A Tragic Honesty

by Blake Bailey

  Instead of becoming some lesser, latter-day version of Scott and Zelda, Rich and Sheila reverted to a pair of homely alter egos they dubbed “Pinner and Shirley”: Pinner was a clinging, doe-eyed invalid who resented his wife’s unabashed enjoyment of the beach, the countryside, the long bike rides into town with the baby in tow for a pleasant day’s marketing; Shirley was the caustic scold who tended to return from these outings wondering why on earth a man on death’s door should keep smoking like a chimney and leaving ashes all over the place and couldn’t he at least go for a walk now and then and get a little fresh air? And Shirley it was who put her foot down, finally, refusing to fetch her husband’s cigarettes from Cannes anymore, no matter how pathetically he begged or threatened in her pedaling wake (“[Pinner’s] old broken espadrilles slapping the dust,” as he recalled the scene). What made matters worse was that Sheila herself liked to have the odd smoke after dinner, and went right on having it (“I wasn’t going to quit! There wasn’t anything wrong with me!”) while her husband sat glowering but quiet because of the baby. Later he’d root her butts out of the trash and smoke them down to the last spark, but resented having to do so. “This was the principal source of friction,” Sheila recalled, with marvelous understatement.

  Thankfully Yates had better luck with his art. Sheila’s brother Charlie had sent a copy of Yates’s latest story, “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” to an old show-business friend of the family, the agent Monica McCall, and on January 15, 1952, she replied:“Yates is without question a writer. There is an old cliché: ‘The ink is in the hair,’ and he definitely has it.” And with that Yates made the single most important contact of his career, a woman whose support—professional, moral, and otherwise—would never flag, no matter how rocky the road became.

  Monica McCall was one of five sisters born of Scottish parents in Leicester. Often described as “a perfect English lady,” sweet and devoted to her clients, she was also tough as nails and never to be trifled with. A grande dame who resembled “a pretty version of Margaret Rutherford” (as her protégé Mitch Douglas put it), McCall inherited the same quirky, determined nature that had spurred one of her sisters to leap off London’s Waterloo Bridge after a failed love affair and another to become a nun who vanished at a tender age into a vow of silence. But Monica was nothing if not worldly, and her career is the stuff of legend in the publishing world. She was born in 1899 but refused to reveal that fact to anybody, not even to company insurance representatives, choosing rather to do without coverage. And when she and her longtime partner, the poet Muriel Rukeyser, were arrested with a crowd for lying down in the Senate visitors gallery to protest the Vietnam War, McCall insisted the police take her to jail along with everybody else, no matter what her age. On the other hand, she wasn’t averse to acting enfeebled if it fit her purpose, as when she’d commandeer wheelchairs at airports, the better to sail through the crowd to her flight. She brought the same wily righteousness to her professional conduct—an elusive quality indistinguishable from tenderness with regard to her clients’ interests. When Esquire wanted to put her at the “Red-Hot Center” of its “Literary Universe,” she declined, as she thought it beneath the dignity of herself and her authors. It was this sort of integrity that commanded Yates’s respect and even love, such that he named his second daughter after her, a gesture McCall never forgot. She often inquired after her namesake, and once sent the child an antique brooch with “Monica” engraved on it.

  Her curious mixture of warmth and savvy was evident from the start of their relationship. Two weeks after she remarked to Charlie Bryant that his brother-in-law had ink in his hair, she wrote to Yates directly and asked if she might “please call [him] Dick”: “Since I have known your fine Sheila since she was two years old, I don’t believe I can address you as ‘Mr. Yates’!” That said, she then deflated the jubilant Dick by making it clear she hadn’t, in fact, told Charlie that she was willing to handle him solely on the basis of “A Really Good Jazz Piano”—though in fact she had: “I’m delighted to read any other stories that you care, or he cares to send in,” she’d written Charlie in that first letter, “and furthermore to represent him.” (She later apologized for the error when Yates pointed it out to her.) She was, however, “very interested” to read more of his work, and would then decide whether or not to take him on as a client.

