A Tragic Honesty (15 page)

In later years when Yates met the odd person from York, Pennsylvania, he'd tell how his professional career actually began with a very brief stint at the
York Gazette and Daily
—one of the most radical newspapers in the country, then or now. The
Gazette and Daily
opposed the cold war, championed the causes of organized labor and racial equality, and was one of only two daily newspapers in the country to support Henry Wallace's Progressive Party bid for president in 1948. Yates, who would always consider himself something of a leftist (though his politics were a highly individual affair, to put it mildly), later told the writer Ken Rosen that he thought the newspaper represented the “best of America” at that time. But so little is known of Yates's tenure at the
Gazette and Daily
that one broaches the matter only in passing, in the hope of shedding a little light on the “half-assed romantic ideas” Yates professed to have in those days—ideas compounded, perhaps, of various novels and a growing need to rebel against the snobbish, half-assed conservatism and overall pretension of his mother.

Meanwhile Yates was deeply conflicted as to whether he should take advantage of the GI Bill and go to college as he'd always planned—as every one of his Avon friends had done or were about to do—or get on with his writing career without further delay. By the time he returned to New York he'd apparently decided to put things off another year while reading as much as possible and leading the life of a “knockabout intellectual,” à la Frank Wheeler in
Revolutionary Road
. As he later reminisced, “At twenty, fresh out of the Army and surfeited with Thomas Wolfe, I embarked on a long binge of Ernest Hemingway that entailed embarrassingly frequent attempts to talk and act like characters in the early Hemingway books. And I was hooked on T. S. Eliot at the same time, which made for an uncomfortable set of mannerisms.” But Yates's brief spell as a would-be T. S. Hemingway was curtailed by a letter from his sister: Dookie's presence at High Hedges was putting a strain on her marriage, she wrote, and while she herself didn't mind the arrangement so much, Fred most emphatically did. Therefore she hoped Richard would agree to end his bachelor idyll, at least for a while, and do his part in caring for their indigent, difficult mother.

So much, then, for college and knockabout intellectualizing. In short order Yates got a job writing for a trade journal,
Food Field Reporter,
while he and Dookie moved into an apartment on Hudson Street. The arrangement gave Yates a ready excuse when people asked why he didn't go to college, but for the rest of his life he'd bitterly regret the decision as a “dumb, arrogant thing to do.” It was “arrogant” because it was based on a romantic notion out of Hemingway that a
real
writer didn't need college—but there was more to it than that. “It was partly fear,” he admitted (as Bill Grove) in “Regards at Home”: “I'd done poorly in high school, the Army had assessed my IQ at 109, and I didn't want the risk of further failure.” Whatever the case, Yates's lack of a college education would become a lifelong obsession, a lodestone to which he'd forever return when he felt inadequate—intellectually, socially, professionally. “God, you can't mean that!” he exploded when one of his students wished aloud that he'd skipped college. “Jesus Christ, I'd give anything to have gotten a college education—I feel the lack of it
all
the time.” And to another ex-student he wrote how “delighted” he was that the young man had decided to go back and finish his degree—“not because of any vicarious sentimental horseshit about Wishing I'd Gone Myself,” he wrote, a disclaimer he belied somewhat by adding “[college is] the healthiest possible climate in which a talented young man can hope to experience growth and development”; and even more to the point, “it's probably a hell of a lot more fun than … doing any of the other dreary, mechanical, bread-winning things you'd have to do instead.”

Not that he found work altogether unpleasant, at least not at first; like Emily Grimes he rather enjoyed composing headlines “quickly and well, so that the spaces counted out right the first time”—and in fact he later told a friend that Emily's nice headline for
Food Field Observer
was one he'd actually written for a journal of (almost) the same name:

“HOTEL BAR” BUTTER
HITS SALES PEAK;
MARGARINES FADE.

