“Laugh? I Thought I’d Die!!”: Richard Yates’s Unpublished Letters

Richard Yates has a name for bleakness. But his unpublished letters, kept by his daughters, show a man desperate to be funny while his life kept falling apart.

Humour as self-defence

At thirteen he wrote a friend an ecstatic, spelling-mangled letter about his sister's embarrassment, ending with 'Laugh? I thought I'd die!!'

Sending alimony to his ex-wife, he noted: 'Here's this month's alimony, with all my love. And I'll be damned if that isn't a masterpiece of a sentence, which could serve as an epigrammatic definition of our marriage.'

Even apologising to friends after a manic weekend, he itemized his sins: constant smoking and coughing, talking their ears off, a dreadful poetry recital, and spitting on the wife.

The sadness underneath

The same letters trace his lifelong troubles: alcohol, breakdowns, poverty. After one breakdown he was committed to Bellevue; later he wrote a friend from hospital advising his agent on surviving the ward: ignore the nurses, humour the doctors, and above all rest.

A Hollywood screenplay fell through and he lost the money meant for his children's college, concluding wryly: 'That, I guess, is show biz.'

Love for his daughter as the one bright spot

In his last years, largely forgotten and broke, he sent his college-age daughter Gina short notes: 'I love you to an absurd degree.' 'Every thought of you makes a little party in my heart.'

Throughout a life of struggle, these letters finally show the unfiltered, tender heart of a writer who used laughter to ward off despair.