A Tragic Honesty (60 page)

“Your brother killed my sister,” Yates said to Louise Rodgers on the train back to Manhattan.
*
She replied to the effect that the matter was more complicated than that; she'd always regarded Yates as something of a malcontent, particularly where family was concerned. As for Martha, she found it fascinating that Louise, a charming, intelligent woman, had nothing but admiration for
Dookie
of all people and would only laugh when Yates tried to remonstrate with her. He'd always led Martha to believe that his mother was ridiculous at best, and at worst a monster of feckless egoism.

Yates was still in New York when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. A month before, he'd written his old Justice Department colleague Barrett Prettyman that the world seemed “more hopeful now than at any time since God knows when—Johnson out, the Paris talks on, and an election shaping up in which Our Side looks likely to win.” By “Our Side” Yates meant liberals in general who opposed the war,
not
die-hard Kennedy partisans such as Prettyman: “I don't mean to be disloyal,” he added, “but I'm wearing a McCarthy sticker on the back bumper of my car. It was purchased before RFK declared his candidacy, but I haven't taken it off yet because RFK hasn't yet said anything big enough to convince me that he'd be a better President.” Such sentiments notwithstanding, Wendy Sears spotted Yates at the requiem for RFK at St. Patrick's Cathedral; he made himself conspicuous by proceeding uncertainly up the aisle to take a Communion wafer. Afterward she caught up with him outside the church: Had he converted to Catholicism, or was his interest in the Eucharist just a tribute to his old employer? “Jesus,” said the flustered Yates, “I was just following the crowd!”

He wouldn't follow it for long, though not even Yates was wholly immune to RFK's peculiar charm. Later that summer he wrote another, condoling letter to Prettyman, referring to Kennedy's death as a “hideous loss” and expressing chagrin over the unseemly pro-McCarthy message of his previous letter: “I didn't realize how ready and eager I was to have my mind changed until it was too late. For whatever it's worth, let me tell you that McCarthy now seems very pale indeed, as does every other national political figure.” This was somewhat for Prettyman's benefit, but at the time Kennedy's death genuinely affected Yates as a sorrow both personal and political. As the years passed, however, he became more and more impatient with any hint of Kennedy hagiography, until he eventually lumped RFK into his general indictment of the brothers as overrated, phony, out for number one, and ruthless.

*   *   *

Yates spent much of the fall in pencil-chewing seclusion with his manuscript; he'd recently stumbled on the information that more than 50 percent of first novelists never publish a second novel (“that scares the shit out of me”), and more than ever he just wanted to be shut of the thing. In November he mailed what he “hoped was a finished novel” to Gottlieb, who “didn't like it but came up with three or four very good ideas about how it could be revised and improved”: Apparently Gottlieb suggested that he cut a gratuitous final chapter, as well as tweak the Alice Prentice material in ways that might bring about a slight further refinement of the structure.
*
For another two months, then, Yates was “up to [his] ass” in further repairs, but finally relinquished the thing for good in February. He'd even come up with a title—
A Special Providence
—after discarding such recent ideas as
A Letter Home
and
The Wine of Astonishment
. Indeed the title may have been the one thing about the book he definitely liked, though he had to concede a heady sense of liberation now that his joyless, eight-year ordeal was over. As he wrote Prettyman, “[The novel] may not be very good—I suspect it is nowhere near as good as my first one—but the beautiful thing about it now is that it's done and off my back, leaving me free to write other and maybe better novels.” And then there was always the chance his pessimism was misplaced: Not only did Gottlieb profess to like the book, he even went so far as to list by name all the
other
people at Knopf who liked it—sales and publicity people at that.

What with his regular income and leftover Rockefeller money, Yates found himself rather flush when he received the nine thousand dollars due on delivery of his manuscript. Never mind that he now had a daughter at Bennington, one of the most expensive colleges in the country; it was time to celebrate—the curse of his second novel was lifted (so it seemed), he'd never given Martha a proper honeymoon, and after all,
Money is to spend
. Thus he decided to take his wife on a grand tour that summer.

They departed at the beginning of June, stopping in New York on the way. A night was spent with the Styrons in Connecticut, and Yates was in high spirits for most of the visit: His hosts went out of their way to put his shy wife at ease, and it may have gratified Yates for Martha to witness his friendship with such an eminent man. Later, however, they had dinner at the home of playwright Arthur Miller, whom Martha described as a “full-time celebrity”: “He was very imposing and gruff,” she recalled. “Everything was
Marilyn
this and
Marilyn
that, or else he'd name-drop some other famous person.” Intimidated, neither Yates nor Martha said a single word during the entire meal.

They'd originally planned to rent a flat in London, though Yates may have figured the nostalgia would soon turn sour. Whatever the case, they passed only a few “idle, boozy” days there: Yates visited his old neighborhood in South Kensington, and possibly became as moody as his character Jack Flanders when he encountered his old flat at Two Neville Terrace, or when the bartender at the Anglesea failed to recognize him. Maybe not, though: Martha doesn't recall any such tiresomeness at that stage of the trip, and in fact Yates received some very heartening news there: His agent in London, Monica McCall reported, was “
very
high on [his] book.”

He was in excellent fettle by the time they got to Ireland, where they rented a car and drove around the countryside for two weeks. Yates loved everything about the place—especially the people, who shared his fondness for drinking, singing, and talking (unpretentiously) about literature. Yates made friends at every pub; they valued him as a writer, and laughed when he'd mention, for instance, that
his
favorite lines of poetry were “
Fly
/ing too
high
/with some
guy
/in the
sky
…” The only drawback was Yates's driving—as ever, he refused to let a woman take the wheel, while he himself drove “like he'd never quite caught on”—which made their progress “maddeningly slow” as the white-knuckled Yates negotiated narrow winding lanes. Still, Martha considered Ireland the happiest time of the marriage.

They should have stayed in Ireland. The reasons Yates hadn't liked Paris almost twenty years earlier still applied: His French was a joke and the Parisians treated it as such, and all he wanted in the way of haute cuisine was a good steak. Also, though Martha herself spoke a little French—ergo a little more than her husband—Yates wouldn't let her order in restaurants, while he invariably became flustered when a “snooty” waiter seemed amused by his accent, to say nothing of his philistine tastes. Soon—quite like his own Jack Flanders—Yates was “trudg[ing] along with a look of petulant bewilderment in his eyes … the picture of a bumbling American tourist.”

But amid such dreariness he'd at least looked forward to dinner with his French publisher, Jean Rosenthal, a charming man who'd personally translated Yates's first two books to impressive acclaim. The evening promised to redeem the whole Paris debacle: Rosenthal and his wife took their guests to an excellent restaurant, and far from snickering at Yates's preference for
bifteck saignant
(while Martha tried snails for the first time), Rosenthal lauded the author as one of the great hopes of American literature and so forth. Alas, all this was by way of sweetening the pill, and once the plates were cleared the Frenchman got down to business: He regretted to report that Éditions Robert Laffont had decided
not
to publish Yates's second novel. Rosenthal had found the book very “moving and sensitive,” and if it had been written by a French author they wouldn't have
hesitated
to publish;
however.
… “Dick was like a deflating balloon,” Martha recalled. When Rosenthal noticed the effect his words were having, he hastily dropped the matter and cast about for happier themes. But the damage was done, and Yates proceeded to get drunker than his wife had ever seen him. Later Rosenthal wrote a letter expanding tactfully on the points he'd deferred over dinner. He discussed the commercial risk of foreign novels—translation costs, sparse reviews, the high retail price of a longish book such as Yates's—none of which would have mattered, of course, were it not for the following: “I do like the book and I think that the portrait of Alice is excellent and of a vivid accuracy. But as I had begun to tell you in Paris, the war part—interesting as it may be—has not the same stamp of deep originality. To put it bluntly, it is in the same vein as many war novels and it is a long section of the book.”

That was pretty blunt, all right, and for the rest of the vacation Yates was decidedly poor company. Rosenthal, a man whose judgment he trusted, had told him almost exactly what he'd feared all along: He'd be a laughingstock once the novel was published, and everyone would say
Revolutionary Road
had been a fluke.

Martha tried to cheer him up, but it was no good. “He was a mess.
Very
depressed: not just flat, but very very
sad
. Everything was pointless, ridiculous.” While in Cannes—where Yates had written his first publishable fiction as a sickly yet still hopeful young man—the enraptured Martha ventured to remark on the beauty of the prospect: the moonless Mediterranean, the glittering lights of town, the marvelous blackness of the sky.
“Don't give me that poetic bullshit about a black sky!”
Yates exploded.

They also went to Rome, Lisbon, and finally Madrid, where all the gifts Martha had bought for her family were stolen out of the rental car. Yates told her to buy more, and kept drinking. The only time he laughed, and then bitterly, was when she worried about how much money they were spending.

*   *   *

Shortly after their return to Iowa in August, Yates received the rather anticlimactic news that his mother had died. Martha and Monica were on hand when he got the phone call from Central Islip, and both remember his matter-of-fact tone as he agreed to the various funeral arrangements.
*
But afterward he seemed pensive and remote—“perhaps fretful over the fact that he didn't feel worse about it,” said Monica. He also might have been somewhat bemused by the way his mother's death had coincided with the publication (two months later) of a book that would have destroyed her if she had been alive and lucid. His “fair Texan” Carole had once observed that he couldn't finish the novel “because it is much harder to kill a mother than it is to kill a wife,” and she remarked on how “scared” Yates had looked when she said as much (though it's possible she misconstrued an exasperated silence on Yates's part).

A far greater concern at the time was his daughter Sharon, who'd flunked out of Bennington after the spring term. In recent years her adolescent rebellion had taken increasingly disturbing forms: In Mahopac she fought constantly with her mother, and broke curfew to attend forbidden parties at the old Babaril estate; she drank, smoked pot, and was rightly suspected of worse. Sheila accused her of becoming unstable “just like [her] father,” which tended to provoke Sharon into a shrill defense of the man as one of the most
feeling
people she knew. But when Yates himself expressed pique over her “irresponsible, aimless” life, she'd accuse him of trying to “control” her and make her a “carbon copy” of him. Finally, having finished high school a semester early, she ran away from home and joined some “cool creeps” (as Yates called them) in Andes, New York, where they proposed to start a ski lodge but mostly sat around getting stoned and sleeping.

Yates was somewhat mollified when Sharon started college in spring 1968, though he'd hoped for the corrective gentility of a proper “Eastern women's college” rather than an “arty-farty,” dubiously coed place like Bennington. When Yates heard she had a boyfriend of sorts, he was disgusted: “What kind of
guy
goes to Bennington?” he remarked to a friend. “And then hangs around! And he's with my daughter!” Before long an effete boyfriend would be the least of his worries. For her winter work-study interval, Sharon packed off to yet another hippie “ski resort” in Manchester: “With time on my hands,” she wrote her father, “in the hills of Vermont, I'll be able to work on learning to sit and concentrate on one thing”—a habit she'd admittedly failed to cultivate at Bennington. “My whole generation is running,” she noted in closing, “just as hard as I was, and we all help each other.” At the very least Yates must have rolled his eyes at that particular envoi, and meanwhile his disdain for hippies would have certainly been aroused by the scene in Manchester, which was rather like the scene in Andes the year before.

The bewildered girl bottomed out that summer in Boston, where she'd washed up with one of her classmates. The latter's boyfriend was a chemistry major from Brandeis who supported himself by making and selling LSD, and Sharon spent much of the summer in a psychedelic haze. It was tolerable as long as she had companions, but in the fall her roommate went back to Bennington and suddenly she found herself stoned among relative strangers, and living in a “horrible flop.” Around this time she was “rescued” by her father—an incident he reluctantly saw fit to fictionalize in
Young Hearts Crying,
though Sharon claims she wasn't as luridly strung out as Laura Davenport. “Dad called one morning after a party, and I was a little fuzzy,” she remembered. “He got all worked up: ‘My God, what are you taking? I'm gonna come out and get you!' I decided maybe it wasn't such a bad idea.” As good as his word, Yates caught the first plane to Boston and brought his daughter back to Iowa with him.