A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  They’d originally planned to rent a flat in London, though Yates may have figured the nostalgia would soon turn sour. Whatever the case, they passed only a few “idle, boozy” days there: Yates visited his old neighborhood in South Kensington, and possibly became as moody as his character Jack Flanders when he encountered his old flat at Two Neville Terrace, or when the bartender at the Anglesea failed to recognize him. Maybe not, though: Martha doesn’t recall any such tiresomeness at that stage of the trip, and in fact Yates received some very heartening news there: His agent in London, Monica McCall reported, was “very high on [his] book.”

  He was in excellent fettle by the time they got to Ireland, where they rented a car and drove around the countryside for two weeks. Yates loved everything about the place—especially the people, who shared his fondness for drinking, singing, and talking (unpretentiously) about literature. Yates made friends at every pub; they valued him as a writer, and laughed when he’d mention, for instance, that his favorite lines of poetry were “Fly/ing too high/with some guy/in the sky…” The only drawback was Yates’s driving—as ever, he refused to let a woman take the wheel, while he himself drove “like he’d never quite caught on”—which made their progress “maddeningly slow” as the white-knuckled Yates negotiated narrow winding lanes. Still, Martha considered Ireland the happiest time of the marriage.

  They should have stayed in Ireland. The reasons Yates hadn’t liked Paris almost twenty years earlier still applied: His French was a joke and the Parisians treated it as such, and all he wanted in the way of haute cuisine was a good steak. Also, though Martha herself spoke a little French—ergo a little more than her husband—Yates wouldn’t let her order in restaurants, while he invariably became flustered when a “snooty” waiter seemed amused by his accent, to say nothing of his philistine tastes. Soon—quite like his own Jack Flanders—Yates was “trudg[ing] along with a look of petulant bewilderment in his eyes … the picture of a bumbling American tourist.”

  But amid such dreariness he’d at least looked forward to dinner with his French publisher, Jean Rosenthal, a charming man who’d personally translated Yates’s first two books to impressive acclaim. The evening promised to redeem the whole Paris debacle: Rosenthal and his wife took their guests to an excellent restaurant, and far from snickering at Yates’s preference for bifteck saignant (while Martha tried snails for the first time), Rosenthal lauded the author as one of the great hopes of American literature and so forth. Alas, all this was by way of sweetening the pill, and once the plates were cleared the Frenchman got down to business: He regretted to report that Éditions Robert Laffont had decided not to publish Yates’s second novel. Rosenthal had found the book very “moving and sensitive,” and if it had been written by a French author they wouldn’t have hesitated to publish; however.… “Dick was like a deflating balloon,” Martha recalled. When Rosenthal noticed the effect his words were having, he hastily dropped the matter and cast about for happier themes. But the damage was done, and Yates proceeded to get drunker than his wife had ever seen him. Later Rosenthal wrote a letter expanding tactfully on the points he’d deferred over dinner. He discussed the commercial risk of foreign novels—translation costs, sparse reviews, the high retail price of a longish book such as Yates’s—none of which would have mattered, of course, were it not for the following: “I do like the book and I think that the portrait of Alice is excellent and of a vivid accuracy. But as I had begun to tell you in Paris, the war part—interesting as it may be—has not the same stamp of deep originality. To put it bluntly, it is in the same vein as many war novels and it is a long section of the book.”

  That was pretty blunt, all right, and for the rest of the vacation Yates was decidedly poor company. Rosenthal, a man whose judgment he trusted, had told him almost exactly what he’d feared all along: He’d be a laughingstock once the novel was published, and everyone would say Revolutionary Road had been a fluke.

  Martha tried to cheer him up, but it was no good. “He was a mess. Very depressed: not just flat, but very very sad. Everything was pointless, ridiculous.” While in Cannes—where Yates had written his first publishable fiction as a sickly yet still hopeful young man—the enraptured Martha ventured to remark on the beauty of the prospect: the moonless Mediterranean, the glittering lights of town, the marvelous blackness of the sky. “Don’t give me that poetic bullshit about a black sky!” Yates exploded.

