A Tragic Honesty (12 page)

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Were it not for his home life and the wartime possibility of imminent death, Yates's final year at Avon might have been idyllic. As noted in
A Good School,
his classmates were actually
nice
to one another—not only because they were seniors, but also because of a general wish to live and let live in what little time was left before being drafted. The mood was one of rather blithe pessimism. Rumor had it that Mrs. Riddle and Headmaster Stabler—never on the best of terms—had reached an impasse over the budget and other matters, and even the faculty seemed a bit tongue-in-cheek about bothering with one's work. Yates's favorite English teacher, Dr. Knowles, occasionally spent whole classes in self-absorbed silence, studying Japanese characters with a magnifying glass and chuckling at nothing in particular. And when the school warden—an amiable but overserious sixth former named David Bigelow (who affected not to care when people called him “Shorty”)—tried to enforce the headmaster's blackout regulations, he was met with such brazen ridicule that the memory angers him still.

Yates thrived. Because of his excellent record as editor he was given the unprecedented privilege of running
The Avonian
without the aid of a faculty adviser, and the newspaper became more influential than ever—not only was it sent to training camps around the country, but also to every theater of war where alumni served. It was an ideal time to be a lackadaisical student wholly committed to other, more glorious pursuits, and Yates relished his role as a kind of maverick litterateur. Witness his senior profile in the
Winged Beaver
(accompanied by a snapshot of Yates sneering, with a cigarette):

As Editor during his last two years, Dick's familiar figure has been seen many a Tuesday afternoon, draped in a pair of gray trousers and wilted blue shirt as he strides about with a harassed look. At five fifteen he totters into the Avon Club, lights the usual cigarette, and falls on the most comfortable sofa. The crisis has passed and our next
Avonian
will come out after all.

Yates was also the school's most gifted cartoonist, and his caricatures of Stabler and staff were prized as keepsakes among the students. As art director of the
Winged Beaver
(and later associate editor), he provided the yearbook illustrations for two years, and his lead cartoon for the 1944 edition was apt: a hulking, ape-faced drill sergeant holding a uniform in one hand and crooking a fat finger at some unseen recruit with the other. It was precisely what awaited them all, and everything else seemed beside the point. The time was right for antiheroes, and Yates was eulogized as such in the
Winged Beaver
: “And then Dick Yates, Our Editor,/ Our Novelist divine/ Who burned his midnight oil so much/ He switched to turpentine.”

Yates's picturesque fretting over his various
Avonian
duties was mostly reserved for daylight hours; at night he burned his oil to work on fiction, and lost no time pouring his impressions from the
New York Sun
into a short story, “Schedule,” which he finished early that autumn. Yates was proud enough of this effort to send it to Thomas Wolfe's agent and biographer, the rather celebrated Elizabeth Nowell,
*
who responded with an almost three-page, single-space critique that was remarkable in its prescience. “I think you're pretty good,” she began, and continued in the same tone of candid, qualified congratulation. Nowell didn't know how old Yates was, only that he was in school, but noted that his story was far better than many she'd read by amateur adults. “I don't mean by that that I think you are ready to be published, but … keep on writing and getting surer of yourself: cutting deeper in the groove. The main thing is that you have a fine quality to your writing: the kind of feel to it that really good stuff has. As long as you've got that you'll never lose it.”

“Schedule,” which appeared in the 1944
Winged Beaver,
is an apprentice work of unmistakable promise, and perhaps worth dwelling on at some little length. “The best part of [the story is] the very fine background of it,” Nowell rightly pointed out, “the way you make the reader really see and hear and smell the newspaper building and all the departments in it.” The first quarter of the story, in fact, is given over to some five hundred words of wonderfully irrelevant atmosphere: “The cigarette smoke rose listlessly, curling toward the ceiling, until it met the draft from the open top-halves of the windows and was whirled sharply out into the morning sunlight”—and from there we move on to the makeup editor “gingerly” sipping his coffee, to the pressroom workers with their “jaunty square hats of folded newspaper” (readers of
The Easter Parade
take note), to the great press machines “turning out newspapers fifteen a second, pushing them out wet with ink and hot from the dryers,” and so forth.

