CHAPTER SIXTEEN
“Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired” particularly impressed a twenty-five-year-old Yale graduate named Laura,* who was on the editorial staff of the Atlantic. “Since then I’ve read all the novels, each one unique, wise, and heartbreakingly fine,” she wrote an editor at Pocket Books, whom she hoped to persuade to reissue Yates’s work in paperback. “I’m outraged that Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, a collection that, along with Revolutionary Road, ought to be read by every student of twentieth-century American literature, languishes in a grim (and expensive) hardcover edition published by a reprint house (Greenwood Press).”
Almost a year would pass between the publication of “Joseph” and Yates’s first actual meeting with the young Atlantic editor, but meanwhile she became known among friends and associates as a relentless advocate of his work—a fan, in short. “I’m the one who’s been stalking you,” she finally introduced herself in so many words (at a party she made a point of attending because she knew Yates would be there). By then she’d sat in the audience at two of his readings but shyly refrained from approaching him on both occasions; as she later explained to his daughter Monica, she had low self-esteem at the time—the “girl with glasses” syndrome. She was, however, an attractive young woman (“prettier than she thinks” was how Yates put it), and also possessed the proverbial good personality: She was smart, well-mannered, and capable of making Yates laugh. For many years he’d go on quoting witty things she’d told him. After their first night together, she wrote him about certain of her misgivings: “[I worried] your friend Mary [Robison] … would come back from Ohio with her New Year’s resolution … to live with you and love with you in a nice apartment in Boston … and write touching stories about being almost happy in The New Yorker.” He’d explained the photograph on his desk.
Yates was twice her age but seemed older, wheezing and frail, and the fact that he was able to hang on to her, if only for a while, attests to a powerful lingering charm. At his best he was nothing if not “understanding and knowing and kind” (as Mary Robison pointed out), all the more so in the presence of pretty young women. But in the case of Laura—the last significant romance of Yates’s life—perhaps the best explanation is a basic human tendency to idealize artists because of their work. As Peggy Rambach observed, “Dick’s writing was so sensitive, so tender toward children, that Laura figured he’d be that person.” He was and he wasn’t, but in any case she pursued the man who was. As a courting gesture—lest she get a “sweet send-off” at the outset—she mailed him the complete lyrics to one of his favorite old tunes, “Mountain Greenery”: “Whatever happens,” she wrote, “it’s a great song and I’d love to hear you sing it and, non sequiturally speaking, I love you.” And he seemed to love her too, though as Monica Yates remarked, “The physical aspect was hard to fathom.”
For a while, though, he seemed rejuvenated—relative, that is, to the morose disheveled old man who smoked and muttered at the Crossroads. While in Arkansas for a reading that February, he was the life of several parties—not only the drunkest but the most ebullient guest. “Dick was bombed, but he was on,” remembered a married woman with the improbable name of Booghie, with whom he shamelessly flirted. “Do you remember me—Booghie?” she wrote him afterward. “We sat on the couch and you promised to love me forever, and give me big bucks, and kisses all over and we sang songs, and I fell in love.… It was the high point of my winter.”
Yates even found pretexts for introducing Laura to his daughters—without, however, quite violating his old taboo against exposing them to girlfriends as such. Monica was in her last year of college and considering a career in publishing, so it simply made sense for Yates to invite her to Boston in order to meet a nice, smart “friend” of his who could advise her about the profession. Also, Monica had recently published a story in the Boston Globe, whereupon Dubus wrote her a kind letter to the effect that she should “stick to her guns” and keep working on her stories rather than be pressured into writing a novel (“I got the impression,” said Monica, “that he was justifying his own career mostly”). As Yates assumed she’d want to meet Dubus too, he proposed that the five of them—Andre and Peggy, he and Laura, and Monica who was about the same age as the other two women—get together for dinner. Monica agreed, but reluctantly: She’d read between the lines re Laura’s true status and found the prospect of being in the midst of older men and their daughterly girlfriends “creepy”; besides, she was a “mess” at the time—unhappy, high-strung—and didn’t relish having to deal with her father in person, knowing he’d be drunk. And so he was, though his well-spoken young “friend” made a good impression; as for Dubus, he was almost as drunk as Yates. Monica was appalled: “Both he and Dad were very boisterous. Andre kept telling these tedious anecdotes about going into bars and charming the locals: ‘So I walked in and pretty soon the whole place was eating out my hands!’ etcetera. Again and again the waiter warned him and Dad to lower their voices. An awful night.” Laura herself seemed to enjoy such outings and contribute to the general hilarity, though they soon palled in Peggy Rambach’s case: “I was very bored during Andre’s meetings with Dick. I was the woman and hence ignored. My mind would wander, I’d daydream, concentrate on the length of Dick’s cigarette ash and so on. It reminds me of how Dick once inscribed a book to us: ‘To Andre with all my respect…’—and this and that, on and on, then finally—‘and to Peggy, who is a lovely girl.’”
Though arguably there was no connection, Monica Yates had a psychotic episode shortly after that meeting with Dubus et al. Like her sister a decade before, she’d taken an hallucinogenic drug (mushrooms) and hadn’t come down; like her father she thought she was Christ; like both she had a history of depression. “I was anorexic early in college—five foot nine, 107 pounds—then during my last year I got fat,” she said. “I was very upset about this, and I was messing up in a lot of other ways, too—losing close friends, my boyfriend, that sort of thing.” After a week in the Northampton mental hospital, her mother arranged for her to be transferred to Grasslands in Westchester, where she stayed for six weeks. At the time she was diagnosed as schizophrenic and given the drug Haldol, though an outpatient psychiatrist decided it was an isolated incident and took her off medication. When it was all over, Monica went to Durango, Colorado, where Martha and Gina had recently moved; she found work in a nursing home, though mostly she “holed up” and wondered what had happened to her and worried about the future. Her father worried too—“Join the club,” he’d told her—though his main advice was just to get on with her life and try not to think about it. She thought about it anyway (“Dad didn’t do enough of that,” she said; “the crazier he got, the more he’d deny it”), and perhaps as a further reaction against fate, she became deeply religious. This, however, worked no better than being a chemistry major. During a lonely solo bicycle trip that took her through the Bible Belt, she called her father: “Dad, I don’t want to go to heaven if these people are the ones who’ll be there!” “Well of course, baby,” he replied. “Everyone knows that.”
Meanwhile Sharon Yates’s life had grown increasingly tranquil in her father’s absence. Two years before, she’d met her future husband Richard Levine, a shy man who’d felt daunted in the presence of his girlfriend’s rather celebrated, saturnine father. “Every time Jimmy Carter tells another lie,” Yates dourly quipped on meeting Levine, “he grows another tooth.” That night at dinner, Levine grew uneasy as the silence expanded at their table; he’d expected Yates to be a lively raconteur, but the man sat leaning to one side with his face set. As it happened, he and Sharon were eavesdropping on a nearby table—a mutual habit when together—and every so often they’d remark caustically on what they overheard. That was in 1977, and on July 21, 1979, Sharon and Levine eloped. Yates was disgusted at first—he’d wanted to walk his daughter down the aisle and give her away—but he soon got over it. A little later they visited him in Boston, and after dinner he took them back to his crepuscular apartment and opened a bottle of champagne.
* * *
Yates’s story collection proceeded apace, though he’d had to change the title Five Kinds of Dismay because he now planned six stories rather than five, and one of them hadn’t struck him as particularly dismaying. He’d suggested Aspects of Home to Sam Lawrence, who found it “too academic”; Yates altered it to the less Forsterian Broken Homes. “Nobody’s eyes light up much on hearing my tentative title,” he wrote. “The idea, see, is that all the stories will touch in some way on fucked-up families.” A somewhat younger author who also favored such themes—indeed was indebted to Yates in a number of ways and modest enough to admit it—visited Boston that summer. “I wanted to tell you again how pleased I was to meet you and to be able to spend a few hours with you,” Raymond Carver wrote. “You’ve been one of my heroes since I first read Revolutionary Road and was just stopped dead in my tracks with admiration.” Carver had presented Yates with a copy of his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and now enclosed a second, Furious Seasons, with the diffident caveat that Yates read only four of the stories therein (he listed them). “Don’t take any of this, please, as an obligation of any sort,” he added. It’s unknown whether the two ever met again.
