A Tragic Honesty (35 page)

Either you didn't listen, or I didn't make myself clear, or both, and I am willing to try again. They are quite simple: When we separated, I hoped for some time that a radical change in one or both of us would make possible a rebuilt marriage. I no longer have any such hope.… As to my seeing you any more or being friends, this is totally out of the question from now on. I don't hate or feel bitter towards you, but I soon would if I continued to see you.… Some things simply come to an end—I have relinquished two close friendships in my life, and so I am ready to accept this. It will be much easier for everyone if you accept it too. Once you have, I believe you will be relieved, as I am, to let Mr. Golditch [the lawyer] make arrangements that are comfortable for me, the children, and yourself.

The “radical change” for which Sheila had hoped was, of course, that Yates would curb his drinking and get help for whatever else was ailing him, but after Bellevue she knew better. As for Yates, neither then nor later would he be able to accept rejection on the basis of his drinking and/or mental health—hence Sheila's exasperated but not unkind “Some things simply come to an end.”

Yates became all the more desperate to make things work with Beury. “The only nice thing in my life right now,” he wrote her, a week after that letter from Sheila, “is that you've promised to come up here next Wednesday.” But with so much emotionally at stake, Yates was too overwrought in Beury's presence to stay sober, and besides he always had a ready excuse: “He said he was irrational because
Revolutionary Road
was about to be published,” said Beury, “and he'd worked so hard to finish it—etcetera—as if it were only a passing phase. It seemed plausible at the time, but it didn't change.” There were moments, though, when he was at least somewhat sober (that is, on the way to getting drunk) and thus charming, courteous, and funny—in other words the very man Beury hoped he'd be whenever he got “well” again.

This alternating pattern was suggested by Yates's visit to Virginia a week or so before Christmas. All went well at first: Beury was touched by her gift—a pair of monogrammed gold cufflinks that Yates said was the most valuable thing he owned—and while they drove about the countryside they came upon a big plantation house with a For Sale sign in front. Yates spoke seriously about buying the place, and for the moment he made Beury see the “glamour” of it—the genteel literary life they'd lead there, writing all day and having drinks on the veranda “like Dash and Lillian Hellman.” Full of the idea, Yates got excitably drunker than usual and was miserably hungover the next morning, when they'd planned to drive back to New York via Charlottesville, where the writer Nancy Hale was giving a cocktail party in Yates's honor. Hale, a very admiring advance reader of
Revolutionary Road,
had done a number of kind things for Yates, who was grateful enough to remain on good behavior during her party. Afterward he fell apart. Every few miles on the road he'd pull over and buy beer to “calm his nerves,” and by the time they got to Washington he was a tipsy wreck. He tried to mollify his traveling companion by insisting they stop in a posh hotel—same room but separate beds, as Beury (with Yates's approval) was still a virgin—where he ordered a bottle of bourbon and drank himself to sleep.

*   *   *

The two months leading up to the publication of
Revolutionary Road
were an eventful time for Yates, who bobbed about in the maelstrom without quite going under. He coped as well as possible with such obligations as a “big Celebrity Interview” with a South American journalist—a typically “boozy business,” wrote Yates: “[I] feel bottomless chagrin at having been a garrulous clown, and wonder how many of my ill-considered pronouncements on literature and life got scribbled down for the edification of fifty trillion South Americans, and am busy thanking God that nobody I know can read Spanish.” Perhaps the most important advance publicity was the excerpt scheduled for the February issue of
Esquire
. Yates had agonized over editing his work to the magazine's specifications, and was perturbed to learn that his own rather drastic cuts were insufficient. On January 11 he and Rust Hills spent two hours going over the proofs, line by line, until they'd reached a compromise of sorts, or so Yates thought. “The author, the publishers, and I, are deeply shocked and disappointed by the treatment given to this excerpt,” Monica McCall wrote
Esquire
editor Arnold Gingrich on January 20. “Not only has the [published] text been cut and changed, after the very careful editing and cutting which the author himself completed … but the illustration presents the characters as two vastly unattractive
middle-aged
people, in fact the heroine looks something like Sophie Tucker.” Gingrich, stiffly indignant, called the complaints “shocking.” He conceded that he didn't much like the illustration either, but denied that any further changes had been made to the text without Yates's consent; he also pointed out that he'd been so certain the excerpt was a credit to its author that he'd appended proofs to his recommendation for Yates's Guggenheim.

Sam Lawrence was also dismayed by the
Esquire
treatment, but remained optimistic on the whole: “I think we have a best-seller,” he wrote on January 25, calling Yates's attention to the current
Publisher's Weekly,
which reflected “the kind of advance enthusiasm and exceptional interest
Revolutionary Road
is creating.” The book's sizable advertising budget was being put to good use: A thousand promotional copies with special jackets had been distributed among the various pundits in the trade and media, while sales reps were instructed to attach personal cards to copies sent to all major booksellers in their territories. A big quote ad was planned for the
New York Times Book Review
just prior to publication. On the basis of the advance notice alone, Yates had every reason to feel jubilant.

What he felt was “semi-hysteria,” as he put it, kept somewhat in abeyance by the steady, all-but-lethal flow of bourbon. At times in his life when he wasn't able to get on with his writing, for whatever reason, Yates would let himself go to a degree unusual even for him. This was one of those times. Things were happening and he let them happen. On February 3, Yates's thirty-fifth birthday, Sheila took a one-day trip to Alabama and got a no-fault divorce; the lawyer Golditch subsequently informed Yates that there was a sixty-day waiting period before he could remarry: “You are free to remarry at any place and at any time after April 3, 1961.” By now Yates seemed rather to doubt the prospect, and informed Beury of the development with a single unembellished line: “Got my final divorce decree in the mail last Friday.” Somewhat better news (though by no means unequivocally so) was that he'd been offered a part-time position by the Columbia School of General Studies, the adult education branch of the university. This in addition to his New School duties and freelance work.

Yates did not lack company during this time. Bread Loaf had widened his circle of acquaintance, and nowadays he was nothing if not socially available. The Irishman Arthur Roth was a good companion, as Yates not only admired him as a writer, but as a drinker almost as heedless as he. Yates and Roth enjoyed baiting each other while in their cups, and one night during a party at Bob Riche's apartment the two got in a violent, careening, “kidding” wrestling match that culminated amid broken glass in an empty bathtub, where Riche doused them both with a bucket of water.

At Bread Loaf there was also a group of writerly Rutgers students (the poet John Ciardi, then the director of the conference, was on the Rutgers faculty), who looked up to the hard-drinking Yates as a rather romantic role model. Alan Cheuse, editor of the undergraduate literary magazine, remembered the invariable routine involved in a visit to Yates's apartment: “Dick would hand you a tumbler of bourbon as soon as you arrived. It'd be five or six in the evening and he'd be drunk already. You'd drink and talk, then have dinner at the Blue Mill and drink some more. After that Dick would go back to his apartment and pass out. He was always kind—he took a real interest in you—but clearly he didn't like sober people.” Perhaps closest among the Rutgers crowd was Ed Kessler, who joined Yates for such anomalous outings as a Robert Lowell reading at Columbia, after which they adjourned downtown until, several blurred hours later, a groggy Kessler woke up on a cot in Yates's basement. Both Kessler and Cheuse arranged for Yates to give paid readings and lectures at Rutgers, an ordeal that was new to him then: “For God's sake if you have any ideas about what I ought to say in my lecture,” he wrote Kessler, “please don't keep them to yourself. Should I take the Beatniks over the jumps?… Or discuss Eliot's objective correlative as exemplified in Looney Tunes (‘That's all, Folks')? Or do a double buck and wing soft-shoe routine and recite Kipling's ‘If' for an encore? I mean like HELP me in this thing, Kessler.” The lecture went without a hitch, but the party afterward ended badly. The young writer Maureen Howard was there (her husband was on the faculty), and to everybody's surprise the drunken Yates had a bone to pick with her. He'd read her stories in the best-of-the-year anthologies, and didn't like the way she stylized her characters in terms of their tastes—what they wore, what they ate, and so on. He thought it was simplistic and condescending, and he was very emphatic about it. “Maureen seemed like a tough person,” said Kessler, “but Dick could
destroy
somebody if he wanted.” She left the party in tears.

It had been a long ten months since Yates had finished his novel, and mercifully the suspense was almost over, if not the hysteria. One way or the other Yates had much to be proud of: Kazin, Styron, Updike
*
and many others had blessed his work, and two days before publication a further blurb was wired from Tennessee Williams of all people, who rarely bothered with that sort of thing: “Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is.” Sam Lawrence assured Yates that such praise was disinterested (“Don't be concerned about your virility”), and added, “We have never had this kind of response for a first novel since I can remember.… This is what makes publishing worthwhile.” The two men planned to meet at the Harvard Club on publication day, March 1, to celebrate the fruitful consummation of a long and often dreary ordeal.

*   *   *

Yates was never one to ignore reviews, or for that matter dismiss them with a mandarin chuckle when they were bad. “Oh yes,” he responded when an interviewer asked if he paid attention to them, and added with typical candor that he sometimes read them “five or six times over”: “When they're helpful is when they're good, and they make me furious when they're bad, which is to say they're probably not helpful at all.”

It's interesting to imagine Yates reading certain reviews of
Revolutionary Road,
much less five or six times over, and perhaps it's safe to say that most of them weren't very helpful. With a few exceptions, the good reviews tended to make fairly obvious points, while the bad ones were what Walker Percy called “bad-bad”—that is, bad in every sense: negative, badly written, in bad faith. An early review in
Library Journal
seemed to bode well: “Seldom has the talk of a desperate, ineffectual man been captured with such uncanny precision as in this novel,” it noted, and also made the nice point that the book hardly lacked humor in the midst of its general unpleasantness (“such is the nature of life that some of the most pathetic moments are also the most comical”). But at least two of the major reviews on Sunday, March 5, took the line that
Revolutionary Road
must be negligible because it dealt with the tired subject of suburban discontent: “No amount of contrived symbolism can hide what has become a hackneyed theme in the contemporary American novel,” wrote R. D. Spector in the
New York Herald Tribune,
and W. E. Preece of the
Chicago Tribune
went further, claiming the book read like an “intentional parody of all the similarly type-cast novels that went before it.” Happily, Martin Levin provided a strong corrective in that Sunday's
New York Times Book Review
. The “excellence” of the book, wrote Levin, lay in the “integrity” of its approach: “Eschewing the pitfalls of obvious caricature or patent moralizing, Mr. Yates chooses the more difficult path of allowing his characters to reveal themselves—which they do with an intensity that excites the reader's compassion as well as his interest.”

Leave it to Orville Prescott, the dean of bad-bad reviewers, to rebut in the daily
Times
on behalf of low middlebrows everywhere. The novel, he wrote, was a “brilliantly dismal” tour de force about “two psychopathic characters and their miserable haste to self-destruction.” Having thus established that the Wheelers are mentally ill—indeed, Frank is an “absolute psychotic”—Prescott could only wag his head at the folly of such a “superior” writer as Yates wasting his time and talent on characters “so far gone into mental illness that they are incapable of responsible decisions and unaware of the duty and necessity of making them.” And lest one forget the main point, he concluded: “No fair-minded reader could finish
Revolutionary Road
without admiration for Mr. Yates's impressive skill; but whether the mentally ill Wheelers deserve the five years of labor Mr. Yates has lavished upon them is another question.”

Magazine reviews were mostly positive, though the approval of
The New Yorker
continued to elude Yates: “The Wheelers are young, pathetic, trapped, half educated, and without humor—meaningless characters leading meaningless lives,” remarked the anonymous reviewer in the “Briefly Noted” section. “Mr. Yates's attempt to lend drama to their predicament, through an unconvincing introduction of madness and violence in the story, serves only to emphasize the flimsy nature of his work.” This weirdly peevish squib was offset by more considered treatment in the
Saturday Review
and the
New Republic
, whose reviewers—David Boroff and Jeremy Larner respectively—made large claims for the novel. Boroff called Yates “a writer of commanding gifts,” whose “prose is urbane yet sensitive, with passion and irony held deftly in balance,” while Larner discussed not only technique but also the book's sociological significance: “To read
Revolutionary Road
is to have forced upon us a fresh sense of our critical modern shortcomings: failures of work, education, community, family, marriage … and plain nerve.” Even
Newsweek
called it “the find of the year,” though Yates was perhaps most pleased by Dorothy Parker's panegyric in the June
Esquire
: “A treasure, a jewel, a whole trove is Richard Yates's
Revolutionary Road
.… Mr. Yates's eyes and ears are gifts from heaven. I think I know of no recent novel that has so impressed me, for the manners and mores of his people are, it seems to me, perfectly observed.”