A Tragic Honesty Read online

Stephen Benedict and his older brother Russell were Yates’s best friends in Scarborough, and the youngsters’ activities suggest the kind of off-center precocity Yates may have had in mind when he described the “interesting” products of progressive education in A Special Providence. Stephen and Richard formed the Scarborough Jitterbugs, a two-man ocarina band that approximated such popular standards as the Andrews Sisters’ “Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen” and “Oh, Johnny, Oh!” “We energetically rehearsed, then tootled away on numerous occasions for anyone who’d listen,” Benedict recalled. “Almost every piece would be punctuated by one of us with the sepulchral moo of an enormous bass ocarina, certain to break up anyone in range. That sad yet comic sound will forever bring Dick to mind.” Perhaps encouraged by her son’s ocarina prowess—or just the general ambience of juvenile creativity—Dookie hired a Mr. Bostelman to give Richard private violin lessons at the gatehouse; either the instrument didn’t catch on or Dookie didn’t pay the man or both, but Yates’s musical career seems to have stalled with the Scarborough Jitterbugs. Meanwhile Russell Benedict (influenced by Yates’s sister?) started a weekly newspaper in his basement, the Scarborough News Sheet—six pages of society items, gossip, cartoons and gags (Yates’s contribution), and the odd subversive bit such as a photo Russell had taken, and pasted in all one hundred copies, of a drowned vagrant woman on a slab at the local morgue. Corpses withal, such a novel and nourishing world came at a crucial time for Yates, and had a lingering impact that went well beyond the obvious. He pondered this in a 1961 letter, written after a reunion with Stephen Benedict and two weeks before the publication of his first and most famous novel:

  Had dinner tonight with an old boyhood friend from the years 1937–39 when I lived in a town called Scarborough, whose amateur theatre group (“The Beechwood Players”) served as the original for “The Laurel Players” in my book. He found it incredible, and I found it spooky, that I had completely failed to remember the name of a winding blacktop road in that town on which he and I and many of our schoolmates used to pass the most impressionable hours of our formative years: “Revolutionary Road.” Pretty Freudian, buddy.

  * * *

  The “sad yet comic” moo of the bass ocarina (a strikingly apt leitmotiv for the life of Richard Yates) should be sounded at this point, as things began to fall apart in Scarborough. For one thing, Yates’s relative popularity wasn’t likely to last while his “long, nasty descent” into puberty gained momentum. By the age of thirteen he was already taller than most of his peers, but not much developed in other respects—if anything, the attenuation of his body seemed to make him weaker, and he could hardly have appeared more clumsy if he’d tried milking it for laughs (which he didn’t). And despite the school’s emphasis on creativity and so forth, it also lavished prestige on its student athletes, especially in the upper grades, and this universal fact of prep-school life boded ill for Yates. Even Stephen Benedict—who was smaller and a year younger—always prevailed in their frequent wrestling matches, which seemed to bother Yates in a quiet way. For the rest of his life, in fact, he’d be haunted by a sense of physical inadequacy, which would manifest itself in a number of curious and not-so-curious ways.

  And then of course there was the matter of Yates’s poverty, for which his seedy, undernourished appearance served as a kind of advertisement. Most of his schoolmates came from wealthy or at least comfortably middle-class families, and Yates was made keenly and increasingly aware of their snobbery. Susan Cheever, who experienced the same paradox while living at Beechwood, wrote, “We had the luxuries of the very rich—rolling lawns, a swimming pool, gardeners who doffed their caps—but we were tenants, scraping to get by.” And here was the dark side of Scarborough: Though creativity and personal charm were pluses, they were no substitute for money, and one learned the hard way how suddenly one’s sense of belonging could evaporate when a few bills weren’t paid. For her part Dookie worked hard to preserve her cherished foothold on the estate: She tried to recruit more students as well as improve her own work (in the hope of that elusive, lucrative “one-man exhibition”) by dispensing with garden sculpture in favor of direct stone carving and abstract forms. But her progress as an artist brought little material reward, and the good life she’d come so close to grasping began to slip away.

