more excerpts from “Young Hearts Crying”

A few chapters of Cold Spring Harbor moved me to read everything Richard Yates wrote. Then, a year or so after reading it all, I reread Revolutionary Road and Young Hearts Crying.

 

With the latter, I saw the book’s improbable protagonist differently this time. Michael seemed stronger, and his humiliations more relatable.

 

Michael Davenport combines promise and good looks with cowardliness and serious feelings of inadequacy. He is a World War II vet who writes for a boring industry trade magazine to support his true passion—writing plays and poetry.

 

He met his first wife, Lucy Blaine, while he was at Harvard and she was at Radcliffe College. She wanted to support him. But she was no wallflower. And she had a big, big inheritance that embarrassed Michael.

 

Michael and Lucy move to a neighborhood closer to the enviable home of a successful artist-painter friend, Tom Nelson. During a small welcome party, Tom's wife Pat describes the neighborhood to Michael and Lucy as a community suspicious of newcomers’ income and ambitions. She says a neighbor once interrogated her about Tom's income.

 

“He said ‘You mean a fine-arts painter?’

 

“And I'd never heard that term before, have you? A 'fine-arts' painter?

 

"Well, we kept going around and around like that, missing each other's points, until he finally went away; but just before he went away he gave me this very narrow, unpleasant look, and he said 'So whadda you kids got, a trust fund?'"

 

And the Davenports slowly shook their chuckling heads in appreciation of the story.

 

"No, but you're going to find a lot of that here," Pat told them, as if in fair warning. "Some of these Putnam County types assume that everybody does one kind of work for a living and another kind for—I don't know —for 'love' or something. And you can't get through to them; they won't believe you; they'll think you're putting them on, or else they'll think you've got some trust fund."

 

There was nothing for Michael to do now but look down into his nearly empty whiskey glass, wishing it were full, and be silent. He couldn't explode in this house because it would be humiliating, but he knew he would almost certainly explode later, when he and Lucy were alone, either in the car or after they got home. "Christ's sake," he would say. "What the fuck does she think I do for a living? Does she think I make my fucking living out of poems?"

 

But then a sobering, cautionary line of thought reminded him that he couldn't afford to explode alone with Lucy, either. To explode with Lucy over a thing like this would only open up the long, subtle, tantalizing argument that went all the way back to their honeymoon at the Copley Plaza.

 

When, she might ask, would he ever come to his senses? Didn't he know there had never been a need for Chain Store Age, or for Larchmont, or for this dopey little house in the decadence of Tonapac? Why, then, wouldn't he let her pick up the phone and call her bankers, or her brokers, or whoever it was who could instantly set them free?

 

No: no. He would have to control his temper one more time. He would have to be silent tonight and tomorrow and the next day. He would have to sweat it out.

 

Lucy and Michael divorce, and later she meets Carl, a writer—a promising writer, no less. Michael could never accept Lucy’s wealth. But Lucy understands Carl to be different.

 

The idea of devoting her life to a man had stirred in her only once before, in the early days with Michael; and if it had come nothing then, was that any reason to disparage the possibilities this time?

 

Carl might well be "hung up" in his second novel, as he kept saying he was, but Lucy's presence could help him work it through. Then there'd be another book, and another and still others, with Lucy always faithfully at his side. And she knew there was no fear of Carl's being intimidated by her money. He'd told her more than once—jokingly, but saying it anyway—that he'd love to let her fortune pay his way through life.

 

The difference in attitude here, she guessed, was that Michael Davenport's stern independence arose from his never having known what poverty was. Carl Traynor had always known what it was, so he understood that it held no virtue—and he understood too that having an unearned income would imply no corruption.

 

There often seemed to be nothing Carl didn't understand, or couldn't understand after a moment's reflection; that may have been part of what made him a compelling writer, and in any case it made him effortlessly kind.

 

But Lucy and Carl don't last. Meanwhile, Michael remarries, this time to a woman named Sarah, and he takes a steady job teaching at a Midwest college. When it’s Michael’s turn to throw a party for faculty and graduate students, he serendipitously sees Terry, an old acquaintance—a waiter, actually—that Mike knew from a restaurant he liked. Yates describes Michael getting too drunk too fast at the party and trying to pace himself.

 

"Well, what the hell: why marry some plain girl when you can get a pretty girl instead?" From the tone of his own voice Michael could tell he had begun to drink too much, too fast, but he was sober enough to know he could still repair the damage by staying away from whiskey for the next hour.

 

"Wait right here," he told Terry, who was perched on a tall wooden stool brought from the kitchen and nursing a bourbon and water. "I'll go get her."

 

"Baby?" he said to his wife. "Would you like to come and meet the soldier?"

 

"I'd love to."

 

And from the moment he left them together he knew they would get along. He went to the kitchen and drank water. Then he busied himself at the sink, washing out glasses to kill as much as possible of the time before he could go to the liquor table again. When two or three students drifted into the kitchen he conversed with them in a quiet, humorous, good-host kind of way that seemed to prove he was getting better, though his watch said there was still almost half an hour to wait. He strolled back into the living room to give other people the benefit of his presence, and he almost collided with John Howard, who looked tired and ill.

 

"Sorry," Howard said. "Damn good party, but I'm afraid I'm not used to the hard stuff—or maybe I'm too old for it. I think we'd better be on our way."

 

But Grace wasn't ready to leave. "Go, then, John," she said from the sofa where she sat among her friends. "Take the car and go, if you want to. I can always get a ride." And it occurred to Michael that this was undoubtedly true: all her life, Grace Howard must have been the kind of girl who could always get a ride.

 

When the whole of his hour was mercifully over, he felt righteous as he fixed himself a good one at the liquor table. And that oddly bracing sense a righteousness persisted after he'd turned back to mingle with his guests; it seemed to enhance the joviality of his drawing the more sullen students away from the walls, winning their smiles and even their pleasing laughter. It was a damn good party, and it was getting better all the time. Looking around the room he could see men he thought of every day as fools, or bores, or worse, but now he felt a comradely affection for all of them, and for their nicely dressed women. This was the old fucked-up English department; he was an old fucked-up English department man—and if they had suddenly begun to raise their voices in the opening verse of "Auld Lang Sy" it would have brought tears to his eyes he sang along.

 

Toward the novel’s end, Michael takes a job teaching at Boston University. Seems like a few lifetimes later. On his way east with Sarah, he stops to visit an acquaintance, Paul Maitland. Paul is a little like him—an artist, a painter, working for a living to support his art.

 

Both men know Tom Nelson, the professional artist, and he comes up in conversation. Michael jabs, describing Tom as commercial. Paul argues:

 

“Well, but the word 'commercial’ isn't really appropriate for Tom," Paul objected. "It may apply to a flukey kind of luck like Morin's, but that's an entirely different thing. Tom's a professional. He found his line early and he's stayed with it. You have to admire that."

 

"Well, I guess you have to respect it; I'm not sure it's something you necessarily have to admire." And Michael didn't like the way this talk was going. Not very many years ago he had tried to defend Tom Nelson against Paul Maitland, only to find his lines of defense falling apart under Paul's attack; now the roles were exactly reversed, and he had an uneasy sense that he was about to collapse again. It didn't seem fair—there ought to be more consistency in the world than this—and the worst part was that nothing could be said to be at stake anymore for either adversary: they had both been reduced to eking out a living in farm-state colleges, probably for life, while Tom Nelson went serenely about the business of success.

 

"His standards are as high as those of any painter I know," Paul was saying, warming to the argument, "and he's never sold a picture he doesn't believe in. I don't see how anyone can ask more of an artist than that."

 

"Well, okay, you may be right about the professional part of it," Michael conceded, with the deliberation of a strategist abandoning one position in order to strengthen another. "But the man himself is something else. Nelson can be a prick when he puts his mind to it. Or if not a prick, at least a real pain in the ass."

 

And almost before he knew what his talking mouth was up to, he had launched into the story of the trip to Montreal. It took longer to tell than he'd thought it would—that was bad enough—and there seemed to be no way of telling it that didn't portray himself as something of a fool.

 

Sarah's calm, brown-eyed gaze was leveled at him above her neatly held coffee cup while he talked. She had wept in silence after his drunken bungling at Terry Ryan's expense; she had been openly disappointed in him time and again since then ("Well, now you've lost me completely"); by now there had come to be a certain resignation in her way of waiting for him to discredit himself.

 

". . . No, but the point is Nelson knew I could've had that girl that night," he heard himself saying, trying to explain and redeem the story after it had been told.

 

I love Yates. I love every word he wrote.

 

 

Notes: Radcliff was a women's liberal arts college in Cambridge, Massachusetts—the partner institution of what was the all-male Harvard College.