by Blake Bailey
A month later Dookie was still holding her own—“physically stronger but mentally off her trolly [sic]” as Yates put it—and she was moved to St. Johnland, an Episcopalian “home for the aged” in King’s Park, Long Island. Her total monthly expenses came to a relatively exorbitant $260, and the Suffolk County Welfare Department demanded that Yates and Ruth contribute to their mother’s care. Both were strapped and the extra burden was unwelcome, to put it mildly; when Ruth reminded her brother that Dookie’s doctor at St. Johnland needed a one-time fee of $150 in addition to regular expenses, Yates exploded. Further discussion was impossible, and Ruth wrote him a weary letter instead: “I am not, as you so neatly put it, trying to ‘cozy up to this shit-head.’ I feel, and Fred agrees, that Dookie needs Dr. Alexander and Dr. Alexander needs $150. It’s cut and dried.… Don’t let’s fight anymore.” There was one other practical matter: Since welfare benefits still paid the better part of Dookie’s care, the State of New York would claim her assets when she died. Therefore Ruth suggested they persuade Dookie to “give” them her sculpture, as it was “just possible that twenty years from now somebody will want to collect ‘Ruth Yates.’”*
Dookie tuned in and out of lucidity, but even at her best she lived in a delusional fog. “It was Bob Jones [?] who arranged to have me hit by that car,” she belligerently insisted, and wondered what would be done about it. At first she thought she’d “served two years as President of the United States”—it’s possible she was confusing the nation with the National Association of Women Artists—and then demoted herself to first mother. She thought Yates was John F. Kennedy, that she lived in an annex of the White House, and that the nurses were pretty insolent under the circumstances. Her place among the “aristocracy” seemed assured at last, but soon she became depressed and withdrawn. She stopped speaking of her role in Camelot, and during one of Yates’s rare visits she sat ignoring him while she studied her haggard face in a hand mirror; finally, carefully, she painted lipstick on her reflection. The primacy of image over reality was complete.
“The deaths of parents, dreadful and sad as they are, do I think to an extent free writers,” said Alice Adams, and this was certainly true of Yates. But it was a long and difficult process, and it exacted a psychic toll. He once told interviewers that the prologue of A Special Providence—in which Private Prentice visits his mother and listens to her drunken boasting about her artistic career—was the hardest scene he ever wrote (“I sweated blood over that”), and still more years would pass before he thought he was finally, truly able to “see things in the round” where his childhood was concerned. And the more he saw, the more obsessive and bitter he became, until finally he was as haunted as Stephen Dedalus by the memory of a spurned, beloved, and deeply hated mother.
* * *
By mid-August Yates needed a break, and with Dookie bound for St. Johnland he decided to accept John Ciardi’s invitation to return to Bread Loaf as a teaching fellow. His friend Ed Kessler was driving to Vermont in rather illustrious company—Julia Child and her husband Paul; Bernard DeVoto’s widow Avis—and invited Yates to join them. The five had breakfast together at DeVoto’s apartment the morning of their departure, and Yates was on his best behavior. Paul Child had been the art teacher at Avon Old Farms when Yates was a bedraggled fourth former, and both seemed pleased by the subsequent turn of events, though perhaps the happily married Child was a bit more so than his old pupil.
The two weeks passed without major mishap, though the good impression Yates made on the Childs and Avis DeVoto didn’t last. DeVoto presided over Treman Cottage, where privileged staff members gathered to eat, drink, joke, argue, and plot sexual assignations, rather in spite of their domineering hostess. DeVoto insisted her guests provide their own liquor and mark the bottles, and if anyone was so much as a minute late moving from veranda or lounge or lawn to the dining room, that person found the door shut. A student who wrote Yates a postconference note, inviting him to visit her, promised, “[W]e don’t mark our bottles here … and there isn’t anyone named Avis within fifty miles, except maybe a car rental agency.” Yates seems to have kept his temper in the face of such fussiness, but not without a certain amount of extravagant sulking. “He had the manner of a spoiled child,” said Julia Child, who remembered him as a “romantic figure” but a “difficult drunk”: “He seemed conspicuously unstable—Byronic, adrift.”
