A Tragic Honesty (20 page)

Yates sent his seven best stories in the order he'd written them, and a month later McCall responded with a thumbnail critique of each and a definite decision to offer at least two of the stories for sale, and hence become his agent. Manifest in her letter is an all but infallible sense of what sold in the so-called literary fiction market, and in the future when Yates chose to ignore her advice he'd generally come to regret it. McCall noted that Yates's work showed a “good build”—i.e., that his more recent stories were better than his early ones, a good augury, but for now most of them didn't pass muster. A brief anecdote titled “Bells in the Morning” was a “promising beginning but not saleable,” and “A Last Fling, Like” lacked everything from a strong story to a “vivid or interesting or moving character.” Two other stories Yates sent in the batch, “The Misfits” and “Shepherd's Pie on Payday,” are no longer extant in any form—and no wonder, given the awful verdict McCall passed on each: The first was “out of focus,” and the second was “nothing more nor less than two rather briefly etched characters having a conversation which leads nowhere” (to which she tactfully added, “Don't forget that every good writer has an occasional lapse, and forgive me for thinking this one of your lapses!”). The only stories she thought potentially saleable were “The Canal” and “No Pain Whatsoever”—and though she had little apparent hope for the former (“I will do my best to place it”), her estimate of the latter was prescient as ever (“best story of the lot … deeply touching, beautifully characterized”).

Most telling was her ambivalence toward that early draft of “A Really Good Jazz Piano”; though she thought it a “great improvement” over most of Yates's other stories, its ending was “unprepared for and obscure”—that is, in this version the two protagonists, Carson and Ken, erupt in weird laughter over their cruelty toward Sid, the black jazz pianist, and on that note the story ends. “Do you want to think about the end at all,” McCall inquired, “or let me know what you were trying to do, or is that too dreary for you?” Yates replied that he thought the ending “honest” and wanted to keep it, and McCall agreed to offer the story as is. It would take Yates six years to accept his error.

*   *   *

In April the Yateses moved into Stephen Benedict's former apartment at Palais Beau Site in Cannes, once the place had finally been vacated by a navy wife who'd lived there after Benedict (she later became fodder for Yates's story, “Evening on the Côte d'Azur,” about which more below). Before the war Palais Beau Site had been a rather stately hotel and, whatever its subsequent decline, was a vast improvement over La Monada in Juan-les-Pins. The new apartment was a compact arrangement of two rooms plus kitchen and bath, with pleasant ceramic-tiled floors and a little balcony in back that afforded a stunning view of the Mediterranean. “At its best and sunniest,” Benedict recalled, “it was paradise.”

Yates would have agreed in at least one respect: Now that he was closer to town he could buy his own cigarettes, the procurement of which was about the only thing that coaxed him outside. Occasionally he'd walk on the beach, but mostly he was content to stick to his old routine of writing, smoking, and coughing. As for Sheila, she was sick of the whole business, and chose to go her own way as much as possible. A letter she wrote in 1962 alludes to their “semi-separation in Cannes,” and one can only guess what this entailed, since she now remembers the time as “tranquil” relative to later years. True, she was tired of “fussing about cigarettes” and so forth, but as for the rest of it she'd come to accept (at least in retrospect) that her husband was simply a “city person”—and
city
meant New York, Paris, or London, and not some overheated tourist trap like Cannes, where he'd just as soon stay at his desk.

Meanwhile the news from Monica McCall suggested that Yates wasn't headed for overnight success. Within a month both “The Canal” and “No Pain Whatsoever” were turned down by the
Atlantic Monthly, Harper's, Esquire,
and
The New Yorker
. “Yates has a lot of talent,” wrote
Esquire
(returning “Canal”), “but we just aren't using much fiction with a World War II angle.” The
Atlantic
thought “No Pain Whatsoever” was “bogged down in the wasteful conversation which seemed to fill far too much of the first two-thirds of the story.” And while
Harper's
was “impressed” and willing to see more—they did, and declined—
The New Yorker
dispatched both stories with a standard rejection slip.
*
A few months later “No Pain Whatsoever” was also rejected by a new literary magazine called
Discovery,
whose editor would someday become a friend and colleague of Yates. As Vance Bourjaily wrote McCall, the story was “perfectly handled,” with “only one thing missing … some feeling of why the author has chosen to write it”; as far as Bourjaily could tell, the narrator “never develops an attitude” toward Myra, the adulterous protagonist, and hence one doesn't know “whether tragedy's involved or simply animal pathos.” An elaborate way of saying, perhaps, that the reader can't tell whether Myra's supposed to be good or bad.

