A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  Is it a bad novel? It is not. Yates didn’t write (or publish anyway) bad novels, and a work of fiction is not to be condemned outright on the basis of unlikable characters. The book is always readable and interesting, full of “agonizing moments and virtuoso passages of comic relief” as Sam Lawrence put it: When Davenport yanks the nails out of the carpet to play with Nelson’s toy soldiers, or oafishly trades punches at parties, or endures that long bout of impotence with Mary Fontana, most readers are bound to experience a certain pang of recognition whether they like Davenport or not. Moreover such scenes—indeed almost every scene and image in the novel—work to contribute something to our sense of the characters’ awkwardness, the awful gulf between who they are and who they wish to be.

  In fact the book’s virtues are all representative of Yates’s best work; Broyard, however, proceeded by exhaustively attacking the novel’s biggest flaw—weak characters—and then suggested that this was the most typical Yatesian feature, which brought him cunningly to the real business at hand:

  Several critics have praised Mr. Yates’s “precision” and his style.… A devil’s advocate might say that his characters are so simple and unambiguous that they can be “precisely” described. So far as style is concerned, there doesn’t seem to be any, and perhaps this is by design, an emblem of Mr. Yates’s realism, his refusal to embellish or distort his characters with authorial eloquence.

  The main question in Mr. Yates’s work is whether we are being asked to see around, or beyond, the characters to some kind of symbolism—or to take them literally. Are we supposed to forgive their shortcomings and their failures as God does, or are they being offered up as intrinsically interesting, without extenuation? Is his perspective metaphysical or entomological? His characters seem shrunk by realism, robbed of invention and reduced to bleak and repetitive rituals.

  Defending Yates against the larger charges of what Cassill called (in a sympathetic letter to Yates) the “Anatole assassination” is tempting but redundant at this point. “What happens to a writer who says you have no style…?” Cassill wrote with wondering indignation, a sentiment that will be shared by Yates’s admirers and rejected, perhaps, by his detractors. The same applies to Broyard’s insinuation that Yates’s characters, as a rule, are so shrunken and flat that no enlightened reader could possibly find them intrinsically (or “entomologically”) interesting. If one is apt to hold that opinion of the Wheelers, Helen and John Givings, Alice Prentice, John Wilder, the Grimeses, Bill Grove, Gloria Drake, et al., to say nothing of Sobel, Sergeant Reece, Vincent Sabella, Ken Platt, Christine Phillips, Sally Baldwin, et al., then one is probably neither a reader of Yates nor of the present book. (Most of Yates’s characters, suffice to say, serve both an “entomological” and “metaphysical” purpose—as Yates intended—but one has already gone into all that.)

  Truth be known, Broyard was something of a Yates character himself, and as such merits a certain amount of entomological inspection. “You made it and he did not,” Cassill wrote Yates. “Back in the time I knew Anatole he was among the white hopes, deservedly so for the merit of the few things he published in the fifties. After that … well, only the competent malice of what he has written as a reviewer.” Broyard made a minor name for himself as an author of short fiction—most of it parts of a novel he never finished—at a time when, rather like Yates, he was supporting himself by writing direct-mail advertising. When he and Yates became friends, they were on precisely the same level: near-contemporaries who’d published some promising stories and were struggling to complete novels while teaching for beggar’s wages at the New School. Then Yates published two brilliant books in two years and was offered fifteen thousand dollars to adapt Styron’s novel for the movies. “I hope you’re being corrupted by now,” Broyard wrote his friend while the latter was in Hollywood. “I’m not, I’m so busy reading manuscripts and running to class.… We console ourselves with the delusion of grandeur that someday they’ll [Broyard’s stories] be collected.—And yours were.… Someday I may want to get corrupted too.” As it happened, Broyard’s fiction would never be published in book form, though the corruption part panned out after a fashion: Reviewing for the Times gave him financial security as he started a family, as well as an alibi for not writing fiction and a bully pulpit for settling old scores. His friendship with Gordon Lish ended when Broyard maliciously attacked the first novel of one of Lish’s favorite new discoveries. As Lish recalled, “Anatole actually admitted to me that he was getting his own back because I was publishing all these first novelists, while he was struggling to produce a novel of his own. Anatole didn’t want to be a reviewer. He was quite determined to punish people.”

  By the time Broyard left Manhattan in 1963, his friend Yates was already showing signs of becoming a full-time drunk, and one imagines Broyard thinking kindly of him in the long years of literary silence that followed. Then rather abruptly Yates began publishing one acclaimed book after another, and the level of bile rose accordingly as Broyard saw fit to review three of them. Young Hearts Crying, with its theme of youthful manqué promise ending in bitterness and regret, must have been especially provoking (quite apart from its aesthetic defects): “[A]n insufficient talent is the cruelest of all temptations,” Broyard noted, with perhaps unwitting irony, in reference to the Davenports.

  “Anatole died as he lived, with a hatchet in his hand,” Sam Lawrence wrote Yates in 1990.

  A few weeks before he died he publicly destroyed the reputation and life work of Leonard Michaels in the NY Sunday Times. For nearly 20 years, Anatole was under contract to us for a novel, first at the Atlantic Monthly Press, then Delacorte, and he would introduce me as his “publisher.” I never had the heart to deny it. He couldn’t bring himself to complete a sustained work, either fiction or his memoir (which I read in part and which mostly concerned his seducing women in the Village).*

  * * *

  The reception of Young Hearts Crying, capped by the humiliation of being ridiculed for the benefit of millions of Times readers, sent Yates into a tailspin from which, in some respects, he never quite recovered. Perhaps the most damaging effect of Broyard’s review was that it made Yates genuinely doubt his value as a writer—though, to be sure, he recognized certain nonliterary motives on the reviewer’s part. One night at the Crossroads, he told Wakefield that Broyard had once coveted a girlfriend of his (Barbara Beury?); Yates quipped that Broyard’s reviewer bio at the end of “Two-Fisted Self-Pity” should read, Anatole Broyard wanted to fuck Richard Yates’s girlfriend in the early sixties. The more he and Wakefield considered the matter, the more incensed (and drunk) they became, until finally they decided to get on a train that night and go “beat the shit out of Anatole”; but reason was presently restored to its throne. At other times Yates would agonize over the relative justice of Broyard’s remarks—he’d always held the highest regard for the man’s intelligence and taste, after all. And whenever someone would try to compliment him for Young Hearts Crying, Yates would wince and say it was “soap opera” that he’d only written to fulfill a contract.

  Another blow fell in the form of a brief, waggish essay titled “A Clef” by his old friend Bob Parker. “One day around Christmas…,” it began, “I found a new book by Richard Yates in a bookstore in Connecticut.

  I always keep track of his books because he and I used to be friends. The photo on the book jacket showed him looking sullen and hurt. My mother once surprised me by saying he was handsome.

  As I looked through the book, a novel called Young Hearts Crying, some words jumped out at me: “painter,” “toy soldiers,” “Putnam County.” I concentrated on the text for a moment, then with a flush I realized that I was a character in the book, “Tom Nelson.” I bought Young Hearts Crying and read it in one evening, growing more uneasy as each chapter unfolded. Tom Nelson was insufferable. I went to bed feeling angry and embarrassed. I hoped none of my friends would read the book.

  I tried to reason with myself. When I paint a port
rait, it’s the irregularities and crooked places in a face that interest me. I supposed it was the same with Yates, but I was hurt anyway.…

  It was clear from the start of the book that the hero, a writer called “Davenport,” is Yates, although Yates does a far better job of disguising himself than he does me. Many of our old friends from Putnam County are there as well—the painter Tony Vevers (“Paul Maitland”), Ed Sherin (“Ralph Morin”) and Will Geer (“Ben Duane”) from the theater, and the writer Bob Riche (“Bill Brock”).…

  When Davenport meets Nelson, he observes that Nelson “wasn’t even dressed right, instead of a suit coat he wore an Army tanker’s jacket.…” Davenport, a war hero, immediately ascertains that Nelson is not entitled to his tanker’s jacket. I remember that jacket; in fact, I think I still have it somewhere. Yates, who had no more business owning a tanker’s jacket than I did, gave it to me.…

  I don’t know what Davenport would make of New York City today, thirty years after I started wearing Army jackets. There, on every street, are men dressed as fighter pilots with helmets, goggles and silk scarves; Eighth Army desert rats; Bosnian sharpshooters; Zouaves; Turcos; and Wehrmacht Feldwebels. I imagine Davenport staggering across town quivering with suppressed rage, hoping he can get to the station and away from all that khaki before yet another nervous breakdown lands him in Bellevue.

