A Tragic Honesty (79 page)

Also that summer he attended the Wesleyan Writers' Conference, where he encountered such friends as George Garrett and Grace Schulman. Garrett and Madison Smartt Bell drove down for a weekend from the Stone Coast Conference in Maine, and the two arrived in the midst of a late-night, open-ended faculty-student reading (“the precursor of poetry slams,” Bell noted). The audience was visibly restless by then, and Yates more visibly than most—seated unsteadily between two young women on the floor. “Yates would make a groping pass at the woman on his left,” said Bell, “and she'd politely rebuff him. Then he'd listen to a bit of the reading and commence a growling muttering. Then he'd make a move on the woman on his right. This went on for a while. Finally he had a huge coughing fit, as if he were about to die, and that pretty much ended the reading.” Yates pulled himself together for his reunion with Schulman, an effort that seemed to make him cranky (“I thought you had to be here
Thursday,
” he snapped); for the most part, though, he managed to sublimate his bitterness into a kind of somber, formal politeness. The two brought each other up-to-date, more or less, but the old rapport was gone and they avoided much talk of the past. After their meeting Yates seemed to let himself go, missing most of his conferences while he staggered about campus in a grass-stained seersucker suit, his pants held up by a piece of rope. “He looks like an Ivy League wino,” someone remarked.

And yet, for all that, Yates didn't entirely lose his dignity, and as Garrett pointed out, “The students loved him.” Then as ever, Yates treated young writers without condescension of any kind, and his ill health tended to evoke compassion and make his wolfish behavior (such as it was) seem more comical than predatory. Above all he showed a kindly interest in their work, whether he came to conferences or not. In the months after Wesleyan, Yates called up his students one by one (usually late at night) and announced that he'd finally read their manuscripts and was ready to discuss them. One of these students was the writer Elizabeth Cox, whose first novel Yates scrutinized over the course of a year. “‘What does your character
really
say here, in this moment?' Yates asked me again and again,” Cox recalled.

And I had to answer right away, at our lunch table or wherever we were. He didn't let any insincere or dishonest remark go unchallenged.… Knowing Yates was an exhilarating experience in straight talk. Never had I been with someone who spoke so directly and expected such reciprocal honesty, and it changed me. As a writer, I learned to want only what was true in every moment. As a teacher of writing, I came to believe that challenging another writer in this manner is a sign of real respect.

Another reason Yates's dissolute conduct was easily forgiven, particularly that summer, was the impression he gave of being under a strain that had little to do with loneliness or ill health. As it happened the imminent publication of
Liars in Love
was a prospect Yates dreaded: For almost four years, well after his original advance had run out, he'd exhausted himself chiseling draft after draft, only to have the stories dismissed as “mean-spirited” by
The New Yorker
; moreover, in many respects the book was even more obviously autobiographical than, say,
A Special Providence
. The thought of being perceived as perversely “mean-spirited” on the subject of his own family, his mother and wives and so forth, was almost too much to bear. “I'm lying on the floor in a pool of blood,” he told Loree Rackstraw in late-August, when she called after he failed to show up for dinner at her Boston hotel. The “pool of blood” was the result of biting his tongue during an alcoholic seizure, though he didn't go into all that with Rackstraw. “The ambulance is coming—gotta go,” he said, and hung up. Many years before, in Iowa, Rackstraw had always called Cassill in moments of Yatesian emergency, and she did so now. This time the man sighed with a mixture of humor and sad exasperation. “I don't watch out for Dick anymore,” he said.

*   *   *

The dreaded issues of mean-spiritedness and autobiography did indeed come up in the reviews of
Liars in Love,
but in most cases they were mitigated by praise. Such ambivalence was expressed in the
Atlantic
by James Atlas, who, after an appreciative overview of Yates's career, noted his great reservation: “Too much brutal dialogue, too much mean-spirited circumstance, wears a reader down. Yates is the bleakest writer I know.” But Atlas concluded his review with a high compliment: “Yates accomplished what Fitzgerald did at his best: an evocation of life's unbearable poignance, the way it has of nurturing hope and denying it, often in the same instant.” Similarly Robert Wilson in the
Washington Post
faulted Yates for “showing too little sympathy for the characters,” which Wilson thought diminished the impact of their little or large defeats; but Wilson, too, seemed equivocal in his misgivings (“one of [Yates's] strengths is that he doesn't flinch”), and the stories were otherwise so compelling that he ranked them “with the finest realistic fiction being written.”

