A Tragic Honesty

by Blake Bailey

  Sheila, too, was repulsed as ever by her “knick-knacky and scatter-ruggy” mother (“a mental case, to be sure”), but had to be civil as long as she was living in the woman’s house in Danbury (“like one of those spreads in Better Homes and Gardens”). This, however, was easily done, as Sheila had long ago conquered the worst of her aversion to Marjorie; she only wished her brother could cultivate the same detachment. “Charlie’s hate is making him sick because he loves her, or did,” she wrote Yates in April. “Mother, on the other hand, hates him but it doesn’t violate anything because she has no feeling for him.… She doesn’t feel anything for me either and the fact that she doesn’t has long since stopped affecting me at all. And until Charlie feels as I do about her he’ll be very sick in all departments of his life.” Little wonder that Sheila, in such company, should discover a renewed fondness for her husband.

  * * *

  Yates was determined to make the most of his “Jody” success, and now he had the further incentive of seeming a worthy provider in Sheila’s eyes. He asked Monica McCall if there was any chance his “more shopworn stories”—terminal cases such as “Foursome,” “Comptroller,” and something called “Stay Away from Liquids”—would sell on the English market. McCall suggested he show them to her colleague Dorothy Daly at the Curtis Brown agency in London, and a month later Daly reported that Yates’s work was “well-written” but “far, far too American in outlook to find a home here.” Yates continued to cast about. He even briefly revived his cartooning career, with particular emphasis on his old specialty, kahts, a portfolio of which he sent to Sheila with instructions to pass it on to McCall. Mussy was delighted by her Daddy’s drawings—“[she] showed everybody the pictures of Sweetheart,” Sheila wrote—but McCall was less so: “I know nothing about placing of pictures,” she tersely replied.

  Meanwhile Yates realized his best career move by far would be to write a novel—he might never again have such a bonus of time, money, and freedom. But quite simply he didn’t know how to proceed: “[M]ost of my ideas so far seem better suited to short stories,” he wrote Stephen Benedict, “and before I start a novel I want to be very damn sure I’ve got a grip on a novel-sized theme. But I may take the plunge any day, and the notion of a possible advance from Morrow makes it particularly tempting.” Instead he wrote “Lament for a Tenor,” the sort of exercise in explicit autobiography that always made him uneasy, no matter how well the actual writing seemed to go. In fact he thought the story might turn out to be his best yet in terms of the market, and he found himself envisaging future scholars “trying to explain the streak of sentimentality that spoiled all my work.” With that in mind, his smile may have been a bit on the wry side when he read McCall’s ecstatic response: “Oh that is a wonderful story! If The New Yorker made any sense they would buy it, but if they don’t I swear by everything I know that I will sell it.” As usual, her instincts would prove sound.

  Yates’s busy careerism was partly by way of distracting himself from an awful loneliness. Apart from the pubs he had no social life to speak of, and even the pubs were beginning to pall. As he wrote Sheila, none of the regulars “ever seems to talk about anything—never, I mean, say anything worth listening to.… None of them seems to like one another, either—when they get hold of an outsider, like me, they all take turns backing him into a corner and giving him the straight low-down on all the others present.” He also remarked on the gratingly repetitive Anglicisms to which he was subjected: “[T]he favorite adverb for everything is ‘madly’ (This pub’s getting madly smart, you know; I’m feeling madly hungover today) … [and] any sort of neurosis, real or suspected, is ‘really quite mental.’” Nor did he have Aunt Mary to keep him company anymore, since she’d left in April to spend the season at her cottage in Sussex. When he got desperate enough he’d go visit her daughter Gemma, whom he found rather dull and abrasive but well-meaning, and a decent cook besides. It was Gemma who suggested he find a roommate, since Yates had qualms now about paying so little rent but doubted he could afford more. That he thought the roommate idea “pretty good,” rent question or no, says volumes about his state of mind: “[I]t’ll be nice to have someone to share the cleaning and shopping chores,” he wrote, “and once the warm weather is here we won’t necessarily have to be big buddies, because this place is really two separate rooms.” In the same letter he was also at pains to point out that he’d sold their bicycle to Gemma for the lavish sum of thirty shillings (“how’s that for the opposite of kick-me-again?”), that he’d managed to gain weight (“high testimony to my conscientiousness”), and that he was “efficiency personified about the housework.” A changed man, in short, albeit a rather despondent one: “It’s a wrench passing other meats [babies] on the street, and listening to them chatter on busses.”

  Whether Yates’s loneliness led all the way to a disastrous affair with a Piccadilly prostitute, à la “Liars in Love,” will have to remain a matter of conjecture. His daughter Monica doesn’t recall his ever admitting as much, and as she points out, “[H]e wouldn’t have not admitted it,” since he was nothing if not candid with her. But as readers familiar with “Liars” will have realized by now, most of its details about Yates’s life in London are almost scrupulously accurate, from the chronology (“It was March of 1953, and he was twenty-seven years old”) to the exact location of the basement flat at 2 Neville Terrace (“where Chelsea met South Kensington along the Fulham Road”) to the English aunt who comes down to use the bathtub every morning, and so on. At any rate, something decidedly fishy appears to be lurking amid the pitiful braggadocio of a letter Yates wrote Sheila in June:

  In the past three months.… I’ve learned that women—not just a particular kind of woman (and it’s remarkable how few kinds there really are), but women in general—find me attractive as all get-out. They don’t need any special indoctrination or any apologies, they just like me, and this has come as an enormous surprise. (It will also, I’m sure, give you a badly distorted idea of the way I’ve been spending my time, but never mind that for now.) The value of this is that it has enabled me to relax in a certain fundamental way for the first time in my life. It will make me a much more relaxed, less neurotic and less demanding kind of husband, I can assure you.

  One could go on deconstructing this passage, but suffice to say that if the “women in general” who found Yates “attractive as all get-out” were anything like the devious, aggressive whore Christine in “Liars,” then he was probably more eager than ever to return to the relative calm of domesticity. Though perhaps, too, he looked forward to a distant day when he could recollect the “subtler pleasure in considering all the pathetic things about [Christine]—the humorless ignorance, the cheap, drooping underwear, the drunken crying.”

  Sheila appears to have enjoyed less exotic diversions, though apart from her family problems she did feel a great relief at being home again. The United States was like “a beautiful sunlit garden” to her, “where it’s even lovely to die or be sick.” Lest her husband take this the wrong way, she added that she wasn’t worrying so much about their separation anymore because “we both miss each other very much [and] know it’s a good idea.” Meanwhile an old childhood friend named Fess was teaching her how to drive (a skill she’d eventually attempt to pass on to Yates with curious results), and poor Charlie was disturbed as ever. The psychiatrist at Fairfield had told Sheila her brother was “completely recessed”—in other words, “acting like a very small child,” as when he caused a brawl on the ward by pulling a chair out from under another patient. Nor did the shock treatments seem to help, and for a while they were stopped in favor of psychotherapy per se, though Charlie was a reluctant analysand at best. He had a way of saying Why? or Prove it, when he bothered to say anything at all.

  Oddly enough, Mussy adored her deranged uncle and vice versa; she also proved an excellent go-between in Sheila’s relations with Marjorie and Dookie. The first was “genuinely fascinated” by the child: Once when Mussy passed her
grandmother a cookie during tea and topped this with a pack of cigarettes and a polite, “Haf a chicherette, gramer,” the poor woman was stunned. “Did you teach her that?” she asked Sheila, who replied, “No. She does it because she likes to.” Whereupon Marjorie tried to pay Sheila a rare compliment: “I guess I never saw a child that had been handled right.” But no sooner were the words out that she got a “frantic” look and said, “But I couldn’t, I just couldn’t with you two,” and fled the room. As for Dookie, she was quite comfortable as a grandmother, which didn’t require her to be either a role model or a provider. At the time she was supporting herself by sculpting souvenir bunnies and turkeys for the holidays (this while hoping for more dignified employment at the City Center art complex), and by far her favorite audience for that sort of thing was little Mussy, who liked to wear Dookie’s smocks and play with her plasticene animals. Nor was Dookie a bad companion to Sheila, especially now that the nervous old woman was out from under the scrutiny of her exasperated son. In fact she was often amusing and shrewd on subjects other than herself: After a rare gathering of the Maurer family (Ida’s husband had died), Dookie remarked with cold satisfaction that her sisters were “in their second childhoods”; and on the subject of her son’s work, she astutely observed that there were “innumerable things” he didn’t write about because of her. For a while Sheila considered it a “terrific bulwark” to know she could always move in with Dookie if life became intolerable with Marjorie.

  * * *

  As the weather changed, Yates took long solitary walks and thought what a shame it was that his wife and daughter had never experienced London like this—“a far cry from the drab and grimy town we saw all winter,” he wrote Sheila. Watching other parents with their “meats” was a torment, but one he couldn’t help indulging in; he kept thinking of things he might have done with Mussy, such as taking her out on a rowboat in Hyde Park, and now perhaps he never would. He observed, too, the springtime tradition of “interesting-looking” people who congregated on the terrace of his favorite pub on Sunday afternoons, “like a big outdoor cocktail party,” but he felt less and less inclined to join them. “My euphoria over the pleasures of bachelor life [has] pretty well palled,” he wrote with doleful understatement—though reminders of married life were hardly an unadulterated pleasure: When a doctor at the “air clinic” remarked that he’d once examined Sheila, Yates was at first pleased and then dour as the man seemed to remember the occasion all too vividly (“I got the distinct impression that he wanted to compliment me on the firmness of your breasts”).

  The brooding monotony of his days was broken somewhat by the arrival of a roommate, a fortyish fellow named Bill Bray, who introduced himself as a stage director and theatrical business manager “between jobs.” Yates noted with relief that the man was “decidedly not queer,” but thought it a bad sign that he “seem[ed] to spend most of his time drifting around trying to borrow money while he waits for the big job.” His roommate’s picaresque lifestyle did, however, provide Yates with new material for his letters: He wrote how Bray had applied for National Assistance, but when a state welfare inspector came around to their flat, he found Bray passed out amid a litter of beer bottles; the inspector took a dim view and left, while Bray “spent the rest of the day muttering about the limitations of the bureaucratic mind.” Then Bray had a scheme to get himself hired as an extra in a big American movie about King Arthur being filmed in Epping Forest; he thought that Yates, with his height, would make a perfect stand-in for the actor James Stewart and clear a thousand dollars for nine weeks’ work. Alas, it didn’t pan out, and finally Bray took what he called a “very temporary job” at an ice-cream parlor in Kensington, offering to “work [Yates] in as a counter-man or bus-boy.”

  When Yates wasn’t waxing witty or wise or pitiful in his letters, he had a tendency to become bitter—the result of many hours of dark rumination. “Here’s this month’s alimony, with all my love,” he wrote. “And I’ll be damned if that isn’t a masterpiece of a sentence, which could serve as an epigrammatic definition of our marriage.” And such was their odd dynamic that Sheila’s most loving letters tended to provoke the most biting replies. After she received (for the purpose of typing and feedback) the manuscript of “Lament for a Tenor,” she wrote how “proud” she was: “I sort of forgot about being proud of you … and not just because of your work or because you’re good-looking—because you have good taste in life … your coming home now could be nothing but good for me”; Charlie had even offered to loan them money for a boat ticket. For Yates this was surely the answer to his fondest prayer—but the more he thought about it, the more agitated and even enraged he became, or so the crescendo of his response suggests:

  Charlie’s offer of the $165 is awfully damn nice, and very touching. Maybe I’ll take him up on it, but let’s give Tenor a chance to sell first, okay? Because I’d rather come home that way if I can. And don’t you think, anyway, that we ought to let a little more time elapse?… When I come home it will probably be our absolutely last damn chance for a good life together, and I want to be sure we’re both ready.… When you are [ready],… you won’t think my coming home might be good for you, as you say you do now—you’ll know damn well it would be … because you’ll be ready to god damn it be my girl, and no crap about it.… I guess I’m the most naive son of a bitch in the world. But there isn’t anything so terrible about being naive, is there? It’s a far more appropriate trait for people our age, and a more fruitful one too … than the kind of sickly, emotion-starved world-weariness you find in the Chelsea pubs. Or to put it another way, I like being “born yesterday,” because it gives me a pretty good chance of being alive tomorrow, when everybody else is dead.