  They also went to Rome, Lisbon, and finally Madrid, where all the gifts Martha had bought for her family were stolen out of the rental car. Yates told her to buy more, and kept drinking. The only time he laughed, and then bitterly, was when she worried about how much money they were spending.

  * * *

  Shortly after their return to Iowa in August, Yates received the rather anticlimactic news that his mother had died. Martha and Monica were on hand when he got the phone call from Central Islip, and both remember his matter-of-fact tone as he agreed to the various funeral arrangements.* But afterward he seemed pensive and remote—“perhaps fretful over the fact that he didn’t feel worse about it,” said Monica. He also might have been somewhat bemused by the way his mother’s death had coincided with the publication (two months later) of a book that would have destroyed her if she had been alive and lucid. His “fair Texan” Carole had once observed that he couldn’t finish the novel “because it is much harder to kill a mother than it is to kill a wife,” and she remarked on how “scared” Yates had looked when she said as much (though it’s possible she misconstrued an exasperated silence on Yates’s part).

  A far greater concern at the time was his daughter Sharon, who’d flunked out of Bennington after the spring term. In recent years her adolescent rebellion had taken increasingly disturbing forms: In Mahopac she fought constantly with her mother, and broke curfew to attend forbidden parties at the old Babaril estate; she drank, smoked pot, and was rightly suspected of worse. Sheila accused her of becoming unstable “just like [her] father,” which tended to provoke Sharon into a shrill defense of the man as one of the most feeling people she knew. But when Yates himself expressed pique over her “irresponsible, aimless” life, she’d accuse him of trying to “control” her and make her a “carbon copy” of him. Finally, having finished high school a semester early, she ran away from home and joined some “cool creeps” (as Yates called them) in Andes, New York, where they proposed to start a ski lodge but mostly sat around getting stoned and sleeping.

  Yates was somewhat mollified when Sharon started college in spring 1968, though he’d hoped for the corrective gentility of a proper “Eastern women’s college” rather than an “arty-farty,” dubiously coed place like Bennington. When Yates heard she had a boyfriend of sorts, he was disgusted: “What kind of guy goes to Bennington?” he remarked to a friend. “And then hangs around! And he’s with my daughter!” Before long an effete boyfriend would be the least of his worries. For her winter work-study interval, Sharon packed off to yet another hippie “ski resort” in Manchester: “With time on my hands,” she wrote her father, “in the hills of Vermont, I’ll be able to work on learning to sit and concentrate on one thing”—a habit she’d admittedly failed to cultivate at Bennington. “My whole generation is running,” she noted in closing, “just as hard as I was, and we all help each other.” At the very least Yates must have rolled his eyes at that particular envoi, and meanwhile his disdain for hippies would have certainly been aroused by the scene in Manchester, which was rather like the scene in Andes the year before.

  The bewildered girl bottomed out that summer in Boston, where she’d washed up with one of her classmates. The latter’s boyfriend was a chemistry major from Brandeis who supported himself by making and selling LSD, and Sharon spent much of the summer in a psychedelic haze. It was tolerable as long as she had companions, but in the fall her roommate went back to Bennington and suddenly she found herself stoned among relative strangers, and living in a “horrible flop.” Around this time she was “rescued” by her father—
an incident he reluctantly saw fit to fictionalize in Young Hearts Crying, though Sharon claims she wasn’t as luridly strung out as Laura Davenport. “Dad called one morning after a party, and I was a little fuzzy,” she remembered. “He got all worked up: ‘My God, what are you taking? I’m gonna come out and get you!’ I decided maybe it wasn’t such a bad idea.” As good as his word, Yates caught the first plane to Boston and brought his daughter back to Iowa with him.

