A Tragic Honesty (39 page)

Cocksmanship was one thing, but Yates wanted a proper female companion—he called himself an “incurable keeps-player”—and his “Sweet Briar Sweetie” was proving elusive on the subject of further visits. This became a less pressing concern after a party late that spring at Stephen Benedict's apartment in the Village, where Yates met Natalie Bowen. The encounter was curious but not atypical of the affair that followed. Charles Van Doren, recently implicated in the quiz-show scandals, was sitting off by himself when the drunken Yates bellowed over the crowd,
“How dare that crook show his face in public?”
Van Doren affected not to hear, and a thin pretty woman rushed up to Yates and indignantly shushed him. Yates looked her over: She was wearing a sleeveless blue top with two silver bracelets wrapped around her biceps. “How'd you get those two bracelets up there?” he asked finally. “Elbow grease!” she replied, and Yates laughed. “He wouldn't leave my side the rest of the night,” she recalled.

Bowen was a thirty-one-year-old editor at Putnam's with a masters in musicology from Brown—a worldly woman who was charmed but undaunted by a loud, drunken author who seemed “delighted by his own literary fame.” She went back to his apartment that first night, and while they undressed Yates paused to examine her bra, plumply padded in the cups: “
That
can take care of itself,” he said. Yates was another matter: Like his characters Andrew Crawford, Michael Davenport, and Bill Grove, he proved to be almost totally impotent. “It was ridiculous as far as the sex went,” Bowen remembered. “It always was. He was never sober enough to get it up in any particularly gratifying way. But that wasn't the point of our relationship; he needed some female to be close to, to hold him.” Yates was a touchingly conventional lover: After a certain amount of old-fashioned foreplay, he'd take a sheepish stab at missionary intercourse, fail, and finally roll over and say “Don't go away” until he fell asleep. The plea was so nakedly insistent that it became embarrassing, and one night Bowen said, gently enough, “Dick, that's
unmanly
.” Yates was mortified.
*

Bowen was tough, witty, and independent, a refugee from a wealthy dysfunctional family in Fall River, Massachusetts, and for a while Yates seemed to enjoy her feistiness. She called him “a hulking ego in a tweed jacket” and was impatient with his bemused acceptance of certain sordid aspects of his life. “What the hell am I doing here?” he'd say, looking around his apartment as if for the first time. “How did this
happen
?” At one point Bowen took down his Venetian blinds, caked with grime, and made the naked Yates wash them “in that disgusting stand-up shower stall he never cleaned.” Grace Schulman pointed out that Bowen was very “elegant and correct,” but also “the kind of person who would tell you that your fly is open.” When Schulman said as much to Yates, he replied, “Don't you
want
to know if your fly is open?”

Yates's own receptiveness to this sort of remark depended on whether he was drunk or sober. “Dick was courteous and polite,” said Bowen. “He always wanted to do the expected thing—always.
If
he was sober.” Generally that meant he did the expected thing until noon or so. On weekends the two would sleep late and then go out for Bloody Marys. Yates would insist that the 110-pound Bowen match him drink for drink (it was “one of his gentleman's rules”), and for the most part she was happy to oblige: She hated her job at Putnam's, where she edited “control vocabulary books” for children, and was such a heavy drinker that she ended up in AA several years later. Meanwhile the outings with Yates were compelling incentives for going on the wagon. Yates's ambivalence toward Bowen was never far from the surface: On the one hand he seemed pleased that she had “breeding” and an Ivy League degree, but after two or three drinks he'd begin to sense she was putting him down somehow, making light of his own lack of education or déclassé background. Then suddenly he'd be in the throes of another “awful paranoid screaming fit” until finally Bowen would get up and leave. Later he'd show up at her door with a hangdog look, and the whole business would start over. “I was really fond of him,” she said, “but I just couldn't handle it.”

Yates seemed to cultivate a lack of sophistication, but also (at least in the presence of someone like Bowen) to be rather abashed about it. He always ordered the same thing for breakfast and dinner—scrambled eggs, the “small steak” at the Blue Mill—and it was ill advised to suggest, however lightheartedly, that he try something a bit more exotic for a change. Also he always wore the same daily Brooks Brothers uniform: tweed jacket, blue button-down shirt, gray flannel or khaki trousers, desert boots, a rumpled trenchcoat in cold weather, and for special occasions the tailored suit he'd bought in London. He called all the women in his life “baby,” tenderly, but sometimes too in a menacing tone (“Look, baby…”). He could knowledgeably discuss a number of writers, but the only ones that really mattered remained the same—Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Keats—and the second was a constant, wistful guidepost for life as well as art. “Fitzgerald inhabited this gilded universe from which Dick felt forever excluded,” Bowen observed. “Princeton, football games, Stutz Bearcats—Dick coveted it all intensely. He
hated
not going to college, and his way of dressing was a way of looking Ivy League. He always felt on the outside looking in—
so
ashamed living with his mother on the fringes of that estate [in Scarborough]. I felt sorry for him. I'd say, ‘What
difference
does it make, Dick? You have all this talent!' But it didn't matter.”

Perhaps Yates thought, at some level, that it was easy for
her
to say: She'd grown up in a beautiful old house as a Fall River Bowen; she had a masters from Brown. And yet, for all that, she was hardly the sort you took home to meet your mother, even if your mother happened to be Dookie. Barbara Beury was a different matter. At twenty she was still a “nice girl” who'd never dream of sleeping with a man she just met, or sleeping with a man who wasn't her husband, period; moreover she was the great-granddaughter of Col. Joseph Beury, a Charleston coal baron, and Bowen or no Bowen, Beury remained the woman Yates wanted to marry. Dookie liked her, too. As Yates wrote Beury in May, “Forgot to tell you that my mother spent approximately forty-nine hours telling me how Lovely and Nice and Intelligent you are—‘just the sort of girl you can't help liking right away' etc. etc. etc. and hopes to see you again. I was terribly pleased, like any other gangling slob who hopes his Mom will like his Girl.”

Beury had planned—or rather Yates had planned on her behalf—to move to New York after graduation and perhaps work at
Glamour,
where Grace Schulman was trying to arrange a job for her. But Buery was having second thoughts. “I guess I was a bit of a bastard on the phone yesterday,” Yates had written her in February, and two months later he was “sorry … about all the drunken, shouting, self-pitying phone calls,” and by May she was hanging up on him (“poutily,” Yates thought). But the
succès d'estime
of
Revolutionary Road
kept her interest kindled, and around this time she invited Yates back to Sweet Briar in order to address her creative-writing class. He was a hit—“charming, witty, impressive”—and Beury was reminded of how glamorous it might be to have a handsome, somewhat famous writer for a boyfriend and maybe even a husband. Afterward they went to her professor's house for a drink, and all went well until the latter ventured to suggest that the one thing that “hadn't quite come off” in
Revolutionary Road
was Yates's use of a “Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness.” Yates hated Faulkner. “Dick got furious—cursing, screaming, spilt drink, etcetera,” Beury recalled.
“What the hell do you know?”
he shouted.
“You're just some little college writing teacher!”
The man's wife was about to call the police, when Beury at last managed to lead her date away. A few days later Beury's professor took her aside: “Look, it's none of my business,” he said, “but if I were you I'd stay away from that man. He's unstable.”

Yates wanted to be treated as a proper suitor, and that meant meeting Beury's parents. Since it seemed unlikely that her coal-executive father would make invidious comparisons to Faulkner, Beury was willing to look into it, but the man wasn't interested. Yates was too old, he said, and a writer to boot, the last an anathema that required no inkling of his other vagaries; besides, a nice local boy named George, a friend of the family no less, had given Beury an engagement ring over Thanksgiving. But the girl balked: George was
dull,
and whatever else Yates was, he was rarely that. Clinging to a hope that her life would prove a romantic affair, Beury tried to arrange a meeting between Yates and a great-aunt in Jamestown, New York, hoping that the matriarch might pave the way. At first the woman agreed to see him, but called it off after she'd spoken to Beury's father.

Sometimes fathers really do know best. Early that summer Beury was coaxed back to New York, where Yates acted like such a tiresome drunk that even the Schulmans wanted to get rid of him. He kept maundering about how—if Beury
really
cared for him—she'd take that job at
Glamour
so they could be married; then he'd turn bitter and accuse her of “chickening out.” The letter he wrote afterward reflected an awareness that he'd probably blown it for good this time, though he tried to be graceful about it: “Even if you end up marrying George and organizing the bridge club (with washable plastic cards) you'll never be an ‘a' to me.” An “a” as opposed to a “the,” he meant, a hausfrau as opposed to a personage—this a rather shrewd washable card for Yates to play, the better to remind Beury of why she'd liked him in the first place. “My old silver-haired mother keeps asking after you,” he added forlornly.

*   *   *

That summer Yates visited Cape Cod with Natalie Bowen and the Schulmans. Bob Riche had taken a cottage in Provincetown, and Yates agreed to deliver an old Volkswagen that a friend was loaning Riche for the summer. It was one of the last times the two friends would meet. When Yates had finished
Revolutionary Road
—thereby reducing Frank Wheeler to his bare essence, a “lifeless man” whose favorite subject is “my analyst this; my analyst that”—his contempt for Riche seemed to crystallize. He inscribed his friend's copy of the novel with a curt “For old times' sake,” and told the Schulmans that Riche, like the character he'd partly inspired, was a professional analysand who only pretended to be a writer, but would never be more than a PR hack.

It wasn't a very jolly trip. They started late and got lost, and when the dour Yates snapped a cigarette out the window they were pulled over by the police. That was perhaps the high point: Yates overheard a policeman refer to them as a “band of youths,” and took to repeating the phrase whenever he needed a laugh. The phrase was much repeated. Soon it became clear that they wouldn't get to Provincetown by nightfall, and Bowen suggested they stop at her parents' house in Fall River. It was an impressive place—to Yates and the Schulmans it represented the “solidity and stability” the three had never quite known in their own lives—but it soon became clear that in this case a comely edifice was misleading. Bowen's father was a surly alcoholic, her mother “a sweet and ineffectual Billie Burke person” (as Bowen put it), and both parents were openly resentful toward their daughter for neglecting them. Grudgingly the older couple made up rooms for their unexpected guests. “Well, nobody in this family seems to be speaking to each other,” Yates said, “but at least we can go to our separate bedrooms and stay there.” Each bedroom had its own bathroom.

The visit with Riche lacked even that consolation. “This looks like a slave shack compared to the place we stayed last night,” Grace Schulman observed on arrival. Her opinion of Riche was largely informed by Yates's critique, and the two treated their host as though he were the subject of a semiprivate and only mildly amusing joke. Riche tried to be affable but got little encouragement, though Bowen seemed to know what was going on and sympathized. Riche himself was more bewildered than anything: He had a general idea why Yates looked down on him (“I was this asshole writer who wasn't going anywhere”), but never quite understood what seemed to him such a sudden, categorical rejection.
*

It was probably a relief for Yates to get back to New York, where he now knew any number of famous writers. As ever, the more he admired a person's work, the more he was apt to find that person congenial as a human being. He'd recently read
The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne
on the recommendation of Sam Lawrence, the book's American publisher, and eagerly approached its author at a subsequent party: “This confident, good-looking young man came up to me and told me how much he had liked my first novel,” Brian Moore remembered. “I was pleased and gratified. I thanked him. He then said: ‘Do you ever worry about having written a second novel which mightn't be as good as the first?'” For a moment Moore thought he was being mocked, but Yates's earnest, worried face convinced him otherwise.

The Irish-Canadian Moore had a lot in common with Yates: Both were realistic writers whose characters tended to be lonely, self-deluding failures, and Moore, too, was a witty, voluble man who often became dour and withdrawn. For a while Yates was something of a tipsy fixture at Moore's apartment in the East Seventies, along with the Australian writer Franklin Russell (with whom Moore would eventually exchange wives), who regarded Yates as a “soulmate drinker”: “Dick had a steely dedication to destroying himself,” said Russell admiringly. “He realized that if you're gonna drink, it's gotta be
serious
.” In fact Yates was rather more serious than either man in that respect, and often needed assistance getting home at night. Once Moore asked a young woman to see him off, and Yates became galvanized with indignation: “Outrageous!” he shouted. “A
girl
take me home? I'll take
her
home!” “Are you sure you're competent?” Moore inquired. “Of course I'm ‘competent,'” snapped Yates, spinning around and walking full speed into a wall. Another night the men staggered back from a party, and Yates insisted on trudging through the gutter; when he came to cars he'd climb ponderously over the back, jump onto the hood, and proceed as before. “After watching this episode,” Moore remarked, “I realize I'm just a country boy.”