Meanwhile Yates was in financial trouble. In the fall he accepted a one-semester appointment at Harvard Extension teaching two classes—fiction and expository writing (the latter a subject he hadn’t taught since his New School days)—but was still unable to pay nine hundred dollars in back taxes to the state of Massachusetts. When they threatened to seize his property (one pauses to wonder what Yates had to fear from such a threat), he called his friend Joe Mohbat in Brooklyn. Usually when he called to talk to the Mohbats, the lonely Yates would immediately apologize for taking up their time (“I know you have better things to do”), but this was different. As Mohbat remembered, “He took a while getting around to it, but he sounded pretty desperate. He insisted I draft a note and charge interest and so on. I wouldn’t be surprised if he went without meals to pay me back; it ate him up to ask for money.” Yates’s first installment on the loan was somewhat delayed when the check became buried amid the chaos of his desk—“where, as you’ll see,” he wrote Mohbat, “it picked up a few traces of roach shit”—but Yates was nonetheless grateful for what he considered the rather ambiguous favor of “[saving his] ramshackle life.”
At that point poverty was a lesser sorrow. Though Yates and Laura were still somewhat together after several months, the end was near. The usual problems applied, though in certain ways the two remained compatible despite Yates’s lapses; by then, however, he needed more than just an “emotional nurse” (the function he ascribed to past girlfriends and wives), he needed someone to care for him physically—a lot to ask of anybody, much less a charming young woman with her life ahead of her. Such was his infirmity that Geoff Clark was “horrified” when he saw Yates that fall in Rhode Island, noting how Laura was obliged to “guide him about”: “[A]fter a quick beer in the union before his reading, Dick, requiring assistance, took minutes—hours, it seemed—to climb the union stairs, stopping periodically on a step, clinging to the railing as he breathed heavily, agonizingly, gathering himself for the next step.” During his readings, too, Yates was often derailed by coughing and what Clark described as “lip-smacking pauses that broke the rhythm.”* As for what it was like sharing a bedroom with Yates—the couple spent a night at Clark’s house during the visit, and through the wall he heard Yates “hacking, coughing, muttering, groaning, pacing” all night long.
“I think this may be my last foray into the magic world of young girls,” he wrote Mohbat that same month. “Got to face facts, and I’ll soon be 54, which everybody knows is the time for carpet slippers and companionship with some pleasant lady whose brains have been utterly scrambled since her third husband walked out in 1965. That’s what’s great about young girls, apart from their vastly superior flesh: their brains haven’t yet had time to be scrambled by the world.” Yates tried to be philosophical about things, but he was heartbroken and dreaded the loneliness that lay ahead. When the young woman calmly declined a belated proposal of marriage, Yates tried to win her back—or simply forestall the inevitable—with his prose. Probably he spent at least a week polishing the seven typed pages of comic pensées and vignettes that make up “Notes Toward an Understanding of Laura M—,”* an effort reminiscent of those strenuously witty letters he had written Barbara Beury twenty years earlier, though even more wistful and funny and sad. “Talk of marriage brings on an intellectual power-failure in most contemporary girls,” he wrote.
Their circuits go out one after another, and they must fill silence and darkness with commitment and relationship and identity and sharing and coping and space and meaningful … and this-level and that-level and feelings and feelings and feelings and feelings—this spastic paralysis can go on for hours until somebody manages to change the fuse; only then do things come back to life and allow a girl to say “love” again.
So I am forever grateful that Laura M— is an extraordinary girl. Her circuits never go out. Her “no” and her “too old” may hurt like whips, but they are words a man can trust.
One can fill in a lot of blanks based on these pages; suffice to say, the basic trajectory of the romance seems to have been pretty much the same as all the others in Yates’s life, if perhaps mitigated by a bit more humor and mutual appreciation than usual. “When Laura said she didn’t like my story I shouted ugly stuff for about two hours and made her cry,” he wrote. “Since that night, I have been unable to discuss my work with Laura at all except in postures of arrogance or apology.” That Yates would have found other reasons to shout at her (and surely did) is beyond doubt, but once she saw fit to criticize his work, however innocently, the die was cast. Indeed, most of Yates’s “Notes” seem the product of his creative brooding on that subject, as when he imagined Laura considering one of his stories for the Atlantic:
She reads it through with an open mind, blinking now and then at the soft-edged and idealized parts; then she prepares an inter-office memo to Richard Todd [an editor at the magazine].
Dick: (And Laura, bless her heart, hasn’t yet gotten over a sweet, secret thrill at calling Mr. Todd by his first name) This new R. Yates story leaves much, I think, to be desired.…
A few days later she receives Todd’s reply:
Laura: I couldn’t agree more. Soft-edged, idealized and boring, boring, boring.… Reject this piece. Trash it. Wipe it out. We will, I think, be doing the wretched man a favor.…
The diamond-bright precision of Todd’s intelligence is just the tonic Laura needs to help her compose her letter to me, which reads like this:
Dear Richard Yates: Like most of your previous thirty-four submissions, this one came close.…
I’m afraid I can’t meet you for a drink on Friday, as promised; something has come up. Try me later in the month, okay?
Kisses, L.…
* * *
Whenever I say ugly stuff in restaurants, Laura goes into the ladies’ room and cries. This helps her to put me in perspective.… I make frequent use of mens’ rooms, too, in various bleak and melancholy ways, but Laura doesn’t known anything about that.…
* * *
This is a multiple-choice question. If Laura is the nicest girl I have ever known … then how come I shout ugly stuff at her all the time?
A. Because I want to disappoint her and drive her away like the harsh and terrible old man I am afraid of becoming.
B. Because I am like Doctor Jack-O’-Lantern in having to show I don’t need anybody’s kindness while dying for it.
C. Because I drink too much beer.
The best answer wavers somewhere between B and C, though the ramifications of C are everywhere in evidence, and help to explain another item:
I am pretty sure Laura thought pushing me over the hedge was funny, but she didn’t laugh at the time because that would have spoiled her sense of outrage. In much the same way, she seldom allows outrage to spoil her sense of what’s funny, even on being teased about such matters as vegetarianism and cultivated body hair.
Fair to assume that Laura pushed (and Yates fell) because he was exasperatingly drunk again, and then the fact that she cultivated body hair and vegetarianism would seem to push the whole opposites-attract principle beyond the generational pale. Other problems apparently included her admiration for the brilliance of David Milch (who’d taught her at Yale), her frequent fraternizing with friends her own age (“this madcap shuttling between Somerville and Harvard and Jamaica Plain”), and the fact that, finally, she’d begun to avoid Yates entirely except for the odd weekday lunch. “I love Laura M—,” the “Notes” sadly conclude. “I will love Laura M—until the day I push aside my Jello and scratch at the window of my oxygen tent for the last time.”
A month or so later, Laura took a job with Random House and moved to New York. “She’s offered ample assurance that we’ll still be ‘friends,’ but I’ve never really believed in stuff like that,” Yates wrote the Arkansas woman named Booghie that December. “Still, I’ve been familiar with loneliness before, many times, and know I’ll survive it. If I can’t exactly welcome it like an old comrade, at least it’s no worse than putting up with some tiresome old acquaintance of mine.” In the meantime he wondered if he might address his present correspondent as Margaret: “Because while ‘Booge’ is certainly a cute and kicky name—Don’t get me wrong—I think I’d prefer the idea of a lovely, forever unattainable girl named Margaret, down there in Arkansas, to whom I can write letters once in a while—on the hopeful assumption that she might once in a while write back.” But he must have decided that Arkansas was too far away, or that a married woman named Booghie really was too unattainable, or that confessing his loneliness to a relative stranger was unseemly, or perhaps the letter got lost amid the roach droppings and other refuse. In any case it was never sent.
