by Blake Bailey
While Dookie applied her native flair to making contacts and grinding lenses, Yates found work as a copyboy at the New York Sun. Though the Sun “[wasn’t] really much of a paper” (as Walter Grimes explains to his daughters in The Easter Parade), Yates enjoyed the role of an honest workingman. At the time the extra income made it possible for him and Dookie to move to a larger furnished apartment only a block away from the Ultima Optical Company on West Fifty-fifth, if somewhat farther from the Sun on Chambers Street. Also, the job gave him good material for his next short story (more on that below), some of which was deftly recycled for his fourth novel more than thirty years later.
For a while Yates may have enjoyed being the breadwinner at the age of seventeen, but the romance soon began to pall. The combined salaries of a copyboy and a lens grinder didn’t amount to much, but Dookie was utterly debonair about the future. Night after night she jabbered about the contacts she was making in the fashion world, as well as the lucrative “one-man show” that was right around the corner, while her son listened and the canned soup simmered. As for Richard’s hard work to pay for groceries and most of the rent, Dookie pretended with friends that it was just “a little laboring job … you know the kind of thing boys do in the summertime.” And then, as if there were no pressing question of how to pay fees at an expensive private school in the fall, Dookie blew much of their wages on a new wardrobe—this, of course, to establish herself in the fashion world. “You sound just like your father,” she’d sigh, when he ventured to suggest that they be more thrifty. Finally he began to lose his temper. When thus cornered (especially about money), Dookie tended to throw a kind of stylized fit—partly a matter of genuine hysterics, no doubt, and partly a matter of enlightened self-interest. In one form or another the performance is given by all her fictional personae, though perhaps most vividly by Alice Prentice:
And she burst into tears. As if shot, she then clutched her left breast and collapsed full length on the floor.… She lay facedown, quivering all over and making spastic little kicks with her feet, while he stood and watched.… It had happened often enough, in various crises, that he knew she wasn’t really having a heart attack; all he had to do was wait until she began to feel foolish lying there.
As it turned out, Dookie never did generate enough contacts to break back into the fashion world, though shortly before her son returned to school she managed to find a job in a factory that made department-store mannequins. This was better suited to her talents than lens grinding, but all such work was “harsh and degrading,” as Yates put it in “Regards at Home”—“pitifully wrong for a bewildered, rapidly aging, often hysterical woman who had always considered herself a sculptor with at least as much intensity as I brought to the notion of myself as a writer.”
* * *
Were it not for his home life and the wartime possibility of imminent death, Yates’s final year at Avon might have been idyllic. As noted in A Good School, his classmates were actually nice to one another—not only because they were seniors, but also because of a general wish to live and let live in what little time was left before being drafted. The mood was one of rather blithe pessimism. Rumor had it that Mrs. Riddle and Headmaster Stabler—never on the best of terms—had reached an impasse over the budget and other matters, and even the faculty seemed a bit tongue-in-cheek about bothering with one’s work. Yates’s favorite English teacher, Dr. Knowles, occasionally spent whole classes in self-absorbed silence, studying Japanese characters with a magnifying glass and chuckling at nothing in particular. And when the school warden—an amiable but overserious sixth former named David Bigelow (who affected not to care when people called him “Shorty”)—tried to enforce the headmaster’s blackout regulations, he was met with such brazen ridicule that the memory angers him still.
Yates thrived. Because of his excellent record as editor he was given the unprecedented privilege of running The Avonian without the aid of a faculty adviser, and the newspaper became more influential than ever—not only was it sent to training camps around the country, but also to every theater of war where alumni served. It was an ideal time to be a lackadaisical student wholly committed to other, more glorious pursuits, and Yates relished his role as a kind of maverick litterateur. Witness his senior profile in the Winged Beaver (accompanied by a snapshot of Yates sneering, with a cigarette):
As Editor during his last two years, Dick’s familiar figure has been seen many a Tuesday afternoon, draped in a pair of gray trousers and wilted blue shirt as he strides about with a harassed look. At five fifteen he totters into the Avon Club, lights the usual cigarette, and falls on the most comfortable sofa. The crisis has passed and our next Avonian will come out after all.
