A Tragic Honesty (85 page)

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Yates regarded
Cold Spring Harbor
as another “plateau performance”—a modest, craftsmanlike effort that “may help take the edge off some of the terrible things that were said about
Young Hearts Crying
.” He didn't seem to worry much about personal exposure either, having somewhat disguised himself as the adolescent Phil Drake, while his mother made her fourth appearance in the novels as the feckless hysteric Gloria. As with Pookie in
The Easter Parade,
Yates not only “stripped” Gloria of his mother's artistic pretense, he actually seemed to milk her repugnant features all the more, perhaps in order to reinvent the character or, as he put it, simply to get his mother “right.” In that respect he felt he'd succeeded at last, and this was a matter of no small satisfaction. “You are one hell of a good writer,” wrote Vonnegut, to whom the book was dedicated, “and the best reporter I know of big messages in small gestures and events. Your most striking contribution to American literature, though,… is your harrowingly honest inventory of the meager resources available to middle-class mediocrities.”

That was about as good a way as any to summarize Yates's achievement, and most critics agreed that
Cold Spring Harbor
succeeded along just those lines—in the smallness of the “gestures and events” as well as the polished, unflinching portrayal thereof. “Reading this meticulously crafted novel, one wonders why the author has made matters so difficult for himself,” wrote Elaine Kendall of the
Los Angeles Times,
bluntly describing the plot as having to do with “pitiful losers” who “slide passively into poverty, alcoholism, blindness and lunacy”—an unpromising synopsis, but hardly inaccurate. “Against all odds,” Kendall continued, “Yates has managed to show that chronic misery can be as much an art form as acute agony.” Howard Frank Mosher, writing in the
Washington Post,
also felt obliged to win back the faint-hearted after a grinding recital of the novel's plot: “If all this sounds terribly bleak, I should quickly point out that
Cold Spring Harbor
is so consistently well-written, just, unsentimental and sympathetic that the intertwined lives of the Shepherds and Drakes are every bit as fascinating as they are grim.” Most revealing was the dialectic between the daily and Sunday reviews in the
New York Times,
by Michiko Kakutani and Lowry Pei respectively, which reminded one yet again of what Stewart O'Nan called “the tricky heart of Yates's fiction”: that is, the question of whether his “pitiful losers” are so much “literary cannon fodder” (Broyard's phrase), or rather the product of Yates's objective yet compassionate view of average, suffering humanity. “Mr. Yates writes of these characters with sympathy so clear-hearted that it often feels like nostalgia for his own youth,” Kakutani observed, “and yet he is also thoroughly uncompromising in revealing their capacity for self-delusion, their bewilderment in the face of failure.” Lowry Pei, however, thought Yates had stumbled in walking his usual tightrope between sympathy and brutal detachment: “Mr. Yates's narrative voice often sounds like that of a misanthropic anthropologist, making it difficult if not impossible to feel sympathy with the characters' dreams. The frequent, and occasionally unclear, shifts in the narrator's attention from one character's viewpoint to the next … intensify this feeling.”

Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, the fact that his protagonists Frank and April were “too nice”: “See and show both of these people from the outside, in the round, and from the inside too. Be ‘simultaneously enchanted and repelled by their inexhaustible variety.'
Think
about them, and the hell with the reader's sympathies. Make them
love and hate
each other the way real people do.” Yates seized on this approach—showing his characters from the outside and in—as the key to making otherwise unexceptional people interesting, and nowhere in his fiction is the omniscient view more flexible, even to the point of apparent vacillation, than in
Cold Spring Harbor
. Rather tellingly, Pei echoed Yates's (and hence Fitzgerald's) own words when he called the effect “an uneasy combination of acceptance and revulsion”—that is, an unfocused viewpoint, as if the author himself didn't quite know what he thought of these characters and wished to have it both ways.

