CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

A Cheer for Realized Men: 1988-1992

By February, Yates had moved into Milch’s guest house and was hard at work on some treatments proposed by his benefactor: One idea concerned two families with lots of foster children, a kind of postmodern Brady Bunch meets Eight Is Enough; another was about a group of young newspaper reporters living in a communal house in Washington, D.C. Yates despised the work (“There were a lot of jokes on the word ‘treatment,’” his daughter Monica recalls), but Milch was covering his room, board, and child-support payments—as well as dispensing plenty of “walking-around money” as he called it—so Yates bent himself to the task of contriving joys and sorrows related to the business of communal living. “I remember Milch well,” Vonnegut wrote Yates, “since he took a strong dislike to me, which, you will agree, I’m sure, makes about as much sense as hating hot fudge sundaes or Helen Hayes.” Vonnegut wryly observed that Hill Street Blues was “a very important work of art,” but applauded the fact that Milch had “thrown lucrative work in the direction of good writers who would like to make some real money for a change.”

Yates was miserable. He desperately wanted to believe that he was doing something worthwhile for Milch—at any rate he was determined to persuade Milch of that fact—but something in the latter’s manner belied any such hope. “How we doin’ today, Sport?” Milch would greet him of a morning, clapping him on the shoulder. (“That little shit! He called me ‘Sport’!” Yates raged wonderingly to a friend.) At other times, though, the two would sit and talk about writing, at seeming ease with each other; Gina Yates, who knew how damaging the arrangement was to her father’s ego, nevertheless got the distinct impression that Yates and Milch were friends. And really Milch was fond of Yates—perhaps more so than he’d anticipated—but at the same time he harbored “a real undisclosed anger” for having been bullied and rejected all those years before at Iowa: “It was kind of an ongoing humiliation for Dick to be the recipient of generosity,” said Milch. “Thank God I wasn’t aware of it consciously, but in retrospect all those elements fed into it. This was payback for ‘Wouldn’t you like to be David Milch?’”

After tactfully rejecting a number of treatments, Milch suggested that TV work wasn’t Yates’s line and encouraged him to go back to his novel. Yates was crestfallen. He proposed that part of his debt to Milch—which would eventually climb to $36,000—could serve as an option on Uncertain Times, and he constantly assured Milch that he’d pay back the rest of it one way or the other. Whatever he proposed was fine with Milch (“Fine, fine”), but the whole situation was far from fine with Yates: “He chafed and chafed and chafed that this young snotnose was supporting him,” said Monica. “He was always growling about the $36,000 he owed Milch: ‘I’ll get him that goddamn $36,000!’ It wasn’t an issue to Milch, but Dad wouldn’t drop it.” Meanwhile Yates’s cigarette fumes were forever wafting about chez Milch, an otherwise smoke-free environment where children lived besides. “Well, if there’s no real work for me out here,” Yates stiffly told his host one day, “I guess I’ll go home and tie up some loose ends.” Milch said that was fine.

After a long despondent bender in Boston, Yates reappeared in Los Angeles looking as if he were on the verge of death. His hands trembled, he couldn’t catch his breath, he seemed in pain all the time. He was frantic to finish his novel, but equally to do whatever he could to earn his keep with Milch. Milch was appalled: He urged Yates to concentrate on his health and novel, in that order, and let the rest go; they formalized a financial arrangement and found an apartment for Yates in west Los Angeles. Naturally Yates insisted on something spartan, and he got it: a furnished one-bedroom in a motel-like complex built around a shabby courtyard. On the orange shag carpet Yates set up a card table for his manual Royal, then nailed three portraits of his daughters to the wall and that was that. The apartment—as noted by a reporter who later interviewed Yates there—“was the kind of place people hole up when they’re on the lam from the law.”

Other than Milch, Yates’s only companion during these months was a three-hundred-pound recovering heroin addict named Larry, who was dying of AIDS. Milch had put the man up in an apartment near Yates’s, and in return Larry cooked breakfast for Milch’s children and served as Yates’s chauffeur. “Larry and Dick formed the most unlikely duo,” Milch remarked with twinkling understatement. “They were the best thing in each of their lives. Driving Dick around gave Larry something to do during the day, and gave Dick something to bitch about.” The poignant Larry seemed to provoke Yates in a number of ways: The car always stank of his cigars (though he was careful to put them out as soon as Yates got in), and he insisted on taking Yates to intolerable movies; also, he was morbidly devoted to David Milch and Narcotics Anonymous, and Yates thought it was all a bunch of hokum—both Larry’s ease with accepting charity and his faith in twelve-step programs. Mainly Yates was exasperated by the hopelessness of the man: When he wasn’t placidly resigned to whatever remained of his life, he tended to dwell on the guilt he felt for being a bad father during his addict days. “You’re a hive of regret!” Yates would explode. “Dick resented everything about Larry, but in fact adored him,” said Milch. “He’d gather all his strength to berate Larry’s taste in movies or whatever, then he’d be tired and go to sleep, and Larry could go home. That’s why Larry was such a gift to Dick: Dick’s ranting was just background music to Larry, who understood it for what it was.”

Yates’s rancor spared no one; indeed, at times, it seemed the only thing keeping him alive. Once he’d gotten over his initial gratitude, he became particularly abusive toward Milch, as if he were baiting the man to cast him into the outer darkness. As Milch recalled, “A necessary precondition for any conversation with Dick was to spend five or ten minutes on the extent to which I’d abused my gifts and abdicated my responsibilities as a writer. By then he was out of breath so we couldn’t talk about anything else.” In the end Milch was no more offended by such bluster than Larry—if anything it was simply painful to witness, as when Yates would insist on showing Milch bits of manuscript to prove his novel really existed. But no matter how pitiful Yates occasionally seemed, he commanded respect and hence forgiveness; he was struggling to keep his dignity, and he refused to give up.

One day he asked Milch to meet him for dinner at the Bicycle Café on Wilshire. (The place was around the corner from Yates’s apartment, and soon became his Crossroads and Blue Mill in Los Angeles.) “After the usual diatribe about my having embraced everything philistine and inauthentic in American culture,” Milch remembered, “we settled down to business. It was hard for Dick to ask for anything: You had to figure out what he wanted, offer it to him, then be lambasted for a while for having offered it.” Yates embarked on an elaborate preamble about how “full of shit” Hollywood parties were, how Milch’s parties were liable to be worse than most (“I’d never been to a Hollywood party,” said Milch, “but I was trying to agree with him in principle”), full of “fucking Hollywood phonies” and so forth. Then Yates segued to the topic of his sixteen-year-old daughter Gina, who was coming out for a visit; he hadn’t seen her in a long time, etc. “Dick, I have an idea,” said Milch, getting the picture. “Why don’t we have a party?” Yates consented, and seemed pleased with the result: The other guests made much of him, and Gina seemed to enjoy herself and plainly adored her father. At some point the tipsy Yates, expansive with happiness, made to embrace Gina and caught his thumb in her hoop earring, tearing the lobe. As the blood gushed from her ear, Yates became abject, and Gina forgot her own distress and fell to consoling him. “It was so sad,” said Milch, “and yet a perfect moment from one of Dick’s stories: the best of intentions, but some fundamental inauthenticity or incapacity with devastating results … and yet something transcendently beautiful in the failure of the moment.”

*   *   *

What Monica Yates called her “last hurrah as a writer” was a 1988 stay at the MacDowell Colony, where she tried to revise her novel into something more literary, or anyway less embarrassing; in her cabin she noticed her father’s name on the roster of previous occupants, an ambiguous portent at best. Back in New York she was earning good wages as a part-time word-processor at Skadden Arps law firm, but Yates perceived her life as lonely and bleak. “I’m not Emily Grimes,” Monica would protest. “This isn’tdepressing.” Then one night in September, as luck would have it, her building burned down and her novel with it. Monica watched from the street as everything she owned went up in smoke; she didn’t even have a toothbrush. She wondered if this was some kind of sign.

Yates wasn’t inclined to put it that way, though he thought it might be a nice opportunity for both of them: He needed company in Los Angeles; she needed a place to stay and time to think; he’d sleep on the couch and she could have the bedroom all to herself. Monica was tempted—any change seemed good at that point—though she did have one predictable reservation. “I like to drink,” Yates had always balked in the past. “I enjoy it. It’s the one thing I really enjoy.” Monica had suggested he find something else. “Like what?” he asked. “Nature and exercise?” His last alcoholic collapse in Boston had coincided with Monica’s time at MacDowell, and over the phone she’d angrily insisted that he finally make the connection between drinking, drugs, and breakdowns. Yates professed to see her point and afterward seemed to limit himself to the occasional beer, but Monica demanded total abstinence before she’d move to Los Angeles. In the end Yates agreed: By then he was tired enough of hangovers, breakdowns, contretemps of all sorts—and loneliness—to give full-time sobriety a try.

As Larry drove them in from the airport, Yates mentioned in passing that there was “a little bit of a cockroach problem” at his apartment. This proved to be an impressive understatement: Yates’s kitchen had been all but annexed by the pests; one cabinet in particular, where a rotten potato forlornly reposed, was “a moving sheet of cockroaches.” Monica spent her entire first night in Los Angeles smashing, spraying, and finally scrubbing away the sticky brown residue of the slaughter—though for weeks afterward, every morning, dead and dying roaches would appear on the floor with fresh abundance. Monica came to think of her father’s housekeeping as “tidy, but not clean”: Though he seemed oblivious to the ashes that covered the place like volcanic soot, to vermin of all sorts, to the gray slime left by the black sponge he sometimes ran over counters, to the stench emanating from a broken disposal unit, he nonetheless kept his manuscripts in neat piles, made up his couch each morning, and was nettled by his daughter’s inclination to leave newspapers strewn any which way.

Other than that, they got along remarkably well. Though Yates missed alcohol every waking hour of the day, he kept his promise and stayed sober. The change in his temperament was astounding: Once again he became the doting, playful father whom Monica had known and adored as a child, with the difference that now they could live as companionable adults. Every morning they read and loudly discussed the New York Times. “People around here must think we hate each other,” they’d say, laughing at their own raised voices and merry fuck you’s. One night they went out with Larry David (who’d come to Los Angeles to work on the Seinfeld pilot), as well as actor-comedian Richard Lewis and a starlet he was dating at the time. Afterward a tearful Monica lamented that her life was going nowhere—she was holed-up in a one-bedroom apartment with her father, while Lewis’s starlet lived in a penthouse. “Ah baby,” said Yates. “Cheer up. At least we’re not as bad as Woody Herman and his daughter”—whereupon he showed her a story in the Times about how the jazz great and his middle-aged daughter had washed up on a Los Angeles lawn, evicted with all their worldly goods.

