A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  Yates had wanted to quit “gracefully,” he wrote a friend—“and just about that time the president decided to go to Dallas. And one of the millions of tiny changes brought about by that tragic business was that my job was dissolved. So I didn’t have to quit after all, and was able to leave Robert with no hard feelings.” In the wake of the assassination, at least, Yates had come to think of the attorney general as “Robert”—not the more common “Bob,” or even (as in moments of particular ambivalence) one of “the fucking Kennedys.” Whatever else Yates thought of the man, he didn’t doubt his basic decency anymore: Not only had Kennedy treated him with kindness and tact over the FBI matter, but it was hard not to have tender feelings for a man as ravaged with grief as the president’s brother.

  Yates continued to take a dim view of JFK. In the words of John Wilder in Disturbing the Peace, he considered the president “a rich boy, a glamour boy, a senator who’d never once spoken out against McCarthy even after it was safe for anyone to do so, a candidate who’d bought the primaries and rigged the convention.” In fact Yates made that exact remark, more or less, while explaining to Arthur Schlesinger Jr. why he (Yates) remained “an unregenerate Stevenson man”; and Schlesinger’s reply was essentially that of Paul Borg in the novel: “I think we have to agree that Stevenson was a Greek. Kennedy’s a Roman. We need Romans in the country now.”* But Yates didn’t buy that. To him Kennedy was a shallow opportunist, the ultimate triumph of surface over substance, and such a president should be deplored no matter what he manages to accomplish (via the efforts of others, as Yates would have it). Perhaps to mock his own unworldliness, though, Yates considered the following quote from Schlesinger as a possible epigraph to Uncertain Times: “Never look for political ideas in a literary mind.”

  * * *

  Yates’s sister Ruth had deteriorated rapidly since her decision, a few months before, to remain with her husband. That summer she’d been too drunk to attend her daughter Dodo’s high school graduation, and Fred was far from sober when he arrived (late) for the ceremony. “Everybody in town knew about the situation,” their daughter recalled. “It was a horrible experience growing up in that house, especially after Fred [Jr.] went into the service and Peter went off to school.” Dodo had never really known her mother as a sane, functioning person: By the time the girl reached puberty, Ruth had given up most of her avocations at Fred’s behest; she drank in the morning and tried to sleep it off during the day, in hope of being “fresh” when her husband returned from work. Their daughter would find bottles stashed all over the house, even around the mailbox where she waited for the school bus; one morning Ruth caught the girl trying to remove the hidden bottles and came after her with a kitchen knife. Another time Dodo found her mother in the closet trying to hang herself with knotted neckties: Fred had been out of town, and Ruth was terrified of his coming home that evening and finding her drunk again.

  “She felt like everything was drifting away from her,” said her sister-in-law Louise. Not only were the children gone most of the time, but her husband had gotten into the habit of “working overtime” and leaving town as often as possible “on business.” A few months after Ruth had called her brother for help, she turned up at Louise Rodgers’s Manhattan apartment in the middle of the night. “Your brother doesn’t love me anymore,” she was sobbing. “I have nothing to live for.” That Fred had girlfriends was hardly a mystery (“He was spoiled, from a good family, so he figured he could do what he wanted,” said his daughter); more puzzling to his children was why he wouldn’t arrange (or let anyone else arrange) some kind of long-term care for his alcoholic and now suicidal wife. When confronted, he’d say he was “handling it.”

  That winter, Ruth called her brother again and asked if she could come stay with him in Washington. This time Yates gently talked her out of it: He was working hard on his novel and needed privacy; besides, his apartment was too small, and most of the time he shared it with Wendy Sears. The truth was that he’d come to believe his sister was a hopeless case, and felt contempt for the way she’d “fucked up her life”—become the victim of a man like Fred Rodgers, whom (Yates was sure of it now) she’d never really leave. And even though Ruth’s call depressed him, he told Sears he was “glad it happened.” It brought him back to the “hard facts of life,” he said, so he could get on with putting those facts on paper and not worry about being so goddamn “literary.”

  A few weeks later Ruth was in Central Islip, the state mental hospital on Long Island. She’d crashed into a parked car, and a boat anchor in the back of her station wagon had shot forward and hit her in the back of the head. When Yates visited her at the hospital, her shaved scalp was swathed in a large turbanlike bandage; but the injury was incidental to the main diagnosis of acute alcoholism that had brought her to Central Islip. Somewhere, too, among the 122 buildings of the vast asylum was Dookie, who’d been moved there after St. Johnland became too expensive.

  Ruth would be in and out of Central Islip for what remained of her life, but she no longer discussed such matters with her brother. A few weeks after her first hospitalization she typed a letter to Yates full of chatty domestic news: Her son Peter had presented her with a secondhand Underwood portable for her birthday; Fred Jr.’s wife had just given birth to a baby girl who looked exactly like Fred Sr. (“this makes [my husband] very angry, because it makes him tend to feel like a grandfather, and he doesn’t care for the idea”); she’d been harvesting blackberries all week even though she hated blackberries (“I do this, remembering what the man said when asked why he wanted to climb Mt. Everest—‘Because it’s there’”); and finally she hadn’t visited Dookie lately because her driving was “limited to strictly local stuff, at least until I gain a little more self-confidence and grow a little more hair.” The entire letter was transcribed almost word for word in The Easter Parade, where it serves as evidence that Sarah Grimes has surrendered herself to the illusion that she is “the happiest, most contented little housewife in the world.” For the purpose of his novel, though, Yates saw fit to cut the last line of Ruth’s actual letter: “It’s quite lonely around here.”

  * * *

  The night before he left Washington for a Christmas visit with his daughters, Yates stayed up until three A.M. wrapping presents; Wendy Sears offered to come over and help, but he wanted to do it himself. He’d arranged to spend the holiday with Sharon and Monica at the Plaza Hotel. By then the girls had moved back to Mahopac, and their father was eager to compensate for what he called “that proletarian town” by giving them a taste of high life during their visits—nice restaurants, the theater, the Plaza. It was an almost wholly successful Christmas: The girls ordered butterscotch sundaes from room service and read Eloise with Yates; they romped in the hallway and wished they could live there forever. Monica recalls that the only dark moments came when she—then six—sensed her father’s almost oppressive need to please them; she wondered if he could really afford such gestures, since he usually lived in a basement.

  Yates was briefly in better spirits now that his work for the Kennedys was over. He took Wendy Sears to New York for the first time and introduced her to friends: They had dinner at the Blue Mill with Broyard, who seemed to like Sears in an unsalacious way, and spent a jolly evening with the Schulmans, who were naturally relieved to have the sodden Craige off their hands. In fact the visit went remarkably without a hitch, though Sears vowed never to pass another night in Yates’s “dark, awful, dirty” apartment at 27 Seventh Avenue South.

  Yates continued to live in Washington until early April; he claimed to like the town well enough, but it was mostly a matter of having a warm body in his bed at night. Wendy Sears, however, was almost frantically longing for freedom. She was still fond of Yates and awed by his stature as a writer, but as a constant companion he was a disaster. Even times of relative calm were nerve-racking. The air was forever charged with some dire emotion—as when Sears gave him, for his thirty-eighth birthday, a black leather album with the
gold-embossed title, The Speeches of Robert F. Kennedy, by Richard Yates. “I thought he was going to cry,” she said. “He was always so astonished when you gave him a gift, or did anything nice for him.” Then in March they took a larky drive through the Virginia countryside to visit Yates’s old friend Ed Kessler, who’d taken a job at William and Mary. As with the New York trip, the weekend was almost ominously tranquil: Kessler led them on a droll historical tour of Williamsburg, and later they attended an elegant cocktail party where they mingled with the likes of Winthrop Rockefeller.

  But Sears knew it was only a matter of time, and when the storm broke it was worse than ever. Looking back, she can’t remember why they stopped at that motel outside Washington, or why Yates started screaming and throwing things, only that it went on for a long time and was definitely the last straw. It wasn’t a question of his being menacing, or actually throwing things at her, or even taking her into account one way or the other. But the episode was terrifying all the same, not to say exhausting, and when Yates left Washington a few weeks later they agreed to part as friends. He lerved her, he said, which was a little less than love but more than like. Sears was just glad he was at a safe distance now, so she could enjoy his finer qualities via letters and phone calls.

  Granted, he was under a strain. At the end of December he’d finally decided to accept Lawrence’s arrangement of five hundred dollars a month up to three thousand—this for a novel he was by no means confident of finishing, at any rate not within six months, and meanwhile the money was just enough to cover child support and alimony with a pittance left over. Monica McCall continued to make encouraging noises about the lucrative prospects of Lie Down in Darkness, but that bubble burst (again) in January when Frankenheimer decided to let his option lapse. The following month Yates learned he was the recipient of a Brandeis University Creative Arts Award (“for recognition of promise”) in the amount of a thousand dollars, to be awarded at the Waldorf in May; Nabokov was slated for special recognition that night, and certainly Yates hoped to meet the great man,* though his own award hardly altered the fact that by the end of the summer he’d be broke. McCall tried to interest him in writing a sixty thousand–word social history of Saratoga Springs, New York, for Prentice-Hall (“There are of course a number of elements involved: money, society, health, gambling and horses, and I think that such a book could be fun to do”), but Yates was not interested. Finally by mid-February his outlook was bleak enough for him to accept, at long last, a teaching position at the Iowa Workshop beginning that fall. Cassill was pleased to gain another ally, and replied with the cheerful news that Yates would be getting eight—rather than the aforesaid seven—thousand dollars a year; he was advised to buy a car, however.

  Money was one thing, but Yates’s erratic behavior was mostly fueled by despair over his work. More than three years earlier he’d conceived his novel, all too ambitiously, as a bildungsroman to rival Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; but on bad days he saw the thing as little more than so much pointless confession, and wondered whether he should simply cut his losses and write something else. On what appeared to be a relatively good day in mid-March he wrote his friend Miller Williams,

  I’m working like a bastard on this second novel, which is at the stage now when I sometimes think the only respectable thing to do is burn it, but on betters days I continue to hold pretty grandiose hopes for the damn thing. It’s a tough one, about five times more “autobiographical” than Revolutionary Road, with all the possibilities for Naked Embarrassment implied in that statement. But if I can bring it off it might be good.

  Such occasional confidence was mostly due to the novel’s excellent self-contained prologue, in which Prentice visits his deluded mother in New York while on leave from the army. That part of the book was finished, was “formed” as Yates put it, but the problem he couldn’t solve was how to relate it to the rest of the novel—that is, how to find some plausible connection between Prentice’s war experiences and his disenchantment with (and subsequent liberation from) his mother. Was any such connection really valid? And wasn’t the whole point of the prologue to suggest that Prentice is already disenchanted with his mother, even before he goes overseas?

  So Yates brooded. And while there were days when he worked “like a bastard,” there were others he spent writing letters to Wendy Sears, or making lists, or “doing research” and drinking. He asked Sears to find books about the Seventy-fifth Infantry Division, the Ninth Army, and wondered what she thought of such prospective titles as Rite of Passage, Prentice, and The Straggler (one of the many rejected titles for Revolutionary Road). Sears was nothing if not obliging: She visited the Library of Congress on his behalf, and tended to prefer whatever title was presently on his mind.

  A representative artifact of this period is a curious group of poems Yates wrote amid the inertia of evading his novel. The title pretty much says it all: “QWERTYUIOP: Six Efforts To Achieve Coherence While Using Only the Second Row of Keys on the Standard Typewriter.” The novelty of such an exercise suggests a writer with far too much time on his hands. Fittingly the theme of all six “efforts” is literary failure. A few samples:

  A CONFESSION OF FULBRIGHTS

  We were poor, we were witty,

  Our poetry tip-top, our Europe pretty.

  We quit our torpor, quit our rue—

  Yet O!—we quit our typewriter, too.

  A RELIGIOUS-CONVERT WRITER’S LAMENT

  O Piety, Piety, prior to you

  I wrote poor yet I wrote true.

  I wrote out worry, wrote up riot.

  O Piety, Piety, Piety—Quiet!

  A LOVE SONG

  Pet, I owe you poetry.

  I write to you; yet, eye-to-eye,

  You pout, you weep, require rye.

  O Pet, I owe you poetry.

  Yates recited his verse during a boozy night with Styron in Martha’s Vineyard, and the latter was so impressed that he wanted to see about getting it published in the New York Review of Books. Alas, Styron misplaced the one rumpled page Yates mailed him that summer, which naturally turned out to be the only copy of the manuscript. Eventually Yates got around to rewriting the poems from memory, and they appeared in Esquire two and a half years later. Twice as many years would pass before Yates’s second novel was published.

  * * *

  At Sam Lawrence’s suggestion, Yates arranged to spend the summer at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire, where in theory he would finish his novel in a placid yet stimulating environment—as Lawrence described it, “you work all day and carouse from 5 to 6 p.m. on: writers, painters, sculptors, composers.” Monica McCall had another client who lived in the area, the writer Richard Frede, and Yates stopped at the man’s house for a dinner party en route. “Yates was pleasant enough,” Frede remembered, “but still it was a rather fearful experience: He seemed to be drinking compulsively, hurting himself with drink. One after another.”

  At the colony Yates was given a secluded cabin with a desk, bed, and fireplace, where at first he was able to settle down to work; the only interruption before cocktail hour was a pickup truck that delivered box lunches between 11:30 and noon, with one’s letters tucked next to the sandwiches. Wendy Sears wrote almost every other day, and Yates also got some rather nostalgic gossip from Sheila and the Schulmans: The first reported that her brother Charlie was now working at Reader’s Digest (something to do with computers) as part of a program prescribed by his doctors to help him “get along with people,” while Grace mentioned that Barbara Beury had been in touch asking if she still had a chance at that Glamour job (“I’ll put in a dime if you like,” Grace added wryly. “Clinkety, clinkety clink. The last one was Jerry”). Such news of his previous lives in Washington, New York, and beyond was calmly received at a distance, and during the first week Yates managed to write fiction at the astounding rate of three to five pages a day.

  It didn’t last. As he became better acquainted with his fellow colonists
, the nights grew longer and more bibulous, and soon he was entangled in a distracting affair with a “rich, waspy” painter manquée named Victoria. He continued to write a fair amount, but there were days of crapulent depression when he wondered why he bothered. At the beginning of August he called Wendy Sears and told her he’d finished the last chapter, though he didn’t seem pleased about it, and a few days later he vented his frustration in a letter to the Schulmans:

  The damn place [MacDowell] is a little too Bread-Loafy for comfort—by which I mean that too many evenings get wasted having Brilliant Conversations with the Nicest and Best People you’ve Ever Met, and then waking up with a terrible hangover and going to the damn typewriter as if it were an instrument of torture. Sometimes I get good working days in and hardly drink at all; other times everything goes to hell. Worst feature now is that I’m horribly aware of the time slipping away, and feel a compulsion to finish the effing book by September First whether it’s any good or not—and this, of course, is not exactly a healthy attitude.

  One good thing: there’s a guy here with a collection of old-timey phonograph records, and I’ve mastered both lyrics and tune of an absolutely great Al Jolson item called “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?”—I promise to sing it for you loud and clear the minute I’m back in town.

  By then his friend Victoria had left MacDowell to go abroad, and Yates was all the more free to write or drink or sing or sit in his cabin and brood. When Edmund Wilson visited the colony for a weekend in mid-August, the languishing Yates declined an invitation to deliver the salutatory remarks; Wendy Sears called to ask him about it, but Yates was too drunk to give a coherent account—“Oh well,” he managed to sigh. The next day Sears wrote him a scolding letter: “Brendan Behan drank because when he did, he knew he couldn’t write and this was his excuse.”