A Tragic Honesty (82 page)

Delacorte held a publication party for Yates in the White and Gold Suites at the Plaza Hotel. Once again he asked Wendy Sears to be his date, but when she wanted to bring a friend, Rosie Johnson, Yates sourly disinvited her from the more intimate dinner for family and friends in the Oak Room afterward. The whole occasion had spurred an even worse state of angst than usual: The early reviews of
Young Hearts Crying
had been mixed, and his old friend Anatole Broyard was slated to weigh in with a full-page notice in the
New York Times Book Review
(Herbert Mitgang had interviewed Yates for the inset profile); meanwhile fellow writers such as Dubus, Crumley, Conroy, Thomas McGuane, Robert Stone, and Ann Beattie, to name a few, were on hand at the Plaza to pay homage to a man they viewed as a master. On arrival Sharon and Monica Yates observed that their father was drunk but ambulatory, and both sought more sober people to talk to—Jill Krementz, Hilma Wolitzer, and Yates's old student Richard Price. The guest of honor bore up through dinner, more or less, though his daughters continued to watch his drinking with dismay. As they were leaving, Yates began to quarrel with the Delacorte rep over the
suite,
not
room,
they'd promised him that night at the Plaza.

*   *   *

In
Young Hearts Crying
the writer Carl Traynor is noted as saying that he “wanted to publish fifteen books before he died, and to have no more than three of them—‘or four, tops'—be the kind of books that would have to be apologized for.” Yates set the same goal for himself and fell short in both respects, one of them fortunate: He published nine books but only felt obliged (usually) to apologize for
two
of them.
*
Of the latter one was
A Special Providence
and the other was
Young Hearts Crying
.

Even reviewers who were well disposed to Yates tended to find most of the characters flat and unsympathetic, while the (male) protagonist was thought to be downright repulsive. “I got so terribly tired of the weakness of Michael Davenport,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the daily
Times,
for whom the novel was “beguilingly vivid yet ultimately tiresome.” Jonathan Yardley of the
Washington Post
denounced Davenport as “monumentally inept and boorish,” and that was far from all. Noting the similarity to Yates's “deservedly celebrated first novel,” Yardley embarked on the wholesale demolition of
Young Hearts Crying
via comparison: “Where the first novel was artful, this latest is awkward; where the first was subtle, this latest is obvious; where the first was sympathetic, this latest is disdainful.” The reviewer took particular exception to Yates's “clumsily constructed” plot, what with its two long sections devoted to Lucy and Michael Davenport respectively, while the other all but disappears from the story. “Yates has written some very good books,” Yardley concluded, “but
Young Hearts Crying
isn't one of them.” Brian Stonehill of the
Los Angeles Times,
however, found the book's structure one of its finest features, as it “unroll[s] itself seamlessly, inevitably, with the ineluctability of a three-act tragedy, but without classic tragedy's effort to raise its characters above our own level.” And finally,
Time
magazine's Jay Cocks wrote the sort of encomium that—one hopes, anyway—gave Yates at least a measure of comfort: “
Young Hearts Crying
could stand as a definitive portrait of a man and woman, maturing in the 1940s, who spend the next three decades trying to get a grip on dwindling dreams that will not die and who have to settle down and, finally, settle.… [Yates] is just the writer that Michael Davenport always wanted to be.”

Yates was at the Crossroads when he read Broyard's long review (suggestively titled “Two-Fisted Self-Pity”) on page three of the Sunday
Times,
and his waitress Jennifer Hetzel noticed that he seemed upset. “Everything okay?” she asked.
“Who's going to pay my daughter's goddamn tuition?”
Yates exploded, indicating Broyard's handiwork. Hetzel was struck not only by the vehemence of the outburst—Yates, though often in a grouchy mood, tended to be quiet and polite—but also by the fact that he'd gone so far as to allude to his writing and/or private life, something he almost never did. “He was
that upset,
” she recalled. And no wonder. Broyard's review was not just an attack on
Young Hearts Crying,
but a skillful and malicious attempt to erase much of Yates's reputation with a single definitive stroke. “At a time when a wider public is gaining access to Richard Yates's work,” a reader protested in a subsequent letter to the
Times,
“it is sad to see a critic of Anatole Broyard's influence decide not only to lambast Mr. Yates's recent novel,… but to go for the jugular too by excoriating the man's earlier writing.… It is disheartening that [Yates's] long overdue success has brought in the sharks.” And this, of course, from a general reader who presumably had no way of knowing that Broyard and Yates were once boon companions, or that Yates had never spoken of his friend's work except with kindness and admiration. Not that such considerations were ever known to interfere with Broyard's brand of “critical objectivity”—indeed the performance might even be called Broyardian. As Dan Wakefield (and others) noted, “Broyard would actually request books by writers he disliked or resented for the express purpose of junking them.” But more on that in due course.

