A Tragic Honesty Read online

  “Not much for one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers,” said Wier. “Doesn’t seem right.”

  They were loading a pickup truck with Yates’s belongings, such as they were, when Wier had a little epiphany. Suddenly he knew, he was sure, where he’d find Uncertain Times. He walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and there it was: at least four hundred pages in a box, and on the last page was written, in proud capitals, “END.” Wier read no further (Yates wouldn’t have liked that), but just held the manuscript and savored his own exaltation: In that freezer, that poor man’s fireproof safe, he’d found the one thing that mattered to Richard Yates.

  CHAPTER ONE

  The Caliche Road: 1926-1939

  If the prerequisite of any great writer’s life is an unhappy childhood, then Richard Yates was especially blessed. It was not something he liked to talk about as an adult except in the most oblique terms. Once, as he walked past one of his many childhood apartments in Greenwich Village, he pointed to the iron bars on the window and remarked to a friend, “My little legs stuck out of those bars and I used to kick the bricks—kick, kick, kick…” If pressed, he might explain that he was sitting alone in the dark, staring outside and waiting for his mother to come home. And if he was drunk and sad enough, he might talk about his mother’s alcoholism, or her involvement with strange men; sometimes he’d even say that he hated her. But that sort of thing was rare.

  Yates aspired to a high standard of decorum both in art and life. A passage he cut from an early draft of his story “A Natural Girl,” has the Yates-like protagonist David Clark announce to his young wife, “I must’ve had the most fucked-up childhood in American history. I’ve told you a lot about my parents and all that. But I’ve always held back. I’ve never gotten down to the pain of it. I’ve been hiding and pretending all my life.” It’s easy to see why Yates cut this. First of all, it doesn’t quite ring true in terms of the character (as Yates liked to challenge his students, “Would that character say that? I don’t think so”), but also David Clark’s damaged psyche can be suggested in far more satisfying aesthetic terms—for example, his willingness to wear his hair “in the manner of the actress Jane Fonda” because he thinks his wife will like it that way. Such details objectify the matter nicely, and no mention need be made of the character’s fucked-up childhood. And so in life Yates contented himself, when sober and at his best, with the image of a barred window: “Kick, kick, kick…” He knew that direct explication rarely told the whole truth, and above all he was determined to be truthful. And one of the essential truths of Yates’s childhood—of his whole life, perhaps—is that he loved and admired his mother at least as much as he later claimed to despise her. She was a source of pain he never could evade, though writing about her helped.

  She was born in Greenville, Ohio, the seat of Darke County (she later spelled Darke without the e, perhaps by way of suggesting a general benightedness). Greenville, in the far western part of the state near the Indiana border, was a town of some five thousand souls in the late nineteenth century, and to this day preserves some of its frontier ethos. Annie Oakley is and will always be the town’s favorite daughter—she joined Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show in 1885, six years before Yates’s mother was born—and one may attend the annual “Annie Oakley Days” festival there, or see the many local examples of antique steam-driven farm machinery, or visit the site where the Treaty of Greenville was signed once the Indians were subdued and this outpost secured in the name of progress. Progress meant farms and schools and Main Street merchants, and of course churches: By 1875 the citizenry was divided among eight Protestant churches and one Catholic. It was a world perhaps best evoked in the pages of Winesburg, Ohio: “Men labored too hard and were too tired to read. In them was no desire for words printed upon paper. As they worked in the field, vague, half-formed thoughts took possession of them. They believed in God and in God’s power to control their lives.”

  Yates’s grandfather, Amos Bigelow Maurer, was one of sixteen children born to German immigrants, Henry and Julia Ann (Bigler) Maurer. Amos was twenty-two in 1871, when he left the hamlet of Bradford for a session of schooling in Greenville, about ten miles away. He planned to clerk for a dry-goods merchant that summer, but first he needed to perfect his penmanship, the better to write out orders and receipts with a credible flourish. His teacher in Greenville was Fannie Hatch Walden, and her own penmanship was impeccable—full of ornate curlicues and so forth, such that the sense of what she wrote was liable to be lost amid the finery, which was just as well. At any rate she subsequently corresponded with her favorite pupil and “dear friend Mr. Maurer,” who in turn did his tremulous best to emulate Miss Walden’s skill. With a well-meaning travesty of loops and swirls, he wrote her from such towns as Minster, where he worked at a private auction on behalf of his employer, Mr. Sharpe: “He says I am the best clerk for a beginner that he ever seen. I was in the store until ten o’clock, sold about fourty dollars worth. I have learned a great deal in the way of dry goods.” But the Minster letter ends on a doleful note. “I don’t like this town a bit. Because the people are all German,” Amos explained, without detectable irony, and Fannie replied: “I should like to have seen you when you sold the first yard of goods. Would it not be nice if you could be a clerk for Mr. Sharpe a while and do so well. After a while be clerk for yourself.” The two had been corresponding for more than a year before they attained this level of intimacy.

  In October 1873 the hand of Providence pressed them together at last; with the end of their long courtship in sight, the letters suggest the kind of life they envisioned in the heart of Darke County. Fannie, but a week away from moving out of Widow Adams’s boarding house on northeast Main Street, described a funeral she’d attended for one of the more venerable citizens of nearby Union: “[He] was buried in the honors of the Odd Fellows last Tuesday his name was McFeely and there were five different lodges here. His remains were conveyed to the cemetery in the new hearse which we seen at the fair.” Such were the rewards of a busy life devoted to faith, family, and friends—five lodges!—and Amos was as anxious to get on with it as Fannie. He wrote her a prenuptial poem to this effect: “I know thine’s no worldly heart,” it began accurately, then went on a bit and ended with,

  And now the day’s close at hand.

  But, dear, it’s far enough away,

  Yet soon we’ll be one happy band.

  I’ll close wishing you a good day.

  For the honeymoon they went to Dayton.

  * * *

  Over the next eighteen years Amos and Fannie had seven children, at least four of whom, it’s safe to say, were made more or less in their parents’ image. The oldest daughter Ida lived to the virtuous age of ninety-one, and spent her dotage painting flowers in watercolor and collecting Saturday Evening Post covers in bound fifty-two-page volumes, one for each year.* Margaret, Mina, and Love Maurer married young and moved away from Greenville; later they joined Ida and their parents in ostracizing their brother Rufus, who’d gone to Washington, D. C., and married a Jew. Elsa Maurer was different, somewhat; at least as respectable as her sisters, and deeply spiritual, she inherited these qualities without quite the dose of provincial bigotry that went with them. Rather late in life she married a math professor who, within a few years, drowned off the coast of Galveston; before and after this event, Elsa devoted her life to contemplating the Infinite and helping her sister Ruth, the youngest and most wayward of the lot. As with Rufus, the rest of the family would have little to do with Ruth and vice versa—which left Elsa, who always had both time and a bit of money to spare.

  Ruth Walden Maurer was born December 31, 1891, though her entry in Who’s Who of American Women gives her birthday as exactly five years later, as do her entries in all the various artists’ directories and even her Social Security application. Indeed, it’s likely that her own children—who called her “Dookie” to distinguish her from her daughter and namesake—were unsure of their mother’s age u
ntil a sad day in 1961 when circumstances forced them to find a birth certificate (“you know how Pookie’s always been about her age,” says Sarah Grimes in The Easter Parade). But such fudging was a minor detail in a vast reinvention that began almost at birth—a quest for self-realization by a woman who was, as her son wrote of her model in A Special Providence, “remarkable and gifted and brave”:

  How else could anyone explain the story of her life? At the turn of the century, when all the sleeping little towns of Indiana had lain locked in provincial ignorance, and when in that environment a simple dry-goods merchant named Amos Grumbauer had raised six ordinary daughters, wasn’t it remarkable that his seventh had somehow developed a passion for art, and for elegance, and for the great and distant world of New York?

