A Tragic Honesty (50 page)

CHAPTER TEN

A New Yorker Discovers the Middle West: 1964-1966

Before the poet Paul Engle and others began to teach creative writing there in the mid-thirties, the University of Iowa was a minor member of the Big Ten with nothing much to recommend it other than a picturesque locale (Victorian architecture, the Iowa River winding through campus). Thirty years later, the “Workshop” was by far the most famous writing program in the country, rivaled only by its counterpart at Stanford established by Wallace Stegner, an Iowa graduate. The Workshop was composed of a hundred or so carefully selected graduate students who prided themselves on being part of a bohemian community of writers coexisting with, but remaining aloof from, the conservative bumpkins of both town and campus. “Greenwich Village West” they called it, and tried to live up to the name by smoking pot, getting drunk, and enjoying a certain amount of “free love” long before such a lifestyle was assimilated into the national counterculture. Just beneath the surface of this self-styled Arcadia, however, was a snakepit of internecine strife between poets and fiction writers, traditionalists and experimentalists, the talented and not-so-talented, the drunk and not-so-drunk, the faculty and administrators.

Yates would have preferred to stand apart from all that, or most of it anyway. He'd come to Iowa for one reason—as he liked to say (echoing Vonnegut), “The business of teaching creative writing offers solace to writers who are down on their luck.”
He
was down on his luck, and grateful for the chance to make a living, but continued to think the whole idea of “teaching” writing was ridiculous. He felt no particular solidarity with the whole noble experiment—a Community of Writers—much less its affected bohemian nonsense, though he was glad enough to know that liquor by the drink was now legal in Iowa City. And certainly he could use whatever comforts were afforded by an emancipated sexual ethos, whether he quite subscribed to it or not. As he'd written Cassill, “I must admit I'm a little leery about the idea of living in Iowa as a bachelor—what if anything does a fella do for laughs on those long winter nights out there?” Cassill replied that the night life of the town was fairly dull—“few places interesting to eat out in, even fewer to drink in”—but assured him that he'd be invited to a lot of parties, and that “a great deal of flexibility” was possible in one's private life: “That is, everyone will know what you are up to, but no one will interfere.”

Yates's arrival in Iowa was far from auspicious. His car overheated and caught fire on the way, and what few worldly possessions weren't in storage (and hence lost forever) were scorched in the mishap. Somehow he managed to be only a few minutes late to his inaugural guest lectureship, but was ill prepared and utterly cowed: “I found myself talking about Bellow,” he said later, “about whom I knew nothing. And they were writing it down!” When that ordeal was over he was conducted to his lodgings, which Cassill had found within the specified price range of eighty dollars a month or less: a drafty ramshackle Victorian mansion divided into four apartments at 317 South Capitol Street (“Turn at the sign that says ‘Save Two Cents,'” Yates would instruct visitors in a despondent drawl), where he would dwell for the next nine months with a table, bed, typewriter, and little else. One of the first things he did was write a letter to his daughter Monica, at the bottom of which he drew his signature cartoon of a sad daddy with a thought balloon above his head filled with the face of a pretty girl: “Thinking of you.”

*   *   *

Yates was a celebrity at the Workshop as soon as he arrived—many regarded
Revolutionary Road
as the most important novel written by a faculty member—and before long he became something of a legend. “I think we all wanted to be Richard Yates,” his student Robert Lacy remembered. “I know for a fact that I did. He was tall, lanky, and movie-star handsome back then, and he moved in an aura of sad, doom-haunted, F. Scott Fitzgeraldian grace. He was Gatsby and Nick Carraway and Dick Diver all rolled into one.” Gaunt and dapper and courtly, coughing mortally as he lit one cigarette after another with palsied hands, he was “everybody's idea of a writer” as David Milch put it. And for many Iowa students, learning how to
look
like a writer was at least as important as learning how to write—of course, one had to cultivate a fair amount of misery to look as “doom-haunted” as Yates, though perhaps that was a price worth paying.

