From the moment Richard Yates was taken off his plane in a wheelchair back in August 1990, his associates in Alabama expected him to die there. He looked all but dead already. Still an unrepentant four-pack-a-day smoker—despite his being diagnosed with “a touch of emphysema” some twenty years before—Yates had just learned the hard way that he could no longer fly without almost suffocating to death. Blue-lipped, ashen, and gasping, he was taken from the airport straight to the hospital. Members of the English department were already casting about for some other personage to fill the Coal Royalty Endowed Chair in Creative Writing, when Yates returned from his ordeal newly equipped with oxygen tanks—feeling better, or so he said. At any rate smoking as much as ever. Graduate student Tony Earley, head of what was furtively called the “Yates Task Force,” worried that the great author would burst into flames on his watch. “You can’t smoke with oxygen tanks,” Yates’s daughter Monica admonished him. “Media hype,” Yates replied.
Before Alabama, Yates had been living in Los Angeles, a place he hated in every conceivable particular—the people, the weather, the sprawl, the buildings, the “fucking film business” that lured him out there time and again with the promise of easy money, which for Yates meant more time to write. It hadn’t worked out before, and it hadn’t worked out this time. “Can you believe it?” Yates would say to the few friends who saw him out there. “Remember I said I’d never do this shit again? Yet here I am.” Here I am: a phrase to which Yates was much given—wherever he was—as in How did this happen? Bemused, stoical, a little sad, perhaps, but willing to find the humor that was somewhere, surely, in his present predicament: How did I get here? “Getting out of here is an appealing idea,” he told an interviewer from the Los Angeles Times. “But then, as long as I’ve lived, getting out of wherever I am has seemed an appealing idea.”
As ever, his friends and admirers wanted to help, from whatever distance they kept themselves, and perhaps none was so devoted as Andre Dubus. A few years back Dubus had been the “chair writer” at the University of Alabama, and even then it occurred to him that this would be an almost ideal sinecure for his old friend. Basically it was a lucrative four-month vacation: For $27,500 (almost seven times what Yates had gotten at the Iowa Workshop in 1964) one was expected to teach a single upper-level literature course and deliver a public reading, as well as occasionally comment on student manuscripts. The chair writer was lodged near the football stadium in a large furnished house, the Strode House, previously occupied by such distinguished writers as Russell Banks, Margaret Atwood, Wright Morris, and Dubus himself.
Dubus had likely broached the matter as early as 1985, when an ailing Yates was struggling to finish Cold Spring Harbor at his usual painstaking pace, having run through his latest advance—a state of affairs that, give or take a nuance or two, was status quo throughout his career. Don Hendrie, the director of the Alabama writing program and a former Iowa student, wondered even then whether Yates was well enough to take the job. He talked it over with George Starbuck, the poet, another friend from Iowa who’d retired to Alabama after the onset of Parkinson’s disease. Starbuck agreed with Dubus: It would be a nice thing to do for Dick, who certainly deserved whatever help he got. And so it happened that several years later, with no other salvation in sight, Yates was at last welcomed to Alabama: “The host of Yates fans in these parts,” Hendrie wrote, “are delighted that you will come and are looking forward to your stay.”
It wasn’t long before Yates was figuring a way to get out of Alabama. “I don’t want to die in fucking Dixie,” he told friends over the phone, amid gasps and coughing fits. Certainly he wasn’t expected to like it in the South. Never mind the eloquent speeches he’d written for Robert Kennedy at the height of the civil rights movement—Yates was a New Yorker, and almost anywhere else was what his old friend Vonnegut called “up the river.” Yates had spent a lot of his adult life up the river, sometimes by choice as well as necessity, but in the end he’d always planned to come home. Nevertheless, when his chair semester ended at Alabama he moved into a cheap apartment near campus and, while the many months went by, gave no sign of leaving. Said Tony Earley, “We were touched that Dick stayed in Tuscaloosa because he’d made friends there who looked out for him and were kind to him. Still, there was a sense of sadness that he’d ended up living among grad students who’d been strangers only six months before—this writer who’d once been considered on a level with Styron and Cheever.” That said, the main reason Yates stayed was that he simply couldn’t afford to leave. Not yet, anyway. And this was another incentive to finish the book he’d been working on for six years, with whatever energy he could still muster. It was a novel titled Uncertain Times, based on his Kennedy experience, which just might prove a salable subject.
