A Tragic Honesty (104 page)

Wolfe, Don M.

Wolfe, Thomas

Wolfe, Tom

Wolitzer, Hilma

Wolper, David

women

Yates's attitude toward

Yates's attractiveness to

Wood, Natalie

The World on Fire
(film project)

World War II

Yates's experiences in

Woskoff, Dan

“A Wrestler with Sharks”

characters and plot

Wright, Ernest Bicknell

Yaddo colony

Yale Review

Yale University

Yardley, Jonathan

Yates, Gina (Yates's daughter)

attitude toward Yates

birth

final visits and calls

party for, in Los Angeles

psychotic episode of

Yates, Horatio (Yates's paternal grandfather)

Yates, Martha.
See
Speer, Martha

Yates, Monica (Yates's daughter)

attitude toward Yates

birth of

final visits and calls

learns of Yates's mental illness

mentoring by Yates

present life

stays with Yates in Los Angeles

visits with Yates

writing career of

Yates, Richard

apartment fire

apartments, gloom and grime of

appearance

disliked by self

down-and-out

good looks

archaic air of

in army

ashes, final disposition of

attachments to unlikely people

attitudes toward

blacks

feminists

poets

suicide

bellicose personality

bipolarity of

birth of

bleak worldview of

as book reviewer

breakdowns

cartoonist talent

character of, opinions of

as child, frailty and unathleticism of

childhood friendships

childhood unpopularity

clothing and style

poor, as child

daughters (grown-up), relations with

daughters (young), visits

death in hospital

divorce from Martha

divorce from Sheila

drinking and alcoholism of

driving lessons and lack of motoring skill

estate of, indebtedness of

European trip with Martha

family lineage

as father

FBI check on

fear of being alone

fights with Sheila

final visits and calls from family and friends

friendships with writers

funeral arrangements

good manners of

health problems

air injections

fire injuries

hypoxia and need for oxygen tanks

inguinal hernia

lung damage

pneumonia

stammer and cough

tuberculosis

his lot to live with women

hospitalizations

induction into Army

interviews with

Ploughshares
interview (1972)

journalism jobs

lack of college education

light verse of

list of neglected writers

list of ten nourishing books

list of writers he admires

literary influences on

marriage counseling undergone by

marries Martha Speer

marries Sheila Bryant

meets Martha Speer

meets Sheila Bryant

memorial services

mental illness and instability of

military experience

morality of

musical zest

name of (Richard Walden Yates)

never exposed daughters to outside women

newspaper experience

nicknames for

nude posing for mother, as child

obituary

parents' divorce

personality, sweetness of

physical incompetence of

politics of

poverty of, in adulthood

poverty of, in childhood

psychiatric treatments

psychopharmacological treatments

public relations work by

résumé he prepared looking for commercial work (1972)

reunions with Sheila

search for female companionship after divorces

self-destructive habits

self-education

separations from Sheila

sexual experience of

sexual performance of

smoking habit

Yates stops

social class insecurity

speechwriter for Robert Kennedy

suicide attempt

summer jobs

teacher of writing

tribute to (New York City, 1992)

work on school newspaper

writing career

advances against sales

earliest efforts

fan letters

first sale

his agent

rejection slips

Yates's ruminations about

writing genres

film scripts

ghostwriting

romans à clef

screenwriting

short stories

writing method

difficulty getting the work out

no more resting

slowness of, and constant revisions

typing of manuscripts

writings

critics' reviews of

fading reputation of, own awareness of

lasting legacy of

out-of-print books

sales

titles of past and future books

writing style

autobiographical elements

determinism

naturalism claimed in

perfectionism

Yates, Ruth (Yates's mother).
See
Maurer, Ruth

Yates, Ruth (Yates's sister)

bad marriage and alcoholism

birth of

childhood

courtship

death of

final days

married life

personality of

relations with father

relations with Yates during childhood

weds Fred Rodgers

Yates, Sharon (Yates's daughter)

birth

called “the Meat,” “Mousemeat,” “Mussy”

childhood

education

in Iowa

present life

troubled adolescence

weds Richard Levine

Yates's visits with

Yates, Sheila.
See
Bryant, Sheila

Yates, Vincent Matthew (Yates's father)

absence of, during Yates's childhood

alimony and child support paid by

birth family of

birth of

illness and death of

Yates's occasional visits to

Yates, William (Yates's uncle)

York, Penn.

York Gazette and Daily

Young, Marguerite

Young Hearts Crying

characters and plot

publication

reviews of

sales

Zola, Emile

ALSO BY BLAKE BAILEY

The Sixties

Additional Acclaim for Blake Bailey's
A Tragic Honesty

“[Bailey] has written not merely a splendid biography of Yates … but one of the most moving and engrossing literary biographies of our times.”

—The New York Sun

“Mr. Bailey keeps it all interesting by tracing the myriad threads that connect Yates's life and fiction and by writing highly readable prose that at times shines with well-chosen words.… His assessments of Yates's novels are insightful and sympathetic.”

—The Wall Street Journal

“Superb … Blake Bailey's retelling of Yates's life is as good a biography of a contemporary writer as I have read.”

—
Dan Wakefield,
The Boston Globe

“Blake Bailey captures the beauty of Yates's prose and the depth of his vision.… [An] excellent biography.”

