by Blake Bailey
* Such titles included A Cry of Prisoners, Losers, Nectar in a Sieve, The Fiasco, The Big Nothing, Oak Hill, A House in the Country, A Rampage in Cellophane, The Acid Soil, and (Yates’s “working title” according to a friend) The Bullshit Artist.
* Williams appears as Arnold Clark in Uncertain Times: “Grove had met Arnold Clark at a summer writers’ conference where a cheerful kind of touch football had been played on idle afternoons; and Clark, playing quarterback, had helped him briefly to overcome a chronic aversion to sports by saying ‘Sure you can’ when Grove said he didn’t think he could go out and catch a long forward pass. Grove went out, the pass came high and fast, and he not only picked it out of the air like a real player but carried it thirty dizzy yards for a touchdown, to the beer-bloated cheers of at least a hundred people.”
* An NIMH study found that almost half (46 percent) of those diagnosed with bipolar, or manic-depressive, disorder are also dependent on alcohol or drugs. As Kay Jamison points out, “Alcohol and drug abuse often worsens the overall course of manic-depressive illness, occasionally precipitates the disease in vulnerable individuals, and frequently undermines the effects of treatment.” This was preeminently so in Yates’s case.
† Onset of the illness usually occurs in late adolescence, though Yates’s experience is not uncommon. Initial episodes tend to be triggered by unusual stress or personal losses; later episodes occur more or less spontaneously.
* According to Yates’s daughter Monica, the novel’s entire opening sequence (St. Vincent’s, Bellevue, etc.) is a “totally true” rendering of the episode. It always amazed her—and anybody else who ever saw Yates in the midst of a breakdown—that he could remember any part of it later, much less in such lucid detail.
* This story was a staple of Broyard’s repertoire, and appears in his posthumous memoir Kafka Was All the Rage, wherein the woman’s expandable ass is described with a slightly different simile than Beury remembers.
* John Updike wrote of Revolutionary Road: “I was fascinated and, in the end, deeply distressed by Mr. Yates’s compassionate, well-wrought, and claustrophobic book.” Of Updike, Yates later told Ploughshares: “I think [he’s] very talented, though none of his novels have been wholly successful for me so far.” In private he was more caustic: “Is John Updike still only twenty-nine years old?” he’d say on hearing some fresh acclaim for the writer.
* The importance of mirrors and windows, as devices of exposure and reflection, is suggested by the novel’s French title, La Fenêtre Panoramique.
* The name “Mrs. Givings” was one of Yates’s favorite details. According to his friend Robin Metz, Yates had a habit of checking phonebooks in various cities for a listing of “Givings,” but never found one. This delighted him: “Doesn’t it sound like a real name?” he’d say. “It doesn’t exist! Isn’t that fucking fantastic?” The reader should consult Ford’s introduction to the novel for a nice analysis of Yates’s use of “extraliteral” names such as Givings, Wheeler, Prentice, Wilder, Grimes, etc.
* Imagination is particularly required since Yates didn’t preserve her letters.
† A satirical work by Alexander King (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1960).
* Subsequent accounting by Little, Brown adjusted the total hardcover sales to around 8,900.
* This, said Yates, was the biggest problem with student writing: “It takes many amateur writers … a long time to realize that they are addressing strangers with their work. Writing any kind of fiction is a public performance.”
* From “A Natural Girl”: “‘Oh, don’t go away.…’ That was the cry, or the plea, that had broken from David Clark’s mouth as if wholly beyond his control with almost all the women he’d known since his divorce. Several girls had seemed to find it endearing, others had been baffled by it, and one sharp-tongued woman had called it ‘an unmanly thing to say.’”
* Five years later Riche was puzzled but touched when Yates called, out of the blue, to congratulate him on the premiere of his play about Malcolm X, Message from the Grass Roots. Riche was less than touched eighteen years later, when he read Young Hearts Crying and came to the part where Bill Brock discusses his play Negroes: “‘Well, sure, it’s kind of a stark little title, but that very quality of starkness is what I was after’—and he felt that his gift for dialogue had served him well in exploring the artistic possibilities of American Negro speech. ‘For example,’ [Brock] said, ‘all through the play the characters keep saying “muh-fuh”; “muh-fuh”—and I’ve spelled it just that way.’”
