A Tragic Honesty (21 page)

The porcelain soap dish had given way under his brush, dropped from the wall and smashed, breaking the cup and saucer he'd just washed.… Things like this had been happening nearly every day since he came home from the hospital. First there had been the discovery that he'd left his silver fountain pen behind, in the locker beside his hospital bed, and [his wife] had to make a special trip back to get it from the nurses. Then on the second or third day, when he'd insisted on helping with the housework, he had shaken the dust mop out the window so hard that the head of the thing fell off, five stories down into the courtyard, and left him absurdly shaking the naked stick over the windowsill.

Let that image of Yates's alter ego “shaking the naked stick” linger as a kind of endearing emblem of his domestic life. As for the rest of the story, it offers a number of fine moments such as these, and reflects the kind of frustrated escapism into which the high-strung Yates may well have lapsed whenever Sheila's “elaborate kindliness” or “tight-lipped silence” had implied what a hopeless bungler he was (hence the protagonist daydreams of various ways in which to redeem himself—e.g., heroically going back to work despite his illness, buying champagne for a bravura celebration, and so on). But as a narrative it doesn't go anywhere in particular except an ending so sappy and artificial that Yates must have held his nose to write it: “Oh Bill, I
have
been awful since you came home, haven't I?” says the nagging but now miraculously reformed wife. “Oh Bill, you ought to break
all
the dishes, right over my dumb head.”

Monica McCall, who knew what Yates was up to, wrote that she might be able to sell the story to the “slicks” if he'd revise it in order to dramatize the Mittyish reveries—“[they] should be more acted out, rather than imagined in his mind”—and appended a list of notes to that purpose. But as it turned out, the “slicks” were no more interested than
The New Yorker
et al., though
Collier's
found the story “readable and amusing” and commended the author's “remarkable ear for dialogue.” Yates appreciated the compliment, though wondered that it should be made “on the basis of ‘Convalescent Ego,' for God's sake.”

Perhaps to get the taste of “Ego” out of his mouth, Yates returned to his former manner with a vengeance. “Evening on the Côte d'Azur” seems almost pitiless in its treatment of the meager resources, mental or otherwise, available to a middle-class Everywoman such as Betty Meyers, a navy wife living in Cannes. Betty's days pass in a nausea of boredom: Oblivious to the beauty of the sea and beach, she resents her children, her absentee husband, her faded looks, the snotty French, and longs to be back in Bayonne, New Jersey, of all places. Inevitably she allows herself to be seduced by an affable officer named Tom, whom she immediately imagines she loves; as she lies “at peace” in the afterglow, her husband all but forgotten, the narrative point of view switches to that of her departed lover, who cruelly ridicules her for the benefit of two young sailors. “Son, any man couldn't make that oughta turn in his uniform.” Nor is there any danger of a contretemps with Betty's husband, as one of the sailors seems to expect: “Oh, Jesus Christ, Junior,” the crafty old officer tells the kid. “When're you gonna grow up? Whaddya think—I told her my real name?”

“Evening on the Côte d'Azur” was turned down by
The New Yorker, Harper's,
the
Atlantic,
and
Esquire,
whose editor wrote that it “suffers from a confusion of styles. Sometimes the story is seen by its heroine—stupid and adolescent—sometimes by its author, in rather rich prose.” This is unjust. The third-person narrator who mimics the diction of the viewpoint character (“Oh, she knew the Sixth Fleet was supposed to be a good deal, and everything”) is a valid approach, and one that Yates would refine to more subtle effect in his later work; moreover, the quick objective bridge between Betty's and Tom's points of view is hardly written in “rather rich prose”—but no matter. While the story falls a bit short of Yates's mature outlook and voice, he was clearly on the brink of finding a way out of the wilderness, at least as a writer.

*   *   *

Palais Beau Site became rather expensive in high season, and late that summer Yates suggested that Sheila write to her English aunt, a woman she hardly knew, and inquire about lodgings in London. The aunt replied that her own apartment in South Kensington had a basement flat that she'd be happy to rent for a nominal sum, two pounds a week, as long as they didn't mind her using the bathtub each morning. They didn't mind at all, and in October they moved.

For the first time in Europe, Yates was relatively happy. He liked almost everything about London, including Sheila's aunt—a bluff seventy-year-old widow who'd changed her first name, sensibly enough, from Bevin to Mary (Fagin). The frail, gentlemanly Yates seemed to excite the woman's maternal instinct, and before long they were thick as thieves: Aunt Mary was full of stories about London show-business types (her husband had been a theatrical producer), and Yates loved to listen as a way of unwinding after the day's work. Also, with what they saved on rent they could afford a good nursery school for Mussy, who'd grown into a charming but noisy two-year-old. Not only did this make for a more tranquil writing environment, but left Yates with enough energy in the evening to play games like “Ready for a Girl” and “Dup-dup-dup.” The first, as his daughter recalls, was “some sort of running-chasing game,” and the second involved putting her on his lap and singing “Dup-
dup
-dup” to the tune of an English martial jingle until, with great hilarity, his knees would part and she'd splash to the floor. “What are you doing on the
floor?
” Yates would say mock sternly; “I asked you to sit in my lap!” Another benefit of nursery school (Mrs. Pierce's Academy) was that it left Sheila free during the day—and so, contrary to their Paris arrangement, she agreed to stay home at night with the toddler while Yates went off to the pubs, an activity he enjoyed and she didn't.

In fact she didn't enjoy much of anything by then, almost as if her and Yates's respective levels of contentment were inversely related. In a letter she wrote him a year later, Sheila wondered why she'd gotten so “snarky and sick” in London, even though life there had been “perfect … in all its outside aspects.” This was mostly a matter of lonely, wishful revisionism on her part, as their life in London (or hers anyway) had been far from “perfect,” on the outside or in. By the time they'd come to live in that cozy, claustrophobic basement flat, Sheila was sicker than ever of Yates's vagaries—his moody scribbling, fecklessness, and self-neglect—and what made it even more intolerable was her hatred of London per se. As Yates evoked her views in the story “Liars in Love”:

[London] was big and drab and unwelcoming; you could walk or ride a bus for miles without seeing anything nice, and the coming of winter brought an evil-smelling sulphurous fog that stained everything yellow, that seeped through closed windows and doors to hang in your rooms and afflict your wincing, weeping eyes.

Sheila made a fine distinction between the lesser of two evils and decided to stay inside the flat all day, amid a pall of cigarette smoke and seeping fog. Occasionally her cousins Gemma or Barbara—sweet but conventional—would visit, but that was about it. And though it was true that she and her husband didn't quarrel much anymore (“quarreling had belonged to an earlier phase of their marriage”), the thick awkward silences were hardly an improvement.

At least Yates had his writing to keep him busy, and on that score he was more hopeful than ever: The story he'd finished just before leaving Cannes, “Jody Rolled the Bones”—his fifteenth since moving to Europe (“Number 15 off the production line,” as he put it)—had been gleefully received by Monica McCall. “Oh the new one is an absolute beauty,” she wrote on September 16, “I think it quite the best piece you have done.” A month later it was declined “by the narrowest margin” for an
Atlantic
“First,” as the editors thought it was “simply a shade too predictable.” But the next day a follow-up letter came from the new twenty-six-year-old assistant editor at the magazine, Seymour Lawrence, who wanted to hold the story for one more week pending the return of his celebrated mentor, Edward Weeks, who was just then wrapping up a lecture tour. Weeks returned and promptly read the story—“far and away superior to the general run of Army material,” he glossed—and on October 21, 1952, Yates received a cable: ATLANTIC BUYING JODY FOR A “FIRST” AT TWO HUNDRED AND FIFTY MANY CONGRATULATIONS MONICA.

He was on his way at last. The first thing he did was write friends and family,
*
and naturally he expressed his rather solemn gratitude to Miss McCall, apologizing for the meagerness of her commission—twenty-five dollars after all that hard work—a matter much on his mind, evidently. “Sweet of you to be concerned,” she replied. “The pleasure and excitement in getting a young writer started is far greater than the interest financially, and believe me I never would have taken you on unless I believed that through the years we would all be making plenty of money to pay the rent.”

A heady time, as one thing really did seem to lead to another. Within days of publication in the February 1953 issue, Yates received a promising overture from Frances Phillips of William Morrow: “That was one grand story in the Atlantic.… It would be a great pleasure to hear that you have a novel and that it is free.… If you have an agent, please tell him/her of my interest.” Even more promptly he'd heard from Jacques Chambrun, who represented Somerset Maugham no less, and was known to be a roguish poacher of other people's clients: “I should like to have the opportunity to handle some, at least, of your future work.” But no agent or editor would prove more persistent than Yates's young discoverer at the
Atlantic,
Seymour Lawrence, who even then was scheming to do bigger things in his own career: “I want to tell you how much I enjoyed Jody,” he wrote. “I'm very much interested in your work, and I wonder if you are planning to do a novel. If you are, I should be very glad to offer you any help and editorial assistance I can.” For now, though, Yates had no novel to discuss with him or anybody else, nor the remotest idea for one; he'd exhausted himself on those “big, ambitious, tragic” efforts of his earlier years, and preferred to perfect his craft in the shorter form.

His progress is everywhere apparent in “Jody Rolled the Bones,” a story that fulfills one of the highest criteria of literary excellence: It's even more rewarding to read the second or third time than the first, as its nuances reveal themselves one after another. “If you're going to do something,” Yates would later tell his students, “do it well. Stand in the stream and work down through the soft mulch to the rock bottom.” “Jody” is perhaps the first story in which Yates managed to work all the way down to the bottom, beyond the rather easy pessimism that mars his earlier work.

At first “Jody” seems to conform to a conventional formula: the hardboiled sergeant who turns out to have, if not quite a heart of gold, then many lovable qualities. Yates even describes his protagonist, Sergeant Reece, as “typical—almost a prototype,” which prepares the reader all the more for that kind of story. But as a character Reece defies the formula. On the one hand he's a rather despicable, simple-minded bigot who affects to be incapable of pronouncing foreign names, calls foreigners “gorillas,” and has few human skills apart from those required by the job. On the other hand he's a superb soldier whose approach to leadership is “classically simple: he led by being excellent”—as when he demonstrates the proper use of a bayonet: “At the instructor's commands [Reece] whipped smartly into each of the positions, freezing into a slim statue while the officer … [pointed out] the distribution of his weight and the angles of his limbs, explaining that this was how it should be done.” And Yates strikes just the right note of fairness, of benign detachment, in dividing blame between Reece and his recruits: “But if excellence is easy to admire it is hard to like, and Reece refused to make himself likable. It was his only failing, but it was a big one, for respect without affection can't last long—not, at least, where the sentimentality of adolescent minds is involved.”

One is tempted to go on exploring the craft of this story, from the nicely sustained metaphor of the title (derived from the chant that not only serves to unify the men but suggests the unfairness of army life and life in general) to the resonant ending in which the recruits revert to “a bunch of shameless little wise guys” in Reece's absence—a collective mediocrity that will haunt them, Yates implies, for the rest of their lives. “You've done it with ‘Jody,'” an
Atlantic
reader from Hico, Texas, wrote Yates. “Better, I think, than Hemingway ever did it, better than you will do it again. But in doing it you have broken the code. A soldier does not write; he soldiers. (Kipling was a genius; you probably are not.)” Yates kept that letter, and twelve years later he got another from Colonel Roger Little of the Office of Military Psychology and Leadership: “Jody,” wrote Little, had long been used “as a reference … because it is such a sensitive portrayal of the basic trainee's perception of the noncommissioned officer.” Thus Yates had written about a “typical” sergeant after all, in itself something of a novelty.

*   *   *

Yates's brother-in-law Charlie had been strange all his life, but as a young man he seemed to pull himself together and even show signs of brilliance: He prepped at Andover, earned a bachelor's degree in physics at Harvard and a master's in math at the University of Maryland. Later he held a job at the Bureau of Standards and then at Hughes Aircraft, where he was employed while the Yateses were abroad. For about a year after their departure, Charlie wrote long articulate letters signed with love, full of advice and encouragement about his brother-in-law's writing career. But one day Yates got a different kind of letter, written in a childish scrawl: “Dear Dick, This is you: a prick with ears!”—and there was an illustration to that effect. One such letter might easily be laughed off, but the ones that followed were even more bizarre: almost totally incoherent, and decorated with all sorts of obscene doodling. From time to time a more normal letter would appear that made little or no reference to the others, which hardly diminished the oddness of it all.