were about the same age and believed themselves on the verge of greatness, and together they rode the bus to Vermont. Yates set the tone by approaching the prettiest, most dauntingly well-groomed girl and asking if she, too, was bound for Bread Loaf; she gave him a nodding smile, and Yates returned to his seat with an anticipatory swagger. On arrival, however, the young woman fell in with a Dartmouth man, and for the next few days Yates would bellow “Booo, Dartmouth!” whenever the two passed by.

Some ten scholars roomed in the same cottage, resulting in a “drunken and frantic” atmosphere, in Yates’s words. Nobody got much writing done. When they weren’t swapping stories or holding profane literary arguments, Yates would loudly croon his repertoire of Broadway standards one after the other, word for word, verse and refrain. Nor was he any more decorous in public, particularly where Bob Riche was concerned. A lot of good-natured, foul-mouthed banter had passed between the two over the years, but now Yates seemed frankly contemptuous of his old friend. “Others were still dunces,” Riche said, “but he himself was no longer that.” As ever, Riche tried to give as well as he got, but lacked Yates’s “authority of success”—as Fitzgerald would have it—and sometimes came across as petulant and ridiculous. One night in a local restaurant the two regaled their fellow scholars by roaring insults at each other; when a waiter asked them to lower their voices, a defensive Riche turned on a tablemate and asked why hewas being so quiet. The man stood up and offered to fight Riche, who left the restaurant in a huff. By then Yates appeared to feel sorry for his friend and patiently coaxed him back inside, but when Riche learned the kitchen had since closed, he burst into tears.

When Yates’s antic behavior wasn’t mingled with contempt, he got along fine with staff and scholars alike. He felt a particular rapport with the black writer John A. Williams, who called the frail Yates “Dreadnought Dick” and lured him into a drunken touch-football game. To Yates’s enduring amazement, he managed to catch Williams’s pass and run for a touchdown (perhaps the last instance of athletic exertion in Yates’s life).* Every other morning the two would walk to the state liquor store and stock up for their ongoing symposia on jazz, writing, and race in the scholars’ cottage. Both were war veterans, and Yates was curious about the discrimination Williams had suffered as a black soldier relegated to rear-echelon service. A related subject was the dilemma of being a black writer in 1960: “I well remember,” Williams wrote Yates ten years later, “even then how much of an outsider I felt, not racially, but professionally. The world belonged to you, Wallant … and others.”

Ed Wallant and Yates did, in fact, seem to have a lot in common. For many years Wallant had supported his family in the suburbs by working for an advertising agency; he’d become the firm’s art director by the time he began to write seriously at the age of thirty, and within four years he’d published one novel and finished another. “And speaking of incredible,” Yates noted a month after Bread Loaf, “Ed Wallant has practically sold his second novel, this one having taken him a whole seven months to write (his first one took him all of five, the little bastard).” Wallant’s just-completed second novel was The Pawnbroker, a minor classic of Holocaust fiction that was nominated with Revolutionary Road for the 1962 National Book Award. Not surprisingly, Yates was galled by Wallant’s facility (he referred to the latter’s third novel as a “premature ejaculation”), both as a matter of jovial envy and because he sincerely believed the man’s work suffered as a result. Yates even tried to argue with Wallant about it, rather in the manner of Fitzgerald’s telling Thomas Wolfe to be more like Flaubert than Zola, and with roughly the same effect. As it turned out, Wallant and Wolfe seem to have been driven by the same weird awareness, conscious or otherwise, that time was short.

Meanwhile, amid the boozy disputes and touch football, love was in the air. Bob Riche met his future wife that year at Bread Loaf, a happy occasion dampened only slightly by the fact that Yates didn’t approve—this, Riche opined, because the woman was only five foot one (“Dick wasn’t crazy about short people”), blind in one eye, and had been abandoned at birth—the last a detail Yates found peculiarly telling. “[She’s] the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Riche reflected forty years later. “But it was not helpful having a guy who was pretty much my best friend at the time calling her ‘the orphan.’”

Perhaps Yates was too besotted, in every sense, to be tactful. One day in the dining hall he spotted a pretty blond waitress struggling with a heavy tray. He rushed over to help her carry it, then shyly offered her a flower from his table. Ed Kessler, a Rutgers graduate student at Bread Loaf that year, observed that Yates’s “Lost Soul quality” was apt to be found attractive by the kind of women who went to writers’ conferences. Barbara Singleton Beury, the scholarship waitress in question, was decidedly one of these: A student at Sweet Briar (just like Peyton Loftis), she’d come to Bread Loaf in order to meet some real writers and, if possible, to become one herself. Yates was a real writer, all right, while in his eyes Beury was that Gatsbyesque abstraction, a genteel Southern girl with sensibility. Yates dubbed her his “Sweet Briar Sweetie” and could hardly believe his luck—was it all, he wondered later, some kind of hallucination? “Because that’s exactly what I often think it was,” he wrote Beury, “the whole magical business of meeting a golden girl in an alcoholic mist on a mountain.”

*   *   *

The chaste courtship that began at Bread Loaf was to be resumed immediately in New York. Beury’s roommate and best friend at the conference, Maria Sebastiani, was sailing back to Rome the following weekend, and Beury came to the city to see the girl off and visit her new suitor. As it happened, the two young women would have done better to say good-bye in Vermont.

For a full year now Yates had been skirting the abyss: He missed his wife and daughters to the point of desperation, and the frantic labor he’d poured into the final stretch of his novel, combined with teaching and Remington Rand, had left him ripe for a crisis. “A massive lethargy set in as soon as the novel was out of my hands,” he wrote Cassill; “I’ve been feeling empty and lazy as hell ever since.” Such moods of postpartum depression, as it were, began to alternate with overwhelming waves of elation or panic that only massive amounts of alcohol could allay. As another manic-depressive (who knew Yates well) explained, “We feel so off all the time, like a thermostat is forty degrees off. Alcohol is a way to medicate that uneasiness.”* Yates’s own uneasiness had risen steadily over the past few years, until at last—at the relatively tardy age of thirty-four—he could no longer stave off a full-blown breakdown.^†

The first night of Barbara Beury’s visit—Thursday, September 1—appears to have been merely hilarious. Yates drank the usual stupendous amount, but his twenty-year-old date figured “that’s what writers did.” They spent the evening with his friends Arthur and Ruth Roth, who fawned over Yates’s young lady and called the couple “Zelda and F. Scott FitzYates.” Beury’s thick Southern accent was West Virginian rather than Alabaman in origin, but like Zelda she was a bit fey and fancied herself a writer, and while Yates had never read her stuff (being, as he put it, too “drunk and self-absorbed” at Bread Loaf), he assumed it was the work of a rare soul, and persisted in calling her his “golden girl.” Finally, slumped over the Roths’ table, he mumbled something about marriage.

