A Tragic Honesty (2 page)

As ever, his friends and admirers wanted to help, from whatever distance they kept themselves, and perhaps none was so devoted as Andre Dubus. A few years back Dubus had been the “chair writer” at the University of Alabama, and even then it occurred to him that this would be an almost ideal sinecure for his old friend. Basically it was a lucrative four-month vacation: For $27,500 (almost seven times what Yates had gotten at the Iowa Workshop in 1964) one was expected to teach a single upper-level literature course and deliver a public reading, as well as occasionally comment on student manuscripts. The chair writer was lodged near the football stadium in a large furnished house, the Strode House, previously occupied by such distinguished writers as Russell Banks, Margaret Atwood, Wright Morris, and Dubus himself.

Dubus had likely broached the matter as early as 1985, when an ailing Yates was struggling to finish
Cold Spring Harbor
at his usual painstaking pace, having run through his latest advance—a state of affairs that, give or take a nuance or two, was status quo throughout his career. Don Hendrie, the director of the Alabama writing program and a former Iowa student, wondered even then whether Yates was well enough to take the job. He talked it over with George Starbuck, the poet, another friend from Iowa who'd retired to Alabama after the onset of Parkinson's disease. Starbuck agreed with Dubus: It would be a nice thing to do for Dick, who certainly deserved whatever help he got. And so it happened that several years later, with no other salvation in sight, Yates was at last welcomed to Alabama: “The host of Yates fans in these parts,” Hendrie wrote, “are delighted that you will come and are looking forward to your stay.”

It wasn't long before Yates was figuring a way to get out of Alabama. “I don't want to die in fucking Dixie,” he told friends over the phone, amid gasps and coughing fits. Certainly he wasn't expected to like it in the South. Never mind the eloquent speeches he'd written for Robert Kennedy at the height of the civil rights movement—Yates was a New Yorker, and almost anywhere else was what his old friend Vonnegut called “up the river.” Yates had spent a lot of his adult life up the river, sometimes by choice as well as necessity, but in the end he'd always planned to come home. Nevertheless, when his chair semester ended at Alabama he moved into a cheap apartment near campus and, while the many months went by, gave no sign of leaving. Said Tony Earley, “We were touched that Dick stayed in Tuscaloosa because he'd made friends there who looked out for him and were kind to him. Still, there was a sense of sadness that he'd ended up living among grad students who'd been strangers only six months before—this writer who'd once been considered on a level with Styron and Cheever.” That said, the main reason Yates stayed was that he simply couldn't afford to leave. Not yet, anyway. And this was another incentive to finish the book he'd been working on for six years, with whatever energy he could still muster. It was a novel titled
Uncertain Times,
based on his Kennedy experience, which just might prove a salable subject.

*   *   *

Around noon on November 7, 1992, Allen Wier was informed of Yates's death at the Birmingham VA hospital a few hours earlier. Wier was director of the Alabama writing program by then, and he must have seemed as good a person to call as any. He was an admirer of Yates's work, of course, but also felt a kind of protective fondness for the man—which might explain why he can't remember who called him that day with the bad news. Amid the shock and pathos of the moment, his only definite memory is of the caller's almost hectoring urgency:
What is being done to secure Yates's manuscript?
“The implication,” Wier recalled, “was that we were remiss in not barricading Yates's apartment until the manuscript was saved. The caller had no idea how uninterested the average Tuscaloosa resident was in Yates's writing.”

Wier didn't have a key to Yates's duplex apartment on Alaca Place, but that wasn't a problem since Yates hadn't had one either (he just kept losing it, so why bother?). The fact that Yates's apartment was always unlocked was widely known among people who also knew there wasn't much to steal, and to whom it would never occur to intrude except to offer help. Nor would any self-respecting burglar be likely to linger on Alaca Place, a brief stretch of road with a series of compact semidetached red-brick bungalows on either side, where graduate students and the odd retiree lived. Yates's unit was the last of a chain where the street ended in a cul-de-sac.

