A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  Yates was more skittish than ever about subjecting himself to the scrutiny and possible disdain (or pity) of clever young people. For moral support he called a fellow World War II veteran named Bob Doherty, who’d been in his workshop at the Wesleyan conference; Yates explained that he wanted someone his own age in the class and implored Doherty to participate free of charge (an offer the man accepted). When Yates appeared at a party given by faculty member Jayne Anne Phillips, whom he’d met through Sam Lawrence a few years before, his anxiety was contagious. In a mumble he complimented a student on some chili the young man had brought, and when the latter replied, “Oh, it’s just a mix,” the two lapsed into a flustered silence. Phillips, who was fond of Yates, began to worry lest he show the effect of all the bourbon he was drinking, and asked Epstein to take him home. On his way out Yates handed her his cup, and she noticed a number of cigarette butts floating inside.

  Yates began to relax a few minutes into his first class. “I want to write porn movies,” said his student John Walter when it was his turn to explain who he was and what he was doing there. Yates welcomed the levity. His group of a dozen students was not only quirky and unpretentious, but talented, and several went on to have considerable careers—Melanie Rae Thon, Julia Johnson, Jennifer Moses, and the would-be pornographer John Walter, who became a playwright.

  They adored Yates. “Dick was depressed and very frail, but dignified,” said his student Natalie Baturka. “He elicited awe from us. Unlike Jayne Anne and Leslie, who were young and trying to prove themselves, Dick seemed not to give a fuck what others thought of him, but he was also fragile and insecure. In class, though, he had an air of effortless authority.” The paradox of Yates’s self-assurance and terrible vulnerability—noted by many—occurred to Melanie Rae Thon one day when he called to praise a story of hers. “He was the finest reader I’ve ever known,” she said. “He’d read through a story and see everything you intended there, and give you a vision of what your story could be if you had the patience to bring it to fruition.” Unqualified praise from such a reader was a rare, exalting experience, and Thon was feeling pleased with herself when suddenly Yates’s voice became small and shy: “Do you ever read my work…?”

  He was less inclined than ever to mediate wrangling in his workshop; while his students “beat the shit out of each other,” as Baturka put it, Yates would listen placidly and later buy the class a pitcher of beer at a campus bar. “Dad’s gonna make it all better,” he’d say, and presently a spirit of relative amity would prevail. Half his students were romantically involved with one another, which added a certain piquancy to the atmosphere. For his part Yates didn’t hesitate to admit that he liked having attractive women in his class, though he often wondered, wistfully, why they didn’t wear dresses more often. His “courtly macho thing” (as his female students put it) was accepted with good humor and even rather cherished—coming from such a woebegone man, the effect was more endearing than not. “Dick seemed a little scary at first,” student Jon Garelick recalled. “Here was this big bent guy with a gray beard and all. But he was totally friendly and charming. Jayne Anne Phillips told us, ‘He’s Dick, not Mr. Yates,’ and after that we always called him Dick. ‘I’m going to meet Dick for a drink,’ or ‘Let’s go see how Dick’s doing.’” When they saw how Dick was living on Beacon Street, they were appalled. John Walter organized a work party, and while Yates sipped beer at the Crossroads, students painted his apartment and sanded the floor on their hands and knees.

  Yates’s life at BU was a little less lonely, as admiring students adapted themselves to the Kantian regularity of his schedule. If they wanted to talk about a manuscript, or simply “see how Dick’s doing,” he was always in his booth at the Crossroads (facing the door) between certain hours of the day. Natalie Baturka lived a block away on Beacon Street and met Yates for dinner almost every night that semester. They made an interesting pair. At age twenty-one Baturka was perhaps the youngest student in Yates’s graduate class, and by her own account something of a naïf at the time. “Dick was the one who taught me how to drink hard liquor. Meanwhile he made me feel like the most talented, interesting, pretty woman in the world. I didn’t see myself that way; I never said a word in his class.” The two would sit for hours drinking, smoking, and talking (or not), until Yates was ready to leave around ten or eleven; if he was in particularly bad shape, Baturka would walk him all the way to the door of his second-floor apartment and make sure he got into bed. “He’d always make an obligatory pass and ask me to stay the night,” she recalled. “Somehow it didn’t bother you—it was like he was trying to be polite, as if he thought you expected it.” And then, too, there was the ample compulsion of loneliness. “It was hard for women to be friends with Dick without intimacy coming up,” said Jayne Anne Phillips, who was taken aback one night when he suddenly kissed her after dinner. Her startled look didn’t escape his notice, and the next day he sent Phillips a “very touching and well-worded” note of apology.

