Richard Yates (novelist)

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Richard Yates

Richard Yates in 1960
Born February 3, 1926
Yonkers, New York
Died November 7, 1992 (aged 66)
Occupation novelist, short story writer
Nationality United States
Literary movement Realism

Richard Yates (February 3, 1926 – November 7, 1992) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for his exploration of mid-20th century life.

Contents

[edit] Biography

Born in Yonkers, New York, Yates came from an unstable home. His parents divorced when he was three and much of his childhood was spent in many different towns and residences. Yates first became interested in journalism and writing while attending Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut. After leaving Avon, Yates joined the Army, serving in France and Germany during World War II. By the middle of 1946 he was back in New York[2] Upon his return to New York he worked as a journalist, freelance ghost writer (briefly writing speeches for Attorney General Robert Kennedy) and publicity writer for Remington Rand Corporation.[3] His career as a novelist began in 1961 with the publication of the widely heralded Revolutionary Road. He subsequently taught writing at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research,[2] Boston University (where his papers are archived)[4], at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, at Wichita State University, and at the University of Southern California Master of Professional Writing Program.

In 1962, he wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness. Twice divorced, Yates was the father of three daughters: Sharon, Monica and Gina. In 1992, he died of emphysema and complications from minor surgery in Birmingham, Alabama.[5]

His daughter Monica once dated Seinfeld co-creator, Larry David and David's first meeting with the writer was the basis for "The Jacket" episode of Seinfeld's second season.[6]

[edit] Novels

Yates's first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year (alongside Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, which won, and Joseph Heller's Catch-22). Yates was championed by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Parker, William Styron, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever. Yates's brand of realism was a direct influence on writers such as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford.[2]

Yates was also an acclaimed author of short stories. Despite this, only one of his short stories appeared in the The New Yorker (after repeated rejections). This story, "The Canal," was published in the magazine nine years after the author's death to celebrate the 2001 release of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates.

For much of his life, Yates's work met almost universal critical acclaim, yet not one of his books sold over 12,000 copies in hardcover first edition.[7] All of his novels were out of print in the years after his death, though his reputation has substantially increased posthumously and many of his novels have since been reissued in new editions. This current success can be largely traced to the influence of Stewart O'Nan's 1999 essay in the Boston Review, "The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print".

In the early 1980s when Yates was completely unknown, another unknown writer, Don J. Snyder of Maine, was introduced to his work by Edgar A. Beem, a writer and librarian in Portland. Snyder and Yates became friends and on several occasions Snyder drove to Boston where Yates was living in squalor, and brought him to Maine to spend time together, sometimes with Portland's community of young writers who admired his work. When the weather was fair, Snyder and Yates would walk Scarborough Beach, Yates in his Brooks Brothers searsucker suit. Yates wrote a letter of recommendation for Snyder's application to The Iowa Writers Workshop in 1984, and he also wrote a blurb for Snyder's first novel, Veterans Park.

In January 1983 The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine hired Snyder to write a feature story about Yates. The two spent hours talking and when Snyder closed his notebook at the end of the interviews, Yates asked him if he would not write the story until after he was dead.

Snyder honored his request. The story appears here:

Richard Yates by Don J. Snyder

This is the beach in Maine where I used to walk with my friend Richard Yates in the days when he was unknown to the world except to writers and those hoping to be writers who whispered his name and the names of his stories and books, whispered with reverence because we couldn't believe how good he was. Too good, it seemed. We walked this beach when I was commissioned to write a story about him for The Boston Globe Sunday Magazine. We'd known each other a few years by then. I think it was 1982. He prepared for these walks the way a weary soldier prepared for another night journey into enemy territory, breaking down a six pack of sixteen ounce Pabst blue ribbon beers and wearing them --two in the pockets of his ratty Brooks Brothers searsucker suit pants, two more in the outside pockets of the matching jacket, the last two in the inside pockets, weighted down like that weary soldier with ammunition clips, as he walked.

"Look," he said to me at the end of one of those walks after he had told me all his secrets about his marriages and divorces, the women who had worshipped him and hated him, his daughters who had turned away from him and forgiven him, his good friend who killed himself, his old students who tried to save him from his own loneliness. "Jesus," he said, cigarettes going in both hands, the ashes salting his hunched shoulders, "don't write about this crap until after I'm dead, alright?"

We had already spent some of my expense money by then on beer and cigarettes.

This is the beach in Maine where I'm reading the new collection of his short stories. I bought the book a few weeks ago and whenever I can get away I return to the beach to read it. Today toward dusk the beach was almost empty, and the tide was out far so that a quiet hung over the shore. Quiet enough to hear the distant train whistle which reminded me of another one of the near misses in Dick's life like the National Book Award he almost won for his first novel, and the book he almost saved from a fire and the Hollywood movie script he wrote that would have made him famous if the movie had been made. The train whistle reminds me of the great chance Dick had just when things were looking hopeless for him. William Styron set up a meeting with the Kennedys and Dick was hired to write speeches for Bobby. Then Bobby went off to California and was murdered in a hotel.

I can name thirty, maybe fifty scenes like that in Dick's life. Scenes that led to the desolation of his spirit. Bitterness. Rage. I remember the rage. That night I mentioned The New Yorker magazine and he threw a highball glass against the wall. The New Yorker had never published any of his work and the arrogant editor there, William Shawn, once told him that until he stopped walking back and forth across the same quarter acre of pain and despair he didn't want to see any more of his stories. Poor fool; he didn't know that God had placed Dick on that quarter acre to write about it for the rest of us every single day of his awful life.

We had some laughs too. One good laugh over my first novel which he was going to write a blurb for as soon as he had the time to read it with a clear head, meaning sober, meaning it could take some time. When he finally finished he asked me if it was too late for me to make changes to the book. I told him it was. He said that was too bad because the book had a lot of bad writing in it that he would have fixed for me. "Alright," he said, "how about I write something vague like how this book assures your future as a novelist?” He didn't say what kind of future. We laughed and I thanked him from the bottom of my heart.

I'm not laughing now as I recall that. I'm trying not to cry because of all the wonderful things that people are writing now and saying about Dick's work. Now that he's gone. Now that it's too late to bring any light into the dark rooms he hid in for so long.

I've been reading all these wonderful things and wondering if anyone is ever going to get it right. The reason for his desolation, I mean. And for the loneliness in his characters. Here's something that gets close. Dick's own words which I stole and stuck in a novel of my own just a few months ago. "I was seeing a psychiatrist once and she was telling me that I was going to need long term counseling in order to come to terms with the destruction in my past. I know that depression is real and that some people suffer terribly from diseases of the mind, but in my case it wasn't depression, it was cowardice. When I told the doctor this, she tilted her head and said, "maybe you're right."

I remember Dick sticking a fork through a bar napkin when he told me this. The first time we met came about a month after I had taken a bus from Maine to Boston and a cab to his door and then was too afraid to knock. I was twenty seven then, intoxicated by his prose. After I rode the bus home I wrote him and told him about this and gave him my phone number in case he ever came to Maine.

He called and said, "That was a goddamned stupid thing to do, pal. Next time knock."

On this beach in those days there was a magnificent summer hotel made of wood, four storeys high. It's gone now like Dick. But I put him up there once to try and save his life. A clean room with white lace curtains on windows that faced the sea. Sometime in the night he caused a problem. The manager called me and said, "Your friend doesn't belong in a hotel, he belongs in a hospital."

"Why don't you stop drinking and smoking and try to live." I said to him after that. He shook his head. "You're old enough to know this," he said, "but apparently you don't. Some people are braver than others."

I could write about all of this now that Dick is gone and the value of his stock is rising. I might get a contract to write a memoir about our times together in the days when I was asking him what my life as a writer might be like, and he was showing me. But I think Dick would hate a memoir. I can hear him telling me that memoirs should be written by Civil War generals on their death beds. Or maybe bartenders in Beverly Hills. I want to write something that he would enjoy and I'm thinking as I drive away from the beach that what I'm going to do with all the stories and the scenes he gave me is write a screenplay for a Hollywood movie. I can just see him getting such a kick out of that. Not a book for the literary world that was always so afraid he would throw up or fall down at their parties. A movie for regular people who never heard of Richard Yates but feel in some chamber of their hearts the same unworthiness he felt, and couldn't survive. END

With the revival of interest in Yates's life and work after his death, Blake Bailey published the first in-depth biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (2003). Film director Sam Mendes directed Revolutionary Road, a film reuniting the lead actors of Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet (Mendes's wife). It was released on 26 December 2008. The film was nominated for many film awards including BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Academy Awards. [8]

[edit] Popular culture citations

  • Richard Yates was godfather to the veteran character actor John Lacy.

Films

  • In the movie Lonesome Jim (2005) the protagonist cites Yates as one of his favorite authors and adds that when he died all his books were out of print.
  • In Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), Lee (Barbara Hershey) thanks Elliott (Michael Caine) for lending her The Easter Parade, which she says was great.
  • In the Academy Award-winning film Million Dollar Baby, one character was shown reading a Richard Yates book.

Novels

Vintage edition, 2000

Other

  • Singer Tanita Tikaram's 1992 album title, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, was borrowed from Yates's 1962 collection of short stories.
  • Yates was portrayed in an episode of Seinfeld as "Alton Benes", Elaine's taciturn and hard-driving father who has George and Jerry scared of him. Yates's daughter, Monica, once dated Larry David, the show's executive producer.

[edit] Bibliography

v • d • e
Works by Richard Yates
Novels:
Short story collections:

[edit] Filmography

[edit] References

  1. ^ "The Hum Inside the Skull, Revisited", The New York Times, 2005-01-16. Retrieved on 2008-04-12.
  2. ^ a b c A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. 2003. 
  3. ^ Ford, Richard (2000-04-09). "Essay; American Beauty (Circa 1955)". The New York Times Book Review (The New York Times Company). http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9900E3DF123CF93AA35757C0A9669C8B63. Retrieved 2008-03-31. 
  4. ^ "Drinking With Dick Yates". The North American Review: 75. May-August 2001. 
  5. ^ Pace, Eric (1992-11-09). "Richard Yates, Novelist, 66, Dies; Chronicler of Disappointed Lives". The New York Times (The New York Times Company). http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9E0CE6DD1138F93AA35752C1A964958260. Retrieved 2008-03-31. 
  6. ^ Bailey, Blake. A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. Picador, 2003.
  7. ^ "A Fresh Twist in the Road For Novelist Richard Yates, a Specialist in Grim Irony, Late Fame's a Wicked Return". Los Angeles Times. July 9, 1989. 
  8. ^ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0959337/awards
  9. ^ Film Review: Revolutionary Road, Peter Bradshaw, Guardian, 2009 Jan 30

[edit] Further reading

[edit] External links

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