A Tragic Honesty (30 page)

Of course it's one thing to bait some faceless Babbitt in Winnetka, another to mock more or less inoffensive people—chiefly female—about matters over which they have no control. One of the more curious paradoxes of Yates's nature was his almost archaic courtliness toward women on the one hand, and his lifelong tendency to emphasize their physical defects and/or dubious upbringing on the other. “Margaret Truman” was how he referred to a tall, skinny woman whom a friend briefly dated, while another became “the druggist's daughter” because of her humble background in the Bronx. And once, when Yates was introduced to a young woman who exposed her upper gums when she smiled, he turned around and mimicked her with a precise ugly grimace. “In those days,” said Bob Riche, “he reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Côte d'Azur: an awful pain in the ass, but fun to be around.”

*   *   *

More so than most, Yates was at his best among people he admired—generally those who combined talent with integrity, particularly other writers—and one explanation for his abrasiveness in the mid-fifties was that he knew very few people who fitted that description. Nor was he quite the sickly, uncertain, and mostly sober young man who'd gone to Europe to teach himself how to write; since then Yates had grown more sure of his own essential talent, and this (plus alcohol) made him less patient with people he regarded as pretentious and self-deluding—who reminded him of Dookie, in short. But in 1958 Yates had the good fortune of meeting a few peers, and all the better that this should come about as the result of breakthroughs in his career.

Esquire
had decided to buy “The B.A.R. Man” after all, whereupon fiction editor Rust Hills and his assistant took Yates out to lunch. As he later described the occasion, Yates listened with bored annoyance while the two editors “kept cracking each other up at the table with inside jokes and references that [Yates] couldn't follow.” At one point, though, they mentioned R. V. Cassill, a name Yates recognized (barely, since he thought it was pronounced “
C
as
sill
”) as the author of such excellent stories as “The Prize” and “The Biggest Band.” When Yates expressed his admiration, Hills told him that
Cass
ill and his wife were living in New York and about to give a party, to which an extra invitation could easily be obtained. Yates was delighted, and his subsequent meeting with Verlin Cassill at the man's “ramshackle” Village apartment was (almost) an unqualified success:

He was the first real writer I had ever met [Yates wrote], though I'd known plenty of the other kind, and he made an excellent first impression: an intense, black-haired man of thirty-eight or so, tired-looking and very courteous, with a voice so deep you had to lean a little forward in the party noise for fear of missing something. And even before that party was over, though his courtesy never flagged, I had found out something instructive about him. When Verlin says “Ah” in a certain way it means you have just said something dumb. It means he has decided to let you get away with it for now, but that if you don't start watching your mouth, in about a minute he may tear you apart—verbally, of course.

A long time would pass before Yates experienced the full effect of failing to heed that monitory “Ah,” and in the meantime he benefited greatly from Cassill's many kindnesses. From the beginning, though, there were awkward moments, as when Cassill and his wife spent a weekend in Mahopac shortly after that first encounter: “There was a lot of drinking,” Yates wrote, “and Verlin held forth at some length on ‘marriage' as an abstract idea, which didn't go over very well with my wife and me because our own marriage was about to collapse, though we knew he couldn't possibly have known that.” The visit improved when Cassill presented Sharon and Monica with toy airplanes he'd made out of balsa wood and rice paper, which flew for impressive distances with the help of a windup propeller. It seemed to Yates, then as later, that Cassill constructed such planes with the same craft and care he brought to his (and others') fiction: “He has always understood fine structure and firm surface, the coiling and release of power, and the necessary illusion of weightlessness.… Verlin understands wreckage, too.”

The privilege of meeting his first “real writer” coincided with another encouraging development: Yates and three others were picked out of 250 candidates to be featured in Scribner's forthcoming
Short Story 1,
the first volume in a series meant to showcase promising new writers. Four of Yates's stories were selected for the collection: “Jody Rolled the Bones,” “The Best of Everything,” “Fun with a Stranger,” and (at last) “A Really Good Jazz Piano.” Moreover, Scribner's contract included an option on his next book—“a happy and peaceful solution to the long drawn-out Sam Lawrence flirtation,” as Monica McCall put it, though Lawrence was not so easily put off. Like a fickle lover whose flame returns with jealousy, he tried to woo Yates back with honeyed words (“I have absolute faith in you as an author”), as well as a proposed two-book contract that would involve the novel-in-progress and a collection of short stories. For the moment, however, all he was really offering was an option of five hundred dollars, and McCall squelched him with the sort of acerbic curtness she reserved for Lawrence alone: “I fully appreciate your longtime interest in Dick Yates, but he does feel that he wants to make no commitments on the novel until the manuscript is finished to his satisfaction.”

