A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  Despite a lifelong dependence on her children, Dookie was not entirely without friends; in fact her new Village milieu afforded a number of congenial people who seemed to appreciate her as an artist and hostess. One of her neighbors on Bedford Street was Howard Cushman, best known as E. B. White’s roommate at Cornell. Dookie and “Cush” became friends, and at least once he brought the illustrious White around to meet the twelve-year-old Ruth, who’d started her own weekly courtyard newspaper modeled somewhat after The New Yorker (Ruth’s younger brother would also become a great fan of the magazine). Cushman’s daughter from a previous marriage, Nancy, was Richard’s age and a playmate of sorts. One of her father’s gags was to drape her in his suit jacket and crouch behind her with his own arms in the sleeves—a routine Yates described in “Joseph” and later adopted with his own daughters: “the sight of a smiling little girl … waving and gesturing with huge, expressive hands, was enough to make everyone smile.” Such parlor tricks formed the lighter side of Village domestic life.

  Perhaps the most abiding friendship of Dookie’s adult life was with Cushman’s ex-wife Elisabeth, a journalist who’d met her former husband in the city room of a New Rochelle newspaper. On the surface she and Dookie had little in common: Elisabeth Cushman was a self-supporting socialist who (as Yates characterized her in “Trying Out for the Race”) “liked to have it known that both her parents were illiterate Irish immigrants”; while Dookie’s ancestors were scarcely more distinguished, this was the sort of thing that chafed at her quasi-aristocratic Republican sensibilities. But happily each was rather bitter about life and appreciated the other’s mordant wit—“they would get together and trash things,” as one friend put it—beyond which lay an even deeper affinity. “Richard, we are growing old,” Cushman wrote the nineteen-year-old Yates in the course of describing how she and Dookie had just celebrated VE-day. “You were too young to know the evenings when a pinch bottle, Haig and Haig, was but a drop in our bucket.” Judging by his fiction, however, Yates had known such evenings all too vividly, as well as other evenings and other drinking companions—the various boozy, dilettantish divorcées whom Dookie cultivated in the Village, the Natalie Crawford and Sloane Cabot types who “liked to use words like ‘simpatico’” and wrote unsalable radio scripts whose characters included “a sad-eyed, seven-year-old philosopher” with a comical stammer.

  There was a lot of drinking, and the consequences were often unfortunate given the presence of small children. Yates never quite got over the shock, however often repeated, of seeing strange men at his mother’s breakfast table, and made a point of never exposing his daughters to any woman who was not his wife. Indeed, Dookie’s alcoholism and love affairs suggested a larger, more troubling theme to Yates’s mind—what he referred to, reluctantly in so many words, as an improper closeness with his mother. One hastens to add that Yates despised psychological jargon and wasn’t apt to invoke Oedipus complexes and the like, much less accuse his mother of sinister motives, conscious or otherwise. Which is not to say that he didn’t blame her, and deeply, for the damage done. Such was his sense of helplessness as a child—reinforced in any number of ways by his mother—that he’d often throw panic-stricken, seizurelike tantrums when she’d leave him alone at night, and he never forgot what it was like to lie awake in the dark, wondering when or if she’d ever come home. And when she did, late, drunk, she had a tendency to comfort her son by getting into bed with him—at least once, as in “Joseph,” she vomited on his pillow. “Yates felt enraged at his mother,” said his psychiatrist Winthrop Burr, who recalled that Yates (usually circumspect to the point of brusqueness during their sessions) would often get “on the edge of tearful” when he discussed her. Her alcoholic inconstancy, along with the mutual dependence she always elicited, was a disastrous combination. “It was as if he were her only confidant,” said Burr. “He gave a picture of the two of them alone in the world. The sister was a blank.”

