A Tragic Honesty

by Blake Bailey

  It’s more accurate to say that writing and VA hospitals had kept Yates alive over the years, so that he gladly accepted their occasional slipshod treatment, even to the bitter end. For years VA doctors had put off operating on Yates’s inguinal hernia, which had become more and more painful as his coughing got worse and he had to drag tanks around. The hernia was forever popping out like a sausage link, but it took several grueling trips to Birmingham before the doctors finally deemed it “emergency” enough to operate. By that time Yates was almost dead anyway—but then, he’d always wanted to die in a hospital where people would clean him up. “Sam, I’m dying,” he gasped to his publisher a few days before the trip. “I can’t work anymore. I can’t do anything.”

  When Gina called from Mexico that Sunday, Yates cheerfully assured her it was only a routine procedure. They were about to say good-bye when the phone cut out, a common occurrence. “In the past,” Gina remembered,

  we had agreed that if we got cut off before saying goodbye, we would just leave it until the following week. Even so, I was inexplicably compelled to ask the [concierge] to call back. After about half an hour he got through. Dad said, “You didn’t have to call back—we were finished!” And I said, “I know, I just wanted to say goodbye and I love you!” He said he loved me too, and we hung up.

  Monica considered hiring a private nurse (or coming down herself) to tend her father following the operation, but in the end she simply couldn’t afford it—besides, as Yates blithely insisted, it was no big deal. After surgery on Thursday, November 5, he told Monica the wound wasn’t closing properly and they might have to operate again; a little later he left a message on her machine: “Don’t worry, baby, they put this mesh thing in, and it’s going to be okay.”

  Probably his last conversation, Friday night, was with Susan Braudy. He sounded unwell, and when she pressed him about it, he admitted—his voice dropping a little sheepishly—that he was in a lot of pain. “Ask the nurse for painkillers!” said Braudy, and Yates promised he would. He left the phone off the hook when he tried to hang up, and Braudy continued to listen as a nurse asked Yates if he needed anything. “No,” she heard him say, “I’m fine.”

  At around three in the morning Yates apparently had a coughing fit that caused him to vomit. No nurse was around (though arguably a person in Yates’s condition should have been recuperating in the ICU), and he struggled to get out of bed. The next morning they found him on the floor, dead of suffocation.

  Epilogue

  Yates used to ruminate gloomily about the kind of obituary he’d get—“two inches in the Times,” he’d say, “at best, and the only book they’ll mention is Revolutionary Road.” One likes to think he would have been pleased that he was at least somewhat mistaken, since in fact the Times’s lead obituary for Monday, November 9, was Yates’s; and while it’s true that his first and most famous novel was the only one discussed at length, the other titles were duly listed and collectively described as being “about self-deception, disappointment, and grief.” The rest of his career was limned from Yonkers to Avon to the army to Remington Rand, from speechwriting to teaching and two broken marriages. Sam Lawrence got in a plug for Uncertain Times, though he added that he wasn’t sure yet whether the manuscript was in “publishable form.” Yates was dubbed in the headline a “Chronicler of Disappointed Lives.” Fair enough.

  Monica was the first to be notified of her father’s death, and for a long time she felt “complete desolation and brokenheartedness”: “I didn’t know how I was going to keep going without him. Who else would respond to me like that? No one else would really see me the way he did, and think I was so interesting, and get what I was saying when I said it.” Monica had become so attached to her father that, as his health failed, she begged him to reassure her that some sort of afterlife existed so they could be reunited. But Yates wasn’t having any of that: “Nah baby,” he’d say, “just blackness!” Gina was still in Mexico when her father died; she called him that Sunday as usual, hoping he’d already be home after his “routine procedure.” Fearing the worst when he didn’t answer, she called her mother, who’d just gotten the news from Sharon. “Gina burst into tears,” Martha recalled. “Destroyed.” Outside the family, the person who probably took Yates’s death the hardest was Andre Dubus, who seemed not only devastated but angry when he called his first wife Pat. “Dick let himself die,” he sobbed.

