by Blake Bailey
Winged Beaver school yearbook
Wolfe, Don M.
Wolfe, Thomas
Wolfe, Tom
Wolitzer, Hilma
Wolper, David
women
Yates’s attitude toward
Yates’s attractiveness to
Wood, Natalie
The World on Fire (film project)
World War II
Yates’s experiences in
Woskoff, Dan
“A Wrestler with Sharks”
characters and plot
Wright, Ernest Bicknell
Yaddo colony
Yale Review
Yale University
Yardley, Jonathan
Yates, Gina (Yates’s daughter)
attitude toward Yates
birth
final visits and calls
party for, in Los Angeles
psychotic episode of
Yates, Horatio (Yates’s paternal grandfather)
Yates, Martha. See Speer, Martha
Yates, Monica (Yates’s daughter)
attitude toward Yates
birth of
final visits and calls
learns of Yates’s mental illness
mentoring by Yates
present life
stays with Yates in Los Angeles
visits with Yates
writing career of
Yates, Richard
apartment fire
apartments, gloom and grime of
appearance
disliked by self
down-and-out
good looks
archaic air of
in army
ashes, final disposition of
attachments to unlikely people
attitudes toward
blacks
feminists
poets
suicide
bellicose personality
bipolarity of
birth of
bleak worldview of
as book reviewer
breakdowns
cartoonist talent
character of, opinions of
as child, frailty and unathleticism of
childhood friendships
childhood unpopularity
clothing and style
poor, as child
daughters (grown-up), relations with
daughters (young), visits
death in hospital
divorce from Martha
divorce from Sheila
drinking and alcoholism of
driving lessons and lack of motoring skill
estate of, indebtedness of
European trip with Martha
family lineage
as father
FBI check on
fear of being alone
fights with Sheila
final visits and calls from family and friends
friendships with writers
funeral arrangements
good manners of
health problems
air injections
fire injuries
hypoxia and need for oxygen tanks
inguinal hernia
lung damage
pneumonia
stammer and cough
tuberculosis
his lot to live with women
hospitalizations
induction into Army
interviews with
Ploughshares interview (1972)
journalism jobs
lack of college education
light verse of
list of neglected writers
list of ten nourishing books
list of writers he admires
literary influences on
marriage counseling undergone by
marries Martha Speer
marries Sheila Bryant
meets Martha Speer
meets Sheila Bryant
memorial services
mental illness and instability of
military experience
morality of
musical zest
name of (Richard Walden Yates)
never exposed daughters to outside women
newspaper experience
nicknames for
nude posing for mother, as child
obituary
parents’ divorce
personality, sweetness of
physical incompetence of
politics of
poverty of, in adulthood
poverty of, in childhood
psychiatric treatments
psychopharmacological treatments
public relations work by
résumé he prepared looking for commercial work (1972)
reunions with Sheila
search for female companionship after divorces
self-destructive habits
self-education
separations from Sheila
sexual experience of
sexual performance of
smoking habit
Yates stops
social class insecurity
speechwriter for Robert Kennedy
suicide attempt
summer jobs
teacher of writing
tribute to (New York City, 1992)
work on school newspaper
writing career
advances against sales
earliest efforts
fan letters
first sale
his agent
rejection slips
Yates’s ruminations about
writing genres
film scripts
ghostwriting
romans à clef
screenwriting
short stories
writing method
difficulty getting the work out
no more resting
slowness of, and constant revisions
typing of manuscripts
writings
critics’ reviews of
fading reputation of, own awareness of
lasting legacy of
out-of-print books
sales
titles of past and future books
writing style
autobiographical elements
determinism
naturalism claimed in
perfectionism
Yates, Ruth (Yates’s mother). See Maurer, Ruth
Yates, Ruth (Yates’s sister)
bad marriage and alcoholism
birth of
childhood
courtship
death of
final days
married life
personality of
relations with father
relations with Yates during childhood
weds Fred Rodgers
Yates, Sharon (Yates’s daughter)
birth
called “the Meat,” “Mousemeat,” “Mussy”
childhood
education
in Iowa
present life
troubled adolescence
weds Richard Levine
Yates’s visits with
Yates, Sheila. See Bryant, Sheila
Yates, Vincent Matthew (Yates’s father)
absence of, during Yates’s childhood
alimony and child support paid by
birth family of
birth of
illness and death of
Yates’s occasional visits to
Yates, William (Yates’s uncle)
York, Penn.
