by Blake Bailey
Williams awoke feeling so ill from cigarettes that she almost went to the hospital. Despite her frailty, she managed to get Yates a date—an attractive colleague from Poets and Writers—but the whole business exhausted her, and she could hardly move for the rest of the evening. Happily Yates proved a low-maintenance guest. Quite content with the Chinese takeout Russell ordered for the four of them, Yates coaxed his date away at a seemly hour to join him for a nightcap elsewhere. Before he left, he accepted his friends’ invitation to stay at their house in East Hampton for as long as he liked, the better to rest up from his recent ordeal. Russell and Williams agreed to call at his hotel in the morning.
The next day Russell was stopped in the hotel lobby by police, who informed him that a man upstairs had a gun. Russell (familiar with Yates’s condition, all the more so because he was bipolar himself) explained that he was a friend of the suspect, who was having mental problems as the result of injuries suffered in a fire. He assured police that Yates was harmless, quite a well-known writer in fact, but in any event Russell would take full responsibility. They let him pass. “Oh hi, Frank,” Yates greeted him. He was crouched behind a sofa with a large stick in his hands. “Listen: The place is surrounded by Germans at the back. Some of my guys are in front with automatic weapons, but we’ve really got to be careful.” (Words to that effect.) Russell said the cops downstairs were on their side, so that Yates could slip out a side door while Russell covered him with a B.A.R. Yates thought it just might work, and once he was outside Russell waved him into the car and they took off for Long Island.
“Dick got crazier and crazier,” Russell recalled. Like a mantra he kept insisting he needed to get to a telephone, then he rolled down the window and began shouting at passing cars: “Look out! Look out! Tanks on the horizon! Watch out! Get covered!” They decided to pull into a gas station and assess the situation while Yates made his call. After they let him out of the car (“Clear the area! Goddamn Germans are coming!”), Williams told Russell that she’d really rather not have Yates in their house; what about Arthur and Ruth Roth? Russell agreed it was worth a try. Meanwhile Yates was unable to get the phone to work. Russell persuaded him to take five and made a number of calls himself: to the Roths (they were happy to put Yates up) and to Sam Lawrence, who called back a few minutes later with the name and number of Yates’s doctor at the VA; Russell got hold of the man and arranged for Yates’s various prescriptions to be phoned in to a nearby pharmacy. They picked up the pills on the way to the Roths’ house.
By the time they arrived Yates was already sedated. Williams took Ruth Roth aside and explained that he was having problems; the tranquilizers helped, but the other pills might take a few days to kick in. Ruth, who was fond of Yates and used to his quirks, assured Williams that she and Arthur could handle him and were happy to do so. Sure enough, when Russell and Williams returned a few hours later for a backyard barbecue, they found Yates agreeably listless with liquor and pills. He hadn’t slept for the past few nights, and was finally succumbing to a salubrious exhaustion. The worst had apparently passed.
The next day Russell got a call from Arthur Roth. “For Christ’s sake,” said Roth, “get over here! Dick’s gone totally off his wicket!” Yates had slept poorly the night before, and in the morning the Roths found him jittery but composed, or so they’d hoped. Suddenly he asked Ruth to pick up a broom and start sweeping—he wanted to describe the action in his writing—and when she balked he got angry. The situation deteriorated until Yates locked himself in a bathroom and refused to come out. Afraid that his friend was perhaps taking an overdose of pills, Roth called the police and then Russell.
By the time Russell arrived, a tractor-trailer had come to a ragged stop near the Roths’ house and its driver was animatedly discussing the matter with police. “This fucking naked guy comes running into the middle of the road!” he was saying. “What the hell am I supposed to do?” The naked Yates, meanwhile, was racing around Roth’s house urinating on the walls. The police watched with folded arms. Russell approached and asked if they intended to remove Yates from the premises, and an officer shook his head: In mental cases they couldn’t act, he said, though an ambulance was on its way. Russell began spraying Yates with a garden hose in an effort to calm him down.
The two ambulance attendants were actually volunteer firemen from the neighborhood, and Roth later commended their “ennobling brotherhood” for helping to wrestle Yates to the ground and put him in the ambulance. While the firemen rode shotgun, Roth agreed to sit in the back with Yates. “Driving behind that ambulance,” Russell remembered, “was like watching a washer-dryer with limbs and body parts spinning into view.” The ambulance disgorged two bloody men on arrival at the hospital in Southampton, where emergency room workers were willing to tranquilize Yates but otherwise flatly refused to admit him as a patient. When it came to light that Yates was a veteran, though, they suggested that Russell and Roth drive their friend to the Northport VA.
“My father spent years in Northport as a mental patient,” Roth later wrote Yates. “In fact he died there. The experience of helping commit you unloosed all sorts of guilt feelings in me.” While Roth lapsed into a speechless funk in the hospital lobby (an “Abreactive Experience” he called it), Russell was all action: He strapped the heavily sedated Yates into a wheelchair and demanded that he be committed on the spot. A clerk asked a number of questions about Yates’s service information, which Russell answered off the top of his head (“Rank?” “Captain.” “Serial number?” “55-666-777,” etc); finally the clerk became suspicious and summoned the head psychiatrist—an Armenian whose command of English was spotty. “I am the big person here!” he announced. “This whole hospital is mine!” Noticing the distraught Roth, he began to lead him away by the elbow for questioning, but Russell indicated Yates. “What is your name?” the doctor asked the seated, bleary-eyed man, who managed to mumble “Dick.” The doctor insisted on calling him “George,” despite repeated correction. (“At one point he asked me what I thought was wrong with you,” Roth wrote Yates, “and it was only with the utmost self-control that I prevented myself from saying, ‘He keeps thinking people are calling him George.’”) But it seemed the doctor was just passing time, as he ended the interview by declaring that no beds were available.
By now Russell was desperate, as much for his own sake as Yates’s. Roth had wandered off somewhere, and as Russell began to wheel their friend toward the exit he got an idea. He continued down the long corridor until he came to a janitor’s closet at the back of the hospital. He trundled Yates inside and shut the door. An orderly seemed to eye Russell suspiciously as the latter returned, alone, to the lobby and hurried out to the car, where he found Roth sitting in the passenger seat with a stunned look on his face. “My father died there,” Roth explained, dully, as they drove away. “They haven’t even changed the paint.”
* * *
Years later Russell wrote in a personal memoir: “The abandonment of Yates … in the janitor’s closet of a madhouse, was an act of kindness by a friend, not so much to help him get sane again, but to protect him from the lunacy that he had revealed [i.e., in his fiction] pullulating outside the madhouse walls.” As for Arthur Roth, he recorded what he considered “the most intensely dramatic six hours of [his] life” in the regular column he wrote for the East Hampton Star, praising the communal spirit and physical strength of neighbors and police who’d helped “cart [Yates] off.” He didn’t mention Yates by name, though already the story was more or less common knowledge in the parochial world of literary New York. “I was surprised and disappointed in that article,” Grace Schulman wrote Roth.
I feel that it was tawdry to betray your long friendship with Dick Yates … [and that] you have made … a shabby thing of what friendship is all about: privacy, trust, discretion.… Usually [Dick] is a good person, capable of free choice under most instances but given to a severe illness that might befall any of us at any time.… Close feelings continue long afte
r friendships cease to be active, and somehow I feel that the friendship we all shared years ago is still too important to be treated in that way.
It’s doubtful Yates was aware of Schulman’s protest (which would have touched him, albeit a bit ruefully perhaps), as he’d been discovered in the janitor’s closet by then and duly admitted as a mental patient to the Northport VA, where he languished into the month of August. Still, things could have been a lot worse. Along with his salvaged manuscript and other effects, Sam Lawrence was holding eleven hundred dollars in cash they’d found in Yates’s pants; in fact the publisher had taken care of everything, and meanwhile had every reason to hope Yates would be free in time for publication of The Easter Parade at the end of the month. Yates was irritated at Lawrence for “hyping himself as a hero,” but otherwise seemed cheerful enough. When Bob Lehrman visited him at Northport, Yates pointed out the more interesting lunatics and reflected on some of the lesser-known effects of losing one’s reading glasses. All he asked was that Lehrman bring him a few cartons of cigarettes.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
Out with the Old: 1976-1978
What Yates called the “ugly and humiliating” events of that summer had taken a lasting toll. Though he hadn’t been badly disfigured by the fire, his good looks had assumed a rather battered quality: His nose was “red and potato-y,” as his daughter Sharon put it, and his beard’s foremost cosmetic purpose was now to conceal the slight burn scars on his cheeks. Smoke inhalation had further damaged his lungs, and his hacking cough became an even more constant nuisance. Mainly the ordeal seemed to age him: Friends who hadn’t seen him in a while were shocked by the difference. He’d become a peculiarly feeble fifty-year-old man.
The destitute Manhattan of the mid-seventies had always seemed alien to Yates, and the fire served to underline the fact that nothing much was left for him there. The last three years had been one disaster after another, the latest of which had left him even more non grata among old acquaintances, not to mention a disturbing burden on his daughter. Still, as long as he had a roof over his head he could always bear up, more or less, and after the fire he called his friend Edward Hoagland about a possible sublet in WestBeth—a HUD housing project of four hundred apartments in the old Bell Lab Building on Hudson Street, where artists with low incomes could live cheaply. But there was a long waiting list, and as Hoagland tried tactfully to explain to Yates, WestBeth wasn’t really his style. “Dick was an O’Hara-Cheever type,” he said, “and there were too many arty beatniks at WestBeth for someone of his quasi–Ivy League gentility.”
When Sam Lawrence heard that Yates was considering a move to Boston, he was guardedly encouraging: “You know several people here and life in the Boston-Cambridge area is far more pleasant and agreeable than Manhattan. And not as distracting or as expensive. I’ve always found it so, as does Dan Wakefield, Tim O’Brien, etc.” Actually Yates didn’t know all that many people in Boston other than Lawrence himself; he’d been gratified to learn that good writers such as Wakefield admired his work, but in fact he’d never been exposed to that circle.* Dubus lived in nearby Haverhill, and Yates’s old student DeWitt Henry was in the city, but that was about it. And lest Yates get the idea that Lawrence would exert himself socially, the latter made a not-so-subtle point of suggesting that Yates get in touch with Joan Norris—the nice publicist who’d paid him that visit in the hospital—if he did decide to move to Boston after his release from Northport. “[She] would be glad to show you around if I’m not here,” he wrote, adding that he’d be traveling for the next two months except for a brief time in September. Without a doubt Lawrence wanted his disaster-prone friend to find a more congenial place to live and work, but not at his own expense.
By late August Yates and what remained of his worldly possessions were installed at the Sheraton Commander near Harvard Square. “I was a bit taken aback by Dick’s abrupt arrival,” said Joan Norris, whom Yates called his “welcoming committee of one.” He was already in town when he finally got in touch with her, and Norris was struck by the extent to which he seemed dependent on an almost total stranger. Worried that she’d given him the “wrong idea,” she nonetheless did her best to get Yates situated: She helped him find an apartment and buy a few pieces of furniture; she showed him the more notable sights. Within a week or so Yates moved into a two-room brownstone apartment at 473 Beacon Street and learned the neighborhood well enough to fend for himself. But he continued to rely on Norris for companionship, despite the fact that she shrank politely from his caresses and always, always declined his invitation to spend the night.
Sam Lawrence did his part with an elegant dinner party at Locke-Ober’s, where Yates inscribed freshly minted copies of The Easter Parade and finally met Wakefield, O’Brien, and others. Lawrence made the usual display of ordering fine wines and toasting Yates with due ceremony. As a publisher he was good about that sort of thing.
* * *
With one infamous exception, reviews for The Easter Parade were the best of Yates’s career, though in later years he was reluctant to accept praise for it. He suspected it was “too skimpy” to compete with his first novel, and besides he’d “dashed it off in eleven months” because he “needed the money.” Nothing that came so easy could be very good in Yates’s eyes. When a friend tried to compliment him on the novel’s “consistent symbolism” (for example, when Pookie paints the hand mirror with lipstick or Emily is rescued by her nephew the priest), Yates was almost aggressively dismissive—as he put it, the book was “autobiography” rather than “allegory”: “Emily fucking Grimes is me,” he laughed. “I mean it was all there lying around. Peter. My poor pretentious mother.” He did give himself credit for one thing, however: “I’m the one who saw it.”*
During the summer of 1976, though, as advance copies circulated among friends and fellow writers, the word got out that Yates (then a mental patient at the Northport VA) had written a masterpiece. “Ask me about The Easter Parade,” Vonnegut remarked to random people, “and I’ll tell you to ask me about Madame Bovary.” When Grace Paley came to Brown for a reading, she and her host Verlin Cassill compared notes on what made the novel—never mind its craft—so deeply moving: “[W]e murmured together about how very, very, very sad you tell the story,” Cassill wrote Yates, “and certainly that’s it, though it might be said in more flowery critical terms.” Because of the novel’s excellence Yates even seemed on the brink of grasping his two great ambitions—publication in The New Yorker and front-page notice by the New York Times Book Review. “You write so damn well!” exclaimed Michael Arlen, a staff writer for the former. “How bloody difficult it is to write a good novel, and how few writers manage it! Well, congratulations: and I hope it brings you some good money. Damn well should.” So now Yates had a wild admirer on the inside. As for that other business, alas, the scheduled front-page review of The Easter Parade was thwarted by a newspaper strike, ending up on page 4.
It was still a fine review. A. G. Mojtabai called the novel a “wrenching tale,” and singled out the author’s subtle but resonant use of symbolism (perhaps to Yates’s chagrin)—as when Emily realizes her sister couldn’t possibly know how to find Pookie’s building at Central Islip when she herself is locked up there: “The image of mother and daughter locked into separate stone buildings in some vast impersonal construction is never underlined by the author,” Mojtabai noted; “it is nothing spectacular, but its strength is considerable and cumulative.” Ross Feld in the New Republic praised the bravery of Yates’s “depressing” vision: “In four novels now, he’s gone his way, and with each one he’s becoming more unusual and valuable.” Feld thought the modest scope of The Easter Parade was deceptive, that in fact it was “paradigmatic” of a vanishing genre—“the urban WASP novel”—a field all but ceded to Yates by the likes of O’Hara, Cheever, and Updike, who’d ceased to particularize the bewildered “disenfranchisement” of the middle class: “Few writers now use so much unflinching care, skill, and discipline to lay ou
t a vision of dogged existence in life’s despite,” Feld concluded. A few reviewers had qualms with what they considered a rather narrow, brutal determinism, but could hardly deny the book’s overall power. “[Yates’s] characters seldom have a chance to enhance their lot by moral or emotional choice,” wrote Richard Todd in the Atlantic. “But the details of their suffering are exact, indisputable and moving.”
Yates’s old friend Anatole Broyard begged to differ. “These [characters] bow down to the imperatives not of life, but of the author’s sense of craftsmanship,” he sneered in the daily Times. “Craft, in The Easter Parade, resembles a kind of etiquette, which keeps the characters inside the confines of predetermined form.” A promising salvo, this, for what might have proved an adept hatchet job, but the rest reads like the sloppy homework of a peevish schoolboy. To support his thesis, Broyard ticked off a number of random examples in which plausible characterization is allegedly sacrificed to some petty consideration of craft. “Would any normal … father say that to his thrilled little daughters?” Broyard wondered about Walter Grimes’s remark that he’s “only a copy-desk man.” “Or does he say it because the author enjoys its dying fall?” With unwitting humor (humorous to a biographer), Broyard also expressed petulant incredulity over a scene that Yates described almost exactly from life—that is, Emily’s last meeting with the alcoholic, toothless Sarah: “Can we believe that her conventional husband and her grown sons would have allowed her to appear this way? Or is she again being sacrificed to a ‘good scene’?” And though Broyard concluded his diatribe by accusing contemporary novelists (as if Yates were representative of their worst tendencies) of being “unwilling or unable to meet their people on their messy terms,” he’d earlier sniped at the “pointless incongruity” (i.e., “messiness”?) of Yates’s characterizations.
