His biographer, Blake Bailey (A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates, 2003) notes that a young Yates referred to cats often in his letters, and even notes when one ran away. Not only was Yates ambitious to be a writer, but apparently his love of cats was also apparent from a formative age. A writer's writer indeed.
We excerpt from a thoughtful overview of Yates's career:
'[After the reception of Revolutionary Road, Yates, buoyed] by his new celebrity, and drinking now that he was alone, ...accepted John Frankenheimer’s offer to write a screenplay of William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness and moved to Hollywood, following unwisely in the footsteps of his idol Fitzgerald. After completing the script (it was never shot), in 1963 he made an even stranger leap, signing on with the Kennedy administration to write speeches for then Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy. After JFK’s assassination, Yates took a teaching job at the University of Iowa, finding time to co-author the script of the World War II movie The Bridge at Remagen, released in 1969....
'Throughout the decade,[of the Sixties] his health wasn’t good. He was gaunt, and because of [a]... bout with TB he had difficulty breathing. He also smoked like a stove, drank hard and steadily, and frequently didn’t eat. Apparently he was hospitalized during this period for a nervous breakdown–perhaps several times, according to a comment made in a later interview: "I’ve been in and out of bughouses, yes."
....
'Unable to support himself by his books, he continued to teach and write through the early ’70s, still plagued by drinking and depression. He had remarried in 1968, and in 1974 he divorced again, his second wife retaining custody of their daughter.
'....Two years later, in 1978, Yates surprised the literary world again when Delacorte published A Good School, his third novel in four years. Suddenly he’d become not only exacting but prolific. His life had become regimented. He’d moved to an apartment in Boston and quit drinking the hard stuff. Sam Lawrence had persuaded Delacorte to pay Yates in advance for his books and then had put him on what amounted to a monthly salary. If he was going to run short of money, he could pick up part-time teaching gigs to fill the gaps. Under these new living conditions, Yates thrived.
....
'With the boom in the American short story, Liars in Love did well enough, and in 1983, on the strength of Yates’s now solid literary reputation, Delta, Delacorte’s trade paperback arm, brought out a reprint of Revolutionary Road. Yates’s health was failing, but he continued to work and teach, and in 1984 published his fifth title in ten years, Young Hearts Crying.
...
'But, as with his other books, Young Hearts Crying didn’t sell, despite being a Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection. Though he’d published eight challenging and original books to considerable praise, Esquire was right when it said, "Richard Yates is one of America’s least famous great writers."
....
'In 1989, the Vintage Contemporary series begun by Gary Fisketjon picked up Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and The Easter Parade. Yates was teaching at USC now, suffering from emphysema and living in an apartment with rented furniture, one wall adorned with portraits of his three daughters. He was still smoking, and still writing, working on a novel drawn from his experiences as a speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy, titled Uncertain Times, of which Esquire had supposedly bought two chapters. He was almost halfway through the book in 1989, and just finishing it when he died of complications following minor surgery in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, in the fall of 1992.
...
'Since then all of his fiction has gone out of print. Fellow writers claim this is due to the unsparing and truthful picture he painted of ordinary American life, that editors know they can’t sell such a bleak and unredeemed vision in the feel-good Spielberg world of commercial publishing. That could be true, especially now, in the era of Oprah’s Book Club, when sickeningly cute rules the mainstream and pointlessly clever the avant-garde; the author with serious intent and lucid execution is a rarity.
...
'The same [neglect was true] ... of Fitzgerald before his resurrection or Faulkner when his greatest work was out of print. Like them, Yates is not only a fine writer, but his fiction represents an important aspect of the American experience: the confusion of the post-war boom.'
To end our essay, we recall the epitaph Richard Yates used for his A Special Providence (1969): "We are lived by powers we pretend to understand." The words are the title of a poem in W. H. Auden's Another Time (1940), which the poet repeated in this stanza:
We are lived by powers we pretend to understand:
They arrange our loves; it is they who direct at the end
The enemy bullet, the sickness, or even our hand.
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