by Blake Bailey
Yates would have shaken his head and sighed, For Christ’s sake, Kittredge; for him there were no “possibilities” beyond the necessary craftsmanship of depicting “apparent reality” in all its intricacy, and people who ignored the rules were phonies—“chessmasters,” maybe, but not writers. Toward Coover and his coterie Yates maintained a more or less civil distance; whenever he was tempted to register some kind of aesthetic demurral, he tended to preface it with a phrase like “Well, I’m just a dumb guy, but I think…” In The Easter Parade, though, he channeled his frustration through the Yates-like Jack Flanders, a “traditional” poet who accuses his experimental colleague “Krueger” of having “thrown everything overboard”: “His favorite critical adjective is ‘audacious.’ Some kid’ll get stoned on pot and scribble out the first thing that comes into his head, and Krueger’ll say ‘Mm, that’s a very audacious line.’”
The political concomitant of all this “subversive” writing was no less distasteful to Yates. The Workshop to which he returned in 1966 was, as Robert Lehrman described it, “a seething mix of creative ferment and rage about the Vietnam War.” A number of students had sought refuge from the draft by enrolling in the program, and teachers such as Vonnegut expressed solidarity by refusing to flunk anyone even if they never wrote a word. Director George Starbuck insisted on being arrested with a number of Workshop students who’d protested CIA recruitment by blocking the entrance to the student union. Yates’s rather paradoxical liberalism produced a complex but characteristic response: He opposed the war, but even more adamantly opposed the counterculture. He loathed the shaggy incivility of the protesters (whom he privately called “faggots” and worse) and was outraged by their tendency to blame the war on the soldiers. In Young Hearts Crying, Davenport’s response to a popular mock–recruitment poster (JOIN THE ARMY/VISIT EXOTIC PLACES/ AND KILL PEOPLE) was also Yates’s: “And I mean what kind of horseshit is that?… Soldiers are the victims of wars; everybody knows that.” But any number of people at Iowa disagreed: Soldiers are to blame, they argued, since they might have chosen to be conscientious objectors rather than murderers—to which Yates would respond, in effect, that one couldn’t expect a bunch of naive, patriotic kids to be so enlightened. (Martha Speer sympathized with such a view: “I myself had enlisted in a hopeless cause: Richard Yates.”) Yates thought the general disorder of the counterculture—ideological and otherwise—threatened the integrity of the Workshop, such as it was, and by the end of that first semester he was already casting about for openings at other, less radicalized universities.
But these were incidental matters, for the most part. Yates could coexist with a postrealistic counterculture as long as his own work and domestic life were in some kind of order, and in that regard he was having the best year “in the past four or five” as he reported to Cassill: “This is partly because I’m making slow but steady progress on my book (yeah, yeah, the same damn book, but different now),… but mostly because of Martha Speer.” For Martha’s sake he’d curtailed his drinking, curbed his temper (somewhat), and “learned a few tricks about how to keep students from bugging me and how to keep a safe and cordial distance from what I believe is called ‘Social Life.’” The young woman had probationally agreed to marry Yates in the not-distant future, and he was careful to stay on his best behavior. He also tried to help her find a few companions among his students’ wives and girlfriends—without much success, as Martha tended to be even more reticent than usual among women her own age. In fact she was rather opaque in general, though Yates could hardly fail to detect that she was a little conflicted about things, and he wondered whether age might be a problem after all; as he told friends, he didn’t want to seem “like fucking Sinatra” going after Mia Farrow. Andre Dubus, who sympathized with Yates’s tastes in women, sought to reassure him: “Good work to you down there, and I don’t really see why a twenty year age-gap should prevent marriage … but I’m impulsive and I’d probably tell the chick, like unto Sinatra, Come fly with me, come fly come fly away.…”
Meanwhile neither of their families knew anything. Martha’s parents continued to believe that she resided chastely at Black’s, and it was convenient that she return to Kansas City for Christmas that year, since Yates’s daughters were visiting Iowa and there was no question of their meeting Martha unless marital plans were definite. Indeed, the couple’s holiday separation may have decided things, at least in Yates’s mind. Though he enjoyed showing his children the rural splendors of Iowa, Martha’s long absence was an intolerable wrench. At least one night, though, he was diverted by welcome voices from the past: Wendy Sears was working for Mayor Lindsay in New York, and Joe Mohbat had visited her from Harvard where he was a Neiman fellow; they’d just finished dinner when they decided to have a phone reunion with their forlorn friend in the hinterland. “Dick, guess what we’re doing?” said Sears. “Joe and I are sitting here smoking pot.” Yates affected to be aghast—“You fucking hippies!” etc.—though he was touchingly happy to hear from them.
* * *
Financially it was the best and worst of times. In March, Al Ruddy bought out the motion picture rights to Revolutionary Road for $15,500, about $12,000 of which went to Yates after 10 percent was subtracted for Monica McCall and Little, Brown respectively. But really he saw very little of this windfall, as he passed most of it on to the parsimonious Sheila to divide between a college fund and down payment on a new house. As for the $10,000 federal grant, much of that had already evaporated toward debts incurred when The Bridge at Remagen fell through.
Meanwhile Sam Lawrence was pressing him to make good on their gentlemen’s agreement of three years before. “We would be prepared to make a substantial offer on your next book or books,” he reminded Yates. “I would very much like to be your publisher again.” As if to demonstrate his largess, Lawrence struck a deal with Yates’s friend Vonnegut for a $25,000 advance on his next book. Again Yates appealed to his agent for guidance, and again she guided him away from Lawrence: While she conceded that his Knopf advance was only $20,000 ($7,000 of which had gone to reimburse Little, Brown), she also pointed out that Lawrence would actually be paying for both hardcover and softcover rights, and hence Yates stood to lose “anywhere between $50,000 and $400,000” on a big softcover sale. “I do know that the pressures on you are appalling,” she wrote, “and I’m sure that your main nightmare must be a buying of time in order to finish the book. But I would hope never to have to see you pay too high a price for the time.” McCall couldn’t have known that a big paperback sale was hardly in the cards for Yates’s next book, but it was bad advice nonetheless. Lawrence subsequently assured Yates that he was willing to “repay the outstanding advance on your current novel and at the same time provide for additional income”; also the author would receive both hard and softcover royalties, pace McCall. But as Yates reminisced a few dreary years later,
In the end I told Sam I just couldn’t afford to keep my promise—told him (and this is the kind of memory that really rankles) not in a letter or in person over a drink, but in an abrupt, testy little conversation over the God damn telephone. That was splitsville between us.
And the rest is history. Within two years his “venture” had burgeoned into the multi-million-dollar Delacorte empire—one best-seller after another.
As such matters came to a head, and progress on his novel stalled again in late spring, Yates’s precarious well-being began to slip. When a young editor named Gordon Lish came to Iowa to interview Yates for a collection of taped readings, he found the author obliging but “lugubrious.” The two got “roaring drunk” (their tinkling glasses are audible on the tape), and afterward Yates insisted on driving his guest to the airport. They arrived early and sat in the cocktail lounge, where Yates bitterly maundered about having to “teach” for a living. At one point they discussed a mutual friend, Anatole Broyard, the mention of whom only reminded Yates of his main theme: He remarked on Broyard’s new career as a critic—the fact that Broyard, at
least, didn’t have to demean himself by teaching anymore, much less in the sticks.
Yates’s colleagues began to notice something amiss. When Peter Davison of the Atlantic Monthly Press came to Iowa in May, Yates gave a crowded party at which his behavior seemed oddly “elevated.” Davison—who’d witnessed the spectacle of Yates’s being taken away in a straitjacket five years before at Bread Loaf—suddenly had a “clear impression” that the man was bipolar. Such conduct was all the more conspicuous to faculty and staff, toward whom Yates had tended, in the past, to be nothing if not reserved. But one night he startled his colleague Bill Murray by staying late after a party to discuss his daughter Sharon, who (Yates said) was romantically involved with a Negro.* Murray, though on good terms with Yates, was taken aback by such abrupt and bizarre intimacy. “The Workshop was very incestuous,” said Murray, “but I thought a wall of privacy should prevail.”
Martha Speer didn’t know what to make of the rather gradual change. For no particular reason Yates began to drink more and grow irritable; he paced around the house at night, sleeping less and less. He’d already told her about his psychotic episodes in the past (hence the pills), but hadn’t characterized himself as suffering from chronic mental illness. Martha wondered if others noticed the change, but nobody told her anything (until later) and she didn’t know whom to confide in. “I was left to my own devices,” she said. “It was horrible. I wanted to escape quite often, but I felt it was a commitment and I was stuck with it.” As Yates’s paranoia began to escalate, she thought she could somehow arrest the process by being steadfastly rational—by explaining, again and again, that she and others weren’t looking at him in any particular way, that a certain person wasn’t plotting against him, but of course it was no use. Repeatedly Yates went berserk—raging over grievances old and new, hurling furniture at phantoms out of his past. The nurses who lived upstairs complained about the racket to the landlady, an eccentric woman who adored Yates and did nothing. One night he arrived drunk at a dinner party for a man who’d been hired as “executive secretary” of the Workshop. “Where’s the pencil pusher?” Yates roared—and when he found the guest of honor in the kitchen: “Are you the pencil pusher?” The latter stammered some kind of protest, and Yates dumped a bowl of spaghetti over the man’s head. Finally, as a state of total psychosis set in, Yates began to hallucinate so badly he mistook old acquaintances for other people; once, elated, he told Martha he had a plan to save the world.
Yates’s students had known for some time that he was unwell: He was often drunk in class and at least once had lapsed into a crying jag. Such was their devotion, though, that they hesitated to say anything lest they get him in trouble. In the end it was Yates himself who spoke up. One morning he approached Vance Bourjaily and explained, shakily, that he had to commit himself for treatment; he thought he’d killed JFK, and though in a way he knew it wasn’t true, at the same time he was convinced of it. Unfortunately, he was determined to teach a two-hour class before he went to the hospital. Fortified with alcohol, Yates slumped over the lectern and stood blinking into the bright fluorescent light: “[He was] clearly upset,” Robert Lehrman recalled, “his voice even raspier than usual, and [he] stunned us with a long, rambling, only partly coherent monologue about a writer who turned out to have the luck of being a great writer—and married a woman of great wealth—the punch line of which was that it was William Styron.” Yates was at pains to make it clear he didn’t resent Styron—hell no, he admired the man—but it was just that he’d had such an easier life.
Yates was admitted to the hospital for a month. His friend Robin Metz paid him a visit, but felt “hopelessly inadequate” to the situation. Yates was in a locked ward for acutely disturbed patients, and Metz tried to think of cheerful things to say while others wailed and moaned and gibbered around them. Insofar as he was aware of Metz at all, Yates was abject at being seen in such a place; he sat on a couch with his knees pulled up to his forehead, “shrunk into himself,” and hardly acknowledged his visitor at all. “I realized that being a friend wasn’t always enough,” said Metz. “For the first time I realized how bad a situation Dick was in—how wretched and miserable he was.”
Martha Speer felt almost as miserable. Apart from Yates and a family whose way of life she’d rejected, she was pretty much alone in the world, and too depressed at the moment to judge things clearly. Yates’s psychiatrist at the hospital, a Dr. Brown, took pity on the bewildered young woman: “You may want to get out of this,” he urged her. “This man is going to have serious mental health problems.” Speer would always remember Dr. Brown with gratitude, as he was the only person at the time who tried to deal honestly with her. But she had a “savior complex” and chose to ignore his advice. As she later explained to Yates, “I thought ‘this is life,’ that my childhood had protected me from reality, that I could find both escape and meaning for myself in an almost religious kind of identification to another.”
Thus committed, the first thing she did was rent a smaller, cheaper apartment two blocks down the hill on Van Buren. Money, after all, was one of the things that preyed on Yates’s mind, and at least in that respect she could be of some definite use to him. But when he got out of the hospital he was displeased. “Don’t be ridiculous!” he told her, shaking his head at their “boring” new digs. “Money is to spend!”
* * *
That summer Yates rented a cottage in Montauk Point, Long Island, where he could “hole-up” and get some writing done: “No chance of finishing the book in that time,” he wrote Cassill, “but there’s a considerable chance that I might get it sufficiently in shape to finish next year.” As it turned out, he was in far too deep a funk for creative labor. Kline had given him powerful new tranquilizers on the strict condition that he stop drinking, and the drugs combined with alcoholic withdrawal left him dopey and depressed. For days at a time he hardly spoke, except to complain about his writing: He wished Martha had known him when he was “younger and smarter,” when he “knew what the hell [he] was doing.” It got very monotonous, and Martha’s depression deepened as well.
Yates put off seeing his sister almost to the end. More than three years had passed since their last meeting at Central Islip, and he dreaded what he and his fiancée would find at High Hedges. If anything it was worse than he imagined. The forty-six-year-old Ruth was now a toothless invalid who could hardly speak or walk without assistance. Yates sat beside her on the sofa and made kind, encouraging noises as she fumbled with his hands and talked about their childhood in a slurred, meandering way. Her husband Fred chatted with Martha and made sure Ruth’s glass was filled, while their well-mannered son Peter answered questions about his seminary and patiently weathered his mother’s inept sallies of affection. He alone seemed at ease with the situation. “The family was used to dealing with [Ruth],” Martha recalled, “they kept her propped up, but Peter had the best idea of her condition. The others sort of pretended it wasn’t there.” Yates endured things as long as he could, then abruptly stood up and said good-bye to his dazed older sister for the last time.
He also had a last (but one) meeting with Sheila that summer. Over lunch at Grand Central, he broke the news of his engagement to Martha, and Sheila wasn’t entirely successful in masking her skepticism. “Does she know about your problems?” she asked, and Yates replied, “Oh yes, she knows everything” in a rushed, rather touchy voice. Sheila tried to be properly congratulatory, but was further bemused by the whole age business and couldn’t help but wonder whether Yates was trying to recapture something irretrievable. Both were feeling a little awkward toward the end, and sad, and later that day Sheila wrote her ex-husband a note expressing what she’d failed to find words for in his presence:
I hope you’re not sorry for our talk today and I want you to know I don’t think you’re foolish in what you’re thinking of doing. What I really wanted to say is to do with those memories I mentioned of our romance of long ago when you and I were very young. They mean a grea
t deal to both of us and I’ve known for a long time that nothing can come of trying to find that again with anyone else—something completely different, yes … but that particular agony and delight, never. That’s the Garden of Eden and we’ve gone out. There are other Edens, though, and if this is truly another one altogether and you’re not battering at the gates of the old one, then it’s not foolish.… Love, and good luck, Sheila
In later years she’d rarely speak of Yates—much less in Edenic terms—but then she never remarried either.
* * *
Yates’s dosages were adjusted before he left New York in mid-September, and by the time he was back in Iowa he felt like a new man. He returned to his sensible drinking regime and vowed not to let teaching duties monopolize his time; he informed his workshop that he refused to read any more stories “about the sex lives of graduate students in English.” He was determined to devote at least four hours a day to his novel until the damn thing was finished, and in fact Martha Speer can hardly remember his ever missing those four hours again, no matter how blocked or addled he sometimes became. He’d work with his door open, smoking or pacing with a pencil in his teeth, occasionally reading something aloud to her. She became adept at responding in a way that seemed both candid and appreciative.
