A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  One of the things a young soldier had to prove is suggested by the rotary condom dispenser of which the character Colby avails himself (in vain) prior to a three-day pass in Paris: “He was very likely the only soldier in Europe ever to have spent three days in Paris without getting laid.” Whether Yates had any better luck, either then or before with all those lonely nihilistic German women, merits a moment of consideration. Yates was almost certainly a virgin when he entered the army; an all but total lack of female company was a notorious liability of life at Avon, where the best one could do was an occasional tea or dance at Ethel Walker’s or Miss Porter’s (always well-chaperoned, and besides such girls tended to take a dim view of Avon “fairies”). As for fictional evidence, the luckless Colby is but one of several callow young soldiers who bear a resemblance to Yates: Prentice loses his virginity almost in spite of himself, toward the end of basic training, while Warren Mathews of “Liars in Love” remembers how (“as a boy on his first furlough from the Army after the war”) he longed to buy time with one of the “Piccadilly Commandos” in London, but ended up “despis[ing] himself for letting the whole two weeks of his leave run out without doing so.” As we shall see, Yates seems to have gotten over the worst of his squeamishness while in the army, with the help of alcohol perhaps, but to some extent sex would always be a problematic business.

  Yates got a pleasant reprieve from the dullness of camp life in December, when as part of an army employment program he was sent to England to work for three weeks as an apprentice reporter on the Halifax Courier and Guardian. Life in Halifax was very peaceful, and Yates made a good impression on all. His editor, a kindly fiftyish fellow named Harwood, referred to Yates as “one of the brethren of the Press” and later thanked him for giving “color to our hard-working life.” But Harwood was sheepish about how little there was for Yates to do in Halifax, where even at the liveliest of times one had to scrape for news (hence the “hard-working” part). At the time meat and money were scarce, and not a single cigarette was for sale, the latter fact perhaps the most newsworthy item where Yates was concerned. But he made out all right. He and three other “juniors” in the office loafed and joked all day, and on weekends went to the Empress Dance Hall—where Yates met what may have been his first actual girlfriend, a stenographer named Joan. For two years they corresponded, and such was their lingering intimacy that Joan never bothered to write her last name or, for that matter, say anything remotely of interest. “Connie says you went out with me for a plaything whilst you were in Halifax,” she chides him with an almost audible northern twang, though such rakishness seems well beyond Yates at the time. Indeed, he gave her a bracelet and ring, the first of which she went on wearing but not (as she punctiliously noted) the second, suggesting a novice attempt at betrothal on Yates’s part. This tendency to become deeply attached to unlikely people would remain one of his most poignant and self-destructive qualities.

  Yates spent the rest of his leave and a bit more in London, and was technically AWOL when he made friends with Tony Vevers at the Red Cross Club. Vevers was an Englishman who’d joined the U.S. Army after his family had emigrated during the Blitz. As a fellow prep-school boy and aspiring painter, he and the Anglophilic Yates found much to discuss while happily staggering from one pub to the next. Still in the flush of his Halifax conquest, Yates managed to impress Vevers with his relative suavity toward the opposite sex: Already he was seeing a young woman from the American Embassy, and was able to wangle a date for Vevers as well. The four attended a Brahms recital, after which Yates (possibly fortified from a flask) dropped to one knee like Al Jolson and began to sing “Mammy.” “He was full of a sort of guileless joie de vivre then,” Vevers recalled many decades later, with a rueful emphasis on then, since in the meantime he’d found himself in one of Yates’s novels. For a while, though, the friendship would give him little to regret.

  Yates was demobilized on January 15, 1946, and the next five months seem to have been filled with little more than idle waiting at one of the tent cities in France, with an occasional bit of Parisian monkey business to dispel the boredom. “Yates, please tell me how one guy manages to get into as many scrapes as you, and then manages to worm his way out of it undamaged,” a friend wrote in March, but no details of such scrapes follow. “You don’t sound very keen on France,” wrote Halifax Joan, perhaps giving a better sense of Yates’s mood at the time. No doubt he was homesick by then, or at least ready for a change. Most of his Avon friends were already back in the States and getting on with their lives, albeit with a kind of dreary sameness that might have given Yates pause. Hugh Pratt and David “Shorty” Bigelow had already settled on their future wives and careers (medicine, business), while Pratt—after years of spieling about Schopenhauer et al.—had even found God. Yates was perhaps a little bemused by Pratt’s revelation, to say nothing of the news that Bick Wright had resolved his own perplexities by deciding to become a clergyman.

