This article originally appeared in the Reader on November 14, 2003.
I found his work the way many undergraduates do—through his anthologized 1952 story “The Best of Everything.” Its vivid New York dialogue reminded me of J.D. Salinger, but unlike the penthouse misfits of Nine Stories, Yates’s characters were an ordinary lower-middle-class couple, warily circling the knowledge that their impending marriage will be a colossal mistake. Two of my writing teachers, Robin Metz at Knox College and Mark Costello at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, had studied under Yates at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop back in the mid- to late-60s and urged me to check out his work. I read Young Hearts Crying (1984), at the time his latest novel (which he would later disown), and from there made my way back to Revolutionary Road. Since then I’ve given away innumerable copies of it because it’s the perfect gift: few people I’ve met have read it, and few people who’ve read it have ever forgotten it.
He couldn’t have been more pleased to meet someone who’d read his work closely, and he was happy to satisfy my curiosity about his work. I was surprised to hear him give such a grim assessment of it: he liked Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade (1976), a novel about his mother and sister, yet he considered himself a failed writer.
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Though he wasn’t quite this candid in class, the novel was based on his years living in suburban Redding, Connecticut, with his first wife, Sheila Bryant, and working as a hack writer at the Remington Rand Corporation in New York. An attractive couple in their early 30s, Frank and April marry to rescue each other from loneliness but several years and two children later find themselves trapped in a stultifying Connecticut suburb, their love fading as surely as their dreams of greatness. Frank wears a veil of irony to shield himself from a pointless office job, April slides into angry despair as a dutiful housewife. They spend countless boozy evenings with their neighbors Shep and Milly Campbell discussing “the elusive but endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity, of The Suburbs, or Madison Avenue, or American Society Today,” luxuriating in the sense “that they alone, the four of them, were painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.”
I always pressed him for details about his new book, but aside from telling me the title—”Uncertain Times,” taken from a remark Robert Kennedy made to him—he just laughed. The Justice Department had hired Yates after Kennedy’s disastrous meeting with James Baldwin, Lorraine Hansberry, and other black cultural figures in May 1963, hoping this talented young novelist recommended by William Styron could lend some poetry to Kennedy’s civil rights pronouncements. Yates described Kennedy to me as aloof and conceited, though he wrote a friend at the time that Kennedy “seemed to like what I wrote, which fortunately was almost all about civil rights, and I think I even managed to put a few words in his mouth that were stronger than he otherwise might have used.”
The last time we spoke at length was that August, when he asked me to drive him to the Birmingham airport to pick up Gina, his 20-year-old daughter from his second marriage. Yates joked that he wasn’t going to let any of us near a dish like his daughter, but he seemed surly. I wondered if he was angry about our phone conversation a couple months earlier: he’d called to see if I had any beer, having forgotten that Alabama blue laws prevented the sale of alcohol on Sunday, and I’d told him I couldn’t help him out. Since he’d arrived in Tuscaloosa he’d tended to drink at most five or six beers a night—nothing like the bottle of whiskey a day I’d read about—and once in a while I would pick up beer for him. But this was the first indication I’d ever had that he couldn’t go without. He probably sensed my pity and hated me for it, and I, as other people in his life, imagined him dicing me up in a story, finding the one ugly, honest detail that would lay me bare.