Short Story 1
was published in September 1958, and included stories by Yates, Gina Berriault, B. L. Barrett, and Seymour Epstein. Under the headline “Gifted Quartet,” the
New York Times
commended Yates for his “skill and insight” as well as the “admirable variety” of his stories, but Epstein's work was more favorably noted, and the reviewer generally deplored an “emphasis on characterization at the expense of plot” and “the preponderance of unlikable character types.” Granville Hicks in the
Saturday Review
called the four writers “talented and serious” but thought none was “quite first-rate,” and the
New York Herald Tribune
was similarly equivocal: “Despite several small drawbacks, it is only fair to say that the trial is off to a distinguished start.” The
San Francisco Chronicle,
however, picked Yates out of the lineup for a particularly nasty slur: “Yates presents the outward appearances of a bright new talent, but a close inspection of his four stories reveals that his stylistic graces are imitative, in the bad sense, of Scott Fitzgerald and other writers.”

Yates's own favorite of the four was Gina Berriault, in whose exquisitely gloomy work he recognized a soul mate; he wrote her a fan letter that launched a lifelong mutual admiration. “I can't remember when I've enjoyed a letter as much as I did yours,” she replied, adding that she had to accept his compliments because she had such respect for
his
work: “[Y]ou're a subtle, painstaking, warmhearted writer and so it follows that I believe what you say.” Berriault was the same kind of writer, and in Yatesian terms an almost ideal human being: She approached her work with such humility that she was often incapable of doing it, yet cared about little else; unapologetically private, she professed not to know any critics, belong to any societies, or have any unusual anecdotes about herself. Berriault and Yates, a month apart in age, would not actually meet face to face for another eleven years, and rarely thereafter, but kept in touch and forever championed each other as writers and human beings. “Richard Yates is my guardian angel,” she wrote, “one of the few or many who each of us has close by, even though they're continents away and centuries away.… They look after our conscience as we write just as they looked after their own.” Yates looked after Berriault in more practical ways as well, helping her to get hired at the Iowa Workshop even though, like him, she had no college degree. He also named his third daughter after her, which gives one a sense of what Berriault ultimately meant to Yates, as well as what human qualities mattered in general.

He also became friends with Seymour Epstein, whom he met one day at the old Scribner's Building on Fifth Avenue. For the next few years they were frequent companions, though it was hardly a matter of deep calling to deep. “Dick was like a Janus head,” said Epstein. “Two different people.” One of these people, he concedes, was “charming and honorable” (“if somebody needed help in the world of writing, Dick would immediately put himself forward”), while the other was an “emotional parasite” who drank too much and went around “bleed[ing] on people.” As for Yates's view of Epstein, one needn't look much further than
Disturbing the Peace,
in which the latter appears (through a jaundiced lens) as Paul Borg, a pharisaic bore.

*   *   *

As Yates entered his fourth year of obsessively precise labor—as the form of his novel gradually prevailed over chaos—his life deteriorated. Outside the wellhouse he was a sullen, coughing drunk, and Sheila steered clear as much as possible. About the only times he'd pull himself together were his biweekly trips to the Remington Rand offices, from which he generally returned sober. But one night he called home from Grand Central in a state of curious disorientation. “I can't get home,” he said in a panic. “I don't know how to get home.” Sheila wasn't sure what to make of this: He didn't sound drunk, though he'd been so “saturated with booze” the day before that it seemed plausible he was still affected by it; but that would hardly explain his frantic inability to negotiate a commute he'd made hundreds of times. Sheila finally got him to calm down and listen to careful instructions, and promised to meet him at the train. He was still “not right in the head” when he arrived, and clearly he hadn't been drinking.