* * *
Yates had a horror of being pitied (at least by non-intimates), and as his health declined and the sadness of his life became obvious, he took more frequent refuge in a gruff, though by no means humorless, persona. “Ahh, mind your own goddamn business!” he’d snap, coughing, when solicitous strangers would advise him to quit smoking. “You guys ever going to start wearing grownup clothes?” he said to Dubus and Jim Crumley, indicating their cowboy boots and jeans. In such a mood he particularly relished the chance to squelch anything smacking of pretension or phoniness. “I just love your work, Mr. Yates,” said a critic from the Boston Globe. “And I can see why Flaubert is such an influence. Really, there’s no great novel that isn’t about adultery.” Yates looked the man up and down, then laughed in his face: “You’re out of your mind!” At the same time Yates became all the more sympathetic toward what he perceived as real suffering. The writer John Casey had gotten on Yates’s bad side some fifteen years before in Iowa (by seeming overprivileged and picking on Bob Lehrman), but when the two met in 1980 at their mutual friend Bill Keough’s house, Yates was strikingly kind. “Yates really likes you,” Keough told Casey afterward, and it occurred to the latter that he’d endeared himself by having had the “worst year of [his] life”: “My dog and father had died, my wife had left me, and my best friend had just killed himself. I’d been kicked to shit, and now I was a real human being in Dick’s eyes.” When Casey went on to win the National Book Award, Yates wrote him a warm letter of congratulation.
Early that summer Dan Wakefield returned to Boston after three years in Los Angeles, and immediately got in touch with Yates. “I was in terrible condition, drinking way too much,” said Wakefield, “and I knew Dick would be a good person to drink with.” That he was, though a proper venue was crucial. Yates became paranoid in upscale establishments such as the Hampshire House, and would argue with waiters who’d slighted him in some way, real or imagined, whereupon he’d be cut off at the bar. It was largely a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because he felt scrutinized he drank more to lessen his anxiety, which naturally resulted in scrutiny-provoking behavior. One night at the Newbury Steak House he lit his beard on fire and sat flapping his hands at his face.
After that, he and Wakefield stuck to the Crossroads, where their Friday night “ritual dinner” was the only regular event on Yates’s social calendar. “He was a wonderful source of solace, encouragement, and literary friendship and support,” Wakefield noted. “I loved hearing him put down the ‘phonies’ and the overrated novels whose style was not really up to snuff … as he waved his long, bony finger and smiled knowingly above his beard.” Lest one get the impression Yates had mellowed with age—full of benign, finger-wagging wisdom about the perennial rise and fall of literary pretenders—rest assured the reality was a good deal more raucous. “What a crock of shit!” was the constant punch line when Yates discussed writers he despised. “Wakefield,” he’d rasp, “every seven or eight years a book comes out by some fucking phony and gets reviewed on the front page of the Times and everybody loves it and it’s not worth shit.” The current paradigm was John Irving’s The World According to Garp—“What a crock of shit!”—or anything by Joseph Heller or Saul Bellow (the friends agreed with Tom Wolfe’s definition of hell: A bus ride across America with nothing to read but Mr. Sammler’s Planet). After six months of such boozy commiseration, Wakefield startled his friend one night by ordering a Diet Coke; while Yates sat stunned and indignant, Wakefield sheepishly admitted that he’d decided to go on the wagon. “A Diet Coke!” Yates roared every time thereafter. “Yeah, and then he’s gonna go home and play with his paper dolls!”
Wakefield remembers Yates as a “charming, witty man” whose ugly side only surfaced when he was very drunk or disturbed or both, but the ugly side was all Martha saw after the divorce. On the phone he was usually fine: They’d talk briefly about Gina, and only seldom would he try to lure her into more intimate territory. “But in person,” said Martha, “he invariably became nasty; seeing me triggered bad feelings in Dick.” In the fall he visited Gina in Durango, and the three went out to dinner together. It may have been that Yates resented Martha’s insinuating herself into these outings in a vaguely custodial role; in any event he began tipsily baiting her with an off-color story that struck her as inappropriate in the presence of the eight-year-old Gina. The more she warned Yates to stop, the more smirkingly nasty he became, until finally she threw a quiche at him. Affecting high delight, he laughed as they were ejected from the restaurant. In the parking lot Martha asked Gina if she were coming home with her, but the child loyally refused to leave her father. (“I really tried to avoid being involved in Dick’s visits after that,” said Martha.) Gina vividly remembers how Yates, distrait, drank so much beer at breakfast the next day that their waitress politely insisted he have coffee before ordering more.
One night Wakefield got a call from Yates, who said he was sick and had run out of food. Wakefield brought a bag of groceries to Yates’s apartment, which “reminded [him] of something out of Dostoyevsky”: It was almost completely dark inside (Yates hadn’t ventured out in a long time, apparently, and the lightbulb had expired), except for the blue glow of the stove burners, which were turned up against the cold. When Yates called his friend a second time, he was frantic and incoherent. Rather panicked himself, Wakefield called Monica Yates and told her something was terribly wrong with her father, but she didn’t seem particularly shaken. “Here he goes again,” she said, and tried to reassure the man (“Don’t get too upset; it happens a lot”). She suggested he take Yates to the nearest emergency room, where they’d arrange to transfer him to the VA.
The frequency of Yates’s breakdowns increased as he became more solitary and miserable. Again and again he’d drink too much and stop eating, subsisting on coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol until he became ill and disoriented. At first Wakefield was a little startled that Yates’s daughters didn’t seem more concerned, though by then they’d learned the hard way that it didn’t pay to meddle. “Ahh, Wakefield’s just a damn busybody!” Yates would snap, if Sharon or Monica admitted over the phone that his friend was worried about him (hence the call). Except in states of desperate paranoia or physical distress, Yates would refrain from contacting people and simply lie low in his apartment brooding over some particular delusion. If one of his daughters happened to get him on the phone, he’d interrogate her in a coy, tentative way: “So … do you think I did something terrible to Gina?” (when in most cases he hadn’t seen the girl in months)—whereupon they’d usually call an ambulance or get in touch with Winthrop Burr (“Dad’s on the blink again”), who’d authorize hospitalization on the legal grounds that Yates was unable to care for himself. Within a few days—sober, medicated, and somewhat lucid again—Yates would be up in arms with whoever had hospitalized him. “He’d call me stupid and say I was missing the point,” Burr remembered. “That I harped on his drinking when that wasn’t the problem. ‘Useless,’ ‘worthless’… I heard that a lot.” Generally Yates would discharge himself at the first opportunity—one nurse reported seeing him leave (or try to) “with tubes hanging out of every orifice”—and angrily vow that he’d never go back, that he refused to “sit around watching TV and eating ice cream with a bunch of crazies.”
Deeply humiliated afterward, Yates seemed to blame others for having seen him at his worst, and the more one tried to help, the more culpable one became. “How did you know? Who told you? Who called the doctor?” he’d grill his daughters after his latest breakdown. He was never contrite, certainly never grateful, and inevitably even the kindest people learned to keep their distance. Joan Norris had remained fond of Yates over the years, but beyond a point she refused to meet him unless Wakefield went with her. “What the hell did you get me up to Boston for, you bitch?” Yates would turn on her. “You’re just a groupie!” That he was unwell didn’t make such attacks any less stunning. “They were so weird and sudden,” said Norris, “like a splash of cold water. There was no trigger, it just happened.” Even the tolerant Wakefield began to stay away, though he liked and admired and finally pitied Yates too much to drop him entirely. Yates in turn tended to treat Wakefield with the respect due a fellow writer and dear man, but he would bristle at any suggestion, no matter how meek, that he take better care of himself. “It just got too painful,” said Wakefield. “He went on doing the same things over and over.”
Around this time Wendy Sears moved back to Boston after several years of marriage in Italy to a monoglot sculptor named Andrea Grassi.* As Yates often made a point of reminding her, he was baffled by the whole Italian sojourn, not to mention the loutish ex-husband, but mostly he just felt touchingly glad to have the pleasure of her company again. Shortly after her return he wrote her a series of love limericks:
The mere presence of sweet Wendy Sears
For the first time in (wow!) fifteen years
Is enough, for a start,
To break a man’s heart
And thus make him burst into tears.
