by Blake Bailey
Perhaps Yates thought, at some level, that it was easy for her to say: She’d grown up in a beautiful old house as a Fall River Bowen; she had a masters from Brown. And yet, for all that, she was hardly the sort you took home to meet your mother, even if your mother happened to be Dookie. Barbara Beury was a different matter. At twenty she was still a “nice girl” who’d never dream of sleeping with a man she just met, or sleeping with a man who wasn’t her husband, period; moreover she was the great-granddaughter of Col. Joseph Beury, a Charleston coal baron, and Bowen or no Bowen, Beury remained the woman Yates wanted to marry. Dookie liked her, too. As Yates wrote Beury in May, “Forgot to tell you that my mother spent approximately forty-nine hours telling me how Lovely and Nice and Intelligent you are—‘just the sort of girl you can’t help liking right away’ etc. etc. etc. and hopes to see you again. I was terribly pleased, like any other gangling slob who hopes his Mom will like his Girl.”
Beury had planned—or rather Yates had planned on her behalf—to move to New York after graduation and perhaps work at Glamour, where Grace Schulman was trying to arrange a job for her. But Buery was having second thoughts. “I guess I was a bit of a bastard on the phone yesterday,” Yates had written her in February, and two months later he was “sorry … about all the drunken, shouting, self-pitying phone calls,” and by May she was hanging up on him (“poutily,” Yates thought). But the succès d’estime of Revolutionary Road kept her interest kindled, and around this time she invited Yates back to Sweet Briar in order to address her creative-writing class. He was a hit—“charming, witty, impressive”—and Beury was reminded of how glamorous it might be to have a handsome, somewhat famous writer for a boyfriend and maybe even a husband. Afterward they went to her professor’s house for a drink, and all went well until the latter ventured to suggest that the one thing that “hadn’t quite come off” in Revolutionary Road was Yates’s use of a “Faulknerian stream-of-consciousness.” Yates hated Faulkner. “Dick got furious—cursing, screaming, spilt drink, etcetera,” Beury recalled. “What the hell do you know?” he shouted. “You’re just some little college writing teacher!” The man’s wife was about to call the police, when Beury at last managed to lead her date away. A few days later Beury’s professor took her aside: “Look, it’s none of my business,” he said, “but if I were you I’d stay away from that man. He’s unstable.”
Yates wanted to be treated as a proper suitor, and that meant meeting Beury’s parents. Since it seemed unlikely that her coal-executive father would make invidious comparisons to Faulkner, Beury was willing to look into it, but the man wasn’t interested. Yates was too old, he said, and a writer to boot, the last an anathema that required no inkling of his other vagaries; besides, a nice local boy named George, a friend of the family no less, had given Beury an engagement ring over Thanksgiving. But the girl balked: George was dull, and whatever else Yates was, he was rarely that. Clinging to a hope that her life would prove a romantic affair, Beury tried to arrange a meeting between Yates and a great-aunt in Jamestown, New York, hoping that the matriarch might pave the way. At first the woman agreed to see him, but called it off after she’d spoken to Beury’s father.
Sometimes fathers really do know best. Early that summer Beury was coaxed back to New York, where Yates acted like such a tiresome drunk that even the Schulmans wanted to get rid of him. He kept maundering about how—if Beury really cared for him—she’d take that job at Glamour so they could be married; then he’d turn bitter and accuse her of “chickening out.” The letter he wrote afterward reflected an awareness that he’d probably blown it for good this time, though he tried to be graceful about it: “Even if you end up marrying George and organizing the bridge club (with washable plastic cards) you’ll never be an ‘a’ to me.” An “a” as opposed to a “the,” he meant, a hausfrau as opposed to a personage—this a rather shrewd washable card for Yates to play, the better to remind Beury of why she’d liked him in the first place. “My old silver-haired mother keeps asking after you,” he added forlornly.
* * *
That summer Yates visited Cape Cod with Natalie Bowen and the Schulmans. Bob Riche had taken a cottage in Provincetown, and Yates agreed to deliver an old Volkswagen that a friend was loaning Riche for the summer. It was one of the last times the two friends would meet. When Yates had finished Revolutionary Road—thereby reducing Frank Wheeler to his bare essence, a “lifeless man” whose favorite subject is “my analyst this; my analyst that”—his contempt for Riche seemed to crystallize. He inscribed his friend’s copy of the novel with a curt “For old times’ sake,” and told the Schulmans that Riche, like the character he’d partly inspired, was a professional analysand who only pretended to be a writer, but would never be more than a PR hack.
It wasn’t a very jolly trip. They started late and got lost, and when the dour Yates snapped a cigarette out the window they were pulled over by the police. That was perhaps the high point: Yates overheard a policeman refer to them as a “band of youths,” and took to repeating the phrase whenever he needed a laugh. The phrase was much repeated. Soon it became clear that they wouldn’t get to Provincetown by nightfall, and Bowen suggested they stop at her parents’ house in Fall River. It was an impressive place—to Yates and the Schulmans it represented the “solidity and stability” the three had never quite known in their own lives—but it soon became clear that in this case a comely edifice was misleading. Bowen’s father was a surly alcoholic, her mother “a sweet and ineffectual Billie Burke person” (as Bowen put it), and both parents were openly resentful toward their daughter for neglecting them. Grudgingly the older couple made up rooms for their unexpected guests. “Well, nobody in this family seems to be speaking to each other,” Yates said, “but at least we can go to our separate bedrooms and stay there.” Each bedroom had its own bathroom.
The visit with Riche lacked even that consolation. “This looks like a slave shack compared to the place we stayed last night,” Grace Schulman observed on arrival. Her opinion of Riche was largely informed by Yates’s critique, and the two treated their host as though he were the subject of a semiprivate and only mildly amusing joke. Riche tried to be affable but got little encouragement, though Bowen seemed to know what was going on and sympathized. Riche himself was more bewildered than anything: He had a general idea why Yates looked down on him (“I was this asshole writer who wasn’t going anywhere”), but never quite understood what seemed to him such a sudden, categorical rejection.*
It was probably a relief for Yates to get back to New York, where he now knew any number of famous writers. As ever, the more he admired a person’s work, the more he was apt to find that person congenial as a human being. He’d recently read The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne on the recommendation of Sam Lawrence, the book’s American publisher, and eagerly approached its author at a subsequent party: “This confident, good-looking young man came up to me and told me how much he had liked my first novel,” Brian Moore remembered. “I was pleased and gratified. I thanked him. He then said: ‘Do you ever worry about having written a second novel which mightn’t be as good as the first?’” For a moment Moore thought he was being mocked, but Yates’s earnest, worried face convinced him otherwise.
The Irish-Canadian Moore had a lot in common with Yates: Both were realistic writers whose characters tended to be lonely, self-deluding failures, and Moore, too, was a witty, voluble man who often became dour and withdrawn. For a while Yates was something of a tipsy fixture at Moore’s apartment in the East Seventies, along with the Australian writer Franklin Russell (with whom Moore would eventually exchange wives), who regarded Yates as a “soulmate drinker”: “Dick had a steely dedication to destroying himself,” said Russell admiringly. “He realized that if you’re gonna drink, it’s gotta be serious.” In fact Yates was rather more serious than either man in that respect, and often needed assistance getting home at night. Once Moore asked a young woman to see him off, and Yates became galvanized with indignation: “Outrageou
s!” he shouted. “A girl take me home? I’ll take her home!” “Are you sure you’re competent?” Moore inquired. “Of course I’m ‘competent,’” snapped Yates, spinning around and walking full speed into a wall. Another night the men staggered back from a party, and Yates insisted on trudging through the gutter; when he came to cars he’d climb ponderously over the back, jump onto the hood, and proceed as before. “After watching this episode,” Moore remarked, “I realize I’m just a country boy.”
Yates liked few things better than being admired by writers he admired, but in one case he suspected ulterior motives. He thought it ominous when he got a person-to-person call from “Beverly” (“Beverly who?” “Beverly Hills calling, sir”) and it turned out to be Tennessee Williams, who wondered if his favorite new writer would like to meet for dinner in New York. Yates felt certain that his “effeminate” jacket photo had something to do with this, but how could he say no to Tennessee Williams? They met at the Forty-seventh Street YMCA, where Williams liked to swim; Yates stood in the lobby when suddenly the playwright appeared, dressed for dinner and still wearing a bathing cap. “How did it go?” Natalie Bowen asked when Yates returned late that night. “We talked books and drank,” he reported. “I wasn’t his cup of tea.” Still, Yates remained convinced that a fair percentage of the reading public regarded him as “queer,” and later insisted that Grace Schulman make him look “ballsy” when she photographed him for the jacket of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.
By the summer of 1961, however, such a book had yet to materialize. Sam Lawrence was eager to consolidate Yates’s reputation with a story collection, but Yates made him wait while he slowly progressed with his eleventh study of loneliness, “Builders.” It was his first sustained fiction in almost a year, and his first short story since the abortive “End of the Great Depression.” Work on his war novel had come to a dead end, and at one point he became so desperate that he blamed it on his table: “It’s too high,” he told Grace Schulman. “I need to get over my writing.…” So he sawed the legs down, to no avail. He wondered if perhaps it was the material itself that was the problem: He’d never been wholly satisfied with previous attempts at explicit autobiography, which seemed to go against the grain of his favorite Flaubertian principal—“The writer’s relation to his work must be like that of God to the Universe: omnipresent and invisible”; and then, too, there was the uneasy sense of exposure inherent in writing (much less publishing) confessional fiction, all the more so while his mother was still alive. “Builders,” then, began as an “experimental warm-up” to see if he could make “decent fiction” out of a “direct autobiographical blow-out,” and he was tentatively pleased with the result. Indeed, he was sure enough of its basic soundness to be undaunted when Rust Hills rejected an early draft as a “formula story” (“[about] a ‘colorful’ character encountered by a writer”); Yates went back to work, and told Lawrence that his new book would have to wait a bit longer until he brought “Builders” to its final, perfected form.
Money, as usual, was a problem. Yates halfheartedly cast about for work while hoping that Hollywood’s interest in his novel would soon amount to more than occasional teasing. The director John Frankenheimer, who would soon begin work on The Manchurian Candidate and was considered the industry’s foremost wunderkind, had been trying to get financing for Revolutionary Road without success. Yates thought any number of big-name actors would be thrilled to play Frank Wheeler—if they could only be persuaded to read the book—in which case the financing would follow. He particularly wanted Jack Lemmon for the part, and one day he spotted the man in a coffee shop. But the moment passed: Yates didn’t have a copy of his novel handy, and was loath to seem just another hustling fan. “But I knew he’d buy it!” he told the Schulmans. “I came so close!” By midsummer he was so broke he accepted a book-reviewing assignment from the Saturday Review—Jerome Weidman’s My Father Sits in the Dark and Other Selected Stories. “Jerome Weidman writes three kinds of short stories,” Yates wrote: “little sharp ones that are sometimes good, nostalgic ones that are often corny, and long flabby ones that are nearly always very bad. The trouble with My Father Sits in the Dark is that the good ones are badly outnumbered.”
Yates’s poverty was enough to make him long for the fall, when at least he’d have some income from teaching—but such anticipation was rueful at best. Reading students’ work was a hateful distraction, and once his double duty at Columbia began he’d have more of it than ever. The previous spring he’d taught a second, nonfiction class at the New School, for which he’d written a course description that read like the jeremiad of a man bracing himself for the worst: “No culture has placed greater stress on the value of ‘communication’ than ours, and none has produced greater quantities of inept and muddled writing.” Yates therefore solicited the “literate non-professional” interested in everything from “the personal essay to the business report,” and promised to emphasize “lucid phrasing” and “[how to avoid] dullness.” As it happened, mere dullness would have been a blessing. As he’d written Beury in late April:
Had a dreary class tonight after which an enormous fifty-year-old matron who can neither spell, punctuate nor write coherent English cornered me to demand, frankly, whether I thought she Had Talent. Tried to evade the question for twenty minutes and ended up saying sure. Depressing experience.… [I’ve] pretty well decided that teaching does sap the old creative energy after all. Why do so many sad clowns want to be writers? It’s hard, no fun, scrambles your brains and leaves you unfit for practically all other kinds of human activity. Apart from which there’s no dough in it except for Leon Uris and Allen Drury.
And sometimes, in a small way, for Richard Yates. That summer Rust Hills offered him “a considerable amount of dough” to serve as editor of an anthology featuring winners of a fiction contest for unpublished writers sponsored by Esquire and Bantam Books. All Yates had to do was read some five thousand stories (with an assistant) and select fifteen or so winners—this in addition to whatever his students at Columbia and the New School saw fit to produce. And meanwhile, too, he was still ghosting the odd speech for an agency in Princeton.
* * *
At seventy Dookie seemed tough and talkative as ever, despite a long half century of drinking, smoking, and fiscal emergency. For eight years she’d divided her time between Manhattan and St. James, where she rested each weekend amid her considerable efforts to keep the City Center art gallery afloat. The long commute was brutal in the summer and the hot little garage apartment at High Hedges was hardly an oasis, such that one might have wondered why she bothered to make the trip at all. The fact was, for all her illustrious contacts in the art world, the old woman was socially alone in the city except for an incompatible sister and a beloved son whom she rarely saw. High Hedges couldn’t have been much better—her relationship with Ruth was an uneasy truce, Fred hardly spoke to her, and all but one of her grandchildren had grown up and moved out—but her belongings were there, her sculpture, and anyway it was a change.
Yates later told friends that his mother’s cerebral hemorrhage (and much of its aftermath) happened exactly the way he described it in The Easter Parade, though the only surviving witness—Ruth’s daughter and namesake—remembers a few details differently. Unlike the far more dissolute Pookie Grimes, Yates’s mother was fully clothed when her fifteen-year-old granddaughter found her comatose in the garage apartment, nor was there any sign of emptied bowels or bottles of whiskey (“Bellows Partners’ Choice”) strewn about the place. The rest happened pretty much as written: Dookie had failed to emerge after a few swelt-ering days in mid-July, and Yates’s sister had sent little Ruth to investigate.
Yates took it hard. He was with the Schulmans when he got the news that his mother had suffered an “insult to the brain” (Yates was appalled by the term) and that her chance of survival was less than 50 percent. Over the four or five months he’d known the Schulmans he’d always spoken kindly of his mother, and from the depths of h
is remorse he did so then: She was an elegant, talented woman who’d married beneath her, he said; an artist reduced at one point to sculpting mannequins. He wished he’d taken better care of her, and now she was likely to die or go on living as a vegetable. “I heard she was crazy before the stroke,” said Natalie Bowen, after Yates caught a train for Long Island.
Dookie had revived somewhat when Yates got to the hospital, but she didn’t seem to recognize him or anybody else, and was unable to speak more than a few random words. The doctors said that she could die within days or go on living for years, with or without some significant degree of brain damage. “[They] are talking in terms of ‘wait and see’ for weeks or months to come—it’s amazing how little they really know about things like this,” Yates wrote Barbara Beury:
Meanwhile I’ve been living with my sister and her family out here in Ass Hole, Long Island, and my time has been wholly given over to the round of hospital visits, conversational banality, drunken slobberings, quarrels and all the other Thomas Wolfean goodies that accompany emergencies like this. My sister is in a constant state of near-hysteria, which doesn’t help things much, and she and I have hardly anything in common, which makes it even less jolly. Worst week I’ve had in years, buddy.
But such was Yates’s guilty desire to be a dutiful son that he was prepared to spend most of the summer, if necessary, amid the stormy boredom of High Hedges (or at least until Dookie’s condition was established one way or the other). Lonely and miserable, he called Sheila, one of the few people who could somewhat fathom his conflicted feelings: He wanted to do something about his mother, he said, but felt helpless.
