A Tragic Honesty (61 page)

For the rest of that year she lived in the stone cottage with Yates and Martha. At first she remained a bit slow on the uptake, and her father arranged for her to see a psychiatrist; the man diagnosed her as having suffered a drug-induced psychotic episode and prescribed Thorazine, which she soon stopped taking. “I was depressed and found it hard to concentrate,” she said, “but not really psychotic—I felt
overwhelmed
by reality, not out of touch with it.” Meanwhile her father's attitude seemed rather inscrutable at times: On the one hand he was glad to have her home and eager to do what he could to help, but often he seemed very irritable about things. Her depressive moping grated on his nerves, and when she confided details of her life in Bennington and Boston, he'd sometimes respond with neutral interest and sometimes with rage. “How could you
do
something so stupid!” he erupted—understandably—when she mentioned how she'd once spent her entire semester's allowance on wholesale hash, most of which she'd smoked herself rather than selling at a profit as intended. What seemed odd, though, was that Yates's responses one way or the other were hard to predict, no matter
what
was being discussed. “He was never really well even when he was well,” said Sharon, who around this time gained particular insight into her father's condition. “Just in general he'd often say irrational, irrelevant things.” She once mentioned a roommate who had a black boyfriend, and Yates said the girl was just trying to spite her parents; when Sharon calmly tried to explain (“No, they went to high school together and he's really a nice guy” etc.), her father snapped “Why
else
would she do that?
Girls like Negroes because they have big penises!
” At his best, Yates was incapable of such a benighted remark—but there it was. “I'd blink at him and get quiet,” said Sharon, “and he'd go off and have a drink. He didn't seem aware of his own strange behavior, though if I got tearful he'd apologize.”

Martha made the situation not only bearable but “pretty jolly.” The better to leave Yates alone during his grouchy working hours, the women enrolled in a typing course and kept each other company. Each acted as a kind of calming buffer between the other and Yates, and there was no friction whatsoever between themselves. (“Will you guys stop
fighting
already?” Yates wryly remarked, when the two had a laughing disagreement over how to cook mushrooms.) Still, Yates was eager for his daughter to go back to college, and she was only too happy to oblige, as she missed the company of people her own age. Martha advised her to look at small liberal arts colleges—less conservative than Carleton, if a bit more so than Bennington—but Sharon disliked the hassle of ordering catalogs and writing application essays. One day she stopped at the Iowa admissions office and filled out an application (no essays), and was promptly accepted for the following semester. In January she moved to a dormitory.

*   *   *

Publication was always an unnerving experience for Yates, particularly so in the case of
A Special Providence
: He remained convinced that the book was an inferior performance, that after the eight-year wait reviewers were bound to be disappointed. What made matters worse (throughout his career) was the baldly autobiographical nature of the work: Though in time Yates would grow convinced that such material—
if
properly crafted—was not only valid but rather crucial, he never got used to the humiliation of exposing himself in public, of “dropping [his] pants in Macy's window” as he put it.

His terrible fragility was well known to friends, who did their best to reassure him. “I imagine you are now going through the traditional big sweat in anticipation of the publication of a new book,” wrote Vonnegut, “and I'll guess that it is tougher for you than it is for most people.… Because you're you. For you, things are tougher.” Vonnegut urged his friend to keep it all in perspective: “Every good writer I know acknowledges you as a master.… So—carry on. But you've already won.” When the book was published in October, though, such personal admiration did little to lessen Yates's gloom over poor sales and scant reviews. “It is a beautiful book,” wrote Joan Didion, and Styron sent a congratulatory telegram: HOPE YOU SAW EXCELLENT REVIEW CURRENT HARPERS FINE STUFF I FIND CRITIC AND ALL TRUE. Yates may have been relieved to know he still enjoyed Styron's good opinion, and the
Harper's
review was indeed fine (“Yates presents with no sentimentality a story that is all but heartbreaking”), but he couldn't help dwelling on the fact that, say, the daily
New York Times
had ignored the book entirely. And still his friends assured him that, far from disgracing himself, he'd written a very good novel—certainly better than what he'd led them to expect. “I remember how many times you called your book … a piece of shit,” wrote Dubus. “So I expected [it] to be a piece of shit, barely and finally released from the anguished bowels of a weeping man.… Not so. I find it a wonderful fucking novel.” But in the meantime Bantam had passed on the paperback rights, and such slights meant to Yates that the novel was
no damn good,
period. By the end of November he was so despondent that Martha called Robin Metz (and presumably others), begging him to hurry up and finish the book so he could praise it, persuasively, to Yates. This Metz did, addressing what he knew to be the particular concerns of the author: “What do Alice Prentice's dreams and delusions
mean
unless we see them juxtaposed against the mud and slop, the weariness of marching?” In short the book held together after all, and wasn't the mishmash Yates suspected it was.

Because the novel wasn't widely reviewed, Yates assumed that “a lot of people didn't think much of it,” which may or may not have been so; nevertheless, the actual reception was by no means the disaster he'd anticipated. There were no outright pans among the major reviews, all of which acknowledged Yates's skill. Joyce Carol Oates in
The Nation
noted the novel's similarity to the “disturbing and prophetic”
Revolutionary Road,
insofar as both explore “various contemporary delu-sions” such as the common tendency among Americans not to accept “[their] own mediocrity”: “A sad, gray, deathly world,” Oates concluded, “—dreams without substance—aging without maturity: This is Yates's world, and it is a disturbing one.” John Thompson's review in
Harper's
(the one that caught Styron's eye) was an almost unequivo-cal rave: He called the novel “straightforward, intelligent, and clearly written,” and referred to the “bad luck” of Alice Prentice as being “so quotidian, so possible, so plausible, that it is more terrifying to read of it than to read of the disasters and massacres of kings.”

Yates's pessimism was somewhat vindicated by Elizabeth Dalton's belated notice in the December 14
New York Times Book Review
: “[
A Special Providence
] is in some essential ways an honest and intelligent novel,” she began, “and yet it fails, finally, to be a moving or exciting one.” Dalton thought the war sections the strongest of the book, though “the effect of [Prentice's] mediocrity is to deprive his conflict of urgency and significance.” As for Alice, she is “simply too thin and pathetic a character to support much attention.” Even Yates's “clarity and precision of detail” was viewed as a lapse of sorts, since “so heavy an air of patient skill hangs over much of the writing that the book seems almost embalmed in good craftsmanship.” And finally one can almost picture Yates nodding his head in masochistic agreement with Dalton's coup de grace—to wit, that the childhood section “seems remote” to the rest of the narrative, “and its placement in the middle, between the two halves of Robert's war adventures, gives the novel a queer, broken-backed structure.”

Revealingly—though hardly for the first time—Yates's craftsmanship was held against him, damned as both excessive
and
lacking, at a time when a fastidious concern for “structure” and “style” was viewed with suspicion or outright indifference. Somewhere in the subtext of Dalton's review was perhaps a thought shared by other critics who were too bored by Yates's latest to bother reviewing it: Namely, if the man insisted on writing a traditional realistic novel—a
war
novel for that matter, a
coming-of-age
novel—then it had better have a sound narrative structure, but really, why write such a book in the first place? Hadn't anyone told Yates that “the true enemies of the novel [are] plot, character, setting, and theme” (as postmodernist John Hawkes had summed it up)? That the so-called New Journalists had usurped the conventions of fiction in order to dramatize a reality that seemed to baffle the imagination, while novelists were left to challenge the very nature of “reality” itself (and hence the authorities behind it) with wacky surrealistic satire and/or formal experiment?

Yates knew all about it, of course, though perhaps even he was startled by how far things had gone. Fred Chappell, in his 1971 essay on
Revolutionary Road,
noted the “inglorious” literary fads that had helped consign Yates's reputation to near-oblivion in the space of ten years, and quoted the poet Randall Jarrell to good effect: “It is hard to write even a competent naturalistic story, and when you have written it what happens?—someone calls it a competent naturalistic story.” With
A Special Providence
Yates had again written such a story, and to detractors he'd chosen an even more hackneyed subject than the suburbs—that is, World War II, about which any number of sensitive young men had been writing for almost a quarter century. Such a novel should at least possess the stylistic verve or the
relevance
of a
Slaughterhouse Five
or a
Catch-22,
whose “black humor” pointed up the absurdity of war at any time or place, and whose “real” subject was of course the contemporary war in Vietnam.

But finally what galled Yates most was that
A Special Providence
simply wasn't good enough to overcome current trends; also, that he'd wasted so much time on it. Eight years ago he'd had the idea of writing a “direct autobiographical blowout” about the war—to be exact, about a young man who is disabused of his romanticism by the ordeal of war. But such a story was familiar, to say the least, and whatever had struck Yates as momentous about his own experience seemed less so in retrospect; hence the long struggle to
form
the material in such a way that made it fresh and avoided what Yates called “the two terrible traps that lie in the path of autobiographical fiction—self-pity and self-aggrandizement.”

The result was a noble failure, at least by Yates's standards. Jean Rosenthal had it right when he called the war sections “interesting” but not particularly original. Yates remembered his own infantry experience as alternately tedious and terrifying, and he rendered it with a number of vivid details: the “smell of mildew and rubber and his own breath,” as Prentice tries not to vomit in his gas mask; the corpses' eyes “like dusty marbles”; the soldier Krupka who “sat on the chest of the bespectacled corpse and spooned up his can of dehydrated eggs, which were almost exactly the color of the dead man's flesh.” But the images of corpses and basic training and war in general had long been exhausted by books and the movies, and their reanimation required a more novel viewpoint than that of a romantic and rather typically self-conscious young man. Yates knew this, and “after much labor and much to [his] chagrin” realized that no amount of polishing and fine writing and craft could quite overcome the fallacy of his approach, to say nothing of the fundamental insincerity at the bottom of it—that is, the fact that Yates himself was
not
particularly disillusioned by the war, and really had no strongly defined point of view at all, much less a novel one.

But faced with the artistic challenge of posing
disillusionment
as the defining factor in Prentice's development—and thus linking the latter's war experience to his childhood—Yates resorted to the mechanical formula of a movie motif, whereby the reader is reminded every so often that Prentice has yet to cast off his mother's romanticism: Thus he imagines himself carrying a wounded buddy in the manner of Lew Ayres in
All Quiet on the Western Front,
or labors at seducing a woman by lighting two cigarettes at a time like Paul Henreid in
Now, Voyager,
and so on. All of which culminates in a labored epiphany devised to meet the needs of Yates's synthetic theme, however lacking in spontaneity or psychological plausibility. “No account ever really needed to be settled,” Prentice reflects after bravely taking a beating from a bigger soldier;

nothing ever really needed to be proved. Everything would always come right in the end as long as a couple of good guys went up behind the barn and had it out, as long as a mother fell on her knees and offered all her thanks to God and they played the Star-Spangled Banner on the radio. That was what these voices had to say; that was their lying sentimental message, and it all went down as smoothly as the pancakes and jelly.

Whereupon Prentice vomits up the pancakes and jelly, and hence rejects the sentimental values of America, the movies, and his mother—rather patly, not to say sentimentally, as doubtless Yates himself suspected. And so as a kind of corrective he finally asserts that “all [Prentice] knew with any clarity was that he was nineteen years old, that the war was over, and that he was alive.” That was all the nineteen-year-old Yates had known as well.

But he never had to strain after meaning or originality where his childhood was concerned, and the book comes alive whenever it returns to Alice Prentice. The theme associated with the character, that of a “special providence,” is not superimposed for the sake of craft, but rather reflects the essential delusion of people such as Alice-Dookie—that is, that they are gifted, among the world's golden people, and that God (or somebody) will always provide. Alice's refusal to face reality leads her and Bobby into disaster time and again, and yet if she were level-headed like her “dreary” ex-husband (“I've got a good amateur voice, that's all”), life would be intolerable. Having committed herself to the fiction that she is “remarkable and gifted and brave”—a noble fugitive from a dull provincial family and husband, from all the dull conventions of average people—Alice would rather endure hardship than resign herself to being merely “reasonable.” And in fact the bland, uncertain rewards of reality aren't enough for
anybody,
much less modestly talented people such as Alice, though most of us learn to live with our compromises. Those who don't are ultimately left with only God to believe in them, and perhaps with the comfort of a cocktail that's still nearly two-thirds full.