A Tragic Honesty

by Blake Bailey

  * * *

  Yates’s coming out as a soon-to-be-celebrated author took place at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference that August. The two-week gathering was in part a pastoral alcoholic boondoggle, particularly so for the designated “scholars” such as Yates, whose optional duties included critiquing the odd apprentice manuscript and attending to their own work amid the rustle and birdsong of the Vermont woods. For Yates it was a long-deferred and richly deserved vacation, and he made the most of it.

  Bob Riche also went to Bread Loaf that year, as did a couple of Yates’s fellow teachers at the New School, Edward Lewis Wallant and Arthur Roth. All were about the same age and believed themselves on the verge of greatness, and together they rode the bus to Vermont. Yates set the tone by approaching the prettiest, most dauntingly well-groomed girl and asking if she, too, was bound for Bread Loaf; she gave him a nodding smile, and Yates returned to his seat with an anticipatory swagger. On arrival, however, the young woman fell in with a Dartmouth man, and for the next few days Yates would bellow “Booo, Dartmouth!” whenever the two passed by.

  Some ten scholars roomed in the same cottage, resulting in a “drunken and frantic” atmosphere, in Yates’s words. Nobody got much writing done. When they weren’t swapping stories or holding profane literary arguments, Yates would loudly croon his repertoire of Broadway standards one after the other, word for word, verse and refrain. Nor was he any more decorous in public, particularly where Bob Riche was concerned. A lot of good-natured, foul-mouthed banter had passed between the two over the years, but now Yates seemed frankly contemptuous of his old friend. “Others were still dunces,” Riche said, “but he himself was no longer that.” As ever, Riche tried to give as well as he got, but lacked Yates’s “authority of success”—as Fitzgerald would have it—and sometimes came across as petulant and ridiculous. One night in a local restaurant the two regaled their fellow scholars by roaring insults at each other; when a waiter asked them to lower their voices, a defensive Riche turned on a tablemate and asked why he was being so quiet. The man stood up and offered to fight Riche, who left the restaurant in a huff. By then Yates appeared to feel sorry for his friend and patiently coaxed him back inside, but when Riche learned the kitchen had since closed, he burst into tears.

  When Yates’s antic behavior wasn’t mingled with contempt, he got along fine with staff and scholars alike. He felt a particular rapport with the black writer John A. Williams, who called the frail Yates “Dreadnought Dick” and lured him into a drunken touch-football game. To Yates’s enduring amazement, he managed to catch Williams’s pass and run for a touchdown (perhaps the last instance of athletic exertion in Yates’s life).* Every other morning the two would walk to the state liquor store and stock up for their ongoing symposia on jazz, writing, and race in the scholars’ cottage. Both were war veterans, and Yates was curious about the discrimination Williams had suffered as a black soldier relegated to rear-echelon service. A related subject was the dilemma of being a black writer in 1960: “I well remember,” Williams wrote Yates ten years later, “even then how much of an outsider I felt, not racially, but professionally. The world belonged to you, Wallant … and others.”

  Ed Wallant and Yates did, in fact, seem to have a lot in common. For many years Wallant had supported his family in the suburbs by working for an advertising agency; he’d become the firm’s art director by the time he began to write seriously at the age of thirty, and within four years he’d published one novel and finished another. “And speaking of incredible,” Yates noted a month after Bread Loaf, “Ed Wallant has practically sold his second novel, this one having taken him a whole seven months to write (his first one took him all of five, the little bastard).” Wallant’s just-completed second novel was The Pawnbroker, a minor classic of Holocaust fiction that was nominated with Revolutionary Road for the 1962 National Book Award. Not surprisingly, Yates was galled by Wallant’s facility (he referred to the latter’s third novel as a “premature ejaculation”), both as a matter of jovial envy and because he sincerely believed the man’s work suffered as a result. Yates even tried to argue with Wallant about it, rather in the manner of Fitzgerald’s telling Thomas Wolfe to be more like Flaubert than Zola, and with roughly the same effect. As it turned out, Wallant and Wolfe seem to have been driven by the same weird awareness, conscious or otherwise, that time was short.

  Meanwhile, amid the boozy disputes and touch football, love was in the air. Bob Riche met his future wife that year at Bread Loaf, a happy occasion dampened only slightly by the fact that Yates didn’t approve—this, Riche opined, because the woman was only five foot one (“Dick wasn’t crazy about short people”), blind in one eye, and had been abandoned at birth—the last a detail Yates found peculiarly telling. “[She’s] the greatest thing that ever happened to me,” Riche reflected forty years later. “But it was not helpful having a guy who was pretty much my best friend at the time calling her ‘the orphan.’”

  Perhaps Yates was too besotted, in every sense, to be tactful. One day in the dining hall he spotted a pretty blond waitress struggling with a heavy tray. He rushed over to help her carry it, then shyly offered her a flower from his table. Ed Kessler, a Rutgers graduate student at Bread Loaf that year, observed that Yates’s “Lost Soul quality” was apt to be found attractive by the kind of women who went to writers’ conferences. Barbara Singleton Beury, the scholarship waitress in question, was decidedly one of these: A student at Sweet Briar (just like Peyton Loftis), she’d come to Bread Loaf in order to meet some real writers and, if possible, to become one herself. Yates was a real writer, all right, while in his eyes Beury was that Gatsbyesque abstraction, a genteel Southern girl with sensibility. Yates dubbed her his “Sweet Briar Sweetie” and could hardly believe his luck—was it all, he wondered later, some kind of hallucination? “Because that’s exactly what I often think it was,” he wrote Beury, “the whole magical business of meeting a golden girl in an alcoholic mist on a mountain.”

  * * *

  The chaste courtship that began at Bread Loaf was to be resumed immediately in New York. Beury’s roommate and best friend at the conference, Maria Sebastiani, was sailing back to Rome the following weekend, and Beury came to the city to see the girl off and visit her new suitor. As it happened, the two young women would have done better to say good-bye in Vermont.

  For a full year now Yates had been skirting the abyss: He missed his wife and daughters to the point of desperation, and the frantic labor he’d poured into the final stretch of his novel, combined with teaching and Remington Rand, had left him ripe for a crisis. “A massive lethargy set in as soon as the novel was out of my hands,” he wrote Cassill; “I’ve been feeling empty and lazy as hell ever since.” Such moods of postpartum depression, as it were, began to alternate with overwhelming waves of elation or panic that only massive amounts of alcohol could allay. As another manic-depressive (who knew Yates well) explained, “We feel so off all the time, like a thermostat is forty degrees off. Alcohol is a way to medicate that uneasiness.”* Yates’s own uneasiness had risen steadily over the past few years, until at last—at the relatively tardy age of thirty-four—he could no longer stave off a full-blown breakdown.†

  The first night of Barbara Beury’s visit—Thursday, September 1—appears to have been merely hilarious. Yates drank the usual stupendous amount, but his twenty-year-old date figured “that’s what writers did.” They spent the evening with his friends Arthur and Ruth Roth, who fawned over Yates’s young lady and called the couple “Zelda and F. Scott FitzYates.” Beury’s thick Southern accent was West Virginian rather than Alabaman in origin, but like Zelda she was a bit fey and fancied herself a writer, and while Yates had never read her stuff (being, as he put it, too “drunk and self-absorbed” at Bread Loaf), he assumed it was the work of a rare soul, and persisted in calling her his “golden girl.” Finally, slumped over the Roths’ table, he mumbled something about marriage.

  The next evening Beury and her friend Maria Sebastia
ni were supposed to meet Yates at his apartment and go out to dinner. Just prior to their arrival, Yates made a raving phone call to Sheila; whatever he was trying to say remained wholly unintelligible, and finally she told him to stay put while she called their only mutual friend in the city, Seymour Epstein. Beury and Maria got there first. “He was crying, hysterical, babbling,” Beury recalled. “He’d laugh uncontrollably, and then burst into tears. He’d been drinking a lot. I didn’t know what to do.” This was overstepping the bounds of writerly eccentricity to be sure, and Yates would hasten to lend perspective in a subsequent letter to Beury:

  The worst possible way for a young lady to be introduced to her suitor is for him to have a nervous breakdown in her lap, and nobody is more painfully aware of that fact than me. But I also know … that there are certain happenings which nobody on earth can help. (This is the secret of tragedy in writing, by the way, and it’s also the secret of comedy.) Please understand that I have never been as “crazy” (i.e. disorderly, irrational, out of control) as when you saw me last.…

  The quotes around crazy are a nice touch, as they suggest that one is crazy only in a kind of transitory, ironical sense, the tragicomic victim of ineluctable cause and effect. The latter part of the equation was true, with or without the quotes.

  When Seymour Epstein arrived, he assumed his hard-drinking friend was in the throes of delirium tremens (though the empty bottles scattered all over the apartment hardly indicated alcoholic withdrawal), and with Beury’s help he managed to coax Yates into a taxi. What followed was reproduced with remarkable clarity in the opening pages of Disturbing the Peace.* When they arrived at St. Vincent’s Hospital, Yates was put in a wooden wheelchair and pushed into the emergency room, where his raving became louder and more abusive (insofar as he made sense at all). Finally a doctor told him to behave himself—“You’re in line with everyone else”—and Yates exploded, “Tell this dumb son of a bitch he doesn’t know anything about writing!” (a terrible indictment coming from Yates), then stamped on the footrest of the wheelchair and broke it. The doctor had seen enough. “This guy isn’t coming into the hospital,” he told Epstein. “He just damaged hospital property.” An orderly wheeled Yates back outside, where he was forced into a police car and taken to Bellevue. Epstein followed in a taxi, but was told in the psychiatric wing that his friend would not be eligible for release until next Wednesday at the earliest, since the doctors were gone for the Labor Day weekend.

  Yates awoke in a collapsible metal bunk in the Men’s Violence Ward, and was made to walk the floor with the other patients—a milieu evoked in Disturbing the Peace:

  Steel-mesh panels were being drawn across the folded bunks to prevent anyone from using them: this was indeed the corridor, the place for walking. It was yellow and green and brown and black; it was neither very long nor very wide, but it was immensely crowded with men of all ages from adolescence to senility, whites and Negroes and Puerto Ricans, half of them walking one way and half in the other.… Then he saw that the black floor ahead was scattered with gobs of phlegm.

  After a breakfast of oatmeal and canned milk, the patients were given doses of peraldehyde. This made them sleepy, until even the dirty sweat-soaked mattresses in a dark alcove at the end of the corridor became tempting. Yates would often tell of his horror on discovering (as does John Wilder) that the men lying on either side of him were masturbating. And it seems probable that Yates, enraged at finding himself in such a squalid place, made a disturbance à la Wilder and Michael Davenport that resulted in his being “shot out”—forcibly given an injection and locked in a padded cell to sleep it off.

  On Tuesday or Wednesday of the following week, Yates was interviewed by a group of doctors and deemed competent enough for removal to the Rehabilitation Ward on a separate floor, where he was pleased to find “real beds, chrome-and-leatherette armchairs, good showers with soap and a kind of shampoo guaranteed to remove lice.” Soon he was ready for his exit interview. A social worker sternly advised him to quit drinking and arrange for regular psychiatric care, while Yates affected to appreciate the probational nature of his release. “I have given the Bellevue authorities my solemn promise,” he wrote Beury, “to avail myself of what they call ‘voluntary psychiatric assistance’ whenever too many good or bad things start crowding in on me in bunches in the future.” On September 8, after almost a week of incarceration, Yates was signed out by Seymour Epstein. “When he saw me in the waiting room,” Epstein recalled with lingering pique, “he scurried off into a corner indicating he didn’t want to see me—whether in shame or what, I don’t know. I signed him out, but I didn’t take him out. He never said a word to me.”

  In fact Yates blamed his friend for the whole horrific episode—for Epstein’s failure of imagination, that is, in being unable to distinguish between “crazy” and crazy. Thus, when Yates would later tell people that “Bellevue was an epiphany,” he was rarely if ever referring to his own condition, but rather to Seymour Epstein; everything that had ever struck Yates as faintly distasteful about the man was suddenly woven into a single explanatory pattern—he was “close-minded,” “conventional,” “unadventurous.” He was a square, in other words, and when Epstein and his wife Miriam insisted on helping Yates find a good therapist, and when the latter turned out to be the kind of “quack” who made his patients stop drinking as a condition of treatment—well, it only proved Yates’s “epiphany” all the more. As a later psychiatrist put it, “Yates was always the smart one; everyone else was stupid. As far as he was concerned, none of his hospitalizations was justified. They came about because other people were stupid or didn’t understand what he was going through. He felt this way even when he was sane.”

  The “quack” who’d objected to Yates’s drinking, a Dr. Wiedeman, recommended another therapist to the Epsteins (“You should get help for that man,” he told them, “but you might lose a friend”), and for a while Yates was shaken enough to cooperate. Though he blithely assured Barbara Beury that “the chances are about 108 to one” that another breakdown would ever occur, he was terrified about the future. “There was always a fearfulness about Dick,” a friend noted, “as if he were apprehensive that something bad was about to happen.” On the other hand, Yates never quite saw the point in confiding as much to a “therapist” (another word he entombed in quotes)—a man in a bad suit who rarely bothered to take notes and whose remarks were either banal or fatuous, or so Yates thought. It wouldn’t be long, then, before he decided to go his own way, finding guidance as ever in the precepts of literary sages, primarily Flaubert, who was echoed in a piece of advice he gave Peter Najarian two weeks after Bellevue. “For God’s sake, take it easy,” he wrote the young man, who’d favored his teacher with a self-loathing diatribe about his failures as an artist. Yates continued:

  All you ought to be worrying about now is order (not about how to impose it on chaos, which is the opposite of art, but about how to bring it out of chaos, which is art itself). And your worrying about this ought not to be a tortured thing—God knows there’s enough torture growing wild in everybody’s life so that nobody in his right mind needs to cultivate it—but a serene thing. Don’t, in other words, jazz yourself up into a nervous wreck. Be quiet, be as sane as you can, and let the work come out of you. If it’s going to come, it will; if it’s not, no amount of self-induced frenzy is going to help it along.

  One final piece of solemn, teacherly advice, and I do mean this: Try to like yourself a little better.

  This may be read as pure soliloquy, of course: Hamlet advising himself to be less indecisive, Lear warning himself away from madness, and fate remaining aloof.

  * * *

  Though Yates had known Beury less than three weeks, including the week spent in Bellevue, he was certain he wanted to marry her—all the more so since receiving, the day after his release, a letter of tender concern which he found not only “beautiful” but “very, very well-written.” Beury, now back at Sweet Briar, had decided to leave t
he door ajar where Yates was concerned. She figured the meltdown she’d witnessed was perhaps (as Yates assured her) a once-in-a-lifetime aberration. Meanwhile, only two things were preventing Yates from packing his bags and moving to Virginia: “1. I have to set up new ways of making money, because my biggest ghost-writing contact (Remington Rand) dissolved under me in July.” This was true, and a further source of prebreakdown stress: After more than a decade as Yates’s bête noire and stalwart source of income, Remington Rand had sacked his contact, Andy Borno, and killed the magazine Systems. Having lost the devil he knew, Yates at least had “two excellent leads on new and painless ghost-writing opportunities” but would have to stay in New York to pursue them. Also: “2. At the present time I need, or rather want, to be geographically as close to my children as possible.” He was, however, willing to get the ball rolling by asking his wife for a divorce as early as the following week. That said, he closed his letter to Beury with a poem he’d written for her at Bellevue (“with a borrowed pencil on a very, very small piece of paper”):

  POPULAR SONG

  I love you in the lips

  And I love you in the nerves

  And I love you in the head;

  Which rhymes with dead.

  And now do you know what I guess I’ll do?

  In the hope you’ll help me to see it through?

  I guess I’ll love you in the heart;

  Which rhymes with art.

  The Bard of Scarborough Country Day hadn’t lost his lyric touch, and Beury was sufficiently moved to suggest he visit her at Sweet Briar the weekend after next. She balanced this with a wary quip about how she might be better off with an “air-conditioning salesman” (an oblique response to his marital overtures?), and continued to express a lot of pointed concern for his well-being. “I wish you wouldn’t ‘worry’ about me,” Yates retorted, and made the familiar case that he was “boringly well-adjusted most of the time, and as able to look after [him]self as any other solid citizen.” As for her invitation to Virginia, he’d like nothing better but was simply too strapped at the moment—however: “Could you come here? If so I’d arrange for you to stay at the Evangeline (Maria’s hangout) or some other equally blameless sanctuary for young ladies, and I’d solemnly promise not to keep you up past your bedtime.” Beury wrote back that it might be fun to come up with her roommate, especially if Yates could arrange to get the latter a date with one Jim Shokoff, a Rutgers student they’d met at Bread Loaf. “I think it’s a very swell and interesting idea,” Yates dryly replied; “but oh, how earnestly and prayerfully I would like to suggest that you contrive to do it some other weekend.” In short, he wanted to see her alone, and to this end he wrote an elaborately polished satire of the various “Frightful Visions” such a visit seemed to conjure in Beury’s “exquisitely close-cropped head.” The first of these was a bit of stock humor about drugged drinks and seduction—this, perhaps, in hope that the next two scenarios would smack of the same breezy absurdity: