by Blake Bailey
Where his students’ fiction was concerned, Yates was polite if he could help it, but also emotional, blunt, and uncompromising: Either a story (a scene, a line, a word) came alive or it didn’t, and he was eager to explain why it didn’t and how (if possible) to fix it. Intellectual exercises, ideas, abstractions, didacticism, pretension, or implausibility of any kind were fatal errors. Mark Dintenfass was startled when Yates called to discuss his first three stories, and dismissed two of them as “crap”: Dintenfass was trying to write like Nabokov, Yates explained, and only Nabokov could do that; Dintenfass’s other story, however, was about real life, the life he knew, and that’s what he should be writing about. “It’s the most important thing anyone ever told me as a writer,” said Dintenfass, who turned away from “fruitless experimentation” and started a novel about Jewish life in Brooklyn. Yates encouraged him to send opening chapters to Monica McCall, who eventually sold the book.
Yates could get away with calling a piece of fiction “crap” (though he’d rarely say as much unless he had some kind of compliment in store) because his goodwill was never in doubt. Flattery was bullshit; what was good for the work? “Would it really happen that way?” he’d expostulate. “I don’t think so.” He wanted students to see the “Platonic form” of the work—its latent state of finished perfection—and this involved examining every nuance in terms of precision and truth. “Dick demonstrated the keenest eye I’ve ever seen for the flaw, great or small, in fiction,” said Geoffrey Clark; “and for the small telling detail that transfigures or transfixes; and for cant, cheap tricks, and especially unfelt fiction.” A student’s ego never stood in the way of Yates’s insistence that something could be improved, even if the story or novel in question had already been accepted for publication (or published). “They’re rushing you,” Yates told James Alan McPherson, whose first collection Hue and Cry was in press at the time. “Slow down.” And he proceeded to tease through McPherson’s paragraphs, pointing out all the little things that needed to be “fixed” prior to publication. “I hope this won’t make you sore,” he wrote DeWitt Henry, “but I’m not too crazy about your story”—a typical preamble to an epistolary critique, both in terms of candor and modest reluctance.
If a story was a total loss, was “crap” in short, Yates would summarize the reason(s) as briefly as possible and elaborate only if challenged. And he much preferred to say he liked a given story, then list his various quibbles at length—e.g., “I simply can’t imagine a man polishing off a whole fifth of whisky in a single drive between Philadelphia and New York. Better make it a pint”; “You have her kick off her shoes, flop on the couch, throw back her head, eyes closed, and rub her throat (hardly the gestures of a frightened girl, or even a wary one).”
Yates was more diffident during the formal workshop sessions. At the New School he’d never felt comfortable criticizing students’ work in front of their peers, and amid the ruthless crucifixions of Iowa the best he could do, at times, was serve as a gentle referee. “Hm, did you really have to say that?” he’d intercede, and try to silence the more rabid critics by pointing out the better qualities of a given story, while (in accordance with workshop protocol) its reeling author would have to weather the onslaught in red-faced silence. Occasionally Yates was so startled by the carnage he’d simply withdraw into chain-smoking bemusement. His student Bill Kittredge described a session in Yates’s workshop as “the most savage thing [he’d] ever witnessed”: “This guy from Spokane just got shelled. People were reading lines aloud from his story and everybody would laugh. Dick let it get out of hand. There were a lot of strong personalities in the class—Ivy Leaguers, New Yorkers. The guy from Spokane left town after that, and nobody ever saw him again.”
