A Tragic Honesty (68 page)

Yates was a bit less lonely when Sharon moved back to New York in December, though he didn't see as much of her as he might have liked. Along with her sister Monica, she'd also received a deranged phone call or two the previous summer, and wasn't sure whether she was equal to coping with more of the same. Besides, she had her own problems—she was unemployed and had little idea what to do with her life. Certainly she didn't need any more tumult and worry, and in recent years her father had been difficult even at the best of times. For a while she stayed away in Mahopac, then found a job as a file clerk with a Wall Street firm and moved to a small apartment in Brooklyn Heights, whereupon she began seeing her father on a consistent, if not frequent, basis. He seemed somewhat better, though still crotchety: Sharon had begun dating an older man whom Yates thought an awful bore (she agreed for the most part), and he scolded her for wasting time with a man she didn't love; there should be romance and the possibility of marriage, he insisted, otherwise why bother?

Among the many people in the city he used to know, the only one he saw regularly was Bill Reardon, whom he met every week or so for boozy dinners. Yates was comfortable with Reardon, all the more so since the latter had fallen on hard times—the result of a long run of alcohol-related bad luck. A second marriage in the late-sixties had soon ended, after which Reardon lost his job at
Scientific American,
set his apartment on fire, and declared bankruptcy. By the mid-seventies he'd moved to a squalid loft space in TriBeCa, where he supported himself as a chauffeur of sorts. He was, in short, one of the few people who could make Yates feel almost fortunate by comparison, and it was a blow when Reardon died later that year of liver failure. At a memorial gathering on the Upper West Side, Yates mingled somberly with half-forgotten friends from the past, most of whom he was seeing for the last time. “You and I were the only ones who'd sit up and talk all night to Bill,” he told Marjorie Owens in a husky whisper.

An improbable figure came along to fill the void. In the fifties and sixties, Seymour Krim had been a devoted hipster who wrote antiestablishment articles for the
Village Voice
and edited a magazine called
Nugget,
whose audience he envisioned as “call girls, dope addicts, jazz musicians and prisoners.” He was among those who espoused the idea that the weirdness of actual events had made realistic fiction obsolete, and while teaching at the Iowa Workshop he'd been a great enthusiast of experimentation, praising students for such audacious effects as scribbling in the margins of their stories. Yates and Krim had overlapped at Iowa for just one year, 1970–71, and remarkably Yates had seemed more amused than offended by the aging hipster. They put their workshop sections together on the first day of class, and the neophyte Krim asked his colleague what he did about grades. “Oh, I just give everybody an A,” Yates replied.
*
The following year Krim's provocateur tendencies (to say nothing of his drinking and pot smoking) led to a fiasco at least as damning as Yates's breakdown five years before: A drunken Krim insulted the writer Angus Wilson at a public symposium, then turned on the audience. “Oh, bullshit!” he sneered at an elderly woman who'd wondered why nobody wrote novels for ladies anymore, and when a female student got up to leave, Krim hooted: “She's bored with this goddamn symposium! Who wouldn't be? She's going to find her boyfriend and get laid.”

Despite such antics Krim was the kindest of men—“a great generous soul,” Dan Wakefield called him—especially where other writers were concerned. For decades he made a practice of sending encouraging postcards (“loved the piece”) whenever a friend's work appeared in print. And while he and Yates might have differed aesthetically, by 1975 they had just about everything else in common: Krim, too, was a lonely middle-aged bachelor in bad health who drank and smoked too much, and if anything his apartment was even grimmer than Yates's—a tiny studio in the East Village where he washed his dishes in the bathroom sink. The two men were a comfort to each other. Krim was able to make the gloomy Yates laugh, and the latter became so dependent on Krim's postcards that he threw tantrums when they didn't arrive:
“Where's my mail?!”
he yelled in front of one companion; by then Krim's notes had become so regular that Yates almost suspected the postman of theft.