  For the rest of that year she lived in the stone cottage with Yates and Martha. At first she remained a bit slow on the uptake, and her father arranged for her to see a psychiatrist; the man diagnosed her as having suffered a drug-induced psychotic episode and prescribed Thorazine, which she soon stopped taking. “I was depressed and found it hard to concentrate,” she said, “but not really psychotic—I felt overwhelmed by reality, not out of touch with it.” Meanwhile her father’s attitude seemed rather inscrutable at times: On the one hand he was glad to have her home and eager to do what he could to help, but often he seemed very irritable about things. Her depressive moping grated on his nerves, and when she confided details of her life in Bennington and Boston, he’d sometimes respond with neutral interest and sometimes with rage. “How could you do something so stupid!” he erupted—understandably—when she mentioned how she’d once spent her entire semester’s allowance on wholesale hash, most of which she’d smoked herself rather than selling at a profit as intended. What seemed odd, though, was that Yates’s responses one way or the other were hard to predict, no matter what was being discussed. “He was never really well even when he was well,” said Sharon, who around this time gained particular insight into her father’s condition. “Just in general he’d often say irrational, irrelevant things.” She once mentioned a roommate who had a black boyfriend, and Yates said the girl was just trying to spite her parents; when Sharon calmly tried to explain (“No, they went to high school together and he’s really a nice guy” etc.), her father snapped “Why else would she do that? Girls like Negroes because they have big penises!” At his best, Yates was incapable of such a benighted remark—but there it was. “I’d blink at him and get quiet,” said Sharon, “and he’d go off and have a drink. He didn’t seem aware of his own strange behavior, though if I got tearful he’d apologize.”

  Martha made the situation not only bearable but “pretty jolly.” The better to leave Yates alone during his grouchy working hours, the women enrolled in a typing course and kept each other company. Each acted as a kind of calming buffer between the other and Yates, and there was no friction whatsoever between themselves. (“Will you guys stop fighting already?” Yates wryly remarked, when the two had a laughing disagreement over how to cook mushrooms.) Still, Yates was eager for his daughter to go back to college, and she was only too happy to oblige, as she missed the company of people her own age. Martha advised her to look at small liberal arts colleges—less conservative than Carleton, if a bit more so than Bennington—but Sharon disliked the hassle of ordering catalogs and writing application essays. One day she stopped at the Iowa admissions office and filled out an application (no essays), and was promptly accepted for the following semester. In January she moved to a dormitory.

  * * *

  Publication was always an unnerving experience for Yates, particularly so in the case of A Special Providence: He remained convinced that the book was an inferior performance, that after the eight-year wait reviewers were bound to be disappointed. What made matters worse (throughout his career) was the baldly autobiographical nature of the work: Though in time Yates would grow convinced that such material—if properly crafted—was not only valid but rather crucial, he never got used to the humiliation of exposing himself in public, of “dropping [his] pants in Macy’s window” as he put it.

  His terrible fragility was well known to friends, who did their best to reassure him. “I imagine you are now going through the traditional big sweat in anticipation of the publication of a new book,” wrote Vonnegut, “and I’ll guess that it is tougher for you than it is for most people.… Because you’re you. For you, things are tougher.” Vonnegut urged his friend to keep it all in perspective: “Every good writer I know acknowledges you as a master.… So—carry on. But you’ve already won.” When the book was published in October, though, such personal admiration did little to lessen Yates’s gloom over poor sales and scant reviews. “It is a beautiful book,” wrote Joan Didion, and Styron sent a congratulatory telegram: HOPE YOU SAW EXCELLENT REVIEW CURRENT HARPERS FINE STUFF I FIND CRITIC AND ALL TRUE. Yates may have been relieved to know he still enjoyed Styron’s good opinion, and the Harper’s review was indeed fine (“Yates presents with no sentimentality a story that is all but heartbreaking”), but he couldn’t help dwelling on the fact that, say, the daily New York Times had ignored the book entirely. And still his friends assured him that, far from disgracing himself, he’d written a very good novel—certainly better than what he’d led them to expect. “I remember how many times you called your book … a piece of shit,” wrote Dubus. “So I expected [it] to be a piece of shit, barely and finally released from the anguished bowels of a weeping man.… Not so. I find it a wonderful fucking novel.” But in the meantime Bantam had passed on the paperback rights, and such slights meant to Yates that the novel was no damn good, period. By the end of November he was so despondent that Martha called Robin Metz (and presumably others), begging him to hurry up and finish the book so he could praise it, persuasively, to Yates. This Metz did, addressing what he knew to be the particular concerns of the author: “What do Alice Prentice’s dreams and delusions mean unless we see them juxtaposed against the mud and slop, the weariness of marching?” In short the book held together after all, and wasn’t the mishmash Yates suspected it was.

