Page 20 - WTP Vol. XIII #3

Gasoline FLowers (continued from preceding page)
release of the film, Revolutionary Road, directly after Christmas in 2008, long after his death. That winter there was a spate of columns and articles (all by men) giving him his posthumous due, yet still doom- ing him with the moniker “a writer’s writer,” a term that should be as moribund as class distinction and just like that appellation is still pretty much alive and well.
Yates wrote for us all. He knew the hard truth that life does not discriminate when it hands out pain. Some of us may allow ourselves to feel it more than others, but that depends on sensitivity, not gender, nor what you do for work. Yates wrote for women and for men. He wrote about how much people disappoint each other, whatever their sex.
Like so many artists of different stripes, he also pos- sessed a confused vanity. He wanted to be known. He wanted all the accolades. Yet he also wanted to be a simple tragedian, alone in a smoke-besotted studio apartment suffering the writer’s life, always knowing that in the future he would be loved; he must be loved for his work and in spite of himself. Implicit was the notion that if you liked his work, he could get away with being a bad boy—as if good work is license for the kind of self-destruction that hurts you and all those around you. For strangers it may be. For people who love you, it’s harder.
Yates was delighted when I told him that Revolution- ary Road reminded me of Tess of the D’Urbervilles, that each novel was nothing less than a true, feminist effort by a man, that April and Tess were both anti- heroines of the first order. He liked this, and I was uniquely humbled by such faith in my opinion from such a great writer.
Revolutionary Road was nominally inspired by his first divorce. He wrote the last drafts of the novel, after he and his wife had separated, in a basement apartment at 27 Seventh Avenue South in New York. Hence his affliction with and affection for small, dark studios filled with smoke. He thought they brought him writer’s luck.
He’d also spent some of his childhood years living with his mother and sister in an apartment on the corner of Bedford and Commerce Streets in the Vil- lage, and on occasion, we would take a cab downtown for a stroll through streets filled with bronze plaques on brownstones commemorating many, memorable writers. We walked arm in arm. This seemed deco- rous enough to me in case we ran into anyone I knew. We never did.
He was in search of poignant memories, what leftover sweetness of youth that there might be that might be lurking there. I was learning a novelist’s history. On these strolls, we would always stop at his building,
27 Seventh Avenue South, at the corner of Bedford Street, and peer into the dull, sooty windows. He would tell me about the pages he wrote there, and I would listen in awe, mainly that such a good book had been written in such unbearable shabbiness. Nobody lived there anymore. It had become a dark grimy ut- terly bleak basement once again.
Yates had been diagnosed as manic-depressive. He was the worst kind of patient, one who stopped tak- ing his medication (lithium) just when it was starting to really help him. He told me he stopped taking his pills because he needed to be able to feel. He needed to write the only way he knew how—to put every- thing else in life second. If he believed his fluent sense of emotion was hampered by the medication, then it was. Call it an inverted placebo effect.
Yates had a way of writing flat that was never flat, that put lyricism into the ordinary—a good part of the reason for stories. He was dedicated to working each sentence until its resonance could not be denied. He suffered to do this, smoked and drank too much
to do it. That was the way he justified his vices. He needed them to survive, so that he could continue to write, he reasoned unreasonably.
It was as if he was afraid he would jinx whatever that thing called talent is, if he were to make himself the
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