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Cold Spring Harbor

The aching, crying need for will and purpose in your life--anybody's life--was something Charles Shepard knew about from long and helpless experience. He was a retired army officer, a man with poetic habits of thought that he'd always tried to suppress, and it often seemed that his own capacity for zeal had vanished with the Armistice of 1918.

As an impassioned young second lieutenant of infantry, newly married to the prettiest girl at the officers' club dance and reasonably sure she would pray for him, he had arrived in France three days after the war ended--and his disappointment was so intense that more than a few other officers had to tell him, impatiently, not to be silly about it.

"I'm NOT," he would insist, "I'm NOT." But he always knew there'd be no escaping the truth; he had even begun to suspect that a queasy sense of abortion might haunt the rest of his life.


This passage from Richard Yates's "Cold Spring Harbor" reminds me of "Catch-22": the special craziness of resenting the fact that you will not have a chance to get killed in a war!

Also, I love that Yates seems to have such passion for storytelling: It's as if you can sense the delight underneath the words. I see that in the phrase: "A queasy sense of abortion might haunt the rest of his life." That adjective "queasy"--paired with "sense of abortion" .....I can't think of anyone else who can write like that.

Isaac Mizrahi said, in the NYT recently, that he is suspicious of style. Any self-conscious "stylishness" in writing turns him off. (I think he was thinking of Hemingway.) My sense is that Mizrahi would love Yates, who wrote simply, but wrote with grace. (Ellie Kemper talks about this, too. "Yates is smart and profound but he doesn't hit you over the head with his skill. He writes clearly, in an unflashy way.")

Again, Yates finds humor in the gap between our grand self-delusions and actual reality. Imagine the young man greedily dreaming of his pretty girlfriend--almost-certain that that girlfriend will spend every waking hour praying for his speedy return from the perilous, sexy war. But, in fact, that young man will not ever encounter danger. It is his *curse* to not encounter danger. And he will have to *protest* that the cards he has been dealt aren't upsetting: "I'm NOT being petulant! I'm NOT!" (If you have to issue the denial, a listener might get suspicious....Where there's smoke....etc....etc....)

You can't find "Cold Spring Harbor" at most NYC bookstores. More's the pity! But take a trip to the main branch of the Manhattan library. Go now. Nothing is greater than Yates.

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