Yates wasn't much comforted by the admiring eyes that followed him around. Not only was he losing faith in himself as a writer—a little worse than dying—but he'd
never
had any faith in himself as a teacher, and now he was being scrutinized by people,
intellectuals,
who took the whole business very seriously indeed. It was one thing to “teach” nice-biddy hobbyists and car-painting dreamers at the New School, another to be exposed as a fraud in the eyes of some of the brightest, most talented young writers in the country, many of whom hailed from the dreaded Ivy League. And the earliest signs seemed to indicate that Yates and the Workshop wouldn't mix. At one of his first parties he was approached by an admiring new student named Robin Metz; Yates was tipsily cordial until the young man happened to mention that he'd gone to Princeton. Yates squinted at his necktie. “What's this,” he said, flipping it into Metz's startled face, “—a fucking
club tie
?” Then, to make matters worse, the two found themselves having brunch together the next day, in a group that included Richard Baron and E. L. Doctorow (both with the Dial Press at the time), who were in town for a publishers' conference. At one point it came to light that Metz had been a student of Philip Roth at Princeton, and Yates's face darkened as Baron went on about what a
prodigy
Roth was as a teacher and a writer—the National Book Award at age twenty-six! Verlin Cassill and Vance Bourjaily heartily concurred. Then Metz (“still irked”) mentioned the tie-flipping incident of the night before, and the mortified Yates explained to the table that he didn't remember that
at all
. By the end of the brunch both men were miserable: Metz, because he'd alienated the writer he most admired on the faculty; Yates, because some Princeton snotnose had just made him look like a fool in front of his new colleagues—and for that matter he was stuck in a place where people made a
big fucking deal
out of Philip Roth, whose lack of basic human sympathy was evident on every page of his books (and who'd won the NBA at age twenty-six).
*

A week later Metz got a message to meet Yates at Donnelly's Bar. Warily, the young man arrived at the appointed time and found Yates sitting in a booth with a coterie of three or four older students he'd already picked out as drinking buddies. “There he is now,” one of them hissed. Yates sprung to his feet and shook Metz's hand: “I read your story ‘Doughboy,'” he said. “That's one fucking good story! I've wanted to meet you ever since.” Metz, a little puzzled, pointed out that they'd already met—the necktie and Philip Roth and so forth. Yates waved his hand: “Oh, well, I don't care about
that.
…”

And (beyond the heat of the moment) he
didn't,
and that was one of the things that proved a bit of a revelation to Yates's more smitten students: He cared about the
writing
—whether Hemingway's or Metz's or whosoever's—more passionately than any jargon-spouting literature professor, such that life itself was somewhat less than secondary. In the World War II–era Quonset huts where Workshop classes were held, Yates would sit on the edge of a desk with his long legs dangling, as he lovingly flipped through and finger-thumped the ragged paperbacks he taught from. His student Luke Wallin called him a “sublime, rugged presence,” and particularly looked forward to his seminar on contemporary fiction:

His lectures were like his narrative voice: gentle and careful, honest and clean and surprising. He was something to watch, with his aging good looks, his shyness (he was extremely polite to his students, almost afraid of them), and best of all his personal, thought-out views of each novel we read. He, too, had an incredible voice, expressing such pain and such love for American writing.… His views were presented in quiet, open challenge to the class, and it always amazed me how little his otherwise boisterous students would take exception and argue. His criticism reminds me most of Kazin's, about as nonacademic as one could find, and full of power. His lasting example was of a writer who had taken his tradition deeply to heart.

As his listeners at Bread Loaf had also learned, Yates had a gift for imparting his very subjective enthusiasms; he rarely if ever approached a text in any kind of systematic way, but rather pointed to a line, a detail, a bit of dialogue, and said in effect,
See?
His fixed ideas remained the same—revealing dialogue, objectification, structural integrity,
precision
—but he digressed more than ever in discussing them. The “controlled sentiment” of
Lolita
might remind him of “Guests of the Nation” or “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” and (legs softly kicking, head wagging in awe) he'd enumerate certain pertinent aspects of those stories, and perhaps others, until it was time to go. And then the following week he'd discuss an entirely different novel, as dictated by the syllabus, and
Lolita
would be forgotten unless it happened to cross his mind again for whatever reason. Such an approach would explain the rather inchoate notes that student Loree Wilson took as she tried to follow the thread of Yates's “lectures”:

The Sun Also Rises
: Pathos of the book—it's almost as if … Story of a nymphomaniac, a romantic, and an emasculated.… Book is pernicious if read the wrong way. Hemingway is not speaking—Jake Barnes is speaking.

