CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Yates never entirely recovered from losing Martha, and once she was gone, whatever last threads of sanity had bound him to the world began to fray. Sharon visited her father while Martha was “think[ing] things out” in Kansas City, and found him “very shaky”: He said nothing about marital problems, but drank heavily and bickered as if to distract himself. Around this time, too, he attended a CUNY writers’ conference, where John Williams noticed his friend was “ill, or getting that way”: At a festive lunch attended by such rivals as Joseph Heller and E. L. Doctorow, Yates looked as if he were stupefied with depression.
He tried reaching out to a few old friends, though he was embarrassed by his own wretchedness and could barely bring himself to speak. “Martha got mixed up with those libbers,” he told Cassill. “They put ideas in her head. I’m not the easiest person to live with, Verlin, but I tried to be decent with her. She’s taken off and gone away.” He also commiserated with Dubus, who was then going through “that loneliness shit” too; but Yates was far more desolate, and his worried friend encouraged him to call one of his (Dubus’s) former students in the city—a woman, he noted, who was “attractive, tall, intelligent … divorced, childless.” But Yates only wanted Martha, and was so ashamed of losing her that he couldn’t bear telling most of his friends, especially those who’d been at the wedding. “Dick was out of touch for over a year after the breakup,” said Robin Metz. “He felt he’d disappointed people.” “Damn,” Loree Wilson Rackstraw wrote when she finally got the news. “It always made me pleased to envision you with Martha, and to know you were happy.” These were people who knew better than most what Yates had been like without a full-time caretaker.
One day the bewildered man showed up at Vonnegut’s apartment on East Forty-eighth Street: He couldn’t remember where he’d left his dry cleaning, he explained, and his wife had left him. “I’m leading a very unnatural existence,” he said. The kindly Vonnegut invited him to rest there as long as he liked, and Yates shambled in and stayed for almost two weeks. He seemed aware that whatever he said or tried to say seemed a little odd, so he hardly spoke at all; Vonnegut described him as a “black hole in the room”: “He had nothing to be proud of or look forward to at that point. Quite neutered. This was a sick man, carrying himself around in his arms.”
According to the “PERSONAL RECORD OF ILLNESS” Yates wrote for himself on August 9, 1974—an attempt to reconstruct his lost summer as best he could, while mysterious hospital bills continued to pile up—the most sustained mental collapse of Yates’s life began with an alcoholic seizure on the street (“Epileptic fit” Yates wrote in quotes) on May 21. He knocked two teeth out and was taken to a hospital where he was visited by Monica McCall, after which Yates noted “SEVEN MISSING DAYS.” In the meantime McCall’s companion, Muriel Rukeyser, tried to arrange a room at Yaddo for Yates, who’d apparently told McCall how desperately he needed to get out of the city; but there were no available rooms that summer. On May 31 Yates was found wandering around Staten Island in a daze, and was taken by ambulance to South Bay Hospital: “Records show [I] gave my address as 20 Cliff Street” (Yates’s old Staten Island address, though he’d since moved to a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side), “my ‘spouse’ as Martha and my age as 29.” The next day he was removed to St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Richmond, Staten Island, where he stayed for a week and was billed $1,222.
Perceived as indigent, perhaps, Yates was then taken to the State Hospital at South Beach for three days, where he was visited by Bill Reardon—“Don’t yet know how he found out I was there,” Yates wrote (and double-underlined) two months later, which suggests Reardon was sworn to secrecy on the subject. (It can hardly be overemphasized that one of the worst aspects of these ordeals, for Yates, was always the awful shame he later felt once he learned how widely the word had spread.) On June 11 he was transferred to Kirby–Manhattan State Psychiatric Hospital on Ward’s Island, where he stayed until July 18: “I remember all 47 [37] days at Ward’s Island,” Yates wrote. “Suffered two more ‘epileptic seizures’ while there.* No memory of homecoming.” Yates was under the dubious impression he was released from the hospital without a wallet, wristwatch, or “any clothes of [his] own,” though such alleged losses could have occurred at any point that summer; without some kind of supporting documentation, Yates was simply too disoriented to know when, what, or how. “Have dim memory of being mugged by a black gang in a subway station,” he wrote. “Other dreamlike memories: Arriving at Jerry Schulman’s apartment dressed in nothing but a hospital gown, begging for shelter. He refused, gave me shirt, pants and underpants of his own and told me ‘Go to a hospital.’” Schulman flatly denies that this ever happened.
Sometime during the summer Monica Yates finally discovered the extent of her father’s mental illness. The seventeen-year-old answered the phone and listened in horror as Yates told her in a panicky, begging, barely coherent voice that he’d been rolled in the subway and the police had taken his clothes and he was at the station and somebody had to get him out of there. “I was frantically scared,” Monica recalled; “my mother was away. I called Bill Reardon, who gently explained, ‘He’s in the hospital. I’m sorry. You have to talk to your mother about this.’” By the time Sheila got home, her daughter was hysterical. “I tried to explain the gist of [her father’s illness] between her sobs,” said Sheila.
Yates was at liberty for one week after his release from Ward’s Island. On July 25 he went to see a new psychiatrist,† Dr. Carol Keban, whose office was on East Eighty-seventh Street. His taxi got stuck in traffic, and Yates asked to be let out a few blocks away. “Didn’t have proper address on me,” he wrote; “wandered for hours asking innumerable doormen for ‘help’ until all the old delusions came back. Must have come home well past midnight, after one doorman called me a ‘bum.’” When he returned to his apartment he phoned Martha and tried to explain what had happened; she told him to take a tranquilizer and go to bed—when he woke up, she said, he’d be “in good hands.” The next morning she tried to get in touch with Monica McCall, who was on vacation; her associate Jo Stewart was familiar with the problem, though, and promised to do what she could.
An out-of-work actor named Mitch Douglas was in the office as a temporary employee; it was, in fact, his first day on a job that would soon become a permanent career—the beginning of a long association with McCall and her clients. The first client he ever served was Richard Yates. Jo Stewart gave him the author’s address, and told him to go there with a mailroom assistant and take Yates to Bellevue: “Whatever you do,” she advised, “don’t let him know you’re taking him to the psych ward.” When Douglas arrived at the dingy, devastated little apartment on West Seventy-third, he found Yates hunched in the corner “like a trapped animal,” but otherwise subdued. “Would you like to go to the hospital?” Douglas asked. “Oh yes,” said Yates in a small voice, “I’d like that.” Douglas had told the taxi driver not to divulge their exact destination, but as they approached Bellevue the man loudly inquired, “Which entrance to the psych ward you want?” Fortunately Yates was disinclined to protest at that point. “The lobby was crowded with homeless people trying to get in,” Douglas recalled; “they were talking and fighting with imaginary people—total chaos. Dick was interviewed as soon as we got there: ‘Are you married?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where’s your wife?’ ‘Somewhere farrr a-way.’ They admitted him on the spot, ahead of all the others doing their tricks.” Yates went peacefully.
