by Blake Bailey
That night at the armory, Henry announced to the crowd that Yates was “in the hospital with pneumonia” and conveyed his apologies; Robert Brustein, director of the Loeb Drama Center at Harvard, agreed at the last minute to read Yates’s part of the program. In his opening remarks, Henry noted Yates’s affinity with the other writer on the dais, William Styron: “Both would probably agree with George Eliot’s definition of tragedy.… ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’… Both masters have shown us courage and spirit by functioning on the edge of that other side of silence.” After Brustein read from the screenplay, Styron thanked the crowd for observing such a “worthy occasion: celebrating Richard Yates”; he then read the first chapter of Revolutionary Road, which he called an “exceptional” and “definitive” novel.
Yates was soon released from the hospital, whereupon he moved to a tiny apartment above the Crossroads. Thus his life shrank a half block more. Now he hardly had to go outside at all if he didn’t want to—though the flight of stairs, taken twice a day, was more than enough exercise for such a decrepit man. Still, Yates was satisfied with the new arrangement: The nightly hubbub from below was a companionable noise, and the aroma of cigarettes and beer was, to Yates, a delightful nosegay. Shortly after he moved in, he attended a christening party at the home of his new landlord, Mike Brodigan. Yates sat in the corner vacantly sipping whiskey, smiling vaguely when spoken to.
* * *
Around midsummer Yates’s latest advance—actually an advance for the book after the unfinished Cold Spring Harbor, since by then he was a full book behind on his contract—ran out, and Delacorte held fast against further payments until the present novel was delivered. At such desperate moments in the past, Monica McCall had not only commiserated with Yates—weathering his panicky phone calls with motherly patience and signing her notes with “Love”—but she’d also found ways of putting money in his pocket until the crisis had passed. Mitch Douglas did his best: He, too, loaned Yates money, and only a few years ago he’d compelled Sam Lawrence to increase his advances to Yates by confronting him with a firm offer from another publisher. All the while, though, Douglas was given to hectoring Yates about meeting his contractual obligations, and it was clear to both men that neither was very dear to the other. Doug-las had come to dread that doleful voice on the phone—carefully polite, but with an edge of hysteria (“like a quiver on the launching pad”): “Hi, it’s Dick Yates, I need money.” And their chats would go downhill from there.
That summer Douglas seemed genuinely alarmed by his client’s deterioration, and as a last resort he had a make-or-break discussion with Delacorte’s editor in chief, Jackie Farber. Perhaps out of an understandable sense of urgency or exasperation, Douglas permitted himself to be far more candid than Yates (or Monica McCall for that matter) would have been likely to condone. Douglas explained that the stress of meeting deadlines before his money ran out was “depleting [Yates] mentally and physically,” and pointed out that Yates’s increasingly frequent breakdowns were landing him in the hospital again and again. He said that a number of publishers were willing to pay Yates for the prestige of his name, to which Farber rejoined by wondering if they were also willing to reimburse Delacorte for the unearned advances Yates had accumulated over the years. She further asserted that it was a little unseemly of Douglas to negotiate by making her feel guilty about Yates’s personal distress. The next day Douglas recapitulated his basic position in writing—“[I]f you are going to hold on to an author, then you have to be willing to accept whatever problems must come with a package”—and went on to suggest that pathetic references to Yates were fairly unavoidable at this point: “[C]an you imagine how I feel,” he wrote,
as it happened yesterday, when Richard Yates tells me that [he] has lost 15 pounds and looks like a concentration camp victim because he has had to survive the past few weeks on two eggs mixed in a glass of milk, and that he was going to have to go back in the hospital simply to have food to eat.… I can’t feel very good as an agent or as a human being when I have indications that there are publishers out there who are willing to pay Yates the kind of advances he needs to meeting financial obligations and put food in his mouth.
Farber must have been touched in spite of herself, as she insisted on taking Yates to lunch and trying to work out their differences in person. Douglas went along (“my heart in my mouth”): “Within twenty minutes,” he recalled, “Dick had downed four drinks and spilt a fifth on the tablecloth, and then burnt a hole in it.” There were no more lunches after that, and Douglas proceeded to negotiate a contract with Atheneum for Uncertain Times. Meanwhile Yates became more bitterly determined than ever to end his association with Douglas, for reasons that were only incidentally professional.