* Neither Yates’s children nor Ruth’s have any idea what became of Dookie’s sculpture. All attempts to trace her work through museums, Pen and Brush, the National Association of Women Artists, etc., were unsuccessful. Except perhaps for some fugitive pieces in private collections, her work seems to have totally disappeared.
* “On the first day of class I asked my students if they’d read various writers—Henry James, for example,” Jacobus recalled. “Almost every time, Sheila’s hand was the only one that went up. Finally I stopped asking, since I could see she was getting embarrassed.”
* Both Herbert Gold and the third judge, Lewis Gannett, are on record as having chosen The Moviegoer purely as a matter of merit. “I admired Yates’s writing,” Gold told me, “but I think there’s a monotony in the prose—so much pain expressed. If writing is no fun, why go on with it?”
* Catherine Downing died in 1979 at the age of fifty-four, and Yates was in touch with her as late as 1975. When one considers that he undertook to write “Saying Goodbye to Sally” sometime in late ’79 or early ’80, the title may be understood to have a poignant secondary meaning.
* Yates’s remarks are paraphrased in Sheila’s letters; his side of the correspondence doesn’t survive.
* Studies show that suicide is remarkably prevalent among bipolar patients: Up to one-half attempt it at least once. Yates’s halfhearted wrist slashing went back to 1949, and there were no further attempts as far as anybody knows. His daughter Monica remarked that his whole lifestyle was a “slow suicide,” but added that Yates himself “would have poo-poo’d that.” His daughter Sharon was even more emphatic: “Suicide was always inconceivable to Dad. Toward the end he said he’d do anything to prolong life, even go on a respirator.”
* Uncertain Times is the most autobiographical of Yates’s novels—which is to say, very autobiographical. Since the period in Yates’s life covered by the novel is roughly the period covered by this chapter, I occasionally quote or paraphrase from the work without explicit/repetitive citation. The reader should be able to detect when I’ve taken this liberty, and rest assured that I do so only when I have good reason to suspect that the passage in question adheres closely to the facts.
* Her first name.
* President Kennedy’s speech on June 11 was written almost entirely by Theodore Sorenson.
* In 1982, Rosenthal wrote about Merkins (which he spelled “Murcans” for the occasion) when he filled in for William Safire’s “On Language” column in the New York Times Magazine.
† As follows: The Great Gatsby, Madame Bovary, Judith Hearne, Lie Down in Darkness, Dubliners, A Farewell to Arms, The Scarlet Letter, The Naked and the Dead, Lord Jim, and The Good Soldier.
* The Newsweek item appears almost word for word in Disturbing the Peace—that is, to announce the same job for the Yates-like Chester Pratt.
* Sic “Wendy.” In the novel the character based on Sears is called “Holly Parsons,” but in the later, rougher stages of the manuscript there are several instances where he’d yet to change real names.
* Wendy Sears witnessed this exchange at a party Schlesinger gave in August 1963. In his biography of Robert Kennedy, Schlesinger baldly declared: “Richard Yates, the novelist … did not like [Robert] Kennedy.” Perhaps he assumed (not without cause) that Yates’s contempt for JFK embraced both brothers, but it doesn’t seem that Yates explicitly disparaged RFK in Schlesinger’s presence.
* Nabokov
remained in Switzerland rather than accept the award in person.
* In those days Yates thought Roth “condescended” to his characters—that is, made them into so many foolish stereotypes. “I thought Philip Roth was vastly overrated for years until I read Portnoy’s Complaint,” he told Ploughshares; “then I forgave him everything including his millions of dollars.”
* Dubus wrote in a 1970 letter to Yates: “Getting a letter from Richard Yates mentioning Anton Pavlovich Chekhov is somewhat like getting a letter from Jesus Christ mentioning the Holy Spirit.”
