by Blake Bailey
But Pei has a point of sorts: The narrator’s essential attitude toward Gloria Drake would seem mostly one of revulsion, period, such that the reader is unlikely to feel anything but gratified by her eventual comeuppance. Indeed there seems something a little gleeful—even “misanthropic”—in the narrator’s tabulation of Gloria’s defects, most of them expressed in grossly physical terms: Her attempt at a “girlish and disarming” laugh serves only to “call attention to how loose and ill-defined her lips [are]” and thus makes her look “like a shuddering clown”; her hair is a “blend of faded yellow and light gray, as if dyed by many years of drifting cigarette smoke”; she has a “frail, slack little figure”; she talks “until veins the size of earthworms [stand] out in her temples … until white beads of spit” gather at the corners of her mouth; to “pantomime ‘worry’ she [makes] as if to put her hand on her heart, but instead [cups and clasps] her pendulous left breast, as if she were feeling herself up”—and so on, and on. It’s a bit much, and barely ameliorated by Charles Shepherd’s gallant observation that it’s wrong to make fun of a lonely woman, in this case Gloria, as if all lonely women are doomed to become cackling, malodorous clowns. On the other hand, such people do exist in some form or another, and one can only reiterate that Yates viewed Gloria as the best likeness of Dookie he ever managed: a triumph. And if she fails to win the reader’s sympathies? As Yates was careful to remind himself, “the hell with the reader’s sympathies.”
Which, in a nutshell, may explain why Cold Spring Harbor didn’t sell and why, for that matter, Yates’s books keep going out of print. To repeat the obvious, most people don’t like reading about, much less identifying with, mediocre people who evade the truth until it rolls over them. And yet most of us face such a reckoning sooner or later, and few of us are really the brave stoical mavericks or handsome heedless romantics out of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, who do stay in print. If Yates seemed to vacillate between “acceptance and revulsion” toward his people—with a decided emphasis on the latter in the case of Gloria Drake and certain others—it was at least in pursuit of an honest synthesis.
Cold Spring Harbor is a good minor novel, not one of Yates’s best or worst, but utterly representative. As such it wasn’t likely to attract new readers or alienate old ones (what few were left), and this was perhaps as it should be. Impoverished, broken in health, often drunk and demented, Yates deviated not a whit from the true north of his artistic conscience; Cold Spring Harbor, then, was a suitable last transcendence, though to Yates it was simply a matter of nine books down and six to go.
* * *
The delivery date for Uncertain Times was November 1987, and Yates felt fairly confident he could manage it: Though certain scenes were already proving “stubborn and difficult,” the basic plot was blocked out, and most of the book—the early parts anyway—had been “a pleasure to write.” Meanwhile he also produced an essay on the subject of Cassill’s 1961 novel Clem Anderson, which Yates described as “the best novel I know of on the subject of writing, or on the condition of being a writer” (the very theme Yates himself was then grappling with); “and that alone seems marvelous because so many other novelists have found only embarrassment in the same material.”
Yates’s appreciation appeared in both Ploughshares and the volume Rediscoveries II, and was instrumental in persuading Pushcart Press to reissue Cassill’s novel a few years later, an edition for which the essay served as introduction. Yates’s effort was in homage to a man who’d provided enormous moral and professional support over the years, in light of which Yates was only a little disgruntled—but distinctly so—when he noticed that, in the new edition, “special thanks” were offered to David Madden, Peggy Bach, and DeWitt Henry, but not himself. In fact the essay had been a strain for Yates, and not simply because he took little pleasure in writing criticism. “Spent most of the day trying to wade through Verlin Cassill’s endless, endless novel and haven’t finished the damn thing yet,” Yates had noted a quarter century earlier, when Clem Anderson was first published.
He’s still a very good writer but oh Jesus how the book does go on and on. There are pieces of very bad writing in it too, both through carelessness and artiness, and I’m not sure but that there’s something essentially weak in the overall idea of the thing. Haven’t been able to say what yet, though, except that his central character becomes a terrible bore after a while instead of the “genius” he is supposed to be.…
Either Yates’s later praise of the book was a little disingenuous—a true measure of the deep gratitude he felt for past favors—or he’d changed his mind over time; perhaps a bit of both. In any case he never mentioned his hurt feelings to Cassill.
For longer and longer intervals Yates brooded away the hours downstairs at the Crossroads, almost always alone. On bad days especially (bad writing, bad health) he seemed to agonize over the lasting value of his work—this at a time when he knew his reputation was already fading. Often a stranger’s compliment would leave him incredulous, and any mention of his lesser novels pained him deeply. Don Lee, then an M.F.A. student at Emerson, visited Yates occasionally at the Crossroads, and one day saw him intently scribbling on a napkin. Embarrassed when Lee asked him about it, Yates reluctantly revealed that he’d listed the titles of his own books (a frequent occupation by then). “Nine books,” said Yates. “Nine’s not so bad, is it?”
Yates appreciated company—any company—though conviviality took precious energy he was careful to hoard for his work. He rarely wrote or received letters anymore, and most of his friends had fallen out of touch one by one. No matter how ravaged and feeble he became, though, the sight of a pretty woman acted on Yates like a galvanic elixir, and his standards remained as ambitious as ever. At an Emerson College party he turned to Wakefield and wheezed, “Look at that one! I’m gonna put the moves on her!” The girl was perhaps nineteen, and sure enough Yates hobbled over, for better or worse. Around this time, too, Robin Metz came to Boston and was sad to find his old friend so sickly and forlorn; at their second meeting, though, Metz brought a former student who’d moved to the area, one Sue Doe, and Yates seemed to drop twenty years in an instant. But whether he was able to accept it or not, Yates’s lothario days were over. Once he called Wendy Sears and asked her to come to his apartment and help him make his bed; while she arranged the dank grayish sheets as best she could, Yates excitedly told her that he had a date that night with an attractive young woman—the first in a long, long while—and hoped to make love to her after a fashion. A few days later Sears asked how it went, and Yates sadly admitted the woman had stood him up.
Most of the time he understood the reasons for his loneliness all too well. On the rare occasion that some random admirer sought him out, Yates would often avoid drinking in order to make a better impression. Ten years before, at the behest of their mutual friend Seymour Krim, a man named Raymond Abbott had arranged to meet Yates while in Boston, and had ended up driving him to the airport; when Abbott called again in 1986, Yates eagerly invited him to the Crossroads, though he hadn’t the faintest idea who the man was. “To Ray,” he inscribed Cold Spring Harbor, “In regret for having been smashed on the way to the airport that time.” During their second meeting Yates sipped club soda and chain-smoked; after several hours of halting conversation, Abbott tried to say good-bye. “Do you have to go just yet, Ray?” Yates asked again and again. “Can’t you stay a bit longer?” His loneliness was so painfully obvious that Yates was obliged to explain, in so many words, that most people had given him up as a drunk; when Abbott asked about women, Yates just shrugged and shook his head. That year another admirer, Martin Jukovsky, spent a single “strange and somewhat distressing afternoon” with Yates. “He kept up a brilliant stream of conversation,” Jukovsky recalled, “but his voice had a tremble. He would often drift into old woes, such as regrets about his marriage; when this happened, he would seem ready to break into tears, his voice would get this odd, weepy sound, though he never actually cried.” Y
ates also spoke obsessively about being trapped in a “rotten contract” with a “wretched literary agent,” and begged the bewildered man for advice. As with Abbott, he drank nothing stronger than club soda.
Every so often the awfulness would overwhelm Yates, and he’d go from soda to beer to bourbon and back to the hospital. His health was such that any kind of sustained drinking was all but guaranteed to cause a breakdown. That winter Wendy Sears called to check on Yates, who gagged and gurgled on the phone for some fifteen minutes before finally hacking out, “Help me.” Sears was afraid of what she’d find in Yates’s apartment, and called around until DeWitt Henry agreed to investigate. He and Brodigan found Yates unconscious in a room spattered with blood and garbage. When Sears visited Yates a few days later at the VA, he seemed in a daze of pain and didn’t speak; she thought he was dying. The next week Yates called with the cheery news that he was back home and feeling much better. He’d been taken off lithium and given Tegretol, which (it was hoped) would do double duty in controlling his seizures and manic episodes. But none of it was any good, of course, if Yates wouldn’t stop drinking.
It had been a bad year all around. That summer Yates’s beloved friend Andre Dubus was hit by a car and permanently crippled; in September his left leg was amputated at the knee. There would be no more hilarious, comforting get-togethers at the Crossroads or Yates’s apartment. Meanwhile Yates did what he could. Amid the mixed literary company of John Irving, Jayne Anne Phillips, Updike, Vonnegut, and others, Yates participated in a benefit reading that February at the Charles Hotel in Cambridge to raise money for Dubus’s medical expenses. While Dubus smiled at him from a portable hospital bed in the back of the ballroom, Yates kicked off the event with his story “Trying Out for the Race,” which he described as “a little tarnished, but it’ll have to do.” When he finished—“charm[ing] the audience with a quiet, dreamy tale,” according to the Boston Globe—he introduced the next reader, Vonnegut, who (Yates said) had promised to be “just as long and just as lugubrious.”
Nothing much happened to Yates for another five months, when his second grandchild Emily was born July 17, 1987. Yates took a shuttle flight to New York and left the same day, lingering long enough to deliver a bouquet of flowers to Sharon and, once again, take his son-in-law out for a celebratory drink. As Yates was leaving the hospital he heard a familiar voice— “Hi, Dick!”—and there was his first wife Sheila, whom he hadn’t laid eyes on in twenty years. Startled, he dropped something to the floor but was too feeble to bend over and pick it up; Sheila handed it to him. “He was so weak and done in,” she remembered. “His life was over. And we had nothing to say to each other.” Later Yates called Sharon and expressed his amazement: “My God, she’s an old lady! She let her hair go white!”
* * *
By the end of the summer it was clear that Uncertain Times wouldn’t be finished by November or anywhere close. Nor was there any question of renegotiating his contract: Yates had no agent, no capacity for handling such matters on his own, and no semi-tractable publisher such as Sam Lawrence. By a somewhat happy coincidence, his friend DeWitt Henry was then acting chair of the creative writing program at Emerson, and was able to provide Yates a one-semester appointment teaching undergraduates; after that he was on his own. By then Yates was viewed in Boston (and beyond) as an unemployable drunk, but if he managed to acquit himself at Emerson he might regain a measure of credibility. That was the idea anyway, and in fact Yates rose to the occasion rather nicely: He met all his classes and even recommended a student’s work for the “Discovery” issue of Ploughshares, writing an introduction to the accepted story.
But it was shaping up to be a cold winter. With his advance gone and the semester almost over, Yates was facing total destitution, and even the better-case scenarios were grim: The Emerson job had served to remind him that he had neither the energy nor the desire to teach anymore, yet the alternatives were nil, and he’d have to count himself fortunate if anyone was willing to hire him at all; meanwhile he was forced to borrow money from Vonnegut, whose affable eagerness to help didn’t make the request any less excruciating. Only three years before he’d been an NEA Senior Fellow, America’s “least famous great writer” according to Esquire, and all his books (but one) were back in print for the first time in years; now, at age sixty-one, he’d be lucky to keep a roof over his head. On the other hand, it was more than a little miraculous that he was even alive.
And then a number of things happened to remind Yates that, as he put it, “the world [wasn’t] really at [his] throat after all.” Dubus, Vonnegut, and others got the word out that Yates was in trouble, and benefactors soon began to appear. For years Dubus and George Starbuck had been urging Don Hendrie at the University of Alabama to hire Yates, his old teacher, for the prestigious (and lucrative) Coal Royalty Endowed Chair in Writing. Clearly the time was now, but the earliest Hendrie could schedule Yates was the fall 1988 semester; it was possible, though, that an interim stipend could be worked out if Yates was willing to read student manuscripts and visit the odd class. The thought of living in the Deep South (“fucking Dixie”) was anathema to Yates for any number of reasons, but this time he couldn’t see a way around it. By December he’d arranged to forward his mail to the Alabama English Department, but then a most improbable savior intervened.
Yates’s old nemesis David Milch was now in Los Angeles as producer of the hit TV series Hill Street Blues. Looking back, Milch can’t recall who told him of Yates’s predicament; in any case Milch was in a position to help and didn’t hesitate to do so, though he realized he’d have to make it seem like a legitimate job offer lest his proud old teacher refuse. He invited Yates to write treatments for TV pilots, and assured him he’d have plenty of time left over to finish his novel—anyway they’d work out the details later, and meanwhile Yates was welcome to stay in Milch’s guest house for as long as he liked. Yates was in no position to question such generosity. As for Milch, he wonders if he was fully conscious of his own motives at the time. “As Katherine Anne Porter once said,” he remarked, “‘I never heard of a perfect synonym, or an unmixed motive.’”
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
A Cheer for Realized Men: 1988-1992
By February, Yates had moved into Milch’s guest house and was hard at work on some treatments proposed by his benefactor: One idea concerned two families with lots of foster children, a kind of postmodern Brady Bunch meets Eight Is Enough; another was about a group of young newspaper reporters living in a communal house in Washington, D.C. Yates despised the work (“There were a lot of jokes on the word ‘treatment,’” his daughter Monica recalls), but Milch was covering his room, board, and child-support payments—as well as dispensing plenty of “walking-around money” as he called it—so Yates bent himself to the task of contriving joys and sorrows related to the business of communal living. “I remember Milch well,” Vonnegut wrote Yates, “since he took a strong dislike to me, which, you will agree, I’m sure, makes about as much sense as hating hot fudge sundaes or Helen Hayes.” Vonnegut wryly observed that Hill Street Blues was “a very important work of art,” but applauded the fact that Milch had “thrown lucrative work in the direction of good writers who would like to make some real money for a change.”
Yates was miserable. He desperately wanted to believe that he was doing something worthwhile for Milch—at any rate he was determined to persuade Milch of that fact—but something in the latter’s manner belied any such hope. “How we doin’ today, Sport?” Milch would greet him of a morning, clapping him on the shoulder. (“That little shit! He called me ‘Sport’!” Yates raged wonderingly to a friend.) At other times, though, the two would sit and talk about writing, at seeming ease with each other; Gina Yates, who knew how damaging the arrangement was to her father’s ego, nevertheless got the distinct impression that Yates and Milch were friends. And really Milch was fond of Yates—perhaps more so than he’d anticipated—but at the same time he harbored “a real undisclosed anger” for
having been bullied and rejected all those years before at Iowa: “It was kind of an ongoing humiliation for Dick to be the recipient of generosity,” said Milch. “Thank God I wasn’t aware of it consciously, but in retrospect all those elements fed into it. This was payback for ‘Wouldn’t you like to be David Milch?’”
After tactfully rejecting a number of treatments, Milch suggested that TV work wasn’t Yates’s line and encouraged him to go back to his novel. Yates was crestfallen. He proposed that part of his debt to Milch—which would eventually climb to $36,000—could serve as an option on Uncertain Times, and he constantly assured Milch that he’d pay back the rest of it one way or the other. Whatever he proposed was fine with Milch (“Fine, fine”), but the whole situation was far from fine with Yates: “He chafed and chafed and chafed that this young snotnose was supporting him,” said Monica. “He was always growling about the $36,000 he owed Milch: ‘I’ll get him that goddamn $36,000!’ It wasn’t an issue to Milch, but Dad wouldn’t drop it.” Meanwhile Yates’s cigarette fumes were forever wafting about chez Milch, an otherwise smoke-free environment where children lived besides. “Well, if there’s no real work for me out here,” Yates stiffly told his host one day, “I guess I’ll go home and tie up some loose ends.” Milch said that was fine.