a tragic honesty

out of the two or three biographies i've read i've never read one where the tone is one of wry, ironic detachment

in this biography of richard yates the tone is one of wry, ironic detachment

there is a deliberateness on the part of blake bailey, the author of this biography, to make things funny, to follow long, excruciating passages of richard yates having seizures or whatever with short, deadpan, ironic sentences that consistently made me laugh

i had always sort of avoided Richard Yates because people described Revolutionary Road as heartbreaking and sad and sentimental and i didn't really want to read those things

no one said funny or wry, so i thought that it would be unreadable, because people always say that whatever book is funny and wry

finally i read it

Revolutionary Road is funny and wry

it is satirical, has a forcedly unsentimental, almost doomed, tone, and a voice that is sarcastic and detached and amused and critical and resigned and deadpan

richard yates is not the dull, safe, suburban, unfunny, unintelligent, uncontroversial writer that i had somehow assumed him to be based on his association with realism and 'clear' prose, and based on what i've read about him and his books, mostly on the internet

i shouldn't assume

richard yates is clinically insane, drunk, against just about everything, loud, shy, hilarious, playful, a shit-talker, kind, sympathetic, destitute, intelligent to the point of thinking that other supposed normal intelligent people are idiots, miserable, lonely, confused, depressed, controversial, six foot three

and the tone of the biography is also all that

and if you read this book, you will treat the following people better, maybe

old people, 'insane' people, people who go around mumbling things like they're insane, people who appear disheveled and dirty, people who are alone all the time and appear 'insane' or 'inhuman'

i'll quote some passages now

[about a bad review he got by anatole broyard]

Yates quipped that Broyard's reviewer bio [...] should read, Anatole Broyard wanted to fuck Richard Yates's girlfriend in the early Sixties.

[about his novel The Easter Parade]

When a friend tried to compliment him on the novel's "consistent symbolism" [...] Yates was almost aggresively dismissive--as he put it, the book was "autobiography" rather than "allegory": "Emily Fucking Grimes is me," he laughed.

[about richard yate's apartment]

"It was so bare and awful," said Peggy Rambach [...] "Dick was the least bourgeois person I ever met," said Mark Costello [...] As for that particular apartment, Costello summed it up as "fucking grim." [...] Robin Metz remembers staring at the circle of crushed cockroaches around Yate's swivel desk chair..."

[about his "skid-row figure" appearance (because of his constant drinking of alcohol, smoking of cigarettes)]

...he was morbidly conscious of the way people stared at him on a daily basis, as if he were a curious and disturbing spectacle. "How do I look," he asked [...] after his ejection from the Parker House. "Is something wrong with me?"

[about a girl he sort of saw sometimes, the publicist for The Easter Parade.]

"What the hell did you get me up to Boston for, you bitch?" Yates would turn on her. "You're just a groupie!"

[about a reading he was invited to where no one showed up]

He sat in the silent lecture hall while his two sponsors gazed at their watches... Yates suggested they adjourn to a bar.

[about a letter of apology Yates wrote to his psychiatrist of many years (Yates had called him stupid and screamed at him)]

"Take care of those two beautiful girls," [Yates] closed, referring to a portrait in Burr's office of his young son and daughter.

[self explanatory]

"All I want is a story in the goddamned New Yorker!" [Yates'd] rage when discussing the ups and downs of his career; also he'd started referring to staple writers for the magazine with an almost reflexive opprobrium--particularly "John fucking Cheever" and "John fucking Updike."

[about being rejected by Esquire]

Yates responded to this latest rejection by calling [Gordon Lish, Esquire editor] on the phone and abusively accusing him of favoring only "name" writers; finally he threatened to "get on a plane and shoot [Lish]"

[some more quotes]

Other than Milch, Yates's only companion during these months was a three-hundred-pound recovering heroin addict named Larry, who was dying of AIDS.

Sheer desperation was the only thing that kept Yates going. He was tired, anxious, and broke, in no condition either to teach or write at anything like his old level, yet the only alternative was death. His students' work was mostly bad, and Yates couldn't think of anything to say about it; he began to take double doses of tranquilizers [...]

Around this time Yates had a seizure in the foyer of the Crossroads.

For an ashtray he used a large salad bowl [...]

When not in the hospital or seated at his desk, Yates spent his days in an alcoholic fog.

"It's okay, we just had a little seizure here," a medic said as they loaded Yates onto the gurney.

[a month before he died]

...he called Bob Lacy and asked the man if he'd like to know what he, Yates, had done the night before; Lacy said he would. "Get this," Yates wheezed. "I got smashed last night, and then you know what I did? I sat here on this couch in my lousy apartment reading the first chapter of Revolutionary Road out loud to myself and crying like a baby...Tears running down my cheeks. Can you believe that?"