A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  * By his own recollection the first story Yates ever wrote was about a condemned man who learned, en route to the electric chair, that the officer beside him was his long-lost brother. One wonders if Yates knew of his grandfather Horatio’s ordeal with the unfortunate William Kemmler.

  * In one respect (and certain others) Mrs. Riddle would have been pleased with the adult Yates, who bought his clothes almost entirely at Brooks Brothers. As for the relative raffishness of Franklin Simon, Lothar Candels (Avon ’43) remembered an occasion when students watched Hitchcock’s Saboteur on Saturday Movie Night; during the most famous scene a man hangs from the Statue of Liberty and his jacketsleeve rips at the armpit. “FRANKLIN SIMON!” the students yelled in unison.

  * Yates used real names in his first draft of A Good School and altered them slightly in revision.

  * Yates told his daughter Monica that the masturbation scene was true as written. Harry Flynn, for his part, said he doesn’t recall the incident.

  * Magee gained a certain degree of posthumous fame for his poem “High Flight”: “Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of earth.… Put out my hand and touched the face of God.”

  * No relation to Hugh Pratt, one of Yates’s later friends at Avon.

  * The two had been out of touch since the summer Yates went to Vermont. Sixty years later Benedict wrote, “Rereading the Cold Spring Harbor letter, when Dick was 16, three years after the others, the change seems quite poignant. The wonderful silliness is gone and the adult has begun to emerge.”

  * Wright’s widow confirmed his aptitude for melodrama. As a minor example (a major one will follow in due course), she remembered how Wright used to lurch tragically against walls, in all apparent seriousness, if dinner was late. He did suffer from low blood sugar, she pointed out, but the lurching was a bit much.

  * As may be evident by now, The Easter Parade is one of Yates’s most autobiographical novels, even though the “Me character”—as Yates liked to refer to the inevitable character(s) based on himself—is a woman. “Emily fucking Grimes is me,” Yates told a friend, paraphrasing Flaubert.

  * Both Nowell and Yates’s favorite teacher, Richard Knowles, were from the small town of South Dartmouth, Massachusetts. It seems reasonable to assume, then, that Knowles had something to do with getting his protégé’s work read by someone of Nowell’s stature.

  * The school reopened in 1948, after Mrs. Riddle had been safely deceased for two years, and prospers unto this day. At one point, as a matter of pure coincidence, Yates’s daughter Monica was a counselor at a camp for overweight children held at Avon Old Farms.

  * Nor should one forget the “slightly above average” score [109?] that twelve-year-old Prentice earns in A Special Providence. Psychologist Nancy Andreasen offered a clinical explanation for why creative writers generally fail to excel on IQ tests: “[They] tend to sort in large groups, change dimensions while in the process of sorting, arbitrarily change starting points, or use vague distantly related concepts as categorizing principles.” Perhaps, though in Yates’s case one suspects he was simply too slow and methodical.

  * In Uncertain Times Grove is writing (or rather not writing, since he’s just as blocked as Yates was) a novel exactly like A Special Providence—so exactly, in fact, that he ruminates much over “his friend and mentor, called Quint in the book.” Called Quint in both books, Grove’s and Yates’s, which gives one a sense of what can happen when an author runs out of material, but more on that later.

  † Yates was in the 289th Infantry Regiment of the 75th Division. For Robert Prentice this becomes the 189th Regiment of the 57th Division.

  * From the Uncertain Times manuscript: “Grove had agonized over [Quint’s death], and the rest of the book would suggest that nothing between March and the end of the war had served to provide a cleansing atonement for his sense of guilt and nothing ever would [italics mine]—though in some dim way he still believed that writing it out as a story might help.” In the margin Yates had scribbled, “Cut all this.”

  * As Wright liked to point out, the sergeant had probably saved his life (inadvertently), since the Germans generally assumed they could pick off the first scout and aimed at the second and third scouts instead. Still, Wright was seriously damaged by the war—if not quite to the extent he claimed later (see below)—such that his wife could never rouse him from sleep without risking some sort of somnolent assault.

