CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
In the mid-eighties Yates’s former acquaintances would sometimes see a gaunt, stupefied, ragged old man staggering around the streets of Boston; an incredulous second look would confirm that the wretch was none other than Richard Yates. The usual impulse was to hurry away before one was recognized by this poor ghost, though of course there was no danger of that. When not in the hospital or seated at his desk, Yates spent his days in an alcoholic fog.
Underlying his other woes, Yates was almost broke again. Young Hearts Crying had made a brief appearance at the bottom of the Boston Globe best-seller list and was an alternate selection of the Book-of-the-Month Club, but still hadn’t sold more than ten thousand copies in hardcover. Delacorte had been losing money on Yates for years, and was less and less willing to extend advances to cover the time he needed to finish his books. By the spring of 1985 the situation was desperate: Yates’s work-in-progress, Cold Spring Harbor, was little more than half done and his advance money was about to run out; nor was Yates in any condition to resort to his old recourse, teaching, even if such jobs had been available to him.
For some time DeWitt Henry had intended to publish, under the auspices of Ploughshares, Yates’s screenplay adaptation of Lie Down in Darkness; almost ten years before, Yates had wryly dug this relic out of his trunk, brushed away the vermin turds, and handed it over to Henry. The idea was that publication might renew interest in producing the film, a hope that Yates had never quite relinquished in times of particular fiscal anxiety. Finally, in May 1985, publication was at hand: William Styron’s “Lie Down in Darkness”: A Screenplay was to be launched with a gala reading by Yates and Styron at the BU Armory, an event that would be attended by a number of Boston’s cultural nobs. Yates was excited about it, though not in any positive sense.
Around this time Dubus got a raving phone call from Yates—the CIA had given him rat poison and he’d been kicked out of the Crossroads, etc. Dubus called DeWitt Henry and Henry called Michael Brodigan, who confirmed that, yes, Yates had become unruly and been told to leave the restaurant two days before. When he hadn’t come back or answered his phone, Brodigan had called Monica Yates, who was likewise unable to reach her father. Another two days passed, and then Henry learned from his Ploughsharescofounder, Peter O’Malley, that the Cambridge police had arrested Yates in Harvard Square for public drunkenness and transferred him to a drying-out facility.
Yates resurfaced shortly before the Styron reading on May 11, and Henry arranged to meet him at the Crossroads. One look at Yates and Henry realized that alcohol was only part of the problem, something he’d suspected (without knowing for sure) ever since reading Disturbing the Peace. “His short-tempered, fragmented ravings reminded me of King Lear,” said Henry, who walked Yates back to his apartment and urged him to get some sleep. The next day Henry got a call from Dan Wakefield: Yates was locked in his apartment and needed their help. When they arrived, in a heavy rain, Yates buzzed them into the building and shoved a key under his door. “The room was a mess,” Henry recalled, “clothes, money, and papers strewn around, spilled ashtrays, bottles and beer cans.… Dick sat hunched on his couch, shakily smoking, while Dan and I sat facing him in folding chairs. Dick turned on me: ‘Get high school outta here! What are you looking at? Those eyes!’ He pointed at my rubbers: ‘My mother taught me to take off my rubbers in the house!’” Wakefield got the number of Yates’s VA psychiatrist, who arranged for the police to dispatch a squad car. “You’re calling the cops!” Yates yelled over and over, but began to calm down somewhat when the police arrived and coaxed him to gather his things for the hospital, a familiar enough ritual by then.
A few days later an apologetic Yates called Henry and asked him to bring a carton of cigarettes to the VA. Henry felt as he were being “taken into Bluebeard’s castle” as he passed through security stations en route to the twelfth floor, Ward C, for mental patients and detoxing alcoholics. “Dick had always seen me as ‘high school,’ ‘Mr. Big Eyes,’” said Henry, “a protégé whose good opinion he wanted to keep. But this broke the ice between us about his mental illness.” He found Yates in bed, where he’d been working on Cold Spring Harbor using the swinging food table as a desk. As they walked down the hall to an open lounge, Yates greeted a number of other patients and greedily broke out the cigarettes. Henry had brought several copies of the published screenplay for Yates to sign; once Styron had signed them too, they’d be sold as hundred-dollar collectors’ items to help Ploughshares recoup its investment.
That night at the armory, Henry announced to the crowd that Yates was “in the hospital with pneumonia” and conveyed his apologies; Robert Brustein, director of the Loeb Drama Center at Harvard, agreed at the last minute to read Yates’s part of the program. In his opening remarks, Henry noted Yates’s affinity with the other writer on the dais, William Styron: “Both would probably agree with George Eliot’s definition of tragedy.… ‘If we had a keen vision and feeling of all ordinary human life, it would be like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.’… Both masters have shown us courage and spirit by functioning on the edge of that other side of silence.” After Brustein read from the screenplay, Styron thanked the crowd for observing such a “worthy occasion: celebrating Richard Yates”; he then read the first chapter of Revolutionary Road, which he called an “exceptional” and “definitive” novel.
Yates was soon released from the hospital, whereupon he moved to a tiny apartment above the Crossroads. Thus his life shrank a half block more. Now he hardly had to go outside at all if he didn’t want to—though the flight of stairs, taken twice a day, was more than enough exercise for such a decrepit man. Still, Yates was satisfied with the new arrangement: The nightly hubbub from below was a companionable noise, and the aroma of cigarettes and beer was, to Yates, a delightful nosegay. Shortly after he moved in, he attended a christening party at the home of his new landlord, Mike Brodigan. Yates sat in the corner vacantly sipping whiskey, smiling vaguely when spoken to.
* * *
Around midsummer Yates’s latest advance—actually an advance for the book after the unfinished Cold Spring Harbor, since by then he was a full book behind on his contract—ran out, and Delacorte held fast against further payments until the present novel was delivered. At such desperate moments in the past, Monica McCall had not only commiserated with Yates—weathering his panicky phone calls with motherly patience and signing her notes with “Love”—but she’d also found ways of putting money in his pocket until the crisis had passed. Mitch Douglas did his best: He, too, loaned Yates money, and only a few years ago he’d compelled Sam Lawrence to increase his advances to Yates by confronting him with a firm offer from another publisher. All the while, though, Douglas was given to hectoring Yates about meeting his contractual obligations, and it was clear to both men that neither was very dear to the other. Doug-las had come to dread that doleful voice on the phone—carefully polite, but with an edge of hysteria (“like a quiver on the launching pad”): “Hi, it’s Dick Yates, I need money.” And their chats would go downhill from there.
That summer Douglas seemed genuinely alarmed by his client’s deterioration, and as a last resort he had a make-or-break discussion with Delacorte’s editor in chief, Jackie Farber. Perhaps out of an understandable sense of urgency or exasperation, Douglas permitted himself to be far more candid than Yates (or Monica McCall for that matter) would have been likely to condone. Douglas explained that the stress of meeting deadlines before his money ran out was “depleting [Yates] mentally and physically,” and pointed out that Yates’s increasingly frequent breakdowns were landing him in the hospital again and again. He said that a number of publishers were willing to pay Yates for the prestige of his name, to which Farber rejoined by wondering if they were also willing to reimburse Delacorte for the unearned advances Yates had accumulated over the years. She further asserted that it was a little unseemly of Douglas to negotiate by making her feel guilty about Yates’s personal distress. The next day Douglas recapitulated his basic position in writing—“[I]f you are going to hold on to an author, then you have to be willing to accept whatever problems must come with a package”—and went on to suggest that pathetic references to Yates were fairly unavoidable at this point: “[C]an you imagine how I feel,” he wrote,
as it happened yesterday, when Richard Yates tells me that [he] has lost 15 pounds and looks like a concentration camp victim because he has had to survive the past few weeks on two eggs mixed in a glass of milk, and that he was going to have to go back in the hospital simply to have food to eat.… I can’t feel very good as an agent or as a human being when I have indications that there are publishers out there who are willing to pay Yates the kind of advances he needs to meeting financial obligations and put food in his mouth.
Farber must have been touched in spite of herself, as she insisted on taking Yates to lunch and trying to work out their differences in person. Douglas went along (“my heart in my mouth”): “Within twenty minutes,” he recalled, “Dick had downed four drinks and spilt a fifth on the tablecloth, and then burnt a hole in it.” There were no more lunches after that, and Douglas proceeded to negotiate a contract with Atheneum for Uncertain Times. Meanwhile Yates became more bitterly determined than ever to end his association with Douglas, for reasons that were only incidentally professional.
The moment arose when Monica Yates submitted a novel, Looking Good, based on her experience as a nurse at an Avon Old Farms camp for overweight children. Monica herself didn’t have a very high opinion of this effort—“No, it’s terrible,” she’d tell her father when he asked to see it—but thought at the time that, if nothing else, it might have commercial possibilities. Besides, it was becoming more and more embarrassing to identify herself at New York parties as “a writer,” and a published novel would at least validate the claim somewhat. But already she was backing away from a literary career, and when Douglas agreed to represent the work (“a terrific read”), she implored him not to let her know about any rejections; like her father, she had a tendency to take things hard. “I will respect your wishes about not telling you about rejections,” Douglas replied, “but that worries me. Rejection is a big part of this business.… If you can’t deal with the rejection factor—perhaps you should be doing something other than writing?? I love you and think you are very gifted—but I want you to be happy and part of the business is dealing with the business on its own terms.” With this note he enclosed the standard one-page agency agreement, which “irrevocably” tied her to ICM as agent for the work in question. Monica refused to sign it. Such an agreement, after all, was even then causing her father a lot of grief.
Monica was more relieved than not when Douglas regretted that he couldn’t represent her if she wouldn’t sign, but when Yates heard of the matter he was furious, or affected to be. “Nobody talks to my little girl like that!” he raged at Douglas in the course of firing him over the phone. (“One of the most welcome communications I ever had in my life,” said Douglas.) Such was Yates’s disdain that he was willing to terminate Doug-las’s services even though the man would continue to receive commission on Yates’s future work. Still, he had few regrets about firing Douglas at whatever cost: Apart from his less rational antipathies, he viewed the agent as an indiscreet man who lacked a proper appreciation for his work.* “Since breaking off with you on the phone that day,” he wrote Douglas, “I have only become more certain, rather than less, that it was the right decision. I’m very glad too that you will continue to receive your share of whatever income the novel Uncertain Times may bring. I won’t forget the many examples of your patience with me over the years, and hope we can remain on decent and businesslike terms.” It would be hard to say which man was more relieved to be rid of the other.
Yates was drinking too much to be anything but a burden, and his company was simply unbearable most of the time. His daughter Monica adored him, but at a distance: He was the one person who seemed to understand her perfectly, and their long animated phone conversations were a solace to both in these later years. Moreover, Monica’s appreciation for her father’s work continued to grow over time, and she was forever thrusting his books on acquaintances. One of these was her ex-boyfriend Larry David, a comedian and future cocreator of the TV show Seinfeld.* He and Monica had remained good friends after their break-up, and such was David’s admiration for her father that Monica invited him to meet Yates over dinner. When David began to demur (“I didn’t want to meet him or anybody”), Monica pleaded: Her father was bound to drink too much, and she dreaded being alone with him. Reluctantly David relented. When he arrived at the Algonquin on the night in question, Monica was late, and David found himself face-to-face with the writer he admired so much. The latter was gruffly civil, though he seemed to take a dim view of David’s teetotaling. The younger man tried to break the ice with a funny story about how he’d pretended to be suicidal to get out of Vietnam, and showed Yates the tragic face he used to pull while marching with the national guard. Yates pointed out that he himself was a veteran of World War II. Eventually Monica turned up. Over dinner her father remained mostly sober, though he had at least one awful coughing fit and his wheezy muttering was all but unintelligible to David, who relied on Monica to translate. In general Yates was not amused by David, deploring his lack of courtliness toward Monica, though the couple were only friends. As for David, he was thoroughly intimidated, and when it came time to leave the restaurant he found himself in a bind: It had begun snowing outside, and David’s expensive suede jacket would almost certainly be ruined; he was tempted to turn it inside out, but the lining was garish and liable to be denounced by Yates. As David recalled, “Should I risk a rebuff from a great writer? I decided to eat [i.e., absorb the cost of] the jacket. It was never the same.” The loud lining may or may not have provoked Yates, but the Seinfeld episode based on this meeting most certainly did (as we shall see).
