A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  For example, he believed it detracted from one’s own self-esteem to be harshly critical of others, however tempting it was to criticize. Visiting us one evening, he brought us a little bank and insisted we feed it coins (dimes in those days) whenever any of us said unkind words about absent people. The practice took hold, and the bank stayed in our living room. Dick tried to be careful. One day, though, the name of a writer came up—a bad writer, Dick thought—who had won a prize. Dick sprang to his feet, emptied his pockets of change, and only then let loose a stream of invective.

  The little bank was called the Physicians and Authors Benefit Fund (PABF), the proceeds of which would send a writer to medical school or a physician to a creative writing program. “I think that remark is fineable,” one of them would say when the level of discourse sagged—as it often, wittily, did. Yates aspired to a Platonic self, but he was also a man who tilted at cops and told women to write with balls (and worse, much worse), while at the same time deploring ribaldry-for-its-own-sake and hence taking Cheever to task for being a “dirty old man.” And yet amid such contradictions one could divine certain steadfast moral coordinates, indeed almost a puritanical streak. Yates’s daughters, for example, were sacrosanct; he’d never violate their innocence by exposing them to a girlfriend, period, and he was appalled when a woman quipped, “Don’t you want your daughters to know you have a penis?” Also, he hated pretense even in such harmless, pathetic forms as name-dropping. In college Grace Schulman had been a Mademoiselle guest editor, as had Joan Didion and Sylvia Plath, and her mentor at the magazine (and theirs) was one Cyrilly Abels; when Yates met the latter, she lost no time alluding to “Truman” et al., until Yates put his head on the Schulmans’ coffee table and went to sleep. “Best regards to Cyrilly,” he subsequently wrote his friends, “[and] C.P., Truman, Carson, Alfred, Guvvie, Frank, Ken, and the gang, and do thank them all for being so patient with Jerome (dime enclosed).”

  As much as Yates wished to be at his best with the Schulmans, he remained an alcoholic with a severe mood disorder, and this of course made friendship problematic. “The seeds of estrangement were planted from the beginning,” said Grace, though the good times outnumbered the bad. Yates was trying to get back to work, and this meant a disciplined avoidance of alcohol during the day (he’d drink tonic water because it tasted alcoholic); usually, then, he could drink steadily at the Schulmans’ and still be in control, if a bit charmingly overanimated. But sometimes he’d become difficult, explode over trifles, such that it was hard to tell whether he was drunk or disturbed or both. And when he slept over or they took trips together, Yates tended to be so dour in the morning, and for much of the sober day, that his friends would wonder if they’d done something wrong. Always he required a lot of maintenance. His wild gesticulations sent ashes flying all over the apartment, and even though they installed a number of large ashtrays for Yates’s benefit, he rarely bothered to use them; worse was his drunken tendency to light and forget his cigarettes, leaving them to smolder holes in the furniture.

  And then really, their various affinities aside, it’s hard to imagine a more curious misalliance than Yates and a sensitive young female poet from a liberal background—which is to say, Yates was not politically correct by most standards let alone Grace Schulman’s. Though a self-styled “radical” Democrat, Yates was a social and aesthetic traditionalist who would always believe, not-so-deep down, that a woman was better off as a wife and mother and that most modern poetry was crap. To be a good writer was to write with balls, and when Yates would groan about “that tree thing,” he often meant the tree in question was affected, fey, and, well, feminine. To Grace Schulman it became clear that Yates was dismissive of certain women because, among other things, they were women. She deplored as “puerile” the way Yates derided a female scholar whose academic specialty was Icelandic literature; she didn’t think he’d laugh as hard if the Nordic maven were male. And once she observed Yates arguing with a pregnant novelist over who was more deserving of a Guggenheim: “I have great recommendations,” said Yates. “So do I,” the woman replied. “Well”—Yates paused—“but you’re a girl, and you’ve got a baby.”

