A Tragic Honesty

by Blake Bailey

  Yates flew to Los Angeles in mid-March and spent a week or so as Frankenheimer’s guest in Malibu. On the plane he felt a bad cold coming on—always ominous for the consumptive Yates—and the milieu chez Frankenheimer was hardly conducive to a quick recovery. As he wrote the Schulmans, “I spent the first week in Frankenheimer’s palace by the sea, mostly in a state of continual drunken, shouting story conference with the man himself, while [actress] Evans Evans tiptoed discreetly around in her Mou-Mou [sic].” The whole episode is treated at length in “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” in which Frankenheimer appears as “Carl Oppenheimer”—“a dramatic, explosive, determinedly tough-talking man of thirty-two.” The portrait is not altogether flattering: Oppenheimer is an intellectually pretentious egomaniac who bullies his adoring girlfriend (“Ellie, can you check the kitchen and find out what the fuck’s happened to all the bouillon?”), and indeed Yates thought Frankenheimer overdid his flamboyant young genius persona. For the most part, though, Yates was struck by how well they got along: “Believe it or not, we made a happy household,” he reported to the Schulmans. Frankenheimer was also a divorced father of two daughters, and he obviously respected Yates’s accomplishment as a writer. Yates in turn rather envied the man’s relationship with Evans Evans—who, though a good sport and attractive enough, was hardly the kind of glamorous starlet Yates would have expected. It occurred to him that he, too, needed such a helpmeet.

  Mainly Yates felt intimidated. Apart from the immediate domestic rapport, it was the Hollywood scene writ large: the great pad in Malibu, famous actors calling at all hours for bizarre reasons, power brokers of all sorts coming and going. Yates had never written a screenplay before, and suspected that Frankenheimer—who could have hired anyone in Hollywood—might at any moment realize his mistake. But in fact the two men collaborated well together: The bombastic Frankenheimer found Yates “quite shy” in a pleasant, receptive way, and deferred to his views on literary matters, while Yates was “eager to absorb the whole screenwriting process” from Frankenheimer. Nor did Yates make himself conspicuous as a drinker: “We all drank,” said Frankenheimer. “We all behaved erratically. We weren’t prototypes for a brokerage firm. Besides, the Styron piece was really horrid, depressing—we’d both be depressed, and one of us would say ‘God, let’s have a drink.’ We had to boost each other up.” Best of all, there was no question of Yates’s having to compromise his artistic integrity in exchange for Hollywood lucre; both he and Frankenheimer agreed on a rigorously faithful adaptation of Styron’s novel, with due emphasis on its incest theme, and damn the censors. All this came as a great relief to the folks at home, some of whom wondered if success would spoil Dick Yates: Soon after he left for Tinseltown, Sheila reported that she’d been accosted at a party by an almost total stranger, who demanded, “Do you think Hollywood is changing Dick’s values?” “Nobody, honest to God,” Yates assured the Schulmans, “has tried to corrupt me yet, which in a way is faintly disappointing—there’s nobody to hate, and nobody to blame if the picture turns out to be a mess. They all keep insisting that I have Absolute Freedom.” If anything the whole business seemed too good to be true, right down to the nature of the work itself, which Yates found “a remarkably easy and interesting kind of writing to do.”

  Once he and Frankenheimer agreed on the “thrust” of the screenplay, Yates rented the ground floor of a tiny dilapidated beach house in a far more raffish section of Malibu. Like Jack Fields in “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” he almost immediately regretted his choice: “He didn’t realize until after moving in—and after paying the required three months’ rent in advance—that the place was very nearly as dismal and damp as his cellar in New York.” As if to convince himself that the glamour of his adventure hadn’t faded yet, Yates rented a sporty white convertible and stressed his shack’s better features in letters to friends. “Baby, this is Crazyville,” he wrote Ed Kessler. “Wobbling around here in a sleek little sunlit beach house while the Pacific thunders beyond my terrace.” To the Schulmans he admitted his lodgings were “about as big as 27 Seventh Ave.,” but at least the beach was private and it was “picturesque as all get-out, and reasonably cheap, too.” But the damp mildewy hovel didn’t agree with Yates’s lungs, and within a week his cold had developed into pneumonia. The doctor warned him about the possibility of a TB recurrence, and Jerry Schulman mailed a three-month supply of isoniazid (“the drug I’ve been needling you about for three months”). Yates may or may not have bothered to take the medicine as prescribed, but anyway his health continued to be poor for at least a month or so.

  * * *

  Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published a few days after Yates arrived in California, and geographical isolation seems to have enhanced his sense of detachment toward a rather disappointing reception. “[The book] is Not Selling at All and being ignored by most New York critics,” he wrote Kessler, “but getting excellent reviews in all the places that don’t count—Chicago, Detroit, Atlanta, Los Angeles, etc.” Yates told the Schulmans he was especially pleased by a Southern critic who’d compared the collection favorably to Hemingway and Fitzgerald: “He’s probably some semi-literate cracker with tobacco-juice running down his chin, but it makes delightful reading all the same.” Above all he was gratified by the fact that reviewers tended to single out “Builders” as the best story, an advance on the author’s earlier work that indicated growth and the brilliant career to come. But very few seemed to think brilliance had already been established, and amply so, on the strength of his first two books.

  Perhaps the most representative notice was Peter Buitenhuis’s in the March 25 New York Times Book Review. Buitenhuis recognized many of Yates’s virtues—pitch-perfect dialogue, “exact and memorable” details, the “unexpected rightness [of his endings] that is the peculiar reward of reading a first-rate story”—but like many critics then and after, he ultimately and rather perversely held Yates’s craftsmanship against him. In an irony that might have struck the author as droll, Buitenhuis (and others) implied that Bernie Silver’s hackneyed “Builders” metaphor constituted Yates’s actual method for writing a well-made story: “Mr. Yates has submitted his considerable talent to the formula,” Buitenhuis wrote, “and has been ground by the mill into mediocrity.” Happily he thought that “Builders” was a hopeful sign Yates was moving away from “formulaic” O. Henry-like stories toward a more Chekhovian mode, whereby “the situation grows naturally out of the characters” rather than vice versa.

  Other reviews offered a thumbnail sketch of the conventional arguments that tend to be marshaled for and against Yates’s work. Richard Sullivan in the Chicago Tribune could no more resist the “Builders” metaphor than Buitenhuis, but at least he used it to express a kind of stolid approval: “Each story stands on its own. Each is written with its own care and its own craft. Each is a sturdy structure in revealing prose.” Some took Yates to task for his “limited” range—a charge leveled at everything from the artful economy of his plots to the mediocre character types to a repetitive bleakness of theme. Hollis Alpert of the Saturday Review wondered “why, over the span of ten years in which [the stories] were written, Mr. Yates didn’t explore farther,” and J. C. Pine of Library Journal suggested that Yates needed “a larger canvas” lest “his vaunted ‘compassion’” come across as mere “snobbery.”

  Perhaps the first indication that Eleven Kinds of Loneliness would stand the test of time came almost two years later, when the critic Jacques Cabau wrote a long appreciation for the influential French weekly Express: “A Flaubert formed in the rough school of the magazine,” the review was titled. Cabau called Yates “one of the hopes of his generation,” and suggested that the perfection of his prose (even in translation) was the work of a slow, meticulous writer who “searches for hours for the exact word, and often finds it.” Not surprisingly the Frenchman was especially pleased by Yates’s insights into the hollowness of American life: “Eleven Kinds of Loneliness—a courageous theme in America, where loneliness
is a sin, where success is obligatory and happiness is the first duty of every citizen.” Such considered praise, aimed at posterity, was long in coming on this side of the Atlantic, though an awareness of the book’s excellence was—to repeat Richard Ford’s phrase on the subject of Revolutionary Road—“a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees.” In 1978 Jonathan Penner noted in the New Republic that the collection “stands at the pinnacle of its genre,” and three years later Robert Towers made an even more definitive claim in the New York Times Book Review: “the mere mention of its title is enough to produce quick, affirmative nods from a whole generation of readers … [it is] almost the New York equivalent of Dubliners.”

  The comparison to Joyce’s masterpiece is not an idle one, and for that matter the two books have more in common than merit. Each evokes the ethos of a time and place in a peculiarly memorable way, and each reveals aspects of human weakness which are universal and abiding, but flourish better under certain conditions. It’s no coincidence that the paralysis of Joyce’s Dublin produced characters that might well be called Yatesian. In Joyce’s “Counterparts,” for example, the frustrated lout Farrington—whose humiliations as a bullied clerk can only be dispelled by violence (“The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot”)—is the spitting image of Yates’s “B.A.R. Man,” John Fallon, who returns from the war to find himself in a dismal world of underpaid office labor and a loveless marriage. At a slightly higher social level we find Gabriel Conroy in “The Dead,” a kind of Irish Frank Wheeler who affects Continental sophistication in order to distance himself from his petty-bourgeois background—his arty aunts and “country cute” wife—but is finally revealed as “the pitiable fatuous fellow he had caught a glimpse of in the mirror.” Postwar America and turn-of-the-century Dublin have niches in store for people like Fallon and Farrington, Conroy and Wheeler, and these tend to be commensurate to their limitations; enticed to act on their longings for something more, be it fame or fulfillment or simple human acceptance, they’re exposed like the boy in “Araby”—as creatures “driven and derided by vanity.”

  The charge that Yates’s range is “limited” is particularly unfair in regard to Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. Never again would Yates depict such a broad cross-section of society, from the welfare child Vincent Sabella to the expatriate Yalies Carson Wyler and Ken Platt, and all the lonely people in between. That he was constrained by the “formulaic” demands of magazine fiction is true, though one might as well say that a poet is constrained by the sonnet or a composer by the sonata. Yates’s talent, like Salinger’s, was honed by the necessary discipline of concision, sharply delineated characters, and a clear trajectory of beginning, middle, and end. Both authors would later allow themselves the luxury of “a larger canvas” in their not-so-short fiction—looser dialogue and plots, more ambiguity—and in one case the result was not especially fortunate.

  But given only four or five thousand words to tell a story, Yates learned to be ruthless in restricting himself only to the most resonant details. The bleakness of Vincent Sabella’s life, for example, is imparted by a single image: “Clearly, he was from the part of New York that you had to pass through on the train to Grand Central—the part where people hung bedding over their windowsills and leaned out on it all day in a trance of boredom, and where you got vistas of straight, deep streets … all swarming with gray boys at play in some desperate kind of ball game.” As for the characters themselves, Yates sketched them with a few deft strokes; rather like the more contradictory, lingered-over Wheelers, they are both stylized types and nobody but themselves. Thus Leon Sobel, the former sheet-metal worker with writerly pretensions in “A Wrestler with Sharks,” is aptly described as “a very small, tense man with black hair that seemed to explode from his skull and a humorless thin-lipped face.… His eyebrows were always in motion when he talked, and his eyes, not so much piercing as anxious to pierce, never left the eyes of the listener.”

  When critics call Yates “limited” what they often mean is not that he worries too much about “building” his stories according to some formulaic blueprint, but rather that (pace Bernie Silver’s instructions) he doesn’t put enough windows in. Readers want more light, more hope and moral uplift, not such an unremittingly “limited” view of frustration and failure. Few writers can make the reader wince the way Yates can: On the tenth reading it’s still uncomfortable to read the passage in “A Really Good Jazz Piano” where Carson humiliates Sid; or when Leon Sobel produces his pitifully pretentious newspaper column (with “a small portrait of himself in his cloth hat” clipped to the top); or when Vincent adds “a triangle of fiercely scribbled pubic hair” to his otherwise loving graffito of Miss Price; or when John Fallon’s better-paid wife makes him come back to the table and drink his milk (“you’re the one that makes me buy milk”), and a page later he avenges himself by scornfully waving a padded bra “in her startled face.” Readers who deplore this kind of thing believe Yates is more cruel than compassionate, but this is rather beside the point. As Richard Russo noted in his introduction to the Collected Stories, Yates leaves out the “windows” because “he believes this light to be a lie.” In real life the light seeps in, if at all, “through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder’s faulty craftsmanship”—and certainly Yates, qua builder, makes allowance for such occasional rays: hence the grace that allows Ken Platt to recognize a kindred loneliness in his friend’s eyes; or Leon Sobel’s loving wife who believes in him no matter what; or the memory of being “a damn good B.A.R. man” that will have to suffice for the rest of Fallon’s mediocre, loutish life.

  “The truth is a funny thing,” as Leon Sobel says. “People wanna read it, but they only wanna read it when it comes from somebody they already know their name.” Perhaps, but not necessarily in the case of Richard Yates: Readers who already knew his name as author of the depressing Revolutionary Road—that is to say, readers who were keen for diversion amid the grim uncertainties of the cold war—might have decided to give Eleven Kinds of Loneliness a miss, while those who didn’t know Yates at all plumped in favor of Updike’s Pigeon Feathers. In any case the stories didn’t sell despite a number of excellent reviews in the provincial press. When Monica McCall fired off an angry letter to Sam Lawrence demanding a full-page ad—the kind of treatment Updike was getting—the hapless man demurred: The “economics of publishing” wouldn’t permit it, he explained, and the Updike situation was “by no means comparable” since the latter had received front-page reviews all over the country; for Yates they’d already spent almost a dollar a copy on advertising, and distributed 543 gift copies to reviewers, critics, authors, and booksellers. But the total sale had petered out at around two thousand, and there it was.

  Yates took the news remarkably well, though he did venture to inquire why he couldn’t find the book anywhere in greater Los Angeles. Lawrence replied that at least seven area bookstores had ordered copies, and added a bit of heavy humor to ease the strain: “They’re there, and now all you have to do is persuade those starlets and tycoons to buy them. But do they read out there?”

  * * *

  The last week in March, while laid up with pneumonia, Yates set aside work on his screenplay to make a final selection for the Bantam anthology. By then he was thoroughly sick of the whole business—in his introduction he wrote that he’d begun to develop “a kind of literary snow-blindness” amid the “blizzard of manuscripts”—but fairly satisfied with the result: He’d managed to cull fifteen good stories out of the five thousand submitted, and also sent thirty-five runners-up just in case. Rust Hills was “quite impressed” by Yates’s selection, though he did decide to rearrange the top two prizewinners so that a quirky, formless story called “Two Semesters at Wagner Inn” got first place instead of George Cuomo’s more conventional “A Part of the Bargain.” The anthology was titled Stories for the Sixties (“Here are some of the writers you’ll watch for in the Sixties,” trumpets the cove
r blurb), and Yates’s introduction was a precise summary of his own principles whatever the decade:

  There are, I believe, no sentimental stories in this collection. None of them betrays the uncomfortable sound of an author trying to speak in a voice that is not his own, nor is there any in which the voice is not worth listening to.… It might be tempting to look for literary trends in these fifteen stories, or to draw conclusions from them about contemporary ways of seeing Man and Society, but that’s a risky business better left to scholars and critics. For an editor, it’s enough to know that they encompass a healthy variety of style and content, that each writer has accomplished what he set out to do, and that what he set out to do was neither false nor trivial.

  Fair enough, though readers who watched for these particular writers in the sixties or any other decade were bound to be somewhat disappointed. Of the fifteen, only one would become at all well-known: Judith Rossner, author of Looking for Mr. Goodbar. George Cuomo and Helen Hudson (a former New School student of Yates) would go on to have productive if rather obscure careers, while another, Silvia Tennenbaum, wrote a commercial novel titled Rachel, the Rabbi’s Wife.

  After Yates’s first hectic month in California, he was perhaps too exhausted to feel proper elation at the news that he’d won a Guggenheim in the amount of $4,500. He was deflated further by the fact that his friend and fellow NBA-nominee Ed Wallant had just gotten a Guggenheim for $6,000, and had kited off to Rome after submitting his third and fourth novels simultaneously. Yates was gleeful when he got word that both manuscripts had been rejected pending further revision (“Maybe the little bastard will now begin to learn that it’s difficult to write good novels”), but shocked into taking a kinder view a few months later, when Wallant died suddenly of a brain aneurysm at thirty-six. “It was almost as if he knew he didn’t have much time,” Yates remarked in a later interview, having noted his friend’s hasty working methods.