A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  Despite such antics Krim was the kindest of men—“a great generous soul,” Dan Wakefield called him—especially where other writers were concerned. For decades he made a practice of sending encouraging postcards (“loved the piece”) whenever a friend’s work appeared in print. And while he and Yates might have differed aesthetically, by 1975 they had just about everything else in common: Krim, too, was a lonely middle-aged bachelor in bad health who drank and smoked too much, and if anything his apartment was even grimmer than Yates’s—a tiny studio in the East Village where he washed his dishes in the bathroom sink. The two men were a comfort to each other. Krim was able to make the gloomy Yates laugh, and the latter became so dependent on Krim’s postcards that he threw tantrums when they didn’t arrive: “Where’s my mail?!” he yelled in front of one companion; by then Krim’s notes had become so regular that Yates almost suspected the postman of theft.

  The friends would meet at the Lion’s Head and discuss books, mostly, but also more general issues relating to their common predicament. One night Yates broached the subject of suicide, perhaps aware of the fact that he himself was widely viewed as a prime candidate. Both Monica McCall and Sam Lawrence had openly worried about the possibility for years, now more than ever, but Yates was adamant in denouncing the act as “self-indulgent”—which is not to say it didn’t exert a pull. The year before, Loree Wilson Rackstraw’s second husband had killed himself, and when Yates called to offer condolence he seemed “envious but scornful”: “[Dick said] something like, ‘How did he do it,’” Rackstraw recalled, “with a tone of voice that said, ‘How did he have the right to do it?’ I believe he had a kind of hero’s pride that he didn’t kill himself. And also pride that he could drink and smoke so much and still stay alive. He wasn’t going to be a wimp and stop drinking or off himself!” But something about Krim’s response made Yates drop the subject—an awkward moment that Krim sought to clarify in a subsequent letter: “My mother did the Dutch Act when I was 10 and it’s always hung over my life as a possible way out if and when things got too tough.… But I enjoy discussing such things with you and please feel no sensitivity at all for categorizing all such acts as self-indulgence.”

  By that summer, in fact, Yates was able to dismiss the idea with more than just abstract distaste. He was never more content than when his work was going well, and by August he had half-finished a novel that promised to be on a par with Revolutionary Road. As for the novel about to be published, he viewed it as a respectable “plateau performance”—if nothing else, an improvement on A Special Providence. The usual dread that attended publication was all but entirely absent this time, perhaps because he had neither high hopes to be dashed nor expectations of disaster; also he felt he’d mostly disguised the autobiographical nature of the work behind the deceptive persona of John Wilder, so there was less question of any humiliating public exposure. Meanwhile Vonnegut had come through with another supportive blurb (“Richard Yates has regained the wonderful power he demonstrated in Revolutionary Road. It is a cause for celebration”). George Garrett called the book “the best novel [he’d] read in ages,” and Sam Lawrence was nothing but optimistic.* What mattered most to Yates, though, was that he himself believed in his talent again: “I think it’s okay,” he wrote of his third novel, “though not as big or as rich as I’d hoped. Am trying to make up for that in my next one.”

  Around publication in early September he went to Washington for a festive weekend with Joe Mohbat and his new wife Nancy. Yates was in such high spirits that he inadvertently spat in the young woman’s eye while in the middle of an excited bit of storytelling. “Things I regret,” he wrote the couple afterward: “1.-Smoking and coughing all the time. 2.-Bending your ears so much. 3.-Pulling that half-assed poetry recital on you in the restaurant.† 4.-Spitting on Nancy. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me for these four … then there would seem to be every chance that we might somehow get together again soon. Hope so.” At his best Yates was still a lively companion, if a bit hard to take in large doses (as he was coming to realize himself). His friendships with the Mohbats and various others remained viable for the very reason that they were conducted at a certain distance of space and time.

