A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates Read online

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you for your personal use only. You may not make this e-book publicly available in any way. Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  Epigraphs

  Prologue

  CHAPTER ONE The Caliche Road: 1926–1939

  CHAPTER TWO A Good School: 1939–1944

  CHAPTER THREE The Canal: 1944–1947

  CHAPTER FOUR Liars in Love: 1947–1951

  CHAPTER FIVE The Getaway: 1951–1953

  CHAPTER SIX A Cry of Prisoners: 1953–1959

  CHAPTER SEVEN A Glutton for Punishment: 1959–1961

  CHAPTER EIGHT The World on Fire: 1961–1962

  CHAPTER NINE Uncertain Times: 1962–1964

  CHAPTER TEN A New Yorker Discovers the Middle West: 1964–1966

  CHAPTER ELEVEN A Natural Girl: 1966–1968

  CHAPTER TWELVE A Special Providence: 1968–1969

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN Fun with a Stranger: 1970–1974

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN Disturbing the Peace: 1974–1976

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN Out with the Old: 1976–1978

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN Young Hearts Crying: 1979–1984

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN No Pain Whatsoever: 1985–1988

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN A Cheer for Realized Men: 1988–1992

  Epilogue

  Notes

  Index

  Also by Blake Bailey

  Additional Acclaim for Blake Bailey’s A Tragic Honesty

  Copyright

  For Mary

  Acknowledgments

  I am most indebted to Richard Yates’s family; if any one of them had declined to cooperate, this book would have been greatly diminished. Monica Shapiro, Yates’s daughter and executor, not only spent untold hours in conversation with me but granted absolute access to Yates’s papers and encouraged others to assist me. The rest of the family was unfailingly patient, friendly, and helpful. I had many delightful talks with Yates’s older daughter, Sharon Levine, who also went to the awful trouble (with her husband Richard) of arranging Yates’s papers and shipping them to me in large installments. The youngest daughter, Gina, sent detailed e-mails from her home in Honduras, so that costly phone interviews could be somewhat curtailed. The forbearance of Yates’s ex-wives was considerable. For the sake of this project, Sheila Yates overcame a profound reluctance to discuss her ex-husband, and I remain ineffably grateful. Martha Speer’s kindness in any number of ways was among my greatest pleasures in working on this book.

  I deeply appreciate the contribution of Yates’s nephews and niece. Fred Rodgers and Ruth Ward were unflinchingly candid in discussing the details of their mother’s tragic life, and I depended a great deal on the Reverend Peter Rodgers for information relating to the family’s history—genealogical data as well as such priceless memorabilia as the love letters between Yates’s maternal grandparents and what seems to be the only surviving photograph of Ruth and Richard Yates as small children. Equally indispensable was the testimony of Ruth’s sister-in-law, Louise Rodgers, the last of her family generation and a very shrewd witness indeed.

  When I first considered writing this book, I made a very fortunate phone call to Steven Goldleaf, coauthor (with David Castronovo) of an excellent monograph on Yates in the Twayne’s United States Authors series. Professor Goldleaf was kind enough to send me his considerable research on Yates, which saved me enormous time and trouble and gave me momentum enough to persevere. Grace and Jerry Schulman were among my first interview subjects, and their generous assistance in every possible respect has stood me in good stead ever since. A number of people shared letters, photographs, and other Yatesiana: Stephen Benedict, Natalie Bowen, Susan Braudy, Michael Brodigan, Lothar Candels, the late R. V. Cassill and his wife Kay, Geoffrey Clark, Jim Conroy, Larry David, Frances Doel, Carolyn Gaiser, Tom Goldwasser, Wendy Sears Grassi, DeWitt Henry, Ann Wright Jones, J. R. Jones, Edward Kessler, Lyn Lacy, Merloyd Lawrence, Robert Lehrman, John Paul Lowens, Barbara Beury McCallum, Robin Metz, Joseph Mohbat, Peter Najarian, Robert Andrew Parker, E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., Loree Rackstraw, Peggy Rambach, Jim Stewart, John A. Williams, and Miller Williams. I am particularly grateful to Yates’s longtime psychiatrist, Winthrop Burr, for agreeing to speak to me despite the conventional qualms of his profession; in the end he decided a greater good was served by candor, and I applaud his courage. Robert Riche elaborated on our interviews with many e-mails full of anecdotes, philosophical musings, helpful suggestions, and so forth, such that it was rather like having a witty, hectoring Greek chorus on hand. David Milch—the most spontaneously articulate human being I have ever encountered—told me more about Richard Yates in two hours than I otherwise learned in an average week, and he deserves to be commended for that.