  Two weeks later Monica and Sharon went to Tuscaloosa to pack up their father’s things and decide what to do about the body, which was being kept in cold storage at a local funeral home. There were a few complications. Yates was entitled to a free burial at the VA cemetery in Alabama, but his daughters agreed he wouldn’t have liked that, so they arranged to pay for cremation; at the last moment, though, the funeral home director discovered that a third daughter existed—in Mexico—and refused to proceed without her signature. Monica and Sharon joked about stowing the body in Yates’s old Mazda and shipping it home, but as it happened there was no extra charge for a few more weeks of refrigeration. Meanwhile they had to clear out the bungalow on Alaca Place. Allen Wier and some graduate students had already cleaned up the worst of it, including the loose change strewn about the floor, which they’d left for the daughters in a tidy plastic bag. Yates’s remaining effects were as follows: an air-conditioner and typewriter, which were stashed in the Mazda and trucked back to Brooklyn; some books and unpacked boxes of letters (“I should throw this shit out,” Yates had said in May re his life’s store of letters, but Monica talked him out of it); a spavined old sofa, table, and bed; some soiled sheets in the back of the closet which Yates had lacked the energy to clean. The books and letters were mailed home, the rest abandoned. On the plane back to New York, Monica and Sharon sat putting the loose change into rolls. “Our inheritance!” they laughed. “The family fortune!”

  On December 16, 1992, Sam Lawrence and Kurt Vonnegut hosted a memorial service for Yates at the Century Club in Manhattan. In his eulogy Vonnegut spoke of the “forced march” he’d made through all nine of Yates’s books before preparing his remarks: “Not only did I fail to detect so much as an injudiciously applied semicolon; I did not find even one paragraph which, if it were read to you today, would not wow you with its power, intelligence, and clarity.” He remembered how his old friend Yates had always “yearned to live as F. Scott Fitzgerald lived when Fitzgerald was rich and famous and young, to jump into the Plaza fountain with his clothes on and his pockets stuffed with paper money”; but even though Yates was “a more careful writer than Fitzgerald, and one who was even more cunningly observant,” he could never escape the middle-class life he wrote about so well. Finally Vonnegut looked back on the early days of their friendship at the Writers’ Workshop in Iowa City. “One of our colleagues was Nelson Algren,” he concluded, “another world-class story-teller and outsider who died broke, but who was more famous than Yates because he had made love to Simone de Beauvoir. These things matter.”

  Vonnegut read tributes by Dubus and Loree Rackstraw, then a number of illustrious people—Yates’s “good if not close” friends—read from his work: Styron, Frank Conroy, Barrett Prettyman, David Milch, Dan Wakefield, and Robert Stone. Richard Price and Richard Levine gave reminiscences, as did Yates’s short-lived girlfriend from the mid-seventies, Carolyn Gaiser, who startled the crowd (“Who is that?”) with a wittily impious evocation of Yates as, essentially, a lonely alcoholic given to “monumental” tantrums. The last item on the program was a long “requiem” by Sam Lawrence, read by his son Nick because of the former’s stammer. Among other things Lawrence remembered his boozy Harvard Club dinners with Yates in their youth, and dwelled at curious length on facts and figures relating to their various contracts. All in all, though, it was a fair and heartfelt summation of Yates’s career. “He drank too much, he smoked too much, he was accident-prone, he led an itinerant life, but as a writer he was all in place,” said Lawrence. “He wrote the best dialogue since John O’Hara, who also lacked th
e so-called advantages of Harvard and Yale. And like O’Hara he was a master of realism, totally attuned to the nuances of American behavior and speech.” Lawrence ended, “You know what I think he would have said to all this? ‘C’mon, Sam, knock it off. Let’s have a drink.’”

  And so they did. While a jazz pianist played the standards Yates had loved so well, an odd assortment of long-lost friends and family ate, drank, and caught up. Yates’s nephews Peter and Fred Rodgers were there, as was his niece Ruth (“Dodo”), who spoke bitterly about her alcoholic mother. Grace Schulman was there; at one point guests had been asked to stand and share memories of Yates, and she mentioned the advice he’d given her as an apprentice poet (“Write with balls, Grace!”) as well as the way he’d insisted on fining her and Jerry a dime for saying “unkind words about absent people.” Wendy Sears was there, and read aloud a letter the lonely Yates had written from Hollywood in 1965, all about how cheered he’d been by a Father’s Day poem from the eight-year-old Monica. Bob Riche was there, despite having written a 1990 novel whose protagonist Bill Brock (named after Riche’s oafish persona in Young Hearts Crying) reflects thus on his old friend “Pritch Bates”: “[He] managed to squeeze out a half-dozen largely ignored lifeless novels in which with increasing bitterness he blamed his mother, his father, his sister, his ex-wives and whatever former friends he once had for the miserable mess he has since made of his life.”* And Bob Parker was there, though he was a bit unsettled to learn that Monica (“I’m surprised to see you!”) was bitterly aware of his 1985 lampoon, “A Clef”: “So big deal Bob Parker,” she wrote him afterward,

