by Blake Bailey
Early that summer Dan Wakefield returned to Boston after three years in Los Angeles, and immediately got in touch with Yates. “I was in terrible condition, drinking way too much,” said Wakefield, “and I knew Dick would be a good person to drink with.” That he was, though a proper venue was crucial. Yates became paranoid in upscale establishments such as the Hampshire House, and would argue with waiters who’d slighted him in some way, real or imagined, whereupon he’d be cut off at the bar. It was largely a self-fulfilling prophecy: Because he felt scrutinized he drank more to lessen his anxiety, which naturally resulted in scrutiny-provoking behavior. One night at the Newbury Steak House he lit his beard on fire and sat flapping his hands at his face.
After that, he and Wakefield stuck to the Crossroads, where their Friday night “ritual dinner” was the only regular event on Yates’s social calendar. “He was a wonderful source of solace, encouragement, and literary friendship and support,” Wakefield noted. “I loved hearing him put down the ‘phonies’ and the overrated novels whose style was not really up to snuff … as he waved his long, bony finger and smiled knowingly above his beard.” Lest one get the impression Yates had mellowed with age—full of benign, finger-wagging wisdom about the perennial rise and fall of literary pretenders—rest assured the reality was a good deal more raucous. “What a crock of shit!” was the constant punch line when Yates discussed writers he despised. “Wakefield,” he’d rasp, “every seven or eight years a book comes out by some fucking phony and gets reviewed on the front page of the Times and everybody loves it and it’s not worth shit.” The current paradigm was John Irving’s The World According to Garp—“What a crock of shit!”—or anything by Joseph Heller or Saul Bellow (the friends agreed with Tom Wolfe’s definition of hell: A bus ride across America with nothing to read but Mr. Sammler’s Planet). After six months of such boozy commiseration, Wakefield startled his friend one night by ordering a Diet Coke; while Yates sat stunned and indignant, Wakefield sheepishly admitted that he’d decided to go on the wagon. “A Diet Coke!” Yates roared every time thereafter. “Yeah, and then he’s gonna go home and play with his paper dolls!”
Wakefield remembers Yates as a “charming, witty man” whose ugly side only surfaced when he was very drunk or disturbed or both, but the ugly side was all Martha saw after the divorce. On the phone he was usually fine: They’d talk briefly about Gina, and only seldom would he try to lure her into more intimate territory. “But in person,” said Martha, “he invariably became nasty; seeing me triggered bad feelings in Dick.” In the fall he visited Gina in Durango, and the three went out to dinner together. It may have been that Yates resented Martha’s insinuating herself into these outings in a vaguely custodial role; in any event he began tipsily baiting her with an off-color story that struck her as inappropriate in the presence of the eight-year-old Gina. The more she warned Yates to stop, the more smirkingly nasty he became, until finally she threw a quiche at him. Affecting high delight, he laughed as they were ejected from the restaurant. In the parking lot Martha asked Gina if she were coming home with her, but the child loyally refused to leave her father. (“I really tried to avoid being involved in Dick’s visits after that,” said Martha.) Gina vividly remembers how Yates, distrait, drank so much beer at breakfast the next day that their waitress politely insisted he have coffee before ordering more.
One night Wakefield got a call from Yates, who said he was sick and had run out of food. Wakefield brought a bag of groceries to Yates’s apartment, which “reminded [him] of something out of Dostoyevsky”: It was almost completely dark inside (Yates hadn’t ventured out in a long time, apparently, and the lightbulb had expired), except for the blue glow of the stove burners, which were turned up against the cold. When Yates called his friend a second time, he was frantic and incoherent. Rather panicked himself, Wakefield called Monica Yates and told her something was terribly wrong with her father, but she didn’t seem particularly shaken. “Here he goes again,” she said, and tried to reassure the man (“Don’t get too upset; it happens a lot”). She suggested he take Yates to the nearest emergency room, where they’d arrange to transfer him to the VA.
The frequency of Yates’s breakdowns increased as he became more solitary and miserable. Again and again he’d drink too much and stop eating, subsisting on coffee, cigarettes, and alcohol until he became ill and disoriented. At first Wakefield was a little startled that Yates’s daughters didn’t seem more concerned, though by then they’d learned the hard way that it didn’t pay to meddle. “Ahh, Wakefield’s just a damn busybody!” Yates would snap, if Sharon or Monica admitted over the phone that his friend was worried about him (hence the call). Except in states of desperate paranoia or physical distress, Yates would refrain from contacting people and simply lie low in his apartment brooding over some particular delusion. If one of his daughters happened to get him on the phone, he’d interrogate her in a coy, tentative way: “So … do you think I did something terrible to Gina?” (when in most cases he hadn’t seen the girl in months)—whereupon they’d usually call an ambulance or get in touch with Winthrop Burr (“Dad’s on the blink again”), who’d authorize hospitalization on the legal grounds that Yates was unable to care for himself. Within a few days—sober, medicated, and somewhat lucid again—Yates would be up in arms with whoever had hospitalized him. “He’d call me stupid and say I was missing the point,” Burr remembered. “That I harped on his drinking when that wasn’t the problem. ‘Useless,’ ‘worthless’… I heard that a lot.” Generally Yates would discharge himself at the first opportunity—one nurse reported seeing him leave (or try to) “with tubes hanging out of every orifice”—and angrily vow that he’d never go back, that he refused to “sit around watching TV and eating ice cream with a bunch of crazies.”
Deeply humiliated afterward, Yates seemed to blame others for having seen him at his worst, and the more one tried to help, the more culpable one became. “How did you know? Who told you? Who called the doctor?” he’d grill his daughters after his latest breakdown. He was never contrite, certainly never grateful, and inevitably even the kindest people learned to keep their distance. Joan Norris had remained fond of Yates over the years, but beyond a point she refused to meet him unless Wakefield went with her. “What the hell did you get me up to Boston for, you bitch?” Yates would turn on her. “You’re just a groupie!” That he was unwell didn’t make such attacks any less stunning. “They were so weird and sudden,” said Norris, “like a splash of cold water. There was no trigger, it just happened.” Even the tolerant Wakefield began to stay away, though he liked and admired and finally pitied Yates too much to drop him entirely. Yates in turn tended to treat Wakefield with the respect due a fellow writer and dear man, but he would bristle at any suggestion, no matter how meek, that he take better care of himself. “It just got too painful,” said Wakefield. “He went on doing the same things over and over.”
Around this time Wendy Sears moved back to Boston after several years of marriage in Italy to a monoglot sculptor named Andrea Grassi.* As Yates often made a point of reminding her, he was baffled by the whole Italian sojourn, not to mention the loutish ex-husband, but mostly he just felt touchingly glad to have the pleasure of her company again. Shortly after her return he wrote her a series of love limericks:
The mere presence of sweet Wendy Sears
For the first time in (wow!) fifteen years
Is enough, for a start,
To break a man’s heart
And thus make him burst into tears.
The other verses were in a similar vein, reminiscent of the courtly, whimsical Yates of fifteen years before. Indeed, little had changed between the two in most respects. Wendy Sears was somewhat sadder and wiser, to be sure, but essentially the same stoical good sport who’d weathered Yates’s rages and exchanged notes with him during tedious meetings at the Justice Department. Though wary of leading Yates on, she’d occasionally meet him for dinner or drinks and agree to be his date for the odd formal f
unction, as when he received the PEN/New England Award for Literary Distinction in late November 1980. “That was one of the better literary parties,” Sam Lawrence wrote him the next day. “And an unexpected bonus was seeing you with Wendy Sears again. She hasn’t changed one iota.”
Sears was inclined to say the same of Yates. “He’d become terribly repetitious,” she observed. “He was stuck: still wearing the same gray suit, blue shirt and preppy ties, still making the same crabby conversation about the president and politics or whatever. He just didn’t pay attention to the changing world—political, social, cultural, nothing. Dick was still back in the fifties.” Among others, too, the operative phrase for the later Yates was out of touch. Though he was lovingly (or fiercely) eloquent about literary matters, he became dogmatic and rather muddled when conversation took a general turn, and seemed to know little or nothing about basic current events. As such he was bound to be rather tiresome company among nonwriters, tending to lapse into captious correction of a person’s grammar, word choice, or social manners. Such punctilios issued a bit incongruously from a man who often couldn’t be bothered—as Sears reluctantly noticed—to clean his clothes or beard (“matted with drool and snot”). But still there were glimpses of the old charm, the wit, as if a playful heart were trapped inside this cranky, troubled old man.
