by Blake Bailey
Back in Staten Island the couple divided their belongings into two separate moving vans; Yates could now afford to live in Manhattan. He was so vividly crestfallen that several of their neighbors asked him what the problem was. “The problem,” he might have reflected à la Michael Davenport, “is that my wife is leaving me, and I think it’s going to drive me crazy.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Disturbing the Peace: 1974-1976
Yates never entirely recovered from losing Martha, and once she was gone, whatever last threads of sanity had bound him to the world began to fray. Sharon visited her father while Martha was “think[ing] things out” in Kansas City, and found him “very shaky”: He said nothing about marital problems, but drank heavily and bickered as if to distract himself. Around this time, too, he attended a CUNY writers’ conference, where John Williams noticed his friend was “ill, or getting that way”: At a festive lunch attended by such rivals as Joseph Heller and E. L. Doctorow, Yates looked as if he were stupefied with depression.
He tried reaching out to a few old friends, though he was embarrassed by his own wretchedness and could barely bring himself to speak. “Martha got mixed up with those libbers,” he told Cassill. “They put ideas in her head. I’m not the easiest person to live with, Verlin, but I tried to be decent with her. She’s taken off and gone away.” He also commiserated with Dubus, who was then going through “that loneliness shit” too; but Yates was far more desolate, and his worried friend encouraged him to call one of his (Dubus’s) former students in the city—a woman, he noted, who was “attractive, tall, intelligent … divorced, childless.” But Yates only wanted Martha, and was so ashamed of losing her that he couldn’t bear telling most of his friends, especially those who’d been at the wedding. “Dick was out of touch for over a year after the breakup,” said Robin Metz. “He felt he’d disappointed people.” “Damn,” Loree Wilson Rackstraw wrote when she finally got the news. “It always made me pleased to envision you with Martha, and to know you were happy.” These were people who knew better than most what Yates had been like without a full-time caretaker.
One day the bewildered man showed up at Vonnegut’s apartment on East Forty-eighth Street: He couldn’t remember where he’d left his dry cleaning, he explained, and his wife had left him. “I’m leading a very unnatural existence,” he said. The kindly Vonnegut invited him to rest there as long as he liked, and Yates shambled in and stayed for almost two weeks. He seemed aware that whatever he said or tried to say seemed a little odd, so he hardly spoke at all; Vonnegut described him as a “black hole in the room”: “He had nothing to be proud of or look forward to at that point. Quite neutered. This was a sick man, carrying himself around in his arms.”
According to the “PERSONAL RECORD OF ILLNESS” Yates wrote for himself on August 9, 1974—an attempt to reconstruct his lost summer as best he could, while mysterious hospital bills continued to pile up—the most sustained mental collapse of Yates’s life began with an alcoholic seizure on the street (“Epileptic fit” Yates wrote in quotes) on May 21. He knocked two teeth out and was taken to a hospital where he was visited by Monica McCall, after which Yates noted “SEVEN MISSING DAYS.” In the meantime McCall’s companion, Muriel Rukeyser, tried to arrange a room at Yaddo for Yates, who’d apparently told McCall how desperately he needed to get out of the city; but there were no available rooms that summer. On May 31 Yates was found wandering around Staten Island in a daze, and was taken by ambulance to South Bay Hospital: “Records show [I] gave my address as 20 Cliff Street” (Yates’s old Staten Island address, though he’d since moved to a tiny apartment on the Upper West Side), “my ‘spouse’ as Martha and my age as 29.” The next day he was removed to St. Vincent’s Medical Center in Richmond, Staten Island, where he stayed for a week and was billed $1,222.
