by Blake Bailey
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By 1984 Yates’s relationship with Dr. Winthrop Burr had deteriorated. During their early years together Yates would sometimes acknowledge that the sessions were a comfort—that they “made him less afraid of himself,” as Burr put it—but when the psychiatrist began to emphasize alcoholism as a major factor, Yates grew more and more hostile. Finally, after one enforced hospitalization too many, Yates became so enraged during a session that Burr walked out on him: “He was shouting so loud you could hear him down the hall,” said Burr, “calling me stupid, saying I lacked imagination, that my whole profession was corrupt and had fed off him all these years—used him as a guinea pig, done him no good.” Later Yates came to the clinic, drunk, and confronted Burr with an ambulance bill. Since his last hospitalization hadn’t been necessary in the first place, said Yates, he insisted that Burr pay. Burr pointed out that Yates was drunk (he denied it) and asked him to leave. After that there were no more psychotherapy sessions. Yates still came in for medication refills, and was civil but laconic when Burr asked how he was doing. A short while later Burr left the VA, but offered to take Yates on as a private patient at a reduced fee; Yates declined, though he did write Burr a gracious, rather apologetic letter thanking him for all his help. “Take care of those two beautiful girls,” he closed, referring to a portrait in Burr’s office of his young son and daughter. Burr continued to contact his successor at the VA and inquire about Yates’s condition, but the woman wasn’t able to tell him much.
Yates became increasingly cantankerous toward an unimaginative world that had used him ill. “Ahh that’s ridiculous!” he’d snap at any remark that didn’t jibe with his calcified worldview. For old times’ sake Wendy Sears was willing to invite Yates over for very special occasions—his fifty-eighth birthday, say—but it was an ordeal to be suffered strictly out of the goodness of one’s heart. Any remonstrance, no matter how diffident, over Yates’s slovenly ash spilling or aggressive opinionating was apt to spark a tantrum; it was better to let things go and watch the clock. Meanwhile Yates’s ambivalence toward such “well-bred” women as Sears and her cohorts became even more pointed, as he detected bad taste and pretension at every turn. One such woman’s cluttered, bohemian digs in Cambridge were, to Yates, an “absurd” attempt to deny her birthright, and when Sears and another Brahmin girlfriend worked as caterers’ maids, Yates refused to accept that they needed the money. “Oh how madcap,” he declared sarcastically.
Happily his literary fame was showing signs of resurgence. The year before, Revolutionary Road had been reissued as a Delta paperback, which attracted a long, laudatory notice by Michiko Kakutani in the daily Times: “More than two decades after its original publication, it remains a remarkable and deeply troubling book—a book that creates an indelible portrait of lost promises and mortgaged hopes in the suburbs of America.” Yates’s readership, such as it was, seemed primed for the publication of Young Hearts Crying in the fall, and already Yates was not only under way with his next novel, but eager to get started on the one after that. “It’s nice that Barrett Prettyman (or whoever it was) suggested publishing a collection of my Bobby Kennedy speeches,” Yates wrote Sam Lawrence in June,
but I’ve got a better idea: a novel about that period, with Bobby serving as one of the characters and even Jack having a walk-on part. Wendy Sears will be prominently featured, as will a haggard fellow who begrudges every hour spent at speechwriting because it’s denying him his life’s work; and there’ll be a large, mostly funny supporting cast.… I’ve been collecting notes and sketches for it over the past several years; I know how it’s going to begin and develop and where it will go from there. I’m planning to call it Uncertain Times unless a snappier title comes along.
Lawrence saw nothing ominously uncharacteristic about such an overt, political roman à clef—on the contrary, he thought the idea “infinitely better” than any book of speeches. Unfortunately he wasn’t Yates’s publisher anymore: A few months back he’d become a casualty of budget cuts and had moved his imprint to Dutton; as a result Yates’s next two novels, both under contract to Delacorte, would be published as “Seymour Lawrence” books in name alone. But the Kennedy novel struck Lawrence as a possible commercial breakthrough for Yates, and he wanted to be part of it: “The people at Dutton, from the President on down, are your fans,” he wrote. “I wish we could sign a contract right now.”
Yates was almost solvent for the first time in years. That August he and three others (Peter Taylor, Stanley Kunitz, and William Meredith) were awarded NEA Senior Fellowships worth twenty-five thousand dollars each—“to support and honor creative writers who have received the highest critical acclaim, but whose work may not be widely known outside the literary field.” As Frank Conroy explained on behalf of the Endowment, Yates had been selected by three separate panels of distinguished writers to receive the honor: “That’s great,” Yates replied (in a voice Conroy described as sounding “like it was coming from the back of a cement mixer which was also making cement while he spoke”); “when do I get the check?” Daunted as ever by the fearful prospect of facing an award reception alone, a bashful Yates asked “Wendy Serious” to be his “girl” again; she declined, of course, though she was willing to attend the reception with him. The evening was blessedly uneventful: Yates mingled a bit stiffly for a while, then stuck close to Sears and only snapped at her once (when she expressed a fondness for the work of John Irving). The high point came when Frank Conroy tipsily serenaded Yates on the piano, though the latter was eager to leave all the same.
As the October publication of his sixth novel approached, Yates’s ship appeared to be coming in at last. “I think Young Hearts Crying is the finest thing you’ve done,” Sam Lawrence wrote. “The writing is flawless, the dialogue rings absolutely true, and the characters come immediately to life and stay that way. It’s a broader canvas than Revolutionary Road (to which it will no doubt be compared). There are stark agonizing moments and virtuoso passages of comic relief. I’m proud to have my name on the title page.” As with Yates’s first novel—to which Young Hearts Crying would indeed be compared—an advance excerpt was published in Esquire, which described Yates as “one of America’s least famous great writers.” It was remarkable redemption for a man who, eleven years and five books before, had threatened to shoot the magazine’s fiction editor.
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.
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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 Cry
ing.
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, t
he 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.