Yates was at his best among the unthreatening young, whose work he critiqued with candor and a sense of tact that came naturally in moods of sober detachment. The poet Miller Williams was a student that year, a friend thereafter, and found much to emulate in Yates’s approach: “Dick never praised simply to make you feel good, but he never wounded with criticism either.” Yates also made his mark in the lecture hall, as a lovingly modest enthusiast vis-à-vis his pet subjects—Flaubert and Fitzgerald, dialogue and the objective correlative.
And finally Yates managed to finish “Builders” and tune up the other stories for his collection, which he sent off to Sam Lawrence as soon as Bread Loaf was over. “I can’t tell you how impressed I was with Eleven Kinds of Loneliness,” Lawrence replied; he’d read and reread each story with “renewed pleasure” (even the ones he’d rejected over the years) and liked “Builders” the best of all: “It is the most poignant and profoundly moving and it has a kind of prayer at the end which I could not forget.”
Back in New York, Yates’s life was in flux. His friend Anatole Broyard, at the age of forty-one, had decided to marry—to retire at the top of his form, so to speak. Yates was among the fifty or so guests who attended the Village wedding, where he presented the couple with a crystal decanter. After that he and Broyard saw little of each other: The latter, thus domesticated, avoided Yates as an unpredictable drunk, and in 1963 he and his wife settled in Connecticut; later, when Broyard became a full-time reviewer for the New York Times, he’d often be in a position to remind Yates, after a peculiar fashion, of their old friendship.
Yates’s romantic life was “lively if somewhat confused,” as he put it; two long-term affairs became moribund that fall, while others came and went. Barbara Beury decided to turn down the Glamour job and stay in West Virginia, though she continued to write Yates and even spoke of visiting now and then. Yates’s response was irascible but gracious on the whole: He was tired of their “endless sophomoric discussions about ‘fate’ and ‘bridge-burning,’” he wrote, just as he supposed she was tired of his “instabilities and uncertainties”; but he agreed it might be nice to maintain “an undemanding, friendly-correspondence type thing that would enable us to keep in touch without driving each other crazy.” But they didn’t keep in touch. A few weeks later Yates decorously confessed to “a new involvement,” and though Beury tried to assure him that she wanted to remain friends anyway (“Christ, Dick, you’re no cad or whatever, in fact to be honest I’ve been regarding our relationship as a ‘buddy system’ since May of last year”), she never heard from him again.
Yates’s “new involvement” also superseded his old one with Natalie Bowen. He never did adjust to the combination of her sharp tongue and Fall River pedigree, nor did she grow any more used to the noise. One night the couple met Sam Lawrence for dinner and all got more or less equally drunk, after which they went back to Bowen’s apartment for a nightcap. Before long Yates was raving at both of them, muddling his grievances as he addressed one or the other, until Bowen locked herself in the bathroom and Lawrence tried lugubriously to reason with him. For Bowen such scenes had become all too familiar, with or without a third party, ditto Yates’s tendency to come banging on her door in the middle of the night to apologize. Toward the end (“as a last resort”) he went so far as to tell Bowen he loved her—and then suddenly it was over: He had a new involvement. Unlike Barbara Beury, though, Bowen would continue to hear from him over the years, however sporadically. A few months after their breakup Yates called while she was in the process of moving; he insisted on coming over and helping her unpack boxes. “I
remember Dick busily carrying books from one room to another,” said Bowen, “one of my friends commenting that she could always tell where Dick had been from the little pile of ashes he left behind.” Eventually, more than ten years later, she’d find herself in a position to return this curious favor.
Yates’s first involvement after Bowen came to a bad end. The woman’s name was Lynn and she was also a writer (not a good sign), a recent divorcée who needed a job. Grace Schulman, obliging as ever, introduced her to the editors of Glamour, and the pretty, well-spoken young woman was hired on the spot as a copywriter. She was still working there when she came in one day “looking as though someone had been beating her over the head,” Schulman recalled: “moaning, wordless.” Yates had just broken up with her, and no wonder: He’d never thought much of her mind—she had “brains of submoronic intellect,” he said—plus he’d always been suspicious of the fact that she’d married a wealthy man. At any rate he wasn’t alone for long. At a publishing party Bob Riche was glad to introduce his old friend to Sandra Walcott, a “rich, classy girl” who was “too intimidating” for Riche’s own taste. Walcott, a reader at Holt, was a great admirer of Revolutionary Road, and she seems to have brought out the best in Yates. Indeed she remembers him as “a perfect gentleman,” and never experienced the slightest hint of tumult in his presence: “He’d drink wine or beer,” she said, “but that was it. He was very sensitive, tender, and courtly. No big ego. He alluded to past problems with drinking, and was thoughtful and honest about it.” This of course is a recognizable side of Yates, but when Walcott also recalls his “cute little apartment,” the brow begins to furrow a bit: If he managed to tidy the place to such a miraculous extent that someone like Walcott would find it “cute,” then that winter must truly have been a halcyon period.
Even Sheila was having second thoughts about her ex-husband. Their relations had gradually thawed since the Bellevue episode, until Yates had taken to spending the night (chastely) when visiting his children in Danbury, where Sheila had moved to be near the teachers’ college where she was taking classes for her degree. At one point she proudly brought Yates to the home of her English teacher, a young writer named Lee Jacobus, for whom Sheila was a favorite pupil.* Yates finished off the man’s small store of liquor, a little of everything, but remained in control and at one point asked Jacobus to submit a story to the Bantam contest.
For her part Sheila continued to be troubled by Yates’s drinking, but her doubts were somewhat offset by his growing stature as a writer, to say nothing of his exemplary conduct as a father. Then over Christmas Sheila was so touched by Yates’s gift of fine Danish crystal that their rapprochement became heated. A few days later she and the girls drove to Tarrytown to meet Yates for dinner; afterward Sharon woke up in the back of the car and observed her mother canoodling her father’s neck: “You know what I want, dear,” she was saying. When Sharon inquired about this, Sheila was briskly matter-of-fact: Your father and I might get together again, she said, but don’t get your hopes up and don’t tell your sister.
Otherwise they kept it secret from the children, a situation Sheila disliked as a “hole-in-corner deal.” She was sneaking weekend visits to New York, as well as trysting with Yates in and around Danbury, but she wasn’t willing to commit to anything more permanent. In some ways the past two years had been the most rewarding (certainly the most peaceful) of Sheila’s life: After her abysmal academic performance as a girl, she was gratified to learn that she had it in her to be an excellent student, and she liked keeping an orderly home for her children without interference or mess. But she was lonely. “I have learned what it is to need,” she wrote Yates, “to want to go to bed with you and not be able to.… I’ve missed you so awfully much.” Not so much, however, that she’d altogether forgotten that she and Yates were “a hell of a lot of trouble to each other.” And Yates, too, was a little skeptical—he told Sheila he’d gotten his self-esteem back after the divorce—but the prospect of living with his daughters again, of having a reliable body in bed at night, far outweighed his doubts. Early that spring he parted company with Sandra Walcott: “He was very kind about it,” she recalled. “He said he was seeing his ex-wife again, and that he could only see one woman at a time. I never heard from Dick or saw him again.”
* * *
As the new year dawned, Yates was less inclined to view himself as a tragic figure. The modest abstemious fellow who sipped only wine and beer, who impressed the well-bred Walcott with his “cute” bachelor digs, was at the moment so awash in good news that even he had to concede that the “tragic” label was a trifle inexact. For one thing he’d digested the worst of his “rather exaggerated emptiness and despair that followed Revolutionary Road,” and in the meantime “Builders” had reassured him not only that he could still write, but also use problematic personal material and avoid what he called “the two terrible traps that lie in the path of autobiographical fiction—self-pity and self-aggrandizement.” Moreover Hollywood was coming around at last: Though Frankenheimer had shelved plans to make Revolutionary Road, he’d optioned an equally depressing novel by a more famous author who, like the director, happened to be a fan of Richard Yates. Frankenheimer realized he needed a “special type of writer” to adapt Lie Down in Darkness for the screen, and while Styron himself wasn’t available for such work, he knew somebody who was. “The Movie Deal that seemed so certain for my book all summer and fall came to a dreary end about a month ago,” Yates had written in late-November,
but I’m now almost equally excited and nervous about another deal which is said to be 90 percent of a sure thing—a job to write the screenplay for Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness, in exchange for such a colossal amount of money that it would buy my freedom for the next two years. If this does happen I will go to Hollywood the first week in January and earn all the dough before summer; if it doesn’t I’ll stay here in the old mousetrap and continue with other freelance droppings.
Two months later Yates still had “no whiff of a contract yet,” but his “endlessly optimistic agent” assured him it was only a matter of time that he’d be bound for Hollywood and the big money.
In general he was too busy to worry about life with his old morbidity. Apart from his teaching duties, some three thousand stories had already been submitted for the Bantam contest, and Yates—never much of a skimmer—was “temporarily out of the writing game” as he made his slow, conscientious way through the vast pile. The work was a bit depressing at times, as Yates was made more aware than ever that, where writing fiction is concerned, many are called but very few are chosen. One submission came from a New Jersey State Prison inmate, who wrote Yates a long letter admitting, gratuitously, that he wasn’t much of a writer, though he did have a number of saleable ideas for a novel, all of which revolved around the same basic premise of a prisoner unjustly accused. No story was enclosed; what the man really wanted was advice: “Mr. Yates, how can I make sure that know one [sic] can use this story concerning me and this whole case? There are a few lawyers thinking about taking this story using it for motion picture.”
When the drudgery and waiting got him down, Yates could indulge in the “serene and majestic daydreams” that had sustained him as a hopeful apprentice and now seemed on the verge of realization. In January Revolutionary Road was named one of the eleven finalists for the National Book Award, along with such strong contenders as Heller’s Catch-22, Salinger’s Franny and Zooey, Wallant’s The Pawnbroker, and an obscure first novel called The Moviegoer by a forty-five-year-old physician named Walker Percy. Sam Lawrence was guardedly hopeful—he knew for a fact that at least one of the three judges that year, Herbert Gold, was a big fan of Revolutionary Road (“the book was a shattering experience for him”), and meanwhile there was a growing consensus that such best-sellers as Catch-22 and Franny and Zooey were, after all, ludicrously overrated. Yates emphatically agreed.
After the award ceremony on March 13, Yates and his fellow nominee Ed Wallant went away
to commiserate. They were disappointed but philosophical: The Moviegoer was a good book and Percy seemed a nice guy, but both had come to believe they had a real chance. Then, two days later, Gay Talese reported in the New York Times that writer Jean Stafford had, in effect, waylaid her fellow NBA judges in favor of the underdog Percy.* It was a story that, in bitter moments, struck Yates as all too plausible. Though he later told interviewers that Stafford was “a beautiful writer,” for private consumption he called her “a pathetic lush” and would often recount the story of how she’d derailed his career. According to his friend Dan Wakefield, the 1962 National Book Award was “a ‘Rosebud’ moment for Dick: If he’d won, his whole life would have been different.” To be sure, for a writer who often seemed almost self-destructively modest about his own work, Yates could be surprisingly vehement on the subject of the NBA. When a student later asked whether he’d “really wanted” it, Yates was incredulous: “Want it? Want it? Of course I wanted it, I wanted it so fucking bad I could taste it!”
At the time, though, Yates could afford to be stoical. A month before the ceremony he’d been summoned to the Plaza Hotel by John Frankenheimer. “Just to save you anxiety in the elevator,” the director told Yates on the house phone, “you have the job.” Faced with the staggering prospect of fifteen thousand dollars for a few months’ work—to adapt a novel he admired, no less—the impoverished freelancer comported himself with admirable poise in the great director’s presence. Amid a suiteful of name-dropping Hollywood types (“Who’s going to wet-nurse Warren [Beatty] on the set? I did last time,” etc.), Yates sat apart with Frankenheimer and explained his thoughts on Styron’s work. The director was “very favorably impressed”: “Dick was without subterfuge. Very direct and intelligent, no pretense at all. It was clear he loved Lie Down in Darkness and came well prepared to discuss it.”