The other verses were in a similar vein, reminiscent of the courtly, whimsical Yates of fifteen years before. Indeed, little had changed between the two in most respects. Wendy Sears was somewhat sadder and wiser, to be sure, but essentially the same stoical good sport who’d weathered Yates’s rages and exchanged notes with him during tedious meetings at the Justice Department. Though wary of leading Yates on, she’d occasionally meet him for dinner or drinks and agree to be his date for the odd formal function, as when he received the PEN/New England Award for Literary Distinction in late November 1980. “That was one of the better literary parties,” Sam Lawrence wrote him the next day. “And an unexpected bonus was seeing you with Wendy Sears again. She hasn’t changed one iota.”
Sears was inclined to say the same of Yates. “He’d become terribly repetitious,” she observed. “He was stuck: still wearing the same gray suit, blue shirt and preppy ties, still making the same crabby conversation about the president and politics or whatever. He just didn’t pay attention to the changing world—political, social, cultural, nothing. Dick was still back in the fifties.” Among others, too, the operative phrase for the later Yates was out of touch. Though he was lovingly (or fiercely) eloquent about literary matters, he became dogmatic and rather muddled when conversation took a general turn, and seemed to know little or nothing about basic current events. As such he was bound to be rather tiresome company among nonwriters, tending to lapse into captious correction of a person’s grammar, word choice, or social manners. Such punctilios issued a bit incongruously from a man who often couldn’t be bothered—as Sears reluctantly noticed—to clean his clothes or beard (“matted with drool and snot”). But still there were glimpses of the old charm, the wit, as if a playful heart were trapped inside this cranky, troubled old man.
* * *
One aspect of Yates’s old-fashioned worldview was a frank, utterly unapologetic homophobia. Some of this went deep indeed, and doubtless had to do with certain conventional insecurities about his “girlishly” round eyes and “bubbly” mouth, to say nothing of his childhood awkwardness and desperate clinging to his mother and sister. Yates was forever at pains to prove his masculinity (even to the point of forbidding a woman to drive)—but apart from all that, he despised what he viewed as the pretension and bad taste of the camp sensibility. He dismissed Knowles’s A Separate Peace as “a homosexual novel in disguise” (“the emotions are a little too ‘purple’ for regular boys”), and thought gay literature in toto was overrated due to a specious impression of originality evoked by a nonheterosexual ethos. Be that as it may, the bottom line was simply this: Effeminate gay men drove Yates up the wall, much like his hardboiled counterpart Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying:
Oh, shit [he reflects re his newborn son]; and there were still other possibilities too dreadful to contemplate. What if, in response to things that struck him as funny, your son took to saying “I love it” or “Oh, how delicious”? What if he wanted to walk around the kitchen with one hand on his hip, telling his mother about the marvelous time he’d had with his friends last night at a really nice new place in town called the Art Deco?
When Monica McCall retired in 1980, Mitch Douglas took over her clients, and Yates found himself contractually bound to an agent who was very evidently gay and given to indignant demands that Yates shape up and turn in his books on time. While Yates didn’t like lesbians either, he’d always made a sovereign exception in the case of Monica McCall: She was a “lady,” and there was nothing remotely butch or outré about her; she revered his talent and cared for him as a human being; above all she never nagged him about deadlines or discussed his vagaries in general. She’d looked after him in every sense (more so than Yates might have realized) and was all but seamlessly unpatronizing about it; Yates remarked that she’d “saved [his] life” after Martha left him. Following a series of strokes, though, McCall moved to Canada (where she died in 1982), and Yates was that much more alone in the world. Now when he called his agent to ask for money, he was often given a “snitty” lecture by a man whose first (and somewhat abiding) impression of Yates was qua lunatic. Yates hated Mitch Douglas.
Their association got off on the wrong foot twice: first at Bellevue in 1974, and again when Douglas adopted Yates as a client six years later. But first a pertinent digression: As Yates continued to produce the long, exquisitely wrought stories for his second collection, The New Yorker continued to reject them one after another. At first these rejections were cordial as ever (“this one came close,” “keep trying us,” and so on), though Yates was not at all mollified anymore. “All I want is a story in the goddamned New Yorker!” he’d rage when discussing the ups and downs of his career; also he’d started referring to staple writers for the magazine with an almost reflexive opprobrium—particularly “John fucking Cheever” and “John fucking Updike” (or “Precious John”). One of Monica McCall’s last attempted transactions on his behalf was to offer “Trying Out for the Race” to The New Yorker in late 1979. “I don’t know if you usually write covering letters,” Yates wrote her, “but I’d greatly appreciate your doing so in this case: you might find some way to remind [fiction editor] Roger Angell that his magazine has been shamelessly teasing me with ‘encouragement’ for thirty years or more.” Such teasing was about to end forever, though not in a way Yates or any other writer of his stature might have expected. For the moment, though, Angell continued to tease, rejecting “Trying Out for the Race” with a fair degree of tact: “This is written with admirable care and sensitivity, but these lives don’t seem worth the trouble he has given them. I also have some difficulty in understanding why this is all happening in the 1930s.… [Yates] has many admirers here, and I still hope we will publish him some day.” McCall made a practice of copying such (relatively) “nice” rejection letters to Yates, while the more perfunctory or even brutal kind she’d usually paraphrase or keep to herself.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, by then, any number of Yates’s former colleagues and students had at least one credit in The New Yorker, and even his daughter Monica had received a long, detailed letter of encouragement from the same editor (Fran Kiernan) who’d called one of Yates’s best stories “soft-edged and idealized.” What made it even worse, perhaps, was that Yates knew these later stories were among his finest work. When “Regards at Home” was published in the August 1980 issue of the Atlantic (having been rejected by The New Yorker), Sam Lawrence wrote that it was “magnificent, as fine and perceptive a work as anything being written today”—and a few months later, when Lawrence received the finished manuscript of all seven stories, he found it “simply marvelous”: “Congratulations a thousand fold and my profound thanks. It’s always been a privilege to be your publisher and now more than ever.”
Oddly enough, one of Lawrence’s two favorite stories, “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” left Roger Angell not only cold but faintly hostile: He called the characters “false and hollow,” though he allowed that the unwholesome Beverly Hills milieu was perhaps to blame. No such extenuation, however, was granted in the case of “A Natural Girl”: “Mr. Yates is extremely skillful and readable” (at least two conciliatory adjectives were pro forma in all these letters), “but I can’t quite believe this dialogue or those lives or, worst of all, such a mean-spirited view of things.… Some writers do see the world this way but I think Mr. Yates is just trying it all on for effect.” Hard words: “[M]ean-spirited” stories were clearly not to Angell’s taste, but the fact that he wasn’t even willing to concede the sincerity of Yates’s attitude (“trying it all on for effect”) seemed rather mean-spirited in itself. And by the time Angell had finished the story “Liars in Love,” three days later, he seemed to dislike Yates on any number of levels: “This didn’t come close. I think he is a confident, accomplished writer, but it seems clearer and clearer to me that his kind of fiction is not what we’re looking for. I mean this without offense, and I wonder if it wouldn’t save a lot of time and disappointment if you and he could come to that same conclusion.”
“I know these rejections will disappoint you,” Mitch Douglas wrote Yates, “but I hope not too much so.” He enclosed the notes from Angell, adding that he’d tried to remonstrate with the man over the phone, but found him “very stiff and stodgy.”
In fact Yates was very, very disappointed. It was the end of one of his fondest dreams, and he was in no condition to appreciate the almost artistic inevitability of it all—to wit, that the subtext of all those New Yorker rejections over the decades had floated to the surface at last, slowly but suddenly clarified like a darkroom photograph, in the blunt antipathy of Angell’s notes: Though Yates was skillful, readable, confident, accomplished and whatever else, his vision of life was repulsive. Thus spake The New Yorker.*
In the years that followed, in the Crossroads or the consulting room of Winthrop Burr, Yates would often hold forth on the subject of his two foremost (extant) bêtes noires: Mitch Douglas and The New Yorker. Also, for the benefit of the odd visitor to Beacon Street, Yates would occasionally grope through his papers, find Angell’s letters, and read them aloud in a shaky voice—perhaps in the hope of being reassured, once more, that the man and his institution were wrong. Another turn of the screw was the fact that his daughter Monica had recently moved to Manhattan and found a job—as a library assistant at The New Yorker. Yates was displeased.
* * *
During the early months of 1981, Yates stayed busy but also allowed himself a bit of diversion. With Liars in Love (as the book was now called) off his hands, he wrote an engaging essay for the New York Times Book Review titled “Some Very Good Masters,” which distilled the high points of twenty years’ worth of lectures and rumination about his two favorite novels, Gatsby and Madame Bovary. He closed on a deprecatory, somewhat elegiac note that seemed to indicate a growing concern with his own mortality and literary legacy:
Time is everything. I am 55 now, and my first grandchild is expected in June. It has been many years since I was a young man, let alone an apprentice writer. But the eager, fearful, self-hectoring spirit is slow to fade. With my 8th book just begun—and with deep regret for the desolate wastes of time that have kept it from being my 10th or 12th—I feel I haven’t really started yet. And I suppose this rather ludicrous condition will persist, for better or worse, until my time runs out.
Yates spent the early summer weeks at Yaddo working on his new novel, but in June he took a break to attend the birth of his grandchild, Sonia, in Brooklyn. He brought flowers to Sharon in the hospital, and took his son-in-law out for a drink toasting the baby. At the time Richard Levine’s natural father was dying in a rest home, so the young man particularly appreciated Yates’s willingness to assume a paternal role; in general Levine idolized Yates as a writer and a man, so much so that he didn’t mind (even rather enjoyed) Yates’s goading him to express himself as precisely as possible. “Dick drew me into labor over finding just the right word for some topics of our conversation,” Levine noted; “because just a good word was never enough for Dick Yates, whether he was in the company of writers or not.” Such was Levine’s admiration that he was startled by Yates’s confession, that same afternoon, that he felt a sense of failure as a father.
Meanwhile Yates compensated for the bleak regimentation of his life in Boston by getting the most out of larky junkets like out-of-town readings and writers’ conferences. Always topmost among his priorities was finding female company, and all things considered he didn’t do half badly. Sponsors and fellow writers tended to fuss over Yates at such events, which had the effect of transforming him (figuratively) from a feeble old man into a great writer going ungently into that good night. His friend Ed Kessler, then on the faculty at American University, invited Yates to Washington that summer to give a reading. The two hadn’t seen each other in fifteen years or more, and Kessler extended himself to show Yates a good time, putting him up in a fine hotel and throwing a dinner party in his honor. Yates was tipsy at his own reading, and subsequently disappeared with a student admirer; by the time he showed up at the party chez Kessler, dinner was over and his host was vexed. “How do you keep these walls so white?” Yates blearily inquired after a long dressing-down. Later Kessler discovered that his guest had run up a sizable bill at the hotel bar, and this was borne in mind when Yates wrote asking for a job.
Also that summer he attended the Wesleyan Writers’ Conference, where he encountered such friends as George Garrett and Grace Schulman. Garrett and Madison Smartt Bell drove down for a weekend from the Stone Coast Conference in Maine, and the two arrived in the midst of a late-night, open-ended faculty-student reading (“the precursor of poetry slams,” Bell noted). The audience was visibly restless by then, and Yates more visibly than most—seated unsteadily between two young women on the floor. “Yates would make a groping pass at the woman on his left,” said Bell, “and she’d politely rebuff him. Then he’d listen to a bit of the reading and commence a growling muttering. Then he’d make a move on the woman on his right. This went on for a while. Finally he had a huge coughing fit, as if he were about to die, and that pretty much ended the reading.” Yates pulled himself together for his reunion with Schulman, an effort that seemed to make him cranky (“I thought you had to be here Thursday,” he snapped); for the most part, though, he managed to sublimate his bitterness into a kind of somber, formal politeness. The two brought each other up-to-date, more or less, but the old rapport was gone and they avoided much talk of the past. After their meeting Yates seemed to let himself go, missing most of his conferences while he staggered about campus in a grass-stained seersucker suit, his pants held up by a piece of rope. “He looks like an Ivy League wino,” someone remarked.
And yet, for all that, Yates didn’t entirely lose his dignity, and as Garrett pointed out, “The students loved him.” Then as ever, Yates treated young writers without condescension of any kind, and his ill health tended to evoke compassion and make his wolfish behavior (such as it was) seem more comical than predatory. Above all he showed a kindly interest in their work, whether he came to conferences or not. In the months after Wesleyan, Yates called up his students one by one (usually late at night) and announced that he’d finally read their manuscripts and was ready to discuss them. One of these students was the writer Elizabeth Cox, whose first novel Yates scrutinized over the course of a year. “‘What does your character really say here, in this moment?’ Yates asked me again and again,” Cox recalled.
And I had to answer right away, at our lunch table or wherever we were. He didn’t let any insincere or dishonest remark go unchallenged.… Knowing Yates was an exhilarating experience in straight talk. Never had I been with someone who spoke so directly and expected such reciprocal honesty, and it changed me. As a writer, I learned to want only what was true in every moment. As a teacher of writing, I came to believe that challenging another writer in this manner is a sign of real respect.
Another reason Yates’s dissolute conduct was easily forgiven, particularly that summer, was the impression he gave of being under a strain that had little to do with loneliness or ill health. As it happened the imminent publication of Liars in Love was a prospect Yates dreaded: For almost four years, well after his original advance had run out, he’d exhausted himself chiseling draft after draft, only to have the stories dismissed as “mean-spirited” by The New Yorker; moreover, in many respects the book was even more obviously autobiographical than, say, A Special Providence. The thought of being perceived as perversely “mean-spirited” on the subject of his own family, his mother and wives and so forth, was almost too much to bear. “I’m lying on the floor in a pool of blood,” he told Loree Rackstraw in late-August, when she called after he failed to show up for dinner at her Boston hotel. The “pool of blood” was the result of biting his tongue during an alcoholic seizure, though he didn’t go into all that with Rackstraw. “The ambulance is coming—gotta go,” he said, and hung up. Many years before, in Iowa, Rackstraw had always called Cassill in moments of Yatesian emergency, and she did so now. This time the man sighed with a mixture of humor and sad exasperation. “I don’t watch out for Dick anymore,” he said.
* * *
The dreaded issues of mean-spiritedness and autobiography did indeed come up in the reviews of Liars in Love, but in most cases they were mitigated by praise. Such ambivalence was expressed in the Atlantic by James Atlas, who, after an appreciative overview of Yates’s career, noted his great reservation: “Too much brutal dialogue, too much mean-spirited circumstance, wears a reader down. Yates is the bleakest writer I know.” But Atlas concluded his review with a high compliment: “Yates accomplished what Fitzgerald did at his best: an evocation of life’s unbearable poignance, the way it has of nurturing hope and denying it, often in the same instant.” Similarly Robert Wilson in the Washington Post faulted Yates for “showing too little sympathy for the characters,” which Wilson thought diminished the impact of their little or large defeats; but Wilson, too, seemed equivocal in his misgivings (“one of [Yates’s] strengths is that he doesn’t flinch”), and the stories were otherwise so compelling that he ranked them “with the finest realistic fiction being written.”
A number of reviewers arrived at that assessment with hardly any qualms at all. “It is good to report that realism in short fiction is alive and well,” began Robert Harris’s rave in the Saturday Review, and ended, “At a time when much short fiction busies itself with surfaces, it is something of a wonder to find stories that cut to the bone.” A late review in America asserted “the simple truth of the matter: Yates is one of our best practicing fiction writers,” while Dan Wakefield pitched in with a paean in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner, calling his friend “a contemporary master in full command of his fictional power.”