  At the end of the semester Yates gave a party at his apartment, which Walter and others retidied for the occasion. It was a modest success. Yates exerted himself as host, buying a case of beer at the Marlborough Market and, true to form, refusing the aid of female students as—weaving and wheezing—he carried it down Beacon Street. His guests nibbled politely at hors d’oeuvres (liverwurst on saltines) and a few asked Yates to inscribe copies of his books. “What’s this?” Yates asked Garelick, annoyed by a discount sticker on the cover of Liars in Love, and more so when the young man admitted he hadn’t finished the book yet. “Well, there are some people who’ve read the whole thing,” Yates grumbled. Perhaps to redeem himself, Garelick remarked knowingly on the “erotic charge” between the brother and sister in “A Compassionate Leave”; Yates rolled his head along the back of his chair: “Ohh! Ohh!” he groaned over and over.

  * * *

  That summer Yates and Dubus gave a reading together at the Stone Coast Conference in Gorham, Maine. “It was a big hit,” George Garrett remembered. “For years people were still talking about it: ‘Were you there?’ The rapport between Yates and Dubus was very evident. They bantered for about two hours, and finally Dubus said, ‘Maybe we should do this more often.’”

  Yates’s “minders” at the conference were Ken Rosen and Madison Smartt Bell, both of whom conceded the “stunning” reading Yates gave with Dubus; both, too, wondered at the disparity between Yates’s warmth and dignity on stage and cranky drunken fecklessness off it. “Goddamn it, Rosen, you’re the biggest namby-pamby I ever met!” he roared when his host sighed a little too audibly at one of Yates’s indiscretions. He’d flown to the conference on a one-way ticket, broke, assuming his honorarium would cover his return. The day after his reading, though, the check wasn’t ready, so while Rosen taught class and scrambled around trying to expedite payment, Bell kept an eye on their guest. Zealous campus police had already made it known that they took a dim view of Yates’s conspicuous drinking, and that afternoon there was a row when he was barred from bringing beer into the student cafeteria. (“The school employees worked for the state,” said Bell, “and weren’t beholden to students or faculty; they comported themselves like surly postal workers or zookeepers.”) Finally, to Bell’s relief, Rosen showed up waving an honorarium check and drove Yates to the airport.

  Getting him on the plane was another matter. “I was mesmerized by Yates’s gruff disregard of ordinary notions of time and space,” Rosen mused. “He said something like, ‘Well, my plane leaves at 4:30 and it’s 4:25 now, so let’s have another drink.’” They missed the 4:30 flight, then another, and finally Rosen had to drive Yates back to campus for the night. “I was grading papers in the dorm,” Bell remembered, “and I heard a commotion in the hall—and here comes Yates up the stairs, one arm draped over Rosen on one side and Rosen’s twelve-year-old daughter Ingrid on the other. Then, at the top of the stairs, Yates flung them off with a kind of James Brown move and yelled, ‘Rosen, I’m sick and tired
of your OH MY GODS! Fuck you and your OH MY GODS!’” Once Yates was safely back in his room for the night, Rosen took Bell aside: “I think I dropped the ball here,” he sighed, and explained what had happened at the airport. He asked Bell to drive Yates to an early morning flight, and when Bell began to protest Rosen assured him that Yates was a “soldier” and would be up and ready to go by dawn. “Just make sure of two things,” he said: “get his room key off him, and make sure he has his ticket.” Around 6:30 the next morning, natty in his seersucker suit, Yates irascibly flashed his Delta envelope when Bell asked him about it; ten miles later, at the airport, Yates discovered that the envelope was empty except for a receipt. “That’s when I lost my twenty-four-year-old temper,” Bell recalled. He phoned Rosen, who found the ticket secreted in his own jacket, and together the two men watched Yates board a plane at last.

  His teaching duties over and his students dispersed, Yates’s life became strictly divided between working and drinking. Even when sober he wandered his half-block of Beacon Street like a lanky oblivious Banquo, head down and muttering. One day there was a fire on the third floor of the Crossroads, and the intersection of Beacon and Massachusetts was a chaos of firetrucks, police cars, swishing hoses, and popping glass. Restaurant employees spotted Yates on the yonder side of the melee and watched, bemused, as he proceeded through the crowd, past the cordon, over the hoses, and into the restaurant. “Dick,” said Michael Brodigan, “we’re closed.” “Why?” Yates asked.