  “Your news is great news,” wrote the good Mr. Harwood of Halifax on June 14, five days before Yates was discharged at Fort Dix with a Good Conduct Medal and the rank of private first class. “Now you will be able to stretch that long length of yours, and, craning up to the topmost sky-scraper, exclaim, ‘Now wot?’” Now wot indeed.

  * * *

  Yates’s permanent address on his honorable discharge is “High Hedges, St. James L.I., New York,” and it was there that he was welcomed back from the war by Dookie, Ruth, and the Rodgers clan. High Hedges was the eight-acre estate bought by Fritz Rodgers’s parents in 1916 for their retirement, though at the time it had no such imposing name. In fact the former North Shore golf course was rather weedy and nondescript; Fritz himself had designed the sixteen-room, white clapboard main house as well as a three-bedroom cottage originally built for his mother’s widowhood (where Ruth and Fred had lived since the birth of their second child). For many years after he’d inherited the place, Fritz had rented it out while he and his family lived in England, and the name “High Hedges” is said to have been the whim of a tenant struck by the overgrowth of Oriental vines planted years before by Fritz’s green-thumbed mother. But The Easter Parade suggests another possibility: “Does it have a name?” Pookie asks Geoffrey Wilson. “You know, the way estates have names.” “Overgrown Hedges,” Wilson proposes as a joke, which Pookie earnestly refines into “Great Hedges”: “That’s what I’m going to call it, anyway.… ‘Great Hedges,’ St. Charles, Long Island, New York.”

  Be that as it may, Yates’s homecoming at High Hedges seems to have been a rather dismal affair—though one can imagine (assisted by a similar scene in A Special Providence) Dookie’s elation on being reunited with her cherished son and soul mate: “Her frizzled gray head scarcely came up to his breast-pocket flap and she was frail as a sparrow, but the force of her love was so great that he had to brace himself in a kind of boxer’s stance to absorb it.” The others were more restrained, but went out of their way to be nice, and indeed Richard seemed badly in need of their niceness. “He moped around the whole time,” Ruth’s sister-in-law Louise remembered. “He was very depressed—didn’t know what to do with his life.” That was undoubtedly true, though Yates’s uncertain future wasn’t the only thing likely to depress him. Dookie, now fifty-four and hunched with osteoporosis, was again facing destitution now that her son was out of the army. For the time being she was dependent on the Rodgerses, a fact that might have led Yates to brood over the general ethos of High Hedges. His brother-in-law was, if anything, more loutish than ever, and the two men quietly despised each other; the walls of the cottage where Ruth and Fred lived were covered with illustrations of the navy Hellcats and Wildcats built by Fred’s employer. Most nights the adults would gather at the main house, which stank of mildew, to get drunk together—even Fritz’s valetudinarian wife, who liked her sherry well enough to leave bed during the cocktail hour until she delicately passed out and was carried upstairs. Little wonder Yates wanted to escape and figure things out, though it mean
t abandoning his poor mother again.

  In later years when Yates met the odd person from York, Pennsylvania, he’d tell how his professional career actually began with a very brief stint at the York Gazette and Daily—one of the most radical newspapers in the country, then or now. The Gazette and Daily opposed the cold war, championed the causes of organized labor and racial equality, and was one of only two daily newspapers in the country to support Henry Wallace’s Progressive Party bid for president in 1948. Yates, who would always consider himself something of a leftist (though his politics were a highly individual affair, to put it mildly), later told the writer Ken Rosen that he thought the newspaper represented the “best of America” at that time. But so little is known of Yates’s tenure at the Gazette and Daily that one broaches the matter only in passing, in the hope of shedding a little light on the “half-assed romantic ideas” Yates professed to have in those days—ideas compounded, perhaps, of various novels and a growing need to rebel against the snobbish, half-assed conservatism and overall pretension of his mother.