The next evening Beury and her friend Maria Sebastiani were supposed to meet Yates at his apartment and go out to dinner. Just prior to their arrival, Yates made a raving phone call to Sheila; whatever he was trying to say remained wholly unintelligible, and finally she told him to stay put while she called their only mutual friend in the city, Seymour Epstein. Beury and Maria got there first. “He was crying, hysterical, babbling,” Beury recalled. “He’d laugh uncontrollably, and then burst into tears. He’d been drinking a lot. I didn’t know what to do.” This was overstepping the bounds of writerly eccentricity to be sure, and Yates would hasten to lend perspective in a subsequent letter to Beury:

The worst possible way for a young lady to be introduced to her suitor is for him to have a nervous breakdown in her lap, and nobody is more painfully aware of that fact than me. But I also know … that there are certain happenings which nobody on earth can help. (This is the secret of tragedy in writing, by the way, and it’s also the secret of comedy.) Please understand that I have never been as “crazy” (i.e. disorderly, irrational, out of control) as when you saw me last.…

The quotes around crazy are a nice touch, as they suggest that one is crazy only in a kind of transitory, ironical sense, the tragicomic victim of ineluctable cause and effect. The latter part of the equation was true, with or without the quotes.

When Seymour Epstein arrived, he assumed his hard-drinking friend was in the throes of delirium tremens (though the empty bottles scattered all over the apartment hardly indicated alcoholic withdrawal), and with Beury’s help he managed to coax Yates into a taxi. What followed was reproduced with remarkable clarity in the opening pages of Disturbing the Peace.* When they arrived at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Yates was put in a wooden wheelchair and pushed into the emergency room, where his raving became louder and more abusive (insofar as he made sense at all). Finally a doctor told him to behave himself—“You’re in line with everyone else”—and Yates exploded, “Tell this dumb son of a bitch he doesn’t know anything about writing!” (a terrible indictment coming from Yates), then stamped on the footrest of the wheelchair and broke it. The doctor had seen enough. “This guy isn’t coming into the hospital,” he told Epstein. “He just damaged hospital property.” An orderly wheeled Yates back outside, where he was forced into a police car and taken to Bellevue. Epstein followed in a taxi, but was told in the psychiatric wing that his friend would not be eligible for release until next Wednesday at the earliest, since the doctors were gone for the Labor Day weekend.

Yates awoke in a collapsible metal bunk in the Men’s Violence Ward, and was made to walk the floor with the other patients—a milieu evoked in Disturbing the Peace:

Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other.… Then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm.

After a breakfast of oatmeal and canned milk, the patients were given doses of peraldehyde. This made them sleepy, until even the dirty sweat-soaked mattresses in a dark alcove at the end of the corridor became tempting. Yates would often tell of his horror on discovering (as does John Wilder) that the men lying on either side of him were masturbating. And it seems probable that Yates, enraged at finding himself in such a squalid place, made a disturbance à la Wilder and Michael Davenport that resulted in his being “shot out”—forcibly given an injection and locked in a padded cell to sleep it off.

On Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week, Yates was interviewed by a group of doctors and deemed competent enough for removal to the Rehabilitation Ward on a separate floor, where he was pleased to find “real beds, chrome-and-leatherette armchairs, good showers with soap and a kind of shampoo guaranteed to remove lice.” Soon he was ready for his exit interview. A social worker sternly advised him to quit drinking and arrange for regular psychiatric care, while Yates affected to appreciate the probational nature of his release. “I have given the Bellevue authorities my solemn promise,” he wrote Beury, “to avail myself of what they call ‘voluntary psychiatric assistance’ whenever too many good or bad things start crowding in on me in bunches in the future.” On September 8, after almost a week of incarceration, Yates was signed out by Seymour Epstein. “When he saw me in the waiting room,” Epstein recalled with lingering pique, “he scurried off into a corner indicating he didn’t want to see me—whether in shame or what, I don’t know. I signed him out, but I didn’t take him out. He never said a word to me.”

In fact Yates blamed his friend for the whole horrific episode—for Epstein’s failure of imagination, that is, in being unable to distinguish between “crazy” and crazy. Thus, when Yates would later tell people that “Bellevue was an epiphany,” he was rarely if ever referring to his own condition, but rather to Seymour Epstein; everything that had ever struck Yates as faintly distasteful about the man was suddenly woven into a single explanatory pattern—he was “close-minded,” “conventional,” “unadventurous.” He was a square, in other words, and when Epstein and his wife Miriam insisted on helping Yates find a good therapist, and when the latter turned out to be the kind of “quack” who made his patients stop drinking as a condition of treatment—well, it only proved Yates’s “epiphany” all the more. As a later psychiatrist put it, “Yates was always the smart one; everyone else was stupid. As far as he was concerned, none of his hospitalizations was justified. They came about because other people were stupid or didn’t understand what he was going through. He felt this way even when he was sane.”

The “quack” who’d objected to Yates’s drinking, a Dr. Wiedeman, recommended another therapist to the Epsteins (“You should get help for that man,” he told them, “but you might lose a friend”), and for a while Yates was shaken enough to cooperate. Though he blithely assured Barbara Beury that “the chances are about 108 to one” that another breakdown would ever occur, he was terrified about the future. “There was always a fearfulness about Dick,” a friend noted, “as if he were apprehensive that something bad was about to happen.” On the other hand, Yates never quite saw the point in confiding as much to a “therapist” (another word he entombed in quotes)—a man in a bad suit who rarely bothered to take notes and whose remarks were either banal or fatuous, or so Yates thought. It wouldn’t be long, then, before he decided to go his own way, finding guidance as ever in the precepts of literary sages, primarily Flaubert, who was echoed in a piece of advice he gave Peter Najarian two weeks after Bellevue. “For God’s sake, take it easy,” he wrote the young man, who’d favored his teacher with a self-loathing diatribe about his failures as an artist. Yates continued:

All you ought to be worrying about now is order (not about how to impose it on chaos, which is the opposite of art, but about how to bring it out of chaos, which is art itself). And your worrying about this ought not to be a tortured thing—God knows there’s enough torture growing wild in everybody’s life so that nobody in his right mind needs to cultivate it—but a serene thing. Don’t, in other words, jazz yourself up into a nervous wreck. Be quiet, be as sane as you can, and let the work come out of you. If it’s going to come, it will; if it’s not, no amount of self-induced frenzy is going to help it along.

