by Blake Bailey
Their daughter, Ruth, was born August 4, 1921, and spent her first eight years in the picturesque village of Hastings-on-Hudson, ten or so miles upriver from Manhattan. Later Ruth would say that those early years in Hastings had been the happiest of her life—as much a reflection on the relative happiness of her adulthood as on that idyll by the Hudson. Be that as it may, her parents’ marriage was two-thirds over when her brother, Richard Walden,* was born on February 3, 1926, in a Yonkers hospital. He later wrote that his sister’s nostalgia for the Hastings era made him envious “because [he] could scarcely remember it at all.” And since Yates wasn’t inclined to write about things he couldn’t remember in terms of mimetic mood and detail, his fiction gives only a faint glimpse of that time—as in Cold Spring Harbor, when the father’s “look of ruddy health after the first few swallows of whiskey” reminds his son, vaguely, “of rare and unexpected Christmas mornings, long ago.” Hardly a vision of Proust-ian enchantment, but for Yates it would have to suffice. By the time he was three, the best of his childhood was over.
To understand why his parents divorced one may look in a number of directions. Dookie’s artistic pretensions had become more desperate with time, and it may have been that Vincent didn’t take these seriously enough, or at any rate balked when she asked him to pay for a year of study in Paris. And perhaps, for Dookie, all this was part of a greater malaise—a sense that she was being “stifled” like her counterpart Pookie in The Easter Parade, who “always used to compare herself with the woman in A Doll’s House.” As for Vincent, there were probably times when the dull grind of breadwinning got him down, and like the father in A Special Providence he may have been driven to the odd bout of debauchery (“he would disappear for three and four days at a time and come home reeking of gin, with lipstick all over his shirt”). And perhaps, too, it was partly a matter of Vincent’s enthusiasm for Democratic Party politics, his friendships with “dreadful little Irish people from Tammany Hall,” as the Dookie surrogate (a “good Republican”) puts it in “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired.”
In sum they seem to have been very different people after all, with little more in common than a fondness for liquor and cigarettes. Dookie left after nine years and took the children—but more particularly she took her son. As Yates wrote in A Good School, he and his father had an “unspoken agreement”:
I had been given over to my mother. There was pain in that assumption—for both of us, I would guess, though I can’t speak for him—yet there was an uneasy justice in it too. Much as I might wish it otherwise, I did prefer my mother. I knew she was foolish and irresponsible, that she talked too much, that she made crazy emotional scenes over nothing and could be counted on to collapse in a crisis, but I had come to suspect, dismally, that my own personality might be built along much the same lines. In ways that were neither profitable nor especially pleasant, she and I were a comfort to one another.
By the time Yates wrote these lines he’d had fifty years to reflect on just how alike he and his mother were, indeed to be reminded of it again and again, and while he despised his mother’s failings all the more for seeing them in himself, such an awareness certainly improved (and in some ways was limited to) his art. As a young man he discovered Flaubert, and Dookie became his foremost Emma; his sense of her, and hence humanity, proved vital to his bleakly deterministic worldview. As he explained in a 1972 interview, his characters “all rush around trying to do their best—trying to live well, within their known or unknown limitations, doing what they can’t help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can’t help being the people they are. That’s what brings on the calamity at the end.” Yates’s compassion for human weakness, for the flaws that make failure so inevitable, is everywhere in his work—with the occasional exception of certain characters based on his mother, which range from the rounded and essentially forgivable Alice Prentice in A Special Providence to Dickensian grotesques such as Pookie in The Easter Parade and Gloria Drake in Cold Spring Harbor. Tellingly or not, Yates also tended to be hard on characters based on himself. But all are worthy of our sympathy in at least one respect: They try to do their best but fail because of limitations over which they have no control. “After all, she was only human,” Yates liked to say of his mother, having just relieved himself of some scathing diatribe on the subject.
For much of Yates’s early life, though, he and Dookie were a comfort to one another. Daughter Ruth was something of a comfort as well, but she was more her father’s child, and after the divorce she continued to visit him as much as possible; at one point she even pretended to need weekly (rather than monthly) orthodontia as a pretext for going into the city. But Richard had never really known his father and never really would; he preferred to stay home with Dookie, a kindred soul whom he resembled not only in temperament but appearance—from the great mournful eyes and dark pouches beneath them to the never-corrected overbite that made his plump upper lip protrude slightly—features he despised.
* * *
The first thing Dookie did after the divorce was take that trip to Paris. She’d been accepted by the Académie Julian to study under the eminent sculptor Paul Landowski, but also she wanted to expose her precocious three-year-old to the kind of high culture that only Paris could provide.* She left Ruth behind with her sister Elsa, a decision that was likely a mutual one. There was the expense of taking both children, and while it seems reasonable to take a sentient eight-year-old for company rather than a toddler, Ruth was probably only too happy to stay behind, knowing even then what a trip abroad with Dookie might entail.
What Dookie hoped to achieve was perhaps more complicated than she was willing to admit: On the one hand, she meant to learn her craft from a great master and perhaps achieve greatness herself; but the girl from Greenville might also observe Continental manners firsthand, and refine the kind of sophisticated persona that might enable her, along with her reputation as an artist, to be admitted into the highest social circles. “The art of sculpture and the idea of aristocracy had always appealed to her equally,” Yates wrote in A Good School, a notion he explored further in “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired”: “Her idea was that any number of rich people, all of them gracious and aristocratic, would soon discover her: they would want her sculpture to decorate their landscaped gardens, and they would want to make her their friend for life.” It’s possible that Dookie’s artistic aspirations were animated to some extent by petty snobbery; but it’s also fair to point out—as many do—that she worked hard to realize such talent as she had, and often under circumstances that were far from aristocratic. And then, too, it’s hard to blame her for hoping to make friends with the sort of people to whom it might never occur to collect Saturday Evening Post covers in bound volumes.
Whether Dookie found what she was looking for in Paris is impossible to say. What was meant to be a year of study was cut short after six months or so, when the stock market crashed and she had to come home. The toddler Richard remembered little or nothing of the whole expedition and rarely spoke of it, though he reported in his fiction that it had been “confused and unpleasant” for his mother—who could hardly pronounce, much less speak, French, and who was almost certainly broke most of the time (no matter how much she later milked the subject for conversational purposes). As for her work as a sculptor, it must have improved somewhat, since she began to have her first minor successes not long after her return, and certainly she liked to invoke Landowski as one of her mentors.
But perhaps the most significant impact was psychological: Dookie seems to have become even less conventional after Paris, a liberation that may have begun amid the studios and cafés of the Left Bank, or else was just the inevitable letting-go of a lonely divorcée at loose ends (in Depression-era Greenwich Village, no less). Somewhat paradoxically, though, she remained much concerned with matters of propriety: reluctant to speak of indelicate things, and always an elegant dresser—though also rather loud and crude at times, and her well-chosen clothes tende
d to be stained in some sadly obvious way. Perhaps all this was reconciled in the name of worldliness, or nobility at odds with circumstance, but one can’t help wondering how it affected her son, who inherited the same contradictions to a remarkable degree. Also (as a young man anyway) he cherished the dream of Paris as a place where one might find oneself as an artist and a man, though in this respect his mother wasn’t the only influence.
* * *
For a while after her return, Dookie and the children were all but alone in the world. Her family hadn’t approved of the divorce, and later relished the chance to spell this out by refusing to come to Ruth’s wedding. In the meantime they simply stayed away. Dookie’s older sister Elsa was the one exception, and since she lived nearby and was willing to help (her ill-fated husband lay a few years in the future), she must have been a comfort—anyway up to a point. “Elsa was very sensible in contrast to Dook,” Yates’s first wife Sheila remembered. “But she rode it pretty hard.” The woman appears as the “bossy and meddlesome and condescending” Eva in A Special Providence, who disapproves of her sister’s marriage and then of her divorce; still, Elsa deserves a certain amount of credit just for sticking around, as she did for the duration of Yates’s childhood and beyond, amid sporadic (and no doubt salutary) estrangements. Her grandnephew Peter described her as “a stable center” in the children’s lives, suggesting the lack of that quality in every other respect. And while Yates would sometimes complain that it was his lot to live among women—a mother, sister, and maiden aunt; later two wives and three daughters—he seemed grateful to Elsa for propping his mother up through her many misadventures.
And Elsa had every reason to be exasperated, of course. A notable cause of Dookie’s loneliness, then as later, was her singular lack of compunction where money was concerned. Her only income at the height of the Depression was whatever small amount Vincent could spare in the way of alimony and child support, and yet she insisted on a standard of gentility—large apartments in the Village or rented homes in “nice” suburban neighborhoods—that she couldn’t remotely afford to maintain. When the money ran out, as it always did, she’d sponge off friends and neighbors until there was nobody left and it was time to move on. “Dook’s fantastic schemes have a horribly dreamlike almost nightmarish quality when they begin to crash about her ears,” Sheila Yates wrote her husband in the fifties, when such disasters had become a dreadful theme in their lives. But the whole “hysterical odyssey” had begun some twenty years before, as Dookie’s determination to be an artist—to vindicate herself in the eyes of a patronizing, provincial family and ex-husband—distracted her almost entirely from the more practical aspects of motherhood.
And while the bills went unpaid and the family was evicted from one place after another, Dookie became all the more emotionally dependent on her children. She encouraged them to view their chaotic lives as an adventure—the three of them against the world. “She was a free spirit,” Yates wrote in “Regards at Home.” “We were free spirits, and only a world composed of creditors or of ‘people like your father’ could fail to appreciate the romance of our lives.” As part of the romance Dookie would read aloud from Great Expectations when they were hungry or awaiting another eviction. The children could further identify with Dickens in terms of their seedy clothes, which made them conspicuous at whatever new school, in whatever “nice” neighborhood, they found themselves from one year to the next. At the time Yates adored what he perceived to be his mother’s “gallantry and goodness,” and since he made few friends— perpetually being “the only new boy and the only poor boy”—he became almost desperately attached to Dookie, and vice versa. For the rest of his life he was terrified of being left alone, and during childhood his shattered nerves were evidenced by (among other things) a bad stammer, which later seemed to return in the form of a chronic cough that became more pronounced when he was ill at ease.
And what about the art for which all these sacrifices were made? “She wasn’t a very good sculptor,” Yates put it bluntly in “Joseph,” referring mostly (if not entirely) to the “stiff and amateurish” quality of her early work, circa 1932. Her specialty, after Paris, was modeled garden figures cast in lead—nymphs and geese and pipe-playing Pans that were meant to decorate the lawns of the wealthy but usually ended up as part of a growing clutter that followed the family into their next living space, however modest. But Dookie remained undaunted; a big sale or “one-man exhibition” was forever in the offing, and while occasional little coups did occur, they never brought much in the way of money or acclaim. Meanwhile Dookie’s favorite model for her faunlets, often posed in the nude, was the small, obliging Richard; in A Special Providence the mortified four-year-old son of Alice Prentice hunches over to cover his genitals, “round-eyed with humiliation,” while neighborhood children laugh at him from a studio window.*
Many years later Yates told his youngest daughter, Gina, that what he remembered best about his mother was her body odor—that she smelled bad, no matter how hard she tried to clean herself, doubtless the “rotten tomato” smell he attributes to Gloria Drake in Cold Spring Harbor. And body odor is one of many ignominious, nasty physical details that recur among Dookie’s fictional personae: rotten teeth, lipstick smeared outside the mouth, stained clothing, sweat-darkened armpits, and so on—most of which work to suggest the essential instability of the woman, her sweaty incipient hysteria. In many cases Yates makes the matter explicit, as in “Regards at Home”: “It had often occurred to me that she was crazy—there had been people who said she was crazy as long as I could remember.” Gloria Drake is flatly described as “mentally ill,” and everywhere in Yates’s work there are scenes of screaming, writhing fits thrown by mother characters (“after she’d lost all control and gone on shouting anyway”). In short, it seems far from implausible that Dookie suffered from a degree of mental illness, possibly the manic depression that afflicted her son (a disorder that’s almost entirely genetic in origin), or perhaps some other form of mood disorder. And even if there weren’t such a hereditary link, the chaos she always engendered would have certainly taken a psychological toll. As it happened, Yates later complained of “cruel, bullying voices” in his head that made it hard to sleep and often horrific to dream—voices that evoked some bizarre tantrum or another that he’d overheard as a child.
* * *
After a couple of years in a rural Connecticut farmhouse (though it was far beyond Dookie’s means, its chief virtue was a large barn where she could work on her sculpture), the family moved to its first and perhaps best Greenwich Village apartment—the place on Bedford Street so lovingly described in “Joseph”: “There were six or eight old houses facing our side of the courtyard … and ours was probably the showplace of the row because the front room on its ground floor was two stories high.” Dookie crowded the room with her garden figures and turned it into a “high, wide, light-flooded studio,” while Ruth and Richard shared one of the two small bedrooms upstairs. When alone together, the children mostly spent their time either playing in the courtyard (“a few stunted city trees and a patch of grass” that Dookie always called “the garden”) or listening to afternoon children’s programs on their Majestic radio in the dining room. Toward the back of the ground floor was the least appealing part of this or any of their apartments: a “roach-infested kitchen” with “a stove and sink that were never clean” and “a brown wooden icebox with its dark, ever-melting block of ice.” Apart from an instinct for rudimentary tidiness that she passed on to her son, Dookie had little apparent relish for detailed housework. Rather than wash the dirty dishes, she’d regularly send her children out to buy paper plates, and Yates mentions the odors of mildew and cat droppings and plasticene to evoke the basic bouquet of his childhood.
Most days Dookie worked hard at her craft, but it would be several years before she had any sort of gainful employment, and the leisure hours must have seemed long at times. Later she became active in a number of art organizations, but as lo
ng as her children were still at home there was less need for such distraction. The three of them were together constantly, and their principal way of killing time was going to the movies. As an adult Yates lost the habit entirely, and once when someone left him a television he never bothered to plug it in; but he often startled friends with detailed and rather emotional accounts of the movies he’d seen in the thirties. “I wasn’t a bookish child,” he wrote in a 1981 essay; “reading was such hard work for me that I avoided it whenever possible. But I wasn’t exactly the rough-and-ready type either, and so the movies filled a double need: They gave me an awful lot of cheap story material and a good place to hide.” Slight, frail, and morbidly shy, Yates felt intimidated by the tough Italian kids in the Village, and for a long time wasn’t entirely at ease in any company other than his mother and sister’s. Like the Drakes in Cold Spring Harbor, the three didn’t bother to check show times, but simply wandered in off the street: “[M]uch of their pleasure came from waiting for a prolonged confusion to clarify itself on the screen”; then, after the movie had come full circle, they’d watch it again “to intensify the story they already knew.” Such total insularity in their everyday routines might have led to rather esoteric behavior, not unlike the Drakes’ “ritualized baby talk that no outsider could probably have followed.” Little wonder Yates had trouble adjusting to the various institutions (prep school, the army, and so on) of the outside world.