The friends would meet at the Lion's Head and discuss books, mostly, but also more general issues relating to their common predicament. One night Yates broached the subject of suicide, perhaps aware of the fact that he himself was widely viewed as a prime candidate. Both Monica McCall and Sam Lawrence had openly worried about the possibility for years, now more than ever, but Yates was adamant in denouncing the act as “self-indulgent”—which is not to say it didn't exert a pull. The year before, Loree Wilson Rackstraw's second husband had killed himself, and when Yates called to offer condolence he seemed “envious but scornful”: “[Dick said] something like, ‘How did he do it,'” Rackstraw recalled, “with a tone of voice that said, ‘How did he have the right to do it?' I believe he had a kind of hero's pride that
he
didn't kill himself. And also pride that he could drink and smoke so much and still stay alive. He wasn't going to be a wimp and stop drinking or off himself!” But something about Krim's response made Yates drop the subject—an awkward moment that Krim sought to clarify in a subsequent letter: “My mother did the Dutch Act when I was 10 and it's always hung over my life as a possible way out if and when things got too tough.… But I enjoy discussing such things with you and please feel no sensitivity at all for categorizing all such acts as self-indulgence.”

By that summer, in fact, Yates was able to dismiss the idea with more than just abstract distaste. He was never more content than when his work was going well, and by August he had half-finished a novel that promised to be on a par with
Revolutionary Road
. As for the novel about to be published, he viewed it as a respectable “plateau performance”—if nothing else, an improvement on
A Special Providence
. The usual dread that attended publication was all but entirely absent this time, perhaps because he had neither high hopes to be dashed nor expectations of disaster; also he felt he'd mostly disguised the autobiographical nature of the work behind the deceptive persona of John Wilder, so there was less question of any humiliating public exposure. Meanwhile Vonnegut had come through with another supportive blurb (“Richard Yates has regained the wonderful power he demonstrated in
Revolutionary Road
. It is a cause for celebration”). George Garrett called the book “the best novel [he'd] read in ages,” and Sam Lawrence was nothing but optimistic.
*
What mattered most to Yates, though, was that he himself believed in his talent again: “I think it's okay,” he wrote of his third novel, “though not as big or as rich as I'd hoped. Am trying to make up for that in my next one.”

Around publication in early September he went to Washington for a festive weekend with Joe Mohbat and his new wife Nancy. Yates was in such high spirits that he inadvertently spat in the young woman's eye while in the middle of an excited bit of storytelling. “Things I regret,” he wrote the couple afterward: “1.-Smoking and coughing all the time. 2.-Bending your ears so much. 3.-Pulling that half-assed poetry recital on you in the restaurant.
†
4.-Spitting on Nancy. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me for these four … then there would seem to be every chance that we might somehow get together again soon. Hope so.” At his best Yates was still a lively companion, if a bit hard to take in large doses (as he was coming to realize himself). His friendships with the Mohbats and various others remained viable for the very reason that they were conducted at a certain distance of space and time.

*   *   *

Disturbing the Peace
earned the kind of reception that Yates had expected. Gene Lyons in the
New York Times Book Review
came closest to summing up the consensus, commending the book's “exact precision of style and flawless construction,” but finding Wilder a simplistic pawn whose fate is too predictable to engage the reader much: “
Disturbing the Peace
is an eloquent minor novel,” Lyons wrote, “by an author whom one begins to suspect of systematically denying himself major possibilities.” Yates's old friend Anatole Broyard, who reviewed the book in the daily
Times,
was markedly grudging in his praise. He allowed that the novel succeeded “to a degree,” and particularly commended the Bellevue scenes, but dismissed Wilder's repetitive drunkenness as “about as interesting as having someone throw up on you” and suggested the story's deeper meaning was muddled if not entirely absent. William Pritchard paid the author a compliment in the
Hudson Review
which may have caused unwitting offense
*
: “One hopes we will begin to be more grateful for American writers like [Yates]: if you can't be Pynchon why try to be second best? Richard Yates works superbly within the limits of his strength.” The one notable outright pan was Peter Prescott's notice in
Newsweek,
which granted the novel's “readability” but declared it an ignoble performance on the whole: “Wilder is an … unsympathetic wretch, and his wife a dismal cow.… Of such stuff is melodrama, not tragedy, made.”

