A Tragic Honesty (75 page)

But in Yates's case they were never dazzled for long, though many remained fond of him. “For fifteen years,” noted the writer Mary Robison, “I was just a lot of disappointment to Dick. Oh, but I loved him. How could I not? He was understanding and knowing and kind.” Robison was in her twenties when she met Yates, and apart from the matter of her considerable talent, she eminently filled the bill in terms of his preferred “body type” and other aesthetic requirements. “There are many things that I should thank you for,” she wrote him after leaving Boston to take a teaching position in Ohio. “I love you, Dick, for what you are, and what you were for me, and the things you did that were nice. Nice.” Among the things he did for her (so he told friends) was help with her writing—those celebrated stories about bleak middle-class lives that placed her at the forefront of so-called minimalism, the general trend back to realistic fiction in the seventies and eighties that was partly influenced by Richard Yates. As Robison's reputation grew with a run of stories in
The New Yorker,
Yates would sometimes grumble about how he'd been “used”—but all the while he kept a photo of Robison on his desk, and whenever the two met in Boston or various writers' conferences he was known to make hopeful passes at her. Finally, in 1986, she wrote him a note from Bennington that expressed a paradigm of the sentiments Yates aroused in women who appreciated his finer points but simply couldn't bear him for long: “I've loved you for a decade,” she wrote, but added that she was “guaranteed” to disappoint him and asked that he not let her “lead [him] on” anymore. “We both know I can't be with you, Dick.”

To some extent Yates blamed the brevity of these attachments on a persistent problem—toward the end of the seventies, he was less and less able to function sexually. “It bothered him a lot,” said Winthrop Burr, “and he was quite demanding that something be done about it.” Naturally Burr suggested he stop (or drastically reduce) drinking and smoking, but Yates angrily rejected the idea. Burr then referred him to a urologist, who couldn't find much the matter, which only compounded Yates's frustration. All Burr could do was advise and readvise that alcohol and tobacco were indeed major factors. The choice was clear: Either abstain from both or settle for a life of “gentle passion.”

*   *   *

“Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired” was rejected by
The New Yorker,
which offered the editorial gloss that it was “soft-edged and idealized” (a phrase that often sprang to Yates's bitter lips in years to come); it was then published in the February 1978 issue of the
Atlantic
. Its appearance occasioned a number of admiring letters, among them a note from Seymour Krim: “It's this combination of memoir/fiction, rooted in American history,… which permits the story to go beyond its characters and makes them representatives of a time as well as themselves.” This appeared to be the consensus view, as the story went on to win a National Magazine Award as well as inclusion in that year's O. Henry volume. More importantly it spurred Yates on to a spate of story writing: By April two stories were in “various stages of partial first draft,” another was “barely emerging in notes-and-outline form,” and still another was “floating around out there in the blue.” At the time Yates was planning a total of five long stories for a collection titled
Five Kinds of Dismay
. “The trouble with all this,” he wrote a friend, “is that Delacorte doesn't want to mess with it—or at least, if they decide they do, it'll be in a very disgruntled and half-hearted way.”

For the moment, though, Yates could afford to call his own shots somewhat. “
A Good School
is magnificent and your strongest book to date,” Sam Lawrence gushed in February. “The way you've managed to create an entire world with such incredible economy impresses me more than I can say.” Others agreed that Yates's technical mastery was impressive as ever, but what especially struck many were aspects of what Krim called “the mellow Yates”: “[
A Good School
] somehow turns a corner,” Krim noted, and the writer Hannah Green likewise found the performance “so moving and so perfect” that her letter to Lawrence turned into an almost flustered panegyric: “[Yates is] brilliant, a consummate artist, and it's his
feeling
that is so right, sensitive, refined, strong, firm, RIGHT!”
Feeling,
indeed, seemed the key: Not only had Yates continued to grow as a writer in terms of craft, but also philosophically, salvaging from the ruins of his life a greater degree of compassion for suffering humankind. “I'm moved by a blessed irony that we've all watched slowly unfolding,” Cassill wrote Lawrence.

You know, all his life Dick has wanted to be as good a writer as Fitzgerald—and now, by grace of the irony they both should appreciate, he stands out as a better one.… Dick buttresses [his] moral imagination with a craftsmanship that Fitzgerald only displayed sporadically, even in his best things.… I'm as moved to tears by thinking about Dick and his long, lonely haul as by his fine new book. How he's kept the faith.

Lawrence's faith as a publisher, meanwhile, was greater than ever: On the strength of such an ecstatic advance response, as well as a preview excerpt to be run in the June 25 issue of the
New York Times Book Review
(“The best free advertising we could hope for”), he ordered an optimistic first printing of fifty thousand copies.

It was a drastic miscalculation, of course, though reviews offered the usual bit of moral recompense. Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, in the daily
Times,
called the novel “thoroughly charming” and noted that while Yates “skirts the edge of sentimentality … he steers clear of that, too, and what we end up with is both funny and touching, both likable and ludicrous.” Julian Moynahan's lengthy treatment in the Sunday
Times
examined the deceptive complexity of Yates's narrative voice, inasmuch as it prepares the reader for a first-person memoir in the foreword only to revert to fictional omniscience throughout the main narrative; what promises to be merely personal, then, is in fact “a first-class work of the imagination marked by an interest in real history, by a sophisticated awareness of the ambiguous relation between any fiction and its ‘real-life' sources, and by a recognition that no authors, including the Joyces, Flauberts, Jane Austens and Henry Millers, have ever been able to write themselves completely out.” Even
The New Yorker
tossed the author a sop in its “Briefly Noted” section (“a graceful and articulate narrative”), while Yates's old student Jonathan Penner used the occasion to make a thorough case in the
New Republic
for the larger importance of Yates's work: “In an age embarrassed by story-telling, half-persuaded by chic critics that fiction should repel innocent belief, [Yates] tells stories we believe. In a time when experiment with language is more highly valued than skill with it, he experiments no more than fish do with swimming.”

There were a few demurrals. John Skow in
Time
called Yates “a good but doleful writer” and conceded nothing of the novel's relatively hopeful outlook: “Staring unflinchingly at bad nerves and loneliness is admirable, but fearing to look at any other sort of human condition is not.” Nicholas Guild of the
Washington Post
found the novel “well-written and entertaining,” but added that the balance between “boy plots” and “adult plots” amounted almost to a clash of genres and that the tidy resolution of each was hackneyed and artificial. And finally Thomas R. Edward observed in the
New York Review of Books
that the novel's “principal events seem more suited to television drama than to serious fiction.”

Impressed by “the mellow Yates” of
A Good School,
some readers were inclined to overrate it somewhat (not least Sam Lawrence, who doubtless hoped the more upbeat mood would lead to greater sales). The skillful observation and deft pacing of the novel moved Jerome Klinkowitz, an astute critic of Yates's work, to rank it as his best: “If writing were baseball, this would by Richard Yates's perfect game.” But this is perhaps going too far.
A Good School
is an expert performance within its narrow range of substance and length, and serves most notably to indicate that Yates was evolving in interesting ways.

As Moynahan pointed out, the dimensions of the book's autobiographical material are broadened by the omniscient narrator (an approach that would culminate in the elaborately shifting viewpoints of
Cold Spring Harbor
), which has the effect of enhancing the protagonist's coming-of-age story with contrapuntal sketches of his fellow misfits, old and young, at Dorset Academy. Like Bill Grove, almost all the characters tend to be afflicted in some way—whether overtly in the case of the polio-stricken Jack Draper's “funny little hands” and “funny little feet,” or Terry Flynn's “elegantly stiff” little finger (a nice objective correlative for his latent homosexuality, as it stands primly erect while he “frown[s] soberly over the task” of masturbating Grove), or psychologically in the case of the aptly named Van Loon (he of the lingering bowel movements) or Haskell, who has a full-blown mental breakdown. As for Grove himself, he is a kind of amalgam of maladjustment, and through the eyes of “Frenchy” La Prade we observe him in all his blue-nailed inadequacy: “The kid was a mess.… He seemed in danger of stumbling over his own legs as he made his way to a chair, and he sat so awkwardly as to suggest it might be impossible for his body to find composure. What an advertisement for Dorset Academy!” An advertisement indeed, since Dorset Academy is a veritable haven for aberration posing as a pretentious brand of “individualism”—a “school for the sons of the gentry” that appears to have been “conceived in the studios of Walt Disney.”

But Yates is not simply making cheap fun of such a place and its people, as witnessed by what novelist Stewart O'Nan called the “complex, generous voice” of Yates's first-person frame narrator: “His voice here is so inviting in his patience and forthrightness,” O'Nan wrote, “his willingness to both expose his deepest pain and forgive everyone (even himself) for their shortcomings … that naturally other writers have tried to emulate it—Richard Ford most notably in his story ‘Communist' and myself in my first novel
Snow Angels
.” Tellingly, one of the most unsympathetic characters at the outset of the novel, Steve MacKenzie—the Dorset bully who derides Bill Grove as a “puddle of piss”—comes off best at the end, when the narrator recalls meeting him circa 1955 and being given a bit of kindly, pertinent advice: “Listen, though: don't look back too much, okay? You can drive yourself crazy that way.” MacKenzie, then, has grown up to become a decent if unremarkable fellow, as have the rest of Grove's misfit schoolmates in their own pardonable fashion. A few (it is noted) have died in the war—a fate that loomed over every member of Grove's class, and lent poignancy and a touch of grandeur to their incidental foibles. But finally, the one person who should have meant the most to the narrator and meant so little—his father—haunts him now, and the novel's final lines (wherein Grove imagines what he might have said to the man to make amends) linger in the mind like that “pure ribbon of sound” heard fleetingly from some ghost station a thousand miles away:

I will probably always ask my father such questions in the privacy of my heart, seeking his love as I failed and failed to seek it when it mattered; but all that—as he used to suggest on being pressed to sing “Danny Boy,” taking a backward step, making a little negative wave of the hand, smiling and frowning at the same time—all that is in the past.

A Good School
is indeed a “thoroughly charming” novel that in a number of writerly ways transcends its genre; superficially, though, it's liable to strike the general reader as just another coming-of-age story about preppies, and as such it was largely ignored. “I want to reassure you that we will work things out,” Lawrence wrote the anxious Yates, when sales stalled around the usual ten thousand copies. “I'm committed to your work and to you as an author till death do us part and I'm not about to let either of us down.” It was true, and in the meantime Lawrence was building what he hoped would prove a lucrative backlist, while both men nibbled the tidbits of occasional recognition. For
A Good School
the pickings were rather slim: The
Times
listed it in their annual roundup as one of the notable books of 1978, and it was nominated for the St. Botolph's Award for best novel by a New England writer—won, however, by Yates's old nemesis Maureen Howard, whom he'd made cry some seventeen years before.

A curious postscript were the odd ghosts
A Good School
flushed out of the author's past. “Since reading your book,” wrote Yates's old tormenter Richard Edward Thomas (“Ret”) Hunter, “I have looked a number of times in the mirror at my ‘animal rooting mouth.'” Hunter reported that he was now a lonely and somewhat impoverished widower living in Miami (“If I had been after truffles [that is, with his rooting mouth], I'd now be rich,” he wryly remarked), and Yates was so contrite about his unkind description of Hunter that he wrote the man a long mollifying letter. He was also contacted by a woman named Mary Nickerson, who identified herself as a friend of Bick Wright's widow, Ann: “She knows that I also read your books, she and Bick having put all their friends on to you.… Ann said she'd wondered if you would like to hear what did happen to Bick.” Yates was intrigued, and accepted an invitation to dine at Nickerson's home in Brookline with her and Ann Wright Jones. That night he learned that his rebellious, sardonic, mawkish friend Bick had become an English teacher after quitting the seminary, and for all the man's absurdities (most of which had remained intact over the years) he was a dedicated, inspiring teacher with whom adolescents felt an immediate rapport. He'd died in Houston of a brain tumor at the age of thirty-nine. To the end he remained bitter about the whole privileged ethos of his unhappy childhood.