  When you read a roman à clef and find yourself depicted as one of the great idiots of your generation, you do have to wonder if this is the author’s jaundiced, self-serving perception or the opinion of everyone who knows you. As soon as I had finished the book, I dialed another friend from the old days in Putnam County, Peter Kane Dufault, the poet.

  “I just read Richard Yates’s new book, Young Hearts Crying,” I told him.

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Well, I appear in it as a painter called ‘Nelson.’”

  “Who is Richard Yates? Did I ever know him?”

  “He used to stand around at parties of mine, looking sad and wondering what William Styron and William Humphrey were doing.”

  “Oh yes…”

  … “There’s one chapter where he has Davenport punch Tony Vevers at a party, only he calls Vevers ‘Paul Maitland.’”

  “Wait.… I punched Tony Vevers!”

  “Yeah, and he also has himself going to Harvard.”

  “I didn’t know him there,” Peter said.

  “Well, he didn’t go. In fact, he never finished high school. There’s more—he makes himself into a boxing champion and a poet. He marries a rich wife.”

  “He’s describing me,” said Peter.…

  Parker wrote the piece “in a fit of anger” the day after he finished Young Hearts Crying, and promptly mailed copies to Yates and the journal Grand Street.* From the former he got no response. It’s possible that at some point Yates was able to look back on Parker’s effort as witty and not so bad humored under the circumstances, but at the time it was water down a drowning man’s throat. The last thing Yates wanted the public to know was that his fictional people were harsh caricatures of former friends, or that he’d filched the glamorous details of another man’s life to bedizen an essentially autobiographical persona (one that had a tendency to land in Bellevue, no less); or that he himself was perceived as a boozy climber who mooned over the doings of Styron and so on. And whether the piece was published or not, the mere fact that Yates’s old Putnam County friends were aware of how he’d portrayed them, and very hurt and angry about it, was enough to prey on his mind.

  One night Yates’s old friend from the Kennedy days, Barrett Prettyman, called to catch up and congratulate him on Young Hearts Crying. As Prettyman noted in a subsequent letter to Yates, it was “a very strange telephone conversation.” Yates seemed not only drunk and bewildered but peculiarly angry at Prettyman himself: When the latter mentioned that he’d recently married a younger woman, Yates denounced him (with no apparent irony) as a dirty old man. “Despite this unpleasantness, which concerns and puzzles me,” Prettyman wrote, “I very much hope that you continue to be successful and to turn out such beautiful work.”

  A godawful year and a half later, in mid-1986, Yates’s general shame and distress had subsided enough for him to muster an apology: “As you probably know,” he wrote Prettyman,

  I’ve had periodic spells of certifiable insanity for many years, and on the day of your phone call I was trying, unsuccessfully, to recover from the humiliating reviews of my last book. Not long after that I did go crazy, and had to be taken once again into the VA madhouse that has sort of become my second home here in Boston.…

  Of all the unkind and unpleasant things I said to you, the one that rankles my memory most was trying to make crude fun of you for having a youthful new wife. That was dumb as well as nasty; and besides, I’m nobody to talk: I married a lovely twenty-year-old when I was forty, and would give anything to have her back with me now.… I will feel a little less like an asshole about all this if you can somehow let me know we’re back on good terms.

  Prettyman promptly did so—but again, all that came later.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  No Pain Whatsoever: 1985-1988

  In the mid-eighties Yates’s former acquaintances would sometimes see a gaunt, stupefied, ragged old man staggering around the streets of Boston; an incredulous second look would confirm that the wretch was none other than Richard Yates. The usual impulse was to hurry away before one was recognized by this poor ghost, though of course there was no danger of that. When not in the hospital or seated at his desk, Yates spent his days in an alcoholic fog.