  Yates sent his seven best stories in the order he’d written them, and a month later McCall responded with a thumbnail critique of each and a definite decision to offer at least two of the stories for sale, and hence become his agent. Manifest in her letter is an all but infallible sense of what sold in the so-called literary fiction market, and in the future when Yates chose to ignore her advice he’d generally come to regret it. McCall noted that Yates’s work showed a “good build”—i.e., that his more recent stories were better than his early ones, a good augury, but for now most of them didn’t pass muster. A brief anecdote titled “Bells in the Morning” was a “promising beginning but not saleable,” and “A Last Fling, Like” lacked everything from a strong story to a “vivid or interesting or moving character.” Two other stories Yates sent in the batch, “The Misfits” and “Shepherd’s Pie on Payday,” are no longer extant in any form—and no wonder, given the awful verdict McCall passed on each: The first was “out of focus,” and the second was “nothing more nor less than two rather briefly etched characters having a conversation which leads nowhere” (to which she tactfully added, “Don’t forget that every good writer has an occasional lapse, and forgive me for thinking this one of your lapses!”). The only stories she thought potentially saleable were “The Canal” and “No Pain Whatsoever”—and though she had little apparent hope for the former (“I will do my best to place it”), her estimate of the latter was prescient as ever (“best story of the lot … deeply touching, beautifully characterized”).

  Most telling was her ambivalence toward that early draft of “A Really Good Jazz Piano”; though she thought it a “great improvement” over most of Yates’s other stories, its ending was “unprepared for and obscure”—that is, in this version the two protagonists, Carson and Ken, erupt in weird laughter over their cruelty toward Sid, the black jazz pianist, and on that note the story ends. “Do you want to think about the end at all,” McCall inquired, “or let me know what you were trying to do, or is that too dreary for you?” Yates replied that he thought the ending “honest” and wanted to keep it, and McCall agreed to offer the story as is. It would take Yates six years to accept his error.

  * * *

  In April the Yateses moved into Stephen Benedict’s former apartment at Palais Beau Site in Cannes, once the place had finally been vacated by a navy wife who’d lived there after Benedict (she later became fodder for Yates’s story, “Evening on the Côte d’Azur,” about which more below). Before the war Palais Beau Site had been a rather stately hotel and, whatever its subsequent decline, was a vast improvement over La Monada in Juan-les-Pins. The new apartment was a compact arrangement of two rooms plus kitchen and bath, with pleasant ceramic-tiled floors and a little balcony in back that afforded a stunning view of the Mediterranean. “At its best and sunniest,” Benedict recalled, “it was paradise.”

  Yates would have agreed in at least one respect: Now that he was closer to town he could buy his own cigarettes, the procurement of which was about the only thing that coaxed him outside. Occasionally he’d walk on the beach, but mostly he was content to stick to his old routine of writing, smoking, and coughing. As for Sheila, she was sick of the whole business, and chose to go her own way as much as possible. A letter she wrote in 1962 alludes to their “semi-separation in Cannes,” and one can only guess what this entailed, since she now remembers the time as “tranquil” relative to later years. True, she was tired of “fussing about cigarettes” and so forth, but as for the rest of it she’d come to accept (at least in retrospect) that her husband was simply a “city person”—and city meant New York, Paris, or London, and not some overheated tour
ist trap like Cannes, where he’d just as soon stay at his desk.

  Meanwhile the news from Monica McCall suggested that Yates wasn’t headed for overnight success. Within a month both “The Canal” and “No Pain Whatsoever” were turned down by the Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, Esquire, and The New Yorker. “Yates has a lot of talent,” wrote Esquire (returning “Canal”), “but we just aren’t using much fiction with a World War II angle.” The Atlantic thought “No Pain Whatsoever” was “bogged down in the wasteful conversation which seemed to fill far too much of the first two-thirds of the story.” And while Harper’s was “impressed” and willing to see more—they did, and declined—The New Yorker dispatched both stories with a standard rejection slip.* A few months later “No Pain Whatsoever” was also rejected by a new literary magazine called Discovery, whose editor would someday become a friend and colleague of Yates. As Vance Bourjaily wrote McCall, the story was “perfectly handled,” with “only one thing missing … some feeling of why the author has chosen to write it”; as far as Bourjaily could tell, the narrator “never develops an attitude” toward Myra, the adulterous protagonist, and hence one doesn’t know “whether tragedy’s involved or simply animal pathos.” An elaborate way of saying, perhaps, that the reader can’t tell whether Myra’s supposed to be good or bad.

