Robert Coates (critic)

Coates was born in New Haven, Connecticut in 1897. He was the second but only living child of Harriet Coates, a Victorian with feminist sympathies and Frederick Coates, a toolmaker-cum-inventor who became a professional designer of special machinery. In 1905, the Coates family embarked on a 10-year tour of the United States. They moved so often that Malcolm Cowley wrote that the young Coates “grew up in more places than laid claim to Homer.”[8] Before he had turned eighteen, Coates had lived in various gold-mining camps in Colorado;[9][10] in Seattle, Washington; Portland, Oregon; Cincinnati, Ohio; Springfield, Massachusetts; Buffalo, New York; New York City; and Rochester, New York. As a result, as Coates recalls in his book of memoirs, “everywhere we went, I was, for a period at least, the new boy, the outsider.”[11] Even during the three years that the family stayed in Cripple Creek (1905-1908), they were far from stationary. They moved from the fairly large town of Victor to Independence, then moved on to Goldfield, and finally settled down in the tiny settlement of Christmas Crossing, a “mere clump of log huts and tar-papered shanties” [12] at an altitude of close to eleven thousand feet.

In 1915, Coates enrolled at Yale University (class of 1919). He published several short stories in the Yale Literary Magazine, and joined its editorial board in the spring of 1918. His early stories took their inspiration from realist writers like O.Henry on the one hand and naturalist writers like Du Maupassant and Theodore Dreiser on the other. Coates also was a member of the literary fraternity “Chi Delta Theta” where he found himself in the company of poet Stephen Vincent Benét, playwrights Thornton Wilder and Philip Barry, and future founder and editor of Time, Henry Luce. When the US became involved in World War I, Coates became a private in the Yale R.O.T.C. in November 1917 and joined the air service (naval aviation) in June 1918. The war was over, however, before he had obtained his wings.

After graduation, Coates moved to New York and worked as an advertising man for the United States Rubber Company. In the spring of 1921 he exchanged New York City for the rural surroundings of Woodstock, in upstate New York, and devoted himself to writing poetry[13] (VFH, 199). The following unpublished poem, inspired by metaphysical poetry, is called “The Noose:”[14]

      I hold my whole life like a noose,

      Following you everywhere.

      I hold it light and very loose

      To make the better snare.

      Still like the frightened butterfly

      You would elude the net;

      And like a gentle hunter, I

      Shall fling it round you yet.

      And though you flee across the field

      And flutter in the heather.

      Know that when captive you shall yield

      We'll both be bound together.

• The Eater of Darkness (Contact Editions, Paris 1926; Macaulay, New York, 1929; republished by Putnam, 1959)
• Yesterday's Burdens (1933; rpt. 1975, 2020)
• The Bitter Season (1946)
• Wisteria Cottage (1948) (also known as The Night Before Dying)
• The Farther Shore (1955)

Collections

• All the Year Round (1943)
• The Hour After Westerly (1957)
• The Man Just Ahead of You (1965)

Stories[15]

• The Outlaw Years (1930)
• Coates, Robert (January 15, 1949). "The Art Galleries: Blume, Delaunay, Glackens". The New Yorker. Vol. 24 no. 47. pp. 48–49. Reviews Peter Blume at the Durlacher Gallery, Robert Delaunay at the Sidney Janis Gallery, and William Glackens at the Kraushaar Galleries.
• Coates, Robert (January 28, 1950). "The Art Galleries: Rembrandt and Juan Gris". The New Yorker. Vol. 25 no. 49. pp. 60, 62. Reviews Rembrandt at the Wildenstein Gallery; Gris at the Buchholz Gallery.
• The View from Here (1960). Memoir
• Beyond the Alps (1961)
• South of Rome (1965)