A Tragic Honesty (72 page)

It was still a fine review. A. G. Mojtabai called the novel a “wrenching tale,” and singled out the author's subtle but resonant use of symbolism (perhaps to Yates's chagrin)—as when Emily realizes her sister couldn't possibly know how to find Pookie's building at Central Islip when she herself is locked up there: “The image of mother and daughter locked into separate stone buildings in some vast impersonal construction is never underlined by the author,” Mojtabai noted; “it is nothing spectacular, but its strength is considerable and cumulative.” Ross Feld in the
New Republic
praised the bravery of Yates's “depressing” vision: “In four novels now, he's gone his way, and with each one he's becoming more unusual and valuable.” Feld thought the modest scope of
The Easter Parade
was deceptive, that in fact it was “paradigmatic” of a vanishing genre—“the urban WASP novel”—a field all but ceded to Yates by the likes of O'Hara, Cheever, and Updike, who'd ceased to particularize the bewildered “disenfranchisement” of the middle class: “Few writers now use so much unflinching care, skill, and discipline to lay out a vision of dogged existence in life's despite,” Feld concluded. A few reviewers had qualms with what they considered a rather narrow, brutal determinism, but could hardly deny the book's overall power. “[Yates's] characters seldom have a chance to enhance their lot by moral or emotional choice,” wrote Richard Todd in the
Atlantic
. “But the details of their suffering are exact, indisputable and moving.”

Yates's old friend Anatole Broyard begged to differ. “These [characters] bow down to the imperatives not of life, but of the author's sense of craftsmanship,” he sneered in the daily
Times
. “Craft, in
The Easter Parade,
resembles a kind of etiquette, which keeps the characters inside the confines of predetermined form.” A promising salvo, this, for what might have proved an adept hatchet job, but the rest reads like the sloppy homework of a peevish schoolboy. To support his thesis, Broyard ticked off a number of random examples in which plausible characterization is allegedly sacrificed to some petty consideration of craft. “Would any normal … father say that to his thrilled little daughters?” Broyard wondered about Walter Grimes's remark that he's “only a copy-desk man.” “Or does he say it because the author enjoys its dying fall?” With unwitting humor (humorous to a biographer), Broyard also expressed petulant incredulity over a scene that Yates described almost exactly from life—that is, Emily's last meeting with the alcoholic, toothless Sarah: “Can we believe that her conventional husband and her grown sons would have allowed her to appear this way? Or is she again being sacrificed to a ‘good scene'?” And though Broyard concluded his diatribe by accusing contemporary novelists (as if Yates were representative of their worst tendencies) of being “unwilling or unable to meet their people on their messy terms,” he'd earlier sniped at the “pointless incongruity” (i.e., “messiness”?) of Yates's characterizations.

Those who wish Yates ill (for whatever reason) are mostly constrained to a single line of attack where
The Easter Parade
is concerned: that it's
too
perfect,
too
pat, that its merciless craftsmanship works like a kind of infernal machine to grind its characters down. “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life,” the narrator announces at the outset, “and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents' divorce.” Immediately the reader is swept up in the current of the story—before one can balk at the dark warning of that opening sentence—and just over two hundred pages and fifty nightmarish years later one suddenly arrives full circle at the ironic counterpoint of that final line: “Would you like to come on in and meet the family?” Ah, the family.

If one likes uplift—believes in the family, believes that people tend to learn from their mistakes and so forth—then clearly
The Easter Parade
will be a bitter read. But a feat of empty craftsmanship it is not. Life goes wrong for the Grimes sisters not because of some implausible contrivance on the part of a sinister narrator, but rather because “they can't help being the people they are”—Yates's explicit vision of tragedy. Emily fancies herself “a stickler for accuracy” and is determined to avoid her mother's follies and pass through life without illusions—but illusions (of love or God or self-worth or whatever) are simply the way people make sense of inexplicable suffering, and by trying to comprehend things at face value Emily comprehends nothing (“I see”) and ends up alone. Least of all can she comprehend Emily Grimes, and hence her male companions tend to be reflections of her own tenuous self-image, and just as unwittingly false. While Emily strives to be an intellectual at Columbia, she ends up with the flabby philosopher manqué Andrew Crawford, who absurdly affects the “demeanor of an athlete at rest.” Due for a spell of carnality after Crawford's impotence, she spends a number of luxurious nights with the virile Lars Ericson, who proves to be a narcissistic bisexual given to striking poses à la Michelangelo's
David
. As for Emily's own poses and self-deceptions, the most ruinous by far is that of being essentially independent despite her “unfathomable dread of being alone.” The results are evident in Emily's forced behavior toward Howard Dunninger, her last bulwark against total isolation. Dunninger—who works for a company that makes synthetic fibers, no less—is a sturdy burgher who can offer, if not love, the sort of security Emily desperately needs. But her bewildered self-doubt is such that she often hesitates to make an intimate gesture, lest the man think her too demanding or needy. Thus the affair is circumscribed by a number of nice calculations on Emily's part, as she labors to become the precise kind of companion that a prosaic fellow such as Dunninger might want. “As she often told him—and she knew it might have been wiser not to tell him at all—she had never enjoyed herself so much with anyone.”

Might it all have worked out differently? Perhaps, if Yates had been the kind of writer Broyard accuses him of being, and thus willing to contrive a particular outcome by making his characters behave implausibly. But of course the opposite is true: Emily and Sarah “can't help being the people they are,” and so Emily clings to a mirage of independence rather than saving her sister and perhaps herself (“I don't
want
her dragging down my life”), while Sarah, in turn, doesn't really want to be saved—her marriage is “sacred,” after all, and has given her the only real sense of love and security she's ever known. “Most people do the best they can,” says Emily's nephew Peter. “When terrible things happen, there usually isn't anyone to blame.” The idea runs like a gray thread throughout Yates's work: It's bleakly true in a way, but it's insufficient, and it's meant to be.

As the Flaubertian writer who is “omnipresent and invisible” in his own work, Yates reveals the pattern of his characters' mistakes without manipulating their fates; he's off paring his nails, so to speak, while the characters behave as they must. Some readers express exasperation over the fecklessness of Yates's people, but how would anyone appear from a wholly objective vantage? However we might “rush around trying to do [our] best” (Yates's phrase), a certain degree of squalor awaits us all—loneliness, error, death—and reminders of this are woven artfully into every page of
The Easter Parade
. Sarah is marked for disaster by the “fine little blue-white scar” on her eyelid (“like the hesitant stroke of a pencil”); the main street of St. Charles is dominated by a sign announcing BLOOD AND SAND WORMS; Pookie strives for “flair” but can't put her lipstick on straight and dribbles spaghetti sauce on her chin, and after all her name is
Grimes
. Perhaps the most poignant symbol is the eponymous “Easter Parade” photograph of Tony and Sarah—“smiling at each other like the very soul of romance in the April sunshine”—which Emily finds “hanging awry” after Sarah's funeral, “as if from some heavy blow that had shuddered the wall.”

Groping to explain the greatness of
The Easter Parade,
Cassill had it right: It arises from the “very, very, very
sad
” way Yates tells the story, and of course this too is a function of craft. Even the novel's summary narration serves the larger purpose of emphasizing the characters' helplessness, as if things are happening
to
them, suddenly, but with terrible logic. Part Two begins, “For a few years after she divorced Andrew Crawford”—a splendid elliptical leap from the previous line (“I hate your body”); what follows is a bit of deft exposition about Emily's jobs in the meantime, her two abortions, a representative scene of her struggling to make sense of it all (ABORTION: A WOMAN'S VIEW), and finally her grateful return to the everyday routine of work and parties. “Then suddenly it was 1955, and she was thirty years old.” All in two pages.

The Easter Parade
was one of five novels nominated for that year's National Book Critics' Circle Award (John Gardner's
October Light
won, which must have galled Yates), a
New York Times
Editors' Choice Book of the Year, as well as one of fifty “notable books” selected by the American Library Association. Delacorte sold more than twelve thousand in hardback and the Book-of-the-Month Club sold a colossal (for Yates) 112,000. The breadth of its appeal was such that Saul Bellow declared it one of the “top three novels of the year,” which may help to explain why Yates himself thought so little of it.

