A Tragic Honesty (49 page)

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The night before he left Washington for a Christmas visit with his daughters, Yates stayed up until three
A.M
. wrapping presents; Wendy Sears offered to come over and help, but he wanted to do it himself. He'd arranged to spend the holiday with Sharon and Monica at the Plaza Hotel. By then the girls had moved back to Mahopac, and their father was eager to compensate for what he called “that proletarian town” by giving them a taste of high life during their visits—nice restaurants, the theater, the Plaza. It was an almost wholly successful Christmas: The girls ordered butterscotch sundaes from room service and read
Eloise
with Yates; they romped in the hallway and wished they could live there forever. Monica recalls that the only dark moments came when she—then six—sensed her father's almost oppressive need to please them; she wondered if he could really afford such gestures, since he usually lived in a basement.

Yates was briefly in better spirits now that his work for the Kennedys was over. He took Wendy Sears to New York for the first time and introduced her to friends: They had dinner at the Blue Mill with Broyard, who seemed to like Sears in an unsalacious way, and spent a jolly evening with the Schulmans, who were naturally relieved to have the sodden Craige off their hands. In fact the visit went remarkably without a hitch, though Sears vowed never to pass another night in Yates's “dark, awful, dirty” apartment at 27 Seventh Avenue South.

Yates continued to live in Washington until early April; he claimed to like the town well enough, but it was mostly a matter of having a warm body in his bed at night. Wendy Sears, however, was almost frantically longing for freedom. She was still fond of Yates and awed by his stature as a writer, but as a constant companion he was a disaster. Even times of relative calm were nerve-racking. The air was forever charged with some dire emotion—as when Sears gave him, for his thirty-eighth birthday, a black leather album with the gold-embossed title,
The Speeches of Robert F. Kennedy, by Richard Yates
. “I thought he was going to cry,” she said. “He was always so
astonished
when you gave him a gift, or did anything nice for him.” Then in March they took a larky drive through the Virginia countryside to visit Yates's old friend Ed Kessler, who'd taken a job at William and Mary. As with the New York trip, the weekend was almost ominously tranquil: Kessler led them on a droll historical tour of Williamsburg, and later they attended an elegant cocktail party where they mingled with the likes of Winthrop Rockefeller.

But Sears knew it was only a matter of time, and when the storm broke it was worse than ever. Looking back, she can't remember why they stopped at that motel outside Washington, or why Yates started screaming and throwing things, only that it went on for a long time and was definitely the last straw. It wasn't a question of his being menacing, or actually throwing things
at
her, or even taking her into account one way or the other. But the episode was terrifying all the same, not to say exhausting, and when Yates left Washington a few weeks later they agreed to part as friends. He
lerved
her, he said, which was a little less than love but more than like. Sears was just glad he was at a safe distance now, so she could enjoy his finer qualities via letters and phone calls.

Granted, he was under a strain. At the end of December he'd finally decided to accept Lawrence's arrangement of five hundred dollars a month up to three thousand—this for a novel he was by no means confident of finishing, at any rate not within six months, and meanwhile the money was just enough to cover child support and alimony with a pittance left over. Monica McCall continued to make encouraging noises about the lucrative prospects of
Lie Down in Darkness,
but that bubble burst (again) in January when Frankenheimer decided to let his option lapse. The following month Yates learned he was the recipient of a Brandeis University Creative Arts Award (“for recognition of promise”) in the amount of a thousand dollars, to be awarded at the Waldorf in May; Nabokov was slated for special recognition that night, and certainly Yates hoped to meet the great man,
*
though his own award hardly altered the fact that by the end of the summer he'd be broke. McCall tried to interest him in writing a sixty thousand–word social history of Saratoga Springs, New York, for Prentice-Hall (“There are of course a number of elements involved: money, society, health, gambling and horses, and I think that such a book could be fun to do”), but Yates was not interested. Finally by mid-February his outlook was bleak enough for him to accept, at long last, a teaching position at the Iowa Workshop beginning that fall. Cassill was pleased to gain another ally, and replied with the cheerful news that Yates would be getting eight—rather than the aforesaid seven—thousand dollars a year; he was advised to buy a car, however.

Money was one thing, but Yates's erratic behavior was mostly fueled by despair over his work. More than three years earlier he'd conceived his novel, all too ambitiously, as a bildungsroman to rival Joyce's
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
; but on bad days he saw the thing as little more than so much pointless confession, and wondered whether he should simply cut his losses and write something else. On what appeared to be a relatively good day in mid-March he wrote his friend Miller Williams,

I'm working like a bastard on this second novel, which is at the stage now when I sometimes think the only respectable thing to do is burn it, but on betters days I continue to hold pretty grandiose hopes for the damn thing. It's a tough one, about five times more “autobiographical” than
Revolutionary Road,
with all the possibilities for Naked Embarrassment implied in that statement. But if I
can
bring it off it might be good.

Such occasional confidence was mostly due to the novel's excellent self-contained prologue, in which Prentice visits his deluded mother in New York while on leave from the army.
That
part of the book was finished, was “formed” as Yates put it, but the problem he couldn't solve was how to relate it to the rest of the novel—that is, how to find some plausible connection between Prentice's war experiences and his disenchantment with (and subsequent liberation from) his mother. Was any such connection really valid? And wasn't the whole point of the prologue to suggest that Prentice is
already
disenchanted with his mother, even before he goes overseas?

So Yates brooded. And while there were days when he worked “like a bastard,” there were others he spent writing letters to Wendy Sears, or making lists, or “doing research” and drinking. He asked Sears to find books about the Seventy-fifth Infantry Division, the Ninth Army, and wondered what she thought of such prospective titles as
Rite of Passage, Prentice,
and
The Straggler
(one of the many rejected titles for
Revolutionary Road
). Sears was nothing if not obliging: She visited the Library of Congress on his behalf, and tended to prefer whatever title was presently on his mind.

