A Tragic Honesty (17 page)

Meanwhile his evenings were free again, and that meant coming home and keeping his mother company. According to “Regards,” she greeted him one night with a peculiar buoyancy, and Yates thought “for a moment of unreasoning hope” that she might have found a job. But no. As “resident sculptor” at Pen and Brush she'd been asked to contribute a bit of light entertainment to an upcoming party, and she was eager to give her son a preview (“with bright eyes and a brisk little hopping around on the floor of our wretched home”). It was a parody of the old Chiquita Banana jingle:

Oh, we are the sculptors and we've—come to say

You have to treat the sculptors in a—certain way …

Yates decided to get out: “I borrowed three hundred dollars from the bank, gave it to my mother … and told her, in so many words, that she was on her own.” Almost immediately life began to improve. He moved to a dark apartment on Jones Street and advertised for a roommate, who proved to be a compatible young man named Blanchard “Jerry” Cain—a mechanical engineer with a rather lurid past. Back in San Francisco Cain had become involved with a married woman named Jessie, who had a young son; when her husband divorced her and sought custody, she'd fled to New York with the boy and gone underground. After a seemly interval, Jerry had changed his name from “Redner” to “Cain” and followed her. Like Yates he was shy and outwardly conventional—an engineer, after all—but with quirky restive depths. According to his adopted son, he was a superb jazz-pianist who occasionally played in “low piano bars of the Village,” which suggested a sort of latent “golden person” status; but what surely appealed to Yates most, at least at the outset, was Cain's kindred disdain for a “pretentious” and “totally inadequate mother” who fancied herself a poet.
*
Also the roommates had extreme poverty in common: Cain was new to the city and holding an ad hoc job, while a good part of Yates's meager wages went toward paying off the bank loan that had bought his freedom. Cain would later remark that his most emblematic memory of this time was when Yates brandished the entire contents of their fridge—a rotten orange—and muttered over and over, “What is to be done…?”

Once Dookie was out of the picture, Yates and Sheila were reconciled. The couple spent a lot of time with their new friends Jerry and Jessie, and perhaps that quixotic love affair made an impression. In any event, shortly after the Cains themselves were married, Sheila capitulated to Yates. “I figured ‘Oh well, what the hell…'” she remembered a half century later, and laughed. “
God,
whatever made me marry that guy in the first place?”

*   *   *

The wedding took place on June 8, 1948. Mary Bialek was the maid of honor; there was no best man or any other witnesses (the Cains had to work during the day). Because Sheila was under twenty-one the law required a church wedding, so after some calls from City Hall they took their license uptown to a Presbyterian church on Park Avenue, where the minister and his wife were waiting for them. The ceremony was performed with sweetness and dispatch, and before long they were back on Jones Street, where Yates was still on the lam from Dookie. Sheila's mother stopped by and gave them a cooking pot, a few friends wished them well, and that was that.

With the Cains they soon found a picturesque place on West Twelfth Street near the river: a three-story apartment building with a tunnel leading through the ground floor to a courtyard, in the middle of which was a tiny “Hansel and Gretel cottage,” as one friend described it. The couples flipped a coin for the cottage and the Yateses lost, taking instead a seedy but well-lighted room on the third floor of the outer building. A frequent visitor was Sheila's brother, Charlie, who'd managed to graduate from Harvard and was now working for a government agency in Washington. Charlie was strange as ever, emphatic and opinionated, but he and his brother-in-law were friendly in a rather combative way. The only person Charlie felt entirely at ease with was his sister, though he admired the fact that Yates wanted to be a writer and was eager to read his stories and help in whatever way he could, which might have caused Yates a ticklish moment or two.