  Nor did Yates have much use for intellectuals, and Schulman’s most revered teacher at Bard College was Theodore Weiss—an intellectual poet, no less. Weiss was head of the literature department, and at Schulman’s request he’d agreed to interview Yates for a full-time position the latter badly needed. Weiss had been “moved and more” by Revolutionary Road, but must have been puzzled by its author, who seemed to bear him some sort of grudge. To the mortification of both Schulmans, Yates smoked and pointedly flicked his ashes around in brazen defiance of Weiss’s request (since he’d been ill) that they all have some candy instead. Their host, wincing but still polite, tried to ask Yates a few interviewish questions (“What about a student who didn’t do any work, who just wanted to think for four years? Would you flunk him?”), but Yates either ignored the man or gave perfunctory answers at best, until finally—not for the first time—he put his head down and tried to get some sleep. (“I got turned down for that job at Bard,” he reported afterward to Barbara Beury.)

  Ten years later Yates wrote the Schulmans: “Knowing you both was one of the very few things that kept me sane during all those frantic, dismal years of my second bachelorhood. I know I was an exasperating friend at times, but I can’t ever thank you enough, or hope to repay you, for the unflagging moral support you gave me when I needed it most. Please don’t ever forget that, either of you.” The man who could admit as much was noble at heart, and for a long time the Schulmans loved him no matter what. “We saw the hair on his arms,” said Grace.

  * * *

  Yates’s favorite possession was a watercolor portrait of him and his daughters, painted by Bob Parker. He hung it over his bed and encouraged visitors to admire it; a girlfriend recalled, “It was the nicest thing in that crummy dump.” It was also the closest the woman ever came to Sharon and Monica Yates. Every other weekend girlfriends were banished, not even allowed to call, and Yates would go alone to Grand Central Station and wait for his daughters’ train. “I admired Dick’s almost painful conscientiousness toward his daughters,” said his friend Edward Hoagland. “He really suffered from the loss of their constant company. He’d carry Monica on his shoulders, and Sharon would walk alongside. It made an indelible impression on me. I always made a point of carrying my children on my shoulders after that.”

  Yates was a poignantly devoted father, but it was an odd arrangement in many ways. The basement was no place for children, however tidy he tried to make it for their visits, and the claustrophobic squalor combined with his vividly ill health made for a somewhat anxious atmosphere. While his daughters tried to sleep in his bed, Yates would set up an old army cot and spend much of the night pacing, smoking, and hacking, all the more insomniac because he was sober. The next morning his daughters would wake him by tickling his feet, and Yates would hold his head in his hands and resume coughing amid whatever playful remarks he could muster. The four-year-old Monica was so disturbed by her father’s condition that she developed a habit of putting a hand on her chest and breathing deeply, because he couldn’t.

  For breakfast the three always went to the Howard Johnson’s near the subway stop on West Fourth Street, where they’d try to make plans that reconciled the divergent interests of two girls seven years apart in age. Monica liked going to the Central Park carousel or zoo, perhaps a puppet show, and Sharon was often willing to go along and play the part of a shepherding big sister, though she preferred shopping and street festivals and coffee bars. But both were at pains to defer to the younger Monica, who was often sulky and miserable during these visits: She didn’t like the wait and noise and smoke of restaurants, and wanted to be home with her toys, away from the cockroaches swarming in her father’s shower stall. Yates worked hard to keep her cheerful, and was enchanted by both his daughters whatever their mood. “He saw us through rose-colored glasses,” M
onica said. “He thought we were more beautiful, more talented, more everything.” When one of the girls would do something memorable—for example, when Monica said “welks” for “you’re welcome” as one says “thanks” for “thank you”—Yates would store it away and tell his friends over and over, sometimes for years.

  The childless Schulmans were indispensable in making these weekends a success. While Grace and Sharon rented bicycles and went riding around the park, the two men would squire Monica on their shoulders to the zoo, the carousel, the puppet show. “Jerry Schulman was an unbelievably beloved figure from my childhood,” said Monica, who tended to “fasten on other guys” as they seemed “so much more together” than her father. Yates would occasionally try to assert his authority with the little girl, but was always more bossed than bossing. He knew that his youngest daughter worried about him, that the gloom of his life cast something of a pall over hers, and he tried to make her laugh whenever possible: He made up songs about her and helped her write plays, called her “Clownfish” or “Bunnyrabbit” or simply “Small.” And if she wanted something more stable than a playmate, there was always Jerry Schulman. As for Sharon, she was called “Bigger” and lived up to the name—tall and mature for her age, she demanded that her doting father treat her more like an adult, but Grace treated her that way with far less awkwardness than Yates. Also, as Sharon remarked, “I was very self-conscious about being so tall, and Grace, who was almost six feet, made me feel great about it.”

