by Blake Bailey
At the time Yates seemed rather sheepishly pleased with himself. He wrote friends that he’d “found a girl”—his “fair Texan”—and broke the news to Frances Doel as though he expected her to be happy for him. After his mysterious disappearance, he asked Doel to meet him at an old haunt, the Raincheck Room on Santa Monica Boulevard, where he greeted her with a “guiltily triumphant” smile: “You thought there was something wrong with me, didn’t you? Well, there isn’t.” He then explained about the “healthy woman” who’d helped him over that “problem” he was having. He spoke to Doel as if she were a fond old confidante who happened to be familiar with the problem in question. The young woman was stricken but tried to seem pleased.
This meeting was meant to be good-bye, though Doel didn’t know it at the time. When the days passed and she didn’t hear from Yates again, she paid him a visit on the pretext of returning some books; he was sitting alone amid some boxes, about to leave Los Angeles. Doel burst into tears: “I tried to be stoical—not to let my emotions go to the point where they became false, as Dick would have it—but I couldn’t help it.” Yates tried to comfort her, then rummaged through some boxes and came up with copies of his two books. Doel had once mentioned how much she used to love Christmas pantomimes in England, and that she’d always preferred playing the principal boy in Shakespearean productions at school (she found it oddly fascinating that the audience knew she was really a girl). Hence Yates inscribed Revolutionary Road, “For Frances—Who may once have wished to be a Principal Boy but who, in a far larger and more desperate pantomime, has been unforgettable as my principal girl. Love, Dick.” Then he took her hand and walked her back to the apartment she’d recently found on the same block.
“The world was out of sync for days after,” Doel recalled. To cheer her up, the Bogdanoviches took her to see The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, which turned out to be a “terrifying” experience: “I couldn’t make sense of it. I couldn’t match the words with the images.” Yates wrote her a last kindly letter, but she never saw him again and remained haunted by his memory. “I obsessively studied the jacket photos: He looked ill, rapidly aging, and I guessed things weren’t going well. Then there were no more books, and then I saw his obituary. I’d always had a sense that I could call him, that he was at least around, and suddenly it was no longer possible.”
CHAPTER ELEVEN
A Natural Girl: 1966-1968
Yates drove straight to Iowa City from Hollywood, but when he arrived he couldn’t find his new apartment at 800 North Van Buren. His old friend Loree Wilson—who’d recently finished her thesis and was about to leave town—was with a new arrival, Mark Costello, when the phone rang. Yates was at the Airliner and needed her help, but there was no hurry. (“Dick’s helplessness over logistical details was learned,” said Costello; “he didn’t want to fuck with it and wanted other people to take care of him.”) When they arrived at the bar Yates was “drunk out of his gourd”; happily he only had a few more blocks to drive.
A year ago he’d been depressed about being in Hollywood, but grateful at least that it wasn’t Iowa; now it was the other way around. He’d returned almost a month earlier than necessary, simply because he couldn’t wait any longer and hoped to “get [his] brains into some kind of focus” before classes began and his “fair Texan” arrived with her daughter. (He and Carole had decided to live together.) He’d been in Iowa less than a week when he got some very good news: Along with such writers as Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, he’d been awarded that ten-thousand-dollar grant from the National Arts Council. “So I’m no longer in much financial stress and can pay off some of my debts,” Yates wrote, “and I guess it tends to prove that I’m a good deal luckier than I care to believe.”
So it seemed. The old Bourjaily place where he now found himself was on the ground floor of a stately Victorian mansion, and his typewriter was parked beneath a crystal chandelier; the dusty baubles gave him something to look at, but still the place struck him as big and empty and strange. Really, he didn’t feel lucky at all. The change of scenery hadn’t affected his writer’s block a whit, and what the hell was he doing back in Iowa anyway? Why had he invited some feckless woman (and her two-year-old daughter) to live with him? After a couple of weeks beneath the chandelier he was miserable enough to write a rare letter to his sister, the contents of which are suggested by her reply: “If we stick together,” Ruth wrote, “we’ll both live through it.” (By “it” she meant life in general.) “Don’t ‘adapt,’ dear; persevere.”
It wasn’t half-bad advice. By the second week of September, the gloom had lifted somewhat: Workshop people were back in town, and the first big social event was a welcome-back-from-Hollywood party for Yates. There was a swimming pool and Sinatra tunes, old faces as well as new, and the guest of honor was in good form—just drunk enough to wax droll on the subject of Hollywood without becoming bitter and obsessive about it. Once again he was the most glamorous writer in Iowa, certainly the best dressed, and what’s more he seemed to sense as much. Suavely he approached one of the youngest women at the party (about a week shy of her twenty-first birthday) and asked her out on a date. She accepted readily enough, though she seemed reserved almost to the point of indifference; in fact she was “bowled over” by the handsome celebrity.
Martha Speer was the fourth of nine children born to a well-to-do doctor in Kansas City, and she’d always wanted to be an artist of some sort. At Carleton College she’d auditioned for plays but ended up designing sets, and this soon became part of a larger disenchantment: The school was too staid and “goal-oriented” for her tastes, there was no art department per se, and anyhow such an environment was hardly the “real world.” So she dropped out and returned to her appalled parents in Kansas City, where she worked as a waitress for a few months. After that she went to Mexico for the summer, then followed a boyfriend to the University of Iowa and enrolled as an art student because she “couldn’t think of anything else to do.” Around this time she found herself talking to Yates at the party in his honor; she’d attended as the date of a fellow art student who was not the young man for whose sake she’d come to Iowa.
Within days she’d moved most of her things into Yates’s apartment. “He swept me off my feet with his personality,” she explained. He was a well-known writer, and though she was “a nobody” he listened to her with what appeared to be real interest, with humility and humor, and of course he sang the old standards for her. She couldn’t quite understand why this charming, distinguished man of letters was paying so much attention to her—was, for that matter, practically goading her into merging her life with his. When she returned to Kansas City for a few days before the semester got under way, Yates suggested she persuade her parents to let her move out of the dorm and into Black’s Apartments (where a lot of Workshop students lived), which would make it easier to deceive them about the fact that she was living neither at the dorm nor Black’s, but rather with a man twice her age. Speer was happy to go along with that or whatever else he advised: “I was ready to strike out on my own,” she remembered. “I detested the role of the little Midwestern kid from an upper-middle-class family.”
There was, however, one immediate hitch. “I’m sorry your friend is having trouble disinvolving herself, sorry you have to argue with her,” Speer wrote Yates from Kansas City. An awkward business, to be sure, when the woman named Carole arrived from Texas with the rest of her things and a two-year-old daughter in tow, only to find she’d been superannuated in the meantime. One doubts she took it lying down either, as three years later she was still inclined to castigate Yates for the “traumatic and cowardly way” he’d ended the affair; but then, too, she allowed that he was “at least honest.” What he seems to have been most emphatically honest about was his obsession with Martha Speer (“I want the hell out of her,” he said), and nothing in the immediate future was liable to change that. He also reminded the older woman that it was essentially her idea to come to Iowa—he’d promised nothi
ng.
The sequel was sordid, and one can only speculate to what extent it interfered with Yates’s newfound happiness. Evidently Carole had little reason to return to Texas, since she went on living aimlessly in Iowa for at least another year. At first she had a few brief affairs with Workshop students, then took a campus job in the chemistry lab and pretty much disappeared from Yates’s purview. The following summer, still in Iowa, she took an overdose of sleeping pills; after two days she was found comatose in her car, and almost pronounced DOA at the emergency room (“until some smart-ass intern found a flutter of a pulse,” as she put it). Finally, after three more months in an Iowa City mental hospital, she returned to Texas. “If you ever blamed yourself for my suicide deal,” she wrote Yates, “let me assure you … that you were only indirectly or passively concerned with it. The guy I was living with was the main reason. I was very depressed when I met him and he … terrorized me into a paralysis which nothing could alleviate except death.” However, she wasn’t willing to let Yates entirely off the hook for at least his “passive” culpability—she pointed out that he’d started a “flow of love” in her that had proved “drowning”: “My suicide was an act of love, Dick, not an act of hostility or hurt.” Whether Yates had wondered much one way or the other is a mystery.
He’d solved his problem in time for Martha Speer’s return, and two days later (September 19) he gave her a dozen yellow roses for her twenty-first birthday. Yates’s students and colleagues could scarcely believe the change that was coming over him: Suddenly he seemed content, steady, even somewhat soberly so. He’d dispensed with the morning martinis and drank according to a disciplined regime: a quarter of a fifth of bourbon per night, neither more nor less (except for the occasional party), and never before five P.M. As for Speer, who’d also been going through a bad patch, she felt exalted by all the attention—not just from Yates, but from those who admired him and valued her as his beloved. She liked being the only woman included in those raucous chats at the Airliner, and for a time she even liked the fact that almost all the talk was literary (as when Yates would spend half an hour discussing, say, how certain ceiling tiles might be described in fiction), which only served as another reminder that a brilliant man was in love with her.
That she didn’t really love him back was a problem, though perhaps not an insurmountable one. For a long time she’d craved purpose in her life, and what better than caring for a man who stood a good chance of becoming a bona fide famous writer? And it wasn’t just a matter of self-interest—she was fond of him: He made her laugh and “elicited a sense of protectiveness,” as she put it, “coupled with respect.” On the other hand, she sometimes felt as if she’d been “swept along into his life,” and worried over the heedlessness of it all. Before she could quite parse out her feelings, she was insolubly linked with Yates in the eyes of Iowa, and the man himself was cleaving to her for dear life. And then, too, it became increasingly clear that her role was to listen and sympathize and support, with very little coming the other way, to the extent that one’s ego was liable to vanish in the process. As Monica Yates pointed out, “Dad didn’t notice other people. He picked up on asshole people, he could figure people out in general, but in another way he saw himself projected out, and that’s another thing that made Martha angry: She thought he was going to be so perceptive, but really he was very self-regarding.”
But what else was she going to do with her life? That (at the time) was very much the question. “I was afraid to face people, afraid of my inadequacy, convinced I was boring and untalented,” she wrote Yates several years later. “You told me I was pretty, talented, and smart, while at the same time making it seem unnecessary for me to ever use any of these things.” Still, it was nice to know she was worthwhile in the abstract, or at least as Yates’s caregiver, and of course there was always the chance things would get better.
* * *
After that first bumpy month the year was off to a good start for Yates in almost every respect. His novelty verse “QWERTYUIOP” appeared in the October Esquire, and prompted a fan letter from Roger Angell of The New Yorker: “As an occasional palindromist and part-time anagrammist,” he wrote, “I have had occasion to study this curious back-corner of letters, and I think you may have invented a new form. Invented it and exhausted it, all at the same time.” For Yates’s private reading pleasure, Angell enclosed a kindred performance of his own—a long ribald poem wherein every line is an anagram of the title, “On a Festival Aire”: “O, a vile siena fart!” it begins. This would prove one of the most gracious letters Yates ever received from The New Yorker, and particularly Roger Angell, who wrote in a very different vein some fifteen years later.
Even with his friend Cassill gone, the Workshop—or the “Program in Creative Writing” as it was now known (since Cassill’s battle had been lost)—seemed rather congenial, at least for a while, and certainly more peaceful. Paul Engle, though still a force, had resigned as director to devote himself to the International Writers’ Workshop, and his successor, the poet George Starbuck, soon became a friend and sometime protector of Yates. Workshop classes had moved out of the barracks and into the better-ventilated English Philosophy Building, and as a teacher Yates was more in demand than ever. His legend had spread in his absence, such that he was at the top of many preference lists and could pick and choose among the more talented students—the realists, anyway.
A vague source of disquiet was the new, experimental element on the fiction staff, including the surrealistic Chilean novelist José Donoso and a man named Kurt Vonnegut, who was known as everything from a black humorist to an intellectual science-fiction writer. Yates steered clear of Donoso but struck up a respectful friendship with Vonnegut. The latter was still three years away from the wealth and fame that Slaughterhouse Five would bring, though he’d made a minor splash with such novels as Cat’s Cradle and Mother Night. At the time, though, it’s likely that Yates was still the better known of the two. What mattered was that both men deeply admired the other’s work. In his Ploughshares interview, Yates made a point of exonerating Vonnegut from the charge that he was one of the detested “post-realists”: “The difference is that there’s real fictional meat in his best work, despite the surface flippancy of his style—real suffering, real passion, real humor.… When I hear kids today mention him in the same breath with some silly clown like Richard Brautigan it drives me up the wall.” Vonnegut, in turn, thought Revolutionary Road was “one of the best books by a member of [his] generation,” and over the years nobody was more instrumental in promoting Yates’s reputation.
The two men never saw much of each other, but from the beginning they had a kind of brotherly rapport. Both had served as enlisted men in the war, and both had supported families with egregious jobs (Vonnegut at General Electric for a time), followed by many bleak years of the freelance grind. They were amused by Workshop students who worried that such jobs would “damage their machinery,” and each year the two gave “a very unpopular lecture” on the subject “The Writer and the Free Enterprise System”: “We would talk about all the hack jobs writers could take in case they found themselves starving to death,” Vonnegut said. “Dick and I found out you can almost always get work if you can write complete sentences.” But what bonded the two most, perhaps, was the fact that they were essentially melancholy men who sometimes took refuge in antic behavior—Vonnegut also liked to sing and dance (“I’d rather be Astaire than anybody other than Chekhov”)—to say nothing of cigarettes and alcohol. Vonnegut referred to Yates as “Eeyore” and insisted that his depression was mostly “existential”: “Dick was a man of big dreams,” he said, “but modest expectations.”
What Yates expected in the way of decent writing was another matter, and he felt annoyed and somewhat threatened by a now-rampant tendency—even among his own students—to indulge in what he considered gimmicky fiction: incredible characters and situations, fancy word stringing, fey whimsy, political diatribes, and so forth. For Yates
such effects were “violations, bullshit” (as Bill Kittredge put it), whose proliferation sorely tested his vaunted sense of tact. When one of his more promising students submitted such a story for workshop critique, and others proceeded to praise it lavishly, Yates stood frozen at the lectern as if stricken with stunned distaste; after some forty-five minutes he suddenly broke out with, “I think you’re all just fucking around—let’s go on to the next story.” “It was like a bomb went off in the room,” said Kittredge, who to this day can hardly write a tricky line without picturing Yates’s “sad old eyes” and hearing his anguished “For Christ’s sake, Kittredge…”
But experimental fiction was the coming thing in the mid-sixties, and traditional writers such as Yates were widely considered passé and sentimental; the oppressive reality of current events seemed to call for a more subversive approach. “Oh, the hell with that,” said Yates in Ploughshares. “I find that reprehensible.” In fact he was pleased by his own pithy restraint here, since he’d been tempted to say so much more; as he subsequently wrote interviewer DeWitt Henry:
I wanted very much to mount an all-out attack on the whole fucking “Post-realistic School,” and I think I brought that off rather nicely in a short space. I didn’t mention one of the most loathsome of that breed—Robert Coover—by name, because I know the little sonovabitch personally, and a good many people know I know him, and it might have read like a vindictive personal vendetta.
Coover’s arrival at Iowa the following year was like the advent of a literary Antichrist to Yates—the incarnation of everything he deplored, and a constant reminder that he himself was perceived as old hat. Amid an increasingly radical ethos, Coover became the star of the Workshop, gathering around him a claque of students who wrote the same kind of “lazy” and “soulless” fiction as Yates would have it. And what really hurt was that some of these students were talented defectors from his own class—Kittredge, for instance, who remarked that he’d found such divergent influences a “good combination”: “From Coover I learned to see what I was doing in terms of traditions and possibilities more universal than realism. From Yates I learned something I can only sum up as responsibility, to my characters and story, to readers, and to myself.”