In fact Yates wanted to have it many ways, every conceivable way, just as long as the basic integrity of a character remains intact—a fixed entity viewed from a variety of angles. Thus, over cocktails with the elder Shepherds, Gloria watches her beloved daughter with a gelid eye as the latter burbles to her in-laws that she's “never been happier”: “It reminded [Gloria] of Curtis Drake at his most vapid; but then, Rachel had always been her father's child.” This is unkind, though it aptly reflects Gloria's jealousy toward her daughter's happiness and closeness with the Shepherds (and Curtis Drake), while at the same time being a fairly just observation—Rachel
is
vapid. Rachel, in turn, is loyal enough to Gloria not to discuss the latter's “rotten tomato smell” with her brother, but she's also determined to be a better mother to her own child than Gloria was to her. In short, both mother and daughter “
love and hate
each other the way real people do,” an ambivalence that particularly applies to families. In the same way Yates manages to make the loutish Evan Shepherd a somewhat interesting, somewhat sympathetic character. Evan's extreme limitations lead him from one dreary disappointment to the next, but he goes on doing his little best withal: He refrains from outright rudeness toward the egregious Gloria, and is a doting if doltish father to his young daughter; but then, too, he hits his wife and calls her “soft as shit,” and in the eyes of his brother-in-law he's a “dumb bastard”: “This asshole was going to spend the rest of his life on the factory floor with all the other slobs, and it would serve him right.” And that's true too, as Gloucester says in
Lear
.

But Pei has a point of sorts: The narrator's essential attitude toward Gloria Drake would seem mostly one of revulsion, period, such that the reader is unlikely to feel anything but gratified by her eventual comeuppance. Indeed there seems something a little gleeful—even “misanthropic”—in the narrator's tabulation of Gloria's defects, most of them expressed in grossly physical terms: Her attempt at a “girlish and disarming” laugh serves only to “call attention to how loose and ill-defined her lips [are]” and thus makes her look “like a shuddering clown”; her hair is a “blend of faded yellow and light gray, as if dyed by many years of drifting cigarette smoke”; she has a “frail, slack little figure”; she talks “until veins the size of earthworms [stand] out in her temples … until white beads of spit” gather at the corners of her mouth; to “pantomime ‘worry' she [makes] as if to put her hand on her heart, but instead [cups and clasps] her pendulous left breast, as if she were feeling herself up”—and so on, and
on
. It's a bit much, and barely ameliorated by Charles Shepherd's gallant observation that it's wrong to make fun of a lonely woman, in this case Gloria, as if all lonely women are doomed to become cackling, malodorous clowns. On the other hand, such people
do
exist in some form or another, and one can only reiterate that Yates viewed Gloria as the best likeness of Dookie he ever managed: a triumph. And if she fails to win the reader's sympathies? As Yates was careful to remind himself, “the hell with the reader's sympathies.”

Which, in a nutshell, may explain why
Cold Spring Harbor
didn't sell and why, for that matter, Yates's books keep going out of print. To repeat the obvious, most people don't like reading about, much less identifying with, mediocre people who evade the truth until it rolls over them. And yet most of us face such a reckoning sooner or later, and few of us are really the brave stoical mavericks or handsome heedless romantics out of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who
do
stay in print. If Yates seemed to vacillate between “acceptance and revulsion” toward his people—with a decided emphasis on the latter in the case of Gloria Drake and certain others—it was at least in pursuit of an honest synthesis.

Cold Spring Harbor
is a good minor novel, not one of Yates's best or worst, but utterly representative. As such it wasn't likely to attract new readers or alienate old ones (what few were left), and this was perhaps as it should be. Impoverished, broken in health, often drunk and demented, Yates deviated not a whit from the true north of his artistic conscience;
Cold Spring Harbor,
then, was a suitable last transcendence, though to Yates it was simply a matter of nine books down and six to go.

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The delivery date for
Uncertain Times
was November 1987, and Yates felt fairly confident he could manage it: Though certain scenes were already proving “stubborn and difficult,” the basic plot was blocked out, and most of the book—the early parts anyway—had been “a pleasure to write.” Meanwhile he also produced an essay on the subject of Cassill's 1961 novel
Clem Anderson,
which Yates described as “the best novel I know of on the subject of writing, or on the condition of being a writer” (the very theme Yates himself was then grappling with); “and that alone seems marvelous because so many other novelists have found only embarrassment in the same material.”

Yates's appreciation appeared in both
Ploughshares
and the volume
Rediscoveries II,
and was instrumental in persuading Pushcart Press to reissue Cassill's novel a few years later, an edition for which the essay served as introduction. Yates's effort was in homage to a man who'd provided enormous moral and professional support over the years, in light of which Yates was only a little disgruntled—but distinctly so—when he noticed that, in the new edition, “special thanks” were offered to David Madden, Peggy Bach, and DeWitt Henry, but not himself. In fact the essay had been a strain for Yates, and not simply because he took little pleasure in writing criticism. “Spent most of the day trying to wade through Verlin Cassill's endless, endless novel and haven't finished the damn thing yet,” Yates had noted a quarter century earlier, when
Clem Anderson
was first published.

He's still a very good writer but oh Jesus how the book does go on and on. There are pieces of very bad writing in it too, both through carelessness and artiness, and I'm not sure but that there's something essentially weak in the overall idea of the thing. Haven't been able to say what yet, though, except that his central character becomes a terrible bore after a while instead of the “genius” he is supposed to be.…

Either Yates's later praise of the book was a little disingenuous—a true measure of the deep gratitude he felt for past favors—or he'd changed his mind over time; perhaps a bit of both. In any case he never mentioned his hurt feelings to Cassill.

For longer and longer intervals Yates brooded away the hours downstairs at the Crossroads, almost always alone. On bad days especially (bad writing, bad health) he seemed to agonize over the lasting value of his work—this at a time when he knew his reputation was already fading. Often a stranger's compliment would leave him incredulous, and any mention of his lesser novels pained him deeply. Don Lee, then an M.F.A. student at Emerson, visited Yates occasionally at the Crossroads, and one day saw him intently scribbling on a napkin. Embarrassed when Lee asked him about it, Yates reluctantly revealed that he'd listed the titles of his own books (a frequent occupation by then). “Nine books,” said Yates. “Nine's not so bad, is it?”

Yates appreciated company—any company—though conviviality took precious energy he was careful to hoard for his work. He rarely wrote or received letters anymore, and most of his friends had fallen out of touch one by one. No matter how ravaged and feeble he became, though, the sight of a pretty woman acted on Yates like a galvanic elixir, and his standards remained as ambitious as ever. At an Emerson College party he turned to Wakefield and wheezed, “Look at that one! I'm gonna put the moves on her!” The girl was perhaps nineteen, and sure enough Yates hobbled over, for better or worse. Around this time, too, Robin Metz came to Boston and was sad to find his old friend so sickly and forlorn; at their second meeting, though, Metz brought a former student who'd moved to the area, one Sue Doe, and Yates seemed to drop twenty years in an instant. But whether he was able to accept it or not, Yates's lothario days were over. Once he called Wendy Sears and asked her to come to his apartment and help him make his bed; while she arranged the dank grayish sheets as best she could, Yates excitedly told her that he had a date that night with an attractive young woman—the first in a long, long while—and hoped to make love to her after a fashion. A few days later Sears asked how it went, and Yates sadly admitted the woman had stood him up.

Most of the time he understood the reasons for his loneliness all too well. On the rare occasion that some random admirer sought him out, Yates would often avoid drinking in order to make a better impression. Ten years before, at the behest of their mutual friend Seymour Krim, a man named Raymond Abbott had arranged to meet Yates while in Boston, and had ended up driving him to the airport; when Abbott called again in 1986, Yates eagerly invited him to the Crossroads, though he hadn't the faintest idea who the man was. “To Ray,” he inscribed
Cold Spring Harbor,
“In regret for having been smashed on the way to the airport that time.” During their second meeting Yates sipped club soda and chain-smoked; after several hours of halting conversation, Abbott tried to say good-bye. “Do you have to go just yet, Ray?” Yates asked again and again. “Can't you stay a bit longer?” His loneliness was so painfully obvious that Yates was obliged to explain, in so many words, that most people had given him up as a drunk; when Abbott asked about women, Yates just shrugged and shook his head. That year another admirer, Martin Jukovsky, spent a single “strange and somewhat distressing afternoon” with Yates. “He kept up a brilliant stream of conversation,” Jukovsky recalled, “but his voice had a tremble. He would often drift into old woes, such as regrets about his marriage; when this happened, he would seem ready to break into tears, his voice would get this odd, weepy sound, though he never actually cried.” Yates also spoke obsessively about being trapped in a “rotten contract” with a “wretched literary agent,” and begged the bewildered man for advice. As with Abbott, he drank nothing stronger than club soda.