  Give or take a few syllables, the passage sticks to the facts, as does most of Yates’s fiction about his family. Just like Alice Prentice in A Special Providence, Dookie left her hometown before she finished high school, and was in fact one of the first female students at the Cincinnati Art Academy, where she studied China Painting and Drawing from Life. At the time she had only a vague idea of becoming an artist, and wouldn’t settle on a particular métier until much later. Her immediate goal was to gain the skills to get out of Ohio and find a job in New York, and never to look back except in scorn and derision. For the rest of her life Dookie scoffed at everything that struck her as bland and bourgeois, though in one respect (at least) she never left Greenville: No matter how bohemian she later affected to be, or how destitute she often became, Dookie was always proud to call herself a “good Republican.” “[S]he had probably grown up hearing the phrase ‘good Republican’ as an index of respectability and clean clothes,” Yates speculated in a later story. “And maybe she had come to relax her standards of respectability … but ‘good Republican’ was worth clinging to.”

  Dookie would later say she married beneath her, and no doubt she meant a number of things by that; at least in one respect, though, she married about as far above herself as she could get. For Richard Yates’s lineage on his father’s side is very distinguished indeed—what’s more, Yates was aware of this. “I know,” he replied, when his nephew Peter (an amateur genealogist) told him they were direct descendants of one of the country’s first great men, Governor William Bradford of Plymouth. The most powerful colonial governor, a man of legendary virtue, Bradford is perhaps best known as the self-taught author of History of Plimouth Plantation—a classic among literary annals, notable for its directness of style, the author’s determination to tell the truth in the plainest possible language. Yates, if he gave the matter much thought (and there are reasons to suspect he did), may well have been proud of such an ancestor.

  The Bradford connection came through Yates’s paternal grandmother, Clarissa Antoinette Cleveland, a member of the same illustrious, many-branched family that produced Grover, the country’s twenty-second and twenty-fourth president, and Moses, the founder of Cleveland, Ohio. In 1864 Clarissa married a seminarian, Horatio Yates, who later became one of the most active and respected Methodist clergymen in central New York. The followers of John Wesley stress the social responsibility of Christians, and Horatio Yates clearly took that aspect of his calling to heart. After moving his growing family from one tiny pastorate to another throughout Cayuga County, Yates became chaplain of Auburn State Prison in 1887, a year after the birth of his eighth and last child, Vincent Matthew, the father of Richard Yates. Vincent’s formative years, then, were spent (happily or not) in the parsonage of a prison that was infamous for its brutality. The so-called Auburn system was informed by the spirit of Calvinism, a belief in the utter depravity of humankind, and its foremost mandate was to break the prisoners’ spirits through beatings and floggings, forced labor, solitary confinement, shaved heads, striped suits, and lockstep. Such a life was conducive to thinking about one’s heavenly reward, and in 1826 the Auburn warden, Gershom Powers, conceived the idea of a resident chaplain—a man “activated by motives of public policy and Christian benevolence,” he wrote. “Residing with convicts, and visiting their solitary and cheerless abodes, they will consider him their minister, their guide, their counselor, and their friend.”

  The evidence suggests that Horatio Yates was all these things. One of his grandson’s most cherished possessions was a violin lovingly carved by a prisoner for Chaplain Yates, with a woman’s head at the end of the fingerboard and a mother-of-pearl inlaid case.* Horatio Yates’s devotion to his wayward flock became a matter of public record in August 1890, when the country’s first capital punishment by electrocution took place at Auburn State Prison. William Kemmler had killed his common-law wife Tillie Ziegler with a hatchet, and was held in a single cell for almost a year waiting for death. Horatio Yates visited the man several times a week, and read to him from a picture Bible (Kemmler was mentally deficient). The prisoner’s last hours were spent in prayer with the kindly chaplain, who proved such a comfort that Kemmler insisted he be one of the twenty-six witnesses to the execution. “Gentlemen, I wish you all good luck,” said Kemmler as he was strapped to the chair. “I believe I am going to a good place and I am ready to go.” Horatio Yates, having convinced the poor man of God’s infinite mercy, sat and watched with the others as shock after shock failed to kill him—as he gasped and gurgled, his teeth grinding audibly, the capillaries bursting on his cheeks, the room filling with the stench of roasting flesh and feces, until several witnesses fainted and the district attorney ran retching for the door. Chaplain Yates’s reaction went unrecorded, though the episode might have put things in a curious perspective for a while. In any case he continued to serve as chaplain for seven more years, and his passing in 1912 was noted at respectful length by all the Auburn newspapers.