As he'd later admit, Yates's early publicity and newspaper work (to say nothing of Dookie and other drains) had left him without much time or vitality for writing fiction. What little he did produce seemed barely good enough to keep him going, or rather not bad enough to make him quit. But then he was only twenty-two, and so far he'd managed to live like his idol Hemingway in almost every other respect—he'd gone to war, skipped college, worked for a newspaper, and married young. Now that he was married, though, there was a constant witness to that awkward apprenticeship of his, and perhaps for her sake he tried harder than ever to make good. Each night after dinner—no matter how exhausted after a long day at a job he despised—Yates would retire behind a folding screen, switch on his desk lamp, and impersonate Hemingway at his typewriter. “But it was here, of course,” as he wrote in “Builders,”

under the white stare of that lamp, that the tenuous parallel between Hemingway and me endured its heaviest strain. Because it wasn't “Up in Michigan” that came out of my machine; it wasn't any “Three Day Blow,” or “The Killers”; very often, in fact, it wasn't really anything at all, and even when it was something [my wife] called “marvelous,” I knew deep down that it was always, always something bad.

Let it serve as some measure of his desperation that he really did answer an ad for an “Unusual free-lance opportunity” placed by a cabbie in the
Saturday Review of Literature
. Readers of “Builders” will know the rest, but the episode warrants a brief summary here. The cabbie proposed that Yates ghostwrite a series of “autobiographical” stories about, of course, a heroic cabbie who changes the lives of his clients with bits of wise advice given in the nick of time. At first Yates took the job because he misunderstood the terms (the man had shown him a canceled check to a previous ghostwriter in the amount of twenty-five dollars, which turned out to be in payment for
five
stories rather than one), and then kept doing it because he was almost able to believe that the cabbie would sell the stories as planned to
Reader's Digest
. Yates also persisted because he took pride in the surprising craftsmanship of his own hackwork. Nothing came of the arrangement, needless to say, except for the boost it gave Yates's shaky self-confidence as a writer.

But for every boost there were letdowns—a lot of them, as his stories were rejected one after the other. The editors of
Harper's,
however, went too far when they attached a flyer for
The Art of Readable Writing,
by Rudolf Flesch (“author of
The Art of Plain Talk
”), to the latest in a long series of rejections, whereupon the wounded Yates reacted with a letter of protest. A sympathetic editor hastened to assure him that no offense was intended; it was common practice for mavens such as Flesch to circularize the
Harper's
slush pile. “Seriously,” the editor inquired, “does this practice seem to you improper, or were you just having some fun with us?” Yates's response doesn't survive, though a second note from
Harper's
suggests that Yates had been “very courteous” and perhaps a bit humorous in his initial indignation.

This is reassuring, since Yates's sense of humor was certainly being tried at the time. Almost as soon as he'd reconciled with his mother, she began calling him up “in meekness and urgency” to ask for loans of ten or twenty dollars, until he and Sheila were afraid to answer the phone. Also, being on (relatively) good terms with Dookie meant having her over for dinner, during which she'd talk and drink and finally pass out on the couch.
*
By then Yates had lost patience with her; at best there was a constant bickering simmer between them, often boiling over into screaming fights. “They were both ‘yelly' type people,” as Sheila put it, “and Dookie would give as much as she got. She'd burst into tears, but still yell.” The tension was eased for a time when she finally found freelance work sculpting mannequin heads. But it wasn't long before the National Association of Women Artists offered her a public relations job that—however—required her to work on an indefinite voluntary basis before they put her on salary. “And if she had to spend several months working full-time there without pay”—muses the narrator of “Regards”—“how could she get her mannequin heads done? Wasn't it ironic how things never seemed to work out quite right? Yeah.”

Meanwhile Yates was “sweating out the ax” at work, since the assistant financial editor had long ago discovered how little this particular rewrite man knew about puts and calls and debentures. A few weeks before Christmas the editor's hand fell on his shoulder (“right in the middle of a paragraph about domestic corporate bonds in moderately active trading”), and a few days later Yates found himself winding up toy kittens for a Fifth Avenue dimestore. As he wrote in “Builders,” it was “along in there sometime … that [he] gave up whatever was left of the idea of building [his] life on the pattern of Ernest Hemingway's.” Nor was his next job, at a labor newspaper called the
Trade Union Courier,
likely to restore his faith in life as a romantic affair. The biweekly tabloid served as the model for the
Labor Leader
in Yates's story “A Wrestler with Sharks”—a “badly printed” rag whose employees were either the dregs of the profession or young men marking time until something better came along. At that point Yates may have wondered which category he belonged to.

*   *   *

And then in April 1949 his luck seemed to change at last, as he began his long intermittent association with Remington Rand, the business machine company that would soon introduce the world's first commercially viable electronic computer, the UNIVAC. For the exorbitant sum of eighty dollars a week, Yates was hired to write copy for the company's external house organ, a dismal monthly magazine called
Systems
. With a man named Dan Woskoff, who designed and illustrated
Systems,
Yates shared a peaceful cubicle on the eleventh floor and conducted his day in much the same way as Frank Wheeler at Knox Business Machines—chatting, taking long coffee breaks, and writing sales-promotion prose (“Speaking of Production Control, dot, dot, dot”). The best part was that his new colleagues were almost as apathetic and cynical as he, which meant he could goof off with a relatively clear conscience.

It also meant he could go home at night with plenty of energy stored up for his own work, and the results were encouraging. “With Hemingway safely abandoned,” he wrote in “Builders,” “I had moved on to an F. Scott Fitzgerald phase; then, the best of all, I had begun to find what seemed to give every indication of being my own style.” Yates would go on forging his own style, but to some extent he'd never entirely abandon his “F. Scott Fitzgerald phase”—as his friend Robert Lacy put it, Yates was an “unabashed worshiper” of Fitzgerald. And apart from his admiration of the work, Yates found startling biographical parallels with the man: Both he and Fitzgerald were children of eccentric, smothering mothers and ineffectual salesmen fathers, and both were preeminently “shabby-genteel”—poor boys with storied ancestors who often found themselves among the rich, most notably at boarding school, where both endured formative ordeals as the poorest, most unpopular boys on campus. That Fitzgerald had gone to Princeton made Yates even more wistful about missing all that, and his rather mawkish, lifelong sense of the Ivy League derived from the Spires and Gargoyles milieu of
This Side of Paradise
. Indeed, Yates was quite self-conscious in his cultivation of a Fitzgeraldian mystique, with all that implies of romantic self-destruction—of smoking and drinking and lung ailments and emotional tumult, as well as courtliness (when sober) and a Brooks Brothers wardrobe. Finally, while Yates was at least a head taller than his idol, as young men they resembled each other as closely as brothers.

But it was the work that ultimately mattered, and for Yates
The Great Gatsby
was holy writ. Encountering the novel for the first time was, quite simply, the definitive milestone of his apprenticeship, without which he might well have found something else to do with his life:
Gatsby,
Yates declared, was his “formal introduction to the craft.” Both the lyricism of the prose (to his dying day, Yates could hardly read the last page without tears in his eyes) and the peripheral first-person narrator (who is both “enchanted and repelled” by the world of the very rich) were features Yates admired and refined in terms of his own approach. In two other respects, the book's influence was fundamental. “Every line of dialogue in
Gatsby
serves to reveal more about the speaker than the speaker might care to have revealed,” Yates wrote in his essay “Some Very Good Masters,” and offered as an example “the awful little party in Myrtle Wilson's apartment.” But another formal feature was more important still, and arguably became the backbone of Yates's aesthetic—it would not only prove crucial in his learning how to distance himself from highly personal material, but also provide fodder for a lifetime of teaching spiels:

I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase “objective correlative” until the scene in
Gatsby
where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explains that they are “the finest specimens of human molars.”

Get it? Got it.
That's
what Eliot meant.

Around this time Yates also discovered a contemporary with similar debts—“to Fitzgerald and Lardner,” he later noted, “but he'd settled those accounts honorably”—when the story “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” appeared in
The New Yorker
. Yates loved the subtle accumulation of meaningful details, the elliptical dialogue, and above all the revelation of character through action (for example, Muriel Glass's oblivious manicure as the phone rings, as her husband ponders suicide, which the delighted Yates called “the essence of aplomb”). After “Bananafish” Yates became an even more devoted reader of
The New Yorker
; each week he looked forward to the day it came out, when he'd rush to the newsstand to see if there was another story by his favorite new writer, J. D. Salinger. Echoes of Salingerian diction are especially audible in Yates's early work, and linger faintly in his mature style, the result of his reading over and over his five favorite stories in
Nine Stories.
*
“Here was a man who used language as if it were pure energy beautifully controlled,” Yates wrote, “and who knew exactly what he was doing in every silence as well as in every word.”