  * A somber postscript to this postwar lark: Shafer, who’d married and moved to Japan, got back in touch with Yates after seeing advertisements for Revolutionary Road in American magazines. In her first letter she confided her problems with mental illness over the years, and Yates responded with similar candor and incidentally mentioned his old love for her. Her last couple of letters, following what she described as “a schizophrenic reaction,” were written from a mental hospital.

  * Sheila’s brother Charlie would later serve as the model for the mentally disturbed John Givings in Revolutionary Road.

  * The Bialek sisters, fresh out of Glen Burnie, Maryland, excited Sheila’s condescension with their lack of sophistication and lowbrow boyfriends. The dynamic between the roommates gave Yates the idea for his story “The Best of Everything.” Several years later, through a curious turn of events (see below), Sheila would be reunited with a more worldly Doris Bialek and the two would form a friendship that abides to this day.

  * “Dookie and I got along fine,” Sheila claims, and certainly in later years this appears to have been the case (though a sensible ambivalence on Sheila’s part persisted, as letters prove). Perhaps Sheila had little reason to suspect that Dookie disliked her at first, since each seems to have treated the other with elaborate civility most of the time. At any rate, since the details in “Regards at Home” are accurate in almost every knowable respect, the antipathy between the Dookie and Sheila characters offers at least a credible sense of how things were.

  * Blanchard “Jerry” Cain was almost certainly a partial model for Shepherd “Shep” Campbell in Revolutionary Road. As his son, Robin, pointed out, “Blanchard and Shepherd were both mechanical engineers. They both worked in Stamford for a while, they both made a sojourn to Arizona and they both returned to New York having failed to find there what they sought.”

  * “She’d drink a couple of beers and fall asleep,” said Sheila. “I didn’t think she was an alcoholic, she just couldn’t hold it. I didn’t understand the hullabaloo about her being a drunk.” Yates told Sheila that his mother had been more of a drunk when he was a child, but that her alcoholism had assumed less lurid forms with age.

  * Yates’s favorite was “Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut,” though he disliked the didacticism and implausibility of “Teddy,” and deplored the self-indulgence of the later Glass-family stories.

  * Yates’s daughters never noticed such scars, which suggests they were superficial and perhaps halfheartedly inflicted.

  * At first she thought it was Ira Levin, of Rosemary’s Baby fame (“some fairly famous writer named Levin”). I wrote Mr. Levin a letter, and he kindly left a message on my machine to the effect that he wasn’t anywhere near Paris in 1951, though he thought Meyer Levin had been. (“Was it Meyer Levin, by any chance?” I asked Sheila; “Yes! Exactly!” she replied.) Ira Levin went on to say that, as a matter of interesting coincidence, he did have a “Yates connection” all his own—to wit, Yates’s former mother-in-law, Marjorie Bryant, sold Levin a house in Wilton, Connecticut, in the mid-sixties. “She was a charming lady who was quite proud of [Yates],” said Ira Levin, without audible irony.

  * Namely the end of Salinger’s “Pretty My Mouth and Green My Eyes” (published in The New Yorker not long before Yates wrote “The Canal”), and the woman’s climactic outburst in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants.”

  * In the hope of evoking dramatic irony rather than suspense, I remind the reader that The New Yorker rejected every story Yates ever wrote (four or five of which are classics, or so a number of famous writers think)
, including “The Canal,” which a later generation of New Yorker editors saw fit to publish in the January 15, 2001, issue, eight years too late for Yates to enjoy it.

  * His sweet-natured sister Ruth was especially happy for him—her own stories had met with rejection for many years—such that her oldest son Fred vividly remembers her jubilation at the news.

  * As Sheila’s old friend Ann Barker tells it, Charlie tried to bludgeon the aunt who raised him. Sheila, however, dismisses the story with amused disdain: “Charlie didn’t bludgeon anybody. We never even saw our aunt after we were children.” As for what actually did happen, Sheila seemed disinclined to go into details, apart from pointing out that (a) it was purely between Charlie and their mother, and (b) there was no physical violence involved. “My mother was a very nervous person and Charlie yelled and frightened her, that’s all.”

  * That same month Elsa wrote her nephew and asked that he “pray that the time comes soon” when Dookie was less dependent on her—“for her sake certainly,” the good woman added, “and to permit me to go forward in another direction.” Hope springeth eternal.

  * Note the Salingerian “like a madman.” For the past two years Yates had often cheered himself up by reading Catcher in the Rye, and it showed in his everyday locutions. He also liked to say that things “killed” him.

  * E.g., in the first paragraph of the story, Sheila changed “(‘pretty good’) or (‘too stiff’)”—etc.—into one parenthetical statement and capitalized each separate remark, thus: “(‘Pretty good,’ or ‘Too stiff,’ or ‘It didn’t look natural’).” A small point, perhaps, but Yates was a stickler for such points and clearly valued her input.

  * In the same letter, Yates wrote of “screw[ing] up all his tact and courage” to tell his mother what it was about—and this for a story that didn’t even directly concern her! As for his decision not to collect “Tenor” in book form, he almost surely considered it too sentimental, no matter how well it played as competent commercial fiction. And finally it’s possible, too, that even then he was planning to put the same material—a crucial episode in his life, after all—to better use later, post-Dookie, as of course he did.

  * Though the opposite of a materialist (particularly later in life), Yates would always have a weakness for “smart attire,” as Mrs. Riddle would have it: “Just buy clothes,” he’d say, when asked what he’d do with a lot of money.

  * “Pretty” was Yates’s primary term of endearment for Sheila.

  * An episode that provided the McGuffin for Yates’s 1989 film treatment, The World on Fire. Yates’s version of the event was historically inaccurate, to put it mildly, for reasons I look forward to exploring later.

  * Nobody seems to remember much about that Halloween party on Perry Street, except that at some point the Yateses presented a sleepy but well-groomed Mussy to their guests. As for Bob Riche’s then-girlfriend Pamela Vevers, she vaguely remembers seeing the Yateses on that occasion and perhaps two or three others. Thirty years later she was bemused, to say the least, when it was called to her attention that she’d appeared in Young Hearts Crying as Diana Maitland, Michael Davenport’s ideal love object. As Pamela Vevers will assure anyone who asks, there was no flirtation (imagined or otherwise) between her and Yates or any other Davenport-like person; that said, she does concede a superficial resemblance on her part to Diana Maitland, and thinks certain other real-life people (e.g., Bob Riche) were very accurately portrayed.

  * Let it not pass without comment that such Dookie partisans tend to have axes to grind against Yates: e.g., Riche and Vevers because of Young Hearts Crying, and Louise Rodgers because of The Easter Parade (wherein the house designed by her beloved father appears as the hideous mildewy wreck “Great Hedges”).

  * Yates excused himself from this incestuous arrangement, though he was happy to offer input when solicited.

  * Whom she married and eventually divorced. Sherin’s second wife was the actress Jane Alexander, and he went on to a very successful career in television, as producer of such hits as Law and Order. He served as the model for Ralph Morin in Young Hearts Crying.

  * One will recall the “favorite subject” of the widowed Frank Wheeler: “‘my analyst this’; ‘my analyst that.’” In his notes to Revolutionary Road, Yates described this composite character as being like “Bob [Riche] without humor and me without talent.”

  * Namely, Shepherd “Shep” Campbell in Revolutionary Road. As noted, Blanchard “Jerry” Cain was perhaps the main model for this composite.

  * The quote is taken from the 1972 Ploughshares interview. Yates was explaining how his brother-in-law’s personality was similar to that of John Givings in Revolutionary Road.

  * “He kissed her, and this, though one of the best parts of the story, was always a little uncertain. He wasn’t sure how they would keep their noses from colliding.” I’d wager this bit was inspired by the five-year-old boy’s question to Sergeant X in Salinger’s “For Esmé—with Love and Squalor”: “‘Why do people in films kiss sideways?’” A bad sign that Yates seemed to be falling back on an old influence in so obvious a fashion.

  † In the Winter 1962 issue of Transatlantic Review.

  * Yates has been called a “naturalistic” (or “neonaturalistic”) writer, though he had little affinity for (or familiarity with) naturalism as a literary tradition. “Are you aware—you must be—that [Revolutionary Road] is just what Zola felt the naturalistic novel ought to be?” a reader wrote Yates, who replied in part: “I was very flattered by your comparison of my book to Zola’s work, but must confess my ignorance of what he said the ‘naturalistic novel ought to be’—or, for that matter, of the idea that my book was ‘naturalistic’ at all.”

  * “Donarann” in Young Hearts Crying, wherein the estate and its various tenants are depicted with almost absolute fidelity. Mahopac is called “Tonapac” in the novel.

  * Geer was the model for Ben Duane in Young Hearts Crying. Michael Davenport’s views on Duane’s sexual orientation are pretty much those of his creator, a matter worthy of later discussion.

  * Just like Tom Nelson in Young Hearts Crying. Parker would later have much to say about this novel and his part in it, as we shall see.

  * Also the title of Chester Pratt’s first novel in Disturbing the Peace—which suggests that, fifteen years later, Yates continued to reflect fondly on his Conrad Jones correspondence.

  * Yates retroactively incorporated these disputes into Revolutionary Road, as witnessed by Sheila’s remark in a 1962 letter comparing the published novel with an earlier draft: “It seems to me now that both Frank’s idea that [April] should be psychoanalyzed and her recognition of lack of love for him are new to the book, am I right?” Curiously enough Sheila later insisted that she’d never read Revolutionary Road in its entirety: “Our relations were such that last year he was working on it that I didn’t want to read it. It was too uncomfortable.… I couldn’t take the constant agonizing over every word of it. I had other interests by then.” She also claims she had no idea the novel was dedicated to her until very recently, when her daughter Monica showed her the 2000 Vintage edition (“It came as a complete surprise,” said Sheila, “though it makes sense”). But of course she did read the novel. According to the letter quoted above, she found it “a great creation, and the writing extraordinarily fine,” and went on to make a number of more specific observations. For what it’s worth, I myself am convinced that Sheila—whose memory is clear as a bell in most respects—has sincerely persuaded herself over the past forty years that she never read the published novel. Yates once mentioned to his psychiatrist that Sheila, a few years after the divorce, told him the book had hurt her feelings and that she’d never read his work since. Yates was crushed.

  * Rollin went on to become a celebrity of sorts as a writer and NBC news correspondent. She’s perhaps best known for the book First You Cry, about her mastectomy.

  * “A Clef” was accepted by Grand Street in 1985 but never published, perhaps
out of consideration for Yates’s feelings or (more likely) because of concerns that it was libelous. Parker’s version of the Montreal story is mostly true, no doubt, but subjective: In fact the young actress was impressed enough by Yates to write him a few letters afterward, in the first of which she apologized for the awful CBC adaptation of his story: “I felt we deserved all the indifference, contempt, and, what was worse, your tired acceptance, as if one could expect no more from provincial actors.” One will return to such matters as this actress and Parker’s “A Clef” by and by.

  * Suzanne Schwertley’s place in literary history must be reduced to a footnote—that is, as the woman who typed the final draft of Revolutionary Road. According to Bob Riche, she was also romantically involved with Yates, who “dropped her like a hotcake” as soon as she finished the typing job. Riche described her as a “nice but rather sad woman” in her late thirties whom Yates “kept under wraps.” After the couple parted, Riche distinctly remembers her describing Yates as “a thug.” Whether Yates’s cavalier thuggishness was the bitter exaggeration of a woman scorned, or perhaps a passing effect of Broyard’s Svengalian influence, or pure invention, will have to remain a mystery, as Schwertley could not be traced for an interview.