  Meanwhile Yates was deeply conflicted as to whether he should take advantage of the GI Bill and go to college as he’d always planned—as every one of his Avon friends had done or were about to do—or get on with his writing career without further delay. By the time he returned to New York he’d apparently decided to put things off another year while reading as much as possible and leading the life of a “knockabout intellectual,” à la Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road. As he later reminisced, “At twenty, fresh out of the Army and surfeited with Thomas Wolfe, I embarked on a long binge of Ernest Hemingway that entailed embarrassingly frequent attempts to talk and act like characters in the early Hemingway books. And I was hooked on T. S. Eliot at the same time, which made for an uncomfortable set of mannerisms.” But Yates’s brief spell as a would-be T. S. Hemingway was curtailed by a letter from his sister: Dookie’s presence at High Hedges was putting a strain on her marriage, she wrote, and while she herself didn’t mind the arrangement so much, Fred most emphatically did. Therefore she hoped Richard would agree to end his bachelor idyll, at least for a while, and do his part in caring for their indigent, difficult mother.

  So much, then, for college and knockabout intellectualizing. In short order Yates got a job writing for a trade journal, Food Field Reporter, while he and Dookie moved into an apartment on Hudson Street. The arrangement gave Yates a ready excuse when people asked why he didn’t go to college, but for the rest of his life he’d bitterly regret the decision as a “dumb, arrogant thing to do.” It was “arrogant” because it was based on a romantic notion out of Hemingway that a real writer didn’t need college—but there was more to it than that. “It was partly fear,” he admitted (as Bill Grove) in “Regards at Home”: “I’d done poorly in high school, the Army had assessed my IQ at 109, and I didn’t want the risk of further failure.” Whatever the case, Yates’s lack of a college education would become a lifelong obsession, a lodestone to which he’d forever return when he felt inadequate—intellectually, socially, professionally. “God, you can’t mean that!” he exploded when one of his students wished aloud that he’d skipped college. “Jesus Christ, I’d give anything to have gotten a college education—I feel the lack of it all the time.” And to another ex-student he wrote how “delighted” he was that the young man had decided to go back and finish his degree—“not because of any vicarious sentimental horseshit about Wishing I’d Gone Myself,” he wrote, a disclaimer he belied somewhat by adding “[college is] the healthiest possible climate in which a talented young man can hope to experience growth and development”; and even more to the point, “it’s probably a hell of a lot more fun than … doing any of the other dreary, mechanical, bread-winning things you’d have to do instead.”

  Not that he found work altogether unpleasant, at least not at first; like Emily Grimes he rather enjoyed composing headlines “quickly and well, so that the spaces counted out right the first time”—and in fact he later told a friend that Emily’s nice headline for Food Field Observer was one he’d actually written for a journal of (almost) the same name:

  “HOTEL BAR” BUTTER

  HITS SALES PEAK;

  MARGARINES FADE.

  On the other hand it was awfully insipid stuff, and the romantic young man who’d gorged himself on Wolfe, Hemingway, and Eliot must have felt a rather keen sense of desperation. Nor was he likely to meet many congenial people in the course of his daily beat on behalf of the grocery industry. But finally it just wasn’t “real journalism,” and had nothing to do with being a writer—the gist of Yates’s advice to his son-in-law, many years later, when the latter wondered if working for a trade journal was a valid way to practice the craft.

