A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  Those who wish Yates ill (for whatever reason) are mostly constrained to a single line of attack where The Easter Parade is concerned: that it’s too perfect, too pat, that its merciless craftsmanship works like a kind of infernal machine to grind its characters down. “Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life,” the narrator announces at the outset, “and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parents’ divorce.” Immediately the reader is swept up in the current of the story—before one can balk at the dark warning of that opening sentence—and just over two hundred pages and fifty nightmarish years later one suddenly arrives full circle at the ironic counterpoint of that final line: “Would you like to come on in and meet the family?” Ah, the family.

  If one likes uplift—believes in the family, believes that people tend to learn from their mistakes and so forth—then clearly The Easter Parade will be a bitter read. But a feat of empty craftsmanship it is not. Life goes wrong for the Grimes sisters not because of some implausible contrivance on the part of a sinister narrator, but rather because “they can’t help being the people they are”—Yates’s explicit vision of tragedy. Emily fancies herself “a stickler for accuracy” and is determined to avoid her mother’s follies and pass through life without illusions—but illusions (of love or God or self-worth or whatever) are simply the way people make sense of inexplicable suffering, and by trying to comprehend things at face value Emily comprehends nothing (“I see”) and ends up alone. Least of all can she comprehend Emily Grimes, and hence her male companions tend to be reflections of her own tenuous self-image, and just as unwittingly false. While Emily strives to be an intellectual at Columbia, she ends up with the flabby philosopher manqué Andrew Crawford, who absurdly affects the “demeanor of an athlete at rest.” Due for a spell of carnality after Crawford’s impotence, she spends a number of luxurious nights with the virile Lars Ericson, who proves to be a narcissistic bisexual given to striking poses à la Michelangelo’s David. As for Emily’s own poses and self-deceptions, the most ruinous by far is that of being essentially independent despite her “unfathomable dread of being alone.” The results are evident in Emily’s forced behavior toward Howard Dunninger, her last bulwark against total isolation. Dunninger—who works for a company that makes synthetic fibers, no less—is a sturdy burgher who can offer, if not love, the sort of security Emily desperately needs. But her bewildered self-doubt is such that she often hesitates to make an intimate gesture, lest the man think her too demanding or needy. Thus the affair is circumscribed by a number of nice calculations on Emily’s part, as she labors to become the precise kind of companion that a prosaic fellow such as Dunninger might want. “As she often told him—and she knew it might have been wiser not to tell him at all—she had never enjoyed herself so much with anyone.”

  Might it all have worked out differently? Perhaps, if Yates had been the kind of writer Broyard accuses him of being, and thus willing to contrive a particular outcome by making his characters behave implausibly. But of course the opposite is true: Emily and Sarah “can’t help being the people they are,” and so Emily clings to a mirage of independence rather than saving her sister and perhaps herself (“I don’t want her dragging down my life”), while Sarah, in turn, doesn’t really want to be saved—her marriage is “sacred,” after all, and has given her the only real sense of love and security she’s ever known. “Most people do the best they can,” says Emily’s nephew Peter. “When terrible things happen, there usually isn’t anyone to blame.” The idea runs like a gray thread throughout Yates’s work: It’s bleakly true in a way, but it’s insufficient, and it’s meant to be.

  As the Flaubertian writer who is “omnipresent and invisible” in his own work, Yates reveals the pattern of his characters’ mistakes without manipulating their fates; he’s off paring his nails, so to speak, while the characters behave as they must. Some readers express exasperation over the fecklessness of Yates’s people, but how would anyone appear from a wholly objective vantage? However we might “rush around trying to do [our] best” (Yates’s phrase), a certain degree of squalor awaits us all—loneliness, error, death—and reminders of this are woven artfully into every page of The Easter Parade. Sarah is marked for disaster by the “fine little blue-white scar” on her eyelid (“like the hesitant stroke of a pencil”); the main street of St. Charles is dominated by a sign announcing BLOOD AND SAND WORMS; Pookie strives for “flair” but can’t put her lipstick on straight and dribbles spaghetti sauce on her chin, and after all her name is Grimes. Perhaps the most poignant symbol is the eponymous “Easter Parade” photograph of Tony and Sarah—“smiling at each other like the very soul of romance in the April sunshine”—which Emily finds “hanging awry” after Sarah’s funeral, “as if from some heavy blow that had shuddered the wall.”

