Blake Bailey Quotes

That winter he was invited to give a reading at the University of Massachusetts (Boston), but not a single person showed up. He sat in the silent lecture hall while his two sponsors gazed at their watches; finally Yates suggested they adjourn to a bar. He didn't seem particularly surprised.

The Lost Weekend was the only book, out of five books, that I wrote sober, without stimulus or sedative.

As Monica Yates pointed out, "Dad didn't notice other people. He picked up on asshole people, he could figure people out in general, but in another way he saw himself projected out, and that's another thing that made Martha angry: She thought he was going to be so perceptive, but really he was very self-regarding.

My father was a golden boy from a very small town. He won a very prestigious law scholarship to NYU Law School, and there in Greenwich Village, he met my mother, who was very young, fresh off the boat from Germany.

He loved the idea that he was mentally ill," said his daughter Monica, "and hated the idea he was an alcoholic" - that is, bipolar disorder was a bona fide illness, while alcoholism smacked of a shameful personal failing.

To be a good biographer, you have to be an empiricist. You know, you have to gather the evidence, you have to keep an open mind, and you have to be objective. A memoirist goes in with all the baggage of a bad biographer.

Yates's determinism, like Flaubert's, was a matter of knowing his characters well enough to know their fates, and making the reader see this, too. Just as one never expects Emma to repent of her infidelity and embrace provincial life, one also figures the Wheelers won't move to Europe and live happily ever after. Their weaknesses, well defined at the outset, mark them for a bad end.

When a child is young," Burck explained one night (perhaps he was relating Hauber's analogy), "you can catch him if he falls. Then he

Vevers remarked on what struck them as Yates's peculiar attitude toward women: 'He expected them to drink a lot and be beautiful all the time.

He got down on one knee and begged Nikky's forgiveness while everyone in the office gathered around laughing and clapping - it was so cute - and really, you know, that's what it took with Nikky! My own hands clapped mechanically, but I thought What the fuck what the fuck what the fuck . . . this, again, directed at me rather than them. I

One of the more curious paradoxes of Yates's nature was his almost archaic courtliness toward women on the one hand, and his lifelong tendency to emphasize their physical defects and/or dubious upbringing on the other.

The whole psychoanalytical establishment in America at midcentury was geared to make people with homosexual proclivities feel like monsters, moral degenerates.

A damnably readable, streamlined, yet deeply researched work. Skipping the ancestors and aftermath of conventional biography, Max gives us the man, his work, and his times-the niceties of which (so complicated, so exquisitely intertwined) Max articulates with, well, Wallace-like lucidity and wit. Above all this is the story of a touching young man who insisted on being something better than simply the smartest person in the room.

I myself am consummately middle class. We grew up in upper-middle-class suburbs in Oklahoma City, and that's very much the same ethos as what Richard Yates and John Cheever wrote about.

In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald - namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters "in the very act of giving themselves away.

Fitzgerald's work was almost entirely out of print when 'The Lost Weekend' was published in 1944 - even 'Gatsby' seemed well on its way to being forgotten - and Jackson had meant to be 'deliberately prophetic' in calling attention to a writer he considered the foremost chronicler of 'the temper and spirit of the time.' More than twenty years later he finally received credit, in writing, for having played a key role in the so-called Fitzgerald Revival.

But what ultimately made Yates the scourge of copy editors was his simple aversion to criticism; any emendation in his manuscript, be it a single semicolon, would cause dark alcoholic brooding, which would finally erupt in long, hectoring, semicoherent phone calls.

Poor Scott. Briefly, briefly, as a boy on the verge of manhood, he'd been so handsome and promising that the sequel must have seemed a dream; behind the acne and brain damage and bewildering alienation, he was a golden boy still. Probably he thought he'd given his poor old stepmom the thrill of her life. One thing was certain: at that moment he'd loved her and was sorry for ever thinking ill of her - she'd packed his lunch! - and wanted to convey this in some meaningful way. Probably, too, he was drunk and/or high. As Scott's only brother - a person who shared his sense of humor and some of his darker tendencies too - I considered explaining as much to Sandra, for what it was worth. Instead I said, "Welcome to the club." ". . . No!" I nodded. "Tongue and all." Sandra

I write literary biographies, so above all, I have to love the subject's books. But choosing a subject is tough.

With literary biographies, you're either shelved with other biographies or next to your subject's fiction.

There were other times, fortunately, when he knew better. "All I write about is family," Elizabeth Cox told him. "That's all there is to write about," Yates replied.

Largely to spare his feelings, she'd spoken in rather vague terms about wanting to "find herself," and Yates concluded that she'd become a "womens'-libbing bitch" as he sometimes put it. He couldn't speak calmly on the subject; partly, perhaps, because his mother's "independence" had caused him so much grief, Yates's hatred for all "feminist horseshit" bordered on the pathological.