by Blake Bailey
Or, Worse Still:
Barbara … twists one slightly soiled white glove in the other as she stands beneath the Biltmore clock, an hour and forty-five minutes past the carefully appointed time of her date. Peering down the carpeted stairway, she sees a sudden moil of confusion near the revolving door. The doorman, three cab drivers, seven bellhops and a Bellevue attendant are engaged in some frantic grappling activity; and somehow, out of this muddle, wobbles a man. Almost unrecognizable, his clothing caked with filth and bristling with the snouts of bourbon bottles, his face swollen and streaked with maudlin tears, he reels and fumbles his way upstairs. There he topples, falls headlong, grasps Barbara around the knees and says: “Help.”
And finally, the Worst and Most Frightful Vision of All:
Gay as a day in May … Barbara bounces up the Biltmore steps and finds a hollow-eyed, tragically haggard apparition under the clock.… [He takes her to] the bleakest, dimmest, and most fourth-rate of all Tenth Avenue saloons. And there, surrounded by sawdust and urine puddles and tired prostitutes and lurching longshoremen, he begins a droning recital of all his Problems.… He starts telling her all over again—ever and ever more boringly—about his unhappy childhood and his unhappy marriage and his unhappy love affairs and his grinding, soul-wrenching, general all-around unhappiness; and this goes on for two nights and two days until it’s time for Barbara to sink gratefully into the sports car and turn back toward sunnier climes and sweeter briars.
Give or take a Tenth Avenue saloon and a bellhop or two, it was perhaps a bit too plausible to get the really big laughs, and Yates sensed as much. “All this was supposed to be funny,” he added, “but I’ve just read it over, and it doesn’t give me any chuckles. Forced humor, you see.” He abruptly turned to other matters, and mentioned in passing that a trip to Virginia might be feasible later that fall, as he wanted “to soak up a little of the landscape and foldways” for the opening Camp Pickett chapters of his novel-in-progress.
This novel existed only in the abstract, and the fact that Yates was in no hurry to start soaking up atmosphere suggests how little disposed he was to write. Most of the time he brooded nervously over the reception of Revolutionary Road, and no wonder: The news was so relentlessly good that it bordered on the portentous, and it was all Yates could do to maintain a tenuous grip on his equilibrium. The advance comment from Alfred Kazin, for example: “This excellent novel is a powerful commentary on the way we live now. It locates the new American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage. No other people has made of marriage quite what we have, has taught itself to invest so much in what is essentially a romantic idea. Mr. Yates understands this very well, but never points.” Now that Kazin had actually read the novel, he was not only willing to endorse Yates’s Guggenheim application, but also he persuaded Sam Lawrence to accept, at last, the title Revolutionary Road. “After Little, Brown got that letter from Kazin, I stopped being another chancy first novelist and became something of a celebrity up there,” Yates wrote Beury. “[The advertising manager] and his public-relations lady came barreling down here this week, bought me triple bourbons and asked any number of discreet, respectful questions as to whether I’d mind being interviewed on the Dave Garroway show, etc. etc.”
Also around this time—and not a moment too soon for Yates’s finances—Esquire bought the opening chapters, to be published a month before the novel as a self-sustained excerpt titled “After the Laurel Players.” And already Hollywood was interested: Saul David of Columbia Pictures wrote Monica McCall that he’d be “delighted to work with [Yates] … though I’d hope that Revolutionary Road will swiftly make him so rich that he wouldn’t dream of working with me,” while a bona fide mogul, Sam Goldwyn Jr., announced that he’d “never read a more brilliant first novel”—an impulsive bit of hype that, as Yates put it, “[came] drearily to naught, because cooler heads in his organization decided that the moviegoing public ‘is not ready for a story of such unrelieved tragedy, for so relentless a probing of the sources of pain.’ Sic transit the hell Gloria.” This was far from the last time cooler heads in the industry would prevail where Yates was concerned.
Sam Lawrence and his associates realized they had a potentially hot property on their hands, but the book’s packaging and promotion were problematic. Now that the title was definitely Revolutionary Road, they felt obliged to make it as obvious as possible that the book was in fact about the failure of contemporary marriage, not a work of historical fiction. Yates had balked at the original jacket design—a sepia photograph of a man and woman standing forlornly back to back, over a pithy snippet of the Kazin quote—but he was finally overwhelmed by the star treatment. As he wrote Beury:
The Presentation today came off with maximum glory: everybody solemnly sitting in silence around an enormous leather chair containing me, while the advertising manager read his script and flipped the frames of a visual-aid demonstrator, just like Madison Avenue. Their new jacket copy is overpoweringly reverent—starts out “Rarely does a publisher introduce a first novel filled with such devastating power and compassion that it seems destined to become an enduring comment and influence upon our very way of life, etc, etc, etc,—and I was so overpowered by the reverence that I allowed them to seduce me into accepting a somewhat modified version of the dreary photographic jacket design.
Yates would bitterly regret letting that “dreary” jacket pass, though in fairness there could be little doubt that Lawrence et al. were doing their best to market a very depressing novel by a virtually unknown writer. The advertising budget was based on an anticipated sale of twenty thousand copies, or roughly four times as many as most first novels; the paperback rights were already sold, and Yates would receive a first installment of $2,500 in January. High hopes abounded, hideous jacket or no: “The meeting broke up with many high-powered handshakes and floods of drink,” Yates wrote of the sales presentation, “after which Sam Lawrence (editor) fed the hell out of me on about seven pounds of roast beef at the Algonquin; then he took me to a criminally expensive nightclub featuring giant Negress strip tease artists.” How many first novelists could say as much?
* * *
For a man who seemed about to become the toast of two coasts, Yates continued to live on a grindingly humble scale. Earlier that fall he’d resumed teaching at the New School, a deadly business cheered only slightly by the fact that he now felt able to befriend his eminent colleague there, Alfred Kazin, who proved to be “very nice and un-awesome.” Meanwhile as the weather got colder Yates moped about the basement “wearing forty-three sweaters” because the building’s ancient furnace had died. He wrote no fiction, though he stayed busy doing freelance PR work. Johnson & Johnson’s national sales conference in New Brunswick was coming up, and Yates had to write speeches for all the corporate and sales executives. He also tried his hand at ghostwriting an article for Scientific American—“a gruesome failure,” as he put it, that left him in the gloomy position of having to “wrangle with the editor” in order to “rescue the lousy 300 bucks they promised.” He implored Monica McCall to find him some kind of steady job in publishing, but it didn’t pan out.
He consoled himself with thoughts of his “golden girl,” whom he managed to coax back to New York in late October and again a few weeks later. Both visits were something of a bust. Yates’s clothing wasn’t quite “bristling with the snouts of bourbon bottles,” nor did he dissolve into “maudlin tears” en route to Bellevue—but close enough. “Dick was always drinking,” said Beury, “and sometimes he’d be slobbering drunk by the end of the evening.” For Yates it was a matter of impossibly high expectations and poor health; he wanted to seem vibrant and charming but didn’t have the energy or impulse. He drank to compensate. Also he was loath to be eclipsed by his friend Broyard, who (though five years older) was dating any number of college “popsies” as Yates called them; predictably the man’s ears pricked up when Yates told him about Beury: “[Anatole] has expressed a keen desire to have dinner with us during
your visit,” Yates wrote her, “and I said okay, maybe. (But he’d better watch his God damn step, or there’ll be Bad Trouble.)” As it happened Broyard indulged in a few suavely told tales about past conquests (e.g., the one about the woman whose “ass exploded like an inflatable raft” when she doffed her girdle*), but appears to have been on passably good behavior, and certainly a bit of comic relief was welcome at that point.
Otherwise there was little to remember about these visits except for telltale signs of instability on the part of Beury’s host, whose October postmortem was duly bleak: “The whole three days went by so fast, and I spent so much of it being tired or half drunk or asleep, that I don’t quite believe it happened and I’m full of regrets.… [You’re likely] to write me off as the terribly nice but hopelessly sad young man whom no girl in her right mind could ever consider a permanent type.” Beury was in her right mind, more or less, but still remained interested in Yates—or rather in the brilliant, sensitive man who’d written those stories in Short Story 1 (her copy was inscribed, “If ever any beauty I did see/Which I desired, and got, ’twas but a dream of thee”—Dick [and John Donne]”), not to mention a novel that just might make him a household name. That man deserved a lot of patience.
His wife Sheila might have begged to differ. Back in September, Yates had reported to Beury that his “formal divorce talk” with his wife had been “friendly and pleasant, maximum cooperation guaranteed”—which implied that Sheila was now graciously willing to let him go since he’d found another, and so she was. Yates, however, was not cooperating to a maximum extent. “He drove the lawyers nuts,” said Sheila. “He knew [a reconciliation] wasn’t going to happen, but he was making trouble for the sake of making trouble.” This was a bit reductive, perhaps; in fact Sheila’s observation that Yates “could never bear losing close people” was nearer the mark, as she knew well enough at the time: “I thought I had explained my reasons for wanting an immediate settlement,” she wrote him on November 2.
Either you didn’t listen, or I didn’t make myself clear, or both, and I am willing to try again. They are quite simple: When we separated, I hoped for some time that a radical change in one or both of us would make possible a rebuilt marriage. I no longer have any such hope.… As to my seeing you any more or being friends, this is totally out of the question from now on. I don’t hate or feel bitter towards you, but I soon would if I continued to see you.… Some things simply come to an end—I have relinquished two close friendships in my life, and so I am ready to accept this. It will be much easier for everyone if you accept it too. Once you have, I believe you will be relieved, as I am, to let Mr. Golditch [the lawyer] make arrangements that are comfortable for me, the children, and yourself.
The “radical change” for which Sheila had hoped was, of course, that Yates would curb his drinking and get help for whatever else was ailing him, but after Bellevue she knew better. As for Yates, neither then nor later would he be able to accept rejection on the basis of his drinking and/or mental health—hence Sheila’s exasperated but not unkind “Some things simply come to an end.”
Yates became all the more desperate to make things work with Beury. “The only nice thing in my life right now,” he wrote her, a week after that letter from Sheila, “is that you’ve promised to come up here next Wednesday.” But with so much emotionally at stake, Yates was too overwrought in Beury’s presence to stay sober, and besides he always had a ready excuse: “He said he was irrational because Revolutionary Road was about to be published,” said Beury, “and he’d worked so hard to finish it—etcetera—as if it were only a passing phase. It seemed plausible at the time, but it didn’t change.” There were moments, though, when he was at least somewhat sober (that is, on the way to getting drunk) and thus charming, courteous, and funny—in other words the very man Beury hoped he’d be whenever he got “well” again.
This alternating pattern was suggested by Yates’s visit to Virginia a week or so before Christmas. All went well at first: Beury was touched by her gift—a pair of monogrammed gold cufflinks that Yates said was the most valuable thing he owned—and while they drove about the countryside they came upon a big plantation house with a For Sale sign in front. Yates spoke seriously about buying the place, and for the moment he made Beury see the “glamour” of it—the genteel literary life they’d lead there, writing all day and having drinks on the veranda “like Dash and Lillian Hellman.” Full of the idea, Yates got excitably drunker than usual and was miserably hungover the next morning, when they’d planned to drive back to New York via Charlottesville, where the writer Nancy Hale was giving a cocktail party in Yates’s honor. Hale, a very admiring advance reader of Revolutionary Road, had done a number of kind things for Yates, who was grateful enough to remain on good behavior during her party. Afterward he fell apart. Every few miles on the road he’d pull over and buy beer to “calm his nerves,” and by the time they got to Washington he was a tipsy wreck. He tried to mollify his traveling companion by insisting they stop in a posh hotel—same room but separate beds, as Beury (with Yates’s approval) was still a virgin—where he ordered a bottle of bourbon and drank himself to sleep.
* * *
The two months leading up to the publication of Revolutionary Road were an eventful time for Yates, who bobbed about in the maelstrom without quite going under. He coped as well as possible with such obligations as a “big Celebrity Interview” with a South American journalist—a typically “boozy business,” wrote Yates: “[I] feel bottomless chagrin at having been a garrulous clown, and wonder how many of my ill-considered pronouncements on literature and life got scribbled down for the edification of fifty trillion South Americans, and am busy thanking God that nobody I know can read Spanish.” Perhaps the most important advance publicity was the excerpt scheduled for the February issue of Esquire. Yates had agonized over editing his work to the magazine’s specifications, and was perturbed to learn that his own rather drastic cuts were insufficient. On January 11 he and Rust Hills spent two hours going over the proofs, line by line, until they’d reached a compromise of sorts, or so Yates thought. “The author, the publishers, and I, are deeply shocked and disappointed by the treatment given to this excerpt,” Monica McCall wrote Esquire editor Arnold Gingrich on January 20. “Not only has the [published] text been cut and changed, after the very careful editing and cutting which the author himself completed … but the illustration presents the characters as two vastly unattractive middle-aged people, in fact the heroine looks something like Sophie Tucker.” Gingrich, stiffly indignant, called the complaints “shocking.” He conceded that he didn’t much like the illustration either, but denied that any further changes had been made to the text without Yates’s consent; he also pointed out that he’d been so certain the excerpt was a credit to its author that he’d appended proofs to his recommendation for Yates’s Guggenheim.
Sam Lawrence was also dismayed by the Esquire treatment, but remained optimistic on the whole: “I think we have a best-seller,” he wrote on January 25, calling Yates’s attention to the current Publisher’s Weekly, which reflected “the kind of advance enthusiasm and exceptional interest Revolutionary Road is creating.” The book’s sizable advertising budget was being put to good use: A thousand promotional copies with special jackets had been distributed among the various pundits in the trade and media, while sales reps were instructed to attach personal cards to copies sent to all major booksellers in their territories. A big quote ad was planned for the New York Times Book Review just prior to publication. On the basis of the advance notice alone, Yates had every reason to feel jubilant.
What he felt was “semi-hysteria,” as he put it, kept somewhat in abeyance by the steady, all-but-lethal flow of bourbon. At times in his life when he wasn’t able to get on with his writing, for whatever reason, Yates would let himself go to a degree unusual even for him. This was one of those times. Things were happening and he let them happen. On February 3, Yates’s thirty-fifth birthday, Sheila took a one-d
ay trip to Alabama and got a no-fault divorce; the lawyer Golditch subsequently informed Yates that there was a sixty-day waiting period before he could remarry: “You are free to remarry at any place and at any time after April 3, 1961.” By now Yates seemed rather to doubt the prospect, and informed Beury of the development with a single unembellished line: “Got my final divorce decree in the mail last Friday.” Somewhat better news (though by no means unequivocally so) was that he’d been offered a part-time position by the Columbia School of General Studies, the adult education branch of the university. This in addition to his New School duties and freelance work.