York Gazette and Daily
Young, Marguerite
Young Hearts Crying
characters and plot
publication
reviews of
sales
Zola, Emile
ALSO BY BLAKE BAILEY
The Sixties
Additional Acclaim for Blake Bailey’s A Tragic Honesty
“[Bailey] has written not merely a splendid biography of Yates …
but one of the most moving and engrossing literary biographies of our times.”
—The New York Sun
“Mr. Bailey keeps it all interesting by tracing the myriad threads that connect Yates’s life and fiction and by writing highly readable prose that at times shines with well-chosen words.… His assessments of Yates’s novels are insightful and sympathetic.”
—The Wall Street Journal
“Superb … Blake Bailey’s retelling of Yates’s life is as good a biography of a contemporary writer as I have read.”
—Dan Wakefield, The Boston Globe
“Blake Bailey captures the beauty of Yates’s prose and the depth of his vision.… [An] excellent biography.”
—Chicago Tribune
“Unlike some exhaustively documented recent literary biographies, A Tragic Honesty manages without prurience and with great generosity to convey Yates’s life and work.… Bailey knows how to make clear without condescension. A very Yatesian mode, in fact.”
—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
“A Tragic Honesty … manages to trump [Yates] at his own game … Authoritative … Admirably thorough.”
—The Washington Post Book World
“[A] lucid and surprisingly uplifting biography.”
—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“If you did not love this handsome, terribly sick person in real life, as did so many of us in this good book, you will surely celebrate his gallantry in demanding of himself perfection in at least one part of his awful life, which was the words he put on paper.”
—Kurt Vonnegut
“Blake Bailey tells Yates’s story in terms that the novelist might have approved.”
—Fred Chappell, The Raleigh News & Observer
“This biography should go a long way toward introducing a new generation of readers to a man once called, with reason, the best American writer of the last half of the last century.… It’s a story Blake Bailey tells stylishly and thoroughly … Yates deserves this rich and ample treatment of his life.”
—The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Utterly extraordinary.… [A Tragic Honesty] is a harrowing, black-humored great book of its time.”
—The Buffalo News
“An impressive piece of reclamation work … It’s an odd sensation to read a biography as laudable and as necessary as Mr. Bailey’s.”
—New York Observer
“[An] excellent new biography … Neither glamorizing nor condemning Yates, A Tragic Honesty gives us one more reason to revisit this singular author and his legacy.”
—Newsday
“A Tragic Honesty reads like a novel, its pace quick and littered with unforgettable stories and vivid characters. This is the textured account of one man’s life and his nearly obsessive need to create art, and Bailey strikes to the depths of Yates the writer and man, all in all making the book a pleasure to read even for those who have never read a line of his work.”
—The New Orleans Times-Picayune
“[An] unflinching biography.”
—The Seattle Times
“Blake Bailey’s compelling biography of Richard Yates tells a great, singularly American story about one of the greatest, most singularly American writers who ever lived. A Tragic Honesty is an honest tragedy. It is also a triumph.”
—Mark Winegardner, author of Crooked River Burning
“Bailey’s biography is excellent at weaving the life and work into a single, coherent narrative, one that hews to the facts and avoids speculation.… Bailey’s biography will be the definitive one.”
—The Tampa Tribune
“As rewarding as reading [Yates’s] novels … As amazing as it is commendable … A Tragic Honesty is an excellent explication and analysis of Yates’s life and fiction.”
—Chicago Sun-Times
“Bailey has done a great job of sorting through the facts of Yates’s difficult life, assembling them into a story that mirrors the best of his subject’s fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly
“[Bailey] writes with just the sort of clean, precise, and powerful prose his subject devoted himself to.… As Bailey meticulously and perceptively chronicles Yates’s arduous translation of experience into art, and the vagaries of his critical reception, he exposes the anguish and transcendence of the writing life, and the tragedy of mental illness.”
—Booklist (starred review)
A TRAGIC HONESTY. Copyright © 2003 by Blake Bailey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Picador® is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin’s Press under license from Pan Books Limited.
www.picadorusa.com
Portions of this book appeared in The Gettysburg Review, The New England Review, and Night Train.
For permission to quote at length from letters, private papers, and other materials, the author and publisher are grateful to the following individuals: Kay Cassill, Mitch Douglas, Gordon Lish, Robert Andrew Parker, Grace Schulman, Martha Speer, and Sheila Yates. The author particularly appreciates the generous cooperation of Monica Shapiro, Richard Yates’s daughter and literary executor.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Bailey, Blake.
A tragic honesty: the life and work of Richard Yates / Blake Bailey.—1st ed.
p. cm.
