by Blake Bailey
* * *
Sam Lawrence’s career had taken some curious turns of late. The previous April, as Yates prepared to leave Washington, Lawrence had come to town and gloomily announced that he’d parted company with Atlantic Monthly Press. As Yates remembered the episode a few years later, “He talked of prospects for a big job at Knopf and asked me, shyly, if I’d stick with him.… Not only did I promise, but we firmly and maybe even mawkishly shook hands on it.” As good as his word, Yates severed his connection with Atlantic as soon as Lawrence was established at Knopf—a somewhat sturdier firm, after all. But Lawrence had gotten used to being in charge of things (“I’m a publisher, not an editor”), and a few months later he took a leap of faith and hoped Yates would follow again: “I resigned from Knopf early this week to embark on my own and establish an independent imprint here in Boston. I want you to be on the First List which will appear in the Autumn of 65. There will be 5 or 6 books and you will be in good company: Brian [Moore], Anatole, Katherine Anne Porter, Alastair Reid.”
This, Yates thought, was getting a bit thick. Certainly it was the wrong time for him to be taking any kind of financial gamble: He was already in debt for a novel he couldn’t finish, his teaching income was a joke, and there were no other prospects in sight. He and Sheila had also decided to take Sharon out of that “dumb, blue-collar” high school in Mahopac and send her to a proper boarding school (“I don’t want Bigger to be finger-fucked by the motorcycle crowd,” he told the Schulmans); just the week before, in fact, both mother and daughter had visited—and set their hearts on—a Quaker school called Oakwood, where the annual tuition was a whopping $2,435. Sheila thought she could arrange a partial scholarship ($800), but either way the expense was grim for a man who could barely pay his bar tab. And though they’d made a gentleman’s agreement, Lawrence’s recent employment record hardly inspired confidence. Monica McCall was adamant: “Sam’s attitude is rather deplorable, certainly arrogant. Not for one moment could I advise you to commit yourself to any editor, I don’t care who it might be, only just starting out on their own.… I told [Lawrence] that your illness had set you back desperately in regard to your work … and that probably he wouldn’t get any answer to his letter. So that lets you off that hook!”
Yates’s poor health, poverty, and general malaise made for a strained Christmas. In New York he stayed with the Schulmans, who were shocked by his deterioration over the past three months. That first evening, as he dined with Grace at the Blue Mill (Jerry was out of town), he told her he was badly in need of medication and had an emergency appointment with Kline in the morning. But any further mention of his mental state became redundant when they returned to the Schulmans’ apartment, where Yates began shouting and kicking furniture. For the first time Grace felt a little afraid of him; they were alone together, and he seemed capable of anything. More than fear, though, she felt a kind of weary exasperation: “Insanity is no excuse for bad behavior,” she told him, then turned around and went to bed. Yates was demonstratively calm the next day, though further outbursts followed and it was a long visit all around.
“I know apologies are a bore,” he wrote afterward, “but I am sorry as hell about those several loud-mouth evenings, and am filled with admiration for your patience in putting up with me.” The Schulmans replied graciously as ever (“people don’t stop caring for one another because of some silly thing like that”), though they were slowly but surely coming to the end of their tether. After a ruckus Yates was sometimes sorry, but seemed incapable of conceding actual insanity and often blamed others for his behavior. If the Schulmans asked him to leave when he lost control, or offered to take him to the hospital, he’d only wax more belligerent—and later, in moments of seeming lucidity, he’d still look back on the incident with a sense of injustice (“Why’d you ask me to leave? Obviously there was nothing wrong with me!”). Though he often complained about his awful childhood—indeed more so all the time*—any suggestion that he augment drug treatment with some form of psychotherapy was met with table-pounding scorn: “Why go to a two-man to tell me what a ten-man has discovered?” By “two-man” he meant an ordinary shrink, and by “ten-man” he meant Freud—or rather (since he didn’t like Freud) some personage of ideal wisdom and tact, which pretty much ended the discussion.
Back in Iowa Yates was “lonesome as hell.” If nothing else, New York had been a blessed respite from his novel, during which he’d almost managed to convince himself it wasn’t as bad as he thought; on his return he resolved to undertake “a crash program to get the bleeding book finished by March One.” But within days he was gloomier than ever—the novel simply wasn’t working, and he didn’t know what to do about it. Also Iowa was cold, he felt sick all the time, and other people weren’t much of a comfort; as for his job, it was a daily torment. “[T]he ‘teaching’ routine grows increasingly dreary,” he wrote the Schulmans. “It’s easy work, but so basically lacking in substance—and even fraudulent—that I’m damned if I can understand how full-grown men can find it rewarding in its own right, year after year. I’ve now firmly decided not to come back here next fall, even if they ask me real pretty.… I’d rather rot in Hollywood than go on performing the ponderous bullshit-artist role I’m expected to play in this place.”
But the privilege of rotting in Hollywood remained purely speculative, and his only immediate chance for escaping the Middle West lay in finishing his novel. So far the only part he’d dared show around was that unimpeachable prologue; meanwhile he’d “tinkered and brooded and fussed” so much with the rest he could scarcely see it anymore—though he sensed something was terribly, organically wrong—and in February he finally accepted the fact that he’d have to get an outside opinion before he went any further. His friend Cassill was the inevitable choice: The author of Writing Fiction and one of the leading practitioner-teachers of same, Cassill was an astute if somewhat captious critic, who for months had bullied Yates to quit “digging himself into a trap” and move on. Yates could count on the man’s probity, but that was rather the problem—if Cassill said the book was bad, the book was bad. And Yates had once told him it might turn out to be better than Revolutionary Road!
“Verlin Cassill’s verdict on my book could not have been more negative,” he informed the Schulmans. “He talked for a long time, some of it incomprehensible but most of it all too painfully clear—he said at one particularly unkind point that it ‘reads like a book written by a man on tranquilizers’ (Jesus!)—and I was pretty shattered for a few desperate and boozy days.” Cassill himself doesn’t remember it that way, and particularly disowns the “tranquilizer” remark. What he recalls telling Yates, in effect, was that the book probably wasn’t as good as Revolutionary Road, but it did have a “Hardyesque compassion” to it and a number of fine incidental things. But at that stage of composition the story of Prentice’s mother wasn’t developed much beyond the prologue, which after all was the strongest section of the book. Hence Cassill suggested that he either balance the war sections with more stuff about Alice Prentice, or just finish the damn book as it was and write an entirely different one about his “crazy sainted mother.” Yates would eventually take most of this advice to heart, but for a while his almost total despair was akin to “a kind of peace”: “I can remember the same kind of thing happening fifteen years ago, when the first X-ray showed that I really did have TB, and could therefore stop worrying.”
* * *
After an all-night celebration of his thirty-ninth birthday, Yates became increasingly withdrawn from the communal world of the Workshop. Partly this was a matter of depression and ill health, but a number of other factors conspired to make the whole atmosphere distasteful to Yates. For one thing Cassill was engaged in an ugly feud with the head of the English department, John Gerber, who wanted to absorb the Workshop into the regular academic program. Cassill thought that writers (à la Hemingway’s “wolves” who ought to stick together) should be immune from the bureaucratic, bourgeois rigmarole of conv
entional academia, and that the MFA should be regarded as a legitimate terminal degree.* Yates agreed with his friend, more or less, but lacked the man’s crusading fervor. “I think my loyalty has been called into question at least once,” he wrote in a later tribute to Cassill, “but then, calling people’s loyalty into question is as much a part of Verlin as his endless conspiracy theories, or his wrong-headed rages,… or his ominous way of saying ‘Ah.’” Reluctantly Yates attended a dramatic meeting at Cassill’s house, where the charismatic host conducted himself like the leader of some revolutionary fringe group. “What will you do?” he hectored each person in turn. “And you?” He thought they should all resign from the Workshop if their demands weren’t met, and insisted on an overt pledge of loyalty from everyone in the room. Yates looked miserable: “Oh Christ, Verlin, do we have to go through all this? Can’t we just talk it out?” Cassill shushed him as if he were a callow little brother: “Dick, you just don’t understand.” At one point Yates looked ill and left the room (“It just seems so concocted—”), and when he finally returned Cassill was pacing and shouting as before. “Is this shit still going on?” Yates sighed. “C’mon, let’s all go have a drink.”
But a tiresome, divisive political situation wasn’t the main reason for his low profile. That spring, as his health and spirits continued to flag, his friend Andre Dubus offered Yates the greatest conceivable form of succor—his wife Pat. At the time he thought it the least he could do where both parties were concerned: Dubus (“a cherry when I got married,” as he put it) had spent the first years of his manhood raising a family, and now amid the swinging milieu of the Workshop he openly made up for lost time with various students and wives; it seemed only fair, then, that Pat be allowed to follow her heart and comfort a talented man who needed all the comfort he could get, and who happened to be one of her husband’s dearest friends.
A nice gesture, perhaps, but hardly one that enhanced the friendship. As Dubus later wrote Yates, “I wasn’t so Goddam happy because, as you know, Pat loved you then and still does, and I reckon I got jealous, not about the boudoir, but the heart.” The tension between them became so sticky that Yates almost gave up going to parties altogether, particularly since a lot of them took place at Dubus’s house down the street from a certain sign on South Capitol that said “Save Two Cents.” Yates felt terrible about the whole thing—he was “a moralist at heart” as Milch pointed out—but not so terrible that he was willing to go without female company. It was certainly a trade-off, though; Yates sometimes had to be seen in public, after all, and Iowa City suddenly seemed a very small place. One day, after Pat had spent the night with Yates, the two men bumped into each other on the street. Dubus’s first novel had just been rejected by Viking, and Yates tried to console his friend over Bloody Marys at the Airliner. “[But] all the time you were feeling bad,” Dubus wrote, “and I knew you were, so I was uncomfortable, and I kept thinking what an ass I was, how I was ruining all those fine moments in all of our lives.” They would not reconcile while at Iowa. Dubus knew that Yates had no intention of returning in the fall, and decided to bide his time until the affair necessarily ended in May. But the last months were sad for both men: They adored each other, and the constrained civility between them was perhaps more painful than outright hostility. For Yates, the year was shaping up as an all but total loss.
Meanwhile another, far older friendship was in danger. In late March Sam Lawrence had finally made a deal with Dell-Delacorte to finance and distribute books under his own imprint; he assured Yates that he was prepared to offer a larger advance and better terms than he was presently getting at Knopf. The month before, however, Yates’s project had been passed on to a brilliant young editor, Robert Gottlieb, who lost no time getting off to a good start with his new author: “I’ve wanted to publish you ever since reading Revolutionary Road,” Gottlieb wrote, “which I loved.” As for Monica McCall’s advice, it was predictably anti-Lawrence: “Was Sam ever useful to you as editor?” she knowingly inquired. “I have had no particular experience with him in that respect, though I have had with Bob Gottlieb and do know that he is magnificent.” Having insinuated the point that Gottlieb was precisely the kind of hands-on man that Yates might require this time around, McCall addressed the main issue: “Sam’s present position could result in one of two things: either further monies from [Knopf] or more money from Sam now that he has Dell-Delacorte behind him.” For the moment, though, McCall urged Yates to stay put.
But at this point the real question was whether he had any book to sell. After Cassill’s withering (or perhaps only ambivalent) critique, Yates had despairingly informed his agent that the novel wouldn’t be ready that spring after all—despite the fact that he’d already promised as much to Gottlieb, despite the fact that Rust Hills had already bought the prologue as an “advance excerpt” for the Saturday Evening Post. McCall replied that he “mustn’t worry”: They’d simply show the manuscript “unofficially” to Gottlieb as a first draft, and the prologue would run in the magazine without any reference to the novel. Official or not, though, Yates dreaded the prospect of presenting inferior work to an admiring new editor, and spent feverish weeks “making notes and drawing spooky diagrams and trying to figure out some way to break [the book] open and take it apart and put it back together a different way.” He even consulted a somewhat more accomplished work, which now seemed to have been written a long, long time ago: “[M]aybe it’s a kind of literary masturbation,” he wrote, “but I’m rereading Revolutionary Road, studying the way it’s put together as if it were written by somebody else, in the hope that it will give me some clues.”
But the mystery remained unsolved, and Yates’s latest annus horribilis—the academic year 1964–65—came to a kind of logical end in early April, when he went to New York and was told by both Gottlieb and McCall that his novel was unpublishable. “I’m afraid we really are in trouble this time, dear,” says Grove’s agent “Erica Briggs” in Uncertain Times. “It doesn’t work as a book. It’s not a war novel because there’s not enough war in it, and it isn’t a coming-of-age novel because the boy doesn’t really come of age.” All was not lost, however: Briggs-McCall suggested (not unfamiliarly) that Grove-Yates expand the narrative to tell more of the mother’s story:
“She’s one of the world’s lost people, isn’t she? And you always do that kind of thing so well.”
“Jesus, I don’t know [Grove replied]. That would be opening a whole new can of worms.”
“I suppose it would, yes. But I know you can work it out.… The point is I can’t handle the manuscript as it stands. I don’t want to represent you with this.”
“So there went the ball game,” Yates wrote friends. If Cassill’s verdict had been the moral equivalent of TB, this was advanced cancer. It was awful on so many levels that it might have inspired a kind of vertigo. The very idea of “expanding” the novel to write in detail about his mother (and hence the ghastly childhood of a character “clearly and nakedly” himself) was “a whole new can of worms,” to put it mildly, and never mind that Dookie wasn’t even dead yet—indeed, still enjoyed the odd moment of fleeting lucidity. Moreover he was sick to death of “that crummy novel” one way or the other, his credibility as a promising writer was waning fast, and he didn’t know what to do next or even if there were any more books in him. And finally he was broke and had no definite source of income that summer, and if it came down to living in Iowa another year he’d pretty much rather die.
“If calling me when you get into your worse moments of panic helps you at all,” McCall wrote him in early May, “then I want you to know that I don’t really mind, except that you create a sense of frustration and failure and pressure, pressure which you know realistically is not necessary!… I know these are hideous days for you, but urge you to try not to panic.” She was pursuing every possible lead in Hollywood: The producer Albert Ruddy presently held the option on Revolutionary Road, and might be persuaded to hire its author to write a screen
play; Ross Hunter or Elliott Kastner might have work, or a man named Richard Lewis who produced TV dramas, or even Johnny Johnson at Walt Disney (though McCall had to admit she could hardly picture Yates as a Disney writer—“however if you can write speeches and articles for Remington Rand…”); and finally Yates’s old Hollywood agent Malcolm Stuart handled a young B-movie director named Roger Corman, who’d just signed a big contract with Columbia and was shopping around for a screenwriter. McCall doubted, however, that anyone would hire Yates sight unseen; he’d simply have to go west and hope for the best. “Train yourself to go into appointments where for the moment it is talk and not necessarily a firm offer of a job,” she advised, “[and] get in the mood where you don’t care if there is a job or not.” Sensing, perhaps, that this was a tall order for such a desperate man, she added two lines from “Chaucer’s translation of the Boethius Cancellations [sic] of Philosophy.… ‘Ne hope for nothing/Ne drede not.’” Yates was well on his way to mastering the first part of that formula.
At the end of May he stopped in New York to see his daughters, but the eight-year-old Monica was upset over the brevity of his visit, and acted moody and unresponsive. More depressed than ever, Yates confided his fears about Hollywood to Nathan S. Kline, who made a referral Yates scribbled on his bill: “Dr. Robert T. Rubin, Neuropsych Inst UCLA.”
* * *
Yates’s luck took a temporary turn for the better. Roger Corman hired him in mid-June for “ridiculous amounts of money,” and Yates splurged on a “sleek” Hollywood apartment at 1215 North Harper in hope of attracting visits from his daughters. Frugal as ever, though (where his own needs were concerned), he made up for this extravagance in other ways: His tendency never to change the oil had reduced his previous car to a smoldering husk, and now he replaced it with the cheapest thing he could find—a yellow Volkswagen (used), which he regarded as “Hitler’s car” and cursed himself for buying.