The moment arose when Monica Yates submitted a novel, Looking Good, based on her experience as a nurse at an Avon Old Farms camp for overweight children. Monica herself didn’t have a very high opinion of this effort—“No, it’s terrible,” she’d tell her father when he asked to see it—but thought at the time that, if nothing else, it might have commercial possibilities. Besides, it was becoming more and more embarrassing to identify herself at New York parties as “a writer,” and a published novel would at least validate the claim somewhat. But already she was backing away from a literary career, and when Douglas agreed to represent the work (“a terrific read”), she implored him not to let her know about any rejections; like her father, she had a tendency to take things hard. “I will respect your wishes about not telling you about rejections,” Douglas replied, “but that worries me. Rejection is a big part of this business.… If you can’t deal with the rejection factor—perhaps you should be doing something other than writing?? I love you and think you are very gifted—but I want you to be happy and part of the business is dealing with the business on its own terms.” With this note he enclosed the standard one-page agency agreement, which “irrevocably” tied her to ICM as agent for the work in question. Monica refused to sign it. Such an agreement, after all, was even then causing her father a lot of grief.
Monica was more relieved than not when Douglas regretted that he couldn’t represent her if she wouldn’t sign, but when Yates heard of the matter he was furious, or affected to be. “Nobody talks to my little girl like that!” he raged at Douglas in the course of firing him over the phone. (“One of the most welcome communications I ever had in my life,” said Douglas.) Such was Yates’s disdain that he was willing to terminate Doug-las’s services even though the man would continue to receive commission on Yates’s future work. Still, he had few regrets about firing Douglas at whatever cost: Apart from his less rational antipathies, he viewed the agent as an indiscreet man who lacked a proper appreciation for his work.* “Since breaking off with you on the phone that day,” he wrote Douglas, “I have only become more certain, rather than less, that it was the right decision. I’m very glad too that you will continue to receive your share of whatever income the novel Uncertain Times may bring. I won’t forget the many examples of your patience with me over the years, and hope we can remain on decent and businesslike terms.” It would be hard to say which man was more relieved to be rid of the other.
Yates was drinking too much to be anything but a burden, and his company was simply unbearable most of the time. His daughter Monica adored him, but at a distance: He was the one person who seemed to understand her perfectly, and their long animated phone conversations were a solace to both in these later years. Moreover, Monica’s appreciation for her father’s work continued to grow over time, and she was forever thrusting his books on acquaintances. One of these was her ex-boyfriend Larry David, a comedian and future cocreator of the TV show Seinfeld.* He and Monica had remained good friends after their break-up, and such was David’s admiration for her father that Monica invited him to meet Yates over dinner. When Da
vid began to demur (“I didn’t want to meet him or anybody”), Monica pleaded: Her father was bound to drink too much, and she dreaded being alone with him. Reluctantly David relented. When he arrived at the Algonquin on the night in question, Monica was late, and David found himself face-to-face with the writer he admired so much. The latter was gruffly civil, though he seemed to take a dim view of David’s teetotaling. The younger man tried to break the ice with a funny story about how he’d pretended to be suicidal to get out of Vietnam, and showed Yates the tragic face he used to pull while marching with the national guard. Yates pointed out that he himself was a veteran of World War II. Eventually Monica turned up. Over dinner her father remained mostly sober, though he had at least one awful coughing fit and his wheezy muttering was all but unintelligible to David, who relied on Monica to translate. In general Yates was not amused by David, deploring his lack of courtliness toward Monica, though the couple were only friends. As for David, he was thoroughly intimidated, and when it came time to leave the restaurant he found himself in a bind: It had begun snowing outside, and David’s expensive suede jacket would almost certainly be ruined; he was tempted to turn it inside out, but the lining was garish and liable to be denounced by Yates. As David recalled, “Should I risk a rebuff from a great writer? I decided to eat [i.e., absorb the cost of] the jacket. It was never the same.” The loud lining may or may not have provoked Yates, but the Seinfeld episode based on this meeting most certainly did (as we shall see).
Usually the repercussions of Yates’s rare forays into the world were far from comical. When he combined a visit to Gina with a writers’ conference at the University of Denver, he almost managed to undo fourteen years’ worth of (relatively) good behavior with his daughter. His old friend Seymour Epstein was on the Denver faculty, and Yates got up for their meeting with a heedless drinking spree. At a conference luncheon, Yates took the hostess aside and said “Look, I’m an alcoholic. When I sit down to eat, I need a glass of bourbon beside me at all times. Is that understood?” By the time he arrived at Martha’s door the next day, he was haggard and trembling with hangover. And for once not even Gina could cheer him up—indeed, nothing she said was right. “Why d’you say that? What d’you mean?” Yates snapped at her, over and over. On the brink of tears but determined as ever to please, Gina tried to explain that she was paying him a compliment—that she was proud to have such a famous writer for a dad. Yates looked more pained than ever. “You don’t understand,” he said, “you don’t get it.” Then, at urgent tortuous length, he tried to explain that fame wasn’t important, he didn’t want to be loved for that; but his speech began to fail as if he were lapsing into aphasia. He’d stutter and stop in mid-sentence, then make a frustrated face and start over. “Listen, I’m not sick, I’m just tired,” he told the concierge, as he kept stuttering and stopping while trying (for whatever reason) to change his room. When Gina woke up the next morning, Yates was sitting on the other bed staring at her; then he took a step toward the bathroom and collapsed. The terrified girl ran screaming into the hall and flagged down an employee, who called an ambulance. “It’s okay, we just had a little seizure here,” a medic said as they loaded Yates onto the gurney.
When Epstein heard that his friend had been taken to Porter Hospital, he called Martha to apologize: Knowing Yates’s history as well as he did, he should have watched him better; in the meantime was there anything Epstein could do? “Look,” said Martha, “I don’t want to go near the man, or vice versa.” But Gina urged her to reconsider, and Yates was finally allowed to recuperate on the couch for a couple days. It was not a happy reunion for either him or Martha. “Thanks for the ‘hospitality,’” Yates said with bleak sarcasm as he took leave of his ex-wife. Toward Gina he was frantically apologetic: He suffered from a medical condition called epilepsy, he explained, urging the girl to ask her teacher about it. A few days later, Gina’s teacher took her out of class to discuss the matter; Yates had called the woman and insisted she do so.
Back in Boston he lost himself in work—“busy in the best sense,” he reported to Prettyman: “sane and working every day: tired every night.” One day that spring (1986) a young admirer named Don Lee spotted Yates on a bench in the Prudential Center. Yates was on his way to the post office to mail Cold Spring Harbor to his publisher and had to stop every few yards to get his wind back. He sat pensively weighing the manuscript in his hand. “It’s a small novel,” he sighed. “So was The Great Gatsby,” said Lee. Yates affected to cheer up: “That’s right,” he said. “That’s right.”
* * *
Yates regarded Cold Spring Harbor as another “plateau performance”—a modest, craftsmanlike effort that “may help take the edge off some of the terrible things that were said about Young Hearts Crying.” He didn’t seem to worry much about personal exposure either, having somewhat disguised himself as the adolescent Phil Drake, while his mother made her fourth appearance in the novels as the feckless hysteric Gloria. As with Pookie in The Easter Parade, Yates not only “stripped” Gloria of his mother’s artistic pretense, he actually seemed to milk her repugnant features all the more, perhaps in order to reinvent the character or, as he put it, simply to get his mother “right.” In that respect he felt he’d succeeded at last, and this was a matter of no small satisfaction. “You are one hell of a good writer,” wrote Vonnegut, to whom the book was dedicated, “and the best reporter I know of big messages in small gestures and events. Your most striking contribution to American literature, though,… is your harrowingly honest inventory of the meager resources available to middle-class mediocrities.”
That was about as good a way as any to summarize Yates’s achievement, and most critics agreed that Cold Spring Harbor succeeded along just those lines—in the smallness of the “gestures and events” as well as the polished, unflinching portrayal thereof. “Reading this meticulously crafted novel, one wonders why the author has made matters so difficult for himself,” wrote Elaine Kendall of the Los Angeles Times, bluntly describing the plot as having to do with “pitiful losers” who “slide passively into poverty, alcoholism, blindness and lunacy”—an unpromising synopsis, but hardly inaccurate. “Against all odds,” Kendall continued, “Yates has managed to show that chronic misery can be as much an art form as acute agony.” Howard Frank Mosher, writing in the Washington Post, also felt obliged to win back the faint-hearted after a grinding recital of the novel’s plot: “If all this sounds terribly bleak, I should quickly point out that Cold Spring Harbor is so consistently well-written, just, unsentimental and sympathetic that the intertwined lives of the Shepherds and Drakes are every bit as fascinating as they are grim.” Most revealing was the dialectic between the daily and Sunday reviews in the New York Times, by Michiko Kakutani and Lowry Pei respectively, which reminded one yet again of what Stewart O’Nan called “the tricky heart of Yates’s fiction”: that is, the question of whether his “pitiful losers” are so much “literary cannon fodder” (Broyard’s phrase), or rather the product of Yates’s objective yet compassionate view of average, suffering humanity. “Mr. Yates writes of these characters with sympathy so clear-hearted that it often feels like nostalgia for his own youth,” Kakutani observed, “and yet he is also thoroughly uncompromising in revealing their capacity for self-delusion, their bewilderment in the face of failure.” Lowry Pei, however, thought Yates had stumbled in walking his usual tightrope between sympathy and brutal detachment: “Mr. Yates’s narrative voice often sounds like that of a misanthropic anthropologist, making it difficult if not impossible to feel sympathy with the characters’ dreams. The frequent, and occasionally unclear, shifts in the narrator’s attention from one character’s viewpoint to the next … intensify this feeling.”
Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, the fact that his protagonists Frank and April were “too nice”: “See and show both of these people from the outside, in the round, and
from the inside too. Be ‘simultaneously enchanted and repelled by their inexhaustible variety.’ Think about them, and the hell with the reader’s sympathies. Make them love and hate each other the way real people do.” Yates seized on this approach—showing his characters from the outside and in—as the key to making otherwise unexceptional people interesting, and nowhere in his fiction is the omniscient view more flexible, even to the point of apparent vacillation, than in Cold Spring Harbor. Rather tellingly, Pei echoed Yates’s (and hence Fitzgerald’s) own words when he called the effect “an uneasy combination of acceptance and revulsion”—that is, an unfocused viewpoint, as if the author himself didn’t quite know what he thought of these characters and wished to have it both ways.
In fact Yates wanted to have it many ways, every conceivable way, just as long as the basic integrity of a character remains intact—a fixed entity viewed from a variety of angles. Thus, over cocktails with the elder Shepherds, Gloria watches her beloved daughter with a gelid eye as the latter burbles to her in-laws that she’s “never been happier”: “It reminded [Gloria] of Curtis Drake at his most vapid; but then, Rachel had always been her father’s child.” This is unkind, though it aptly reflects Gloria’s jealousy toward her daughter’s happiness and closeness with the Shepherds (and Curtis Drake), while at the same time being a fairly just observation—Rachel is vapid. Rachel, in turn, is loyal enough to Gloria not to discuss the latter’s “rotten tomato smell” with her brother, but she’s also determined to be a better mother to her own child than Gloria was to her. In short, both mother and daughter “love and hate each other the way real people do,” an ambivalence that particularly applies to families. In the same way Yates manages to make the loutish Evan Shepherd a somewhat interesting, somewhat sympathetic character. Evan’s extreme limitations lead him from one dreary disappointment to the next, but he goes on doing his little best withal: He refrains from outright rudeness toward the egregious Gloria, and is a doting if doltish father to his young daughter; but then, too, he hits his wife and calls her “soft as shit,” and in the eyes of his brother-in-law he’s a “dumb bastard”: “This asshole was going to spend the rest of his life on the factory floor with all the other slobs, and it would serve him right.” And that’s true too, as Gloucester says in Lear.