  * * *

  Disturbing the Peace earned the kind of reception that Yates had expected. Gene Lyons in the New York Times Book Review came closest to summing up the consensus, commending the book’s “exact precision of style and flawless construction,” but finding Wilder a simplistic pawn whose fate is too predictable to engage the reader much: “Disturbing the Peace is an eloquent minor novel,” Lyons wrote, “by an author whom one begins to suspect of systematically denying himself major possibilities.” Yates’s old friend Anatole Broyard, who reviewed the book in the daily Times, was markedly grudging in his praise. He allowed that the novel succeeded “to a degree,” and particularly commended the Bellevue scenes, but dismissed Wilder’s repetitive drunkenness as “about as interesting as having someone throw up on you” and suggested the story’s deeper meaning was muddled if not entirely absent. William Pritchard paid the author a compliment in the Hudson Review which may have caused unwitting offense*: “One hopes we will begin to be more grateful for American writers like [Yates]: if you can’t be Pynchon why try to be second best? Richard Yates works superbly within the limits of his strength.” The one notable outright pan was Peter Prescott’s notice in Newsweek, which granted the novel’s “readability” but declared it an ignoble performance on the whole: “Wilder is an … unsympathetic wretch, and his wife a dismal cow.… Of such stuff is melodrama, not tragedy, made.”

  Perhaps. As a character Wilder is unremarkable when he isn’t utterly loathsome, and while this is in line with Yates’s intention, it does diminish the emotional impact: By the end of the novel, when the lifeless Wilder is left permanently institutionalized (implausibly enough), it’s all but impossible for the reader to care. As for the rest of the characters—from the pompous Paul Borg to the bovinely patient Janice Wilder to the fickle Pamela Hendricks—they’re little more than embodied traits, figures in a morality play, and while such flatness lends itself to the macabre comedy of the novel, the basic effect is a cold one.

  Such apparent flaws aside, Disturbing the Peace is a remarkable work of art, an advance on Yates’s previous work in almost every technical sense. Even its flaws can be justified in terms of craft: That Wilder is one of life’s losers, and obnoxiously bitter about it, is an essential requirement of the story Yates meant to tell. And this ceases to be a liability if one considers the novel as the black comedy it is, and so views its hero as a laughable victim rather than a tragic figure meant to evoke pathos. When a friend informed Yates that she’d cried at Wilder’s fate, he responded with mild exasperation: “I had hoped people might wince a little … or shudder, but really didn’t expect anyone to cry. Maybe someday I’ll write a book that makes people laugh, which is a good deal harder to do.”

  Harder still when the material is so repugnant, but not impossible given a receptive reader. Again, those who insist on sympathetic, well-rounded characters in serious “realistic” fiction are bound to be disappointed here—particularly by the supporting cast, since the world of sane society in Disturbing the Peace is largely perceived through the eyes of the misfit Wilder, for whom it is monstrously bland and smug: a mass caricature, in short. His wife is “fond of the word ‘civilized’… and of ‘reasonable’ and ‘adjustment’ and ‘relationship,’” while she is terrified by “things she [doesn’t] understand.” Even scenes that ostensibly aren’t from Wilder’s point of view, but reinforce his basic perspective, might be understood as enacted in his mind—for example, when his friend Paul Borg pauses in traffic to “admire the sober maturity of his face,” or when Wilder’s triumphant rival Chester Pratt is commended by Pamela Hendricks because he’s “so nice and tall.” The world from which the diminutive Wilder finds himself excluded is a place where nuance is equated with aberration; aptly its ruler is the “glamou
r boy” Kennedy rather than the problematic egghead Stevenson (Wilder’s choice). And the response to being lumped among the “losers of the world” is rage, as Wilder’s fellow Bellevue inmate Henry Spivack—another aberrant and hence more nuanced character—makes explicit when he rails against the complacent normality of his family: “Dear Sis; dear Miss Priss,” he writes. “This is important. This is reality [italics added]. 1.-Call Dad. 2.-Call Eric and Mark. 3.-Tell your husband he is a simpering, pretentious little fool. 4.-GET ME OUT OF HERE.”

