Tough is the night

‘Mostly we authors repeat ourselves,’ Scott Fitzgerald observed late in his life. ‘We learn our trade, well or less well, and we tell our two or three stories … as long as people will listen.’ There’s a lot of truth in this remark (though some authors have more than two or three stories to tell), but in the case of the American writer Richard Yates, subject of this fascinating biography, there was only one story that obsessed him and Yates, essentially, told it again and again in both his long and short fiction whether people were listening or not.

Richard Yates was born in Yonkers, NY, in 1926 into a thoroughly dysfunctional family and his own tortured psyche and that of his mother and relatives provided him with the raw material of his fiction for his working life. Yates was mentally unstable and an alcoholic (as was his only sister). Their mother was a rackety, self-appointed ‘Bohemian’ sculptress who divorced her dull, middle-management husband as soon as was feasible and took her children off on a series of flits through pre-second world war New England and Green- wich Village, somehow managing to keep one step ahead of the bailiffs and the creditors but royally messing up her children in the process (in her cups, she was in the habit of slipping into bed with her pubescent son).