by Blake Bailey
* * *
For the first half of 1992 Yates all but disappeared from public view as he made a last sustained effort to finish Uncertain Times. Sam Lawrence hoped to publish the book in the fall, and Rust Hills bought a long excerpt for Esquire and encouraged the author by calling the pages “vintage Yates.”* According to Childress, Yates was keeping “long writing hours” despite his condition, and was irritated by unexpected interruptions. To the last, though, Yates expressed a tormented ambivalence toward his work in progress: On some days he’d seem pleased and say the end was in sight, then he’d say the whole thing was a mess and he’d have to do it over. Nor was the book’s relative merit the only issue: In 1991 Styron had published Darkness Visible, a memoir of his struggle with clinical depression; Yates was appalled, considering it unseemly for a writer to air his personal life in nonfictional form (this despite his admiration for Fitzgerald’s Crack-Up essays). But Uncertain Times was itself a curious amalgam of fact and fiction, with a protagonist who resembled Yates almost as baldly as “Kennedy” did Kennedy, and what it revealed about the author’s life was at least as embarrassing as anything Styron had openly confessed about his. So there was that. Finally Yates showed his manuscript to “some foolish person,” as his daughter Monica recalled, “who read it and said it wasn’t any good.” Yates soon lost heart after that, and besides he was simply too oxygen deprived to continue. His last manuscript note is dated August 28, 1992.
At the time of his death, the novel was perhaps two-thirds finished: about 250 pages of narrative in various stages of revision. The first 100 pages are typed and polished, with only the occasional word struck out or changed. The next 100 pages are much rougher—mostly typed, but heavily revised with drastic deletions and emendations, marginal notes, and many inserted holograph pages. The last fifty pages are fairly chaotic: A few of these are typed and heavily revised; the rest are written in a rapid, hard-to-decipher scrawl. Also, there are about 70 pages of additional material: notes, fragments of scenes and dialogue, lists and outlines. Yates’s own dating suggests that the first, relatively fluent 150 pages or so were written before 1989—after that, his failing stamina is poignantly evident on the page: “FIX” is scrawled again and again in the margin, as well as a number of fretful glosses such as, “She wouldn’t say that.” As he got bogged down in the slow agony of revision—many pages are frantically scored with deletions, minute insertions, and finally struck out altogether—the frustrated Yates began to abandon unfinished, unsatisfactory sections (“FIX”) in order to get on with his story, writing several scenes out of sequence. Some of these later pages seem to have been written as rapidly as possible, with hardly any correction, as if Yates were in a race with that day’s tiny store of concentration. By the end he appeared to be writing in minute spurts of a few lines a day, and was so oxygen deprived that he sometimes referred to the same character by different names from one sentence to the next—hence “Bill” becomes “Jim” and then “Bill” again; “Arnold” becomes “Henry,” and so on.
The novel opens on New Year’s Day 1963, as Bill Grove happily anticipates the “avalanche of money” he’ll receive as soon as his screenplay (based on an acclaimed novel by the more famous Paul Cameron, a “good if not close” friend) is made into a movie starring Henry Fonda and Natalie Wood. Grove hopes that such a stroke of success will help reverse certain morbid trends in his life—two mental breakdowns in the past three years, a squalid basement apartment in the Village, and a drunken slatternly girlfriend named Nora Harrigan. By February, however, everything has gone wrong: The movie is red-lighted when its stars pull out, and meanwhile Grove’s second novel (“about some young guys in the army in Europe during the last few months of the war”) has become all but impossible to write, such that Grove worries he’s “ready to go off again.” For a few months he tries halfheartedly to return to public-relations work, until one night—while he and Nora lugubriously discuss her “toe-jam”—Paul Cameron calls to report that he’s recommended Grove as speechwriter for Bobby Kennedy. Grove is skeptical (“I’m not even sure I like the fucking Kennedys”), but hardly in a position to refuse. After an interview with the great man in Washington, and a trial speechwriting assignment that (to his surprise) he enjoys, Grove is hired.
For a while he does well at the job: His first few speeches (transcribed almost in full for the reader) are so well received that he’s asked to submit a draft for the president’s civil rights address on national television. Almost from the start, though, Grove finds himself at odds with the “true believers” whose idealism blinds them to the Kennedys’ essential speciousness; also there’s a constant dissonance between Grove’s feckless, messy private life and the clean-living, go-getting atmosphere of public service. Grove transplants the squalor of his Barrow Street cellar to his “office” at the Justice Department—a dusty, cluttered file room he appropriates in order to be alone with his thoughts and cigarettes. Meanwhile, too, a pending FBI background check threatens to reveal that Grove’s been hospitalized twice as a mental patient and has an ongoing drinking problem. Grove tries to adjust somewhat to his new circumstances by purging the drunken, depressing Nora in favor of a genteel virgin named Holly Parsons; also he moves into the suburban Washington home of an old army buddy, Frank Marr, whose conventional middle-class family offers a stark and somewhat stabilizing alternative to Grove’s raffish bachelor lifestyle.
So it goes for the first 150 pages, more or less, and so far so good. The pace is brisk (though arguably one transcribed speech would suffice), the prose clean, and best of all a nice ironic balance is struck between Grove’s private and public lives—a crucial dialectic that begins when Grove’s “toe-jam” remarks coincide with his being summoned to public service by the glamorous Paul Cameron. Nor does Yates indulge in any easy satire of the Kennedys as merely “figments of the public imagination,” as the cynical Nora Harrigan describes them. Rather, in typical Yatesian fashion, Grove remains “simultaneously enchanted and repelled” by the world he encounters at the Justice Department: “You’re getting a rare concentration of intelligence and decency in there,” Warren Pickering (the Prettyman surrogate) aptly observes. “Lot of plain courage, too, because some of these guys’ve risked their necks down South once or twice and they will again.” This is true, but on the other hand such idealism has its dark or dull side, exemplified by RFK’s press secretary Jim Thurman—a fatuous, humorless Babbitt who speaks of the “real Americans” in the Midwest and reads nothing but “an occasional detective story or Western to help him kill time on airplanes.” As for Kennedy himself, he’s evoked as boyish and well-meaning and slightly out of his depth: “part of his shirttail bulge[s] loose on one side” as he interviews Grove, and he speaks with a lot of halting, inarticulate ah’s as he tries to marshal his thoughts. But then, too, he’s egocentric and calculating, often lapsing into a gum-chewing, people-ignoring trance between public performances, and cursing himself for having neglected to shake hands with motorcycle cops while the cameras roll.
When Grove begins to lose interest in his speechwriting duties, and the focus shifts to his private life, the novel goes off the rails. There is less dramatized conflict between the world of action and that of the skeptical introspective writer, and more introspection per se. Grove broods a lot over his stalled novel, for instance, which entails a precise rehashing of certain aspects of A Special Providence as well as the actual experiences that inspired it. But mostly the plot becomes dominated by the ups and downs (mostly downs) of Grove’s affair with the wholly uninteresting Holly Parsons. (“I never had a feeling Dick had any idea who I really was,” said Wendy Sears, who was bemused when Yates told her he was putting her in a novel. “He always talked about his own ideas, his own point of view on things. I was just a vessel for him.”) Parsons, a blandly good-natured “classy” girl, serves as witness and sounding board for Grove’s various inadequacies: his impotence, sexual and otherwise; his precarious mental health; his tendency to fly into dr
unken rages at the slightest provocation. Again, when all this is balanced with the can-do ethos of Kennedy-era idealism, rather than a “classy” abstraction such as Holly Parsons, it makes some kind of narrative sense; otherwise it’s so much ranting in a vacuum. Yates himself couldn’t seem to figure out where he was going with all this, apart from contriving one humiliation after another for his alter ego: Hence Grove spends a night in jail after yelling at Holly in public, but afterward seems to “redeem” himself when (according to Yates’s notes) he “discovers he can get laid”—though Holly implicitly diminishes this feat by calling it a simple act of friendship on her part; Grove again gets laid at the MacDowell Colony with a different woman, who also punctures his ego by asking, “How well do you really know Paul Cameron?”; and finally Grove’s novel is rejected by his agent—the apparent climax of Uncertain Times.
Given better health and alertness, could Yates have pulled it all together and made it work? Possibly, though it would have taken at least as much “brain-scrambling” effort as Revolutionary Road—the same exhausting, extended struggle to reconcile exquisite ambiguities in his own mind in order to convey them in art: “If the suburbs are to blame,” Yates wrote in a 1956 memo to himself, “—and they are to no greater extent than the ‘artist’ illusion—remember that—it must be implied by cumulative effect rather than slammed home in every chapter.… I must never let the meanings escape both me and the reader through my efforts to hold his interest [italics added].” Reading Uncertain Times, one gets the impression that Yates couldn’t quite determine the meaning of Grove’s disaffection with public service, and was all too aware that in writing more and more about himself (that is, Grove), he was holding nobody’s interest but his own. “‘Solipsism,’” Yates wrote in his notes: “‘a theory holding that the self can know nothing but its own modifications and that the self is the only existing thing’… Holly P.uses this word in criticizing Grove.” Thus Yates tried to explain to himself the fundamental conflict between Grove’s self-absorption and the relatively unreflective nature of political idealism—and thus, too, he tried to explain why, perhaps, he’d come to dwell so entirely on Grove and his times, rather than those of the greater world.
No doubt Yates found himself more interesting than the public figures who populate the earlier, more readable, but ultimately underwhelming chapters of Uncertain Times. Because Yates could only animate such characters as Kennedy, Burke Marshall, Edwin Guthman, et al., in terms of their public personae, the final effect reads like nothing so much as highly competent political fiction—“It isn’t felt,” as Yates would tell his students. Meanwhile the story of Grove’s various demons was felt, but it didn’t quite mesh with the rest of the material and was also uncomfortably confessional in the context of an historically accurate roman à clef.
Such was the quandary Yates couldn’t resolve, though he (almost) died trying.
* * *
The last time Monica Yates visited her father was in May 1992, about six months before his death. She couldn’t help but suspect she was seeing him for the last time: He “looked like a scarecrow” and was so feeble he could hardly walk to the bathroom without sitting down every few steps; he shuffled and stumbled from one piece of furniture to the next. Sometimes the surgical tubing that connected him to the humming tanks in the bedroom would snarl, and his lips would turn blue. For the most part he was able to laugh off the worst of his infirmity. One night the two went to dinner with George Starbuck, who was then in the final stages of Parkinson’s; the man’s speech was labored and he made constant “pill-rolling” motions with his hands, but he was still a bit stronger than Yates. “Oh God, baby—” gasped the latter, faced with stairs at the restaurant, “we can’t do this!” Somehow, with Monica’s strenuous help, the dying men managed the ascent, and seemed pleased but hardly able to eat or speak from the strain. It was a relatively mellow visit for Monica, though her father could still be provoked; his reading was now limited to the New York Times and works of political history, about which he cultivated a kind of cranky punditry. “How can you say that?” he demanded of Monica in a restaurant, when she remarked that Nixon “wasn’t so bad.”
As time ran out, though, and he began to let go of things, Yates subsided into a larger peace. When Gina visited in August, she found her father “enlightened and very accepting”: He liked to say he was “in the bright winter of life,” that his only wish was to go back to New York before he “checked out”; as for his novel, he doubted more and more that he had the energy to finish it. Nor could he muster the strength or desire to venture out much. Childress had moved to Arizona that summer, and the only people who visited regularly were Ron Sielenski and Shelley Hippler, who continued to tidy his house and make sure he was okay. But mostly Yates preferred to be alone—he knew how mortal he looked, and simply wanted to drink beer and think about the past. When he got tipsy and nostalgic enough, he’d call up old friends to say, in effect, good-bye, though he was sometimes hard to understand because of emphysema or beer or both. The last time Yates spoke to Loree Rackstraw he could hardly finish a sentence without gasping. “He ended the conversation by saying, ‘We had some good times in Iowa City, didn’t we?’ It was heartbreaking.”
Writing had kept Yates alive all these years. He’d always promised Monica not to die until he finished his novel, but one day he admitted he’d given it up. “You know, I’m just tired,” he explained. “Don’t want to live much longer.” If he felt sorry for himself at all, it was in that particular respect—he’d never write again—but such a mood was touched with a kind of exaltation when he considered the transcendence of his life’s work. A month before he died, he called Bob Lacy and asked the man if he’d like to know what he, Yates, had done the night before; Lacy said he would. “Get this,” Yates wheezed. “I got smashed last night, and then you know what I did? I sat here on this couch in my lousy apartment reading the first chapter of Revolutionary Road out loud to myself and crying like a baby.… Tears running down my cheeks. Can you believe that?” Another time Susan Braudy begged him to read her the last page of Gatsby; he’d always said it was his favorite piece of prose, the very passage that had made him so determined to write (“If there wasn’t a Fitzgerald, I don’t think I would have become a writer”). “Dropping the telephone to make an unpleasant rolling clatter as he opened a can of beer,” Braudy remembered, “he started to read in the most matter-of-fact and loving way.” Yates got as far as the following lines:
He had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night.
There was a long silence. “Sorry, sweetheart,” said Yates, “I better hang up. I’m crying like a damn fool.”
One of the last people to see Yates alive was Scott Bradfield, author of the novel The History of Luminous Motion. Three weeks before Yates’s death, Bradfield had arranged an interview for the London Independent. “Richard Yates was America’s finest post-war novelist and short story writer,” the article began, “but he was a surprisingly difficult man to contact.” Bradfield had tried tracking Yates down through his latest publisher, Vintage, whose people knew nothing of his whereabouts and seemed indifferent to promoting the author of a few three-year-old paperback reprints. “I’ve been ill, you see,” said Yates, when Bradfield finally managed to get him on the phone, “and I may go into the VA hospital shortly, but I’d really like to do this, I really would.” A couple days later Bradfield drove all the way from Chicago to Tuscaloosa, and spent a few hours chatting with Yates in his living room. Though “extremely cordial,” Yates seemed disinclined to discuss his work much, and would bridle mildly at what he called “slick” questions. “You’re giving me too much at once,” he said, or “I’m just not smart enough to answer big questions about things like ‘themes’ and ‘purposes’ in my work
.” He was especially exasperated by the “slick” tag realist: “All fiction is filled with technique,” he said. “It’s ridiculous to suggest one technique is any more realistic than any other.” Again and again Yates tried to steer the discussion away from himself, even if it meant interviewing the interviewer: Where did Bradfield get that T-shirt? Where was he born? What did he want to do next?
“Finally we broke for lunch,” Bradfield wrote, “and there was something dimly Yatesian about how the rest of the afternoon developed—a constant slippage between intentions and effects.” When Yates discovered that his favorite steak house was already closing, he drove them to the Red Lobster franchise restaurant, where he was faintly disappointed to find that their only steak was a New York cut—much too big. Bradfield urged him to order it (“This is on The Independent. Let’s break the suckers”), but Yates scrupulously refused: “[a] waste,” he said, and ordered the chicken. Exhausted when they returned to Alaca Place, Yates nonetheless offered his guest a last beer and took cordial leave of him. “‘It was very, well, enjoyable,’ he said, showing the sort of care with which he has selected virtually every single word of his published prose. Not a ‘great’ afternoon. Not even ‘exciting’ or ‘funny’ or ‘wonderful.’ But ‘enjoyable,’ yes. It was very, well, enjoyable.” When the article ran on November 21, Yates was already dead, and Bradfield appended a suitable envoi: “I can live with the uncomprehending publishers, the dumb reviews of his work, the dull place he ended up in, even the second-rate restaurant and the slow, awkward circuit around the driveway we made three or four times before Yates could find the exit on to the main road.… [But] I wish he’d ordered the goddamn steak.”