* “Wobbly” stands for “Industrial Workers of the World,” a labor movement founded on revolutionary principles in 1906.
* “Maybe this is silly,” Wendy Sears had written him the previous summer, “but I think it’s about time you stopped dwelling on your past—unfortunate though it may be.”
* After Cassill resigned from Iowa the following year, he founded the Associated Writing Programs as a rival to the more academically oriented Modern Language Association.
* Rubin declined to be interviewed, though he did admit that he remembered Yates qua patient very well indeed. The psychiatrist, a young man in 1965, is almost assuredly the model for Dr. Burton L. Rose in Disturbing the Peace—“a small, slight, pale man who couldn’t have been over thirty,… His office, deep in the labyrinthine complex of the [UCLA] Medical Center, was barely big enough to contain a desk, two chairs, and a psychiatric couch.… How could anyone ‘talk’ to this solemn, staring boy in this claustrophobic room?”
* It’s likely that Yates balked at Wolper’s demand for another rewrite, and perhaps that’s why he was fired, but all that’s definitely known is that (a) further rewrites were done, and (b) Yates was fired (sans ten thousand dollars). See endnotes.
* Last name deliberately omitted.
* “Dick wasn’t racist about it,” Murray recalled, “simply concerned [about Sharon] in general.” Sharon Yates points out that she was not involved with a black man, then or later. Around that time, however, she was entering a phase of adolescent rebellion in which she’d test her parents’ liberalism with provocative hypothetical questions, such as “What if I dated a Negro?” She assumes that’s where her father got the idea, but it was a delusion—“part of his nuttiness.”
* According to the oldest son Fred—who takes a very dim view of his father—Ruth’s autopsy showed cirrhosis as the sole cause of death, and indeed most (if not all) of her occasional bruises seem to have been caused by the falls to which she was prone in later years. Yates’s reasoned view of his sister’s death was not so much that her husband caused it with a single beating or shove, but rather “with twenty-five years of brutality and stupidity and neglect,” as Emily Grimes puts it.
* Unlike the rest of his published work, Yates did not preserve any drafts of A Special Providence, his least favorite novel. Beyond a point, then, one can only speculate on the revision process, based on oblique references in letters as well as the uncertain testimony of a few interview subjects. As for Robert Gottlieb, he vaguely remembers Yates (“a tall, good-looking fellow”), but has entirely forgotten the fact that he worked on Yates’s second novel. It seems improbable, anyway, that Gottlieb “didn’t like” that penultimate draft; his correspondence is nothing but encouraging.
* Martha said that Yates settled the matter over the phone and didn’t go back to New York for the funeral. All three of Ruth’s children, however, recall seeing him there—indeed say it was their last meeting with “Uncle Dick.” Also (for what it’s worth), Emily Grimes attends Pookie’s funeral in The Easter Parade—a scene depicted with the same vivid particularity as the graveside service for Sarah Grimes, which of course was based on firsthand observation. Still, I can find no compelling evidence that Yates made a special trip to New York for his mother’s funeral, nor do I find it plausible for any number of reasons. As for the hesitant testimony of his niece and nephews, I daresay they’ve conflated the memory of Yates’s presence at their mother’s funeral, which, after all, was just over a year before Dookie’s.
* Sam Lawrence, whose imprint was then at Dell, had nothing to do with these transactions.
* Clark was kind enough to send me a tape of Yates’s reading (“Doctor Jack-o’-Lantern”) from this visit—the only time I’ve ever heard Yates’s voice: Sonorous, doleful, with a barely perceptible lisp, he sounds to me like a rather less jaunty version of the actor Donald Sutherland. By all accounts—when in good form—Yates relished the opportunity to read for a receptive audience; on the tape, his imitation of Vincent Sabella’s New York accent earns him a well-deserved burst of laughter, and the final applause is properly enthusiastic.
