A Tragic Honesty (69 page)

Ironically the most “unrealistic” scenes are perhaps the most mimetically exact—namely Wilder's psychotic delusions, which evoke the actual process of going mad with compelling accuracy. And while the overall effect is harrowing and never less than convincing, the comic tone of the novel is held precisely in balance. Thus Wilder smells dogshit on his thumb to remind himself that “he was earthbound and mortal,” and imagines a series of impatient tabloid headlines as his Messiah delusion takes over: SAVIOR OR FRAUD?… A GLIMPSE!… IS HE OR ISN'T HE?… THIS IS GETTING SILLY.… THE MILLENNIUM! Such a tour de force is the very “order in chaos” to which the hapless Wilder aspires, but which only the rare artist can ever impose—a point reinforced by the presence of the Nabokovian doppelganger (and Yatesian “Me character”) Chester Pratt, yet another apposite touch in this singular novel.

One last felicity needs to be mentioned, if only because it was important to Yates: “Generally,” he remarked, explaining his own growth as a writer, “I've acquired a better sense of pace.” Whereas
A Special Providence
often languishes amid a welter of detail,
Disturbing the Peace
is impressionistic in the best sense. Thus Dr. Brink calls Wilder's attention to an article about himself (Brink) in the August 1961 issue of
American Scientists,
after which more than six months pass in the course of a few sentences:

There wasn't time to read it in the office, but [Wilder] took it home and promised himself to read it soon. In the end the magazine somehow found its way to Pamela's apartment, and when he asked her about it at Christmastime, long after it had ceased to matter very much, she said she guessed she'd thrown it away.

All at once it was spring again.…

Such compression would prove an even more crucial aspect of the novel that followed.

Those who consider Yates a “writer's writer” are particularly advised to take another look at the underrated
Disturbing the Peace
. Readers who need to
care
about fictional characters will be left cold, as will readers who require a certain clarity of message. (The novel proposes no solution to the problems it raises: Modern reality is insipid, Yates suggests, and those who can't take refuge in art or illusions or “success”—of whatever sort—are probably condemned to addiction or madness, and there you have it.) But the novel is as strange and perfect in its way as a Fabergé egg, and almost as beautifully useless.

*   *   *

Though an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and Psychology Today Book Club,
Disturbing the Peace
sold no better than Yates's previous novels. He was somewhat consoled, though, when it was chosen to receive the Rosenthal Foundation Award of two thousand dollars from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for “that literary work … which though it may not be a commercial success, is a considerable literary achievement.” The citation referred to
Revolutionary Road
as a “modern American classic,” and at first Yates seemed almost giddily pleased; then his face fell and he grumbled, “Oh, what the hell, it's only worth $2,000.” Perhaps he noticed in the enclosed brochure that Robert Coover was slated to receive an award for three thousand dollars at the same ceremony.

Work was its own reward as ever, not least because it was the best way to avoid dwelling on life. By the end of the year
The Easter Parade
was “in the home stretch, for better or worse,” and a fruitful month at Yaddo yielded not only a finished typescript but also the first chapter and outline of his next novel—“about that second-rate school my mother got me a scholarship to,” Yates chuckled. He thought he could make such a book “pretty funny,” and besides the idea provided ready means of getting “more dollars from Delacorte.” But the main thing was just to keep busy. When his old Iowa disciples Bob Lehrman and Jody Lowens came to Manhattan for New Year's Eve 1975, the only heartening item they found in Yates's bare, chilly apartment was the neatly squared manuscript on his desk. Otherwise the place gave them “an overwhelming impression of loneliness”: “The tenants were on rent strike and there was no heat in the building,” Lowens recalled. “Dick had the stove burners turned up, the oven too, and he apologized about the cold.” Sensing his guests' discomfort, physical and otherwise, Yates invited to buy them a drink at a nearby hotel on Fifth Avenue. It had grown dark by the time they returned to Twenty-sixth Street, and the young men invited Yates to come out and celebrate New Year's Eve with them. “Nah,” he said, “I'd better get back to work.” “I lost contact with Dick after that,” said Lowens. “His life was just too depressing.”

