by Blake Bailey
* * *
Next to finishing his novel, Yates’s most urgent priority was to find a steady female companion. Night was a time of peculiar dread when he was alone, scarcely less so as a grown man than as a child sitting in the dark waiting for his mother to come home. He drank to get to sleep, and also to control a nervous desperation that threatened to overwhelm him since his marriage had ended. Such instability was hardly conducive to attracting even the most motherly, well meaning, or for that matter unconventional young woman—at least two of whom vividly remember, more than forty years later, their disquieting one-night encounters with the newly single Yates. Betty Rollin was a recent Sarah Lawrence graduate when Bob Riche introduced the two at a Village party.* Yates seemed charming and well spoken (if a bit too old), and Rollin allowed herself to be coaxed back to his apartment for a drink. But the ambience of the basement unnerved her, and she suddenly sensed that all was not well with her host: “There was something broken about the man,” she recalled, “as if he’d been through something. His talk was breezy and he had a good sense of humor, but I got the impression he was covering up a lot of darkness.” Rollin had no further contact with Yates, nor did Gail Richards after a single dinner at the Blue Mill. Richards was twenty-one when she met Yates through Rust Hills at Esquire. At first she was rather attracted by his brooding quality—but something more unsettling emerged at the Blue Mill: “I thought I was witnessing the beginning of a breakdown,” she said. “I wasn’t easily scared off in those days—a certain amount of angst was interesting—but this was outside my comprehension. He had a kind of fractured intensity: distraught, jumpy, anxious, with these very busy gesticulating hands.” And no matter what Yates’s terrible need at the time, neither episode was simply a matter of first-date jitters; the unanimous impression among his acquaintances, male or female, was that he was fighting a losing battle to hold himself together. “It was exhausting to be in his company,” said Warren Owens, who’d met Yates shortly after his separation. “He showed constant signs of strain—smoking, fidgeting, knocking over glasses. I was always happy to see Dick, but just as happy to leave him.”
Yates’s quest for a mate sometimes took him far afield. In November 1959 he and Bob Parker went on a road trip to a Montreal television studio to watch a live performance of “The Best of Everything,” adapted for the Canadian Broadcasting Company. The excursion was the basis for a memorable scene in Young Hearts Crying, in which Tom Nelson remarks to Davenport, “You figure there’ll be some nice girl in the show, and she’ll come up to you with big eyes and say ‘You mean you’re the author?’”—and Davenport takes offense, since that was exactly what he (and Yates) had figured. Bob Parker points out that the fictional version of this incident is “accurate in almost every respect,” except for the “insidious motives” attributed to himself in the person of Tom Nelson. Indeed, Parker remembers a rather pleasant outing, quite devoid of friction as far as he could tell at the time. The only abrasive teasing took place at the Canadian border, where Parker made fun of a Mountie’s hat, but the rest of the drive was a cheerful wintry idyll. And then in Montreal, just as the lonely Yates had hoped, there was “some nice girl in the show” who thought highly of his story and writers in general, and she did invite both men back to her house and, yes, it was a little awkward. But as Parker wrote in his essay “A Clef”—a barbed rebuttal to Young Hearts Crying—there was no question of his refusing, à la Tom Nelson, to take the hint and leave Yates alone with an actress ripe for seduction: “Yates was so preoccupied with the whiskey that he didn’t notice the glazed look in her eyes. She finally said to me, ‘I’m going to bed. Tell him to leave some of Daddy’s liquor.’”*
Yates’s ongoing funk may have discouraged romance, but it was rarely without its lighter side. Once, when he and Riche were having a diner breakfast after a long night, Yates wandered off to get cigarettes out of a machine and inadvertently put his quarter into the jukebox instead (after a puzzled moment he selected “Love Me Tender”). And sometimes he’d channel his “fractured intensity” into madcap improvisational shticks, such as the blocked songwriter at the piano: “Baked Alaska! Baked Alaska!” he’d sing to the tune of “K-K-K-Katie,” then scratch his head and mutter, “No no, that’s not it.” Or else he’d invent wacky variations on clichéd movie scenarios, his favorite being A Star Is Born; Yates adored the idea of the washed-up husband dying for the sake of an ascendant, noble wife, and liked to ponder the many diverting ways such a situation might come to pass.
In some respects Yates’s “second bachelorhood” (as he called it) began to look up when he befriended his New School colleague, Anatole Broyard. For a decade or so, Broyard’s stories had appeared in prestigious little magazines, and Yates had lasting respect for him not only as the author of “some of the finest autobiographical fiction [he’d] ever read,” but also as a wit whose various mots Yates quoted for many years. In the early days, though, the larger part of Broyard’s reputation rested on his being—as the writer Anne Bernays (a former girlfriend) put it—“the greatest cocksman in New York for a decade”; she also called him “a mean man,” and was not alone in thinking so, particularly among women. Cassill, who lived around the corner from Broyard in the late fifties, would often step out to get a morning newspaper and spot his illustrious neighbor escorting a young woman home or to school. As for Broyard’s friendship with Yates, it puzzled Cassill for a while, and then it didn’t: “Dick was forthright, honest, a bit unsophisticated at times. Broyard was the opposite: mendacious, crafty, disingenuous. But he had a success formula with women, and Dick envied that. He’d come to New York to lead a bolder life, and Broyard was a model for this life.”
Certainly Yates needed all the laughs he could get, and Broyard had a nice way of working ribaldry into even the most elevated discourse. Of a writer well-known to both, Broyard told Yates, “Reading him is like the guy trying to fuck his girlfriend on the beach, but his dick keeps falling in the sand. Finally he gets it in and the girl says, ‘Put it back in the sand.’” Broyard was perhaps Yates’s first writer friend for whom literature was a digression rather than the main theme. Some twenty years later, when another of Yates’s friends was wondering whether to circumcise his first son, Yates remarked how Broyard used to brag about the way women liked to play with his foreskin during fellatio. At the time Yates was mostly amused, but also a little appalled: “Anatole goes up to the Museum of Modern Art on Friday afternoons,” he told Cassill, “picks up a nice girl from a good college, takes her home for the weekend—then kicks her out. And they love him for this. I go to bed with one of them and they want to marry me!” But then Yates was grateful for whatever odd success came his way, and Broyard’s example was something of an inspiration.
* * *
A month or so after Yates’s marriage ended, Sam Lawrence had come to New York and commiserated with Yates at the Harvard Club (“one of the most fruitful non-literary discussions we have had in a long time,” Lawrence noted a few days later). Yates, perhaps touched by the man’s sympathy, agreed at last to accept an option payment of one thousand dollars giving Atlantic Monthly Press first consideration of his novel, then titled Contemporary Life on the Eastern Seaboard. Such an option, however, was already held by Scribner’s via the Short Story 1 contract, until a disgruntled Charles Scribner agreed to release Yates with the epistolary equivalent of scraping something nasty off his shoe: “This option was very important in our agreeing to publish [your] stories … and we thought this was a commitment in good faith on your part. On the other hand, our Firm does not like to bring out the work of anyone wishing to change publishers.”
In mid-March 1960, after five years of labor that had wreaked havoc on his health and personal life, Yates informed Sam Lawrence that he’d finished his novel. Or rather, almost: On second thought he decided to take another six weeks in order to get “every sentence right, every comma and semicolon in place”—until, on May 5, he was able to write Cassill, “My book is finally done
, as of last Monday, and is now being typed by a lovely blonde named Suzanne Schwertley who was a student in your New School class two years ago and says she found it (or you; it’s hard to tell which) ‘fascinating.’ Nice girl, too.”* A week later the freshly typed manuscript was mailed to Lawrence, who in the meantime had recommended Yates for a scholarship to the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference later that summer: “Although you may not learn too much there,” he wrote Yates, “it should be a pleasant break from the New York treadmill.” Lawrence of all people appreciated how badly his friend needed a break.