By the beginning of 1959 Yates was a mental and physical wreck. In January he was hospitalized with an inguinal hernia—a congenital defect, made all the more painful by constant coughing fits. As for his being “not right in the head,” it was some measure of how out of touch he'd become that he seemed amazed to learn that his marriage was not only troubled but moribund. Things came to a head when he was offered (through Cassill's good offices) a part-time teaching position at the Iowa Workshop. As he'd never ceased to believe that Remington Rand was at the bottom of his woes, Yates figured this was at least one solution, however temporary, though in fact he didn't much like the idea of leaving New York—and neither, to put it mildly, did Sheila.

When she couldn't find an elegant way to explain why she objected to moving out to the sticks with an unstable alcoholic, Yates accused her of not loving him anymore. Sheila wasn't inclined to deny it, and Yates decided she was insane. Very much in the manner of Frank Wheeler lecturing April on the definition of insanity, he took the position that her childhood had warped her as surely as Charlie—that she was, in effect, incapable of love. Sheila admitted she'd never been entirely sure what “love” was, but also pointed out that it didn't really matter in the present case. She was fed up, period. Mostly she was tired of all the roaring, repetitive arguments, eleven years' worth, and when Yates persisted she finally fell silent and refused to respond. “I wasn't as glib as he was,” she said. “He could talk rings around me and everyone else, drunk or sober.” In the end he wore her down sufficiently to persuade her that, as a last resort, they should see a marriage counselor.
*

These sessions didn't work out the way Yates seemed to expect. Before long the counselor suggested that his drinking, not Sheila's emotionally deprived childhood, was the main problem. Yates in turn accused the woman of taking his wife's side against him, and finally became so belligerent that the counselor refused to see him anymore; she was only a psychiatric social worker, she said, and Yates's “serious disorders” were beyond her scope. Sheila, however, was welcome to continue and did, though the woman's advice was simple enough: Unless her husband agreed to stop drinking and get help, the marriage had to end. As for Yates, he was only too happy to discuss the matter further at home: that is, to explain that his drinking was
not
a relevant issue. “By then,” said Sheila, “I just wanted a good night's sleep.”

They decided to separate, neither of them in any particular rush to go through the “needless expense” of divorce unless one or the other found somebody else to marry. As for Yates's immediate plans, he couldn't bear the thought of being in a strange place without his children; later that summer, then, he wired Paul Engle at the Iowa Workshop that “other commitments” had come up, though he hoped a “similar opportunity may exist at some future date.” Verlin Cassill, who was moving to Iowa in the fall, had arranged for Yates to take over his writing class at the New School for Social Research. In August, Yates moved back to the city.

CHAPTER SEVEN

A Glutton for Punishment: 1959-1961

For a week or so Yates floated among his few friends in the city, sober only for such intervals required to skim the classifieds and look at the odd apartment. For a couple of nights he stayed with Bob Riche on Jones Street, where he ended up vomiting on the rug. In later years the unfading stain never failed to remind Riche of Yates, who for his part would occasionally refer to “the time [he] ruined Bob's rug” in a doleful voice, as though it had been a very dark time indeed.

The basement apartment Yates rented near Sheridan Square on the corner of Seventh Avenue South and Bedford Street was a prototype for the various places he'd inhabit as a bachelor in the years ahead. It was cramped, dark, bare, roach-infested, nicotine-stained, and deeply depressing to his friends and children. Yates came to accept their perception of his new apartment as accurate (though he'd go on living there, on and off, for five years), but when he first discovered the place he could hardly believe his luck: It was dirt cheap and conveniently located near the New School and his old haunts. There was even a small street-level window where he could relieve his claustrophobia by watching the feet of fellow Villagers pass to and fro. All he had to do was move in a few wan belongings—bed, sling chairs, bookcase (small), desk, typewriter, gooseneck lamp, map of London—and get back to writing his novel. Visitors were struck by certain awful details to which Yates himself seemed oblivious: the bloodstains on his deskchair cushion (from piles), the calm roaches in plain sight, nothing but bourbon and instant coffee in the tiny kitchen. Peter Najarian, one of Yates's New School students, was haunted by the memory of 27 Seventh Avenue South; later, when he learned of Yates's death, he thought of “thirty-three years ago when Richard lived in that basement studio”—as he wrote in
The Great American Loneliness
: “‘Love Genius,' Blake said, ‘it is the face of God.' But why the cigarettes and bourbon … why the misery for the sake of a line, what kind of love was it that shoved a man into a basement and made him want to escape through art?”