Perhaps. As a character Wilder is unremarkable when he isn't utterly loathsome, and while this is in line with Yates's intention, it does diminish the emotional impact: By the end of the novel, when the lifeless Wilder is left permanently institutionalized (implausibly enough), it's all but impossible for the reader to care. As for the rest of the characters—from the pompous Paul Borg to the bovinely patient Janice Wilder to the fickle Pamela Hendricks—they're little more than embodied traits, figures in a morality play, and while such flatness lends itself to the macabre comedy of the novel, the basic effect is a cold one.

Such apparent flaws aside,
Disturbing the Peace
is a remarkable work of art, an advance on Yates's previous work in almost every technical sense. Even its flaws can be justified in terms of craft: That Wilder is one of life's losers, and obnoxiously bitter about it, is an essential requirement of the story Yates meant to tell. And this ceases to be a liability if one considers the novel as the black comedy it is, and so views its hero as a laughable victim rather than a tragic figure meant to evoke pathos. When a friend informed Yates that she'd
cried
at Wilder's fate, he responded with mild exasperation: “I had hoped people might wince a little … or shudder, but really didn't expect anyone to cry. Maybe someday I'll write a book that makes people laugh, which is a good deal harder to do.”

Harder still when the material is so repugnant, but not impossible given a receptive reader. Again, those who insist on sympathetic, well-rounded characters in serious “realistic” fiction are bound to be disappointed here—particularly by the supporting cast, since the world of sane society in
Disturbing the Peace
is largely perceived through the eyes of the misfit Wilder, for whom it is monstrously bland and smug: a mass caricature, in short. His wife is “fond of the word ‘civilized'… and of ‘reasonable' and ‘adjustment' and ‘relationship,'” while she is terrified by “things she [doesn't] understand.” Even scenes that ostensibly aren't from Wilder's point of view, but reinforce his basic perspective, might be understood as enacted in his mind—for example, when his friend Paul Borg pauses in traffic to “admire the sober maturity of his face,” or when Wilder's triumphant rival Chester Pratt is commended by Pamela Hendricks because he's “so nice and tall.” The world from which the diminutive Wilder finds himself excluded is a place where nuance is equated with aberration; aptly its ruler is the “glamour boy” Kennedy rather than the problematic egghead Stevenson (Wilder's choice). And the response to being lumped among the “losers of the world” is rage, as Wilder's fellow Bellevue inmate Henry Spivack—another aberrant and hence more nuanced character—makes explicit when he rails against the complacent normality of his family: “Dear Sis; dear Miss Priss,” he writes. “This is important. This is
reality
[italics added]. 1.-Call Dad. 2.-Call Eric and Mark. 3.-Tell your husband he is a simpering, pretentious little fool. 4.-GET ME OUT OF HERE.”

But finally, of course, “reality” is perceived imperfectly by both the outcasts of Bellevue and better-adjusted citizens such as Borg and Janice, who are frightened and repelled by the abnormal. For that matter, a novel whose main character is a drunken lunatic might be pardoned for straying from the conventions of reality
and
realism, and in fact
Disturbing the Peace
is no more “realistic” than, say, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh (which it resembles). As a writer Yates was constrained by his own standards of craft, never by the requirements of so-called realism per se, and with this novel he adopted an approach to fit the matter at hand—to wit, a satire on the relative nature of sanity in modern society. That such a work entails certain surrealistic, metafictional effects is underappreciated by those who think Yates was forever at pains to avoid comparisons to Coover, Pynchon, et al. For example: One of the main themes of the novel is the disparity between art and life, “reality” and madness, and hence it's a valid (and funny) narrative tactic for the “gentleman producer” Carl Munchin to propose a rewrite of Wilder's Bellevue script that mimics (metafictionally) the very plot of the novel we're reading: “How does Bellevue change his life?” says Munchin. “I want a revised version of this script of yours to serve as part one, you see. Then I want to see a part two and a part three.… I'd say build him up for another breakdown … in part two, and then in part three let him have it.… Wipe him out.” Similarly the weary hack who does the initial rewrite, Jack Haines, fleshes out the script's protagonist in a way that accidentally divines the actual nature of Wilder's life simply by sticking to the usual clichés: “He's unhappily married and he's got kids he can't relate to and he feels trapped. He's solidly middle-class. I don't know what he does for a living, but let's say it's something well-paid and essentially meaningless, like advertising.”