That a fine writer and reader like Bourjaily could render such a judgment suggests something of what Yates was up against. Of course there was less tolerance for moral ambiguity in those days, but that goes only so far in explaining the discomfort and even outrage that Yates's work (throughout his career) aroused in certain readers: “
Why
does he have to write so unpleasantly that one feels there's just no good in anybody?” wrote a
Harper's
editor in rejecting “A Really Good Jazz Piano”—and really, the saga of that story alone (assuredly a classic; Yates's own favorite as late as 1974) might serve to encapsulate the kind of reception his early work, in particular, received. “What a good story this must be for us to be going on about it so!” wrote Monica McCall in April 1952, as she remonstrated with Yates over that problematic ending. A few months later “Jazz” was turned down by both
New American Writing
and
New World Writing,
and the next year
Argosy
followed suit: “[T]he playboy setting and depressing ending rule it out for us.” In 1955 the writer Peter Matthiessen, then an editor at
Paris Review,
rejected the story for a familiar reason, which he saw fit to frame in aesthetic rather than moral terms: “The cruelty which forms its climax is incredible, not in itself, but in terms of these characters and this situation.” When
Esquire
also called the ending a “let-down” in 1957, Yates finally got the point and revised the story into its present superlative form—whereupon
The New Yorker
promptly rejected it with what must by then have seemed an almost mocking refrain: “Hope you [McCall] will let us see other stories from him.”
Esquire
agreed to have another look at the revised version, and this time accepted it—only to reject it again when they learned that Yates would be including the story in the 1958 Scribner's volume
Short Story 1
(“Rust Hills did have the grace to say that he was distressed and apologetic about the manner in which they handled ‘the matter,'” McCall wrote bitterly).
The New Yorker
offered to reconsider yet again, but this time found it “too pat and neatly contrived” (as opposed to lacking believability, an earlier charge), and other rejections followed from
Harper's,
the
Atlantic,
and
Saturday Evening Post
(“for fairly obvious reasons”). Finally—almost a decade after Yates had finished that draft on the Riviera—the story made its magazine debut in Vance Bourjaily's
Discovery
. To this day Bourjaily feels proud of having published one of Yates's best and most representative stories: “I'm a jazz snob like Carson,” he said, “and by the end of the story I understood his offense, and saw it in myself, even if Carson didn't.” That Bourjaily and other good readers tend to
see themselves
in Yates's characters is perhaps a clue worth remembering.

Meanwhile back in Cannes, 1952, the waves shushed outside and the sunlight dazzled the tiles and Yates lit another cigarette and got on with his work. He now had a superb agent, and several magazine editors thought he was talented (if misanthropic) and wanted to see more. Given that on a good day the most he could write was maybe half a polished page, or just over a hundred words, there was no time to let up—though he still had a lot to learn, and the quality of his work wavered. “Foursome,” the next story he finished after “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” was rejected without fanfare and doesn't survive.