Perceived as indigent, perhaps, Yates was then taken to the State Hospital at South Beach for three days, where he was visited by Bill Reardon—“Don’t yet know how he found out I was there,” Yates wrote (and double-underlined) two months later, which suggests Reardon was sworn to secrecy on the subject. (It can hardly be overemphasized that one of the worst aspects of these ordeals, for Yates, was always the awful shame he later felt once he learned how widely the word had spread.) On June 11 he was transferred to Kirby–Manhattan State Psychiatric Hospital on Ward’s Island, where he stayed until July 18: “I remember all 47 [37] days at Ward’s Island,” Yates wrote. “Suffered two more ‘epileptic seizures’ while there.* No memory of homecoming.” Yates was under the dubious impression he was released from the hospital without a wallet, wristwatch, or “any clothes of [his] own,” though such alleged losses could have occurred at any point that summer; without some kind of supporting documentation, Yates was simply too disoriented to know when, what, or how. “Have dim memory of being mugged by a black gang in a subway station,” he wrote. “Other dreamlike memories: Arriving at Jerry Schulman’s apartment dressed in nothing but a hospital gown, begging for shelter. He refused, gave me shirt, pants and underpants of his own and told me ‘Go to a hospital.’” Schulman flatly denies that this ever happened.
Sometime during the summer Monica Yates finally discovered the extent of her father’s mental illness. The seventeen-year-old answered the phone and listened in horror as Yates told her in a panicky, begging, barely coherent voice that he’d been rolled in the subway and the police had taken his clothes and he was at the station and somebody had to get him out of there. “I was frantically scared,” Monica recalled; “my mother was away. I called Bill Reardon, who gently explained, ‘He’s in the hospital. I’m sorry. You have to talk to your mother about this.’” By the time Sheila got home, her daughter was hysterical. “I tried to explain the gist of [her father’s illness] between her sobs,” said Sheila.
Yates was at liberty for one week after his release from Ward’s Island. On July 25 he went to see a new psychiatrist,† Dr. Carol Keban, whose office was on East Eighty-seventh Street. His taxi got stuck in traffic, and Yates asked to be let out a few blocks away. “Didn’t have proper address on me,” he wrote; “wandered for hours asking innumerable doormen for ‘help’ until all the old delusions came back. Must have come home well past midnight, after one doorman called me a ‘bum.’” When he returned to his apartment he phoned Martha and tried to explain what had happened; she told him to take a tranquilizer and go to bed—when he woke up, she said, he’d be “in good hands.” The next morning she tried to get in touch with Monica McCall, who was on vacation; her associate Jo Stewart was familiar with the problem, though, and promised to do what she could.
An out-of-work actor named Mitch Douglas was in the office as a temporary employee; it was, in fact, his first day on a job that would soon become a permanent career—the beginning of a long association with McCall and her clients. The first client he ever served was Richard Yates. Jo Stewart gave him the author’s address, and told him to go there with a mailroom assistant and take Yates to Bellevue: “Whatever you do,” she advised, “don’t let him know you’re taking him to the psych ward.” When Douglas arrived at the dingy, devastated little apartment on West Seventy-third, he found Yates hunched in the corner “like a trapped animal,” but otherwise subdued. “Would you like to go to the hospital?” Douglas asked. “Oh yes,” said Yates in a small voice, “I’d like that.” Douglas had told the taxi driver not to divulge their exact destination, but as they approached Bellevue the man loudly inquired, “Which entrance to the psych ward you want?” Fortunately Yates was disinclined to protest at that point. “The lobby was crowded with homeless people trying to get in,” Douglas recalled; “they were talking and fighting with imaginary people—total chaos. Dick was interviewed as soon as we got there: ‘Are you married?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Where’s your wife?’ ‘Somewhere farrr a-way.’ They admitted him on the spot, ahead of all the others doing their tricks.” Yates went peacefully.
“In Bellevue,” Yates wrote in his memorandum, “[I was] treated by Dr. Rosenberg who be
came very exasperated with me.” Meanwhile a devoted former student of Yates, Jim Goldwasser, asked a young psychiatrist friend named George Hecht to visit Yates and give him a sense that someone on the outside was looking after him. “Yates was absolutely nonfunctional,” said Hecht. “I had just finished my residency, and it was hard for me to believe a human being could degenerate to that extent.” “Visited by Dr. Hecht,” Yates noted, “but our communication fragmentary and I remember nothing of his talk. Discharged [on August 1] with supply of pills and stern lecture by Rosenberg, who called me ‘infantile.’ REMEMBERED.” One may assume that Rosenberg became frustrated with Yates’s refusal to acknowledge his alcoholism, or the extent of his problems in general. In any case his latest confinement at Bellevue had left him demoralized and furious—all the more so when he got the bill: $1,150. Among his first acts as a free man was to call Mitch Douglas. As the latter remembered: “Dick shouted at me, ‘You little motherfucker, you checked me into the psych ward!’ And I said ‘No, Dick. You checked yourself in.’” Douglas paused. “And that was the beginning of our adventures together.”
