by Blake Bailey
It was the “concern” part that rankled. Concern meant that he was mawkishly aware of Yates’s failings—his drinking and instability and general incapacity to care for himself. Lawrence, too, was a heavy drinker and rather strange man in his own right, but he was also prosperous, and proprietary toward his authors; what he demanded (implicitly) in return for his largess was that they do their work and show a seemly gratitude, a sentiment Yates sometimes felt and sometimes didn’t. Lawrence’s later eulogy of his old friend, while touching in parts, reads almost like a litany of unacknowledged favors, as it’s largely comprised of data relating to their various contracts. “Dad would’ve hated that eulogy,” said Monica Yates. “[Lawrence] went on and on about the money.… That was a love-hate relationship big-time.” Another aspect of Lawrence’s concern that bothered Yates was the fact that it was mostly transmitted at arm’s length (usually in the form of a check)—all the more so later, when Lawrence seemed unwilling to “soil himself” with Yates’s difficult life. Yates would mimic him bitterly—“D-d-d-don’t m-m-mix b-b-business with puh-pleasure!”—or so Lawrence liked to tell Yates, though the former’s social life was actually consumed by “business” with and on behalf of his authors. “Yates was always angry at Lawrence,” said psychiatrist Winthrop Burr, “but at the same time he wanted to be more accepted by him.”
For a while, though, it sufficed that Lawrence had rescued him from Wichita, and Yates lost no time traveling to New York, alone, to find an apartment. Needless to say, he was in no shape for such a trip, which would serve as a bleak foreshadowing of the move to come. Perhaps the first blow was his discovery that he couldn’t afford to live in Manhattan after all; he’d have to settle for one of the outer boroughs, which to Yates was only a slight step up from Kansas. For that and any number of other reasons, he began drinking even harder than before, which provoked a fresh and frightening symptom of advanced alcoholism: epileptic seizures. His first attack took place at Bill Reardon’s apartment in the Village, and later that day he had another in Jerry Schulman’s car, while the latter drove him to Staten Island to view an apartment. Yates—already drunk and semideranged when Schulman arrived to pick him up—began thrashing and frothing at the mouth while they passed through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, then tried to jump out of the car. Schulman had to hold the writhing man in place until they could turn around.
After a phone call to Nathan S. Kline, Yates thought he was calm enough to make the trip back to Staten Island, but once they arrived he had another seizure, this time in the presence of his prospective landlord. As his convulsions subsided he tried to stand up and tripped on a toy car, which (according to Schulman) prompted “a stream of hideous invective.” The landlord proved remarkably sympathetic; no doubt mollified by the relative sanity of Yates’s companion, he agreed to rent the apartment to this disturbed man, perhaps on the theory that he was having a bad day. It continued badly. Schulman drove his friend to the airport, where Yates began to have second thoughts about catching his flight: It was late, he felt lousy, and besides he usually called Monica at this time of day. When Schulman offered to take Yates to a hospital, Yates became indignant: “Don’t tell me what to do!” he shouted, and staggered off to find a phone. Schulman, meanwhile, called Martha in Kansas and asked her advice: With a baby screaming in the background, she mentioned a number of pills her husband should take and urged Schulman to get him on the plane no matter what. When the exhausted man tried to do as he was told, Yates exploded as if mortally offended by his friend’s presumption. “It was humiliating to be with him,” said Schulman. “After that I realized you couldn’t do the right thing for Dick, because he’d always insist on taking care of himself.”
The episode officially killed whatever was left of Yates’s friendship with the Schulmans. Grace had been drifting away for some time—apart from a general exasperation with Yates, her life had simply settled in such a way that commotion makers were no longer welcome: She was a professor at Baruch College as well as poetry editor of The Nation and director of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center; also, she was sick of “literary people” who exploited her husband’s good nature. “Often I had to be the heavy in protecting [Jerry] from what I felt to be insulting responses to him for his kindness,” she said. “And when I heard about his patience with Dick that day, I thought—enough. Enough of Dick’s bad behavior.” As for Jerry, he accepted a last goodwill invitation to dine with the Yateses in Staten Island, but the evening was awkward and neither man made an effort to contact the other again.
