A Tragic Honesty (88 page)

*   *   *

Yates was heartily sick of living off Milch. A university placement service had shopped his résumé all over the country, but apart from a few nibbles, “nobody would touch him” as Monica Yates put it. Finally he called the director of the USC Masters of Professional Writing program, James Ragan, and laid it on the line: His daughter had come to live with him, Yates said, and he “want[ed] to give her stability”; he'd take anything the man could give him. As it happened Ragan had nothing, but such was his admiration for Yates—mixed with pity, perhaps—that he offered a half course for the spring 1989 semester, paid out of Ragan's own budget, with a full course to follow if all went well. That was the end of the Milch money.

For a while Yates rallied, endearing himself to students and faculty alike with his grim, almost miraculous resolve to overcome his decrepitude. He was so determined to wean himself from Milch that, rather than rely on Larry for transportation, he attempted (once) to take a bus to campus—a “disaster,” Yates reported. Before long a protective network of students had formed to drive him to class or the grocery store or wherever he wanted to go. He also befriended Ragan, who often invited Yates to his home and let him smoke as much as he wanted. One night the two were having dinner at the faculty center, when Ragan noticed that Yates's face had turned blueish and blankly helpless. Ragan administered an inexpert Heimlich, but only a bit of food came up; by the time the ambulance arrived Yates looked about to expire. Ragan followed him to the emergency room and anxiously awaited the verdict: “I thought Dick had met the same fate as Tennessee Williams,” he recalled, “and on
my
watch.” After half an hour or so, Yates emerged smiling and insisted on teaching his class that night. As they taxied back to campus, Yates remarked, “I kept thinking of Tennessee Williams”—and Ragan laughed. Yates gave him a bitter look: “What the hell are you laughing about? Williams choked to
death
!”

Sheer desperation was the only thing that kept Yates going. He was tired, anxious, and broke, in no condition either to teach or write at anything like his old level, yet the only alternative was death. His students' work was mostly bad, and Yates couldn't think of anything to say about it; he began to take double doses of tranquilizers just to get through his classes, and soon his mind began to slip. He became more obsessed than ever by his debt to Milch, and amid a spell of increasingly odd behavior he wrote the man a note and hand-delivered it to his wife, who looked it over and smiled—a good sign, Yates thought. (When asked about this, Milch quoted Robert Penn Warren: “‘Some foolishness a man is due to forget.'”) Monica was horrified by the change in her father: He began to giggle and stare at her; he stopped sleeping and talked incessantly. “How am I ‘not right'?” he demanded. “What's wrong with me? What d'you mean I'm
crazy
? What's
crazy
about this?” One night she woke up and found him standing in her room wearing a raincoat, frantically pushing a vacuum cleaner and saying he couldn't work it—what could he do—? Monica left the apartment and checked into a Holiday Inn (“I had to get some sleep”), but next morning she returned and insisted they go to the hospital. At length Yates seemed to agree, but once they arrived he pretended that nothing was wrong, and responded with fluent disdain to such questions as “What year is it?” and “Who's the president?” Faced with the prospect of taking the deranged man home, Monica began to cry, and Yates went berserk: “What're you gonna do,
cry
now?
What's your problem?
” he yelled over and over. The doctors assumed that he was a danger to others and hustled him off to the locked psychiatric ward for a mandatory thirty days. Monica found him “drooling and bleary-eyed” when she visited, and was so unnerved by the whole business that she began seeing a VA therapist herself. Within a week or so, she said a sad good-bye to her father and moved to a place of her own in Venice Beach.

On his release in April, Yates was gratified to learn that Ragan had gladly kept his job open for however long it took to recover from his latest bout of “pneumonia.” Meanwhile Yates called Don Hendrie at the University of Alabama and expressed his strong desire to occupy the Strode House as soon as possible. The best Hendrie could do was fall 1990, but at least it gave Yates something to look forward to.

Around this time his old friend Barrett Prettyman paid a visit, and found Yates pleasant, if somewhat chastened and faded. Yates hit it off with Prettyman's companion, Noreen McGuire, and after a fairly jolly brunch he put his arm around her as they walked back to the car—affectionately, but also because he needed support. Along the way Yates bent down to pat a dog and almost toppled over. He seemed frustrated by his frailty and spoke openly of dying: He wasn't so much afraid as he was sad—he still had a number of projects to finish, and wanted to be closer to his daughters. Back at his apartment, his friends noticed that he kept his front door unlocked, and Yates explained that he didn't have keys as he'd only lose them. Wasn't he afraid of thieves? “Nah, if they break in, they won't steal this,” said Yates, indicating his manuscript and rickety manual typewriter. Indeed, there was little else to steal.