  you had a few asshole qualities and Dad focused on those and brought them to life [i.e., in Young Hearts Crying].… I hope in the end you see the compliment he paid you, deeming you artist enough to face that, the way he always did. When you read one of Dad’s books you cringe at all the characters’ foibles and feel uncomfortable and exposed. That is why his books aren’t popular—only people who are made happy enough by great art for it to outweigh the discomfort can enjoy them.… Far from despising you he admired and wondered about you and considered you an authentic artist. He also considered your life luckier than his, and your nature safer.

  “Don’t be sorry for coming to the funeral,” Monica added in the margin. “Sharon and I were happy to see you in spite of ourselves—we both agreed it was kind and admirable of you to have made a point of being there.”

  Andre Dubus hosted another, somewhat smaller memorial service at Harvard’s Lamont Library on February 3, Yates’s sixty-seventh birthday. Notably absent on both occasions was Yates’s daughter Gina—in Arizona at the time. “I knew it would be a literary event,” she explained, “and that whole side of Dad’s life was separate from our relationship.”

  * * *

  Four months after Yates’s death, Sam Lawrence came to the “painful conclusion” that Uncertain Times wasn’t “complete enough to publish”: “There are, of course, wonderful things in it and how we wish your father could have finished it and made it the novel he envisioned,” he wrote Monica. “But to publish it in its present state would serve neither the loyal Yates fans and readers nor his own memory. As you well know, your father was a perfectionist and I doubt if he would have wanted this manuscript published or possibly even read in its unfinished state.” Lawrence had decided not to pursue collection of the large unearned advance, in deference to “an author [he] loved and admired.” Ten months later—just over a year after Yates’s death—Lawrence himself died of a heart attack. Yates was not listed by the Times as one of the “many important writers” Lawrence had introduced to the public, though Richard Brautigan and J. P. Donleavy were.

  In his will Yates left everything to his daughters in equal shares, and named Monica his executor. He died deep in debt, and remained so even after Lawrence forgave the advances. There was David Milch’s “walking-around money,” which perhaps bothered Yates’s shade (“I’ll get him that goddamn $36,000!”) if not Milch, but the federal government wasn’t so easily appeased. Again and again Monica was contacted about her father’s unpaid income tax, until finally even the IRS realized that collection was hopeless. “It was a big hole,” said Monica, “and we turned our backs on it all and felt bad.”

  Yates’s first wife Sheila, however, inherited her mother’s shrewdness about money, and lives comfortably on her investments after retiring as a schoolteacher. Monica once mentioned to her father that Sheila had managed to save one hundred thousand dollars: “Why doesn’t she give you a thousand, baby?” said Yates. “Then she’d have ninety-nine thousand fucking dollars saved!” Eventually Sheila came through in her own way. When Monica was engaged to a surgeon named Brian Shapiro in 1995, her mother paid for a modest wedding in Scarsdale. At the reception Sharon asked Harvey Shapiro (no relation to Monica’s husband) to go introduce himself to Sheila. “Hi,” he said. “I’m Harvey Shapiro. I knew your husband.” Sheila gave him a hard stare and walked away without a word.

  Sheila’s brother Charlie is alive and spry. For the last decade or so he’s worked as a ward clerk at the last VA hospital where he was a patient. He’s often floated from ward to ward, as he has a tendency to rearrange the nurses’ station wherever he goes: “They set it up to talk on the phone,” he says emphatically, “not to work!” The only people he sees are family, and during holidays he hovers about the kitchen bouncing on the balls of his feet à la John Givings.

  Martha Speer moved to Hancock, Michigan, after her second marriage ended in 1993.

  As for Monica, she went on to lead the sort of life that her father had always thought would be most fulfilling for her: She is now a housewife and mother to three boys and a girl.

  As young women both Sharon and Monica suffered a single “isolated psychotic episode,” never to recur; Gina’s turn came in 1998. She and her husband had been traveling almost five months out of every year, and after a bout of dysentery in Southeast Asia, Gina began to experience a euphoric sense of omniscience. For a while she thought she was a witch with psychic powers, and just before a long blackout she fancied herself the Goddess of the North Pole (emergency room medics were on hand, so she thought at the time, to verify this). A little later her father appeared to her, and Gina asked him what the secret to being a great writer was. “Is that all you want to know?” he smiled (“as if to imply that there were more important things in life,” said Gina). “All right. If you really want to know, then I’ll tell you.” Very deliberately he spoke the words: “It’s all in that last … final … hesitation. But if you don’t want to end up like me, you have to reverse it.” Gina lay in bed intoning, over and over, Reverse that final hesitation.… When she related Yates’s cryptic advice to her half-sister Monica, the latter burst out laughing: “I was really hoping there’d be something in there we could use!” she said. “What are we supposed to do with that?”

  Yates’s ashes, still in their original shipping box, reside in the basement of Sharon’s house in Brooklyn. She and Monica can’t decide what to do with them; they’ve considered scattering them in Washington Square or, better still, over all of Manhattan from a plane. Their exasperated mother tells them to take the box down the street to Green-Wood Cemetery, where no less than Peter Cooper and Louis Comfort Tiffany are buried. But Sharon’s gotten used to having the ashes in her basement; recently, when Yates finally got a story in The New Yorker, she gave the shipping box a little shake: “Way to go, Dad!”

  * * *

  “To write so well and then to be forgotten is a terrifying legacy,” Stewart O’Nan wrote in his 1999 essay, “The Lost World of Richard Yates”—O’Nan went on to predict, however, “Eventually the books will make it back in print, just as Faulkner’s and Fitzgerald’s did, and Yates will take his place in the American canon.” In the years after Yates’s death, as his books dropped out of print and his reputation seemed headed for almost total oblivion, a number of devotees (mostly writers themselves) continued to press Yates’s work on a new generation of r
eaders—to preserve what Robin Metz called “the tradition continuum from Flaubert to Fitzgerald to Yates”—to enact a “cultural-literary secret handshake,” as Richard Ford would have it. Yates’s former students have felt the apostolic burden most keenly. DeWitt Henry calls Yates “one of the few good voices in [his] head,” and he tries to impart that voice to his own students: “I hear his vigilant hectoring always, for genuine clarity, genuine feeling, the right word, the exact English sentence, the eloquent detail, the rigorous dramatization of story. Don’t evade. Don’t cheat.” Another student, Edwin Weihe, remembers the loving way Yates found “small truths” in his students’ stories, “the descriptions of things, like a hanger snapping when you jerked a coat from it.” Many years later Weihe encountered Yates again, and asked if his old teacher remembered him. “Yes, of course,” the latter replied, “the snapping hanger.” “Richard Yates,” said Weihe—echoing Ford, echoing others—“was the place you went back to.”

  The resurrection of Richard Yates began in earnest with Random House’s 2000 edition of Revolutionary Road, with an introduction by Ford that was also published in the New York Times Book Review. Ford described the novel as a “cultish standard,” especially among writers “who have kept its reputation burnished by praising it, teaching it, sometimes unwittingly emulating its apparent effortlessness, its complete accessibility, its luminous particularity, its deep seriousness toward us human beings, about whom it conjures shocking insights and appraisals.” This edition has continued to sell briskly, such that one might venture to hope that Revolutionary Road is now installed in the so-called canon, whatever that is. The novel was listed by the Harvard Book Store as one of the “100 Favorite Titles” among college students, and the Dalkey Archive Press named it one of their thirty “Most Influential Novels of the 20th Century.” When a new edition was published in the UK in 2001, Paul Connolly of The Times noted that “finally the British reading public will be given the opportunity to discover America’s finest forgotten author.” Also that year—a banner year in what one is emboldened to call the Yates Revival—Holt published The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, which actually made best-seller lists in Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and elsewhere. New editions of The Easter Parade, A Good School, and A Special Providence have followed, and soon perhaps Yates’s entire oeuvre will be back in print—to stay.