by Blake Bailey
Meanwhile Yates awaited news of “Tenor,” and found himself in a “creative slump”: He was still without a good idea for a novel, and was sick of writing short stories and living hand-to-mouth with a “completely aimless, pointless, useless bastard” like Bill Bray for company. Two pieces of bad news had deflated him further: His six best stories were returned in a batch by the English magazine Argosy, whose editor remarked on their “Americanness” and “bitter astringency of tone” (“You certainly shoot to kill, don’t you?”); and the next day he learned that Collier’s had declined “Tenor,” since they “[didn’t] have room for another story about the emotional problems of a young boy.” Monica McCall remained confident, though by then her mood wasn’t contagious.
Yates tried to cheer himself up by observing the coronation of Queen Elizabeth—a “terrific show” whose vast cheering crowds only served to remind him of his loneliness, which in turn suggested how much worse things might have been if Sheila were there: “I know perfectly well,” he wrote her, “that your cop-fear would have kept us home all day in a great family snit, with you redundantly insisting that if I wanted to go there was nothing to stop me, and me bellowing the whole point of the thing would be lost unless you came too. I guess there are certain advantages in bachelorhood after all.” One such advantage was decidedly not his roommate Bill Bray, who got loudly drunk every night and brought home a “grubby, homely Village type who not only Does It but talks about it in clarion tones, almost entirely four-letter words,” Yates wrote. “The sad thing about old Bill is that he has absolutely nothing to show for his forty-odd years, despite what would seem to be all the advantages of breeding, native intelligence and good looks.” If nothing else, the man acted as an impetus for Yates’s getting out of the flat more often. He was even willing to accompany his cousin-in-law Barbara to a quaint choral concert at her club, which involved “about a million print-dress biddies” and other solid citizens singing to her majesty’s health, a spectacle that moved Yates strangely: “It was so painful and so heartbreakingly nice that it was enough to make you fall in love with this country forever.” A couple weeks later he took a four-hour bus trip to visit Aunt Mary in Sussex, and then rode all the way back the same afternoon to catch a “wolloping good party” at the flat of Mrs. Pierce (the nursery school proprietor), where Bill Bray turned up and “got blind, fall-down drunk as usual.”
With such a cautionary figure in mind, Yates proposed that he end his expatriation forthwith and get on with supporting his family in the manner to which they wished to become accustomed. Mussy was soon to be put in a seedy, city-subsidized nursery where “there mightn’t be anyone for [her] to have extra-curricular activities with,” or so Sheila worried (though the situation was saved by the presence of two other “true blue shabby-genteel” parents and their daughters), and that was but a small aspect of the whole intolerable situation. “We’re never going to get rich out of short stories,” Yates wrote. The only “real dough” to be made was in the novel he’d sooner or later write, but until then it was time to face facts: “Don’t you think it might be a healthier idea … if I quit writing stories, come home and get a really good job of the sort that Monica might be able to help me get, or that I might get myself on the strength of my Atlantic story, and mark time that way until the novel idea comes along?” Yates was desperately ready to “start living a decent upper-middle-class life—car, clothes, house, etc.” And by a “really good job” he didn’t mean Remington Rand: “a moral defeat [that] might put me back in the hospital (Fairfield, if not Halloran).” Nor did he wish for any kind of “physically grueling” newspaper work, but rather some kind of “well-paid” job on the staff of a magazine or publishing firm. And lest this seem a headlong retreat into respectability, Yates reminded Sheila of all the things he’d gained from his two years in Europe: “Monica, the Atlantic, the nibble from Morrow, and a great deal of practical writing experience without which I’d probably never have the guts to tackle a novel, let alone to write a good one.”
Sheila professed to be appalled by the idea: “If you had a job that would be the end and in your heart you know it.… What would our crazy marriage be if you came here and made us comfortable with a 9–5 job?… I can find a man easily who can give me that kind of life and be a lot better company than you’d be doing it.” Perhaps, but such shrill insistence that he remain abroad and follow his dream (“Stay in England,” she ordered him; “write and forget about us all”) suggested a rather unflattering subtext—namely, that her husband’s company wasn’t much desired either as a writer or a nine-to-five drone.
