A Tragic Honesty (78 page)

Around this time Wendy Sears moved back to Boston after several years of marriage in Italy to a monoglot sculptor named Andrea Grassi.
*
As Yates often made a point of reminding her, he was baffled by the whole Italian sojourn, not to mention the loutish ex-husband, but mostly he just felt touchingly glad to have the pleasure of her company again. Shortly after her return he wrote her a series of love limericks:

The mere presence of sweet Wendy Sears

For the first time in (wow!) fifteen years

Is enough, for a start,

To break a man's heart

And thus make him burst into tears.

The other verses were in a similar vein, reminiscent of the courtly, whimsical Yates of fifteen years before. Indeed, little had changed between the two in most respects. Wendy Sears was somewhat sadder and wiser, to be sure, but essentially the same stoical good sport who'd weathered Yates's rages and exchanged notes with him during tedious meetings at the Justice Department. Though wary of leading Yates on, she'd occasionally meet him for dinner or drinks and agree to be his date for the odd formal function, as when he received the PEN/New England Award for Literary Distinction in late November 1980. “That was one of the better literary parties,” Sam Lawrence wrote him the next day. “And an unexpected bonus was seeing you with Wendy Sears again. She hasn't changed one iota.”

Sears was inclined to say the same of Yates. “He'd become terribly repetitious,” she observed. “He was
stuck
: still wearing the same gray suit, blue shirt and preppy ties, still making the same crabby conversation about the president and politics or whatever. He just didn't pay attention to the changing world—political, social, cultural, nothing. Dick was still back in the fifties.” Among others, too, the operative phrase for the later Yates was
out of touch
. Though he was lovingly (or fiercely) eloquent about literary matters, he became dogmatic and rather muddled when conversation took a general turn, and seemed to know little or nothing about basic current events. As such he was bound to be rather tiresome company among nonwriters, tending to lapse into captious correction of a person's grammar, word choice, or social manners. Such punctilios issued a bit incongruously from a man who often couldn't be bothered—as Sears reluctantly noticed—to clean his clothes or beard (“matted with drool and snot”). But still there were glimpses of the old charm, the wit, as if a playful heart were trapped inside this cranky, troubled old man.

*   *   *

One aspect of Yates's old-fashioned worldview was a frank, utterly unapologetic homophobia. Some of this went deep indeed, and doubtless had to do with certain conventional insecurities about his “girlishly” round eyes and “bubbly” mouth, to say nothing of his childhood awkwardness and desperate clinging to his mother and sister. Yates was forever at pains to prove his masculinity (even to the point of forbidding a woman to drive)—but apart from all that, he despised what he viewed as the pretension and bad taste of the camp sensibility. He dismissed Knowles's
A Separate Peace
as “a homosexual novel in disguise” (“the emotions are a little too ‘purple' for regular boys”), and thought gay literature in toto was overrated due to a specious impression of originality evoked by a nonheterosexual ethos. Be that as it may, the bottom line was simply this: Effeminate gay men drove Yates up the wall, much like his hardboiled counterpart Michael Davenport in
Young Hearts Crying
:

Oh, shit [he reflects
re
his newborn son]; and there were still other possibilities too dreadful to contemplate. What if, in response to things that struck him as funny, your son took to saying “I love it” or “Oh, how delicious”? What if he wanted to walk around the kitchen with one hand on his hip, telling his mother about the marvelous time he'd had with his friends last night at a really nice new place in town called the Art Deco?

When Monica McCall retired in 1980, Mitch Douglas took over her clients, and Yates found himself contractually bound to an agent who was very evidently gay and given to indignant demands that Yates shape up and turn in his books on time. While Yates didn't like lesbians either, he'd always made a sovereign exception in the case of Monica McCall: She was a “lady,” and there was nothing remotely butch or outré about her; she revered his talent and cared for him as a human being; above all she never nagged him about deadlines or discussed his vagaries in general. She'd looked after him in every sense (more so than Yates might have realized) and was all but seamlessly unpatronizing about it; Yates remarked that she'd “saved [his] life” after Martha left him. Following a series of strokes, though, McCall moved to Canada (where she died in 1982), and Yates was that much more alone in the world. Now when he called his agent to ask for money, he was often given a “snitty” lecture by a man whose first (and somewhat abiding) impression of Yates was
qua
lunatic. Yates hated Mitch Douglas.