One final piece of solemn, teacherly advice, and I do mean this: Try to like yourself a little better.

This may be read as pure soliloquy, of course: Hamlet advising himself to be less indecisive, Lear warning himself away from madness, and fate remaining aloof.

*   *   *

Though Yates had known Beury less than three weeks, including the week spent in Bellevue, he was certain he wanted to marry her—all the more so since receiving, the day after his release, a letter of tender concern which he found not only “beautiful” but “very, very well-written.” Beury, now back at Sweet Briar, had decided to leave the door ajar where Yates was concerned. She figured the meltdown she’d witnessed was perhaps (as Yates assured her) a once-in-a-lifetime aberration. Meanwhile, only two things were preventing Yates from packing his bags and moving to Virginia: “1. I have to set up new ways of making money, because my biggest ghost-writing contact (Remington Rand) dissolved under me in July.” This was true, and a further source of prebreakdown stress: After more than a decade as Yates’s bête noire and stalwart source of income, Remington Rand had sacked his contact, Andy Borno, and killed the magazine Systems. Having lost the devil he knew, Yates at least had “two excellent leads on new and painless ghost-writing opportunities” but would have to stay in New York to pursue them. Also: “2. At the present time I need, or rather want, to be geographically as close to my children as possible.” He was, however, willing to get the ball rolling by asking his wife for a divorce as early as the following week. That said, he closed his letter to Beury with a poem he’d written for her at Bellevue (“with a borrowed pencil on a very, very small piece of paper”):

POPULAR SONG

I love you in the lips

And I love you in the nerves

And I love you in the head;

Which rhymes with dead.

And now do you know what I guess I’ll do?

In the hope you’ll help me to see it through?

I guess I’ll love you in the heart;

Which rhymes with art.

The Bard of Scarborough Country Day hadn’t lost his lyric touch, and Beury was sufficiently moved to suggest he visit her at Sweet Briar the weekend after next. She balanced this with a wary quip about how she might be better off with an “air-conditioning salesman” (an oblique response to his marital overtures?), and continued to express a lot of pointed concern for his well-being. “I wish you wouldn’t ‘worry’ about me,” Yates retorted, and made the familiar case that he was “boringly well-adjusted most of the time, and as able to look after [him]self as any other solid citizen.” As for her invitation to Virginia, he’d like nothing better but was simply too strapped at the moment—however: “Could you come here? If so I’d arrange for you to stay at the Evangeline (Maria’s hangout) or some other equally blameless sanctuary for young ladies, and I’d solemnly promise not to keep you up past your bedtime.” Beury wrote back that it might be fun to come up with her roommate, especially if Yates could arrange to get the latter a date with one Jim Shokoff, a Rutgers student they’d met at Bread Loaf. “I think it’s a very swell and interesting idea,” Yates dryly replied; “but oh, how earnestly and prayerfully I would like to suggest that you contrive to do it some other weekend.” In short, he wanted to see her alone, and to this end he wrote an elaborately polished satire of the various “Frightful Visions” such a visit seemed to conjure in Beury’s “exquisitely close-cropped head.” The first of these was a bit of stock humor about drugged drinks and seduction—this, perhaps, in hope that the next two scenarios would smack of the same breezy absurdity:

Or, Worse Still:

Barbara … twists one slightly soiled white glove in the other as she stands beneath the Biltmore clock, an hour and forty-five minutes past the carefully appointed time of her date. Peering down the carpeted stairway, she sees a sudden moil of confusion near the revolving door. The doorman, three cab drivers, seven bellhops and a Bellevue attendant are engaged in some frantic grappling activity; and somehow, out of this muddle, wobbles a man. Almost unrecognizable, his clothing caked with filth and bristling with the snouts of bourbon bottles, his face swollen and streaked with maudlin tears, he reels and fumbles his way upstairs. There he topples, falls headlong, grasps Barbara around the knees and says: “Help.”

And finally, the Worst and Most Frightful Vision of All:

Gay as a day in May … Barbara bounces up the Biltmore steps and finds a hollow-eyed, tragically haggard apparition under the clock.… [He takes her to] the bleakest, dimmest, and most fourth-rate of all Tenth Avenue saloons. And there, surrounded by sawdust and urine puddles and tired prostitutes and lurching longshoremen, he begins a droning recital of all his Problems.… He starts telling her all over again—ever and ever more boringly—about his unhappy childhood and his unhappy marriage and his unhappy love affairs and his grinding, soul-wrenching, general all-around unhappiness; and this goes on for two nights and two days until it’s time for Barbara to sink gratefully into the sports car and turn back toward sunnier climes and sweeter briars.

Give or take a Tenth Avenue saloon and a bellhop or two, it was perhaps a bit too plausible to get the really big laughs, and Yates sensed as much. “All this was supposed to be funny,” he added, “but I’ve just read it over, and it doesn’t give me any chuckles. Forced humor, you see.” He abruptly turned to other matters, and mentioned in passing that a trip to Virginia might be feasible later that fall, as he wanted “to soak up a little of the landscape and foldways” for the opening Camp Pickett chapters of his novel-in-progress.

This novel existed only in the abstract, and the fact that Yates was in no hurry to start soaking up atmosphere suggests how little disposed he was to write. Most of the time he brooded nervously over the reception of Revolutionary Road, and no wonder: The news was so relentlessly good that it bordered on the portentous, and it was all Yates could do to maintain a tenuous grip on his equilibrium. The advance comment from Alfred Kazin, for example: “This excellent novel is a powerful commentary on the way we live now. It locates the new American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage. No other people has made of marriage quite what we have, has taught itself to invest so much in what is essentially a romantic idea. Mr. Yates understands this very well, but never points.” Now that Kazin had actually read the novel, he was not only willing to endorse Yates’s Guggenheim application, but also he persuaded Sam Lawrence to accept, at last, the title Revolutionary Road. “After Little, Brown got that letter from Kazin, I stopped being another chancy first novelist and became something of a celebrity up there,” Yates wrote Beury. “[The advertising manager] and his public-relations lady came barreling down here this week, bought me triple bourbons and asked any number of discreet, respectful questions as to whether I’d mind being interviewed on the Dave Garroway show, etc. etc.”