  Underlying his other woes, Yates was almost broke again. Young Hearts Crying had made a brief appearance at the bottom of the Boston Globe best-seller list and was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, but still hadn’t sold more than ten thousand copies in hardcover. Delacorte had been losing money on Yates for years, and was less and less willing to extend advances to cover the time he needed to finish his books. By the spring of 1985 the situation was desperate: Yates’s work-in-progress, Cold Spring Harbor, was little more than half done and his advance money was about to run out; nor was Yates in any condition to resort to his old recourse, teaching, even if such jobs had been available to him.

  For some time DeWitt Henry had intended to publish, under the auspices of Ploughshares, Yates’s screenplay adaptation of Lie Down in Darkness; almost ten years before, Yates had wryly dug this relic out of his trunk, brushed away the vermin turds, and handed it over to Henry. The idea was that publication might renew interest in producing the film, a hope that Yates had never quite relinquished in times of particular fiscal anxiety. Finally, in May 1985, publication was at hand: William Styron’s “Lie Down in Darkness”: A Screenplay was to be launched with a gala reading by Yates and Styron at the BU Armory, an event that would be attended by a number of Boston’s cultural nobs. Yates was excited about it, though not in any positive sense.

  Around this time Dubus got a raving phone call from Yates—the CIA had given him rat poison and he’d been kicked out of the Crossroads, etc. Dubus called DeWitt Henry and Henry called Michael Brodigan, who confirmed that, yes, Yates had become unruly and been told to leave the restaurant two days before. When he hadn’t come back or answered his phone, Brodigan had called Monica Yates, who was likewise unable to reach her father. Another two days passed, and then Henry learned from his Ploughshares cofounder, Peter O’Malley, that the Cambridge police had arrested Yates in Harvard Square for public drunkenness and transferred him to a drying-out facility.

  Yates resurfaced shortly before the Styron reading on May 11, and Henry arranged to meet him at the Crossroads. One look at Yates and Henry realized that alcohol was only part of the problem, something he’d suspected (without knowing for sure) ever since reading Disturbing the Peace. “His short-tempered, fragmented ravings reminded me of King Lear,” said Henry, who walked Yates back to his apartment and urged him to get some sleep. The next day Henry got a call fr
om Dan Wakefield: Yates was locked in his apartment and needed their help. When they arrived, in a heavy rain, Yates buzzed them into the building and shoved a key under his door. “The room was a mess,” Henry recalled, “clothes, money, and papers strewn around, spilled ashtrays, bottles and beer cans.… Dick sat hunched on his couch, shakily smoking, while Dan and I sat facing him in folding chairs. Dick turned on me: ‘Get high school outta here! What are you looking at? Those eyes!’ He pointed at my rubbers: ‘My mother taught me to take off my rubbers in the house!’” Wakefield got the number of Yates’s VA psychiatrist, who arranged for the police to dispatch a squad car. “You’re calling the cops!” Yates yelled over and over, but began to calm down somewhat when the police arrived and coaxed him to gather his things for the hospital, a familiar enough ritual by then.

  A few days later an apologetic Yates called Henry and asked him to bring a carton of cigarettes to the VA. Henry felt as he were being “taken into Bluebeard’s castle” as he passed through security stations en route to the twelfth floor, Ward C, for mental patients and detoxing alcoholics. “Dick had always seen me as ‘high school,’ ‘Mr. Big Eyes,’” said Henry, “a protégé whose good opinion he wanted to keep. But this broke the ice between us about his mental illness.” He found Yates in bed, where he’d been working on Cold Spring Harbor using the swinging food table as a desk. As they walked down the hall to an open lounge, Yates greeted a number of other patients and greedily broke out the cigarettes. Henry had brought several copies of the published screenplay for Yates to sign; once Styron had signed them too, they’d be sold as hundred-dollar collectors’ items to help Ploughshares recoup its investment.