A Tragic Honesty (25 page)

The local bohemians got in at last, but only … after their ringleader had floored Bill in the doorway with a right to the nose and held him down in absurdly drunken combat while his followers climbed in over their writhing bodies. Everybody seemed to feel that the brawl was just what was needed to give the party a fine old pre-war flavor, and it ended in a great deal of sentimental handshaking.

Thus was Yates's launch as a successful author celebrated, and for the moment anything seemed possible—perhaps he'd prove to be a writer like Fitzgerald who could have his cake and eat it too, money
and
prestige, and be something of a bon vivant in the bargain. “So I am now a famous host,” he merrily noted.

*   *   *

The
Cosmopolitan
sale worked wonders for Yates's marital problems, which seemed to vanish overnight. Both he and Sheila wished the other were present so each could celebrate with the one person who really understood what it meant—a further reminder that, for better or worse, there was nobody else who mattered much in their lives. Nor was there any question about Yates's coming home now as soon as possible, since Sheila's long-held ambivalence toward him had suddenly been turned against herself: She conceded “what an odd view of the world and its people” she'd always had, and now it was she, not Yates, who spoke of all the ingenious “little tricks” she was practicing for becoming a better person—such as “hugging Mussy (much against her will) when there are ‘a million things to do,'” and cultivating an easier, more tolerant nature in general. “I do love you so much, Rich,” she declared. “I won't kid myself about that anymore.” Yates was gratified, if a bit leery of that exalted tone he knew so well: “Absence sure does seem to have made your heart grow fonder,” he wrote; “presence will make it cool off somewhat.” Meanwhile he warned her against turning their marriage into an “intellectual project,” adding that if she just relaxed and loved him, “all the little tricks … will learn themselves.”

For the most part, though, they were too happy to bicker anymore, as they busily prepared to become a family again. After a month of frustrated searching, Sheila had found a “quaint and Villagy” three-room apartment at 96 Perry Street, between Bleecker and Hudson (Dookie had helped close the deal “by throwing her weight around in a realty office when she noticed some very
bad
paintings on the wall”). By mid-August she and Mussy had moved in, and a week later Yates reported to the American Express that he was ready to return to the States as soon as possible. He was told that a cancellation would probably make a berth available within two or three weeks, which wasn't soon enough for Yates. At first he considered inventing “some heart-rending emergency” to persuade the American Welfare Service to book a more immediate passage, but on second thought decided “it might be a bit awkward if they got wise.”

While he waited Yates got a good start on a story he called “The Ordeal of Vincent Sabella” (“all about meats in the fourth grade”) and spent leisure hours mulling the future with unwonted optimism. Now that he was making good as a writer, he could even allow himself to consider taking the odd freelance job from Remington Rand; in fact an old coworker had just inquired (“with some temerity,” said Sheila, “in light of your success”) whether they should prepare an account for him. For the moment Yates could afford to make them wait. He was almost a shoo-in to win the
Atlantic
“First” Award in December—so far there was only one other “First” in competition for that year—and that would mean another $750.

Indeed the only thing that cast a shadow was the prospect of what
Cosmopolitan
might do to his story: “The main illustration will probably be something very corny with the tenor in full song and the little boy sniveling in the corner,” he wrote. “Shudder to think about it. My next twelve stories are going to be so damn unsentimental that
Cosmopolitan
wouldn't touch them with a ten-foot pole.” Sheila noted reassuringly that she'd gone through a whole stack of
Cosmopolitan
s in the ladies' room at work—the stories were “good,” the illustrations “quite tasteful”—but Yates was not comforted. He even considered running the story under a pseudonym.

Fortunately he was distracted by any number of cheerful errands to run while he waited for a berth. There was the question of how best to transport Sweetheart, the crotchety Angora, whose return Mussy had demanded. Yates solemnly inquired at the American Express about traveling with cats, and was told the law required a proper “basket”: “So I looked into cat-baskets at Selfridge's and found they are very elaborate damn things costing two pounds five.” He bought one. Also, Sheila sent him a list of toys to bring back for Mussy—“a coloring book with
water
paints; a little sailboat for the tub; a whistle; a gun (honest to God! but no caps, please)”—as well as “those lovely smelly English soaps” for herself and either a black or “nice antiquey red” pocketbook. Most pressing and intricate by far was the matter of Yates's new suit, about which he sent almost daily dispatches from Savile Row.
*
Early in August he'd settled on Oxford gray flannel (“this may not sound very imaginative, but it's the most useful and best-looking kind of suit I know”), but vacillated as to the right tailor, until at last tradition in its hoariest form won the day: Gieves and Hawkes at Number One Savile Row, he wrote, was “sort of the English version of Brooks Brothers” and the sign outside assured one that “[they'd] been in business since 1066 or something.”

Yates's giddiness waxed as his departure approached, such that even a bitter end to his friendship with Bill Bray couldn't dampen his spirits. “Old Bill” had been in a “pout” since Yates refused to loan him more money, and left his debt unpaid when he cleared out of the flat in late August. It was the end of something, to be sure, but Yates felt marvelous: “I don't think I've ever been
less
depressed about life in general,” he wrote Sheila. “I just don't see how we can fail to have a damn good time together when I come home, Pretty.
*
The setup on Perry Street sounds ideal, and the idea of having you and the Meat under the same roof again is staggeringly nice.” By the time his passage was cleared on the
Maasdam
in mid-September, Yates had wrapped up his affairs with admirable efficiency: He'd obtained a clean bill of health and complete X-ray records from the hospital, run a vacuum over the rug at Neville Terrace, taken his leave of Aunt Mary, and gotten himself and Sweetheart aboard the ship in good time. And in the midst of a pleasant crossing (the food was “wonderful” and little girls were stroking the cat “at regular intervals”), he received a telegram from Sheila:
Cosmopolitan
had bought “A Glutton for Punishment”—unhappy ending and all—for another $850.

The
Maasdam
docked at Hoboken on September 19, 1953, and the chipper Yates disembarked with a scowling cat in his arms. This was his daughter Sharon's first definite memory of her father.

CHAPTER SIX

A Cry of Prisoners: 1953-1959

Yates and Sheila had planned “a sort of honeymoon” after his return, and perhaps this came to pass in one form or another; but it wasn't long before Remington Rand had lured him back on a rather feverish “freelance” basis. Yates began to report twice a month to a man named Andy Borno (the physical model for the squat, balding Laurel Players director in
Revolutionary Road
), who gave him new assignments in the form of so-called case histories, to wit: Yates would visit companies that had purchased Remington Rand products and interview the relevant engineers, systems analysts, and salespeople, then ghostwrite articles under the name of whatever executive made the purchase. Such puff pieces were placed in business magazines by Remington Rand, which paid Yates $125 (plus expenses) per job. “All this was very boring stuff,” Yates said in 1981, “but it occupied only about half of my working time and so financed the whole of my first novel.” For the next seven years, then, Yates devoted the first half of each month to PR work and the second to fiction (it was necessary to segregate the tasks as much as possible)—a routine that resulted in one novel, a handful of stories, at least five hundred ghostwritten articles, many executive speeches, and almost every word of Remington Rand's internal house organ, perhaps the only writing Yates ever did drunk.

His particular beat was the UNIVAC, to which Remington Rand had recently acquired exclusive rights. The first electronic computer designed for business use, the UNIVAC had made a splash in 1951, when it predicted an Eisenhower landslide based on less than 1 percent of the vote.
*
But talk of an impending “computer revolution” continued to leave most people cold, and the UNIVAC, at eight tons per unit, was hardly an easy sell. That Yates was entrusted with much of its promotion attests to the quality of his work. Not only was he able to translate esoteric technological jargon into chatty Babbittese for the layman, but his articles were also effective in soothing worries over “the broad economic and social implications of what was then the new and controversial phenomenon of ‘automation,'” as Yates noted in a later résumé. Such was his known expertise on the subject that he was hired to write the UNIVAC entry for Funk & Wagnall's
Encyclopedia
. Nor were the rich “implications” of automation (economic, social, metaphorical) lost on Yates as a fiction writer—hence Frank Wheeler explains to his wife, on the morning of her suicide, how an electronic computer works: “‘Only instead of mechanical parts, you see, it's got thousands of little individual vacuum tubes…' And in a minute he was drawing for her, on a paper napkin, a diagram representing the passage of binary digit pulses through circuitry.” Flaubert himself might have coveted those “vacuum tubes” and “binary digit pulses”; as for Yates, he thought it the best scene he ever wrote.

