by Blake Bailey
As for the question of other neglected contemporaries in the realistic tradition, Henry had originally suggested three: Edward Wallant, Brian Moore, and Evan Connell. Yates agreed they were neglected after a fashion, but for very different reasons (e.g., Wallant because of his early death), and hence in revision he made a separate, qualified case for each—“and then,” as he wrote Henry, “once I got started, I couldn’t stop. There are simply too God damn many neglected contemporary writers, and I felt I had to mention at least a few of them.” The few? Anatole Broyard, Gina Berriault, R. V. Cassill, George Garrett, Seymour Epstein, Fred Chappell, Helen Hudson, Edward Hoagland, George Cuomo, Arthur Roth, Andre Dubus, James Crumley, Mark Dintenfass, Theodore Weesner, and on and on—mostly friends or students, but still writers whose work Yates admired, and whose careers he was loath not to boost when given the chance.
“Anyway,” Yates’s letter to Henry continued, “that got me started on the making of still another damn list—
a list of traditional, realistic writers who haven’t been neglected, who have made major critical and popular reputations—and in a way that was the most maddening part of the whole damn thing. In one of my early drafts, for example, I launched into a furious, splenetic diatribe against Saul Bellow, and another equally nasty assessment of J. P. Donleavy. But I tore all that stuff up in the end; I finally decided the best way to do it was simply to leave out the writers whose work I don’t respect … and mention only those whose work I do. It’s really a short list, as you’ll see.*
Another diatribe that required a great deal of temperate revision was the one against “the whole fucking Post-realistic School’”—from which he felt obliged explicitly to exempt Vonnegut despite the “tricky business” of the nice blurb the man had provided for Revolutionary Road: “[S]o I guess some of your more small-minded readers are going to think I’m kissing his ass in return for that favor,” Yates advised Henry. “And the point I’d like to make, to you, is that I don’t give a shit if they do.” Finally he asked Henry to “read this damn thing carefully, and bear in mind that my whole effort has been to make it clear, sane, rational and fair.”
It was all those things, and Yates’s pains in making it so were not in vain. A few months later Henry walked down the street to Sam Lawrence’s office in order to submit his own work-in-progress, as well as to show a sample issue of Ploughshares and the Yates interview in proof. Lawrence was impressed by how “cogent and back-to-work” his old friend seemed. The two men had been out of touch for almost five years; Yates was hurt but unsurprised that Lawrence had sent no word when A Special Providence was published (“in all its carefully-edited sloppiness,” as Yates put it). He assumed Lawrence had given him up for dead—another washed-up author, and a treacherous friend at that—and thus was “very touched” to hear again from Lawrence that November: “I’ve just finished reading proofs of a very fine interview you gave to DeWitt Henry and I could hear your voice clearly,” Lawrence wrote. “If for any reason you decide to change publishers, please let me know.” “So who knows?” said Yates. “I might still bring out a Delacorte ‘Seymour Lawrence Book’ and have money coming in by the bushel-basketful.”
* * *
Meanwhile he was still in Wichita. His writer-in-residence appointment had been renewed for another year, and might indeed become permanent if he wasn’t careful. By then the idea of getting out of Kansas and going home to New York had become an obsession, and Yates was far from particular about the means. He asked Hayes Jacobs—an old freelancer like himself—to find him an employment agent who could scout the New York job market for anything from PR to publishing to teaching to whatever, preferably on a part-time basis. Jacobs was less than sanguine (“devilishly hard to place you at the price you’re seeking”), but put him in touch with Elise Ford at the Prudential Placement Agency.
For Ms. Ford’s benefit, Yates spent much of his Thanksgiving vacation updating his résumé—a two-and-a-half page, single-spaced summary of a singularly varied career: Its subject (a “Free-lance Writer”) was an NBA-nominated author of three books who’d received several major grants, served as “sole speechwriter” for Robert F. Kennedy, written screenplays for John Frankenheimer and Roger Corman, and published short stories in numerous anthologies and major magazines (though not, alas, The New Yorker); along the way he’d also written for Food Field Reporter, Trade Union Courier, UPI, Johnson & Johnson, and of course Remington Rand (about which he spilled the most résumé ink of all, detailing his various duties on behalf of the UNIVAC); and last but hardly least, he’d taught at four universities and his list of references included Styron, Vonnegut, Cassill, Kazin, Bourjaily, and Dr. Frank Kastor at Wichita State University (“This is my present position”).
Such a résumé would seem to suggest an eminently can-do kind of guy, but amid what Jacobs called the “big Nothing” of the New York job market, the only initial nibble it elicited was from N. W. Ayer and Son, Inc., who thought they might be able to get Yates an occasional PR assignment concerning the “U.S. Army’s second centennial.” The academic world was even more categorical in its rejection. Hostos Community College was willing to interview Yates (but wouldn’t pay travel expenses), while Sarah Lawrence, Rutgers, Queensborough Community College, Rider College, Princeton, Wellesley, Skidmore, and SUNY at Stony Brook—just to mention the few that favored Yates with a reply—had no openings at the time. As a kind of dismal postscript, Yates’s old New York friend Arthur Roth wrote in January that his last two novels had been rejected (“a lot of commitment down the drain”) and for the past nine months he’d been working as a carpenter’s helper. “I often wonder how you are doing and how life is treating you,” Roth remarked.
At the moment Yates was of the opinion that life was treating him poorly. Perhaps as a favor to Sam Lawrence (with whom McCall was tentatively negotiating a contract for Disturbing the Peace), Yates agreed to review a Delacorte novel for the New York Times Book Review—something called The Morning After, by Jack B. Weiner. All Yates knew at the outset was that the book was about a drunk, and by the time he finished it Yates was a drunk again, too. Martha never quite understood the coincidence: “The fact that he’d review such a book gave me the creeps,” she said, “and afterward he seemed to make a decision to give up. The book seemed to remind him that drinking was something he could do.”
The book also made him aware of the fact that a Delacorte author had just published a novel almost exactly like the one Yates himself had been writing for three years. Ninety percent of Yates’s Times review is a dogged plot summary, as if he were bemusedly enumerating all the ways in which Weiner’s book resembled his own: The alcoholic protagonist Charlie Lester is a PR man who’s “cynical about his work”; he decides to consult a “vain, supercilious” psychiatrist who “appears to doze through Charlie’s hapless monologues”; after a few sessions Charlie “quits the man cold” and goes on a vacation to dry out, but ends up “screaming drunken obscenities to [his wife] on the phone”; he makes his ten-year-old son feel “so unhappy and embarrassed” that all the boy can muster is a mumbled “Fine” or “OK” or “No” (the constant refrain of John Wilder’s son is “I don’t know. I don’t care”). And so on. Toward the end of his review, Yates pointed out a few flaws such as Weiner’s “dreadful images” (for example, the surf rolls in “as if to the slow rhythmic beat of a giant, salt-encrusted metronome”), but then manfully calls it a “compelling piece of work”: “Charlie Lester’s real ‘problem’ is the agony of his total isolation, and it comes to serve as an eloquent, unforgettable metaphor for the secret loneliness in us all.” A very Yatesian theme, that, and an apt description of Wilder’s (and Yates’s) “real ‘problem’” as well.
So began what might arguably be called the worst year (or two) of Yates’s life, which of course is no mean assertion. “He started drinking during the day,” Martha remembered. “One of his students was a big drinker, and the two of them would get drunk a lot until three A.M. or so. I hated
it.” In despair over his novel (to say nothing of life in general, the steady drumbeat of rejection coming his way from New York), Yates tried writing a short story for the first time in ten years. Titled “Forms of Entertainment,” it was promptly rejected by The New Yorker and then sent to Gordon Lish at Esquire, who’d solicited work from Yates as soon as he arrived at the magazine a few years before. Monica McCall reported that Lish was “putting the story through”—that is, “sending it upstairs to [Editor in Chief] Harold Hayes for confirmation of purchase, which does not necessarily mean a firm acceptance because apparently Hayes could … turn it down.” Yates was frantic enough to call Lish on the phone, which resulted in the following note: “Dick—I’m doing all that can be done; trust me. But for God’s sake, man, keep this thing in perspective.”
