This summer Picador illuminated an overlooked chapter in American literature when it published a hefty biography of my old writing teacher and friend Richard Yates (1926-’92), the author of Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness. I’d been keeping an eye out for the book ever since I was interviewed for it two years earlier, but I procrastinated for weeks before finally cracking it, because as anyone who’s read his fiction might suspect and as anyone who knew him well would testify, Yates was much better acquainted with the varieties of loneliness than joy.
The first time I saw Yates, in August 1990, he was standing alone in the foyer of a restaurant in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, trying to catch his breath after the short walk to the front door. I’d been looking forward to meeting him, and I recognized him immediately from his dust-jacket photos, but he was having such a rough time that I decided to introduce myself later. He was only 64, but years of emphysema had doubled him over slightly, and his skin was sallow from a lifelong habit of four packs a day–a couple days earlier he’d been taken off an airplane in a wheelchair and revived with oxygen, which he would soon begin using daily. His hair and his beard were white, set off by bright blue eyes, and he was clad in the casual prep-school ensemble he’d picked up as a teenager and never shed: herringbone tweed jacket, crisp white shirt, tan khakis, crepe-soled shoes.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
He couldn’t have been more pleased to meet someone who’d read his work closely, and he was happy to satisfy my curiosity about his work. I was surprised to hear him give such a grim assessment of it: he liked Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade (1976), a novel about his mother and sister, yet he considered himself a failed writer.
It was one lesson I couldn’t have learned in class. For ten years I’d been pursuing the same career, encouraged by praise from teachers and classmates just as he had been, and here he sat with 40 years of clear accomplishment, as insecure as I was. The better I got to know him the more he frightened me, largely because I saw some of myself in him: the crippling self-doubt, the mordant humor, the addictive personality, the talent for articulating other people’s flaws. No wonder I loved his books so much. I’d just gotten married that summer; he’d been living alone since 1974, when his second wife left him. He told me he was still “carrying the torch” for her. Years later when my wife and I divorced, I wondered if I would live out my days like him, old and alone.
Hoping to escape their materialistic life, Frank and April hatch a scheme to move their family to Paris for a year, the better to discover themselves. The Campbells are wounded when the Wheelers drop in for one of their little cocktail parties but are suddenly and visibly bored by them (for Shep, who’s secretly infatuated with April, the moment is doubly painful). Then Frank begins to change his mind about leaving their little house on Revolutionary Road–not because of the attractive job offer he receives or because of April’s unexpected pregnancy, but because he’s begun to wonder whether he was really meant for greatness after all and he’s frightened by the prospect of finding out.
Kennedy’s inclusion in the book had prompted Esquire to buy two chapters as an excerpt, but Yates had been struggling with the manuscript for years: he couldn’t seem to get the characters, and the book stalled just like the 1969 A Special Providence, which had taken up seven years of his life and then flopped. It was the only one of his books I hadn’t read in my early 20s, because it was long and hard to find and he’d disparaged it in interviews. Begun as an “autobiographical blowout” after the careful craft of Revolutionary Road, it dully chronicles a young man’s unexceptional experiences in Germany at the tail end of World War II, while uncertainly exploring his painful relationship with a delusional mother. The lack of distance from the material had clearly tied him in knots, and I could only guess the same thing was happening with “Uncertain Times.”
His mood soared after we collected Gina, who lived in Denver with her mother, Martha Speer, and was studying at the University of British Columbia. I invited them to dinner when I dropped them off, but Yates never got back to me or anyone else, as far as I know. He wanted his daughter all to himself. I’d seen her portrait the week he arrived, propped up in the living room of the Strode House, and for years the pictures of his three daughters had been the sole personal touch in his cheap apartments. I never saw either of them again.
