A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  That Saturday a big snowstorm struck, and Meyer called Yates to cancel the trip. But Yates wanted to talk about something else. Earlier Meyer had mentioned a friend who, when drunk, rode a horse into her house yelling, “The British are coming! The British are coming!”; Meyer had thought it curious how such people became “situational alcoholics”—that is, given to regular benders but otherwise somewhat abstemious. Yates had seemed a touch defensive when the subject first came up, but now he was downright obsessed by it: “Why are you so critical of her?” he snapped on the phone. “I think it’s refreshing! I think it’s a wonderful gesture!” He went on and on and wouldn’t be persuaded to drop it. Finally Meyer told him she was coming over.

  She found Yates in very bad shape. “He was drinking and smoking about ten cigarettes at once,” she remembered. “He’d light one, forget about it, and light another. I thought he was going to set himself on fire again.” Yates hadn’t eaten (or slept) since their dinner on Thursday, and Meyer coaxed him out of his apartment to get some food. He never stopped talking for a moment—a “grandiose and strange” monologue about the various people who’d betrayed and abandoned him over the years; when Meyer tried to distract him with happier subjects, he’d become angry (“Why are we talking about this?”). At last she called her psychiatrist for advice, and was told to stay with Yates until he got exhausted. At the moment it seemed a remote contingency. Yates would begin to lie down, then jump back up and start pacing again, or try to write, all the while lighting cigarettes one after the other and talking, talking. Meyer began to worry that she herself would be the one to get exhausted and wake up in flames.

  As night fell, Meyer began to panic. She couldn’t hold out much longer, nor could she leave Yates alone like this. “Don’t tell my daughters!” he said over and over. The only two people Yates would allow her to call in the Boston area were Mortimer and Dubus, but Meyer couldn’t get hold of either. Her psychiatrist advised her to take him “somewhere safe”—that is, the hospital—but Yates frowned on the idea. For hours they went back and forth about it, and finally he relented. “I drove him to the walk-in clinic at Massachusetts General,” said Meyer, “which was run by a couple of four-year-olds. They refused to care for him because he had no insurance. I told them he was a famous writer with plenty of money, but it cut no ice.” Eventually the suggestion was made that Yates be taken to the Bedford VA, but the ambulance was long in coming and meanwhile the exhausted Meyer was enjoined to stay with the patient. By then Yates was coming down at last, mumbling dazed apologies as the terrible awareness began to dawn.

  When it was over Meyer was on the edge of collapse herself, and arranged to visit friends in Florida to recuperate. Before she left town, though, she wanted to make sure somebody was looking after Yates. She called Sam Lawrence—whom she knew slightly through her ex-husband—and left a detailed message as to Yates’s whereabouts and condition. She called Vonnegut, and listened as the black humorist regaled her with other Yatesian adventures (“like it was all a big lark”). She called George Garrett to cancel their visit. The upshot of Meyer’s laudable concern was that the story of the snowdrift and its aftermath became a cornerstone of Yates’s legend. “I was impressed by the way he persevered,” said the writer Madison Smartt Bell (who eventually heard the story from Garrett). “After burning down his apartment and falling into that snowdrift, I figured, you know, he’d survived both fire and ice.”

  After that, Yates became more of a pariah than ever—particularly in Boston, where he was derided in polite literary circles as a drunken joke. “I used to regard Dick as a test by which to judge others,” said Bill Keough, an old Iowa friend whom Yates occasionally visited in West Townsend. “If someone was an ambitious shit, he wouldn’t care about Dick, because his books didn’t sell and people thought him odd, a loser. But if you cared about writing, you cared about Dick too.” Very few people in Boston, it seemed, cared about writing, and it soon became apparent to Yates that most people knew the worst wherever they happened to live. Shortly after his release from the Bedford VA, he got a long-distance call from his old girlfriend Carolyn Gaiser, who advised him to quit drinking. “I was afraid he’d fly into one of his rages,” Gaiser recalled, “but he thanked me for my concern and said he wasn’t ready to do anything that drastic. It was pretty clear he wasn’t eager to stay on the phone.”