Their association got off on the wrong foot twice: first at Bellevue in 1974, and again when Douglas adopted Yates as a client six years later. But first a pertinent digression: As Yates continued to produce the long, exquisitely wrought stories for his second collection,
The New Yorker
continued to reject them one after another. At first these rejections were cordial as ever (“this one came close,” “keep trying us,” and so on), though Yates was not at all mollified anymore. “All I want is a story in the goddamned
New Yorker
!” he'd rage when discussing the ups and downs of his career; also he'd started referring to staple writers for the magazine with an almost reflexive opprobrium—particularly “John fucking Cheever” and “John fucking Updike” (or “Precious John”). One of Monica McCall's last attempted transactions on his behalf was to offer “Trying Out for the Race” to
The New Yorker
in late 1979. “I don't know if you usually write covering letters,” Yates wrote her, “but I'd greatly appreciate your doing so in this case: you might find some way to remind [fiction editor] Roger Angell that his magazine has been shamelessly teasing me with ‘encouragement' for thirty years or more.” Such teasing was about to end forever, though not in a way Yates or any other writer of his stature might have expected. For the moment, though, Angell continued to tease, rejecting “Trying Out for the Race” with a fair degree of tact: “This is written with admirable care and sensitivity, but these lives don't seem worth the trouble he has given them. I also have some difficulty in understanding why this is all happening in the 1930s.… [Yates] has many admirers here, and I still hope we will publish him some day.” McCall made a practice of copying such (relatively) “nice” rejection letters to Yates, while the more perfunctory or even brutal kind she'd usually paraphrase or keep to herself.

It's worth bearing in mind that, by then, any number of Yates's former colleagues and students had at least one credit in
The New Yorker,
and even his daughter Monica had received a long, detailed letter of encouragement from the same editor (Fran Kiernan) who'd called one of Yates's best stories “soft-edged and idealized.” What made it even worse, perhaps, was that Yates
knew
these later stories were among his finest work. When “Regards at Home” was published in the August 1980 issue of the
Atlantic
(having been rejected by
The New Yorker
), Sam Lawrence wrote that it was “magnificent, as fine and perceptive a work as anything being written today”—and a few months later, when Lawrence received the finished manuscript of all seven stories, he found it “simply marvelous”: “Congratulations a thousand fold and my profound thanks. It's always been a privilege to be your publisher and now more than ever.”

Oddly enough, one of Lawrence's two favorite stories, “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” left Roger Angell not only cold but faintly hostile: He called the characters “false and hollow,” though he allowed that the unwholesome Beverly Hills milieu was perhaps to blame. No such extenuation, however, was granted in the case of “A Natural Girl”: “Mr. Yates is extremely skillful and readable” (at least two conciliatory adjectives were pro forma in all these letters), “but I can't quite believe this dialogue or those lives or, worst of all, such a mean-spirited view of things.… Some writers do see the world this way but I think Mr. Yates is just trying it all on for effect.” Hard words: “[M]ean-spirited” stories were clearly not to Angell's taste, but the fact that he wasn't even willing to concede the
sincerity
of Yates's attitude (“trying it all on for effect”) seemed rather mean-spirited in itself. And by the time Angell had finished the story “Liars in Love,” three days later, he seemed to dislike Yates on any number of levels: “This didn't come close. I think he is a confident, accomplished writer, but it seems clearer and clearer to me that his kind of fiction is not what we're looking for. I mean this without offense, and I wonder if it wouldn't save a lot of time and disappointment if you and he could come to that same conclusion.”