  But finally, of course, “reality” is perceived imperfectly by both the outcasts of Bellevue and better-adjusted citizens such as Borg and Janice, who are frightened and repelled by the abnormal. For that matter, a novel whose main character is a drunken lunatic might be pardoned for straying from the conventions of reality and realism, and in fact Disturbing the Peace is no more “realistic” than, say, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh (which it resembles). As a writer Yates was constrained by his own standards of craft, never by the requirements of so-called realism per se, and with this novel he adopted an approach to fit the matter at hand—to wit, a satire on the relative nature of sanity in modern society. That such a work entails certain surrealistic, metafictional effects is underappreciated by those who think Yates was forever at pains to avoid comparisons to Coover, Pynchon, et al. For example: One of the main themes of the novel is the disparity between art and life, “reality” and madness, and hence it’s a valid (and funny) narrative tactic for the “gentleman producer” Carl Munchin to propose a rewrite of Wilder’s Bellevue script that mimics (metafictionally) the very plot of the novel we’re reading: “How does Bellevue change his life?” says Munchin. “I want a revised version of this script of yours to serve as part one, you see. Then I want to see a part two and a part three.… I’d say build him up for another breakdown … in part two, and then in part three let him have it.… Wipe him out.” Similarly the weary hack who does the initial rewrite, Jack Haines, fleshes out the script’s protagonist in a way that accidentally divines the actual nature of Wilder’s life simply by sticking to the usual clichés: “He’s unhappily married and he’s got kids he can’t relate to and he feels trapped. He’s solidly middle-class. I don’t know what he does for a living, but let’s say it’s something well-paid and essentially meaningless, like advertising.”

  Ironically the most “unrealistic” scenes are perhaps the most mimetically exact—namely Wilder’s psychotic delusions, which evoke the actual process of going mad with compelling accuracy. And while the overall effect is harrowing and never less than convincing, the comic tone of the novel is held precisely in balance. Thus Wilder smells dogshit on his thumb to remind himself that “he was earthbound and mortal,” and imagines a series of impatient tabloid headlines as his Messiah delusion takes over: SAVIOR OR FRAUD?… A GLIMPSE!… IS HE OR ISN’T HE?… THIS IS GETTING SILLY.… THE MILLENNIUM! Such a tour de force is the very “order in chaos” to which the hapless Wilder aspires, but which only the rare artist can ever impose—a point reinforced by the presence of the Nabokovian doppelganger (and Yatesian “Me character”) Chester Pratt, yet another apposite touch in this singular novel.

  One last felicity needs to be mentioned, if only because it was important to Yates: “Generally,” he remarked, explaining his own growth as a writer, “I’ve acquired a better sense of pace.” Whereas A Special Providence often languishes amid a welter of detail, Disturbing the Peace is impressionistic in the best sense. Thus Dr. Brink calls Wilder’s attention to an article about himself (Brink) in the August 1961 issue of American Scientists, after which more than six months pass in the course of a few sentences:

  There wasn’t time to read it in the office, but [Wilder] took it home and promised himself to read it soon. In the end the magazine somehow found its way to Pamela’s apartment, and when he asked her about it at Christmastime, long after it had ceased to matter very much, she said she guessed she’d thrown it away.

  All at once it was spring again.…

  Such compression would prove an even more crucial aspect of the novel that followed.

  Those who consider Yates a “writer’s writer” are particularly advised to take another look at the underrated Disturbing the Peace. Readers who need to care about fictional characters will be left cold, as will readers who require a certain clarity of message. (The novel proposes no solution to the problems it raises: Modern reality is insipid, Yates suggests, and those who can’t take refuge in art or illusions or “success”—of whatever sort—are probably condemned to addiction or madness, and there you have it.) But the novel is as strange and perfect in its way as a Fabergé egg, and almost as beautifully useless.

  * * *

  Though an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and Psychology Today Book Club, Disturbing the Peace sold no better than Yates’s previous novels. He was somewhat consoled, though, when it was chosen to receive the Rosenthal Foundation Award of two thousand dollars from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for “that literary work … which though it may not be a commercial success, is a considerable literary achievement.” The citation referred to Revolutionary Road as a “modern American classic,” and at first Yates seemed almost giddily pleased; then his face fell and he grumbled, “Oh, what the hell, it’s only worth $2,000.” Perhaps he noticed in the enclosed brochure that Robert Coover was slated to receive an award for three thousand dollars at the same ceremony.

  Work was its own reward as ever, not least because it was the best way to avoid dwelling on life. By the end of the year The Easter Parade was “in the home stretch, for better or worse,” and a fruitful month at Yaddo yielded not only a finished typescript but also the first chapter and outline of his next novel—“about that second-rate school my mother got me a scholarship to,” Yates chuckled. He thought he could make such a book “pretty funny,” and besides the idea provided ready means of getting “more dollars from Delacorte.” But the main thing was just to keep busy. When his old Iowa disciples Bob Lehrman and Jody Lowens came to Manhattan for New Year’s Eve 1975, the only heartening item they found in Yates’s bare, chilly apartment was the neatly squared manuscript on his desk. Otherwise the place gave them “an overwhelming impression of loneliness”: “The tenants were on rent strike and there was no heat in the building,” Lowens recalled. “Dick had the stove burners turned up, the oven too, and he apologized about the cold.” Sensing his guests’ discomfort, physical and otherwise, Yates invited to buy them a drink at a nearby hotel on Fifth Avenue. It had grown dark by the time they returned to Twenty-sixth Street, and the young men invited Yates to come out and celebrate New Year’s Eve with them. “Nah,” he said, “I’d better get back to work.” “I lost contact with Dick after that,” said Lowens. “His life was just too depressing.”

  For a while, though, he did have “a girl”—as Yates would forever say, though in this case the girl was in her late-thirties. A decade before, Carolyn Gaiser had been a promising young woman who worked at Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour (where she was friends with Grace Schulman), wrote poetry and fiction (including a story published in the Paris Review), and went to Italy on a Fulbright. Then she suffered a breakdown of sorts and spent a number of years in and out of hospitals. Once the worst had passed, Gaiser was like “an aging Sally Bowles” in the words of a friend: “She had a kind of bleak, bittersweet humor.” She was still in a rather convalescent mode when she met Yates—“two lost people bumping into each other in the dark,” as Gaiser put it.

  Seymour Krim introduced the two at the Lion’s Head. “I understand we have some ex–mutual friends in common,” Yates said, meaning the Schulmans. Perhaps because he was aware of Gaiser’s own troubled history, Yates didn’t hesitate to admit that he found himself virtually alone in the world. “I have two close friends left,” he said. “Sam Lawrence and Sy [Krim].” They compared notes about the Schulmans: Gaiser also felt she’d been banished for becoming difficult, and while Yates conceded that in his case he was
mostly to blame, he remained deeply bitter toward Grace. Jerry he forgave as a sweet man who’d been provoked beyond endurance, and by way of example Yates recounted what he still thought was their last meeting—when Schulman “threw him out in the street”: “I must have gotten out of line,” Yates shook his head. “I can’t remember much about it.” The Schulmans had been separated since 1971, and Yates described how Jerry lived alone in a “tiny dismal apartment” hoping Grace would take him back—“but she never will,” he said knowingly.* Gaiser agreed that it was “tragic,” and Yates nodded: “Yeah, but it’s true.” Then his face lit up. “Hey, that’s a great new game! We can start a list of ‘tragic but true’ people!”

  As they prepared to leave the bar and get dinner somewhere, Krim took Gaiser aside: “Don’t let him drink too much,” he warned. “He’s on antipsychotic medication.” Gaiser was reminded of her time at Bread Loaf in 1963, the most memorable aspect of which was her involvement with Nelson Algren; a close second, though, was the pervasive gossip about “the man who’d threatened to kill Ciardi” the year before: Richard Yates. Now that man was sitting across from her at Jimmy Day’s, drinking too much beer and railing against his “child bride ex-wife” who was then dating a carpenter: “Can you imagine?” he said. “A carpenter! I don’t want my little girl Gina exposed to that kind of proletarian stupidity!” He persisted with the subject for some time, then asked for Gaiser’s phone number. She gave it to him.