Yates tended to tidy up for visitors, which usually meant putting things in their proper piles and more or less clearing the floor of debris, but he wasn't much for detailed housekeeping. Friends who'd seen the inside of his apartments in New York, Boston, Los Angeles—anywhere he'd lived as a bachelor—remember the arc of cockroach carcasses around his desk (casually stamped as he swiveled to and fro in his chair), as well as the curtains of whatever color turned grayish brown with dust and cigarette smoke, the one filthy sponge in the kitchen, and so on. Yates had been a very sick man when he left for the hospital in Birmingham, but he probably hadn't expected to die after minor surgery for a hernia; in any case he hadn't bothered to tidy up before he left. “There was a trail of wadded Kleenex all over the floor,” said Wier, “like Hansel and Gretel's bread crumbs.” There was also a shirt box full of pennies, nickels, and a few dimes—no quarters, as Yates had used those to buy the
New York Times
—which overflowed onto the floor amid the Kleenex: about two hundred dollars' worth in all (his daughters counted it later). There were a few pieces of vinyl and chrome furniture with the stuffing coming out, most of it bought at the Salvation Army. Nothing in the kitchen but a jar of mustard and a few empty bottles of Heineken. And several books scattered over every surface throughout the five small rooms, as if Yates had opened them one after the other but soon lost interest and let them drop.

Wier followed a skein of surgical tubing into the bedroom—to a large oxygen tank at the foot of an unmade bed. He searched the closet for a manuscript and was struck by Yates's wardrobe: two identical herringbone tweed jackets, three or four identical pairs of khaki pants, and several identical blue button-down shirts; a few pairs of size 10½ Brooks Brothers black shoes and two pairs of so-called desert boots—ankle-high, sand-colored, crepe-soled suede shoes popular in the fifties and sixties. There was also a stack of five or six sets of slate blue bedsheets, still in their store wrapping; apparently Yates had just put down a new set whenever the old ones got dirty. Finally there was a pile of Jiffy mailing envelopes preaddressed to the pharmaceutical company where Yates got his medication (a tranquilizer and the anticonvulsant Tegretol for seizures and mania). But no manuscript. For a while Wier kept looking and finally went to get help.

By the time he came back with a couple of graduate students, Wier's heart had begun to sink, fraught with the implications of what he'd seen. Yates's place seemed part of some bleak motel: There was nothing that smacked of the personal except for photographs of his three daughters—carefully arranged on an otherwise blank wall—and an L-shaped desk with several sharpened pencils and a large cigarette burn. Apart from an old Mazda rusting in the sun, the only thing of value was an Olivetti typewriter, its owner's manual wrapped in the original plastic. But still no sign of Yates's novel.

“Not much for one of the twentieth century's greatest writers,” said Wier. “Doesn't seem right.”

They were loading a pickup truck with Yates's belongings, such as they were, when Wier had a little epiphany. Suddenly he knew, he was sure, where he'd find
Uncertain Times
. He walked into the kitchen, opened the freezer, and there it was: at least four hundred pages in a box, and on the last page was written, in proud capitals, “END.” Wier read no further (Yates wouldn't have liked that), but just held the manuscript and savored his own exaltation: In that freezer, that poor man's fireproof safe, he'd found the one thing that mattered to Richard Yates.

CHAPTER ONE

The Caliche Road: 1926-1939

If the prerequisite of any great writer's life is an unhappy childhood, then Richard Yates was especially blessed. It was not something he liked to talk about as an adult except in the most oblique terms. Once, as he walked past one of his many childhood apartments in Greenwich Village, he pointed to the iron bars on the window and remarked to a friend, “My little legs stuck out of those bars and I used to kick the bricks—kick, kick, kick…” If pressed, he might explain that he was sitting alone in the dark, staring outside and waiting for his mother to come home. And if he was drunk and sad enough, he might talk about his mother's alcoholism, or her involvement with strange men; sometimes he'd even say that he hated her. But that sort of thing was rare.

Yates aspired to a high standard of decorum both in art and life. A passage he cut from an early draft of his story “A Natural Girl,” has the Yates-like protagonist David Clark announce to his young wife, “I must've had the most fucked-up childhood in American history. I've told you a lot about my parents and all that. But I've always held back. I've never gotten down to the pain of it. I've been hiding and pretending all my life.” It's easy to see why Yates cut this. First of all, it doesn't quite ring true in terms of the character (as Yates liked to challenge his students, “Would that character say that? I don't think so”), but also David Clark's damaged psyche can be suggested in far more satisfying aesthetic terms—for example, his willingness to wear his hair “in the manner of the actress Jane Fonda” because he thinks his wife will like it that way. Such details objectify the matter nicely, and no mention need be made of the character's fucked-up childhood. And so in life Yates contented himself, when sober and at his best, with the image of a barred window: “Kick, kick, kick…” He knew that direct explication rarely told the whole truth, and above all he was determined to be truthful. And one of the essential truths of Yates's childhood—of his whole life, perhaps—is that he loved and admired his mother at least as much as he later claimed to despise her. She was a source of pain he never could evade, though writing about her helped.

She was born in Greenville, Ohio, the seat of Darke County (she later spelled
Darke
without the
e,
perhaps by way of suggesting a general benightedness). Greenville, in the far western part of the state near the Indiana border, was a town of some five thousand souls in the late nineteenth century, and to this day preserves some of its frontier ethos. Annie Oakley is and will always be the town's favorite daughter—she joined Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in 1885, six years before Yates's mother was born—and one may attend the annual “Annie Oakley Days” festival there, or see the many local examples of antique steam-driven farm machinery, or visit the site where the Treaty of Greenville was signed once the Indians were subdued and this outpost secured in the name of progress. Progress meant farms and schools and Main Street merchants, and of course churches: By 1875 the citizenry was divided among eight Protestant churches and one Catholic. It was a world perhaps best evoked in the pages of
Winesburg, Ohio
: “Men labored too hard and were too tired to read. In them was no desire for words printed upon paper. As they worked in the field, vague, half-formed thoughts took possession of them. They believed in God and in God's power to control their lives.”

Yates's grandfather, Amos Bigelow Maurer, was one of sixteen children born to German immigrants, Henry and Julia Ann (Bigler) Maurer. Amos was twenty-two in 1871, when he left the hamlet of Bradford for a session of schooling in Greenville, about ten miles away. He planned to clerk for a dry-goods merchant that summer, but first he needed to perfect his penmanship, the better to write out orders and receipts with a credible flourish. His teacher in Greenville was Fannie Hatch Walden, and her own penmanship was impeccable—full of ornate curlicues and so forth, such that the sense of what she wrote was liable to be lost amid the finery, which was just as well. At any rate she subsequently corresponded with her favorite pupil and “dear friend Mr. Maurer,” who in turn did his tremulous best to emulate Miss Walden's skill. With a well-meaning travesty of loops and swirls, he wrote her from such towns as Minster, where he worked at a private auction on behalf of his employer, Mr. Sharpe: “He says I am the best clerk for a beginner that he ever seen. I was in the store until ten o'clock, sold about fourty dollars worth. I have learned a great deal in the way of dry goods.” But the Minster letter ends on a doleful note. “I don't like this town a bit. Because the people are all German,” Amos explained, without detectable irony, and Fannie replied: “I should like to have seen you when you sold the first yard of goods. Would it not be nice if you could be a clerk for Mr. Sharpe a while and do so well. After a while be clerk for yourself.” The two had been corresponding for more than a year before they attained this level of intimacy.

In October 1873 the hand of Providence pressed them together at last; with the end of their long courtship in sight, the letters suggest the kind of life they envisioned in the heart of Darke County. Fannie, but a week away from moving out of Widow Adams's boarding house on northeast Main Street, described a funeral she'd attended for one of the more venerable citizens of nearby Union: “[He] was buried in the honors of the Odd Fellows last Tuesday his name was McFeely and there were five different lodges here. His remains were conveyed to the cemetery in the new hearse which we seen at the fair.” Such were the rewards of a busy life devoted to faith, family, and friends—five lodges!—and Amos was as anxious to get on with it as Fannie. He wrote her a prenuptial poem to this effect: “I know thine's no worldly heart,” it began accurately, then went on a bit and ended with,