CHAPTER ELEVEN
Yates drove straight to Iowa City from Hollywood, but when he arrived he couldn’t find his new apartment at 800 North Van Buren. His old friend Loree Wilson—who’d recently finished her thesis and was about to leave town—was with a new arrival, Mark Costello, when the phone rang. Yates was at the Airliner and needed her help, but there was no hurry. (“Dick’s helplessness over logistical details was learned,” said Costello; “he didn’t want to fuck with it and wanted other people to take care of him.”) When they arrived at the bar Yates was “drunk out of his gourd”; happily he only had a few more blocks to drive.
A year ago he’d been depressed about being in Hollywood, but grateful at least that it wasn’t Iowa; now it was the other way around. He’d returned almost a month earlier than necessary, simply because he couldn’t wait any longer and hoped to “get [his] brains into some kind of focus” before classes began and his “fair Texan” arrived with her daughter. (He and Carole had decided to live together.) He’d been in Iowa less than a week when he got some very good news: Along with such writers as Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, he’d been awarded that ten-thousand-dollar grant from the National Arts Council. “So I’m no longer in much financial stress and can pay off some of my debts,” Yates wrote, “and I guess it tends to prove that I’m a good deal luckier than I care to believe.”
So it seemed. The old Bourjaily place where he now found himself was on the ground floor of a stately Victorian mansion, and his typewriter was parked beneath a crystal chandelier; the dusty baubles gave him something to look at, but still the place struck him as big and empty and strange. Really, he didn’t feel lucky at all. The change of scenery hadn’t affected his writer’s block a whit, and what the hell was he doing back in Iowa anyway? Why had he invited some feckless woman (and her two-year-old daughter) to live with him? After a couple of weeks beneath the chandelier he was miserable enough to write a rare letter to his sister, the contents of which are suggested by her reply: “If we stick together,” Ruth wrote, “we’ll both live through it.” (By “it” she meant life in general.) “Don’t ‘adapt,’ dear; persevere.”
It wasn’t half-bad advice. By the second week of September, the gloom had lifted somewhat: Workshop people were back in town, and the first big social event was a welcome-back-from-Hollywood party for Yates. There was a swimming pool and Sinatra tunes, old faces as well as new, and the guest of honor was in good form—just drunk enough to wax droll on the subject of Hollywood without becoming bitter and obsessive about it. Once again he was the most glamorous writer in Iowa, certainly the best dressed, and what’s more he seemed to sense as much. Suavely he approached one of the youngest women at the party (about a week shy of her twenty-first birthday) and asked her out on a date. She accepted readily enough, though she seemed reserved almost to the point of indifference; in fact she was “bowled over” by the handsome celebrity.
Martha Speer was the fourth of nine children born to a well-to-do doctor in Kansas City, and she’d always wanted to be an artist of some sort. At Carleton College she’d auditioned for plays but ended up designing sets, and this soon became part of a larger disenchantment: The school was too staid and “goal-oriented” for her tastes, there was no art department per se, and anyhow such an environment was hardly the “real world.” So she dropped out and returned to her appalled parents in Kansas City, where she worked as a waitress for a few months. After that she went to Mexico for the summer, then followed a boyfriend to the University of Iowa and enrolled as an art student because she “couldn’t think of anything else to do.” Around this time she found herself talking to Yates at the party in his honor; she’d attended as the date of a fellow art student who was not the young man for whose sake she’d come to Iowa.
Within days she’d moved most of her things into Yates’s apartment. “He swept me off my feet with his personality,” she explained. He was a well-known writer, and though she was “a nobody” he listened to her with what appeared to be real interest, with humility and humor, and of course he sang the old standards for her. She couldn’t quite understand why this charming, distinguished man of letters was paying so much attention to her—was, for that matter, practically goading her into merging her life with his. When she returned to Kansas City for a few days before the semester got under way, Yates suggested she persuade her parents to let her move out of the dorm and into Black’s Apartments (where a lot of Workshop students lived), which would make it easier to deceive them about the fact that she was living neither at the dorm nor Black’s, but rather with a man twice her age. Speer was happy to go along with that or whatever else he advised: “I was ready to strike out on my own,” she remembered. “I detested the role of the little Midwestern kid from an upper-middle-class family.”
There was, however, one immediate hitch. “I’m sorry your friend is having trouble disinvolving herself, sorry you have to argue with her,” Speer wrote Yates from Kansas City. An awkward business, to be sure, when the woman named Carole arrived from Texas with the rest of her things and a two-year-old daughter in tow, only to find she’d been superannuated in the meantime. One doubts she took it lying down either, as three years later she was still inclined to castigate Yates for the “traumatic and cowardly way” he’d ended the affair; but then, too, she allowed that he was “at least honest.” What he seems to have been most emphatically honest about was his obsession with Martha Speer (“I want the hell out of her,” he said), and nothing in the immediate future was liable to change that. He also reminded the older woman that it was essentially her idea to come to Iowa—he’d promised nothing.
The sequel was sordid, and one can only speculate to what extent it interfered with Yates’s newfound happiness. Evidently Carole had little reason to return to Texas, since she went on living aimlessly in Iowa for at least another year. At first she had a few brief affairs with Workshop students, then took a campus job in the chemistry lab and pretty much disappeared from Yates’s purview. The following summer, still in Iowa, she took an overdose of sleeping pills; after two days she was found comatose in her car, and almost pronounced DOA at the emergency room (“until some smart-ass intern found a flutter of a pulse,” as she put it). Finally, after three more months in an Iowa City mental hospital, she returned to Texas. “If you ever blamed yourself for my suicide deal,” she wrote Yates, “let me assure you … that you were only indirectly or passively concerned with it. The guy I was living with was the main reason. I was very depressed when I met him and he … terrorized me into a paralysis which nothing could alleviate except death.” However, she wasn’t willing to let Yates entirely off the hook for at least his “passive” culpability—she pointed out that he’d started a “flow of love” in her that had proved “drowning”: “My suicide was an act of love, Dick, not an act of hostility or hurt.” Whether Yates had wondered much one way or the other is a mystery.
He’d solved his problem in time for Martha Speer’s return, and two days later (September 19) he gave her a dozen yellow roses for her twenty-first birthday. Yates’s students and colleagues could scarcely believe the change that was coming over him: Suddenly he seemed content, steady, even somewhat soberly so. He’d dispensed with the morning martinis and drank according to a disciplined regime: a quarter of a fifth of bourbon per night, neither more nor less (except for the occasional party), and never before fiveP.M. As for Speer, who’d also been going through a bad patch, she felt exalted by all the attention—not just from Yates, but from those who admired him and valued her as his beloved. She liked being the only woman included in those raucous chats at the Airliner, and for a time she even liked the fact that almost all the talk was literary (as when Yates would spend half an hour discussing, say, how certain ceiling tiles might be described in fiction), which only served as another reminder that a brilliant man was in love with her.
That she didn’t really love him back was a problem, though perhaps not an insurmountable one. For a long time she’d craved purpose in her life, and what better than caring for a man who stood a good chance of becoming a bona fide famous writer? And it wasn’t just a matter of self-interest—she was fond of him: He made her laugh and “elicited a sense of protectiveness,” as she put it, “coupled with respect.” On the other hand, she sometimes felt as if she’d been “swept along into his life,” and worried over the heedlessness of it all. Before she could quite parse out her feelings, she was insolubly linked with Yates in the eyes of Iowa, and the man himself was cleaving to her for dear life. And then, too, it became increasingly clear that her role was to listen and sympathize and support, with very little coming the other way, to the extent that one’s ego was liable to vanish in the process. As Monica Yates pointed out, “Dad didn’t notice other people. He picked up on asshole people, he could figure people out in general, but in another way he saw himself projected out, and that’s another thing that made Martha angry: She thought he was going to be so perceptive, but really he was very self-regarding.”
But what else was she going to do with her life? That (at the time) was very much the question. “I was afraid to face people, afraid of my inadequacy, convinced I was boring and untalented,” she wrote Yates several years later. “You told me I was pretty, talented, and smart, while at the same time making it seem unnecessary for me to ever use any of these things.” Still, it was nice to know she was worthwhile in the abstract, or at least as Yates’s caregiver, and of course there was always the chance things would get better.
* * *
After that first bumpy month the year was off to a good start for Yates in almost every respect. His novelty verse “QWERTYUIOP
” appeared in the October Esquire, and prompted a fan letter from Roger Angell of The New Yorker: “As an occasional palindromist and part-time anagrammist,” he wrote, “I have had occasion to study this curious back-corner of letters, and I think you may have invented a new form. Invented it and exhausted it, all at the same time.” For Yates’s private reading pleasure, Angell enclosed a kindred performance of his own—a long ribald poem wherein every line is an anagram of the title, “On a Festival Aire”: “O, a vile siena fart!” it begins. This would prove one of the most gracious letters Yates ever received from The New Yorker, and particularly Roger Angell, who wrote in a very different vein some fifteen years later.
Even with his friend Cassill gone, the Workshop—or the “Program in Creative Writing” as it was now known (since Cassill’s battle had been lost)—seemed rather congenial, at least for a while, and certainly more peaceful. Paul Engle, though still a force, had resigned as director to devote himself to the International Writers’ Workshop, and his successor, the poet George Starbuck, soon became a friend and sometime protector of Yates. Workshop classes had moved out of the barracks and into the better-ventilated English Philosophy Building, and as a teacher Yates was more in demand than ever. His legend had spread in his absence, such that he was at the top of many preference lists and could pick and choose among the more talented students—the realists, anyway.
A vague source of disquiet was the new, experimental element on the fiction staff, including the surrealistic Chilean novelist José Donoso and a man named Kurt Vonnegut, who was known as everything from a black humorist to an intellectual science-fiction writer. Yates steered clear of Donoso but struck up a respectful friendship with Vonnegut. The latter was still three years away from the wealth and fame that Slaughterhouse Five would bring, though he’d made a minor splash with such novels as Cat’s Cradleand Mother Night. At the time, though, it’s likely that Yates was still the better known of the two. What mattered was that both men deeply admired the other’s work. In his Ploughshares interview, Yates made a point of exonerating Vonnegut from the charge that he was one of the detested “post-realists”: “The difference is that there’s real fictional meat in his best work, despite the surface flippancy of his style—real suffering, real passion, real humor.… When I hear kids today mention 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] generation,” and over the years nobody was more instrumental in promoting Yates’s reputation.
The two men never saw much of each other, but from the beginning they had a kind of brotherly rapport. Both had served as enlisted men in the war, and both had supported families with egregious jobs (Vonnegut at General Electric for a time), followed by many bleak years of the freelance grind. They were amused by Workshop students who worried that such jobs would “damage their machinery,” and each year the two gave “a very unpopular lecture” on the subject “The Writer and the Free Enterprise System”: “We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death,” Vonnegut said. “Dick and I found out you can almost always get work if you can write complete sentences.” But what bonded the two most, perhaps, was the fact that they were essentially melancholy men who sometimes took refuge in antic behavior—Vonnegut also liked to sing and dance (“I’d rather be Astaire than anybody other than Chekhov”)—to say nothing of cigarettes and alcohol. Vonnegut referred to Yates as “Eeyore” and insisted that his depression was mostly “existential”: “Dick was a man of big dreams,” he said, “but modest expectations.”
What Yates expected in the way of decent writing was another matter, and he felt annoyed and somewhat threatened by a now-rampant tendency—even among his own students—to indulge in what he considered gimmicky fiction: incredible characters and situations, fancy word stringing, fey whimsy, political diatribes, and so forth. For Yates such effects were “violations, bullshit” (as Bill Kittredge put it), whose proliferation sorely tested his vaunted sense of tact. When one of his more promising students submitted such a story for workshop critique, and others proceeded to praise it lavishly, Yates stood frozen at the lectern as if stricken with stunned distaste; after some forty-five minutes he suddenly broke out with, “I think you’re all just fucking around—let’s go on to the next story.” “It was like a bomb went off in the room,” said Kittredge, who to this day can hardly write a tricky line without picturing Yates’s “sad old eyes” and hearing his anguished “For Christ’s sake, Kittredge…”
But experimental fiction was the coming thing in the mid-sixties, and traditional writers such as Yates were widely considered passé and sentimental; the oppressive reality of current events seemed to call for a more subversive approach. “Oh, the hell with that,” said Yates in Ploughshares. “I find that reprehensible.” In fact he was pleased by his own pithy restraint here, since he’d been tempted to say so much more; as he subsequently wrote interviewer DeWitt Henry:
I wanted very much to mount an all-out attack on the whole fucking “Post-realistic School,” and I think I brought that off rather nicely in a short space. I didn’t mention one of the most loathsome of that breed—Robert Coover—by name, because I know the little sonovabitch personally, and a good many people know I know him, and it might have read like a vindictive personal vendetta.
Coover’s arrival at Iowa the following year was like the advent of a literary Antichrist to Yates—the incarnation of everything he deplored, and a constant reminder that he himself was perceived as old hat. Amid an increasingly radical ethos, Coover became the star of the Workshop, gathering around him a claque of students who wrote the same kind of “lazy” and “soulless” fiction as Yates would have it. And what really hurt was that some of these students were talented defectors from his own class—Kittredge, for instance, who remarked that he’d found such divergent influences a “good combination”: “From Coover I learned to see what I was doing in terms of traditions and possibilities more universal than realism. From Yates I learned something I can only sum up as responsibility, to my characters and story, to readers, and to myself.”
Yates would have shaken his head and sighed, For Christ’s sake, Kittredge; for him there were no “possibilities” beyond the necessary craftsmanship of depicting “apparent reality” in all its intricacy, and people who ignored the rules were phonies—“chessmasters,” maybe, but not writers. Toward Coover and his coterie Yates maintained a more or less civil distance; whenever he was tempted to register some kind of aesthetic demurral, he tended to preface it with a phrase like “Well, I’m just a dumb guy, but I think…” In The Easter Parade, though, he channeled his frustration through the Yates-like Jack Flanders, a “traditional” poet who accuses his experimental colleague “Krueger” of having “thrown everything overboard”: “His favorite critical adjective is ‘audacious.’ Some kid’ll get stoned on pot and scribble out the first thing that comes into his head, and Krueger’ll say ‘Mm, that’s a very audacious line.’”
The political concomitant of all this “subversive” writing was no less distasteful to Yates. The Workshop to which he returned in 1966 was, as Robert Lehrman described it, “a seething mix of creative ferment and rage about the Vietnam War.” A number of students had sought refuge from the draft by enrolling in the program, and teachers such as Vonnegut expressed solidarity by refusing to flunk anyone even if they never wrote a word. Director George Starbuck insisted on being arrested with a number of Workshop students who’d protested CIA recruitment by blocking the entrance to the student union. Yates’s rather paradoxical liberalism produced a complex but characteristic response: He opposed the war, but even more adamantly opposed the counterculture. He loathed the shaggy incivility of the protesters (whom he privately called “faggots” and worse) and was outraged by their tendency to blame the war on the soldiers. In Young Hearts Crying, Davenport’s response to a popular mock–recruitment poster (JOIN THE ARMY/VISIT EXOTIC PLACES/ AND KILL PEOPLE) was also Yates’s: “And I mean what kind of horseshit is that?… Soldiers are the victims of wars; everybody knows that.” But any number of people at Iowa disagreed: Soldiers are to blame, they argued, since they might have chosen to be conscientious objectors rather than murderers—to which Yates would respond, in effect, that one couldn’t expect a bunch of naive, patriotic kids to be so enlightened. (Martha Speer sympathized with such a view: “I myself had enlisted in a hopeless cause: Richard Yates.”) Yates thought the general disorder of the counterculture—ideological and otherwise—threatened the integrity of the Workshop, such as it was, and by the end of that first semester he was already casting about for openings at other, less radicalized universities.
But these were incidental matters, for the most part. Yates could coexist with a postrealistic counterculture as long as his own work and domestic life were in some kind of order, and in that regard he was having the best year “in the past four or five” as he reported to Cassill: “This is partly because I’m making slow but steady progress on my book (yeah, yeah, the same damn book, but different now),… but mostly because of Martha Speer.” For Martha’s sake he’d curtailed his drinking, curbed his temper (somewhat), and “learned a few tricks about how to keep students from bugging me and how to keep a safe and cordial distance from what I believe is called ‘Social Life.’” The young woman had probationally agreed to marry Yates in the not-distant future, and he was careful to stay on his best behavior. He also tried to help her find a few companions among his students’ wives and girlfriends—without much success, as Martha tended to be even more reticent than usual among women her own age. In fact she was rather opaque in general, though Yates could hardly fail to detect that she was a little conflicted about things, and he wondered whether age might be a problem after all; as he told friends, he didn’t want to seem “like fucking Sinatra” going after Mia Farrow. Andre Dubus, who sympathized with Yates’s tastes in women, sought to reassure him: “Good work to you down there, and I don’t really see why a twenty year age-gap should prevent marriage … but I’m impulsive and I’d probably tell the chick, like unto Sinatra, Come fly with me, come fly come fly away.…”
Meanwhile neither of their families knew anything. Martha’s parents continued to believe that she resided chastely at Black’s, and it was convenient that she return to Kansas City for Christmas that year, since Yates’s daughters were visiting Iowa and there was no question of their meeting Martha unless marital plans were definite. Indeed, the couple’s holiday separation may have decided things, at least in Yates’s mind. Though he enjoyed showing his children the rural splendors of Iowa, Martha’s long absence was an intolerable wrench. At least one night, though, he was diverted by welcome voices from the past: Wendy Sears was working for Mayor Lindsay in New York, and Joe Mohbat had visited her from Harvard where he was a Neiman fellow; they’d just finished dinner when they decided to have a phone reunion with their forlorn friend in the hinterland. “Dick, guess what we’re doing?” said Sears. “Joe and I are sitting here smoking pot.” Yates affected to be aghast—“You fucking hippies!” etc.—though he was touchingly happy to hear from them.
* * *
Financially it was the best and worst of times. In March, Al Ruddy bought out the motion picture rights to Revolutionary Road for $15,500, about $12,000 of which went to Yates after 10 percent was subtracted for Monica McCall and Little, Brown respectively. But really he saw very little of this windfall, as he passed most of it on to the parsimonious Sheila to divide between a college fund and down payment on a new house. As for the $10,000 federal grant, much of that had already evaporated toward debts incurred when The Bridge at Remagen fell through.
Meanwhile Sam Lawrence was pressing him to make good on their gentlemen’s agreement of three years before. “We would be prepared to make a substantial offer on your next book or books,” he reminded Yates. “I would very much like to be your publisher again.” As if to demonstrate his largess, Lawrence struck a deal with Yates’s friend Vonnegut for a $25,000 advance on his next book. Again Yates appealed to his agent for guidance, and again she guided him away from Lawrence: While she conceded that his Knopf advance was only $20,000 ($7,000 of which had gone to reimburse Little, Brown), she also pointed out that Lawrence would actually be paying for both hardcover and softcover rights, and hence Yates stood to lose “anywhere between $50,000 and $400,000” on a big softcover sale. “I do know that the pressures on you are appalling,” she wrote, “and I’m sure that your main nightmare must be a buying of time in order to finish the book. But I would hope never to have to see you pay too high a price for the time.” McCall couldn’t have known that a big paperback sale was hardly in the cards for Yates’s next book, but it was bad advice nonetheless. Lawrence subsequently assured Yates that he was willing to “repay the outstanding advance on your current novel and at the same time provide for additional income”; also the author would receive both hard and softcover royalties, pace McCall. But as Yates reminisced a few dreary years later,
In the end I told Sam I just couldn’t afford to keep my promise—told him (and this is the kind of memory that really rankles) not in a letter or in person over a drink, but in an abrupt, testy little conversation over the God damn telephone. That was splitsville between us.
And the rest is history. Within two years his “venture” had burgeoned into the multi-million-dollar Delacorte empire—one best-seller after another.
As such matters came to a head, and progress on his novel stalled again in late spring, Yates’s precarious well-being began to slip. When a young editor named Gordon Lish came to Iowa to interview Yates for a collection of taped readings, he found the author obliging but “lugubrious.” The two got “roaring drunk” (their tinkling glasses are audible on the tape), and afterward Yates insisted on driving his guest to the airport. They arrived early and sat in the cocktail lounge, where Yates bitterly maundered about having to “teach” for a living. At one point they discussed a mutual friend, Anatole Broyard, the mention of whom only reminded Yates of his main theme: He remarked on Broyard’s new career as a critic—the fact that Broyard, at least, didn’t have to demean himself by teaching anymore, much less in the sticks.
Yates’s colleagues began to notice something amiss. When Peter Davison of the Atlantic Monthly Press came to Iowa in May, Yates gave a crowded party at which his behavior seemed oddly “elevated.” Davison—who’d witnessed the spectacle of Yates’s being taken away in a straitjacket five years before at Bread Loaf—suddenly had a “clear impression” that the man was bipolar. Such conduct was all the more conspicuous to faculty and staff, toward whom Yates had tended, in the past, to be nothing if not reserved. But one night he startled his colleague Bill Murray by staying late after a party to discuss his daughter Sharon, who (Yates said) was romantically involved with a Negro.* Murray, though on good terms with Yates, was taken aback by such abrupt and bizarre intimacy. “The Workshop was very incestuous,” said Murray, “but I thought a wall of privacy should prevail.”
Martha Speer didn’t know what to make of the rather gradual change. For no particular reason Yates began to drink more and grow irritable; he paced around the house at night, sleeping less and less. He’d already told her about his psychotic episodes in the past (hence the pills), but hadn’t characterized himself as suffering from chronic mental illness. Martha wondered if others noticed the change, but nobody told her anything (until later) and she didn’t know whom to confide in. “I was left to my own devices,” she said. “It was horrible. I wanted to escape quite often, but I felt it was a commitment and I was stuck with it.” As Yates’s paranoia began to escalate, she thought she could somehow arrest the process by being steadfastly rational—by explaining, again and again, that she and others weren’t looking at him in any particular way, that a certain person wasn’t plotting against him, but of course it was no use. Repeatedly Yates went berserk—raging over grievances old and new, hurling furniture at phantoms out of his past. The nurses who lived upstairs complained about the racket to the landlady, an eccentric woman who adored Yates and did nothing. One night he arrived drunk at a dinner party for a man who’d been hired as “executive secretary” of the Workshop. “Where’s the pencil pusher?”Yates roared—and when he found the guest of honor in the kitchen: “Are you the pencil pusher?” The latter stammered some kind of protest, and Yates dumped a bowl of spaghetti over the man’s head. Finally, as a state of total psychosis set in, Yates began to hallucinate so badly he mistook old acquaintances for other people; once, elated, he told Martha he had a plan to save the world.
Yates’s students had known for some time that he was unwell: He was often drunk in class and at least once had lapsed into a crying jag. Such was their devotion, though, that they hesitated to say anything lest they get him in trouble. In the end it was Yates himself who spoke up. One morning he approached Vance Bourjaily and explained, shakily, that he had to commit himself for treatment; he thought he’d killed JFK, and though in a way he knew it wasn’t true, at the same time he was convinced of it. Unfortunately, he was determined to teach a two-hour class before he went to the hospital. Fortified with alcohol, Yates slumped over the lectern and stood blinking into the bright fluorescent light: “[He was] clearly upset,” Robert Lehrman recalled, “his voice even raspier than usual, and [he] stunned us with a long, rambling, only partly coherent monologue about a writer who turned out to have the luck of being a great writer—and married a woman of great wealth—the punch line of which was that it was William Styron.” Yates was at pains to make it clear he didn’t resent Styron—hell no, he admired the man—but it was just that he’d had such an easier life.
Yates was admitted to the hospital for a month. His friend Robin Metz paid him a visit, but felt “hopelessly inadequate” to the situation. Yates was in a locked ward for acutely disturbed patients, and Metz tried to think of cheerful things to say while others wailed and moaned and gibbered around them. Insofar as he was aware of Metz at all, Yates was abject at being seen in such a place; he sat on a couch with his knees pulled up to his forehead, “shrunk into himself,” and hardly acknowledged his visitor at all. “I realized that being a friend wasn’t always enough,” said Metz. “For the first time I realized how bad a situation Dick was in—how wretched and miserable he was.”
Martha Speer felt almost as miserable. Apart from Yates and a family whose way of life she’d rejected, she was pretty much alone in the world, and too depressed at the moment to judge things clearly. Yates’s psychiatrist at the hospital, a Dr. Brown, took pity on the bewildered young woman: “You may want to get out of this,” he urged her. “This man is going to have serious mental health problems.” Speer would always remember Dr. Brown with gratitude, as he was the only person at the time who tried to deal honestly with her. But she had a “savior complex” and chose to ignore his advice. As she later explained to Yates, “I thought ‘this is life,’ that my childhood had protected me from reality, that I could find both escape and meaning for myself in an almost religious kind of identification to another.”
Thus committed, the first thing she did was rent a smaller, cheaper apartment two blocks down the hill on Van Buren. Money, after all, was one of the things that preyed on Yates’s mind, and at least in that respect she could be of some definite use to him. But when he got out of the hospital he was displeased. “Don’t be ridiculous!” he told her, shaking his head at their “boring” new digs. “Money is to spend!”
* * *
That summer Yates rented a cottage in Montauk Point, Long Island, where he could “hole-up” and get some writing done: “No chance of finishing the book in that time,” he wrote Cassill, “but there’s a considerable chance that I might get it sufficiently in shape to finish next year.” As it turned out, he was in far too deep a funk for creative labor. Kline had given him powerful new tranquilizers on the strict condition that he stop drinking, and the drugs combined with alcoholic withdrawal left him dopey and depressed. For days at a time he hardly spoke, except to complain about his writing: He wished Martha had known him when he was “younger and smarter,” when he “knew what the hell [he] was doing.” It got very monotonous, and Martha’s depression deepened as well.
Yates put off seeing his sister almost to the end. More than three years had passed since their last meeting at Central Islip, and he dreaded what he and his fiancée would find at High Hedges. If anything it was worse than he imagined. The forty-six-year-old Ruth was now a toothless invalid who could hardly speak or walk without assistance. Yates sat beside her on the sofa and made kind, encouraging noises as she fumbled with his hands and talked about their childhood in a slurred, meandering way. Her husband Fred chatted with Martha and made sure Ruth’s glass was filled, while their well-mannered son Peter answered questions about his seminary and patiently weathered his mother’s inept sallies of affection. He alone seemed at ease with the situation. “The family was used to dealing with [Ruth],” Martha recalled, “they kept her propped up, but Peter had the best idea of her condition. The others sort of pretended it wasn’t there.” Yates endured things as long as he could, then abruptly stood up and said good-bye to his dazed older sister for the last time.
He also had a last (but one) meeting with Sheila that summer. Over lunch at Grand Central, he broke the news of his engagement to Martha, and Sheila wasn’t entirely successful in masking her skepticism. “Does she know about your problems?” she asked, and Yates replied, “Oh yes, she knows everything” in a rushed, rather touchy voice. Sheila tried to be properly congratulatory, but was further bemused by the whole age business and couldn’t help but wonder whether Yates was trying to recapture something irretrievable. Both were feeling a little awkward toward the end, and sad, and later that day Sheila wrote her ex-husband a note expressing what she’d failed to find words for in his presence:
I hope you’re not sorry for our talk today and I want you to know I don’t think you’re foolish in what you’re thinking of doing. What I really wanted to say is to do with those memories I mentioned of our romance of long ago when you and I were very young. They mean a great deal to both of us and I’ve known for a long time that nothing can come of trying to find that again with anyone else—something completely different, yes … but that particular agony and delight, never. That’s the Garden of Eden and we’ve gone out. There are other Edens, though, and if this is truly another one altogether and you’re not battering at the gates of the old one, then it’s not foolish.… Love, and good luck, Sheila
In later years she’d rarely speak of Yates—much less in Edenic terms—but then she never remarried either.
* * *
Yates’s dosages were adjusted before he left New York in mid-September, and by the time he was back in Iowa he felt like a new man. He returned to his sensible drinking regime and vowed not to let teaching duties monopolize his time; he informed his workshop that he refused to read any more stories “about the sex lives of graduate students in English.” He was determined to devote at least four hours a day to his novel until the damn thing was finished, and in fact Martha Speer can hardly remember his ever missing those four hours again, no matter how blocked or addled he sometimes became. He’d work with his door open, smoking or pacing with a pencil in his teeth, occasionally reading something aloud to her. She became adept at responding in a way that seemed both candid and appreciative.
The shared trauma of Yates’s breakdown had “glued” the couple together, as Martha put it, but no definite wedding plans were made until early that fall, when Mrs. Speer tracked her daughter down by telephone to Yates’s apartment. Things happened fast after that: Martha admitted they were living together but were engaged to be married, whereupon an immediate visit to Kansas City was arranged so Yates could meet the parents. Anxious at the prospect, he made a rather good impression: He and Dr. Speer were about the same age and found a number of tastes in common (music for one), and both parents deemed him a gentleman; for Yates’s part he was in awe of the family’s bland, putative stability, while they were duly impressed by the information that he was a celebrated author. The father was quietly dubious over Yates’s ability to generate a steady income (to say nothing of his age and apparent health), but as the man quipped, “I have so many daughters, letting one of them go won’t bother me too much.”
Yates was gleeful in announcing the wedding to friends. “I’m getting married,” he wrote Cassill. “She’s twenty years younger than me but I keep thinking about Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Sinatra and Justice Douglas, which makes it okay. Anyway I’m drinking less and showing many other signs of health including a protuberant gut and a winning smile.” He’d asked Sheila not to tell their daughters until it was definite, and a couple of weeks before the ceremony he called to break the news: “I’m getting married! Isn’t that exciting?” They’d had no idea of Martha’s existence, much less of the fact that she was just four and a half years older than Sharon—but if he was happy, so were they.
The Workshop turned out in force for the event: Everyone seemed deeply moved that the lovable, troubled Yates had found someone to take care of him; as Lehrman noted, “We wanted him to have a happier life.” Jerry Schulman was best man, and both he and Grace were struck by the way students and colleagues doted on Yates, how eager they were to accommodate the Schulmans simply because they were his friends. One rather ominous specter at the feast, however, was the poet John Berryman, about whom Grace had published an essay in the journal Shenandoah; as a pleasant diversion during the wedding rehearsal, Yates had arranged for her to attend a tea in Berryman’s honor. The plan began to backfire the night before, when the boozy, disturbed poet accosted Yates after a concert and began ranting about marriage—whether for or against was hard to tell—while Yates listened with perhaps a grim sense of recognition. The next day at the tea Berryman was owlishly tipsy, and began dictating poetry at the table (“He said it was a Chinese stanza,” said Grace; “it wasn’t”). When he learned of Schulman’s paper on the subject of his autobiographical Sonnets, he asked her whether they’d been too private to publish. He seemed genuinely upset about it.
The day of the wedding—January 20, 1968—Yates was badly hungover. The night before, he’d been the happy, silly, singing life of a party given by Bourjaily in the couple’s honor. Martha’s eight siblings were in town, and while they didn’t know much about writing, each of them thought Yates was a delightful fellow. He made a resplendent groom, too, in his Gieves and Hawkes suit—“tall, fair-haired, gorgeous,” as Grace Schulman remembered him that day—and after a few nips from a student’s flask, his crapulence faded and he entered the First Presbyterian Church with a merry grin. When the four-year-old ring-bearer, Lisa Metz, paused warily in the aisle, Yates dropped to his haunches and gave her a look of ecstatic reassurance. “Dick was so handsome when he smiled,” said the ring-bearer’s father; “he was so full of joy at having this sweet little kid involved. His eyebrows would go up, up, up as he coaxed her on.” The bride was a little dismayed to smell liquor on his breath—in a church, no less, on this of all days—but once they were man and wife and a mass of people were happily pelting them with rice, she managed a flustered smile. For better or worse, the thing was done. “I just placed my bets in that direction,” she later mused. “It might have turned out great. Who knows, he might have written another Revolutionary Road and become really famous.”
In fact a number of excellent books would follow, though by the time they were written Martha had lost all interest in Yates’s career. And whatever the case, fame or no, he would have still been the man she married. As Bill Murray remembered, “Here was this very ordinary, sweet girl, dressed like a June bride, walking into a maelstrom. I thought, Oh my God, what’s going on here?”