That summer the Vintage reprints of Yates's three best books were published amid a small flurry of acclaim. David Streitfeld interviewed him for the short-lived celebrity magazine
Fame,
while Elizabeth Venant wrote a long feature article for the Sunday
Los Angeles Times
. Both reporters seemed aghast to find Yates in such straitened circumstances, and a common indignant theme of their stories (“The Great Unknown” and “A Fresh Twist in the Road”) was the bewildering extent to which a writer of Yates's stature had been forgotten, the awful toll such neglect had taken. “It's a pretty bad time,” Yates admitted to Streitfeld, in a voice the latter described as “thick and furry, steeped in tobacco and Jim Beam.” In both interviews Yates made a point of mentioning that he was on the wagon—he took it for granted they'd heard he was a drunk—though he was hardly self-congratulatory about it. “I was more affable when I was drinking,” he told Venant. “Now I'm sort of shrunk into myself from the effort to keep from drinking.” Whatever the subject, Yates responded with the same flat, almost drab candor, refusing to glamorize either his life or work, past or present. “I've been in and out of bughouses, yes,” he said, when Streitfeld wondered about the recurrence of madness in his fiction, and for the same reason Venant inquired about his childhood: “Most people looking back believe their childhood was more poignant than anyone else's,” Yates replied. “So I won't compete for the poignancy prize. My parents were decent people. My childhood was OK.”

*   *   *

In September, Yates's old friend Seymour Krim, ill with heart disease and related problems, took his own life with the help of instructions from the Hemlock Society. A week before, he'd mailed a last wave of postcards to friends, explaining that he'd been sick and expressing his affection one last time before “checking out.” In recent years, whenever he went to New York, Yates had visited Krim, and was well aware of the man's deteriorating health. Despite their past disputes on the subject, Yates wasn't at all disposed to characterize his friend's suicide as “self-indulgent”; he thought it a commendable end to an intolerable situation. “Seymour Krim was a champion,” Yates wrote for the memorial service at the Village Gate. “[He] gave so much of his energy helping other writers, in any number of crucial ways, that nobody will ever know how many of us are indebted to him … but we have one proud and honorable thing in common: Seymour Krim was a friend of ours.” One year later Yates would have the satisfaction of outliving a very different kind of friend, Anatole Broyard.

A year that began with poverty and madness was ending on a decidedly upbeat note. Ever since moving his list to Houghton-Mifflin, Sam Lawrence had been negotiating to buy out Yates's contract for
Uncertain Times,
and in December he was finally able to offer his friend a two-book deal providing a fresh advance and thirty-three monthly payments. Elizabeth Venant of the
Los Angeles Times
paid Yates a “return visit” at the end of 1989, and cheerfully reported the “lucky break” that would enable him to quit teaching for several months and devote all his time to finishing his novel. “
Uncertain Times
is scheduled for publication in the spring,” Venant concluded, “and perhaps for Yates, times will be uncertain no more.”

Indeed, it was shaping up to be a banner year. Also that December, Yates received a flattering letter from a woman in New York named Susan Braudy, who'd just optioned
The Easter Parade,
which she planned to adapt herself for television. A novelist and former Warner Brothers vice president, Braudy was well connected in the industry and had an uncommon degree of enthusiasm for the project at hand (which in retrospect she calls “a labor of love and desperation”). As she wrote Yates, “The book was first given to me by Paul Schrader who wrote
Taxi Driver,
the movie, among other things. He told me what a major work it was, advised me to stay home from work for a day to read it and have a full cry which I did.” Then a few years later Braudy was watching Woody Allen's
Hannah and Her Sisters
when she noticed Yates's novel mentioned in one scene: “That's my favorite book!” she blurted out in the theater. She was so enthused that she wrote Woody Allen a letter praising both the movie and his taste in fiction; Allen replied that he knew little about Yates but loved his “clean prose and way of telling a story.” That same year, in fact, Allen had remarked in the
New York Times
that he loved books about the “problems and strengths of women,” and therefore “couldn't wait to get [his] hands on … the Richard Yates novel,
The Easter Parade
.” Finally, in 1989, Braudy wrote Allen again to let him know she'd optioned the book and would appreciate any help or advice; Allen replied with a gracious note that Braudy enclosed for Yates's perusal: “I'm delighted to hear you are planning to dramatize ‘Easter Parade,'” Allen wrote in part. “I called [actress] Dianne Wiest and told her about it and you can feel free to call her.… She hasn't read the book, but I told her how wonderful it is and that you were serious about a high quality presentation of it.” Yates was elated by Woody Allen's interest, and promptly followed-up with a call to Bruce Ricker, a lawyer and independent filmmaker whom Yates had met through Krim. Ricker happened to be acquainted with Wiest, and wrote her that “Woody Allen [had] highly recommend[ed]” her for a part in
The Easter Parade,
a copy of which he enclosed. Susan Braudy had already done as much, and may have been a bit piqued by Yates's unsolicited initiative; in any case she eventually got in touch with her favorite author by phone—the beginning of a very curious chapter in both their lives.

