A Tragic Honesty (94 page)

you had a few asshole qualities and Dad focused on those and brought them to life [i.e., in
Young Hearts Crying
].… I hope in the end you see the compliment he paid you, deeming you artist enough to face that, the way he always did. When you read one of Dad's books you cringe at all the characters' foibles and feel uncomfortable and exposed. That is why his books aren't popular—only people who are made happy enough by great art for it to outweigh the discomfort can enjoy them.… Far from despising you he admired and wondered about you and considered you an authentic artist. He also considered your life luckier than his, and your nature safer.

“Don't be sorry for coming to the funeral,” Monica added in the margin. “Sharon and I were happy to see you in spite of ourselves—we both agreed it was kind and admirable of you to have made a point of being there.”

Andre Dubus hosted another, somewhat smaller memorial service at Harvard's Lamont Library on February 3, Yates's sixty-seventh birthday. Notably absent on both occasions was Yates's daughter Gina—in Arizona at the time. “I knew it would be a literary event,” she explained, “and that whole side of Dad's life was separate from our relationship.”

*   *   *

Four months after Yates's death, Sam Lawrence came to the “painful conclusion” that
Uncertain Times
wasn't “complete enough to publish”: “There are, of course, wonderful things in it and how we wish your father could have finished it and made it the novel he envisioned,” he wrote Monica. “But to publish it in its present state would serve neither the loyal Yates fans and readers nor his own memory. As you well know, your father was a perfectionist and I doubt if he would have wanted this manuscript published or possibly even read in its unfinished state.” Lawrence had decided not to pursue collection of the large unearned advance, in deference to “an author [he] loved and admired.” Ten months later—just over a year after Yates's death—Lawrence himself died of a heart attack. Yates was not listed by the
Times
as one of the “many important writers” Lawrence had introduced to the public, though Richard Brautigan and J. P. Donleavy were.

In his will Yates left everything to his daughters in equal shares, and named Monica his executor. He died deep in debt, and remained so even after Lawrence forgave the advances. There was David Milch's “walking-around money,” which perhaps bothered Yates's shade (
“I'll get him that goddamn $36,000!”
) if not Milch, but the federal government wasn't so easily appeased. Again and again Monica was contacted about her father's unpaid income tax, until finally even the IRS realized that collection was hopeless. “It was a big hole,” said Monica, “and we turned our backs on it all and felt bad.”

Yates's first wife Sheila, however, inherited her mother's shrewdness about money, and lives comfortably on her investments after retiring as a schoolteacher. Monica once mentioned to her father that Sheila had managed to save one hundred thousand dollars: “Why doesn't she give
you
a thousand, baby?” said Yates. “Then she'd have
ninety-nine
thousand fucking dollars saved!” Eventually Sheila came through in her own way. When Monica was engaged to a surgeon named Brian Shapiro in 1995, her mother paid for a modest wedding in Scarsdale. At the reception Sharon asked Harvey Shapiro (no relation to Monica's husband) to go introduce himself to Sheila. “Hi,” he said. “I'm Harvey Shapiro. I knew your husband.” Sheila gave him a hard stare and walked away without a word.

Sheila's brother Charlie is alive and spry. For the last decade or so he's worked as a ward clerk at the last VA hospital where he was a patient. He's often floated from ward to ward, as he has a tendency to rearrange the nurses' station wherever he goes: “They set it up to talk on the
phone,
” he says emphatically, “not to
work
!” The only people he sees are family, and during holidays he hovers about the kitchen bouncing on the balls of his feet à la John Givings.

Martha Speer moved to Hancock, Michigan, after her second marriage ended in 1993.

As for Monica, she went on to lead the sort of life that her father had always thought would be most fulfilling for her: She is now a housewife and mother to three boys and a girl.

As young women both Sharon and Monica suffered a single “isolated psychotic episode,” never to recur; Gina's turn came in 1998. She and her husband had been traveling almost five months out of every year, and after a bout of dysentery in Southeast Asia, Gina began to experience a euphoric sense of omniscience. For a while she thought she was a witch with psychic powers, and just before a long blackout she fancied herself the Goddess of the North Pole (emergency room medics were on hand, so she thought at the time, to verify this). A little later her father appeared to her, and Gina asked him what the secret to being a great writer was. “Is that all you want to know?” he smiled (“as if to imply that there were more important things in life,” said Gina). “All right. If you really want to know, then I'll tell you.” Very deliberately he spoke the words: “It's all in that last … final … hesitation. But if you don't want to end up like me, you have to
reverse
it.” Gina lay in bed intoning, over and over,
Reverse that final hesitation
.… When she related Yates's cryptic advice to her half-sister Monica, the latter burst out laughing: “I was really hoping there'd be something in there we could
use
!” she said. “What are we supposed to do with that?”

Yates's ashes, still in their original shipping box, reside in the basement of Sharon's house in Brooklyn. She and Monica can't decide what to do with them; they've considered scattering them in Washington Square or, better still, over all of Manhattan from a plane. Their exasperated mother tells them to take the box down the street to Green-Wood Cemetery, where no less than Peter Cooper and Louis Comfort Tiffany are buried. But Sharon's gotten used to having the ashes in her basement; recently, when Yates finally got a story in
The New Yorker,
she gave the shipping box a little shake: “Way to go, Dad!”

*   *   *

“To write so well and then to be forgotten is a terrifying legacy,” Stewart O'Nan wrote in his 1999 essay, “The Lost World of Richard Yates”—O'Nan went on to predict, however, “Eventually the books will make it back in print, just as Faulkner's and Fitzgerald's did, and Yates will take his place in the American canon.” In the years after Yates's death, as his books dropped out of print and his reputation seemed headed for almost total oblivion, a number of devotees (mostly writers themselves) continued to press Yates's work on a new generation of readers—to preserve what Robin Metz called “the tradition continuum from Flaubert to Fitzgerald to Yates”—to enact a “cultural-literary secret handshake,” as Richard Ford would have it. Yates's former students have felt the apostolic burden most keenly. DeWitt Henry calls Yates “one of the few good voices in [his] head,” and he tries to impart that voice to his own students: “I hear his vigilant hectoring always, for genuine clarity, genuine feeling, the right word, the exact English sentence, the eloquent detail, the rigorous dramatization of story. Don't evade. Don't cheat.” Another student, Edwin Weihe, remembers the loving way Yates found “small truths” in his students' stories, “the descriptions of things, like a hanger snapping when you jerked a coat from it.” Many years later Weihe encountered Yates again, and asked if his old teacher remembered him. “Yes, of course,” the latter replied, “the snapping hanger.” “Richard Yates,” said Weihe—echoing Ford, echoing others—“was the place you went back to.”

The resurrection of Richard Yates began in earnest with Random House's 2000 edition of
Revolutionary Road,
with an introduction by Ford that was also published in the
New York Times Book Review
. Ford described the novel as a “cultish standard,” especially among writers “who have kept its reputation burnished by praising it, teaching it, sometimes unwittingly emulating its apparent effortlessness, its complete accessibility, its luminous particularity, its deep seriousness toward us human beings, about whom it conjures shocking insights and appraisals.” This edition has continued to sell briskly, such that one might venture to hope that
Revolutionary Road
is now installed in the so-called canon, whatever that is. The novel was listed by the Harvard Book Store as one of the “100 Favorite Titles” among college students, and the Dalkey Archive Press named it one of their thirty “Most Influential Novels of the 20th Century.” When a new edition was published in the UK in 2001, Paul Connolly of
The Times
noted that “finally the British reading public will be given the opportunity to discover America's finest forgotten author.” Also that year—a banner year in what one is emboldened to call the Yates Revival—Holt published
The Collected Stories of Richard Yates,
which actually made best-seller lists in Washington, Boston, San Francisco, and elsewhere. New editions of
The Easter Parade, A Good School,
and
A Special Providence
have followed, and soon perhaps Yates's entire oeuvre will be back in print—to stay.

One imagines Yates pleased, if not particularly happy. Like his own characters, he couldn't help being who he was; if he'd lived to see his fame increase, no doubt he'd fret over his imperfections all the more, and resume the lonely struggle to do better (“this crazy, obsessive business of trying to be a good writer”), while he endured his nonwriting life as best he could—which is to say, not very well. “Henry James spoke of the ‘obstinate finality of human being,'” said David Milch, “and Dick was that. He was an aching example of what an artist is, and what being an artist
doesn't
solve in our human predicament.”

Perhaps, but imagine a Richard Yates to whom it never occurred to write a word, and
there
would be a picture of misery, rather than one of redemptive heroism. And happiness too—yes—that, too, after a fashion. “I remember how much you laughed,” said Andre Dubus in memoriam, “how easy it was to make you laugh, how much of your laughter was at yourself.

It's your mornings I imagine, Dick; you never complained to me about your body, so I imagine you waking to a room, a world, that seemed to have enough air for everyone but you, and gathering yourself, putting on those gentleman's clothes you wore, and bringing your great heart and your pure writer's conscience to the desk, the legal pad, the pencil. You just kept doing it, morning after morning, and you inspired me, you gave me courage, taking your morning stand against your flesh and circumstance, writing your prose that was like a blade, a cloud, a flame, a breath.

So you rest, old friend. I'll always love you. And about all those words you wrote in all your books on my shelf, I'll say as you used to about a book or story you loved: They're swell, Dick, they're really swell; it's a sweetheart of a life's work, it's a sweetheart.

Notes

The following abbreviations appear in these notes:

Most of the letters to Richard Yates cited below are from his personal papers, and I'm deeply grateful for permission to quote from them. With the signal exception of Yates's letters to Sheila in 1953 (copies of which were found among his papers), letters from Yates are in the hands of the recipients unless otherwise noted. Quotations are only cited when the source is not explicitly given in the text. Interview subjects are cited initially, and thereafter only when needed for the sake of clarity; otherwise the reader may assume that uncited quotations are from personal interviews.

Prologue

“a touch of emphysema”: Int. Monica Yates Shapiro.

“Can you believe it?”: Int. Tom Goldwasser.

“Getting out of here”: Elizabeth Venant, “A Fresh Twist in the Road,”
Los Angeles Times,
July 9, 1989, section 6, page 8.

“The Host of Yates fans”: Don Hendrie Jr. to RY, April 27, 1989.

“We were touched”: Int. Tony Earley.

“The implication”: Int. Allen Wier.

“Not much for one”: Quoted in Steve Featherstone, “November 7, 1992,”
Black Warrior Review
21, no. 1 (Fall/Winter 1994), 157–158.