Amid this idyll Monica persisted in her childhood tendency to badger Yates about his bad habits—“baiting the lion in his lair,” she called it. Taped to the wall was a piece of paper titled “Things to Do,” and in Yates’s column she’d written such items as “Quit smoking”; “Stop saying ‘fuck’”; “Improve posture.” Yates, in turn, chided his daughter’s lack of discipline as a writer: “You read too much, you exercise too much, you do everything but write,” he told her. The truth was, whatever wan literary impulse abided in Monica was being killed by the daunting example of her father’s absolute commitment. Despite mortal illness and constant fatigue, he wrote for hours every day; even a letter to the electric company was polished into lapidary perfection. “I thought ugh, I can’t do that,” said Monica. When Yates would remonstrate with her on the subject, she’d sometimes accuse him of wanting her to be like him, to which Yates would reply No, he truly thought writing was the only fulfilling thing for her—apart from being a wife and mother. “He was very sincere about it,” said Monica, “and he was partly right: I had that sort of temperament, but not enough talent or drive. Still, it made me happy to hear him say that, since it made me see that he himself was fulfilled by his writing. He thought it a great, worthy life—the only life.”

The most disquieting aspect of living with Yates was to witness at close range the morbidities of failing health. Every morning he’d hawk and retch in a desperate effort to clear his lungs; as his emphysema worsened, the wet bronchial cough of twenty years earlier gave way to a ragged hacking, the mucus drying up and the alveoli collapsing. Even more disturbing were symptoms akin to those of mental illness. Not long after Monica’s arrival, Yates was hospitalized with pneumonia, prior to which he seemed to be slipping into dementia—in one case obsessing about a check to Martha he’d already sent. “Gotta get her that check, baby,” he panted over and over as Monica tried to calm him. Not until later, when she became a nurse, did Monica realize that her father had been suffering from the effects of hypoxia—lack of oxygen to the brain and other tissues. At the time, however, such behavior was an ominous reminder of past lapses.

Though he had every intention of finishing Uncertain Times and, with any luck, a few other books, Yates began to accept at least the possibility that he might die soon—out of print, forgotten, and broke. The old mirage of a big movie deal seemed the only hope of providing an inheritance for his daughters (he still wanted to send Gina to Harvard), and in his final years this became a fixed idea of sorts. In 1988 a Denver-based filmmaker named Donna Dewey optioned Cold Spring Harbor and hired Yates’s old friend Bill Harrison (of Rollerball fame) to write the screenplay. Harrison decided that the apparent protagonist, Evan Shepherd, was too unsympathetic to build a story around, and decided instead to focus on Phil Drake—that is, Phil’s bike riding around Long Island with the affluent loser “Flash” Ferris. Harrison proposed to call this adaptation Bicycle Summer, and further proposed not to reveal the details to Yates until it was too late for him to howl in protest. Over dinner at Tutto Bene in November, Yates sipped seltzer and pressed Harrison about his screenplay—questions Harrison artfully dodged, both then and during Yates’s subsequent phone calls. Finally Harrison and Dewey submitted the script to Jack Clayton, director of the 1974 remake of Gatsby, who seemed interested. Alas, the movie was never made, though for Yates it would have been a bittersweet experience at best.

“There’s just no whore in that man at all,” Dubus once remarked of Yates. Despite his sheepish claims to the contrary, Yates could never deliberately write “soap opera” or be party to it (if he could help it), at least where his serious work was concerned; indeed, he felt hideous anguish when it was cheapened in even the most incidental way. Just before leaving Boston, he’d finally acquired a new agent—a young man named Ned Leavitt, who also handled Dan Wakefield. About a year later Leavitt arranged for Random House to reissue Revolutionary Road, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, and The Easter Parade as part of their popular Vintage Contemporaries line, a deal that promised to revitalize Yates’s career somewhat. This happy prospect was diminished, however, when Yates saw the cover art, which so enraged him that he was tempted to stop the presses with legal action. “Why has surrealism been chosen as the cover style for these novels, when I can find it on no other Vintage books?” he wrote in a memo to Leavitt, which he copied to his lawyer friend Prettyman. The proposed cover for Revolutionary Road depicted a small suburban house and church within a floating glass jar, against which was propped a ladder; Yates thought this inexplicably evoked Sylvia Plath’s Bell Jar, that the ladder was a “mixed metaphor,” and that the church was “wholly inappropriate.” He demanded that the “three offending images” be removed and the house lowered to the ground. As for the cover of The Easter Parade (two hanging dresses with folded human arms): “The picture is gruesome, to no purpose. Does it mean to suggest identical twins who have only coat-hanger hooks where their heads ought to be? I am entirely baffled and believe readers will be, too.” With little change, though, the covers were allowed to stand.*

Meanwhile Yates was casting about for some way to achieve financial independence, and toward that end he suspended work on his novel in early 1989 to write a twenty-two-page “proposal for a screenplay” titled The World on Fire. The treatments for Milch had been hateful labor, but the well-crafted and funny World on Fire reads like a pleasant exercise in nostalgia, if a somewhat mercenary and left-handed one. “This will be a story of the early 1950’s in America,” it begins, “when electronic computers were still an infant technology with a great if barely discernible future.” The protagonist is a twenty-eight-year-old salesman for Remington Rand named Harold Clark, whose go-getting ingenuity wins him a transfer from Wichita to New York, where he’s expected to promote the “cumbersome, intricate and expensive” UNIVAC by developing applications “sexy” enough to stir the public imagination. Harold is hindered in this venture by a bland, unimaginative boss named Ed Grundy, whose staff is comprised of “cool, languid snobs who have long made a virtue of despising their work.” Harold’s brainchild is to use the UNIVAC to predict the outcome, on national TV, of the 1952 presidential election; he railroads the idea past an envious sales staff and doubtful engineers, whereupon an “avalanche of publicity” ensues: “If machines relieve mankind of thought as a burden, will we then be free for more creative lives?” the media wonders. “Will the computer revolution bring a new Age of Enlightenment?”

Yates used his insider’s knowledge of the UNIVAC and its various controversies to good effect, and bolstered it all with a subplot addressing his favorite theme of mediocre people—women in particular—who wistfully pursue “creative” lives. Harold’s bored wife Elaine falls in with a circle of women who “allow themselves long and adventurous days in Manhattan,” trying to “find themselves” via “psychotherapy and its numbing jargon” as well as painting, acting, dancing, and writing classes. Elaine enrolls in a lecture course at the New School called “Strategies of Indirection in the Novel” taught by a witty rake, Thurston Picard, who naturally seduces her. Picard surprises Elaine by finding her husband’s work interesting—computers, he says, may prove “a way of transcending reality”—but on the night of the election, everything goes wrong for Harold. The UNIVAC (with its “two separate, cable-linked components … each the size of a room”) all but crowds out the broadcasting equipment at the television network, and then delivers results that are not only late but grossly inaccurate. Harold’s disgrace is mirrored by that of another modest visionary, Yates’s hero Adlai Stevenson, while the fatuous Eisenhower “is shown waving both arms, displaying the wide empty grin that will come to personify the United States for the next eight years.” It would seem a typical Yates ending, but this was for the movies, after all. Thus, when Professor Picard pointedly tells his students that the UNIVAC fiasco reminds him of “Flaubert’s great image of the carp on the kitchen table,” Elaine leaves the class in disgust and goes back to her sacked husband, who is far too plucky to be daunted long by this setback. The movie ends with the couple popping champagne on the road back to Wichita, as the song “Side by Side” comes up on the soundtrack.

The proposal was shopped around the major studios, whose representatives tended to pass on the story but commend the writing; Ruth Pomerance and Scott Rudin at Columbia told Yates’s agent they were “huge fans and would like to develop something with him”—but nothing came of this, or of The World on Fire. In the latter case it was perhaps for the best, since the story’s pivotal event is fundamentally inaccurate: In fact the UNIVAC made history by predicting Eisenhower’s 1952 landslide based on less than 1 percent of the vote. Yates was puzzled when he couldn’t find newspaper accounts to verify his own version, though probably he didn’t research the matter very thoroughly. In later years he was intimidated by librarians (and cabbies and waiters and doormen) who were liable to look askance at his wheezing disheveled helplessness; a couple of years before, after one abortive attempt to research Uncertain Times at a Boston library, he’d asked the young Don Lee to go in his stead and find part of a speech he’d written in an old microfilmed issue of Time magazine.

*   *   *

Yates was heartily sick of living off Milch. A university placement service had shopped his résumé all over the country, but apart from a few nibbles, “nobody would touch him” as Monica Yates put it. Finally he called the director of the USC Masters of Professional Writing program, James Ragan, and laid it on the line: His daughter had come to live with him, Yates said, and he “want[ed] to give her stability”; he’d take anything the man could give him. As it happened Ragan had nothing, but such was his admiration for Yates—mixed with pity, perhaps—that he offered a half course for the spring 1989 semester, paid out of Ragan’s own budget, with a full course to follow if all went well. That was the end of the Milch money.

For a while Yates rallied, endearing himself to students and faculty alike with his grim, almost miraculous resolve to overcome his decrepitude. He was so determined to wean himself from Milch that, rather than rely on Larry for transportation, he attempted (once) to take a bus to campus—a “disaster,” Yates reported. Before long a protective network of students had formed to drive him to class or the grocery store or wherever he wanted to go. He also befriended Ragan, who often invited Yates to his home and let him smoke as much as he wanted. One night the two were having dinner at the faculty center, when Ragan noticed that Yates’s face had turned blueish and blankly helpless. Ragan administered an inexpert Heimlich, but only a bit of food came up; by the time the ambulance arrived Yates looked about to expire. Ragan followed him to the emergency room and anxiously awaited the verdict: “I thought Dick had met the same fate as Tennessee Williams,” he recalled, “and on my watch.” After half an hour or so, Yates emerged smiling and insisted on teaching his class that night. As they taxied back to campus, Yates remarked, “I kept thinking of Tennessee Williams”—and Ragan laughed. Yates gave him a bitter look: “What the hell are you laughing about? Williams choked to death!”

Sheer desperation was the only thing that kept Yates going. He was tired, anxious, and broke, in no condition either to teach or write at anything like his old level, yet the only alternative was death. His students’ work was mostly bad, and Yates couldn’t think of anything to say about it; he began to take double doses of tranquilizers just to get through his classes, and soon his mind began to slip. He became more obsessed than ever by his debt to Milch, and amid a spell of increasingly odd behavior he wrote the man a note and hand-delivered it to his wife, who looked it over and smiled—a good sign, Yates thought. (When asked about this, Milch quoted Robert Penn Warren: “‘Some foolishness a man is due to forget.’”) Monica was horrified by the change in her father: He began to giggle and stare at her; he stopped sleeping and talked incessantly. “How am I ‘not right’?” he demanded. “What’s wrong with me? What d’you mean I’m crazy? What’s crazy about this?” One night she woke up and found him standing in her room wearing a raincoat, frantically pushing a vacuum cleaner and saying he couldn’t work it—what could he do—? Monica left the apartment and checked into a Holiday Inn (“I had to get some sleep”), but next morning she returned and insisted they go to the hospital. At length Yates seemed to agree, but once they arrived he pretended that nothing was wrong, and responded with fluent disdain to such questions as “What year is it?” and “Who’s the president?” Faced with the prospect of taking the deranged man home, Monica began to cry, and Yates went berserk: “What’re you gonna do, cry now? What’s your problem?” he yelled over and over. The doctors assumed that he was a danger to others and hustled him off to the locked psychiatric ward for a mandatory thirty days. Monica found him “drooling and bleary-eyed” when she visited, and was so unnerved by the whole business that she began seeing a VA therapist herself. Within a week or so, she said a sad good-bye to her father and moved to a place of her own in Venice Beach.

On his release in April, Yates was gratified to learn that Ragan had gladly kept his job open for however long it took to recover from his latest bout of “pneumonia.” Meanwhile Yates called Don Hendrie at the University of Alabama and expressed his strong desire to occupy the Strode House as soon as possible. The best Hendrie could do was fall 1990, but at least it gave Yates something to look forward to.

Around this time his old friend Barrett Prettyman paid a visit, and found Yates pleasant, if somewhat chastened and faded. Yates hit it off with Prettyman’s companion, Noreen McGuire, and after a fairly jolly brunch he put his arm around her as they walked back to the car—affectionately, but also because he needed support. Along the way Yates bent down to pat a dog and almost toppled over. He seemed frustrated by his frailty and spoke openly of dying: He wasn’t so much afraid as he was sad—he still had a number of projects to finish, and wanted to be closer to his daughters. Back at his apartment, his friends noticed that he kept his front door unlocked, and Yates explained that he didn’t have keys as he’d only lose them. Wasn’t he afraid of thieves? “Nah, if they break in, they won’t steal this,” said Yates, indicating his manuscript and rickety manual typewriter. Indeed, there was little else to steal.

That summer the Vintage reprints of Yates’s three best books were published amid a small flurry of acclaim. David Streitfeld interviewed him for the short-lived celebrity magazine Fame, while Elizabeth Venant wrote a long feature article for the Sunday Los Angeles Times. Both reporters seemed aghast to find Yates in such straitened circumstances, and a common indignant theme of their stories (“The Great Unknown” and “A Fresh Twist in the Road”) was the bewildering extent to which a writer of Yates’s stature had been forgotten, the awful toll such neglect had taken. “It’s a pretty bad time,” Yates admitted to Streitfeld, in a voice the latter described as “thick and furry, steeped in tobacco and Jim Beam.” In both interviews Yates made a point of mentioning that he was on the wagon—he took it for granted they’d heard he was a drunk—though he was hardly self-congratulatory about it. “I was more affable when I was drinking,” he told Venant. “Now I’m sort of shrunk into myself from the effort to keep from drinking.” Whatever the subject, Yates responded with the same flat, almost drab candor, refusing to glamorize either his life or work, past or present. “I’ve been in and out of bughouses, yes,” he said, when Streitfeld wondered about the recurrence of madness in his fiction, and for the same reason Venant inquired about his childhood: “Most people looking back believe their childhood was more poignant than anyone else’s,” Yates replied. “So I won’t compete for the poignancy prize. My parents were decent people. My childhood was OK.”

*   *   *

In September, Yates’s old friend Seymour Krim, ill with heart disease and related problems, took his own life with the help of instructions from the Hemlock Society. A week before, he’d mailed a last wave of postcards to friends, explaining that he’d been sick and expressing his affection one last time before “checking out.” In recent years, whenever he went to New York, Yates had visited Krim, and was well aware of the man’s deteriorating health. Despite their past disputes on the subject, Yates wasn’t at all disposed to characterize his friend’s suicide as “self-indulgent”; he thought it a commendable end to an intolerable situation. “Seymour Krim was a champion,” Yates wrote for the memorial service at the Village Gate. “[He] gave so much of his energy helping other writers, in any number of crucial ways, that nobody will ever know how many of us are indebted to him … but we have one proud and honorable thing in common: Seymour Krim was a friend of ours.” One year later Yates would have the satisfaction of outliving a very different kind of friend, Anatole Broyard.

A year that began with poverty and madness was ending on a decidedly upbeat note. Ever since moving his list to Houghton-Mifflin, Sam Lawrence had been negotiating to buy out Yates’s contract for Uncertain Times, and in December he was finally able to offer his friend a two-book deal providing a fresh advance and thirty-three monthly payments. Elizabeth Venant of the Los Angeles Times paid Yates a “return visit” at the end of 1989, and cheerfully reported the “lucky break” that would enable him to quit teaching for several months and devote all his time to finishing his novel. “Uncertain Times is scheduled for publication in the spring,” Venant concluded, “and perhaps for Yates, times will be uncertain no more.”

Indeed, it was shaping up to be a banner year. Also that December, Yates received a flattering letter from a woman in New York named Susan Braudy, who’d just optioned The Easter Parade, which she planned to adapt herself for television. A novelist and former Warner Brothers vice president, Braudy was well connected in the industry and had an uncommon degree of enthusiasm for the project at hand (which in retrospect she calls “a labor of love and desperation”). As she wrote Yates, “The book was first given to me by Paul Schrader who wrote Taxi Driver, the movie, among other things. He told me what a major work it was, advised me to stay home from work for a day to read it and have a full cry which I did.” Then a few years later Braudy was watching Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters when she noticed Yates’s novel mentioned in one scene: “That’s my favorite book!” she blurted out in the theater. She was so enthused that she wrote Woody Allen a letter praising both the movie and his taste in fiction; Allen replied that he knew little about Yates but loved his “clean prose and way of telling a story.” That same year, in fact, Allen had remarked in the New York Times that he loved books about the “problems and strengths of women,” and therefore “couldn’t wait to get [his] hands on … the Richard Yates novel, The Easter Parade.” Finally, in 1989, Braudy wrote Allen again to let him know she’d optioned the book and would appreciate any help or advice; Allen replied with a gracious note that Braudy enclosed for Yates’s perusal: “I’m delighted to hear you are planning to dramatize ‘Easter Parade,’” Allen wrote in part. “I called [actress] Dianne Wiest and told her about it and you can feel free to call her.… She hasn’t read the book, but I told her how wonderful it is and that you were serious about a high quality presentation of it.” Yates was elated by Woody Allen’s interest, and promptly followed-up with a call to Bruce Ricker, a lawyer and independent filmmaker whom Yates had met through Krim. Ricker happened to be acquainted with Wiest, and wrote her that “Woody Allen [had] highly recommend[ed]” her for a part in The Easter Parade, a copy of which he enclosed. Susan Braudy had already done as much, and may have been a bit piqued by Yates’s unsolicited initiative; in any case she eventually got in touch with her favorite author by phone—the beginning of a very curious chapter in both their lives.

For the rest of his time in Los Angeles, Yates hardly left his apartment except for weekly dinners with Monica. Free until August to do nothing but write, he hoped to finish his novel and perhaps get started on the next. But willpower alone wasn’t enough anymore, and every day the work got harder. Meanwhile his manner was becoming odd again, and his daughter simply couldn’t bear it. “What do you mean my voice sounds funny?” he’d ask when she refused to meet him for dinner, and sometimes he’d try to make a joke about it: “You think FDR’s daughter would refuse to have dinner with him because his voice sounded funny?” Monica found such humor “forced and strange,” and the more Yates worked to put her at ease the worse he seemed. “I kept asking the VA shrink to do something,” she recalled, “make him right again the way Burr had always been able to. But it wasn’t his mind or the meds this time, it was hypoxia, and the doctors should have known that even if they weren’t pulmonologists.”

In his daughter’s absence Yates found solace where he could. “Dick was losing touch with reality toward the end,” said Milch. “And one did what one could just to sit and hold his hand. And there was a bit of grace that came to him and me in that—no illusions or retributions involved. But then that haunted look would come back in his eyes and it would be time to go.”

*   *   *

As he was wheeled off the plane in Birmingham, one of the few signs of life Yates showed was a flicker of embarrassment as alarmed graduate students hustled him out to a car and drove to the hospital, where a pulmonologist determined that Yates could no longer endure air travel, or for that matter the ordinary demands of daily life, without oxygen tanks. “Is he going to die?” a frantic Monica asked the doctor over the phone. “How long does he have?” The doctor (“a prick”) replied that he had no idea. As for Yates, he was sounding like a new man now that more oxygen was getting to his brain.

Apart from a slight acquaintance with Don Hendrie, the program director, the only people Yates knew in Tuscaloosa were George and Kathy Starbuck, the first of whom was badly debilitated by Parkinson’s disease. Yates had dinner with the couple once a week, and was often compelled to summon Kathy to the hospital to deal with paperwork and other problems. Now with two invalids on her hands, the woman’s good humor would occasionally flag. Once, after yet another call in the dead of night, she brought along a young friend named Mary to boost her morale and serve as a buffer of sorts; both women arrived to find Yates “damn near dead” on a gurney. After Mary left the room, Yates feebly beckoned to Starbuck. “God,” he gasped, “she’s got great legs!”

Hendrie’s assistant Tony Earley, a graduate student, was designated the “Yates Coordinator”—a job requiring tact, compassion, patience, and resourcefulness, in no particular order.* Yates’s embarrassment at his own helplessness could often flare into anger, and as Earley put it, “One was at pains not to let Dick know how much trouble he was.” When Yates was first installed in the Strode House, Earley was mortified to find the place infested with fleas—and it was his fault! He’d let a friend with a pet wolf sleep there just before Yates’s arrival. Happily the new writer-in-residence seemed oblivious to the pests popping all around him like black sparks, and Earley arranged for an exterminator to come while Yates was out teaching. A more immediate problem was how to get Yates upstairs so he could use the bathroom; Earley had a stair-chair put in, and promptly got a “vicious call” from the university physical plant about hiring an outside contractor. Then, when the chair broke down, Earley rushed over and tried to fix it himself; finally the original mechanic had to return, and Earley was berated again for fiddling with the thing. Most intriguing were the weekly logistics of getting Yates to his classroom a hundred yards away: Since Yates wouldn’t accept deliberate assistance, and couldn’t walk the distance without collapsing, Earley had to arrange for a member of the “Yates Task Force” to appear at the Strode House “by chance” and offer Yates a lift. “There was a constant discreet flurry around Dick to keep him going,” said Earley, “since he was dead-set against any fuss. We laughed at the predicaments we’d find ourselves in while helping Dick, but we were awed by the man himself, by his courage and resilience.” Yates was resilient enough to regard the indignities of his life with occasional humor: Lankily settling himself onto the stair-chair and grinding slowly upstairs to relieve himself, Yates would rest his cheek against a fist and with his free hand pretend to shoot himself in the head.

An abiding feature of Yates’s legend at Alabama is the way he “trashed the Strode House” with his constant smoking—by the time he departed, the furniture was scored with burn marks, the carpet was grayish with ground-in ashes, the curtains sagged with assimilated nicotine. For Yates it seemed a point of pride to keep smoking, and to hell with oxygen tanks. (Another aspect of Earley’s duties, so the joke went, was to be ready at any time to douse Yates when he burst into flames.) Yates’s coughing fits were so violent and extended that one scarcely expected the man to survive them; after ten minutes or so, he’d at last subside with a deep shuddery sigh and light another cigarette. For an ashtray he used a large salad bowl that didn’t have to be emptied so often; he also used it as a receptacle for the profusion of Kleenex required for a cold he suffered more or less constantly. A graduate student, Tim Parrish, once stopped by the Strode House to give Yates a lift, and the latter flicked his butt into the bowl and began to shuffle away. A wad of Kleenex ignited with an emphatic finger of flame. This posed a problem for Parrish: If he rushed to extinguish the fire himself, Yates would be humiliated and hence furious. Meanwhile smoke was billowing out of the bowl. “Uh, Dick, are you sure that cigarette is out?” Yates turned around. “Oh fuck!” he roared. “Fuck!”

A wheelchair was kept in the building where Yates taught, but he still had to walk a few yards from the car, and the effort would leave him gasping with exhaustion; wherever he went, then, he liked to arrive early so he could get his wind back and finish coughing without being ogled. As the chair writer, Yates was required to give at least one public reading—a well-attended event which his handlers had been dreading. Earley asked if he wanted a chair on stage and a clip-on microphone, but Yates refused. He insisted on climbing the stairs to the podium and standing, by his own power, and he wanted the wheelchair stashed out of sight before anyone arrived. When the time came, Earley and the others could hardly bear to watch. “Dick climbed the stairs and didn’t even hold the podium,” Earley recalled. “It was magnificent: he read in a deep, strong voice with a lot of feeling. Then he went back to the front row.” After the last well-wisher had departed—but not before—Yates doubled over in his chair.

One benefit of his infirmity was that he could indulge his gruffness as a teacher; whatever he said was at the expense of precious air, and he wasn’t expected to waste himself on idle blandishment. Thus in his literature course Yates luxuriated in his own dogma, and those who begged to differ “were screwed” as one student put it. The second half of Lord Jim, Yates declared, was little more than a boy’s adventure story; Conrad should have allowed Jim to fail, and cut the whole “phony redemption” business. When one student modestly opined that he thought the novel “worked as a whole,” Yates dogged the youth for months, in class and out, determined to make him admit his error. It was in workshops, though, where Yates showed the full extent of his mettle. After three decades of discussing student work, he’d become purified into a grim ghost of the man who, in his docile salad days, used to “appease every difference of opinion in the room.” No more. Yates advised one student with a “good ear for dialogue” to cultivate deafness, and in the margin of another student’s admittedly “terrible” story, Yates scribbled (re one character’s disparagement of another), “That’s the understatement of the fucking century!”

The odd wrathful critique depended somewhat on Yates’s mood—a sick man is apt to be crabby—but he’d later agonize over the wounds he’d inflicted. In a copy of The Easter Parade owned by the author of the “terrible” story, Yates wrote, “To Bill, with heartfelt apologies for an episode he has been gracious enough to forget.” And then there was the sequel to the burning salad bowl. “Dick was agitated that night and his blood was up,” said Parrish, who drove Yates to Allen Wier’s workshop after they’d put the fire out. The first story under discussion was a bit of “Magical Beautyshop Realism,” as Tony Earley described it, about a spooky barber who gives bad haircuts and strange advice. Yates hated the story, denouncing its heavy-handed whimsy in no uncertain terms. The author sat biting her lip and trying not to cry; the rest of the class was too stunned to speak. Finally—to break the silence, and perhaps because he was dating the author—Earley offered a few words in the story’s defense. Yates regarded him sadly: “Tony, Tony, Tony…” Earley’s own story “Aliceville” was next, and he was somewhat hopeful since Yates had liked his previous effort, “My Father’s Heart.” “‘My Father’s Heart’ was like good sex,” Yates began. “‘Aliceville’ is like masturbation.” Yates later apologized to Earley, though probably not to the woman who wrote the barbershop story.

By 1990 the zeitgeist of the American campus, even in the South, was sufficiently altered for Yates to seem either a quaint midcentury relic or a throwback, depending on how you looked at it. Most students were amused by his somewhat archaic Ivy League uniform of tweeds, flannels, and desert boots, his hair that seemed to stay short whether he cut it or not, his careful manners, his cultivated distance from a changing world. Yates loved to talk about the old days—radio programs, McCarthyism, the movies of his youth—and once when Earley admitted he didn’t know a particular Hoagy Carmichael tune, Yates sang it to him verse after verse. (“The most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me in the literary community,” said Earley.) Young women, alas, tended to be less amused by Yates. “I wish I had a little girl to make potatoes for me,” he said with wistful gallantry at a potluck dinner, while the subject of this pleasantry lapsed into wondering silence along with the rest of the guests. Worse were the women who actually stood up for themselves and their sex. “What’s that got to do with anything?” a student’s wife snapped at Yates—who’d just observed, neutrally enough, that a new addition to the English faculty “[wasn’t] very pretty.”

Yates didn’t get it. “Earley, get over here,” he’d say, after some courtly bon mot had gone mysteriously awry. “What the hell’s the problem? What’d I say?” Any attempt to explain would only vex him further, and soon such women began to seem foreign as Martians to Yates, who treated them with a kind of wary restraint. The truth was, what Yates had always regarded as courtesy seemed creepy and affected to certain of his female students, who made a point of avoiding him; if he hadn’t been so pitifully frail, it would have been worse. The situation pained Yates deeply. He’d regale his young male companions with tales of the old Revolutionary Road days when he could get almost any girl he wanted—a girl who goddammit looked like a girl too, in a proper dress—but now he wasn’t even regarded as a sexual being anymore. To Dan Childress, who later became Yates’s main caretaker, he confessed a poignant recurring dream of running, sprinting—virility—though he hadn’t been able to run or much else in many years.

Nor could Yates have known that the beloved authors he’d always taught—Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Conrad, Ford, et al.—were now viewed as a veritable rogues gallery of dead white males. At the beginning of the semester he broke out his hoary assortment of marked-up paperbacks, the same that had stood him in good stead since his Iowa days, and read aloud the beloved bits of dialogue, objective correlatives, character details, and whatnot. When the students requested a bit more open discussion, the haggard Yates was only too happy to oblige; he noticed, however, that three or four students rarely spoke and indeed seemed to be boycotting the books in question. It might have been when somebody pointed out the absence of women or “people of color” among the assigned authors that a bemused Yates called one student “a pantywaist”—and perhaps the lunar silence that followed was what persuaded him, finally, that he’d better relent a little. He asked the students to suggest a book that they wanted to read. All but unanimously they picked Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which Yates professed to like all right.

*   *   *

Toward the end of Yates’s semester as chair writer—on December 20, 1990, to be exact—he and a few others gathered at Tim Parrish’s house to watch the Seinfeld episode based on Yates’s dinner with Larry David five years before. Monica had watched the show’s taping and thought her father might get a kick out of it. The Yates character—a great but neglected writer called “Alton Benes,” also Elaine’s father—was played by an imposing stone-faced actor named Lawrence Tierney, known for his gruff gangster roles. In this episode, titled “The Jacket,” Elaine begs her friends Jerry and George to have dinner with her and her father: “I need a buffer,” she says. The evening is a disaster. Elaine is late, and Jerry and George are forced to make conversation with the dour Benes, who greets them with a coughing fit and scowls at their nonalcoholic beverages. “Which one’s the funny guy?” he asks, and when George indicates Jerry, Benes fixes him with a baleful look and says, “We had a funny guy with us in Korea. Tail gunner. They blew his brains out all over the Pacific.” Jerry escapes to the bathroom, and George unctuously remarks that he really enjoyed Benes’s novel Fair Game. “Drivel!” says Benes. “Well, maybe some parts,” George concedes uncomfortably, and Benes snaps “What parts?”—after which George pleads a phone call and joins Jerry in the bathroom, where the desperate men discuss their predicament (“How could she leave us alone with this lunatic?”). At last Elaine arrives, and as the four prepare to go to dinner, Jerry turns his expensive new suede jacket inside out so it won’t be ruined by the snow. Elaine’s father sees the jacket’s candy-striped lining and stops Jerry at the door: “You’re not walking down the street with me and my daughter dressed like that,” he growls. “That’s for damn sure.” The terrified Jerry reverses the lining, and the jacket is ruined.

When the show was over, Yates sat smacking his lips. “Well,” he said. “What’d you think?” Sensing Yates’s chagrin throughout, the others had tried not to laugh, and now they could see how “scalded” he looked. “Well,” somebody broke the silence, “it was kindof funny, Dick.” “I’d like to kill that son of a bitch!” Yates erupted, and shambled out of the room. Later, speaking to Monica about it, he picked over details they’d gotten “wrong”: Benes had worn a broad-brimmed hat, said Yates, while he himself had never worn a hat in his life (perhaps he’d forgotten the “much-handled brown fedora” he’d affected as a young UP reporter); he’d fought in WWII, not Korea; and Monica never told stories in the present-tense à la Elaine. And so on. “I’m not that scary,” he said at last.*

That month Yates moved out of the Strode House and stayed with the Parrishes for a week or so until he found a place of his own. He’d decided to remain in Tuscaloosa for at least as long as it took to finish his novel: The cost of living was low, and the university had arranged for him to receive a modest stipend for reading manuscripts and working with students privately—though perhaps the main reason, as Earley put it, was “because he’d made friends there who looked out for him and were kind to him.” Still, it made Yates queasy to be the object of kindness, as it churned up a lot of bitterness over being poor and relatively forgotten—a charity case, in short. While at Parrish’s house he talked obsessively about Vonnegut: a nice guy and good writer, he said, though he (Yates) was at least as good, and look at the difference in their lives! At one point he fretfully lit a cigarette while a fresh one burned in the ashtray. “Oh shit,” he said when his host reminded him. “Goddamn it. Listen, Parrish: I used to smoke five fucking packs a day, and it was great.…”

Yates’s last apartment was a small two-bedroom duplex on Alaca Place. He installed an L-shaped desk in the spare bedroom, bought a few other derelict scraps of furniture from the Salvation Army, and arranged his daughters’ photos on the wall. The other bit of decoration was a quote from Adlai Stevenson that he taped over his desk (he was considering it as an epigraph to Uncertain Times): “Americans have always assumed, subconsciously, that every story will have a happy ending.” Mark Costello, who succeeded Yates as the fiction chair writer, remarked with amazement that the dark little bungalow was “even more grim than Boston”: “It was as if Dick’s indifference to his surroundings was catching up with him. I had to remind myself that Dick didn’t care, because otherwise the place depressed me. I couldn’t stay there. I had to get out.”

Yates’s health had improved over the past few months: What with oxygen and steady care, his color was better and he seemed a bit stronger. The ordeal of looking after him, though, had been of such Sisyphean proportions that one wondered what would become of him in the absence of a coordinated, pluralistic effort. What anyone in Yates’s condition needed, at the very least, was a full-time nurse: There were oxygen tanks to replace, meals to provide (for a man who often neglected to eat), and the constant possibility he’d get sick and require immediate medical attention. Graduate students such as Earley, Parrish, and J. R. Jones continued to invite Yates over and visit from time to time, while Ron Sielenski and Shelley Hippler (his “research assistants” as chair writer)*cleaned his apartment and ran the odd errand; but Yates’s main caretaker was a rough-hewn student/car-mechanic named Dan Childress. “Dan was closest to Dick in temperament,” Tim Parrish observed. “Both became isolated from women and other people, and both were conflicted about their writing. It was a real kinship. Dick was a hero to Dan—he loved the man and took good care of him.”

Among Childress’s self-assumed duties was to check the oxygen level of Yates’s tanks, since Yates himself almost never remembered to do so; when the time came, Childress would drive to a strip mall in the suburb of Northport and pick up replacement tanks at the medical supply store. No matter how vigilant he tried to be, though, there were days when he’d find Yates blue-lipped and gasping, too disoriented to speak or even listen unless the young man looked him straight in the eye and yelled his words in order to “get them in there.” Again and again he took Yates back to the hospital, and to this day Childress bitterly maintains that “the VA killed him”: “They treated everyone like shit. The waits, even with an appointment, were hours long.” One day Yates ran out of oxygen by the time Childress wheeled him into the examination room, and when Yates began to hiss at an orderly for help, the man said, “You need to calm down. You won’t get anything until you act right.” Yates continued to gasp and flail in a furious panic, while the man pointedly ignored him; finally Childress spotted an oxygen tank mounted on the wall and helped himself. “Shut the fuck up, Dick,” he said soothingly as he fitted the mask over his face.

Yates had never cooked for himself and wasn’t about to start now, and rather than go to the exhausting bother of leaving his apartment for lunch or dinner, he’d often dispense with eating. Childress reminded him that he could get a free lunch at the nearby senior center, but Yates refused. Finally Childress arranged for a friend named John Dobson, who delivered pizzas at night, to become a “fictitious box-lunch driver”—that is, to deliver daily lunches to Yates as if it were part of Dobson’s regular job or grad-student duties. The meals came from a lunch counter called Mama Jewel’s, which specialized in fatty Southern dishes that were cheap but tasty—a meat and three vegetables for less than four dollars. Yates never questioned or complained about the arrangement.

He wanted more independence, though, and finally asked Childress to get him a car (“the cheapest you can find”). For seven hundred dollars the young man found a rusty reddish Mazda of early-seventies vintage that was in good mechanical shape, though rather too small for its owner’s sprawling frame. As a driver Yates soon became a familiar sight in Tuscaloosa: a gaunt whiskered old man hunched over the wheel of his tiny car, a cigarette smoldering in one fist while the other clasped an oxygen mask to his face—“a bomb on wheels” as one student put it. The car had a cranky shift box and no power steering, and when Yates’s strength failed he’d pop over curbs and drift into the wrong lane and always, always park awry (lane-parked in a parallel space or vice versa) at the Quik Snak, where he took to eating breakfast most mornings. Childress, who kept the car in running order, considered disabling it before Yates killed himself—though already the locals seemed to be adjusting, automatically making way whenever the telltale Mazda came tooling into their ken. As ever, too, strangers rallied to help Yates: Now that he was drinking beer again (why not?) he’d drive to a particular convenience store where the clerks would carry a case of Heineken out to his car—or else wave him away, whereupon Yates would realize it was Sunday, the goddamn blue laws, and he’d have to borrow beer from Childress or one of the others. Whatever his errand, Yates was always exhausted by the time he got back to Alaca Place, sitting forlornly in his car for an hour or so before he could muster the strength to stagger back to his house.

It had been a long time since Yates was part of the lively social atmosphere of a small-town academic community, and now that he was no longer chair writer he tried to make the most of it. Among the seven professors and sixty graduate students in the writing program, there were as many as four gatherings a week—readings, receptions, raucous parties—where Yates was treated as the venerable fixture he was. For Yates it was an alternative to drinking alone on Alaca Place, though he didn’t seem to enjoy himself much. At student parties, particularly, the breathless man could hardly hear himself speak over the blaring music (the Ramones and such, whose appeal baffled Yates), nor could he participate in the drunken croquet games on the lawn. Mostly he sat watching with a vaguely pleased-but-puzzled look, and would wince with the effort of hearing the odd solicitous remark. When the Starbucks came to a party, as rarely happened, Yates would be overjoyed at the sight of people his own age. Still, he liked to think he belonged among the younger set, and when Parrish failed to invite him to a big Halloween party Yates was hurt. “Look, if you don’t want me to come to your house, just say so!” he huffed, as Parrish tried to explain that such a party was apt to get, well, pretty out of control. In the end Yates showed up in his usual tweed and khakis, and when he spotted Tony Earley he began mournfully shaking his head: “Oh—my—God…” Twin Peaks was big at the time, and Earley had come to the party as the corpse of Laura Palmer, wearing a wig, lingerie, and clear plastic wrapping. “I don’t get it,” Yates said whenever someone tried to explain.

He preferred smaller gatherings, and since he didn’t own a TV he was often invited to people’s houses to watch something of particular interest. Yates was delighted by a documentary about RFK’s standoff with George Wallace in 1963, and excitedly pointed and coughed at the screen whenever he recognized one of his old Justice Department colleagues. When he asked J. R. Jones if he’d ever heard of an actor named Joe Pesci—who held the option to Disturbing the Peace—Jones invited him over to watch Raging Bull; Yates found the movie excellent, and wondered who this guy “Martin Scorsese” was. For the most part, though, Yates’s hatred of the movies remained intact to the end. Childress was at least as passionate a buff as Larry in Los Angeles, and like Larry he tried coaxing Yates into watching with him. Finally Yates thought of a movie he’d always wanted to see, Kubrick’s Lolita, but after the first twenty minutes he told Childress to turn it off. A travesty, he said.

All this, of course, was but a fleeting distraction from Yates’s ultimate concern. “Why aren’t you writing?” he’d hector Childress and the others—or, if a given story was already written (and set in type), “Why aren’t you revising this? You should be constantlyrevising!” Nothing was finished in Yates’s eyes, not even his own best work: “How could I improve it?” he’d fire back, rather than accept a simple compliment, or else he’d point to some flaw that he himself had discovered post facto, to his everlasting chagrin (e.g., the same meal served twice in Revolutionary Road). Such zeal had the same effect on Childress as on Monica two years before—he began to realize that if this was what a true vocation involved, then perhaps he should consider something else. In fact five years had passed since Childress had written the one story he was somewhat proud of, and Yates was forever harassing him to improve it. And “harassing” was pretty much the mot juste. Yates appeared to be entering a manic phase when Parrish sought his advice about a bleak story titled “Exterminator,” about a man whose common-law wife leaves him to go live in a trailer with another man who beats her. “Now this scene here,” Yates panted, getting louder and louder, “it needs squalor. More squalor!” “What you’re saying, Dick, is that it needs ‘squalor’?” “SQUALOR!” (“I realized he was exactly right,” said Parrish. “He’d put his finger on it.”)

Yates had mellowed as a parent, at least, particularly toward his beloved Gina. Whatever she did was all right by him, even if it meant relinquishing his dream of sending her to Harvard (after a pleasant summer vacation in Vancouver, she decided to go to the University of British Columbia). She was the last pretty girl in Yates’s life, and he acted toward her like a kind of platonic suitor—funny and affectionate and quietly wise. He always enclosed a loving note with his checks (“I would rather spend an hour on the phone with you than be elected by a landslide”), and approved of her future husband Chad in absentia because, he said, she’d become a warmer person for knowing him. The transformative effects of love were such that Yates didn’t even object to the tattoo (a flower) Gina showed him on the back of her leg; indeed he seemed to startle himself by finding it “cute,” laughing that if his older daughters had done as much he’d have “hit the ceiling.” When Gina came to Tuscaloosa, Yates rebuffed Childress’s offer to show her around. “Nah, you’re a dangerous man,” he said, though the outing was to be chaperoned by Childress’s jealous girlfriend. The fact was, Yates wanted Gina all to himself, and for two weeks they happily chatted about whatever came to mind (except writing): love, sex, marriage, the way Gina liked to smoke pot when she listened to music. Yates faintly deplored the latter, and pointed out that cows piss in the fields where the stuff is grown. “Later on,” Gina recalled, “during a pause in a totally different conversation, Dad says, ‘You know who else lives in those marijuana fields?’ And I said, ‘Who?’ ‘Marijuana rats,’ he said sternly. ‘Those little bastards live to piss!’”

*   *   *

“I loved and hated Richard Yates,” said Susan Braudy, “as I believe he did me. I miss talking to him very much.” More than his daughters or even Dan Childress, Braudy became the most fixed presence in Yates’s life during his last two years in Alabama—though many miles apart, the two spoke on the phone almost every day, including the day Yates died. Originally Braudy had called to discuss her screenplay of The Easter Parade, in the hope of drawing Yates out about the “nuts and bolts” of what was “probably [her] favorite novel in the world.” Yates shrunk from the subject. “Sure, sure,” he said finally. “The Easter Parade probably is about the failure of love.” Soon they found other things to talk about, and Braudy saw a more appealing side to the man. He was forthright but not maudlin about the grim facts of his life, and gruffly opinionated about Braudy’s. When she mentioned that she wanted to refurbish an old church in the country, Yates insisted the idea was gauche. But he was also hard on himself, and inclined to be contrite when he sensed that he’d gone too far and hurt Braudy’s feelings. This was easily done, as Braudy was nothing if not tenderhearted, to the point of being sorely distressed by the sadness of Yates’s life and determined to do something about it. It was Braudy who got in touch with Childress and arranged to pay for the “fictitious box-lunch driver,” and sometimes she’d send money straight to Yates; once, after she’d given him five hundred dollars, he casually admitted that he’d sent it to Gina so she could buy a car.

Yates often made it known that his fondest desire was to return to New York—he had no intention of “nodding out in Dixie”—but as things were, he couldn’t even afford to visit. Braudy’s affection for her favorite writer was buoyed by a preoccupation with certain Jewish ethical imperatives, namely Honor elders, so she decided to bring Yates to New York and honor him one way or another. It wouldn’t do, though, simply to buy him a plane ticket and put him up for a few days: It was one thing for such a proud man to accept the odd check out of the blue, another to let a woman explicitly offer him charity. Besides, Braudy wasn’t rich, despite whatever Yates had surmised to the contrary because of her generosity and Central Park South address (he was under the impression she was a “dowager” à la Gloria Vanderbilt). She decided, then, to organize a reading and pay Yates an honorarium, raised with donations of a thousand to fifteen hundred dollars apiece from a few well-heeled admirers, starting with Woody Allen. “Ms. Braudy found that many writers shared Mr. Allen’s take on Mr. Yates and has now organized a group of them to bring the novelist to New York for a tribute,” read an item in the New York Observer for April 15, 1991. “Mr. [Paul] Schrader, Richard Price, and Kurt Vonnegut are among the literary stars who’ve contributed money to fly Mr. Yates in from his home in Tuscaloosa, Alabama. He is scheduled to read at the Donnell Library on April 11 at 6 P.M., with a reception to follow at the Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street.”

Yates planned to arrive the day before his reading—as it happened, his daughter Monica’s thirty-fourth birthday. She’d recently moved back to New York prior to starting nursing school at Columbia in the fall,* and when she learned of her father’s visit she was plunged into a funk. She dreaded seeing him so deathly ill, not to mention drinking again, and figured the reading would be a failure and he’d be sad. She spent the day gloomily riding her bicycle until, as a kind of despondent “madcap stunt,” she rode it down a flight of stairs and gave herself a black eye and a swollen, badly bruised chin.

Meanwhile air travel had taken its usual toll on Yates. “He was a total mess,” said Braudy. “Thinner than any living person should be, and too weak to walk from the plane to a cab.” The appalled woman called for a wheelchair, while Yates muttered dazedly that he’d be all right as soon as he got to the Algonquin, where he’d arranged to have oxygen tanks waiting in his room. Before they arrived, though, Yates seemed to perk up a bit. “You’re no dowager,” he said to Braudy in the cab, staring at her intently. “You’re a young girl.” Braudy was hardly a “girl” except by Yates’s quaint reckoning, though she was very pretty and her relations with Yates had shifted the moment his head cleared enough to get a good look at her. But eros alone wasn’t enough to resurrect such a wasted man, and by the time they got to the Algonquin—where the oxygen tanks wouldn’t work—he seemed on the verge of total, perhaps permanent collapse. Nonetheless he insisted on meeting Monica and his old student Richard Price as planned, so Braudy assisted him into the dining room; by the time the others arrived, Yates had put his head on the table and begun panting for air. “Not drunk,” he gasped to Monica. “Not drunk, baby.” Then he noticed his daughter’s grossly swollen face. “What can I say?” he managed to quip. “I love the big lug.”

While Yates tried to pull himself together, his companions exchanged glances. “No, Dick,” said Price, as Yates croaked at the waiter for menus, “I think we’d better get you upstairs.” In the room they called the house doctor, and soon Yates was bound for New York Hospital in an ambulance. Braudy, Price, and Monica followed in a cab. After Yates had been taken into the emergency room and given oxygen and fluids, Braudy returned to his side and he groggily resumed pitching woo. “I’m falling in love with you,” he said with a faint smile. As Braudy recalled, “He was half dead, but coming on to me! And I’m a complete wreck!” Finally, around four in the morning, Yates was admitted as a patient. In the meantime Braudy and Monica sat talking outside the ER cubicle, and the latter reflected that this was a hell of a way to spend her birthday.

Sharon Yates remembers her father looking “very jaunty” in his hospital bed, and Braudy confirms that he was “in fine fettle.” Yates was impressed by how much nicer the hospital was than his usual VAs, and of course it always pleased him to cheat death with a certain stylish insouciance. It was fine to be back in New York and in love again. His agent Ned Leavitt visited and noticed something distinctly in the air between Yates and Braudy, at least on Yates’s part, and Monica noticed the same with exasperation. Meanwhile a steady stream of visitors came to pay their last respects, or so it seemed at the time. Richard Price visited every day, and Monica brought the writer Elizabeth Cullinan, whom Yates found impressively pretty despite the fact that she was almost his own age. Monica also invited her father’s old Boston girlfriend Laura, who sat by his bed for a long time and made him laugh.

Everybody agreed that the reading at the Donnell Library and the reception afterward were “Yatesian occasions.” A reporter from the New York Times abruptly departed when he learned that Yates himself wasn’t among those present. Braudy had made an audiotape of Yates in the hospital, wheezing his way through one of his stories, and this was played for a bemused audience of seventy-five or so. Paul Schrader and the journalist Harvey Shapiro read from The Easter Parade, after which the crowd adjourned by foot to the Gotham Book Mart for a reception hosted by Braudy and the actor Patrick O’Neal, who still owned the rights to Revolutionary Road and still planned to make a movie of it written and directed by himself. The bookstore was soon divided between a defiant group of smokers and those who reviled them, until a number of guests repaired to the hospital to visit Yates, who received them bravely.

Four days later, after Braudy had paid the hospital bill with fifteen hundred dollars of honorarium money, she and Yates returned to the airport. As she wheeled him out to the ambulance, his suitcase slipped off his lap and cracked open on the street. Braudy chased down and repacked his effects, then sat with him during the ambulance ride. Yates began to light a cigarette, and when Braudy snapped it out of his hand he tried to kiss her. This went on for the rest of the ride. “Finally I’m wheeling him to his gate at the airport,” said Braudy, “and he begs me to come live with him in Alabama. After that I felt very obligated and spoke to him almost every day.”

*   *   *

Having been feted in his hospital bed, Yates wanted more than ever to go on living long enough to return to New York, where clearly he had a number of admirers as well as a lovely “girl” to pursue. He even quit smoking on his return to Alabama: In light of his recent collapse, the bravado of a four-pack-a-day habit began to seem a bit silly; besides, the way people stared at him when he lit up with oxygen tanks made him feel freakish. To Yates’s mild surprise—and awful regret—he found that stopping cold after fifty years was remarkably easy.

Getting back to New York was a different story. The only affordable housing in Manhattan seemed to be WestBeth, the low-rent artists’ tenement on the Hudson that Yates had briefly considered fifteen years earlier, after the fire that sent him to Boston. As ever there was a long waiting list, but Braudy had a friend on the tenants’ board, Hugh Seidman, who thought an exception might be made in Yates’s case based on his distinction and ill health. Seidman arranged an exploratory meeting with the board, and Monica came to plead her father’s case—a humiliating experience, as it turned out. The board was mostly made up of artists and dancers who’d never heard of Yates and were unwilling to make an exception in any case, and Monica resented having to “play the role of begging daughter.” Above all she felt sad that things had come to this.

Meanwhile Yates was a few months away from depleting his latest advance—that is, an advance on “Book II” of his two-book contract with Sam Lawrence—and his progress on Uncertain Times was slower and more problematic than ever. Sometimes he’d call up friends and ask their opinion of certain passages, a temptation he’d always resisted in the past and proof of just how doubtful he’d become. “He couldn’t seem to finish it, didn’t want to let it go,” said Bob Lacy, whose opinion Yates sought. He was mortified by the prospect of asking Lawrence for more money, but as he told Prettyman that summer, he’d be completely broke by December and needed at least $2,000 a month to live; the two men discussed whether Prettyman (a mutual friend) should “drop a hint” to Lawrence, but in the end Yates decided he should handle it on his own. As Ned Leavitt recalled, “It was an odd situation: As agent, I didn’t have anything to offer Lawrence, who had a faint hope (but not much) that he’d finally get Uncertain Times, and definitely doubted he’d ever see ‘Book II.’ Dick’s health was just too precarious by then.” Still, Lawrence had always maintained that “someday Dick’s books will sell,” and he’d kept the faith too long to give up now; at any rate their old friendship made it impossible to refuse. In September, then, the contract was amended yet again to provide nine more payments of $2,300 a month.

That summer Yates’s ex-wife Martha remarried in Bisbee, Arizona, where she’d gone to think things over after several years as an art therapist. “She’s gone and married an electrician,” Yates dolefully announced. Until then he’d never quite given up hope that maybe someday Martha would come to her senses and take him back; as he’d quickly admit to any acquaintance, he still “carried a torch” for his ex-wife. But he gracefully let go of that dream when the time came: “Congratulations,” he wrote Martha. “I am very glad for your new happiness. With best wishes always, Dick.” After that, his old ardor assumed a more paternal form. “Oh, those poor kids!” he exclaimed when Gina told him about the hardscrabble, odd-job life Martha and her husband were leading in arty Bisbee. “What are they eating on!”

He continued to implore Susan Braudy to visit, if not keep house with him, and she didn’t have the heart to refuse outright; indeed, Yates anticipated her arrival for many months and spoke of little else. He told Prettyman that he was worried about his “performance”—it had been a long time—and while he thought the emotional Braudy was “a little crazy,” he was very excited about seeing her all the same. When Mark Costello came to Alabama that fall, he proved every bit as lovelorn as Yates; Tony Earley called the two “poster children for depressed writers.” Costello was involved with a former Iowa student who’d gone on to a rather distinguished career, but Yates warned him that two writers didn’t make a good match. (Then he’d inquire: “How many stories you say she’s had in The New Yorker?… Six? Goddamn it!”) As for his own infatuation with Braudy—also a writer, though Yates hardly considered her as such—he told Costello again and again of her impending visit, of his moving to New York to be with her and so on, but beneath it all was a belying melancholy. “We both spent a lot of time together in expectation of women who wouldn’t come,” said Costello. “Dick was too physically infirm for that sort of thing, and he knew it.” Knowing it was one thing, accepting it another. Such was the candor of his talks with Braudy, his lonely need to tell her everything, that one day he excitedly confided that a young waitress seemed attracted to him; he planned to comb his hair and take her to a movie. When Braudy asked about it later, though, Yates sighed and said he’d gone back to the diner and realized it was nothing.

Yates had fewer manic spells now that he was drinking less, and those he had tended to burn out quickly for want of energy. At first his friends in Alabama didn’t know what to make of Yates’s mania—he didn’t discuss his illness—only that it came and went, and seemed to leave him no worse for wear. Once he called Tim Parrish and sounded as if his “head [was] exploding”: “It was a brilliant and terrifying stream of consciousness,” Parrish remembered, “and I sensed there was some overarching theme that I wasn’t capable of grasping. Dick was referencing events on the senate floor in the fifties, quoting speeches verbatim. It gave me a sense of what a trial it was to be Richard Yates.” Every so often Yates would “veer into paranoid speculations” about this or that person, and Parrish would try to calm him (“Oh, I don’t think that’s true, Dick”). Another time an alarmed Dan Childress called Costello and reported that he’d found Yates “totally whacked”; to this day Costello is puzzled by the episode. “I went to Dick’s house and he was drunker than I’d ever seen him, but there were no bottles around. There was no booze in the place at all.” This time the “overarching theme” of Yates’s spiel had to do with an official tour of Germany that Vonnegut had made with Nobel laureate Heinrich Böll (which had actually taken place during a PEN conference in the seventies): Yates said that Vonnegut was chosen for the junket because he was German and a WWII veteran and of course famous.… “Costello—goddamn it—Murphy—” he panted, pausing now and then to catch his breath (he called Costello Murphy after the latter’s fictional alter ego); finally he closed his eyes and fell asleep. Two days later he was fine again.

Lucid or not, Yates’s lack of fame didn’t bother him nearly so much as his lack of money, especially now that time was running out. He’d regularly call his friend Bruce Ricker to discuss possible movie deals, and impress on the lawyer his urgent desire to provide some kind of inheritance for his daughters. Yates realized the best bet for a feature-length adaptation of his work was Revolutionary Road, and he was desperate to wrest the property away from Patrick O’Neal, who owned it outright. O’Neal had written a screenplay of the novel that he still hoped to produce and direct someday, but Yates thought the script godawful and was tired of the man’s stalling. O’Neal wouldn’t budge: “It’s in the stars,” he’d tell Ned Leavitt with a mellow sense of assurance. Such “new agey” pronouncements, said Leavitt, “used to send Dick through the roof.”

A far more “tortured” situation, as Leavitt put it, developed over Braudy’s adaptation of The Easter Parade. Calder Willingham, the author of a number of novels and successful screenplays (e.g., Paths of Glory and One-Eyed Jacks), was a great Yates fan and common friend of Seymour Krim. For a long time he’d wanted to adapt The Easter Parade, but his hands were tied as long as Braudy held the option. Yates demanded to see Braudy’s screenplay, and after a bitter argument she finally sent it to him; later, when she asked his opinion, he said he’d decided not to read it after all. This was by way of sparing her feelings. He’d read it and immediately directed Leavitt not to renew the woman’s option under any circumstances. But Braudy would not go quietly: She’d invested a lot of time and emotion in the project, to say nothing of money, and legally she was within her rights. “I feel like taking a gun and shooting you!” she told Leavitt, who lapsed into stunned silence. Even Yates was impressed: “You’ve scared everybody to death,” he told her. But still he insisted she relinquish her option; he calmly explained that the project would be more “viable” if Willingham wrote the screenplay. When Yates spoke of the matter to Leavitt, though, he reverted to an “operatic” rage: He was sickof the woman, he said, and wanted to be rid of her once and for all. “But he kept letting her back into his life,” Leavitt mused, “even though he didn’t like her screenplay. He seemed to make a distinction between her as a writer and a person, and basically he was a sweet-natured man, even when he was pissed off. After he’d rail against Braudy or Patrick O’Neal, I’d remind him of their positions and he’d back off. In fact he felt sympathy for Braudy.” And vice versa. “For my birthday he drew me a cartoon of this dilapidated person holding a heart,” she recalled. “I don’t know, looking back, how I had the fortitude to deal with the situation.”

*   *   *

For the first half of 1992 Yates all but disappeared from public view as he made a last sustained effort to finish Uncertain Times. Sam Lawrence hoped to publish the book in the fall, and Rust Hills bought a long excerpt for Esquire and encouraged the author by calling the pages “vintage Yates.”* According to Childress, Yates was keeping “long writing hours” despite his condition, and was irritated by unexpected interruptions. To the last, though, Yates expressed a tormented ambivalence toward his work in progress: On some days he’d seem pleased and say the end was in sight, then he’d say the whole thing was a mess and he’d have to do it over. Nor was the book’s relative merit the only issue: In 1991 Styron had published Darkness Visible, a memoir of his struggle with clinical depression; Yates was appalled, considering it unseemly for a writer to air his personal life in nonfictional form (this despite his admiration for Fitzgerald’s Crack-Up essays). But Uncertain Times was itself a curious amalgam of fact and fiction, with a protagonist who resembled Yates almost as baldly as “Kennedy” did Kennedy, and what it revealed about the author’s life was at least as embarrassing as anything Styron had openly confessed about his. So there was that. Finally Yates showed his manuscript to “some foolish person,” as his daughter Monica recalled, “who read it and said it wasn’t any good.” Yates soon lost heart after that, and besides he was simply too oxygen deprived to continue. His last manuscript note is dated August 28, 1992.

At the time of his death, the novel was perhaps two-thirds finished: about 250 pages of narrative in various stages of revision. The first 100 pages are typed and polished, with only the occasional word struck out or changed. The next 100 pages are much rougher—mostly typed, but heavily revised with drastic deletions and emendations, marginal notes, and many inserted holograph pages. The last fifty pages are fairly chaotic: A few of these are typed and heavily revised; the rest are written in a rapid, hard-to-decipher scrawl. Also, there are about 70 pages of additional material: notes, fragments of scenes and dialogue, lists and outlines. Yates’s own dating suggests that the first, relatively fluent 150 pages or so were written before 1989—after that, his failing stamina is poignantly evident on the page: “FIX” is scrawled again and again in the margin, as well as a number of fretful glosses such as, “She wouldn’t say that.” As he got bogged down in the slow agony of revision—many pages are frantically scored with deletions, minute insertions, and finally struck out altogether—the frustrated Yates began to abandon unfinished, unsatisfactory sections (“FIX”) in order to get on with his story, writing several scenes out of sequence. Some of these later pages seem to have been written as rapidly as possible, with hardly any correction, as if Yates were in a race with that day’s tiny store of concentration. By the end he appeared to be writing in minute spurts of a few lines a day, and was so oxygen deprived that he sometimes referred to the same character by different names from one sentence to the next—hence “Bill” becomes “Jim” and then “Bill” again; “Arnold” becomes “Henry,” and so on.

The novel opens on New Year’s Day 1963, as Bill Grove happily anticipates the “avalanche of money” he’ll receive as soon as his screenplay (based on an acclaimed novel by the more famous Paul Cameron, a “good if not close” friend) is made into a movie starring Henry Fonda and Natalie Wood. Grove hopes that such a stroke of success will help reverse certain morbid trends in his life—two mental breakdowns in the past three years, a squalid basement apartment in the Village, and a drunken slatternly girlfriend named Nora Harrigan. By February, however, everything has gone wrong: The movie is red-lighted when its stars pull out, and meanwhile Grove’s second novel (“about some young guys in the army in Europe during the last few months of the war”) has become all but impossible to write, such that Grove worries he’s “ready to go off again.” For a few months he tries halfheartedly to return to public-relations work, until one night—while he and Nora lugubriously discuss her “toe-jam”—Paul Cameron calls to report that he’s recommended Grove as speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy. Grove is skeptical (“I’m not even sure I like the fucking Kennedys”), but hardly in a position to refuse. After an interview with the great man in Washington, and a trial speechwriting assignment that (to his surprise) he enjoys, Grove is hired.

For a while he does well at the job: His first few speeches (transcribed almost in full for the reader) are so well received that he’s asked to submit a draft for the president’s civil rights address on national television. Almost from the start, though, Grove finds himself at odds with the “true believers” whose idealism blinds them to the Kennedys’ essential speciousness; also there’s a constant dissonance between Grove’s feckless, messy private life and the clean-living, go-getting atmosphere of public service. Grove transplants the squalor of his Barrow Street cellar to his “office” at the Justice Department—a dusty, cluttered file room he appropriates in order to be alone with his thoughts and cigarettes. Meanwhile, too, a pending FBI background check threatens to reveal that Grove’s been hospitalized twice as a mental patient and has an ongoing drinking problem. Grove tries to adjust somewhat to his new circumstances by purging the drunken, depressing Nora in favor of a genteel virgin named Holly Parsons; also he moves into the suburban Washington home of an old army buddy, Frank Marr, whose conventional middle-class family offers a stark and somewhat stabilizing alternative to Grove’s raffish bachelor lifestyle.

So it goes for the first 150 pages, more or less, and so far so good. The pace is brisk (though arguably one transcribed speech would suffice), the prose clean, and best of all a nice ironic balance is struck between Grove’s private and public lives—a crucial dialectic that begins when Grove’s “toe-jam” remarks coincide with his being summoned to public service by the glamorous Paul Cameron. Nor does Yates indulge in any easy satire of the Kennedys as merely “figments of the public imagination,” as the cynical Nora Harrigan describes them. Rather, in typical Yatesian fashion, Grove remains “simultaneously enchanted and repelled” by the world he encounters at the Justice Department: “You’re getting a rare concentration of intelligence and decency in there,” Warren Pickering (the Prettyman surrogate) aptly observes. “Lot of plain courage, too, because some of these guys’ve risked their necks down South once or twice and they will again.” This is true, but on the other hand such idealism has its dark or dull side, exemplified by RFK’s press secretary Jim Thurman—a fatuous, humorless Babbitt who speaks of the “real Americans” in the Midwest and reads nothing but “an occasional detective story or Western to help him kill time on airplanes.” As for Kennedy himself, he’s evoked as boyish and well-meaning and slightly out of his depth: “part of his shirttail bulge[s] loose on one side” as he interviews Grove, and he speaks with a lot of halting, inarticulate ah’s as he tries to marshal his thoughts. But then, too, he’s egocentric and calculating, often lapsing into a gum-chewing, people-ignoring trance between public performances, and cursing himself for having neglected to shake hands with motorcycle cops while the cameras roll.

When Grove begins to lose interest in his speechwriting duties, and the focus shifts to his private life, the novel goes off the rails. There is less dramatized conflict between the world of action and that of the skeptical introspective writer, and more introspection per se. Grove broods a lot over his stalled novel, for instance, which entails a precise rehashing of certain aspects of A Special Providence as well as the actual experiences that inspired it. But mostly the plot becomes dominated by the ups and downs (mostly downs) of Grove’s affair with the wholly uninteresting Holly Parsons. (“I never had a feeling Dick had any idea who I really was,” said Wendy Sears, who was bemused when Yates told her he was putting her in a novel. “He always talked about his own ideas, his own point of view on things. I was just a vessel for him.”) Parsons, a blandly good-natured “classy” girl, serves as witness and sounding board for Grove’s various inadequacies: his impotence, sexual and otherwise; his precarious mental health; his tendency to fly into drunken rages at the slightest provocation. Again, when all this is balanced with the can-do ethos of Kennedy-era idealism, rather than a “classy” abstraction such as Holly Parsons, it makes some kind of narrative sense; otherwise it’s so much ranting in a vacuum. Yates himself couldn’t seem to figure out where he was going with all this, apart from contriving one humiliation after another for his alter ego: Hence Grove spends a night in jail after yelling at Holly in public, but afterward seems to “redeem” himself when (according to Yates’s notes) he “discovers he can get laid”—though Holly implicitly diminishes this feat by calling it a simple act of friendship on her part; Grove again gets laid at the MacDowell Colony with a different woman, who also punctures his ego by asking, “How well do you really know Paul Cameron?”; and finally Grove’s novel is rejected by his agent—the apparent climax of Uncertain Times.

Given better health and alertness, could Yates have pulled it all together and made it work? Possibly, though it would have taken at least as much “brain-scrambling” effort as Revolutionary Road—the same exhausting, extended struggle to reconcile exquisite ambiguities in his own mind in order to convey them in art: “If the suburbs are to blame,” Yates wrote in a 1956 memo to himself, “—and they are to no greater extent than the ‘artist’ illusion—remember that—it must be implied by cumulative effect rather than slammed home in every chapter.… I must never let the meanings escape both me and the reader through my efforts to hold his interest [italics added].” Reading Uncertain Times, one gets the impression that Yates couldn’t quite determine the meaning of Grove’s disaffection with public service, and was all too aware that in writing more and more about himself (that is, Grove), he was holding nobody’s interest but his own. “‘Solipsism,’” Yates wrote in his notes: “‘a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existing thing’… Holly P.uses this word in criticizing Grove.” Thus Yates tried to explain to himself the fundamental conflict between Grove’s self-absorption and the relatively unreflective nature of political idealism—and thus, too, he tried to explain why, perhaps, he’d come to dwell so entirely on Grove and his times, rather than those of the greater world.

No doubt Yates found himself more interesting than the public figures who populate the earlier, more readable, but ultimately underwhelming chapters of Uncertain Times. Because Yates could only animate such characters as Kennedy, Burke Marshall, Edwin Guthman, et al., in terms of their public personae, the final effect reads like nothing so much as highly competent political fiction—“It isn’t felt,” as Yates would tell his students. Meanwhile the story of Grove’s various demons was felt, but it didn’t quite mesh with the rest of the material and was also uncomfortably confessional in the context of an historically accurate roman à clef.

Such was the quandary Yates couldn’t resolve, though he (almost) died trying.

*   *   *

The last time Monica Yates visited her father was in May 1992, about six months before his death. She couldn’t help but suspect she was seeing him for the last time: He “looked like a scarecrow” and was so feeble he could hardly walk to the bathroom without sitting down every few steps; he shuffled and stumbled from one piece of furniture to the next. Sometimes the surgical tubing that connected him to the humming tanks in the bedroom would snarl, and his lips would turn blue. For the most part he was able to laugh off the worst of his infirmity. One night the two went to dinner with George Starbuck, who was then in the final stages of Parkinson’s; the man’s speech was labored and he made constant “pill-rolling” motions with his hands, but he was still a bit stronger than Yates. “Oh God, baby—” gasped the latter, faced with stairs at the restaurant, “we can’t do this!” Somehow, with Monica’s strenuous help, the dying men managed the ascent, and seemed pleased but hardly able to eat or speak from the strain. It was a relatively mellow visit for Monica, though her father could still be provoked; his reading was now limited to the New York Times and works of political history, about which he cultivated a kind of cranky punditry. “How can you say that?” he demanded of Monica in a restaurant, when she remarked that Nixon “wasn’t so bad.”

As time ran out, though, and he began to let go of things, Yates subsided into a larger peace. When Gina visited in August, she found her father “enlightened and very accepting”: He liked to say he was “in the bright winter of life,” that his only wish was to go back to New York before he “checked out”; as for his novel, he doubted more and more that he had the energy to finish it. Nor could he muster the strength or desire to venture out much. Childress had moved to Arizona that summer, and the only people who visited regularly were Ron Sielenski and Shelley Hippler, who continued to tidy his house and make sure he was okay. But mostly Yates preferred to be alone—he knew how mortal he looked, and simply wanted to drink beer and think about the past. When he got tipsy and nostalgic enough, he’d call up old friends to say, in effect, good-bye, though he was sometimes hard to understand because of emphysema or beer or both. The last time Yates spoke to Loree Rackstraw he could hardly finish a sentence without gasping. “He ended the conversation by saying, ‘We had some good times in Iowa City, didn’t we?’ It was heartbreaking.”

Writing had kept Yates alive all these years. He’d always promised Monica not to die until he finished his novel, but one day he admitted he’d given it up. “You know, I’m just tired,” he explained. “Don’t want to live much longer.” If he felt sorry for himself at all, it was in that particular respect—he’d never write again—but such a mood was touched with a kind of exaltation when he considered the transcendence of his life’s work. A month before he died, he called Bob Lacy and asked the man if he’d like to know what he, Yates, had done the night before; Lacy said he would. “Get this,” Yates wheezed. “I got smashed last night, and then you know what I did? I sat here on this couch in my lousy apartment reading the first chapter of Revolutionary Road out loud to myself and crying like a baby.… Tears running down my cheeks. Can you believe that?” Another time Susan Braudy begged him to read her the last page of Gatsby; he’d always said it was his favorite piece of prose, the very passage that had made him so determined to write (“If there wasn’t a Fitzgerald, I don’t think I would have become a writer”). “Dropping the telephone to make an unpleasant rolling clatter as he opened a can of beer,” Braudy remembered, “he started to read in the most matter-of-fact and loving way.” Yates got as far as the following lines:

He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.

There was a long silence. “Sorry, sweetheart,” said Yates, “I better hang up. I’m crying like a damn fool.”

One of the last people to see Yates alive was Scott Bradfield, author of the novel The History of Luminous Motion. Three weeks before Yates’s death, Bradfield had arranged an interview for the London Independent. “Richard Yates was America’s finest post-war novelist and short story writer,” the article began, “but he was a surprisingly difficult man to contact.” Bradfield had tried tracking Yates down through his latest publisher, Vintage, whose people knew nothing of his whereabouts and seemed indifferent to promoting the author of a few three-year-old paperback reprints. “I’ve been ill, you see,” said Yates, when Bradfield finally managed to get him on the phone, “and I may go into the VA hospital shortly, but I’d really like to do this, I really would.” A couple days later Bradfield drove all the way from Chicago to Tuscaloosa, and spent a few hours chatting with Yates in his living room. Though “extremely cordial,” Yates seemed disinclined to discuss his work much, and would bridle mildly at what he called “slick” questions. “You’re giving me too much at once,” he said, or “I’m just not smart enough to answer big questions about things like ‘themes’ and ‘purposes’ in my work.” He was especially exasperated by the “slick” tag realist: “All fiction is filled with technique,” he said. “It’s ridiculous to suggest one technique is any more realistic than any other.” Again and again Yates tried to steer the discussion away from himself, even if it meant interviewing the interviewer: Where did Bradfield get that T-shirt? Where was he born? What did he want to do next?

“Finally we broke for lunch,” Bradfield wrote, “and there was something dimly Yatesian about how the rest of the afternoon developed—a constant slippage between intentions and effects.” When Yates discovered that his favorite steak house was already closing, he drove them to the Red Lobster franchise restaurant, where he was faintly disappointed to find that their only steak was a New York cut—much too big. Bradfield urged him to order it (“This is on The Independent. Let’s break the suckers”), but Yates scrupulously refused: “[a] waste,” he said, and ordered the chicken. Exhausted when they returned to Alaca Place, Yates nonetheless offered his guest a last beer and took cordial leave of him. “‘It was very, well, enjoyable,’ he said, showing the sort of care with which he has selected virtually every single word of his published prose. Not a ‘great’ afternoon. Not even ‘exciting’ or ‘funny’ or ‘wonderful.’ But ‘enjoyable,’ yes. It was very, well, enjoyable.” When the article ran on November 21, Yates was already dead, and Bradfield appended a suitable envoi: “I can live with the uncomprehending publishers, the dumb reviews of his work, the dull place he ended up in, even the second-rate restaurant and the slow, awkward circuit around the driveway we made three or four times before Yates could find the exit on to the main road.… [But] I wish he’d ordered the goddamn steak.”

*   *   *

“Keep this,” Yates had scribbled next to a sentence typed on a piece of looseleaf and attached to the manuscript of Uncertain Times: “This book is dedicated to men and women of the United States Veterans’ Administration, past and present, in gratitude for their courtesy and kindness no less than for their excellent medical care.”

It’s more accurate to say that writing and VA hospitals had kept Yates alive over the years, so that he gladly accepted their occasional slipshod treatment, even to the bitter end. For years VA doctors had put off operating on Yates’s inguinal hernia, which had become more and more painful as his coughing got worse and he had to drag tanks around. The hernia was forever popping out like a sausage link, but it took several grueling trips to Birmingham before the doctors finally deemed it “emergency” enough to operate. By that time Yates was almost dead anyway—but then, he’d always wanted to die in a hospital where people would clean him up. “Sam, I’m dying,” he gasped to his publisher a few days before the trip. “I can’t work anymore. I can’t do anything.”

When Gina called from Mexico that Sunday, Yates cheerfully assured her it was only a routine procedure. They were about to say good-bye when the phone cut out, a common occurrence. “In the past,” Gina remembered,

we had agreed that if we got cut off before saying goodbye, we would just leave it until the following week. Even so, I was inexplicably compelled to ask the [concierge] to call back. After about half an hour he got through. Dad said, “You didn’t have to call back—we were finished!” And I said, “I know, I just wanted to say goodbye and I love you!” He said he loved me too, and we hung up.

Monica considered hiring a private nurse (or coming down herself) to tend her father following the operation, but in the end she simply couldn’t afford it—besides, as Yates blithely insisted, it was no big deal. After surgery on Thursday, November 5, he told Monica the wound wasn’t closing properly and they might have to operate again; a little later he left a message on her machine: “Don’t worry, baby, they put this mesh thing in, and it’s going to be okay.”

Probably his last conversation, Friday night, was with Susan Braudy. He sounded unwell, and when she pressed him about it, he admitted—his voice dropping a little sheepishly—that he was in a lot of pain. “Ask the nurse for painkillers!” said Braudy, and Yates promised he would. He left the phone off the hook when he tried to hang up, and Braudy continued to listen as a nurse asked Yates if he needed anything. “No,” she heard him say, “I’m fine.”

At around three in the morning Yates apparently had a coughing fit that caused him to vomit. No nurse was around (though arguably a person in Yates’s condition should have been recuperating in the ICU), and he struggled to get out of bed. The next morning they found him on the floor, dead of suffocation.