“It seemed to me you had known a newspaper like this and had wanted to write about it,” Nowell observed, “but had had to have some sort of regular story to weave it around so had taken Al Shapiro as the center of it.” Just so: The great wave of descriptive eloquence with which the story begins washes up, finally and rather randomly, at the feet of Al Shapiro, whose menial task is to bundle the newspapers in twine. Shapiro is a kind of ur-version of the typical Yatesian loser: He wants to be a writer, but his prole father makes him drop out of school to haul ice; later he tries to take a journalism class (where all the students are younger and better dressed than he), but is humiliated by a tweedy pedant who advises him to learn basic grammar first; and finally, fifteen years later, the now middle-aged Al's diminished dreams take him all the way back to high school, despite the ridicule of a vulgar wife (“‘Listen, Al, I don' want no high school boy for a husband'”). In the end a coworker named Moe makes the mistake of teasing Al in precisely the wrong terms—“‘Christ almighty, are you gonna be ignorant
all
your life?'”—whereupon Al goes berserk and attacks the man with his twine cutter.

But mere plot summary fails to do justice to the many fine things here, such as the nicely sustained
time
theme—the schedule of various newspaper editions posted throughout the narrative (even as time runs out on poor Al Shapiro), the “great living monster” of the press machine rolling inexorably on to make the newspaper (as the story ends) “on
time
.” Clearly Yates had worked hard and learned a few things about craft over the past year, and indeed Elizabeth Nowell not only detected his talent but also his autodidactic tendency: “I think you have enough natural feeling for writing to teach yourself and do it far better than anyone else can do it.” This borders on the prophetic, and may explain why Yates kept the letter all his life, perhaps for the purpose of occasional reassurance.

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According to federal law a high school student in 1943 could be drafted in the middle of his senior year if his eighteenth birthday fell before January. This applied to three of Yates's classmates—who took summer school to prepare for winter graduation and subsequent induction—among them Bick Wright. That year Wright had served as associate editor of
The Avonian
and succeeded Candels as the wit behind “The Beaver's Log”; this meant that Yates was necessarily exposed to his friend's vagaries on a more or less constant basis, which seems to have frayed their old rapport. Still, Bick's departure was a potent reminder that things were coming to an end, and probably the two marked the occasion in much the same way as Grove and Ward in
A Good School
—that is, by staying up late in the newspaper office and sharing a pint of smuggled whiskey (“it tasted so awful that Grove couldn't imagine the source of its celebrated power to give pleasure, let alone enslave the soul”). Nor is there much reason to doubt that Wright was just as “dramatically morose” as Ward, full of gloomy bravado in the wake of a Dear John letter he'd just received: “‘I don't care anymore.… I don't care what happens to me in the Army or anything else.'” In any case he left that December; Pierre Van Nordan took over as associate editor, Yates became the new dorm inspector of Building One, and things continued to end.

It was a bad Christmas. As Yates would tell it later (not for laughs), this was the year he was “kidnapped” by Avon—forbidden to go home for the holidays because his tuition hadn't been paid since his father's death. Extreme measures were therefore indicated, though this one was no more successful than others. Dookie temporized as usual, and Yates spent Christmas with the Avon staff, who if anything were less happy about it than he.

Of course the really remarkable thing is their indulgence in allowing him to stay at all, even as a Yuletide hostage. It suggested the larger problem: Headmaster Stabler, in his zeal to recruit less privileged but otherwise well-suited students, had perhaps overlooked the possibility that Mrs. Riddle would choose to cut her losses at some point. But Stabler had all but ensured this result by enacting a number of reforms without the founder's consent: Not only did he switch the clothing franchise from Brooks Brothers to the plebeian Franklin Simon (and was planning to abolish the dress code altogether), but also he changed the name from Avon Old Farms to the Avon School, tinkered with curriculum, insisted on a greater religious presence, and to that end erected a hideous Hodgson Portable Chapel on the campus. This last touch, in particular, seemed to gall Mrs. Riddle. She'd become increasingly bellicose since the death of her husband, and when Stabler presumed to mar the architectural purity of her “indestructible school,” she dropped the bomb: Either abide by the letter of her Deed of Trust, she demanded, or all support would be forever withdrawn. Stabler and the faculty resigned en masse, perhaps in the hope of calling her bluff, but the widow Riddle was not a bluffer. In a letter to her mutinous underlings she noted that she'd spent “seven-ninths of [her] fortune in building and supporting the School,” but now saw no alternative but to close at the end of the academic year. “A noble experiment had somehow gone wrong,” wrote historian Gordon Ramsey.

At any other time the students might have taken the news in the same spirit with which they mocked themselves as “Avon Old Queers,” but given the bleak immediate future it was a real blow, yet another of life's moorings giving way. “Our school is closed, and probably the future will record many a similar disillusionment,” a student wrote in that year's
Winged Beaver
. As for Yates, the yearbook noted: “He does plan a college education and a career as a professional writer, but that must wait until peace.” Something else that would have to wait was Yates's diploma, which was withheld pending the Godot-like prospect of his tuition payment.

No matter. Yates was a graduate in spirit and more or less in fact; and besides, the school was in the process of becoming a home for blinded veterans.
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And then after a fashion he did find a way to pay his debt to Avon, and to his father too, really, perhaps in penance for having been so dismissive of both. On the one hand Yates would always remember Avon as a “dopey little school,” but he also realized it had been almost perfect for the strange young man he was, and like Bill Grove he felt beholden to his father for paying his way—until the poor man died, that is, having given up his life in more than one respect so that his son could become the writer he was meant to be. Yates wished he could thank him for that:

I might even have told him—and this would have been only a slight exaggeration—that in ways still important to me it
was
a good school. It saw me through the worst of my adolescence, as few other schools would have done, and it taught me the rudiments of my trade. I learned to write by working on the [newspaper], making terrible mistakes in print that hardly anybody ever noticed. Couldn't that be called a lucky apprenticeship?

 

CHAPTER THREE

The Canal: 1944-1947

In later life Yates would become almost a parody of the self-destructive personality: He smoked constantly despite tuberculosis, emphysema, and repeated bouts of pneumonia; he was an alcoholic who, when unable to write, would sometimes start the day with martinis at breakfast; he rarely exercised (indeed could hardly walk without gasping), and ate red meat at every meal if he could help it. Such behavior seems to indicate a death wish, but it wasn't that simple in Yates's case. It was true he had a gloomy temperament and was sometimes all but immobilized by depression, though often enough he was capable of high delight, and as for smoking and drinking—well, he liked smoking and drinking. How to explain a man who by no means lacked a fear of pain and suffering (he dreaded cancer in particular) and sometimes rather enjoyed being alive, yet behaved almost as much as humanly possible to the contrary? A number of factors come to mind, but perhaps the most compelling was suggested by Yates's friend and fellow World War II veteran Kurt Vonnegut: “People don't recover from a war. There's a fatalism that he picked up as a soldier. Enlisted men are surprisingly indifferent to survival. Death doesn't matter much.”

Certainly it's hard to imagine Yates as a soldier, and it must have been a jaded group of army examiners before whom this morbidly frail, morbidly self-conscious eighteen-year-old stood in his underwear on June 17, 1944. He was six foot three and weighed just over 160 pounds, but skinniness per se wasn't enough to disqualify him. Nor did the army psychiatrist find much amiss. The man asked him two questions, pro forma: “Do you like girls?” Yates said he did, and the man recorded this fact. “Do you ever get nervous?” Yates said he did, and the man paused. “Like when?” “Like when I'm standing in my underwear with a bunch of other guys getting asked a bunch of questions,” Yates replied, and passed the exam.