* * *
One aspect of Yates’s old-fashioned worldview was a frank, utterly unapologetic homophobia. Some of this went deep indeed, and doubtless had to do with certain conventional insecurities about his “girlishly” round eyes and “bubbly” mouth, to say nothing of his childhood awkwardness and desperate clinging to his mother and sister. Yates was forever at pains to prove his masculinity (even to the point of forbidding a woman to drive)—but apart from all that, he despised what he viewed as the pretension and bad taste of the camp sensibility. He dismissed Knowles’s A Separate Peace as “a homosexual novel in disguise” (“the emotions are a little too ‘purple’ for regular boys”), and thought gay literature in toto was overrated due to a specious impression of originality evoked by a nonheterosexual ethos. Be that as it may, the bottom line was simply this: Effeminate gay men drove Yates up the wall, much like his hardboiled counterpart Michael Davenport in Young Hearts Crying:
Oh, shit [he reflects re his newborn son]; and there were still other possibilities too dreadful to contemplate. What if, in response to things that struck him as funny, your son took to saying “I love it” or “Oh, how delicious”? What if he wanted to walk around the kitchen with one hand on his hip, telling his mother about the marvelous time he’d had with his friends last night at a really nice new place in town called the Art Deco?
When Monica McCall retired in 1980, Mitch Douglas took over her clients, and Yates found himself contractually bound to an agent who was very evidently gay and given to indignant demands that Yates shape up and turn in his books on time. While Yates didn’t like lesbians either, he’d always made a sovereign exception in the case of Monica McCall: She was a “lady,” and there was nothing remotely butch or outré about her; she revered his talent and cared for him as a human being; above all she never nagged him about deadlines or discussed his vagaries in general. She’d looked after him in every sense (more so than Yates might have realized) and was all but seamlessly unpatronizing about it; Yates remarked that she’d “saved [his] life” after Martha left him. Following a series of strokes, though, McCall moved to Canada (where she died in 1982), and Yates was that much more alone in the world. Now when he called his agent to ask for money, he was often given a “snitty” lecture by a man whose first (and somewhat abiding) impression of Yates was qua lunatic. Yates hated Mitch Douglas.
Their association got off on the wrong foot twice: first at Bellevue in 1974, and again when Douglas adopted Yates as a client six years later. But first a pertinent digression: As Yates continued to produce the long, exquisitely wrought stories for his second collection, The New Yorker continued to reject them one after another. At first these rejections were cordial as ever (“this one came close,” “keep trying us,” and so on), though Yates was not at all mollified anymore. “All I want is a story in the goddamned New Yorker!” he’d rage when discussing the ups and downs of his career; also he’d started referring to staple writers for the magazine with an almost reflexive opprobrium—particularly “John fucking Cheever” and “John fucking Updike” (or “Precious John”). One of Monica McCall’s last attempted transactions on his behalf was to offer “Trying Out for the Race” to The New Yorker in late 1979. “I don’t know if you usually write covering letters,” Yates wrote her, “but I’d greatly appreciate your doing so in this case: you might find some way to remind [fiction editor] Roger Angell that his magazine has been shamelessly teasing me with ‘encouragement’ for thirty years or more.” Such teasing was about to end forever, though not in a way Yates or any other writer of his stature might have expected. For the moment, though, Angell continued to tease, rejecting “Trying Out for the Race” with a fair degree of tact: “This is written with admirable care and sensitivity, but these lives don’t seem worth the trouble he has given them. I also have some difficulty in understanding why this is all happening in the 1930s.… [Yates] has many admirers here, and I still hope we will publish him some day.” McCall made a practice of copying such (relatively) “nice” rejection letters to Yates, while the more perfunctory or even brutal kind she’d usually paraphrase or keep to herself.
It’s worth bearing in mind that, by then, any number of Yates’s former colleagues and students had at least one credit in The New Yorker, and even his daughter Monica had received a long, detailed letter of encouragement from the same editor (Fran Kiernan) who’d called one of Yates’s best stories “soft-edged and idealized.” What made it even worse, perhaps, was that Yates knew these later stories were among his finest work. When “Regards at Home” was published in the August 1980 issue of the Atlantic (having been rejected by The New Yorker), Sam Lawrence wrote that it was “magnificent, as fine and perceptive a work as anything being written today”—and a few months later, when Lawrence received the finished manuscript of all seven stories, he found it “simply marvelous”: “Congratulations a thousand fold and my profound thanks. It’s always been a privilege to be your publisher and now more than ever.”
Oddly enough, one of Lawrence’s two favorite stories, “Saying Goodbye to Sally,” left Roger Angell not only cold but faintly hostile: He called the characters “false and hollow,” though he allowed that the unwholesome Beverly Hills milieu was perhaps to blame. No such extenuation, however, was granted in the case of “A Natural Girl”: “Mr. Yates is extremely skillful and readable” (at least two conciliatory adjectives were pro forma in all these letters), “but I can’t quite believe this dialogue or those lives or, worst of all, such a mean-spirited view of things.… Some writers do see the world this way but I think Mr. Yates is just trying it all on for effect.” Hard words: “[M]ean-spirited” stories were clearly not to Angell’s taste, but the fact that he wasn’t even willing to concede the sincerity of Yates’s attitude (“trying it all on for effect”) seemed rather mean-spirited in itself. And by the time Angell had finished the story “Liars in Love,” three days later, he seemed to dislike Yates on any number of levels: “This didn’t come close. I think he is a confident, accomplished writer, but it seems clearer and clearer to me that his kind of fiction is not what we’re looking for. I mean this without offense, and I wonder if it wouldn’t save a lot of time and disappointment if you and he could come to that same conclusion.”
“I know these rejections will disappoint you,” Mitch Douglas wrote Yates, “but I hope not too much so.” He enclosed the notes from Angell, adding that he’d tried to remonstrate with the man over the phone, but found him “very stiff and stodgy.”
In fact Yates was very, very disappointed. It was the end of one of his fondest dreams, and he was in no condition to appreciate the almost artistic inevitability of it all—to wit, that th
e subtext of all those New Yorker rejections over the decades had floated to the surface at last, slowly but suddenly clarified like a darkroom photograph, in the blunt antipathy of Angell’s notes: Though Yates was skillful, readable, confident, accomplished and whatever else, his vision of life was repulsive. Thus spake The New Yorker.*
In the years that followed, in the Crossroads or the consulting room of Winthrop Burr, Yates would often hold forth on the subject of his two foremost (extant) bêtes noires: Mitch Douglas and The New Yorker. Also, for the benefit of the odd visitor to Beacon Street, Yates would occasionally grope through his papers, find Angell’s letters, and read them aloud in a shaky voice—perhaps in the hope of being reassured, once more, that the man and his institution were wrong. Another turn of the screw was the fact that his daughter Monica had recently moved to Manhattan and found a job—as a library assistant at The New Yorker. Yates was displeased.
* * *
During the early months of 1981, Yates stayed busy but also allowed himself a bit of diversion. With Liars in Love (as the book was now called) off his hands, he wrote an engaging essay for the New York Times Book Review titled “Some Very Good Masters,” which distilled the high points of twenty years’ worth of lectures and rumination about his two favorite novels, Gatsby and Madame Bovary. He closed on a deprecatory, somewhat elegiac note that seemed to indicate a growing concern with his own mortality and literary legacy:
Time is everything. I am 55 now, and my first grandchild is expected in June. It has been many years since I was a young man, let alone an apprentice writer. But the eager, fearful, self-hectoring spirit is slow to fade. With my 8th book just begun—and with deep regret for the desolate wastes of time that have kept it from being my 10th or 12th—I feel I haven’t really started yet. And I suppose this rather ludicrous condition will persist, for better or worse, until my time runs out.