ISBN 0-312-28721-6 (hc)
ISBN 0-312-42375-6 (pbk)
EAN 978-0312-42375-9
1. Yates, Richard, 1926–92. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.
PS3575.A83 Z56 2003
813'.54—dc21
[B]
2002042525
First Picador Paperback Edition: May 2004
eISBN 9781466848856
First eBook edition: June 2013
* “Uncle Dick never liked Aunt Ida,” Yates’s sister Ruth wrote her son Peter in 1964. “Come to think of it, Uncle Dick doesn’t like any of them.”
* Richard Yates told his friends Grace and Jerry Schulman that, to him, the violin was a symbol of his family’s history and breeding, and he entrusted it to the Schulmans when he became too transient to bother with precious things; they presented this heirloom to Yates’s daughters at his memorial service.
* At the time, 1953, Dookie was still alive and lucid, and Yates worried about her response to “Lament for a Tenor”—his first explicitly autobiographical work about his family. He was living alone in England when the story was accepted by Cosmopolitan, and it fell to his wife Sheila to explain the premise of “Tenor” to Dookie. “Dook knew right away that it was autobiographical,” Sheila wrote her husband from the States, “and wasn’t too happy, but said she’d realized you’d eventually write about things that she might be uncomfortable about. She defended the Artist’s right to do that and launched into her story about those friends of [Thomas] Wolfe.” Dookie’s defense of artistic freedom (even at her own potential expense) is commendable, though it’s safe to assume she had no idea what lay in store for her following “Tenor.”
* Black-sheep status for Vincent is harder to establish, but not impossible. His mother Clarissa’s obituary in the Auburn Citizen (May 14, 1918) indicates that three of her four married daughters had made their homes near Auburn, while the fourth lived in Norwalk, Ohio; of three surviving sons one was doing YMCA work in Georgia (presumably following in his father’s footsteps), while two, William and Vincent, lived in Chicago and New York, respectively. A roisterous uncle appears in both “Tenor” and A Special Providence, and perhaps this is the brother William, in which case Vincent wasn’t the only one with cosmopolitan tastes. Still, it seems doubtful that both sons of the pious old minister considered a career (however briefly) in show business, so perhaps Vincent was the bigger misfit of the two, at least by his family’s
standards.
* Yates hated his middle name and would not be teased about it, at least not as an adult. He may have wondered why, with such ancestors as Bradford and Cleveland, he was named after a provincial penmanship teacher. Or perhaps he just thought it was a silly name.
* Later Yates said that his mother’s excuse for dragging him around Europe was to “broaden his horizons,” but really it was just a matter of ensuring that his father would keep paying the bills. One suspects it was a little of both.
* A childhood friend recalled seeing a Pan figurine for which the very young Yates had modeled. Dookie had altered the face, but the spindly upper body (above the goat legs) was recognizably Richard.
* Martha Speer remembers it as a clothesline, which may be so; but Yates was fastidious about rendering such literal details as accurately as possible in his fiction, and the “horizontal steel pipe” in The Easter Parade almost certainly reflects a further effort of memory.
* The careful reader will note that Yates didn’t bother to change either Nancy’s or her mother’s real first names (save one letter). In drafts of his later fiction, Yates would often write the actual name of the person on whom a given character was based, and then alter the name slightly in revision. Perhaps as a mnemonic device, he tended to retain actual first names as well as the cadence of his models’ last names.
* Or so he remembered. Others remember differently or not at all, though most agree Yates was fairly popular.
* In A Special Providence the aptly named headmaster, Dr. Cool, produces Bobby Prentice’s file and shares its contents with Alice: “[T]he record disclosed that [Bobby’s IQ] had been assessed at slightly above average, and that he had done reasonably well in the fields of Social Adjustment and Personality Growth. But his Capacity for Self-Discipline had received the rating of Poor, and of the six Units of Study assigned to him during the academic year he had failed two.” Finally he reads aloud one of the more biting teacher comments: “‘Robert may eventually turn out to be as precocious as he seems to think he is, but if he expects to prove it to me he will have to buckle down.’” All this rings true, and for what it’s worth the actual headmaster recognized himself when he read the novel in 1977: “Dad has been running around calling himself Dr. Cool at every opportunity,” his daughter wrote Yates.
* Or so Dookie reported in her Who’s Who entry. However, the Norfolk (Virginia) Museum of Arts and Sciences became (in 1971) the Chrysler Museum, which has no record of this or any other work by Ruth Yates.
* By his own recollection the first story Yates ever wrote was about a condemned man who learned, en route to the electric chair, that the officer beside him was his long-lost brother. One wonders if Yates knew of his grandfather Horatio’s ordeal with the unfortunate William Kemmler.