  His son Vincent was destined for a life of comparative obscurity. A small man of average good looks and few apparent pretensions, he made little impression on his son or the world at large except in a single respect: He had a lovely tenor voice, though not quite enough talent or monomania to make a career out of it. “I think he sang professionally a few times,” Yates surmised in A Good School. “I imagine he joined the General Electric Company in Schenectady as a delaying action, in order to have a few dollars coming in while he continued to seek concert engagements, but before very long the company swallowed him up.” This is Yates being characteristically scrupulous; most likely he knew very little about his father’s life, and even in a piece of fiction (albeit one published as an “autobiographical foreword” in the New York Times Book Review) he would not pretend otherwise. It’s quite possible that Vincent Yates tried to sing professionally, failed, and then accepted the truth of his relative mediocrity and spent the rest of his life, sadder but wiser, as a small-time corporate drone—that he was, in short, a kind of Yatesian hero: the modest man who refuses to live a lie. That, anyhow, is the way Yates portrays him in the fiction, though it appears to have been a somewhat revisionist view.

  Outside his work Yates rarely discussed his father. To his friends, family, and even his psychiatrist he dismissed Vincent as a cipher, someone he hardly knew. But imaginatively he tried hard to fathom this rather dull but decent man who spent most of his adult life as an assistant regional sales manager for General Electric (Mazda Lamp Division); who was patient and reliable in meeting the demands of a flamboyant, profligate ex-wife; and who had a fine singing voice but at some point gave it up for good. Yates’s fullest fictional treatment of his father is “Lament for a Tenor,” his second published story, written eleven years after Vincent’s death.* It seems to reflect a rather guilty impulse to pay belated homage to the man. The protagonist is a sixteen-year-old boy who tries to find something to mourn in a dead father he’d always neglected; among other things he recalls one of his infrequent visits to his father’s office, where a framed photograph of a salesmen’s outing at Tupper Lake had caught his eye: “[H]e came upon his father … between two heavy bald men whose glasses flashed in the sun.… He looked as if he’d tried al
l weekend to get into the spirit of the thing … [but] was lonely and tired now, anxious to go home and even beginning to feel sorry for himself, an operatic tenor lost among the salesmen.” A series of further flashbacks culminates in an epiphanic moment when, as a very small child, the protagonist actually heard his father sing: “When his voice came, it was amazingly big and rich, filling the room: ‘La donna è mobile/Qual piuma al ven-n-to…’” And though his father botches the final high note with a cough (“my wind’s shot”), the son is “too full of pride and love to speak.”

  Vincent is an essentially idealized figure in the fiction (too idealized in the case of “Tenor,” which might explain why the story was never collected): His typical function, at least in the later work, is to serve as foil to the selfish, pretentious characters based on Yates’s mother, and both parents suggest a larger dialectic between realistic and romantic viewpoints—that is, between people like Vincent who refuse to deceive themselves, who don’t insist on their own importance, and people like Dookie who do. To some degree Vincent may have been such a paragon (certainly he was good about paying alimony), but in everyday life, at least, his son wasn’t particularly sentimental about him, and was even somewhat equivocal about who neglected whom. “I didn’t give a shit about why he wasn’t home,” said Yates. “I just wanted him there.”

  * * *

  Dookie and Vincent were married on July 3, 1920. She was pushing thirty, and he was on the brink of premature middle age, and one assumes that both were lonely. Later Dookie would deplore having married such a tedious man, and perhaps God alone can measure the magnitude of Vincent’s regret, but at the time it might have made a kind of sense. Both had fled from rather claustrophobic home lives—in Vincent’s case a literal prison, no less—where each had been the youngest and least conventional of a large family.* Both had a degree of artistic talent, and all the better for Dookie that Vincent had given up his own manqué striving to devote himself to a mundane but respectable career; he could thus support her growing desire to become a sculptor. And finally, by most accounts, both were alcoholics, as both their children would be.