To be fair, one doesn't doubt that Broyard genuinely disliked Yates's novel and for roughly the right reasons: “
Young Hearts Crying
fails … because Michael Davenport is not an interesting or appealing man.” By the time one arrives at that assessment toward the end of the review—such is the suave assuasiveness of Broyard's style—one can scarcely fail to agree that Yates has written a novel all but entirely concerned with a sentimental, self-pitying, bigoted idiot:

In Mr. Yates's attack on phoniness, there is something of the evangelist and of Archie Bunker too. His men are exasperatingly anti-intellectual, almost phobic about large ideas. They're apologetic even about liking literature.… [Davenport] almost always adds an expletive or an obscenity, like a beer chaser, to his esthetic pronouncements.… Mr. Yates's men enjoy sex, drinking and talking: they
suffer
art. When Michael Davenport meets a new woman, he immediately thinks of her in bed.… He calls his women “baby.” Carl Traynor, a novelist…, also calls women baby.… Though Michael Davenport is a published poet, we never see a single line of any of his poems, and this is odd and unconvincing. He doesn't talk like a poet,… and we wonder where he keeps his poetry hidden about his personality.

And so on. As a further example of absurd “macho” posturing in the book, Broyard made light of Davenport's refusal to accept Lucy's millions because it might threaten his “manhood”; ditto the scenes in which Davenport punches party guests in the stomach.

Broyard's observation that both Davenport and Carl Traynor call their women “baby” is crafty on a number of levels, insofar as it leaves the impression that Yates's men are not only a little cretinous but also, taken together, simply cardboard cutouts of the same basic personality—to wit, Yates himself, whose tendency to call women “baby” Broyard knew well. And the fact was, of course, that in the cases of Davenport and Traynor the author
was
duplicating himself, and this points to a legitimate flaw in the novel's conception. Yates's material for
Young Hearts Crying
was wholly autobiographical, and yet he wanted to avoid another obvious alter ego as protagonist (and thereby another “half-acre of pain” review), so he borrowed the intriguing résumé of a man he hardly knew, Peter Kane Dufault, and hence the poetry, Golden Gloves, Harvard, and wealthy wife. But needless to say Michael Davenport remains essentially Yates—or rather how Yates fancied himself, perhaps, had he been a war hero and boxer as well as a writer, not to say devoid of any redeeming, sui-generis qualities such as a sense of humor and excess talent. The resulting composite is a kind of lurching Frankenstein monster of a character who (as Broyard deftly implied) incorporates all of its creator's most conventional, unlikable traits: Yates, like Davenport, was all too apt to refer to the Mahopac-Tonapac estate as a “fruit farm” because “one of America's most celebrated faggot actors” happened to live there; Yates, too, was probably “nettled” (and sometimes enraged) by the perceived phoniness of the cast-off military regalia favored by Bob Parker–Tom Nelson; and doubtless Yates dearly
wished
at times he could fell with a single blow people who made pseudo-intellectual comments at parties (“We're the second Lost Generation”) as well as people who played at being artists of one sort or another. To find what's missing in Michael Davenport, one turns to the more substantial “Me character,” Carl Traynor, tucked away into a subplot of the novel: “There were times when she'd find [Traynor] so lost in his nervous pacing and chain-smoking, talking too fast and absently pulling at the crotch of his pants the way little boys do, that she couldn't believe he had written the book she admired so completely.” Michael Davenport was perhaps too self-consciously masculine to pluck at his crotch in front of women, “absently” or not, but the boyishly anxious Yates (and hence Traynor) could hardly have helped it. And while Davenport can arguably be dismissed as a boorish dolt and little else, Traynor is too human to be merely ridiculous: “But there were other times … when [Traynor] was calm and wise and funny and always knew how to please her.” Yates was like that, too; as for the wooden Davenport, his one memorable witticism is that people tend to say “I can explain everything” in the movies.

