A Tragic Honesty

by Blake Bailey

  Happily for Dookie’s sake, she had less need of their company or philanthropy. City Center kept her busy and paid her a living wage, and during weekends at High Hedges her grandchildren saved her from the worst of her loneliness. On Saturdays they’d visit her cozy, overgrown garage apartment on the estate (she stored her sculpture below), and Dookie would make them a treat of fried bananas in sugar. Even Yates gave her credit for being a good enough grandmother (despite her old complaint that she couldn’t imagine herself as such), and would leave Mussy in her care for days at a time during the summer. But otherwise Dookie kept mostly to herself at High Hedges, though she still liked to visit Fritz and Louise for sherry in the evening. As for relations with her daughter, they were civil but strained: Ruth, out of loyalty to her husband (as well as grievances known only to herself), had made it clear at the outset that Dookie was not wanted by the younger Rodgerses at High Hedges; she relented when Dookie appealed to Fritz, but both women would nurse the hurt for the rest of their lives.

  Ruth’s life was as full as it would ever be: Her children were all at home and she was a happily attentive mother. Twice a week she worked at WGSM in Huntington, where she wrote scripts for radio programs on gardening and local history, and sometimes served as announcer as well. And whatever her differences with Dookie, they were kindred spirits in at least one respect—Ruth’s early involvement with the Willkie campaign had led to a lifelong interest in Republican politics: Ruth was one of the first Republican committeewomen on Long Island, and wrote speeches for Nelson Rockefeller’s gubernatorial campaign. But like her brother—who in time would write a number of political speeches himself (though not at gunpoint would he ever have written for a Republican)—she wanted to be a fiction writer most of all. So great was her ambition to “crack The New Yorker” with one of her “humorous sketches about family life,” that she papered her powder room with the magazine’s covers as a form of hopeful tribute. Fred’s position on the subject of his wife’s diversions was this: They were fine as long as they didn’t distract her from motherhood or cause any confusion as to who the real breadwinner was.

  It was understood that Yates didn’t visit High Hedges very often because of the enmity between him and Fred—or rather Fred served as a convenient excuse. The fact was, Yates loved and cared for his sister and would always feel a bond, but found her frankly dull and depressing. He made the trip to Long Island as a matter of duty, and tended to be cordial but distant while there. His niece Ruth (called Dodo by the family) remembers him as “a mellow sort of man” who smiled a lot, but often looked grave when he and his sister sat talking together, particularly in later years. Sometimes he’d spend time clearing brush on the property (hardly a characteristic activity otherwise), and though he was always kind to Ruth’s children, he was rarely attentive or playful. Once he went on a squirrel-shooting expedition with six-year-old Peter (who can’t remember whether “Uncle Dick” was delighted or horrified by the idea) and once he let thirteen-year-old Fred drive his new Chevy around the grounds, but that was about it. No matter how rare and tense his visits, though, Ruth was not a whit resentful: She adored her talented little brother, and always spoke of him with tender pride.

  * * *

  As anticipated, Yates won the Atlantic “First” award of $750 in December, and a few days later Seymour Lawrence came to New York and invited him to dinner at the Harvard Club. It was the beginning of a long and peculiar friendship. To be sure, things were less complicated in their salad days, when the two got along more or less famously—a bond assisted by their being exact contemporaries (Yates was eight days older) with similar tastes and tendencies. “We would order several Jack Daniel’s on the rocks followed by sirloin steaks, rare please,” Lawrence recalled forty years later. “We would gossip, tell stories, talk about life and letters, who were the good guys and who were the shits.” At the time such meetings were particularly bracing for Yates, who liked being courted at the Harvard Club (“a big deal for me”) and by his own reckoning had no other “literary” friends to speak of.

  And Sam Lawrence was almost as monomaniacal and quirky; if he hadn’t existed it might have been necessary to make him up, at least for the sake of Yates and certain other worthy if problematic writers. “The first time I met Sam Lawrence,” a colleague remembered, “he was making an argument on behalf of one of his authors. The last time I spoke with him … he was doing the same thing.” Quite simply, Lawrence’s life and work were indistinguishable. A man with a bad stammer who drank to overcome shyness, Lawrence had gravitated to writers from the beginning—without, it seems, ever seriously wishing to be a writer himself. As a freshman at Columbia he fell in with a “bad crowd” that included Kerouac and Ginsberg, until his mother made him transfer to Harvard, where he founded the magazine Wake and coaxed submissions from the likes of T. S. Eliot and Tennessee Williams. By the time he met Yates he’d been at the Atlantic Monthly Press in Boston for just over a year. By 1955 he was director of the firm, and thereafter would insist “I’m a publisher, not an editor”—that is, while he had sovereign faith in his editorial judgment (whose dictates he was always willing to follow in defiance of conventional wisdom), he wasn’t remotely interested in the hands-on task of editing books. For a hands-off perfectionist such as Yates, this turned out to be an almost ideal arrangement, but most writers were less autonomous. In the latter case Lawrence had a solution—he simply farmed out the editing chores to his own stable of writers: Thus Kurt Vonnegut edited Dan Wakefield, Wakefield edited Tim O’Brien, and so on.* “Lawrence’s writers were a happy little family,” said DeWitt Henry, who made the intriguing point that most of these writers were not only friends but tended to have drinking and realism in common—or, to put a finer point on it, that “alcohol and its vision” informed their themes to a remarkable degree: “the harrowing experience of reality without illusions that drives the pathology,” as Henry put it.

  Be that as it may, in 1953 Yates and Lawrence were just a couple of boozy young men swapping gossip and dividing the good guys from the shits. Also there was the matter of mutual self-interest: Yates was a talented new writer whose inevitable novel Lawrence wanted to publish, but in the meantime Yates needed to sell his other work. At their first meeting, then, Lawrence agreed to reconsider a few stories that had been previously rejected by the Atlantic—among them the story of Vincent Sabella, the alienated welfare child, which Yates had retitled “Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern.” Yates thought the story one of his best, but Lawrence demurred: “The psychology did not ring wholly true,” he wrote Monica McCall, though he reiterated that “Dick Yates is a writer whom we respect and want to publish frequently.” That said, he rejected Yates’s other stories a second time too, and his judgment of “Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern” would be validated by every magazine from The New Yorker to Discovery to the Yale Review—until a year later it was finally sent back to Yates by a “heartbroken” and “frankly stumped” Monica McCall.

  In early 1954 Yates started a novel that failed to “jell,” and so returned to writing stories. In that genre the level of his work was now consistently excellent, but if anything less saleable than ever. With soul-killing monotony the consensus opinion was expressed by the formula Extremely well-written, but … “Fun with a Stranger” was well-written but inconsequential in terms of its payoff. “Out with the Old” was “a little masterpiece” according to McCall, but a doubtful sell because of the protagonist’s pregnant teenage daughter. “The B.A.R. Man,” she thought, “belongs in The New Yorker, who won’t buy it.” And a story called “Sobel” (later retitled “A Wrestler with Sharks”) was “a beauty as usual, though subject-wise not too easy a one.” Finally in August a rewrite of the two-year-old “Nuptials”—now called “I’ll Be All in Clover” and soon to be called “The Best of Everything”—was bought by the magazine Charm, whose editors also reconsidered in favor of “Fun with a Stranger.” The two stories were Yates’s only sales in 1954.

  * * *

  Af
ter less than a year on Perry Street, the world and Dookie were too much with the Yateses, and they decided to move to the country. Elspeth Vevers’s mother owned a converted barn in northern Westchester, where the Yateses lived for most of that summer in an awkward communal arrangement with the Veverses and two other couples. The house was big, dark, and hot—a bit too much like a barn, converted or otherwise—and Sheila appealed to her mother to find them a better place. Marjorie Bryant was now one of the region’s most successful real estate brokers, as well as an indefatigable fixer-upper in what spare time she allowed herself; as such, she was almost ominously eager to be of use to her daughter and son-in-law. In no time she found them a lovely A-frame carriage house in Salem, Westchester, on the estate of an affable Cossack named Guirey—a great horseman and drinker who’d known Tony Vevers at Yale. He and Yates hit it off, and for a while the place was almost perfect.

  One of their first visitors was Bob Riche, who’d been invited to come out with his then-girlfriend Pamela Vevers. By the time Yates met Riche at the train station, though, the couple had broken up and Pamela was already dating theater director Ed Sherin.* Riche was devastated, and by his own admission had a hard time getting off the subject. Yates tried to console his tearful friend by making fun of the notoriously charming Sherin, whom he described as an “actor type.” But Sheila was less sympathetic. She went out of her way to talk about a delightful recent visit with Sherin and Pamela, and when Riche persisted in licking his wounds, she casually remarked, “Oh Bob, but he’s much better-looking than you.” It began to seem an almost systematic attempt to demoralize Riche, culminating in an episode that haunts him still. As he tried to sleep in an open loft directly over his hosts’ bed, he was disturbed by what struck him as an outrageous act of conjugal derision: “She was giggling and carrying on like a mad sex fiend,” he recalled, “and I always felt it was at the least a bit inappropriate, and more likely deliberate cruelty.” “More likely” indeed, as the Yateses had already turned Riche into something of a private joke; as Sheila later explained, “Bob was the sort of person who gets analysis year in year out,” and her husband (while fond of Riche) found him every bit as ridiculous.* But it is Sheila’s glee that stuck in Riche’s mind: “She had a laugh that snapped out like a whip,” he said.

  Unfortunately the Yateses weren’t able to entertain at the carriage house as much as they might have liked; the place wasn’t heated, and by winter it was time to move on again. At this point the transience of their lives was getting them down again: They wanted their own home in a nice community, where Mussy could be raised in a proper middle-class environment, though Yates wondered if he could handle a mortgage on his rather unstable income. Re-enter Marjorie Bryant, absentee mother turned ubiquitous benefactor: She’d found a lovely little house in the suburban town of Redding, Connecticut, and what’s more she was willing to make the down payment and hold the mortgage herself. Yates loathed the idea of being beholden to his mother-in-law—or anyone, ever—but it was a difficult offer to refuse. Redding provided a pastoral but convenient setting right off Route Seven: The schools in the area were excellent, and the house itself, though not exactly lovely, was suitable—a newish one-story ranch in a broken L-shape, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a big picture window. The latter was a bit of a fright, but on balance they liked the way the cellar had doors on the outside like an old-fashioned farmhouse, and all things considered they decided to take it. Meanwhile Yates arranged to do extra PR work for a firm called Lester Rossin Associates, the better not to miss a single mortgage payment to Marjorie Bryant.

  Sheila’s old friend Ann Barker Kowalsky lived in nearby Brewster, and she and her husband became frequent guests. John “Crash” Kowalsky was a discontented engineer who worked for a microwave electronics company in Pleasantville, and drinking was perhaps the one thing he and Yates had in common. For a while it was a formidable bond. Their nights followed a predictable pattern: The two couples would drink and chat for as long as pleasantly possible before the men became unruly—arguing or bellowing army songs while the women receded into an icy silence. Sometimes, too, Yates would lapse into grumpy, drunken boredom and tell Kowalsky to “get the hell out,” whenever the man’s stories about his proletarian childhood began to pall. One night Yates announced that “Crash” was the model for the “engineering square” in his novel-in-progress,* a characterization that made Kowalsky bridle at the time, though he never did get around to reading the book in question.

  The odd Walpurgisnacht aside, the overall domestic scene on Old Redding Road was tranquil enough. Sheila (whether happily or not) had always been an excellent housewife, and now at last she had a proper venue for her talents. She kept the little house tidy despite Yates’s presence in it, and the family sat down twice a day to tasty, well-balanced meals—especially on holidays, when Sheila would prepare an Anglophilic feast of juicy rare rib roast of beef, mashed potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding. And no matter how much the couple occasionally chafed in each other’s company, they were at pains to be on good behavior for Mussy, who was calming down into a gentle, ladylike child. When she indulged in occasional naughtiness, the worst Yates would do was send her to her room, and only that after a long series of jocular admonishments: “Stop this clownlike behavior,” he’d order the giggling girl, “or I’ll have to get the stick with the nail in it!”

  A drawback of living in the hinterland was that it convinced Yates that he needed to drive a car, and this would become a fresh and fertile source of marital strife. Yates’s lifelong wish to seem “competent as anybody at dealing with the small-change of practical life” was coupled with a terrible awareness that he wasn’t competent, and this made him frustrated and defensive and all but hopeless as a student driver. As he wrote of Bill Grove in Uncertain Times, “He was too nervous and easily rattled ever to handle a car well, and his stubbornness in hating to admit it only made it worse.” Just so. But as Yates would prove time and again, the capacity for knowing thyself in art rarely translates into everyday life. In any event Sheila soon decided she had better things to do than teach her husband how to drive, and so delegated the job to her brother Charlie—a bad choice, not only because Charlie was a long-term mental patient but because Charlie was Charlie: possessed of “an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people’s weaknesses,” as Yates put it.*

  One can only imagine the extent to which Charlie brought such insight to his driving instruction, but it wasn’t long before a fistfight erupted between teacher and pupil. Sheila, who witnessed the incident and called it “pretty horrible,” is almost certain it was the direct result of a driving lesson. In later years, though, Yates would tell a different story, which perhaps conflated a number of similar episodes, and anyway seems to shed light on certain aspects of his family life at the time. According to his version, it all began with a typical phone call from his mother-in-law: Charlie was harassing her, she said; would they come right away and take him back to the hospital? As ever the Yateses tried to oblige, but this time Charlie refused to go. “You’re just pushing me around because I’m a mental patient,” he said. “In Connecticut you can put the cops on me, but in New York I could fight back.” The only way he’d go quietly was if they agreed to drive him to the state line and let him “fight back,” so off they went. When they came to New York the men got out of the car and scuffled a bit in the headlight beams, but both were heavy smokers and soon gasping for breath. “God—” said Charlie as they slumped against the car, “can you believe some guys do this for a living?”

  Whatever the circumstances, no lingering rift resulted. The same can’t be said for Yates’s marriage once he learned how to drive, as the car proved an apt battlefield for the pair. “When he was really being dopey,” Sheila recalled, “he had this big thing about how he had to drive the car, no woman could help him.” One may recall how Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying feels “humiliated—even emasculated” when his wife makes him ride on the passenger’s s
ide. Yates felt the same way, and for that matter aspired to a rather cartoonish stereotype of masculinity in general, forever threatened on all sides and particularly so when he was behind the wheel of a car. And this, in turn, gave Sheila the irresistible opportunity to get her own back for any number of pent-up grievances. As Bob Riche observed, “Dick bumbled around Sheila, especially in the car. I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, she reinforced his feelings of inadequacy, and he played into it unconsciously.” According to Riche, it was a “nightmare” being in the same car with the couple, and the cycle was always the same: Yates would struggle to remain calm while Sheila needled him (“Oh, be careful! You don’t know what you’re doing!” and so on), until finally Yates would snap and the fight would be on. Nor was their daughter exempt from such scenes. Once she watched them bicker over how to run the car heater; when Sheila turned out to be right, Yates exploded “Well, cut my penis off!” and lapsed into a long brooding silence.

  Sheila’s tendency to emphasize her husband’s ineptitude was more than idle perversity, as she came to understand better in retrospect. “I hate the thought of mentally calculating the added amount of cooking, cleaning and wash you add up to,” she later wrote Yates, as they considered another reconciliation; “but I think you know from the Remington Rand years … that doing something you hate for someone you love makes for a cancerous kind of grudge.” Which suggests, too, the insidiously reciprocal nature of that grudge, insofar as each resented the other for putting them in a situation they hated—housework and Remington Rand respectively. Because of Yates’s awful efforts to pay the bills, he might have expected his domestic failings to be pardoned; beyond a certain point, though, even an attitude of weary acceptance on Sheila’s part was liable to be taken (accurately enough) as dire reproach. The mounting tension made for some curious scenes, particularly in the eyes of a five-year-old child. One time, Sharon recalls, her parents sat quietly chatting in the living room, when suddenly Yates hurled his glass into the fireplace and stormed bellowing out of the house.