A Tragic Honesty (27 page)

Unfortunately the Yateses weren't able to entertain at the carriage house as much as they might have liked; the place wasn't heated, and by winter it was time to move on again. At this point the transience of their lives was getting them down again: They wanted their own home in a nice community, where Mussy could be raised in a proper middle-class environment, though Yates wondered if he could handle a mortgage on his rather unstable income. Re-enter Marjorie Bryant, absentee mother turned ubiquitous benefactor: She'd found a lovely little house in the suburban town of Redding, Connecticut, and what's more she was willing to make the down payment and hold the mortgage herself. Yates loathed the idea of being beholden to his mother-in-law—or anyone, ever—but it was a difficult offer to refuse. Redding provided a pastoral but convenient setting right off Route Seven: The schools in the area were excellent, and the house itself, though not exactly
lovely,
was suitable—a newish one-story ranch in a broken L-shape, with two bedrooms, a living room, and a big picture window. The latter was a bit of a fright, but on balance they liked the way the cellar had doors on the outside like an old-fashioned farmhouse, and all things considered they decided to take it. Meanwhile Yates arranged to do extra PR work for a firm called Lester Rossin Associates, the better not to miss a single mortgage payment to Marjorie Bryant.

Sheila's old friend Ann Barker Kowalsky lived in nearby Brewster, and she and her husband became frequent guests. John “Crash” Kowalsky was a discontented engineer who worked for a microwave electronics company in Pleasantville, and drinking was perhaps the one thing he and Yates had in common. For a while it was a formidable bond. Their nights followed a predictable pattern: The two couples would drink and chat for as long as pleasantly possible before the men became unruly—arguing or bellowing army songs while the women receded into an icy silence. Sometimes, too, Yates would lapse into grumpy, drunken boredom and tell Kowalsky to “get the hell out,” whenever the man's stories about his proletarian childhood began to pall. One night Yates announced that “Crash” was the model for the “engineering square” in his novel-in-progress,
*
a characterization that made Kowalsky bridle at the time, though he never did get around to reading the book in question.

The odd
Walpurgisnacht
aside, the overall domestic scene on Old Redding Road was tranquil enough. Sheila (whether happily or not) had always been an excellent housewife, and now at last she had a proper venue for her talents. She kept the little house tidy despite Yates's presence in it, and the family sat down twice a day to tasty, well-balanced meals—especially on holidays, when Sheila would prepare an Anglophilic feast of juicy rare rib roast of beef, mashed potatoes, and Yorkshire pudding. And no matter how much the couple occasionally chafed in each other's company, they were at pains to be on good behavior for Mussy, who was calming down into a gentle, ladylike child. When she indulged in occasional naughtiness, the worst Yates would do was send her to her room, and only that after a long series of jocular admonishments: “Stop this clownlike behavior,” he'd order the giggling girl, “or I'll have to get the stick with the nail in it!”

A drawback of living in the hinterland was that it convinced Yates that he needed to drive a car, and this would become a fresh and fertile source of marital strife. Yates's lifelong wish to seem “competent as anybody at dealing with the small-change of practical life” was coupled with a terrible awareness that he
wasn't
competent, and this made him frustrated and defensive and all but hopeless as a student driver. As he wrote of Bill Grove in
Uncertain Times,
“He was too nervous and easily rattled ever to handle a car well, and his stubbornness in hating to admit it only made it worse.” Just so. But as Yates would prove time and again, the capacity for knowing thyself in art rarely translates into everyday life. In any event Sheila soon decided she had better things to do than teach her husband how to drive, and so delegated the job to her brother Charlie—a bad choice, not only because Charlie was a long-term mental patient but because Charlie was Charlie: possessed of “an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people's weaknesses,” as Yates put it.
*

One can only imagine the extent to which Charlie brought such insight to his driving instruction, but it wasn't long before a fistfight erupted between teacher and pupil. Sheila, who witnessed the incident and called it “pretty horrible,” is almost certain it was the direct result of a driving lesson. In later years, though, Yates would tell a different story, which perhaps conflated a number of similar episodes, and anyway seems to shed light on certain aspects of his family life at the time. According to his version, it all began with a typical phone call from his mother-in-law: Charlie was harassing her, she said; would they come right away and take him back to the hospital? As ever the Yateses tried to oblige, but this time Charlie refused to go. “You're just pushing me around because I'm a mental patient,” he said. “In Connecticut you can put the cops on me, but in New York I could fight back.” The only way he'd go quietly was if they agreed to drive him to the state line and let him “fight back,” so off they went. When they came to New York the men got out of the car and scuffled a bit in the headlight beams, but both were heavy smokers and soon gasping for breath.
“God
—
”
said Charlie as they slumped against the car, “can you believe some guys do this for a living?”

Whatever the circumstances, no lingering rift resulted. The same can't be said for Yates's marriage once he learned how to drive, as the car proved an apt battlefield for the pair. “When he was really being dopey,” Sheila recalled, “he had this big thing about how
he
had to drive the car, no
woman
could help him.” One may recall how Michael Davenport in
Young Hearts Crying
feels “humiliated—even emasculated” when his wife makes him ride on the passenger's side. Yates felt the same way, and for that matter aspired to a rather cartoonish stereotype of masculinity in general, forever threatened on all sides and particularly so when he was behind the wheel of a car. And this, in turn, gave Sheila the irresistible opportunity to get her own back for any number of pent-up grievances. As Bob Riche observed, “Dick bumbled around Sheila, especially in the car. I think it was a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is, she reinforced his feelings of inadequacy, and he played into it unconsciously.” According to Riche, it was a “nightmare” being in the same car with the couple, and the cycle was always the same: Yates would struggle to remain calm while Sheila needled him (“Oh, be careful! You don't know what you're doing!” and so on), until finally Yates would snap and the fight would be on. Nor was their daughter exempt from such scenes. Once she watched them bicker over how to run the car heater; when Sheila turned out to be right, Yates exploded
“Well, cut my penis off!”
and lapsed into a long brooding silence.

Sheila's tendency to emphasize her husband's ineptitude was more than idle perversity, as she came to understand better in retrospect. “I hate the thought of mentally calculating the added amount of cooking, cleaning and wash you add up to,” she later wrote Yates, as they considered another reconciliation; “but I think you know from the Remington Rand years … that doing something you hate for someone you love makes for a cancerous kind of grudge.” Which suggests, too, the insidiously reciprocal nature of that grudge, insofar as each resented the other for putting them in a situation they hated—housework and Remington Rand respectively. Because of Yates's awful efforts to pay the bills, he might have expected his domestic failings to be pardoned; beyond a certain point, though, even an attitude of weary acceptance on Sheila's part was liable to be taken (accurately enough) as dire reproach. The mounting tension made for some curious scenes, particularly in the eyes of a five-year-old child. One time, Sharon recalls, her parents sat quietly chatting in the living room, when suddenly Yates hurled his glass into the fireplace and stormed bellowing out of the house.

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.