“I know these rejections will disappoint you,” Mitch Douglas wrote Yates, “but I hope not too much so.” He enclosed the notes from Angell, adding that he'd tried to remonstrate with the man over the phone, but found him “very stiff and stodgy.”

In fact Yates was very,
very
disappointed. It was the end of one of his fondest dreams, and he was in no condition to appreciate the almost artistic inevitability of it all—to wit, that the subtext of all those
New Yorker
rejections over the decades had floated to the surface at last, slowly but suddenly clarified like a darkroom photograph, in the blunt antipathy of Angell's notes: Though Yates was skillful, readable, confident, accomplished and whatever else, his vision of life was
repulsive
. Thus spake
The New Yorker
.
*

In the years that followed, in the Crossroads or the consulting room of Winthrop Burr, Yates would often hold forth on the subject of his two foremost (extant) bêtes noires: Mitch Douglas and
The New Yorker
. Also, for the benefit of the odd visitor to Beacon Street, Yates would occasionally grope through his papers, find Angell's letters, and read them aloud in a shaky voice—perhaps in the hope of being reassured, once more, that the man and his institution were wrong. Another turn of the screw was the fact that his daughter Monica had recently moved to Manhattan and found a job—as a library assistant at
The New Yorker
. Yates was displeased.

*   *   *

During the early months of 1981, Yates stayed busy but also allowed himself a bit of diversion. With
Liars in Love
(as the book was now called) off his hands, he wrote an engaging essay for the
New York Times Book Review
titled “Some Very Good Masters,” which distilled the high points of twenty years' worth of lectures and rumination about his two favorite novels,
Gatsby
and
Madame Bovary
. He closed on a deprecatory, somewhat elegiac note that seemed to indicate a growing concern with his own mortality and literary legacy:

Time is everything. I am 55 now, and my first grandchild is expected in June. It has been many years since I was a young man, let alone an apprentice writer. But the eager, fearful, self-hectoring spirit is slow to fade. With my 8th book just begun—and with deep regret for the desolate wastes of time that have kept it from being my 10th or 12th—I feel I haven't really started yet. And I suppose this rather ludicrous condition will persist, for better or worse, until my time runs out.

Yates spent the early summer weeks at Yaddo working on his new novel, but in June he took a break to attend the birth of his grandchild, Sonia, in Brooklyn. He brought flowers to Sharon in the hospital, and took his son-in-law out for a drink toasting the baby. At the time Richard Levine's natural father was dying in a rest home, so the young man particularly appreciated Yates's willingness to assume a paternal role; in general Levine idolized Yates as a writer and a man, so much so that he didn't mind (even rather enjoyed) Yates's goading him to express himself as precisely as possible. “Dick drew me into labor over finding just the right word for some topics of our conversation,” Levine noted; “because just a good word was never enough for Dick Yates, whether he was in the company of writers or not.” Such was Levine's admiration that he was startled by Yates's confession, that same afternoon, that he felt a sense of failure as a father.

Meanwhile Yates compensated for the bleak regimentation of his life in Boston by getting the most out of larky junkets like out-of-town readings and writers' conferences. Always topmost among his priorities was finding female company, and all things considered he didn't do half badly. Sponsors and fellow writers tended to fuss over Yates at such events, which had the effect of transforming him (figuratively) from a feeble old man into a great writer going ungently into that good night. His friend Ed Kessler, then on the faculty at American University, invited Yates to Washington that summer to give a reading. The two hadn't seen each other in fifteen years or more, and Kessler extended himself to show Yates a good time, putting him up in a fine hotel and throwing a dinner party in his honor. Yates was tipsy at his own reading, and subsequently disappeared with a student admirer; by the time he showed up at the party chez Kessler, dinner was over and his host was vexed. “How do you keep these walls so
white
?” Yates blearily inquired after a long dressing-down. Later Kessler discovered that his guest had run up a sizable bill at the hotel bar, and this was borne in mind when Yates wrote asking for a job.