More often than not, Yates was less tolerant of such excesses. Sometimes he’d check a student with a look of baleful disapproval, slowly shaking his head (“Bill, Bill, Bill”), or else he’d let others express views that decorum forbade to himself. “You motherfuckers wouldn’t know literature if it ran you down in a car!” shouted his student Jane Delynn in defense of a story under attack. There was a silence. “As the lady in the rear suggested—” Yates sighed approvingly. Above all he became fed-up with the condescending sarcasm of certain students, perhaps most notably David Milch. As one student recalled, “Milch was a slasher in workshops. He was part of a new wave of Ivy League students at Iowa, and some of these students were contemptuous about Iowa’s casual nonacademic milieu. Milch thought Yates was a joke—too nonprofessorial, stumbling, and shy. Too conversational.” Robert Penn Warren had helped Milch get a teaching fellowship at Iowa, where he was touted as a writer of tremendous promise. At twenty-one he was brilliant, learned, and witty, and apt to make light of other students’ writing. “Oh, for Christ’s sake, Milch!” Yates would erupt. “Who’s interested in your jokes? What do you think it feels like to be at the other end of a barb like that?” Not only did Yates object to Milch’s wisecracks, but he wasn’t much inclined to praise the young man’s work either: Sometimes he’d begrudge Milch’s (vaunted) facility for writing dialogue, but was often exhaustive in taking him to task for other lapses.
The enmity between the two doesn’t call for a lot of subtle analysis. Milch was a catalogue of Yates’s foremost bogeys: an unapologetically intellectual graduate of Yale who’d arrived at Iowa under the aegis of the world-famous author of All the King’s Men, no less; a condescending young man who sneered at both students and Yates alike. Milch, for his part, deplores the arrogance of the young man he was, but points out that all the Workshop people, teachers as well as students, were “unfinished spirits” in one way or another: “Self-taught writers like Yates and Vonnegut who’d developed their talents outside the citadels of culture—the ‘apostolic succession’ of Harvard, say: William James teaching Gertrude Stein and so on—had this rage against the Tradition even as it attracted them. They had an adolescent relationship with the authority of culture.” Certainly Food Field Reporter and Remington Rand were about as removed from the citadels as one could get; in any case Yates let himself go one night at Kenny’s Bar. “Who wouldn’t want to be David Milch?” he announced to an audience of Workshop people, on whose periphery was Milch. “He went to Yale! He graduated first in his class! Warren said he has an ear for dialogue that rivals Hemingway! And here he is twenty-one years old.…” It went on and on. The whole spiel, said Milch, “was a devastating encapsulization of everything pretentious and self-important.” Many years later, though, Milch would be in a nice position to get his own back.
* * *
For the most part, Yates chose not to socialize with his fellow faculty members, except for Cassill. “That many writers were never meant to be together in the same place,” he said of Bread Loaf, and so with Iowa. He never felt particularly at ease with rival authors unless they were the sort who wore their eminence lightly—“good guys” as Yates would have it. His colleague Vance Bourjaily was a good guy, modest and affable, though perhaps a bit too much of an outdoorsman for Yates’s taste. The two were cordial but not close. Yates would make a point of attending the frequent parties at Bourjaily’s farm (or any party to which he was asked), but if the guests were mostly faculty Yates would recede into a quiet corner where he could soak in peace.
He preferred the company of graduate students, the more down-to-earth the better. The first to accept his invitation to the Airliner was a burly Texan named Jim Crumley, and soon they were joined by others who, like Crumley, tended to be married ex-servicemen in their late twenties: Bob Lacy, Jim Whitehead, and Andre Dubus; Ted Weesner and Robin Metz also became part of the circle. After a few hours of noisy, drunken argument, one of the young men would call his wife to say they were coming over (while the others would call theirs to say they weren’t), and the evening would continue until three or four in the morning.
Dubus belonged in another category—perhaps the closest thing to a soulmate Yates ever had (though both men would have cringed at the term). Dubus was a s
hy, plain-spoken ex-marine who became raucous and swaggering when he drank. As his third wife Peggy Rambach observed, “Andre wanted to be a tough guy. He was picked on a lot as a kid, and both he and Dick grew up in a time when men couldn’t be sensitive.” The two friends would sit drinking on Dubus’s porch for hours—sometimes bellowing at each other amid skirls of laughter, sometimes hushed—and Dubus got to where he could mimic Yates so perfectly that others couldn’t tell them apart. Along with their temperamental affinities, both had unqualified admiration for the other’s work. Within three weeks of his arrival Yates decided that Dubus was by far the most talented student at Iowa: “Most of the clowns here will never be writers,” he wrote Miller Williams, “and it’s depressing to think of their getting degrees called ‘Master of Fine Arts’—Good God!—but [Dubus] is one of the very few exceptions to the rule. I haven’t read much of his work—he’s Verlin Cassill’s student here, not mine—but I read a story he published in the Sewanee Review a while back that really knocked me out. He’s also a fine guy, which supports my rather shaky theory that good writers tend to be good men.” Almost seven years later, when Yates left Iowa for good, he still considered Dubus the most talented student he’d ever encountered there, while in turn Dubus revered Yates as a master comparable to Chekhov.* As he wrote in a 1989 tribute, “Richard Yates is one of our great writers with too few readers, and no matter how many readers he finally ends up with, they will still be too few, unless there are hundreds of thousands in most nations of the world.”
Dubus and the other married students were almost ideal companions for Yates: Most were hard-drinking men’s men who loved to stay up late and talk about books, and they admired Yates both as a writer and a personality. When he wasn’t shouting them down on some literary point or lost in the throes of another hilarious coughing fit, he’d teach them his vast repertoire of show tunes, ribald ditties, and patriotic anthems. He loved the clever rhymes of Cole Porter and Lorenz Hart (particularly the latter’s “Mountain Greenery”: “While you love your lover, let/Blue skies be your coverlet…”), which he’d linger over with leering relish as he sang verse after verse in their Quonset-hut duplexes. Along with his occasional cartoons, the nearest thing Yates ever had to a hobby was learning old songs and working out routines for performing them, and his memory for lyrics was flawless. Sometimes he’d prefer obscurity for its own sake, whether a parody version (e.g., “Honey Suck My Nose” for “Honeysuckle Rose”) or an old Wobbly* variation (“You’ll Get Pie in the Sky When You Die [That’s a Lie]”)—but the climax of almost any night’s recital was an old WWII hillbilly anthem called “There’s a Star-Spangled Banner Flying Somewhere.” The sentimental vet Yates would become when singing this song was an affecting sight, and fellow servicemen such as Bob Lacy couldn’t resist joining him in joyous harmony. One verse in particular elevated them into a kind of ecstasy:
Though I realize I’m crippled that is true, sir,
Please don’t judge my courage by my twisted leg,
Let me show my Uncle Sam what I can do, sir,
Let me take the Axis down a peg.
“God, how we loved that song!” Lacy remembered. “And, God, how Yates used to love to lead us in it! No doubt there were happier moments in his life. But those were the happiest I ever saw. We’d be gathered in someone’s kitchen, our heads, including Yates’s, all leaned in close together in a drunken bouquet, and the look on his face as he put us through our musical paces would be positively beatific. Occasionally a spouse or girlfriend might stick a head in the door to see what was going on, see what all the racket was. But after one look they’d shake their heads and go away.”
Yates’s high spirits were a necessary outlet, because he was miserable in almost every other department of his life. “Dick walked around with the weight of the world on his shoulders,” said Kittredge. “On the one hand you had the poet Marvin Bell, who’d just written a poem that day and would write another tomorrow, whistling on the way to his eleven o’clock class. Then three o’clock would roll around and here comes Yates shambling down the hallway, depressed as hell because he’s got a six-hundred-page novel and doesn’t know if it’s any good.” Somehow he needed to make his unwieldy manuscript cohere by Christmas, but teaching proved too much of a drain on his time and energy. “If that goddamned movie thing had panned out I wouldn’t be fucking around here!” he’d grumble, faced with at least two hundred pages of student writing a week—with lectures and conferences and chaotic workshop sessions—all in exchange for a gross income of $666 a month, almost $400 of which went to alimony and child support.
Then in October, to make matters worse, he was hospitalized with pneumonia. The Iowa weather was ill suited for a consumptive chain-smoking alcoholic: Scores of pigs were slaughtered each year by hailstones, and it was all but suicidal to run out of gas on a country road in winter. But whatever the season, the creaky old wind-moaning mansion on South Capitol Street was meager shelter at best, and Yates was felled by the first bitter drafts. For two weeks he lay abed in the hospital, deathly ill, alone in a cold alien land, thinking he could scarcely afford to be there. He said as much to Wendy Sears, and sounded so weak and depressed she wanted to “hug [him] to pieces,” while the stolid Sheila was moved to write a kindly note advising him to get well and stop worrying about money (for now). He was somewhat cheered by the concern of his students—one of whom, Jonathan Penner, recalled their hospital visit as an unexpected lesson in Yatesian style: “Steve Salinger sneaked in whiskey. Immediately, Dick poured a shot for his roommate, an elderly farmer. We studied that. That was style.” But such admiration went only so far to alleviate loneliness, to say nothing of paying the bills. “I don’t think I’m at all cut out for this teaching scene,” the convalescent Yates wrote Monica McCall. “It becomes increasingly clear that screenwriting is the only way I can ever hope to achieve minimal solvency and still have the freedom to write fiction.” McCall replied with maternal reassurance: She’d look into getting him that Hollywood job, and meanwhile a further advance on his novel was forthcoming.
Even before his health took a turn for the worse, Yates was an object of tender regard among female students and wives. “He really listened to women when they talked,” said Pat Dubus, “and that was a new experience for us.” Lyn Lacy agreed: “Dick saw more in me than I did myself at the time, and I adored him for it. He was sort of an uncle or brother figure—so friendly, open and interested.” Such intense solicitude on Yates’s part was touched with desperation: More than anything he missed the intimate company of women—a wife, a girlfriend, his daughters. And while the young women at Iowa, married or not, were used to predatory advances (particularly from distinguished authors), there was little of that from Yates: Soft-spoken and handsome, the picture of a gentleman in his coat and tie, he’d prolong the sweetness of their company with fervent curiosity, the only selfish aspect of which was a naked fear of being left alone. “Dick attracted women as a victim,” said Robin Metz, “a kind of Keatsian figure who needed to be cared for.” At least in that respect he’d come to the right place.
In the Workshop there was no particular stigma attached to the rather common phenomenon of love affairs between teachers and students; in principle they were all writers together, and “human moments” were to be expected. Cassill—who looked after Yates in a fraternal way, and was distressed by how sickly and morose he was becoming—urged their friend and mutual student Loree Wilson to help care for him. A single mother who got by on a graduate assistantship, Wilson was strong, voluptuous, and warm hearted, and she adored Yates. “Dick appealed to one’s deepest sympathies,” she said. “He was so clearly unwell, and seemed to be reaching out with those big, soulful eyes, but he could be insatiably needy. He was the loneliest man I ever knew.” As Wilson soon discovered, Yates required at least as much care as that soulful aspect of his seemed to suggest. Mornings she’d find him sitting alone in a booth at the Airliner, forlornly eating a hard-boiled egg with his beer as he li
stened to Barbra Streisand on the jukebox. Other times he’d call from his apartment—“I’m sick, I’m cold, I’m sitting here in a sweater”—and, if possible, Wilson would drop everything and go make him warm. One day Cassill called and told her something was wrong with Yates, that he’d “lost it” and needed to be calmed down. She rushed over, but by the time she arrived Yates had already taken his “emergency kit” of pills prescribed by Kline. “You’re a good kid,” he murmured as he fell asleep.
Perhaps the best part of the arrangement were Wilson’s children, a boy and girl aged seven and eight. It was widely known how much Yates suffered from the absence of his daughters: He blamed himself for being a bad father, and fretted incessantly over whether he’d be able to provide for them. A necessary solace for Yates was lavishing affection on whatever children were available, whether Wilson’s or the Dubuses’ or the Lacys’. He’d give them his undivided attention and refuse to discuss adult matters in their presence. He was particularly attached to Wilson’s daughter, who sometimes joined her mother in bringing soup and other comforts to Yates’s dismal apartment. Both children were disturbed by his gaunt appearance, his wheezing, and for Christmas they gave him a muffler to keep him warm. Yates had nothing to give them in return, and later became so enraged at himself that he began weeping and beating his fist on the car.
