by Blake Bailey
Sheila sympathized with her ex-husband’s distress, but at the time she thought his problems were almost entirely alcohol related, and mostly she was exasperated. “Any hope that we can work things out as husband and wife has gone,” she wrote a few months after the breakdown, when Yates persisted in his visits to Danbury. “I have a sense that I have lost so many, many years, because I was unsure and lonely and confused.… If there’s anything more you want to know, ask me, but please, by letter. When you put a thing on paper, sometimes you discover you already know the answer. Or maybe that there is no answer, which is the same thing.”
CHAPTER NINE
Uncertain Times: 1962-1964
Back in New York, Yates became one of the earliest trial patients of Dr. Nathan S. Kline, a man soon to become world renowned for his work in psychopharmacology. According to his New York Times obituary, Kline “revolutionalized the treatment of mental illness” by introducing the use of tranquilizers, antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs that enabled people to lead productive lives as outpatients—people who would have been considered hopelessly insane just a few years before. Kline was thus instrumental in reducing the stigma of mental illness among a generation that continued to view it as a kind of moral weakness. “The fact that a condition is treated with medication,” he said, “somehow guarantees in the public mind that it is a genuine illness.”
Yates was delighted to learn that he suffered from something so explicable as a “chemical imbalance,” which modern science had the means to redress. No more “Sigmund fucking Freud” for him; all he had to do now was report to Kline’s office on West Sixty-ninth every month or so, answer a few simple questions, and be on his way with a fresh supply of “crazy pills” as he called them. And while many creative people who suffer from mental illness (particularly manic-depressives) deplore the effects of psychotropic drugs and try to do without them, this was never the case with Yates. For an absentminded man, and a writer at that, he was remarkably diligent about taking his pills according to schedule, then coping as best he could with the slight mental dullness (and tremor and dry mouth and frequent urination) that followed. By 1974 Yates was taking as many as three different psychotropics a day, in addition to lithium.
But he wouldn’t stop drinking. It was the one great caveat that every psychiatrist beginning with Kline tried futilely to enforce: Do not mix these drugs with alcohol. At first Yates was wary, but once he learned that no immediate calamity followed, he drank as much as ever—more, perhaps, now that his writing came harder. It was the one reliable pleasure that awaited him after a frustrating day, and most of the time he felt entitled. “He loved the idea that he was mentally ill,” said his daughter Monica, “and hated the idea he was an alcoholic”—that is, bipolar disorder was a bona fide illness, while alcoholism smacked of a shameful personal failing. As he saw it, he drank because he liked to, and no matter what the doctors said, he refused to concede that alcohol made his illness all but impossible to treat. Again and again he was told that even moderate drinking is ill advised when taking lithium, not to mention the other tranquilizers and anti-psychotics he sampled over the years: Such drugs compound the sedative effect of alcohol, and drinkers tend to urinate the drugs out of their system and hence render them ineffective. Needless to say, too, a drunk is less likely to take his medication as prescribed, particularly if his alcoholism is so advanced that blackouts and seizures become common. “This is what keeps your old daddy in business!” he cheerfully told a friend, dumping a handful of pills into his mouth and washing them down with a slug of bourbon.
For the time being, though, things were looking up. Paul Cubeta, the assistant director of Bread Loaf, visited Yates a month after the conference and was relieved to find him completely recovered and quite confident of staying that way. He had Guggenheim money in the bank and a bit left over from Hollywood, and soon he’d be richer than he ever thought possible: Frankenheimer had assured him that United Artists’ reaction to his screenplay was “excellent”; production had yet to be definitely scheduled, and cuts would have to be made, but it seemed only a matter of time now. Meanwhile Yates was covering his bases. He continued to teach at the New School, albeit a bit more lackadaisically than before, and his old friend Verlin Cassill was “ninety-eight per cent sure” he could get Yates a better-paying job at the Iowa Workshop should the need arise.
“It hardly ever happened and it wouldn’t last long,” the novel Uncertain Times begins, “but William Grove felt almost at peace with the world when the new year of 1963 broke over New York.”* This was true for Yates, too, and as a final coup before his life went off the rails again, he was chosen one of the “Ten Americans to Watch in 1963” by Pageant magazine. Each of these ten, the happy few, had briefly transcended the anonymity of life in the vast republic; each stood to become a dominant force in his or her field of endeavor: e.g., Romaldo Giurgola (architecture), Robert A. Good (medicine), Maxine Smith (race relations), George Grizzard (entertainment), and Richard Yates (literature)—the last of whom mentioned his humble beginnings as a copyboy for the New York Sun and remarked that “young writers are not necessarily ruined by Hollywood.”
Not ruined, perhaps, but often disappointed. At the beginning of March, right around the time Yates had hoped to be schmoozing with Natalie Wood (since his contract required that he report to the set), he got bad news from a “hesitant and old”–sounding Monica McCall: There would be no movie. As Yates explained it two years later,
Miss Wood’s agent decided that it might Tarnish Her Image with the Teenagers if she appeared as a girl who loved her Daddy a little too much—and Blooey. She pulled out, then [Henry] Fonda pulled out, then United Artists pulled out, then John Frankenheimer (the Dedicated Young Director) pulled out—and the whole God damned deal fell through—leaving me with a fraction of the earnings I was supposed to reap. I had been counting on sending both my children through college on the money I’d been promised, so when the axe fell it was something of a blow.… That, I guess, is show biz.
He called Styron to commiserate, and a couple weeks later the wealthy, undismayed author wrote a consoling note to Yates: “Frankenheimer’s mills, while grinding exceeding slow, seem to be grinding sure. What I mean is that he has just paid me a substantial amount of money in order to extend the option on Lie Down in Darkness. This seems to indicate that … he is eventually going to do it.” Alas, no, though the property would be kicked around Hollywood for many years, occasionally shimmering into view like a saving mirage in times of terrible need. As for Frankenheimer—whom Yates had come to consider something of a friend—he soon fell out of touch forever. “I always wondered why better things hadn’t happened to Dick,” the director mused. “He was such a great writer.”
* * *
Yates’s progress on his novel seemed thwarted by ambivalence toward his material, not to say a lack of clarity. When he first returned to New York that fall, he tried to capitalize on his “Builders” success by writing another short story, but it soon went cold—so cold, in fact, that he came to believe he’d lost his knack for short fiction entirely; some fifteen years would pass before he managed the trick again. So he went back to his war novel, or coming-of-age novel, or whatever it was apart from a journalistic, unformed account of his own experiences as a feckless private who’d played a nonheroic (as opposed to unheroic or even antiheroic) role in the mop-up action after the Bulge. He asked friends to suggest poems that dealt with “the trials of adolescence”—perhaps he’d find some sort of thematic focus there. Meanwhile he just kept writing: “I’m working hard as hell on a new novel in the hope of finishing it by the end of the year,” he wrote Cassill in early February; “don’t know if it’s any good or not, but the pages keep coming.”
Then they stopped coming—just like that—though the rest of his routine remained intact: Each morning he’d put on the same sweatshirt and corduroy pants, take his pills, make coffee, light cigarettes end on end, and stare at the wall. Then lunch and
a long walk, the hopeful suspense as he hurried back to his desk, and another afternoon of nothing. Sometimes, in an agony of caffeinated frustration, Yates would force himself into a “spasm of writing”—then reread the pages and throw them away: “All the sentences were weak and lame and even the handwriting looked funny.”
