Yates, Richard Waiden

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Yates, Richard Waiden

(b. 3 February 1926 in Yonkers, New York; d. 7 November 1992 in Birmingham, Alabama), novelist and short story writer who depicted the thwarted lives of middle-class suburbanites in the period from the Great Depression to the early 1970s.

Yates’s literary specialty was the portrayal of social disaster, particularly the miscalculations that ruin marriages and friendships and blight careers. With no desire to be inventive or to romanticize his characters, he set out to chart his own damaged, essentially uneventful life in nine fictional versions. Yates and his sister were children whose parents had divorced in 1929; that fact provided Yates with an early window on clashing personalities and money troubles. His mother, Ruth Maurer, was a trained sculptor of modest talents who cherished illusions about a brilliant career and sacrificed family stability and her own earning capacities for art. His father, Vincent Matthew (“Mike”) Yates, a down-to-earth salesman for the General Electric Mazda lamp division, was at odds with his wife’s flighty bohemianism. After raising the children on her own in New York City’s Greenwich Village, Ruth Yates wanted a prep school education for her son, a demand that his father met with great sacrifice. Their son went to Avon Old Farms School in Connecticut, the dispiriting locale of Yates’s A Good School (1978). After graduation in 1944, he was drafted into the army, serving as an infantryman in the European theater.

After his discharge Yates spent 1946 to 1948 as a rewrite man for the news information service United Press International. In 1948 he married Sheila Bryant, with whom he had two children. After working from 1949 to 1950 at Remington Rand as a publicity writer, he secured a veterans’ disability pension for tuberculosis he had contracted during the war, and he moved to Europe for two years. By 1953 he was in Redding, Connecticut, living unhappily with his in-laws, working as a freelance public relations writer— and absorbing the stultifying atmosphere to be used in his first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961). Radically revised from a melodramatic manuscript, the novel is about the plastic and pastel nightmare of suburbia in the mid-1950s. Frank and April Wheeler, a pair of attractive self-deceivers, lose their sense of purpose in life and destroy themselves, all the while epitomizing the illusions of many post–World War II Americans. The book was arguably the high point of Yates’s career—an austerely written, devastatingly ironic social study that earned critical praise and was a finalist for the National Book Award.

Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962), a collection of stories written in the 1950s, was a strong second book. Regarded as an American equivalent of James Joyce’s Dubliners (1914), the collection finely hones the desperations of disconnected people: a hospital patient and his cheating wife, a neurotic teacher and her disappointed class, a slum kid confused by middle-class children, a real writer and a taxi driver with ludicrous literary schemes. Chagrin and denial dominate these episodes. One piece about an exacting army sergeant, “Jody Rolled the Bones,” won the Atlantic Monthly First award in 1953. Before the impact of his successes, Yates had divorced in 1959 and abandoned the business world for teaching at the New School (1959– 1962) and Columbia University (1960–1962). During the 1960s other honors and distinctions rolled in: grants from the Guggenheim Foundation (1962), the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1963), and the Rockefeller Foundation (1967); a job as Robert F. Kennedy’s speechwriter (1963); stints as a screenwriter at United Artists (1962) and Columbia Pictures (1965–1966); and a post in the prestigious writing program at the University of Iowa, which lasted from 1964 to 1971.

Meanwhile Yates’s drinking and attendant psychological problems resulted in hospitalization at the University of California at Los Angeles’s Neuropsychiatric Institute in 1965. His literary output was meager during the decade, and when his war novel A Special Providence appeared in 1969 it disappointed everyone, including himself: it was an old-fashioned, overwritten initiation story in the wake of Joseph Heller’s surreal satire and Kurt Vonnegut’s cosmic fantasies; its hell-and-boredom view of war was lost in the maelstrom of experimentation. He married Martha Speer in 1968, a union that produced one child and ended in divorce in 1975.

Shocked at being denied tenure at Iowa in 1971, Yates tried another post as distinguished writer-in-residence at Wichita State University (1971-1972), but only achieved relative security when Seymour Lawrence, an editor at Delacorte Press with his own imprint, put him on a salary of $1,500 a month from 1973 until the early 1990s. After a few years living in Greenwich Village, he moved to Boston in 1976 and stayed for ten years. The 1970s and early 1980s became his most productive period. With Disturbing the Peace (1975), a harrowing account of a businessman who drinks his way to the madhouse, Yates was back in form– precise and in touch with an age that was fascinated by mental illness and bourgeois conformity. He followed his literary comeback with Easter Parade (1976), a short novel that nevertheless has an epic sweep; the story follows the unhappy lives of the two Grimes sisters, go-getting professional Emily and passive Long Island housewife Sarah. Yates traced their mistakes and futile hopes from the late 1930s into the 1970s. He told a woman fan that the book was “my autobiography, sweetheart, Emily fucking Grimes is me.” A Good School (1978) was cut and tailored from Yates’s fragile early life; its young protagonist, Bill Groves, is a struggling misfit in the affluent preppy world of Dorset Academy, a “funny little place” where even teachers and rich kids hang on to dignity by just a thread.

In the 1980s Yates resumed teaching in creative writing programs, first at Boston University (1981) and Emerson College (1984), briefly at the University of Southern California (1989), and finally–when nearing his death from emphysema–at the University of Alabama at Tuscaloosa (1990-1991). His last three books traced his master theme of mere survival in new ways. Liars in Love (1981) is a collection of long, reflective short stories about crises in his life, most notably the collapse of his mother’s career illusions in the Village during the 1930s and the end of his second marriage. Young Hearts Crying (1984) is his most sustained treatment of the writer’s vocation–and its destructive side effects. Cold Spring Harbor (1986) returns to adolescent feelings of social embarrassment caused by moneyed neighbors and an inept mother. Yates’s unfinished novel, Uncertain Times, is about his days as Robert Kennedy’s speechwriter: it is an unidolatrous look at the energy and optimism of the New Frontier.

Yates was out of step with the literary styles and attitudes of post-1950s America. An exacting realist who disdained postmodern pyrotechnics, a keen observer of neurotic behavior who ignored Freud, he was a literary independent in his time–respected by critics and fellow writers, including Raymond Carver and Ann Beattie, but never as popular as flashier contemporaries. Yet his unsparing vision and meticulous prose recall the classic distinction of Hem ingway’s taut early stories. Yates was cremated and his remains were given to his daughter.

Drafts of Yates’s short fiction and assorted correspondence are located in Boston University’s Special Collections Division at Mugar Library; the manuscript of Uncertain Times is held by his daughter, Monica Yates, a section having been published in Open City, no. 3 (1995): 35–71. Yates’s writing and life have been fully treated in the only book-length study, David Castronovo and Steven Goldleaf, Richard Yates (1996), a volume that includes material from interviews, cultural criticism, analysis of the fiction, and extensive bibliography. A notable review of Revolutionary Road by Theodore Solotaroff, which offers a penetrating critique of Yates’s views of class in modern America, is in Commentary (July 1961). Richard Ford, “American Beauty (Circa 1955),” is a sharply focused appreciation of Revolutionary Road on the occasion of its fortieth year in print, New York Times Book (Review (5 Apr. 2000). Stewart O’Nan, “The Lost World of Richard Yates,” is an excellent short survey of Yates’s art and problematic place in American letters, Boston Review (Oct.-Nov. 1999). An obituary is in the New York Times (9 Nov. 1992).

David Castronovo