  A number of others were kind enough to grant interviews or provide written reminiscences: Judy Adelson, Ann Barker, Natalie Baturka, Richard Bausch, Robin Behn, Madison Smartt Bell, Marvin Bell, Russell Benedict, Anne Bernays, Doris Bialek, David Bigelow, Vance Bourjaily, Alexandra Broyard, Robin Cain, John Casey, Alan Cheuse, Julia Child, Dan Childress, Frank Conroy, Roger Corman, Mark Costello, Jim Crumley, Henry Daden, Peter Davison, Nancy Dibner, Mark Dintenfass, Kent Dixon, Robert Doherty, Mitch Douglas, Pat Dubus, Peter Kane Dufault, Tony Earley, Sandra Walcott Eckhardt, Leslie Epstein, Seymour Epstein, Lincoln Figart, Harry Flynn, John Frankenheimer, John Frasso, Richard Frede, Chet Frederick, Jon Garelick, George Garrett, Daniel Gates, Jennifer Hetzel Genest, John Gerber, Herbert Gold, Ivan Gold, Robert Gottlieb, Edwin O. Guthman, William Harrison, George Hecht, Marcie Herschman, Rust Hills, Edward Hoagland, Lee Jacobus, Irv Jennings, Frank Kastor, Bill Keough, Bill Kittredge, Janis Knorr, John Kowalsky, John Richard Lacy, Robert Lacy, Ned Leavitt, Don Lee, John Leggett, Ira Levin, Gordon Lish, Ann McGovern, Noreen McGuire, Lynn Meyer, Murray Moulding, Julia Munson, William Murray, Don Nickerson, Mary Nickerson, Shaun O’Connell, Sidney Offit, Gilman Ordway, Warren and Marjorie Owens, Dot Parker, Tim Parrish, Jayne Anne Phillips, Hugh Pratt, William Pritchard, James Ragan, Bruce Ricker, Betty Rollin, Ken Rosen, Jack Rosenthal, Franklin Russell, Booghie Salassi, Nikki Schmidt, Hugh Seidman, Harvey Shapiro, Sayre Sheldon, Pamela Vevers Sherin, April Smith, Theodore Solotaroff, Kathy Salter Starbuck, Ted Steeg, William Styron, Melanie Rae Thon, Gail Richards Tirana, Cynthia Vartan, Tony and Elspeth Vevers, Kurt Vonnegut, Dan Wakefield, Theodore Weesner, James Whitehead, Allen Wier, Galen Williams, and Joy Williams.

  Librarians, I think, are ideal human beings—modest, bookish, selflessly helpful—or so was my impression in working with the following individuals: Howard Gotlieb, Sean Noël, and Nathaniel Parks (Mugar Memorial Library, Boston University); Andrew Gladman and Leigh McWhite (J. D. Williams Library, University of Mississippi); Alice Cotten (Special Collections, University of North Carolina); and particularly Mary Gilmore of the Seymour Library in Auburn, New York, who prepared a wonderful three-page typed memo about Horatio Yates and his family, based on what must have been hours of research for a total stranger. The following people and institutions were also helpful: Harriet Lane at Boston University, Robert Polito at the New School for Social Research, Robert Fleming at Emerson University, Robert Bykofsky at the Rockefeller Foundation, various people at Pen and Brush, the National Association of Women Artists, the Cincinnati Art Academy, and John Miskell, the former historian of Auburn Correctional Facility. I’d also like to thank my able resear
ch assistants, Emma Brinkmeyer and Leslie Jacobs.

  The task would have been impossible without the help and encouragement of family, friends, and colleagues. Elizabeth Kaplan is a superb agent, and Joshua Kendall is a scrupulous, tactful editor. My friend Michael Ruhlman has helped me in so many ways that the mind reels to think about it. And finally I am blessed with a loving, supportive, and very tolerant family: Kay, Heidi, Chris, Eliza, Sandra, Kelli, Aaron, Bob, Debra, and of course my parents, Burck and Marlies, to whom I owe debts I can never repay. As for my wife, Mary, neither this book nor anything else would be possible without her.

