A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates

by Blake Bailey

  The odd wrathful critique depended somewhat on Yates’s mood—a sick man is apt to be crabby—but he’d later agonize over the wounds he’d inflicted. In a copy of The Easter Parade owned by the author of the “terrible” story, Yates wrote, “To Bill, with heartfelt apologies for an episode he has been gracious enough to forget.” And then there was the sequel to the burning salad bowl. “Dick was agitated that night and his blood was up,” said Parrish, who drove Yates to Allen Wier’s workshop after they’d put the fire out. The first story under discussion was a bit of “Magical Beautyshop Realism,” as Tony Earley described it, about a spooky barber who gives bad haircuts and strange advice. Yates hated the story, denouncing its heavy-handed whimsy in no uncertain terms. The author sat biting her lip and trying not to cry; the rest of the class was too stunned to speak. Finally—to break the silence, and perhaps because he was dating the author—Earley offered a few words in the story’s defense. Yates regarded him sadly: “Tony, Tony, Tony…” Earley’s own story “Aliceville” was next, and he was somewhat hopeful since Yates had liked his previous effort, “My Father’s Heart.” “‘My Father’s Heart’ was like good sex,” Yates began. “‘Aliceville’ is like masturbation.” Yates later apologized to Earley, though probably not to the woman who wrote the barbershop story.

  By 1990 the zeitgeist of the American campus, even in the South, was sufficiently altered for Yates to seem either a quaint midcentury relic or a throwback, depending on how you looked at it. Most students were amused by his somewhat archaic Ivy League uniform of tweeds, flannels, and desert boots, his hair that seemed to stay short whether he cut it or not, his careful manners, his cultivated distance from a changing world. Yates loved to talk about the old days—radio programs, McCarthyism, the movies of his youth—and once when Earley admitted he didn’t know a particular Hoagy Carmichael tune, Yates sang it to him verse after verse. (“The most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me in the literary community,” said Earley.) Young women, alas, tended to be less amused by Yates. “I wish I had a little girl to make potatoes for me,” he said with wistful gallantry at a potluck dinner, while the subject of this pleasantry lapsed into wondering silence along with the rest of the guests. Worse were the women who actually stood up for themselves and their sex. “What’s that got to do with anything?” a student’s wife snapped at Yates—who’d just observed, neutrally enough, that a new addition to the English faculty “[wasn’t] very pretty.”

  Yates didn’t get it. “Earley, get over here,” he’d say, after some courtly bon mot had gone mysteriously awry. “What the hell’s the problem? What’d I say?” Any attempt to explain would only vex him further, and soon such women began to seem foreign as Martians to Yates, who treated them with a kind of wary restraint. The truth was, what Yates had always regarded as courtesy seemed creepy and affected to certain of his female students, who made a point of avoiding him; if he hadn’t been so pitifully frail, it would have been worse. The situation pained Yates deeply. He’d regale his young male companions with tales of the old Revolutionary Road days when he could get almost any girl he wanted—a girl who goddammit looked like a girl too, in a proper dress—but now he wasn’t even regarded as a sexual being anymore. To Dan Childress, who later became Yates’s main caretaker, he confessed a poignant recurring dream of running, sprinting—virility—though he hadn’t been able to run or much else in many years.

  Nor could Yates have known that the beloved authors he’d always taught—Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Conrad, Ford, et al.—were now viewed as a veritable rogues gallery of dead white males. At the beginning of the semester he broke out his hoary assortment of marked-up paperbacks, the same that had stood him in good stead since his Iowa days, and read aloud the beloved bits of dialogue, objective correlatives, character details, and whatnot. When the students requested a bit more open discussion, the haggard Yates was only too happy to oblige; he noticed, however, that three or four students rarely spoke and indeed seemed to be boycotting the books in question. It might have been when somebody pointed out the absence of women or “people of color” among the assigned authors that a bemused Yates called one student “a pantywaist”—and perhaps the lunar silence that followed was what persuaded him, finally, that he’d better relent a little. He asked the students to suggest a book that they wanted to read. All but unanimously they picked Toni Morrison’s Beloved, which Yates professed to like all right.

  * * *

  Toward the end of Yates’s semester as chair writer—on December 20, 1990, to be exact—he and a few others gathered at Tim Parrish’s house to watch the Seinfeld episode based on Yates’s dinner with Larry David five years before. Monica had watched the show’s taping and thought her father might get a kick out of it. The Yates character—a great but neglected writer called “Alton Benes,” also Elaine’s father—was played by an imposing stone-faced actor named Lawrence Tierney, known for his gruff gangster roles. In this episode, titled “The Jacket,” Elaine begs her friends Jerry and George to have dinner with her and her father: “I need a buffer,” she says. The evening is a disaster. Elaine is late, and Jerry and George are forced to make conversation with the dour Benes, who greets them with a coughing fit and scowls at their nonalcoholic beverages. “Which one’s the funny guy?” he asks, and when George indicates Jerry, Benes fixes him with a baleful look and says, “We had a funny guy with us in Korea. Tail gunner. They blew his brains out all over the Pacific.” Jerry escapes to the bathroom, and George unctuously remarks that he really enjoyed Benes’s novel Fair Game. “Drivel!” says Benes. “Well, maybe some parts,” George concedes uncomfortably, and Benes snaps “What parts?”—after which George pleads a phone call and joins Jerry in the bathroom, where the desperate men discuss their predicament (“How could she leave us alone with this lunatic?”). At last Elaine arrives, and as the four prepare to go to dinner, Jerry turns his expensive new suede jacket inside out so it won’t be ruined by the snow. Elaine’s father sees the jacket’s candy-striped lining and stops Jerry at the door: “You’re not walking down the street with me and my daughter dressed like that,” he growls. “That’s for damn sure.” The terrified Jerry reverses the lining, and the jacket is ruined.

  When the show was over, Yates sat smacking his lips. “Well,” he said. “What’d you think?” Sensing Yates’s chagrin throughout, the others had tried not to laugh, and now they could see how “scalded” he looked. “Well,” somebody broke the silence, “it was kind of funny, Dick.” “I’d like to kill that son of a bitch!” Yates erupted, and shambled out of the room. Later, speaking to Monica about it, he picked over details they’d gotten “wrong”: Benes had worn a broad-brimmed hat, said Yates, while he himself had never worn a hat in his life (perhaps he’d forgotten the “much-handled brown fedora” he’d affected as a young UP reporter); he’d fought in WWII, not Korea; and Monica never told stories in the present-tense à la Elaine. And so on. “I’m not that scary,” he said at last.*

  That month Yates moved out of the Strode House and stayed with the Parrishes for a week or so until he found a place of his own. He’d decided to remain in Tuscaloosa for at least as long as it took to finish his novel: The cost of living was low, and the university had arranged for him to receive a modest stipend for reading manuscripts and working with students privately—though perhaps the main reason, as Earley put it, was “because he’d made friends there who looked out for him and were kind to him.” Still, it made Yates queasy to be the object of kindness, as it churned up a lot of bitterness over being poor and relatively forgotten—a charity case, in short. While at Parrish’s house he talked obsessively about Vonnegut: a nice guy and good writer, he said, though he (Yates) was at least as good, and look at the difference in their lives! At one point he fretfully lit a cigarette while a fresh one burned in the ashtray. “Oh shit,” he said when his host reminded him. “Goddamn it. Listen, Parrish: I used to smoke five fucking packs a day, and it was great.…”

  Yates’s last
apartment was a small two-bedroom duplex on Alaca Place. He installed an L-shaped desk in the spare bedroom, bought a few other derelict scraps of furniture from the Salvation Army, and arranged his daughters’ photos on the wall. The other bit of decoration was a quote from Adlai Stevenson that he taped over his desk (he was considering it as an epigraph to Uncertain Times): “Americans have always assumed, subconsciously, that every story will have a happy ending.” Mark Costello, who succeeded Yates as the fiction chair writer, remarked with amazement that the dark little bungalow was “even more grim than Boston”: “It was as if Dick’s indifference to his surroundings was catching up with him. I had to remind myself that Dick didn’t care, because otherwise the place depressed me. I couldn’t stay there. I had to get out.”

  Yates’s health had improved over the past few months: What with oxygen and steady care, his color was better and he seemed a bit stronger. The ordeal of looking after him, though, had been of such Sisyphean proportions that one wondered what would become of him in the absence of a coordinated, pluralistic effort. What anyone in Yates’s condition needed, at the very least, was a full-time nurse: There were oxygen tanks to replace, meals to provide (for a man who often neglected to eat), and the constant possibility he’d get sick and require immediate medical attention. Graduate students such as Earley, Parrish, and J. R. Jones continued to invite Yates over and visit from time to time, while Ron Sielenski and Shelley Hippler (his “research assistants” as chair writer)* cleaned his apartment and ran the odd errand; but Yates’s main caretaker was a rough-hewn student/car-mechanic named Dan Childress. “Dan was closest to Dick in temperament,” Tim Parrish observed. “Both became isolated from women and other people, and both were conflicted about their writing. It was a real kinship. Dick was a hero to Dan—he loved the man and took good care of him.”

  Among Childress’s self-assumed duties was to check the oxygen level of Yates’s tanks, since Yates himself almost never remembered to do so; when the time came, Childress would drive to a strip mall in the suburb of Northport and pick up replacement tanks at the medical supply store. No matter how vigilant he tried to be, though, there were days when he’d find Yates blue-lipped and gasping, too disoriented to speak or even listen unless the young man looked him straight in the eye and yelled his words in order to “get them in there.” Again and again he took Yates back to the hospital, and to this day Childress bitterly maintains that “the VA killed him”: “They treated everyone like shit. The waits, even with an appointment, were hours long.” One day Yates ran out of oxygen by the time Childress wheeled him into the examination room, and when Yates began to hiss at an orderly for help, the man said, “You need to calm down. You won’t get anything until you act right.” Yates continued to gasp and flail in a furious panic, while the man pointedly ignored him; finally Childress spotted an oxygen tank mounted on the wall and helped himself. “Shut the fuck up, Dick,” he said soothingly as he fitted the mask over his face.

  Yates had never cooked for himself and wasn’t about to start now, and rather than go to the exhausting bother of leaving his apartment for lunch or dinner, he’d often dispense with eating. Childress reminded him that he could get a free lunch at the nearby senior center, but Yates refused. Finally Childress arranged for a friend named John Dobson, who delivered pizzas at night, to become a “fictitious box-lunch driver”—that is, to deliver daily lunches to Yates as if it were part of Dobson’s regular job or grad-student duties. The meals came from a lunch counter called Mama Jewel’s, which specialized in fatty Southern dishes that were cheap but tasty—a meat and three vegetables for less than four dollars. Yates never questioned or complained about the arrangement.

  He wanted more independence, though, and finally asked Childress to get him a car (“the cheapest you can find”). For seven hundred dollars the young man found a rusty reddish Mazda of early-seventies vintage that was in good mechanical shape, though rather too small for its owner’s sprawling frame. As a driver Yates soon became a familiar sight in Tuscaloosa: a gaunt whiskered old man hunched over the wheel of his tiny car, a cigarette smoldering in one fist while the other clasped an oxygen mask to his face—“a bomb on wheels” as one student put it. The car had a cranky shift box and no power steering, and when Yates’s strength failed he’d pop over curbs and drift into the wrong lane and always, always park awry (lane-parked in a parallel space or vice versa) at the Quik Snak, where he took to eating breakfast most mornings. Childress, who kept the car in running order, considered disabling it before Yates killed himself—though already the locals seemed to be adjusting, automatically making way whenever the telltale Mazda came tooling into their ken. As ever, too, strangers rallied to help Yates: Now that he was drinking beer again (why not?) he’d drive to a particular convenience store where the clerks would carry a case of Heineken out to his car—or else wave him away, whereupon Yates would realize it was Sunday, the goddamn blue laws, and he’d have to borrow beer from Childress or one of the others. Whatever his errand, Yates was always exhausted by the time he got back to Alaca Place, sitting forlornly in his car for an hour or so before he could muster the strength to stagger back to his house.

  It had been a long time since Yates was part of the lively social atmosphere of a small-town academic community, and now that he was no longer chair writer he tried to make the most of it. Among the seven professors and sixty graduate students in the writing program, there were as many as four gatherings a week—readings, receptions, raucous parties—where Yates was treated as the venerable fixture he was. For Yates it was an alternative to drinking alone on Alaca Place, though he didn’t seem to enjoy himself much. At student parties, particularly, the breathless man could hardly hear himself speak over the blaring music (the Ramones and such, whose appeal baffled Yates), nor could he participate in the drunken croquet games on the lawn. Mostly he sat watching with a vaguely pleased-but-puzzled look, and would wince with the effort of hearing the odd solicitous remark. When the Starbucks came to a party, as rarely happened, Yates would be overjoyed at the sight of people his own age. Still, he liked to think he belonged among the younger set, and when Parrish failed to invite him to a big Halloween party Yates was hurt. “Look, if you don’t want me to come to your house, just say so!” he huffed, as Parrish tried to explain that such a party was apt to get, well, pretty out of control. In the end Yates showed up in his usual tweed and khakis, and when he spotted Tony Earley he began mournfully shaking his head: “Oh—my—God…” Twin Peaks was big at the time, and Earley had come to the party as the corpse of Laura Palmer, wearing a wig, lingerie, and clear plastic wrapping. “I don’t get it,” Yates said whenever someone tried to explain.

  He preferred smaller gatherings, and since he didn’t own a TV he was often invited to people’s houses to watch something of particular interest. Yates was delighted by a documentary about RFK’s standoff with George Wallace in 1963, and excitedly pointed and coughed at the screen whenever he recognized one of his old Justice Department colleagues. When he asked J. R. Jones if he’d ever heard of an actor named Joe Pesci—who held the option to Disturbing the Peace—Jones invited him over to watch Raging Bull; Yates found the movie excellent, and wondered who this guy “Martin Scorsese” was. For the most part, though, Yates’s hatred of the movies remained intact to the end. Childress was at least as passionate a buff as Larry in Los Angeles, and like Larry he tried coaxing Yates into watching with him. Finally Yates thought of a movie he’d always wanted to see, Kubrick’s Lolita, but after the first twenty minutes he told Childress to turn it off. A travesty, he said.

  All this, of course, was but a fleeting distraction from Yates’s ultimate concern. “Why aren’t you writing?” he’d hector Childress and the others—or, if a given story was already written (and set in type), “Why aren’t you revising this? You should be constantly revising!” Nothing was finished in Yates’s eyes, not even his own best work: “How could I improve it?” he’d fire back, rather than accept a simple complim
ent, or else he’d point to some flaw that he himself had discovered post facto, to his everlasting chagrin (e.g., the same meal served twice in Revolutionary Road). Such zeal had the same effect on Childress as on Monica two years before—he began to realize that if this was what a true vocation involved, then perhaps he should consider something else. In fact five years had passed since Childress had written the one story he was somewhat proud of, and Yates was forever harassing him to improve it. And “harassing” was pretty much the mot juste. Yates appeared to be entering a manic phase when Parrish sought his advice about a bleak story titled “Exterminator,” about a man whose common-law wife leaves him to go live in a trailer with another man who beats her. “Now this scene here,” Yates panted, getting louder and louder, “it needs squalor. More squalor!” “What you’re saying, Dick, is that it needs ‘squalor’?” “SQUALOR!” (“I realized he was exactly right,” said Parrish. “He’d put his finger on it.”)

  Yates had mellowed as a parent, at least, particularly toward his beloved Gina. Whatever she did was all right by him, even if it meant relinquishing his dream of sending her to Harvard (after a pleasant summer vacation in Vancouver, she decided to go to the University of British Columbia). She was the last pretty girl in Yates’s life, and he acted toward her like a kind of platonic suitor—funny and affectionate and quietly wise. He always enclosed a loving note with his checks (“I would rather spend an hour on the phone with you than be elected by a landslide”), and approved of her future husband Chad in absentia because, he said, she’d become a warmer person for knowing him. The transformative effects of love were such that Yates didn’t even object to the tattoo (a flower) Gina showed him on the back of her leg; indeed he seemed to startle himself by finding it “cute,” laughing that if his older daughters had done as much he’d have “hit the ceiling.” When Gina came to Tuscaloosa, Yates rebuffed Childress’s offer to show her around. “Nah, you’re a dangerous man,” he said, though the outing was to be chaperoned by Childress’s jealous girlfriend. The fact was, Yates wanted Gina all to himself, and for two weeks they happily chatted about whatever came to mind (except writing): love, sex, marriage, the way Gina liked to smoke pot when she listened to music. Yates faintly deplored the latter, and pointed out that cows piss in the fields where the stuff is grown. “Later on,” Gina recalled, “during a pause in a totally different conversation, Dad says, ‘You know who else lives in those marijuana fields?’ And I said, ‘Who?’ ‘Marijuana rats,’ he said sternly. ‘Those little bastards live to piss!’”