Usually the repercussions of Yates’s rare forays into the world were far from comical. When he combined a visit to Gina with a writers’ conference at the University of Denver, he almost managed to undo fourteen years’ worth of (relatively) good behavior with his daughter. His old friend Seymour Epstein was on the Denver faculty, and Yates got up for their meeting with a heedless drinking spree. At a conference luncheon, Yates took the hostess aside and said “Look, I’m an alcoholic. When I sit down to eat, I need a glass of bourbon beside me at all times. Is that understood?” By the time he arrived at Martha’s door the next day, he was haggard and trembling with hangover. And for once not even Gina could cheer him up—indeed, nothing she said was right. “Why d’you say that? What d’you mean?” Yates snapped at her, over and over. On the brink of tears but determined as ever to please, Gina tried to explain that she was paying him a compliment—that she was proud to have such a famous writer for a dad. Yates looked more pained than ever. “You don’t understand,” he said, “you don’t get it.” Then, at urgent tortuous length, he tried to explain that fame wasn’t important, he didn’t want to be loved for that; but his speech began to fail as if he were lapsing into aphasia. He’d stutter and stop in mid-sentence, then make a frustrated face and start over. “Listen, I’m not sick, I’m just tired,” he told the concierge, as he kept stuttering and stopping while trying (for whatever reason) to change his room. When Gina woke up the next morning, Yates was sitting on the other bed staring at her; then he took a step toward the bathroom and collapsed. The terrified girl ran screaming into the hall and flagged down an employee, who called an ambulance. “It’s okay, we just had a little seizure here,” a medic said as they loaded Yates onto the gurney.
When Epstein heard that his friend had been taken to Porter Hospital, he called Martha to apologize: Knowing Yates’s history as well as he did, he should have watched him better; in the meantime was there anything Epstein could do? “Look,” said Martha, “I don’t want to go near the man, or vice versa.” But Gina urged her to reconsider, and Yates was finally allowed to recuperate on the couch for a couple days. It was not a happy reunion for either him or Martha. “Thanks for the ‘hospitality,’” Yates said with bleak sarcasm as he took leave of his ex-wife. Toward Gina he was frantically apologetic: He suffered from a medical condition called epilepsy, he explained, urging the girl to ask her teacher about it. A few days later, Gina’s teacher took her out of class to discuss the matter; Yates had called the woman and insisted she do so.
Back in Boston he lost himself in work—“busy in the best sense,” he reported to Prettyman: “sane and working every day: tired every night.” One day that spring (1986) a young admirer named Don Lee spotted Yates on a bench in the Prudential Center. Yates was on his way to the post office to mail Cold Spring Harbor to his publisher and had to stop every few yards to get his wind back. He sat pensively weighing the manuscript in his hand. “It’s a small novel,” he sighed. “So was The Great Gatsby,” said Lee. Yates affected to cheer up: “That’s right,” he said. “That’s right.”
* * *
Yates regarded Cold Spring Harbor as another “plateau performance”—a modest, craftsmanlike effort that “may help take the edge off some of the terrible things that were said about Young Hearts Crying.” He didn’t seem to worry much about personal exposure either, having somewhat disguised himself as the adolescent Phil Drake, while his mother made her fourth appearance in the novels as the feckless hysteric Gloria. As with Pookie in The Easter Parade, Yates not only “stripped” Gloria of his mother’s artistic pretense, he actually seemed to milk her repugnant features all the more, perhaps in order to reinvent the character or, as he put it, simply to get his mother “right.” In that respect he felt he’d succeeded at last, and this was a matter of no small satisfaction. “You are one hell of a good writer,” wrote Vonnegut, to whom the book was dedicated, “and the best reporter I know of big messages in small gestures and events. Your most striking contribution to American literature, though,… is your harrowingly honest inventory of the meager resources available to middle-class mediocrities.”
That was about as good a way as any to summarize Yates’s achievement, and most critics agreed that Cold Spring Harbor succeeded along just those lines—in the smallness of the “gestures and events” as well as the polished, unflinching portrayal thereof. “Reading this meticulously crafted novel, one wonders why the author has made matters so difficult for himself,” wrote Elaine Kendall of the Los Angeles Times, bluntly describing the plot as having to do with “pitiful losers” who “slide passively into poverty, alcoholism, blindness and lunacy”—an unpromising synopsis, but hardly inaccurate. “Against all odds,” Kendall continued, “Yates has managed to show that chronic misery can be as much an art form as acute agony.” Howard Frank Mosher, writing in the Washington Post, also felt obliged to win back the faint-hearted after a grinding recital of the novel’s plot: “If all this sounds terribly bleak, I should quickly point out that Cold Spring Harbor is so consistently well-written, just, unsentimental and sympathetic that the intertwined lives of the Shepherds and Drakes are every bit as fascinating as they are grim.” Most revealing was the dialectic between the daily and Sunday reviews in the New York Times, by Michiko Kakutani and Lowry Pei respectively, which reminded one yet again of what Stewart O’Nan called “the tricky heart of Yates’s fiction”: that is, the question of whether his “pitiful losers” are so much “literary cannon fodder” (Broyard’s phrase), or rather the product of Yates’s objective yet compassionate view of average, suffering humanity. “Mr. Yates writes of these characters with sympathy so clear-hearted that it often feels like nostalgia for his own youth,” Kakutani observed, “and yet he is also thoroughly uncompromising in revealing their capacity for self-delusion, their bewilderment in the face of failure.” Lowry Pei, however, thought Yates had stumbled in walking his usual tightrope between sympathy and brutal detachment: “Mr. Yates’s narrative voice often sounds like that of a misanthropic anthropologist, making it difficult if not impossible to feel sympathy with the characters’ dreams. The frequent, and occasionally unclear, shifts in the narrator’s attention from one character’s viewpoint to the next … intensify this feeling.”
Thirty years before, in his revision notes for his first novel, Yates pondered what he viewed as the single biggest flaw in his work—sentimentality, the fact that his protagonists Frank and April were “too nice”: “See and show both of these people from the outside, in the round, and from the inside too. Be ‘simultaneously enchanted and repelled by their inexhaustible variety.’ Think about them, and the hell with the reader’s sympathies. Make them love and hate each other the way real people do.” Yates seized on this approach—showing his characters from the outside and in—as the key to making otherwise unexceptional people interesting, and nowhere in his fiction is the omniscient view more flexible, even to the point of apparent vacillation, than in Cold Spring Harbor. Rather tellingly, Pei echoed Yates’s (and hence Fitzgerald’s) own words when he called the effect “an uneasy combination of acceptance and revulsion”—that is, an unfocused viewpoint, as if the author himself didn’t quite know what he thought of these characters and wished to have it both ways.
In fact Yates wanted to have it many ways, every conceivable way, just as long as the basic integrity of a character remains intact—a fixed entity viewed from a variety of angles. Thus, over cocktails with the elder Shepherds, Gloria watches her beloved daughter with a gelid eye as the latter burbles to her in-laws that she’s “never been happier”: “It reminded [Gloria] of Curtis Drake at his most vapid; but then, Rachel had always been her father’s child.” This is unkind, though it aptly reflects Gloria’s jealousy toward her daughter’s happiness and closeness with the Shepherds (and Curtis Drake), while at the same time being a fairly just observation—Rachel is vapid. Rachel, in turn, is loyal enough to Gloria not to discuss the latter’s “rotten tomato smell” with her brother, but she’s also determined to be a better mother to her own child than Gloria was to her. In short, both mother and daughter “love and hate each other the way real people do,” an ambivalence that particularly applies to families. In the same way Yates manages to make the loutish Evan Shepherd a somewhat interesting, somewhat sympathetic character. Evan’s extreme limitations lead him from one dreary disappointment to the next, but he goes on doing his little best withal: He refrains from outright rudeness toward the egregious Gloria, and is a doting if doltish father to his young daughter; but then, too, he hits his wife and calls her “soft as shit,” and in the eyes of his brother-in-law he’s a “dumb bastard”: “This asshole was going to spend the rest of his life on the factory floor with all the other slobs, and it would serve him right.” And that’s true too, as Gloucester says in Lear.
But Pei has a point of sorts: The narrator’s essential attitude toward Gloria Drake would seem mostly one of revulsion, period, such that the reader is unlikely to feel anything but gratified by her eventual comeuppance. Indeed there seems something a little gleeful—even “misanthropic”—in the narrator’s tabulation of Gloria’s defects, most of them expressed in grossly physical terms: Her attempt at a “girlish and disarming” laugh serves only to “call attention to how loose and ill-defined her lips [are]” and thus makes her look “like a shuddering clown”; her hair is a “blend of faded yellow and light gray, as if dyed by many years of drifting cigarette smoke”; she has a “frail, slack little figure”; she talks “until veins the size of earthworms [stand] out in her temples … until white beads of spit” gather at the corners of her mouth; to “pantomime ‘worry’ she [makes] as if to put her hand on her heart, but instead [cups and clasps] her pendulous left breast, as if she were feeling herself up”—and so on, and on. It’s a bit much, and barely ameliorated by Charles Shepherd’s gallant observation that it’s wrong to make fun of a lonely woman, in this case Gloria, as if all lonely women are doomed to become cackling, malodorous clowns. On the other hand, such people do exist in some form or another, and one can only reiterate that Yates viewed Gloria as the best likeness of Dookie he ever managed: a triumph. And if she fails to win the reader’s sympathies? As Yates was careful to remind himself, “the hell with the reader’s sympathies.”
Which, in a nutshell, may explain why Cold Spring Harbor didn’t sell and why, for that matter, Yates’s books keep going out of print. To repeat the obvious, most people don’t like reading about, much less identifying with, mediocre people who evade the truth until it rolls over them. And yet most of us face such a reckoning sooner or later, and few of us are really the brave stoical mavericks or handsome heedless romantics out of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who do stay in print. If Yates seemed to vacillate between “acceptance and revulsion” toward his people—with a decided emphasis on the latter in the case of Gloria Drake and certain others—it was at least in pursuit of an honest synthesis.
Cold Spring Harbor is a good minor novel, not one of Yates’s best or worst, but utterly representative. As such it wasn’t likely to attract new readers or alienate old ones (what few were left), and this was perhaps as it should be. Impoverished, broken in health, often drunk and demented, Yates deviated not a whit from the true north of his artistic conscience; Cold Spring Harbor, then, was a suitable last transcendence, though to Yates it was simply a matter of nine books down and six to go.
* * *
The delivery date for Uncertain Times was November 1987, and Yates felt fairly confident he could manage it: Though certain scenes were already proving “stubborn and difficult,” the basic plot was blocked out, and most of the book—the early parts anyway—had been “a pleasure to write.” Meanwhile he also produced an essay on the subject of Cassill’s 1961 novel Clem Anderson, which Yates described as “the best novel I know of on the subject of writing, or on the condition of being a writer” (the very theme Yates himself was then grappling with); “and that alone seems marvelous because so many other novelists have found only embarrassment in the same material.”
Yates’s appreciation appeared in both Ploughshares and the volume Rediscoveries II, and was instrumental in persuading Pushcart Press to reissue Cassill’s novel a few years later, an edition for which the essay served as introduction. Yates’s effort was in homage to a man who’d provided enormous moral and professional support over the years, in light of which Yates was only a little disgruntled—but distinctly so—when he noticed that, in the new edition, “special thanks” were offered to David Madden, Peggy Bach, and DeWitt Henry, but not himself. In fact the essay had been a strain for Yates, and not simply because he took little pleasure in writing criticism. “Spent most of the day trying to wade through Verlin Cassill’s endless, endless novel and haven’t finished the damn thing yet,” Yates had noted a quarter century earlier, when Clem Anderson was first published.
He’s still a very good writer but oh Jesus how the book does go on and on. There are pieces of very bad writing in it too, both through carelessness and artiness, and I’m not sure but that there’s something essentially weak in the overall idea of the thing. Haven’t been able to say what yet, though, except that his central character becomes a terrible bore after a while instead of the “genius” he is supposed to be.…
Either Yates’s later praise of the book was a little disingenuous—a true measure of the deep gratitude he felt for past favors—or he’d changed his mind over time; perhaps a bit of both. In any case he never mentioned his hurt feelings to Cassill.
For longer and longer intervals Yates brooded away the hours downstairs at the Crossroads, almost always alone. On bad days especially (bad writing, bad health) he seemed to agonize over the lasting value of his work—this at a time when he knew his reputation was already fading. Often a stranger’s compliment would leave him incredulous, and any mention of his lesser novels pained him deeply. Don Lee, then an M.F.A. student at Emerson, visited Yates occasionally at the Crossroads, and one day saw him intently scribbling on a napkin. Embarrassed when Lee asked him about it, Yates reluctantly revealed that he’d listed the titles of his own books (a frequent occupation by then). “Nine books,” said Yates. “Nine’s not so bad, is it?”
Yates appreciated company—any company—though conviviality took precious energy he was careful to hoard for his work. He rarely wrote or received letters anymore, and most of his friends had fallen out of touch one by one. No matter how ravaged and feeble he became, though, the sight of a pretty woman acted on Yates like a galvanic elixir, and his standards remained as ambitious as ever. At an Emerson College party he turned to Wakefield and wheezed, “Look at that one! I’m gonna put the moves on her!” The girl was perhaps nineteen, and sure enough Yates hobbled over, for better or worse. Around this time, too, Robin Metz came to Boston and was sad to find his old friend so sickly and forlorn; at their second meeting, though, Metz brought a former student who’d moved to the area, one Sue Doe, and Yates seemed to drop twenty years in an instant. But whether he was able to accept it or not, Yates’s lothario days were over. Once he called Wendy Sears and asked her to come to his apartment and help him make his bed; while she arranged the dank grayish sheets as best she could, Yates excitedly told her that he had a date that night with an attractive young woman—the first in a long, long while—and hoped to make love to her after a fashion. A few days later Sears asked how it went, and Yates sadly admitted the woman had stood him up.
Most of the time he understood the reasons for his loneliness all too well. On the rare occasion that some random admirer sought him out, Yates would often avoid drinking in order to make a better impression. Ten years before, at the behest of their mutual friend Seymour Krim, a man named Raymond Abbott had arranged to meet Yates while in Boston, and had ended up driving him to the airport; when Abbott called again in 1986, Yates eagerly invited him to the Crossroads, though he hadn’t the faintest idea who the man was. “To Ray,” he inscribed Cold Spring Harbor, “In regret for having been smashed on the way to the airport that time.” During their second meeting Yates sipped club soda and chain-smoked; after several hours of halting conversation, Abbott tried to say good-bye. “Do you have to go just yet, Ray?” Yates asked again and again. “Can’t you stay a bit longer?” His loneliness was so painfully obvious that Yates was obliged to explain, in so many words, that most people had given him up as a drunk; when Abbott asked about women, Yates just shrugged and shook his head. That year another admirer, Martin Jukovsky, spent a single “strange and somewhat distressing afternoon” with Yates. “He kept up a brilliant stream of conversation,” Jukovsky recalled, “but his voice had a tremble. He would often drift into old woes, such as regrets about his marriage; when this happened, he would seem ready to break into tears, his voice would get this odd, weepy sound, though he never actually cried.” Yates also spoke obsessively about being trapped in a “rotten contract” with a “wretched literary agent,” and begged the bewildered man for advice. As with Abbott, he drank nothing stronger than club soda.
Every so often the awfulness would overwhelm Yates, and he’d go from soda to beer to bourbon and back to the hospital. His health was such that any kind of sustained drinking was all but guaranteed to cause a breakdown. That winter Wendy Sears called to check on Yates, who gagged and gurgled on the phone for some fifteen minutes before finally hacking out, “Help me.” Sears was afraid of what she’d find in Yates’s apartment, and called around until DeWitt Henry agreed to investigate. He and Brodigan found Yates unconscious in a room spattered with blood and garbage. When Sears visited Yates a few days later at the VA, he seemed in a daze of pain and didn’t speak; she thought he was dying. The next week Yates called with the cheery news that he was back home and feeling much better. He’d been taken off lithium and given Tegretol, which (it was hoped) would do double duty in controlling his seizures and manic episodes. But none of it was any good, of course, if Yates wouldn’t stop drinking.
It had been a bad year all around. That summer Yates’s beloved friend Andre Dubus was hit by a car and permanently crippled; in September his left leg was amputated at the knee. There would be no more hilarious, comforting get-togethers at the Crossroads or Yates’s apartment. Meanwhile Yates did what he could. Amid the mixed literary company of John Irving, Jayne Anne Phillips, Updike, Vonnegut, and others, Yates participated in a benefit reading that February at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge to raise money for Dubus’s medical expenses. While Dubus smiled at him from a portable hospital bed in the back of the ballroom, Yates kicked off the event with his story “Trying Out for the Race,” which he described as “a little tarnished, but it’ll have to do.” When he finished—“charm[ing] the audience with a quiet, dreamy tale,” according to the Boston Globe—he introduced the next reader, Vonnegut, who (Yates said) had promised to be “just as long and just as lugubrious.”
Nothing much happened to Yates for another five months, when his second grandchild Emily was born July 17, 1987. Yates took a shuttle flight to New York and left the same day, lingering long enough to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Sharon and, once again, take his son-in-law out for a celebratory drink. As Yates was leaving the hospital he heard a familiar voice— “Hi, Dick!”—and there was his first wife Sheila, whom he hadn’t laid eyes on in twenty years. Startled, he dropped something to the floor but was too feeble to bend over and pick it up; Sheila handed it to him. “He was so weak and done in,” she remembered. “His life was over. And we had nothing to say to each other.” Later Yates called Sharon and expressed his amazement: “My God, she’s an old lady! She let her hair go white!”
* * *
By the end of the summer it was clear that Uncertain Times wouldn’t be finished by November or anywhere close. Nor was there any question of renegotiating his contract: Yates had no agent, no capacity for handling such matters on his own, and no semi-tractable publisher such as Sam Lawrence. By a somewhat happy coincidence, his friend DeWitt Henry was then acting chair of the creative writing program at Emerson, and was able to provide Yates a one-semester appointment teaching undergraduates; after that he was on his own. By then Yates was viewed in Boston (and beyond) as an unemployable drunk, but if he managed to acquit himself at Emerson he might regain a measure of credibility. That was the idea anyway, and in fact Yates rose to the occasion rather nicely: He met all his classes and even recommended a student’s work for the “Discovery” issue of Ploughshares, writing an introduction to the accepted story.
But it was shaping up to be a cold winter. With his advance gone and the semester almost over, Yates was facing total destitution, and even the better-case scenarios were grim: The Emerson job had served to remind him that he had neither the energy nor the desire to teach anymore, yet the alternatives were nil, and he’d have to count himself fortunate if anyone was willing to hire him at all; meanwhile he was forced to borrow money from Vonnegut, whose affable eagerness to help didn’t make the request any less excruciating. Only three years before he’d been an NEA Senior Fellow, America’s “least famous great writer” according to Esquire, and all his books (but one) were back in print for the first time in years; now, at age sixty-one, he’d be lucky to keep a roof over his head. On the other hand, it was more than a little miraculous that he was even alive.
And then a number of things happened to remind Yates that, as he put it, “the world [wasn’t] really at [his] throat after all.” Dubus, Vonnegut, and others got the word out that Yates was in trouble, and benefactors soon began to appear. For years Dubus and George Starbuck had been urging Don Hendrie at the University of Alabama to hire Yates, his old teacher, for the prestigious (and lucrative) Coal Royalty Endowed Chair in Writing. Clearly the time was now, but the earliest Hendrie could schedule Yates was the fall 1988 semester; it was possible, though, that an interim stipend could be worked out if Yates was willing to read student manuscripts and visit the odd class. The thought of living in the Deep South (“fucking Dixie”) was anathema to Yates for any number of reasons, but this time he couldn’t see a way around it. By December he’d arranged to forward his mail to the Alabama English Department, but then a most improbable savior intervened.
Yates’s old nemesis David Milch was now in Los Angeles as producer of the hit TV series Hill Street Blues. Looking back, Milch can’t recall who told him of Yates’s predicament; in any case Milch was in a position to help and didn’t hesitate to do so, though he realized he’d have to make it seem like a legitimate job offer lest his proud old teacher refuse. He invited Yates to write treatments for TV pilots, and assured him he’d have plenty of time left over to finish his novel—anyway they’d work out the details later, and meanwhile Yates was welcome to stay in Milch’s guest house for as long as he liked. Yates was in no position to question such generosity. As for Milch, he wonders if he was fully conscious of his own motives at the time. “As Katherine Anne Porter once said,” he remarked, “‘I never heard of a perfect synonym, or an unmixed motive.’”