A number of reviewers arrived at that assessment with hardly any qualms at all. “It is good to report that realism in short fiction is alive and well,” began Robert Harris's rave in the
Saturday Review,
and ended, “At a time when much short fiction busies itself with surfaces, it is something of a wonder to find stories that cut to the bone.” A late review in
America
asserted “the simple truth of the matter: Yates is one of our best practicing fiction writers,” while Dan Wakefield pitched in with a paean in the
Los Angeles Herald-Examiner,
calling his friend “a contemporary master in full command of his fictional power.”

The two reviewers who mattered most, though, saw fit to point a glaring spotlight at the autobiographical nature of the material. In his well-meaning notice for the daily
New York Times,
Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described the stories as “wonderfully crafted”: “[E]very detail of this collection stays alive and fresh in one's memory.” Having applauded the stories' impressive “variety,” though, Lehmann-Haupt marveled that such a diversity of setting, incident, and meaning had been milked from what seemed “a single actual experience.” He illustrated the point by demonstrating how the stories might be “collapsed into a single history—the career, autobiographical perhaps, of a boy who has been emotionally seduced by his mother (‘Oh, Joseph, I'm So Tired'), who grows ashamed of his consequent dependence on her and in compensation begins to lash out at females (‘Trying Out for the Race')”—and so on, touching each story in turn, a long paragraph that must have made Yates wince. Two weeks later, though, he might have felt nostalgic for Lehmann-Haupt's benignity on the subject. Robert Towers opened his review in the Sunday
Times
with a tribute to
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
as “almost the New York equivalent of ‘Dubliners'” whose characters “might have been picked almost at random from the fat telephone book of the Borough of Queens.” But this turned out to be a premise for the relative disparagement of Yates's other work: “Scrupulous in its realism, honorable in its refusal to evade embarrassment or failure, the longer fiction seems less able than the short to escape the prison of an (apparently) autobiographical self into the freely imagined lives of others.… It is as if Yates were under some enchantment that compelled him to keep circling the same half-acre of pain.” Towers went on to say other damning and complimentary things, but the “half-acre of pain” remark stuck in Yates's mind—such that in bad moments he was haunted (even more so than before) by a sense of his own limitations and perhaps ludicrous repetitions.

There were other times, fortunately, when he knew better. “All I write about is family,” Elizabeth Cox told him. “That's all there is to write about,” Yates replied. Lehmann-Haupt had a point: What is particularly impressive about
Liars in Love
is the extent to which Yates
transcended
the apparent “prison” of his autobiographical personae. “Mostly, we authors repeat ourselves,” said Fitzgerald. “We learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories … as long as people will listen.” Fitzgerald's basic story—the ecstasy and disillusion of his romance with Zelda—exerted such force on his imagination that, at his best, he was able to refine the matter into a kind of universal idealism, one aspect of which was the American dream. Whether Yates ever achieved the peculiar magic of
Gatsby
is doubtful (who did?), but arguably he was able to extend his own “two or three stories” in more interesting ways over the long run.

“I keep wishing”—Towers wrote—“that Yates would stand back from all his sad young men and characterize them with the empathy and objectivity (as opposed to facile introspection) that he can bring to bear on a Queens barroom buddy or a London prostitute.” Facile introspection? This suggests that there is something solipsistic—or “boringly self-conscious” as Towers puts it—about Yates's protagonists, that the reader is trapped within the “prison” of a single viewpoint. However, with the exception of two stories in
Liars in Love
(“Joseph” and “Regards at Home”) and two in
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
(“Builders” and “A Wrestler with Sharks”) and finally the frame narrative of
A Good School,
Yates
always
wrote in the omniscient third person—the point of which was to show
all
characters, not simply his “sad young men,” from the inside (empathy) as well as the out (objectivity). There is no egregious emphasis, much less a “facile” one, on the inner life of the Yatesian “Me” character, and such glimpses that are given tend to be ironic, as when the first-person narrator of “Regards” ponders the effect of his girlfriend's desertion:

So it was over; and for a little while, taking a tragic view of my situation, I thought I would probably die.… But I was still expected to hammer out United Press copy eight hours a day, and to ride the subway and pay attention to where the hell I was walking on the street, and it doesn't take long to discover that you have to be alive to do things like that.

