A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  A more improbable friendship, and one that perished of natural causes shortly after the war, was the one Yates pursued with the studious Hugh Pratt. Pratt’s greatest appeal appears to have been his almost daunting respectability: Apart from his work as editor of the Winged Beaver and associate editor of The Avonian, he was one of the school’s top scholars and a standout football player to boot. Above all he was serious, and demanded seriousness from his friends. At least one thing he and Yates had in common was a fondness for late-night bull sessions of the loftier sort; both were charter members of something called the “Midnight Oil League.” Beyond that the attachment is harder to fathom. Like Hugh Britt in A Good School, Pratt was quick to reproach Yates for failures of taste and more obvious personal shortcomings: “You’re always late for everything,” says Britt when Grove asks to be his roommate; “you flunk courses and don’t seem to care; you’re sloppy; that kind of thing could make trouble if we roomed together.” A mutual friend described Pratt as Yates’s “opposite,” and Pratt seemed to agree in every respect but one: “Dick was not frivolous about his writing. He’d scribble over reams of blank paper. Every Saturday we’d build a fire in the Senior Club, and Dick would just sit there and write all day.”

  The extent to which Yates was playing a role for his friend, whose stability and high-mindedness he clearly envied, is worth considering; for that matter such posing in general—and Yates was nothing if not self-conscious as a young man—was arguably essential to his becoming what he was so determined to be. When Grove is announced as the winner of the “America at War” essay contest, he finds that he’s developed “a strange new ability to see himself whole, from the outside, as if through a movie camera twenty feet away”; and Grove maintains this perspective when he plays, with relish, “his role as sportswriter”:

  He would shamble along the sidelines, carrying a clipboard and a chewed pencil to record each play; when a game was stalled he would squat and write, holding the clipboard on one tense thigh and very much aware that a number of smaller kids were peering over his shoulder; when the game broke open again he’d get up and run with it, almost as fast as the ball carrier, with the little kids racing in his wake.

  Yates’s devotion to such tasks was so conspicuous at Avon that he was ultimately regarded as the embodiment of writerly aspiration, and indeed his influence was pervasive: He wrote almost every word of the newspaper, much of the yearbook and literary magazine, and performed all community-service hours in the school’s eighteenth-century printshop. “Dick ran everything of a literary nature,” said classmate Gilman Ordway. “He might have been the only one of us who knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life—become a writer of fiction.”

  And finally, with the arrival of fellow fifth former Ernest Bicknell Wright, Yates’s success might have seemed, in its limited way, more or less complete. “Bicky” Wright was the rebellious scion of an old-money family in Philadelphia (he later had his name removed from the Social Register), and Avon was a last resort after he’d been expelled from two previous prep schools. Like his counterpart “Bucky” Ward in A Good School, Wright immediately “earned an outlaw’s celebrity” by smoking on campus before he was seventeen and cultivating a moody, slouching persona in general. The son of a bullying, alcoholic father who openly professed not to like his children much, Wright despised authority and was alternately witty and bitter about it.

  He and Yates could hardly believe their luck: Both flunked courses and didn’t care, both were sloppy, both were rather curious physical specimens (the diminutive Wright would grow six more inches after he left Avon), and both felt alienated from their surroundings (whatever those happened to be); above all, both coped by making fun of the world. Now each had a perfect audience in the other. As Yates characterized the friendship in A Good School: “It was almost like falling in love. Bucky Ward could make him laugh over and over again until he began to feel like a girl who might at any moment cry ‘Oh, you keep me in stitches!’” Wright was noted in the Winged Beaver as “the possessor of the school’s quickest comeback,” but in this respect Yates became (somewhat to his own surprise) a worthy rival. They had a ritual: Whenever one came up with a particularly choice witticism, the other would pretend to preserve it forever in the top drawer of a Platonic cabinet, filing it away with a flourish of the wrist. Indeed the friendship might have been all but ideal, were it not for Wright’s weakness for melodrama. “Things!” cries Bucky Ward in A Good School. “Christ, Grove, do you ever get so you can’t stand things?… You oughta see my family’s house. Oh, it’s very nice and it’s very big and it cost my father a hell of a lot of money, but I can never make him understand it’s just another thing.” And so on. For Yates, who preferred to keep his weltschmerz to himself, such displays made for uncomfortable moments. He liked Wright better when he was funny.*

  Yates was almost in danger of becoming a reasonably happy young man when his fifty-six-year-old father died suddenly of pneumonia (and general exhaustion, one suspects) on December 14, 1942. Family lore has it that Vincent died on the very day his daughter’s second son was conceived, and moreover that this son, Peter, grew up to be an almost exact replica of his maternal grandfather (not to mention a minister like his great-grandfather). Alas, little else is known of Vincent’s death outside Yates’s fiction, though fortunately ample explication is found there. In fact the episode is treated similarly and at length in A Good School, The Easter Parade, A Special Providence, and especially “Lament for a Tenor.” The protagonist of “Tenor,” Jack Warren, is having breakfast in the refectory when he’s discreetly informed by the headmaster that he has an urgent message to call home. This he does, and though he feels nothing on hearing the sad news except “an automatic tightening in his chest,” he’s impressed by his mother’s uncontrollable weeping, as if she were “a real widow.” In both this story and A Special Providence, Yates’s alter ego is just able to stop himself from saying, in effect, “What the hell, Mother, are we supposed to cry when he dies?” An uncomfortable session with the headmaster follows in “Tenor” (the man speaks vaguely of God’s will and arranges for Warren to leave on an afternoon train), after which the young man heads back to his room to pack and decide how best to get through the next few hours at school: “it was oddly enjoyable to have a secret like this, and he mounted the rest of the stairs with theatrical gravity, an inscrutable, tragic young man.” But he’s troubled by how empty he feels. “You couldn’t very well cry over a man you hardly knew,” Warren reflects, casting back to their last few meetings, which lately “had spaced out to three or four a year, usually just a restaurant lunch and an awkward afternoon during one of Jack’s holidays.”

  In “Tenor” and elsewhere, Yates made note of his father’s obvious deterioration in recent years—that he looked “smaller and grayer,” that he coughed and drank more—though the man always treated his son with alert solicitude, and seemed to accept that it was incumbent on himself to keep the conversation going. One thing that evidently disturbed Yates in retrospect was his failure to call his father “Dad.” In A Good School Bill Grove finds it “all but impossible”: “He remembered having no trouble with the more childish ‘Daddy,’ years ago, but ‘Dad’ eluded his tongue. He tried to avoid the problem, on the rare occasions when he saw the man, by arranging his remarks in such a way as to require calling him nothing at all.” But both Grove and Jack Warren are able to relieve their consciences somewhat by remembering the relative success of that last paternal visit at school, when father and son went for a pleasant-enough stroll around campus and the latter managed, finally, to say “Dad.”

  For the most part, though, the whole event seems to have evoked very little in the way of conventional sentiment. “You know, my father’s really a pretty boring guy,” Jack Warren remarks to his roommate after that visit, and once he knows his father is dead he reads over the man’s last (unanswered) letter, which is full of well-meaning banality: “Was sorry to see you’re still having trouble with
that mark in math. You know the way to improve your math, or anything else for that matter, is just say to yourself, ‘Who’s going to win? This math, or me?’” Little wonder Yates felt bound to admit that he was, after all, his mother’s son, or that his most definite emotion when his father died was a kind of piquant self-pity. When Jack Warren manages a few cathartic sobs on the train home, it dawns on him that he’s really crying “for himself—a boy bereaved,” whereupon he begins to retch rather than cry. The same moment recurs in The Easter Parade, when Emily stops crying over her father as soon as she realizes her tears are “wholly for herself—for poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing.”*

  It could be that Dookie’s far more elaborate grief indicated a greater awareness of certain grim consequences to follow, along with perhaps a genuine fondness for the man and a slight pang for having hastened his decline. Whether she really kissed his corpse on the mouth à la Pookie Grimes and Alice Prentice is impossible to say, though the image serves nicely to suggest the disgust she provoked in her son on that occasion, and ever more frequently afterward. “It was her fault,” Robert Prentice reflects at the funeral. “She had robbed him of a father and robbed his father of a son, and now it was too late.” For a number of reasons Yates’s disenchantment with his mother would accelerate after Vincent’s death, and that may have been the man’s most impressive legacy, both in terms of his son’s life and his son’s work. But Vincent remained something of a two-dimensional figure in Yates’s mind: a mild-mannered, well-meaning fellow who tried to make the best of a terrible mistake—though just how terrible Yates could scarcely appreciate until years later, when his father became a more haunting abstraction. “All I’m really qualified to remember is the sadness of his later life—the bad marriage that cost him so much, the drab little office from which he assisted in managing the sales of light bulbs for so many years, the tidy West Side apartment … where I can only hope he found love before his death.”

  * * *

  Yates spent that Christmas vacation mastering the fine points of a habit that probably killed his father and would eventually kill him, too. But then Yates always loved to smoke, and perhaps it was worth it as far as he was concerned: It gave a shy, nervous person something to do with his hands; it made him alert; he liked the taste; and besides he didn’t much care about his health anyway. But it all began (and to some extent persisted) as the purest form of adolescent affectation, a way of looking—at last—somewhat masculine and grown-up: “Cigarettes were a great help because any big-eyed, full-lipped boy could be made to look all right if he smoked all the time.” With his friend Bick, Yates had begun smoking illicitly during his first semester as a fifth former, but others had made fun of his beginner’s cough; now that he was about to turn seventeen, and eligible to light up at will in the Senior Club, he was determined to outsmoke the lot of them. As he described his self-training in A Good School:

  First he had to learn the physical side of it … how to will his senses to accept drugged dizziness as pleasure rather than incipient nausea. Then came the subtler lessons in aesthetics, aided by the use of the bathroom mirror: learning to handle a cigarette casually, even gesturing with it while talking, as if scarcely aware of having it in his fingers; deciding which part of his lips formed the spot where a cigarette might hang most attractively … and how best to squint against the smoke.… The remarkable thing about cigarettes … was that they added years to the face that had always looked nakedly younger than his age.

  For the rest of his time at Avon, Yates was rarely seen outside the classroom without a butt dangling off his lip, and clearly he looked forward to the day when he’d never have to abstain at all—never have to leave his round-eyed vulnerable face exposed without a smoke screen to squint behind.

  Most students at Avon spent their free time, especially during weekends, availing themselves one way or another of Mrs. Riddle’s vast estate, her picturesque farms and woodlands, playing polo, perhaps, or venturing into Hartford for a meal and a movie. Yates—never one for the outdoors and too poor for polo or Hartford—was almost always (from 1943 on) to be found at either the Avonian office or the Senior Club, smoking and writing. The ambience of the Senior Club particularly appealed to him, what with its leather sofas and armchairs, its phonograph and pool table, its overall conduciveness to “learning how to behave in college” (the closest Yates would ever come to that milieu). Occasionally he’d bestir himself for a game of pool—at least one classmate remembered him (likely in error) as “quite good”—but mostly he sat, smoked, drank coffee, and wrote.

  One of the stories he finished as a fifth former, “Forgive Our Foolish Ways,” was featured in the 1943 Winged Beaver. It is Yates’s earliest surviving fiction, and its thousand or so words describe the spiritual conversion of a dying soldier, hitherto a hard-boiled skeptic. A representative patch of prose: “He remembered running like a scared rabbit across the sand, hearing the machine guns spitting at him, and being half-crazed with horror and fear. He remembered feeling that his face must look like a frightened child’s, mouth open and cheeks jogging loosely.” That last phrase is promising, as are certain others (“writhing like a squashed beetle”), but otherwise the story is unremarkable: At first its wounded protagonist boldly dismisses the “phony ideas” of those who believe in a “phony God,” but while dying he’s surrounded by “an immense, radiant, all-inclusive light” and hears “a great choir,” and so on. For what it’s worth, the story is somewhat better than the three or four others featured in that year’s Winged Beaver, and seems to give a fair sense of what was on Yates’s mind at the time.

  But a far better forum for his ideas—and abilities, too, at least as they stood then—was The Avonian, and perhaps the best proof of this is the last issue of that school year, dated June 9, 1943. At the bottom center of the front page is a box headlined “In Memoriam”:

  As we go to press, tragic news reaches us. It is with profound sorrow that we announce the death of David James Stanley, one of the finest men Avon has ever known. Dave was killed at sea, just three weeks after his departure from School to join the United States Merchant Marine. The loss to Avon is irreparable, his memory imperishable.

  Nothing brought the reality of war closer to Avon than the death of David Stanley, the lovable young man who appears as Larry Gaines in A Good School. Handsome and sweet-natured, Stanley had just become engaged to Alice Sperry, the pretty seventeen-year-old daughter of Avon’s biology teacher. Stanley had finished school early to join the merchant marine and thus avoid the regular draft, when—only a day or two before Avon’s graduation ceremony—his ship collided with a munitions vessel and sank to the bottom of Hampton Bay. As recorded in A Good School, the last issue of the newspaper was minutes away from press (in fact a blackly ironic item remains on page four, listing David Stanley as “Most Likely To Succeed”) when the news reached Avon; alone, amid a community stunned with grief, Yates had to keep his head and compose a brief but seemly tribute, then reconfigure the front page and see The Avonian into press. Not only did he succeed, but the editorial he’d written for that issue could hardly have been more appropriate under the circumstances. Addressed to the graduating class, it put into well-considered words what was surely on the mind of every Avon student in 1943, more than ever after the death of David Stanley:

  In times like these, when everyone’s future is completely uncertain, those of us who are leaving cannot help but be thankful for the steady and secure existence Avon has afforded us. A few of the boys graduating today may never come out of the war alive. All of them will undoubtedly experience more trying and dangerous times than have ever confronted a generation of young men since history began.

  Yates won a special award that year for his work on The Avonian, and deservedly so: Under his editorship the newspaper was “larger in size and more inclusive in scope” (so noted the Winged Beaver), and such improvements were appreciated more widely than one might expect. “You
publish a splendid newspaper,” wrote an alumnus stationed at Fort Leavenworth, Kansas. “I cannot in any way find fault with it, and I admire the wit of the news articles, the frankness of the editorials … [and] congratulate you sincerely on a masterpiece among school papers.” Lest one think this sort of thing caused Yates to take himself too seriously, consider a filler item on page two of that same Avonian: “If the writing in this issue seems rather bumpy in spots, please don’t condemn it too much. Our beloved Editor (?) was in the infirmary with the measles and consequently every single article in this Avonian has contacted [sic] the frightful disease.” Clearly the wag who used to jape about “kahts” and garbagemen and “‘T.B.’ in ‘V.T.’” was still alive, if not altogether well.

  * * *

  Among friends Yates still spoke of his mother admiringly, as a “struggling artist,” while remaining entirely silent on the subject of his father’s death. During the man’s life, though, Yates never really grasped what was involved in the subsidy of a struggling artist such as Dookie, and may have wondered why his father had waxed so solemn, so deadly earnest, whenever he tried to explain that someday she’d be Richard’s responsibility.

  The day had come. Dookie was left with nothing after Vincent’s death, and when Yates returned to New York that summer he found her living in a cheap hotel on East Thirty-ninth Street, all her sculpture and remaining furniture in storage. She was predictably far behind in both rent and storage payments, and eating her meals out of cans. At something called the Ultima Optical Company she’d found a job grinding lenses, though she longed for something more glamorous and remunerative. Some twenty years before, as a single “career gal” in Manhattan, she’d been a fashion illustrator, and to that line of work she devoutly wished to return. One assumes her son was at least as skeptical as Robert Prentice in A Special Providence: “Even he could see how still and labored and hopelessly unsaleable-looking her drawings were, though she explained it was all a question of making the right contacts.”