by Blake Bailey
Among the first to congratulate him was Sam Lawrence; that done, Lawrence briskly reaffirmed his great confidence in Yates’s novel-in-progress: “[Y]our best [work has] always indicated the gifts of a natural writer. There are so many writers today who don’t have that unmistakable quality.” Yates needed the encouragement. When he wasn’t gouging away at his novel between long despondent fortnights lost to PR work, he was trying to stay in the public eye as a fiction writer by reworking a few of his more promising stories. The revised “B.A.R. Man” was now being tried on such magazines as Swank, Bachelor, Gentry, and Nugget, none of whose editors chose to introduce Yates to their special readership. Esquire sniffed that they’d “gotten away a bit from woman-hating stories like the BAR Man one,” and also rejected (again) “A Really Good Jazz Piano” and “Evening on the Côte d’Azur.” Meanwhile Sam Lawrence’s latest sop was vitiated somewhat when he returned the revised “Out with the Old” with yet another perfunctory note along the lines of extremely well-written, but. A year later the same story was accepted by the Western Review, which on further consideration rejected it, as did the Dial (“encouragingly”).
Yates was taking things hard. Two years had passed since he’d started his novel, and a satisfactory draft was nowhere in sight; at this rate he’d never be able to support himself as a fiction writer, yet he could hardly bear the thought of indefinite hacking for Remington Rand. The future looked grim, and Yates behaved accordingly. For most of his adult life he’d been a beer drinker who limited himself to the occasional binge, but now he routinely drank almost a fifth of bourbon a day. At his worst Yates was like one of his own characters facing the terrible truth of his limitations: He’d bemoan his lack of progress to anybody who cared to listen, or else lapse into loud opinionated rants on some elusive general theme, or simply fall over the furniture. He also began vomiting in the morning. At first Sheila assumed the obvious, but in fact drinking was only a general factor. For most of his life from Mahopac on, even in times of relative sobriety, Yates’s pulmonary health was such that he’d never again know what it was like to feel good when he started the day. Sometimes the hacking and vomiting would go on for hours before his lungs were clear enough to light a cigarette and get on with his work.
“From the time Monica was born,” said Sheila, “I knew the marriage was going down the tubes.” When work had gone poorly at the wellhouse, Yates would stalk back to the cottage in a foul mood and spend the night soaking under his wife’s censorious or indifferent gaze. Sometimes they’d have dreary repetitive arguments once the children were in bed, but once again (as in Europe) these became rare. Sheila didn’t have the heart to bother anymore. It wasn’t that Yates was a mean drunk, just noisy and stubborn and self-absorbed, and she decided to find better uses for her time. Beyond a point, she began to consider her life as mostly separate from that of her husband, who was fast becoming a rather ghostly presence. After dinner he’d go back to the wellhouse to drink in peace, while Sheila took evening classes at Danbury State College.
The time came when Yates could no longer juggle fiction with drinking and Remington Rand. The deeper he got into his novel, the more of its intricate design he had to keep in his head, and the forced return to hackwork every couple of weeks became a hideous distraction. This of course led to more despair, drinking, and exhaustion, until something had to give. Perhaps the most loathsomely mechanical aspect of his Remington Rand work was writing the internal house organ—sifting through a bulging monthly envelope full of scraps, which had to be converted into sprightly items about regional sales meetings, or companies that had purchased certain products and why, or who had been promoted to what and so on. Yates couldn’t do it anymore. It was all too close to the quiet desperation at the heart of his novel, the sort of thing that taxed his Flaubertian detachment to the utmost. Sheila, however, flatly refused to give up the three hundred dollars a month brought in by the newsletter alone, and so began to write the thing herself. The subterfuge went on for years without a hitch. If anything, the newsletter might have improved somewhat, as it’s hard to imagine Yates putting much thought into a playlet about the invention of the typewriter, as Sheila was glad to do for a special centennial issue.
