A Tragic Honesty (28 page)

Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the “objective correlative”—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without laboring the point. In “Masters” Yates cited the green silk cigar case that Charles Bovary finds in the road after the ball, a fetish his wife uses “as a source of voluptuous daydreams”; Yates then referred to a later scene of exquisitely nuanced foreboding: “When the pharmacist's young apprentice Justin, who is hopelessly in love with Emma, is cruelly reprimanded by his employer, in her presence, for possessing an illustrated marriage manual
and
for messing around with the jar of arsenic. Wow.” Flaubert also influenced what is known as Yates's “determinism”—though this was mostly a matter of innate sensibility and life experience.
*
“‘Fate is to blame,'” says Charles Bovary in forgiving his dead wife's lover Rodolphe, and Yates had a lively subjective view of what “fate” entailed. “Another thing I have always liked about both
Gatsby
and
Bovary,
” he wrote, “is that there are no villains in either one. The force of evil is felt in these novels but is never personified—neither novel is willing to let us off that easily.” Yates's student Tim Parrish remembered discussing
The Easter Parade
with its author, who wistfully referred to Emily's fateful decision not to connect with her sister. When Parrish asked him what might have happened if she
had
made the connection, Yates replied, “I never thought of that”—meaning that the contingency wasn't available given who Emily was. Yates's determinism, like Flaubert's, was a matter of knowing his characters well enough to know their fates, and making the reader see this, too. Just as one never expects Emma to repent of her infidelity and embrace provincial life, one also figures the Wheelers won't move to Europe and live happily ever after. Their weaknesses, well defined at the outset, mark them for a bad end.

Flaubert was the catalyst for what became
Revolutionary Road,
but meanwhile other developments conspired to spur Yates on to the task. Hiram Haydn at Random House—“that absolutely supreme fiction editor,” as Monica McCall described him—was impressed by Yates's work, and in April 1955 the two met over lunch to discuss the possibility of a book contract. “Like all publishers,” McCall advised Yates prior to the meeting, “I must warn you that [Haydn] is allergic to publishing a book of short stories as an author's first work.” This posed a problem, since Yates's “novel” at the time was little more than a notion, though he seems to have persuaded Haydn that something substantial would soon be ready. At any rate he and McCall gave Random House right of first refusal—a rather pointed snub of Sam Lawrence, whose eagerness to publish Yates's novel had begun to look a bit like complacency in light of his multiple rejections of the stories. But then, McCall would always be wary of Lawrence, and anyway Random House was a more prestigious publisher.

By late summer Yates was finally under way on a book that gave every appearance of jelling, such that in late October McCall was “daily watching the mails hoping for the beginnings.” Three months later McCall was still waiting: “I hope your silence does not mean that you have been having trouble.” It was generally safe to assume Yates was having trouble of one sort or another, but this time his silence was mostly a matter of keeping his head down and moving forward at his own glacial speed—until, almost a year after that lunch with Haydn, Yates was ready to submit the first 134-page section of a novel titled
The Getaway
. To this he appended a 7-page synopsis of the second half.

Haydn was persuaded of Yates's “real ability and the book's real worth,” though more than a little taken aback by the author's express intention to end his novel with a fatal, self-inflicted abortion; stated in the pat terms of a synopsis, it seemed a bit much. “I express to you my doubts about his plan for the rest,” Haydn wrote McCall, “and even though he and I have talked it over and he is certainly willing to tone down his tragic plan … there still remains much doubt on our part.” Their “doubt” was hardly misplaced as to the ending, which Yates had no intention of changing. In fact, as he later pointed out, the main theme of the book was abortion in various forms, and the story itself had evolved around April's literal, climactic act: “I thought of the girl dying in that way, and then the whole problem was to construct a book that would justify that ending.” Yates's reassurance to Haydn that he would “tone down his tragic plan” was deliberately ambiguous; what he actually hoped was that the completed novel would justify the tragedy in such a way as to make it seem inevitable—and cathartic—an effect that could hardly be conveyed by a simple summary, or indeed by the story and characters as they stood at the time.

