A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  But then it would have been worse at almost any other school. Not only were there a fair number of misfits to rival Yates—Avon students were known to refer to themselves as “Avon Old Queers”—but a state of economic democracy was enforced to a remarkable degree. By the founder’s design it was all but impossible for students to spend money: Other than occasional snack sales there were no vendors on campus, and it was a mile and a half to the nearest entrance to the estate. The dress code, too, served its purpose, as everyone wore the same clothes and were therefore equally inclined to play the parts of proper gentlemen. Also, in what would seem a tremendous boon for weaklings, athletics were restricted to intramural competition between two teams, “Diogenes” and “Eagles,” as Mrs. Riddle thought games with other schools were a waste of time and emotion, and that athletics in general were much too emphasized at that age.

  The playing field could hardly be leveled enough in Yates’s case. He later told a friend that he was “held together by safety pins” at Avon, and such a remark resonates beyond the literal. Yates, especially that first year, was the quintessential “slovenly, slouching lad” who pleases no one. “Thin, haggard, disheveled,” was how one classmate described him, and his good friend Hugh Pratt elaborated: “Dick was obviously poorer than the other students. He had to wear the same thing over and over, and it affected his demeanor: He was not happy-go-lucky.” But the most vivid description of the fifteen-year-old Yates is found, as usual, in his own words—that is, from the viewpoint of teacher Frenchy La Prade in A Good School, as he confronts the “gangly, dreary-looking” William Grove: “The kid was a mess. His tweed suit hung greasy with lack of cleaning, his necktie was a twisted rag, his long fingernails were blue, and he needed a haircut.”

  Worst of all, and despite Mrs. Riddle’s good intentions, athletics were the absolute key to social success, and everybody had to participate in at least two sports a semester. Those who were relegated to what was called the “track and soccer scenario” were stigmatized as sissies, and Yates was perhaps the most representative figure. “He was fragile,” said classmate Jim Stewart, “and that’s a bad thing to be at that age.” For most of that first year, then, Yates was goaded into fights he had no hope of winning, paddled by upperclassmen, and humiliated in a number of more intimate ways. “The shower room was the worst part of [his] day,” Yates wrote of William Grove. “Not only was he absurdly thin and weak-looking, but he hadn’t yet developed a full growth of pubic hair: all he had was some brown fuzz, and there was no hiding it.” By all accounts the queer jokes were most prevalent during shower time: The group would shrink away from their victim, as if to avert sexual assault, and then lock him out of his dorm room, naked, when he was due to report to the refectory. And because of Yates’s frailty and fatal lack of pubic hair, such high jinks were liable to get even more out of hand, as happened one night toward the end of that first semester.

  Perhaps the most memorable scene in A Good School is when Grove is held down and molested by a group including Terry Flynn, Ret Lear, and Art Jennings. To be more exact, Grove’s sparse pubic hair is shaved off; then a vigorous but unsuccessful attempt is made to bring him to climax while Grove, with pathetic bravado, begins “laughing artificially and shouting through his laughter: ‘Yeah, yeah, keep trying, you sonofabitches, keep trying—wow, are you guys ever having yourselves a good time.’”

  Did it really happen that way? Ret Hunter, in a letter he wrote Yates in 1979, seemed unable or unwilling to recall: “Most of my friends have said everything from, ‘Sue the bastard,’ to ‘What a sad, unhappy boy he must have been.’ Irv Jennings said, ‘You must admit, Ret, we were a couple of bastards!’ The truth is somewhere in the middle.” Irv Jennings, when asked about the incident, denied any direct involvement—though he did admit to being a witness and offered a few clarifying details: Yates was not actually masturbated, he said; rather a bottle of hair tonic was poured on his genitals to make (so the joke went) his pubic hair grow. And really it seems as if the whole episode ended almost fortunately for Yates: That is, when his genitals began to swell painfully from the tonic, his tormentors became worried that he’d report them to the headmaster, with almost certain expulsion to follow. But he never did; the whole thing blew over, and Yates was left alone after that—though like Bill Grove, he might have spent a number of nights “wondering how he was going to live the rest of his life.”*

  * * *

  On December 6, 1941, Yates’s sister Ruth married Fred Rodgers in an Episcopal ceremony. The bride’s side of the church was somewhat depleted by the calculated absence of Dookie’s sisters, and Vincent Yates (whose family was something of a mystery to his children) also came alone; nor were there many contemporaries of the bride, since Ruth’s life had been too chaotic and itinerant for her to make lasting friendships. But friends and relatives of the Rodgers family, who came in force from Long Island, Cape Cod, and beyond, made a more than respectable gathering, and along with Fred’s pals from Grumman there were as many as a hundred guests at the reception in the St. Regis Hotel. Dancing to a live orchestra followed the sit-down dinner, and Dookie made the most of the Shocking Pink dress and hat she’d bought for the occasion. A study in contrast was her son Richard—on a weekend pass from Avon—who seemed to resent his mother’s extroversion and wasn’t inclined to celebrate. He moped around and said little, while his mother danced with Fritz Rodgers and otherwise carried on as if to compensate for her son’s dreariness.

  Ruth was happy. She adored her husband and was utterly devoted to him and the three children they would produce in the first four years of marriage. In those early days she relished every aspect of motherhood, even the act of giving birth, which she likened to an operatic experience à la Wagner, and she loved Wagner. During the war Fred continued to work at the Grumman plant as enlisted naval personnel, and Ruth would wash his uniforms in the bathtub while listening to the Metropolitan Opera on the radio. “She was smart and beautiful,” said her sister-in-law Louise, who described Ruth as having “a Judy Garland personality and a Joan Crawford look.” But really Ruth was hard to pigeonhole one way or the other; for all her gentle, seeming simplicity, she was a person of considerable refinement. She read widely, wrote stories for her children, and became an expert gardener—and while some of her finer nuances may have been lost on her husband, he loved and appreciated her in his fashion. For a while it was a far better life than she’d known before. And to a seemly but increasing degree, Ruth tried to distance herself from Dookie in favor of her husband, children, and comparatively stable in-laws, though Dookie wasn’t easily gotten rid of.

  * * *

  While away at his sister’s wedding, Yates missed a memorable moment or two at Avon. That Sunday one of the administrators, Commander Hunter, disrupted activity on the polo field to announce, with tears in his eyes, that Pearl Harbor had been attacked. Then, as if to punctuate the matter, Mrs. Riddle’s long-suffering husband—who’d always served as the voice of reason during her more imperious moods—died the very next day. The two events would have intricate consequences for Avon, not altogether unpleasant as far as Yates was concerned. In any event he came back to an already changing atmosphere—a mood of fatalism that became all the more palpable a few days later, with the death of poet-hero John Magee (Avon ’40) in the Battle of Britain.*

  By the spring semester Headmaster Stabler was trying to instill a spartan, martial spirit in the students with an ambitious new program of “wartime discipline” (air-raid drills, blackouts, more community service), one aspect of which had a distinct impact on Yates’s life at Avon and beyond. A schoolwide essay contest was held on the theme of “America at War”—and the winner was Yates, whose reward was a place on the staff of the school newspaper, The Avonian, to which he’d end up devoting most of his time and energy for the next two and a half years. The Avonian was something to do, or rather something he could do, having failed at everything else. It wasn’t, however, any great social coup; there was no real pr
estige in any nonathletic activity, but at least The Avonian gave him a pretext for mingling with other would-be writers, whose absence from the fields of glory was almost as conspicuous as his own.

  The first real friends he made were older boys who sympathized with his loneliness. Davis Pratt,* a sixth former, was something of a role model—“an individualist, a pixie,” as his teacher Clarence Derrick recalled, “the type of person the Avon educational philosophy was designed to enroll and foster.” Pratt’s teachers indulged his aversion to conventional studies and gave him the freedom to pursue his own interests: photography and ornithology. Thus he found both his vocation and avocation at Avon, and when he wasn’t wandering around the woods with his binoculars and camera, he was a friendly reader of Yates’s apprentice fiction, which he compared to the work of Thomas Wolfe (an unequivocal compliment in those days). The two corresponded during the war and died within a year of each other, though it’s doubtful they stayed in touch in the meantime. Still, a look at Pratt’s later career suggests a bond of sorts: He went on to become the first curator of photography at Harvard, where (according to his New York Times obituary) he’d started as an unpaid volunteer. Clarence Derrick expressed the “moral of Davis Pratt” as follows: “If no niche exists, create one for yourself through persistence, dedication and hard work.” Such a process, in Yates’s case, also began in earnest at Avon.

  Lothar Candels, who wrote The Avonian’s humor column (“The Beaver’s Log”), formed what he called a “mutual admiration society” with Yates. Candels was the son of the school cook—a trained European chef who prepared excellent meals but was nonetheless regarded as “a menial”—and thus was no stranger to condescension and outright persecution. Both he and Yates were rather quirky young men with unconventional interests: Candels, in addition to being an occasional writer and photographer, was an avid butterfly collector; once, when he’d proudly mounted a rare moth, a cloddish classmate (whose fictional counterpart figures prominently in A Good School) leaned his elbow on the glass and deliberately damaged the specimen. But Candels was so good-natured that most of the students were fond of him, and like Davis Pratt he became a kind of “parent figure” (as he put it) to the unhappy Yates. “He was always stooped,” Candels remembered, “as though he were carrying around a burden.” Even then Yates was given to sudden brooding depressions—during which, if coaxed, he’d speak in a desultory way of his family, his poverty, his feelings of oddness and despair. Often he wondered aloud whether he should see the school psychiatrist. But his own melancholy seemed to embarrass him, much less talking about it, and he was willing to be kidded out of his funks by the kindly, waggish author of “The Beaver’s Log.” And no matter how fragile Yates seemed in other respects, Candels was impressed by the strength of character he showed as a writer, his precocious sense of total commitment—an enthusiasm he was generous in sharing. “Dick inspired me to write,” said Candels, who later courted his wife by composing sonnets. “He was a sensitive and very touching young man.”

  * * *

  “I suppose you know Ruth is married now, and not only that but she is going to have a baby about the first of October,” Yates wrote Stephen Benedict in the summer of 1942.* “She and her husband, and Mother and I are all living here in Cold Spring Harbor which is a swell little town on the North Shore, about thirty-five miles from New York.”

  The ménage to which Yates came home that summer in Cold Spring Harbor—so gruesomely evoked in his novel of the same name—was almost certainly Dookie’s idea. The elder Rodgerses, Fritz and Louise, had moved out of Genius Row and gone to live in Nantucket for a while; with Ruth married and Richard away at Avon, Dookie found herself alone in an apartment she could scarcely afford in the first place, and now her child-support payments were cut in half. Meanwhile Ruth and Fred had a baby on the way, but the best they could do on his modest salary was a tiny Long Island apartment where they lived for a few months after the wedding. Little doubt, then, that Dookie took it on herself to solve their problems with her usual flair: Combining their meager incomes, they could just afford to rent a dilapidated clapboard house on the fringe of one of the more affluent communities on the North Shore—the hilly beaches of which had been immortalized in the stained-glass designs of Louis Comfort Tiffany, whose estate was one of the many fine old places overlooking Cold Spring Harbor.

  That summer Dookie and Richard really got to know Ruth’s husband for the first time, and both formed an enduring dislike of him (and vice versa). It must have been a shock for Dookie, who believed so wholly in the idea of aristocracy, to be confronted with this awful daily reminder that every advantage of breeding and education could, sometimes, result in such a consummate lout as her son-in-law. And then to be fair: A better man than Fred might have buckled under the strain of having to live with Dookie. What must have been a fatal incompatibility is nicely suggested by the family dinner scenes in Cold Spring Harbor: “Well,” says Gloria Drake; “I’ve always thought the dinner hour was for conversation.” Fred appears as the cretinous Evan, shorn of his accent but essentially intact: “Evan Shephard hardly looked up from his plate, even in response to murmured questions from his wife, and his stolid concentration seemed to suggest that eating, no less than the day’s work of fathering children, was just another part of a man’s job in the world.” Nor was this laconic laborer likely to find much in common with his bumbling, bug-eyed brother-in-law, and perhaps their one attempt to bond was very like the abortive driving lesson Evan gives Phil in the book, though the latter’s humiliation (that is, Yates’s) probably made little difference in his overall view of Fred: “[He] knew there might not be much profit or future in hating your brother-in-law, but that didn’t mean you couldn’t figure him out and see him plain.… This ignorant, inarticulate, car-driving son of a bitch would never even be promoted to a halfway decent job.… Fuck him.”

  In desperate need of pocket money and escape, Yates looked all over the countryside for a summer job, but discovered that most places wouldn’t hire anybody under the age of eighteen. Finally he found employment of sorts as a parking-lot attendant at a roadside restaurant called Costello’s: “All I do is rush around in a chauffeur’s cap and tell people where to park their jalopies,” he wrote Benedict. The chauffeur’s cap had been his own idea: Except for a token sum of five dollars a week he was paid entirely in tips, which began to pick up once he’d found an official-looking cap in an Army and Navy store and thus ceased being a random kid wagging a flashlight. One hesitates to make too much of this episode, Yates’s first paying job, though it’s fair to say that it whetted his appetite for financial independence—within a few months he’d be more or less self-supporting for the rest of his life—and then, too, one can hardly imagine the relief he felt at having some excuse to work all night and sleep most of the day.

  Avon, no doubt, seemed a waiting Arcadia when the time came for Yates to return in mid-September. The living experiment in Cold Spring Harbor had turned cold indeed, at least this particular trial, and a parting of the ways was imminent. The elder Rodgerses were planning at last to resume residence of their family estate in St. James, Long Island, as soon as the tenant’s lease expired in the fall, and they’d invited Fred and Ruth to join them there with the newborn baby. Dookie, meanwhile, would return to New York, but for now she pouted around the house and, always sensitive about her age, openly rued the prospect of becoming a grandmother (“Can you imagine me as a grandmother?” says Pookie in The Easter Parade; “I can’t even imagine you as a mother,” her daughter reflects). And in the midst of it all was Richard, whose departure from the scene, for any number of reasons, was almost surely as frantic as Phil Drake’s:

  [His] final moments of leaving Cold Spring Harbor would always be blurred in his memory. He knew he must have hauled his suitcase downstairs fast because a station taxicab was already honking for him in the driveway; he knew he must have made a stop in the kitchen to accept one last sloppy embrace from his mother; then he was on the tr
ain and the rotten little town was far behind him.

  * * *

  Yates’s last two years at Avon were far happier than his first. He would always be the butt of a certain amount of teasing, but it became more benign as he learned to handle it better. Rather than trying to swagger off insults with more of the same (and getting beaten up or paddled), Yates became a soft-spoken eccentric who rolled with the punches. “I guess I left the coat hanger in by mistake,” he’d say, if a person made fun of his sometimes rigid posture, the way his shoulders tended to bunch and shudder around his ears when he was tense. But perhaps the best way of preempting attack was, after all, simple good manners, and around this time Yates apparently began to take Mrs. Riddle’s precepts to heart. He may have had an apple-size hole in the elbow of his only tweed jacket, and hair that stuck out at an odd angle, but Yates was courteous—shy, formal—or so certain of his would-be enemies remember him.

  Happily he didn’t have to strain himself with everybody. That second year he was named editor in chief of The Avonian and art director of the Winged Beaver (the school yearbook), and hence became a campus figure of sorts. Best of all, he began to make a few friends his own age. Perhaps the first of these was Pierre Van Nordan, whose relative weirdness is evoked by the uncharitable “Van Loon” conferred on his alter ego in A Good School. According to the Winged Beaver, Van Nordan was a connoisseur of “guns, game, Omar Khayyam, women and beer,” and A Good School suggests he also had a penchant for sitting on the toilet longer than necessary. Whatever the case, Van Nordan was in fact regarded as a bit of a curiosity, and probably Yates (like Grove vis-à-vis Van Loon) eventually kept him at a distance while at Avon; however, Yates was at Van Nordan’s bedside when the latter died of Hodgkin’s disease in his early thirties, as the friendship had deepened in later years.