Courtesy of the Estate of Richard Yates.
Richard Yates has a reputation for bleakness. But while the works for which he is best known—the novels Revolutionary Road (1961) and The Easter Parade (1976), as well as the story collection Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962)—do feature a cast of unhappy souls, they are also often funny. So are his letters, which have never before been published.
Having moved to a school in Lower Manhattan, Yates, then thirteen, wrote to his old friend Stephen Benedict, whom he called T-bon. They’d formed the Scarborough Jitterbugs, a two-man band that sang popular standards like the Andrews Sisters’ “Bei Mir Bist Du Schön” and “Oh, Johnny, Oh!”
January 12, 1939 Dear Steve, I really wrote you the verra nite what I gotcher letter. But the giggleiest thing happened! You see mine honorable sister took an excuse to her verra strict princepal, and (oh-ho-ho-haw) she (this’ll kill you) was about to depart from the principle’s desk, and (haw-haw) she glanced out of the corner of her eye and saw her “excuse” bore the picture of a kaht [cat], and a “Dear T-bon.” Laugh? I thought I’d die!! My new school is peachy (oh-so). You might be interested in getting an earful of the gleeful fact that due to my dutiful studies, I, R. Walden Yates, was awarded 3 little bronze lapel-pins. Me and another guy who swings a wicked harmonica, have a sort of orchestra (not as good as the Scarborough jitterbugs). It will be peachy to see the T-bon this summer. Rich
January 12, 1939
Dear Steve,
I really wrote you the verra nite what I gotcher letter. But the giggleiest thing happened! You see mine honorable sister took an excuse to her verra strict princepal, and (oh-ho-ho-haw) she (this’ll kill you) was about to depart from the principle’s desk, and (haw-haw) she glanced out of the corner of her eye and saw her “excuse” bore the picture of a kaht [cat], and a “Dear T-bon.” Laugh? I thought I’d die!!
My new school is peachy (oh-so). You might be interested in getting an earful of the gleeful fact that due to my dutiful studies, I, R. Walden Yates, was awarded 3 little bronze lapel-pins. Me and another guy who swings a wicked harmonica, have a sort of orchestra (not as good as the Scarborough jitterbugs). It will be peachy to see the T-bon this summer.
Rich
***
Early in the summer of 1949, Yates fought with his wife Sheila Bryant, a recent graduate of secretarial school with striking red hair. These fights were so intense that the couple separated. Soon after, Yates attempted suicide. Upon waking in the hospital, he learned that there was a baby on the way. Shortly after the birth of their first daughter, Sharon, the family moved to Paris, which they hated, and then to London, where they lived in a basement flat in South Kensington for two pounds a week.
At Christmas in 1952, Sheila’s brother, Charles Bryant, suffered a severe mental breakdown and was committed to Fairfield Hospital in Connecticut. Sheila decided it was time to return home. But Yates wasn’t ready, and so in March 1953, the couple agreed to a trial separation.
May 5, 1953 Dear Sheila, Here’s this month’s alimony, with all my love. And I’ll be damned if that isn’t a masterpiece of a sentence, which could serve as an epigramatic [sic] definition of our marriage. Is everything all right? Got no letter from you for over a week now, and it makes me a little nervous, especially since your last one was so full of cliff-hanging suspense—you were on the verge of leaving your mother’s, Charley was in Boston and on the verge of being discharged from the hospital, and it was still in doubt where he’d go from there. I’m awfully anxious to get the next installment, and if it doesn’t come in a day or two I may get spastic diarrhea. I probably won’t, really, but I do sort of worry about you when the mailman clumps up the steps and drops nineteen letters for Clifton-Taylor through the slot. I guess it’s inevitable that your letters should start to space out, though, and I’m sure you must be busy. Love, Rich
May 5, 1953
Dear Sheila,
Here’s this month’s alimony, with all my love.
And I’ll be damned if that isn’t a masterpiece of a sentence, which could serve as an epigramatic [sic] definition of our marriage.
Is everything all right? Got no letter from you for over a week now, and it makes me a little nervous, especially since your last one was so full of cliff-hanging suspense—you were on the verge of leaving your mother’s, Charley was in Boston and on the verge of being discharged from the hospital, and it was still in doubt where he’d go from there. I’m awfully anxious to get the next installment, and if it doesn’t come in a day or two I may get spastic diarrhea. I probably won’t, really, but I do sort of worry about you when the mailman clumps up the steps and drops nineteen letters for Clifton-Taylor through the slot. I guess it’s inevitable that your letters should start to space out, though, and I’m sure you must be busy.