Sam Lawrence had a similar response: “
Very
much impressed with the manuscript,” he wrote McCall in June, “but the synopsis itself seemed to be a disappointment.” Nevertheless he was willing to offer an option payment of three hundred dollars “as a vote of our confidence in his ability and as a way of urging him to go forward with the completion of his novel.” McCall austerely insisted on a proper advance of fifteen hundred dollars, and the rather doubtful Lawrence agreed to recommend a contract to his associates at Atlantic–Little, Brown, who rejected the manuscript as “one of the many imitators of
The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit
.” Lawrence, on sober consideration, seemed to accept this verdict as perfectly valid, and his subsequent letter to McCall reflected little of his initial enthusiasm: Yates's “narrative competence” was not in doubt, he wrote, but the theme was “somewhat hackneyed” and the minor characters were “not sufficiently developed”—in sum, the author had yet to find “the most suitable subject and material for his talents,” though Lawrence asked to be kept apprised of any further progress.

McCall reassured Yates that this was “no great blow,” that he should simply finish the book as he saw fit, and in fact Yates was undaunted to a surprising degree. A few months later he reported to McCall that he was making good progress, and instructed her to destroy the previous version. Being compared with Sloan Wilson, it turned out, had proved the sort of strong medicine that cures the patient in the course of almost killing him. As Yates later explained:

Most of my first drafts read like soap opera. I have to go over and over a scene before I get deep enough into it to bring it off. I think I'd be a slick, superficial writer if I didn't revise all the time. The first draft of
Revolutionary Road
was very thin, very sentimental.… I made the Wheelers sort of nice young folks with whom any careless reader could identify. Everything they said was exactly what they meant, and they talked very earnestly together even when they were quarreling, like people in a Sloan Wilson novel. It took me a long time to figure out what a mistake that was—that the best way to handle it was to have them nearly always miss each other's points, to have them talk around and through and
at
each other. There's a great deal of dialogue between them in the finished book … but there's almost no communication.

In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters “in the very act of giving themselves away.” Now more than ever Yates was eager to lose himself in the almost archaeological labor of revision, while Sam Lawrence—whose “vote of confidence” had come full circle—was delighted to learn that such a promising writer remained undiscouraged.

*   *   *

In the summer of 1956 the Yateses moved to the rural town of Mahopac in Putnam County, New York, where they lived on a private estate called Babaril.
*
The pink stucco cottage they rented was arguably a step or two down from their sturdy little ranch house in Redding, but the new home possessed a sort of forlorn charm. The ground floor consisted of a low-ceilinged living room, dining room, and kitchen (Yates could hardly stand up straight), with two small bedrooms upstairs, the larger of which opened onto a narrow balcony with a spiral staircase leading to the flagstones below. The balcony was a picturesque feature (the French doors beneath it were another), though it was liable to collapse if anyone actually stood on it. It gave the impression of being held up by vines, as did the rest of the place, which resembled a kind of dilapidated Hollywood dollhouse; the Lilliputian perspective was enhanced by an adjacent hut where drunken guests could, in a pinch, spend the night. The hut had a tiny fireplace that couldn't be used without igniting the willow tree just above its tiny chimney.

Their landlady was an aging actress named Jill Miller, who with her vanished husband had founded the Putnam County Playhouse, a once-prestigious summer stock theater in the last stages of desuetude. Near the main house was a largely abandoned dormitory for actors, an annex of which was occupied by a local family named Jones. Around the hundred-acre estate were overgrown gardens and crumbling cottages and a weedy old tennis court, but the feature that most appealed to Yates—the clincher, in fact—was a five-by-eight wellhouse at the end of a long winding path. With his landlady's blessing, Yates installed a table, chair, typewriter, and kerosene stove, and wrote most of
Revolutionary Road
there.

