by Blake Bailey
On the very first morning, late for reveille and sleepily fumbling with his unfamiliar infantry leggings, he had put the damned things on backward, with the hood lacings on the inside rather than the outside of his calves; he had taken four running steps across the barracks floor before the lacing hooks of one legging caught the lace of the other, and down he came—all gangling, flailing six-foot-three of him—in a spectacular locklegged fall that left his audience weak with laughter the rest of the day.
And when one considers, finally, that at eighteen Yates was still a boy in almost every particular but height, it’s a wonder he survived at all.
At Camp Pickett he was again a pariah, and this time there was almost nothing he could do about it. He couldn’t find a niche among the surly, mostly working-class men, and there was no way to prove himself, or any fellow fuckup of quite the same magnitude with whom to commiserate. In moments of humiliating defeat he might try to vent his defiance (and perhaps bridge the social gap) by being as loud and foul-mouthed as the best of them, but this only made him seem more ridiculous; and if he tried to keep his own counsel he was mocked and left out just the same. The one thing he could do well was the one thing nobody seemed to notice: stay in step on parade, perform his manual of arms in crisp unison with his comrades—an aptitude made possible, perhaps, by the very fact that nobody was watching.
Later Yates would blend with the masses in a more essential way, as part of a personal (and artistic) ethic. “Dick cultivated an anti-intellectual manner,” his friend and student DeWitt Henry observed,
but there was nothing phony or affected about it. In places like the army and tuberculosis wards he was put in contact with unlettered people, who were just as sensitive as anybody else. Dick instinctively took it as his mission to articulate the complexity of people who didn’t have the official badge of an education. It was a special quality of his writing. But in person, too, his manner was based on his army experiences—this need to bond with unlettered people. To Dick, speaking clearly and simply was good manners; pedantry was bad manners.
Pedantry was bad manners because it was a form of condescension, perhaps the form that made Yates most defensive in later years. While in the army, though, he didn’t know that his own formal education was already over, and his empathy with “unlettered people” was in a latent phase at best. Still, the hardships he suffered as the nonpareil fuckup of Camp Pickett helped teach him the value of action rather than fine words, and perhaps increased his awareness of how certain people were likely to perceive his own behavior: “An all-around incompetent was bad enough,” the narrator remarks of Robert Prentice; “but when he turned out to be a little wise guy too—when he swore not only in bad temper but in what sounded like the clipped, snotty accents of a spoiled rich kid—that was too much.”
It does seem likely that Yates finally made a friend and mentor of sorts at Camp Pickett: a man represented by the well-spoken, irascible character of Quint in A Special Providence. The man seems to have taken pity on Yates, though his typical mood toward the forlorn fuckup was, apparently, exasperation. In any case what happened to “Quint” later, and Yates’s possible part in it, would seem to lend further credibility to Vonnegut’s thesis about the self-destructive tendencies of veterans.*
* * *
As a member of the 75th Division†—nicknamed the “Diaper Division” because it was the youngest to enter the war—Yates went overseas on January 8, 1945. By the time his ship arrived in England, the war in Europe was almost won: The Battle of the Ardennes, or the “Bulge,” was in its final days, and with it the last German offensive had been routed. A hopeful rumor was spread among the replacements of the 75th that they were headed for a camp near Southampton, where they’d be trained to serve as occupation troops in Germany. When they got to Southampton, however, they were told to keep marching until they boarded a foul-smelling troopship bound for France.
From Normandy a train took them through snowy countryside until they came to the First Army replacement depot near a bombed-out, mostly abandoned Belgian village, where Yates lost no time living up to his Camp Pickett legend. Among the many “hilarious” war stories he liked to tell, perhaps the most characteristic is the one about how he was almost reported AWOL within days of arriving overseas. As told in A Special Providence, Yates accepted a soldier’s invitation to join him and others in spending the night at a nearby civilian house, rather than the grain mill where the rest of the men were sleeping. After a jolly time with a hospitable Belgian family—who shared their wine and marveled at Yates’s height (“un grand soldat”)—he woke up, late, to the mass shuffling sound of men on the march. He raced back to the grain mill to retrieve his lone duffel bag, then ran a great distance to catch up with the last of the marching men, and a great distance more before he was staggering alongside his own company. To make matters worse, he’d missed his chance to draw rations and had to watch with famished exhaustion while the others wolfed theirs down. Nor was anyone inclined to share, least of all the mentorly “Quint”: “Half the guys in this company are sick,” he rails at Grove in Uncertain Times (and at Prentice—in so many words—in the other book), “but we don’t fuck up all the time like you. We don’t keep losing our stuff in the snow and forgetting to draw our rations and expecting somebody to take care of us all the time.”