  By then Yates was all too familiar with Sheila’s capriciousness and/or ambivalence where he was concerned. He knew that her loving, April Wheeler–like exaltations were temporary at best, and liable to be followed by some squelching matter-of-fact Shirleyism. “God damn it I love you, Sheila,” he wrote, followed by the preemptive appraisal “I have now laid myself wide open for you to say coolly, in your next letter, that you see what I mean and it’s very touching, but that you really don’t feel equal to looking into the future at this point and can’t make any promises, so I must not get my hopes up.” And while he tried to end this letter on a somewhat positive note, with a bit of neutral humor about Bill Bray, it only spurred him on to a last caustic snipe: “You’d probably flirt outrageously with him if you were here.”

  Sheila’s response was mollifying: “Everything you say about us is quite right and perfect, Rich”—and with that she pretty much let it go. This was partly an honest concession (“it’s one thing to know where the trouble lies and another to get out of it”) and partly an aversion to argument, even epistolary, with such a tenacious foe as Yates. Besides, she had other things to worry about. As it happened she’d gone ahead and moved in with Dookie, only to find her “still living on the usual financial cliff”: Dookie’s rent (shockingly high to begin with, as she felt she needed extra studio space and never mind how to pay for it) was so badly in arrears that eviction was imminent. And while Dookie spoke of “income just over the horizon” (the City Center job), her older sisters Elsa and Margaret, whose dotage she ridiculed, did their best to provide her with eating money.* But otherwise everything was fine: “Dookie is not bitter about any of it,” Sheila noted, “[and] right now she is busy fixing herself an outfit to wear to a big glamorous affair tomorrow evening.” Nor had Dookie changed in other fundamental respects, bad or good: “She still does a hell of a lot of talking but I’ve learned to tune out tactfully … and she is wonderful with Sharon.” But the bottom line was this: “You should think very seriously about what you might feel to be living again in the same city with Dookie’s finances.”

  Yates’s reply reflected his eagerness to make amends for his previous outburst. He assured her that he was equal to coping with Dookie’s periodic duns, however much he used to protest about
the “strain” they put on him, which he now dismissed as a “pretty childish attitude”: “If I can’t help her, I can’t—and until I can it certainly shouldn’t matter much how close to her I live.” In the meantime he was glad to know that Dookie’s spirits were high withal, which of course was “the most important thing.”

  With Dookie facing another eviction, Sheila went about trying to solve her own living situation. Briefly she considered buying a house amid the dystopian sprawl of Levittown, near their friends the Cains, who admitted the place was a “wasteland.” But then one could hardly beat the price—a GI loan paid for the house, with carrying charges of sixty-three dollars a month—so Sheila figured it wouldn’t hurt to look. She was not impressed: “The Levittown houses are clean and modern and very tempting but the people are simply awful and once the joy of the Bendix had worn off, we’d all go crazy”; besides, she added, the nursery schools in the area were full of “strident Jewish supervisors” and overcrowded to boot. For the time being, then, she decided to find an apartment in the city and get a job, though the idea of buying a place in the suburbs was something she wanted her husband to bear in mind (“if we become a family again”).

  Meanwhile Yates awaited news of “Tenor,” and found himself in a “creative slump”: He was still without a good idea for a novel, and was sick of writing short stories and living hand-to-mouth with a “completely aimless, pointless, useless bastard” like Bill Bray for company. Two pieces of bad news had deflated him further: His six best stories were returned in a batch by the English magazine Argosy, whose editor remarked on their “Americanness” and “bitter astringency of tone” (“You certainly shoot to kill, don’t you?”); and the next day he learned that Collier’s had declined “Tenor,” since they “[didn’t] have room for another story about the emotional problems of a young boy.” Monica McCall remained confident, though by then her mood wasn’t contagious.