In keeping with their old dynamic, Yates relished his quirky new venue almost as much as Sheila despised it. “It was the antithesis of Redding,” she said, “so Dick thought it was great. But everything had gone to seed. It was a sad place owned by a sad lady.” Naturally Sheila tried to make the best of things, and perhaps it was fortunate that she could rarely be idle, as her hands were full keeping their cottage in some sort of habitable order. In the summer the cellar flooded regularly, and the roof seemed to leak even when the sun was out. Sheila attended to the caulking and draining and other proprietary chores, while Yates tended to lie low in the wellhouse.

Winters were ghastly cold and the cottage was poorly heated, caulking or no, but at least the bizarre, shifting crowd of summer colonists thinned. The writer Edward Hoagland, who befriended the Yateses around this time, described Babaril as “a place for people at loose ends”—offhand he recalled such tenants as a reclusive Hallmark artist and a man in the middle of a bitter divorce who worked out his anger by firing a pistol. “You never knew
who
you were going to run into,” Sheila complained, though she noted that some tenants were more permanent than others. There were the Joneses, of course, whose five children became playmates of Yates's daughters; the father George, a dull but amiable man with a white-collar job in the city, was recruited along with Sheila to perform in the Putnam Playhouse production of
A Midsummer Night's Dream
. By then Sheila had “lost interest in that sort of thing,” but gamely went through the motions as Titania, while George Jones proved a remarkably able clown. A far more illustrious cast member was Will Geer, then a well-known character actor who later became famous as Grandpa Walton. For most of the fifties Geer was blacklisted, and worked as a gardener on the estate. He strolled about in cowboy boots and an undershirt and mostly kept to himself, though occasionally Sharon and the Jones children would stop by his hut at dusk and listen to ghost stories: “Who's got my arm…?” Geer would intone.
“You do!”
—and the children would flee screaming to their cottages. Yates, who couldn't abide homosexuals, took a dim view of the folksy actor.
*

Much of this was made bearable for Sheila by the fact that she was pregnant again. It gave her something to look forward to, creaky marriage withal. Sharon had long wanted a sibling, and now that her only immediate playmates were the rowdy Jones children, the matter could no longer wait. And Yates was happy to oblige; Mahopac was a hick town—little more than a laundromat, bank, and ice-cream parlor—and he too wanted Mussy to have company other than the Joneses or whatever urchins she met at school. Besides, he was hoping to add a boy to the family (for the sake of novelty and moral support, perhaps), but it wasn't to be. Monica Jane was born on April 10, 1957, and when the nurse told Yates he had another daughter, he was surprised to find that he “felt like a million dollars” (as he later wrote a friend): “You can pick girls up and hug and kiss them anytime you feel like it, until they get too heavy to lift—that's one advantage; another is that they never expect you to teach them how to throw.”

Among the first to congratulate him was Sam Lawrence; that done, Lawrence briskly reaffirmed his great confidence in Yates's novel-in-progress: “[Y]our best [work has] always indicated the gifts of a natural writer. There are so many writers today who don't have that unmistakable quality.” Yates needed the encouragement. When he wasn't gouging away at his novel between long despondent fortnights lost to PR work, he was trying to stay in the public eye as a fiction writer by reworking a few of his more promising stories. The revised “B.A.R. Man” was now being tried on such magazines as
Swank, Bachelor, Gentry,
and
Nugget,
none of whose editors chose to introduce Yates to their special readership.
Esquire
sniffed that they'd “gotten away a bit from woman-hating stories like the BAR Man one,” and also rejected (again) “A Really Good Jazz Piano” and “Evening on the Côte d'Azur.” Meanwhile Sam Lawrence's latest sop was vitiated somewhat when he returned the revised “Out with the Old” with yet another perfunctory note along the lines of
extremely well-written, but
. A year later the same story was accepted by the
Western Review,
which on further consideration rejected it, as did the
Dial
(“encouragingly”).