Yates was also the school’s most gifted cartoonist, and his caricatures of Stabler and staff were prized as keepsakes among the students. As art director of the Winged Beaver (and later associate editor), he provided the yearbook illustrations for two years, and his lead cartoon for the 1944 edition was apt: a hulking, ape-faced drill sergeant holding a uniform in one hand and crooking a fat finger at some unseen recruit with the other. It was precisely what awaited them all, and everything else seemed beside the point. The time was right for antiheroes, and Yates was eulogized as such in the Winged Beaver: “And then Dick Yates, Our Editor,/ Our Novelist divine/ Who burned his midnight oil so much/ He switched to turpentine.”
Yates’s picturesque fretting over his various Avonian duties was mostly reserved for daylight hours; at night he burned his oil to work on fiction, and lost no time pouring his impressions from the New York Sun into a short story, “Schedule,” which he finished early that autumn. Yates was proud enough of this effort to send it to Thomas Wolfe’s agent and biographer, the rather celebrated Elizabeth Nowell,* who responded with an almost three-page, single-space critique that was remarkable in its prescience. “I think you’re pretty good,” she began, and continued in the same tone of candid, qualified congratulation. Nowell didn’t know how old Yates was, only that he was in school, but noted that his story was far better than many she’d read by amateur adults. “I don’t mean by that that I think you are ready to be published, but … keep on writing and getting surer of yourself: cutting deeper in the groove. The main thing is that you have a fine quality to your writing: the kind of feel to it that really good stuff has. As long as you’ve got that you’ll never lose it.”
“Schedule,” which appeared in the 1944 Winged Beaver, is an apprentice work of unmistakable promise, and perhaps worth dwelling on at some little length. “The best part of [the story is] the very fine background of it,” Nowell rightly pointed out, “the way you make the reader really see and hear and smell the newspaper building and all the departments in it.” The first quarter of the story, in fact, is given over to some five hundred words of wonderfully irrelevant atmosphere: “The cigarette smoke rose listlessly, curling toward the ceiling, until it met the draft from the open top-halves of the windows and was whirled sharply out into the morning sunlight”—and from there we move on to the makeup editor “gingerly” sipping his coffee, to the pressroom workers with their “jaunty square hats of folded newspaper” (readers of The Easter Parade take note), to the great press machines “turning out newspapers fifteen a second, pushing them out wet with ink and hot from the dryers,” and so forth.
“It seemed to me you had known a newspaper like this and had wanted to write about it,” Nowell observed, “but had had to have some sort of regular story to weave it around so had taken Al Shapiro as the center of it.” Just so: The great wave of descriptive eloquence with which the story begins washes up, finally and rather randomly, at the feet of Al Shapiro, whose menial task is to bundle the newspapers in twine. Shapiro is a kind of ur-version of the typical Yatesian loser: He wants to be a writer, but his prole father makes him drop out of school to haul ice; later he tries to take a journalism class (where all the students are younger and better dressed than he), but is humiliated by a tweedy pedant who advises him to learn
basic grammar first; and finally, fifteen years later, the now middle-aged Al’s diminished dreams take him all the way back to high school, despite the ridicule of a vulgar wife (“‘Listen, Al, I don’ want no high school boy for a husband’”). In the end a coworker named Moe makes the mistake of teasing Al in precisely the wrong terms—“‘Christ almighty, are you gonna be ignorant all your life?’”—whereupon Al goes berserk and attacks the man with his twine cutter.
But mere plot summary fails to do justice to the many fine things here, such as the nicely sustained time theme—the schedule of various newspaper editions posted throughout the narrative (even as time runs out on poor Al Shapiro), the “great living monster” of the press machine rolling inexorably on to make the newspaper (as the story ends) “on time.” Clearly Yates had worked hard and learned a few things about craft over the past year, and indeed Elizabeth Nowell not only detected his talent but also his autodidactic tendency: “I think you have enough natural feeling for writing to teach yourself and do it far better than anyone else can do it.” This borders on the prophetic, and may explain why Yates kept the letter all his life, perhaps for the purpose of occasional reassurance.
