Page 18 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

Gasoline FLowers (continued from preceding page) church of literature, and this was what that peculiar
church had sent me as the deity to revere.
After I paid the check, Richard Yates walked me the five blocks down Sixth Avenue to the Simon and Schuster building, between 49th and 50th Streets on the east side of the street. On the walk back, we started talking about poetry, and we landed, finally, on Dylan Thomas. Dick said, (I had been calling him Richard until he asked me to call him Dick.) “Don’tcha think he’s the greatest thing since sliced bread!” He’d shouted this in a voice even too loud for a New York City avenue, but nobody was really listening except me.
“Are you kidding?” I replied. “I think he’s the greatest thing since bread itself!” He hacked out a big laugh that drew glances from the rushing, pedestrian traffic. For that comment, alone, it seemed I had won a place of undying affection in the heart of Richard Yates.
He guffawed, slapped me on the back, hugged me, and said, “Why, Baby, that’s great!”
Baby? I was trying to get his books back into print. It would be my boss’s philanthropic command and my dogged pursuit of those rights that would make this happen. I would not manage to secure the rights for S&S, but I would get his publisher, Delacorte Press,
to take notice of their Pulitzer Prize nominee’s work once again. Much like the phenomenon of the newly engaged girl being suddenly more popular with the boys, Delacorte wooed their author and very soon re- printed his work in their Delta trade paperback line, (long before there was any serious movie interest). Pyrrhic victory or not, I was glad his books would be back in print, glad to be at least a partial catalyst in bringing his work back into the hands of new readers. Baby? I guess so.
From Dylan Thomas, we launched into the “missing epigraph”—his favorite epigraph and his favorite tale of disappointed expectation. This involved the epi- graph that had introduced the text of Revolutionary Road in the hardcover edition and had been omitted in the paperback. I hoped it hadn’t been my boss, Ron’s, fault and was sure it hadn’t been. Such stuff about manuscripts, front matter and page proofs was handled by the editorial department, not the boss. Ron’s job was to keep the money flowing.
“Alas! when passion is both meek and wild!”
He shouted the words into the wind, the grit, and the noise of Sixth Avenue.
“It’s John Keats!” He howled the name through a cough.
“You understand, baby? Isn’t that...it?”
“Yes,” I said. “That’s it.” He was right. It was a line of indomitable poetry, and it captured the essence
of the novel. I vowed to myself that if I was lucky enough to get the rights to reprint Revolutionary Road, I would have that epigraph reinstated and felt even more purposeful.
Richard and I kept in touch. He wrote me intense, crafted letters—most of them short jewels. I was interested in the prose. Not that I was interested in merely an epistolary friendship, but he was he was interested in the girl. We enjoyed each other’s com- pany. It was as simple as that.
I put up with the smoke. He put up with my being faithful to the “boyfriend,” though hoping, as he
put it, for “the fading of the dim photographer.” We didn’t think we were putting one over on the world. We knew better than that. But we didn’t mind get- ting a laugh out of pretending to, and, like all of us newly and tentatively within the realms of some- thing called infatuation we believed for a moment or two, that we had won some imaginary race, or was it that we felt we had stolen at least some mo- ments from the pain of it all. Mainly, we were always glad to see each other.
I had felt I’d already known him when I first met him, but of course I only knew the novel. He was not at
all the man I had idealized him to be, but I made do because I needed my hero. I had to respect the man who could write like that, whatever his flaws and limitations. Soon I came to know him thoroughly because I couldn’t help listening, and he couldn’t help telling me his darker truths. I had become the editor, the note taker, the amateur historian with whom he’d seen fit to share the bits and pieces of himself that still endured and still mattered. At least they mat- tered to me. I was the proffered sommelier willing to decant what was left of the wine of his life, even if it was only the dregs. It was a hard honor.
Then again, he told the stories of his life in harshly gleaming detail and with a rough grace that was nothing less than tantalizing to a young writer, be- jeweling hardship so it was made valuable. I imagine that to have an editor passionately interested in his work must have felt a lot like viewing a fresh, new and unlimited horizon, not to mention the “girl” (as he called me) who went with it.
11