Soon Yates was drinking heavily again and wondering whether he’d ever write another page of decent fiction, even as the world continued to honor him. In May, the National Institute of Arts and Letters awarded $2,500 grants to a handful of the most promising young writers in the country, including Yates, William Gaddis, Joseph Heller, William Humphrey, and Peter Matthiessen. An oppressively eminent crowd attended the ceremony at the Academy of Arts and Letters in Upper Manhattan, where an outdoor luncheon was held under a large tent in the courtyard. There was little question of Yates’s enduring such an affair soberly, and by the time he and his fellow honorees were herded into the first two rows of the auditorium, he was vividly impaired. Bob Parker watched from the audience as his friend, summoned at last to the dais, “lumbered like Frankenstein” across the stage: “Dick was wearing a tan gabardine suit, the top button buttoned to the bottom hole, his necktie awry—a cartoon of a drunk. He was barely able to say ‘thank you.’”
It didn’t help that Yates’s latest girlfriend was herself an unstable alcoholic, though perhaps a person of more sober habit would have been out of her depth. Craige* was an Irishwoman in her late twenties who worked as a copy editor for a fashion magazine; mordantly witty when coherent, she became (in Grace Schulman’s words) “very sick and disturbed” when drunk. She had a way of falling down in public, and in a stupor would sometimes mistake Yates for her father or brother, with all that suggested of an unsavory subtext. And though she was still rather young and pretty, dissipation had already taken a toll: “Even then she had something of the Blanche DuBois agedness about her,” Schulman recalled. Indeed, Yates’s description of her in Uncertain Times—where she appears as “Nora Harrigan”—bears this out in rather pitiless terms: “She seemed to be letting her appearance go in subtle, telling ways: something a little bedraggled about the hair, something flaccid in the lips, a generally unwholesome pallor in the face and neck.” Yates even pointed to the character’s “toe jam”—the result of being too hung over to wash her feet in the shower.
Such a couple couldn’t easily accommodate another lost soul, but when Yates learned the full extent of his sister’s predicament he was willing, at least, to take her in. For years he’d been talking about “poor Ruth”—married to such a vulgar oaf, stuck out in “Ass Hole, Long Island” with nothing to do, her looks gone and drinking too much to boot. But he had no idea how bad things had become. By 1963 Ruth was a chronic alcoholic with an enlarged liver, and her husband beat her on a regular basis. “For years we’d hear the beatings,” her oldest son recalled. “The shouting and scrambling around downstairs. Finally, when I was seventeen, I walked in on them. They were both surprised. My father had always hit his children, but this time I was determined to stop him. I shoved him in a chair and held him there.” Both Ruth and her husband drank—it had always been part of the family culture—but since the late fifties Ruth’s drinking had grown steadily out of control. Fred wanted things and people to proceed according to custom (“He was God Almighty,” said his son), and it enraged him to come home for the cocktail hour and find his wife already incapacitated. Usually the argument that followed was limited to screaming and weeping, and would end with Ruth tottering upstairs to pass out; but if Fred was in a particularly nasty mood, or a sufficient number of weeks had passed since the last time, he’d beat her. For years Ruth had claimed that she stayed in the marriage “for the children,” and then as the children grew up and moved out—and were themselves urging her to leave their brutal father—she’d say it was “[her] problem” and she’d “work it out.” Finally it got so bad that she turned to the only person she knew who might be able to help: her brother.
Yates was shocked and furious. He called Sheila—the only person in his life who knew Ruth—and asked her advice: “Dick thought he might go out there and confront Fred,” Sheila recalled, “because Ruth was too much of a cipher to stand up for herself. I thought his quixotic ideas were ridiculous, though I was sorry for Ruth. He was considering all options: take her in, confront her husband, whatever.” Finally Yates offered his sister a place to stay, but by then the crisis had passed: She couldn’t bring herself to leave Fred after all. Her marriage, such as it was, had given her the only “security” she’d ever known, and besides she still loved the man. And what would she do on her own? Yates may have insisted on blustering at Fred over the phone, and even threatened to kill him, but that was pretty much the end of it.
* * *
As the summer approached, Yates was all but broke again. He now had a firm offer to teach at the Iowa Workshop in the fall, but continued to vacillate: There was still a chance the movie would be made, or something might come up in New York—so he told Cassill, who’d discouraged him from taking the job unless he could make a full-year commitment. But now Cassill thought he should come to Iowa anyway and leave whenever he pleased, no matter what the inconvenience to the Workshop. Cassill had become disillusioned with the place: Recently a “mentally ill, incompetent” former student had attacked him in the campus newspaper, and the administration had offered little more than polite sympathy as a show of support. “Hemingway said writers are wolves and have got to stick together,” Cassill wrote his friend, “and that is exactly how I feel again now.” But Yates remained evasive—the fact was, he didn’t want to leave New York and teach in the sticks any more than he had four years earlier. He was even willing to take another PR job, though he was having a hard time convincing interviewers of that: “[H]e was earnestly seeking a kind of work he didn’t want, and that embarrassing contradiction seemed to leak from his very pores.” All this was a long way down from a year ago—from Frankenheimer’s palace in Malibu—and it began to look as though he’d have to brace himself for an Iowa winter after all. But then his friend Styron shook another deus ex machina out of his sleeve.
Attorney General Robert Kennedy was losing the sympathy of black Americans: The long-promised Civil Rights Bill had yet to materialize in May 1963, when activists in Birmingham were hosed and beaten and attacked by police dogs. Burke Marshall—the assistant attorney general in charge of civil rights—went to Alabama and negotiated a truce of sorts, but many viewed it as a feeble response to a widely televised outrage. Then, a week after Marshall’s return to Washington, Kennedy asked the writer James Baldwin to convene a group of influential black celebrities and meet him in New York so they could “talk this thing over.” The meeting was a fiasco. Along with Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and the playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin saw fit to invite a few hard-core activists, such as a young freedom rider who’d been repeatedly beaten and jailed. At one point the latter stuck his finger in Kennedy’s stunned face and told him he’d never fight for this country, that he had no country. “Was I impressed?” Baldwin’s brother David told the media after the meeting. “You see Bobby Kennedys every day, on the street, at cocktail parties. They just don’t get it. And he’s our Attorney General.”
Clearly the administration’s message (whatever it happened to be) wasn’t getting across, and Kennedy decided he needed a decent speechwriter. He asked an assistant, E. Barrett Prettyman, Jr., to find him a “real writer” who could take his ideas and “turn them into words with a snap and a bite to them.” Prettyman called their mutual friend Styron, who said he knew just the man: a superb novelist with extensive experience as a speechwriter, who also happened to need a job. “I don’t even know if I like the fucking Kennedys,” Yates replied when Styron called with the news; Yates pointed out that he’d always been an Adlai Stevenson man, and for that matter couldn’t “get much of a hard-on” for politics in general. “What have you got to lose?” Styron said, in effect, and a couple days later Yates boarded
the Eastern Airlines shuttle for Washington.
At the Justice Department he was received by Prettyman, who briefly explained the job to him. It was the first of its kind: Before, Kennedy’s speeches had been cobbled together by committee, at a certain sacrifice of both style and substance. Worse, Kennedy himself was a rather uncomfortable speaker, who tended to swallow his words and lose the thread, such that an audience hardly knew when to applaud. What was needed, then, were “short, clipped sentences” to match Kennedy’s natural speaking style, as well as a lot of “humanity” to put over his civil rights agenda and counterbalance his “ruthless” image.
At the appointed time Yates was introduced to Kennedy, who struck him as remarkably boyish and slight (“part of his shirttail bulged loose on one side”). Kennedy noted with approval that Yates was not only a highly regarded writer, but also had a strong background in public relations. Then he said, “We’re living in very uncertain times, Mr. Yates, and those of us in a position of leadership are obliged to be responsive to issues like civil rights, but at the same time I have a great sense of responsibility here. Do you understand that?” As Yates later told an interviewer, he replied, “‘Yes, I do,’ without quite knowing what [Kennedy] was talking about.” Finally the attorney general asked him what he was currently working on, and Yates mentioned his novel about the last months of World War II. Kennedy observed that that was an “interesting period,” and expressed a hope that Yates would find time to work on it if he took the job. They shook hands.