Yates agreed to table the matter for the time being, though not before venting his wounded feelings: Her “violent opposition,” he wrote, was rife with the sort of “childishly arbitrary” overstatements that they’d “both have to outgrow” if they were “ever going to be adults, together or separately.” He pointed out that the “social and economic limbo” of their lives was just as inhibiting to creative endeavor as a regular job would be, and the latter was less likely to involve “inadequate housing, illness, family strife, neurotic brooding and frenetic moves around the world.” And really, he wondered, wherefore this sudden precious concern for his writing, which she’d once regarded as little more than a “knack” that distracted him from more worldly pursuits? “You do seem to have funny ideas as to what my talent is all about … now it’s become a sacred flame which must be hovered over and protected at all cost while the world is held perilously at bay.” He assured her that he had no intention of coming home and “demand[ing] restitution of [his] conjugal rights,” though if he did decide to return it would be “altogether [his] business.” He repeated his basic position: “I love you and would like to live with you and Mussy again more than anything, but I will not be Pinner again … and now make it clear again, that the only way you’ll get me back is by wanting me.” He then enumerated, at greater length than ever, the many ways in which he was making himself “a more desirable package than the bundle of raw nerve-tissue” she’d known in the bygone past:
I’ve discovered I am as competent as anybody at dealing with the small-change of practical life.… I can “pull my weight,” “look out for myself,” “stay on the ball” and “cope” as well if not better than the most banal bore in the world, and I can now afford a benign pity—strictly non-violent—for all the millions of people, bless their hearts, who enjoy that sort of thing.… I’ve [also] discovered at long last what you knew from the beginning—that my “broods” do not stem from any dark, Hamlet-like neurosis, incurable and tragic, but from plain laziness.… I have snapped out of countless minor broods, since you left, by suddenly remembering it was time to put the potatoes on, or that the laundromat was about to close, or that there was something good on the radio. And I’ve pulled myself out of several really major ones by the more painful but no less effective method of telling myself to shut up and get back to the typewriter. I’m not saying I’ve overcome them—I had a bad one just the other day—but I’m holding my own against the bastards. They don’t immobilize me any more, and I’m confident it won’t be long before I’ll be able to brush them off like flies. I hope this shrill recital of my little triumphs doesn’t bore you or sound like an old-fashioned “drone.”
Yates appears here as an almost perfect character out of his own imagination—one of those deterministic victims who “rush around trying to do their best … doing what they can’t help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can’t help being the people they are.” Certainly Yates couldn’t help being a practical bungler any more than he could snap out of his “broods” by putting the potatoes on or running off to the laundromat. Indeed, the only durable way of coping with the awful burden of being himself would always be the “more painful” method of “get[ting] back to the typewriter,” though its effect on his marriages would prove neutral at best.
* * *
While Yates was bitterly converting himself into an ideal life-mate,
things took a turn for the better on both sides of the Atlantic and tension began to ease somewhat. For one thing, the indomitable Dookie had managed to pry some part-time wages out of the City Center and thus get a “stay of execution” at her beloved apartment-cum-studio. This was a great relief for all, particularly Sheila, who’d had to cope with a sudden drop in Dookie’s high spirits: “She was so low before—we had the real gamut of emotions daily,” she wrote Yates. “Very wearing for the spectator, and impossible to comfort. She is really a person without shading.” But with the promise of a salaried position in September—as director of the new City Center art gallery, no less—Dookie was not only planning to keep her old place in the West Fifties, but also to fix up the garage apartment at High Hedges as a country getaway, courtesy of Fritz Rodgers. “I am praying that it works out,” wrote Sheila, “but the one snag is the Rodgers, Jr., who I gather feel as they always did about having her so near.”
And Sheila knew just how they felt. Another month chez Dookie was simply out of the question, and in late June she moved to an apartment on King Street in the Village, where she and Mussy lived with a widow and her nine-year-old son. The rent was only fifty a month, and Sheila found her housemate pleasant enough. “She’d never stimulate me but there’d be no clashes, I think, and she’s no Bialek. When she has time, she writes stories for the Confession magazines and she gets The New Yorker—I think she knows the difference.” Yates was unthrilled by the arrangement (“If I do come home before August I guess I’ll have to plan on living at the Y”), though he was somewhat appeased by the Mussy angle: That is, the three-year-old was thriving at the subsidized Village nursery they’d thought would be so Dickensian, and even tended to “[kick] up an awful row” when Sheila came to take her home in the afternoon. When informed of such naughtiness, Yates advised his wife to “feed [Mussy] lots of ice cream and let her run around in her [diapers] and that should take care of it.”
Meanwhile Yates had managed to shut up and get back to the typewriter, which made it somewhat easier for him to stop coveting the life of a stable wage earner. In fact his latest story, “The Game of Ambush,” had begun as an attempt to fictionalize the dilemma in some objectified form, and toward this purpose he’d tried (abortively) to adopt a Gatsbyesque first-person peripheral narrator. An early draft begins with the sentence, “For a while when I was nine years old, my friends and I thought falling dead was the very zenith of romance,” and from there the narrator “Al” goes on to tell the story of his friend Walt Henderson, who ends up sacrificing his musical talent to take some idiot job selling plywood and thereby pay for his ex-wife’s psychiatrists. Perhaps this version struck too close to home; in subsequent drafts, anyway, Yates dispensed with Al and wrote in the third person about Walt, developing an entirely different plot from the same nominal premise. Finally, after much exhaustive tinkering, he had a finished story that he could only describe to Sheila as a “pretty good B-plus effort,” though he was proud of his tenacity in reworking it: “[I]t’s technically as good as I can make it, however ‘uninteresting’ the essential idea of the thing may be, and I’m pretty sure it will get by.” A fair assessment: The story was now about a compulsive failure who copes with being fired, and within certain intrinsic limits Yates had succeeded in an admirably B-plus way. And already he’d put it behind him to write another that he thought would be “very damn good indeed”: “So I’ve been pretty happy these last few days, very un-neurotic and in love with all mankind including myself, the way I always am when I’m full of a new story.”
Sheila thought the B-plus effort was “as good or perhaps better in its way than Tenor,” and mentioned that Charlie had also read it while on a weekend pass from Fairfield: “He liked the story very much … though his comments are sometimes a bit over my head. He did say he wondered if his trouble wasn’t the same as Walt in the story.” Yates was pleased that both seemed to like his new title, “A Glutton for Punishment,” and happily explained its origin: “It came to me in a flash one night when I had quit work rather guiltily to listen to the Turpin-Humez fight on the radio—the announcer said Humez was a glutton for punishment and I sprang for the typewriter like a madman.”* Actually he typed less like a madman than a hard-nosed reporter of the old school—in the rapid two-finger method he used all his life—and Sheila retyped his work with secretarial precision; in the case of “Glutton” (and presumably others), she also took it upon herself to make minor changes of grammar and punctuation which Yates retained in the published version.* However, he chose not to accept her rather astute criticism of the story’s ending, which she reluctantly offered when pressed: “I remember thinking that particular cliché was overdoing the parallel a bit,” she observed of Walt’s last remark, “‘They got me,’” which alludes (tritely?) to the cops-and-robbers games of his youth.
Monica McCall had reacted much the same way—“I love the story and absolutely loathe the ending”—though in her case such objections were made with an eye on the market. McCall wanted the hapless Walt to make a “new stand” as she put it, or whatever it took to give the story “a twist, or a fulfillment and a satisfaction.” She wanted a happy ending, in short, or if nothing else a bit of normal character development—but of course nothing could be more inimical to Yates’s basic view of humanity and Walt in particular, and after a bit of brooding he decided to be “stubborn as a mule” about it: “I’m not going to let her turn me into that kind of a writer,” he wrote Sheila. “If I’m going to start switching endings to suit markets I might as well be back at Remington Rand; and I really think there’s a hell of a lot more future in writing my own way.” Whether Yates was right about the “future” depends, perhaps, on how one views the vagaries of posterity. In any case McCall enjoyed the “funny and nice letter” he wrote declining her suggestions, and within a month the story was returned by the Atlantic, Charm, and The New Yorker (the last of which “continue[d] to be interested in Mr. Yates’s work”).
Yates’s social life was hardly a draining distraction, though at the end of the day there was always Bill Bray (“drearier and drearier”), whose “headquarters” were across the street at the Anglesea Pub; thither Yates was dragged when either his roommate or loneliness got the better of him. The clientele tended to be “slightly more rewarding” than Bray, but of course that wasn’t a lavish compliment. The only person who seemed to interest him at all was “a young journalist and writer named Douglas something,” with whom he could talk about books. (“Remarkable how few writers I’ve known,” Yates reflected, and in fact five more years would pass before he’d meet his first “real” writer, a distinction he made only in retrospect.) Douglas-something was about Yates’s age and had lived in New York as an evacuee during the early part of the war (“at the Sherry Netherlands, which gives you an idea of his class,” Yates noted for Sheila’s benefit); but the writing life hadn’t paid off for the once-posh young man, and now he looked “even broker than Bill.” Indeed there was a kind of striving-yet-aimless quality about the whole Anglesea crowd that rather intrigued Yates: Their “established routine” was to turn up at the pub each night, then “shift en masse” to a club on the Fulham Road, and then to coffee shops and diners and so on, looking for a party that generally failed to materialize. “I’m damned if I know how they can stick it night after night and not end up with faintly suicidal tendencies,” Yates mused. Little did he know that he was about to become the darling of that set.
It began on July 14, when he got his first really good news in nine months—as before, from Monica McCall: COSMOPOLITAN BUYING TENOR EIGHT HUNDRED FIFTY MANY CONGRATULATIONS. “How much money can we stand?” the ecstatic Yates wrote Sheila, and reported that he’d “been wandering around in a haze for two days.” His haze was abetted by the inevitable Bill Bray and all the manqué rowdies at the Anglesea, who got “deliriously drunk” in his honor and seemed to regard him “as an authentic and indisputed genius.” Yates’s roommate was particularly disposed to press this claim, and
for the soundest possible reason: “[Bray has] figured out that I have earned fourteen cents a word, and can’t get over it. It sounds like a hell of a lot over here, where short story writers traditionally think in terms of twenty-five pounds a story instead of three hundred.” Thus while the two staggered about the neighborhood with red carnations in their buttonholes, Bray roared of his friend’s triumph in terms of three-hundred-quid-a-pop.
But leave it to Yates to seize on what he called the “depressing aspect of the thing”: namely, that Cosmopolitan was a “dead-loss prestigewise.” In those days the magazine pandered to sentimental hausfraus, and Yates worried that the editors would butcher his story beyond recognition. If nothing else he expected them to tone down his dialogue—“make my ‘bastards’ into ‘buzzards’ and stuff like that” (in fact they substituted the only slightly less excruciating “jerks” and “stinkers”). But there was a more troubling problem: “[I]f I’ve got to appear among the cookie recipes I sure would rather have it be with a less personal story than this one. This will sort of be like taking off all your clothes for the amusement of several million Bialeks.”* Such an issue would loom larger in Yates’s later career, as his fiction became more baldly autobiographical (and his mental health more precarious), and whether or not there were cookie recipes or Bialeks in the picture would never matter to his shattered peace of mind. For the present, though, Bill Bray acted as a voice of reason: “Really, old boy,” he told the fretful Yates, “one can’t have jam on it.” Bray planned to spend some of the proceeds on a big party for the “madly smart,” and had little patience for such quibbling.
Yates agreed that a celebration was in order. Misgivings aside, the sale of “Tenor” was a milestone: positive proof that he could actually make a living as a writer. But such a métier was fraught with hazards, the most common of which would bedevil Yates from the outset: “[McCall] has left me in a real jam by failing to send the damn check,” he wrote Sheila ten days after the sale. “I’d already invited about a million people to a party tomorrow night … and it’s been pretty grim hounding the mailbox every day and picturing all the Madly Smart guests arriving with nothing at all to drink.” For the moment he’d been able to persuade Mrs. Capon at the dairy (“who loves me so dearly”) to cash a postdated check, but things were already spiraling out of control: Bill Bray had borrowed five pounds, the party would cost ten, and the phone and gas bills were due. Suddenly Yates found himself eighty dollars in the red rather than eight hundred in the black—“a lousy, painful, Dook-style mess,” he gloomily concluded.