  Groping to explain the greatness of The Easter Parade, Cassill had it right: It arises from the “very, very, very sad” way Yates tells the story, and of course this too is a function of craft. Even the novel’s summary narration serves the larger purpose of emphasizing the characters’ helplessness, as if things are happening to them, suddenly, but with terrible logic. Part Two begins, “For a few years after she divorced Andrew Crawford”—a splendid elliptical leap from the previous line (“I hate your body”); what follows is a bit of deft exposition about Emily’s jobs in the meantime, her two abortions, a representative scene of her struggling to make sense of it all (ABORTION: A WOMAN’S VIEW), and finally her grateful return to the everyday routine of work and parties. “Then suddenly it was 1955, and she was thirty years old.” All in two pages.

  The Easter Parade was one of five novels nominated for that year’s National Book Critics’ Circle Award (John Gardner’s October Light won, which must have galled Yates), a New York Times Editors’ Choice Book of the Year, as well as one of fifty “notable books” selected by the American Library Association. Delacorte sold more than twelve thousand in hardback and the Book-of-the-Month Club sold a colossal (for Yates) 112,000. The breadth of its appeal was such that Saul Bellow declared it one of the “top three novels of the year,” which may help to explain why Yates himself thought so little of it.

  * * *

  For Yates there was no more resting between books (if he could help it). In later years his son-in-law would chide him—“If I were you I’d take off for Bermuda”—but the only rewarding escape anymore was writing. As Bob Lacy noted, “Henri Troyat, the biographer, says of Chekhov that by the time he reached forty ‘life had become an excuse for writing.’ For the Dick Yates I knew, life was always an excuse for writing. He didn’t have much of a knack for living.” Yates would not have demurred, and his life in Boston was almost entirely built around his work; whenever he deviated from his narrow routine, disaster had a way of pouncing.

  In a later essay (“A Salute to Mister Yates”), Dubus evoked his friend’s spartan apartment on Beacon Street as a kind of objective correlative for Yates’s total devotion to his craft: “It was … a place that should be left intact when Dick moved, a place young writers should go to, and sit in, and ask themselves whether or not their commitment to writing had enough heart to live, thirty years later, as Dick’s did: with time his only luxury, and absolute honesty one of his few rewards.” Perhaps, but given the way Dubus described this humble shrine, it’s hard to imagine any earnest young apprentice being much daunted by it. He mentioned the L-shaped tables that served as Yates’s desk, covered with a tidy assortment of piles: the legal pads he used for first drafts, a typed manuscript for revision, and galley proofs of other writers’ books; on the shorter table was a manual typewriter and many sharpened pencils. Yates confined himself almost entirely to the room in which he worked; Dubus “never saw him enter” the tiny spare bedroom where Gina slept during her visits. Next to his desk was a sofa where guests would sit, while Yates sat opposite on his narrow bed (“always made,” Dubus pointed out). The rest of his furniture consisted of a bookshelf and a derelict, unplugged TV that
the writer Penelope Mortimer had left Yates when she went back to England. (Yates neither watched TV nor went to the movies.) The only decoration on the walls were some of Gina’s drawings; there was a large bay window overlooking an alley. The refrigerator was stocked with three items: instant coffee, beer, and yogurt, the last of which Yates ate for breakfast (yogurt was one of the “great discoveries” of his later life: tastes good, goes down easy). Yates himself was quite content with the place.

  The words squalid and depressing appear nowhere in Dubus’s essay, though they almost invariably come up when other friends attempt to do justice to that same apartment. “It was so bare and awful,” said Peggy Rambach, Dubus’s third wife. “It stank of cigarette smoke, the blue velvet curtains had turned brown with dust, the walls were gray with nicotine. I once wrote a poem about a child’s picture on Dick’s empty wall; it was a very affecting sight.” “Dick was the least bourgeois person I ever met,” said Mark Costello, referring to Yates’s disdain for material frippery, which even the most hardened bohemians might have found excessive. As for that particular apartment, Costello summed it up as “fucking grim.” There were only one or two wan lights, and particularly at night the place was so gloomy that hardly anyone but Yates could bear it for very long. Robin Metz remembers staring at the circle of crushed cockroaches around Yates’s swivel desk chair: “I reflected that his life had constricted to this little space, full of dead roaches, around his writing. That was all that was left: his whole life.”