Perhaps to make amends, Yates volunteered for dangerous “runner” duty during the Colmar Pocket Battle that began on January 30. The troops had been transported over the freezing Vosges Mountains, and by the time they reached the Alsace region Yates was seriously ill. Though dizzy and feverish and hoarse from coughing, he ran about the tiny shelled-out village from which his battalion planned to launch an attack on the town of Horbourg, three miles away. “He took pride in delivering his small messages, even though the effort of speaking made him twist and rise on tiptoe before any sound came out.” As it happened Yates had pneumonia complicated by pleurisy, and apparently he wasn’t the only one. His friend “Quint” was sick too, and both Bill Grove and Robert Prentice would later “agonize” over the fact that they’d proudly refused to go to an aid station when Quint made the suggestion. “I mean after this Horbourg business is over maybe I’ll go back,” says Prentice, “but not before.” Shamed, Quint decides to stay in the action too, and is killed a few days later—or such is the fate of that character in two of Yates’s most autobiographical novels. If such a man existed, and if he died in these or similar circumstances, then certain psychological ramifications might at least be considered, and for what they’re worth, the reader is left to consider them.* That said, let it be noted that the subject of “Quint”—whoever he was or wasn’t—seems rarely if ever to have been broached outside the novels.
Yates’s own delay in going to an aid station would, without a doubt, have lifelong consequences. Such was his eagerness to redeem himself as a soldier that he continued running messages amid the rubble of Horbourg, as mortar shells burst around him, until he was all but dead with exhaustion. And when he finally woke up to find himself, at last, in an aid station, it was with a dawning sense of embarrassment: He wasn’t even wounded. A doctor dismissively made note of that fact and poked him in the chest, whereupon Yates fell back unconscious. It later transpired that his lungs had been permanently damaged, and for the rest of his life he’d be a semi-invalid. For the time being he was awarded the Combat Infantry Badge (as was everyone who participated in ground combat), but this crumb was only the beginning of a lifetime of restitution the U.S. government would make toward Yates, in various forms, for his valor.
* * *
For five weeks he was far away from the front. The hospital was an old Catholic girls’ school that overlooked the Alsatian hills, and Yates spent his days watching the snow melt and writing grim letters to his Avon friends. One detail he never forgot was the peculiar stench of the pneumonia ward, and sometimes he’d put down his pen and lie wondering at its source.
By the time Yates was released in March, th
e Seventy-fifth Division had driven deep into Germany and was positioned along the west bank of the Rhine; the men were moving from town to town, sometimes under heavy mortar attack, and by his own account Yates ended up shooting a lot of trees. As he later put it, he’d never been so “shit-scared” in all his life, but soon learned—while advancing through eighty-eight fire or flushing Germans out of ruined buildings—that he could “shut off [his] mind and keep a tight asshole and [not] even think about fear” until the danger had passed. (“Keep a tight asshole” became a favorite motto in times of adversity.)
Eventually he was made to feel rather proud of his own bravery, thanks in part to the reassurances of one Frank Knorr, who later told FBI agents that Yates had been “fine” under fire, and then persuaded his incredulous friend that he was quite sincere in saying so. Knorr had been the B.A.R. (Browning Automatic Rifle) man in their squad—the kind of solid, competent mensch that Yates would admire, wistfully, all his life; they’d met after Yates’s return from the hospital in Alsace, and Yates was rather amazed that someone like Knorr was willing to be his friend. Indeed, the two would keep in touch for most of their lives, and something of hero worship is suggested by the fact that Yates, when deranged or in his cups or both, would occasionally claim that he himself had been a B.A.R. man, though the heavy Browning Automatic was generally handled by the burliest, most flatfooted, and reliable member of a twelve-man squad—the antithesis of Yates, in short, and thus a kind of ideal in his eyes.
Yates’s long-standing ambivalence about his performance in combat was partly due to what happened at the Dortmund-Ems Canal, his company’s last major engagement of the war. The canal was Germany’s second line of defense, and in the dark early-morning hours of April 4 the Americans attempted to cross it. While engineers rushed to construct a footbridge and get ladders up on the other side, the men waiting on the bank were subject to constant artillery barrage, and the crossing itself was chaotic: Amid enemy fire and screaming casualties, one terrified column after another went shoving and scrambling over the wet ramshackle bridge and up the ladders, each man laden with heavy equipment. As he wrote in his early story “The Canal”—whose combat scenes were cannibalized almost word for word into A Special Providence—Yates (aka “Lew Miller” and Prentice respectively) was carrying a fifty-pound spool of communication wire as he staggered through the dark and tried to keep his eyes on the man in front of him. But like any number of men that night, Yates lost track of his squad in the melee, and when he finally caught up he was castigated by his sergeant as being, in effect, “more goddamn trouble than [he was] worth.”
In “The Canal” Lew Miller takes this in silence, and the moment is meant to be emblematic of all the humiliation he felt—and still feels five years later—as a fuckup soldier. Yates’s main revision of the scene in A Special Providence is revealing: Prentice recognizes the unfairness of the reprimand and finally stands up for himself (“Don’t be telling me I can’t keep up”), which might reflect Yates’s change of heart about his own soldierly conduct—at least somewhat assisted by the belated good report of Frank Knorr—in the decade-plus that passed between writing “The Canal” and transplanting it into his second novel. In fact the fundamental problem with early drafts of A Special Providence was the lack of growth, the non–coming of age, of its autobiographical protagonist (a prentice no less); but Knorr’s insistence that Yates was, after all, a good soldier, is momentously evoked in Uncertain Times (where Knorr appears as “Frank Marr”) as “something like what patients in psychotherapy call a breakthrough … [that] would strengthen the whole latter part of the book, strengthen the tone of the book itself, and now [Grove] felt he could attack the writing of it with new confidence.” Thus the meekly self-loathing Lew Miller became the more resilient Robert Prentice, by far a more hopeful (and accurate) portrait of the artist as a young GI. And Yates too, though he generally remained “hilarious” on the subject, later came to speak of his war experience with a certain pride.
* * *
By the end of April the 75th Division was mostly distributed among a number of soggy foxholes near Braumbauer and Plettenberg, Germany, in what was said to be a blocking position. After a few weeks of this, Yates’s company was removed to one of the towns and given drier accommodations, and amid such relative luxury the war in Europe abruptly came to an end. Yates—who over the past few months had learned to drink (“out of badly made shoes and boots,” he liked to say)—celebrated the surrender as many did, by staying drunk all night and sleeping most of the day, and perhaps “fraternizing” to some degree with the many unattached German women. Soon his unit was moved to the pleasant town of Kierspe-Bahnhof, where their nominal duty was to guard a thousand newly liberated Russians. Meanwhile the festivities continued, and despite the odd pang (over “Quint” perhaps, or the Dortmund-Ems Canal), Yates seems to have enjoyed himself immensely.
Dookie, however, was having a hard time of it back in New York. While her son’s induction had enabled her to quit the mannequin factory—as a “Class A Dependent” she received a small sum from the government—she was lonely, bored, and poor, and the letters she’d gotten from overseas left her sick with worry. She tried to distract herself with membership in various art organizations: She was recording secretary of something called Artists for Victory, and also active in Pen and Brush, the National Association of Women Artists, and others. But she was essentially alone in the world, and Richard’s absence made that clearer than ever. Her daughter contrived to see less and less of her, and apart from tiresome old Elsa she had no other family to speak of.
She was halfheartedly working on a statuette of the flag raising at Iwo Jima (an Artists for Victory job) when news of the German surrender came over the radio; such was her ecstasy that she tore up the papier-mâché marines and hurled them out the window, as if with a flash of insight into their true artistic worth. With her one good friend, Elisabeth Cushman, she went to an Episcopal church and prayed for her son’s safe return and constant company thereafter, and lit a candle to that effect, and then the two women retired with a bottle of rye. When the equally lonely Cushman—“after my 85th drink,” she noted—suggested they live together again, Dookie replied with tipsy bitterness, “I wouldn’t be a bit surprised … it will serve us right!” Happily for both it wouldn’t be necessary: Dookie’s prayers would soon be answered, and as for Cushman, she moved to California a few months later and stayed there.
Meanwhile Yates and his Avon friends were comparing notes and planning reunions. Bick Wright hadn’t heard from Yates in so long that he was “seriously afraid something had happened to [him].” That noted, Wright called his friend “assinine” [sic] for writing the following bit of garbled bravado: “Combat doesn’t seem so bad from what I’ve seen about it.” “I’ve seen enough of this horror and death to last me a hundred lifetimes,” Wright rejoined, and he meant it too. In fact his experience bore a bleak resemblance to Yates’s: Wright had also been widely reviled as a feckless preppy wise-ass, and one sergeant had always made a point of assigning him first scout in hope that the Germans would shoot him.* Having survived all that, Wright gloomily predicted that now he’d be sent to the Pacific, but hoped Yates and he could someday “take a toot around the country, hitch-hiking and what-have-you.” Davis Pratt’s vision of postwar life was somewhat less picaresque: Together in New York, he wrote Yates, they’d “enjoy good food, women and our interests together gathering at odd hours over some oysters at out of the way places.” As for that other, graver Pratt (Hugh), he was more concerned with the philosophical side of peace. When Yates suggested that his own war experiences were “meaningless,” at least until properly digested, Pratt begged to differ—-or not, depending on how one interprets such dicta as, “Your knowledge of what has happened mayhap be used to illustrate an attitude toward life whose sources will lie somewhere else.”
Whatever Yates’s world-weary pronouncements, the rest of his time overseas was pleasant enough, if a bit uneventful.
Like Colby in “A Compassionate Leave,” his service in Germany with the Army of Occupation “had begun to give every promise of turning into the best time of [his life],” when suddenly that summer he was transferred to Camp Pittsburgh near Reims, one of several redeployment camps named after American cities and cigarette brands, whose postwar purpose was to process soldiers back to the States. Yates’s duties there were mostly clerical—that is, he processed others as opposed to being processed himself, since he still had plenty of time to serve according to the point system. Camp Pittsburgh offered a lot less in the way of liquor and wenching, but on the whole there was something to be said for “the order and the idleness of life in these tents in the grass. There was nothing to prove here.”