A representative artifact of this period is a curious group of poems Yates wrote amid the inertia of evading his novel. The title pretty much says it all: “QWERTYUIOP
: Six Efforts To Achieve Coherence While Using Only the Second Row of Keys on the Standard Typewriter.” The novelty of such an exercise suggests a writer with far too much time on his hands. Fittingly the theme of all six “efforts” is literary failure. A few samples:

A CONFESSION OF FULBRIGHTS

We were poor, we were witty,

Our poetry tip-top, our Europe pretty.

We quit our torpor, quit our rue—

Yet O!—we quit our typewriter, too.

 

A RELIGIOUS-CONVERT WRITER'S LAMENT

O Piety, Piety, prior to you

I wrote poor yet I wrote true.

I wrote out worry, wrote up riot.

O Piety, Piety, Piety—Quiet!

 

A LOVE SONG

Pet, I owe you poetry.

I write to you; yet, eye-to-eye,

You pout, you weep, require rye.

O Pet, I owe you poetry.

Yates recited his verse during a boozy night with Styron in Martha's Vineyard, and the latter was so impressed that he wanted to see about getting it published in the
New York Review of Books
. Alas, Styron misplaced the one rumpled page Yates mailed him that summer, which naturally turned out to be the only copy of the manuscript. Eventually Yates got around to rewriting the poems from memory, and they appeared in
Esquire
two and a half years later. Twice as many years would pass before Yates's second novel was published.

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At Sam Lawrence's suggestion, Yates arranged to spend the summer at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where in theory he would finish his novel in a placid yet stimulating environment—as Lawrence described it, “you work all day and carouse from 5 to 6 p.m. on: writers, painters, sculptors, composers.” Monica McCall had another client who lived in the area, the writer Richard Frede, and Yates stopped at the man's house for a dinner party en route. “Yates was pleasant enough,” Frede remembered, “but still it was a rather fearful experience: He seemed to be drinking compulsively,
hurting
himself with drink. One after another.”

At the colony Yates was given a secluded cabin with a desk, bed, and fireplace, where at first he was able to settle down to work; the only interruption before cocktail hour was a pickup truck that delivered box lunches between 11:30 and noon, with one's letters tucked next to the sandwiches. Wendy Sears wrote almost every other day, and Yates also got some rather nostalgic gossip from Sheila and the Schulmans: The first reported that her brother Charlie was now working at
Reader's Digest
(something to do with computers) as part of a program prescribed by his doctors to help him “get along with people,” while Grace mentioned that Barbara Beury had been in touch asking if she still had a chance at that
Glamour
job (“I'll put in a dime if you like,” Grace added wryly. “Clinkety, clinkety clink. The last one was Jerry”). Such news of his previous lives in Washington, New York, and beyond was calmly received at a distance, and during the first week Yates managed to write fiction at the astounding rate of three to five pages a day.

It didn't last. As he became better acquainted with his fellow colonists, the nights grew longer and more bibulous, and soon he was entangled in a distracting affair with a “rich, waspy” painter manquée named Victoria. He continued to write a fair amount, but there were days of crapulent depression when he wondered why he bothered. At the beginning of August he called Wendy Sears and told her he'd finished the last chapter, though he didn't seem pleased about it, and a few days later he vented his frustration in a letter to the Schulmans:

The damn place [MacDowell] is a little too Bread-Loafy for comfort—by which I mean that too many evenings get wasted having Brilliant Conversations with the Nicest and Best People you've Ever Met, and then waking up with a terrible hangover and going to the damn typewriter as if it were an instrument of torture. Sometimes I get good working days in and hardly drink at all; other times everything goes to hell. Worst feature now is that I'm horribly aware of the time slipping away, and feel a compulsion to finish the effing book by September First whether it's any good or not—and this, of course, is not exactly a healthy attitude.

One good thing: there's a guy here with a collection of old-timey phonograph records, and I've mastered both lyrics and tune of an absolutely great Al Jolson item called “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?”—I promise to sing it for you loud and clear the minute I'm back in town.

By then his friend Victoria had left MacDowell to go abroad, and Yates was all the more free to write or drink or sing or sit in his cabin and brood. When Edmund Wilson visited the colony for a weekend in mid-August, the languishing Yates declined an invitation to deliver the salutatory remarks; Wendy Sears called to ask him about it, but Yates was too drunk to give a coherent account—“Oh well,” he managed to sigh. The next day Sears wrote him a scolding letter: “Brendan Behan drank because when he did, he knew he couldn't write and this was his excuse.”

After he left MacDowell at the end of the month, Yates stopped in New York for ten days to wrap up his affairs before moving to Iowa City. After exactly five years of Dostoyevskian habitation, one imagines a faint pang on Yates's part as he carried his few possessions out of the basement at 27 Seventh Avenue South (never to reclaim them: When he returned to his storage locker a year later, he found it full of a stranger's things; nobody could tell him what had become of his old sling chairs and bookcase and Bob Parker portrait). He lunched with Sam Lawrence and broke the news that he hadn't finished the novel after all, but hoped to do so by Christmas “at the latest.” And finally, per the advice of Verlin Cassill, he bought a “snot-green” used car for the long rural backroads of Iowa. “Richard Yates?” said the man taking his order at the car-painting shop. “There's a good writer who goes by that name.” As it happened, the car painter was himself an aspiring writer who took classes at the New School; the paint shop, he explained, was only a day job. Yates asked him to paint the car gray.