  As for Lynn Meyer, she returned to Boston in February and had lunch with Yates, who was chastened and gentlemanly as ever. When she mentioned that she’d gotten engaged in Florida, he offered warm congratulations and even came to Meyer’s farewell party a few months later and met her new husband. Around that time, too, a party was given for Penelope Mortimer before her return to England. John Updike attended with his new wife, but he and Yates appear not to have spoken. In fact Yates mostly sat alone nursing his drink while the others danced (the guest of honor had particularly wanted dancing). Mortimer’s final note to Yates was sent from London in June. “Please will you understand how important you are and how necessary both as a writer and a person.… I’m sorry if I didn’t live up to expectations, but it’s a zone I find hard to live in. I’m delighted and honored (American) to know you and to go on knowing you.”

  * * *

  Yates found comfort where he could, but in most cases he accepted the defection of random women with a kind of desolate equanimity. As he sat in the Crossroads smoking and muttering, it was mostly Martha on his mind, or so he’d tell others when the need to confide became overwhelming. The last few ghastly years had made him miss her more than ever—if such were possible—and as late as 1977 he continued to put off divorce in hope of her return. Martha, meanwhile, had moved to Marin County, California, in order to put as many miles as possible between her and Yates. “He couldn’t grasp that she’d had it with him,” said Yates’s soon-to-be psychiatrist. “He never could see what a burden he put on other people.” Yates blamed himself for the breakup, but the suddenness of it (as he saw it) continued to puzzle him; he could only figure that she’d been taken in by “the Libbers” and what he called “the artsy-fartsy crowd.” “Imagine going to California to make gew-gaws!” he’d say, which was how he’d refer to Martha’s dabbling in art. In moments of particular bitterness he’d point out that he always thought her photography and whatnot was a sham, and wondered why anyone would swap taking care of a real artist for making “gew-gaws.” As for what he imagined to be her motives for moving to Marin County, they were the same attributed to Sarah Davenport in Young Hearts Crying: “Marin County … had now become well known as a lively and inviting sanctuary for recently divorced young women, many of them mothers—and for swinging, stomping, surprisingly nice young men.” She also taught at a Montessori school there.

  Yates called to speak to Gina every Sunday morning, and when Martha answered the phone he’d often try to keep her on the line with solicitous inquiries about one thing and another. She’d respond politely, but if he got too personal or began to wax sentimental she’d cut him off, and Yates would be hurt. Finally, when the exasperated woman informed him she was seeking no-fault divorce in California, Yates wrote a letter expressing a forlorn perplexity toward her refusal to talk things over, begging her to explain once and for all her reasons for leaving him. This she did. “I have gotten the impression you would rather believe your own version of things than hear mine,” she wrote. “I resent your request that I be ‘gentle and considerate of my words.’ I did that for far too many years at the expense of honesty.” And so, with what must have struck the hurting man as brutal candor (rather than a remarkably temperate elision of specific malfeasances on his part), Martha explained the gist of her grievances:

  You’re the one who wrote Revolutionary Road. You know the torments people go through trying to live out roles, exacting demands from loved ones, secretly longing to be free. But underneath it all I think you don’t believe in freedom. It too is a farce in your view. But I always did guiltily long to be free.… Your statement that ‘most
women of your age can be presumed to have found, by now, about as much of themselves as there ever was to find’ is ridiculous to me.… There were many times when I allowed your way of thinking and of seeing things to impose a type of censorship on mine.…

  I’m afraid that if I don’t emphasize how difficult you were to live with, how exhausting it was trying to please you, understand you, and finally how huge was my resentment at having given myself away for so many years, you will miss the point entirely. So here is that emphasis.

  Emphasis or no, Yates went on talking about “Libbers” and “gew-gaws,” and a year later he’d vent his bitterness in the story “A Natural Girl,” which depicts a more benign version of Yates being callously dumped by a simulacrum of Martha. But at some level he knew better, all the more so over time. As Michael Davenport reflects about his young wife, “Sarah was too nice a girl ever to be charged with ‘torturing’ a man; he had always known that. Still, she had never been the kind of girl who would collaborate in allowing her future to fall apart, and that was something he’d always known about her, too.”