  Because the novel wasn’t widely reviewed, Yates assumed that “a lot of people didn’t think much of it,” which may or may not have been so; nevertheless, the actual reception was by no means the disaster he’d anticipated. There were no outright pans among the major reviews, all of which acknowledged Yates’s skill. Joyce Carol Oates in The Nation noted the novel’s similarity to the “disturbing and prophetic” Revolutionary Road, insofar as both explore “various contemporary delu-sions” such as the common tendency among Americans not to accept “[their] own mediocrity”: “A sad, gray, deathly world,” Oates concluded, “—dreams without substance—aging without maturity: This is Yates’s world, and it is a disturbing one.” John Thompson’s review in Harper’s (the one that caught Styron’s eye) was an almost unequivo-cal rave: He called the novel “straightforward, intelligent, and clearly written,” and referred to the “bad luck” of Alice Prentice as being “so quotidian, so possible, so plausible, that it is more terrifying to read of it than to read of the disasters and massacres of kings.”

  Yates’s pessimism was somewhat vindicated by Elizabeth Dalton’s belated notice in the December 14 New York Times Book Review: “[A Special Providence] is in some essential ways an honest and intelligent novel,” she began, “and yet it fails, finally, to be a moving or exciting one.” Dalton thought the war sections the strongest of the book, though “the effect of [Prentice’s] mediocrity is to deprive his conflict of urgency and significance.” As for Alice, she is “simply too thin and pathetic a character to support much attention.” Even Yates’s “clarity and precision of detail” was viewed as a lapse of sorts, since “so heavy an air of patient skill hangs over much of the writing that the book seems almost embalmed in good craftsmanship.” And finally one can almost picture Yates nodding his head in masochistic agreement with Dalton’s coup de grace—to wit, that the childhood section “seems remote” to the rest of the narrative, “and its placement in the middle, between the two halves of Robert’s war adventures, gives the novel a queer, broken-backed structure.”

  Revealingly—though hardly for the first time—Yates’s craftsmanship was held against him, damned as both excessive and lacking, at a time when a fastidious concern for “structure” and “sty
le” was viewed with suspicion or outright indifference. Somewhere in the subtext of Dalton’s review was perhaps a thought shared by other critics who were too bored by Yates’s latest to bother reviewing it: Namely, if the man insisted on writing a traditional realistic novel—a war novel for that matter, a coming-of-age novel—then it had better have a sound narrative structure, but really, why write such a book in the first place? Hadn’t anyone told Yates that “the true enemies of the novel [are] plot, character, setting, and theme” (as postmodernist John Hawkes had summed it up)? That the so-called New Journalists had usurped the conventions of fiction in order to dramatize a reality that seemed to baffle the imagination, while novelists were left to challenge the very nature of “reality” itself (and hence the authorities behind it) with wacky surrealistic satire and/or formal experiment?

  Yates knew all about it, of course, though perhaps even he was startled by how far things had gone. Fred Chappell, in his 1971 essay on Revolutionary Road, noted the “inglorious” literary fads that had helped consign Yates’s reputation to near-oblivion in the space of ten years, and quoted the poet Randall Jarrell to good effect: “It is hard to write even a competent naturalistic story, and when you have written it what happens?—someone calls it a competent naturalistic story.” With A Special Providence Yates had again written such a story, and to detractors he’d chosen an even more hackneyed subject than the suburbs—that is, World War II, about which any number of sensitive young men had been writing for almost a quarter century. Such a novel should at least possess the stylistic verve or the relevance of a Slaughterhouse Five or a Catch-22, whose “black humor” pointed up the absurdity of war at any time or place, and whose “real” subject was of course the contemporary war in Vietnam.