On the other hand it was awfully insipid stuff, and the romantic young man who'd gorged himself on Wolfe, Hemingway, and Eliot must have felt a rather keen sense of desperation. Nor was he likely to meet many congenial people in the course of his daily beat on behalf of the grocery industry. But finally it just wasn't “real journalism,” and had nothing to do with being a writer—the gist of Yates's advice to his son-in-law, many years later, when the latter wondered if working for a trade journal was a valid way to practice the craft.

On weekends Yates would walk the streets in search of freelance ideas—in theory a way to make extra money and build his journalistic credentials, but more definitely a further respite from his mother's company. His old Scarborough friend Russell Benedict had also moved to the Village, and offered to come along as Yates's photographer. Whether they ever collaborated on a salable idea is doubtful, though at least once they managed to pick up girls in their roles as roving reporters. Roz Wellman and Ginny Shafer were showing a couple of Argentine midshipmen around town on liberty night, when Yates and Benedict approached: Would the two young ladies be willing to submit to an interview about their ambassadorial endeavors? Names and numbers were exchanged, and within a few days the two couples were inseparable. Roz was Yates's girl, or rather the one he slept with at Benedict's apartment, but the darker, hard-drinking, spoken-for Ginny was the one he really loved, and (such is the world) vice versa. “No, I didn't know you were ‘painfully in love' with me,” she wrote Yates in 1961, “I was so damned depressed I was unaware of any ‘pain' other than my own. I knew that I loved you a lot.”
*
For several months anyway, amid such poignant confusion, the four shuttled between bed and Pete's Tavern, where they drank some sort of “pink swill” and commiserated about being young and poor and unfulfilled.

Occasionally Bick Wright would visit the city from Princeton, where he was a student in the theological seminary, and regale Yates with stories about the war and his subsequent conversion. As Yates wrote of Bucky Ward in
A Good School,
“He limped a lot, saying he'd been wounded and had refused a Purple Heart, but there were embarrassing times when he would walk the streets for miles, deep in conversation, without limping at all.” Indeed Wright would limp sporadically for many years—he told his brother he'd refused the Purple Heart because he didn't want to worry their parents—partly because of his old weakness for melodrama and also, perhaps, because he needed some empirical rationale for the religious vocation that would peter out in less than two years and, in general, for a psychological malaise that never quite left him. At some point, though, he sat his wife down and solemnly confessed that his “war wound” was actually due to a childhood tricycle accident. (“Aptly enough,” his widow wryly noted, “Bick's senior thesis at Princeton was about
mythology
.”) Certainly Yates was bound to find his old friend ridiculous, which might explain why Wright was unable to persuade him to quit his job and go to college; Wright even went so far as to fill out most of the applications for him. And soon Yates would also choose to disregard his friend's advice about marriage—“Bick was right about that, too,” he admitted in retrospect—which may have caused the final rift in their friendship, though Yates hadn't quite heard the last of Bick Wright.

*   *   *

The writing career for which Yates had avowedly forfeited his college education was not flourishing. As a compromise he took evening courses in creative writing at Columbia, though it's unclear what effect these had, if any. For much of his adult life Yates would support himself by teaching writing (or “teaching” writing as he liked to put it, in heavy quotes), which if anything convinced him all the more that writing couldn't be taught. No doubt he was more credulous during his apprentice years, or simply desperate enough to try anything. For what it's worth, he did write in the bio-blurb that accompanied his first published story in 1953 that his “unimpressive” postwar career was “brightened” by the evening courses he took at Columbia; and six years after that, at the end of his faculty profile in the New School bulletin, he was able to note “Studied, Columbia” in lieu of the various M.A.'s and Ph.D.'s which his fellow instructors boasted. But in 1946, in the very midst of that “unimpressive” career, he was desperate for some kind of validation, be it a published story or a decent job or any sign of progress whatsoever. “I am sorry to hear you have not got working with a newspaper yet, Richard,” wrote Halifax Joan in November, asking to see some of those short stories he was writing; “I've been wondering what type they are—mysteries—romances—or adventures.”

