On Father’s Day in 1965, Richard Yates, author of the book’ (also a movie) ‘Revolutionary Road’ and teacher at Boston University, opened mail from his daughters Monica and Sharon. The package included a poem from eight-year-old Monica describing how much she missed her father. Yates and his wife Sheila divorced in 1959 and Sheila won custody of the two girls, so he rarely saw them.A few days later, he wrote a letter to his girlfriend telling her about the Father’s Day poem and its young poet.
‘ ‘Wow,’ he wrote on July 2, 1965. ‘Some girl. It’s also a little disturbing because anybody who can write that well at the age of eight is almost certain to have a complicated and difficult life.’
Yates may have projected feelings about his ‘complicated and difficult’ life into the prediction about his daughter’s future. Though Yates’ novels received ample critical acclaim, the author never succeeded with the public. The failure of his work, and his alcoholism led Yates to fall into a deep depression for most of his life.’ In 1961, Yates published his first work ‘Revolutionary Road.’ The book received national acclaim and in 1962. It was a finalist for the National Book Award alongside Joseph Heller’s ‘Catch-22.’ Though hailed by writers and critics alike, Yates never sold more than 10,000 copies of ‘Revolutionary Road’ or any of his other short stories or novels.’
Like ‘Revolutionary Road,’ Yates’ other published works were plagued with profound sadness, disillusionment and an overarching theme of disappointment, which may have been the reason many readers shied away from his sobering and realistic works.
‘ ‘I guess I am not interested in successful people,’ Yates said about his characters in an interview on April 7, 1972. ‘I guess I’m interested in failures.’
After reading ‘Revolutionary Road,’ Tennessee Williams wrote in a noted review of the book, ‘Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don’t know what it is.’
Yates, though always on the verge of fame, never received popular acclaim, and by the time of his death in 1992, most of his nine novels were out of print.
YATES’ LIFE
A failure in the writing world as novelist or Hollywood screenwriter, Yates embraced academia in 1964, accepting an invitation to join the faculty at the University of Iowa’s Writers’ Workshop.
‘I’ve decided I like the place [University of Iowa] after all, which I never thought would happen. I guess what it amounts to is that I’ve proved I can’t make a living in Hollywood or New York without scrambling my brains, which leaves the Groves of Academe as the only reasonable alternative ‘-‘- and these particular groves are the only ones I know,’ Yates said.
In the early 1990s, Yates taught at Boston University. While in Boston, Yates lived in an apartment above Crossroads Irish Pub on Beacon St., and could usually be found at the bar speaking and drinking with his students.
‘The students so loved him that they went down to his joint above the Crossroads to sit and talk to him, and then go up to his apartment and clean up: not just clean up but paint the walls and sand the floors, and generally took care of him,’ Leslie Epstein director of the creative writing program at BU,’ said in an email.
Yates was chronically depressed and spent much of his time drinking at Crossroads. His drunkenness even led to an arrest in Harvard Square, according to a December 28, 2008 Boston Globe article. Apologies for being drunk and inappropriate spill out of much of his correspondence archived in BU’s Howard Gottlieb Archival Center.
On April 9, 1972, Yates wrote two separate letters to two different friends apologizing for his inebriation during a visit.
‘I feel I owe you about fifty apologies, mostly for getting smashed and lousing up your interview,’ he wrote to his student, turned friend, turned author, DeWitt Henry.
‘Well I had a great time, and I hope I didn’t exhaust you both with all my boozing and bullshit,’ he wrote to his friend and fellow writer Geoffrey Clark.
In 1973, Yates attempted to curb his drinking habit, but refused to give up beer.
‘Big change in my life: since leaving the Midwest I’ve been drinking nothing but beer which I seem to remember was your wise policy back at Iowa,’ he said in a July 23, 1973 letter to Clark. ‘I’d become such a wallowing whiskey-head, especially during that last year in Kansas, that I could barely hold a pencil straight, which is no joke at my age. No I don’t much care if I ever open a bottle of bourbon again, except to pour it for somebody else.’
Henry, also a professor at Emerson who hired Yates to work for a semester in 1991, admitted Yates’ could be rough around the edges, calling Yates a ‘womanizer’ and a ‘drunk,’ but said ‘for the most part he was a sweet man and a great human being.’
‘He was a great friend, he was a lonely man, of course. His main contact was with students and other writers,’ Henry said. ‘He always showed up for work no matter how much he’d been drinking.’
A SECOND CHANCE
Now with the popularity of the movie ‘Revolutionary Road,’ which has been nominated’ ‘ for’ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ ‘ three Academy Awards and four Golden Globe Awards, Yates may get a second chance achieving the fame he never experienced in his lifetime.
With the release of the movie, his works are resurfacing to a new audience, one that may be more accepting of his heartbreaking prose. A paperback edition of ‘Revolutionary Road’ has already been published and will soon be followed by a collection of Yates’ complete works.
Josh Lieberman, who runs RichardYates.org, began the website in 2007 after he read a few of Yates’ novels and stories and found that there was not much information on the little known author.
‘There was one site devoted to him, and while there was a lot of information there, it wasn’t updated often and some of the links were broken,’ Lieberman said. ‘I thought that was sort of sad, and certainly Yatesian.”
Lieberman said the movie version of ‘Revolutionary Road’ has definitely spurred interest in the author.
‘There were roughly 300 hits per month before the film. For the month of January 2009 there were 3,500,’ Lieberman said.
Current audiences may better receive ‘Revolutionary Road’ because at the time of the novel’s publication the nation was optimistic, Henry said. An audience that has experienced September 11, 2001 may not be as optimistic.
‘I think history has its way of creating certain sensibilities in readers,’ Lieberman said. ‘He is speaking to the people now.’
Many blamed Yates’ depression as why he never gained or maintained a large readership, Henry said.
‘ ‘I loved ‘Revolutionary Road’ the first time I read it. However, when I re-read it about six years ago, it did not hold up. It’s a pretty good book, not a great one, and it clearly is his best.”
Henry, who teaches Yates’ works at Emerson, said Yates’ writing still impacts his life. ‘I know that the only writing that is worth doing is writing that is true.’ Henry said. ‘He really wanted to look at the world and capture the sad irony of fate itself.’
