A Tragic Honesty (34 page)

This may be read as pure soliloquy, of course: Hamlet advising himself to be less indecisive, Lear warning himself away from madness, and fate remaining aloof.

*   *   *

Though Yates had known Beury less than three weeks, including the week spent in Bellevue, he was certain he wanted to marry her—all the more so since receiving, the day after his release, a letter of tender concern which he found not only “beautiful” but “very, very well-written.” Beury, now back at Sweet Briar, had decided to leave the door ajar where Yates was concerned. She figured the meltdown she'd witnessed was perhaps (as Yates assured her) a once-in-a-lifetime aberration. Meanwhile, only two things were preventing Yates from packing his bags and moving to Virginia: “1. I have to set up new ways of making money, because my biggest ghost-writing contact (Remington Rand) dissolved under me in July.” This was true, and a further source of prebreakdown stress: After more than a decade as Yates's bête noire and stalwart source of income, Remington Rand had sacked his contact, Andy Borno, and killed the magazine
Systems
. Having lost the devil he knew, Yates at least had “two excellent leads on new and painless ghost-writing opportunities” but would have to stay in New York to pursue them. Also: “2. At the present time I need, or rather want, to be geographically as close to my children as possible.” He was, however, willing to get the ball rolling by asking his wife for a divorce as early as the following week. That said, he closed his letter to Beury with a poem he'd written for her at Bellevue (“with a borrowed pencil on a very, very small piece of paper”):

POPULAR SONG

I love you in the lips

And I love you in the nerves

And I love you in the head;

Which rhymes with dead.

And now do you know what I guess I'll do?

In the hope you'll help me to see it through?

I guess I'll love you in the heart;

Which rhymes with art.

The Bard of Scarborough Country Day hadn't lost his lyric touch, and Beury was sufficiently moved to suggest he visit her at Sweet Briar the weekend after next. She balanced this with a wary quip about how she might be better off with an “air-conditioning salesman” (an oblique response to his marital overtures?), and continued to express a lot of pointed concern for his well-being. “I wish you wouldn't ‘worry' about me,” Yates retorted, and made the familiar case that he was “boringly well-adjusted most of the time, and as able to look after [him]self as any other solid citizen.” As for her invitation to Virginia, he'd like nothing better but was simply too strapped at the moment—however: “Could you come here? If so I'd arrange for you to stay at the Evangeline (Maria's hangout) or some other equally blameless sanctuary for young ladies, and I'd solemnly promise not to keep you up past your bedtime.” Beury wrote back that it might be fun to come up with her roommate, especially if Yates could arrange to get the latter a date with one Jim Shokoff, a Rutgers student they'd met at Bread Loaf. “I think it's a very swell and interesting idea,” Yates dryly replied; “but oh, how earnestly and prayerfully I would like to suggest that you contrive to do it some other weekend.” In short, he wanted to see her alone, and to this end he wrote an elaborately polished satire of the various “Frightful Visions” such a visit seemed to conjure in Beury's “exquisitely close-cropped head.” The first of these was a bit of stock humor about drugged drinks and seduction—this, perhaps, in hope that the next two scenarios would smack of the same breezy absurdity:

Or, Worse Still:

Barbara … twists one slightly soiled white glove in the other as she stands beneath the Biltmore clock, an hour and forty-five minutes past the carefully appointed time of her date. Peering down the carpeted stairway, she sees a sudden moil of confusion near the revolving door. The doorman, three cab drivers, seven bellhops and a Bellevue attendant are engaged in some frantic grappling activity; and somehow, out of this muddle, wobbles a man. Almost unrecognizable, his clothing caked with filth and bristling with the snouts of bourbon bottles, his face swollen and streaked with maudlin tears, he reels and fumbles his way upstairs. There he topples, falls headlong, grasps Barbara around the knees and says: “Help.”

 

And finally, the Worst and Most Frightful Vision of All:

Gay as a day in May … Barbara bounces up the Biltmore steps and finds a hollow-eyed, tragically haggard apparition under the clock.… [He takes her to] the bleakest, dimmest, and most fourth-rate of all Tenth Avenue saloons. And there, surrounded by sawdust and urine puddles and tired prostitutes and lurching longshoremen, he begins a droning recital of all his Problems.… He starts telling her all over again—ever and ever more boringly—about his unhappy childhood and his unhappy marriage and his unhappy love affairs and his grinding, soul-wrenching, general all-around unhappiness; and this goes on for two nights and two days until it's time for Barbara to sink gratefully into the sports car and turn back toward sunnier climes and sweeter briars.

Give or take a Tenth Avenue saloon and a bellhop or two, it was perhaps a bit too plausible to get the really big laughs, and Yates sensed as much. “All this was supposed to be funny,” he added, “but I've just read it over, and it doesn't give me any chuckles. Forced humor, you see.” He abruptly turned to other matters, and mentioned in passing that a trip to Virginia might be feasible later that fall, as he wanted “to soak up a little of the landscape and foldways” for the opening Camp Pickett chapters of his novel-in-progress.

This novel existed only in the abstract, and the fact that Yates was in no hurry to start soaking up atmosphere suggests how little disposed he was to write. Most of the time he brooded nervously over the reception of
Revolutionary Road,
and no wonder: The news was so relentlessly good that it bordered on the portentous, and it was all Yates could do to maintain a tenuous grip on his equilibrium. The advance comment from Alfred Kazin, for example: “This excellent novel is a powerful commentary on the way we live now. It locates the new American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage. No other people has made of marriage quite what we have, has taught itself to invest so much in what is essentially a romantic idea. Mr. Yates understands this very well, but never points.” Now that Kazin had actually read the novel, he was not only willing to endorse Yates's Guggenheim application, but also he persuaded Sam Lawrence to accept, at last, the title
Revolutionary Road
. “After Little, Brown got that letter from Kazin, I stopped being another chancy first novelist and became something of a celebrity up there,” Yates wrote Beury. “[The advertising manager] and his public-relations lady came barreling down here this week, bought me triple bourbons and asked any number of discreet, respectful questions as to whether I'd mind being interviewed on the Dave Garroway show, etc. etc.”

Also around this time—and not a moment too soon for Yates's finances—
Esquire
bought the opening chapters, to be published a month before the novel as a self-sustained excerpt titled “After the Laurel Players.” And already Hollywood was interested: Saul David of Columbia Pictures wrote Monica McCall that he'd be “delighted to work with [Yates] … though I'd hope that
Revolutionary Road
will swiftly make him so rich that he wouldn't dream of working with me,” while a bona fide mogul, Sam Goldwyn Jr., announced that he'd “never read a more brilliant first novel”—an impulsive bit of hype that, as Yates put it, “[came] drearily to naught, because cooler heads in his organization decided that the moviegoing public ‘is not ready for a story of such unrelieved tragedy, for so relentless a probing of the sources of pain.' Sic transit the hell Gloria.” This was far from the last time cooler heads in the industry would prevail where Yates was concerned.

Sam Lawrence and his associates realized they had a potentially hot property on their hands, but the book's packaging and promotion were problematic. Now that the title was definitely
Revolutionary Road,
they felt obliged to make it as obvious as possible that the book was in fact about the failure of contemporary marriage,
not
a work of historical fiction. Yates had balked at the original jacket design—a sepia photograph of a man and woman standing forlornly back to back, over a pithy snippet of the Kazin quote—but he was finally overwhelmed by the star treatment. As he wrote Beury:

The Presentation today came off with maximum glory: everybody solemnly sitting in silence around an enormous leather chair containing me, while the advertising manager read his script and flipped the frames of a visual-aid demonstrator, just like Madison Avenue. Their new jacket copy is overpoweringly reverent—starts out “Rarely does a publisher introduce a first novel filled with such devastating power and compassion that it seems destined to become an enduring comment and influence upon our very way of life, etc, etc, etc,—and I was so overpowered by the reverence that I allowed them to seduce me into accepting a somewhat modified version of the dreary photographic jacket design.

Yates would bitterly regret letting that “dreary” jacket pass, though in fairness there could be little doubt that Lawrence et al. were doing their best to market a very depressing novel by a virtually unknown writer. The advertising budget was based on an anticipated sale of twenty thousand copies, or roughly four times as many as most first novels; the paperback rights were already sold, and Yates would receive a first installment of $2,500 in January. High hopes abounded, hideous jacket or no: “The meeting broke up with many high-powered handshakes and floods of drink,” Yates wrote of the sales presentation, “after which Sam Lawrence (editor) fed the hell out of me on about seven pounds of roast beef at the Algonquin; then he took me to a criminally expensive nightclub featuring giant Negress strip tease artists.” How many first novelists could say as much?

*   *   *

For a man who seemed about to become the toast of two coasts, Yates continued to live on a grindingly humble scale. Earlier that fall he'd resumed teaching at the New School, a deadly business cheered only slightly by the fact that he now felt able to befriend his eminent colleague there, Alfred Kazin, who proved to be “very nice and un-awesome.” Meanwhile as the weather got colder Yates moped about the basement “wearing forty-three sweaters” because the building's ancient furnace had died. He wrote no fiction, though he stayed busy doing freelance PR work. Johnson & Johnson's national sales conference in New Brunswick was coming up, and Yates had to write speeches for all the corporate and sales executives. He also tried his hand at ghostwriting an article for
Scientific American
—“a gruesome failure,” as he put it, that left him in the gloomy position of having to “wrangle with the editor” in order to “rescue the lousy 300 bucks they promised.” He implored Monica McCall to find him some kind of steady job in publishing, but it didn't pan out.

He consoled himself with thoughts of his “golden girl,” whom he managed to coax back to New York in late October and again a few weeks later. Both visits were something of a bust. Yates's clothing wasn't quite “bristling with the snouts of bourbon bottles,” nor did he dissolve into “maudlin tears” en route to Bellevue—but close enough. “Dick was
always
drinking,” said Beury, “and sometimes he'd be slobbering drunk by the end of the evening.” For Yates it was a matter of impossibly high expectations and poor health; he wanted to seem vibrant and charming but didn't have the energy or impulse. He drank to compensate. Also he was loath to be eclipsed by his friend Broyard, who (though five years older) was dating any number of college “popsies” as Yates called them; predictably the man's ears pricked up when Yates told him about Beury: “[Anatole] has expressed a keen desire to have dinner with us during your visit,” Yates wrote her, “and I said okay, maybe. (But he'd better watch his God damn step, or there'll be Bad Trouble.)” As it happened Broyard indulged in a few suavely told tales about past conquests (e.g., the one about the woman whose “ass exploded like an inflatable raft” when she doffed her girdle
*
), but appears to have been on passably good behavior, and certainly a bit of comic relief was welcome at that point.

Otherwise there was little to remember about these visits except for telltale signs of instability on the part of Beury's host, whose October postmortem was duly bleak: “The whole three days went by so fast, and I spent so much of it being tired or half drunk or asleep, that I don't quite believe it happened and I'm full of regrets.… [You're likely] to write me off as the terribly nice but hopelessly sad young man whom no girl in her right mind could ever consider a permanent type.” Beury was in her right mind, more or less, but still remained interested in Yates—or rather in the brilliant, sensitive man who'd written those stories in
Short Story 1
(her copy was inscribed, “If ever any beauty I did see/Which I desired, and got, 'twas but a dream of thee”—Dick [and John Donne]”), not to mention a novel that just might make him a household name.
That
man deserved a lot of patience.

His wife Sheila might have begged to differ. Back in September, Yates had reported to Beury that his “formal divorce talk” with his wife had been “friendly and pleasant, maximum cooperation guaranteed”—which implied that Sheila was now graciously willing to let him go since he'd found another, and so she was. Yates, however, was
not
cooperating to a maximum extent. “He drove the lawyers nuts,” said Sheila. “He knew [a reconciliation] wasn't going to happen, but he was making trouble for the sake of making trouble.” This was a bit reductive, perhaps; in fact Sheila's observation that Yates “could never bear losing close people” was nearer the mark, as she knew well enough at the time: “I thought I had explained my reasons for wanting an immediate settlement,” she wrote him on November 2.