Another flaw that tended to reinforce the others was, simply enough, the novel's length. This is
not
to accuse Yates of clumsy construction as Yardley would have it; if
Young Hearts Crying
is clumsy, then so too is practically any sprawling novel—
Ulysses, Anna Karenina, Valley of the Dolls
—in which certain characters dominate the plot at long intervals while others are shunted offstage, and what of it? No, the problem in Yates's case is pretty much length per se—a determination to be comprehensive, ambitious, to avoid “skimpiness” at all costs, the better to duplicate the
scope
of a famous first novel. Ironically, in that author profile entombed in Broyard's minefield, Yates conceded a pertinent point or two in his own favor: “I make fewer mistakes now, technically.… I know when a character can be introduced without a lot of background detail. And I know when a chapter can be hurried along. Generally, I've acquired a better sense of pace.” Quite so, particularly in regard to his three previous novels, but
Young Hearts Crying
lacks that kind of elegant compression and all that inheres in it—understatement, irony, off-center silences. Instead the Davenports talk and talk and repeat the same mistakes and suffer the same embarrassments, all at detailed length, which serves finally to emphasize the fact that, alas, both Michael and Lucy are
very
tiresome people.

Is it a bad novel? It is not. Yates didn't write (or publish anyway) bad novels, and a work of fiction is not to be condemned outright on the basis of unlikable characters. The book is always readable and interesting, full of “agonizing moments and virtuoso passages of comic relief” as Sam Lawrence put it: When Davenport yanks the nails out of the carpet to play with Nelson's toy soldiers, or oafishly trades punches at parties, or endures that long bout of impotence with Mary Fontana, most readers are bound to experience a certain pang of recognition whether they like Davenport or not. Moreover such scenes—indeed almost every scene and image in the novel—work to contribute something to our sense of the characters' awkwardness, the awful gulf between who they are and who they wish to be.

In fact the book's virtues are all representative of Yates's best work; Broyard, however, proceeded by exhaustively attacking the novel's biggest flaw—weak characters—and then suggested that
this
was the most typical Yatesian feature, which brought him cunningly to the real business at hand:

Several critics have praised Mr. Yates's “precision” and his style.… A devil's advocate might say that his characters are so simple and unambiguous that they can be “precisely” described. So far as style is concerned, there doesn't seem to be any, and perhaps this is by design, an emblem of Mr. Yates's realism, his refusal to embellish or distort his characters with authorial eloquence.

The main question in Mr. Yates's work is whether we are being asked to see around, or beyond, the characters to some kind of symbolism—or to take them literally. Are we supposed to forgive their shortcomings and their failures as God does, or are they being offered up as intrinsically interesting, without extenuation? Is his perspective metaphysical or entomological? His characters seem shrunk by realism, robbed of invention and reduced to bleak and repetitive rituals.

Defending Yates against the larger charges of what Cassill called (in a sympathetic letter to Yates) the “Anatole assassination” is tempting but redundant at this point. “What happens to a
writer
who says
you
have no style…?” Cassill wrote with wondering indignation, a sentiment that will be shared by Yates's admirers and rejected, perhaps, by his detractors. The same applies to Broyard's insinuation that Yates's characters,
as a rule,
are so shrunken and flat that no enlightened reader could possibly find them intrinsically (or “entomologically”) interesting. If one is apt to hold that opinion of the Wheelers, Helen and John Givings, Alice Prentice, John Wilder, the Grimeses, Bill Grove, Gloria Drake, et al., to say nothing of Sobel, Sergeant Reece, Vincent Sabella, Ken Platt, Christine Phillips, Sally Baldwin, et al., then one is probably neither a reader of Yates nor of the present book. (Most of Yates's characters, suffice to say, serve both an “entomological”
and
“metaphysical” purpose—as Yates intended—but one has already gone into all that.)