They socialized more than ever, as company seemed to relieve the strain, and generally they were adept at acting the happy couple. Amid such seeming conjugal peace, their friend Ann Kowalsky was impressed by the vaguely dissonant note struck by the Yateses’ dinner table, a tasteful old refectory piece in the Spanish style: “It was the support for Sheila’s marvelous meals and the numerous bottles—beer, wines, Old Grand Dad and Old Crow.” At the time Yates, too, was a curious compound of courtesy and boorishness, gloom and hilarity—one or the other with rather little in between, all aspects of the same restive temperament. An essential sweetness was in evidence when Kowalsky was about to give birth to twins in 1957; the couples agreed she’d call Yates as soon as she went into labor, as he was bound to be home and could drive her to the hospital in Mount Kisco. When the time came, Yates rushed over at once and waited in jittery, chain-smoking misery while Kowalsky got some last-minute chores done. By the time they pulled onto the Merritt Parkway he was barely capable of speech, and sped obliviously past the Mount Kisco exit. This shattered his nerves further, and when they finally arrived at the hospital he was attracting almost as much attention as his hugely pregnant companion. “Please try to calm down,” an orderly said to the trembling, pacing, deathly pale man whom everyone assumed to be the father. “These must be your first twins.” Yates hastened to deny it, and when Kowalsky began teasing him—“Dick, how can you say that at this point! I’m in labor” etc.—he became even more painfully distrait. Such tortured solicitude was touching, and Kowalsky bore it in mind when Yates later made a drunken pass at her.
Perhaps the best times were with their friends Bob and Dot Parker, whom they met shortly after moving to Mahopac. Robert Andrew Parker was a rising young artist who combined a pawky sense of humor with a pokerfaced fondness for toy soldiers and military clothing.* He was especially receptive to Yates’s rather caustic wit, and the two tended to bring out the best in each other. “I used to get a headache behind my eyes from laughing so hard,” Parker said of their times together. Before long he and Yates were embarking on all sorts of improbable outings around Putnam County and points beyond. Once they rose before dawn so they could stake out a good place on the first day of pheasant-hunting season, which officially began at 8:04 A.M. A few minutes before eight, a cock pheasant alighted some twenty yards away, and the excited Yates couldn’t resist blasting it to pieces. “Who shot that bird?” shouted Parker’s angry neighbor. “Was that you, Bob? You should know better than that!” Another time they spent a tipsy afternoon cruising the suburbs of western Connecticut, laughing at street names; Yates needed to find a title for his novel, and this seemed a good place to start.
One of Parker’s friends, Peter Kane Dufault, seemed to interest Yates from afar. Dufault was a poet who’d gone to Harvard, lost early in the Golden Gloves, and married the wealthy heiress of the Spalding Sporting Goods fortune. Like Parker he was a toy soldier enthusiast, and the two would spend whole days planning elaborate campaigns and photographing the smoky aftermath. Yates hardly knew Dufault, though both were part of a loose, somewhat arty social circle that also included Tony Vevers and Bob Riche, and everyone tended to go to the same parties. Yates would eventually appropriate certain details of Dufault’s life in creating his character Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying—due in part, perhaps, to Dufault’s central role in an incident that inspired two linchpin scenes in the novel.
The bare facts are these: Dufault and Tony Vevers agreed to exchange punches at a drunken party; Dufault went first and landed a blow to Vevers’s solar plexus; the latter congratulated him, stepped back to return the punch, and fell over unconscious. There are, however, any number of Rashomon nuances, depending on who tells the story. Parker says the party in question took place at his house
in Croton Falls; Riche thinks it was at the converted barn owned by Elspeth Vevers’s mother; the still-bitter Tony Vevers insists it was at Yates’s cottage in Mahopac. For Vevers the episode serves as an almost perfect narrative catalogue of Yates’s more repellent qualities: First, Yates tended to pressure his guests to get so drunk they couldn’t drive, and those who tried to do so on that particular snowy night ended up in a ditch; second, Yates was ignoring Vevers’s wife, Elspeth, at the party because she was pregnant (“Dick had no use for pregnant women—you had to be skinny and cute”); third, Yates’s overall “mean streak” was peculiarly manifest on this occasion—that is, when Vevers finally came-to after the punch, his wife hysterical, the party and its host had moved on “as though nothing had happened.” Others point out that the muscular Vevers was roaring drunk that night, and in fact had belligerently challenged the affable, reluctant Dufault to punch him in the stomach as hard as he could—also, that chaos, not indifference, had ensued. In any case the memory of this event (colored further by its treatment in Young Hearts Crying) left Tony and Elspeth Vevers with a very dim view of Yates: “Other people were just a source of entertainment to him,” they both insist.