And then his luck seemed to change a bit. Early in 1947 he was hired as a rewrite man on the financial news desk of the United Press. For a salary of fifty-four dollars a week, he wrote the daily Wall Street bond- and curb-market leads, as well as general business and industrial news for the national wire. The good part of the job was being able to say he worked for the “UP” rather than
Food Field Reporter
(he also liked playing the part of the young, Hemingwayesque newspaperman in his rumpled trench coat and fedora). And then, too, the basic contours of his daily routine were appealing: At ten in the morning he'd report to the
Daily News
building in his hardboiled attire, listen to the racket of teletypes and Wall Street tickers for two hours or so, then adjourn to a bar on Forty-second Street where fat slabs of roast beef were free with dime beer, followed at last by a long afternoon of punching out leads until it was six-thirty and time to go home. The bad part was the job itself. As Yates described it in “Builders,” he had only the vaguest idea of what he was supposed to be doing:

“Domestic corporate bonds moved irregularly higher in moderately active trading today.…” That was the kind of prose I wrote all day long for the UP wire, and “Rising oil shares paced a lively curb market,” and “Directors of Timken Roller Bearing today declared”—hundreds on hundreds of words that I never really understood (What in the name of God are puts and calls, and what is a sinking fund debenture? I'm still damned if I know).…

And when he wasn't writing about puts and calls and debentures, or heading uptown to attend his evening classes, or rutting about with Russ and the girls, he was home with his mother, who was always glad to see him. What had started as a temporary arrangement was showing every sign of becoming permanent. Dookie made no effort to get a job—though she often said she'd be “back on [her] feet” in no time—and indeed seemed more than content to live on her son's modest income, as long as she could afford to pay dues at Pen and Brush on Tenth Street, where as “resident sculptor” she conducted what was left of her social life. At first Yates hadn't really minded the setup, as he and his mother were still rather compatible in those days, and after all it was only a matter of time. But he continued to toy with the idea of college, or just a reasonable degree of independence, and after a while his mother's almost mad complacency began to seem ominous. “This wasn't making any sense,” he wrote in “Regards at Home”:

I didn't want to listen to her torrential talk anymore or join in her laughter; I thought she was drinking too much; I found her childish and irresponsible—two of my father's words—and I didn't even want to look at her: small and hunched in tasteful clothes that were never quite clean, with sparse, wild, yellow-gray hair and a soft mouth set in the shape either of petulance or hilarity.

One thing that might have inhibited his mother from taking positive action were her rotten teeth, which made her self-conscious and were painful besides. Yates took her to a free dental clinic in the Village, the Northern Dispensary, where a nice young dentist offered to fit her for dentures at his private office in Queens for half his normal fee. Yates sat with his mother as the rest of her teeth were extracted one by one, and found her agony “oddly satisfying”: “There, I thought as each tooth fell bloody on the tray. There … there … there. How could she make a romance out of this? Maybe now, at last, she would come to terms with reality.”

And for a few days, perhaps, she did—seeming “utterly defeated” by her caved-in face; but as soon as she got her new dentures “she seemed to shed twenty years.” And this was a mixed blessing for her son, since now she was all the more willing to laugh and smile and talk—and
talk
—though she worried that her false teeth made a telltale clacking noise, and she still seemed disinclined to find a means of supporting herself.

CHAPTER FOUR

Liars in Love: 1947-1951

That first year back from the war was a lonely time for Yates. Whether by choice or circumstance, he was drifting away from his old Avon friends. Hugh Pratt, about to be married in Rochester, came home from medical school one day to find that Yates had showed up out of nowhere, left a wedding gift with Pratt's mother, and departed. Pratt never heard from him again. As for Yates's other friends, they were mostly busy with college or career, or had become tiresome like Bick Wright. Russell Benedict, too, was beginning to pall; whatever Yates wanted out of bachelorhood wasn't to be found in Benedict's company. Yates longed to make new friends who were “young, poor, bright, humorous, very much alive and headed in the right direction”—a direction off the beaten track, to be sure, the sort of path taken by abstract beings whom he really did call “golden people.” The long hours he spent in Village bars (“trying to figure out what was going on”) had proved a fruitless guide, and pretty much always would.