  When the Schulmans weren’t available, Yates would sometimes take his daughters to Bill Reardon’s well-appointed apartment on Bedford Street, near the Blue Mill. Reardon was another divorced father who had children about the same age as Sharon and Monica; he made a good living selling ad space for Scientific American, and liked to throw parties for writers and artists who were interested in left-wing causes. The two men would take their children to the Blue Mill, where the waiters would fuss over them, and sometimes the older girls had slumber parties at Reardon’s apartment while their fathers sat drinking in the kitchen. When Sharon was fourteen and a Beatles fan, she was very mildly amused when Yates and Reardon showed up at Grand Central wearing moptop wigs.

  “The last hour of [his daughters’] visits was always a time of hurrying sadness,” Yates wrote in Uncertain Times. After the Sunday ritual of window-shopping on Eighth Street, where Yates would buy a little present for each girl, they’d have a last dinner at the Blue Mill or Grand Central. Yates always got emotional toward the end. Unlike his ex-wife Sheila, who was all business when dropping the girls at the station (“Here you are; bye”), Yates would sit with them on the train until the last moment, crooning “Columbus Discovered America” as a sentimental reminder of all the fun they’d had. Little Monica could hardly bear it: “Stop, stop!” she’d sniffle. At last he’d stand on the platform as the train pulled out, waving and blowing kisses until they were well out of sight. “In a lot of ways,” said Monica, “he was the same way his mother was: the sad, clingy one you loved helplessly when you were a child, and grew impatient with when you were grown up.”

  * * *

  When Newsweek calls your first novel “the find of the year,” your stock is apt to go up among the opposite sex, and so with Yates. It was a further reminder to the likes of Bob Riche that he and his old friend were no longer on equal terms; Yates would repeatedly leave parties with the best-looking woman there, often the very woman Riche had spent the better part of the evening trying to impress. “After you write Revolutionary Road you can screw anybody,” Yates remarked with equal parts arrogance and boyish awe, as he’d just managed to bed a gorgeous Ivy Leaguer and was surprised that such “nice girls” could be so easily seduced.

  On good days he was no longer the jumpy, drunken swain who scared women off with his needy desperation. He was a witty tippling genius novelist, who also happened to be a gentleman. One night at the Blue Mill the writer Dan Wakefield sat with his friend Sarel Eimerl, who was bemoaning the fact that he didn’t seem able to talk to women, and one beauty in particular. “Before the meal was over,” Wakefield recalled, “[Sarel] turned pale and said ‘Look over there, in that booth, that’s her! And damn, she’s with that fellow Dick Yates, and just look, he’s having no trouble talking to her at all! What the hell do you suppose the fellow is saying to her?’” Yates could even afford to be highly selective about the women he chose to charm. A very young and definitively nice girl such as Barbara Beury was near the ideal, worth courting at whatever distance, but a small-time Canadian actress coming out of the past to throw herself at him was not. “You make things most uncomfortable for me by becoming famous just as I am about to take you up on that drink,” wrote the star of that mediocre CBC adaptation of “The Best of Everything.” She’d seen the Newsweek puff and was coming to New York for ten days; could they meet? “You’d be bored to death with me,” Yates replied. “I drink too much.”

  Cocksmanship was one thing, but Yates wanted a proper female companion—he called himself an “incurable keeps-player”—and his “Sweet Briar Sweetie” was proving elusive on the subject of further visits. This became a less pressing concern after a party late that spring at Stephen Benedict’s apartment in the Village, where Yates met Natalie Bowen. The encounter was curious but not atypical of the affair that followed. Charles Van Doren, recently implicated in the quiz-show scandals, was sitting off by himself when the drunken Yates bellowed over the crowd, “How dare that crook show his face in public?” Van Doren affected not to hear, and a thin pretty woman rushed up to Yates and indignantly shushed him. Yates looked her over: She was wearing a sleeveless blue top with two silver bracelets wrapped around her biceps. “How’d you get those two bracelets up there?” he asked finally. “Elbow grease!” she replied, and Yates laughed. “He wouldn’t leave my side the rest of the night,” she recalled.

  Bowen was a thirty-one-year-old editor at Putnam’s with a masters in musicology from Brown—a worldly woman who was charmed but undaunted by a loud, drunken author who seemed “delighted by his own literary fame.” She went back to his apartment that first night, and while they undressed Yates paused to examine her bra, plumply padded in the cups: “That can take care of itself,” he said. Yates was another matter: Like his characters Andrew Crawford, Michael Davenport, and Bill Grove, he proved to be almost totally impotent. “It was ridiculous as far as the sex went,” Bowen remembered. “It always was. He was never sober enough to get it up in any particularly gratifying way. But that wasn’t the point of our relationship; he needed some female to be close to, to hold him.” Yates was a touchingly conventional lover: After a certain amount of old-fashioned foreplay, he’d take a sheepish stab at missionary intercourse, fail, and finally roll over and say “Don’t go away” until he fell asleep. The plea was so nakedly insistent that it became embarrassing, and one night Bowen said, gently enough, “Dick, that’s unmanly.” Yates was mortified.*

  Bowen was tough, witty, and independent, a refugee from a wealthy dysfunctional family in Fall River, Massachusetts, and for a while Yates seemed to enjoy her feistiness. She called him “a hulking ego in a tweed jacket” and was impatient with his bemused acceptance of certain sordid aspects of his life. “What the hell am I doing here?” he’d say, looking around his apartment as if for the first time. “How did this happen?” At one point Bowen took down his Venetian blinds, caked with grime, and made the naked Yates wash them “in that disgusting stand-up shower stall he never cleaned.” Grace Schulman pointed out that Bowen was very “elegant and correct,” but also “the kind of person who would tell you that your fly is open.” When Schulman said as much to Yates, he replied, “Don’t you want to know if your fly is open?”

  Yates’s own receptiveness to this sort of remark depended on whether he was drunk or sober. “Dick was courteous and polite,” said Bowen. “He always wanted to do the expected thing—always. If he was sober.” Generally that meant he did the expected thing until noon or so. On weekends the two would sleep
late and then go out for Bloody Marys. Yates would insist that the 110-pound Bowen match him drink for drink (it was “one of his gentleman’s rules”), and for the most part she was happy to oblige: She hated her job at Putnam’s, where she edited “control vocabulary books” for children, and was such a heavy drinker that she ended up in AA several years later. Meanwhile the outings with Yates were compelling incentives for going on the wagon. Yates’s ambivalence toward Bowen was never far from the surface: On the one hand he seemed pleased that she had “breeding” and an Ivy League degree, but after two or three drinks he’d begin to sense she was putting him down somehow, making light of his own lack of education or déclassé background. Then suddenly he’d be in the throes of another “awful paranoid screaming fit” until finally Bowen would get up and leave. Later he’d show up at her door with a hangdog look, and the whole business would start over. “I was really fond of him,” she said, “but I just couldn’t handle it.”

  Yates seemed to cultivate a lack of sophistication, but also (at least in the presence of someone like Bowen) to be rather abashed about it. He always ordered the same thing for breakfast and dinner—scrambled eggs, the “small steak” at the Blue Mill—and it was ill advised to suggest, however lightheartedly, that he try something a bit more exotic for a change. Also he always wore the same daily Brooks Brothers uniform: tweed jacket, blue button-down shirt, gray flannel or khaki trousers, desert boots, a rumpled trenchcoat in cold weather, and for special occasions the tailored suit he’d bought in London. He called all the women in his life “baby,” tenderly, but sometimes too in a menacing tone (“Look, baby…”). He could knowledgeably discuss a number of writers, but the only ones that really mattered remained the same—Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Keats—and the second was a constant, wistful guidepost for life as well as art. “Fitzgerald inhabited this gilded universe from which Dick felt forever excluded,” Bowen observed. “Princeton, football games, Stutz Bearcats—Dick coveted it all intensely. He hated not going to college, and his way of dressing was a way of looking Ivy League. He always felt on the outside looking in—so ashamed living with his mother on the fringes of that estate [in Scarborough]. I felt sorry for him. I’d say, ‘What difference does it make, Dick? You have all this talent!’ But it didn’t matter.”