A few days later the story was officially rejected. As Lish recalled the episode, “I wanted to get Dick into Esquire, because I felt bad for him and wanted to do something for him: He was so miserable, that I extended myself.” But the truth was that “Forms of Entertainment” had never made it past the magazine’s associate editors, and Lish (“in defiance of [his] better judgment”) had tried but failed to change their minds about it. Yates responded to this latest rejection by calling Lish on the phone and abusively accusing him of favoring only “name” writers; finally he threatened to “get on a plane and shoot [Lish].” “Dick was unappeasable, shouting,” Lish remembered. “His wife was screaming in the background: ‘Don’t pay attention! He’s drunk! He’s drunk!’ Afterward she called me to apologize.” The next day Lish wrote Yates a letter:
Your performance was an appalling piece of self-destruction. How absurd to make an enemy of me and of Esquire.… Your calls, your letters, the whole matter of your offering of “Forms” and your response to the rejection is ugly and sad. Your rage should be directed elsewhere; if you had the maturity of your years, you’d see this. And as for your threats of violence, come ahead, old buddy: you’ll find me as passionate in this as in friendship.
It would take almost three years for a somewhat recovered Yates to apologize; meanwhile he decided not to submit “Forms of Entertainment” elsewhere, and the manuscript doesn’t survive.
“It was a Jekyll and Hyde thing,” Martha said of her husband’s abrupt decline. “It was like something clicked in his brain: Suddenly he wasn’t there anymore. He was irrational, drunk all the time, and it was willful, in-your-face drinking.” Consumed with self-loathing over his work and desperately anxious about the future, Yates began to suspect that the world was conspiring against him. Shortly after the Esquire contretemps, he called Styron and held the man captive for some two hours while he railed against all the people who’d let him down: friends, family, Hollywood people, Iowa people, on and on. Soon Martha became the enemy—particularly when Yates discovered a paperback on alcoholism she’d recently purchased and stashed in a drawer. “He hit the ceiling,” she recalled. “Furious. I couldn’t deny it was to read about him; it was the first time, by default, I’d confronted him that I thought he was an alcoholic.” Many “endless conversations” followed—the long lesson in futility that Sheila had learned so thoroughly more than a decade before. As ever, Yates proved an adept, indefatigable arguer, and would never concede that he was an “alcoholic.” The word enraged him: Whoever used it didn’t understand where the “real ‘problem’” lay.
Into this nightmare came his daughter Monica, who for fifteen years had somehow been spared the knowledge of her father’s mental problems. This time he was too far gone to pull himself together for her visit, though during the daytime, at least, he was sober if morose. But night after night she’d hear him pacing the hours away and hissing abuse at his wife, the word bitch recurring every so often amid the general mutter. One morning she found Martha sitting in the kitchen weeping. “Why is he being so mean?” Monica asked, and the hollow-eyed woman said he had a “drinking problem.” By then Martha herself was so depressed that she’d stopped doing housework, and Monica tried to cheer things up by mopping floors and taking care of the baby. But mostly she stayed away on her bicycle, and when she returned to Mahopac she asked her mother about Yates’s “problem.” Sheila had made it a point never to malign her ex-husband to the children (though “she always spoke badly of him later,” Monica points out), but this time she calmly explained that, yes, he was an alcoholic. “I am your daughter and I love you,” Monica wrote her father, “and I hereby order you to be no longer depressed or sad or feeling blue.… When you finish reading this I want you to go look at your neato wife and your little cute daughter and think of your two big daughters and be overjoyed.”
But Yates was almost beyond noticing his wife and daughter, much less deriving comfort from them. As Martha put it, “He was so self-absorbed by then he couldn’t part the curtains of his own problems and relate to the world.” Determined to confront him with indisputable proof of his sickness (and also, perhaps, to have something to show a doctor when the time came), Martha prepared a list of symptoms that gives a vivid idea of what it was like to live with Yates at his worst, and why it was sometimes difficult to make a proper distinction between alcoholism and mental illness. According to the memo, Yates had taken to “spook[ing]” around the house in his underwear (“usually fanatic about body exposed,” Martha noted, “—skinny legs, etc.”), and sometimes standing still for long intervals, obliviously, as if in deep concentration. He was now smoking “constantly” and “inhal[ing] deeply,” though all the while he was obsessed with a fear of death from lung cancer or heart disease. Like his idol Fitzgerald, he made constant lists in “very emphatic script” while “talking to self and constant whispering (extreme).” Sometimes his grandiosity was such that he became convinced he had an urgent “message to the world” and was on the “verge of something big.” But perhaps the most definitive symptom was an agitated inability to communicate, to understand and make himself understood amid the depths of his own bewildered dread. As Martha wrote:
Mostly quiet and brooding but when gets to talking easily worked up into panicky declarations: “I hate psychiatrists.” “What do you know” “They do watch what you’re wearing.” … Increasingly jumpy to being asked simple question while working or charged with simple tasks or put something on calendar. [E.g.,] “Breakfast is ready.” “God damn it.” Time—calendar and clock great source of consternation, confusion and panic.… Simple phrases and cliches are not understood for their common meaning. [E.g.,] “Which Saturday is this Saturday?” (It could be any in the year) … Recurring conversation. D: Martha? M: What, honey? D: Oh nothing. Recurring: “I’ll be okay just as soon as … Don’t go away.[…] How am I doing? […] I’m all right. […] Who says I’m crazy? (then a hug) […] How could you love a crazy man? […] What’s going to become of me? [”] … As time passes more and more fearful of hospitalization or being doped up and brought down too far (a legitimate fear) and more suspect of my motives—“You think I’m crazy” “You don’t understand.”
The more Martha begged him to get help, the more sarcastic and spitefully drunken he became. And though he was wholly dependent on her (Don’t go away), he seemed unmoved by the distress he caused with such obnoxious behavior. When she finally lost her temper and flew at him with her fists, the inebriated Yates seemed to enjoy the spectacle, holding her off and laughing.
After a while she gave up. “I remember sitting on the couch,” she said, “holding Gina, my tears falling on her, and Dick yelling at me. It was so senseless it sticks in my head: What’s wrong with this picture?” Since she didn’t argue anymore, Yates seemed to assume he’d finally brought her around to his point of view—namely, that he didn’t need help, that all would be well as soon as certain enigmatic factors fell into place. In fact she’d made “a cool-headed, deliberate decision”: She’d do whatever was necessary to help him get back to New York (“I felt responsible for Wichita”), then wait a year or so “for him to be lucid enough to fend for himself.” Then she’d take the ba
by and leave.
* * *
By the time Yates’s luck changed he was in no condition to enjoy it. His red letter day was March 21, 1973, when he was offered a part-time position at Columbia beginning with the spring 1974 semester; far more importantly, a lucrative deal (by Yates’s standards) was finalized that same day with Sam Lawrence, who offered a fifty-thousand-dollar advance for Disturbing the Peace. At the time Yates was too relieved to be bothered much by the somewhat eccentric method of payment, which would persist for the rest of their association: He was to receive twelve thousand dollars on signing, and then equal monthly payments of fifteen hundred dollars until he delivered the manuscript on July 1, 1974, whereupon he’d receive the balance of twenty thousand dollars—or rather, he’d receive ten thousand dollars for delivery and another ten thousand dollars when the book was published. The idea was to provide a steady long-term income for an unpredictable man. “Those monthly payments were a kind of salary,” Lawrence proudly observed, “and they sustained him.”
They also signaled the beginning of an even more ambivalent phase of the friendship. When sane and solvent, Yates was mostly grateful for Lawrence’s belief in him as a writer, for his financial as well as moral support. (“How much do you need, Dick?” Lawrence had said when Yates complained of his Wichita predicament.) It was true that he thought Lawrence a bit pompous, but, as he wrote a friend, “at his best he’s a solid man with good instincts”—moreover, “he’ll never try to fuck around with your manuscripts, as many editors do; he’s never asked me to change a word.” After the “carefully-edited sloppiness” of Knopf, Yates had decided that Lawrence’s laissez-faire approach was a virtue after all; as for the man’s “good instincts,” he found favor with Yates by turning down such novels as The World According to Garp (“On the other hand,” Yates noted, “he’s an enthusiastic supporter of Richard Brautigan, so what the hell are we going to do?”). Lawrence’s view of Yates, meanwhile, was characterized by a kind of complicated magnanimity—“a mixture of admiration and concern,” as their mutual friend Dan Wakefield put it.