“Thieves” is interesting as an early variation on one of Yates's favorite themes: the depths to which people deceive themselves into thinking they're somehow special, set apart from the herd. Protagonist Robert Blaine is the abrasive sage of a TB sanatorium, and for much of the story he holds forth on the meaning of “talent” (“knowing how to handle yourself”), and offers himself as a good example—as when he swaggered into a swanky Madison Avenue clothing store and conned the clerk into thinking he was a bigshot. Well in advance of Blaine's bleak epiphany, though, the reader is given a nudge: “All the stories whose purpose was to show Robert Blaine as a seasoned man of the world were laid in 'thirty-nine or 'forty, when he had first come to New York, just as those intended to show him as an irrepressible youth took place in Chicago, ‘back in the Depression.'” Finally Blaine tells how he “stole” a woman named Irene from her well-heeled husband, whose money they spent for six months: “‘[She] thought I was going to be another Sherwood Anderson. Probably still does.'” The disparity between his past and present “promise” occurs all at once to Blaine, and his breathing becomes “shallow and irregular”; but when a concerned patient seeks help for Blaine's “nerves,” the matter-of-fact nurse delivers a blunt coup de grace: “Oh, honestly, that Blaine.
Nerves,
for God's sake. Big baby, that's all he is.” Monica McCall was kind in her estimate of “Thieves”: “It is a good story, beautifully characterized, but I think not any better selling bet than the stories on which I am working”—a tactful way of saying that it was little more than a few characters having a conversation which leads
somewhere,
perhaps, but nowhere interesting enough to justify the overall lack of drama.

Yates's next story, “The Comptroller and the Wild Wind,” is an even broader repository of the themes and tendencies that would reappear in his later work, as well as a few he'd subsequently discard—Joycean lyricism, for instance: “A long time ago, he had married a girl with splendid long legs and a face that was described as pert (in the blue half-light of dawn she whispered, ‘darling, darling, darling,' and the legs were strong, the face was wild and lovely).” With a further nod to Joyce, the latter's poem “Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba” is quoted in full here, as it would be more than thirty years later as the epigraph to
Young Hearts Crying,
whose title it supplied. And that poem, with all it suggests of the lost illusions of youth, is very much to the point in “Comptroller” and elsewhere (less blatantly) in Yates's work. Another gambit that would become almost a signature is the opening line(s) that foreshadows doom: “The morning after his wife left him, George Pollock, comptroller of the American Bearing Company, had breakfast at a counter for the first time in twenty years. He destroyed three paper napkins trying to remove one, whole, from the tight grip of the dispenser, and nearly upset a glass of water in an effort to keep his briefcase from sliding off his lap.” Hence the bungling Pollock—a dull man judging by his job description and surname—is left utterly helpless by the desertion of his wife, the “Wild Wind” of the title, who was not so wild that she was unwilling to fix him breakfast every morning for twenty years. But no more: “‘Oh, how can anyone hate you,'” she tells him on the eve of her departure with a man who shares her fondness for poetry; “‘you're not hateful—you're just a pompous, posturing
fussy
little man!'” Just so: The decent Pollock is a lot less hateful than, say, Frank Wheeler (to whom the same sentiment would be applied in
Revolutionary Road
), such that one wonders, really, what the man has done to deserve so many humiliations in a single narrative day. “Close, but no cigar—I'm not sure why,” wrote an
Esquire
editor in rejecting the story. “I think it's because there doesn't seem to be any occasion for so much bitter handling, and just a little contempt for the nonintellectual.” To be sure there was compassion as well as contempt, but in terms of basic effect other editors agreed in toto.

Monica McCall was patient and duly encouraging: “You are progressing well from the more anecdotal character sketch type of story into the fuller, more rounded story.” And Yates continued to make progress with his next story, “Nuptials,” an early draft of one of his masterpieces, “The Best of Everything.” McCall responded that it was a “swell story” and submitted it for consideration as an
Atlantic
“First”—the magazine's prestigious showcase for previously unpublished authors. But the
Atlantic
declined without comment, as did
The New Yorker
and
Esquire
a few weeks later, and when McCall proposed sending it to the somewhat obscure
Botteghe Oscure,
a plainly frustrated Yates dismissed the magazine as “an esoteric little tea-party journal.”

By now Yates was badly in need of a success, even if it meant some sort of artistic compromise. After all, his hero Fitzgerald had written any number of hokey, formulaic stories for the
Saturday Evening Post,
and gotten rich in the bargain; why not Richard Yates? The result of such professionalism was “A Convalescent Ego,” a story that turned the raw material of his illness and shaky marriage into a wacky Walter Mitty–like farce. Those who wonder what it must have been like for Sheila when Yates returned from the TB ward (or just on a daily basis for that matter) need look no further than “Convalescent Ego”: