A Tragic Honesty (37 page)

This billet-doux was perhaps a welcome diversion from dwelling on sales figures, which were decidedly meager in the wake of all that “advance enthusiasm and exceptional interest.” A week after publication Sam Lawrence reported a total advance sale of 6,100 copies (“very healthy indeed for a novel, first or otherwise”), and a month later he wrote: “We are over 9,000 and the next two to three weeks will tell whether the book will really go into high figures or will resolve its sale in the 10–15,000 category.” A last momentum-boosting quote ad was run in the
New York Times,
to no avail: Sales stalled at around nine thousand and stayed there—despite Dorothy Parker's review in the June
Esquire,
despite national newspaper critics naming
Revolutionary Road
one of the “fifty important books published between January 1 and May 30.” When the promotional rug was pulled out from under the book in late April, Yates wrote Lawrence a protesting letter: The continuing acclaim, he insisted, justified at least another quote ad. Lawrence disagreed: “I cannot recall when we last launched a first novel in such a powerful and confident way. As a result, more than 10,000 copies
*
were sold in a few weeks, and this is outstanding for a first novel, but as often happens to new fiction, the demand dropped off sharply.” Lawrence reminded Yates that Little, Brown had already spent a relatively lavish $4,500 promoting the book, and “one [more] quote ad will not change anything”: “Our goal has been accomplished. You have now established yourself as an important new American writer.… I hope you still believe that we have done a good publishing job.”

He did and he didn't. Yates never quite got over his anger at the “cheap, vulgar” jacket and “the lousy way the book was marketed,” but in moments of sober detachment he “couldn't really blame Sam for that because the true villains were the Little, Brown executives.” Such ambivalence resounds in his remarks, ten years later, on the subject of what he would always consider his best novel:

[I]n my more arrogant or petulant moments, I still think
Revolutionary Road
ought to be famous. I was sore as hell when it first went out of print, and when Norman Podhoretz made a very small reference to it in his book several years ago as an “unfairly neglected novel,” I wanted every reader in America to stand up and cheer. But of course deep down I know that kind of thing is nonsense.

CHAPTER EIGHT

The World on Fire: 1961-1962

Joseph Heller made the point that “success and failure are both difficult to endure,” and by now Yates had enjoyed a fair portion of each. Indeed, he existed in some limbo in between. As Sam Lawrence reminded him, he was now established as “an important new writer”: The literary world was keeping an eye on him, and many thought he'd written something very like a classic. On the other hand he was broke again, still living in a basement, and hardly able to write a word without crossing it out. His drinking continued apace. One gloomy night he “reread Fitzgerald's ‘Crack Up' for the 400th time” and found that he'd “drawn emphatic pencil lines around these words: ‘I only wanted absolute quiet to think out why I had developed a sad attitude toward sadness, a melancholy attitude toward melancholy and a tragic attitude toward tragedy—why I had become identified with the objects of my horror or compassion.'” It occurred to Yates that he'd first highlighted this passage early in the writing of his novel, when he found himself identifying with the feckless Wheelers to an uncomfortable degree. And now he felt worse than ever. “Old Fitz really does have an uncanny way of laying my problems on the line,” Yates reflected. “In any case the point is that I just plain can't afford to be as doomed as the people I wrote about.”

And yet, like his character Jack Fields in “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” Yates took “a certain literary satisfaction” in seeing himself as a “tragic figure.” He couldn't help being aware of—and sometimes exploiting—the fact that it was more seemly to be a maudlin drunk if one also happened to be the young(ish) author of a brilliant first novel. It was a role he found hard to resist, and yet its implications troubled him: If he couldn't afford to be as doomed as his own characters, then surely he couldn't afford to be as doomed as F. Scott Fitzgerald either; but then too, he'd arguably earned the privilege of putting a romantic face on his misery, if only for a while. The role was congenial because it was true … or was it? He could never quite resolve the question. “The idea of the writer haunted Dick,” said his friend David Milch, who described Yates's literary persona as a fifties-style “refinement of F. Scott Fitzgerald”: “The ordeal of inauthenticity—what was real versus feigned—was a drama enacted in every gesture of his. Dick had this punitive self-consciousness: Had he integrated the
idea
of being a writer with being a writer?” Or, as another friend generalized it, “Dick was both melancholy and played the role of a melancholic.”

But there was more to being Fitzgeraldian than acting melancholy; there was also the impulse to pick drunken fights, to throw one's writerly weight around—the revenge of the weakling who'd spent his youth being picked on by boys bigger and richer than he. “There was a bit of the high school pug in Dick,” said John Williams. “He'd become bellicose when he drank, though when sober he was settled and attentive.” Seymour Epstein agreed: “Dick always wanted to settle things with his fists,” he said, “though I got the impression he always hoped someone would intervene.” Epstein performed this function at least once, in a Village restaurant. “Dick was drunk and talking too loud, and a customer seated nearby asked him to keep it down. Dick said, ‘How'd you like to go outside?' I got between them and mollified the other guy, who would've torn Dick's head off.” More than ever Yates also had a tendency, when drunk, to vent his contempt for people with manqué literary ambitions: “How's the
schoolteaching
going, Hal?” he'd say, whacking the back of a man who considered teaching a degrading and temporary avocation at best. Or, to Bob Riche: “How's the
PR dodge
going, Bob?”—but with nastiness instead of their old conspiratorial glee.

As an acclaimed writer Yates was disinclined to suffer the insolence of waiters, cabbies, and cops who treated him like a common drunk, and this too was a very Fitzgeraldian animus. One day a figure out of the distant past, Doris Bialek, spotted Yates on Fifty-seventh Street; she'd seen neither him nor Sheila in almost ten years, since the couple left for Europe. “He was having an altercation with a policeman,” said Bialek. “He was drunk and cursing the man out. He was with some girl—at first I thought it was his daughter, but it wasn't.” When Yates heard his name called (“Rich! What are
you
doing here?”), he dropped the quarrel with the cop and became solicitous toward his old friend. Bialek recalled, “By then I'd read
Revolutionary Road
and identified Sheila with April Wheeler. I read how April commits suicide and I thought, ‘My God, she must be dead!'” She explained all this to Yates, who hastened to reassure her and even wrote down Sheila's address and phone number for Bialek before saying good-bye.

Yates's friends rarely saw him sober, even during morning strolls in the Village; he'd always greet Warren Owens's wife, Marjorie, with a “big juicy kiss on the lips” that left her dazed with mortification. And then there was the time she ran into Yates in the subway: He'd just been to the dentist, he told her, and found out he had leukoplakia (white precancerous patches in the mouth); the dentist had advised him to stop smoking. “Like hell I will!” said Yates, lighting a cigarette with trembling hands. Many thought he wasn't long for the world, certainly not as a writer, but (oddly enough) they were wrong.

*   *   *

One day Yates got a call from Grace Schulman, a twenty-six-year-old writer for
Glamour
who'd been “enthralled” by
Revolutionary Road
and wanted to include the author in a group of cultural luminaries being featured in the magazine (e.g., Brando, pianist Philippe Entremont, tenor Franco Corelli). Yates had no proper publicity shots to give her—he thought his portrait on the book jacket made him look effeminate—so Schulman arranged a session with the photographer Duane Michals. Afterward Yates and Schulman ducked out of a snowstorm into the Cedar Tavern, and talked for hours. She told him his novel had made the biggest impact on her since Flaubert, and Yates responded with an animated homage to
Madame Bovary
: “When Emma dies, I die,” he said. “We realized there was an enormous connection between us,” said Schulman, “that we'd be lifelong friends. But there was also this sexual undercurrent.” Before things went any further, then, and despite the late hour, she took Yates home to meet her husband Jerry. It was love at first sight all over again.

Yates came to dinner every night that week, and the three became inseparable. “We couldn't get enough of each other,” Schulman recalled. “It was that great moment in life when exciting things are
so
exciting. We told each other everything that had ever happened to us, and talked about the books we loved.” In certain essential respects the Schulmans were ideal companions for Yates. Grace would later become a distinguished poet, but at the time she was strictly an admiring apprentice, and hence no threat to Yates's ego. Jerry was a medical scientist who was well-read enough to appreciate Yates's work without being inclined to judge it; he was also a kind and decent man, patient with the vagaries of an artistic temperament.

For Yates it was almost like having a family again, or anyway congenial siblings. At night they'd share a pot of boeuf bourguignon, then sit around drinking and talking while Grace strummed the guitar. The Schulmans thought the author of
Revolutionary Road
was a wise and compassionate arbiter of human relations, and Yates worked hard to live up to their expectations. Together and separately the young couple confided their marital problems to Yates, and sometimes he'd suddenly excuse himself to take a walk and think things over; “I've emerged with a fresh insight into your problem,” he'd announce on his return. “We never had a friend like that,” said Grace, “before or after.”

Yates was less temperate on the subject of writing. “Write with
balls,
Grace!” he once exclaimed, and when she protested the impertinent anatomical reference, he said: “Well, write with ovaries, then. It's the same thing.” At first she was having trouble writing at all, what with her duties at
Glamour,
and Yates was adamant that she quit: “Any girl in town would give her left breast to have that job,” he said, “but you want to write and you should do it.” Clearly Yates didn't want his beloved friend to become one of the phony strivers of the world, and he rarely missed a chance to play literary Pygmalion. Indeed, the main points of his
ex cathedra
advice amounted to a nice summary of the Yatesian aesthetic. He suggested she read Jane Austen, who had balls, and avoid Katherine Mansfield, who didn't; Gina Berriault had balls to spare, and one of her stories in
Short Story 1
was “better than any of ours.” Cheever was a “dirty old man” who wrote about farts and so forth, and his slick prose didn't compensate for the
sprawl
of his work (“Don't be seduced by prose, Grace; the point is structure”); the same went for John O'Hara.
Billy Budd
was better than
Moby-Dick
because the latter
sprawled. Ulysses
(“I stretched my brain for it”) was far, far better than
Finnegans Wake. A High Wind in Jamaica
and
Invisible Man
were wonderful, classically
structured
books. Characters shouldn't be too “knowy” about themselves; rather they should reveal themselves obliquely, like the narrators in Ford's
A Good Soldier
or Conrad's
Heart of Darkness
. Avoid “privacy” and “preciousness”—neither fiction nor poetry is “a letter home”; one writes with an
audience
in mind.
*
Nor is “honesty” per se a virtue (“Remember what Anatole France said about the dog masturbating on your leg—‘Sure it's honest, but who needs it?'”) And finally, a writer needs to know the difference between sentiment and sentimentality: When Humbert sees the hair on grown-up Lolita's arms and loves her anyway, that's
sentiment,
that's what love
is
—being able to see the hair on somebody's arms.

At the time Schulman wasn't sure whether she wanted to devote herself to poetry or fiction, and Yates insisted on helping her with both. “Bad poems get by me,” he said, “but good ones never do.” Soon this became “Good poems get by me, but bad ones never do,” and Schulman noted the contradiction. Yates waved it away: The same basic rules applied to both fiction and poetry, and to produce first-rate work in either genre required patience, talent, and balls. When Schulman gave up her
Glamour
job to concentrate on creative work, Yates wrote her, “
Don't worry
if it comes slowly at first and fails to give you pleasure, or if your brains feel scrambled, or if you spend whole days staring at the wall.… You must expect to produce a certain amount of bad stuff before it starts getting good.
Stay loose
: don't let your high critical standards choke you up and constrict you before you start.”

Perhaps needless to say, Yates tended to be more generous when holding forth in the abstract, or rather when sober. “Oh, that
tree
thing—” he sneered tipsily, when one of Schulman's poetic motifs came under discussion. It was Yates who unwittingly canceled her future as a fiction writer—destroying with a vehement black pencil the last story she ever ventured to write. “[I] still feel like a turd,” he wrote her afterward, “for … having scrawled those inept and booze-soaked half-assed ‘comments' all over [your manuscript].” Despite such inevitable remorse, though, the balance between candor and kindness was all but impossible for Yates to maintain in the heat of the moment, much less with a dear friend. “PAY NO ATTENTION to what ANYBODY says about your ideas,” he finally insisted, when yet another of his boozy critiques had gone awry. He added that if she'd known him back in 1955—and if she were “as big a bastard as [he]”—she might have said, “‘Ahh, nobody's interested in that Sloan Wilson crap any more'” when he told her about an idea he had for a novel.