Also around this time—and not a moment too soon for Yates’s finances—Esquire bought the opening chapters, to be published a month before the novel as a self-sustained excerpt titled “After the Laurel Players.” And already Hollywood was interested: Saul David of Columbia Pictures wrote Monica McCall that he’d be “delighted to work with [Yates] … though I’d hope that Revolutionary Road will swiftly make him so rich that he wouldn’t dream of working with me,” while a bona fide mogul, Sam Goldwyn Jr., announced that he’d “never read a more brilliant first novel”—an impulsive bit of hype that, as Yates put it, “[came] drearily to naught, because cooler heads in his organization decided that the moviegoing public ‘is not ready for a story of such unrelieved tragedy, for so relentless a probing of the sources of pain.’ Sic transit the hell Gloria.” This was far from the last time cooler heads in the industry would prevail where Yates was concerned.

Sam Lawrence and his associates realized they had a potentially hot property on their hands, but the book’s packaging and promotion were problematic. Now that the title was definitely Revolutionary Road, they felt obliged to make it as obvious as possible that the book was in fact about the failure of contemporary marriage, not a work of historical fiction. Yates had balked at the original jacket design—a sepia photograph of a man and woman standing forlornly back to back, over a pithy snippet of the Kazin quote—but he was finally overwhelmed by the star treatment. As he wrote Beury:

The Presentation today came off with maximum glory: everybody solemnly sitting in silence around an enormous leather chair containing me, while the advertising manager read his script and flipped the frames of a visual-aid demonstrator, just like Madison Avenue. Their new jacket copy is overpoweringly reverent—starts out “Rarely does a publisher introduce a first novel filled with such devastating power and compassion that it seems destined to become an enduring comment and influence upon our very way of life, etc, etc, etc,—and I was so overpowered by the reverence that I allowed them to seduce me into accepting a somewhat modified version of the dreary photographic jacket design.

Yates would bitterly regret letting that “dreary” jacket pass, though in fairness there could be little doubt that Lawrence et al. were doing their best to market a very depressing novel by a virtually unknown writer. The advertising budget was based on an anticipated sale of twenty thousand copies, or roughly four times as many as most first novels; the paperback rights were already sold, and Yates would receive a first installment of $2,500 in January. High hopes abounded, hideous jacket or no: “The meeting broke up with many high-powered handshakes and floods of drink,” Yates wrote of the sales presentation, “after which Sam Lawrence (editor) fed the hell out of me on about seven pounds of roast beef at the Algonquin; then he took me to a criminally expensive nightclub featuring giant Negress strip tease artists.” How many first novelists could say as much?

*   *   *

For a man who seemed about to become the toast of two coasts, Yates continued to live on a grindingly humble scale. Earlier that fall he’d resumed teaching at the New School, a deadly business cheered only slightly by the fact that he now felt able to befriend his eminent colleague there, Alfred Kazin, who proved to be “very nice and un-awesome.” Meanwhile as the weather got colder Yates moped about the basement “wearing forty-three sweaters” because the building’s ancient furnace had died. He wrote no fiction, though he stayed busy doing freelance PR work. Johnson & Johnson’s national sales conference in New Brunswick was coming up, and Yates had to write speeches for all the corporate and sales executives. He also tried his hand at ghostwriting an article for Scientific American—“a gruesome failure,” as he put it, that left him in the gloomy position of having to “wrangle with the editor” in order to “rescue the lousy 300 bucks they promised.” He implored Monica McCall to find him some kind of steady job in publishing, but it didn’t pan out.

He consoled himself with thoughts of his “golden girl,” whom he managed to coax back to New York in late October and again a few weeks later. Both visits were something of a bust. Yates’s clothing wasn’t quite “bristling with the snouts of bourbon bottles,” nor did he dissolve into “maudlin tears” en route to Bellevue—but close enough. “Dick was always drinking,” said Beury, “and sometimes he’d be slobbering drunk by the end of the evening.” For Yates it was a matter of impossibly high expectations and poor health; he wanted to seem vibrant and charming but didn’t have the energy or impulse. He drank to compensate. Also he was loath to be eclipsed by his friend Broyard, who (though five years older) was dating any number of college “popsies” as Yates called them; predictably the man’s ears pricked up when Yates told him about Beury: “[Anatole] has expressed a keen desire to have dinner with us during your visit,” Yates wrote her, “and I said okay, maybe. (But he’d better watch his God damn step, or there’ll be Bad Trouble.)” As it happened Broyard indulged in a few suavely told tales about past conquests (e.g., the one about the woman whose “ass exploded like an inflatable raft” when she doffed her girdle*), but appears to have been on passably good behavior, and certainly a bit of comic relief was welcome at that point.

Otherwise there was little to remember about these visits except for telltale signs of instability on the part of Beury’s host, whose October postmortem was duly bleak: “The whole three days went by so fast, and I spent so much of it being tired or half drunk or asleep, that I don’t quite believe it happened and I’m full of regrets.… [You’re likely] to write me off as the terribly nice but hopelessly sad young man whom no girl in her right mind could ever consider a permanent type.” Beury was in her right mind, more or less, but still remained interested in Yates—or rather in the brilliant, sensitive man who’d written those stories in Short Story 1 (her copy was inscribed, “If ever any beauty I did see/Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee”—Dick [and John Donne]”), not to mention a novel that just might make him a household name. That man deserved a lot of patience.

His wife Sheila might have begged to differ. Back in September, Yates had reported to Beury that his “formal divorce talk” with his wife had been “friendly and pleasant, maximum cooperation guaranteed”—which implied that Sheila was now graciously willing to let him go since he’d found another, and so she was. Yates, however, was not cooperating to a maximum extent. “He drove the lawyers nuts,” said Sheila. “He knew [a reconciliation] wasn’t going to happen, but he was making trouble for the sake of making trouble.” This was a bit reductive, perhaps; in fact Sheila’s observation that Yates “could never bear losing close people” was nearer the mark, as she knew well enough at the time: “I thought I had explained my reasons for wanting an immediate settlement,” she wrote him on November 2.

Either you didn’t listen, or I didn’t make myself clear, or both, and I am willing to try again. They are quite simple: When we separated, I hoped for some time that a radical change in one or both of us would make possible a rebuilt marriage. I no longer have any such hope.… As to my seeing you any more or being friends, this is totally out of the question from now on. I don’t hate or feel bitter towards you, but I soon would if I continued to see you.… Some things simply come to an end—I have relinquished two close friendships in my life, and so I am ready to accept this. It will be much easier for everyone if you accept it too. Once you have, I believe you will be relieved, as I am, to let Mr. Golditch [the lawyer] make arrangements that are comfortable for me, the children, and yourself.

