A Tragic Honesty (64 page)

That summer DeWitt Henry sent a somewhat worked-over transcript of their “interview,” and Yates was so appalled by what he'd apparently let slip while in his cups that he rewrote almost every word, including a number of the questions. “Believe it or not,” he informed Henry, “I
have
put an awful lot of work into this thing—a solid week, working damn near around the clock, neglecting everything else I was supposed to be doing—and I do feel satisfied with it now, though you may not.” The project posed an interesting challenge to Yates. As he began to consider seriously what he'd so “dumbly” put on tape, he found himself working out certain convictions that hadn't been quite so clear in his mind before. For example, his frustration over the failure of
A Special Providence
had provoked “a half-assed outburst against autobiographical fiction,” which on sober reflection struck him as “pure nonsense.” In the published interview, then, Yates nicely amended the matter with a detailed apologia for his own evolution from a mostly “objective” writer to one who'd learned the hard way that he hadn't “earned the right” (
yet
) to translate personal experience directly into fiction—which was
not
to say it couldn't be done, given the proper “distance” and “detachment.”

Perhaps the most ticklish issue was that of
neglect,
both with respect to his own reputation and certain others'. The last thing Yates wanted was to come off as a crybaby who felt he'd been treated unfairly by the literary establishment, or had the bad luck of going against the grain of egregious fashion. His original response (or rather Henry's touched-up version of it) is arguably a bit closer to Yates's true feelings on the subject than what he allowed into print, and deserves to be quoted at length:

A popular writer, a writer who gains a broad and sustained contemporary audience, I guess, like any other writer wants to know he's good, and the bestseller lists and talk shows and his annual income all repay whatever faith it was that sat him down in front of his typewriter in the first place. But if he's a serious writer that's got to come second.… Much more common, and I think the case is mine, [is when] the good work is its own reward and you share it with as many readers as you can and it stays alive, and has some hard-won clarity and richness, some distillation of human investment, that continues to claim some kind of permanent interest no matter what angles fashion may dispose new readers towards.… My first book made a big, popular splash and that kind of success was intoxicating, and I was in the racket, in the race, but the down that followed it was miserable, and the real success has been a quieter, more solid kind of thing. I know the book's good. It's there. It wins new readers. That level is there to be reached, and I don't need a cheering crowd to tell me that it's worth it. It would be nice to be the fashion, to be recognized for what I'm trying to do—in the sense that Mailer is, for instance—life would be easier in a lot of ways—but the price of doing something difficult and honest, something true, as April Wheeler learned, is doing it alone.

Yates cut the entire speech, which perhaps struck him as pontifical or protesting too much, though surely he believed every word of it: To Yates writing
was
a lonely business (it would become more so over time), and
had
to be its own reward.
*
A little more fame, however, would have been “nice.”

As for the question of other neglected contemporaries in the realistic tradition, Henry had originally suggested three: Edward Wallant, Brian Moore, and Evan Connell. Yates agreed they were neglected after a fashion, but for very different reasons (e.g., Wallant because of his early death), and hence in revision he made a separate, qualified case for each—“and then,” as he wrote Henry, “once I got started, I couldn't stop. There are simply too God damn
many
neglected contemporary writers, and I felt I had to mention at least a few of them.” The few? Anatole Broyard, Gina Berriault, R. V. Cassill, George Garrett, Seymour Epstein, Fred Chappell, Helen Hudson, Edward Hoagland, George Cuomo, Arthur Roth, Andre Dubus, James Crumley, Mark Dintenfass, Theodore Weesner, and on and on—mostly friends or students, but still writers whose work Yates admired, and whose careers he was loath not to boost when given the chance.

