CHAPTER THIRTEEN
A Special Providence sold fewer than seven thousand copies and left Yates in debt to Knopf for almost thirteen thousand dollars; Dell paid only twenty-five hundred for the paperback rights and made it clear they weren’t hopeful for a large sale. “But you must not brood over this,” wrote Monica McCall; “it will simply be up to me to get you a sufficient advance from Bob on the new book.” Meanwhile Dell was considering a new edition of Revolutionary Road (out of print by then) for their Contemporary Classics line, so that was a comfort.* Nor was it the only sign that Yates wasn’t entirely forgotten as a force in American literature: That spring he was approached by Boston University, whose representatives were “most desirous of establishing the Richard Yates Collection,” as they were certain future scholars would be studying his life and work. Yates was happy to oblige with whatever papers he had, though he regretted to inform them that he’d already “lost” all working drafts of his latest novel, A Special Providence.
It had taken Yates almost fourteen years to produce his first two novels, and now that he faced “the added disadvantage of being middle-aged and tired,” he doubted that his output would increase. As fame and fortune had ceased to be imminent prospects, Yates was ready at last to commit himself to teaching as a career. “I’ve sort of decided I like [Iowa] after all,” he wrote a friend, “which I never thought would happen. I guess what it amounts to is that I’ve proved I can’t make a living in Hollywood or New York without scrambling my brains, which leaves the Groves of Academe as the only reasonable alternative—and these particular groves are the only ones I know.” As jaded as Yates remained on the subject of “teaching” writing, the truth was he rather enjoyed it: His students brought out the best in him—modesty, candor, generosity—and more than ever he needed their admiration. Unfortunately it was “almost impossible” for Yates to write and teach at the same time (since both “require the same kind of energy”), but such was also the case with every other kind of wage slavery he’d tried, and meanwhile a man and his family had to eat.
Now that he was married and settled, Yates wanted the security of tenure as well; he was now in his fifth year at Iowa and still only a lecturer with an annual salary of twelve thousand dollars, which he bitterly attributed to his lack of an academic degree. In fact tenure was rarely awarded to Workshop faculty, since a brisk turnover was regarded as desirable for any number of reasons—not the least being that many writers were prone to burnout and proved to be mediocre teachers besides. But whatever else one could say of Yates, he wasn’t mediocre, and his friend George Starbuck had recommended him for tenure before resigning as director at the end of the 1968–69 academic year.
In the fall Yates’s promotion was passed by the Executive Committee of the English Department as well as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, but his final appointment had yet to be approved. Meanwhile, a writer and Houghton-Mifflin editor, Jack Leggett, was brought in from Boston to serve as temporary director of the Workshop, and he promptly invited Yates to dinner and vice versa. Leggett was an affable man who knew of Yates through their mutual friend Sam Lawrence, and Yates assumed he’d be an ally. Frankly and rather tipsily, Yates confided his frustration over the tenure question: He’d been given to understand that approval was little more than a formality at this point, but as time dragged on he’d begun to suspect that Paul Engle “had it in for him.” Engle had retired as director a few years ago when the Workshop was absorbed by the English Department, but he still exerted considerable influence behind the scenes, and Yates thought he looked like a man “slinking around with a secret.” In any case Yates hoped that Leggett would fix the matter as soon as possible. Leggett remained affably noncommittal.
Yates’s suspicions were not idle paranoia. Though Paul Engle was regarded as a kind of benignant Carl Sandburg figure, he could be ruthless in protecting the interests of the Workshop—his own brainchild, after all—and that meant weeding out undesirables. Engle had attended Yates’s wedding to Martha, and the men were cordial if not close; privately, though, Engle had always had qualms. During Yates’s first sodden year at Iowa, he’d been protected by the formidable Cassill, who thought the vagaries of writers and Yates in particular should be pardoned as part of the psychic territory. To some extent Engle agreed, but at the same time he recognized the need for diplomatic restraint on the part of teachers and students alike, lest the Workshop’s dubious reputation in the community suffer further.
Probably Yates’s 1967 breakdown, what with all the odd behavior that attended it, had sealed his fate as far as Engle was concerned. After Cassill’s departure Yates still had influential friends such as Bourjaily and Starbuck, but the latter was gone now, too, and other poets on the faculty were not so well disposed. While Yates was careful not to insult colleagues to their faces, he was rather infamous for regarding poets with disdain. As Robin Metz explained, “Poets were open to a kind of effete sensibility—still affected by the modernist idea that they were an academic priesthood, and they engaged in the sort of esoteric literary talk that always intimidated and angered Dick. He thought they put on pretentious airs, while prose writers were foot soldiers doing an honest and difficult job.”
Ultimately, though, the poet whose opinion mattered most was Engle, and whether or not he was aware of Yates’s aesthetic prejudices was probably beside the point; when he learned that someone so “unbalanced” was about to get tenure, he took immediate action. “Engle let it be known in a whispered way that I had to get rid of Yates,” Leggett recalled. “‘This guy must not have tenure,’ he said, ‘otherwise we’ll never get rid of him,’ etcetera. I was the cop-sergeant getting orders from above. And [English chairman] Gerber must have concurred with Engle, since I wouldn’t have done anything without his order.” Leggett also remembered being approached that year by some of Yates’s students, who “loved Dick but thought he was too sick to be teaching”: Apparently Yates had missed a few classes and begun behaving erratically again. Martha, however, claims that his mental health and drinking were more or less under control at the time, and (as far as she knew) he never missed another class after his breakdown three years before.
The fact remained that Yates had been promised tenure, that he desperately needed the security to go on with his writing, and nobody wanted to break the news to him. Leggett noticed how Yates seemed to grow hostile as he began to suspect the deception, but the year passed and nobody said another straightforward word on the subject to Yates.
They waited until he’d left town in June to attend the Hollins Writing Conference in Virginia, an occasion Yates might have enjoyed under other circumstances. Organized by writer-in-residence George Garrett, the two-week conference turned into an almost legendary debauch, featuring some of the leading lights of American literature (for whose services Garrett had paid upward of five thousand dollars a head): Ralph Ellison, Styron, Peter Taylor, James Dickey, and some fifty others. “They turned the dorms into Dodge City,” said Garrett, “swimming in the nude, drinking all night. Dickey came to town with a blond hooker from Miami, and the couple appeared in the Hollins alumni magazine as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dickey.’” Amid the fun Yates somberly attended to his duties and got quietly “stewed” at night. “Martha seemed a nurse,” the writer Bill Harrison observed. “She propped Dick up and sat stroking his arm. My wife would just look at her and shake her head.”
Yates needed the nursing. He’d received a letter on arrival (“c/o The Hollins Writing Conference”) signed by his Iowa colleague Bill Murray, who sheepishly identified himself as “Acting Director” in the summertime absence of those from whom he was taking orders:
A problem has come up regarding your appointment to Associate Professor. The Administration questioned it on two grounds—the usual “ladder of promotion” is from Lecturer to Assistant Professor: Vance was promoted in this way. They also questioned the validity of making a tenured appointment when the Workshop has no Director. You know, of course, that the initial proposal for your promotion passed the Executive Committee of the Department, and through the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts as well. The question came from the Provost of the University.
John Gerber called a special meeting of the Executive Committee, and it was decided to recommend your promotion to Assistant rather than Associate Professor. The Assistant Professorship is a three-year appointment, renewable.… Though the promotion now is to Assistant Professor, your salary will be that promised you as Associate Professor.
Yates was devastated—as much by the cowardice and petty chicanery of it all (“The question came from the Provost of the University”) as by the professional consequences to himself. Back in Iowa, he made a beeline for Leggett’s office and stood glowering in the doorway while the man let him know, affably as ever, that he hadn’t written a recommendation for Yates’s tenure and now—well, he didn’t see how he could. “That told Dick all he needed to know,” said Leggett. “It was time for him to fish or cut bait.”
Yates had no desire to accept the guilty sop of an assistant professorship, but as it turned out he’d be stuck at Iowa for another disgruntled year while he hunted for a job, any job, with a somewhat comparable salary. He even wrote to his old friend Hayes Jacobs at the New School, who jovially replied that he could get Yates as much as eight hundred dollars for a fifteen-week term, which was more than “80% of the writing faculty” were paid. Yates kept looking.
* * *
He didn’t want to spend a day more in Iowa City than strictly necessary, and much of that summer was spent traveling. For a long time he’d been eager to get started on a novel about a man who goes “progressively, irredeemably crazy,” and for the sake of mnemonic atmosphere he returned to the sites of his own breakdowns. For a month or so, he and Martha lived in the same raffish part of Hollywood where Yates had been arrested while emptying his wallet on Sunset Boulevard. Such research had a less than salutary effect on his morale, though he was careful not to drink too much and invite a sequel to the summer of 1965. Meanwhile Brian Moore rallied round with a party or two in the Yateses’ honor. Martha observed that her husband’s Hollywood friends seemed “relieved that someone was taking care of him,” though Joan Didion was “chilly” toward her, and apparently Didion wasn’t the only one. Years later, long after his second marriage was over, Yates was still grumbling about how certain “Hollywood writers” had been rude to his wife, though Martha wasn’t particularly bothered one way or the other (“that’s just the way it was”). For Yates, though, it was further proof of the corrupting influence of the place.
After a teaching visit to Central Oregon Community College, the Yateses spent a week at Bill Kittredge’s home in Missoula, Montana. Yates’s old roughneck buddies Bob Lacy and Jim Crumley were on hand, and the reunion was a festive respite in the midst of a trying summer. Despite the rowdiness of the younger set, Yates was adamant about sticking to his sensible drinking regime for Martha’s sake. “Dick waited until the cocktail hour,” said Kittredge, “but around 4:30 he’d start pacing through the house straightening pictures and checking the thermostat.” As it happened, the visit was the last Kittredge ever saw of his old teacher (except for the “sad eyes” that sometimes appeared whenever he lapsed into tricky prose).
Yates continued his research in New York, lurking around Bellevue and St. Vincent’s and various old haunts in the Village. Memories of his tormented “second bachelorhood,” mingled with a sense of unfulfilled literary promise, left him depressed and on edge. Bob Riche was struck by the change in Yates when the two met at Warren and Marjorie Owens’s house in Bethel, Connecticut. As Riche remembered, “Dick used to be so funny, but no more. Just to be provocative, I mentioned a few postrealist authors like Barth, and Martha took me aside and said ‘Please don’t get him upset.’” Warren Owens also noticed Martha’s tendency to “cringe” at her husband’s outbursts, and later she unhappily confided that she’d been having problems calming him down. Most of the night’s discussion was political: One of the guests, Penny Miller, was the wife of a CBS correspondent who’d recently been killed in Vietnam, and Yates was alternately consoling and volatile in his ranting against the war—incited somewhat, perhaps, by Riche’s competitive tendency to remind the room that he himself was not merely “radical” but “revolutionary.” “I recall trying to say a good many loud and raucous things on all sides,” Yates wrote afterward, “and finally spoiling the whole party by puking my guts out into what I believe was a very nice toilet bowl (yeah, yeah, drunk again).”
But the night had piqued Yates into thinking about the past, his own generation’s political convictions, and on the plane back to Iowa he began to consider a rather peculiar nonfiction project—all the more alluring, perhaps, because his new novel had left him blocked and haunted and he was eager to put it aside, and perhaps too because he was tempted to prove he could be as “relevant” as the next writer. That fall, anyway, Yates appeared at a public reading in Iowa with two manila envelopes under his arm, one marked DISTURBING THE PEACE and the other VETERANS; he told the audience he wasn’t willing to read from either, but would answer questions, most of which were in regard to the latter. As Yates subsequently described Veterans to the man whom it most concerned, “the ‘book’ might be in the form of one long letter, or possibly a series of letters, to an old friend … John A. Williams.” He went on:
But there has been a lot of “veteranship” between you and me—combat service in WWII, early marriages that didn’t work, touch football, boozing, and meeting Famous Writers at Bread Loaf, the many times you tried to explain different kinds of jazz to me … those phone calls between us when Ed Wallant was dying; the time I woke you up … and made you listen to the Kennedy Civil Rights Address that never got delivered; the time you stayed in my Washington D.C. apartment during your Holiday Magazine trip, and much, much more.
Who knows where this bizarre career move would have taken Yates—this impulse to rebut the radical youth of Iowa who, he noted sardonically, were “On the March (… one of the more bewildered undergraduates is my older daughter, Sharon)”—had it not been for John Williams’s intrigued but rather barbed reply. Among other things Williams remembered that their first conversation at Bread Loaf in 1960 had concerned what Yates allegedly called “the mediocre record of black soldiers in World War II”; Williams then proceeded to confess his irritation over being used as a sounding board for Yates’s civil rights speeches in 1963. It took Yates many months to regain his composure, and finally he wrote a measured but seething response: Their “first conversation,” he amended, was not at all as Williams described it, but rather “about the hideous whim of the federal government that consigned virtually all Army blacks to rear-echelon service and support duty.” What angered Yates most, though, was his old friend’s belated frankness about the speechwriting episode. “I guess all this just goes to show how many secrets lie under the surface of any friendship,” Yates concluded. “But it tends to make my ‘Veterans’ book a much harder piece of work than I thought it was going to be and so I have temporarily shelved it.” “Temporarily” soon became forever, and apparently neither Veterans nor any other nonfiction book, relevant or otherwise, was undertaken again.
Perhaps it was for the best. Such diversions seemed the baffled groping of a lost man, but that fall he was summoned back to the true path. He’d been “sore as hell” when Revolutionary Road first went out of print (“Do you know what being out of print is like? It’s like being dead”), but now Dell was preparing a new paperback edition for the lucrative college market. Moreover, his famous friend Vonnegut had provided a blurb in which he called the novel “The Great Gatsby of [its] time”: “All the time I praise books I don’t give a shit about,” he wrote Yates. “This is a sickness of mine. I thank you for the opportunity to do something healthy for a change—to boom one of the best books of our generation.” And finally Fred Chappell’s rueful vindication of the novel was published that April (a month after the Dell edition) in a volume titled Rediscoveries. Martha seized the moment to rally her husband with a “Rebirth Announcement” mailed to friends: “Revolutionary Road is back in print now. Richard Yates Club International. Martha Yates, President.” And by the end of that last, otherwise uneventful year at the Workshop, Yates was able to write that he was “deep” into his new novel “and working with qualified optimism.” It was a start.
* * *
Yates was sufficiently eager to leave Iowa that he decided to accept a job as “Distinguished Writer in Residence” at Wichita State University, though he had to do a certain amount of soul-searching first. Jack Leggett had assured him that his three-year term as assistant professor would remain intact no matter what, so really there was no hurry to settle for a venue like Kansas, which seemed the quintessence of what Vonnegut called “up the river.” On the other hand the salary was decent (sixteen thousand dollars a year), and Martha was in favor of living closer to her family. Nor was he likely to get a better offer. The fact was, even in the darker plains states Yates’s drinking and odd behavior had become all but proverbial—indeed, had been much discussed in advance at Wichita State, where the head of the writing program, Bruce Cutler, was a former Workshop student of Yates. “There’s a great deal of interest among the students here in your arrival,” Cutler wrote his old teacher, on whom he’d promised to keep an eye. At any rate it was only a temporary appointment, renewable or not at the end of the year, whereupon Yates could always return (temporarily) to Iowa.
Moving out of the stone cottage was a melancholy business: Yates was fond of the drafty old conversation piece, where he’d hoped to settle for however long it took to write the novel that would end his teaching days forever. But then he was hardly one to become overly attached to (or even much conscious of) wherever he happened to dwell, and after a big garage sale they moved in August to a suburban tract house in Wichita. The place was soulless, though Yates was impressed by its efficient, no-nonsense modernity, and he went right to work in climate-controlled comfort without any more picturesque distractions.
Things got off to a good start. Yates was promptly interviewed by the local newspaper, and a flattering article with a photo of both Yateses followed; also he was pleased to find that he had two or three students who gave hints of talent and were good occasional companions as well. He felt as if he’d landed on his feet, more or less, and was careful to keep his balance: He stuck to his sensible drinking regime, avoided faculty parties, met his classes on time, and got his work done. One drawback was that Martha’s life was duller than usual, and (with whatever misgivings) she decided it was time to have a baby. Yates saw her point, and within a month of their arrival she was pregnant.
With another child on the way, the long-term prospect of ill-paying academia—whether in Wichita or Iowa City or whatever godforsaken place he landed—looked grimmer than ever, such that he was even willing to consider Hollywood again. In October he asked McCall to find out whether Al Ruddy would hire him to write a screenplay adaptation for Revolutionary Road. McCall urged him to “dream up an original” screenplay if possible, since “material in this form is more easily saleable than in the novel or play form.” Meanwhile Ruddy claimed he was still interested in making a movie out of Yates’s novel, but already had two projects lined up after The Godfather. He did tell McCall that it would “break [his] heart” for another person to produce Revolutionary Road,though if someone made him an “irresistible offer” he wouldn’t stand in the way. But nobody did, and Ruddy kept busy with other things, and Yates decided to forgo “original” screenwriting and get back to work on Disturbing the Peace (“in something of a muddle” by the end of November).
That spring Yates scheduled back-to-back readings at the University of Arkansas and Roger Williams College in Rhode Island; clearly, geographical convenience was not the guiding principle. During three years of marriage he and Martha had rarely been apart, and except for the odd lapse Yates had been on his best behavior. But with a baby due in June, and his financial future uncertain as ever, the Easter break would be his last chance to go on a quick cathartic bender in congenial company—namely, with old friends and/or students such as Miller Williams, Jim Whitehead, and Bill Harrison in Arkansas, and Geoffrey Clark, DeWitt Henry, and the Cassills in Rhode Island. Martha spent the time with her family in Kansas City.
The Arkansas part of the junket remains something of a blur to all concerned. Yates put in a few workshop appearances and gave a reading, after which he got “over the top” drunk at Bill Harrison’s house and passed out on the floor (“students stepped over his body on the way out,” Harrison recalled). Rhode Island was somewhat more memorable, though hardly more sober. Yates’s host, Geoffrey Clark, was a devoted protégé who introduced Yates to his students as “the best teacher I ever had.”* “Say, Geoff, tell me the truth,” Yates later asked him. “Did you really mean that about being the best teacher you ever had? Are you kidding me?” Clark assured him that he was not, and Yates’s face broke into “a shy, pleased smile” as Clark described it, “a Gatsby smile.” Yates was less pleased when he skimmed through his ex-student’s teaching copy of Revolutionary Road and encountered the marginal gloss “use of cliché”: “[Yates] seemed to recoil from it as from a hot poker,” Clark recalled, “then go glum, until my explanation: The note was a reminder to me to point out to my class how he’d use spoken clichés to capture the character of the speaker.”
The main item on the agenda was an interview for the journal Ploughshares, which DeWitt Henry had founded in Boston the year before as a corrective to the tide of experimental postmodernism sweeping the country. The interview was a chance for Yates to discuss the principles of traditional fiction in terms of his own work, as well as to recommend a number of other writers who were in danger of being overlooked amid present trends. The published interview is perhaps the most useful source of Yates’s opinions on his craft and career, as well as the most vivid record of his distinctively candid yet diffident voice—all of which is a bit remarkable given that the actual interview was something of a fiasco and had to be rewritten almost from scratch.
Henry had driven down from Boston with two Ploughshares associates, David Omar White and Peter O’Malley, as well as the latter’s fiancée, the poet Richard Wilbur’s daughter Ellen. The interview was taped over the course of several boozy hours at Clark’s house, and the interviewee was besotted in more ways than one—flirting blatantly with “that luscious Wilbur girl,” as he called her. “I felt like a teenybopper because I admired Revolutionary Road so much,” Wilbur remembered. “But I was also alarmed: I told [Yates] he had the most brutal eye for human flaws of any writer, and it frightened me to think he was casting the same eye, right now, on me.” Yates was flattered, and when Wilbur further confessed a kindred fondness for Cole Porter and Gershwin, he became enthralled. When she wondered if he could supply a forgotten line from a favorite song, his face “lit up at the challenge”: “‘You’re the cream in my coffee,’” she prompted, “‘you’re the—’…?” “‘Lamb in my stew’!” he crowed, and the two proceeded to sing the rest. Wilbur’s fiancé grew increasingly glum as Yates implied that such an elegant woman deserved better (“I seem to recall being not very nice to that Irish clown,” Yates wrote afterward). And finally they all adjourned to Howard Johnson’s, where Cassill (then at Brown University) met them in order to take his worse-for-wear guest home for the night. Alas, amid “all the boozing and bullshit,” as Yates put it, he’d “totally [failed] to apologize to DeWitt for having flubbed his interview.” Indeed, Henry found his transcription “fragmentary, diffuse and frustrating,” but hoped the subject would agree to expand and clarify in written form, and this Yates was happy to do.
There was another, less festive bit of business in the East. David Milch had returned to Yale to teach alongside his old mentors Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, and had recently intimated that he might be able to arrange a writer-in-residence job for Yates. The latter’s distaste at assuming the role of supplicant vis-à-vis an old bête noire like Milch can scarcely be conceived—or rather it can, since it wouldn’t be the last time it happened. But at the time he was simply too desperate not to pursue the lead, however specious: More than ever Yates wanted to end his exile in the sticks and live in or around New York again; also he’d prefer to say he taught at Yale rather than Wichita State. Yates visited Milch’s seminar a few times that spring and summer as a guest lecturer, and though he was visibly cowed by the dreadful ambience of the Ivy League, he acquitted himself well enough for Milch to report somewhat plausibly that “chances [were] very good” he’d be hired: Milch had broached the matter with the author of All the King’s Men,whose “reaction was very favorable, as was that of Cleanth Brooks.” He added, however, that Brooks was “angling for Walker Percy,” though Percy’s health was such that he seemed “reluctant to come north.”
Nothing came of it. “Maybe I didn’t follow through,” said Milch, “or maybe Dick gave the impression he was having a lot of problems.” Whatever the case, Milch concedes his “ambivalence” toward Yates in those days: “Probably I didn’t go out of my way to put Dick at ease—inviting him in, but not letting him know he was in. That was the kind of asshole I was at the time.”
* * *
Gina Catherine was born on June 15, 1972, more than fifteen years after Yates’s previous child; her belated advent seemed a promise that Yates (if he played his cards right) would have the comfort of a doting girl for the rest of his life, and thus was cause for great rejoicing. “She’s lovely!” he wrote friends. “Looks just like her mother.” Her namesake Gina Berriault (who’d finally met Yates in the flesh while teaching at Iowa two years before) wrote that the baby “must be beautiful and delightful, she can’t be less, given her parents who answer to that description themselves.” And so she was, and for a little while Yates was the happiest he’d been since he first met the baby’s mother: Love-struck, he fussed over Gina constantly and even seemed to enjoy changing diapers and so forth. Such was his contentment that he was able to work better, though he had less time for it, while Martha installed a darkroom and got on with both motherhood and photography. The baby’s presence was a decided improvement.
That summer DeWitt Henry sent a somewhat worked-over transcript of their “interview,” and Yates was so appalled by what he’d apparently let slip while in his cups that he rewrote almost every word, including a number of the questions. “Believe it or not,” he informed Henry, “I have put an awful lot of work into this thing—a solid week, working damn near around the clock, neglecting everything else I was supposed to be doing—and I do feel satisfied with it now, though you may not.” The project posed an interesting challenge to Yates. As he began to consider seriously what he’d so “dumbly” put on tape, he found himself working out certain convictions that hadn’t been quite so clear in his mind before. For example, his frustration over the failure of A Special Providence had provoked “a half-assed outburst against autobiographical fiction,” which on sober reflection struck him as “pure nonsense.” In the published interview, then, Yates nicely amended the matter with a detailed apologia for his own evolution from a mostly “objective” writer to one who’d learned the hard way that he hadn’t “earned the right” (yet) to translate personal experience directly into fiction—which was not to say it couldn’t be done, given the proper “distance” and “detachment.”
Perhaps the most ticklish issue was that of neglect, both with respect to his own reputation and certain others’. The last thing Yates wanted was to come off as a crybaby who felt he’d been treated unfairly by the literary establishment, or had the bad luck of going against the grain of egregious fashion. His original response (or rather Henry’s touched-up version of it) is arguably a bit closer to Yates’s true feelings on the subject than what he allowed into print, and deserves to be quoted at length:
A popular writer, a writer who gains a broad and sustained contemporary audience, I guess, like any other writer wants to know he’s good, and the bestseller lists and talk shows and his annual income all repay whatever faith it was that sat him down in front of his typewriter in the first place. But if he’s a serious writer that’s got to come second.… Much more common, and I think the case is mine, [is when] the good work is its own reward and you share it with as many readers as you can and it stays alive, and has some hard-won clarity and richness, some distillation of human investment, that continues to claim some kind of permanent interest no matter what angles fashion may dispose new readers towards.… My first book made a big, popular splash and that kind of success was intoxicating, and I was in the racket, in the race, but the down that followed it was miserable, and the real success has been a quieter, more solid kind of thing. I know the book’s good. It’s there. It wins new readers. That level is there to be reached, and I don’t need a cheering crowd to tell me that it’s worth it. It would be nice to be the fashion, to be recognized for what I’m trying to do—in the sense that Mailer is, for instance—life would be easier in a lot of ways—but the price of doing something difficult and honest, something true, as April Wheeler learned, is doing it alone.
Yates cut the entire speech, which perhaps struck him as pontifical or protesting too much, though surely he believed every word of it: To Yates writing was a lonely business (it would become more so over time), and had to be its own reward.* A little more fame, however, would have been “nice.”
As for the question of other neglected contemporaries in the realistic tradition, Henry had originally suggested three: Edward Wallant, Brian Moore, and Evan Connell. Yates agreed they were neglected after a fashion, but for very different reasons (e.g., Wallant because of his early death), and hence in revision he made a separate, qualified case for each—“and then,” as he wrote Henry, “once I got started, I couldn’t stop. There are simply too God damn many neglected contemporary writers, and I felt I had to mention at least a few of them.” The few? Anatole Broyard, Gina Berriault, R. V. Cassill, George Garrett, Seymour Epstein, Fred Chappell, Helen Hudson, Edward Hoagland, George Cuomo, Arthur Roth, Andre Dubus, James Crumley, Mark Dintenfass, Theodore Weesner, and on and on—mostly friends or students, but still writers whose work Yates admired, and whose careers he was loath not to boost when given the chance.
“Anyway,” Yates’s letter to Henry continued, “that got me started on the making of still another damn list—
a list of traditional, realistic writers who haven’t been neglected, who have made major critical and popular reputations—and in a way that was the most maddening part of the whole damn thing. In one of my early drafts, for example, I launched into a furious, splenetic diatribe against Saul Bellow, and another equally nasty assessment of J. P. Donleavy. But I tore all that stuff up in the end; I finally decided the best way to do it was simply to leave out the writers whose work I don’t respect … and mention only those whose work I do. It’s really a short list, as you’ll see.*
Another diatribe that required a great deal of temperate revision was the one against “the whole fucking Post-realistic School’”—from which he felt obliged explicitly to exempt Vonnegut despite the “tricky business” of the nice blurb the man had provided for Revolutionary Road: “[S]o I guess some of your more small-minded readers are going to think I’m kissing his ass in return for that favor,” Yates advised Henry. “And the point I’d like to make, to you, is that I don’t give a shit if they do.” Finally he asked Henry to “read this damn thing carefully, and bear in mind that my whole effort has been to make it clear, sane, rational and fair.”
It was all those things, and Yates’s pains in making it so were not in vain. A few months later Henry walked down the street to Sam Lawrence’s office in order to submit his own work-in-progress, as well as to show a sample issue of Ploughshares and the Yates interview in proof. Lawrence was impressed by how “cogent and back-to-work” his old friend seemed. The two men had been out of touch for almost five years; Yates was hurt but unsurprised that Lawrence had sent no word when A Special Providence was published (“in all its carefully-edited sloppiness,” as Yates put it). He assumed Lawrence had given him up for dead—another washed-up author, and a treacherous friend at that—and thus was “very touched” to hear again from Lawrence that November: “I’ve just finished reading proofs of a very fine interview you gave to DeWitt Henry and I could hear your voice clearly,” Lawrence wrote. “If for any reason you decide to change publishers, please let me know.” “So who knows?” said Yates. “I might still bring out a Delacorte ‘Seymour Lawrence Book’ and have money coming in by the bushel-basketful.”
* * *
Meanwhile he was still in Wichita. His writer-in-residence appointment had been renewed for another year, and might indeed become permanent if he wasn’t careful. By then the idea of getting out of Kansas and going home to New York had become an obsession, and Yates was far from particular about the means. He asked Hayes Jacobs—an old freelancer like himself—to find him an employment agent who could scout the New York job market for anything from PR to publishing to teaching to whatever, preferably on a part-time basis. Jacobs was less than sanguine (“devilishly hard to place you at the price you’re seeking”), but put him in touch with Elise Ford at the Prudential Placement Agency.
For Ms. Ford’s benefit, Yates spent much of his Thanksgiving vacation updating his résumé—a two-and-a-half page, single-spaced summary of a singularly varied career: Its subject (a “Free-lance Writer”) was an NBA-nominated author of three books who’d received several major grants, served as “sole speechwriter” for Robert F. Kennedy, written screenplays for John Frankenheimer and Roger Corman, and published short stories in numerous anthologies and major magazines (though not, alas, The New Yorker); along the way he’d also written for Food Field Reporter, Trade Union Courier, UPI, Johnson & Johnson, and of course Remington Rand (about which he spilled the most résumé ink of all, detailing his various duties on behalf of the UNIVAC); and last but hardly least, he’d taught at four universities and his list of references included Styron, Vonnegut, Cassill, Kazin, Bourjaily, and Dr. Frank Kastor at Wichita State University (“This is my present position”).
Such a résumé would seem to suggest an eminently can-do kind of guy, but amid what Jacobs called the “big Nothing” of the New York job market, the only initial nibble it elicited was from N. W. Ayer and Son, Inc., who thought they might be able to get Yates an occasional PR assignment concerning the “U.S. Army’s second centennial.” The academic world was even more categorical in its rejection. Hostos Community College was willing to interview Yates (but wouldn’t pay travel expenses), while Sarah Lawrence, Rutgers, Queensborough Community College, Rider College, Princeton, Wellesley, Skidmore, and SUNY at Stony Brook—just to mention the few that favored Yates with a reply—had no openings at the time. As a kind of dismal postscript, Yates’s old New York friend Arthur Roth wrote in January that his last two novels had been rejected (“a lot of commitment down the drain”) and for the past nine months he’d been working as a carpenter’s helper. “I often wonder how you are doing and how life is treating you,” Roth remarked.
At the moment Yates was of the opinion that life was treating him poorly. Perhaps as a favor to Sam Lawrence (with whom McCall was tentatively negotiating a contract for Disturbing the Peace), 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 knew at the outset was that the book was about a drunk, and by the time he finished it Yates was a drunk again, too. Martha never quite understood the coincidence: “The fact that he’d review such a book gave me the creeps,” she said, “and afterward he seemed to make a decision to give up. The book seemed to remind him that drinking was something he could do.”
The book also made him aware of the fact that a Delacorte author had just published a novel almost exactly like the one Yates himself had been writing for three years. Ninety percent of Yates’s Times review is a dogged plot summary, as if he were bemusedly enumerating all the ways in which Weiner’s book resembled his own: The alcoholic protagonist Charlie Lester is a PR man who’s “cynical about his work”; he decides to consult a “vain, supercilious” psychiatrist who “appears to doze through Charlie’s hapless monologues”; after a few sessions Charlie “quits the man cold” and goes on a vacation to dry out, but ends up “screaming drunken obscenities to [his wife] on the phone”; he makes his ten-year-old son feel “so unhappy and embarrassed” that all the boy can muster is a mumbled “Fine” or “OK” or “No” (the constant refrain of John Wilder’s son is “I don’t know. I don’t care”). And so on. Toward the end of his review, Yates pointed out a few flaws such as Weiner’s “dreadful images” (for example, the surf rolls in “as if to the slow rhythmic beat of a giant, salt-encrusted metronome”), but then manfully calls it a “compelling piece of work”: “Charlie Lester’s real ‘problem’ is the agony of his total isolation, and it comes to serve as an eloquent, unforgettable metaphor for the secret loneliness in us all.” A very Yatesian theme, that, and an apt description of Wilder’s (and Yates’s) “real ‘problem’” as well.
So began what might arguably be called the worst year (or two) of Yates’s life, which of course is no mean assertion. “He started drinking during the day,” Martha remembered. “One of his students was a big drinker, and the two of them would get drunk a lot until three A.M. or so. I hated it.” In despair over his novel (to say nothing of life in general, the steady drumbeat of rejection coming his way from New York), Yates tried writing a short story for the first time in ten years. Titled “Forms of Entertainment,” it was promptly rejected by The New Yorker and then sent to Gordon Lish at Esquire, who’d solicited work from Yates as soon as he arrived at the magazine a few years before. Monica McCall reported that Lish was “putting the story through”—that is, “sending it upstairs to [Editor in Chief] Harold Hayes for confirmation of purchase, which does not necessarily mean a firm acceptance because apparently Hayes could … turn it down.” Yates was frantic enough to call Lish on the phone, which resulted in the following note: “Dick—I’m doing all that can be done; trust me. But for God’s sake, man, keep this thing in perspective.”
A few days later the story was officially rejected. As Lish recalled the episode, “I wanted to get Dick into Esquire, because I felt bad for him and wanted to do something for him: He was so miserable, that I extended myself.” But the truth was that “Forms of Entertainment” had never made it past the magazine’s associate editors, and Lish (“in defiance of [his] better judgment”) had tried but failed to change their minds about it. Yates responded to this latest rejection by calling Lish on the phone and abusively accusing him of favoring only “name” writers; finally he threatened to “get on a plane and shoot [Lish].” “Dick was unappeasable, shouting,” Lish remembered. “His wife was screaming in the background: ‘Don’t pay attention! He’s drunk! He’s drunk!’ Afterward she called me to apologize.” The next day Lish wrote Yates a letter:
Your performance was an appalling piece of self-destruction. How absurd to make an enemy of me and of Esquire.… Your calls, your letters, the whole matter of your offering of “Forms” and your response to the rejection is ugly and sad. Your rage should be directed elsewhere; if you had the maturity of your years, you’d see this. And as for your threats of violence, come ahead, old buddy: you’ll find me as passionate in this as in friendship.
It would take almost three years for a somewhat recovered Yates to apologize; meanwhile he decided not to submit “Forms of Entertainment” elsewhere, and the manuscript doesn’t survive.
“It was a Jekyll and Hyde thing,” Martha said of her husband’s abrupt decline. “It was like something clicked in his brain: Suddenly he wasn’t there anymore. He was irrational, drunk all the time, and it was willful, in-your-face drinking.” Consumed with self-loathing over his work and desperately anxious about the future, Yates began to suspect that the world was conspiring against him. Shortly after the Esquire contretemps, he called Styron and held the man captive for some two hours while he railed against all the people who’d let him down: friends, family, Hollywood people, Iowa people, on and on. Soon Martha became the enemy—particularly when Yates discovered a paperback on alcoholism she’d recently purchased and stashed in a drawer. “He hit the ceiling,” she recalled. “Furious. I couldn’t deny it was to read about him; it was the first time, by default, I’d confronted him that I thought he was an alcoholic.” Many “endless conversations” followed—the long lesson in futility that Sheila had learned so thoroughly more than a decade before. As ever, Yates proved an adept, indefatigable arguer, and would never concede that he was an “alcoholic.” The word enraged him: Whoever used it didn’t understand where the “real ‘problem’” lay.
Into this nightmare came his daughter Monica, who for fifteen years had somehow been spared the knowledge of her father’s mental problems. This time he was too far gone to pull himself together for her visit, though during the daytime, at least, he was sober if morose. But night after night she’d hear him pacing the hours away and hissing abuse at his wife, the word bitch recurring every so often amid the general mutter. One morning she found Martha sitting in the kitchen weeping. “Why is he being so mean?” Monica asked, and the hollow-eyed woman said he had a “drinking problem.” By then Martha herself was so depressed that she’d stopped doing housework, and Monica tried to cheer things up by mopping floors and taking care of the baby. But mostly she stayed away on her bicycle, and when she returned to Mahopac she asked her mother about Yates’s “problem.” Sheila had made it a point never to malign her ex-husband to the children (though “she always spoke badly of him later,” Monica points out), but this time she calmly explained that, yes, he was an alcoholic. “I am your daughter and I love you,” Monica wrote her father, “and I hereby order you to be no longer depressed or sad or feeling blue.… When you finish reading this I want you to go look at your neato wife and your little cute daughter and think of your two big daughters and be overjoyed.”
But Yates was almost beyond noticing his wife and daughter, much less deriving comfort from them. As Martha put it, “He was so self-absorbed by then he couldn’t part the curtains of his own problems and relate to the world.” Determined to confront him with indisputable proof of his sickness (and also, perhaps, to have something to show a doctor when the time came), Martha prepared a list of symptoms that gives a vivid idea of what it was like to live with Yates at his worst, and why it was sometimes difficult to make a proper distinction between alcoholism and mental illness. According to the memo, Yates had taken to “spook[ing]” around the house in his underwear (“usually fanatic about body exposed,” Martha noted, “—skinny legs, etc.”), and sometimes standing still for long intervals, obliviously, as if in deep concentration. He was now smoking “constantly” and “inhal[ing] deeply,” though all the while he was obsessed with a fear of death from lung cancer or heart disease. Like his idol Fitzgerald, he made constant lists in “very emphatic script” while “talking to self and constant whispering (extreme).” Sometimes his grandiosity was such that he became convinced he had an urgent “message to the world” and was on the “verge of something big.” But perhaps the most definitive symptom was an agitated inability to communicate, to understand and make himself understood amid the depths of his own bewildered dread. As Martha wrote:
Mostly quiet and brooding but when gets to talking easily worked up into panicky declarations: “I hate psychiatrists.” “What do you know” “They do watch what you’re wearing.” … Increasingly jumpy to being asked simple question while working or charged with simple tasks or put something on calendar. [E.g.,] “Breakfast is ready.” “God damn it.” Time—calendar and clock great source of consternation, confusion and panic.… Simple phrases and cliches are not understood for their common meaning. [E.g.,] “Which Saturday is this Saturday?” (It could be any in the year) … Recurring conversation. D: Martha? M: What, honey? D: Oh nothing. Recurring: “I’ll be okay just as soon as … Don’t go away.[…] How am I doing? […] I’m all right. […] Who says I’m crazy? (then a hug) […] How could you love a crazy man? […] What’s going to become of me? [”] … As time passes more and more fearful of hospitalization or being doped up and brought down too far (a legitimate fear) and more suspect of my motives—“You think I’m crazy” “You don’t understand.”
The more Martha begged him to get help, the more sarcastic and spitefully drunken he became. And though he was wholly dependent on her (Don’t go away), he seemed unmoved by the distress he caused with such obnoxious behavior. When she finally lost her temper and flew at him with her fists, the inebriated Yates seemed to enjoy the spectacle, holding her off and laughing.
After a while she gave up. “I remember sitting on the couch,” she said, “holding Gina, my tears falling on her, and Dick yelling at me. It was so senseless it sticks in my head: What’s wrong with this picture?” Since she didn’t argue anymore, Yates seemed to assume he’d finally brought her around to his point of view—namely, that he didn’t need help, that all would be well as soon as certain enigmatic factors fell into place. In fact she’d made “a cool-headed, deliberate decision”: She’d do whatever was necessary to help him get back to New York (“I felt responsible for Wichita”), then wait a year or so “for him to be lucid enough to fend for himself.” Then she’d take the baby and leave.
* * *
By the time Yates’s luck changed he was in no condition to enjoy it. His red letter day was March 21, 1973, when he was offered a part-time position at Columbia beginning with the spring 1974 semester; far more importantly, a lucrative deal (by Yates’s standards) was finalized that same day with Sam Lawrence, who offered a fifty-thousand-dollar advance for Disturbing the Peace. At the time Yates was too relieved to be bothered much by the somewhat eccentric method of payment, which would persist for the rest of their association: He was to receive twelve thousand dollars on signing, and then equal monthly payments of fifteen hundred dollars until he delivered the manuscript on July 1, 1974, whereupon he’d receive the balance of twenty thousand dollars—or rather, he’d receive ten thousand dollars for delivery and another ten thousand dollars when the book was published. The idea was to provide a steady long-term income for an unpredictable man. “Those monthly payments were a kind of salary,” Lawrence proudly observed, “and they sustained him.”
They also signaled the beginning of an even more ambivalent phase of the friendship. When sane and solvent, Yates was mostly grateful for Lawrence’s belief in him as a writer, for his financial as well as moral support. (“How much do you need, Dick?” Lawrence had said when Yates complained of his Wichita predicament.) It was true that he thought Lawrence a bit pompous, but, as he wrote a friend, “at his best he’s a solid man with good instincts”—moreover, “he’ll never try to fuck around with your manuscripts, as many editors do; he’s never asked me to change a word.” After the “carefully-edited sloppiness” of Knopf, Yates had decided that Lawrence’s laissez-faire approach was a virtue after all; as for the man’s “good instincts,” he found favor with Yates by turning down such novels as The World According to Garp (“On the other hand,” Yates noted, “he’s an enthusiastic supporter of Richard Brautigan, so what the hell are we going to do?”). Lawrence’s view of Yates, meanwhile, was characterized by a kind of complicated magnanimity—“a mixture of admiration and concern,” as their mutual friend Dan Wakefield put it.
It was the “concern” part that rankled. Concern meant that he was mawkishly aware of Yates’s failings—his drinking and instability and general incapacity to care for himself. Lawrence, too, was a heavy drinker and rather strange man in his own right, but he was also prosperous, and proprietary toward his authors; what he demanded (implicitly) in return for his largess was that they do their work and show a seemly gratitude, a sentiment Yates sometimes felt and sometimes didn’t. Lawrence’s later eulogy of his old friend, while touching in parts, reads almost like a litany of unacknowledged favors, as it’s largely comprised of data relating to their various contracts. “Dad would’ve hated that eulogy,” said Monica Yates. “[Lawrence] went on and on about the money.… That was a love-hate relationship big-time.” Another aspect of Lawrence’s concern that bothered Yates was the fact that it was mostly transmitted at arm’s length (usually in the form of a check)—all the more so later, when Lawrence seemed unwilling to “soil himself” with Yates’s difficult life. Yates would mimic him bitterly—“D-d-d-don’t m-m-mix b-b-business with puh-pleasure!”—or so Lawrence liked to tell Yates, though the former’s social life was actually consumed by “business” with and on behalf of his authors. “Yates was always angry at Lawrence,” said psychiatrist Winthrop Burr, “but at the same time he wanted to be more accepted by him.”
For a while, though, it sufficed that Lawrence had rescued him from Wichita, and Yates lost no time traveling to New York, alone, to find an apartment. Needless to say, he was in no shape for such a trip, which would serve as a bleak foreshadowing of the move to come. Perhaps the first blow was his discovery that he couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan after all; he’d have to settle for one of the outer boroughs, which to Yates was only a slight step up from Kansas. For that and any number of other reasons, he began drinking even harder than before, which provoked a fresh and frightening symptom of advanced alcoholism: epileptic seizures. His first attack took place at Bill Reardon’s apartment in the Village, and later that day he had another in Jerry Schulman’s car, while the latter drove him to Staten Island to view an apartment. Yates—already drunk and semideranged when Schulman arrived to pick him up—began thrashing and frothing at the mouth while they passed through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, then tried to jump out of the car. Schulman had to hold the writhing man in place until they could turn around.
After a phone call to Nathan S. Kline, Yates thought he was calm enough to make the trip back to Staten Island, but once they arrived he had another seizure, this time in the presence of his prospective landlord. As his convulsions subsided he tried to stand up and tripped on a toy car, which (according to Schulman) prompted “a stream of hideous invective.” The landlord proved remarkably sympathetic; no doubt mollified by the relative sanity of Yates’s companion, he agreed to rent the apartment to this disturbed man, perhaps on the theory that he was having a bad day. It continued badly. Schulman drove his friend to the airport, where Yates began to have second thoughts about catching his flight: It was late, he felt lousy, and besides he usually called Monica at this time of day. When Schulman offered to take Yates to a hospital, Yates became indignant: “Don’t tell me what to do!” he shouted, and staggered off to find a phone. Schulman, meanwhile, called Martha in Kansas and asked her advice: With a baby screaming in the background, she mentioned a number of pills her husband should take and urged Schulman to get him on the plane no matter what. When the exhausted man tried to do as he was told, Yates exploded as if mortally offended by his friend’s presumption. “It was humiliating to be with him,” said Schulman. “After that I realized you couldn’t do the right thing for Dick, because he’d always insist on taking care of himself.”
The episode officially killed whatever was left of Yates’s friendship with the Schulmans. Grace had been drifting away for some time—apart from a general exasperation with Yates, her life had simply settled in such a way that commotion makers were no longer welcome: She was a professor at Baruch College as well as poetry editor of The Nation and director of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center; also, she was sick of “literary people” who exploited her husband’s good nature. “Often I had to be the heavy in protecting [Jerry] from what I felt to be insulting responses to him for his kindness,” she said. “And when I heard about his patience with Dick that day, I thought—enough. Enough of Dick’s bad behavior.” As for Jerry, he accepted a last goodwill invitation to dine with the Yateses in Staten Island, but the evening was awkward and neither man made an effort to contact the other again.
By the time they moved to New York in June, Yates was a “total wreck,” as Martha put it; even he himself admitted, a month after their arrival, that he’d “become such a wallowing whiskey-head” (not to be confused with alcoholic) that he could “barely hold a pencil straight.” As ever, his drinking both worsened and commingled with the vagaries of mental illness, such that it was impossible to predict what he would do or say next. Shortly before leaving Kansas, he’d invited his daughter Sharon to come take his car off his hands, as long as she agreed to arrange such matters as insurance and title transfer; after she’d done so, she called from Iowa to apprise him of her progress (“Okay, I got the insurance; now we have to—”) and Yates blew up: “What d’you think I am? Some sort of Jewish father?!” Sharon didn’t know what to make of this (certainly the ethnic slur was uncharacteristic): Was he angry because she’d called about practical affairs and hadn’t attended to the proper daughterly preliminaries?
The apartment in Staten Island was still being painted when they arrived, so they spent a few days at the Americana Hotel near Times Square. Yates checked in with Dr. Kline, who prescribed the anticonvulsant drug Dilantin and strongly urged Yates to stop drinking. Probably during this visit, too, Kline prescribed (or represcribed) Antabuse, which Yates took sporadically if at all; his private compromise was to give up whiskey and drink only beer, and his relative initial sobriety had the usual depressive effect. When his Iowa friend Jody Lowens visited him at the hotel, Yates wanted to talk about the death of his former teaching colleague Richard Gehman. Gehman, called “King of the Freelancers” because of his mammoth output, had rated a very brief photoless obituary in the Times. “Three thousand articles and over a dozen books,” Yates sighed, “and they give him five inches for his obituary. I’ll be lucky to get two.”* Lowens recalled that the whole matter “seemed to trouble him tremendously,” and Martha agreed—Yates’s indifference toward fame, she always felt, was deceptive: “Dick had to be recognized for his talent, to be one of the literary elite—anything else amounted to failure. A good marriage and child should have been enough, but it wasn’t.”
Granted that he could scarcely get worse, Yates showed a few signs of improvement in New York. Staten Island wasn’t so bad after all. Their apartment was a cramped two-bedroom on the seventh floor of a drab modern building, but it had a view of sorts and was nice enough by Yates’s standards (“all the places where he lived with Martha were nicer than other apartments in his life,” Monica pointed out). He’d always enjoyed crossing on the ferry, and now that he didn’t have to bother with a day job for a while, he spent leisurely afternoons walking around Manhattan and seeing a few leftover friends. He visited Bill Reardon and John Williams, and was gratified to find that Vonnegut was “taking his enormous success very gracefully” and had even promised to “come slumming” in Staten Island with his new girlfriend, Jill Krementz, an “ultra-fashionable young photographer.” But mostly Yates kept to himself; he was bemused by what he found in the city after his “nine-year exile,” and noted “a certain Rip van Winkle quality to [his] prowlings in Manhattan.” As he wrote his friend Geoffrey Clark:
Christ, how things have changed! The Empire State Building is no longer the tallest in the world, the whole West Side is swarming with guys who look as if they’ve got switchblades in one pocket and hypodermic syringes in the other; the whole Village is a morass of cruising fags and teenyboppers; all the good restaurants and bars have become tourist traps, and all the taxicabs have plastic or wire-mesh partitions to keep the passengers from garrotting the drivers. But it’s home, and I guess I’ll get used to it.
But he never quite did. Like his character Emily Grimes, Yates had begun to “[live] in memories all the time,” and New York was haunted by too many ghosts.
Friends didn’t notice anything particularly amiss between the Yateses: Martha tended to be a courteous hostess, if a bit stiff and withdrawn. (“By then I was so radically disenchanted by the world of writers that I’d rather do anything than listen to them talk.”) Yates liked to mention that this was actually his second time in Staten Island, reminiscing about his eight months in the TB ward at Halloran. Generally, too, he’d pay his wife the gentlemanly tribute of showing off her artwork on the walls (“trees and dogs, things like that,” DeWitt Henry recalled) with many a lavish compliment. Toward Gina he seemed “clumsy and devoted,” said Mark Dintenfass. “He was almost afraid to hold her because he thought he might drop her.” One night the family bumped into Bob Riche and his wife at a Broadway show—the last time Yates and his old friend ever laid eyes on each other—and the Riches cooed appropriately over the somber toddler in their midst. “She’s cute when she doesn’t have that thing stuck in her face,” said Yates, and abruptly plucked the pacifier out of his daughter’s mouth.
Those were the good times. “Dick acted normal around friends,” said Martha. “He could sort of turn it on and off, but his tirades would continue as soon as they left.” Yates spent most of his days anxiously taking pills, trying to write, and stalking around the apartment shouting. It didn’t matter if Martha was present; he wasn’t addressing her, after all. “Lish, you son of a bitch!” he’d suddenly erupt, or else some ghost from a more distant past would provoke his wrath. Martha worried a little what the neighbors thought—surely they heard—but otherwise she was used to it. “Dick’s tantrums were so much background noise by then,” she said. “If he didn’t come out of it, well, I’d already decided to leave. Still, I’m amazed now that I stuck it so long; I’d come to accept things no human being should ever have to accept.”
* * *
Yates conserved the better part of his sanity for work. Though Martha had “no idea how he managed at Columbia,” he nonetheless ventured into Manhattan once a week to meet his two-hour class and hold conferences before and after. His novel was a little behind schedule, but not much, and Sam Lawrence was so “overwhelmed” by the first 122 pages that he urged him not to rush: “What’s most important is to have the book right.” One night the publisher came out to Staten Island for dinner, and Martha bought a special antique chair for the occasion and cooked a sole with cream sauce and mashed potatoes; otherwise she might have been invisible. Lawrence commended her for putting rolls on the table (“Good, rolls. Can’t possibly eat until I’ve had rolls. Ulcer.”), then the two men commenced drinking and talking books. Yates was already thinking about his next novel, the subject of which he proposed to be a “lovable Irish alcoholic” who performed “spontaneous tap dances.” Lawrence winced: “No more desperate characters, Dick. Please.”
Soon Yates got a better idea. Ever since A Special Providence he’d wanted to take another shot at writing an explicitly autobiographical novel, but properly formed this time; one night it occurred to him that a nice way to objectify “the Me character”—as Yates called it—would be to make him a woman. In order to bring it off, though, he’d need more material than his own life could provide. “Dick called me out of the blue,” remembered his old girlfriend Natalie Bowen. “He was drunk, of course, and woke me up, but I was glad to hear from him. He said he was starting a new novel and wondered if I’d be willing to talk about my own life.” Bowen was happy to tell him whatever he needed to know. As Yates was already somewhat aware, she’d led just the kind of independent and rather lonely life he had in mind for his character: She’d been married briefly to a man who told her he “hated [her] body” (referring mainly to her flat chest); she’d had two abortions in the fifties; she’d lived in a “high, spacious apartment near Gramercy Park” where somebody had penciled a “long, thick penis” on one of the wallpaper horses in the hallway, and as her drinking got worse she would occasionally wake up with strange men in her bed; for a while she’d collected unemployment and stayed drunk all day, until finally she went to the Payne-Whitney walk-in mental health clinic and started seeing a psychiatrist.
Yates was delighted, and invited Bowen to come out for dinner and meet his wife. He may or may not have had ulterior motives for exposing Martha to this partial model for the embryonic Emily Grimes—“the original liberated woman” as her nephew Peter remarks with unwitting irony in the novel. That such liberation leads (if only for a while in Bowen’s case) to promiscuity, poverty, and despair was a point Yates would have been eager to impress on Martha, who’d begun to intimate her plans for leaving him.
Largely to spare his feelings, she’d spoken in rather vague terms about wanting to “find herself,” and Yates concluded that she’d become a “womens’-libbing bitch” as he sometimes put it. He couldn’t speak calmly on the subject; partly, perhaps, because his mother’s “independence” had caused him so much grief, Yates’s hatred for all “feminist horseshit” bordered on the pathological. As usual in such matters, he found a sympathetic ally in Andre Dubus, whose own marriage was breaking up around the same time: “Trouble with me and my friends,” he wrote Yates, “is we’re married to women who’re making the transition between the old type woman and the new type and we’re getting the best of neither and the worst of both.” In fact Martha was not at all active in the movement, though its ubiquity could hardly fail to affect her state of mind—as might be surmised by a letter she wrote Yates almost three years later: “Women have been oblique, mysterious, evasive out of fear of telling the truth,… fear of hurting the vulnerable emotions of a man, fear of being scorned or laughed at, and out of shame. I made for myself a perfect trap out of my inability to speak. And the longer I went—taking my self-definition from you … the less you knew me.” At the time, though, she tried to avoid discussing such notions with him—“I didn’t want to throw kerosene on the fire”—but it was typical of Yates to blame his wife’s disaffection on a pernicious ideology (as he saw it) rather than his own behavior.
She left him that spring. Yates would later tell friends that “A Natural Girl” was a “wholly autobiographical” account of their breakup, and while Martha dismisses the story as a “crock,” much of what her fictional alter ego tells the devastated David Clark rings true:
“We haven’t been all right for a long time and we aren’t all right now and it isn’t going to get any better. I’m sorry if this comes as a surprise but it really shouldn’t, and it wouldn’t if you’d ever known me as well as you think you do. It’s over, that’s all. I’m leaving.…”
“You don’t—love me anymore.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Exactly. I don’t love you anymore.”
By then Martha was apt to say all those things, and indeed Yates was shocked when the time came, though as the wife in the story points out, he shouldn’t have been. Martha’s decision was hardly the bombshell hurled by the morbidly callous Susan Andrews. She’d spent almost a year preparing him for her departure (“he was too out-of-it to remember from one day to the next”), and when she finally told him the time had arrived, Yates drew the same conclusion as fifteen years before: Martha’s “inability to love,” like Sheila’s, was a manifestation of insanity.
He made an appointment with Nathan S. Kline for all three of them—baby too—and at length the exasperated Martha agreed to go. For most of the session she was left waiting outside Kline’s office with Gina on her hip, while the two men discussed the matter between them. Finally Kline asked to see Martha alone. “So,” he said. “You’re pretty determined to leave.” “Yes.” “Tell me one thing,” he continued. “I want you to think about this really carefully. Has your primary feeling for Dick always been pity?” “Yes.”“That’s all I need to hear,” said Kline, and rather contemptuously dismissed her. She was then handed over to a psychologist next door (“Kline was just a pill pusher,” she remarked, “not a talk psychiatrist”), who gave her a book with some such title as On Becoming a Human Being. “I almost threw it at him,” said Martha. “Probably the guy was just trying to be helpful, but the book had an unfortunate title.” Both Kline and the second man seemed to “read the anger on [Martha’s] face” and realize that there was “no point in going on.” They were quite right: “I resented being left out of the whole process of Dick’s treatment until then. Nobody had ever asked me anything, and I was the person who had to live with him!”
The actual leaving proved a protracted, problematic business. Martha had tried to go at least once, while Yates was ranting at her, but realized she didn’t have the means: no money, no friends to speak of (outside the marriage), and her family knew nothing of the whole business. Finally, on a day when Yates had gone into the city to teach, she worked up the nerve to call her parents and tell them everything. It came out between sobs, and they arranged to send a plane ticket and money. When Yates returned that afternoon, Martha told him she was going home for a month to “think things out.”
“Dick called me a lot in Kansas,” she remembered, “and he was still verbally abusive, even though he wanted me to stay. He didn’t have the sense to realize he was making matters worse.” When bullying failed to have the desired effect, he began to plead: He’d stop drinking and try to be nicer and so on. But it was no use. Martha wanted an immediate separation, and had already made plans to move to Washington, D.C., for Montessori teacher training.
Back in Staten Island the couple divided their belongings into two separate moving vans; Yates could now afford to live in Manhattan. He was so vividly crestfallen that several of their neighbors asked him what the problem was. “The problem,” he might have reflected à la Michael Davenport, “is that my wife is leaving me, and I think it’s going to drive me crazy.”