Biography delves into Richard Yates' demons

Sunday, July 27, 2003

By John Freeman

Richard Yates was the loneliest writer who ever lived. Ever. If there was ever any doubt that sadness was Yates' hair shirt, Blake Bailey's new biography resolves it.

	"A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates" By Blake Bailey Picador ($35)

Yates was a titan of melancholy. Toward the end of his life, as he courted a woman named Booghie, he wrote:

"I've been familiar with loneliness before, many times, and know I'll survive it. If I can't exactly welcome it like an old comrade, at least it's no worse than putting up with a tiresome old acquaintance."

Bailey sets out to understand the roots of Yates' loneliness, and on that account and many others he succeeds triumphantly.

Drawing on scores of letters, interviews, his fiction and frank conversations with one of Yates' psychologists (so much for patient confidentiality), Bailey depicts a man racked by instability and ambition, someone who was generous with writers but stingy with himself -- a man who gave everything for art, but received little in return.

Yates was raised by Ruth, known as Dookie, after her struggle to be a sculptor exasperated Yates' father so much that he left. She had fine tastes but lacked the means to support them, which meant the Yateses were constantly dodging eviction.

Bailey demonstrates how very autobiographical Yates' fiction was. As the book follows Yates to prep school, into the military and back to New York, where he wrote for Remington Rand, nearly every step of the way can be traced to Yates' later fiction.

For a long time, however, Yates resisted the autobiographical urge as simple and weak. This is ironic, given that his hero was F. Scott Fitzgerald, who drew heavily on personal demons and relationships.

It would take another decade for Yates to produce his classic novel, "Revolutionary Road," as the two banes of his adult life -- alcoholism and bipolar disease -- threw his life into chaos.

During the next 30 years, these afflictions destroyed two marriages and many friendships. Yates was a proud man, but his stubborn self-neglect forced friends like poet Grace Schulman and publisher Seymour Lawrence into becoming a 24-hour MASH unit that bailed him out of bar fights and checked him into mental institutions.

What's amazing is that as Yates' drinking and psychotic outbreaks escalated, he worked harder than ever. Unable to control the tumult of his personal affairs, Yates retreated deeper into writing, something he could control.

But he never entirely dropped out. In spite of his distrust of the notion that writing could be taught, Yates was a prolific and inspiring teacher. Moving between universities from New York to Wichita, he instructed some of today's finest writers: Tony Earley, Mary Robison, John Casey, Andre Dubus and others.

It's a storytelling triumph that Bailey can turn Yates' long slow grind toward obscurity into a compelling and often funny book.

Though Yates' colorful character helps things along, this is, after all, a man who threatened to kill Gordon Lish when the editor rejected him.

As literary trends bounced from postmodernism to minimalism to the anxious maximalism of the '90s, Yates burrowed into his past and emerged again and again with powerful, unflinchingly stark fiction.

As with the best literary biographies, Bailey's book will not just help readers understand this important body of work, it will make them want to read it.

John Freeman is a writer in New York. His reviews and interviews have appeared in "The Guardian," "The Lost Angeles Times," and "The Wall Street Journal."