“Anyway,” Yates's letter to Henry continued, “that got me started on the making of still another damn list—

a list of traditional, realistic writers who
haven't
been neglected, who
have
made major critical and popular reputations—and in a way that was the most maddening part of the whole damn thing. In one of my early drafts, for example, I launched into a furious, splenetic diatribe against Saul Bellow, and another equally nasty assessment of J. P. Donleavy. But I tore all that stuff up in the end; I finally decided the best way to do it was simply to leave out the writers whose work I don't respect … and mention only those whose work I do. It's really a short list, as you'll see.
*

Another diatribe that required a great deal of temperate revision was the one against “the whole fucking Post-realistic School'”—from which he felt obliged explicitly to exempt Vonnegut despite the “tricky business” of the nice blurb the man had provided for
Revolutionary Road
: “[S]o I guess some of your more small-minded readers are going to think I'm kissing his ass in return for that favor,” Yates advised Henry. “And the point
I'd
like to make, to you, is that I don't give a shit if they do.” Finally he asked Henry to “read this damn thing carefully, and bear in mind that my whole effort has been to make it clear, sane, rational and fair.”

It was all those things, and Yates's pains in making it so were not in vain. A few months later Henry walked down the street to Sam Lawrence's office in order to submit his own work-in-progress, as well as to show a sample issue of
Ploughshares
and the Yates interview in proof. Lawrence was impressed by how “cogent and back-to-work” his old friend seemed. The two men had been out of touch for almost five years; Yates was hurt but unsurprised that Lawrence had sent no word when
A Special Providence
was published (“in all its carefully-edited sloppiness,” as Yates put it). He assumed Lawrence had given him up for dead—another washed-up author, and a treacherous friend at that—and thus was “very touched” to hear again from Lawrence that November: “I've just finished reading proofs of a very fine interview you gave to DeWitt Henry and I could hear your voice clearly,” Lawrence wrote. “If for any reason you decide to change publishers, please let me know.” “So who knows?” said Yates. “I might still bring out a Delacorte ‘Seymour Lawrence Book' and have money coming in by the bushel-basketful.”

*   *   *

Meanwhile he was still in Wichita. His writer-in-residence appointment had been renewed for another year, and might indeed become permanent if he wasn't careful. By then the idea of getting out of Kansas and going home to New York had become an obsession, and Yates was far from particular about the means. He asked Hayes Jacobs—an old freelancer like himself—to find him an employment agent who could scout the New York job market for anything from PR to publishing to teaching to whatever, preferably on a part-time basis. Jacobs was less than sanguine (“devilishly hard to place you at the price you're seeking”), but put him in touch with Elise Ford at the Prudential Placement Agency.

For Ms. Ford's benefit, Yates spent much of his Thanksgiving vacation updating his résumé—a two-and-a-half page, single-spaced summary of a singularly varied career: Its subject (a “Free-lance Writer”) was an NBA-nominated author of three books who'd received several major grants, served as “sole speechwriter” for Robert F. Kennedy, written screenplays for John Frankenheimer and Roger Corman, and published short stories in numerous anthologies and major magazines (though not, alas,
The New Yorker
); along the way he'd also written for
Food Field Reporter, Trade Union Courier,
UPI, Johnson & Johnson, and of course Remington Rand (about which he spilled the most résumé ink of all, detailing his various duties on behalf of the UNIVAC); and last but hardly least, he'd taught at four universities and his list of references included Styron, Vonnegut, Cassill, Kazin, Bourjaily, and Dr. Frank Kastor at Wichita State University (“This is my present position”).

Such a résumé would seem to suggest an eminently can-do kind of guy, but amid what Jacobs called the “big Nothing” of the New York job market, the only initial nibble it elicited was from N. W. Ayer and Son, Inc., who thought they might be able to get Yates an occasional PR assignment concerning the “U.S. Army's second centennial.” The academic world was even more categorical in its rejection. Hostos Community College was willing to interview Yates (but wouldn't pay travel expenses), while Sarah Lawrence, Rutgers, Queensborough Community College, Rider College, Princeton, Wellesley, Skidmore, and SUNY at Stony Brook—just to mention the few that favored Yates with a reply—had no openings at the time. As a kind of dismal postscript, Yates's old New York friend Arthur Roth wrote in January that his last two novels had been rejected (“a lot of commitment down the drain”) and for the past nine months he'd been working as a carpenter's helper. “I often wonder how you are doing and how life is treating you,” Roth remarked.

At the moment Yates was of the opinion that life was treating him poorly. Perhaps as a favor to Sam Lawrence (with whom McCall was tentatively negotiating a contract for
Disturbing the Peace
), Yates agreed to review a Delacorte novel for the
New York Times Book Review
—something called
The Morning After,
by Jack B. Weiner. All Yates knew at the outset was that the book was about a drunk, and by the time he finished it Yates was a drunk again, too. Martha never quite understood the coincidence: “The fact that he'd review such a book gave me the creeps,” she said, “and afterward he seemed to make a decision to give up. The book seemed to remind him that drinking was something he could do.”

The book also made him aware of the fact that a Delacorte author had just published a novel almost exactly like the one Yates himself had been writing for three years. Ninety percent of Yates's
Times
review is a dogged plot summary, as if he were bemusedly enumerating all the ways in which Weiner's book resembled his own: The alcoholic protagonist Charlie Lester is a PR man who's “cynical about his work”; he decides to consult a “vain, supercilious” psychiatrist who “appears to doze through Charlie's hapless monologues”; after a few sessions Charlie “quits the man cold” and goes on a vacation to dry out, but ends up “screaming drunken obscenities to [his wife] on the phone”; he makes his ten-year-old son feel “so unhappy and embarrassed” that all the boy can muster is a mumbled “Fine” or “OK” or “No” (the constant refrain of John Wilder's son is “I don't know. I don't care”). And so on. Toward the end of his review, Yates pointed out a few flaws such as Weiner's “dreadful images” (for example, the surf rolls in “as if to the slow rhythmic beat of a giant, salt-encrusted metronome”), but then manfully calls it a “compelling piece of work”: “Charlie Lester's real ‘problem' is the agony of his total isolation, and it comes to serve as an eloquent, unforgettable metaphor for the secret loneliness in us all.” A very Yatesian theme, that, and an apt description of Wilder's (and Yates's) “real ‘problem'” as well.

So began what might arguably be called the worst year (or two) of Yates's life, which of course is no mean assertion. “He started drinking during the day,” Martha remembered. “One of his students was a big drinker, and the two of them would get drunk a lot until three
A.M
. or so. I hated it.” In despair over his novel (to say nothing of life in general, the steady drumbeat of rejection coming his way from New York), Yates tried writing a short story for the first time in ten years. Titled “Forms of Entertainment,” it was promptly rejected by
The New Yorker
and then sent to Gordon Lish at
Esquire,
who'd solicited work from Yates as soon as he arrived at the magazine a few years before. Monica McCall reported that Lish was “putting the story through”—that is, “sending it upstairs to [Editor in Chief] Harold Hayes for confirmation of purchase, which does not necessarily mean a firm acceptance because apparently Hayes could … turn it down.” Yates was frantic enough to call Lish on the phone, which resulted in the following note: “Dick—I'm doing all that can be done; trust me. But for God's sake, man, keep this thing in perspective.”

A few days later the story was officially rejected. As Lish recalled the episode, “I wanted to get Dick into
Esquire,
because I felt bad for him and wanted to do something for him: He was so miserable, that I extended myself.” But the truth was that “Forms of Entertainment” had never made it past the magazine's associate editors, and Lish (“in defiance of [his] better judgment”) had tried but failed to change their minds about it. Yates responded to this latest rejection by calling Lish on the phone and abusively accusing him of favoring only “name” writers; finally he threatened to “get on a plane and shoot [Lish].” “Dick was unappeasable, shouting,” Lish remembered. “His wife was screaming in the background: ‘Don't pay attention! He's drunk! He's drunk!' Afterward she called me to apologize.” The next day Lish wrote Yates a letter:

Your performance was an appalling piece of self-destruction. How absurd to make an enemy of me and of
Esquire
.… Your calls, your letters, the whole matter of your offering of “Forms” and your response to the rejection is ugly and sad. Your rage should be directed elsewhere; if you had the maturity of your years, you'd see this. And as for your threats of violence, come ahead, old buddy: you'll find me as passionate in this as in friendship.