  Not entirely. Yates’s “clean, well-lighted place” in Boston was the Crossroads Irish Pub on the corner of Beacon and Massachusetts Avenue, about a hundred yards from his apartment. Except for special occasions, Yates ate almost every lunch and dinner there for eleven years. Usually he sat alone in a particular booth opposite the bar in front, smoking and staring into space; sometimes he’d mutter to himself between coughing jags. The employees affected not to notice. The owner of the place was a kindly, barrel-shaped Boston Irishman named Michael Brodigan, whose experience with quirky, solitary bachelors was extensive. For a while he had no idea that Yates was a writer, much less a rather celebrated one, but it was pretty much all the same to both men: Brodigan would give Yates a friendly greeting and linger if encouraged, though generally Yates preferred to be left alone with his thoughts. In the afternoon he’d go home and nap, then write for a few more hours and return to the Crossroads around seven. By ten o’clock, usually, he’d drunk enough Michelob to face his dark apartment and get some sleep.

  Yates was not one to insist on special treatment—if his usual booth was taken, he’d gloomily proceed to the next—but he was clearly a man who wanted looking after, and the waitresses at the Crossroads did their best. At times when he was drinking liquor he liked his Jim Beam served in a particular skinny four-ounce glass with water on the side, but there was only one such glass on the premises; Yates was noticeably crestfallen when it wasn’t available. Soon it was set aside as “Dick’s glass.” Yates also enjoyed horseradish with the Sunday special—a prime rib sandwich—so a jar was kept behind the bar for the one person who asked for it; when a waitress discovered it empty one Sunday, she ducked across the street to the Marlborough Market in her apron. All of which was part of a larger campaign to cheer the poor man up. At his worst Yates gave the impression of being a uniquely despondent street person: beard matted, raincoat and suit rumpled and stained, muttering and hacking and half mad. (One might add that his button-down shirts were generally clean and pressed no matter what; taking these to the dry cleaner was part of an instinctive routine.) “What’re you so happy about?” he’d grumble at his waitresses’ show of compensatory perkiness; then he’d try to muster a polite smile before putting his head back in his hands and resuming his funk. After he’d gone for his afternoon nap, waitresses would prepare the booth for his return a few hours later, wiping down both sides thoroughly to get all the ashes scattered by his explosive coughing.

  One of the few companions who continued to meet Yates over the years was Andre Dubus, who every so often made a point of driving (or being driven) down from Haverhill to drink with his friend at the Crossroads. Dubus’s love and admiration for Yates was absolute, though neither man was given to soul-baring intimacies (unless coated in masculine bluster à la “that loneliness shit”), and their talks tended to skim along the well-worn surface of writing and books. Sometimes Dubus would coax his friend to Fenway for a Red Sox game, but Yates was immune to such ancillary enthusiasms and mostly they stayed at the Crossroads. Brodigan noted that the only times he really saw Yates “rowdy”—animated in a happy way—was in Dubus’s company (or, later, Dan Wakefield’s).

  Though he cultivated a certain degree of austerity, Yates hated being so alone in the world. Above all he longed for female companionship, and as one of the greatest living writers in America he was not without opportunity. Any number of women admired his work and wanted to meet him, and generally Yates made a good first impression: modest, courteous, quietly amusing—a gentleman. He also drank too much, got incensed at the least provocation, obliviously raised his voice in public, knocked things over, coughed incessantly, and caused searing embarrassment to himself and others. It didn’t require an unusual degree of insight to realize that he couldn’t help himself, and most women were willing to be patient up to a point—an inevitable point when, drained, they’d withdraw to a safe (if sympathetic) distance.

  Penelope Mortimer was one of these. Writer-in-residence at Boston University when Yates came to the city, she’d admired The Easter Parade and found the author a kindred spirit of sorts: Both chain-smoked, both were fed up with teaching (Mortimer, like Yates, emphasized the transience of her duties by keeping her office stripped of adornment or personal effects), and both had tales to tell of long blocked spells that occasionally rendered life all but hopeless. At fifty-eight Mortimer was more mature than Yates usually liked, but she was also handsome and formidable and a wonderful writer. Yates referred to her as a personage.

  But it wasn’t long before she was finding reasons to avoid him: “I’m not calling back just now because I’m sunk and no good for you,” she wrote, and gave the rather lame excuse—“this may seem very trivial”—that she’d failed in her latest attempt to quit smoking and was depressed about it. “Richard I’m sorry to be such a near-dead loss at the moment. That’s a real apology, not one of yours which are all needless.” Yates scribbled a draft of his response on the back of this note, which helps put the matter into more definite perspective:

  My apologies aren’t “needless”—this last batch was to have been for my dreary outburst at your mention of Edward Albee’s name. I’ll probably get over that sort of thing some day, but nobody should be expected to wait. I’m very, very sorry you’re so low.… Please bear in mind that you’re a lovely … gifted girl, and that I’d rather be [illegible: looks like “quietly” or “quickly”] carried out of your house than welcomed into almost any other I know. Love, Dick

  That last statement strongly suggests Yates had already been physically removed from Mortimer’s apartment—whether kicking and screaming or calmly supine, one cannot know.* What might be surmised from certain other epistolary remarks, though, was that Yates had a fascination with the novelty (c. 1976–77) of Mortimer’s answering machine, and tended to leave rambling and probably sodden messages, particularly when she refused to see him. Also, Mortimer was fiercely opinionated but unwilling, it seems, to weather outbursts from Yates as a result of that fact. “While Revolutionary Road is a lot better than a lot of Updike,” she wrote him, “it’s a lot like a lot of Updike too (don’t be MAD at me).” In general she was going through her own bad patch at the time, and while she evidently cared for Yates and empathized only too well with his malaise (she left him her TV after all), such was not the stuff of romance: “Two scared people don’t make one brave one, have you noticed?” she wrote.

  Around then too he met a middle-aged divorcée named Lynn Meyer at a cocktail party given by V
onnegut’s ex-wife. Meyer had read Revolutionary Road when it was first published, and was thrilled to meet the “exceptionally courteous” author, to whom she gushed about how much the book had meant to people of their generation. Since she figured Yates was “too shy” to ask for her phone number (emphatic praise of his work tended to make Yates pleased but uncomfortable), she called and invited him to another party a few days later. “It was terrible,” she recalled. “Neither of us knew many people there, and everyone was dressed in these Christmas-colored clothes. It was Martha Stewart’s worst nightmare.” But Yates gracefully endured, and afterward made Meyer laugh by deconstructing the “smug, rich, dumb” people at the party.

  During the month or so that they dated, Yates didn’t appear to be drinking much. He offered to keep a bottle of Scotch in his apartment for Meyer’s sake, and assured her it wouldn’t tempt him. And while he often corrected her with the same acuity he’d brought to his critique of the “dumb” nouveau riche, he was generally tactful about it, as if it were simply a matter of mutual interest. When she mentioned a visit to the “beauty parlor,” Yates replied, “You don’t say ‘beauty parlor.’ That’s the wrong class. You say ‘hairdresser.’” Also they talked about Meyer’s children, both in prep school at the time. Yates was intrigued by the general subject of prep schools, but made it clear he’d rather not meet Meyer’s children and bitterly remarked on his mother’s “creepy” tendency to expose her boyfriends to him as a child.

  The two rarely met other people, and as a change of pace they’d planned to drive to the writer George Garrett’s house in Maine for a weekend in January. When they met for dinner that Thursday, though, Yates was jumpy and irritable and coughing more than usual: He explained that, as a result of going off his medication, he’d had a seizure the night before and passed out in a snowdrift.* Though he tried to make light of the incident, he was plainly traumatized both mentally and physically; still, he insisted they stick to their weekend plans, and promised to get plenty of rest before their departure two days later.