Love, Rich
After the divorce, Yates began work on a novel that he said would “break everybody’s heart.” After finishing Revolutionary Road, he promptly had a nervous breakdown. One night, after a worried call from Sheila, a mutual friend admitted him to the psychiatric ward at Bellevue in New York City. When Yates recovered, he learned that his agent, Monica McCall, was also in the hospital. She was being treated for exhaustion. Yates wrote to her with strong advice.
April 23, 1956 Dear Monica, We had no idea you were ill until Gunther told me on the phone today. It’s a damn shame, especially the hospital part. I’m an expert on hospitals and can assure you that they’re all lousy, no matter what it says in the Reader’s Digest. The thing you want to do now is get healed fast, and that means a careful observance of the basic strictures: 1 — Ignore everything nurses tell you, and treat them with a mixture of pity and contempt. They are the helpless victims of a brainwashing so monstrous as to dwarf anything in Orwell. They really do believe in Rules, with all the fervor of their stunted little hearts. Go out of your way, if necessary, to thwart them. They thrive on it. 2 — Be kind to doctors, and never let them know you aren’t falling for their line. Medicine is a slick racket, as full of tricks and shabby motives as advertising or short-story writing, but the trouble with doctors is that they are constitutionally unable to admit it. There are few sights in the world more pathetic than the hurt, bewildered look of a doctor who has begun to suspect that you aren’t paying attention. 3 — Listen carefully, and obey, when they start talking about how you should take it easy and get plenty of rest. This is absolutely the only area in which they are qualified to discuss your problems. Number three is by far the most important of the strictures, if only because I suspect it’s the one least likely to come naturally to you. In other words, be in a hurry to get the hell out of the hospital, but don’t be in any hurry to come back to New York. We can all wait until you’re good and healthy. Sheila and Sharon send their best wishes. As ever, Dick
April 23, 1956
Dear Monica,
We had no idea you were ill until Gunther told me on the phone today. It’s a damn shame, especially the hospital part. I’m an expert on hospitals and can assure you that they’re all lousy, no matter what it says in the Reader’s Digest. The thing you want to do now is get healed fast, and that means a careful observance of the basic strictures:
1 — Ignore everything nurses tell you, and treat them with a mixture of pity and contempt. They are the helpless victims of a brainwashing so monstrous as to dwarf anything in Orwell. They really do believe in Rules, with all the fervor of their stunted little hearts. Go out of your way, if necessary, to thwart them. They thrive on it.
2 — Be kind to doctors, and never let them know you aren’t falling for their line. Medicine is a slick racket, as full of tricks and shabby motives as advertising or short-story writing, but the trouble with doctors is that they are constitutionally unable to admit it. There are few sights in the world more pathetic than the hurt, bewildered look of a doctor who has begun to suspect that you aren’t paying attention.
3 — Listen carefully, and obey, when they start talking about how you should take it easy and get plenty of rest. This is absolutely the only area in which they are qualified to discuss your problems.
Number three is by far the most important of the strictures, if only because I suspect it’s the one least likely to come naturally to you.
In other words, be in a hurry to get the hell out of the hospital, but don’t be in any hurry to come back to New York. We can all wait until you’re good and healthy.
Sheila and Sharon send their best wishes.
As ever, Dick
In 1962, Yates flew to Los Angeles to work on the screenplay for an adaptation of William Styron’s novel Lie Down in Darkness (1951), which would star Natalie Wood as Peyton Loftis. Although they were the same age, Styron had already published three novels, which Yates considered the best of the postwar era. Two years later, Yates wrote to the poet Miller Williams to explain how it fell apart.
March 14, 1964 Miller, About the movie, Miss Wood’s agent decided that it might Tarnish Her Image with the Teenagers if she appeared as a girl who loved her Daddy a little too much, and Blooey. She pulled out, then Henry Fonda pulled out, then United Artists pulled out, then John Frankenheimer (the Dedicated Young Director) pulled out—and the whole God damned deal fell through—leaving me with a fraction of the earnings I was supposed to reap. I had been counting on sending both my children through college on the money I’d been promised, so when the axe fell it was something of a blow. That, I guess, is show biz. Dick ***
March 14, 1964
Miller,
About the movie, Miss Wood’s agent decided that it might Tarnish Her Image with the Teenagers if she appeared as a girl who loved her Daddy a little too much, and Blooey. She pulled out, then Henry Fonda pulled out, then United Artists pulled out, then John Frankenheimer (the Dedicated Young Director) pulled out—and the whole God damned deal fell through—leaving me with a fraction of the earnings I was supposed to reap. I had been counting on sending both my children through college on the money I’d been promised, so when the axe fell it was something of a blow. That, I guess, is show biz.