  It had to be a bitter business. Almost nightly the Vanderlips entertained in their downstairs parlor, and the elegant guests in their evening clothes could be seen through tall lighted windows. Dookie herself had attended the larger parties in the ballroom, amid grand pianos, liveried servants, and the great Van Dyck painting Andromeda, as such occasions tended to be open to the nicer and more creative part of the public—to all, that is, but the truly impecunious, as the Yateses would soon become. But then at least one member of the family definitely benefited (as an artist anyway) from such harsh reversals, since a lifelong sense of exclusion informed the best of Yates’s work (a scene in A Special Providence, for example, has Alice arriving at “Boxwood” and attending the Vander Meers’ lavish Christmas party; it pays homage to a similar scene in Madame Bovary).

  From the practical viewpoint of which she was wholly incapable, Dookie never had any business living at Beechwood, though she wasn’t one to give up without a fight. No doubt she tried to get her children’s scholarships increased at the school, and was denied on the basis of merit (or lack thereof).* And no doubt she got her exasperated ex-husband to agree, yet again, to exceed the terms of the divorce agreement and pay off the more immediate bills. Perhaps Dookie continued to hope that the larger situation could still be saved somehow (more students, a one-man show), even as she grew more “cranky,” as Stephen Benedict recalled, “combined with a good deal of cynicism about life in general, which she clearly felt had not been good to her.” Life would get a lot worse: Before long she was telling her children not to answer the door, and finally the Vanderlips took legal action to evict her and recover the many months of unpaid rent. There was no time to finish the school year when Dookie and her children fled an entire region of creditors in the spring of 1939. “All I remember is that you sort of disappeared overnight,” the headmaster’s daughter wrote Yates, “and no one would tell me why, and I was heartbroken!”

  They found refuge of sorts in Austin, Texas, where Aunt Elsa had gone to live after her marriage to the math professor. This much we know, and if we trust A Special Providence (and perhaps we should at this point, at least in terms of the big picture), we can also assume that Elsa’s semiretired husband was something of an anti-Semite who drank too much and liked to hold forth on such topics as “the menacing rise of the American Negro.” What matters for our purpose is that he seems to have found Dookie distasteful and bullied her son, a mama’s boy (he thought) who should be back in school. “I hate him! I hate him!” Alice Prentice ends up screaming at her hapless sister. “Oh, I know you only married him because he was all you could get, but you’re a fool! He’s a beast!” Or words to that effect, which understandably might have led to both mother and children staggering through a sweltering construction site with their suitcases in hand and a total of seventy-five cents among them. What’s interesting and pertinent about this scene, as rendered in the novel, is the way the “cheerful, heartening” son helps his mother overcome her exhaustion by encouraging her to imagine that the hot “caliche” dust is actually snow, a freezing blizzard from which they have to escape as quickly as possible. “For years, whenever they were faced with any ordeal, she would gain strength from saying ‘Remember the Caliche Road?’”

  Yates remembered the Caliche Road all right, in whatever form it took, but as time went on he became less inclined to collude in his mother’s delusions. Indeed, his childhood tendency to be an accomplice to such folly, as well as its foremost victim, would forever rankle. As much as anything this was the goad that made him determined to expose the truth, no matter how depressing, that people like Dookie are apt to bury beneath layers of everyday self-deceit. For Yates it was a matter of good art,
though it certainly applied to life as well—to friends, family, and (arguably with the poorest result) himself. “The most important thing,” he liked to say, “is not to tell or live a lie.” Pity and forgiveness were important too, however hard they came when one knew the worst about a person. Once, when Yates was responding to questions about his work, a young woman commented on how awful the mother was in A Special Providence—“so careless and thoughtless and self-centered”—and asked Yates what he thought of her. “Oh, I don’t know,” he said quietly. “I guess I sort of love her.”

  CHAPTER TWO

  A Good School: 1939-1944

  By the fall of 1939 they were back in the Village, and all was well again, at least as far as Dookie was concerned. She’d somehow wangled a commission to sculpt a bust of the boxer Joe Louis; in fact, a photograph of her doing so—with the great heavyweight posing in person and the artist’s awestruck children looking on—appeared in the New York Herald Tribune and other newspapers around the country. “We’re celeberaties [sic],” Yates wrote Stephen Benedict, amid doodles of the various photographic groupings sent out by the Associated Press. “And you had to see the lousy one. Roof [Ruth] looks ten times as big as [I do], mater looks like she was a 300 pounder, and I look like I was nine years old.” For as long as his mother worked on the bust, Yates was one of Louis’s biggest fans. He and Dookie were given ringside seats at the Louis–Arturo Godoy fight at Madison Square Garden, where Yates sat scribbling a “blow-by-slug” description of the “prolims” for Benedict: “I can’t describe the Louis fight, cause I want to enjoy that without interruption. Do you blame me? If you never got this letter, you’ll know Joe lost, and I died of heart-failure.” He enclosed a peanut shell from the Garden, and later a “chip off the old block” from the completed Louis bust—which was eventually placed in the permanent collection of the Norfolk Museum of Arts and Sciences.* Meanwhile former champion Jack Dempsey was next; Dookie dubbed the incipient series her “Sports Hall of Fame.”

  Around this time Yates wrote many letters to his best friend Stephen, whose family had moved to California for the year. Apart from a sort of sophisticated whimsy and an ear for colloquial language (as an example of both, he addresses Stephen as “T-bon” throughout, to mimic the pronunciation of a Japanese friend the latter had made), the thirteen- and fourteen-year-old Yates gave little indication in these letters of the grimly precise writer he’d soon set out to become: Spelling and punctuation are almost entirely random, the penmanship sprawls, and as for substance—well, the letters are mostly about cats, or kahts as Yates calls them. Even Joe Louis is “just like a big kaht,” and Yates’s own kaht has just run away, hence he doodles the pet bounding off in a whiff of smoke. Occasionally he makes some passing mention of his new school, or a movie he’s just seen (“the Cowardly Lion was a giggle”), or Joe Louis of course, but he rarely strays altogether from the main theme:

  I really wrote you the verra nite what I gotcher letter. But the giggleiest thing happened! You see mine honorable sister took an excuse to her verra strict princepal [sic], and (oh-ho-ho-haw) she (this’ll kill you) was about to depart from the principle’s [sic] desk, and (haw-haw) she glanced out of the corner of her eye and saw that her “excuse” bore the picture of a kaht, and a “Dear T-bon.” Laugh? I thought I’d die!!

  The passage gives a fair idea of Yates’s epistolary style, perhaps the kind of mock-refined patois affected by some of the more precocious wags at Scarborough Country Day. Certainly the letters suggest that he badly misses both Benedict and the school, more in what he omits than otherwise (“It will be peachy to see the T-bon this summer”). But the overall impression is one of flighty evasive boredom, rather like a child playing with his food; reading between the lines and doodles, it seems as if there was little in Yates’s life except cats and Joe Louis that he much cared to write or even think about. In fact one is vividly reminded of the fourteen-year-old Phil Drake in Cold Spring Harbor, a boy who can “cut through a lot of confusion” with his occasional insight, “even if all he wanted to do was fool around with the cat or examine his face in the mirror, even if he lapsed into the kind of willfully exasperating childishness that suggested he would always be younger than his age.” As for these willfully childish letters to “T-bon,” their subtext is suggested by Yates’s reaction to them forty years later, when Benedict sent him copies in the hope he’d find them amusing. Yates was not amused: It was good to hear from Benedict again, he wrote back, but not so good to get the letters; he didn’t like to think about that time in his life.

  “My school is peachy (oh-so),” Yates wrote in October 1939, and for his friend’s benefit drew caricatures of his new teachers; as a cartoonist Yates was adept at finding just the right physical detail (an effete way of folding the arms, an asymmetrical scowl) to reveal the essence of his subject. Yates may have found the all-male staff of Grace Church School to be a group of ludicrous grotesques, but at least the location was convenient (less than two blocks from the family’s latest apartment on West Eleventh), and Dookie was no doubt pleased by the Episcopal affiliation (“the only aristocratic faith in America”). The school, however, was probably not as “peachy” as Yates made it out to be. In his novel Uncertain Times, Yates’s alter ego William Grove casts back to his traumatic first day of school as a thirteen-year-old, “as the only new boy where everyone else had known each other all their lives”:

  He was standing alone in the school yard when another boy came up to him with a look of lazy menace, said “Hey there, Bubbles” and turned away again. And there was no denying that his face at thirteen did have a sort of bubbly look: eyes so girlishly round they seemed incapable of squinting in a manly way; lips so plump that only an effort of will could compress them into dignity. Luckily, or mercifully, the name “Bubbles” had failed to catch on, and later in adolescence he had managed almost to come to terms with his face.

  The key word is almost. Yates—a strikingly handsome man by any standard, at least in his youth—disliked the way he looked. With the same faculty that made him a decent amateur cartoonist and superb fiction writer, he fixed on his round eyes and plump lips as physiognomic signs of weakness; more to the point, he thought they made him look feminine, “bubbly,” and he had a lifelong horror of being perceived as homosexual. The beard he grew in his forties was by way of partially concealing his “Aubrey Beardsley mouth” (as one friend put it), and the gathering bags under his eyes helped take care of the roundness somewhat, though he never stopped squinting a little for formal portraits.

  But there’s really not much reason to think Yates was more than normally miserable that first year at Grace Church School, or rather that school life per se was more than a minor cause of whatever misery he felt. That the “Bubbles” tag (or its equivalent) did in fact “[fail] to catch on” is borne out somewhat by the lapel pin for “leadership” he was awarded in December, along with pins for “improvement” and “an average of above 80 for the last month.” Yates’s “actual size” doodles of these pins (smaller than a fingernail) also suggest that he was aware of just how dubious they were, though perhaps his giddiness in relating the news to “T-bon” is not entirely a matter of self-mockery: “You might be inerested [sic] in getting an earful of the gleeful fact that due to my dutiful studies … I, R. Walden Yates, was awarded 3 little bronze lapel-pins.” But if this means that Yates was not quite a pariah, he doesn’t seem to have been all that popular either. In the many letters he wrote that year, amid all the manic chatter about cats and movies and so on, there’s only a single glancing reference to a potential new companion: “Me and another guy who swings a wicked harmonica, have a sort of an orchestra (not as good as the scarborough jitterbugs).” Clearly he missed Scarborough, and especially his friend Stephen, whose return in June at least gave him something to look forward to.

  But it wasn’t to be. Dookie had decided to rent a cottage that summer near Milton, Vermont, in the mountains around Lake Champlain. Yates tried hard to coax Benedi
ct into joining them: “You’re invited to a peachy joint in VT where there’s a lake—a free rowboat a big mountain a bathing suit a rustic cabin and best of all Homer [the cat] will be there!!” At the bottom of the letter is a cartoon of Homer lugging his suitcase in the direction of a festive sign (“VERMONT!”), followed by a typical Yatesian witticism: “Remember: ‘You can’t get ‘T.B.’ in ‘V.T.’” All for naught. Benedict couldn’t come, and Yates was faced with the task of finding friends among fellow campers. “Bud Hoyt is getting to be quite chummy and stays late every nite at our cottage playing every kind of game from slap-jack to monopoly,” he wrote enticingly to T-bon a few weeks later, but that was the only mention of Bud Hoyt or anybody else. In late July he wrote a last wan postcard—“You can still come, you know”—by which time he’d probably reverted to spending his days in the usual manner, à la Phil Drake, “fooling around on the floor with the cat … hearing his mother’s relentless talk and longing for it to stop, dying a little when the alcohol began to thicken her tongue.”

  * * *

  Along with the curative powers of fresh water and mountain air, another motive for the Vermont sojourn was to escape from creditors again; during their last days on Eleventh Street the family had been reduced to using the backstairs, the better to sneak in and out of their apartment without alerting the landlord. But Dookie had a flair: When the family came back in August she found a much better place at 62 Washington Square, one of four brownstones on the south side of the park known as “Genius Row,” where writers such as Stephen Crane, O. Henry, and Frank Norris had lived around the turn of the century. The mystique appealed to Dookie, and besides, they had the entire ground floor to themselves. Soon the place was filled with students and statuary and the industrious odor of plasticene; life was back to normal again.

  More or less. By then Ruth was nineteen, and college had never been in the picture; her flirtation with Buchmanism had long passed, and she’d begun dating a series of men whom Dookie found feckless and even a little sinister. The change in Ruth had been troublingly abrupt: Just a year before, she’d carried on a kind of calf-love courtship with Russell Benedict, who was almost two years younger than she; but when he returned from California he found that Ruth regarded him as little more than a boy. “I’d lost out to much older suitors,” he remembered, “but she was nice about it—Ruth was always nice—and there were no hard feelings.” She’d met some of these older men while working as a volunteer for the Associated Willkie Clubs of America, where Dookie had hoped she’d find some nice Republican boys from good families. And so she did, or rather they were Republican, but neither they nor certain others struck Dookie as remotely suitable. Happily the whole dilemma was solved on Easter Sunday 1941, shortly after a family of war refugees moved into the apartment upstairs.