  More than ever he was dependent on the place for any remaining congress with the world. His regular waitress throughout the eighties was a cheerful young woman named Jennifer Hetzel, a BU student who eventually wrote her master’s thesis on the Crossroads (“Communication in the Restaurant Business”). “He’s got emphysema,” Hetzel would snap at customers who looked askance at the hacking, besotted old man in the front booth. For his part Yates enjoyed certain ritualistic exchanges with the waitress about her studies and her father’s arthritis. (“You’re waiting on Richard Yates?” said her father, director of the University of Pittsburgh Press. “At the Crossroads?”) When Hetzel got around to reading some of her customer’s work she was “astonished”: “I couldn’t believe this guy who came in and got drunk every day would go home and write this stuff.” Afterward she always bought two copies of his books (one for her father) and asked Yates to inscribe them, a request that made him agitated: “What d’you want me to write?” he’d complain, staring into space for an hour or so before coming up with something suitably personal. “For Jennifer, whose dessert may create a national sensation, or may not, but who in any case will always be a lovely girl.” (Hetzel sold her own desserts out of the Crossroads.) “For Jennifer, who is living evidence that the world of PR might still be saved.” (Yates had been furious when Hetzel, an English major, had decided to pursue her master’s in public relations.) Hetzel always drew a little man with a belly button on Yates’s checks, but one busy night she omitted the crucial detail. “Where’s the belly button?” he demanded, with genuine pique.

  Around this time Yates had a seizure in the foyer of the Crossroads. After the ambulance had come and gone, Brodigan went to retrieve some of Yates’s things and bring them to the hospital. “Oh God, that apartment…,” he said afterward, looking haunted. From that point on, whenever Yates would disappear for a few days, someone from the restaurant would go check on him. “We missed you,” Hetzel would say after one of his absences, though she knew not to ask questions. It always impressed her, and others, how intervals of relative sobriety and recuperation improved Yates’s appearance: His color would return and he’d be sprucer, less vacant looking. Thus he appeared to Hetzel after his death: “I cried when my father told me about it,” she said, “then I started dreaming about him. Dick was the sort who worked his way into your heart. He needed help, and we’d wanted to help him get through the day.”

  During these lost years Yates’s greatest source of grief and regret was his estrangement from his older daughters. They still spoke on the phone, but face-to-face meetings were rare and tended to go awry. Gina remembers a number of dinners with her father and Monica that ended in fights between the two, the little girl sitting meekly between them until Monica bolted to her feet and stormed out of the restaurant. “He had this Victorian paterfamilias idea that he’d be the benevolent Dad and I’d be the cheerful, doting little girl,” said Monica. “But you can’t be a doting daughter to a guy who falls apart like that. You have to be strong. After a fight, Dad would say, ‘Oh, I just wanted us to be like this,’ and I’d say ‘It can’t be like that, because I’m not like that and you’re not like that.’” What made the impasse more painful was that he and Monica were best friends when Yates was sane and sober. On Sunday mornings they’d talk on the phone for two or three hours at a time, and there was nothing they couldn’t discuss freely: “I loved his take on things,” she said. “He always got it, he always said the right thing.” And he always disappointed her in the end. Monica was the one others called when Yates had a breakdown, and by her mid-twenties she was not only jaded but fed up. “I sensed a sort of prurient relish on the part of the callers: ‘You can’t believe what’s happened,’ they’d say, as if they wanted to test my reaction to it.” She was tired, too, of the terrible fights afterward, which often began with Yates berating her for getting involved, then losing all control (“Oh fuck you, baby!”) when she defended herself. As ever, too, he’d refuse to admit that there was anything much the matter with him. “What’d I do that seemed so ‘crazy’?” he’d say over and over. Everyone else was to blame.

  As for Sharon, she’d found refuge in a family of her own, and cultivated a kind of benign distance from her father. The fact that she wasn’t particularly literary left them without much common ground, even less so when Yates turned out to have remarkably little interest in his grandchild. “Oh yes, dear,” he’d sigh absently when Sharon talked about Sonia. His indifference toward such subjects as potty training and nursery schools was perhaps understandable, though it was a bit puzzling that such a doting father would become such an apathetic grandfather. It bothered Yates a bit, too. “Am I a monster?” he asked Vonnegut. “Nah,” said the latter. “They’re not your kids. That’s just how it is.” Still, Yates hadn’t entirely lost his knack for being charming with little girls, and would draw Sonia out on the phone with ingenuous, particular questions about whatever she wanted to prattle about. And he still deferred, usually, to a child’s interests in mixed company. “Sonia, you should let Grandpa finish his story first,” the girl’s parents would admonish her when she interrupted one of his anecdotes. “Ahh, who wants to hear about that anyway?” Yates would say, dropping the subject. Whatever his good intentions, though, Yates’s rare visits seldom passed without mishap. While at the Levines’ house in 1983, he promptly drank a case of beer and had a seizure. Later, when his daughters visited him in the psychiatric ward, Monica remarked that his toenails needed clipping. “Yeah,” Yates intoned, calmly dotty. “You’re just going to clip my nails like a prostitute.”