By the time they moved to New York in June, Yates was a “total wreck,” as Martha put it; even he himself admitted, a month after their arrival, that he’d “become such a wallowing whiskey-head” (not to be confused with alcoholic) that he could “barely hold a pencil straight.” As ever, his drinking both worsened and commingled with the vagaries of mental illness, such that it was impossible to predict what he would do or say next. Shortly before leaving Kansas, he’d invited his daughter Sharon to come take his car off his hands, as long as she agreed to arrange such matters as insurance and title transfer; after she’d done so, she called from Iowa to apprise him of her progress (“Okay, I got the insurance; now we have to—”) and Yates blew up: “What d’you think I am? Some sort of Jewish father?!” Sharon didn’t know what to make of this (certainly the ethnic slur was uncharacteristic): Was he angry because she’d called about practical affairs and hadn’t attended to the proper daughterly preliminaries?
The apartment in Staten Island was still being painted when they arrived, so they spent a few days at the Americana Hotel near Times Square. Yates checked in with Dr. Kline, who prescribed the anticonvulsant drug Dilantin and strongly urged Yates to stop drinking. Probably during this visit, too, Kline prescribed (or represcribed) Antabuse, which Yates took sporadically if at all; his private compromise was to give up whiskey and drink only beer, and his relative initial sobriety had the usual depressive effect. When his Iowa friend Jody Lowens visited him at the hotel, Yates wanted to talk about the death of his former teaching colleague Richard Gehman. Gehman, called “King of the Freelancers” because of his mammoth output, had rated a very brief photoless obituary in the Times. “Three thousand articles and over a dozen books,” Yates sighed, “and they give him five inches for his obituary. I’ll be lucky to get two.”* Lowens recalled that the whole matter “seemed to trouble him tremendously,” and Martha agreed—Yates’s indifference toward fame, she always felt, was deceptive: “Dick had to be recognized for his talent, to be one of the literary elite—anything else amounted to failure. A good marriage and child should have been enough, but it wasn’t.”
Granted that he could scarcely get worse, Yates showed a few signs of improvement in New York. Staten Island wasn’t so bad after all. Their apartment was a cramped two-bedroom on the seventh floor of a drab modern building, but it had a view of sorts and was nice enough by Yates’s standards (“all the places where he lived with Martha were nicer than other apartments in his life,” Monica pointed out). He’d always enjoyed crossing on the ferry, and now that he didn’t have to bother with a day job for a while, he spent leisurely afternoons walking around Manhattan and seeing a few leftover friends. He visited Bill Reardon and John Williams, and was gratified to find that Vonnegut was “taking his enormous success very gracefully” and had even promised to “come slumming” in Staten Island with his new girlfriend, Jill Krementz, an “ultra-fashionable young photographer.” But mostly Yates kept to himself; he was bemused by what he found in the city after his “nine-year exile,” and noted “a certain Rip van Winkle quality to [his] prowlings in Manhattan.” As he wrote his friend Geoffrey Clark:
Christ, how things have changed! The Empire State Building is no longer the tallest in the world, the whole West Side is swarming with guys who look as if they’ve got switchblades in one pocket and hypodermic syringes in the other; the whole Village is a morass of cruising fags and teenyboppers; all the good restaurants and bars have beco
me tourist traps, and all the taxicabs have plastic or wire-mesh partitions to keep the passengers from garrotting the drivers. But it’s home, and I guess I’ll get used to it.
But he never quite did. Like his character Emily Grimes, Yates had begun to “[live] in memories all the time,” and New York was haunted by too many ghosts.
Friends didn’t notice anything particularly amiss between the Yateses: Martha tended to be a courteous hostess, if a bit stiff and withdrawn. (“By then I was so radically disenchanted by the world of writers that I’d rather do anything than listen to them talk.”) Yates liked to mention that this was actually his second time in Staten Island, reminiscing about his eight months in the TB ward at Halloran. Generally, too, he’d pay his wife the gentlemanly tribute of showing off her artwork on the walls (“trees and dogs, things like that,” DeWitt Henry recalled) with many a lavish compliment. Toward Gina he seemed “clumsy and devoted,” said Mark Dintenfass. “He was almost afraid to hold her because he thought he might drop her.” One night the family bumped into Bob Riche and his wife at a Broadway show—the last time Yates and his old friend ever laid eyes on each other—and the Riches cooed appropriately over the somber toddler in their midst. “She’s cute when she doesn’t have that thing stuck in her face,” said Yates, and abruptly plucked the pacifier out of his daughter’s mouth.
Those were the good times. “Dick acted normal around friends,” said Martha. “He could sort of turn it on and off, but his tirades would continue as soon as they left.” Yates spent most of his days anxiously taking pills, trying to write, and stalking around the apartment shouting. It didn’t matter if Martha was present; he wasn’t addressing her, after all. “Lish, you son of a bitch!” he’d suddenly erupt, or else some ghost from a more distant past would provoke his wrath. Martha worried a little what the neighbors thought—surely they heard—but otherwise she was used to it. “Dick’s tantrums were so much background noise by then,” she said. “If he didn’t come out of it, well, I’d already decided to leave. Still, I’m amazed now that I stuck it so long; I’d come to accept things no human being should ever have to accept.”
* * *
Yates conserved the better part of his sanity for work. Though Martha had “no idea how he managed at Columbia,” he nonetheless ventured into Manhattan once a week to meet his two-hour class and hold conferences before and after. His novel was a little behind schedule, but not much, and Sam Lawrence was so “overwhelmed” by the first 122 pages that he urged him not to rush: “What’s most important is to have the book right.” One night the publisher came out to Staten Island for dinner, and Martha bought a special antique chair for the occasion and cooked a sole with cream sauce and mashed potatoes; otherwise she might have been invisible. Lawrence commended her for putting rolls on the table (“Good, rolls. Can’t possibly eat until I’ve had rolls. Ulcer.”), then the two men commenced drinking and talking books. Yates was already thinking about his next novel, the subject of which he proposed to be a “lovable Irish alcoholic” who performed “spontaneous tap dances.” Lawrence winced: “No more desperate characters, Dick. Please.”
Soon Yates got a better idea. Ever since A Special Providence he’d wanted to take another shot at writing an explicitly autobiographical novel, but properly formed this time; one night it occurred to him that a nice way to objectify “the Me character”—as Yates called it—would be to make him a woman. In order to bring it off, though, he’d need more material than his own life could provide. “Dick called me out of the blue,” remembered his old girlfriend Natalie Bowen. “He was drunk, of course, and woke me up, but I was glad to hear from him. He said he was starting a new novel and wondered if I’d be willing to talk about my own life.” Bowen was happy to tell him whatever he needed to know. As Yates was already somewhat aware, she’d led just the kind of independent and rather lonely life he had in mind for his character: She’d been married briefly to a man who told her he “hated [her] body” (referring mainly to her flat chest); she’d had two abortions in the fifties; she’d lived in a “high, spacious apartment near Gramercy Park” where somebody had penciled a “long, thick penis” on one of the wallpaper horses in the hallway, and as her drinking got worse she would occasionally wake up with strange men in her bed; for a while she’d collected unemployment and stayed drunk all day, until finally she went to the Payne-Whitney walk-in mental health clinic and started seeing a psychiatrist.
Yates was delighted, and invited Bowen to come out for dinner and meet his wife. He may or may not have had ulterior motives for exposing Martha to this partial model for the embryonic Emily Grimes—“the original liberated woman” as her nephew Peter remarks with unwitting irony in the novel. That such liberation leads (if only for a while in Bowen’s case) to promiscuity, poverty, and despair was a point Yates would have been eager to impress on Martha, who’d begun to intimate her plans for leaving him.
Largely to spare his feelings, she’d spoken in rather vague terms about wanting to “find herself,” and Yates concluded that she’d become a “womens’-libbing bitch” as he sometimes put it. He couldn’t speak calmly on the subject; partly, perhaps, because his mother’s “independence” had caused him so much grief, Yates’s hatred for all “feminist horseshit” bordered on the pathological. As usual in such matters, he found a sympathetic ally in Andre Dubus, whose own marriage was breaking up around the same time: “Trouble with me and my friends,” he wrote Yates, “is we’re married to women who’re making the transition between the old type woman and the new type and we’re getting the best of neither and the worst of both.” In fact Martha was not at all active in the movement, though its ubiquity could hardly fail to affect her state of mind—as might be surmised by a letter she wrote Yates almost three years later: “Women have been oblique, mysterious, evasive out of fear of telling the truth,… fear of hurting the vulnerable emotions of a man, fear of being scorned or laughed at, and out of shame. I made for myself a perfect trap out of my inability to speak. And the longer I went—taking my self-definition from you … the less you knew me.” At the time, though, she tried to avoid discussing such notions with him—“I didn’t want to throw kerosene on the fire”—but it was typical of Yates to blame his wife’s disaffection on a pernicious ideology (as he saw it) rather than his own behavior.
She left him that spring. Yates would later tell friends that “A Natural Girl” was a “wholly autobiographical” account of their breakup, and while Martha dismisses the story as a “crock,” much of what her fictional alter ego tells the devastated David Clark rings true:
“We haven’t been all right for a long time and we aren’t all right now and it isn’t going to get any better. I’m sorry if this comes as a surprise but it really shouldn’t, and it wouldn’t if you’d ever known me as well as you think you do. It’s over, that’s all. I’m leaving.…”
“You don’t—love me anymore.”
“That’s right,” she said. “Exactly. I don’t love you anymore.”
By then Martha was apt to say all those things, and indeed Yates was shocked when the time came, though as the wife in the story points out, he shouldn’t have been. Martha’s decision was hardly the bombshell hurled by the morbidly callous Susan Andrews. She’d spent almost a year preparing him for her departure (“he was too out-of-it to remember from one day to the next”), and when she finally told him the time had arrived, Yates drew the same conclusion as fifteen years before: Martha’s “inability to love,” like Sheila’s, was a manifestation of insanity.
He made an appointment with Nathan S. Kline for all three of them—baby too—and at length the exasperated Martha agreed to go. For most of the session she was left waiting outside Kline’s office with Gina on her hip, while the two men discussed the matter between them. Finally Kline asked to see Martha alone. “So,” he said. “You’re pretty determined to leave.” “Yes.” “Tell me one thing,” he continued. “I want you to think about this really carefully. Has your primary feeling for
Dick always been pity?” “Yes.” “That’s all I need to hear,” said Kline, and rather contemptuously dismissed her. She was then handed over to a psychologist next door (“Kline was just a pill pusher,” she remarked, “not a talk psychiatrist”), who gave her a book with some such title as On Becoming a Human Being. “I almost threw it at him,” said Martha. “Probably the guy was just trying to be helpful, but the book had an unfortunate title.” Both Kline and the second man seemed to “read the anger on [Martha’s] face” and realize that there was “no point in going on.” They were quite right: “I resented being left out of the whole process of Dick’s treatment until then. Nobody had ever asked me anything, and I was the person who had to live with him!”
The actual leaving proved a protracted, problematic business. Martha had tried to go at least once, while Yates was ranting at her, but realized she didn’t have the means: no money, no friends to speak of (outside the marriage), and her family knew nothing of the whole business. Finally, on a day when Yates had gone into the city to teach, she worked up the nerve to call her parents and tell them everything. It came out between sobs, and they arranged to send a plane ticket and money. When Yates returned that afternoon, Martha told him she was going home for a month to “think things out.”
“Dick called me a lot in Kansas,” she remembered, “and he was still verbally abusive, even though he wanted me to stay. He didn’t have the sense to realize he was making matters worse.” When bullying failed to have the desired effect, he began to plead: He’d stop drinking and try to be nicer and so on. But it was no use. Martha wanted an immediate separation, and had already made plans to move to Washington, D.C., for Montessori teacher training.