But many considered Yates a capital source of entertainment himself, and perhaps his most appreciative audience was Sheila. The everyday grind of their marriage might have been wretched beyond words, but when it wasn’t just the two of them, and Yates was on a roll, nobody could make his wife laugh harder. In fact—at least while they were married—she came to share his worldview in almost every objective particular. “They seemed to connect very well,” said Dot Parker. “One could start a thought and the other could finish it.” Sheila was even amused (or acted that way) when she herself was the target of her husband’s barbs, as with a routine of his that involved dancing a jig and singing a ribald ditty that began, “Oh my name is Gilhooley…”—nobody remembers the rest, but the gist of it was that Sheila’s Irish background was more shabby than genteel, which (as Yates knew better than anyone) struck at the heart of some rather tenacious pretensions. By then, however, Sheila seemed to know better than to engage Yates in a battle of wit, and was more inclined to sit back and enjoy the show as best she could. “Ever since I first met you,” she later wrote him,
I’ve been so awed by your intellectual and aesthetic quality, that I’ve been dogged by a feeling of never being quite able to make it. Your critical faculties are never suspended, and it never seems to require any effort on your part to keep this going—your taste and judgment seem to operate unerringly and inexhaustibly.… I know you’ll say “Well, hell, I need to collapse, too,” but when you do you go right on thinking and say more witty and observant things about Felix the Cat (or whatever it happens to be) than I could think of in a million years.
One might bear this “quality” in mind when trying to comprehend why Sheila persevered so long in the marriage, and also why it ultimately wore her out: That is, her husband’s acuity—whether witty or vindictive or both, drunk or sober—was “never suspended.”
The lighter side of this quality is nicely illustrated by the Conrad Jones affair. In 1958 Bob Parker was named one of the “Bright Young Men in the Arts” by Esquire, and subsequently received a letter from one of the “Bright Young Men in Business,” Conrad Jones: “Greetings! I feel a little pale in this select company and obliged to explain … that my inclusion is based probably on being the youngest partner (33) of the largest management consulting firm.… Maybe we ‘bright young men’ should know each other. This, then, is a standing invitation for you to stop in and get acquainted when you are in Chicago.” Parker couldn’t resist showing this exuberant letter to Yates, whose response was startlingly heated: A ruthless reprisal was in order, he insisted; long and bitter experience with such people (and their prose) convinced Yates that Jones was simply trying to wangle a business contact. Thus, while Sheila and the Parkers stood by with the odd suggestion, Yates found a blunt pencil and composed a response on his friend’s behalf: “I surely do say ‘yes’ to finding common interests in our different lines. You say you feel pale Mr. Conrad, well you could of ‘knocked me over with a feather’ when I heard they were going to have me in the esquire [sic] magazine.” As for Jones’s invitation to visit, “it just so happen[ed]” (Yates wrote) that Parker and his wife would soon be in the Chicago area: “Therefore, please write me you’re [sic] home street address number and telephone number (home) in case we get there after the close of business.” He added a postscript: “Say! Do you bowl I could give you a pretty good game if you do!” They crumbled half a cookie into the envelope, addressed it in crayon (marked VERY PERSONAL), and dropped it in the mail.
Jones didn’t reply. “I guess some people think their [sic] better than others,” began Yates’s second note, and went on from there. Apparently Jones couldn’t bear such a charge, and wrote back with the sort of civility and lack of irony that had led to his becoming the youngest partner (at thirty-three) of Booz, Allen and Hamilton. Jones pointed out that he and his family would be on vacation for three weeks in December, and suggested the Parkers visit either before or after; he gave his home phone number in Winnetka. Yates was delighted, and labored over his third and final letter with the kind of loving care he accorded his best fiction; the manuscript is heavily scored with strike-outs, subtle emendations, and long marginal second thoughts. “My dear Jones,” began the flawlessly typed final draft,
How nice to have your second note. And how distressing, alas, to find my calendar so filled with a sudden profusion of commitments here that I’m afraid our plans for a jaunt across the Great Plains must be set aside for a time. I may say that Mrs. Parker’s disappointment is as keen as my own, and that nothing would have given us greater pleasure than to accept your hospitality at Winnetka (such a charming place-name—evokes visions of frosty pumpkins and so on, straight out of Whitcomb Riley).
