by Blake Bailey
The shared trauma of Yates’s breakdown had “glued” the couple together, as Martha put it, but no definite wedding plans were made until early that fall, when Mrs. Speer tracked her daughter down by telephone to Yates’s apartment. Things happened fast after that: Martha admitted they were living together but were engaged to be married, whereupon an immediate visit to Kansas City was arranged so Yates could meet the parents. Anxious at the prospect, he made a rather good impression: He and Dr. Speer were about the same age and found a number of tastes in common (music for one), and both parents deemed him a gentleman; for Yates’s part he was in awe of the family’s bland, putative stability, while they were duly impressed by the information that he was a celebrated author. The father was quietly dubious over Yates’s ability to generate a steady income (to say nothing of his age and apparent health), but as the man quipped, “I have so many daughters, letting one of them go won’t bother me too much.”
Yates was gleeful in announcing the wedding to friends. “I’m getting married,” he wrote Cassill. “She’s twenty years younger than me but I keep thinking about Picasso, Charlie Chaplin, Frank Sinatra and Justice Douglas, which makes it okay. Anyway I’m drinking less and showing many other signs of health including a protuberant gut and a winning smile.” He’d asked Sheila not to tell their daughters until it was definite, and a couple of weeks before the ceremony he called to break the news: “I’m getting married! Isn’t that exciting?” They’d had no idea of Martha’s existence, much less of the fact that she was just four and a half years older than Sharon—but if he was happy, so were they.
The Workshop turned out in force for the event: Everyone seemed deeply moved that the lovable, troubled Yates had found someone to take care of him; as Lehrman noted, “We wanted him to have a happier life.” Jerry Schulman was best man, and both he and Grace were struck by the way students and colleagues doted on Yates, how eager they were to accommodate the Schulmans simply because they were his friends. One rather ominous specter at the feast, however, was the poet John Berryman, about whom Grace had published an essay in the journal Shenandoah; as a pleasant diversion during the wedding rehearsal, Yates had arranged for her to attend a tea in Berryman’s honor. The plan began to backfire the night before, when the boozy, disturbed poet accosted Yates after a concert and began ranting about marriage—whether for or against was hard to tell—while Yates listened with perhaps a grim sense of recognition. The next day at the tea Berryman was owlishly tipsy, and began dictating poetry at the table (“He said it was a Chinese stanza,” said Grace; “it wasn’t”). When he learned of Schulman’s paper on the subject of his autobiographical Sonnets, he asked her whether they’d been too private to publish. He seemed genuinely upset about it.
The day of the wedding—January 20, 1968—Yates was badly hungover. The night before, he’d been the happy, silly, singing life of a party given by Bourjaily in the couple’s honor. Martha’s eight siblings were in town, and while they didn’t know much about writing, each of them thought Yates was a delightful fellow. He made a resplendent groom, too, in his Gieves and Hawkes suit—“tall, fair-haired, gorgeous,” as Grace Schulman remembered him that day—and after a few nips from a student’s flask, his crapulence faded and he entered the First Presbyterian Church with a merry grin. When the four-year-old ring-bearer, Lisa Metz, paused warily in the aisle, Yates dropped to his haunches and gave her a look of ecstatic reassurance. “Dick was so handsome when he smiled,” said the ring-bearer’s father; “he was so full of joy at having this sweet little kid involved. His eyebrows would go up, up, up as he coaxed her on.” The bride was a little dismayed to smell liquor on his breath—in a church, no less, on this of all days—but once they were man and wife and a mass of people were happily pelting them with rice, she managed a flustered smile. For better or worse, the thing was done. “I just placed my bets in that direction,” she later mused. “It might have turned out great. Who knows, he might have written another Revolutionary Road and become really famous.”
In fact a number of excellent books would follow, though by the time they were written Martha had lost all interest in Yates’s career. And whatever the case, fame or no, he would have still been the man she married. As Bill Murray remembered, “Here was this very ordinary, sweet girl, dressed like a June bride, walking into a maelstrom. I thought, Oh my God, what’s going on here?”
CHAPTER TWELVE
A Special Providence: 1968-1969
A month or so after the wedding, Yates overcame his aversion to the outdoors and rented a picturesque stone cottage about four miles north of Iowa City near the Coralville Reservoir. Their landlady was the same woman who owned the Victorian house where Yates had had his breakdown, and perhaps she understood his needs better than most. Save for a single neighbor in the vicinity—a “chummy, bubbly, tolerant” woman in her mid-thirties named Jill Van Cleve, who became a good companion to the couple—they were pretty much on their own, and both seemed to like it that way. The cottage was a former soap factory that had been moved stone by stone from the Mennonite colony in nearby Amana: Apart from a small bedroom it was all one space, the most arresting feature being a large fireplace with wrought-iron arms that pulled out. The house had a furnace, too, though it pleased the wistfully masculine Yates to chop wood on cold days and build roaring fires. Soon they inherited a dog named Cindy, who accompanied them on long walks and seemed to complete the household.
Except for his work, these were happy days for Yates. Around this time he grew a permanent beard whose relative tidiness (particularly later) was a telling indicator of his well-being; it lent a certain somber dignity to his features and solved the problem (as he saw it) of a weak chin and effeminate mouth. Life was starting over, and he was eager to leave behind the bewildered-looking bachelor who for years had lived in one anonymous den after another, eating restaurant meals and drinking too much. Now he had a pretty wife who was content to cook and clean and trim his whiskers for him, and he was anxious never to go back.
His daughter Monica was especially pleased with the change: In the old days her father’s odd, transient life had made her too nervous to enjoy her visits, but Martha created a cheerful environment even when Yates was grumpishly stalking about with a pencil in his mouth. Also, the girl relished the company of handsome, robust graduate students such as Bob Lehrman and Jody Lowens, who were frequent guests at the cottage and assumed the role of attentive big brothers. One night Lowens put Monica on his shoulders so she could pry open a mysterious door above the fireplace, where she found an alcove filled with squirrel droppings. She promptly appropriated the space as her own, and Yates (who enjoyed such projects) provided a rope ladder and helped her clean it out. More than ever, father and daughter were a curious pair. “Monica always wanted him to shape up,” said Martha. “It made her mad when he didn’t live up to his own ideals. She’d get disgusted with him, but she loved him dearly.” Almost from infancy the girl had gotten used to being hard on her father, often brazenly so, and as she got older her barbs became more incisive and somewhat less adorable. “Oh, babe, give me a break here!” Yates would bristle, or “Yeah yeah, I know”—this when she’d nag him about smoking, say, which only unnerved him into smoking more.
Meanwhile the world continued to wait patiently for another novel by the author of Revolutionary Road. With the help of his friend Styron, Yates was awarded a Rockefeller grant that winter for eleven thousand dollars, even while he agonized over the merit of the project that continued to attract such lavish subsidy. Styron himself had taken seven years to write his latest novel, The Confessions of Nat Turner, which won the 1968 Pulitzer and left Yates “almost wiped out with admiration and envy”; he wondered whether he’d keep such a man’s respect, much less the world’s, once his own tardy opus was revealed for what it was. The problem—and his editor Gottlieb agreed—remained one of structure: that is, whether to stitch the new material (i.e., Prentice’s childhood with his mother) into the main narrative as so many in
termittent flashbacks, or lump it all into a long discrete bridge in the middle; either way was far from seamless, and Yates couldn’t help but suspect that he’d essentially written two novels which didn’t go together and yet couldn’t stand apart.
He was more vulnerable to criticism than ever. That spring he was invited to give a reading at Knox College in Galesburg, Illinois, where his friend Robin Metz had taken a teaching position. The visit got off to an awkward start when another Workshopper-turned-Galesburgian, Murray Moulding, had Yates over for dinner. Yates seemed somber and out-of-sorts, and when the seat of his lawn chair broke and he hit the ground, he didn’t crack a smile amid the nervous laughter that followed. The next day he was scheduled to give a public reading for students, then meet with faculty from various disciplines to discuss his story “Builders,” which they’d been given to read in advance. The first part of the agenda went fine; the faculty session, however, proved a kind of moral equivalent of that pratfall Yates had taken the night before. Such meetings were meant to be relaxed but scholarly, and usually the work under discussion was somewhat more abstruse than Yates’s story. “I felt like I’d led Dick to slaughter,” said Metz. Yates sat glowering as one academic after another implied—or seemed to imply—that the story was a bit sentimental and overly autobiographical (and really was it fiction at all? and really what does one mean by “fiction”?). Finally a math professor from the Orkney Islands, trying to be kind perhaps, wondered aloud how one does go about distancing oneself from one’s work and hence avoiding sentimentality? Yates slumped so low that Metz thought he might put his head down on the table; on top of everything else, the math professor had a funny accent and that seemed the last straw for Yates. “I don’t have to answer the goddamn question!” he suddenly erupted. There was a silence, and then the meeting was adjourned. Yates remained in his seat until he and Metz were alone. “Fucking sons of bitches!” he resumed. “Why do I come to these goddamn academic conferences?”
Once the ordeal was over, though, Yates made a remarkable recovery. That night Metz gave a raucous party, during which they broke out a twelve-foot collapsible tunnel for children; the idea was to crawl through without spilling your drink, as well as to peek at and poke the behind of the person in front of you. Yates was delighted by the high jinks, and finally transported into laughing, cheering, floor-pounding ecstasy when three pretty coeds did a dance-and-kick rendition of “Shuffle Off to Buffalo.”
* * *
Yates’s sister died in May, three months short of her forty-seventh birthday. Oddly enough, she’d briefly managed to quit drinking a few months prior to that final visit from her brother the summer before; her son Peter had researched a rehabilitation facility in Vermont, and while Fred vetoed the idea, his son’s concern seemed to shame him into making a last effort to “handle” the matter on his own. For a while, then, the goaded Ruth gorged herself with sweets and stayed mostly sober—but Fred kept drinking, and soon she gave up the struggle for good. “With a different husband she might have pulled through,” said her sister-in-law Louise. “But Fred and Ruth had a symbiotic effect on each other—it was a ‘Days of Wine and Roses’ situation.” One night their oldest son, Fred junior, got a call from his father, who was in a drunken stupor and needed the young man to drive Ruth to the hospital: She was sick, he said; she’d taken a fall. Fred junior found his mother more or less sober, though she had a large bruise on one side of her face—hardly uncommon, since she often fell and bruised easily because of liver damage. Three days later she died in the hospital of cirrhosis.
Yates was not surprised by the news (nor was Martha, whose immediate thought on meeting Ruth was “She’s done for”); he professed to be relieved that her “miserable life” was over, and arranged to leave immediately for an early-summer trip to New York. The graveside service in St. James was remarkably similar to Sarah Grimes’s interment in The Easter Parade: Fred Rodgers arrived at the cemetery tipsy and befuddled, supported by a huddle of friends from Grumman, and like his alter ego Tony Wilson he repeatedly “knif[ed] the flat of his hand straight ahead from the temple” and mumbled something like, “Straight ahead: don’t look right, don’t look left, don’t look back.” Later there was a beery gathering at High Hedges, where Fred’s buddies jollied him along with old stories, and his son Peter alertly attended to the other guests. Martha approvingly described the mood as “joyful” (“Ruth had been out of reach for a long time—whatever they’d known of her was gone”). But Fred junior left early that night—“sick, in shock”—and later, after most of the guests had gone, Fred senior sat in the dining room with his sister and broke down crying. “He wasn’t good at communicating deep feelings,” she said, “but in an odd way there was a great love between him and Ruth.” Fred remarried less than a year later but often spoke vaguely of “mistakes” he’d made in his first marriage. He outlived Ruth by twenty-seven years.
“Your brother killed my sister,” Yates said to Louise Rodgers on the train back to Manhattan.* She replied to the effect that the matter was more complicated than that; she’d always regarded Yates as something of a malcontent, particularly where family was concerned. As for Martha, she found it fascinating that Louise, a charming, intelligent woman, had nothing but admiration for Dookie of all people and would only laugh when Yates tried to remonstrate with her. He’d always led Martha to believe that his mother was ridiculous at best, and at worst a monster of feckless egoism.
Yates was still in New York when Robert Kennedy was assassinated. A month before, he’d written his old Justice Department colleague Barrett Prettyman that the world seemed “more hopeful now than at any time since God knows when—Johnson out, the Paris talks on, and an election shaping up in which Our Side looks likely to win.” By “Our Side” Yates meant liberals in general who opposed the war, not die-hard Kennedy partisans such as Prettyman: “I don’t mean to be disloyal,” he added, “but I’m wearing a McCarthy sticker on the back bumper of my car. It was purchased before RFK declared his candidacy, but I haven’t taken it off yet because RFK hasn’t yet said anything big enough to convince me that he’d be a better President.” Such sentiments notwithstanding, Wendy Sears spotted Yates at the requiem for RFK at St. Patrick’s Cathedral; he made himself conspicuous by proceeding uncertainly up the aisle to take a Communion wafer. Afterward she caught up with him outside the church: Had he converted to Catholicism, or was his interest in the Eucharist just a tribute to his old employer? “Jesus,” said the flustered Yates, “I was just following the crowd!”
He wouldn’t follow it for long, though not even Yates was wholly immune to RFK’s peculiar charm. Later that summer he wrote another, condoling letter to Prettyman, referring to Kennedy’s death as a “hideous loss” and expressing chagrin over the unseemly pro-McCarthy message of his previous letter: “I didn’t realize how ready and eager I was to have my mind changed until it was too late. For whatever it’s worth, let me tell you that McCarthy now seems very pale indeed, as does every other national political figure.” This was somewhat for Prettyman’s benefit, but at the time Kennedy’s death genuinely affected Yates as a sorrow both personal and political. As the years passed, however, he became more and more impatient with any hint of Kennedy hagiography, until he eventually lumped RFK into his general indictment of the brothers as overrated, phony, out for number one, and ruthless.
* * *
Yates spent much of the fall in pencil-chewing seclusion with his manuscript; he’d recently stumbled on the information that more than 50 percent of first novelists never publish a second novel (“that scares the shit out of me”), and more than ever he just wanted to be shut of the thing. In November he mailed what he “hoped was a finished novel” to Gottlieb, who “didn’t like it but came up with three or four very good ideas about how it could be revised and improved”: Apparently Gottlieb suggested that he cut a gratuitous final chapter, as well as tweak the Alice Prentice material in ways that might bring about a slight further refinement of the structure.
* For another two months, then, Yates was “up to [his] ass” in further repairs, but finally relinquished the thing for good in February. He’d even come up with a title—A Special Providence—after discarding such recent ideas as A Letter Home and The Wine of Astonishment. Indeed the title may have been the one thing about the book he definitely liked, though he had to concede a heady sense of liberation now that his joyless, eight-year ordeal was over. As he wrote Prettyman, “[The novel] may not be very good—I suspect it is nowhere near as good as my first one—but the beautiful thing about it now is that it’s done and off my back, leaving me free to write other and maybe better novels.” And then there was always the chance his pessimism was misplaced: Not only did Gottlieb profess to like the book, he even went so far as to list by name all the other people at Knopf who liked it—sales and publicity people at that.
What with his regular income and leftover Rockefeller money, Yates found himself rather flush when he received the nine thousand dollars due on delivery of his manuscript. Never mind that he now had a daughter at Bennington, one of the most expensive colleges in the country; it was time to celebrate—the curse of his second novel was lifted (so it seemed), he’d never given Martha a proper honeymoon, and after all, Money is to spend. Thus he decided to take his wife on a grand tour that summer.
They departed at the beginning of June, stopping in New York on the way. A night was spent with the Styrons in Connecticut, and Yates was in high spirits for most of the visit: His hosts went out of their way to put his shy wife at ease, and it may have gratified Yates for Martha to witness his friendship with such an eminent man. Later, however, they had dinner at the home of playwright Arthur Miller, whom Martha described as a “full-time celebrity”: “He was very imposing and gruff,” she recalled. “Everything was Marilyn this and Marilyn that, or else he’d name-drop some other famous person.” Intimidated, neither Yates nor Martha said a single word during the entire meal.