* In the published version of his response re “neglect,” Yates avoided any kind of general statement, restricting himself to the facts of his own career with characteristic modesty: He admitted occasional irritation that Revolutionary Road wasn’t better known, but pointed out that “it did quite well for a first novel”; then he blamed himself for having “tinkered and brooded and fussed” so long over A Special Providence, and concluded, “I can’t honestly claim my stuff has been neglected; it’s probably received just about the degree of attention it deserves. I simply haven’t published enough to expect more—not yet, anyway.”
* To wit: Styron, James Jones, Mailer, and Salinger (except for “those convoluted Glass-family chronicles”); also—with dire reservations in some cases—Updike, Philip Roth, Nabokov, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Jean Stafford, Peter Taylor, Flannery O’Connor, Cheever, Malamud, Bruce Jay Friedman, Thomas Berger, and Joan Didion.
* Yates received almost ten inches and a photo.
* Another potential cause of Yates’s increasingly common seizures was the volatile mixture of drugs he was then taking—none of which, needless to say, should have ever been mixed with alcohol. At Ward’s Island he listed the following as “regular” medications: lithium, Dilantin, Antabuse, Sinequan (for depression and/or anxiety associated with alcohol abuse), and Trilafon (an antipsychotic). “Epileptiform seizures” are a common side effect of lithium in large doses, as well as almost any antipsychotic mixed with alcohol; withdrawal from Dilantin also lowers the seizure threshold.
† By that time Yates was disenchanted with Nathan S. Kline, for any number of conceivable reasons.
* It’s worth bearing in mind that, while Disturbing the Peace followed his previous novel by almost six years, Yates hadn’t actually begun writing the final John Wilder version until sometime in mid-1972—that is, not far from the time he entered one of the most alcoholic, disturbed phases of his life.
* This appears to have been the case—still another reason for Yates’s general popularity among students.
* If Lawrence noticed any similarity between Disturbing the Peace and Jack B. Weiner’s The Morning After—the book that had plunged Yates into such alcoholic misery two and a half years before—he seemed never to mention it. Probably the likeness (such as it was) didn’t occur to anybody but Yates.
† “I don’t remember what poetry,” said Mohbat. “The restaurant was in Georgetown.”
* This would help to explain Yates’s conduct (described below) when the two men met shortly thereafter.
* The Schulmans did in fact reconcile.
* This part may be so much raconteurish filigree, given that the “funny” version he told Dubus et al. came later. As we shall soon see, the morbidly modest Yates was naked when the firemen arrived, and to put it mildly it seems implausible that he’d run about the hallways thus. The main thing Yates wanted to impress on people (particularly Sam Lawrence) was that the fire had nothing to do with his being drunk, which was probably true.
* Yates wore glasses for reading and driving only. His idea that the loss thereof led to scrambled brains was recurrent; he’d said something similar to Monica McCall two years before, and she’d humored him by typing her correspondence in capital letters so he could read it better.
* Despite a close encounter (at the Blue Mill circa 1
961) with Wakefield, whose friend Sarel Eimerl had admired Yates’s way with women. See above.
* Yates was of course a master at selecting life material for maximum effect, though at least one part of The Easter Parade that he didn’t “see” in this sense was the ending, when Emily is taken in by her kindly nephew Peter. In fact Yates never visited any of Ruth’s children after her death, though he did call Peter to apologize for writing such a “hurtful” book. It was the last time they spoke.
* Mortimer died in 1999, and details of her friendship with Yates are derived from a handful of letters and the scant testimony of a few witnesses.
* Again, Yates preferred to be viewed as a man who suffered from a “chemical imbalance” rather than an alcoholic. When lucid, Yates almost always took his medication; if he didn’t, it meant he was drunk or deranged or both, and the primary reason he passed out in the snowdrift was almost certainly drink, not drug withdrawal.
* Yates, a great maker of lists, wrote a chronological memo which gives, year by year, his age, any books of his published, milestone events (e.g., Gina’s birth), and the first name of whatever woman or women he was involved with at the time. For example: “52–53 [age] 1978–79 Mary. Laura. Dolly.”
