by Blake Bailey
But the night had piqued Yates into thinking about the past, his own generation’s political convictions, and on the plane back to Iowa he began to consider a rather peculiar nonfiction project—all the more alluring, perhaps, because his new novel had left him blocked and haunted and he was eager to put it aside, and perhaps too because he was tempted to prove he could be as “relevant” as the next writer. That fall, anyway, Yates appeared at a public reading in Iowa with two manila envelopes under his arm, one marked DISTURBING THE PEACE and the other VETERANS; he told the audience he wasn’t willing to read from either, but would answer questions, most of which were in regard to the latter. As Yates subsequently described Veterans to the man whom it most concerned, “the ‘book’ might be in the form of one long letter, or possibly a series of letters, to an old friend … John A. Williams.” He went on:
But there has been a lot of “veteranship” between you and me—combat service in WWII, early marriages that didn’t work, touch football, boozing, and meeting Famous Writers at Bread Loaf, the many times you tried to explain different kinds of jazz to me … those phone calls between us when Ed Wallant was dying; the time I woke you up … and made you listen to the Kennedy Civil Rights Address that never got delivered; the time you stayed in my Washington D.C. apartment during your Holiday Magazine trip, and much, much more.
Who knows where this bizarre career move would have taken Yates—this impulse to rebut the radical youth of Iowa who, he noted sardonically, were “On the March (… one of the more bewildered undergraduates is my older daughter, Sharon)”—had it not been for John Williams’s intrigued but rather barbed reply. Among other things Williams remembered that their first conversation at Bread Loaf in 1960 had concerned what Yates allegedly called “the mediocre record of black soldiers in World War II”; Williams then proceeded to confess his irritation over being used as a sounding board for Yates’s civil rights speeches in 1963. It took Yates many months to regain his composure, and finally he wrote a measured but seething response: Their “first conversation,” he amended, was not at all as Williams described it, but rather “about the hideous whim of the federal government that consigned virtually all Army blacks to rear-echelon service and support duty.” What angered Yates most, though, was his old friend’s belated frankness about the speechwriting episode. “I guess all this just goes to show how many secrets lie under the surface of any friendship,” Yates concluded. “But it tends to make my ‘Veterans’ book a much harder piece of work than I thought it was going to be and so I have temporarily shelved it.” “Temporarily” soon became forever, and apparently neither Veterans nor any other nonfiction book, relevant or otherwise, was undertaken again.
Perhaps it was for the best. Such diversions seemed the baffled groping of a lost man, but that fall he was summoned back to the true path. He’d been “sore as hell” when Revolutionary Road first went out of print (“Do you know what being out of print is like? It’s like being dead”), but now Dell was preparing a new paperback edition for the lucrative college market. Moreover, his famous friend Vonnegut had provided a blurb in which he called the novel “The Great Gatsby of [its] time”: “All the time I praise books I don’t give a shit about,” he wrote Yates. “This is a sickness of mine. I thank you for the opportunity to do something healthy for a change—to boom one of the best books of our generation.” And finally Fred Chappell’s rueful vindication of the novel was published that April (a month after the Dell edition) in a volume titled Rediscoveries. Martha seized the moment to rally her husband with a “Rebirth Announcement” mailed to friends: “Revolutionary Road is back in print now. Richard Yates Club International. Martha Yates, President.” And by the end of that last, otherwise uneventful year at the Workshop, Yates was able to write that he was “deep” into his new novel “and working with qualified optimism.” It was a start.
* * *
Yates was sufficiently eager to leave Iowa that he decided to accept a job as “Distinguished Writer in Residence” at Wichita State University, though he had to do a certain amount of soul-searching first. Jack Leggett had assured him that his three-year term as assistant professor would remain intact no matter what, so really there was no hurry to settle for a venue like Kansas, which seemed the quintessence of what Vonnegut called “up the river.” On the other hand the salary was decent (sixteen thousand dollars a year), and Martha was in favor of living closer to her family. Nor was he likely to get a better offer. The fact was, even in the darker plains states Yates’s drinking and odd behavior had become all but proverbial—indeed, had been much discussed in advance at Wichita State, where the head of the writing program, Bruce Cutler, was a former Workshop student of Yates. “There’s a great deal of interest among the students here in your arrival,” Cutler wrote his old teacher, on whom he’d promised to keep an eye. At any rate it was only a temporary appointment, renewable or not at the end of the year, whereupon Yates could always return (temporarily) to Iowa.
Moving out of the stone cottage was a melancholy business: Yates was fond of the drafty old conversation piece, where he’d hoped to settle for however long it took to write the novel that would end his teaching days forever. But then he was hardly one to become overly attached to (or even much conscious of) wherever he happened to dwell, and after a big garage sale they moved in August to a suburban tract house in Wichita. The place was soulless, though Yates was impressed by its efficient, no-nonsense modernity, and he went right to work in climate-controlled comfort without any more picturesque distractions.
Things got off to a good start. Yates was promptly interviewed by the local newspaper, and a flattering article with a photo of both Yateses followed; also he was pleased to find that he had two or three students who gave hints of talent and were good occasional companions as well. He felt as if he’d landed on his feet, more or less, and was careful to keep his balance: He stuck to his sensible drinking regime, avoided faculty parties, met his classes on time, and got his work done. One drawback was that Martha’s life was duller than usual, and (with whatever misgivings) she decided it was time to have a baby. Yates saw her point, and within a month of their arrival she was pregnant.
With another child on the way, the long-term prospect of ill-paying academia—whether in Wichita or Iowa City or whatever godforsaken place he landed—looked grimmer than ever, such that he was even willing to consider Hollywood again. In October he asked McCall to find out whether Al Ruddy would hire him to write a screenplay adaptation for Revolutionary Road. McCall urged him to “dream up an original” screenplay if possible, since “material in this form is more easily saleable than in the novel or play form.” Meanwhile Ruddy claimed he was still interested in making a movie out of Yates’s novel, but already had two projects lined up after The Godfather. He did tell McCall that it would “break [his] heart” for another person to produce Revolutionary Road, though if someone made him an “irresistible offer” he wouldn’t stand in the way. But nobody did, and Ruddy kept busy with other things, and Yates decided to forgo “original” screenwriting and get back to work on Disturbing the Peace (“in something of a muddle” by the end of November).
That spring Yates scheduled back-to-back readings at the University of Arkansas and Roger Williams College in Rhode Island; clearly, geographical convenience was not the guiding principle. During three years of marriage he and Martha had rarely been apart, and except for the odd lapse Yates had been on his best behavior. But with a baby due in June, and his financial future uncertain as ever, the Easter break would be his last chance to go on a quick cathartic bender in congenial company—namely, with old friends and/or students such as Miller Williams, Jim Whitehead, and Bill Harrison in Arkansas, and Geoffrey Clark, DeWitt Henry, and the Cassills in Rhode Island. Martha spent the time with her family in Kansas City.
The Arkansas part of the junket remains something of a blur to all concerned. Yates put in a few workshop appearances and gave a reading, after which he got “over the top” drunk at Bi
ll Harrison’s house and passed out on the floor (“students stepped over his body on the way out,” Harrison recalled). Rhode Island was somewhat more memorable, though hardly more sober. Yates’s host, Geoffrey Clark, was a devoted protégé who introduced Yates to his students as “the best teacher I ever had.”* “Say, Geoff, tell me the truth,” Yates later asked him. “Did you really mean that about being the best teacher you ever had? Are you kidding me?” Clark assured him that he was not, and Yates’s face broke into “a shy, pleased smile” as Clark described it, “a Gatsby smile.” Yates was less pleased when he skimmed through his ex-student’s teaching copy of Revolutionary Road and encountered the marginal gloss “use of cliché”: “[Yates] seemed to recoil from it as from a hot poker,” Clark recalled, “then go glum, until my explanation: The note was a reminder to me to point out to my class how he’d use spoken clichés to capture the character of the speaker.”
The main item on the agenda was an interview for the journal Ploughshares, which DeWitt Henry had founded in Boston the year before as a corrective to the tide of experimental postmodernism sweeping the country. The interview was a chance for Yates to discuss the principles of traditional fiction in terms of his own work, as well as to recommend a number of other writers who were in danger of being overlooked amid present trends. The published interview is perhaps the most useful source of Yates’s opinions on his craft and career, as well as the most vivid record of his distinctively candid yet diffident voice—all of which is a bit remarkable given that the actual interview was something of a fiasco and had to be rewritten almost from scratch.
Henry had driven down from Boston with two Ploughshares associates, David Omar White and Peter O’Malley, as well as the latter’s fiancée, the poet Richard Wilbur’s daughter Ellen. The interview was taped over the course of several boozy hours at Clark’s house, and the interviewee was besotted in more ways than one—flirting blatantly with “that luscious Wilbur girl,” as he called her. “I felt like a teenybopper because I admired Revolutionary Road so much,” Wilbur remembered. “But I was also alarmed: I told [Yates] he had the most brutal eye for human flaws of any writer, and it frightened me to think he was casting the same eye, right now, on me.” Yates was flattered, and when Wilbur further confessed a kindred fondness for Cole Porter and Gershwin, he became enthralled. When she wondered if he could supply a forgotten line from a favorite song, his face “lit up at the challenge”: “‘You’re the cream in my coffee,’” she prompted, “‘you’re the—’…?” “‘Lamb in my stew’!” he crowed, and the two proceeded to sing the rest. Wilbur’s fiancé grew increasingly glum as Yates implied that such an elegant woman deserved better (“I seem to recall being not very nice to that Irish clown,” Yates wrote afterward). And finally they all adjourned to Howard Johnson’s, where Cassill (then at Brown University) met them in order to take his worse-for-wear guest home for the night. Alas, amid “all the boozing and bullshit,” as Yates put it, he’d “totally [failed] to apologize to DeWitt for having flubbed his interview.” Indeed, Henry found his transcription “fragmentary, diffuse and frustrating,” but hoped the subject would agree to expand and clarify in written form, and this Yates was happy to do.
There was another, less festive bit of business in the East. David Milch had returned to Yale to teach alongside his old mentors Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks, and had recently intimated that he might be able to arrange a writer-in-residence job for Yates. The latter’s distaste at assuming the role of supplicant vis-à-vis an old bête noire like Milch can scarcely be conceived—or rather it can, since it wouldn’t be the last time it happened. But at the time he was simply too desperate not to pursue the lead, however specious: More than ever Yates wanted to end his exile in the sticks and live in or around New York again; also he’d prefer to say he taught at Yale rather than Wichita State. Yates visited Milch’s seminar a few times that spring and summer as a guest lecturer, and though he was visibly cowed by the dreadful ambience of the Ivy League, he acquitted himself well enough for Milch to report somewhat plausibly that “chances [were] very good” he’d be hired: Milch had broached the matter with the author of All the King’s Men, whose “reaction was very favorable, as was that of Cleanth Brooks.” He added, however, that Brooks was “angling for Walker Percy,” though Percy’s health was such that he seemed “reluctant to come north.”
Nothing came of it. “Maybe I didn’t follow through,” said Milch, “or maybe Dick gave the impression he was having a lot of problems.” Whatever the case, Milch concedes his “ambivalence” toward Yates in those days: “Probably I didn’t go out of my way to put Dick at ease—inviting him in, but not letting him know he was in. That was the kind of asshole I was at the time.”
* * *
Gina Catherine was born on June 15, 1972, more than fifteen years after Yates’s previous child; her belated advent seemed a promise that Yates (if he played his cards right) would have the comfort of a doting girl for the rest of his life, and thus was cause for great rejoicing. “She’s lovely!” he wrote friends. “Looks just like her mother.” Her namesake Gina Berriault (who’d finally met Yates in the flesh while teaching at Iowa two years before) wrote that the baby “must be beautiful and delightful, she can’t be less, given her parents who answer to that description themselves.” And so she was, and for a little while Yates was the happiest he’d been since he first met the baby’s mother: Love-struck, he fussed over Gina constantly and even seemed to enjoy changing diapers and so forth. Such was his contentment that he was able to work better, though he had less time for it, while Martha installed a darkroom and got on with both motherhood and photography. The baby’s presence was a decided improvement.
That summer DeWitt Henry sent a somewhat worked-over transcript of their “interview,” and Yates was so appalled by what he’d apparently let slip while in his cups that he rewrote almost every word, including a number of the questions. “Believe it or not,” he informed Henry, “I have put an awful lot of work into this thing—a solid week, working damn near around the clock, neglecting everything else I was supposed to be doing—and I do feel satisfied with it now, though you may not.” The project posed an interesting challenge to Yates. As he began to consider seriously what he’d so “dumbly” put on tape, he found himself working out certain convictions that hadn’t been quite so clear in his mind before. For example, his frustration over the failure of A Special Providence had provoked “a half-assed outburst against autobiographical fiction,” which on sober reflection struck him as “pure nonsense.” In the published interview, then, Yates nicely amended the matter with a detailed apologia for his own evolution from a mostly “objective” writer to one who’d learned the hard way that he hadn’t “earned the right” (yet) to translate personal experience directly into fiction—which was not to say it couldn’t be done, given the proper “distance” and “detachment.”
Perhaps the most ticklish issue was that of neglect, both with respect to his own reputation and certain others’. The last thing Yates wanted was to come off as a crybaby who felt he’d been treated unfairly by the literary establishment, or had the bad luck of going against the grain of egregious fashion. His original response (or rather Henry’s touched-up version of it) is arguably a bit closer to Yates’s true feelings on the subject than what he allowed into print, and deserves to be quoted at length:
A popular writer, a writer who gains a broad and sustained contemporary audience, I guess, like any other writer wants to know he’s good, and the bestseller lists and talk shows and his annual income all repay whatever faith it was that sat him down in front of his typewriter in the first place. But if he’s a serious writer that’s got to come second.… Much more common, and I think the case is mine, [is when] the good work is its own reward and you share it with as many readers as you can and it stays alive, and has some hard-won clarity and richness, some distillation of human investment, that continues to claim some kind of permanent interest no matter what angles fa
shion may dispose new readers towards.… My first book made a big, popular splash and that kind of success was intoxicating, and I was in the racket, in the race, but the down that followed it was miserable, and the real success has been a quieter, more solid kind of thing. I know the book’s good. It’s there. It wins new readers. That level is there to be reached, and I don’t need a cheering crowd to tell me that it’s worth it. It would be nice to be the fashion, to be recognized for what I’m trying to do—in the sense that Mailer is, for instance—life would be easier in a lot of ways—but the price of doing something difficult and honest, something true, as April Wheeler learned, is doing it alone.
Yates cut the entire speech, which perhaps struck him as pontifical or protesting too much, though surely he believed every word of it: To Yates writing was a lonely business (it would become more so over time), and had to be its own reward.* A little more fame, however, would have been “nice.”
