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.

 

something about "Young Hearts Crying" by Richard Yates

I came across The Easter Parade and The Collected Stories of Richard Yates a long while back and decided to read everything by Yates. I love his writing. I can read these books again throughout my life.

 

But the first time is always special, and Young Hearts Crying was the last Richard Yates novel I read for the first time.

Part One sees the marriage of Michael Davenport and Lucy Blaine. Michael is a young, charismatic upper middle-class man graduating from Harvard on the GI Bill after having been an aerial gunner in World War II. He aspires to be a poet and playwright. Lucy, a lovely amateur actress, attended Radcliffe College and after the wedding reveals to Michael that her family is rich.

The union, the growing tensions and distance between them, and, finally, the dissolution are told in Part One—mostly from Michael's perspective.

Yates focuses on insecurities. After Michael writes a few biographical lines for his first book, Lucy criticizes his work, and he gets upset.

Michael walked away from her across the living room, keeping his back straight, and didn't speak until he had turned and settled himself in an armchair that left at least fifteen feet of floor between them. 

"It's grown increasingly clear lately," he said then, not quite looking at her, "that you’ve come to think of me as a fool."

The writing is wonderful. Part Two switches to Lucy's perspective, and it gets even better.

 

Lucy starts over after the divorce. She soon finds herself attracted to a young theater director running a playhouse beyond the suburbs in New York. The little theater company lives modestly in a dorm near Lucy's place. The director, Jack Halloran, invites Lucy to his private room.

"Is there a key?"

"Huh?"

"I said is there a key for the door?"

"Oh, sure," he said. "Got it in my pocket."

Then at last he switched off the razor and put it away. He locked the door with what seemed some difficulty—he had to try the knob several times to make sure the job was done—and came to sit close beside her, slipping one arm around her ribs. "I was careful to reserve this room before the kids came up," he said, "because I knew I'd want privacy, but I didn't know I'd have somebody so nice to share it with. Oh, and I got us some beer, too." He reached under the cot and pulled out a six-pack of Rheingold Extra Dry. "Probably isn't very cold anymore, but what the hell. Beer’s beer, right?"

Right. Beer was beer; bed was bed; sex was sex; and everybody knew there were no social classes in America.

Yates makes that little move twice in this book—inserting a narrative "Right" after a character says it in dialog. I love it.

 

The theater fling ends, and Lucy searches for another outlet. She takes a writing class and dates the instructor, a novelist named Carl. That story includes this brilliant passage:

"... I'm beginning to see what writers mean about second-novel panic."

"You don't seem panicky to me," she said. "Everything about you now suggests a man who knows exactly what he's doing."

He knew what he was doing, all right. In less than twenty minutes he had her out of the bar and up in the dim seclusion of his apartment, a block or two away. 

"Oh, baby," he murmured as he helped her out of her clothes. "Oh, my lovely. Oh, my lovely girl."

The only trouble at first was that one small, cold-sober part of her mind floated free of the rest of her; it was able to observe how solemn a man could be at times like this, how earnest in his hairy nakedness, and how predictable. You had only to offer up your breasts and there he was his hungering mouth on one and then the other of them, drawing the nipples out hard; you had only to open your legs and there was his hand at work on you, tirelessly burrowing. Then you got his mouth again, and then you got the whole of him, boyishly proud of his first penetration, lunging and thrusting and ready to love you forever, if only to prove that he could.  

But she liked it—oh, she liked it all, and that traitorous little part of her mind winked out into nothingness long before it was over. Then, as soon as her breathing and her voice came back to normal, she told Carl Traynor he was "marvelous."

"You always know how to say just the right thing," he said. "I wish I could do that."

"Well, but you can; you do."

"Sometimes, maybe; other times not. I can think of one or two girls who might want to give you an argument on that point, Lucy."

But Carl's flaws, his insecurity, his humble-bragging about other girls, become too much. They break up.

 

Part Three returns to Michael. He suffered a breakdown after the divorce but recovers, dates some, and then, in his early forties, remarries—this time to a girl half his age: his daughter's high school guidance counselor.

 

One scene that plays out a few times in Yates's novels is a character—usually the male protagonist—suddenly telling off someone he's known a long time. Young Hearts Crying has a great example; Michael catches up with an old acquaintance, Paul Maitland, at a party.

"And I imagine you'll be pleased to be rid of Chain Saw Age."

"Store."

"How's that?"

"It's called Chain Store Age," Michael said. "It's a publication for all kinds of retail stores that operate in—you know—in chains. Get it?" Then, slowly shaking his head in dismay, he said "I'll be God damned. All these years, as long as Brock and I've been telling you what we did, you thought we were talking about fucking chain saws."

"Well, I’ve got it straight now," Paul said, "but yes; I did have the impression you were both concerned with—publicizing chain saws, and that kind of thing."

"Yeah, well, in your case I suppose it was a reasonable mistake. Because you never do listen very carefully, do you, Paul? You never have paid a hell of a lot of attention to anybody in the world but yourself, have you?"

Then the two make up, and Michael says,

"Wanna shake on it, then?" he asked. 

"Well, of course," Paul said, and they were both drunk enough to make an excessively solemn business out of shaking hands.

The second narrative "Right" comes late in the book when Michael tells his second wife he got a job at a university in Massachusetts. The offer letter from the department chair praises Michael's known poem. Michael loves the positive review and shares the compliment with his wife. But her reaction doesn't deliver the reassurance Michael needs.

"Well," she said. "That's really very—really very nice, isn't it?"

It was nice, all right. He had to read it three more times, walking around in the living room, before he could believe it. 

Then Sarah came to stand in the doorway, drying her hands on a dish towel. 

"So I guess it's all settled then, about Boston," she said. "Right?"

Right; all settled. 

But this was the girl whose very skin had once been made "all gooseflesh, all over," and who'd been made to cry, too, by the concluding lines of that poem; now she looked as calm and plain as any other housewife considering the practical aspects of moving to a new place, and he didn't know what to make of the transformation.

Then, during a big fight before he leaves for Massachusetts—

"It wasn't really very long ago," he began, in an almost theatrically quiet voice, "that you told me you thought we were made for each other."

"Yes, I remember saying that," she said. "And the moment I'd said it I knew you'd be reminding me of it, sooner or later."

This time the silence was deep enough to drown in.

When the book ends, both Michael and Lucy have grown but remain unsettled as adults. Lucy, having stopped looking for fulfillment in the arts and men, finds meaningful work with Amnesty International; Michael faces a second divorce, but he is making peace with the turns in his life.

 

 

Notes:

• Part Three also has a great sequence about Michael's young wife having a boy. Michael imagines the difficult years ahead; it's a funny sequence, but more than I want to type out here.
  
• Yates deals a lot with gender in his novels.
• Young Hearts Crying was published in 1984. Cold Spring Harbor, Yates final novel, was published two years later. Yates died in 1992.