Typically the Yates-like protagonist is depicted with the same objectivity as the rest of the characters—or rather depicted with the pitiless
subjectivity
of another character's point of view. Thus David Clark's bored wife in “A Natural Girl” tunes out the man's dull treatise on “position papers” and considers rearranging the furniture, and later watches him “hold his elaborate head in his hands” (“elaborate” because of his modish Jane Fonda haircut) after one of his pathetic outbursts. And meanwhile he in turn wonders what
she
is thinking—alas, the reader already knows, and sees the awful moment coming when she suddenly (to his mind) lowers the boom.

What Towers applauds as the less autobiographical “objectivity” of
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
is, to some extent, a stylized characterization imposed by the brevity of magazine-length fiction. Precisely because Yates wanted to evoke greater
empathy
for his characters he allowed himself the luxury of novella-size canvases in
Liars in Love
. If a story like “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” for example, had been written in five rather than fifteen thousand words, the character of Sally Baldwin might have been reduced to a comic grotesque along the lines of her promiscuous friend Jill—in which case, perhaps, we'd be left with only her most salient features, such as her bloated upper lip when she drinks, or her weakness for “fudgy little showbusiness” phrases like “a very gutsy lady.” As is, we see that side of her in abundance, but we also see the dignity she never quite relinquishes (“You're making fun of me, Jack, and I think you're going to find that's not a very good idea”), as well as the essential perceptiveness that enables her to recognize Fields as a “counterfeit Scott Fitzgerald,” as well as the fact that she herself has led “sort of an idle, aimless life.” When such a person returns to her loneliness at the end of the story, and Jack to his, it isn't a matter of distasteful people meeting a “mean-spirited” fate, but rather the inevitable end to which those particular individuals are liable to come.

As in
A Good School
and elsewhere, Yates extended his autobiographical territory with an omniscient perspective, but even in his rare first-person stories the lives of characters other than the narrator are “freely imagined,” and the effect is anything but mean-spirited or boring. Given what we know of Yates's tormented feelings toward his mother, his attempt to comprehend (in “Joseph”) her own fruitless striving and humiliation, from the distance of almost fifty unhappy years, becomes all the more moving. “I can picture how she looked riding the long, slow train back to New York that afternoon,” the narrator muses.

Her adventure with Franklin D. Roosevelt had come to nothing. There would be no photographs or interviews or feature articles, no thrilling moments of newsreel coverage; strangers would never know of how she'd come from a small Ohio town, or of how she'd nurtured her talent through the brave, difficult, one-woman journey that had brought her to the attention of the world. It wasn't fair.…

She was forty-one, an age when even romantics must admit that youth is gone, and she had nothing to show for the years but a studio crowded with green plaster statues that nobody would buy. She believed in the aristocracy, but there was no reason to suppose the aristocracy would ever believe in her.

At a time when most realistic writers were cultivating “objectivity” with a vengeance—depicting characters who seemed devoid of will or identifying features one way or the other—Yates insisted on substance, roundness, such that his people create their own disasters rather than blundering into them along a path of random circumstance. “And where are the windows? Where does the light come in?”—as ever, in the implication that we're human, we fail, but in our common humanity we belong to one another for better or worse, whether as families or in some ineffable way suggested by the “sound of the city” that Billy's sister describes in “Joseph”: “Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York—more people than you can possibly imagine, ever … and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it's so faint—so very, very faint—that you can't hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time.” In the face of so many millions struggling against anonymity, or just to retain dignity, Helen's “brave, difficult, one-woman journey” is bound for obscurity. But then a kind of mystical kinship is evoked, as well as forgiveness, and doom, in the story's final line: “[O]ur mother was ours; we were hers; and we lived with that knowledge as we lay listening for the faint, faint sound of millions.” Perhaps Yates achieved the peculiar magic of
Gatsby
after all.