  On weekends Yates would walk the streets in search of freelance ideas—in theory a way to make extra money and build his journalistic credentials, but more definitely a further respite from his mother’s company. His old Scarborough friend Russell Benedict had also moved to the Village, and offered to come along as Yates’s photographer. Whether they ever collaborated on a salable idea is doubtful, though at least once they managed to pick up girls in their roles as roving reporters. Roz Wellman and Ginny Shafer were showing a couple of Argentine midshipmen around town on liberty night, when Yates and Benedict approached: Would the two young ladies be willing to submit to an interview about their ambassadorial endeavors? Names and numbers were exchanged, and within a few days the two couples were inseparable. Roz was Yates’s girl, or rather the one he slept with at Benedict’s apartment, but the darker, hard-drinking, spoken-for Ginny was the one he really loved, and (such is the world) vice versa. “No, I didn’t know you were ‘painfully in love’ with me,” she wrote Yates in 1961, “I was so damned depressed I was unaware of any ‘pain’ other than my own. I knew that I loved you a lot.”* For several months anyway, amid such poignant confusion, the four shuttled between bed and Pete’s Tavern, where they drank some sort of “pink swill” and commiserated about being young and poor and unfulfilled.

  Occasionally Bick Wright would visit the city from Princeton, where he was a student in the theological seminary, and regale Yates with stories about the war and his subsequent conversion. As Yates wrote of Bucky Ward in A Good School, “He limped a lot, saying he’d been wounded and had refused a Purple Heart, but there were embarrassing times when he would walk the streets for miles, deep in conversation, without limping at all.” Indeed Wright would limp sporadically for many years—he told his brother he’d refused the Purple Heart because he didn’t want to worry their parents—partly because of his old weakness for melodrama and also, perhaps, because he needed some empirical rationale for the religious vocation that would peter out in less than two years and, in general, for a psychological malaise that never quite left him. At some point, though, he sat his wife down and solemnly confessed that his “war wound” was actually due to a childhood tricycle accident. (“Aptly enough,” his widow wryly noted, “Bick’s senior thesis at Princeton was about mythology.”) Certainly Yates was bound to find his old friend ridiculous, which might explain why Wright was unable to persuade him to quit his job and go to college; Wright even went so far as to fill out most of the applications for him. And soon Yates would also choose to disregard his friend’s advice about marriage—“Bick was right about that, too,” he admitted in retrospect—which may have caused the final rift in their friendship, though Yates hadn’t quite heard the last of Bick Wright.

  * * *

  The writing career for which Yates had avowedly forfeited his college education was not flourishing. As a compromise he took evening courses in creative writing at Columbia, though it’s unclear what effect these had, if any. For much of his adult life Yates would support himself by teaching writing (or “teaching” writing as he liked to put it, in heavy quotes), which if anything convinced him all the more that writing couldn’t be taught. No doubt he was more credulous during his apprentice years, or simply desperate enough to try anything. For what it
’s worth, he did write in the bio-blurb that accompanied his first published story in 1953 that his “unimpressive” postwar career was “brightened” by the evening courses he took at Columbia; and six years after that, at the end of his faculty profile in the New School bulletin, he was able to note “Studied, Columbia” in lieu of the various M.A.’s and Ph.D.’s which his fellow instructors boasted. But in 1946, in the very midst of that “unimpressive” career, he was desperate for some kind of validation, be it a published story or a decent job or any sign of progress whatsoever. “I am sorry to hear you have not got working with a newspaper yet, Richard,” wrote Halifax Joan in November, asking to see some of those short stories he was writing; “I’ve been wondering what type they are—mysteries—romances—or adventures.”

  And then his luck seemed to change a bit. Early in 1947 he was hired as a rewrite man on the financial news desk of the United Press. For a salary of fifty-four dollars a week, he wrote the daily Wall Street bond- and curb-market leads, as well as general business and industrial news for the national wire. The good part of the job was being able to say he worked for the “UP” rather than Food Field Reporter (he also liked playing the part of the young, Hemingwayesque newspaperman in his rumpled trench coat and fedora). And then, too, the basic contours of his daily routine were appealing: At ten in the morning he’d report to the Daily News building in his hardboiled attire, listen to the racket of teletypes and Wall Street tickers for two hours or so, then adjourn to a bar on Forty-second Street where fat slabs of roast beef were free with dime beer, followed at last by a long afternoon of punching out leads until it was six-thirty and time to go home. The bad part was the job itself. As Yates described it in “Builders,” he had only the vaguest idea of what he was supposed to be doing: