A Tragic Honesty (44 page)

Yates was faithful to the novel's episodic, nonlinear structure, which he tightened as much as possible with cuts, dissolves, and motifs linking discrete episodes into a symphonic whole. Perhaps the most structurally crucial sequence in the screenplay is the one leading up to its first climactic plot point, when Milton and the prepubescent Peyton climb the bell tower together. Here as elsewhere Yates evoked character and theme with precise visual economy: After Milton persuades Peyton to apologize for tormenting her sister, the screenplay indicates an immediate cut to father and daughter singing a silly song in the car, like two gleeful children involved in a successful conspiracy; then, as they climb the bell tower, they pause near the top to exchange a look that lingers, ominously, until the clappers fall with a denunciatory clamor to the tune of “Jesus Calls Us”—which we will hear again when Milton passionately kisses Peyton at her wedding, and still again when Peyton climbs the stairs (a
visual
parallel) to commit suicide. Thus Yates suggested the main thematic conflict between illicit love and convention (religious or social) without heavy-handed explication one way or the other, and used the best of Styron's material in doing so. Birds recur in the novel as symbols of flight and freedom, and so too at key points in Yates's version: Pigeons fill the screen when the bell tower clock begins to whir, and later, finally, a flock is disturbed by the fatal impact of Peyton's fall.

Add the sheer perfection of Yates's prose, and the result is a finished work of art that (contrary to his later disclaimer) may well have amounted to a great movie adapted from a great novel. “
God,
it's good,” Frankenheimer said forty years later of Yates's screenplay. “I'd
still
like to make that movie.”

*   *   *

Sheila and Yates exchanged characteristic letters, at once fond and bickering, throughout his stay in California. “At a distance in time and space of four months and 3000 miles,” she wrote, “perhaps we can lay it on the line to each other in a way that will either break the tie … or suggest a way to preserve it.” For Sheila it was a question of giving up “old, reliable tranquility” for the possibility of a greater happiness, though she realized that disaster and disillusionment were far more probable. She pointed out that he'd be better off with a “literary-type girl,” and made it clear that, if they did reunite, things would be different: “I will never—and I mean never—stay home again. Housewifery was my Remington Rand.” Also she was “appalled” at the memory of having to clean up after Yates, but knew all too well what to expect: “Judging from your little flat, and your visit out here, [you] are less likely to keep the trash down than you were in the old days.” Yates responded with a harsh letter to the effect that Sheila was “less wife than anybody [he could] think of,” but later apologized and continued to press for a reconciliation on his return.
*
By July Sheila seemed almost won over: She asked whether he'd like to settle in Danbury or the city—possibly go back to Europe, even—and as late as mid-August she signed off with, “I love you (and miss you).” Then something happened to remind her, permanently this time, that all such prospects were hopeless.

California had been a draining experience for Yates, and two weeks at Bread Loaf seemed a perfect way to relax and savor his triumph before returning to New York and his novel. Indeed, the first week of the conference went remarkably well, though it was far from relaxing. Yates found himself the most celebrated writer on the faculty, a figure of considerable romantic appeal: tall and handsome, still tan from his stint in Hollywood, the embodiment of literary glamour—looks, talent, money. Copies of
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
were snapped up by the conferencees (particularly female), many of whom also regarded Yates as the most scintillating lecturer. He discussed, variously, his experience adapting
Lie Down in Darkness,
the matter of tragic design, the influence of Conrad on Fitzgerald (the peripheral narrator, the “dying fall”), and certain postwar American novels he'd take on a “tight boat”—
The Naked and the Dead, From Here to Eternity, Catcher in the Rye
. After his lectures Yates would return trembling to Treman Cottage, the applause ringing in his ears, and try to calm himself with massive amounts of alcohol. “I should, damn it, have known how much you were giving,” a rueful John Ciardi wrote him afterward; “you were being so damned great, I guess I forgot everything but my directorial gloat over the way you were rocking the Great Hall.”

Yates's breakdown at the 1962 Bread Loaf conference became part of the permanent lore of the place, but details are sketchy at best—a lot of stale, contradictory impressions heard second and third hand from the principal witnesses, most of whom are dead. All agree that Yates was drinking too much, perhaps in an effort to mitigate the rampant pangs of mania—the exhilaration and paranoia, the sense of being stared at and discussed. Yates finally erupted into full-blown, roaring-drunk psychosis at Treman Cottage, where he seems insistently to have helped himself to other people's liquor. When challenged about it (or not), Yates went berserk and began shouting. He apparently called an older woman on the faculty, whom he liked and who liked him, an “ugly fucking battle-ax.” Ultimately he thought he was becoming the Messiah (a common delusion of mania), and legend has it he clambered onto the roof of Treman and held out his arms as though crucified. He told Grace Schulman he remembered swinging from tree branches and naming his gawking students after Christ's disciples, though it's hard to imagine someone with Yates's stamina exerting himself to that extent.

Ciardi and Dr. Irving Klompus, a guest at the conference, somehow managed to coax Yates down from the roof (or tree) and conduct him back to his room, where he was forcibly restrained and sedated. Yates was later under the impression that he'd abused Ciardi as a bad poet and dirty old man, but he appears to have made that much sense only to himself. “You can take my word for one thing,” Ciardi wrote him: “you did say some fairly hairy things to me in your room, but you weren't sore at me. There was a lot of stuff you somehow had to get out but I'll swear you were throwing it by me, not at me.” Typically at the height of his mania, Yates's speech would become a kind of rapid-fire regurgitation of (seemingly) random verbiage—hence Ciardi's impression that it “had to get out” and that it was mostly impersonal, that is, indecipherable; Yates was drunk as well as psychotic after all. In any case he remained “convulsively distraught” (as one witness put it) until the ambulance arrived; a few students stood in the doorway and watched in horror. Sam Lawrence's associate at Atlantic Monthly Press, Peter Davison, was backing out of the parking lot when he was startled by the sight of his firm's most promising author being led away in a straitjacket. It was a brilliantly sunny day.

As always, the worst came later. “After it's over I wince and wither,” the poet Robert Lowell wrote apologetically to T. S. Eliot, whom he'd berated on the phone during a “feverish” episode of mania: “The whole business has been very bruising, and it is fierce facing the pain I have caused, and humiliating [to] think that it has all happened before and that control and self-knowledge come so slowly, if at all.” And so with Yates. After Bread Loaf he found himself at Mary Fletcher Hospital in Burlington, where he became so despondent with shame that a doctor predicted he'd kill himself within two years.
*
In
Disturbing the Peace,
Wilder's response to the information that he is
not
the Messiah—rather just a man behaving oddly at Marlowe College in Vermont—may serve to evoke Yates's own devastation at such times: “That was when he started to cry, because what she said did have the ring of reality; and if this was real and all the rest was a dream, then he'd made a colossal fool of himself and everyone at Marlowe College knew it, or would know it soon.” A number of prominent writers—including the ancient Robert Frost, no less—knew that Yates had behaved like a lunatic, perhaps
was
a lunatic, to say nothing of all the students who'd admired him. John Ciardi was a generous friend, and Yates had said awful things to him; ditto the woman he'd called “an ugly fucking battle-ax.” And still that wasn't the worst of it. When Grace Schulman visited him at the hospital, she made the mistake of sharing a “recognition poem” she'd written based on Seneca's
Hercules Furens,
wherein the protagonist wakes from a spell of madness to learn he's murdered his wife and children. Yates became stricken: As would often be the case, his mania had left him with a terrible lingering delusion that he'd harmed his daughters, or
would
someday, and he felt helpless to do anything about it.

Sheila sympathized with her ex-husband's distress, but at the time she thought his problems were almost entirely alcohol related, and mostly she was exasperated. “Any hope that we can work things out as husband and wife has gone,” she wrote a few months after the breakdown, when Yates persisted in his visits to Danbury. “I have a sense that I have lost so many, many years, because I was unsure and lonely and confused.… If there's anything more you want to know, ask me, but please, by letter. When you put a thing on paper, sometimes you discover you already know the answer. Or maybe that there is no answer, which is the same thing.”

CHAPTER NINE

Uncertain Times: 1962-1964

Back in New York, Yates became one of the earliest trial patients of Dr. Nathan S. Kline, a man soon to become world renowned for his work in psychopharmacology. According to his
New York Times
obituary, Kline “revolutionalized the treatment of mental illness” by introducing the use of tranquilizers, antidepressants, and antipsychotic drugs that enabled people to lead productive lives as outpatients—people who would have been considered hopelessly insane just a few years before. Kline was thus instrumental in reducing the stigma of mental illness among a generation that continued to view it as a kind of moral weakness. “The fact that a condition is treated with medication,” he said, “somehow guarantees in the public mind that it is a genuine illness.”

Yates was delighted to learn that he suffered from something so explicable as a “chemical imbalance,” which modern science had the means to redress. No more “Sigmund fucking Freud” for him; all he had to do now was report to Kline's office on West Sixty-ninth every month or so, answer a few simple questions, and be on his way with a fresh supply of “crazy pills” as he called them. And while many creative people who suffer from mental illness (particularly manic-depressives) deplore the effects of psychotropic drugs and try to do without them, this was never the case with Yates. For an absentminded man, and a writer at that, he was remarkably diligent about taking his pills according to schedule, then coping as best he could with the slight mental dullness (and tremor and dry mouth and frequent urination) that followed. By 1974 Yates was taking as many as three different psychotropics a day, in addition to lithium.

But he wouldn't stop drinking. It was the one great caveat that every psychiatrist beginning with Kline tried futilely to enforce:
Do not mix these drugs with alcohol
. At first Yates was wary, but once he learned that no immediate calamity followed, he drank as much as ever—more, perhaps, now that his writing came harder. It was the one reliable pleasure that awaited him after a frustrating day, and most of the time he felt entitled. “He loved the idea that he was mentally ill,” said his daughter Monica, “and hated the idea he was an alcoholic”—that is, bipolar disorder
was
a bona fide illness, while alcoholism smacked of a shameful personal failing. As he saw it, he drank because he liked to, and no matter what the doctors said, he refused to concede that alcohol made his illness all but impossible to treat. Again and again he was told that even moderate drinking is ill advised when taking lithium, not to mention the other tranquilizers and anti-psychotics he sampled over the years: Such drugs compound the sedative effect of alcohol, and drinkers tend to urinate the drugs out of their system and hence render them ineffective. Needless to say, too, a drunk is less likely to take his medication as prescribed, particularly if his alcoholism is so advanced that blackouts and seizures become common. “This is what keeps your old daddy in business!” he cheerfully told a friend, dumping a handful of pills into his mouth and washing them down with a slug of bourbon.

For the time being, though, things were looking up. Paul Cubeta, the assistant director of Bread Loaf, visited Yates a month after the conference and was relieved to find him completely recovered and quite confident of staying that way. He had Guggenheim money in the bank and a bit left over from Hollywood, and soon he'd be richer than he ever thought possible: Frankenheimer had assured him that United Artists' reaction to his screenplay was “excellent”; production had yet to be definitely scheduled, and cuts would have to be made, but it seemed only a matter of time now. Meanwhile Yates was covering his bases. He continued to teach at the New School, albeit a bit more lackadaisically than before, and his old friend Verlin Cassill was “ninety-eight per cent sure” he could get Yates a better-paying job at the Iowa Workshop should the need arise.

“It hardly ever happened and it wouldn't last long,” the novel
Uncertain Times
begins, “but William Grove felt almost at peace with the world when the new year of 1963 broke over New York.”
*
This was true for Yates, too, and as a final coup before his life went off the rails again, he was chosen one of the “Ten Americans to Watch in 1963” by
Pageant
magazine. Each of these ten, the happy few, had briefly transcended the anonymity of life in the vast republic; each stood to become a dominant force in his or her field of endeavor: e.g., Romaldo Giurgola (architecture), Robert A. Good (medicine), Maxine Smith (race relations), George Grizzard (entertainment), and Richard Yates (literature)—the last of whom mentioned his humble beginnings as a copyboy for the
New York Sun
and remarked that “young writers are not necessarily ruined by Hollywood.”