“In Bellevue,” Yates wrote in his memorandum, “[I was] treated by Dr. Rosenberg who became very exasperated with me.” Meanwhile a devoted former student of Yates, Jim Goldwasser, asked a young psychiatrist friend named George Hecht to visit Yates and give him a sense that someone on the outside was looking after him. “Yates was absolutely nonfunctional,” said Hecht. “I had just finished my residency, and it was hard for me to believe a human being could degenerate to that extent.” “Visited by Dr. Hecht,” Yates noted, “but our communication fragmentary and I remember nothing of his talk. Discharged [on August 1] with supply of pills and stern lecture by Rosenberg, who called me ‘infantile.’ REMEMBERED.” One may assume that Rosenberg became frustrated with Yates’s refusal to acknowledge his alcoholism, or the extent of his problems in general. In any case his latest confinement at Bellevue had left him demoralized and furious—all the more so when he got the bill: $1,150. Among his first acts as a free man was to call Mitch Douglas. As the latter remembered: “Dick shouted at me, ‘You little motherfucker, you checked me into the psych ward!’ And I said ‘No, Dick. You checked yourself in.’” Douglas paused. “And that was the beginning of our adventures together.”
* * *
After the dismal events of the past two years, Yates tried to reconcile himself to loneliness and get on with his work. Indeed, from this point on, Yates’s life would gradually shrink around his writing, a necessity imposed both by himself and the world. A great admirer of Fitzgerald’s letters to his daughter Scottie, Yates doubtless took one quote in particular to heart: “What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.’” In later years the only regret Yates would allow himself to express publicly was over “the desolate wastes of time” that had diminished his productivity. But for the rest of his life, amid a number of terrible infirmities, Yates remained fully focused on his “immediate duty.”
That fall he began the deliberate task of putting his affairs back in order. As before in 1960, he’d promised Bellevue authorities to seek “voluntary psychiatric assistance” on release, and so presented himself to the man who’d visited him in extremis, George Hecht. Again Yates managed to startle the young psychiatrist: “He came to my office a few days after Bellevue,” Hecht said. “He seemed fine. It was amazing he could resurrect himself like that.” Unfortunately Hecht declined to accept Yates as a patient on ethical grounds (because he was the friend of a friend). Hecht recommended a number of other doctors, but for the next few years the irascible, psychiatrist-hating Yates only availed himself of such services (voluntarily) when he needed more or different medication.
By September he was at Yaddo, working steadily. As a testament to his resilience, he was all but caught up with his contract deadline despite recent cataclysms.* Sam Lawrence was planning to feature Disturbing the Peace as the lead fiction title on his summer 1975 list, and meanwhile he’d picked up the latest Ploughshares and read “Evening on the Côte d’Azur—1952” (the strongest of Yates’s hitherto unpublished stories): “It may be an old one,” Lawrence wrote the author, “but is it good.” That same month Varietyreported that the actor Patrick O’Neal had made a deal with Al Ruddy to produce and direct Revolutionary Road, which O’Neal was then in the process of trying to finance. This last development seemed to complete (however deceptively) the overall positive trend, at least where Yates’s career was concerned.
He’d done whatever he could to help Martha get settled in Washington. He called Joe Mohbat, who arranged for her and Gina to stay at his fiancée’s place across from the National Zoo; also she stayed briefly with Jim Goldwasser’s twin brother Tom and his wife Joan, who helped Martha find a suitable one-bedroom apartment in a tough market for single mothers. Whatever her difficulties, Martha was nothing but relieved to be on her own: The chaos of Gina’s first two years had turned her into a quiet, frightened child who had trouble sleeping, though amid the relative calm of Washington she’d begun to show signs of cheering up. Meanwhile Martha felt more pity than censure for the child’s father, particularly at a distance, and their lonely lives remained somewhat linked. There was the kindness of Yates’s friends—they could imagine what Martha had gone through—as well as the companionship of his daughter Sharon, who was also living in Washington and also lonely. Sharon had moved there for the sake of a college boyfriend who’d since gone off to graduate school; she was planning to move back to New York in the near future, but for the time being she kept her stepmother company and played with Gina. All of which made Martha rather wistfully well disposed toward Yates: “I think about you often, Dick,” she wrote in September, “especially of those times when we were the best company for each other. I hope you are not completely miserable and depressed.”
Yates finished his novel that fall and made a number of trips to Washington—to visit Gina, but also to make a good impression on Martha if possible, since he desperately hoped (and would go on hoping) for a reconciliation. He was subdued and dignified, doting toward Gina, but of course Martha had no intention of taking him back. She endured their “awkward” outings for the toddler’s sake: “I always wanted to make sure Gina had contact with Dick, because I wanted her to know the good as well as the bad. I didn’t want her to get some romantic notion of him based on what people said who knew him when he was young.” Lest Yates think Martha was warming to his charms, she wrote a letter that November gently prompting him to get on with the divorce: “[M]y mind just wants things to be definitely resolved,” she explained.
By then Yates had moved to somewhat less cramped quarters on Twenty-sixth off Fifth Avenue, though he could barely manage the seven flights of stairs: “Jesus Christ,” he’d gasp, coughing, “I just hope I don’t have a heart attack and be found dead in this grungy place.” His apartment was a long studio with a few random sticks of furniture—an orange sofa bed where he slept, a wobbly table in the narrow sit-down kitchen, two or three chairs and a desk by the plaid-curtained window; also he installed a bookshelf where he mostly kept the work of friends and students, as well as a handful of novels he couldn’t do without. A Manhattan bachelor again, Yates’s mode of habitation immediately reverted to that of his basement days at 27 Seventh Avenue South, complete with staple cockroaches. Nor did he bother to get out much—so many stairs—except to take meals and teach his weekly class at Columbia, where he found more experimental writing per capita than ever before. Happily his new novel was progressing at an unprecedented pace, and Lawrence had high hopes for Disturbing the Peace; he passed along a memo to Yates from the Delacorte sales manager, who’d remarked, “We should approach this for what it is—a major book with potentially very large sales.”
Yates was a bit less lonely when Sharon moved back to New York in December, though he didn’t see as much of her as he might have liked. Along with her sister Monica, she’d also received a deranged phone call or two the previous summer, and wasn’t sure whether she was equal to coping with more of the same. Besides, she had her own problems—she was unemployed and had little idea what to do with her life. Certainly she didn’t need any more tumult and worry, and in recent years her father had been difficult even at the best of times. For a while she stayed away in Mahopac, then found a job as a file clerk with a Wall Street firm and moved to a small apartment in Brooklyn Heights, whereupon she began seeing her father on a consistent, if not frequent, basis. He seemed somewhat better, though still crotchety: Sharon had begun dating an older man whom Yates thought an awful bore (she agreed for the most part), and he scolded her for wasting time with a man she didn’t love; there should be romance and the possibility of marriage, he insisted, otherwise why bother?