  That a fine writer and reader like Bourjaily could render such a judgment suggests something of what Yates was up against. Of course there was less tolerance for moral ambiguity in those days, but that goes only so far in explaining the discomfort and even outrage that Yates’s work (throughout his career) aroused in certain readers: “Why does he have to write so unpleasantly that one feels there’s just no good in anybody?” wrote a Harper’s editor in rejecting “A Really Good Jazz Piano”—and really, the saga of that story alone (assuredly a classic; Yates’s own favorite as late as 1974) might serve to encapsulate the kind of reception his early work, in particular, received. “What a good story this must be for us to be going on about it so!” wrote Monica McCall in April 1952, as she remonstrated with Yates over that problematic ending. A few months later “Jazz” was turned down by both New American Writing and New World Writing, and the next year Argosy followed suit: “[T]he playboy setting and depressing ending rule it out for us.” In 1955 the writer Peter Matthiessen, then an editor at Paris Review, rejected the story for a familiar reason, which he saw fit to frame in aesthetic rather than moral terms: “The cruelty which forms its climax is incredible, not in itself, but in terms of these characters and this situation.” When Esquire also called the ending a “let-down” in 1957, Yates finally got the point and revised the story into its present superlative form—whereupon The New Yorker promptly rejected it with what must by then have seemed an almost mocking refrain: “Hope you [McCall] will let us see other stories from him.” Esquire agreed to have another look at the revised version, and this time accepted it—only to reject it again when they learned that Yates would be including the story in the 1958 Scribner’s volume Short Story 1 (“Rust Hills did have the grace to say that he was distressed and apologetic about the manner in which they handled ‘the matter,’” McCall wrote bitterly). The New Yorker offered to reconsider yet again, but this time found it “too pat and neatly contrived” (as opposed to lacking believability, an earlier charge), and other rejections followed from Harper’s, the Atlantic, and Saturday Evening Post (“for fairly obvious reasons”). Finally—almost a decade after Yates had finished that draft on the Riviera—the story made its magazine debut in Vance Bourjaily’s Discovery. To this day Bourjaily feels proud of having published one of Yates’s best and most representative stories: “I’m a jazz snob like Carson,” he said, “and by the end of the story I understood his offense, and saw it in myself, even if Carson didn’t.” That Bourjaily and other good readers tend to see themselves in Yates’s characters is perhaps a clue worth remembering.

  Meanwhile back in Cannes, 1952, the waves shushed outside and the sunlight dazzled the tiles and Yates lit another cigarette and got on with his work. He now had a superb agent, and several magazine editors thought he was talented (if misanthropic) and wanted to see more. Given that on a good day the most he could write was maybe half a polished page, or just over a hundred words, there was no time to let up—though he still had a lot to learn, and the quality of his work wavered. “Foursome,” the next story he finished after “A Really Good Jazz Piano,” was rejected without fanfare and doesn’t survive.