Dick
Photograph by Martha Yates.
Shortly after Revolutionary Road was published, Yates got a call from Grace Schulman, a twenty-six-year-old writer for Glamour who loved the novel. Grace took Yates home to meet her husband Jerry, a well-read medical scientist, and the three quickly became friends. For Yates, gripped by loneliness since his divorce, it was almost like having a family again. At night they’d cook beef stew, then lie around drinking and laughing while Grace played songs on the guitar. In an effort to finish his new novel, Yates arranged to spend the summer at the MacDowell Colony in Peterborough, New Hampshire. He was given a secluded cabin with a desk, a bed, and a fireplace.
August 8, 1964 Grace and Jerry, The damn place MacDowell is a little too Bread-Loafy for comfort, by which I mean that too many evenings get wasted having Brilliant Conversations with the Nicest and Best People you’ve Ever Met, and then waking up with a terrible hangover and going to the damn typewriter as if it were an instrument of torture. Sometimes I get good working days in and hardly drink at all; other times everything goes to hell. Worst feature now is that I’m horribly aware of the time slipping away, and feel a compulsion to finish the effing book by September First whether it’s any good or not, and this, of course, is not exactly a healthy attitude. One good thing: there’s a guy here with a collection of old-timey phonograph records, and I’ve mastered both lyrics and tune of an absolutely great Al Jolson called “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?” I promise to sing it for you loud and clear the minute I’m back in town. Dick
August 8, 1964
Grace and Jerry,
The damn place MacDowell is a little too Bread-Loafy for comfort, by which I mean that too many evenings get wasted having Brilliant Conversations with the Nicest and Best People you’ve Ever Met, and then waking up with a terrible hangover and going to the damn typewriter as if it were an instrument of torture. Sometimes I get good working days in and hardly drink at all; other times everything goes to hell. Worst feature now is that I’m horribly aware of the time slipping away, and feel a compulsion to finish the effing book by September First whether it’s any good or not, and this, of course, is not exactly a healthy attitude.
One good thing: there’s a guy here with a collection of old-timey phonograph records, and I’ve mastered both lyrics and tune of an absolutely great Al Jolson called “Where Did Robinson Crusoe Go with Friday on Saturday Night?” I promise to sing it for you loud and clear the minute I’m back in town.
At the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in 1963. Courtesy of the Estate of Richard Yates.
Back in Hollywood, Yates tried to get sober, but it didn’t take. For support, his publisher Sam Lawrence suggested he get in touch with his old friend Brian Moore, who was also in Hollywood writing a screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock. Yates was put off by Moore’s new success, but he left a message at Universal and Moore invited him to his house in Malibu, where he met John Gregory Dunne.
January 18, 1966 Dearest Vernon C, Dunne likes to say, “I’m John Gregory Dunne, the writer, and this is my wife Joan.” What a colossal ego! Joan is the real writer in the family. Dick ***
January 18, 1966
Dearest Vernon C,
Dunne likes to say, “I’m John Gregory Dunne, the writer, and this is my wife Joan.” What a colossal ego! Joan is the real writer in the family.
In 1973, Yates returned to New York with his second wife, Martha Speer, an art student twenty years his junior, and their new baby, Gina. Soon, Martha found the strain of Yates’s alcoholism and mental illness too much to bear, and left for Washington, taking their daughter. Inspired by his stints in various psych wards, he wrote the novel Disturbing the Peace quickly, which was published in early September of 1975.
Around that time, Yates went to Washington for a weekend with his friend Joseph Mohbat and Mohbat’s wife Nancy. Yates was in such high spirits on the trip that he inadvertently spat in Nancy Mohbat’s eye while telling a wild story. His apology came soon after.
September 15, 1975 Joe and Nancy, Things I regret. 1. Smoking and coughing all the time. 2. Bending your ears so much. 3. Pulling that half-assed poetry recital on you in the restaurant. 4. Spitting on Nancy If you can find it in your heart to forgive me for these four then there would seem to be every chance that we might somehow get together again soon. Hope so. I think my new novel is okay, though not as big or as rich as I’d hoped. Am trying to make up for that in my next one. Yours, Dick ***
September 15, 1975
Joe and Nancy,
Things I regret.
1. Smoking and coughing all the time. 2. Bending your ears so much. 3. Pulling that half-assed poetry recital on you in the restaurant. 4. Spitting on Nancy
If you can find it in your heart to forgive me for these four then there would seem to be every chance that we might somehow get together again soon. Hope so.
I think my new novel is okay, though not as big or as rich as I’d hoped. Am trying to make up for that in my next one.
Yours, Dick
In late March of 1976, Yates was asked to interview for a writer-in-residence position at Amherst College. He hated the idea of teaching, but he needed the money. After the interview with the college president, he gave a reading to a group of students, then took questions. Although they asked fairly benign questions (“Where do you get your ideas?”), his responses were sour, superior, and humorless. Yates didn’t get the job, and soon needed some distraction.
April 26, 1976 Dear Mr. Geoff C, I tried smoking some of that marijuana you gave me in Rhode Island but found the highs too much like going crazy. Or maybe it’s just that I shouldn’t be doing it alone. Also, I set my apartment on fire. Three guesses how it started, and the first two don’t count. Apparently I put the butt in an ashtray on the sofa bed and the sheets began to smolder, then I opened the bathroom door and it created a cross-draft. When I discovered the fire I ran all the way to the ground floor and woke everybody in the building. Firemen came and I wish they didn’t see me naked. Maybe worst of all, the manuscript of A Good School was on my desk and I couldn’t get to it. Hope there is something to salvage. Dick
April 26, 1976
Dear Mr. Geoff C,
I tried smoking some of that marijuana you gave me in Rhode Island but found the highs too much like going crazy. Or maybe it’s just that I shouldn’t be doing it alone.
Also, I set my apartment on fire. Three guesses how it started, and the first two don’t count. Apparently I put the butt in an ashtray on the sofa bed and the sheets began to smolder, then I opened the bathroom door and it created a cross-draft. When I discovered the fire I ran all the way to the ground floor and woke everybody in the building. Firemen came and I wish they didn’t see me naked. Maybe worst of all, the manuscript of A Good School was on my desk and I couldn’t get to it. Hope there is something to salvage.
In the late eighties, shortly after publishing his final novel, Cold Spring Harbor (1986), Yates was hospitalised with pneumonia and seemed to be slipping into dementia. Though he had every intention of finishing his novel, “Uncertain Times,” he began to accept the possibility he might soon die, largely out of print and broke. During this time, Yates sent sporadic checks to Gina, his youngest daughter, then in college, often accompanied by short notes.
Yates and Gina in 1975 (left) and 1991 (right). Courtesy of the Estate of Richard Yates.
October 14, 1991 Dear Gina, It’s utterly ridiculous, the way I feel about you.
October 14, 1991
Dear Gina,
It’s utterly ridiculous, the way I feel about you.
Dad
October 31, 1991 Dear Gina, Every thought of you makes a little party in my heart. Dad
October 31, 1991
Every thought of you makes a little party in my heart.
September 22, 1991 Dear Gina, I love you to an absurd degree. Dad *** January 7, 1992 Dear Gina, Everything sucks in Tuscaloosa. Is life any groovier in Vancouver? Love, Dad
September 22, 1991
I love you to an absurd degree.
January 7, 1992
Everything sucks in Tuscaloosa. Is life any groovier in Vancouver?
Love, Dad
January 12, 1992 Dear Gina, I would like to be funny but am feeling too serious today. Very seriously, Dad
January 12, 1992
I would like to be funny but am feeling too serious today.
Very seriously, Dad
February 3, 1992 Dear Gina: If George Bush had you for a daughter he would never again have to fake a smile (though possibly you might). Love, Dad
February 3, 1992
Dear Gina:
If George Bush had you for a daughter he would never again have to fake a smile (though possibly you might).
August 12, 1992 Dear Gina, We miss you at Fools Anonymous meetings. It has been suggested that we change the name of our organization to something trendier that might attract younger members. What would you think of Fools-R-Us? Love, Dad.
August 12, 1992
We miss you at Fools Anonymous meetings.
It has been suggested that we change the name of our organization to something trendier that might attract younger members. What would you think of Fools-R-Us?
Love, Dad.
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