華閱文章網花了幾個月工夫，終于看完了這本厚達613頁的傳記，沒辦法，只能佩服一下自己。
要不是因為愛耶茨，誰會啃完這樣一本書呢。
1999年，為耶茨鳴不平的小說家Stewart O'Nan曾感嘆看不到近期有可能出版耶茨傳記，然而僅過三年，Blake Bailey所著的耶茨傳記《悲劇性的誠實——理查德·耶茨的生平與作品》就出版了。
無可否認，這本書繼承了英美傳記寫作的優良傳統，是部厚實之作。
作為第一部耶茨傳記，它大有“畢其功于一役”的樣子。
作者最大限度占有資料，盡可能多地采訪了跟耶茨有交往的人。
寫作態度上盡可能客觀，又不失同情心。
這本書在資料豐富、感情流露、作品分析等方面，肯定不會讓喜歡耶茨的讀者失望。
我讀了后，仿佛也過完了耶茨并不精彩（精彩得從哪個方面看，當然他留下的文學財富令人贊佩）而且難熬的一生，越看心情越沉重，尤其看到最后，耶茨去世前不久，重病纏身，自知去日無多，計劃中的小說（《Uncertain Times》）無力完成，自己的文學聲名一直局限在小圈子里，似乎給幾個女兒也留不下什么東西。
這天晚上，他坐在沙發上讀自己的成名作《革命之路》第一章，哭得唏里嘩啦的（cried like a baby）。
讀至此，也讓我頓生蒼涼之感。
耶茨年滿六十后還在為生計犯愁，66歲于貧病交加中死去，之前一段時間在阿拉巴馬州（他不喜歡的南方）一所大學教書，完成《Uncertain Times》和回到紐約成了他未竟的心愿，所謂文人固窮，謂耶茨乎？ 2008年，電影《革命之路》上映后，出版界迎來了不大不小的“耶茨熱”，他的幾本書全部再版，就連在國內，他最優秀的三本書也已引進（《革命之路》已出，《十一種孤獨》、《復活節游行》待出），我希望這一切，耶茨都知道。
如果我有他人之才，大可以寫篇長文來介紹這位杰出而落寞的作家，可惜……于是只能以讀書筆記的形式記下點滴： ***耶茨的一生，是寫作的一生，他在寫作上精益求精，多以自身經歷為本，所以他的寫作，也是苦苦在探索自己的靈魂。
耶茨的一生，是貧窮的一生，也是酗酒和進進出出精神病院的一生，令人同情，也令人惋惜。
另外他長期也是煙不離手，平均每天四包煙。
***耶茨沒上過大學，雖然后來擔任過多間大學的教職，但未上大學，是他心頭的一個結，在他的作品中也有所流露。
***耶茨在世時，一直渴望在《紐約客》上發表短篇小說，但一直沒有成功。
只是在其去世多年后的2001年，《紐約客》才刊登了一篇《運河》。
***耶茨的骨灰一直存放在女兒莎朗的地下室里，《紐約客》終于發表耶茨的短篇后，莎朗輕輕拍了拍爸爸的骨灰盒，說：“好樣的，爸爸！” ***耶茨在文學界最好的朋友一為短篇小說家安德烈·杜布伊斯，一為黑色幽默小說家庫爾特·馮內古特，對他都是惺惺相惜。
耶茨去世后，兩人分別在波士頓和紐約為他舉行了追思會。
…………………… 摘抄： P8 耶茨的母親對他有較大影響 And one of the essential truths of Yates's childhood – of his whole life, perhaps – is that he loved and admired his mother at least as much as he later claimed to despise her. She was a source of pain he never could evade, though writing about her helped. P17 講耶茨的人生觀 As a young man he discovered Flaubert, and Dookie (耶茨的母親) became his foremost Emma; his sens of her, and hence humanity, proved vital to his bleakly deterministic world view. As he explained in a 1972 interview, his characters “all rush around trying to do their best – trying to live well, within their known or unknown limitations, doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are. That's what brings on the calamity at the end.” P75 馮內古特談到戰爭對作家的影響，耶茨也參加過二戰。
“People don't recover from a war. There's a fatalism that he picked up as a soldier. Enlisted men are surprisingly indifferent to survial. Death doesn't matter much.” P108 《了不起的蓋茨比》對耶茨影響極大 But it was the work that ultimately mattered, and for Yates The Great Gatsby was holt writ. Encountering the novel for the first time was, quite simply, the definitive milestone of his apprenticeship, without which he might well have found something else to do with his life: Gatsby, Yates declared, was his “formal introduction to the craft.” P242 耶茨給一個想寫作的朋友提建議： “Don't worry if it comes slowly, or if you speed whole days staring at the wall…You must expect to produce a certain amount of bad stuff before it starts getting good. Stay loose: don't let your high critical standards choke you up and constrict you before you start.” P324 關于耶茨對菲利浦·羅斯的看法： In those days Yates thought Roth “condescended” to his characters – that is, made them into so many foolish stereotypes. “I though Philip Roth was vastly overrated for years until I read Portnoy's Complaint, ” he told Ploughshares; “then I forgave him everything including his millions of dollars.” P333另一位著名短篇小說家杜波依斯對耶茨的評價。
八卦一下：在愛荷華市時，杜波依斯的妻子（不知道最后有沒有離婚）甚至跟離婚后的耶茨有了一段情，這短暫影響了杜波依斯跟耶茨的關系，但是他們的友誼還是恢復了。
“Richard Yates is one of our great writers with too few readers, and no matter how many readers he finally ends up with, they will still be too few, unless there are hundreds of thousands in the most nations of the world. ” P369 耶茨和馮尼格一直惺惺相惜： In his Ploushares interview, Yates made a point of exonerating Vonnegut from the charge that he was one of the detested “post-realist”: “The difference is that therer's real fictional meat in his best work, despite the surface flippancy of his style – real suffering, real passions, real humor…When I hear kids today mentions him in the same breath with some silly clown like Richard Brautigan it drives me up the wall. ” Vonnegut, in turn, thought Revolutionary road was “one of the best books by a member of [his] generations, ” on over the years nobody was more instrumental in promoting Yates's reputation. P408 《革命之路》在美國再版時，馮尼格又提供了一句評論：“（那個）時代的《了不起的蓋茨比》。” Moreover, his famous friend Vonnegut had provided a blurb in which he called the novel “The Great Gatsbyof [its] time”: “All the time I praise books I don't give a shit about,” he wrote Yates,“This is a sicknes of mine. I thank you for the opportunity to do something healthy for a change – to boom one of the best books of our generations.” P418 耶茨有段時間戒酒，但是因為評論了一本關于酒鬼的小說而重新喝上了 Yates agreed to review a Delacorte novel for the New York Times Book Review – Something called The Morning After, by Jack B. Weiner. All Yates know at the outset was that the book was about a drunk, and by the time he finished it Yates was a drunk again, too. P448 Work is its own reward as ever, not least because it was the best way to avoid dwelling on life. P496 卡佛與耶茨的交往： A somewhat younger author who also favored such themes – indeed was indebted to Yates in a number of ways and modest enough to admit it – visisted Boston that summer. “I wanted to tell you again how pleased I was to meet you and to be able to spend a few hours with you, ” Raymond Carver wrote. “You've been one of my heroes since I first read Revolutionary Road and was just stopped dead in my tracks with admiration. ” Carver has presented Yates with a copy of his first collection, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, and now enclosed a second, Furious Seasons, with the diffident caveat that Yates read only four of the stories therein (he listed them). “Don't take any of this, please, as an obligation of any sort, ” he added. It's unknown whether the two ever met again. P517 耶茨一次不成功的朗誦會（無人出現） That winter he was invited to give a reading at the University of Massachsetts (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. P550 《復活節游行》出版后，馮內古特致信耶茨 “You are one hell of a good writer,” wrote Vonnegut, to whom the book was dedicated, “and the best reporter I know of big messages in small gestures and events. Your most striking contribution to American literature, though,…is your harrowingly honest inventory of the meager resources available to middle-class mediocrities. P573 伍迪·艾倫也喜歡耶茨，曾想改編耶茨的電影 Then a few years later Braudy was watching Woody Allen's Hannah and Her Sisters when she notices Yates's novel mentioned in one scene: “That's my favorate book!”she blurted out in the theater. She was so enthused that she wrote Woody Allen a letter praising both the movie and his taste in fiction; Allen replied that he knew little about Yates but loved his “clean prose and way of telling a story.” That same year, in fact, Allen had remarked in the New Yorker Times that he loved books about the “problems and strengths of women”, and therefore “couldn't wait to get [his] hands on …the Richard Yates novel, The Easter Parade.”
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