* * *
Around noon on November 7, 1992, Allen Wier was informed of Yates’s death at the Birmingham VA hospital a few hours earlier. Wier was director of the Alabama writing program by then, and he must have seemed as good a person to call as any. He was an admirer of Yates’s work, of course, but also felt a kind of protective fondness for the man—which might explain why he can’t remember who called him that day with the bad news. Amid the shock and pathos of the moment, his only definite memory is of the caller’s almost hectoring urgency: What is being done to secure Yates’s manuscript? “The implication,” Wier recalled, “was that we were remiss in not barricading Yates’s apartment until the manuscript was saved. The caller had no idea how uninterested the average Tuscaloosa resident was in Yates’s writing.”
Wier didn’t have a key to Yates’s duplex apartment on Alaca Place, but that wasn’t a problem since Yates hadn’t had one either (he just kept losing it, so why bother?). The fact that Yates’s apartment was always unlocked was widely known among people who also knew there wasn’t much to steal, and to whom it would never occur to intrude except to offer help. Nor would any self-respecting burglar be likely to linger on Alaca Place, a brief stretch of road with a series of compact semidetached red-brick bungalows on either side, where graduate students and the odd retiree lived. Yates’s unit was the last of a chain where the street ended in a cul-de-sac.
Yates tended to tidy up for visitors, which usually meant putting things in their proper piles and more or less clearing the floor of debris, but he wasn’t much for detailed housekeeping. Friends who’d seen the inside of his apartments in New York, Boston, Los Angeles—anywhere he’d lived as a bachelor—remember the arc of cockroach carcasses around his desk (casually stamped as he swiveled to and fro in his chair), as well as the curtains of whatever color turned grayish brown with dust and cigarette smoke, the one filthy sponge in the kitchen, and so on. Yates had been a very sick man when he left for the hospital in Birmingham, but he probably hadn’t expected to die after minor surgery for a hernia; in any case he hadn’t bothered to tidy up before he left. “There was a trail of wadded Kleenex all over the floor,” said Wier, “like Hansel and Gretel’s bread crumbs.” There was also a shirt box full of pennies, nickels, and a few dimes—no quarters, as Yates had used those to buy the New York Times—which overflowed onto the floor amid the Kleenex: about two hundred dollars’ worth in all (his daughters counted it later). There were a few pieces of vinyl and chrome furniture with the stuffing coming out, most of it bought at the Salvation Army. Nothing in the kitchen but a jar of mustard and a few empty bottles of Heineken. And several books scattered over every surface throughout the five small rooms, as if Yates had opened them one after the other but soon lost interest and let them drop.
Wier followed a skein of surgical tubing into the bedroom—to a large oxygen tank at the foot of an unmade bed. He searched the closet for a manuscript and was struck by Yates’s wardrobe: two identical herringbone tweed jackets, three or four identical pairs of khaki pants, and several identical blue button-down shirts; a few pairs of size 10½ Brooks Brothers black shoes and two pairs of so-called desert boots—ankle-high, sand-colored, crepe-soled suede shoes popular in the fifties and sixties. There was also a stack of five or six sets of slate blue bedsheets, still in their store wrapping; apparently Yates had just put down a new set whenever the old ones got dirty. Finally there was a pile of Jiffy mailing envelopes preaddressed to the pharmaceutical company where Yates got his medication (a tranquilizer and the anticonvulsant Tegretol for seizures and mania). But no manuscript. For a while Wier kept looking and finally went to get help.
By the time he came back with a couple of graduate students, Wier’s heart had begun to sink, fraught with the implications of what he’d seen. Yates’s place seemed part of some bleak motel: There was nothing that smacked of the personal except for photographs of his three daughters—carefully arranged on an otherwise blank wall—and an L-shaped desk with several sharpened pencils and a large cigarette burn. Apart from an old Mazda rusting in the sun, the only thing of value was an Olivetti typewriter, its owner’s manual wrapped in the original plastic. But still no sign of Yates’s novel.
“Not much for one of the twentieth century’s greatest writers,” said Wier. “Doesn’t seem right.”
They were loading a pickup truck with Yates’s belongings, such as they were, when Wier had a little epiphany. Suddenly he knew, he was sure, where he’d find Uncertain Times. He walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and there it was: at least four hundred pages in a box, and on the last page was written, in proud capitals, “END.” Wier read no further (Yates wouldn’t have liked that), but just held the manuscript and savored his own exaltation: In that freezer, that poor man’s fireproof safe, he’d found the one thing that mattered to Richard Yates.