* * *
According to federal law a high school student in 1943 could be drafted in the middle of his senior year if his eighteenth birthday fell before January. This applied to three of Yates’s classmates—who took summer school to prepare for winter graduation and subsequent induction—among them Bick Wright. That year Wright had served as associate editor of The Avonian and succeeded Candels as the wit behind “The Beaver’s Log”; this meant that Yates was necessarily exposed to his friend’s vagaries on a more or less constant basis, which seems to have frayed their old rapport. Still, Bick’s departure was a potent reminder that things were coming to an end, and probably the two marked the occasion in much the same way as Grove and Ward in A Good School—that is, by staying up late in the newspaper office and sharing a pint of smuggled whiskey (“it tasted so awful that Grove couldn’t imagine the source of its celebrated power to give pleasure, let alone enslave the soul”). Nor is there much reason to doubt that Wright was just as “dramatically morose” as Ward, full of gloomy bravado in the wake of a Dear John letter he’d just received: “‘I don’t care anymore.… I don’t care what happens to me in the Army or anything else.’” In any case he left that December; Pierre Van Nordan took over as associate editor, Yates became the new dorm inspector of Building One, and things continued to end.
It was a bad Christmas. As Yates would tell it later (not for laughs), this was the year he was “kidnapped” by Avon—forbidden to go home for the holidays because his tuition hadn’t been paid since his father’s death. Extreme measures were therefore indicated, though this one was no more successful than others. Dookie temporized as usual, and Yates spent Christmas with the Avon staff, who if anything were less happy about it than he.
Of course the really remarkable thing is their indulgence in allowing him to stay at all, even as a Yuletide hostage. It suggested the larger problem: Headmaster Stabler, in his zeal to recruit less privileged but otherwise well-suited students, had perhaps overlooked the possibility that Mrs. Riddle would choose to cut her losses at some point. But Stabler had all but ensured this result by enacting a number of reforms without the founder’s consent: Not only did he switch the clothing franchise from Brooks Brothers to the plebeian Franklin Simon (and was planning to abolish the dress code altogether), but also he changed the name from Avon Old Farms to the Avon School, tinkered with curriculum, insisted on a greater religious presence, and to that end erected a hideous Hodgson Portable Chapel on the campus. This last touch, in particular, seemed to gall Mrs. Riddle. She’d become increasingly bellicose since the death of her husband, and when Stabler presumed to mar the architectural purity of her “indestructible school,” she dropped the bomb: Either abide by the letter of her Deed of Trust, she demanded, or all support would be forever withdrawn. Stabler and the faculty resigned en masse, perhaps in the hope of calling her bluff, but the widow Riddle was not a bluffer. In a letter to her mutinous underlings she noted that she’d spent “seven-ninths of [her] fortune in building and supporting the School,” but now saw no alternative but to close at the end of the academic year. “A noble experiment had somehow gone wrong,” wrote historian Gordon Ramsey.
At any other time the students might have taken the news in the same spirit with which they mocked themselves as “Avon Old Queers,” but given the bleak immediate future it was a real blow, yet another of life’s moorings giving way. “Our school is closed, and probably the future will record many a similar disillusionment,” a student wrote in that year’s Winged Beaver. As for Yates, the yearbook noted: “He does plan a college education and a career as a professional writer, but that must wait until peace.” Something else that would have to wait was Yates’s diploma, which was withheld pending the Godot-like prospect of his tuition payment.
No matter. Yates was a graduate in spirit and more or less in fact; and besides, the school was in the process of becoming a home for blinded veterans.* And then after a fashion he did find a way to pay his debt to Avon, and to his father too, really, perhaps in penance for having been so dismissive of both. On the one hand Yates would always remember Avon as a “dopey little school,” but he also realized it had been almost perfect for the strange young man he was, and like Bill Grove he felt beholden to his father for paying his way—until the poor man died, that is, having given up his life in more than one respect so that his son could become the writer he was meant to be. Yates wished he could thank him for that:
I might even have told him—and this would have been only a slight exaggeration—that in ways still important to me it was a good school. It saw me through the worst of my adolescence, as few other schools would have done, and it taught me the rudiments of my trade. I learned to write by working on the [newspaper], making terrible mistakes in print that hardly anybody ever noticed. Couldn’t that be called a lucky apprenticeship?