All the King's Men
: Road company Faulkner. Melodrama is pejorative term.

Babbitt
: Can't look for grace and tightness in Sinclair Lewis. Babbitt is an accidental work of art. Worked in the 19th c. tradition. Ear for American speech. Scene—education between father and son p. 66, hilarious. Babbitt man going to pieces before our very eyes—contradictions.

Lolita
: Beautiful book—funny and tragic. N. takes such pains setting up this complicated voice of Humbert. Very first pages brilliant. A story about love—but not how Humbert loved Lolita—but the generative writer's love of Nabokov for Humbert Humbert.…

“Uncle Wiggily in Connecticut”: Eloise a type—a neurotic—standardized suburban wife (surroundings and furniture of mind).… Big action doesn't amount to much, but the little bits of dialogue—delicacy—finally make the shape of things. “Down at the Dinghy” a flimsy story … because we're told to love Boo Boo. Mistake of kite and kike is sweet and icky and sentimental.… “Teddy”: annoying damn story. Dick suspects Salinger's zen kick.

The few lines quoted above represent the whole gist, more or less, of what Yates had to say about each book; ellipses indicate either where he left a thought unfinished, or the omission of a line or two (but no more) from Wilson's original notes. What she didn't write down, of course, were all the points where he quoted from the text, as well as his various conversational glosses and digressions (“By the way, for a good example of that kind of rhetorical style you might want to read Katherine Anne Porter's ‘Flowering Judas'.…”), in the course of which he'd come up with the best of those “clean and surprising” aperçus of which Luke Wallin and others were so enamored. Finally, while students waited for him to return to the subject at hand—be it
Lolita
or
Babbitt
or whatever—Yates would abruptly stand up and announce: “I'm going to the Airliner [bar] for a martini. Would anyone care to join me?” There were no exams.

Yates's approach didn't appeal to everyone. It was true that “otherwise boisterous students” tended to defer to him, but not always because they agreed with his opinions; rather the man's extreme politeness—so anxious and unsettling at times—could turn into something else when he was put on the defensive. “Now that is fucking good writing!” Yates would exclaim after reading dialogue from
Gatsby,
say, then thrum a few pages to the next example—perhaps the part where Daisy sobs over Jay's “beautiful shirts”: “Now, if that's Daisy talking, and not Fitzgerald, we've got a great novel!”
Thrum
 … If a hand went up, and a puzzled (or cocky) student asked
why
it was so great, Yates would often get irritated, and suddenly the soft-voiced monk of literature would vanish, replaced by a hungover curmudgeon who hated show-offs. “There's Murray, squirming in his chair to tell us the news again,” Yates said of one student who (until that moment) had a tendency to talk too much, and who happened to be an Ivy Leaguer. And while Yates was compellingly reverential toward the books he loved, he became downright antic on the subject of books he loathed, and dissent was hardly encouraged. Southern students—or those such as David Milch who'd been protégés of Robert Penn Warren at Yale—would blanch at Yates's (literal) trashing of
All the King's Men
as fake, derivative, melodramatic
shit
.

“We all adored him,” said Cassill, and by “we” he meant all the people at Iowa who “got” Yates. “We found him stubborn and foolish sometimes, but he was constantly turning up with his heart in the right place.” While Yates would sometimes overexcitedly praise or damn a book, or put certain students in their place, usually he was the essence of modesty and tact. Though he didn't much like to have his convictions challenged (especially since such a response tended to have faintly mocking overtones), he often wanted to know what students thought, and would listen with an almost disconcerting intensity to any well-meant comment or question. And when a student would say something that seemed (inoffensively) “callow and absurd,” as Geoffrey Clark recalled, Yates was at his best: “[H]e'd take special pains to be gentle with you; it hurt him to inadvertently discomfit a student.… About the only things that really aroused his contempt or derision were pretension or condescension of any kind.”