  That element of tragedy which lies in the very fact of its frequency has not yet wrought itself into the coarse emotion of mankind, and perhaps our frames could hardly bear much of it. If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heart beat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence. As it is, the quickest of us walk about well wadded with stupidity.

  —GEORGE ELIOT, Middlemarch

  Americans have always assumed, subconsciously, that every story will have a happy ending.

  —ADLAI E. STEVENSON

  Prologue

  From the moment Richard Yates was taken off his plane in a wheelchair back in August 1990, his associates in Alabama expected him to die there. He looked all but dead already. Still an unrepentant four-pack-a-day smoker—despite his being diagnosed with “a touch of emphysema” some twenty years before—Yates had just learned the hard way that he could no longer fly without almost suffocating to death. Blue-lipped, ashen, and gasping, he was taken from the airport straight to the hospital. Members of the English department were already casting about for some other personage to fill the Coal Royalty Endowed Chair in Creative Writing, when Yates returned from his ordeal newly equipped with oxygen tanks—feeling better, or so he said. At any rate smoking as much as ever. Graduate student Tony Earley, head of what was furtively called the “Yates Task Force,” worried that the great author would burst into flames on his watch. “You can’t smoke with oxygen tanks,” Yates’s daughter Monica admonished him. “Media hype,” Yates replied.

  Before Alabama, Yates had been living in Los Angeles, a place he hated in every conceivable particular—the people, the weather, the sprawl, the buildings, the “fucking film business” that lured him out there time and again with the promise of easy money, which for Yates meant more time to write. It hadn’t worked out before, and it hadn’t worked out this time. “Can you believe it?” Yates would say to the few friends who saw him out there. “Remember I said I’d never do this shit again? Yet here I am.” Here I am: a phrase to which Yates was much given—wherever he was—as in How did this happen? Bemused, stoical, a little sad, perhaps, but willing to find the humor that was somewhere, surely, in his present predicament: How did I get here? “Getting out of here is an appealing idea,” he told an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times. “But then, as long as I’ve lived, getting out of wherever I am has seemed an appealing idea.”

  As ever, his friends and admirers wanted to help, from whatever distance they kept themselves, and perhaps none was so devoted as Andre Dubus. A few years back Dubus had been the “chair writer” at the University of Alabama, and even then it occurred to him that this would be an almost ideal sinecure for his old friend. Basically it was a lucrative four-month vacation: For $27,500 (almost seven times what Yates had gotten at the Iowa Workshop in 1964) one was expected to teach a single upper-level literature course and deliver a public reading, as well as occasionally comment on student manuscripts. The chair writer was lodged near the football stadium in a large furnished house, the Strode House, previously occupied by such distinguished writers as Russell Banks, Margaret Atwood, Wright Morris, and Dubus himself.

  Dubus had likely broached the matter as early as 1985, when an ailing Yates was struggling to finish Cold Spring Harbor at his usual painstaking pace, having run through his latest advance—a state of affairs that, give or take a nuance or two, was status quo throughout his career. Don Hendrie, the director of the Alabama writing program and a former Iowa student, wondered even then whether Yates was well enough to take the job. He talked it over with George Starbuck, the poet, another friend from Iowa who’d retired to Alabama after the onset of Parkinson’s disease. Starbuck agreed with Dubus: It would be a nice thing to do for Dick, who certainly deserved whatever help he got. And so it happened that several years later, with no other salvation in sight, Yates was at last welcomed to Alabama: “The host of Yates fans in these parts,” Hendrie wrote, “are delighted that you will come and are looking forward to your stay.”

  It wasn’t long before Yates was figuring a way to get out of Alabama. “I don’t want to die in fucking Dixie,” he told friends over the phone, amid gasps and coughing fits. Certainly he wasn’t expected to like it in the South. Never mind the eloquent speeches he’d written for Robert Kennedy at the height of the civil rights movement—Yates was a New Yorker, and almost anywhere else was what his old friend Vonnegut called “up the river.” Yates had spent a lot of his adult life up the river, sometimes by choice as well as necessity, but in the end he’d always planned to come home. Nevertheless, when his chair semester ended at Alabama he moved into a cheap apartment near campus and, while the many months went by, gave no sign of leaving. Said Tony Earley, “We were touched that Dick stayed in Tuscaloosa because he’d made friends there who looked out for him and were kind to him. Still, there was a sense of sadness that he’d ended up living among grad students who’d been strangers only six months before—this writer who’d once been considered on a level with Styron and Cheever.” That said, the main reason Yates stayed was that he simply couldn’t afford to leave. Not yet, anyway. And this was another incentive to finish the book he’d been working on for six years, with whatever energy he could still muster. It was a novel titled Uncertain Times, based on his Kennedy experience, which just might prove a salable subject.

  * * *

  Around noon on November 7, 1992, Allen Wier was informed of Yates’s death at the Birmingham VA hospital a few hours earlier. Wier was director of the Alabama writing program by then, and he must have seemed as good a person to call as any. He was an admirer of Yates’s work, of course, but also felt a kind of protective fondness for the man—which might explain why he can’t remember who called him that day with the bad news. Amid the shock and pathos of the moment, his only definite memory is of the caller’s almost hectoring urgency: What is being done to secure Yates’s manuscript? “The implication,” Wier recalled, “was that we were remiss in not barricading Yates’s apartment until the manuscript was saved. The caller had no idea how uninterested the average Tuscaloosa resident was in Yates’s writing.”

  Wier didn’t have a key to Yates’s duplex apartment on Alaca Place, but that wasn’t a problem since Yates hadn’t had one either (he just kept losing it, so why bother?). The fact that Yates’s apartment was always unlocked was widely known among people who also knew there wasn’t much to steal, and to whom it would never occur to intrude except to offer help. Nor would any self-respecting burglar be likely to linger on Alaca Place, a brief stretch of road with a series of compact semidetached red-brick bungalows on either side, where graduate students and the odd retiree lived. Yates’s unit was the last of a chain where the street ended in a cul-de-sac.

  Yates tended to tidy up for visitors, which usually meant putting things in their proper piles and more or less clearing the floor of debris, but he wasn’t much for detailed housekeeping. Friends who’d seen the inside of his apartments in New York, Boston, Los Angeles—anywhere he’d lived as a bachelor—remember the arc of cockroach carcasses around his desk (casually stamped as he swiveled to and fro in his chair), as well as the curtains of whatever color turned grayish brown with dust and cigarette smoke, the one filthy sponge in the kitchen, and so on. Yates had been a very sick man when he left for the hospital in Birmingham, but he prob
ably hadn’t expected to die after minor surgery for a hernia; in any case he hadn’t bothered to tidy up before he left. “There was a trail of wadded Kleenex all over the floor,” said Wier, “like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs.” There was also a shirt box full of pennies, nickels, and a few dimes—no quarters, as Yates had used those to buy the New York Times—which overflowed onto the floor amid the Kleenex: about two hundred dollars’ worth in all (his daughters counted it later). There were a few pieces of vinyl and chrome furniture with the stuffing coming out, most of it bought at the Salvation Army. Nothing in the kitchen but a jar of mustard and a few empty bottles of Heineken. And several books scattered over every surface throughout the five small rooms, as if Yates had opened them one after the other but soon lost interest and let them drop.

  Wier followed a skein of surgical tubing into the bedroom—to a large oxygen tank at the foot of an unmade bed. He searched the closet for a manuscript and was struck by Yates’s wardrobe: two identical herringbone tweed jackets, three or four identical pairs of khaki pants, and several identical blue button-down shirts; a few pairs of size 10½ Brooks Brothers black shoes and two pairs of so-called desert boots—ankle-high, sand-colored, crepe-soled suede shoes popular in the fifties and sixties. There was also a stack of five or six sets of slate blue bedsheets, still in their store wrapping; apparently Yates had just put down a new set whenever the old ones got dirty. Finally there was a pile of Jiffy mailing envelopes preaddressed to the pharmaceutical company where Yates got his medication (a tranquilizer and the anticonvulsant Tegretol for seizures and mania). But no manuscript. For a while Wier kept looking and finally went to get help.

  By the time he came back with a couple of graduate students, Wier’s heart had begun to sink, fraught with the implications of what he’d seen. Yates’s place seemed part of some bleak motel: There was nothing that smacked of the personal except for photographs of his three daughters—carefully arranged on an otherwise blank wall—and an L-shaped desk with several sharpened pencils and a large cigarette burn. Apart from an old Mazda rusting in the sun, the only thing of value was an Olivetti typewriter, its owner’s manual wrapped in the original plastic. But still no sign of Yates’s novel.