For the rest of his time in Los Angeles, Yates hardly left his apartment except for weekly dinners with Monica. Free until August to do nothing but write, he hoped to finish his novel and perhaps get started on the next. But willpower alone wasn't enough anymore, and every day the work got harder. Meanwhile his manner was becoming odd again, and his daughter simply couldn't bear it. “What do you mean my
voice
sounds funny?” he'd ask when she refused to meet him for dinner, and sometimes he'd try to make a joke about it: “You think FDR's daughter would refuse to have dinner with him because
his
voice sounded funny?” Monica found such humor “forced and strange,” and the more Yates worked to put her at ease the worse he seemed. “I kept asking the VA shrink to
do
something,” she recalled, “make him right again the way Burr had always been able to. But it wasn't his mind or the meds this time, it was hypoxia, and the doctors should have known that even if they weren't pulmonologists.”

In his daughter's absence Yates found solace where he could. “Dick was losing touch with reality toward the end,” said Milch. “And one did what one could just to sit and hold his hand. And there was a bit of grace that came to him and me in that—no illusions or retributions involved. But then that haunted look would come back in his eyes and it would be time to go.”

*   *   *

As he was wheeled off the plane in Birmingham, one of the few signs of life Yates showed was a flicker of embarrassment as alarmed graduate students hustled him out to a car and drove to the hospital, where a pulmonologist determined that Yates could no longer endure air travel, or for that matter the ordinary demands of daily life, without oxygen tanks. “Is he going to die?” a frantic Monica asked the doctor over the phone. “How long does he have?” The doctor (“a prick”) replied that he had no idea. As for Yates, he was sounding like a new man now that more oxygen was getting to his brain.

Apart from a slight acquaintance with Don Hendrie, the program director, the only people Yates knew in Tuscaloosa were George and Kathy Starbuck, the first of whom was badly debilitated by Parkinson's disease. Yates had dinner with the couple once a week, and was often compelled to summon Kathy to the hospital to deal with paperwork and other problems. Now with two invalids on her hands, the woman's good humor would occasionally flag. Once, after yet another call in the dead of night, she brought along a young friend named Mary to boost her morale and serve as a buffer of sorts; both women arrived to find Yates “damn near dead” on a gurney. After Mary left the room, Yates feebly beckoned to Starbuck. “
God,
” he gasped, “she's got great legs!”

Hendrie's assistant Tony Earley, a graduate student, was designated the “Yates Coordinator”—a job requiring tact, compassion, patience, and resourcefulness, in no particular order.
*
Yates's embarrassment at his own helplessness could often flare into anger, and as Earley put it, “One was at pains not to let Dick know how much trouble he was.” When Yates was first installed in the Strode House, Earley was mortified to find the place infested with fleas—and it was his fault! He'd let a friend with a pet wolf sleep there just before Yates's arrival. Happily the new writer-in-residence seemed oblivious to the pests popping all around him like black sparks, and Earley arranged for an exterminator to come while Yates was out teaching. A more immediate problem was how to get Yates upstairs so he could use the bathroom; Earley had a stair-chair put in, and promptly got a “vicious call” from the university physical plant about hiring an outside contractor. Then, when the chair broke down, Earley rushed over and tried to fix it himself; finally the original mechanic had to return, and Earley was berated again for fiddling with the thing. Most intriguing were the weekly logistics of getting Yates to his classroom a hundred yards away: Since Yates wouldn't accept deliberate assistance, and couldn't walk the distance without collapsing, Earley had to arrange for a member of the “Yates Task Force” to appear at the Strode House “by chance” and offer Yates a lift. “There was a constant discreet flurry around Dick to keep him going,” said Earley, “since he was dead-set against any fuss. We laughed at the predicaments we'd find ourselves in while helping Dick, but we were awed by the man himself, by his courage and resilience.” Yates was resilient enough to regard the indignities of his life with occasional humor: Lankily settling himself onto the stair-chair and grinding slowly upstairs to relieve himself, Yates would rest his cheek against a fist and with his free hand pretend to shoot himself in the head.