  To a great extent the sister was overshadowed by the mother (Prentice’s lack of a sibling in A Special Providence is telling), at least in terms of pathological impact. But Ruth, too, was much on Yates’s mind, especially in light of later events. On the rare occasions that he’d mention her as an adult, he tended to say they had little in common, and in a way this was true; but it was also misleading, if only by omission, perhaps because Yates preferred to work out the deeper truth in his fiction. Ruth was characterized as “the most stable member of the family,” the one like her father, and as such she was a good sister to Richard. “They were comrades in a difficult situation,” said Martha Speer, Yates’s second wife, who remembered stories of Ruth and her brother having to forage for food and generally look out for each other. But it was more than a matter of Ruth’s being the (relatively) responsible, protective one—she was also the imaginative one, at least as a child, and almost as painfully sensitive as her brother. Like him she aspired to be a writer from a very early age: There were the weekly newspapers she devised, the plays she acted out with paper dolls, and at night she’d lull Richard to sleep with stories she made up in the various bedrooms they shared (“someone should probably have told my mother that a girl and boy of our ages ought to have separate rooms,” Yates noted ruefully in “Joseph”). And all her life Ruth cried a lot, though the cause was liable to be emotional rather than physical. Like Sarah Grimes in The Easter Parade, the young Ruth split her head open on a steel pipe,* which left a small but permanent scar as well as the impression, which her brother never forgot, that she bore pain remarkably well.

  But perhaps Ruth’s most salient feature is suggested by Sarah’s “look of trusting innocence that would never leave her.” Such innocence, coupled with the awful insecurity she shared with her brother, would lead Ruth into a ruinous life-wrecking marriage—or so Yates believed, and characteristically he blamed his mother. “Even now, at nineteen,” he wrote of the Ruth character, Rachel Drake, in Cold Spring Harbor, “she felt heavily handicapped by ignorance”; but Rachel’s mother refuses to discuss indelicate things like the facts of life with her: “She could evade almost any question with her little shuddering laugh … and the troubling thing about this attitude was that it seemed always to come from carelessness, or laziness, rather than from any kind of principle.” Pookie in The Easter Parade is similarly evasive, and when the fourteen-year-old Alice Towers in “Trying Out for the Race” asks her mother Lucy about a pregnant schoolmate, Lucy responds with “revulsion” and tells her daughter, in effect, to mind her own business: “And Alice looked wounded, an expression even more frequent on her face lately than on her mother’s, or her brother’s.” Whether Dookie was guilty of such pernicious hypocrisy is hard to say, and may be little more than a tendentious attempt on Yates’s part to make sense of his sister’s tragedy. That Ruth was something of a naïf, though, and sadly desperate for love and assurance, is not in doubt. As a teenager she joined Frank Buchman’s “Moral Rearmament” movement, which encouraged confessions and chaste “open love” among its members, and not long after that she would find a more final escape in marriage.

  * * *

  Dookie’s first real success as an artist, at least in terms of exposure, came in 1933 when she was given the opportunity to sculpt a bust of President-elect Roosevelt. The whole episode is so superbly recounted in “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired,” that it’s difficult to do much more than speculate and summarize. Probably her friend Howard Cushman (called Howard Whitman in the story) did get her the entrée, as Dookie would have it, through an old newspaper friend who was part of Roosevelt’s New York staff. And Dookie would certainly be apt to regale her friends with an account of irreverent banter at FDR’s expense while she measured his head: “I said, ‘I didn’t vote for you, Mr. President.’ I said, ‘I’m a good Republican and I voted for President Hoover.’ He said, ‘Why are you here, then?’… and I said, ‘Because you have a very interesting head … I like the bumps on it.’” And Yates’s appraisal of the motive for such effrontery, indeed for the
whole affair—namely, that the headlines would scream, GAL SCULPTOR TWITS FDR FOR “BUMPS” ON HEAD—pretty much puts the matter in a nutshell. The episode seems almost too pat in terms of the quintessential Yates story, what with its romantic-minded mother about to realize her dreams at last, only to be crushed by the cruel disparity between expectations and reality.