  One way that Yates tacitly acknowledged his failings, and tried to make amends, was through his generosity with money. “He’d give it to you when he got it and you’d never hear about it again,” said Monica. Even his ex-wives were happy to admit this point in his favor. Sheila, despite an otherwise withering appraisal of Yates, gives him due credit for never missing a child-support payment. And later, when the grown-up Monica was working in New York at underpaid editorial jobs, Yates sent her two hundred dollars a month for three years. Everything else, after his own food and rent were covered (and sometimes when they weren’t), went to Gina. In later years Yates tended to run through advances before his books were finished and then try to wrestle more out of Sam Lawrence, who was galled by the knowledge of where the money was liable to go. When Martha and Gina moved to Denver in 1983, Yates paid extra for the girl to attend private school, and one friend noted the paradox of Yates’s buying her an elaborate ant
ique dollhouse while he, Yates, lived in two wretched rooms. And that wasn’t all: “By God, I’m sending her to Harvard if it’s the last thing I do!” was a constant refrain.

  But then Gina made him happy, and she wasn’t fazed in the least by the roaches and dustballs of Beacon Street. She learned early, too, while listening to Monica’s literary discussions with her father (“All this bleakness is just bunk, Dad! Life isn’t that bad!” “Fine fine, baby, throw all my books out the window!”), that it might be best to avoid the whole subject of writing, his career, etc., and for the most part she always did. Their Sunday phone chats were determinedly light-hearted and all about her—school, what she’d eaten for breakfast, what she was wearing or looking at or planning to do that day. If Gina seemed inattentive or lazy, Yates would tell her with mock severity to sit up and put her feet on the floor; other than that there was little or no friction. During his lifetime Gina never learned of his mental illness (she thought the pills were for emphysema), nor did he burden her—as he did Monica—with the more desperate details of his daily affairs. “I have loved your father for many years,” Dubus told Gina when they stayed at his house in Haverhill. Dubus was the only friend she ever met during her visits to Boston, and Dubus was grateful for the girl’s existence. “Andre was always worrying about Dick,” said Dubus’s first wife Pat. “That he would get sick, lonely, and die. They loved each other.”

  Others worried too, however distantly. Dubus used to say he could always tell how Yates was doing based on the overall mood of his latest book, and even strangers could sense that all was not well. “I’m writing to tell you that I think you’re the best living writer in America,” read a fan letter from this time. “Evidently, you’ve had a hard life and might not be that comfortable or happy, but your work is superb.” Gloria Vanderbilt felt the same—about the work anyway. In the spring of 1983 she sat next to Vonnegut at a cocktail party and asked if he’d ever heard of a writer named Richard Yates: “I think he’s wonderful,” she said. “I adored The Easter Parade.” Vonnegut replied that in fact Yates was a friend, and informed her that he lived in Boston and would probably appreciate hearing from her. “On impulse [I] hoped to meet you in Boston,” she wrote Yates, after a failed attempt to arrange an impromptu luncheon at the Ritz. “I wanted to tell you that because of you light comes not only through chinks and cracks but you flood my window with light. I love you and thank you.” Yates wrote back suggesting they get together the next time he came to New York, if she wasn’t “repelled by the idea,” and she assured him that “repelled” was hardly the word: “Scared, perhaps, a little. You know so much about women.” Wendy Sears cringed when a giddy Yates told her of his imminent rendezvous with Vanderbilt—“I thought ‘My God, what will happen when she actually meets him?’”—but apparently it came off without a hitch: Vanderbilt wrote afterward that she “could have talked on and on” to Yates, and even phoned him that Thanksgiving and put a number of her friends and fellow admirers on the line. The problem, perhaps, was their second meeting. When Yates was almost destitute a couple of years later, Sears wrote an urgent letter to Vanderbilt about the plight of her favorite author. Within a few days the famous heiress phoned Sears and explained, coldly, that she didn’t have that kind of money.