The “radical change” for which Sheila had hoped was, of course, that Yates would curb his drinking and get help for whatever else was ailing him, but after Bellevue she knew better. As for Yates, neither then nor later would he be able to accept rejection on the basis of his drinking and/or mental health—hence Sheila’s exasperated but not unkind “Some things simply come to an end.”

Yates became all the more desperate to make things work with Beury. “The only nice thing in my life right now,” he wrote her, a week after that letter from Sheila, “is that you’ve promised to come up here next Wednesday.” But with so much emotionally at stake, Yates was too overwrought in Beury’s presence to stay sober, and besides he always had a ready excuse: “He said he was irrational because Revolutionary Road was about to be published,” said Beury, “and he’d worked so hard to finish it—etcetera—as if it were only a passing phase. It seemed plausible at the time, but it didn’t change.” There were moments, though, when he was at least somewhat sober (that is, on the way to getting drunk) and thus charming, courteous, and funny—in other words the very man Beury hoped he’d be whenever he got “well” again.

This alternating pattern was suggested by Yates’s visit to Virginia a week or so before Christmas. All went well at first: Beury was touched by her gift—a pair of monogrammed gold cufflinks that Yates said was the most valuable thing he owned—and while they drove about the countryside they came upon a big plantation house with a For Sale sign in front. Yates spoke seriously about buying the place, and for the moment he made Beury see the “glamour” of it—the genteel literary life they’d lead there, writing all day and having drinks on the veranda “like Dash and Lillian Hellman.” Full of the idea, Yates got excitably drunker than usual and was miserably hungover the next morning, when they’d planned to drive back to New York via Charlottesville, where the writer Nancy Hale was giving a cocktail party in Yates’s honor. Hale, a very admiring advance reader of Revolutionary Road, had done a number of kind things for Yates, who was grateful enough to remain on good behavior during her party. Afterward he fell apart. Every few miles on the road he’d pull over and buy beer to “calm his nerves,” and by the time they got to Washington he was a tipsy wreck. He tried to mollify his traveling companion by insisting they stop in a posh hotel—same room but separate beds, as Beury (with Yates’s approval) was still a virgin—where he ordered a bottle of bourbon and drank himself to sleep.

*   *   *

The two months leading up to the publication of Revolutionary Road were an eventful time for Yates, who bobbed about in the maelstrom without quite going under. He coped as well as possible with such obligations as a “big Celebrity Interview” with a South American journalist—a typically “boozy business,” wrote Yates: “[I] feel bottomless chagrin at having been a garrulous clown, and wonder how many of my ill-considered pronouncements on literature and life got scribbled down for the edification of fifty trillion South Americans, and am busy thanking God that nobody I know can read Spanish.” Perhaps the most important advance publicity was the excerpt scheduled for the February issue of Esquire. Yates had agonized over editing his work to the magazine’s specifications, and was perturbed to learn that his own rather drastic cuts were insufficient. On January 11 he and Rust Hills spent two hours going over the proofs, line by line, until they’d reached a compromise of sorts, or so Yates thought. “The author, the publishers, and I, are deeply shocked and disappointed by the treatment given to this excerpt,” Monica McCall wrote Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich on January 20. “Not only has the [published] text been cut and changed, after the very careful editing and cutting which the author himself completed … but the illustration presents the characters as two vastly unattractive middle-aged people, in fact the heroine looks something like Sophie Tucker.” Gingrich, stiffly indignant, called the complaints “shocking.” He conceded that he didn’t much like the illustration either, but denied that any further changes had been made to the text without Yates’s consent; he also pointed out that he’d been so certain the excerpt was a credit to its author that he’d appended proofs to his recommendation for Yates’s Guggenheim.

Sam Lawrence was also dismayed by the Esquire treatment, but remained optimistic on the whole: “I think we have a best-seller,” he wrote on January 25, calling Yates’s attention to the current Publisher’s Weekly, which reflected “the kind of advance enthusiasm and exceptional interest Revolutionary Road is creating.” The book’s sizable advertising budget was being put to good use: A thousand promotional copies with special jackets had been distributed among the various pundits in the trade and media, while sales reps were instructed to attach personal cards to copies sent to all major booksellers in their territories. A big quote ad was planned for the New York Times Book Review just prior to publication. On the basis of the advance notice alone, Yates had every reason to feel jubilant.

What he felt was “semi-hysteria,” as he put it, kept somewhat in abeyance by the steady, all-but-lethal flow of bourbon. At times in his life when he wasn’t able to get on with his writing, for whatever reason, Yates would let himself go to a degree unusual even for him. This was one of those times. Things were happening and he let them happen. On February 3, Yates’s thirty-fifth birthday, Sheila took a one-day trip to Alabama and got a no-fault divorce; the lawyer Golditch subsequently informed Yates that there was a sixty-day waiting period before he could remarry: “You are free to remarry at any place and at any time after April 3, 1961.” By now Yates seemed rather to doubt the prospect, and informed Beury of the development with a single unembellished line: “Got my final divorce decree in the mail last Friday.” Somewhat better news (though by no means unequivocally so) was that he’d been offered a part-time position by the Columbia School of General Studies, the adult education branch of the university. This in addition to his New School duties and freelance work.

Yates did not lack company during this time. Bread Loaf had widened his circle of acquaintance, and nowadays he was nothing if not socially available. The Irishman Arthur Roth was a good companion, as Yates not only admired him as a writer, but as a drinker almost as heedless as he. Yates and Roth enjoyed baiting each other while in their cups, and one night during a party at Bob Riche’s apartment the two got in a violent, careening, “kidding” wrestling match that culminated amid broken glass in an empty bathtub, where Riche doused them both with a bucket of water.

