Remarks at the Richard Yates Memorial Service

Vonnegut's "Remarks at the Richard Yates Memorial Service" were first printed in 1993 in Richard Yates, An American Writer: Tributes in Memoriam by publisher Seymour Lawrence. They were later included in the Harvard Review of Fall 2003 as part of a feature on Yates.

Summary

Vonnegut asked the pianist, who was playing songs from the 1940s and 50s at the start of the memorial, if he'd ever heard of Richard Yates. He admitted he had not, but "after seeing a turnout as respectable as this", he will surely look him up. Yates knew all the words to those classic songs and was never quite as happy as when he was singing them at a party. He relied on two heroic editors who published "one of the purest American writers of this century, even though they knew they were going to lose a lot of money". Neither Seymour Lawrence or Helen Meyer appear aggrieved by this financial loss. Once when talking with Gloria Vanderbilt—who had recently read and loved The Easter Parade—Vonnegut mentioned that Yates lived alone in Boston. When she next went there, she took him to lunch.

Although Vanderbilt could tell good writing from bad, most people can't. To be praised for writing is "an obscure honor nowadays", but Yates both knew he was a good writer and that to be so was futile. When Vonnegut reviewed all of Yates' works for this speech, he found every paragraph filled with "power, intelligence, and clarity". Yates had wished he could live like a young, famous, and rich F. Scott Fitzgerald, but unlike him or Ernest Hemingway, he had no glamour of locale and company, living his middle-class American life every day. Like Tennessee Williams, he celebrated the unglamourous. When Vonnegut and Yates became friends at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, their colleague Nelson Algren was more famous than them since he'd had sex with Simone de Beauvoir.