Quotes from Blake Bailey

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

I had never understood what Eliot meant by the curious phrase 'objective correlative' until the scene in Gatsby where the almost comically sinister Meyer Wolfsheim, who has just been introduced, displays his cuff links and explain that they are 'the finest specimens of human molars.' Get it? Got it. That's what Eliot meant (109).

When you put a thing on paper, sometimes you discover you already know the answer. Or maybe that there is no answer, which is the same thing.

We don't have to have easy moralizing reactions to characters in literature.

As he wrote a friend, "I'm not at all sure what I'm getting into or getting out of but there seems to be a time for departure and this seems to be it.

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.

Not only had Yates continued to grow as a writer in terms of craft, but also philosophically, salvaging from the ruins of his life a greater degree of compassion for suffering humankind.

Repeatedly Yates went berserk—raging over grievances old and new, hurling furniture at phantoms out of his past. The nurses who lived upstairs complained about the racket to the landlady, an eccentric woman who adored Yates and did nothing.

He had damaged … the ear's innermost chamber, where we hear the heavy noise of the dragon's tail moving over the dead leaves.

I went down like a tray of dishes

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.

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

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.

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.

Work was its own reward as ever, not least because it was the best way to avoid dwelling on life.

But Yates was desperate enough to put aside his anxiety and give teaching a try. He could think of no more demoralizing prospect, after all, than an indefinite future of PR work—insipid, time-consuming, exhausting, and damaging to one's talent, not to mention sanity.

I'm not an academic; I'm just a bookish Joe who gets passionate about certain writers and suddenly wants to read everything they've ever written and find out why they wrote it.