Now that Yates was making $850 a story, he and Sheila thought it high time to distance themselves from the Cains and Bialeks of the world, the better to meet some of those “young, poor, bright, humorous” golden people they'd always dreamed of knowing. They made a start when Yates renewed his acquaintance with Tony Vevers, the English painter he'd met during that roisterous furlough in London eight years before. Vevers and his wife Elspeth had recently moved to New York, where they led a life of romantic squalor in a Lower East Side loft. Yates was impressed by the painter's sincere indifference to his own poverty: Vevers, who supported himself with a number of menial odd jobs, seemed the very embodiment of the idea that one's art was what mattered most and wages were simply a means to that end. That both he and his wife came from posh families made it all the more impressive.

Yates also became friends with Robert Riche, who was dating Vevers's sister at the time. In a letter he wrote Yates many years later, Riche described himself as “no different than I ever was: somewhat naive, somewhat boisterous if encouraged, occasionally funny, generally a bit apprehensive about my position in life, but holding to a basically decent value system, I think.” By the time he wrote those words, Riche had been portrayed in
Young Hearts Crying
as the naive, boisterous, occasionally funny, basically decent, and utterly preposterous Bill Brock; that Riche was aware of (and angered by) this lampoon, but could still write Yates with such candor, attests to the verisimilitude of his fictional counterpart's more amiable traits.

The two had met at a gallery opening a few weeks after Yates's return from Europe. Yates was wearing his tailored English suit, and Riche thought he resembled a young T. S. Eliot (perhaps the desired effect; years later, at any rate, in the midst of a typical round of banter between the two, Riche told Yates he looked like an “English fag” in that suit). They were the same age and seemed to have a lot in common. Both had left-wing sympathies, and Riche went so far as to call himself a “revolutionary” (he'd worked in a factory and served as a labor organizer). Also, Riche had gone to Yale (as had Tony Vevers), and Yates wished he'd gone there. Above all Riche vaguely aspired to be a writer and both were involved in what they wryly called the “PR dodge”; such mutual disdain for their bread and butter was itself the basis for immediate camaraderie. Or so it seemed to Riche when he was invited, on the spot, to a big Halloween party on Perry Street—though in retrospect he realized both Yateses were more taken by his date, the attractive young Pamela Vevers.
*

As for Tony Vevers, he found Yates much changed from the rambunctious, “Mammy”-singing nineteen-year-old he'd known in London. For one thing the older Yates drank more, minus the boyish joie de vivre: “He'd become sharp-tongued and bitter,” Vevers recalled. “One got the impression he wasn't as successful as he wanted to be.” Bob Riche, who hadn't known Yates as a younger man, simply found him a good drinking companion—a “riot,” even—though Yates's abrasive side was hardly lost on him. In fact, both he and Vevers remarked on what struck them as Yates's peculiar attitude toward women: “He expected them to drink a lot and be beautiful all the time,” as Vevers put it. Riche remembered a typical outing to his father's cottage in the country, when he and Yates and a man named Larry Fleischer stayed up drinking and telling dirty jokes long after their wives had gone to bed. Fleischer's wife got fed up with all the laughing, shouting, and coughing, and more than once stuck her head in the door and asked her husband to call it a night. Yates waved her off with increasing contempt, and when the weekend was over the two were no longer speaking. As for Sheila, she seemed to defer to her husband as a matter of choice on social occasions, though sometimes she'd silence him with a frown or a nudge, especially if he got to singing too much.