  Of course such a précis hardly does justice to a story as subtly textured as “Joseph,” though perhaps it does sum up the basic facts of the case. That Dookie’s FDR head was laughably “too small” and “looked like a serviceable bank for loose change” is not just an ingenious objective correlative for the story’s sake (though it’s that too)—in fact the head was “about half life-size,” according to the only real publicity the business attracted, about seventy-five words buried in section 2, page 3, column 8, of the New York Times:

  BUST GIVEN ROOSEVELT. President Sat for Ruth Yates at January Press Conference.… A small bronze [lead] bust of President Roosevelt was presented to him today by Miss Ruth Yates, New York sculptor. The bust, which is about half life-size, was made during Mr. Roosevelt’s press conference at his New York house, just before his trip to Warm Springs in January. This was the only time he could devote to sittings for the bust.

  A further line mentioned that Miss Yates “studied under Paul Landowski in Paris,” but said nothing about how (as Yates imagined the newsreel and feature articles Dookie might have hoped for) “she’d come from a small Ohio town, or of how she’d nurtured her talent through the brave, difficult, one-woman journey that had brought her to the attention of the world.”

  But it was a start, and meanwhile Dookie’s life seemed to look up in other respects, since around this time she found her only enduring boyfriend after the divorce—the “tall and dignified and aristocratic” Englishman who appears as Eric Nicholson in “Joseph” and Sterling Nelson in A Special Providence. As with the FDR story, one can add little to the fiction; all that’s known for sure, more or less, is that such a man existed and stuck around for a year or so before suddenly dropping out of sight to Dookie’s and the children’s regret—though in the children’s case it was more a matter of longing for a conventional home life than any particular fondness for the man himself. As for the details, they’re all but identical in both the novel and story: The man apparently worked in the New York office of a British export firm (specified as a “chain of foundries” in “Joseph”) and “had a wife in England from whom he wasn’t yet technically divorced”; at some point he seems to have persuaded Dookie and the children to share a house with him in Scarsdale, despite the stigma of living out of wedlock in such a community (“the question of whether or not she would find it awkward being called ‘Mrs. Nelson’ remained unsolved; nobody in Scarsdale called her anything at all”); and one day he escaped his creditors by returning to England and his wife, leaving a lot of shabby furniture and forged art as a kind of consolation prize for Dookie. The forged art (described as such in A Special Providence) may have been a flourish of poetic license on Yates’s part, along with the three-year subscription to Field & Stream Nicholson gives the seven-year-old son in “Joseph” (“that impenetrable magazine was the least appropriate of all his gifts because it kept coming in the mail for such a long, long time after everything else had changed for us”)—but one suspects such details are as true as the rest of it, further testimony to Yates’s selective genius, his ability to shape life in the precise terms of his artistic vision.

  The gentility of living in Scarsdale must have grown on Dookie, despite her neighbors’ indifference or outright hostility toward the odd woman who spent her days sculpting in the garage. Because the Englishman’s desertion left her unable to pay the rent, and because she was lonely, she coaxed her friend Elisabeth Cushman to move with her daughter Nancy into a somewhat cheaper house Dookie had found on the nearby Post Road. Together the two families could even afford a live-in maid, though that left them with only one bedroom per family.

  The arrangement was probably not as volatile as it’s depicted in the story “Trying Out for the Race,” or rather there seems not to have been any (lasting) clash between the two mothers; but the respective dysfunctions of the families appear to be faithfully portrayed. “Some time let’s have a little discussion about that sentiment-smothered thing called maternity,” Elisabeth Cushman wrote Yates somewhat later, having referred to her daughter in the same letter as a “zombie child.” From this one might safely assume the factual basis of the frenzied quarreling between Elizabeth Hogan Baker and her nine-year-old daughter in the story, culminating in such remarks as, “I wish that child were at the bottom of the sea.” Bad mothers and a tendency to throw tantrums were things Nancy and Richard had in common as children, with a difference in the former’s case that might have proved fortunate to the latter: “I know she’ll come back,” Nancy says calmly to Russell/Richard in the story,* after her mother abandons her for an assignation in the city. “She always does”—whereupon the boy reflects that “an attitude like that was exactly what he needed in his own life.” Whether or not by Nancy’s example, a somewhat greater maturity on Richard’s part is suggested by the fact that, around the age of ten, he began to make a friend or two among boys his own age; and lest he seem a sissy in their eyes, he made a point of either ignoring or terrorizing his female housemate during their visits, as she remembers to this day.

  * * *

  The move in 1937 to Beechwood, the vast estate of Frank A. Vanderlip in Scarborough-on-Hudson, was the result of Dookie’s work as a sculpting teacher. The Westchester Workshop in White Plains didn’t pay much, but Dookie’s loneliness and boredom must have been desperate enough by then to make her classes more than worthwhile, especially since her students (as Yates described them in A Special Providence) tended to be “women of her own age or older, prosperously married and vaguely dissatisfied.” A few of these women befriended Dookie, and one of them arranged for her to meet the chatelaine of Beechwood, Mrs. Vanderlip herself, who seems to have been charmed: She not only agreed to rent Dookie one of the outbuildings but also gave her the use of a large studio space where she could teach private classes and thereby make enough money, in theory, to pay for the privilege of being in such rarefied surroundings.

  And for a time they were happy. Beechwood was congenial in almost every respect: The fifty-acre estate was a well-manicured wilderness of elms and beeches and giant rhododendron bushes, in the midst of which ran a clear brook and many slate paths, past statuary and gardens transplanted whole from European castles. Above it all loomed the Vanderlip’s five-story mansion, visible from every part of the estate, and a constant reminder of the sort of aristocratic grace to which Dookie so wistfully aspired. Just as importantly, the Vanderlips themselves were no philistine tycoons but rather great patrons of education and the arts. On the property was the ultraprogressive Scarborough Country Day School, founded by Frank Vanderlip in 1913, a place where arts and crafts were emphasized almost as much as science and math. Creativity in general was much admired, and talented people were always welcome at Beechwood: Isadora Duncan had danced on the lawn, and another great chronicler of the American middle class would later occupy a house there. “The swimming pool is curbed with Italian marble,” John Cheever wrote in a 1951 letter from Beechwood, at the beginning of his almost-ten-year tenancy, “lucent and shining like loaves of fine sugar.”

  The Yates family had recourse to the same pool, not far from the northeast corner of the estate, where they lived in a white stucco gatehouse. Formerly the school’s kindergarten, it consisted of a single large room (about thirty feet square) plus a tiny bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. The quarters were tight as ever—the children had to sleep in the main studio-cum-living-room—but at least now there was less reason for the timid Richard to hide inside with his mother and sister. Dookie had enrolled her children in Scarborough Country Day (needless to say she couldn’t really afford the tuition), and the eleven-year-old Yates blossomed there. “He used to speak
of it as the peak of his childhood popularity,” said his daughter Sharon, “followed by a long, nasty descent into an unhappy puberty.”

  The school philosophy placed heavy emphasis on fostering “growth” and “uniqueness,” and this allowed Yates to tap into a latent (at least where the outside world was concerned) silliness that stood him in good stead among children almost as quirky as he. He was much given to making droll and generally inoffensive fun of students and teachers alike. When the art teacher asked the class to paint a picture expressing their emotions, Yates submitted a blank sheet of paper titled “Gloom”—a work that belied his remarkable facility as a cartoonist. “He doodled on everything,” his friend Stephen Benedict remembered, “papers at school, doilies, letters—images of cats, caricatures of teachers, Joe Louis, Adolf Hitler.” Such doodling remained an abiding interest, but at the time Yates’s fame as a poet was far greater. “The doggerel poured out of him,” said Benedict, and the headmaster’s daughter, Mary Jo McClusky (who had a crush on Yates), wrote him a fan letter forty years later in which she remarked, “I remember how you used to delight us all with your spur-of-the-moment poems—guess you were destined to be a writer!” A writer of prose anyway; a sample of Yates’s output from this time suggests he was unlikely to rival his beloved Keats:

  The only noise I hear all day,

  is the clanking of a can.

  I drive a dirty-smelly truck,

  for I am a garbage man.

  The city dumps its waste on me,

  to throw into the river.

  And I can’t stand that gooey smell,

  it kinda turns my liver.

  Yates was elected president of his class,* which must have seemed an apotheosis of sorts after the morbidities of his early childhood.