A Tragic Honesty (57 page)

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.”

Yates would have shaken his head and sighed,
For Christ's sake, Kittredge
; for him there were no “possibilities” beyond the necessary craftsmanship of depicting “apparent reality” in all its intricacy, and people who ignored the rules were phonies—“chessmasters,” maybe, but not writers. Toward Coover and his coterie Yates maintained a more or less civil distance; whenever he was tempted to register some kind of aesthetic demurral, he tended to preface it with a phrase like “Well, I'm just a dumb guy, but I think…” In
The Easter Parade,
though, he channeled his frustration through the Yates-like Jack Flanders, a “traditional” poet who accuses his experimental colleague “Krueger” of having “thrown everything overboard”: “His favorite critical adjective is ‘audacious.' Some kid'll get stoned on pot and scribble out the first thing that comes into his head, and Krueger'll say ‘Mm, that's a very audacious line.'”

The political concomitant of all this “subversive” writing was no less distasteful to Yates. The Workshop to which he returned in 1966 was, as Robert Lehrman described it, “a seething mix of creative ferment and rage about the Vietnam War.” A number of students had sought refuge from the draft by enrolling in the program, and teachers such as Vonnegut expressed solidarity by refusing to flunk anyone even if they never wrote a word. Director George Starbuck insisted on being arrested with a number of Workshop students who'd protested CIA recruitment by blocking the entrance to the student union. Yates's rather paradoxical liberalism produced a complex but characteristic response: He opposed the war, but even more adamantly opposed the counterculture. He loathed the shaggy incivility of the protesters (whom he privately called “faggots” and worse) and was outraged by their tendency to blame the war on the soldiers. In
Young Hearts Crying,
Davenport's response to a popular mock–recruitment poster (JOIN THE ARMY/VISIT EXOTIC PLACES/ AND KILL PEOPLE) was also Yates's: “And I mean what kind of horseshit is that?… Soldiers are the
victims
of wars; everybody knows that.” But any number of people at Iowa disagreed: Soldiers
are
to blame, they argued, since they might have chosen to be conscientious objectors rather than murderers—to which Yates would respond, in effect, that one couldn't expect a bunch of naive, patriotic kids to be so
enlightened
. (Martha Speer sympathized with such a view: “I myself had enlisted in a hopeless cause: Richard Yates.”) Yates thought the general disorder of the counterculture—ideological and otherwise—threatened the integrity of the Workshop, such as it was, and by the end of that first semester he was already casting about for openings at other, less radicalized universities.