A Tragic Honesty (105 page)

*
 Black-sheep status for Vincent is harder to establish, but not impossible. His mother Clarissa's obituary in the
Auburn Citizen
(May 14, 1918) indicates that three of her four married daughters had made their homes near Auburn, while the fourth lived in Norwalk, Ohio; of three surviving sons one was doing YMCA work in Georgia (presumably following in his father's footsteps), while two, William and Vincent, lived in Chicago and New York, respectively. A roisterous uncle appears in both “Tenor” and
A Special Providence,
and perhaps this is the brother William, in which case Vincent wasn't the only one with cosmopolitan tastes. Still, it seems doubtful that
both
sons of the pious old minister considered a career (however briefly) in show business, so perhaps Vincent was the bigger misfit of the two, at least by his family's standards.

*
 Yates hated his middle name and would not be teased about it, at least not as an adult. He may have wondered why, with such ancestors as Bradford and Cleveland, he was named after a provincial penmanship teacher. Or perhaps he just thought it was a silly name.

*
 Later Yates said that his mother's
excuse
for dragging him around Europe was to “broaden his horizons,” but really it was just a matter of ensuring that his father would keep paying the bills. One suspects it was a little of both.

*
 A childhood friend recalled seeing a Pan figurine for which the very young Yates had modeled. Dookie had altered the face, but the spindly upper body (above the goat legs) was recognizably Richard.

*
 Martha Speer remembers it as a clothesline, which may be so; but Yates was fastidious about rendering such literal details as accurately as possible in his fiction, and the “horizontal steel pipe” in
The Easter Parade
almost certainly reflects a further effort of memory.

*
 The careful reader will note that Yates didn't bother to change either Nancy's or her mother's real first names (save one letter). In drafts of his later fiction, Yates would often write the actual name of the person on whom a given character was based, and then alter the name slightly in revision. Perhaps as a mnemonic device, he tended to retain actual first names as well as the cadence of his models' last names.

*
 Or so he remembered. Others remember differently or not at all, though most agree Yates was fairly popular.

*
 In
A Special Providence
the aptly named headmaster, Dr. Cool, produces Bobby Prentice's file and shares its contents with Alice: “[T]he record disclosed that [Bobby's IQ] had been assessed at slightly above average, and that he had done reasonably well in the fields of Social Adjustment and Personality Growth. But his Capacity for Self-Discipline had received the rating of Poor, and of the six Units of Study assigned to him during the academic year he had failed two.” Finally he reads aloud one of the more biting teacher comments: “‘Robert may eventually turn out to be as precocious as he seems to think he is, but if he expects to prove it to me he will have to buckle down.'” All this rings true, and for what it's worth the actual headmaster recognized himself when he read the novel in 1977: “Dad has been running around calling himself Dr. Cool at every opportunity,” his daughter wrote Yates.

*
 Or so Dookie reported in her
Who's Who
entry. However, the Norfolk (Virginia) Museum of Arts and Sciences became (in 1971) the Chrysler Museum, which has no record of this or any other work by Ruth Yates.

*
 By his own recollection the first story Yates ever wrote was about a condemned man who learned, en route to the electric chair, that the officer beside him was his long-lost brother. One wonders if Yates knew of his grandfather Horatio's ordeal with the unfortunate William Kemmler.

*
 In one respect (and certain others) Mrs. Riddle would have been pleased with the adult Yates, who bought his clothes almost entirely at Brooks Brothers. As for the relative raffishness of Franklin Simon, Lothar Candels (Avon '43) remembered an occasion when students watched Hitchcock's
Saboteur
on Saturday Movie Night; during the most famous scene a man hangs from the Statue of Liberty and his jacketsleeve rips at the armpit.
“FRANKLIN SIMON!”
the students yelled in unison.

*
 Yates used real names in his first draft of
A Good School
and altered them slightly in revision.

*
 Yates told his daughter Monica that the masturbation scene was true as written. Harry Flynn, for his part, said he doesn't recall the incident.

*
 Magee gained a certain degree of posthumous fame for his poem “High Flight”: “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth.… Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”

*
 No relation to Hugh Pratt, one of Yates's later friends at Avon.

*
 The two had been out of touch since the summer Yates went to Vermont. Sixty years later Benedict wrote, “Rereading the Cold Spring Harbor letter, when Dick was 16, three years after the others, the change seems quite poignant. The wonderful silliness is gone and the adult has begun to emerge.”

*
 Wright's widow confirmed his aptitude for melodrama. As a minor example (a major one will follow in due course), she remembered how Wright used to lurch tragically against walls, in all apparent seriousness, if dinner was late. He did suffer from low blood sugar, she pointed out, but the lurching was a bit much.

*
 As may be evident by now,
The Easter Parade
is one of Yates's most autobiographical novels, even though the “Me character”—as Yates liked to refer to the inevitable character(s) based on himself—is a woman. “Emily fucking Grimes is
me,
” Yates told a friend, paraphrasing Flaubert.

*
 Both Nowell and Yates's favorite teacher, Richard Knowles, were from the small town of South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that Knowles had something to do with getting his protégé's work read by someone of Nowell's stature.

*
 The school reopened in 1948, after Mrs. Riddle had been safely deceased for two years, and prospers unto this day. At one point, as a matter of pure coincidence, Yates's daughter Monica was a counselor at a camp for overweight children held at Avon Old Farms.

*
 Nor should one forget the “slightly above average” score [109?] that twelve-year-old Prentice earns in
A Special Providence
. Psychologist Nancy Andreasen offered a clinical explanation for why creative writers generally fail to excel on IQ tests: “[They] tend to sort in large groups, change dimensions while in the process of sorting, arbitrarily change starting points, or use vague distantly related concepts as categorizing principles.” Perhaps, though in Yates's case one suspects he was simply too slow and methodical.

*
 In
Uncertain Times
Grove is writing (or rather
not
writing, since he's just as blocked as Yates was) a novel exactly like
A Special Providence
—so exactly, in fact, that he ruminates much over “his friend and mentor, called Quint in the book.” Called Quint in
both
books, Grove's and Yates's, which gives one a sense of what can happen when an author runs out of material, but more on that later.

†
 Yates was in the 289th Infantry Regiment of the 75th Division. For Robert Prentice this becomes the 189th Regiment of the 57th Division.

*
 From the
Uncertain Times
manuscript: “Grove
had
agonized over [Quint's death], and the rest of the book would suggest that nothing between March and the end of the war had served to provide a cleansing atonement for his sense of guilt and
nothing ever would
[italics mine]—though in some dim way he still believed that writing it out as a story might help.” In the margin Yates had scribbled, “Cut all this.”

*
 As Wright liked to point out, the sergeant had probably saved his life (inadvertently), since the Germans generally assumed they could pick off the first scout and aimed at the second and third scouts instead. Still, Wright was seriously damaged by the war—if not quite to the extent he claimed later (see below)—such that his wife could never rouse him from sleep without risking some sort of somnolent assault.

*
 A somber postscript to this postwar lark: Shafer, who'd married and moved to Japan, got back in touch with Yates after seeing advertisements for
Revolutionary Road
in American magazines. In her first letter she confided her problems with mental illness over the years, and Yates responded with similar candor and incidentally mentioned his old love for her. Her last couple of letters, following what she described as “a schizophrenic reaction,” were written from a mental hospital.

*
 Sheila's brother Charlie would later serve as the model for the mentally disturbed John Givings in
Revolutionary Road
.

*
 The Bialek sisters, fresh out of Glen Burnie, Maryland, excited Sheila's condescension with their lack of sophistication and lowbrow boyfriends. The dynamic between the roommates gave Yates the idea for his story “The Best of Everything.” Several years later, through a curious turn of events (see below), Sheila would be reunited with a more worldly Doris Bialek and the two would form a friendship that abides to this day.

*
 “Dookie and I got along fine,” Sheila claims, and certainly in later years this appears to have been the case (though a sensible ambivalence on Sheila's part persisted, as letters prove). Perhaps Sheila had little reason to suspect that Dookie disliked her at first, since each seems to have treated the other with elaborate civility most of the time. At any rate, since the details in “Regards at Home” are accurate in almost every knowable respect, the antipathy between the Dookie and Sheila characters offers at least a credible sense of how things were.

*
 Blanchard “Jerry” Cain was almost certainly a partial model for Shepherd “Shep” Campbell in
Revolutionary Road
. As his son, Robin, pointed out, “Blanchard and Shepherd were both mechanical engineers. They both worked in Stamford for a while, they both made a sojourn to Arizona and they both returned to New York having failed to find there what they sought.”

*
 “She'd drink a couple of beers and fall asleep,” said Sheila. “I didn't think she was an alcoholic, she just couldn't hold it. I didn't understand the hullabaloo about her being a drunk.” Yates told Sheila that his mother had been more of a drunk when he was a child, but that her alcoholism had assumed less lurid forms with age.

*
 Yates's favorite was “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” though he disliked the didacticism and implausibility of “Teddy,” and deplored the self-indulgence of the later Glass-family stories.

*
 Yates's daughters never noticed such scars, which suggests they were superficial and perhaps halfheartedly inflicted.

*
 At first she thought it was
Ira
Levin, of
Rosemary's Baby
fame (“
some
fairly famous writer named Levin”). I wrote Mr. Levin a letter, and he kindly left a message on my machine to the effect that he wasn't anywhere near Paris in 1951, though he thought
Meyer
Levin had been. (“Was it
Meyer
Levin, by any chance?” I asked Sheila; “Yes! Exactly!” she replied.) Ira Levin went on to say that, as a matter of interesting coincidence, he did have a “Yates connection” all his own—to wit, Yates's former mother-in-law, Marjorie Bryant, sold Levin a house in Wilton, Connecticut, in the mid-sixties. “She was a charming lady who was quite proud of [Yates],” said Ira Levin, without audible irony.

*
 Namely the end of Salinger's “Pretty My Mouth and Green My Eyes” (published in
The New Yorker
not long before Yates wrote “The Canal”), and the woman's climactic outburst in Hemingway's “Hills Like White Elephants.”

*
 In the hope of evoking dramatic irony rather than suspense, I remind the reader that
The New Yorker
rejected every story Yates ever wrote (four or five of which are classics, or so a number of famous writers think), including “The Canal,” which a later generation of
New Yorker
editors saw fit to publish in the January 15, 2001, issue, eight years too late for Yates to enjoy it.

*
 His sweet-natured sister Ruth was especially happy for him—her own stories had met with rejection for many years—such that her oldest son Fred vividly remembers her jubilation at the news.

*
 As Sheila's old friend Ann Barker tells it, Charlie tried to bludgeon the aunt who raised him. Sheila, however, dismisses the story with amused disdain: “Charlie didn't bludgeon
any
body. We never even saw our aunt after we were children.” As for what actually did happen, Sheila seemed disinclined to go into details, apart from pointing out that (
a
) it was purely between Charlie and their mother, and (
b
) there was no physical violence involved. “My mother was a very nervous person and Charlie yelled and frightened her, that's all.”

*
 That same month Elsa wrote her nephew and asked that he “pray that the time comes soon” when Dookie was less dependent on her—“for her sake certainly,” the good woman added, “and to permit me to go forward in another direction.” Hope springeth eternal.

*
 Note the Salingerian “like a madman.” For the past two years Yates had often cheered himself up by reading
Catcher in the Rye,
and it showed in his everyday locutions. He also liked to say that things “killed” him.