The letter goes on for two more pages. “I’ve taken the liberty of passing your address to several friends,” Yates wrote, “all of whom do plan western junkets of one sort or another in the next few weeks.” These “friends” included Bertrand Meubles, the lutanist; Bart Pardee, the beat novelist (“One can’t altogether dismiss the charge of incoherence in his early ‘Burn All Your Cities’* and ‘Go, Man, Go!’”); Aubrey Creavey Ewing, the poet (“author of ‘Trembling Shadows’ [Nuance Press, 1956] in which the critic E. E. Toste found ‘some of the most delicately tentative imagery in contemporary verse’”); P. Loomis Llewellyn (“who could be capable of unusual achievement … if his all-but-crippling emotional problem could be transcended”); and Max Klopp, the political scientist (author of “Marx, Man, and the Tyranny of the Middle Class”). One can only imagine what effect this had on Conrad Jones, who perhaps lost some of his innocence along the way.
Of course it’s one thing to bait some faceless Babbitt in Winnetka, another to mock more or less inoffensive people—chiefly female—about matters over which they have no control. One of the more curious paradoxes of Yates’s nature was his almost archaic courtliness toward women on the one hand, and his lifelong tendency to emphasize their physical defects and/or dubious upbringing on the other. “Margaret Truman” was how he referred to a tall, skinny woman whom a friend briefly dated, while another became “the druggist’s daughter” because of her humble background in the Bronx. And once, when Yates was introduced to a young woman who exposed her upper gums when she smiled, he turned around and mimicked her with a precise ugly grimace. “In those days,” said Bob Riche, “he reminded me of F. Scott Fitzgerald on the Côte d’Azur: an awful pain in the ass, but fun to be around.”
* * *
More so than most, Yates was at his best among people he admired—generally those who combined talent with integrity, particularly other writers—and one explanation for his abrasiveness in the mid-fifties was that he knew very few people who fitted that description. Nor was he quite the sickly, uncertain, and mostly sober young man who’d gone to Europe to teach himself h
ow to write; since then Yates had grown more sure of his own essential talent, and this (plus alcohol) made him less patient with people he regarded as pretentious and self-deluding—who reminded him of Dookie, in short. But in 1958 Yates had the good fortune of meeting a few peers, and all the better that this should come about as the result of breakthroughs in his career.
Esquire had decided to buy “The B.A.R. Man” after all, whereupon fiction editor Rust Hills and his assistant took Yates out to lunch. As he later described the occasion, Yates listened with bored annoyance while the two editors “kept cracking each other up at the table with inside jokes and references that [Yates] couldn’t follow.” At one point, though, they mentioned R. V. Cassill, a name Yates recognized (barely, since he thought it was pronounced “Cassill”) as the author of such excellent stories as “The Prize” and “The Biggest Band.” When Yates expressed his admiration, Hills told him that Cassill and his wife were living in New York and about to give a party, to which an extra invitation could easily be obtained. Yates was delighted, and his subsequent meeting with Verlin Cassill at the man’s “ramshackle” Village apartment was (almost) an unqualified success:
He was the first real writer I had ever met [Yates wrote], though I’d known plenty of the other kind, and he made an excellent first impression: an intense, black-haired man of thirty-eight or so, tired-looking and very courteous, with a voice so deep you had to lean a little forward in the party noise for fear of missing something. And even before that party was over, though his courtesy never flagged, I had found out something instructive about him. When Verlin says “Ah” in a certain way it means you have just said something dumb. It means he has decided to let you get away with it for now, but that if you don’t start watching your mouth, in about a minute he may tear you apart—verbally, of course.