At Bread Loaf there was also a group of writerly Rutgers students (the poet John Ciardi, then the director of the conference, was on the Rutgers faculty), who looked up to the hard-drinking Yates as a rather romantic role model. Alan Cheuse, editor of the undergraduate literary magazine, remembered the invariable routine involved in a visit to Yates’s apartment: “Dick would hand you a tumbler of bourbon as soon as you arrived. It’d be five or six in the evening and he’d be drunk already. You’d drink and talk, then have dinner at the Blue Mill and drink some more. After that Dick would go back to his apartment and pass out. He was always kind—he took a real interest in you—but clearly he didn’t like sober people.” Perhaps closest among the Rutgers crowd was Ed Kessler, who joined Yates for such anomalous outings as a Robert Lowell reading at Columbia, after which they adjourned downtown until, several blurred hours later, a groggy Kessler woke up on a cot in Yates’s basement. Both Kessler and Cheuse arranged for Yates to give paid readings and lectures at Rutgers, an ordeal that was new to him then: “For God’s sake if you have any ideas about what I ought to say in my lecture,” he wrote Kessler, “please don’t keep them to yourself. Should I take the Beatniks over the jumps?… Or discuss Eliot’s objective correlative as exemplified in Looney Tunes (‘That’s all, Folks’)? Or do a double buck and wing soft-shoe routine and recite Kipling’s ‘If’ for an encore? I mean like HELP me in this thing, Kessler.” The lecture went without a hitch, but the party afterward ended badly. The young writer Maureen Howard was there (her husband was on the faculty), and to everybody’s surprise the drunken Yates had a bone to pick with her. He’d read her stories in the best-of-the-year anthologies, and didn’t like the way she stylized her characters in terms of their tastes—what they wore, what they ate, and so on. He thought it was simplistic and condescending, and he was very emphatic about it. “Maureen seemed like a tough person,” said Kessler, “but Dick could destroysomebody if he wanted.” She left the party in tears.

It had been a long ten months since Yates had finished his novel, and mercifully the suspense was almost over, if not the hysteria. One way or the other Yates had much to be proud of: Kazin, Styron, Updike* and many others had blessed his work, and two days before publication a further blurb was wired from Tennessee Williams of all people, who rarely bothered with that sort of thing: “Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don’t know what it is.” Sam Lawrence assured Yates that such praise was disinterested (“Don’t be concerned about your virility”), and added, “We have never had this kind of response for a first novel since I can remember.… This is what makes publishing worthwhile.” The two men planned to meet at the Harvard Club on publication day, March 1, to celebrate the fruitful consummation of a long and often dreary ordeal.

*   *   *

Yates was never one to ignore reviews, or for that matter dismiss them with a mandarin chuckle when they were bad. “Oh yes,” he responded when an interviewer asked if he paid attention to them, and added with typical candor that he sometimes read them “five or six times over”: “When they’re helpful is when they’re good, and they make me furious when they’re bad, which is to say they’re probably not helpful at all.”

It’s interesting to imagine Yates reading certain reviews of Revolutionary Road, much less five or six times over, and perhaps it’s safe to say that most of them weren’t very helpful. With a few exceptions, the good reviews tended to make fairly obvious points, while the bad ones were what Walker Percy called “bad-bad”—that is, bad in every sense: negative, badly written, in bad faith. An early review in Library Journal seemed to bode well: “Seldom has the talk of a desperate, ineffectual man been captured with such uncanny precision as in this novel,” it noted, and also made the nice point that the book hardly lacked humor in the midst of its general unpleasantness (“such is the nature of life that some of the most pathetic moments are also the most comical”). But at least two of the major reviews on Sunday, March 5, took the line that Revolutionary Road must be negligible because it dealt with the tired subject of suburban discontent: “No amount of contrived symbolism can hide what has become a hackneyed theme in the contemporary American novel,” wrote R. D. Spector in the New York Herald Tribune, and W. E. Preece of the Chicago Tribune went further, claiming the book read like an “intentional parody of all the similarly type-cast novels that went before it.” Happily, Martin Levin provided a strong corrective in that Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. The “excellence” of the book, wrote Levin, lay in the “integrity” of its approach: “Eschewing the pitfalls of obvious caricature or patent moralizing, Mr. Yates chooses the more difficult path of allowing his characters to reveal themselves—which they do with an intensity that excites the reader’s compassion as well as his interest.”

Leave it to Orville Prescott, the dean of bad-bad reviewers, to rebut in the daily Times on behalf of low middlebrows everywhere. The novel, he wrote, was a “brilliantly dismal” tour de force about “two psychopathic characters and their miserable haste to self-destruction.” Having thus established that the Wheelers are mentally ill—indeed, Frank is an “absolute psychotic”—Prescott could only wag his head at the folly of such a “superior” writer as Yates wasting his time and talent on characters “so far gone into mental illness that they are incapable of responsible decisions and unaware of the duty and necessity of making them.” And lest one forget the main point, he concluded: “No fair-minded reader could finish Revolutionary Road without admiration for Mr. Yates’s impressive skill; but whether the mentally ill Wheelers deserve the five years of labor Mr. Yates has lavished upon them is another question.”

Magazine reviews were mostly positive, though the approval of The New Yorker continued to elude Yates: “The Wheelers are young, pathetic, trapped, half educated, and without humor—meaningless characters leading meaningless lives,” remarked the anonymous reviewer in the “Briefly Noted” section. “Mr. Yates’s attempt to lend drama to their predicament, through an unconvincing introduction of madness and violence in the story, serves only to emphasize the flimsy nature of his work.” This weirdly peevish squib was offset by more considered treatment in the Saturday Review and the New Republic, whose reviewers—David Boroff and Jeremy Larner respectively—made large claims for the novel. Boroff called Yates “a writer of commanding gifts,” whose “prose is urbane yet sensitive, with passion and irony held deftly in balance,” while Larner discussed not only technique but also the book’s sociological significance: “To read Revolutionary Road is to have forced upon us a fresh sense of our critical modern shortcomings: failures of work, education, community, family, marriage … and plain nerve.” Even Newsweek called it “the find of the year,” though Yates was perhaps most pleased by Dorothy Parker’s panegyric in the June Esquire: “A treasure, a jewel, a whole trove is Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road.… Mr. Yates’s eyes and ears are gifts from heaven. I think I know of no recent novel that has so impressed me, for the manners and mores of his people are, it seems to me, perfectly observed.”

Finally two insightful and appreciative reviews appeared later that summer: F. J. Warnke in the Yale Review made the useful point that the “novel is really about the inadequacy of human beings to their own aspirations, and its target is not America but existence,” while Theodore Solotaroff in Commentary noted that “Yates has the superior novelist’s instinct for the nuances by which people give themselves away.” Both reviewers had a few sober misgivings as well: Warnke found the narrative point of view unfocused in such a way that Frank Wheeler and others are alternately sympathetic and the objects of “savage contempt,” while Solotaroff objected that the Wheelers’ “determinative childhoods” undermined the clarity of the book’s social criticism (“the Wheelers probably would have failed under the best of circumstances”).

As with his beloved Gatsby, Yates’s novel got a rather mixed reception despite what many agreed to be its manifest excellence, and like Gatsby, too, it would pass in and out of print for many years to the bewilderment of those (especially writers) who continue to think it deserves the status of an American classic. Twenty years ago James Atlas wrote that Revolutionary Road “remains one of the few novels I know that could be called flawless,” and Richard Ford, in his introduction to the recent Vintage edition, called it “a cultish standard.” That it remains a cultish rather than popular standard is perhaps due to two broad factors: (1) as the writer Fred Chappell pointed out, the book “strikes too close to home”—that is, the educated general reader is all too likely to identify, depressingly, with a pretentious pseudointellectual such as Frank Wheeler; (2) the book’s artistic merit is lost on academic canon-makers who tend to regard it as “merely” another realistic novel about the suburbs. Yates’s meaning seems all too plain for the purpose of scholarly explication, and yet this is one of the most misunderstood American novels, both in terms of its meaning and aesthetic approach. As Ford noted, “Realism, naturalism, social satire—the standard critical bracketry—all go begging before this splendid book. Revolutionary Road is simply Revolutionary Road, and to invoke it enacts a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees.”

The book’s deceptively simple language is like the glassy surface of a deep and murky loch. The first thing one may see is a rippled image of oneself, and then the churning shadows beneath. That Warnke found the Wheelers both sympathetic and repugnant is very much to the point in a novel full of mirrors, windows, and shifting points of view. “I don’t suppose one picture window is going to destroy our personalities,” Frank remarks when they first examine the house in Revolutionary Estates—and indeed the garish window sometimes rewards Frank with a nocturnal image of himself as “the brave beginnings of a personage,” while other windows and “passing mirrors” sometime surprise him with a very different view: “[His face was] round and full of weakness, and he stared at it with loathing.”* And so too with the more admirable April, who from the beginning is shown as two women (at least), filtered through the mingled perspectives of Frank and the rest of the audience at The Petrified Forest: She is both “a tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could destroy” as well as the “graceless, suffering creature whose existence [Frank] tried every day of his life to deny.” Thus the protean Wheelers embody the thematic (and psychologically valid) discrepancy between romantic and elusively “authentic” selves, a split that applies to every major character in the novel with one notable exception—the madly literal John Givings. Such deliberate blurring has led to a certain amount of misinterpretation, as it should. Revolutionary Road, no matter how accessible on the surface, rewards a lifetime of rereading and reflection.

Some who view the novel as more or less straight social satire (or social criticism, depending on whether one finds any humor in it) tend to see the Wheelers as an essentially gifted, decent, but flawed young couple who wither amid the sterility of midcentury America as reflected in its suburban ethos. Yates himself dismissed such a reading out of hand. “The Wheelers may have thought the suburbs were to blame for all their problems,” he told Ploughshares, “but I meant it to be implicit in the text that that was theirdelusion, their problem, not mine.” It seems fair to assume, then, that the Wheelers “would have failed under the best of circumstances” as Solotaroff points out (deploringly), and hence the need for their “determinative childhoods” by way of explaining the cause, or anyway one cause, of this failure. But if the Wheelers are abnormally weak or even mentally ill (as Orville Prescott would have it), where is the universal interest? And if the novel is “really about the inadequacy of human beings to their own aspirations, and its target is not America but existence,” as Warnke suggests, why so much harping on suburbia in the first place? Why the suggestive title, Revolutionary Road?

Yates, having made the point that the suburbs are hardly “to blame” for the Wheelers’ tragedy, goes on to assert that the book’s main target is indeed American culture. “I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the nineteen-fifties,” said Yates.

Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the McCarthy witch-hunts.… I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties.

The suburbs (or American culture at large) are not, then, a mass of malign external forces that combine to thwart the Wheelers’ dreams; rather the Wheelers—in all their weakness and preposterous self-deceit—are themselves definitive figures of that culture, determinative childhoods and all. Granted, they are somewhat less mediocre than most: They can wax eloquent about the “outrageous state of the nation” as well as the “endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity and The Suburbs,” until they begin to convince themselves that they and their friends the Campbells compose “an embattled, dwindling intellectual underground” that is “painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.” But when it comes to the point of leaving the “hopeless emptiness” of it all—or even completing a stone path that would connect their home to Revolutionary Road—Frank, at least, would rather not. As for April, she might never have found herself married to such a man, or living in such a place, were it not for the vulnerabilities created by her “determinative childhood.”

In the end, of course, neither Frank nor April can be entirely summed up in social or historical terms, and certainly the novel is “about” human frailty at any time or place. But in 1955 the Wheelers end up in the suburbs for a reason, even while they and any number of bright, skeptical citizens imagined themselves destined for something better. As Chappell noted, such “fuzzy dreams of freedom and ‘self-realization’” tend to be peculiar to certain fortuitous moments in history: “[P]lentiful money is required and an easy ignoble means of acquiring it, a good spotty liberal education is needed, and there must be a lack of strong ties to family or even to place.… ‘If only I didn’t have to’—that’s probably the commonest excuse we give ourselves.” Amid the affluence of postwar America, the temptation was particularly keen to accept the easy rewards of suburban comfort, an undemanding job, and to fill the emptiness that followed with dreams of potential greatness or adventure. But to pursue such dreams in fact—as Yates well knew—required a resilient sense of autonomy that resisted the siren call of, say, a comfortable ranch house in Redding as opposed to a roach-infested basement in the Village. As the mad John Givings says, “You want to play house, you got to a have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don’t like.” And in a society where one’s status depends almost entirely on the nice house and “good” job, one must possess a formidable sense of self-worth, and perhaps formidable talent as well, to risk failure by leaving the beaten path. Frank Wheeler, like most, would prefer to believe he’s special without putting the matter to a test; meanwhile his sense of inadequacy as the bumbling son of an ineffectual father, coupled with a better-than-average intellect, makes him strident (and almost convincingly so) in his insistence that he’s superior to his fate. And April’s own deprived childhood helps, in part, to account for her desperate need to believe him.