—Chicago Tribune

“Unlike some exhaustively documented recent literary biographies,
A Tragic Honesty
manages without prurience and with great generosity to convey Yates's life and work.… Bailey knows how to make clear without condescension. A very Yatesian mode, in fact.”

—The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

“
A Tragic Honesty …
manages to trump [Yates] at his own game … Authoritative … Admirably thorough.”

—The Washington Post Book World

“[A] lucid and surprisingly uplifting biography.”

—Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“If you did not love this handsome, terribly sick person in real life, as did so many of us in this good book, you will surely celebrate his gallantry in demanding of himself perfection in at least one part of his awful life, which was the words he put on paper.”

—
Kurt Vonnegut

“Blake Bailey tells Yates's story in terms that the novelist might have approved.”

—
Fred Chappell,
The Raleigh News & Observer

“This biography should go a long way toward introducing a new generation of readers to a man once called, with reason, the best American writer of the last half of the last century.… It's a story Blake Bailey tells stylishly and thoroughly … Yates deserves this rich and ample treatment of his life.”

—The San Diego Union-Tribune

“Utterly extraordinary.… [
A Tragic Honesty
] is a harrowing, black-humored great book of its time.”

—The Buffalo News

“An impressive piece of reclamation work … It's an odd sensation to read a biography as laudable and as necessary as Mr. Bailey's.”

—New York Observer

“[An] excellent new biography … Neither glamorizing nor condemning Yates,
A Tragic Honesty
gives us one more reason to revisit this singular author and his legacy.”

—Newsday

“
A Tragic Honesty
reads like a novel, its pace quick and littered with unforgettable stories and vivid characters. This is the textured account of one man's life and his nearly obsessive need to create art, and Bailey strikes to the depths of Yates the writer and man, all in all making the book a pleasure to read even for those who have never read a line of his work.”

—The New Orleans Times-Picayune

“[An] unflinching biography.”

—The Seattle Times

“Blake Bailey's compelling biography of Richard Yates tells a great, singularly American story about one of the greatest, most singularly American writers who ever lived.
A Tragic Honesty
is an honest tragedy. It is also a triumph.”

—
Mark Winegardner, author of
Crooked River Burning

“Bailey's biography is excellent at weaving the life and work into a single, coherent narrative, one that hews to the facts and avoids speculation.… Bailey's biography will be the definitive one.”

—The Tampa Tribune

“As rewarding as reading [Yates's] novels … As amazing as it is commendable …
A Tragic Honesty
is an excellent explication and analysis of Yates's life and fiction.”

—Chicago Sun-Times

“Bailey has done a great job of sorting through the facts of Yates's difficult life, assembling them into a story that mirrors the best of his subject's fiction.”

—Publishers Weekly

“[Bailey] writes with just the sort of clean, precise, and powerful prose his subject devoted himself to.… As Bailey meticulously and perceptively chronicles Yates's arduous translation of experience into art, and the vagaries of his critical reception, he exposes the anguish and transcendence of the writing life, and the tragedy of mental illness.”

—Booklist
(starred review)

A TRAGIC HONESTY.
Copyright © 2003 by Blake Bailey. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

Picador
®
is a U.S. registered trademark and is used by St. Martin's Press under license from Pan Books Limited.

www.picadorusa.com

Portions of this book appeared in
The Gettysburg Review, The New England Review,
and
Night Train
.

For permission to quote at length from letters, private papers, and other materials, the author and publisher are grateful to the following individuals: Kay Cassill, Mitch Douglas, Gordon Lish, Robert Andrew Parker, Grace Schulman, Martha Speer, and Sheila Yates. The author particularly appreciates the generous cooperation of Monica Shapiro, Richard Yates's daughter and literary executor.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bailey, Blake.

    A tragic honesty: the life and work of Richard Yates / Blake Bailey.—1st ed.

    p. cm.

    ISBN 0-312-28721-6 (hc)

    ISBN 0-312-42375-6 (pbk)

    EAN 978-0312-42375-9

    1. Yates, Richard, 1926–92. Authors, American—20th century—Biography. I. Title.

PS3575.A83 Z56 2003

813'.54—dc21

[B]

2002042525

First Picador Paperback Edition: May 2004

eISBN 9781466848856

First eBook edition: June 2013

*
 “Uncle Dick never liked Aunt Ida,” Yates's sister Ruth wrote her son Peter in 1964. “Come to think of it, Uncle Dick doesn't like any of them.”

*
 Richard Yates told his friends Grace and Jerry Schulman that, to him, the violin was a symbol of his family's history and breeding, and he entrusted it to the Schulmans when he became too transient to bother with precious things; they presented this heirloom to Yates's daughters at his memorial service.

*
 At the time, 1953, Dookie was still alive and lucid, and Yates worried about her response to “Lament for a Tenor”—his first explicitly autobiographical work about his family. He was living alone in England when the story was accepted by
Cosmopolitan,
and it fell to his wife Sheila to explain the premise of “Tenor” to Dookie. “Dook knew right away that it was autobiographical,” Sheila wrote her husband from the States, “and wasn't too happy, but said she'd realized you'd eventually write about things that she might be uncomfortable about. She defended the Artist's right to do that and launched into her story about those friends of [Thomas] Wolfe.” Dookie's defense of artistic freedom (even at her own potential expense) is commendable, though it's safe to assume she had no idea what lay in store for her following “Tenor.”