*   *   *

For Yates there was no more resting between books (if he could help it). In later years his son-in-law would chide him—“If I were you I'd take off for Bermuda”—but the only rewarding escape anymore was writing. As Bob Lacy noted, “Henri Troyat, the biographer, says of Chekhov that by the time he reached forty ‘life had become an excuse for writing.' For the Dick Yates I knew, life was
always
an excuse for writing. He didn't have much of a knack for living.” Yates would not have demurred, and his life in Boston was almost entirely built around his work; whenever he deviated from his narrow routine, disaster had a way of pouncing.

In a later essay (“A Salute to Mister Yates”), Dubus evoked his friend's spartan apartment on Beacon Street as a kind of objective correlative for Yates's total devotion to his craft: “It was … a place that should be left intact when Dick moved, a place young writers should go to, and sit in, and ask themselves whether or not their commitment to writing had enough heart to live, thirty years later, as Dick's did: with time his only luxury, and absolute honesty one of his few rewards.” Perhaps, but given the way Dubus described this humble shrine, it's hard to imagine any earnest young apprentice being much daunted by it. He mentioned the L-shaped tables that served as Yates's desk, covered with a tidy assortment of piles: the legal pads he used for first drafts, a typed manuscript for revision, and galley proofs of other writers' books; on the shorter table was a manual typewriter and many sharpened pencils. Yates confined himself almost entirely to the room in which he worked; Dubus “never saw him enter” the tiny spare bedroom where Gina slept during her visits. Next to his desk was a sofa where guests would sit, while Yates sat opposite on his narrow bed (“always made,” Dubus pointed out). The rest of his furniture consisted of a bookshelf and a derelict, unplugged TV that the writer Penelope Mortimer had left Yates when she went back to England. (Yates neither watched TV nor went to the movies.) The only decoration on the walls were some of Gina's drawings; there was a large bay window overlooking an alley. The refrigerator was stocked with three items: instant coffee, beer, and yogurt, the last of which Yates ate for breakfast (yogurt was one of the “great discoveries” of his later life: tastes good, goes down easy). Yates himself was quite content with the place.

The words
squalid
and
depressing
appear nowhere in Dubus's essay, though they almost invariably come up when other friends attempt to do justice to that same apartment. “It was so bare and awful,” said Peggy Rambach, Dubus's third wife. “It stank of cigarette smoke, the blue velvet curtains had turned brown with dust, the walls were gray with nicotine. I once wrote a poem about a child's picture on Dick's empty wall; it was a very affecting sight.” “Dick was the least bourgeois person I ever met,” said Mark Costello, referring to Yates's disdain for material frippery, which even the most hardened bohemians might have found excessive. As for that particular apartment, Costello summed it up as “fucking
grim
.” There were only one or two wan lights, and particularly at night the place was so gloomy that hardly anyone but Yates could bear it for very long. Robin Metz remembers staring at the circle of crushed cockroaches around Yates's swivel desk chair: “I reflected that his life had constricted to this little space, full of dead roaches, around his writing. That was all that was left: his whole life.”

Not entirely. Yates's “clean, well-lighted place” in Boston was the Crossroads Irish Pub on the corner of Beacon and Massachusetts Avenue, about a hundred yards from his apartment. Except for special occasions, Yates ate almost every lunch and dinner there for eleven years. Usually he sat alone in a particular booth opposite the bar in front, smoking and staring into space; sometimes he'd mutter to himself between coughing jags. The employees affected not to notice. The owner of the place was a kindly, barrel-shaped Boston Irishman named Michael Brodigan, whose experience with quirky, solitary bachelors was extensive. For a while he had no idea that Yates was a writer, much less a rather celebrated one, but it was pretty much all the same to both men: Brodigan would give Yates a friendly greeting and linger if encouraged, though generally Yates preferred to be left alone with his thoughts. In the afternoon he'd go home and nap, then write for a few more hours and return to the Crossroads around seven. By ten o'clock, usually, he'd drunk enough Michelob to face his dark apartment and get some sleep.