  “Thieves” is interesting as an early variation on one of Yates’s favorite themes: the depths to which people deceive themselves into thinking they’re somehow special, set apart from the herd. Protagonist Robert Blaine is the abrasive sage of a TB sanatorium, and for much of the story he holds forth on the meaning of “talent” (“knowing how to handle yourself”), and offers himself as a good example—as when he swaggered into a swanky Madison Avenue clothing store and conned the clerk into thinking he was a bigshot. Well in advance of Blaine’s bleak epiphany, though, the reader is given a nudge: “All the stories whose purpose was to show Robert Blaine as a seasoned man of the world were laid in ’thirty-nine or ’forty, when he had first come to New York, just as those intended to show him as an irrepressible youth took place in Chicago, ‘back in the Depression.’” Finally Blaine tells how he “stole” a woman named Irene from her well-heeled husband, whose money they spent for six months: “‘[She] thought I was going to be another Sherwood Anderson. Probably still does.’” The disparity between his past and present “promise” occurs all at once to Blaine, and his breathing becomes “shallow and irregular”; but when a concerned patient seeks help for Blaine’s “nerves,” the matter-of-fact nurse delivers a blunt coup de grace: “Oh, honestly, that Blaine. Nerves, for God’s sake. Big baby, that’s all he is.” Monica McCall was kind in her estimate of “Thieves”: “It is a good story, beautifully characterized, but I think not any better selling bet than the stories on which I am working”—a tactful way of saying that it was little more than a few characters having a conversation which leads somewhere, perhaps, but nowhere interesting enough to justify the overall lack of drama.

  Yates’s next story, “The Comptroller and the Wild Wind,” is an even broader repository of the themes and tendencies that would reappear in his later work, as well as a few he’d subsequently discard—Joycean lyricism, for instance: “A long time ago, he had married a girl with splendid long legs and a face that was described as pert (in the blue half-light of dawn she whispered, ‘darling, darling, darling,’ and the legs were strong, the face was wild and lovely).” With a further nod to Joyce, the latter’s poem “Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba” is quoted in full here, as it would be more than thirty years later as the epigraph to Young Hearts Crying, whose title it supplied. And that poem, with all it suggests of the lost illusions of youth, is very much to the point in “Comptroller” and elsewhere (less blatantly) in Yates’s work. Another gambit that would become almost a signature is the opening line(s) that foreshadows doom: “The morning after his wife left him, George Pollock, comptroller of the American Bearing Company, had breakfast at a counter for the first time in twenty years. He destroyed three paper napkins trying to remove one, whole, from the tight grip of the dispenser, and nearly upset a glass of water in an effort to keep his briefcase from sliding off his lap.” Hence the bungling Pollock—a dull man judging by his job description and surname—is left utterly helpless by the desertion of his wife, the “Wild Wind” of the title, who was not so wild that she was unwilling to fix him breakfast every morning for twenty years. But no more: “‘Oh, how can anyone hate you,’” she tells him on the eve of her departure with a man who shares her fondness for poetry; “‘you’re not hateful—you’re just a pompous, posturing fussy little man!’” Just so: The decent Pollock is a lot less hateful than, say, Frank Wheeler (to whom the same sentiment would be applied in Revolutionary Road), such that one wonders, really, what the man has done to deserve so many humiliations in a single nar
rative day. “Close, but no cigar—I’m not sure why,” wrote an Esquire editor in rejecting the story. “I think it’s because there doesn’t seem to be any occasion for so much bitter handling, and just a little contempt for the nonintellectual.” To be sure there was compassion as well as contempt, but in terms of basic effect other editors agreed in toto.

  Monica McCall was patient and duly encouraging: “You are progressing well from the more anecdotal character sketch type of story into the fuller, more rounded story.” And Yates continued to make progress with his next story, “Nuptials,” an early draft of one of his masterpieces, “The Best of Everything.” McCall responded that it was a “swell story” and submitted it for consideration as an Atlantic “First”—the magazine’s prestigious showcase for previously unpublished authors. But the Atlantic declined without comment, as did The New Yorker and Esquire a few weeks later, and when McCall proposed sending it to the somewhat obscure Botteghe Oscure, a plainly frustrated Yates dismissed the magazine as “an esoteric little tea-party journal.”

  By now Yates was badly in need of a success, even if it meant some sort of artistic compromise. After all, his hero Fitzgerald had written any number of hokey, formulaic stories for the Saturday Evening Post, and gotten rich in the bargain; why not Richard Yates? The result of such professionalism was “A Convalescent Ego,” a story that turned the raw material of his illness and shaky marriage into a wacky Walter Mitty–like farce. Those who wonder what it must have been like for Sheila when Yates returned from the TB ward (or just on a daily basis for that matter) need look no further than “Convalescent Ego”: