A Tragic Honesty (40 page)

Yates liked few things better than being admired by writers he admired, but in one case he suspected ulterior motives. He thought it ominous when he got a person-to-person call from “Beverly” (“Beverly
who
?” “Beverly Hills calling, sir”) and it turned out to be Tennessee Williams, who wondered if his favorite new writer would like to meet for dinner in New York. Yates felt certain that his “effeminate” jacket photo had something to do with this, but how could he say no to Tennessee Williams? They met at the Forty-seventh Street YMCA, where Williams liked to swim; Yates stood in the lobby when suddenly the playwright appeared, dressed for dinner and still wearing a bathing cap. “How did it go?” Natalie Bowen asked when Yates returned late that night. “We talked books and drank,” he reported. “I wasn't his cup of tea.” Still, Yates remained convinced that a fair percentage of the reading public regarded him as “queer,” and later insisted that Grace Schulman make him look “ballsy” when she photographed him for the jacket of
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
.

By the summer of 1961, however, such a book had yet to materialize. Sam Lawrence was eager to consolidate Yates's reputation with a story collection, but Yates made him wait while he slowly progressed with his eleventh study of loneliness, “Builders.” It was his first sustained fiction in almost a year, and his first short story since the abortive “End of the Great Depression.” Work on his war novel had come to a dead end, and at one point he became so desperate that he blamed it on his table: “It's too high,” he told Grace Schulman. “I need to get
over
my writing.…” So he sawed the legs down, to no avail. He wondered if perhaps it was the material itself that was the problem: He'd never been wholly satisfied with previous attempts at explicit autobiography, which seemed to go against the grain of his favorite Flaubertian principal—“The writer's relation to his work must be like that of God to the Universe: omnipresent and invisible”; and then, too, there was the uneasy sense of exposure inherent in writing (much less publishing) confessional fiction, all the more so while his mother was still alive. “Builders,” then, began as an “experimental warm-up” to see if he could make “decent fiction” out of a “direct autobiographical blow-out,” and he was tentatively pleased with the result. Indeed, he was sure enough of its basic soundness to be undaunted when Rust Hills rejected an early draft as a “formula story” (“[about] a ‘colorful' character encountered by a writer”); Yates went back to work, and told Lawrence that his new book would have to wait a bit longer until he brought “Builders” to its final, perfected form.

Money, as usual, was a problem. Yates halfheartedly cast about for work while hoping that Hollywood's interest in his novel would soon amount to more than occasional teasing. The director John Frankenheimer, who would soon begin work on
The Manchurian Candidate
and was considered the industry's foremost wunderkind, had been trying to get financing for
Revolutionary Road
without success. Yates thought any number of big-name actors would be thrilled to play Frank Wheeler—if they could only be persuaded to read the book—in which case the financing would follow. He particularly wanted Jack Lemmon for the part, and one day he spotted the man in a coffee shop. But the moment passed: Yates didn't have a copy of his novel handy, and was loath to seem just another hustling fan. “But I
knew
he'd buy it!” he told the Schulmans. “I came so close!” By midsummer he was so broke he accepted a book-reviewing assignment from the
Saturday Review
—Jerome Weidman's
My Father Sits in the Dark and Other Selected Stories
. “Jerome Weidman writes three kinds of short stories,” Yates wrote: “little sharp ones that are sometimes good, nostalgic ones that are often corny, and long flabby ones that are nearly always very bad. The trouble with
My Father Sits in the Dark
is that the good ones are badly outnumbered.”

Yates's poverty was enough to make him long for the fall, when at least he'd have some income from teaching—but such anticipation was rueful at best. Reading students' work was a hateful distraction, and once his double duty at Columbia began he'd have more of it than ever. The previous spring he'd taught a second, nonfiction class at the New School, for which he'd written a course description that read like the jeremiad of a man bracing himself for the worst: “No culture has placed greater stress on the value of ‘communication' than ours, and none has produced greater quantities of inept and muddled writing.” Yates therefore solicited the “literate non-professional” interested in everything from “the personal essay to the business report,” and promised to emphasize “lucid phrasing” and “[how to avoid] dullness.” As it happened, mere dullness would have been a blessing. As he'd written Beury in late April:

Had a dreary class tonight after which an enormous fifty-year-old matron who can neither spell, punctuate nor write coherent English cornered me to demand, frankly, whether I thought she Had Talent. Tried to evade the question for twenty minutes and ended up saying sure. Depressing experience.… [I've] pretty well decided that teaching
does
sap the old creative energy after all. Why do so many sad clowns want to be writers? It's hard, no fun, scrambles your brains and leaves you unfit for practically all other kinds of human activity. Apart from which there's no dough in it except for Leon Uris and Allen Drury.

And sometimes, in a small way, for Richard Yates. That summer Rust Hills offered him “a considerable amount of dough” to serve as editor of an anthology featuring winners of a fiction contest for unpublished writers sponsored by
Esquire
and Bantam Books. All Yates had to do was read some five thousand stories (with an assistant) and select fifteen or so winners—this in addition to whatever his students at Columbia and the New School saw fit to produce. And meanwhile, too, he was still ghosting the odd speech for an agency in Princeton.

*   *   *

At seventy Dookie seemed tough and talkative as ever, despite a long half century of drinking, smoking, and fiscal emergency. For eight years she'd divided her time between Manhattan and St. James, where she rested each weekend amid her considerable efforts to keep the City Center art gallery afloat. The long commute was brutal in the summer and the hot little garage apartment at High Hedges was hardly an oasis, such that one might have wondered why she bothered to make the trip at all. The fact was, for all her illustrious contacts in the art world, the old woman was socially alone in the city except for an incompatible sister and a beloved son whom she rarely saw. High Hedges couldn't have been much better—her relationship with Ruth was an uneasy truce, Fred hardly spoke to her, and all but one of her grandchildren had grown up and moved out—but her belongings were there, her sculpture, and anyway it was a change.

Yates later told friends that his mother's cerebral hemorrhage (and much of its aftermath) happened exactly the way he described it in
The Easter Parade,
though the only surviving witness—Ruth's daughter and namesake—remembers a few details differently. Unlike the far more dissolute Pookie Grimes, Yates's mother was fully clothed when her fifteen-year-old granddaughter found her comatose in the garage apartment, nor was there any sign of emptied bowels or bottles of whiskey (“Bellows Partners' Choice”) strewn about the place. The rest happened pretty much as written: Dookie had failed to emerge after a few swelt-ering days in mid-July, and Yates's sister had sent little Ruth to investigate.

Yates took it hard. He was with the Schulmans when he got the news that his mother had suffered an “insult to the brain” (Yates was appalled by the term) and that her chance of survival was less than 50 percent. Over the four or five months he'd known the Schulmans he'd always spoken kindly of his mother, and from the depths of his remorse he did so then: She was an elegant, talented woman who'd married beneath her, he said; an artist reduced at one point to sculpting mannequins. He wished he'd taken better care of her, and now she was likely to die or go on living as a vegetable. “I heard she was crazy
before
the stroke,” said Natalie Bowen, after Yates caught a train for Long Island.

Dookie had revived somewhat when Yates got to the hospital, but she didn't seem to recognize him or anybody else, and was unable to speak more than a few random words. The doctors said that she could die within days or go on living for years, with or without some significant degree of brain damage. “[They] are talking in terms of ‘wait and see' for weeks or months to come—it's amazing how little they really know about things like this,” Yates wrote Barbara Beury:

Meanwhile I've been living with my sister and her family out here in Ass Hole, Long Island, and my time has been wholly given over to the round of hospital visits, conversational banality, drunken slobberings, quarrels and all the other Thomas Wolfean goodies that accompany emergencies like this. My sister is in a constant state of near-hysteria, which doesn't help things much, and she and I have hardly anything in common, which makes it even less jolly. Worst week I've had in years, buddy.

But such was Yates's guilty desire to be a dutiful son that he was prepared to spend most of the summer, if necessary, amid the stormy boredom of High Hedges (or at least until Dookie's condition was established one way or the other). Lonely and miserable, he called Sheila, one of the few people who could somewhat fathom his conflicted feelings: He wanted to
do
something about his mother, he said, but felt helpless.

A month later Dookie was still holding her own—“physically stronger but mentally off her trolly [
sic
]” as Yates put it—and she was moved to St. Johnland, an Episcopalian “home for the aged” in King's Park, Long Island. Her total monthly expenses came to a relatively exorbitant $260, and the Suffolk County Welfare Department demanded that Yates and Ruth contribute to their mother's care. Both were strapped and the extra burden was unwelcome, to put it mildly; when Ruth reminded her brother that Dookie's doctor at St. Johnland needed a one-time fee of $150 in addition to regular expenses, Yates exploded. Further discussion was impossible, and Ruth wrote him a weary letter instead: “I am not, as you so neatly put it, trying to ‘cozy up to this shit-head.' I feel, and Fred agrees, that Dookie needs Dr. Alexander and Dr. Alexander needs $150. It's cut and dried.… Don't let's fight anymore.” There was one other practical matter: Since welfare benefits still paid the better part of Dookie's care, the State of New York would claim her assets when she died. Therefore Ruth suggested they persuade Dookie to “give” them her sculpture, as it was “just possible that twenty years from now somebody will want to collect ‘Ruth Yates.'”
*

Dookie tuned in and out of lucidity, but even at her best she lived in a delusional fog. “It was Bob Jones [?] who arranged to have me hit by that car,” she belligerently insisted, and wondered what would be done about it. At first she thought she'd “served two years as President of the United States”—it's possible she was confusing the nation with the National Association of Women Artists—and then demoted herself to first mother. She thought Yates was John F. Kennedy, that she lived in an annex of the White House, and that the nurses were pretty insolent under the circumstances. Her place among the “aristocracy” seemed assured at last, but soon she became depressed and withdrawn. She stopped speaking of her role in Camelot, and during one of Yates's rare visits she sat ignoring him while she studied her haggard face in a hand mirror; finally, carefully, she painted lipstick on her reflection. The primacy of image over reality was complete.

“The deaths of parents, dreadful and sad as they are, do I think to an extent free writers,” said Alice Adams, and this was certainly true of Yates. But it was a long and difficult process, and it exacted a psychic toll. He once told interviewers that the prologue of
A Special Providence
—in which Private Prentice visits his mother and listens to her drunken boasting about her artistic career—was the hardest scene he ever wrote (“I sweated blood over that”), and still more years would pass before he thought he was finally, truly able to “see things in the round” where his childhood was concerned. And the more he saw, the more obsessive and bitter he became, until finally he was as haunted as Stephen Dedalus by the memory of a spurned, beloved, and deeply hated mother.

*   *   *

By mid-August Yates needed a break, and with Dookie bound for St. Johnland he decided to accept John Ciardi's invitation to return to Bread Loaf as a teaching fellow. His friend Ed Kessler was driving to Vermont in rather illustrious company—Julia Child and her husband Paul; Bernard DeVoto's widow Avis—and invited Yates to join them. The five had breakfast together at DeVoto's apartment the morning of their departure, and Yates was on his best behavior. Paul Child had been the art teacher at Avon Old Farms when Yates was a bedraggled fourth former, and both seemed pleased by the subsequent turn of events, though perhaps the happily married Child was a bit more so than his old pupil.

The two weeks passed without major mishap, though the good impression Yates made on the Childs and Avis DeVoto didn't last. DeVoto presided over Treman Cottage, where privileged staff members gathered to eat, drink, joke, argue, and plot sexual assignations, rather in spite of their domineering hostess. DeVoto insisted her guests provide their own liquor and mark the bottles, and if anyone was so much as a minute late moving from veranda or lounge or lawn to the dining room, that person found the door shut. A student who wrote Yates a postconference note, inviting him to visit her, promised, “[W]e don't mark our bottles here … and there isn't anyone named Avis within fifty miles, except maybe a car rental agency.” Yates seems to have kept his temper in the face of such fussiness, but not without a certain amount of extravagant sulking. “He had the manner of a spoiled child,” said Julia Child, who remembered him as a “romantic figure” but a “difficult drunk”: “He seemed conspicuously unstable—Byronic, adrift.”