by Blake Bailey
He wanted to be a proper country husband, a productive member of his household and community. He wanted to show he could “pull his weight,” “stay on the ball,” and “cope” as well or better than the most banal bore in Redding, but his efforts had a way of ending badly. One morning while his wife was fixing breakfast he went outside to burn some trash. A few minutes later he let loose an aria of obscenities, but the jaded Sheila simply assumed he’d stubbed his toe and went on with her business. Finally she glanced outside: There was a brushfire in the backyard, on the edges of which Yates gamboled ineffectually. The volunteer fire department arrived in time to save their house, and a penitent Yates agreed to become a member, faithfully attending meetings every Saturday night. According to Bob Riche, he was just lonely: “Dick yearned to have friends. Sheila kept telling him to get out and become a part of the community. So he tried, the poor bastard, and joined the volunteer fire department … and sat around at meetings with local farm types trying to fit in, and crushing beer cans with one hand.”
At last he gave up. His marriage was on the rocks again, everything was wrong, and he blamed it largely on Redding. Or rather: Because he’d accepted the charity of a woman he despised, he was forced into a wholly false and self-defeating position; not only was he obliged to be pleasant to Marjorie (as he was in any case), but also grateful—to visit her and be visited, to mediate between her and Charlie, and above all to work harder than ever at the “PR dodge” to pay off a mortgage and avoid the necessity of even more gratitude, all for the privilege of living in a place where he was lonely and miserable and couldn’t get any decent work done. Sheila tried to remonstrate: They had a nice house in Connecticut where Mussy was likely to get a good education; everything would be fine (or tolerable) if he could just get over his resentment toward Marjorie and accept her good turn.
Yates referred to the whole arrangement as “Gethsemane” and wanted out, period. “He claimed all his problems in every way were caused by Remington Rand and my mother,” Sheila said. “Finally I stopped arguing with him. I thought maybe that was true. I didn’t realize this was an ongoing situation that would go on no matter where we lived or what happened.” They’d lived in Redding for just over a year.
* * *
Yates would always say that when the work is going well, the rest follows. The work was going poorly. For the past three years Monica McCall and Sam Lawrence and everybody else had urged him to write a novel, but what with one thing and another he seemed no closer to getting started in early 1955 than he’d ever been. Meanwhile his other work was not only drying up but in danger of regressing, if one judges by the quality of “The End of the Great Depression”—as it happened, the last short story Yates would write for another six years.
“Depression” is mostly comprised of Walter Mittyish daydreams, much like the earlier “Convalescent Ego”—an ominous similarity. The story, set in 1937, is about a solitary twelve-year-old boy who assumes that the Depression will last well into the future, and hence fantasizes about becoming a hero to the downtrodden and ultimately the president who ends the crisis sometime in the fifties. For a while the boy’s fantasy adheres to the same reassuring narrative, which at one point has him chastely kissing a generic dream-girl.* Eventually, however, the boy’s naive idealism is eclipsed by puberty, and the fantasy is altered when the girl abruptly reveals her breasts and metamorphoses into “Gretchen Sondergaard, at school”: “And he didn’t know it then … but the nature of his dreams was changed forever.” The young George Plimpton at the Paris Review rejected “Depression” with a lengthy critique advising, in effect, that Yates flesh out the frame story lest the reader “get so involved in the text of the daydreams that we forget it is a boy dreaming them and take them at face value.” This Yates dutifully did, adding some dialogue between the boy’s parents wherein they discuss his welfare in terms that are alternately gruff (father) and fretful (mother). It wasn’t much of an improvement, and when Plimpton rejected the revised version he pointed to a more intrinsic flaw: “The Walter Mitty scenes [are] supposed to be ludicrous clichés, but they turn out as slapstick, with little subtlety worked in which might have given them originality.” In other words, neither part of this strangely amateurish story worked, and one can only wonder why Yates ever allowed it to be published at all.†
Clearly he was exhausted, and perhaps the banalities of PR work were beginning to infiltrate his imagination. The only hope of escape was to write a successful novel—the raw material of which, he already sensed, would be the stuff of his own predicament. But he wanted to transcend the merely personal, to avoid the pitfalls of sentiment and self-pity. And before he wrote a word he wanted above all to purge the stale residue of PR work from his brain; what better antidote than the great hater of the bourgeoisie and their cant, Flaubert, whose impersonal masterpiece proved the perfect goad at the time. “That was when Madame Bovary took command,” Yates wrote in “Some Very Good Masters”:
I had read it before but hadn’t studied it the way I’d studied Gatsby and other books; now it seemed ideally suited to serve as a guide, if not a model, for the novel that was taking shape in my mind. I wanted that kind of balance and quiet resonance on every page, that kind of foreboding mixed with comedy, that kind of inexorable destiny in the heart of a lonely, romantic girl. And all of it, of course, would have to be done with an F. Scott Fitzgerald kind of freshness and grace.
Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the “objective correlative”—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without laboring the point. In “Masters” Yates cited the green silk cigar case that Charles Bovary finds in the road after the ball, a fetish his wife uses “as a source of voluptuous daydreams”; Yates then referred to a later scene of exquisitely nuanced foreboding: “When the pharmacist’s young apprentice Justin, who is hopelessly in love with Emma, is cruelly reprimanded by his employer, in her presence, for possessing an illustrated marriage manual and for messing around with the jar of arsenic. Wow.” Flaubert also influenced what is known as Yates’s “determinism”—though this was mostly a matter of innate sensibility and life experience.* “‘Fate is to blame,’” says Charles Bovary in forgiving his dead wife’s lover Rodolphe, and Yates had a lively subjective view of what “fate” entailed. “Another thing I have always liked about both Gatsby and Bovary,” he wrote, “is that there are no villains in either one. The force of evil is felt in these novels but is never personified—neither novel is willing to let us off that easily.” Yates’s student Tim Parrish remembered discussing The Easter Parade with its author, who wistfully referred to Emily’s fateful decision not to connect with her sister. When Parrish asked him what might have happened if she had made the connection, Yates replied, “I never thought of that”—meaning that the contingency wasn’t available given who Emily was. Yates’s determinism, like Flaubert’s, was a matter of knowing his characters well enough to know their fates, and making the reader see this, too. Just as one never expects Emma to repent of her infidelity and embrace provincial life, one also figures the Wheelers won’t move to Europe and live happily ever after. Their weaknesses, well defined at the outset, mark them for a bad end.
Flaubert was the catalyst for what became Revolutionary Road, but meanwhile other developments conspired to spur Yates on to the task. Hiram Haydn at Random House—“that absolutely supreme fiction editor,” as Monica McCall described him—was impressed by Yates’s work, and in April 1955 the two met over lunch to discuss the possibility of a book contract. “Like all publishers,” McCall advised Yates prior to the meeting, “I must warn you that [Haydn] is allergic to publishing a book of short stories as an author’s first work.” This posed a problem, since Yates’s “novel” at the time was little more than a notion, though he seems to have persuaded Haydn that something substantial would soon be ready. At any rate he and McCall gave Random House right of first refusal—a rather pointed snub of Sam Lawrence, whose eagerness to publish Yates’s no
vel had begun to look a bit like complacency in light of his multiple rejections of the stories. But then, McCall would always be wary of Lawrence, and anyway Random House was a more prestigious publisher.
By late summer Yates was finally under way on a book that gave every appearance of jelling, such that in late October McCall was “daily watching the mails hoping for the beginnings.” Three months later McCall was still waiting: “I hope your silence does not mean that you have been having trouble.” It was generally safe to assume Yates was having trouble of one sort or another, but this time his silence was mostly a matter of keeping his head down and moving forward at his own glacial speed—until, almost a year after that lunch with Haydn, Yates was ready to submit the first 134-page section of a novel titled The Getaway. To this he appended a 7-page synopsis of the second half.
Haydn was persuaded of Yates’s “real ability and the book’s real worth,” though more than a little taken aback by the author’s express intention to end his novel with a fatal, self-inflicted abortion; stated in the pat terms of a synopsis, it seemed a bit much. “I express to you my doubts about his plan for the rest,” Haydn wrote McCall, “and even though he and I have talked it over and he is certainly willing to tone down his tragic plan … there still remains much doubt on our part.” Their “doubt” was hardly misplaced as to the ending, which Yates had no intention of changing. In fact, as he later pointed out, the main theme of the book was abortion in various forms, and the story itself had evolved around April’s literal, climactic act: “I thought of the girl dying in that way, and then the whole problem was to construct a book that would justify that ending.” Yates’s reassurance to Haydn that he would “tone down his tragic plan” was deliberately ambiguous; what he actually hoped was that the completed novel would justify the tragedy in such a way as to make it seem inevitable—and cathartic—an effect that could hardly be conveyed by a simple summary, or indeed by the story and characters as they stood at the time.
Sam Lawrence had a similar response: “Very much impressed with the manuscript,” he wrote McCall in June, “but the synopsis itself seemed to be a disappointment.” Nevertheless he was willing to offer an option payment of three hundred dollars “as a vote of our confidence in his ability and as a way of urging him to go forward with the completion of his novel.” McCall austerely insisted on a proper advance of fifteen hundred dollars, and the rather doubtful Lawrence agreed to recommend a contract to his associates at Atlantic–Little, Brown, who rejected the manuscript as “one of the many imitators of The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit.” Lawrence, on sober consideration, seemed to accept this verdict as perfectly valid, and his subsequent letter to McCall reflected little of his initial enthusiasm: Yates’s “narrative competence” was not in doubt, he wrote, but the theme was “somewhat hackneyed” and the minor characters were “not sufficiently developed”—in sum, the author had yet to find “the most suitable subject and material for his talents,” though Lawrence asked to be kept apprised of any further progress.
McCall reassured Yates that this was “no great blow,” that he should simply finish the book as he saw fit, and in fact Yates was undaunted to a surprising degree. A few months later he reported to McCall that he was making good progress, and instructed her to destroy the previous version. Being compared with Sloan Wilson, it turned out, had proved the sort of strong medicine that cures the patient in the course of almost killing him. As Yates later explained:
Most of my first drafts read like soap opera. I have to go over and over a scene before I get deep enough into it to bring it off. I think I’d be a slick, superficial writer if I didn’t revise all the time. The first draft of Revolutionary Road was very thin, very sentimental.… I made the Wheelers sort of nice young folks with whom any careless reader could identify. Everything they said was exactly what they meant, and they talked very earnestly together even when they were quarreling, like people in a Sloan Wilson novel. It took me a long time to figure out what a mistake that was—that the best way to handle it was to have them nearly always miss each other’s points, to have them talk around and through and at each other. There’s a great deal of dialogue between them in the finished book … but there’s almost no communication.
In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one’s characters “in the very act of giving themselves away.” Now more than ever Yates was eager to lose himself in the almost archaeological labor of revision, while Sam Lawrence—whose “vote of confidence” had come full circle—was delighted to learn that such a promising writer remained undiscouraged.
* * *
In the summer of 1956 the Yateses moved to the rural town of Mahopac in Putnam County, New York, where they lived on a private estate called Babaril.* The pink stucco cottage they rented was arguably a step or two down from their sturdy little ranch house in Redding, but the new home possessed a sort of forlorn charm. The ground floor consisted of a low-ceilinged living room, dining room, and kitchen (Yates could hardly stand up straight), with two small bedrooms upstairs, the larger of which opened onto a narrow balcony with a spiral staircase leading to the flagstones below. The balcony was a picturesque feature (the French doors beneath it were another), though it was liable to collapse if anyone actually stood on it. It gave the impression of being held up by vines, as did the rest of the place, which resembled a kind of dilapidated Hollywood dollhouse; the Lilliputian perspective was enhanced by an adjacent hut where drunken guests could, in a pinch, spend the night. The hut had a tiny fireplace that couldn’t be used without igniting the willow tree just above its tiny chimney.
Their landlady was an aging actress named Jill Miller, who with her vanished husband had founded the Putnam County Playhouse, a once-prestigious summer stock theater in the last stages of desuetude. Near the main house was a largely abandoned dormitory for actors, an annex of which was occupied by a local family named Jones. Around the hundred-acre estate were overgrown gardens and crumbling cottages and a weedy old tennis court, but the feature that most appealed to Yates—the clincher, in fact—was a five-by-eight wellhouse at the end of a long winding path. With his landlady’s blessing, Yates installed a table, chair, typewriter, and kerosene stove, and wrote most of Revolutionary Road there.
In keeping with their old dynamic, Yates relished his quirky new venue almost as much as Sheila despised it. “It was the antithesis of Redding,” she said, “so Dick thought it was great. But everything had gone to seed. It was a sad place owned by a sad lady.” Naturally Sheila tried to make the best of things, and perhaps it was fortunate that she could rarely be idle, as her hands were full keeping their cottage in some sort of habitable order. In the summer the cellar flooded regularly, and the roof seemed to leak even when the sun was out. Sheila attended to the caulking and draining and other proprietary chores, while Yates tended to lie low in the wellhouse.
Winters were ghastly cold and the cottage was poorly heated, caulking or no, but at least the bizarre, shifting crowd of summer colonists thinned. The writer Edward Hoagland, who befriended the Yateses around this time, described Babaril as “a place for people at loose ends”—offhand he recalled such tenants as a reclusive Hallmark artist and a man in the middle of a bitter divorce who worked out his anger by firing a pistol. “You never knew who you were going to run into,” Sheila complained, though she noted that some tenants were more permanent than others. There were the Joneses, of course, whose five children became playmates of Yates’s daughters; the father George, a dull but amiable man with a white-collar job in the city, was recruited along with Sheila to perform in the Putnam Playhouse production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. By then Sheila had “lost interest in that sort of thing,” but gamely went through the motions as Titania, while George Jones proved a remarkably able clown. A far more illustrious cast member was Will Geer, then a well-known character actor who later became famous as Grandp
a Walton. For most of the fifties Geer was blacklisted, and worked as a gardener on the estate. He strolled about in cowboy boots and an undershirt and mostly kept to himself, though occasionally Sharon and the Jones children would stop by his hut at dusk and listen to ghost stories: “Who’s got my arm…?” Geer would intone. “You do!”—and the children would flee screaming to their cottages. Yates, who couldn’t abide homosexuals, took a dim view of the folksy actor.*
Much of this was made bearable for Sheila by the fact that she was pregnant again. It gave her something to look forward to, creaky marriage withal. Sharon had long wanted a sibling, and now that her only immediate playmates were the rowdy Jones children, the matter could no longer wait. And Yates was happy to oblige; Mahopac was a hick town—little more than a laundromat, bank, and ice-cream parlor—and he too wanted Mussy to have company other than the Joneses or whatever urchins she met at school. Besides, he was hoping to add a boy to the family (for the sake of novelty and moral support, perhaps), but it wasn’t to be. Monica Jane was born on April 10, 1957, and when the nurse told Yates he had another daughter, he was surprised to find that he “felt like a million dollars” (as he later wrote a friend): “You can pick girls up and hug and kiss them anytime you feel like it, until they get too heavy to lift—that’s one advantage; another is that they never expect you to teach them how to throw.”