For a while, though, he did have “a girl”—as Yates would forever say, though in this case the girl was in her late-thirties. A decade before, Carolyn Gaiser had been a promising young woman who worked at
Harper's Bazaar
and
Glamour
(where she was friends with Grace Schulman), wrote poetry and fiction (including a story published in the
Paris Review
), and went to Italy on a Fulbright. Then she suffered a breakdown of sorts and spent a number of years in and out of hospitals. Once the worst had passed, Gaiser was like “an aging Sally Bowles” in the words of a friend: “She had a kind of bleak, bittersweet humor.” She was still in a rather convalescent mode when she met Yates—“two lost people bumping into each other in the dark,” as Gaiser put it.

Seymour Krim introduced the two at the Lion's Head. “I understand we have some ex–mutual friends in common,” Yates said, meaning the Schulmans. Perhaps because he was aware of Gaiser's own troubled history, Yates didn't hesitate to admit that he found himself virtually alone in the world. “I have two close friends left,” he said. “Sam Lawrence and Sy [Krim].” They compared notes about the Schulmans: Gaiser also felt she'd been banished for becoming difficult, and while Yates conceded that in his case he was mostly to blame, he remained deeply bitter toward Grace. Jerry he forgave as a sweet man who'd been provoked beyond endurance, and by way of example Yates recounted what he still thought was their last meeting—when Schulman “threw him out in the street”: “I must have gotten out of line,” Yates shook his head. “I can't remember much about it.” The Schulmans had been separated since 1971, and Yates described how Jerry lived alone in a “tiny dismal apartment” hoping Grace would take him back—“but she never will,” he said knowingly.
*
Gaiser agreed that it was “tragic,” and Yates nodded: “Yeah, but it's true.” Then his face lit up. “Hey, that's a great new game! We can start a list of ‘tragic but true' people!”

As they prepared to leave the bar and get dinner somewhere, Krim took Gaiser aside: “Don't let him drink too much,” he warned. “He's on antipsychotic medication.” Gaiser was reminded of her time at Bread Loaf in 1963, the most memorable aspect of which was her involvement with Nelson Algren; a close second, though, was the pervasive gossip about “the man who'd threatened to kill Ciardi” the year before: Richard Yates. Now that man was sitting across from her at Jimmy Day's, drinking too much beer and railing against his “child bride ex-wife” who was then dating a carpenter: “Can you imagine?” he said. “A carpenter! I don't want my little girl Gina exposed to that kind of proletarian stupidity!” He persisted with the subject for some time, then asked for Gaiser's phone number. She gave it to him.

Soon they were spending weekends together. On their first official date Yates appeared in a trench coat, and Gaiser remarked that he looked like Holden Caulfield grown up (“Dick treasured this as a compliment”). That was perhaps the high point of their three months together. Gaiser was a Swarthmore alumna who spoke with what Yates called an affectedly “lockjaw” accent. She also tended to compensate for a hobbled self-esteem by insinuating past successes, all of which had a provoking effect on Yates, to say the least. When she mentioned her
Paris Review
credit and regretted that she'd yet to finish a novel—a lingering ambition of hers—Yates hooted, “If you haven't written a novel by the time you're forty [she wasn't forty, but close] you never will!” Gaiser defensively presented Yates with specimens of her published work from the sixties, but he wasn't impressed. Nor was she when Yates, after a certain number of drinks, would start crooning the old standards that used to wow Wendy Sears and the like: “I'd try to look breathless and thrilled,” Gaiser recalled, “but it got really tiresome.” Later they'd go out for dinner, and Yates would lapse into ungovernable coughing (while talking obsessively about Martha and the carpenter), which attracted kind strangers to their table offering water and smacking the mortified man on the back.

One day in March he was vividly downcast. He'd just gotten proofs for
The Easter Parade
with the following copy editor's memo still attached:

This is
not
a rush book! However it is a difficult author who may call you in his natural state which is a drunken stupor, to check out a comma or something. The editor's note says light copyediting, which is exactly what is needed. Please do not use whoever did his previous book as the author is disenchanted with him/her.

“Dick
agonized
over whether they'd left it there on purpose or accident,” said Gaiser. Given that almost exactly the same note would later be attached to
Liars in Love,
it's fair to assume that the Delacorte copy editors were trying to send Yates a message. By then his perfectionist quibbling, excited by alcohol, had become something of a legend among editors and friends alike. “Nobody was up to Dick's long-winded colloquies,” said DeWitt Henry, with whom Yates once spoke for several “deadly serious” hours on the subject of whether “toe-jam” was the
mot juste
. Yates was nothing if not dogmatic on matters of punctuation and grammar, and relentless whenever he required information of any sort. While writing about the Dorset printshop in
A Good School,
he pestered Henry to provide pertinent technical data (“quoins” and the like), ditto when he needed fodder for his Washington novel,
Uncertain Times
: “He leaned into conversations and always wanted more detail, detail,” said Joe Mohbat, “[then] he'd call months later and say, ‘Remember you were talking about…? Where
was
that? Tell me more about that.'”

But what ultimately made Yates the scourge of copy editors was his simple aversion to criticism; any emendation in his manuscript, be it a single semicolon, would cause dark alcoholic brooding, which would finally erupt in long, hectoring, semicoherent phone calls. Meanwhile the foregone end of his affair with Gaiser was hastened somewhat when he canvassed her opinion of
The Easter Parade,
which he'd given her to read in galleys. “Do you think it compares to
Revolutionary Road
?” he pressed, after she'd repeated that it was “very good.” “Well,” she said, “I think it's very good, but I don't think it's brilliant compared to
Revolutionary Road
.” “Damn! Well, I knew that!” said Yates with a kind of bluff stoicism, though from that point on the phrase
good—but not brilliant
! would resurface nastily when he was drunk.

During their last few weeks together, Yates made the woman “pay and pay and pay” as Fitzgerald would have it. “You must have gone to a posh girls' school to get that accent,” he'd insist at every opportunity, though she assured him this wasn't the case. Once while they were having dinner in the Village, Yates spotted a former Iowa student and delightedly invited him to join them. “Did you know Algren?” Gaiser asked, after a long silence on her part. “Jesus Christ!” Yates turned on her. “Can't I take you
anywhere
without you dragging up Nelson Algren again?” He made it generally clear that almost any company was preferable to Gaiser's, and urged her to bring friends whenever possible to their meetings. She was amazed by how Yates would metamorphose in the presence of anyone he wished to charm. “How can you help but be in love with this man?” asked a girlfriend whom he'd regaled with witty RFK anecdotes, accent and all. In this case, though, it turned out he was just keeping his hand in: “Well, your friend is delightful,” he told Gaiser later that evening, “but I can't stand fat girls. Just can't tolerate it.” Soon Gaiser herself became the victim of Yates's “ruthless aesthetics” where women were concerned. One morning she found him staring at her “as if there were a tarantula on [her] shoulder”: “Good God, what
is
that?” he said, shakily pointing. “Sort of a
ridge
under your eyes—” “Cheekbones?” asked Gaiser, but Yates shook his head. “No, I mean that padding of
flesh
over them … well anyway, it's very unfortunate.”

The end came sometime in April. One night at a restaurant, Yates was holding forth on a favorite theme—wishing he'd gone to college—when Gaiser mentioned an old friend from Swarthmore who'd joined the faculty of an Ivy League school, which later paid for the man's occasional stints in pricey rehab facilities. Not only did Yates detect an injustice here, he seemed to think Gaiser tactless for even bringing it up. “Why should that fucking guy have Ivy League colleges picking up tabs for his breakdowns when I have to stay at these ratty hospitals?” he ranted, until a waiter asked them to leave. By the next weekend Yates's mood had only darkened further. Having evidently spent the interval brooding over pretentious Swarthmore girls who presumed to criticize his work, he burst out in a Village restaurant:
“Who the fuck do you think you are? What do you have to show for yourself but some yellowed newspaper clippings and that snotty accent you picked up at some posh girls' school?!”
Gaiser thought this gratuitously cruel, but gamely rejoined that she
hadn't
gone to a posh—“Ahh, who the fuck cares?” said Yates. “As I fled down the street,” Gaiser recalled, “Dick ran after me. Between coughs, he said, ‘Okay, break up with me. But will you still be my date at the Academy of Arts and Letters?' If I hadn't been so angry with him at the time, I might have recognized the pathos of that remark.”