The two reviewers who mattered most, though, saw fit to point a glaring spotlight at the autobiographical nature of the material. In his well-meaning notice for the daily New York Times, Christopher Lehmann-Haupt described the stories as “wonderfully crafted”: “[E]very detail of this collection stays alive and fresh in one’s memory.” Having applauded the stories’ impressive “variety,” though, Lehmann-Haupt marveled that such a diversity of setting, incident, and meaning had been milked from what seemed “a single actual experience.” He illustrated the point by demonstrating how the stories might be “collapsed into a single history—the career, autobiographical perhaps, of a boy who has been emotionally seduced by his mother (‘Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired’), who grows ashamed of his consequent dependence on her and in compensation begins to lash out at females (‘Trying Out for the Race’)”—and so on, touching each story in turn, a long paragraph that must have made Yates wince. Two weeks later, though, he might have felt nostalgic for Lehmann-Haupt’s benignity on the subject. Robert Towers opened his review in the Sunday Times with a tribute to Eleven Kinds of Loneliness as “almost the New York equivalent of ‘Dubliners’” whose characters “might have been picked almost at random from the fat telephone book of the Borough of Queens.” But this turned out to be a premise for the relative disparagement of Yates’s other work: “Scrupulous in its realism, honorable in its refusal to evade embarrassment or failure, the longer fiction seems less able than the short to escape the prison of an (apparently) autobiographical self into the freely imagined lives of others.… It is as if Yates were under some enchantment that compelled him to keep circling the same half-acre of pain.” Towers went on to say other damning and complimentary things, but the “half-acre of pain” remark stuck in Yates’s mind—such that in bad moments he was haunted (even more so than before) by a sense of his own limitations and perhaps ludicrous repetitions.
There were other times, fortunately, when he knew better. “All I write about is family,” Elizabeth Cox told him. “That’s all there is to write about,” Yates replied. Lehmann-Haupt had a point: What is particularly impressive about Liars in Love is the extent to which Yates transcended the apparent “prison” of his autobiographical personae. “Mostly, we authors repeat ourselves,” said Fitzgerald. “We learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories … as long as people will listen.” Fitzgerald’s basic story—the ecstasy and disillusion of his romance with Zelda—exerted such force on his imagination that, at his best, he was able to refine the matter into a kind of universal idealism, one aspect of which was the American dream. Whether Yates ever achieved the peculiar magic of Gatsby is doubtful (who did?), but arguably he was able to extend his own “two or three stories” in more interesting ways over the long run.
“I keep wishing”—Towers wrote—“that Yates would stand back from all his sad young men and characterize them with the empathy and objectivity (as opposed to facile introspection) that he can bring to bear on a Queens barroom buddy or a London prostitute.” Facile introspection? This suggests that there is something solipsistic—or “boringly self-conscious” as Towers puts it—about Yates’s protagonists, that the reader is trapped within the “prison” of a single viewpoint. However, with the exception of two stories in Liars in Love (“Joseph” and “Regards at Home”) and two in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (“Builders” and “A Wrestler with Sharks”) and finally the frame narrative of A Good School, Yates always wrote in the omniscient third person—the point of which was to show all characters, not simply his “sad young men,” from the inside (empathy) as well as the out (objectivity). There is no egregious emphasis, much less a “facile” one, on the inner life of the Yatesian “Me” character, and such glimpses that are given tend to be ironic, as when the first-person narrator of “Regards” ponders the effect of his girlfriend’s desertion:
So it was over; and for a little while, taking a tragic view of my situation, I thought I would probably die.… But I was still expected to hammer out United Press copy eight hours a day, and to ride the subway and pay attention to where the hell I was walking on the street, and it doesn’t take long to discover that you have to be alive to do things like that.
Typically the Yates-like protagonist is depicted with the same objectivity as the rest of the characters—or rather depicted with the pitiless subjectivity of another character’s point of view. Thus David Clark’s bored wife in “A Natural Girl” tunes out the man’s dull treatise on “position papers” and considers rearranging the furniture, and later watches him “hold his elaborate head in his hands” (“elaborate” because of his modish Jane Fonda haircut) after one of his pathetic outbursts. And meanwhile he in turn wonders what sheis thinking—alas, the reader already knows, and sees the awful moment coming when she suddenly (to his mind) lowers the boom.
What Towers applauds as the less autobiographical “objectivity” of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is, to some extent, a stylized characterization imposed by the brevity of magazine-length fiction. Precisely because Yates wanted to evoke greater empathy for his characters he allowed himself the luxury of novella-size canvases in Liars in Love. If a story like “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” for example, had been written in five rather than fifteen thousand words, the character of Sally Baldwin might have been reduced to a comic grotesque along the lines of her promiscuous friend Jill—in which case, perhaps, we’d be left with only her most salient features, such as her bloated upper lip when she drinks, or her weakness for “fudgy little showbusiness” phrases like “a very gutsy lady.” As is, we see that side of her in abundance, but we also see the dignity she never quite relinquishes (“You’re making fun of me, Jack, and I think you’re going to find that’s not a very good idea”), as well as the essential perceptiveness that enables her to recognize Fields as a “counterfeit Scott Fitzgerald,” as well as the fact that she herself has led “sort of an idle, aimless life.” When such a person returns to her loneliness at the end of the story, and Jack to his, it isn’t a matter of distasteful people meeting a “mean-spirited” fate, but rather the inevitable end to which those particular individuals are liable to come.
As in A Good School and elsewhere, Yates extended his autobiographical territory with an omniscient perspective, but even in his rare first-person stories the lives of characters other than the narrator are “freely imagined,” and the effect is anything but mean-spirited or boring. Given what we know of Yates’s tormented feelings toward his mother, his attempt to comprehend (in “Joseph”) her own fruitless striving and humiliation, from the distance of almost fifty unhappy years, becomes all the more moving. “I can picture how she looked riding the long, slow train back to New York that afternoon,” the narrator muses.
Her adventure with Franklin D. Roosevelt had come to nothing. There would be no photographs or interviews or feature articles, no thrilling moments of newsreel coverage; strangers would never know of how she’d come from a small Ohio town, or of how she’d nurtured her talent through the brave, difficult, one-woman journey that had brought her to the attention of the world. It wasn’t fair.…
She was forty-one, an age when even romantics must admit that youth is gone, and she had nothing to show for the years but a studio crowded with green plaster statues that nobody would buy. She believed in the aristocracy, but there was no reason to suppose the aristocracy would ever believe in her.
At a time when most realistic writers were cultivating “objectivity” with a vengeance—depicting characters who seemed devoid of will or identifying features one way or the other—Yates insisted on substance, roundness, such that his people create their own disasters rather than blundering into them along a path of random circumstance. “And where are the windows? Where does the light come in?”—as ever, in the implication that we’re human, we fail, but in our common humanity we belong to one another for better or worse, whether as families or in some ineffable way suggested by the “sound of the city” that Billy’s sister describes in “Joseph”: “Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York—more people than you can possibly imagine, ever … and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it’s so faint—so very, very faint—that you can’t hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time.” In the face of so many millions struggling against anonymity, or just to retain dignity, Helen’s “brave, difficult, one-woman journey” is bound for obscurity. But then a kind of mystical kinship is evoked, as well as forgiveness, and doom, in the story’s final line: “[O]ur mother was ours; we were hers; and we lived with that knowledge as we lay listening for the faint, faint sound of millions.” Perhaps Yates achieved the peculiar magic of Gatsby after all.
* * *
“Liars in Love is one of the most highly praised books of the season and I hope you are as pleased as we are,” Sam Lawrence wrote in mid-November, a month after publication. “We’ve sold over 6500 copies to date which is good for a collection of stories.” “Good” is one way of putting it; on the other hand such a highly praised book might have sold better, and meanwhile Yates still had to find some way of making alimony and child-support payments, to say nothing of his own mean subsistence. As for the d’estime part of the success he was supposed to be having, it was an elusive phenomenon at best. That winter he was invited to give a reading at the University of Massachusetts (Boston), but not a single person showed up. He sat in the silent lecture hall while his two sponsors gazed at their watches; finally Yates suggested they adjourn to a bar. He didn’t seem particularly surprised.
Not a moment too soon, he was offered a visiting professorship for the spring 1982 semester in the prestigious creative-writing program at Boston University. The director, Leslie Epstein, wasn’t even aware that Yates had any teaching credentials, but such was his admiration that he was willing to take a chance. Twenty years earlier he’d been in Verona, Italy, when a friend had loaned him the newly published Revolutionary Road, which Epstein stayed up all night reading. “There aren’t many books that make you remember where you were when you read them,” said Epstein, whose flattering letter served as the model for Davenport’s “clear and definite offer of employment” from BU in Young Hearts Crying: “Apart from the business at hand, let me say that I have always considered [Revolutionary Road] to be among the finest [novels] written in this country since the Second World War.”
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 antique 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.
* * *
By 1984 Yates’s relationship with Dr. Winthrop Burr had deteriorated. During their early years together Yates would sometimes acknowledge that the sessions were a comfort—that they “made him less afraid of himself,” as Burr put it—but when the psychiatrist began to emphasize alcoholism as a major factor, Yates grew more and more hostile. Finally, after one enforced hospitalization too many, Yates became so enraged during a session that Burr walked out on him: “He was shouting so loud you could hear him down the hall,” said Burr, “calling me stupid, saying I lacked imagination, that my whole profession was corrupt and had fed off him all these years—used him as a guinea pig, done him no good.” Later Yates came to the clinic, drunk, and confronted Burr with an ambulance bill. Since his last hospitalization hadn’t been necessary in the first place, said Yates, he insisted that Burr pay. Burr pointed out that Yates was drunk (he denied it) and asked him to leave. After that there were no more psychotherapy sessions. Yates still came in for medication refills, and was civil but laconic when Burr asked how he was doing. A short while later Burr left the VA, but offered to take Yates on as a private patient at a reduced fee; Yates declined, though he did write Burr a gracious, rather apologetic letter thanking him for all his help. “Take care of those two beautiful girls,” he closed, referring to a portrait in Burr’s office of his young son and daughter. Burr continued to contact his successor at the VA and inquire about Yates’s condition, but the woman wasn’t able to tell him much.
Yates became increasingly cantankerous toward an unimaginative world that had used him ill. “Ahh that’s ridiculous!” he’d snap at any remark that didn’t jibe with his calcified worldview. For old times’ sake Wendy Sears was willing to invite Yates over for very special occasions—his fifty-eighth birthday, say—but it was an ordeal to be suffered strictly out of the goodness of one’s heart. Any remonstrance, no matter how diffident, over Yates’s slovenly ash spilling or aggressive opinionating was apt to spark a tantrum; it was better to let things go and watch the clock. Meanwhile Yates’s ambivalence toward such “well-bred” women as Sears and her cohorts became even more pointed, as he detected bad taste and pretension at every turn. One such woman’s cluttered, bohemian digs in Cambridge were, to Yates, an “absurd” attempt to deny her birthright, and when Sears and another Brahmin girlfriend worked as caterers’ maids, Yates refused to accept that they needed the money. “Oh how madcap,” he declared sarcastically.
Happily his literary fame was showing signs of resurgence. The year before, Revolutionary Road had been reissued as a Delta paperback, which attracted a long, laudatory notice by Michiko Kakutani in the daily Times: “More than two decades after its original publication, it remains a remarkable and deeply troubling book—a book that creates an indelible portrait of lost promises and mortgaged hopes in the suburbs of America.” Yates’s readership, such as it was, seemed primed for the publication of Young Hearts Cryingin the fall, and already Yates was not only under way with his next novel, but eager to get started on the one after that. “It’s nice that Barrett Prettyman (or whoever it was) suggested publishing a collection of my Bobby Kennedy speeches,” Yates wrote Sam Lawrence in June,
but I’ve got a better idea: a novel about that period, with Bobby serving as one of the characters and even Jack having a walk-on part. Wendy Sears will be prominently featured, as will a haggard fellow who begrudges every hour spent at speechwriting because it’s denying him his life’s work; and there’ll be a large, mostly funny supporting cast.… I’ve been collecting notes and sketches for it over the past several years; I know how it’s going to begin and develop and where it will go from there. I’m planning to call it Uncertain Times unless a snappier title comes along.
Lawrence saw nothing ominously uncharacteristic about such an overt, political roman à clef—on the contrary, he thought the idea “infinitely better” than any book of speeches. Unfortunately he wasn’t Yates’s publisher anymore: A few months back he’d become a casualty of budget cuts and had moved his imprint to Dutton; as a result Yates’s next two novels, both under contract to Delacorte, would be published as “Seymour Lawrence” books in name alone. But the Kennedy novel struck Lawrence as a possible commercial breakthrough for Yates, and he wanted to be part of it: “The people at Dutton, from the President on down, are your fans,” he wrote. “I wish we could sign a contract right now.”
Yates was almost solvent for the first time in years. That August he and three others (Peter Taylor, Stanley Kunitz, and William Meredith) were awarded NEA Senior Fellowships worth twenty-five thousand dollars each—“to support and honor creative writers who have received the highest critical acclaim, but whose work may not be widely known outside the literary field.” As Frank Conroy explained on behalf of the Endowment, Yates had been selected by three separate panels of distinguished writers to receive the honor: “That’s great,” Yates replied (in a voice Conroy described as sounding “like it was coming from the back of a cement mixer which was also making cement while he spoke”); “when do I get the check?” Daunted as ever by the fearful prospect of facing an award reception alone, a bashful Yates asked “Wendy Serious” to be his “girl” again; she declined, of course, though she was willing to attend the reception with him. The evening was blessedly uneventful: Yates mingled a bit stiffly for a while, then stuck close to Sears and only snapped at her once (when she expressed a fondness for the work of John Irving). The high point came when Frank Conroy tipsily serenaded Yates on the piano, though the latter was eager to leave all the same.
As the October publication of his sixth novel approached, Yates’s ship appeared to be coming in at last. “I think Young Hearts Crying is the finest thing you’ve done,” Sam Lawrence wrote. “The writing is flawless, the dialogue rings absolutely true, and the characters come immediately to life and stay that way. It’s a broader canvas than Revolutionary Road (to which it will no doubt be compared). There are stark agonizing moments and virtuoso passages of comic relief. I’m proud to have my name on the title page.” As with Yates’s first novel—to which Young Hearts Crying would indeed be compared—an advance excerpt was published in Esquire, which described Yates as “one of America’s least famous great writers.” It was remarkable redemption for a man who, eleven years and five books before, had threatened to shoot the magazine’s fiction editor.
Delacorte held a publication party for Yates in the White and Gold Suites at the Plaza Hotel. Once again he asked Wendy Sears to be his date, but when she wanted to bring a friend, Rosie Johnson, Yates sourly disinvited her from the more intimate dinner for family and friends in the Oak Room afterward. The whole occasion had spurred an even worse state of angst than usual: The early reviews of Young Hearts Crying had been mixed, and his old friend Anatole Broyard was slated to weigh in with a full-page notice in the New York Times Book Review (Herbert Mitgang had interviewed Yates for the inset profile); meanwhile fellow writers such as Dubus, Crumley, Conroy, Thomas McGuane, Robert Stone, and Ann Beattie, to name a few, were on hand at the Plaza to pay homage to a man they viewed as a master. On arrival Sharon and Monica Yates observed that their father was drunk but ambulatory, and both sought more sober people to talk to—Jill Krementz, Hilma Wolitzer, and Yates’s old student Richard Price. The guest of honor bore up through dinner, more or less, though his daughters continued to watch his drinking with dismay. As they were leaving, Yates began to quarrel with the Delacorte rep over the suite, not room, they’d promised him that night at the Plaza.
* * *
In Young Hearts Crying the writer Carl Traynor is noted as saying that he “wanted to publish fifteen books before he died, and to have no more than three of them—‘or four, tops’—be the kind of books that would have to be apologized for.” Yates set the same goal for himself and fell short in both respects, one of them fortunate: He published nine books but only felt obliged (usually) to apologize for two of them.* Of the latter one was A Special Providence and the other was Young Hearts Crying.