CHAPTER THREE
The Canal: 1944-1947
In later life Yates would become almost a parody of the self-destructive personality: He smoked constantly despite tuberculosis, emphysema, and repeated bouts of pneumonia; he was an alcoholic who, when unable to write, would sometimes start the day with martinis at breakfast; he rarely exercised (indeed could hardly walk without gasping), and ate red meat at every meal if he could help it. Such behavior seems to indicate a death wish, but it wasn’t that simple in Yates’s case. It was true he had a gloomy temperament and was sometimes all but immobilized by depression, though often enough he was capable of high delight, and as for smoking and drinking—well, he liked smoking and drinking. How to explain a man who by no means lacked a fear of pain and suffering (he dreaded cancer in particular) and sometimes rather enjoyed being alive, yet behaved almost as much as humanly possible to the contrary? A number of factors come to mind, but perhaps the most compelling was suggested by Yates’s friend and fellow World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut: “People don’t recover from a war. There’s a fatalism that he picked up as a soldier. Enlisted men are surprisingly indifferent to survival. Death doesn’t matter much.”
Certainly it’s hard to imagine Yates as a soldier, and it must have been a jaded group of army examiners before whom this morbidly frail, morbidly self-conscious eighteen-year-old stood in his underwear on June 17, 1944. He was six foot three and weighed just over 160 pounds, but skinniness per se wasn’t enough to disqualify him. Nor did the army psychiatrist find much amiss. The man asked him two questions, pro forma: “Do you like girls?” Yates said he did, and the man recorded this fact. “Do you ever get nervous?” Yates said he did, and the man paused. “Like when?” “Like when I’m standing in my underwear with a bunch of other guys getting asked a bunch of questions,” Yates replied, and passed the exam.
It was downhill from there. In the weeks that followed, whatever self-confidence Yates had gained from his Avon success was
decimated. First there was the IQ test that recruits took at the induction center. Yates alluded to this experience twice in his fiction—in Disturbing the Peace and the more explicitly autobiographical “Regards at Home”—and both times he gave the same IQ score: 109. Like many a great writer before him (Salinger and Cheever come to mind), Yates was a poor test taker—a slow, careful reader whose aversion to math bordered on the phobic.* This being the case, John Wilder’s ordeal in Disturbing the Peace rings true: Wilder recounts for his psychiatrist how he scored 100 on his first attempt at the “Army General Classification test,” which he retook in hope of scoring the 110 or better needed to qualify for officers’ training; when he missed by a single point, he tried to remonstrate with the examiner, who said, “‘Curious thing; you didn’t get a single question wrong, but you only did about half of them.’… ‘Well, but, sir [Wilder replies], if I got them all right doesn’t that indicate—’… ‘It indicates a hundred and nine. You must be a very slow reader, that’s all.’” Like Wilder, too, Yates’s relatively poor performances on such tests would be a lifelong source of insecurity, though in person he hardly gave the impression of one whose IQ was barely above average (except perhaps in his almost obsessive vigilance against any form of intellectual pretension).
And so Yates had to make his way among enlisted men, almost all of whom were older, stronger, and more comfortable in their own skin. Under other circumstances he might have withdrawn into the shy, courteous persona that had served him well among bullies at Avon, but with his ineptitude on constant display it was hard to maintain any sort of sangfroid, nor was the army a place for little gentlemen. After a “mild and pampered” month as an air corps recruit, Yates was transferred to Camp Pickett, Virginia, for basic training as an infantry rifleman—where (as he wrote of Bill Grove in Uncertain Times) “he’d been a fuckup, in the unforgiving idiom of the time.” Later the term “fuckup” would invariably come to Yates’s lips whenever he discussed his army days, which he endeavored to do in a lighthearted way. “Dick was hilarious about his war experiences,” said his friend Pat Dubus. “The stories were always at his own expense, and he could really make you see it.” The humor, the pathos too, mostly arose from a vast discrepancy between his desperate effort as a soldier, his pure intentions, and the results achieved by his clownishly incompetent body. For it can hardly be emphasized enough that Yates was clumsy on a legendary scale: All his life he bumbled and tripped and knocked things down, and not only was he clumsy but absentminded too—a bad combination in the army, as illustrated by the newly recruited Prentice in A Special Providence: