by Blake Bailey
But finally what galled Yates most was that A Special Providence simply wasn’t good enough to overcome current trends; also, that he’d wasted so much time on it. Eight years ago he’d had the idea of writing a “direct autobiographical blowout” about the war—to be exact, about a young man who is disabused of his romanticism by the ordeal of war. But such a story was familiar, to say the least, and whatever had struck Yates as momentous about his own experience seemed less so in retrospect; hence the long struggle to form the material in such a way that made it fresh and avoided what Yates called “the two terrible traps that lie in the path of autobiographical fiction—self-pity and self-aggrandizement.”
The result was a noble failure, at least by Yates’s standards. Jean Rosenthal had it right when he called the war sections “interesting” but not particularly original. Yates remembered his own infantry experience as alternately tedious and terrifying, and he rendered it with a number of vivid details: the “smell of mildew and rubber and his own breath,” as Prentice tries not to vomit in his gas mask; the corpses’ eyes “like dusty marbles”; the soldier Krupka who “sat on the chest of the bespectacled corpse and spooned up his can of dehydrated eggs, which were almost exactly the color of the dead man’s flesh.” But the images of corpses and basic training and war in general had long been exhausted by books and the movies, and their reanimation required a more novel viewpoint than that of a romantic and rather typically self-conscious young man. Yates knew this, and “after much labor and much to [his] chagrin” realized that no amount of polishing and fine writing and craft could quite overcome the fallacy of his approach, to say nothing of the fundamental insincerity at the bottom of it—that is, the fact that Yates himself was not particularly disillusioned by the war, and really had no strongly defined point of view at all, much less a novel one.
But faced with the artistic challenge of posing disillusionment as the defining factor in Prentice’s development—and thus linking the latter’s war experience to his childhood—Yates resorted to the mechanical formula of a movie motif, whereby the reader is reminded every so often that Prentice has yet to cast off his mother’s romanticism: Thus he imagines himself carrying a wounded buddy in the manner of Lew Ayres in All Quiet on the Western Front, or labors at seducing a woman by lighting two cigarettes at a time like Paul Henreid in Now, Voyager, and so on. All of which culminates in a labored epiphany devised to meet the needs of Yates’s synthetic theme, however lacking in spontaneity or psychological plausibility. “No account ever really needed to be settled,” Prentice reflects after bravely taking a beating from a bigger soldier;
nothing ever really needed to be proved. Everything would always come right in the end as long as a couple of good guys went up behind the barn and had it out, as long as a mother fell on her knees and offered all her thanks to God and they played the Star-Spangled Banner on the radio. That was what these voices had to say; that was their lying sentimental message, and it all went down as smoothly as the pancakes and jelly.
Whereupon Prentice vomits up the pancakes and jelly, and hence rejects the sentimental values of America, the movies, and his mother—rather patly, not to say sentimentally, as doubtless Yates himself suspected. And so as a kind of corrective he finally asserts that “all [Prentice] knew with any clarity was that he was nineteen years old, that the war was over, and that he was alive.” That was all the nineteen-year-old Yates had known as well.
But he never had to strain after meaning or originality where his childhood was concerned, and the book comes alive whenever it returns to Alice Prentice. The theme associated with the character, that of a “special providence,” is not superimposed for the sake of craft, but rather reflects the essential delusion of people such as Alice-Dookie—that is, that they are gifted, among the world’s golden people, and that God (or somebody) will always provide. Alice’s refusal to face reality leads her and Bobby into disaster time and again, and yet if she were level-headed like her “dreary” ex-husband (“I’ve got a good amateur voice, that’s all”), life would be intolerable. Having committed herself to the fiction that she is “remarkable and gifted and brave”—a noble fugitive from a dull provincial family and husband, from all the dull conventions of average people—Alice would rather endure hardship than resign herself to being merely “reasonable.” And in fact the bland, uncertain rewards of reality aren’t enough for anybody, much less modestly talented people such as Alice, though most of us learn to live with our compromises. Those who don’t are ultimately left with only God to believe in them, and perhaps with the comfort of a cocktail that’s still nearly two-thirds full.
Alice’s self-deception borders on the pathological, so that her striving has both a universal and larger-than-life aspect. Her son Robert, though, is not so compelling: His desire to be a hero, or at least a competent soldier, is surely typical of most young men at war, and hardly requires a fantastically deluded mother as an explanatory factor. Moreover, Robert’s role in the flashback section is rather incidental, while Alice is all but absent (even by implication) from the war section; if the flashback had been given from Robert’s (rather than Alice’s) point of view, it might have related more clearly to the rest of the book, but then those particular scenes would have been weakened in the process. Which is to say, alas, that the two stories really don’t belong in the same novel—not ideally anyway, not in a novel written by a man who believed structure was among the highest virtues of narrative art (“Don’t be seduced by prose, Grace; the point is structure”).
But Alice alone is worth the price of admission, so to speak, and there’s much to commend in every part of the book, whether or not it all works as a whole. In a better world, then, A Special Providence would have been treated as a noteworthy transitional effort by a writer of the first rank, who’d already produced two arguable classics; instead it was all but ignored by reviewers and public alike, dismissed as Just Another War Novel. And meanwhile nobody loathed the book more than its author, who considered omitting it from future pages listing “Other Books by Richard Yates.” At the time he comforted himself with the prospect of writing “better and easier” books, but first he’d have to get his confidence back, and that would prove a long, ravaging process. “Let’s see,” he later said to a friend. “I guess I first got to know you right around the end of the sixties, right? Just about the time I started falling apart.…”
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
Fun with a Stranger: 1970-1974
A Special Providence sold fewer than seven thousand copies and left Yates in debt to Knopf for almost thirteen thousand dollars; Dell paid only twenty-five hundred for the paperback rights and made it clear they weren’t hopeful for a large sale. “But you must not brood over this,” wrote Monica McCall; “it will simply be up to me to get you a sufficient advance from Bob on the new book.” Meanwhile Dell was considering a new edition of Revolutionary Road (out of print by then) for their Contemporary Classics line, so that was a comfort.* Nor was it the only sign that Yates wasn’t entirely forgotten as a force in American literature: That spring he was approached by Boston University, whose representatives were “most desirous of establishing the Richard Yates Collection,” as they were certain future scholars would be studying his life and work. Yates was happy to oblige with whatever papers he had, though he regretted to inform them that he’d already “lost” all working drafts of his latest novel, A Special Providence.
It had taken Yates almost fourteen years to produce his first two novels, and now that he faced “the added disadvantage of being middle-aged and tired,” he doubted that his output would increase. As fame and fortune had ceased to be imminent prospects, Yates was ready at last to commit himself to teaching as a career. “I’ve sort of decided I like [Iowa] after all,” he wrote a friend, “which I never thought would happen. I guess what it amounts to is that I’ve proved I can’t make a living in Hollywood or New York without scrambling my brains, which leaves the Groves of Academe as the only reasonable alter
native—and these particular groves are the only ones I know.” As jaded as Yates remained on the subject of “teaching” writing, the truth was he rather enjoyed it: His students brought out the best in him—modesty, candor, generosity—and more than ever he needed their admiration. Unfortunately it was “almost impossible” for Yates to write and teach at the same time (since both “require the same kind of energy”), but such was also the case with every other kind of wage slavery he’d tried, and meanwhile a man and his family had to eat.
Now that he was married and settled, Yates wanted the security of tenure as well; he was now in his fifth year at Iowa and still only a lecturer with an annual salary of twelve thousand dollars, which he bitterly attributed to his lack of an academic degree. In fact tenure was rarely awarded to Workshop faculty, since a brisk turnover was regarded as desirable for any number of reasons—not the least being that many writers were prone to burnout and proved to be mediocre teachers besides. But whatever else one could say of Yates, he wasn’t mediocre, and his friend George Starbuck had recommended him for tenure before resigning as director at the end of the 1968–69 academic year.
In the fall Yates’s promotion was passed by the Executive Committee of the English Department as well as the dean of the College of Liberal Arts, but his final appointment had yet to be approved. Meanwhile, a writer and Houghton-Mifflin editor, Jack Leggett, was brought in from Boston to serve as temporary director of the Workshop, and he promptly invited Yates to dinner and vice versa. Leggett was an affable man who knew of Yates through their mutual friend Sam Lawrence, and Yates assumed he’d be an ally. Frankly and rather tipsily, Yates confided his frustration over the tenure question: He’d been given to understand that approval was little more than a formality at this point, but as time dragged on he’d begun to suspect that Paul Engle “had it in for him.” Engle had retired as director a few years ago when the Workshop was absorbed by the English Department, but he still exerted considerable influence behind the scenes, and Yates thought he looked like a man “slinking around with a secret.” In any case Yates hoped that Leggett would fix the matter as soon as possible. Leggett remained affably noncommittal.
Yates’s suspicions were not idle paranoia. Though Paul Engle was regarded as a kind of benignant Carl Sandburg figure, he could be ruthless in protecting the interests of the Workshop—his own brainchild, after all—and that meant weeding out undesirables. Engle had attended Yates’s wedding to Martha, and the men were cordial if not close; privately, though, Engle had always had qualms. During Yates’s first sodden year at Iowa, he’d been protected by the formidable Cassill, who thought the vagaries of writers and Yates in particular should be pardoned as part of the psychic territory. To some extent Engle agreed, but at the same time he recognized the need for diplomatic restraint on the part of teachers and students alike, lest the Workshop’s dubious reputation in the community suffer further.
Probably Yates’s 1967 breakdown, what with all the odd behavior that attended it, had sealed his fate as far as Engle was concerned. After Cassill’s departure Yates still had influential friends such as Bourjaily and Starbuck, but the latter was gone now, too, and other poets on the faculty were not so well disposed. While Yates was careful not to insult colleagues to their faces, he was rather infamous for regarding poets with disdain. As Robin Metz explained, “Poets were open to a kind of effete sensibility—still affected by the modernist idea that they were an academic priesthood, and they engaged in the sort of esoteric literary talk that always intimidated and angered Dick. He thought they put on pretentious airs, while prose writers were foot soldiers doing an honest and difficult job.”
Ultimately, though, the poet whose opinion mattered most was Engle, and whether or not he was aware of Yates’s aesthetic prejudices was probably beside the point; when he learned that someone so “unbalanced” was about to get tenure, he took immediate action. “Engle let it be known in a whispered way that I had to get rid of Yates,” Leggett recalled. “‘This guy must not have tenure,’ he said, ‘otherwise we’ll never get rid of him,’ etcetera. I was the cop-sergeant getting orders from above. And [English chairman] Gerber must have concurred with Engle, since I wouldn’t have done anything without his order.” Leggett also remembered being approached that year by some of Yates’s students, who “loved Dick but thought he was too sick to be teaching”: Apparently Yates had missed a few classes and begun behaving erratically again. Martha, however, claims that his mental health and drinking were more or less under control at the time, and (as far as she knew) he never missed another class after his breakdown three years before.
The fact remained that Yates had been promised tenure, that he desperately needed the security to go on with his writing, and nobody wanted to break the news to him. Leggett noticed how Yates seemed to grow hostile as he began to suspect the deception, but the year passed and nobody said another straightforward word on the subject to Yates.
They waited until he’d left town in June to attend the Hollins Writing Conference in Virginia, an occasion Yates might have enjoyed under other circumstances. Organized by writer-in-residence George Garrett, the two-week conference turned into an almost legendary debauch, featuring some of the leading lights of American literature (for whose services Garrett had paid upward of five thousand dollars a head): Ralph Ellison, Styron, Peter Taylor, James Dickey, and some fifty others. “They turned the dorms into Dodge City,” said Garrett, “swimming in the nude, drinking all night. Dickey came to town with a blond hooker from Miami, and the couple appeared in the Hollins alumni magazine as ‘Mr. and Mrs. Dickey.’” Amid the fun Yates somberly attended to his duties and got quietly “stewed” at night. “Martha seemed a nurse,” the writer Bill Harrison observed. “She propped Dick up and sat stroking his arm. My wife would just look at her and shake her head.”
Yates needed the nursing. He’d received a letter on arrival (“c/o The Hollins Writing Conference”) signed by his Iowa colleague Bill Murray, who sheepishly identified himself as “Acting Director” in the summertime absence of those from whom he was taking orders:
A problem has come up regarding your appointment to Associate Professor. The Administration questioned it on two grounds—the usual “ladder of promotion” is from Lecturer to Assistant Professor: Vance was promoted in this way. They also questioned the validity of making a tenured appointment when the Workshop has no Director. You know, of course, that the initial proposal for your promotion passed the Executive Committee of the Department, and through the Dean of the College of Liberal Arts as well. The question came from the Provost of the University.
John Gerber called a special meeting of the Executive Committee, and it was decided to recommend your promotion to Assistant rather than Associate Professor. The Assistant Professorship is a three-year appointment, renewable.… Though the promotion now is to Assistant Professor, your salary will be that promised you as Associate Professor.
Yates was devastated—as much by the cowardice and petty chicanery of it all (“The question came from the Provost of the University”) as by the professional consequences to himself. Back in Iowa, he made a beeline for Leggett’s office and stood glowering in the doorway while the man let him know, affably as ever, that he hadn’t written a recommendation for Yates’s tenure and now—well, he didn’t see how he could. “That told Dick all he needed to know,” said Leggett. “It was time for him to fish or cut bait.”
Yates had no desire to accept the guilty sop of an assistant professorship, but as it turned out he’d be stuck at Iowa for another disgruntled year while he hunted for a job, any job, with a somewhat comparable salary. He even wrote to his old friend Hayes Jacobs at the New School, who jovially replied that he could get Yates as much as eight hundred dollars for a fifteen-week term, which was more than “80% of the writing faculty” were paid. Yates kept looking.
* * *
He didn’t want to spend a day more in Iowa City than strictly necessary, and much of that summer was spent trave
ling. For a long time he’d been eager to get started on a novel about a man who goes “progressively, irredeemably crazy,” and for the sake of mnemonic atmosphere he returned to the sites of his own breakdowns. For a month or so, he and Martha lived in the same raffish part of Hollywood where Yates had been arrested while emptying his wallet on Sunset Boulevard. Such research had a less than salutary effect on his morale, though he was careful not to drink too much and invite a sequel to the summer of 1965. Meanwhile Brian Moore rallied round with a party or two in the Yateses’ honor. Martha observed that her husband’s Hollywood friends seemed “relieved that someone was taking care of him,” though Joan Didion was “chilly” toward her, and apparently Didion wasn’t the only one. Years later, long after his second marriage was over, Yates was still grumbling about how certain “Hollywood writers” had been rude to his wife, though Martha wasn’t particularly bothered one way or the other (“that’s just the way it was”). For Yates, though, it was further proof of the corrupting influence of the place.
After a teaching visit to Central Oregon Community College, the Yateses spent a week at Bill Kittredge’s home in Missoula, Montana. Yates’s old roughneck buddies Bob Lacy and Jim Crumley were on hand, and the reunion was a festive respite in the midst of a trying summer. Despite the rowdiness of the younger set, Yates was adamant about sticking to his sensible drinking regime for Martha’s sake. “Dick waited until the cocktail hour,” said Kittredge, “but around 4:30 he’d start pacing through the house straightening pictures and checking the thermostat.” As it happened, the visit was the last Kittredge ever saw of his old teacher (except for the “sad eyes” that sometimes appeared whenever he lapsed into tricky prose).
Yates continued his research in New York, lurking around Bellevue and St. Vincent’s and various old haunts in the Village. Memories of his tormented “second bachelorhood,” mingled with a sense of unfulfilled literary promise, left him depressed and on edge. Bob Riche was struck by the change in Yates when the two met at Warren and Marjorie Owens’s house in Bethel, Connecticut. As Riche remembered, “Dick used to be so funny, but no more. Just to be provocative, I mentioned a few postrealist authors like Barth, and Martha took me aside and said ‘Please don’t get him upset.’” Warren Owens also noticed Martha’s tendency to “cringe” at her husband’s outbursts, and later she unhappily confided that she’d been having problems calming him down. Most of the night’s discussion was political: One of the guests, Penny Miller, was the wife of a CBS correspondent who’d recently been killed in Vietnam, and Yates was alternately consoling and volatile in his ranting against the war—incited somewhat, perhaps, by Riche’s competitive tendency to remind the room that he himself was not merely “radical” but “revolutionary.” “I recall trying to say a good many loud and raucous things on all sides,” Yates wrote afterward, “and finally spoiling the whole party by puking my guts out into what I believe was a very nice toilet bowl (yeah, yeah, drunk again).”