As characters the Wheelers are meant to be representative and somewhat stylized, but also rounded and plausible individuals in their own right, the better for the reader to identify with them on the one hand, while maintaining a certain judgmental detachment on the other. Yates achieves this kind of double vision—though some would call it inconsistency—with a limited omniscient viewpoint that shifts from character to character, then at apposite moments becomes godlike. For example, the Wheelers’ argument during their drive home from the Laurel Players fiasco is given through Frank’s point of view, and his frustration toward what seems his wife’s unwarranted bitchiness tends to evoke our sympathy; when she jumps out of the car and runs away (“a little too wide in the hips”), we follow with Frank until a car approaches, whereupon we are suddenly looking at rather than through him: “His arms flapped and fell; then, as the sound and the lights of an approaching car came up behind them, he put one hand in his pocket and assumed a conversational slouch for the sake of appearances.” One’s heart goes out to the embattled, well-meaning, if rather pathetic man who would have it known he’s more than just a “dumb, insensitive suburban husband,” while the laughable puppet (“His arms flapped and fell”) who worries about “appearances” is contemptible. And yet they are convincingly the same man.

Yates provokes a moral judgment from readers, but not at the expense of their sympathy: “I much prefer the kind of story,” he said, “where the reader is left wondering who’s to blame until it begins to dawn on him (the reader) that he himself must bear some of the responsibility because he’s human and therefore infinitely fallible.” This involves, again and again, an uncomfortable sense of Frank Wheeler—c’est moi on the part of the reader, though almost any of Yates’s better characters will fit this Flaubertian formula. We may not, at first, identify with the silly Helen Givings, a recognizable type of suburban busybody whose insipid patter and hobbies seem a pitiful form of self-hypnotic escapism. It’s easy to feel superior to such a person, but less so when suddenly confronted with her despair—as Helen glances at her feet (“like two toads”) and begins to cry: “She cried because she was fifty-six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who’d ever asked her to marry him, and because she’d done it, and because her only child was insane.” This is sad, but later Yates incites us to judgment again: Helen is a woman who can feel pity for herself, but is ready enough to abandon her son to a mental hospital on the convenient pretext that he somehow contributed to April’s suicide. Such callousness is at the heart of Helen’s shallow everyday pretending—and yet we don’t forget her despair either.*

*   *   *

While Yates tried to recover from the psychological fallout of Revolutionary Road—the long gestation, revision, relinquishment, and finally the Chinese water torture of its reviews—he was gratified, perhaps, by the epistolary response. For a man who was once a miserable, stammering, skinny kid hiding away in movie theaters or shabby apartments, it must have been gratifying to be told of his greatness by family, friends, and strangers all over the world. His sister Ruth sent a valentine of loving praise; Aunt Elsa (now in her seventies and still looking after her sister somewhat) was especially pleased that her nephew’s novel stressed the importance of a loving childhood; and one can only imagine Dookie’s proud maternal bliss.* Yates also heard from his favorite English teacher at Avon, Richard Knowles, who was now in his eighties and more admiring of his pupil than ever, while another English teacher in Houston, Ernest “Bick” Wright, was all but beside himself. For years Wright had scanned the shelves of libraries and bookstores in search of some evidence that his old friend’s early dedication had borne fruit, and had almost abandoned hope when Revolutionary Road appeared. Wright thought the novel exquisite both as a work of art and a vision of life, and afterward would speak of its author as an almost holy figure who’d devoted everything to the cultivation of his talent.

A few representative bits of mail from the general reader are worth mentioning. A blustery but prescient fellow named Andrew Sinats warned Yates, “You threaten the intellectuals who would accept and receive your work.… At the beginning of the book I hated Frank Wheeler, hated you for writing such an awful characterization, and hated that part of myself that was like Frank Wheeler. I even hated you for being right.” Donn C. McInturff, a suburban husband and father of two, also identified with Frank, and wondered if the character resembled his creator: “If this was indeed your existence, [how] did you manage to escape from it to get your book written? Was it to Paris?” At the age of thirty-six, McInturff himself wanted to sell his house and “pound out this [novel] that lives in [him]” because (despite an “excellent” credit rating) he was “starving from the inside.” And finally Yates received a parcel from one Thalia Gorham Kelly, an elderly lady from San Diego, who wrote in what can only be called a fine old spidery hand, “Not knowing where else to dispense of two such repugnant books as Revolutionary Road and May This House Be Free from Tigers,^† I am sending them to you … the author who so industriously presented weak, inferior types.” Mrs. Kelly strongly suggested that Yates “enlarge [his] acquaintance” to include “people who face their problems and manage to find other solutions than drunkenness, sex perversion and adultery.”

This billet-doux was perhaps a welcome diversion from dwelling on sales figures, which were decidedly meager in the wake of all that “advance enthusiasm and exceptional interest.” A week after publication Sam Lawrence reported a total advance sale of 6,100 copies (“very healthy indeed for a novel, first or otherwise”), and a month later he wrote: “We are over 9,000 and the next two to three weeks will tell whether the book will really go into high figures or will resolve its sale in the 10–15,000 category.” A last momentum-boosting quote ad was run in the New York Times, to no avail: Sales stalled at around nine thousand and stayed there—despite Dorothy Parker’s review in the June Esquire, despite national newspaper critics naming Revolutionary Road one of the “fifty important books published between January 1 and May 30.” When the promotional rug was pulled out from under the book in late April, Yates wrote Lawrence a protesting letter: The continuing acclaim, he insisted, justified at least another quote ad. Lawrence disagreed: “I cannot recall when we last launched a first novel in such a powerful and confident way. As a result, more than 10,000 copies* were sold in a few weeks, and this is outstanding for a first novel, but as often happens to new fiction, the demand dropped off sharply.” Lawrence reminded Yates that Little, Brown had already spent a relatively lavish $4,500 promoting the book, and “one [more] quote ad will not change anything”: “Our goal has been accomplished. You have now established yourself as an important new American writer.… I hope you still believe that we have done a good publishing job.”

He did and he didn’t. Yates never quite got over his anger at the “cheap, vulgar” jacket and “the lousy way the book was marketed,” but in moments of sober detachment he “couldn’t really blame Sam for that because the true villains were the Little, Brown executives.” Such ambivalence resounds in his remarks, ten years later, on the subject of what he would always consider his best novel:

[I]n my more arrogant or petulant moments, I still think Revolutionary Road ought to be famous. I was sore as hell when it first went out of print, and when Norman Podhoretz made a very small reference to it in his book several years ago as an “unfairly neglected novel,” I wanted every reader in America to stand up and cheer. But of course deep down I know that kind of thing is nonsense.