Among the many people in the city he used to know, the only one he saw regularly was Bill Reardon, whom he met every week or so for boozy dinners. Yates was comfortable with Reardon, all the more so since the latter had fallen on hard times—the result of a long run of alcohol-related bad luck. A second marriage in the late-sixties had soon ended, after which Reardon lost his job at Scientific American, set his apartment on fire, and declared bankruptcy. By the mid-seventies he’d moved to a squalid loft space in TriBeCa, where he supported himself as a chauffeur of sorts. He was, in short, one of the few people who could make Yates feel almost fortunate by comparison, and it was a blow when Reardon died later that year of liver failure. At a memorial gathering on the Upper West Side, Yates mingled somberly with half-forgotten friends from the past, most of whom he was seeing for the last time. “You and I were the only ones who’d sit up and talk all night to Bill,” he told Marjorie Owens in a husky whisper.
An improbable figure came along to fill the void. In the fifties and sixties, Seymour Krim had been a devoted hipster who wrote antiestablishment articles for the Village Voice and edited a magazine called Nugget, whose audience he envisioned as “call girls, dope addicts, jazz musicians and prisoners.” He was among those who espoused the idea that the weirdness of actual events had made realistic fiction obsolete, and while teaching at the Iowa Workshop he’d been a great enthusiast of experimentation, praising students for such audacious effects as scribbling in the margins of their stories. Yates and Krim had overlapped at Iowa for just one year, 1970–71, and remarkably Yates had seemed more amused than offended by the aging hipster. They put their workshop sections together on the first day of class, and the neophyte Krim asked his colleague what he did about grades. “Oh, I just give everybody an A,” Yates replied.* The following year Krim’s provocateur tendencies (to say nothing of his drinking and pot smoking) led to a fiasco at least as damning as Yates’s breakdown five years before: A drunken Krim insulted the writer Angus Wilson at a public symposium, then turned on the audience. “Oh, bullshit!” he sneered at an elderly woman who’d wondered why nobody wrote novels for ladies anymore, and when a female student got up to leave, Krim hooted: “She’s bored with this goddamn symposium! Who wouldn’t be? She’s going to find her boyfriend and get laid.”
Despite such antics Krim was the kindest of men—“a great generous soul,” Dan Wakefield called him—especially where other writers were concerned. For decades he made a practice of sending encouraging postcards (“loved the piece”) whenever a friend’s work appeared in print. And while he and Yates might have differed aesthetically, by 1975 they had just about everything else in common: Krim, too, was a lonely middle-aged bachelor in bad health who drank and smoked too much, and if anything his apartment was even grimmer than Yates’s—a tiny studio in the East Village where he washed his dishes in the bathroom sink. The two men were a comfort to each other. Krim was able to make the gloomy Yates laugh, and the latter became so dependent on Krim’s postcards that he threw tantrums when they didn’t arrive: “Where’s my mail?!” he yelled in front of one companion; by then Krim’s notes had become so regular that Yates almost suspected the postman of theft.
The friends would meet at the Lion’s Head and discuss books, mostly, but also more general issues relating to their common predicament. One night Yates broached the subject of suicide, perhaps aware of the fact that he himself was widely viewed as a prime candidate. Both Monica McCall and Sam Lawrence had openly worried about the possibility for years, now more than ever, but Yates was adamant in denouncing the act as “self-indulgent”—which is not to say it didn’t exert a pull. The year before, Loree Wilson Rackstraw’s second husband had killed himself, and when Yates called to offer condolence he seemed “envious but scornful”: “[Dick said] something like, ‘How did he do it,’” Rackstraw recalled, “with a tone of voice that said, ‘How did he have the right to do it?’ I believe he had a kind of hero’s pride that he didn’t kill himself. And also pride that he could drink and smoke so much and still stay alive. He wasn’t going to be a wimp and stop drinking or off himself!” But something about Krim’s response made Yates drop the subject—an awkward moment that Krim sought to clarify in a subsequent letter: “My mother did the Dutch Act when I was 10 and it’s always hung over my life as a possible way out if and when things got too tough.… But I enjoy discussing such things with you and please feel no sensitivity at all for categorizing all such acts as self-indulgence.”
By that summer, in fact, Yates was able to dismiss the idea with more than just abstract distaste. He was never more content than when his work was going well, and by August he had half-finished a novel that promised to be on a par with Revolutionary Road. As for the novel about to be published, he viewed it as a respectable “plateau performance”—if nothing else, an improvement on A Special Providence. The usual dread that attended publication was all but entirely absent this time, perhaps because he had neither high hopes to be dashed nor expectations of disaster; also he felt he’d mostly disguised the autobiographical nature of the work behind the deceptive persona of John Wilder, so there was less question of any humiliating public exposure. Meanwhile Vonnegut had come through with another supportive blurb (“Richard Yates has regained the wonderful power he demonstrated in Revolutionary Road. It is a cause for celebration”). George Garrett called the book “the best novel [he’d] read in ages,” and Sam Lawrence was nothing but optimistic.* What mattered most to Yates, though, was that he himself believed in his talent again: “I think it’s okay,” he wrote of his third novel, “though not as big or as rich as I’d hoped. Am trying to make up for that in my next one.”
Around publication in early September he went to Washington for a festive weekend with Joe Mohbat and his new wife Nancy. Yates was in such high spirits that he inadvertently spat in the young woman’s eye while in the middle of an excited bit of storytelling. “Things I regret,” he wrote the couple afterward: “1.-Smoking and coughing all the time. 2.-Bending your ears so much. 3.-Pulling that half-assed poetry recital on you in the restaurant.† 4.-Spitting on Nancy. If you can find it in your heart to forgive me for these four … then there would seem to be every chance that we might somehow get together again soon. Hope so.” At his best Yates was still a lively companion, if a bit hard to take in large doses (as he was coming to realize himself). His friendships with the Mohbats and various others remained viable for the very reason that they were conducted at a certain distance of space and time.
* * *
Disturbing the Peace earned the kind of reception that Yates had expected. Gene Lyons in the New York Times Book Review came closest to summing up the consensus, commending the book’s “exact precision of style and flawless construction,” but finding Wilder a simplistic pawn whose fate is too predictable to engage the reader much: “Disturbing the Peace is an eloquent minor novel,” Lyons wrote, “by an author whom one begins to suspect of systematically denying himself major possibilities.” Yates’s old friend Anatole Broyard, who reviewed the book in the daily Times, was markedly grudging in his praise. He allowed that the novel succeeded “to a degree,” and particularly commended the Bellevue scenes, but dismissed Wilder’s repetitive drunkenness as “about as interesting as having someone throw up on you” and suggested the story’s deeper meaning was muddled if not entirely absent. William Pritchard paid the author a compliment in the Hudson Review which may have caused unwitting offense*: “One hopes we will begin to be more grateful for American writers like [Yates]: if you can’t be Pynchon why try to be second best? Richard Yates works superbly within the limits of his strength.” The one notable outright pan was Peter Prescott’s notice in Newsweek,which granted the novel’s “readability” but declared it an ignoble performance on the whole: “Wilder is an … unsympathetic wretch, and his wife a dismal cow.… Of such stuff is melodrama, not tragedy, made.”
Perhaps. As a character Wilder is unremarkable when he isn’t utterly loathsome, and while this is in line with Yates’s intention, it does diminish the emotional impact: By the end of the novel, when the lifeless Wilder is left permanently institutionalized (implausibly enough), it’s all but impossible for the reader to care. As for the rest of the characters—from the pompous Paul Borg to the bovinely patient Janice Wilder to the fickle Pamela Hendricks—they’re little more than embodied traits, figures in a morality play, and while such flatness lends itself to the macabre comedy of the novel, the basic effect is a cold one.
Such apparent flaws aside, Disturbing the Peace is a remarkable work of art, an advance on Yates’s previous work in almost every technical sense. Even its flaws can be justified in terms of craft: That Wilder is one of life’s losers, and obnoxiously bitter about it, is an essential requirement of the story Yates meant to tell. And this ceases to be a liability if one considers the novel as the black comedy it is, and so views its hero as a laughable victim rather than a tragic figure meant to evoke pathos. When a friend informed Yates that she’d cried at Wilder’s fate, he responded with mild exasperation: “I had hoped people might wince a little … or shudder, but really didn’t expect anyone to cry. Maybe someday I’ll write a book that makes people laugh, which is a good deal harder to do.”
Harder still when the material is so repugnant, but not impossible given a receptive reader. Again, those who insist on sympathetic, well-rounded characters in serious “realistic” fiction are bound to be disappointed here—particularly by the supporting cast, since the world of sane society in Disturbing the Peace is largely perceived through the eyes of the misfit Wilder, for whom it is monstrously bland and smug: a mass caricature, in short. His wife is “fond of the word ‘civilized’… and of ‘reasonable’ and ‘adjustment’ and ‘relationship,’” while she is terrified by “things she [doesn’t] understand.” Even scenes that ostensibly aren’t from Wilder’s point of view, but reinforce his basic perspective, might be understood as enacted in his mind—for example, when his friend Paul Borg pauses in traffic to “admire the sober maturity of his face,” or when Wilder’s triumphant rival Chester Pratt is commended by Pamela Hendricks because he’s “so nice and tall.” The world from which the diminutive Wilder finds himself excluded is a place where nuance is equated with aberration; aptly its ruler is the “glamour boy” Kennedy rather than the problematic egghead Stevenson (Wilder’s choice). And the response to being lumped among the “losers of the world” is rage, as Wilder’s fellow Bellevue inmate Henry Spivack—another aberrant and hence more nuanced character—makes explicit when he rails against the complacent normality of his family: “Dear Sis; dear Miss Priss,” he writes. “This is important. This is reality [italics added]. 1.-Call Dad. 2.-Call Eric and Mark. 3.-Tell your husband he is a simpering, pretentious little fool. 4.-GET ME OUT OF HERE.”
But finally, of course, “reality” is perceived imperfectly by both the outcasts of Bellevue and better-adjusted citizens such as Borg and Janice, who are frightened and repelled by the abnormal. For that matter, a novel whose main character is a drunken lunatic might be pardoned for straying from the conventions of reality and realism, and in fact Disturbing the Peace is no more “realistic” than, say, the early novels of Evelyn Waugh (which it resembles). As a writer Yates was constrained by his own standards of craft, never by the requirements of so-called realism per se, and with this novel he adopted an approach to fit the matter at hand—to wit, a satire on the relative nature of sanity in modern society. That such a work entails certain surrealistic, metafictional effects is underappreciated by those who think Yates was forever at pains to avoid comparisons to Coover, Pynchon, et al. For example: One of the main themes of the novel is the disparity between art and life, “reality” and madness, and hence it’s a valid (and funny) narrative tactic for the “gentleman producer” Carl Munchin to propose a rewrite of Wilder’s Bellevue script that mimics (metafictionally) the very plot of the novel we’re reading: “How does Bellevue change his life?” says Munchin. “I want a revised version of this script of yours to serve as part one, you see. Then I want to see a part two and a part three.… I’d say build him up for another breakdown … in part two, and then in part three let him have it.… Wipe him out.” Similarly the weary hack who does the initial rewrite, Jack Haines, fleshes out the script’s protagonist in a way that accidentally divines the actual nature of Wilder’s life simply by sticking to the usual clichés: “He’s unhappily married and he’s got kids he can’t relate to and he feels trapped. He’s solidly middle-class. I don’t know what he does for a living, but let’s say it’s something well-paid and essentially meaningless, like advertising.”
Ironically the most “unrealistic” scenes are perhaps the most mimetically exact—namely Wilder’s psychotic delusions, which evoke the actual process of going mad with compelling accuracy. And while the overall effect is harrowing and never less than convincing, the comic tone of the novel is held precisely in balance. Thus Wilder smells dogshit on his thumb to remind himself that “he was earthbound and mortal,” and imagines a series of impatient tabloid headlines as his Messiah delusion takes over: SAVIOR OR FRAUD?… A GLIMPSE!… IS HE OR ISN’T HE?… THIS IS GETTING SILLY.… THE MILLENNIUM! Such a tour de force is the very “order in chaos” to which the hapless Wilder aspires, but which only the rare artist can ever impose—a point reinforced by the presence of the Nabokovian doppelganger (and Yatesian “Me character”) Chester Pratt, yet another apposite touch in this singular novel.
One last felicity needs to be mentioned, if only because it was important to Yates: “Generally,” he remarked, explaining his own growth as a writer, “I’ve acquired a better sense of pace.” Whereas A Special Providence often languishes amid a welter of detail, Disturbing the Peace is impressionistic in the best sense. Thus Dr. Brink calls Wilder’s attention to an article about himself (Brink) in the August 1961 issue of American Scientists, after which more than six months pass in the course of a few sentences:
There wasn’t time to read it in the office, but [Wilder] took it home and promised himself to read it soon. In the end the magazine somehow found its way to Pamela’s apartment, and when he asked her about it at Christmastime, long after it had ceased to matter very much, she said she guessed she’d thrown it away.
All at once it was spring again.…
Such compression would prove an even more crucial aspect of the novel that followed.
Those who consider Yates a “writer’s writer” are particularly advised to take another look at the underrated Disturbing the Peace. Readers who need to care about fictional characters will be left cold, as will readers who require a certain clarity of message. (The novel proposes no solution to the problems it raises: Modern reality is insipid, Yates suggests, and those who can’t take refuge in art or illusions or “success”—of whatever sort—are probably condemned to addiction or madness, and there you have it.) But the novel is as strange and perfect in its way as a Fabergé egg, and almost as beautifully useless.
* * *
Though an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club and Psychology Today Book Club, Disturbing the Peace sold no better than Yates’s previous novels. He was somewhat consoled, though, when it was chosen to receive the Rosenthal Foundation Award of two thousand dollars from the National Institute of Arts and Letters for “that literary work … which though it may not be a commercial success, is a considerable literary achievement.” The citation referred to Revolutionary Road as a “modern American classic,” and at first Yates seemed almost giddily pleased; then his face fell and he grumbled, “Oh, what the hell, it’s only worth $2,000.” Perhaps he noticed in the enclosed brochure that Robert Coover was slated to receive an award for three thousand dollars at the same ceremony.
Work was its own reward as ever, not least because it was the best way to avoid dwelling on life. By the end of the year The Easter Parade was “in the home stretch, for better or worse,” and a fruitful month at Yaddo yielded not only a finished typescript but also the first chapter and outline of his next novel—“about that second-rate school my mother got me a scholarship to,” Yates chuckled. He thought he could make such a book “pretty funny,” and besides the idea provided ready means of getting “more dollars from Delacorte.” But the main thing was just to keep busy. When his old Iowa disciples Bob Lehrman and Jody Lowens came to Manhattan for New Year’s Eve 1975, the only heartening item they found in Yates’s bare, chilly apartment was the neatly squared manuscript on his desk. Otherwise the place gave them “an overwhelming impression of loneliness”: “The tenants were on rent strike and there was no heat in the building,” Lowens recalled. “Dick had the stove burners turned up, the oven too, and he apologized about the cold.” Sensing his guests’ discomfort, physical and otherwise, Yates invited to buy them a drink at a nearby hotel on Fifth Avenue. It had grown dark by the time they returned to Twenty-sixth Street, and the young men invited Yates to come out and celebrate New Year’s Eve with them. “Nah,” he said, “I’d better get back to work.” “I lost contact with Dick after that,” said Lowens. “His life was just too depressing.”
For a while, though, he did have “a girl”—as Yates would forever say, though in this case the girl was in her late-thirties. A decade before, Carolyn Gaiser had been a promising young woman who worked at Harper’s Bazaar and Glamour (where she was friends with Grace Schulman), wrote poetry and fiction (including a story published in the Paris Review), and went to Italy on a Fulbright. Then she suffered a breakdown of sorts and spent a number of years in and out of hospitals. Once the worst had passed, Gaiser was like “an aging Sally Bowles” in the words of a friend: “She had a kind of bleak, bittersweet humor.” She was still in a rather convalescent mode when she met Yates—“two lost people bumping into each other in the dark,” as Gaiser put it.
Seymour Krim introduced the two at the Lion’s Head. “I understand we have some ex–mutual friends in common,” Yates said, meaning the Schulmans. Perhaps because he was aware of Gaiser’s own troubled history, Yates didn’t hesitate to admit that he found himself virtually alone in the world. “I have two close friends left,” he said. “Sam Lawrence and Sy [Krim].” They compared notes about the Schulmans: Gaiser also felt she’d been banished for becoming difficult, and while Yates conceded that in his case he was mostly to blame, he remained deeply bitter toward Grace. Jerry he forgave as a sweet man who’d been provoked beyond endurance, and by way of example Yates recounted what he still thought was their last meeting—when Schulman “threw him out in the street”: “I must have gotten out of line,” Yates shook his head. “I can’t remember much about it.” The Schulmans had been separated since 1971, and Yates described how Jerry lived alone in a “tiny dismal apartment” hoping Grace would take him back—“but she never will,” he said knowingly.* Gaiser agreed that it was “tragic,” and Yates nodded: “Yeah, but it’s true.” Then his face lit up. “Hey, that’s a great new game! We can start a list of ‘tragic but true’ people!”
As they prepared to leave the bar and get dinner somewhere, Krim took Gaiser aside: “Don’t let him drink too much,” he warned. “He’s on antipsychotic medication.” Gaiser was reminded of her time at Bread Loaf in 1963, the most memorable aspect of which was her involvement with Nelson Algren; a close second, though, was the pervasive gossip about “the man who’d threatened to kill Ciardi” the year before: Richard Yates. Now that man was sitting across from her at Jimmy Day’s, drinking too much beer and railing against his “child bride ex-wife” who was then dating a carpenter: “Can you imagine?” he said. “A carpenter! I don’t want my little girl Gina exposed to that kind of proletarian stupidity!” He persisted with the subject for some time, then asked for Gaiser’s phone number. She gave it to him.
Soon they were spending weekends together. On their first official date Yates appeared in a trench coat, and Gaiser remarked that he looked like Holden Caulfield grown up (“Dick treasured this as a compliment”). That was perhaps the high point of their three months together. Gaiser was a Swarthmore alumna who spoke with what Yates called an affectedly “lockjaw” accent. She also tended to compensate for a hobbled self-esteem by insinuating past successes, all of which had a provoking effect on Yates, to say the least. When she mentioned her Paris Review credit and regretted that she’d yet to finish a novel—a lingering ambition of hers—Yates hooted, “If you haven’t written a novel by the time you’re forty [she wasn’t forty, but close] you never will!” Gaiser defensively presented Yates with specimens of her published work from the sixties, but he wasn’t impressed. Nor was she when Yates, after a certain number of drinks, would start crooning the old standards that used to wow Wendy Sears and the like: “I’d try to look breathless and thrilled,” Gaiser recalled, “but it got really tiresome.” Later they’d go out for dinner, and Yates would lapse into ungovernable coughing (while talking obsessively about Martha and the carpenter), which attracted kind strangers to their table offering water and smacking the mortified man on the back.
One day in March he was vividly downcast. He’d just gotten proofs for The Easter Parade with the following copy editor’s memo still attached:
This is not a rush book! However it is a difficult author who may call you in his natural state which is a drunken stupor, to check out a comma or something. The editor’s note says light copyediting, which is exactly what is needed. Please do not use whoever did his previous book as the author is disenchanted with him/her.
“Dick agonized over whether they’d left it there on purpose or accident,” said Gaiser. Given that almost exactly the same note would later be attached to Liars in Love, it’s fair to assume that the Delacorte copy editors were trying to send Yates a message. By then his perfectionist quibbling, excited by alcohol, had become something of a legend among editors and friends alike. “Nobody was up to Dick’s long-winded colloquies,” said DeWitt Henry, with whom Yates once spoke for several “deadly serious” hours on the subject of whether “toe-jam” was the mot juste. Yates was nothing if not dogmatic on matters of punctuation and grammar, and relentless whenever he required information of any sort. While writing about the Dorset printshop in A Good School, he pestered Henry to provide pertinent technical data (“quoins” and the like), ditto when he needed fodder for his Washington novel, Uncertain Times: “He leaned into conversations and always wanted more detail, detail,” said Joe Mohbat, “[then] he’d call months later and say, ‘Remember you were talking about…? Where was that? Tell me more about that.’”
But what ultimately made Yates the scourge of copy editors was his simple aversion to criticism; any emendation in his manuscript, be it a single semicolon, would cause dark alcoholic brooding, which would finally erupt in long, hectoring, semicoherent phone calls. Meanwhile the foregone end of his affair with Gaiser was hastened somewhat when he canvassed her opinion of The Easter Parade, which he’d given her to read in galleys. “Do you think it compares to Revolutionary Road?” he pressed, after she’d repeated that it was “very good.” “Well,” she said, “I think it’s very good, but I don’t think it’s brilliant compared to Revolutionary Road.” “Damn! Well, I knew that!” said Yates with a kind of bluff stoicism, though from that point on the phrase good—but not brilliant! would resurface nastily when he was drunk.
During their last few weeks together, Yates made the woman “pay and pay and pay” as Fitzgerald would have it. “You must have gone to a posh girls’ school to get that accent,” he’d insist at every opportunity, though she assured him this wasn’t the case. Once while they were having dinner in the Village, Yates spotted a former Iowa student and delightedly invited him to join them. “Did you know Algren?” Gaiser asked, after a long silence on her part. “Jesus Christ!” Yates turned on her. “Can’t I take you anywherewithout you dragging up Nelson Algren again?” He made it generally clear that almost any company was preferable to Gaiser’s, and urged her to bring friends whenever possible to their meetings. She was amazed by how Yates would metamorphose in the presence of anyone he wished to charm. “How can you help but be in love with this man?” asked a girlfriend whom he’d regaled with witty RFK anecdotes, accent and all. In this case, though, it turned out he was just keeping his hand in: “Well, your friend is delightful,” he told Gaiser later that evening, “but I can’t stand fat girls. Just can’t tolerate it.” Soon Gaiser herself became the victim of Yates’s “ruthless aesthetics” where women were concerned. One morning she found him staring at her “as if there were a tarantula on [her] shoulder”: “Good God, what is that?” he said, shakily pointing. “Sort of a ridge under your eyes—” “Cheekbones?” asked Gaiser, but Yates shook his head. “No, I mean that padding of flesh over them … well anyway, it’s very unfortunate.”
The end came sometime in April. One night at a restaurant, Yates was holding forth on a favorite theme—wishing he’d gone to college—when Gaiser mentioned an old friend from Swarthmore who’d joined the faculty of an Ivy League school, which later paid for the man’s occasional stints in pricey rehab facilities. Not only did Yates detect an injustice here, he seemed to think Gaiser tactless for even bringing it up. “Why should that fucking guy have Ivy League colleges picking up tabs for his breakdowns when I have to stay at these ratty hospitals?” he ranted, until a waiter asked them to leave. By the next weekend Yates’s mood had only darkened further. Having evidently spent the interval brooding over pretentious Swarthmore girls who presumed to criticize his work, he burst out in a Village restaurant: “Who the fuck do you think you are? What do you have to show for yourself but some yellowed newspaper clippings and that snotty accent you picked up at some posh girls’ school?!” Gaiser thought this gratuitously cruel, but gamely rejoined that she hadn’t gone to a posh—“Ahh, who the fuck cares?” said Yates. “As I fled down the street,” Gaiser recalled, “Dick ran after me. Between coughs, he said, ‘Okay, break up with me. But will you still be my date at the Academy of Arts and Letters?’ If I hadn’t been so angry with him at the time, I might have recognized the pathos of that remark.”
* * *
By 1976 Monica Yates had begun to distance herself from her father. Her sudden exposure to the worst of his mental illness two years before had been bad enough, but even when he was relatively stable it was distressing to speak to him; Monica was less passive than her older sister, and after a lifetime of hearing Yates complain about one thing or another—“pulling for pity” she called it—impatience had taken over, and she often hung up on him. Also, of course, he was rarely sober: “There was a window,” she said. “He’d wake up tremendously hungover, and put himself together for about two hours. Then he wrote, and then he went out and got drunk for the rest of the day.” Meanwhile her mother was “the opposite extreme”—briskly pleasant and self-possessed to the point of aloofness—and Monica was sick of them both. She graduated high school early and considered escaping via the Peace Corps; instead she spent a year at nursing school and then enrolled at the University of Massachusetts (Amherst) as a chemistry major—mainly because pure science was the last thing her father would have picked himself, and Monica wanted to avoid the “self-indulgence” of anything connected with the literary life.
In late March Yates was asked to interview at Amherst College for an opening as writer-in-residence. Though he hated the idea of teaching full-time again, he needed the money and was anxious for almost any change in his present situation; above all, it would mean living near his daughter, who still had little idea of his importance as a writer. And the job seemed his for the taking: The chairman of the English department, William Pritchard, was a great admirer (as Yates might have surmised from the man’s review of Disturbing the Peace a few months before), and was thrilled to learn from DeWitt Henry that Yates was available. Whether the fix was in or not, though, Yates was so terrified of making a poor showing in his daughter’s eyes that, as the date approached, he was almost on the verge of a breakdown. He had to give a reading in addition to the interview, and felt certain that his stories would seem dated to Amherst students, while he himself would come across as a “whiskery old bullshit artist.”
The trip got off to a good start. He went to Rhode Island first and gave a reading at Roger Williams as the guest of his protégé Geoffrey Clark, whose unconditional esteem always brought out the best in him; also, he made the acquaintance of another admiring writer and “good guy,” Robert Stone. He then moved on to Amherst. Monica lived in a walk-up apartment, where her father’s arrival was heralded by a hideous burst of coughing that brought her “health-freak friends” out of their rooms to gaze, appalled, at the bewhiskered apparition pausing every few steps to gasp for air and/or light another cigarette.
Prior to his interview with Amherst president Bill Ward, Yates and Monica had lunch with Pritchard and a colleague, neither of whom knew what to make of the coughing, laconic, oddly hostile Yates. “When do I see the head honcho?” the latter kept asking between paroxysms, or whenever the two men’s genial patter subsided. Pritchard wondered if Yates had any idea who he (Pritchard) was; perhaps Yates hadn’t read that admiring review of Disturbing the Peace? Pritchard’s colleague, meanwhile, spoke with a kind of British accent that seemed to set their guest’s teeth on edge.
After his interview with Yates, President Ward took Pritchard aside. “My God, Bill, you think this is going to work out?” Pritchard just shook his head. (Ward was an affable Irishman and heavy smoker himself; it was a bad sign that Yates hadn’t warmed in his presence.) By then Yates had given his reading to a group of students in Pritchard’s living room, followed by one of the most gruesome Q&A sessions anybody had ever witnessed. Yates, who coughed more than he spoke, may or may not have known that the students had input into the selection process; perhaps he thought the whole thing was just a formality, and a tiresome one at that. “He was the opposite of ingratiating,” Pritchard recalled. “Some of the students’ questions might have been pretty inept—like, ‘Where do you get your ideas?’—but Yates didn’t give an inch. His responses were sour, superior, humorless. Sort of like, ‘Take it or leave it.’”
“Went through the sweaty business of reading and asskissing at Amherst,” Yates wrote Geoffrey Clark, “then waited more than a week only to have them give me—you guessed it—the cough drop.” The cough drop was one of Yates’s favorite terms for rejection, derived from John O’Hara (who used it to characterize his treatment at the hands of the literary establishment): The idea was that when a teacher hands out all the candy, she gives the last hapless kid a cough drop. Yates was not only hurt and embarrassed by the whole fiasco, but puzzled to boot: “Still can’t figure out why,” he wrote, “since I thought I’d played my cards pretty well up there. The department chairman’s letter was some lame nonsense to the effect that there is agitation to hire a woman or a black.” Pritchard remembers all too well the “equivocating” letter he’d had to write, as well as Yates’s poignant response: “I’d said, ‘Send me your expenses.’ Yates had come up on the bus, and he mailed me this scrap of ugly brown paper in an envelope with something like ‘$36.03’ scrawled on it.”
Denied a prestigious job and lowered still further (he thought) in his daughter’s regard, Yates holed up in his apartment and tried to comfort himself with some marijuana Clark had given him in Rhode Island—but the highs, he found, were too much like going crazy. “Or maybe,” he wrote, “it’s just that I shouldn’t do it alone.” By then he didn’t have much choice in the matter.
Not uncommonly, though, Yates’s work was flourishing in inverse proportion to his personal fortunes. He was making excellent progress with his new novel, and The Easter Parade was scheduled to be a Book-of-the-Month Club dual main selection (with Judith Guest’s Ordinary People) for September. The deal would help pay off his debt to Delacorte, but far more important to Yates were all the new readers he’d gain—more than one hundred thousand if only one in ten subscribers took the book. Yates cheerily noted that Delacorte’s first response to his novel had been “tepid,” but now they were “climbing all over” him. As Sharon Yates remembered, “There was a general sense of this is it”—the rediscovery would soon be in full swing.
Then in late June Yates set his apartment on fire. “Three guesses how,” he later told Dubus, “and the first two don’t count.” As ever, he’d started the day with a cigarette in bed, then gone to the bathroom to throw up and shower. Apparently Yates put the butt in an ashtray on the arm of the sofa bed, and the sheets began to smolder when he threw them off to get up—then he opened the bathroom door and created a cross-draft that caused the bed to burst into flames. According to the “funny story” Yates later made of the incident, when he discovered the fire he ran all the way to the ground floor and woke everybody in the building, knocking on all the doors as he made his way back up.* By the time he attempted to reach his desk and recover the one-hundred-page manuscript of A Good School, he was prevented by a wall of flames that badly burned his face and hands. He also inhaled a lot of smoke, and was perhaps only semiconscious when the firemen arrived through the window, from which they thoroughly doused the apartment and destroyed whatever of Yates’s effects the fire had missed (with at least two exceptions, noted below). Yates was rushed to the Bellevue ICU and was all but inconsolable when, coming to, he learned that firemen had seen him naked. Meanwhile the hair was scorched off his face, his hands were bandaged mitts, and his lungs were in even worse shape than before.
Word traveled fast. Sam Lawrence, who knew Yates could never be bothered to make copies of his manuscripts, called their old friend Frank Russell in East Hampton and begged him to go to Yates’s apartment immediately and find out if A Good School could be salvaged. Russell obliged, and when he squinted into the drenched, smoky room he spotted a crisp black square on Yates’s desk. A former intelligence operative in Southeast Asia, Russell soaked the manuscript in glycerine for a few hours, then peeled the pages apart and Xeroxed them between sheets of acetate. Also intact was a large steamer trunk in which Yates kept letters and original manuscripts; Lawrence subsequently urged him to relinquish the latter into the care of Boston University without further delay.
Among Yates’s visitors at Bellevue was Kurt Vonnegut, who found his friend in a fetal position amid hissing oxygen equipment. “Aren’t you celebrating the Bicentennial a little early?” Vonnegut quipped. Yates gave him a sheepish, so-what-else-is-new look and asked for a cigarette. Now he’d have to buy an entirely new wardrobe, he mused. Worse (though he kept this part to himself), he had no health insurance, and Bellevue was costing him hundreds of dollars a day for however long it took for smoke-damaged lungs and third-degree burns to heal. From this potentially disastrous situation arose what would prove to be one of the great blessings of Yates’s later life: Sharon, sifting through the rubble of her father’s apartment, found his honorable discharge in the steamer trunk and got the idea to transfer Yates to the VA hospital across the street from Bellevue. His medical records followed, and thereafter were readily available whenever Yates found himself back in the care of the Veterans Administration. Rarely would he be hounded anymore by exorbitant bills from private doctors.
Around this time he was visited by an attractive stranger from Boston—a woman in her early thirties named Joan Norris, whom Lawrence had hired to handle PR for The Easter Parade. The novel had so overwhelmed her that when Dan Wakefield mentioned Yates’s predicament, she impulsively caught a plane to New York. Early rumors suggested that Yates had been blinded in the fire, so Norris was relieved to find the man browless and blistered but decidedly able to see. “You look fabulous in green,” she said, and Yates chuckled and croaked for a cigarette. She held it to his lips and told him of all the people in Boston, her friend Wakefield for one, who adored his work and wished him a full and speedy recovery. The information stayed in his mind.
* * *
A week after the fire Sharon Yates found her father muttering and rocking in bed, and when she tried to speak to him—“Here’s the bathrobe you wanted”—he answered with non sequiturs: “Bathrobe on the rooftop? Clothes on the barn?” Disoriented by his injuries, Yates had forgotten to mention the matter of psychotropic medication to his doctors; also, as he got older, physical problems tended to lead to a concomitant mental collapse. Anyway Yates was moved to the psychiatric ward, where he soon became merely eccentric again. “I figured out what happened,” he told Sharon in a calm but intense voice. “See, the reason I’m like this is I lost my glasses. And I can’t see! And if I can’t see, my brains get scrambled.”* A couple weeks later he called Sam Lawrence and expressed agitated concern that Delacorte planned to promote The Easter Parade as “a woman’s book”; mostly, though, he vented frustration over the fact that he was still cooped up in a hospital. A few days later he checked himself out.
At first Yates was homeless but otherwise in fine fettle. He cashed his latest monthly check from Delacorte and took a room at the same raffish hotel where he’d gone to eat breakfast for the last year or so; presumably, too, he bought a few items of clothing. Then he called Frank Russell and offered to take him to dinner as a show of gratitude for saving his manuscript. Russell and his friend Galen Williams (founder of the organization Poets and Writers) met Yates at the specified location—a dingy bar in the twenties called Three Ravens, where the awful food was somewhat redeemed by the liveliness of their host, who waxed in charm and animation as the evening wore on. Yates wanted to go barhopping, and began drinking brandies one after the other without visible effect. Williams had never smoked before, and Yates persuaded her to match him cigarette for cigarette. The night ended around three in the morning. “I’m looking for a girl,” Yates told his friends, and they invited him to dine at Williams’s apartment the following night, a Friday; they promised to find him a date in the meantime.
Williams awoke feeling so ill from cigarettes that she almost went to the hospital. Despite her frailty, she managed to get Yates a date—an attractive colleague from Poets and Writers—but the whole business exhausted her, and she could hardly move for the rest of the evening. Happily Yates proved a low-maintenance guest. Quite content with the Chinese takeout Russell ordered for the four of them, Yates coaxed his date away at a seemly hour to join him for a nightcap elsewhere. Before he left, he accepted his friends’ invitation to stay at their house in East Hampton for as long as he liked, the better to rest up from his recent ordeal. Russell and Williams agreed to call at his hotel in the morning.
The next day Russell was stopped in the hotel lobby by police, who informed him that a man upstairs had a gun. Russell (familiar with Yates’s condition, all the more so because he was bipolar himself) explained that he was a friend of the suspect, who was having mental problems as the result of injuries suffered in a fire. He assured police that Yates was harmless, quite a well-known writer in fact, but in any event Russell would take full responsibility. They let him pass. “Oh hi, Frank,” Yates greeted him. He was crouched behind a sofa with a large stick in his hands. “Listen: The place is surrounded by Germans at the back. Some of my guys are in front with automatic weapons, but we’ve really got to be careful.” (Words to that effect.) Russell said the cops downstairs were on their side, so that Yates could slip out a side door while Russell covered him with a B.A.R. Yates thought it just might work, and once he was outside Russell waved him into the car and they took off for Long Island.
“Dick got crazier and crazier,” Russell recalled. Like a mantra he kept insisting he needed to get to a telephone, then he rolled down the window and began shouting at passing cars: “Look out! Look out! Tanks on the horizon! Watch out! Get covered!” They decided to pull into a gas station and assess the situation while Yates made his call. After they let him out of the car (“Clear the area! Goddamn Germans are coming!”), Williams told Russell that she’d really rather not have Yates in their house; what about Arthur and Ruth Roth? Russell agreed it was worth a try. Meanwhile Yates was unable to get the phone to work. Russell persuaded him to take five and made a number of calls himself: to the Roths (they were happy to put Yates up) and to Sam Lawrence, who called back a few minutes later with the name and number of Yates’s doctor at the VA; Russell got hold of the man and arranged for Yates’s various prescriptions to be phoned in to a nearby pharmacy. They picked up the pills on the way to the Roths’ house.
By the time they arrived Yates was already sedated. Williams took Ruth Roth aside and explained that he was having problems; the tranquilizers helped, but the other pills might take a few days to kick in. Ruth, who was fond of Yates and used to his quirks, assured Williams that she and Arthur could handle him and were happy to do so. Sure enough, when Russell and Williams returned a few hours later for a backyard barbecue, they found Yates agreeably listless with liquor and pills. He hadn’t slept for the past few nights, and was finally succumbing to a salubrious exhaustion. The worst had apparently passed.
The next day Russell got a call from Arthur Roth. “For Christ’s sake,” said Roth, “get over here! Dick’s gone totally off his wicket!” Yates had slept poorly the night before, and in the morning the Roths found him jittery but composed, or so they’d hoped. Suddenly he asked Ruth to pick up a broom and start sweeping—he wanted to describe the action in his writing—and when she balked he got angry. The situation deteriorated until Yates locked himself in a bathroom and refused to come out. Afraid that his friend was perhaps taking an overdose of pills, Roth called the police and then Russell.
By the time Russell arrived, a tractor-trailer had come to a ragged stop near the Roths’ house and its driver was animatedly discussing the matter with police. “This fucking naked guy comes running into the middle of the road!” he was saying. “What the hell am I supposed to do?” The naked Yates, meanwhile, was racing around Roth’s house urinating on the walls. The police watched with folded arms. Russell approached and asked if they intended to remove Yates from the premises, and an officer shook his head: In mental cases they couldn’t act, he said, though an ambulance was on its way. Russell began spraying Yates with a garden hose in an effort to calm him down.
The two ambulance attendants were actually volunteer firemen from the neighborhood, and Roth later commended their “ennobling brotherhood” for helping to wrestle Yates to the ground and put him in the ambulance. While the firemen rode shotgun, Roth agreed to sit in the back with Yates. “Driving behind that ambulance,” Russell remembered, “was like watching a washer-dryer with limbs and body parts spinning into view.” The ambulance disgorged two bloody men on arrival at the hospital in Southampton, where emergency room workers were willing to tranquilize Yates but otherwise flatly refused to admit him as a patient. When it came to light that Yates was a veteran, though, they suggested that Russell and Roth drive their friend to the Northport VA.
“My father spent years in Northport as a mental patient,” Roth later wrote Yates. “In fact he died there. The experience of helping commit you unloosed all sorts of guilt feelings in me.” While Roth lapsed into a speechless funk in the hospital lobby (an “Abreactive Experience” he called it), Russell was all action: He strapped the heavily sedated Yates into a wheelchair and demanded that he be committed on the spot. A clerk asked a number of questions about Yates’s service information, which Russell answered off the top of his head (“Rank?” “Captain.” “Serial number?” “55-666-777,” etc); finally the clerk became suspicious and summoned the head psychiatrist—an Armenian whose command of English was spotty. “I am the big person here!” he announced. “This whole hospital is mine!” Noticing the distraught Roth, he began to lead him away by the elbow for questioning, but Russell indicated Yates. “What is your name?” the doctor asked the seated, bleary-eyed man, who managed to mumble “Dick.” The doctor insisted on calling him “George,” despite repeated correction. (“At one point he asked me what I thought was wrong with you,” Roth wrote Yates, “and it was only with the utmost self-control that I prevented myself from saying, ‘He keeps thinking people are calling him George.’”) But it seemed the doctor was just passing time, as he ended the interview by declaring that no beds were available.
By now Russell was desperate, as much for his own sake as Yates’s. Roth had wandered off somewhere, and as Russell began to wheel their friend toward the exit he got an idea. He continued down the long corridor until he came to a janitor’s closet at the back of the hospital. He trundled Yates inside and shut the door. An orderly seemed to eye Russell suspiciously as the latter returned, alone, to the lobby and hurried out to the car, where he found Roth sitting in the passenger seat with a stunned look on his face. “My father died there,” Roth explained, dully, as they drove away. “They haven’t even changed the paint.”
* * *
Years later Russell wrote in a personal memoir: “The abandonment of Yates … in the janitor’s closet of a madhouse, was an act of kindness by a friend, not so much to help him get sane again, but to protect him from the lunacy that he had revealed [i.e., in his fiction] pullulating outside the madhouse walls.” As for Arthur Roth, he recorded what he considered “the most intensely dramatic six hours of [his] life” in the regular column he wrote for the East Hampton Star, praising the communal spirit and physical strength of neighbors and police who’d helped “cart [Yates] off.” He didn’t mention Yates by name, though already the story was more or less common knowledge in the parochial world of literary New York. “I was surprised and disappointed in that article,” Grace Schulman wrote Roth.
I feel that it was tawdry to betray your long friendship with Dick Yates … [and that] you have made … a shabby thing of what friendship is all about: privacy, trust, discretion.… Usually [Dick] is a good person, capable of free choice under most instances but given to a severe illness that might befall any of us at any time.… Close feelings continue long after friendships cease to be active, and somehow I feel that the friendship we all shared years ago is still too important to be treated in that way.
It’s doubtful Yates was aware of Schulman’s protest (which would have touched him, albeit a bit ruefully perhaps), as he’d been discovered in the janitor’s closet by then and duly admitted as a mental patient to the Northport VA, where he languished into the month of August. Still, things could have been a lot worse. Along with his salvaged manuscript and other effects, Sam Lawrence was holding eleven hundred dollars in cash they’d found in Yates’s pants; in fact the publisher had taken care of everything, and meanwhile had every reason to hope Yates would be free in time for publication of The Easter Parade at the end of the month. Yates was irritated at Lawrence for “hyping himself as a hero,” but otherwise seemed cheerful enough. When Bob Lehrman visited him at Northport, Yates pointed out the more interesting lunatics and reflected on some of the lesser-known effects of losing one’s reading glasses. All he asked was that Lehrman bring him a few cartons of cigarettes.