  The divorce was finalized that spring, which momentarily seemed to improve Martha’s mood where her ex-husband was concerned. When he wrote asking her, in effect, to remember the good times and all the ways he’d tried to make her happy—enumerating a number of specific material gifts—Martha replied in a way that suggested he wasn’t far wrong in assuming she’d been influenced by certain modish ideas. “Does an apple tree give skirts, does a rosebush give shoes, does the sky give watches?” she wrote, imploring Yates to meditate more on things unseen. Specifically she urged him to get psychoanalyzed: “You’ve always had so many voices, but no one to help you interpret them. This would be called dream therapy, or Jungian therapy—ask among your friends. Accept the obvious gifts of your own psyche.”

  Whether because of Martha’s well-meaning advice, or simply because he needed someone to talk to (even a psychiatrist), Yates subsequently arranged to meet for weekly psychotherapy sessions with the thirty-four-year-old Winthrop Burr at the VA outpatient clinic in Boston. “The nicest thing about me is my stories,” he announced at the outset. In a manner that was generally brusque and detached—he was skeptical as ever that airing his pain to a stranger would serve any useful purpose—Yates spoke of his agonizing loneliness since the breakup of his marriage. He mentioned a few people who begrudged him little bits of their time, but really he had no close friends. Also he lived in constant fear of humiliation: People treated him as a “skid-row figure” because, Yates supposed, he coughed and smoked and looked unwell. (That he was often drunk wasn’t emphasized as a factor.) For example, he’d gotten into a number of fights with cabbies who were rude to him; Yates would start yelling and they’d make him get out. Once he tried to meet Sam Lawrence for a drink at the Parker House hotel, but employees wouldn’t let him in the door. Tracing the cause of his alienation and its manifold effects, Yates would speak of his mother with a scathing, obsessive hatred that sometimes brought him to the brink of tears.

  “There was a lot to admire in Yates,” said Burr. “He evoked feelings of protectiveness in others.” Over the years Yates was occasionally gracious in acknowledging the young psychiatrist’s help, though often he was quite the opposite. In retrospect Burr regrets taking him as a patient: “You don’t do psychodynamic therapy with people who are drinking. It doesn’t help them, and it might make them worse [because] it stirs up emotions that make them want to drink.” In the beginning, though, Burr wasn’t aware of the extent of his patient’s drinking, as Yates was at pains to conceal it; but in due course Burr came to believe that Yates’s increasingly frequent breakdowns, indeed any number of woes, were all but entirely caused by alcohol.

  * * *

  Meanwhile a happy incongruity between Yates’s life and work continued to obtain. As he intensely reflected on his childhood, both for Burr’s benefit and that of A Good School, he felt more and more compelled to write about that seminal episode when his mother had been commissioned to sculpt FDR (as well as a cluster of other memories from that time, such as her drunkenly getting into bed with him and puking on his pillow). At first Yates considered working the material into his novel somewhere, but finally decided to put the book aside for a month or so and write a separate, self-contained account. It was a breakthrough for Yates, whose every attempt to write short fiction over the past fifteen years (more than twenty, really, with the single exception of “Builders”) had come to naught. “I was so pleased with the way [“Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired”] turned out,” he told an interviewer, “that I thought I might try to write six others when A Good School was over and make a book of them.” Writing stories would also enable him to renew his campaign to breach the walls of The New Yorker.

  In April, Yates accepted a two-week Visiting Writer stint at Columbia, though in general he was more reluctant than ever to enter a classroom: As always, he was inclined to husband his time and energy for writing, but also the prospect of ridicule and failure had become far more threatening. The Amherst debacle haunted him, and then of course he was morbidly conscious of the way people stared at him on a daily basis, as if he were a curious and disturbing spectacle. “How do I look?” he asked Crossroads owner Michael Brodigan after his ejection from the Parker House. “Is something wrong with me?” Even a chance to visit his friend Geoff Clark at Roger Williams was more than he could face at the time: “Thanks for the invitation,” he wrote, “but I’ll shy away. Every time I meet one of your classes I make a horse’s ass of myself, and that tendency would be rampantly worse if I were given a chance to ‘explain’ The Easter Parade to a roomful of girls.”

  Much more welcome was the chance to resume his mentorly role on a private level with his semi-estranged daughter Monica, who’d switched her college major from chemistry to English—a rather momentous decision. In recent years she’d become vexed by an awareness that she was the one most like her father, with all that seemed to portend of potential instability, and hence the pursuit of a science degree had been one way of dodging her fate. Besides, neither parent had ever made much of Yates’s writing, which Monica had come to perceive as so much self-indulgent escapism; throughout her childhood she’d told friends he was a “college professor,” which sounded better. Then a fellow student turned out to be an ardent admirer of Revolutionary Road—indeed, seemed starstruck at the prospect of meeting the author. And Monica’s first creative-writing teacher at the University of Massachusetts was none other than George Cuomo—whose career Yates had helped launch as editor of Stories for the Sixties—and Cuomo made it clear that Yates had a very considerable reputation. Only then did Monica read her father’s entire oeuvre and realize how good he was, which inspired her to be a writer too. “I’m so incredibly lucky to have you!” she wrote him. “As soon as I finish [a story] I really like, I’ll bring it to you—we can talk about everything.…”

  And so it came to pass, and for the most part it was good for both. For the next decade or so, among the first things Yates would mention in almost any conversation was the fact that his daughter was a writer, too. It bolstered his self-respect to know that, at least in one sense, he was a good role model; he gave extensive, tactful critiques of her stories (“He figured things out,” she said, “and he was always right”), and recommended her best work to Monica McCall, who accepted her namesake as a client. Candidly, though, Yates’s misgivings were at least as great as his pride: He considered writing fiction “the hardest and loneliest profession in the world,” and knew only too well the kind of dismal toll such a life could take. And then, truth be known (though he was careful not to labor this point in mixed company), Yates didn’t think women were cut out to be serious artists, since such a difficult business interfered with their main function as caregivers. He regarded a handful of female writers as first-rate—Jane Austen, George Eliot, Alice Munro, Gina Berriault, perhaps one or two others—and thought the rest would be better off focusing their energy elsewhere. “Dad th
ought the best, most fulfilling thing for a woman was to get married and have a family,” said Monica. But meanwhile, in lieu of such a blessed turn of events, he wished her well.

  Among his daughters Monica became his closest confidante, the one who understood him best and vice versa, but Gina was his heart. Affectionate, pretty, utterly nonjudgmental where her father was concerned, she was the great solace of his later years; those who knew Yates at his sickest and saddest were struck by the way he’d light up—his color quite literally returning—at the mention of her name: “She was the one he had a crush on,” was how one friend put it. From the beginning they had a breezy rapport. “What’s that over your head but not the ceiling?” he’d say to the giggling toddler over the phone. “Sky.” “What’s that under your feet but not the floor?” “Ground.” Along with the sweetness of Gina’s nature, another reason the relationship never soured was distance, which necessarily limited their contact to brief visits two or three times a year. At such intervals Yates was careful to be on his best behavior. “I was told at a very early age that Dad had a drinking problem,” said Gina. “I remember him always having a beer in hand at his apartments and always ordering lots of drinks at restaurants. However, I don’t remember him as ever acting particularly disorderly, slurring, or having boozy breath or anything like that.” Her earliest memory of Yates was his visit to California in the summer of 1977, when she was five. In his motel room they made up a game called “mow the meadow”: Yates covered his eyes while Gina went around the room with a carton of cigarettes (a make-believe lawn mower) saying “Mow, mow, mow,”—until Yates opened his eyes and exclaimed, “Oh, what pretty flowers!” “He seemed to enjoy the game as much as I did and had unlimited patience,” Gina recalled, “repeating the same silly thing over and over without getting bored. We both remembered ‘mow the meadow’ with fondness over the years.” Meanwhile Yates would discuss the girl’s mother only in the most glowing terms, romanticizing her to the point of rendering her all but unrecognizable—e.g., “Your mother was always very athletic”—which, as Gina points out, simply wasn’t the case.