A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

It was almost certainly after the brawl that followed, or sometime very early that summer, that the couple separated and Yates attempted suicide. One can only speculate about what was going through his head when he decided to cut his wrists: His wife was back with the Bialek sisters and wanted a divorce; the “big, ambitious, tragic novel” he’d begun with such hope that spring was now permanently stalled, and of course nobody wanted his short stories; his health was poor, his job was mindless, and there was little promise of anything better, ever. Plus he was very, very tired all the time, and probably at that moment very drunk as well. So he did it, and woke up the next day having to cope with the mess. Perhaps this episode was what he had in mind twelve years later, when Yates wrote apropos of the critic Alfred Kazin’s remark that Revolutionary Road “locates the new American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage”: “Mr. Yates may understand things very well when it comes to writing fiction, and it’s terribly nice for him that he can locate an American tragedy, but the awful part is that in real life he has come painfully close to participating in one … and being one himself, squarely on the field of marriage.” Arguably he’d have better reason at various times in later life to take such drastic action—but apparently he never did, except in the slow and steady fashion of four packs a day. In fact, he rarely missed an apt moment to denounce suicide as “self-indulgent,” especially when one had obligations to others. That summer Yates discovered he was about to have such obligations, whether he and his wife wanted them or not.

  For better or worse, then, she came back to him and even quit her “dumb little job” at Botany Mills; the baby was due in March, and meanwhile Sheila sometimes wondered if she’d imagined what Yates had told her about that episode in her absence. But another glance at his wrists confirmed it all over again.*

  * * *

  Sharon Elizabeth Yates (aka “Mousemeat,” “Mussy,” or simply “the Meat”) was born on March 22, 1950, and was mostly a cause for celebration. Yates was a doting, playful father, though he was awkward changing diapers and handling the baby in general and tended to stick her with pins. Also his writing (such as it was) had to be interrupted while they adjusted themselves to the baby’s schedule, and the prospect of Europe seemed ever dimmer—which was sad, as the thought of quitting their old grind and pursuing the ghosts of Scott and Ernest amid the cafés of Montparnasse had become more appealing than ever. On the other hand, the most practical reason for going—to put an ocean between themselves and Dookie—had become less urgent, since the latter’s tireless volunteerism had finally paid off: A few months before, Ruth Yates had begun a two-year term as president of the National Association of Women Artists, at a salary equal to what her son was making at Remington Rand. A rather startling turn of events while it lasted.

  Soon a new and far graver concern rushed to fill the void. For several weeks Yates’s health had been worse than usual: He coughed constantly and felt exhausted and out of breath; mornings he woke up dripping with sweat. His weight had dropped to 140 pounds. Sheila would stand and wait at the top of subway steps while her twenty-four-year-old husband wheezed behind her like an old man. Finally, a month or so after the baby was born, Yates got his chest X-rayed and learned he had advanced tuberculosis. That evening an official from Bellevue came to the apartment and took Yates away to the crowded TB ward, where he stayed for three weeks until space was found at Halloran, the veterans’ hospital on Staten Island. “[A]ll I knew then,” he wrote, “was how good it felt to be encouraged—even to be ordered, by a grim ex-Army nurse wearing a sterile mask—to lie down and stay there.”

  In some ways it would prove one of the best things that had ever happened to him. Halloran wasn’t a bad place—with its remote manicured lawns, its reverie of hushed waiting within the separate, single-story TB building. The hundred or so shuffling or wheelchair-bound patients tended to be friendly with one another in a quiet, diffident way that suited Yates: He could talk and listen as much or as little as he liked, and for the most part he felt a genuine sense of solidarity with his fellow consumptives. As he noted in an early draft of “Regards”: “I think death was on all of our minds in those drowsing, melancholy wards, where the bedside radios droned all day in the very sound of boredom; most of us were in no real danger of dying, but our existence seemed clearly to be something less than life.” Every so often Yates would see a doctor for his pneumothorax treatment—a needle between the ribs to inject air into the lung and collapse it—but otherwise there was little to do but lie there.

  He had plentiful means to distract himself from morbid thoughts: A group of his Remington Rand friends had chipped in and bought him a large box of Modern Library books; as his future publisher Seymour Lawrence put it, Halloran became Yates’s “Harvard, Yale, and Princeton.” What had hitherto inhibited him most as a writer was a dire sense of his own ignorance; since high school his life had been a hamster wheel of war and work and worry, with Dookie’s demands scotching any hope of repose in between. And while Yates would forever remain a slow, insecure writer with a wildly inflated idea of what he’d missed by way of college, his eight months in the TB ward began a lifelong process of autodidactic recompense. Some of the writers he got around to reading there (“without whose work I might never have put together a halfway decent book of my own”) included Dickens, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, E. M. Forster, Katherine Mansfield, Sinclair Lewis, and Dylan Thomas; particularly he read (and reread) Chekhov, Conrad, Joyce, Jane Austen, Ring Lardner, and Keats. And Flaubert too, though he wouldn’t accord Madame Bovary the sort of scrutiny it deserved (for his own purposes) until several years later.

  “I was very independent at the time,” said Sheila, a bit of elliptical dialogue that would have made the authors of Gatsby and Revolutionary Road proud. With her husband indefinitely hospitalized on Staten Island, Sheila was for all purposes single again. She farmed the baby out to a kindly old couple in New Rochelle and found a job at the Dobeckmun Company on West Fifty-seventh, where she was secretary to a publicity director whose mission it was to promote the metallic yarn Lurex. Meanwhile a kindly coworker from Remington Rand, who was fond of Yates and fancied herself a photographer, offered to shoot a portrait of Sheila and the baby that would serve to keep Yates company during the lonely intervals between visits. “It was a strained time,” Sheila concedes; what with visiting the baby and doing her job and whatnot, she wasn’t able to make it out to Halloran (“quite a schlep”) more than every week or so. And when she got there Yates was often reticent or surly or both, and always “smoking like a chimney,” tuberculosis withal, which made her wonder even more what conceivable future there was in staying married to such a man.

  Her old Bronxville friend Ann Barker came to live with her in the Twelfth Street apartment, and proved a far more congenial roommate than either of the Bialek sisters or for that matter Yates himself. The two young women were a few doors down from eligible bachelors, and whether by chance or design the women’s cat had a way of wandering into the men’s apartment. At first the men simply tossed it out, until a neighbor advised them of its provenance (“that cat belongs to two pretty ladies”); the next time they returned it in person. A propitious visit: Within three months Barker was engaged to one of the men, John Kowalsky, while Sheila flirted with his roommate and several of his friends—an assortment of NYU and Columbia graduates, not a would-be writer in the bunch. When Sheila was overheard remarking that she was a “grass widow,” Barker reminded her that she wasn’t divorced yet; “Oh, that doesn’t matter!” Sheila hissed, as if it were just a bothersome formality.

  When her husband was finally released as an outpatient in February 1951, Sheila decided to stay married on a “wait-and-see basis”: As a bitter Yates later described the situation, she’d decided to be “brave,” taking him back “as a partner in a sensible arrangement of joint parenthood.” A bit on the unromantic side, perhaps, though one can hardly blame Sheila: At twenty-three she had little to look forward to but a life of caring for an infirm “writer�
� who seemed disinclined to care for himself. There was, however, a peculiar sweetness to Yates—a tolerant devotion (or dependency) that Sheila came to appreciate better over time: “You’re the only person who’s ever loved me,” she wrote him later, “no matter how much I played outside the rules.” Another incentive for sticking around was the $207 a month Yates had been awarded for his “service-connected disability,” which was guaranteed for five years as long as his lungs were checked on a weekly basis at VA-approved clinics “anywhere in the world.” And since ten months had passed since his illness was originally diagnosed, he was entitled to a retroactive lump sum of more than two thousand dollars.

  To Sheila the next move was clear: Paris. “Because I mean if we don’t do it now” (says the wife in “Regards”), “while we’re young enough and brave enough, when are we ever going to do it at all?” As Sheila recalled, Yates was suddenly intimidated by the idea: Though he’d “talked constantly” about Europe before his illness, “[tuberculosis] had sapped his will” and now he seemed bent on returning to Remington Rand. But Sheila had enough willpower for both of them; the allure of helping her boss promote Lurex had palled—she was ready for a change, the more drastic the better. Like April Wheeler tuning out her weak-willed, equivocating husband, she pressed ahead with the arrangements.

  It didn’t take long. Within a week Yates had done his part by getting in touch with Stephen Benedict, who was then living in Paris. They needed an affordable two- or three-room apartment, Yates wrote, and hoped Benedict could help them “steer clear of the conventional Cook’s-Tour-filthy-postcard set.” Benedict replied that a friend’s place would fall vacant within a month or so, and in the meantime they could live cheaply in one of the pensions. For the sake of economy, though, he advised them to settle in the provinces eventually, and Yates assured him they’d probably head south for the winter: “Our only plans are that we want to stay in Europe indefinitely and I want to do an awful lot of writing.”

  They sailed on April 14 aboard the United States, where a “cramped farewell party” was held in their tourist-class cabin. While Sheila changed the baby’s diapers on the upper berth, a dapper-hatted Dookie sat below and regaled the guests (the Cains and Bialeks, plus friends from Botany Mills and Remington Rand) with odd bits of esoterica about the National Association of Women Artists. As she went on talking and drinking, her knees sagged apart until her underpants showed (“an old failing”)—but such ghastliness would soon be in the past, and Yates could afford to feel magnanimous: “I had luck, time, opportunity, a young girl for a wife, and a child of my own.”

  CHAPTER FIVE

  The Getaway: 1951-1953

  They arrived in Paris on April 20 and checked into a cheap hotel called the Atlantic. Yates went to the U.S. Embassy and arranged for medical care, which consisted of the usual weekly injections of air to maintain a partial collapse of both lungs. Meanwhile they waited for Benedict’s friend to clear out of his apartment on the Rue du Bac in St.-Germain-des-Prés, and Yates took Sheila and the baby on long strolls around the Left Bank—where as a young GI he’d “walked himself weak down its endless blue streets and all the people who knew how to live had kept their tantalizing secret to themselves.” Five years later the secret was safe as ever, though they did find a café they liked, the Deux Magots, where at least they could be among a fair number of people who spoke English.

  Yates was determined to “[grind] out short stories at the rate of about one a month,” and as soon as they were settled he got down to work. While he spent his days writing, smoking, and coughing, Sheila was obliged to find ways of keeping herself and the baby out of the apartment as much as possible—a pleasant-enough occupation, most of the time: She did the marketing, went to museums, shopped, explored, and consoled herself that at least it wasn’t New York. But there were bad days when she felt at loose ends, anonymous—“that awful feeling of not quite being there when people look at you,” she later described it—and the baby served as a constant reminder (if a winsome one) that she’d committed herself to a man, a life, that didn’t seem right no matter what the scenery.

  She was free to do as she liked at night, when it was her husband’s turn to look after “the Meat,” and before long she was recruited to act in a “dreadful” play. So negligible was this enterprise that Sheila hardly remembers the rather famous man who wrote and directed (novelist Meyer Levin, who later won acclaim as the author of Compulsion),* and has quite forgotten such matters as title, plot, character, or even how she got involved in the first place (she suspects she was hired with a group of other American and Swedish expatriates who were spotted at certain cafés). It was something to do. The evening rehearsals went on for a longish while, and finally on opening night there was a fairly large audience—then a bit fewer the next night, and hardly anybody after that. The play closed in less than a week. Yates attended one of the more uncrowded performances and seemed rather bemused by the badness of it all.

  Sheila’s steadiest companion was a former prostitute named Chantal, who was kept as a mistress by one of Yates’s Avon acquaintances, a dull rich person whom everyone avoided as much as possible, and whose name is lost to posterity. Neither Chantal nor Sheila spoke the other’s language, though they were compatible in other ways and managed to communicate quite effectively after a fashion. Once the play was over and Sheila again found herself with too much time to think, Chantal enticed her to explore some of the more raffish aspects of Paris—particularly the bals musettes where poor people went to amuse themselves on weekends, and where Sheila occasionally found herself in “sticky situations” with tough-looking laborers who wanted more than a dance. But Chantal knew how to handle such fellows, and in general their nights made for an exhilarating change.

  As for Yates, he felt tired and ill at the end of the day, and apart from the odd drink at the Deux Magots he wasn’t up to doing much or asking questions about whatever his wife was doing. He was happy to stay home with the Meat and consider his progress as a writer, and at least in this respect he must have felt gratified. Two stories he wrote in Paris, “A Last Fling, Like,” and “The Canal,” give a sense of his range and growth at this time.

  The first is little more than a well-done pastiche of the Lardneresque monologue wherein a stock vulgarian reveals herself as such in some unwitting way. The “fling” in question is a trip to Europe the narrator takes prior to going ahead with her marriage to some nonentity named Marty. As she tells it to a girlfriend, she spent the vacation flirting with a number of lackluster men (evoked with Salingerian pathos: “[He] looked a little bit like Richard Widmark, but he was sort of on the plump side and his hands were always wet”) and having random misadventures, until she feels nothing but relief to be back in her familiar office-girl routine. Europe, in short, is a bust, though it does afford her a delicious chance to put Marty in his place when he protests that he wouldn’t have gone gadding off to Europe before their wedding; as the narrator gleefully reports her riposte to the girlfriend: “‘Listen, brother, don’t kid yourself.’ I says, ‘You’d do it quick enough, if you had the money.’”

  With “The Canal” Yates began to find his own voice, as well as a vision to go with it—indeed, the story is such an advance over “Fling” that one can hardly believe they were written within months of each other. That “Canal” is a far more personal story may explain its relative success, up to a point: That is, such an exercise served to steer Yates away from secondhand characters and situations, though it would be a long time before he got over the worst of his squeamishness toward what he feared was subjective, “unformed” work. Perhaps he was also uncomfortable casting such a cold eye on, say, his marriage and the sustaining illusions thereof—as when Lew Miller, in the frame-story of “Canal,” imagines how his wife perceives him at an awful party where he waxes reticent while a more prosperous man boasts about the war:

  Miller realized uneasily that for Betty there was a special kind of women’s-magazine romanticism in having a
husband who never talked about the war—a faintly tragic, sensitive husband, perhaps, or at any rate a charmingly modest one—so that it really didn’t matter if Nancy Brace’s husband was more handsome, more solid in his Brooks Brothers suit and, once, more dashing in his trim lieutenant’s uniform.

  But the wife’s “women’s-magazine romanticism” is not so pronounced that she’s immune to exasperation with her “modest” husband’s dull refusal to discuss his own wartime heroics: “Darling,” she says after the party, “why do you let an ass like that eclipse you so in a conversation?” The answer, of course, is that Lew Miller is deeply ashamed of his relative failure as a soldier—a secret he’s kept from his wife—and while he’d rather not admit as much, he refuses to tell self-aggrandizing lies about it either. Thus, while Miller’s final outburst at his wife (“‘Will you shut up? Will you please for God’s sake shut up?’”) is somewhat derived from similar moments in famous stories by Salinger and Hemingway,* it also faithfully represents the reality of Yates’s life with Sheila, in a way that probably made both uneasy. He would have to find a way to distance himself from such material.

  * * *

  In October they moved to Juan-les-Pins, near Cap d’Antibes and Cannes on the Riviera—where the Fitzgeralds had frolicked with the Murphys and Hemingways, with Isadora Duncan and Picasso and Dorothy Parker (later a fan of Richard Yates); the very place where Scott had written much of Gatsby, and the place he evoked so elegiacally in Tender Is the Night.

  It was a different story for Yates. By the time he arrived, le beau monde was long gone, and their shabby apartment at La Monada was a far cry from Gausse’s Hotel in Tender. Nor were there any wacky waterskiing antics behind whooshing hydroplanes, or swimming in a “choppy little four-beat crawl,” or lounging on a raft where laughing expats sat clinking martini glasses. There was none of that: Yates was too sick to swim and didn’t like the outdoors anyway. He couldn’t even do the few things he’d enjoyed in Paris—walking around city streets, talking to English-speaking people in cafés—since they were almost two miles from town, and he was damned if he’d ride a girl’s bicycle (with a child seat fixed to the back) to get there, even if he had the stamina to do so, which he didn’t.