Even reviewers who were well disposed to Yates tended to find most of the characters flat and unsympathetic, while the (male) protagonist was thought to be downright repulsive. “I got so terribly tired of the weakness of Michael Davenport,” wrote Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the daily Times, for whom the novel was “beguilingly vivid yet ultimately tiresome.” Jonathan Yardley of the Washington Post denounced Davenport as “monumentally inept and boorish,” and that was far from all. Noting the similarity to Yates’s “deservedly celebrated first novel,” Yardley embarked on the wholesale demolition of Young Hearts Crying via comparison: “Where the first novel was artful, this latest is awkward; where the first was subtle, this latest is obvious; where the first was sympathetic, this latest is disdainful.” The reviewer took particular exception to Yates’s “clumsily constructed” plot, what with its two long sections devoted to Lucy and Michael Davenport respectively, while the other all but disappears from the story. “Yates has written some very good books,” Yardley concluded, “but Young Hearts Crying isn’t one of them.” Brian Stonehill of the Los Angeles Times, however, found the book’s structure one of its finest features, as it “unroll[s] itself seamlessly, inevitably, with the ineluctability of a three-act tragedy, but without classic tragedy’s effort to raise its characters above our own level.” And finally, Time magazine’s Jay Cocks wrote the sort of encomium that—one hopes, anyway—gave Yates at least a measure of comfort: “Young Hearts Crying could stand as a definitive portrait of a man and woman, maturing in the 1940s, who spend the next three decades trying to get a grip on dwindling dreams that will not die and who have to settle down and, finally, settle.… [Yates] is just the writer that Michael Davenport always wanted to be.”
Yates was at the Crossroads when he read Broyard’s long review (suggestively titled “Two-Fisted Self-Pity”) on page three of the Sunday Times, and his waitress Jennifer Hetzel noticed that he seemed upset. “Everything okay?” she asked. “Who’s going to pay my daughter’s goddamn tuition?” Yates exploded, indicating Broyard’s handiwork. Hetzel was struck not only by the vehemence of the outburst—Yates, though often in a grouchy mood, tended to be quiet and polite—but also by the fact that he’d gone so far as to allude to his writing and/or private life, something he almost never did. “He was that upset,” she recalled. And no wonder. Broyard’s review was not just an attack on Young Hearts Crying, but a skillful and malicious attempt to erase much of Yates’s reputation with a single definitive stroke. “At a time when a wider public is gaining access to Richard Yates’s work,” a reader protested in a subsequent letter to the Times, “it is sad to see a critic of Anatole Broyard’s influence decide not only to lambast Mr. Yates’s recent novel,… but to go for the jugular too by excoriating the man’s earlier writing.… It is disheartening that [Yates’s] long overdue success has brought in the sharks.” And this, of course, from a general reader who presumably had no way of knowing that Broyard and Yates were once boon companions, or that Yates had never spoken of his friend’s work except with kindness and admiration. Not that such considerations were ever known to interfere with Broyard’s brand of “critical objectivity”—indeed the performance might even be called Broyardian. As Dan Wakefield (and others) noted, “Broyard would actually request books by writers he disliked or resented for the express purpose of junking them.” But more on that in due course.
To be fair, one doesn’t doubt that Broyard genuinely disliked Yates’s novel and for roughly the right reasons: “Young Hearts Crying fails … because Michael Davenport is not an interesting or appealing man.” By the time one arrives at that assessment toward the end of the review—such is the suave assuasiveness of Broyard’s style—one can scarcely fail to agree that Yates has written a novel all but entirely concerned with a sentimental, self-pitying, bigoted idiot:
In Mr. Yates’s attack on phoniness, there is something of the evangelist and of Archie Bunker too. His men are exasperatingly anti-intellectual, almost phobic about large ideas. They’re apologetic even about liking literature.… [Davenport] almost always adds an expletive or an obscenity, like a beer chaser, to his esthetic pronouncements.… Mr. Yates’s men enjoy sex, drinking and talking: they suffer art. When Michael Davenport meets a new woman, he immediately thinks of her in bed.… He calls his women “baby.” Carl Traynor, a novelist…, also calls women baby.… Though Michael Davenport is a published poet, we never see a single line of any of his poems, and this is odd and unconvincing. He doesn’t talk like a poet,… and we wonder where he keeps his poetry hidden about his personality.
And so on. As a further example of absurd “macho” posturing in the book, Broyard made light of Davenport’s refusal to accept Lucy’s millions because it might threaten his “manhood”; ditto the scenes in which Davenport punches party guests in the stomach.
Broyard’s observation that both Davenport and Carl Traynor call their women “baby” is crafty on a number of levels, insofar as it leaves the impression that Yates’s men are not only a little cretinous but also, taken together, simply cardboard cutouts of the same basic personality—to wit, Yates himself, whose tendency to call women “baby” Broyard knew well. And the fact was, of course, that in the cases of Davenport and Traynor the author was duplicating himself, and this points to a legitimate flaw in the novel’s conception. Yates’s material for Young Hearts Crying was wholly autobiographical, and yet he wanted to avoid another obvious alter ego as protagonist (and thereby another “half-acre of pain” review), so he borrowed the intriguing résumé of a man he hardly knew, Peter Kane Dufault, and hence the poetry, Golden Gloves, Harvard, and wealthy wife. But needless to say Michael Davenport remains essentially Yates—or rather how Yates fancied himself, perhaps, had he been a war hero and boxer as well as a writer, not to say devoid of any redeeming, sui-generis qualities such as a sense of humor and excess talent. The resulting composite is a kind of lurching Frankenstein monster of a character who (as Broyard deftly implied) incorporates all of its creator’s most conventional, unlikable traits: Yates, like Davenport, was all too apt to refer to the Mahopac-Tonapac estate as a “fruit farm” because “one of America’s most celebrated faggot actors” happened to live there; Yates, too, was probably “nettled” (and sometimes enraged) by the perceived phoniness of the cast-off military regalia favored by Bob Parker–Tom Nelson; and doubtless Yates dearly wished at times he could fell with a single blow people who made pseudo-intellectual comments at parties (“We’re the second Lost Generation”) as well as people who played at being artists of one sort or another. To find what’s missing in Michael Davenport, one turns to the more substantial “Me character,” Carl Traynor, tucked away into a subplot of the novel: “There were times when she’d find [Traynor] so lost in his nervous pacing and chain-smoking, talking too fast and absently pulling at the crotch of his pants the way little boys do, that she couldn’t believe he had written the book she admired so completely.” Michael Davenport was perhaps too self-consciously masculine to pluck at his crotch in front of women, “absently” or not, but the boyishly anxious Yates (and hence Traynor) could hardly have helped it. And while Davenport can arguably be dismissed as a boorish dolt and little else, Traynor is too human to be merely ridiculous: “But there were other times … when [Traynor] was calm and wise and funny and always knew how to please her.” Yates was like that, too; as for the wooden Davenport, his one memorable witticism is that people tend to say “I can explain everything” in the movies.
Another flaw that tended to reinforce the others was, simply enough, the novel’s length. This is not to accuse Yates of clumsy construction as Yardley would have it; if Young Hearts Crying is clumsy, then so too is practically any sprawling novel—Ulysses, Anna Karenina, Valley of the Dolls—in which certain characters dominate the plot at long intervals while others are shunted offstage, and what of it? No, the problem in Yates’s case is pretty much length per se—a determination to be comprehensive, ambitious, to avoid “skimpiness” at all costs, the better to duplicate the scope of a famous first novel. Ironically, in that author profile entombed in Broyard’s minefield, Yates conceded a pertinent point or two in his own favor: “I make fewer mistakes now, technically.… I know when a character can be introduced without a lot of background detail. And I know when a chapter can be hurried along. Generally, I’ve acquired a better sense of pace.” Quite so, particularly in regard to his three previous novels, but Young Hearts Cryinglacks that kind of elegant compression and all that inheres in it—understatement, irony, off-center silences. Instead the Davenports talk and talk and repeat the same mistakes and suffer the same embarrassments, all at detailed length, which serves finally to emphasize the fact that, alas, both Michael and Lucy are very tiresome people.
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 portrait, 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.