For Yates, of course, it remained to be seen whether the past five years had been well or ill spent—at least according to the judgment of Sam Lawrence, whose treatment of his work had tended to be capricious at best. But this time there was no room for doubt, nor did Lawrence keep him in suspense: “I spent the entire weekend reading Revolutionary Road,” he wrote Yates on May 17, “and I was impressed and struck with its dramatic force, the dimensions of its themes, and the mature professional control of your narrative.” It was, in short, an “extraordinary performance,” as Lawrence wrote in his two-page editorial report, which emphasized the novel’s universality (as opposed to its derivative Sloan Wilsonish triteness) and recommended immediate acceptance:
Yates is dealing with very real problems of the mid-century American.… Frank Wheeler is the prototype of thousands of young Americans who have been in the war, got married too early, began a family by mistake, taken a job which they are indifferent to, and then try to make their lives and marriages work. Frank is intelligent enough to know he is trapped, but he doesn’t have anything he really believes in or wants instead.… There are a few minor changes to be made—an over-emphasis on what it means to be “a man” and the harangues on what is wrong with American life. But these are minor, and I would be glad to see the book published exactly as it is.… Richard Yates is speaking for his generation, and he is speaking forcefully, and truly, and alas, tragically.
One notes with a cocked eyebrow that little mention is made of April Wheeler—that she too is “trapped,” say, and for that matter the main victim of the tragedy—though Lawrence tags her in passing as “spirited, defiant”; one assumes there were few if any women on the Atlantic–Little, Brown editorial board. As for changing Frank’s “harangues” against America, Yates may have pointed out that these were intended to be somewhat ironic, ditto that stuff about being “a man,” since the book was indeed published almost “exactly as it is.”
For years Yates’s life had seemed a pretty hapless affair, but suddenly he began to get one good break after another. Little, Brown not only concurred with Lawrence’s opinion of Revolutionary Road, they agreed to increase the author’s advance to $2,500 (in exchange for 10 percent of the radio, movie, and television sales). A few days later Lawrence wrote Yates, “Congratulations on your Bread Loaf scholarship! Everything seems to be coming your way, and I hope this establishes a pattern. Now all that’s left is Marilyn Monroe.” The next week Yates traveled to Boston to sign the novel contract as well as a separate contract for a book of short stories, after which he and Lawrence had a “funny evening” on the town that eventually petered out because the latter couldn’t show Yates “more of the night life, [because] there wasn’t any to show.” One matter they seemed to have discussed over bourbon and sirloins was the clinical accuracy of April Wheeler’s abortion technique, as Lawrence followed up by suggesting Yates consult Babies by Choice or Chance by Alan F. Cuttmacher.
All this was good for morale, but the problem of sustenance remained. The advance from Little, Brown was in payment for five years of work, during which Yates’s literary income had been next to nothing—a bit of math that boded ill for a man paying alimony and child support each month. Bob Parker suggested he try for a Guggenheim Fellowship; Yates had invited the artist to the city to discuss the possibility of illustrating his novel’s jacket (in terms of its latest title, An Outrage in Toyland), and when Parker saw the “ugly, damp” basement on Seventh Avenue, he began casting about for ways to extricate Yates. Sam Lawrence was skeptical—“[I]t’s practically impossible for a young writer to win a Guggenheim if he has not already published a book”—but he was also keenly aware of Yates’s bottom line, and urged him to go ahead and apply. For his part Lawrence tried to recruit such eminent sponsors as the critic Alfred Kazin, who doubted he could oblige but agreed to serve as an advance reader of Revolutionary Road. Meanwhile Yates began to draft a Guggenheim statement concerning a novel he wanted to write about World War II: “Owing to its autobiographical nature I was reluctant to start work on it until I had first learned to write a more objective novel. That book is now finished.”
That book was now finished except for a title. After An Outrage in Toyland was scrapped, Yates was tempted to return to Revolutionary Road, but his publisher was adamantly opposed; such a title, thought Lawrence, made the book seem “a work of history and not a contemporary novel.” Lawrence continued: “Several of us did like The Players, but there was no overriding enthusiasm for it. Someone did suggest that perhaps you could keep the word ‘Road,’ but simply substitute another one for ‘Revolutionary.’” Lawrence thought Morningside Road had a nice ring to it, but on second thought liked Generation of Strangers even better. The writer Dan Wakefield remembers visiting Atlantic Monthly Press and being told by Lawrence’s associate, Peter Davison, “We have a terrific novel with a lousy title”; he then showed Wakefield a list of ten alternative titles and asked his opinion.* By August, Lawrence was leaning toward A Connecticut Tragedy, while Yates was reverting back to Revolutionary Road.
What seemed fairly certain at the time, snappy title or no, was that Yates was on the brink of becoming a somewhat famous writer—perhaps even a Voice of His Generation—and this made him a little less insecure about meeting other famous writers. “He used to stand around at parties of mine, looking sad and wondering what William Styron and William Humphrey were doing,” said Bob Parker twenty-five years later, as he tried to remind a mutual friend who Richard Yates was. This is a bit much, but not without a kind of glancing malicious insight—that is, Yates (at least as a younger man) did seem to harbor a wistful desire to know the writers he admired, and to be admired in turn. But as long as he was little more than the obscure author of a few promising stories, he felt painfully unworthy in the presence of those who’d made it. Kay Cassill remembers that his early “awe” of her husband often bordered on the uncomfortable, and when Yates met the charismatic founder of the Iowa Workshop, Paul Engle, he seemed “shaken by the experience.” Naturally he might have preferred for this sort of thing to work the other way around. Though modest about his work to an almost detrimental degree, Yates didn’t lack a certain Fitzgeraldian zest for fame—for meeting other writers (intellectuals too) on an equal or superior footing. As Orwell pointed out, one of the “four great motives for writing” (indeed the paramount motive) is “sheer egoism”: “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One should never undertake such a thing if one were not driven on by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” Yates had any number of demons, one of the more benign of which was a longing to be taken seriously by people who counted.
He was therefore elated on learning that William Styron had read galleys of Revolutionary Road and declared it “A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic.” Styron was akin to being the ultimate golden person in Yates’s eyes: Though the same age, he’d already published three books, including Lie Down in Darkness, which Yates considered one of the best American novels of the postwar era. Not only that, but Styron was rich, charming, and accessible, a friend to the famous and less-than-famous in all walks of life, a man who’d never been reduced to the kind of “grubby little writing for hire” that had left Yates so exhausted at the age of thirty-four. In short—to paraphrase Uncertain Times (in which Styron appears as “Paul Cameron”)—he would have made Yates weak with en
vy if it hadn’t been clear from the start that he considered Yates a good writer too. “I smoke too much” was the first line out of Yates’s mouth on meeting Styron (“that might have been his last line as well,” Styron remarked at Yates’s memorial service); he then launched into a detailed encomium of Lie Down in Darkness. Styron responded in kind: He had not only read Yates’s novel but several short stories as well, and admired them all. And since both men liked to drink (“Dick was always lubricating his thoughts with alcohol,” said Styron), it was an auspicious meeting. “He’s a great guy,” Yates later wrote a friend, “the least pretentious celebrity I’ve ever met.” Nor would he ever find cause to change that opinion, a rare enough phenomenon in itself.
That summer he also met the poet Marianne Moore at an exhibition of Bob Parker’s work at a posh Madison Avenue gallery. Their chat was engrossing enough for Parker’s mother to feel left out; on the other hand, Moore didn’t have much use for contemporary fiction, and Yates’s interest in poetry was roughly limited to Keats, so there it was. Still, Yates’s tipsy-but-dignified poise in the great woman’s presence was such that it stuck in Parker’s mind, as did a subsequent exchange on a train. Calling Yates’s attention to a tall, bug-eyed conductor, Parker said, “If he took his hat off, he’d look just like you.” Yates was not amused. “I don’t look at all like that guy!” he exploded. Parker was startled: Such ragging was typical of the friendship, and Yates had always taken it (and returned it) in stride. But no more, apparently, and Parker wasn’t alone in noticing this. As Bob Riche remarked, “A self-effacing, insecure, self-denigrating guy suddenly saw himself as different than before. His life changed dramatically (for the worse, I think) from that point on.”