* * *
After the dismal events of the past two years, Yates tried to reconcile himself to loneliness and get on with his work. Indeed, from this point on, Yates’s life would gradually shrink around his writing, a necessity imposed both by himself and the world. A great admirer of Fitzgerald’s letters to his daughter Scottie, Yates doubtless took one quote in particular to heart: “What little I’ve accomplished has been by the most laborious and uphill work, and I wish now I’d never relaxed or looked back—but said at the end of The Great Gatsby: ‘I’ve found my line—from now on this comes first. This is my immediate duty—without this I am nothing.’” In later years the only regret Yates would allow himself to express publicly was over “the desolate wastes of time” that had diminished his productivity. But for the rest of his life, amid a number of terrible infirmities, Yates remained fully focused on his “immediate duty.”
That fall he began the deliberate task of putting his affairs back in order. As before in 1960, he’d promised Bellevue authorities to seek “voluntary psychiatric assistance” on release, and so presented himself to the man who’d visited him in extremis, George Hecht. Again Yates managed to startle the young psychiatrist: “He came to my office a few days after Bellevue,” Hecht said. “He seemed fine. It was amazing he could resurrect himself like that.” Unfortunately Hecht declined to accept Yates as a patient on ethical grounds (because he was the friend of a friend). Hecht recommended a number of other doctors, but for the next few years the irascible, psychiatrist-hating Yates only availed himself of such services (voluntarily) when he needed more or different medication.
By September he was at Yaddo, working steadily. As a testament to his resilience, he was all but caught up with his contract deadline despite recent cataclysms.* Sam Lawrence was planning to feature Disturbing the Peace as the lead fiction title on his summer 1975 list, and meanwhile he’d picked up the latest Ploughshares and read “Evening on the Côte d’Azur—1952” (the strongest of Yates’s hitherto unpublished stories): “It may be an old one,” Lawrence wrote the author, “but is it good.” That same month Variety reported that the actor Patrick O’Neal had made a deal with Al Ruddy to produce and direct Revolutionary Road, which O’Neal was then in the process of trying to finance. This last development seemed to complete (however deceptively) the overall positive trend, at least where Yates’s career was concerned.
He’d done whatever he could to help Martha get settled in Washington. He called Joe Mohbat, who arranged for her and Gina to stay at his fiancée’s place across from the National Zoo; also she stayed briefly with Jim Goldwasser’s twin brother Tom and his wife Joan, who helped Martha find a suitable one-bedroom apartment in a tough market for single mothers. Whatever her difficulties, Martha was nothing but relieved to be on her own: The chaos of Gina’s first two years had turned her into a quiet, frightened child who had trouble sleeping, though amid the relative calm of Washington she’d begun to show signs of cheering up. Meanwhile Martha felt more pity than censure for the child’s father, particularly at a distance, and their lonely lives remained somewhat linked. There was the kindness of Yates’s friends—they could imagine what Martha had gone through—as well as the companionship of his daughter Sharon, who was also living in Washington and also lonely. Sharon had moved there for the sake of a college boyfriend who’d since gone off to graduate school; she was planning to move back to New York in the near future, but for the time being she kept her stepmother company and played with Gina. All of which made Martha rather wistfully well disposed toward Yates: “I think about you often, Dick,” she wrote in September, “especially of those times when we were the best company for each other. I hope you are not completely miserable and depressed.”
Yates finished his novel that fall and made a number of trips to Washington—to visit Gina, but also to make a good impression on Martha if possible, since he desperately hoped (and would go on hoping) for a reconciliation. He was subdued and dignified, doting toward Gina, but of course Martha had no intention of taking him back. She endured their “awkward” outings for the toddler’s sake: “I always wanted to make sure Gina had contact with Dick, because I wanted her to know the good as well as the bad. I didn’t want her to get some romantic notion of him based on what people said who knew him when he was young.” Lest Yates think Martha was warming to his charms, she wrote a letter that November gently prompting him to get on with the divorce: “[M]y mind just wants things to be definitely resolved,” she explained.
By then Yates had moved to somewhat less cramped quarters on Twenty-sixth off Fifth Avenue, though he could barely manage the seven flights of stairs: “Jesus Christ,” he’d gasp, coughing, “I just hope I don’t have a heart attack and be found dead in this grungy place.” His apartment was a long studio with a few random sticks of furniture—an orange sofa bed where he slept, a wobbly table in the narrow sit-down kitchen, two or three chairs and a desk by the plaid-curtained window; also he installed a bookshelf where he mostly kept the work of friends and students, as well as a handful of novels he couldn’t do without. A Manhattan bachelor again, Yates’s mode of habitation immediately reverted to that of his basement days at 27 Seventh Avenue South, complete with staple cockroaches. Nor did he bother to get out much—so many stairs—except to take meals and teach his weekly class at Columbia, where he found more experimental writing per capita than ever before. Happily his new novel was progressing at an unprecedented pace, and Lawrence had high hopes for Disturbing the Peace; he passed along a memo to Yates from the Delacorte sales manager, who’d remarked, “We should approach this for what it is—a major book with potentially very large sales.”
Yates was a bit less lonely when Sharon moved back to New York in December, though he didn’t see as much of her as he might have liked. Along with her sister Monica, she’d also received a deranged phone call or two the previous summer, and wasn’t sure whether she was equal to coping with more of the same. Besides, she had her own problems—she was unemployed and had little idea what to do with her life. Certainly she didn’t need any more tumult and worry, and in recent years her father had been difficult even at the best of times. For a while she stayed away in Mahopac, then found a job as a file clerk with a Wall Street firm and moved to a small apartment in Brooklyn Heights, whereupon she began seeing her father on a consistent, if not frequent, basis. He seemed somewhat better, though still crotchety: Sharon had begun dating an older man whom Yates thought an awful bore (she agreed for the most part), and he scolded her for wasting time with a man she didn’t love; there should be romance and the possibility of marriage, he insisted, otherwise why bother?
Among the many people in the city he used to know, the only one he saw regularly was Bill Reardon, whom he met every week or so for boozy dinners. Yates was comfortable with Reardon, all the more so since the latter had fallen on hard times—the result of a long run of a
lcohol-related bad luck. A second marriage in the late-sixties had soon ended, after which Reardon lost his job at Scientific American, set his apartment on fire, and declared bankruptcy. By the mid-seventies he’d moved to a squalid loft space in TriBeCa, where he supported himself as a chauffeur of sorts. He was, in short, one of the few people who could make Yates feel almost fortunate by comparison, and it was a blow when Reardon died later that year of liver failure. At a memorial gathering on the Upper West Side, Yates mingled somberly with half-forgotten friends from the past, most of whom he was seeing for the last time. “You and I were the only ones who’d sit up and talk all night to Bill,” he told Marjorie Owens in a husky whisper.
An improbable figure came along to fill the void. In the fifties and sixties, Seymour Krim had been a devoted hipster who wrote antiestablishment articles for the Village Voice and edited a magazine called Nugget, whose audience he envisioned as “call girls, dope addicts, jazz musicians and prisoners.” He was among those who espoused the idea that the weirdness of actual events had made realistic fiction obsolete, and while teaching at the Iowa Workshop he’d been a great enthusiast of experimentation, praising students for such audacious effects as scribbling in the margins of their stories. Yates and Krim had overlapped at Iowa for just one year, 1970–71, and remarkably Yates had seemed more amused than offended by the aging hipster. They put their workshop sections together on the first day of class, and the neophyte Krim asked his colleague what he did about grades. “Oh, I just give everybody an A,” Yates replied.* The following year Krim’s provocateur tendencies (to say nothing of his drinking and pot smoking) led to a fiasco at least as damning as Yates’s breakdown five years before: A drunken Krim insulted the writer Angus Wilson at a public symposium, then turned on the audience. “Oh, bullshit!” he sneered at an elderly woman who’d wondered why nobody wrote novels for ladies anymore, and when a female student got up to leave, Krim hooted: “She’s bored with this goddamn symposium! Who wouldn’t be? She’s going to find her boyfriend and get laid.”
