Arts and Letters

Bob Coates was born in 1897, in New Haven. He got his red hair—the most characteristic thing about him—from his mother, who was of Scottish origin. His father was a diemaker and part-time inventor—an impulsive and gregarious man, always striking up conversations with strangers and bringing business acquaintances home unexpectedly for dinner. He also had a loose foot. Coates grew up all over America, and this experience, though broadening, was also lonely. "Saturday was the worst time," a character in his novel Yesterday's Burdens remarks. "Youth has its pride and observances. I was the new boy who went to a different school than the others and no one spoke to me and I spoke to no one. Saturdays I would get out my bicycle. I had a tennis racket in a plaid canvas case, and this I would hang over the handle bar. I would ride importantly away as if to a lively engagement at the courts. But the tennis racket was only a symbol: I had no engagement with anyone. Instead, I would go cycling aimlessly about the streets." He went to eight different grammar and high schools in twelve years, and ended up back where he had started, in New Haven, at Yale. For eight months, in 1918, he was a naval aviation cadet, leading a charmed life. Once, in a moment of absentmindedness, he made a right turn as though he were driving a Hupmobile, forgetting all about the rudder, and the plane went into a tailspin, from which the flight instructor just barely managed to extricate them. Machinery didn't really interest him.

His father had always wanted him to go into business with him, and as a youngster he used to get Meccano sets for Christmas when what he wanted was The Oxford Book of English Verse. He couldn't remember a time when he didn't want to be a writer. When he left college he worked briefly for a newspaper agency and then for the United States Rubber Company, writing inspirational pamphlets. At the beginning of the twenties he sold a story for fifty dollars, and with the check he bought a hundred-pound bag of lentils and retired to Woodstock, to a shack in the woods, and wrote. One day his father turned up and, after looking around him at the shack and the pot of lentils on the stove and the typewriter, said, "You really mean it, don't you, boy?" and Coates said, "Yes, Father, I do," and his father said, "Well, I'll have to speak to your mother about this." Shortly afterward, Coates found himself on the way to France to join what was not yet called The Lost Generation.

"It was a fine time to be young," he wrote many years afterward, "especially in Paris, and for a bunch of kids from Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Rochester, Dallas, and other way stations who until the war had hardly known that Europe existed." Later generations of American writers have had no choice but to envy this one. The franc was inflated, the dollar was not. He lived very comfortably on seventy dollars a month. He walked the streets. He walked the streets of Paris until he knew them like the lines in the palm of his hand. He wanted, he said, not only to be in France, and to speak French, but to be French. This trick has never been managed by someone who wasn't born in France, of a French mother and father, but Coates wasn't the first American to try it. Or the last. One day he saw a man stepping off the curb just ahead of him, directly in the path of an oncoming bus, and without thinking, he yelled, "Attention à la voiture!" The man stepped back, just in time, and for the rest of that day and for days to come Coates relived the incident in his mind, with satisfaction. He was thinking in French, like a Frenchman. He had crossed over the line.

Being his father's son, he talked to strangers… "You didn't have to make an appointment, a pilgrimage, to meet Léger, Picasso, Satie, Pascin, Juan Gris, Tristan Tzara, or Brancusi. You found them at a table nearby in one of the cafes of the quarter, and as the evening wore on and mutual friends appeared, you were likely to find yourself seated at the same table with them—or at their table infinitely rounded out, satellited, so to speak, with other tables—and talking and drinking with them without the least self-consciousness on either side." He was soon free to call on Ford Madox Ford, and Ezra Pound, and Gertrude Stein, and at all their houses there was the same feeling of equality between the older and more established artists and the young newcomers. The north, south, east, and west of the young Coates' world were Broom, Gargoyle, transition, and the Transatlantic Review. In these magazines the English language was being manipulated in ways that had never been done before. Janet Flanner, remembering Coates as a young man, remembering his bright red hair, said that he looked like a flag.

He came home, got a job in New York, and started to write a Dadaist novel in his evenings. After a year he managed to get back to France. This time he lived in Giverny. Monet was still there, painting waterlilies, and it was so quiet at night that you could hear the waterwheel throbbing on the river nearby. Coates went on various excursions, to Chartres, down the Seine, to Marseilles and then on to Italy. He finished the novel. It is called The Eater of Darkness. Gertrude Stein read it and liked it and set about getting it published. The dedication reads: "To My Father and Mother, Nick Carter, 'Sapper' (H. C. McNeille), Elsa, Kathleen Cannell, ex-mayor Hylan, Gertrude Stein, Robert McAlmon, George Lafflin Miller, Oleg Skrypitzine, J. C. Henneberger, Gerald Chapman, Harold Loeb, The New York Times, Jeannie Oliver, M.D., I.B.F., and Fantomas..." Like a small boy on his knees asking God to bless every single person he knows. One sentence chosen not quite at random is enough to demonstrate what The Eater of Darkness is like: Parenthesis—though what follows is not inserted in the middle of anything—"She fed herself into the vast conveyorbelt of plate glass windows blue signs with gold letters is the Place de la Contrescarpe" inner parenthesis "the expectant autobusses rustling with hooded plumage in the trees" close inner parenthesis "and he said" close outer parenthesis but no period. The book has not had a great many readers.

Coates came back to America for good in 1927. During the next forty years he published four more novels, three collections of short stories, a work of nonfiction, The Outlaw Years, a book of informal recollections, and a book of travel, about a summer in the Italian hill towns.

He started writing for The New Yorker when it was two years old—profiles, reporter pieces, stories, book reviews. For thirty years he was The New Yorker's art critic. Unlike many art critics, he actually looked at the pictures. What he could not admire he seldom bothered to mention. His taste was formed in the cafés of Paris.

Apart from his wonderfully natural, lucid, informal, and seemingly effortless prose style, what stands out most about his work is the paradox that a nature so gentle should have been drawn over and over again to the condition of violence. Perhaps the answer is simply the attraction of opposites. Perhaps it is not that easily explained. What I do know is that in the matter of editorial suggestions—changes of punctuation and syntax mostly—he was, in his soft-spoken way, the most unyielding writer I have ever had anything to do with. I don't know whether to attribute this to obstinacy or to fear—the fear that if he surrendered one-sixteenth of an inch he would find himself, out of pure amiability, surrendering a mile. In any event it was his story and he had every right to have it published the way he wanted it. He was a much better writer than is generally acknowledged. He had no talent for self-publicizing and counted on true merit's receiving a proper recognition. He was an adorable man.