A Tragic Honesty (51 page)

Accordingly Yates preferred underdogs: students who were socially inept, who were talented but hadn't found their voices yet, and who tended to be the target of mean-spirited sallies from the smart-ass contingent. “Oh c'mon, you don't really mean that!” Yates would admonish the latter, if they unfairly attacked a person's work or observation. When one of his more awkward students went on to become a well-known critic and novelist, Yates fondly reminisced how “smelly and shy” the man had been at Iowa, how others had mocked him as a crackpot. Yates lavished attention on such students, and protected them both in and out of the classroom. John Casey remembers how “furious” Yates became with him and David Plimpton for bullying their roommate (and Yates's student) Robert Lehrman: The three young men had rented a farmhouse together, but the suburban Lehrman was ill-suited to country life; he'd tag along in his loafers while the older, bigger men shot birds and turtles, ridiculing Lehrman the while. Both Casey and Plimpton were from genteel backgrounds—Casey had prepped in Switzerland and attended Harvard Law, Plimpton (like his cousin George) was the product of an illustrious New England family—and Yates considered their treatment of Lehrman a typical instance of the rich picking on the (relatively) poor. Yates let Casey know that he wouldn't stand for it.

But, as Lehrman himself remembers, it was always a student's work that mattered most: “Yates had no doubt that writing was important. Unlike some of the other writers on the faculty—Nelson Algren, for example, who was shocked that he had to actually read student work—Dick threw himself into helping us.” Yates put himself at the disposal of those who wanted to discuss writing—whether their own or others', at the Airliner or in his office—and he'd not only read their work, but cover it with scribbled commentary in his own recognizable voice. Once Lehrman wrote a demurring essay on Yates's pet concept of literary “condescension,” as it applied (or rather
didn't
apply in Lehrman's view) to Roth's
Goodbye, Columbus
; Yates's marginal notes (given below in italics) were typically prickly but amused. “‘Condescension' is not a part of the official language of criticism,” Lehrman began, “—certainly Northrop Frye would disapprove of it [
big deal
]—for good reason.… The word doesn't apply to literature [
Why not?
].… Sinclair Lewis, for example, feels superior to Babbitt [
says who?
], Flaubert had great difficulty convincing himself [
But he
did,
which is the point
] that Emma Bovary wasn't too petty to write about, and so on.” Lehrman went on to claim that writers of farce (e.g., Roth) necessarily “condescend” to their characters, and noted: “It is not that Roth satirizes the Patimkins but that at the same time he takes Neil Klugman seriously [
Right! And there goes your argument about ‘Farce'
].” And so on. Yates's good-natured sniping continued to the last page, at the bottom of which he wrote:
Okay. You finally convinced me—but it was touch and go for a while there, buddy. R. Y
. He gave the paper an A.

Actual “workshop” sessions—in which student fiction was read aloud and discussed, often viciously—were held once a week in the afternoon. Each writer on the faculty had a section of fifteen workshop students, assigned somewhat on the basis of mutual affinity: That is, if a student wrote in a purely realistic mode then he or she might be apt to sign up for Yates, and if Yates liked his or her work then he might be apt to accept the student into his section. Sometimes he'd give the person a call first. DeWitt Henry had been so “galvanized” by
Revolutionary Road
that when he left his Harvard Ph.D. program to transfer to Iowa for a continued draft deferment and time to write, he was thrilled to discover Yates among the staff and left a writing sample for him. At a dingy table in one of the Workshop Quonset huts, Yates praised “The Lord of Autumn”—then told Henry to scrap it: Too influenced by Faulkner, he said, but a talented piece of work nonetheless. Henry handed him the tentative pages of a new story, and a few days later was even more thrilled by an excited call from Yates, announcing that these pages were “the real thing” and had to be a novel. “The sword fell on my shoulder,” said Henry.

Where his students' fiction was concerned, Yates was polite if he could help it, but also emotional, blunt, and uncompromising: Either a story (a scene, a line, a word) came alive or it didn't, and he was eager to explain
why
it didn't and how (if possible) to fix it. Intellectual exercises, ideas, abstractions, didacticism, pretension, or implausibility of any kind were fatal errors. Mark Dintenfass was startled when Yates called to discuss his first three stories, and dismissed two of them as “crap”: Dintenfass was trying to write like Nabokov, Yates explained, and only Nabokov could do that; Dintenfass's
other
story, however, was about
real life,
the life he knew, and
that's
what he should be writing about. “It's the most important thing anyone ever told me as a writer,” said Dintenfass, who turned away from “fruitless experimentation” and started a novel about Jewish life in Brooklyn. Yates encouraged him to send opening chapters to Monica McCall, who eventually sold the book.

Yates could get away with calling a piece of fiction “crap” (though he'd rarely say as much unless he had some kind of compliment in store) because his goodwill was never in doubt. Flattery was bullshit; what was good for the work? “Would it
really
happen that way?” he'd expostulate. “I don't think so.” He wanted students to see the “Platonic form” of the work—its latent state of finished perfection—and this involved examining every nuance in terms of precision and truth. “Dick demonstrated the keenest eye I've ever seen for the flaw, great or small, in fiction,” said Geoffrey Clark; “and for the small telling detail that transfigures or transfixes; and for cant, cheap tricks, and especially
unfelt
fiction.” A student's ego never stood in the way of Yates's insistence that something could be improved, even if the story or novel in question had already been accepted for publication (or published). “They're rushing you,” Yates told James Alan McPherson, whose first collection
Hue and Cry
was in press at the time. “Slow down.” And he proceeded to tease through McPherson's paragraphs, pointing out all the little things that needed to be “fixed” prior to publication. “I hope this won't make you sore,” he wrote DeWitt Henry, “but I'm not too crazy about your story”—a typical preamble to an epistolary critique, both in terms of candor and modest reluctance.

If a story was a total loss, was “crap” in short, Yates would summarize the reason(s) as briefly as possible and elaborate only if challenged. And he much preferred to say he
liked
a given story, then list his various quibbles at length—e.g., “I simply can't imagine a man polishing off a whole fifth of whisky in a single drive between Philadelphia and New York. Better make it a pint”; “You have her kick off her shoes, flop on the couch, throw back her head, eyes closed, and rub her throat (hardly the gestures of a frightened girl, or even a wary one).”

Yates was more diffident during the formal workshop sessions. At the New School he'd never felt comfortable criticizing students' work in front of their peers, and amid the ruthless crucifixions of Iowa the best he could do, at times, was serve as a gentle referee. “Hm, did you really have to say that?” he'd intercede, and try to silence the more rabid critics by pointing out the better qualities of a given story, while (in accordance with workshop protocol) its reeling author would have to weather the onslaught in red-faced silence. Occasionally Yates was so startled by the carnage he'd simply withdraw into chain-smoking bemusement. His student Bill Kittredge described a session in Yates's workshop as “the most savage thing [he'd] ever witnessed”: “This guy from Spokane just got
shelled
. People were reading lines aloud from his story and everybody would laugh. Dick let it get out of hand. There were a lot of strong personalities in the class—Ivy Leaguers, New Yorkers. The guy from Spokane left town after that, and nobody ever saw him again.”

More often than not, Yates was less tolerant of such excesses. Sometimes he'd check a student with a look of baleful disapproval, slowly shaking his head (“Bill, Bill, Bill”), or else he'd let others express views that decorum forbade to himself.
“You motherfuckers wouldn't know literature if it ran you down in a car!”
shouted his student Jane Delynn in defense of a story under attack. There was a silence. “As the lady in the rear suggested—” Yates sighed approvingly. Above all he became fed-up with the condescending sarcasm of certain students, perhaps most notably David Milch. As one student recalled, “Milch was a slasher in workshops. He was part of a new wave of Ivy League students at Iowa, and some of these students were contemptuous about Iowa's casual nonacademic milieu. Milch thought Yates was a joke—too nonprofessorial, stumbling, and shy. Too conversational.” Robert Penn Warren had helped Milch get a teaching fellowship at Iowa, where he was touted as a writer of tremendous promise. At twenty-one he was brilliant, learned, and witty, and apt to make light of other students' writing. “Oh, for Christ's sake, Milch!” Yates would erupt. “Who's interested in your jokes? What do you think it feels like to be at the other end of a barb like that?” Not only did Yates object to Milch's wisecracks, but he wasn't much inclined to praise the young man's work either: Sometimes he'd begrudge Milch's (vaunted) facility for writing dialogue, but was often exhaustive in taking him to task for other lapses.

The enmity between the two doesn't call for a lot of subtle analysis. Milch was a catalogue of Yates's foremost bogeys: an unapologetically intellectual graduate of Yale who'd arrived at Iowa under the aegis of the world-famous author of
All the King's Men,
no less; a condescending young man who sneered at both students and Yates alike. Milch, for his part, deplores the arrogance of the young man he was, but points out that
all
the Workshop people, teachers as well as students, were “unfinished spirits” in one way or another: “Self-taught writers like Yates and Vonnegut who'd developed their talents outside the citadels of culture—the ‘apostolic succession' of Harvard, say: William James teaching Gertrude Stein and so on—had this
rage
against the Tradition even as it attracted them. They had an adolescent relationship with the authority of culture.” Certainly
Food Field Reporter
and Remington Rand were about as removed from the citadels as one could get; in any case Yates let himself go one night at Kenny's Bar.
“Who wouldn't want to be David Milch?”
he announced to an audience of Workshop people, on whose periphery was Milch. “He went to Yale! He graduated first in his class! Warren said he has an ear for dialogue that rivals Hemingway! And here he is
twenty-one years old
.…” It went on and on. The whole spiel, said Milch, “was a devastating encapsulization of everything pretentious and self-important.” Many years later, though, Milch would be in a nice position to get his own back.

*   *   *

For the most part, Yates chose not to socialize with his fellow faculty members, except for Cassill. “
That
many writers were never meant to be together in the same place,” he said of Bread Loaf, and so with Iowa. He never felt particularly at ease with rival authors unless they were the sort who wore their eminence lightly—“good guys” as Yates would have it. His colleague Vance Bourjaily was a good guy, modest and affable, though perhaps a bit too much of an outdoorsman for Yates's taste. The two were cordial but not close. Yates would make a point of attending the frequent parties at Bourjaily's farm (or any party to which he was asked), but if the guests were mostly faculty Yates would recede into a quiet corner where he could soak in peace.

He preferred the company of graduate students, the more down-to-earth the better. The first to accept his invitation to the Airliner was a burly Texan named Jim Crumley, and soon they were joined by others who, like Crumley, tended to be married ex-servicemen in their late twenties: Bob Lacy, Jim Whitehead, and Andre Dubus; Ted Weesner and Robin Metz also became part of the circle. After a few hours of noisy, drunken argument, one of the young men would call his wife to say they were coming over (while the others would call theirs to say they weren't), and the evening would continue until three or four in the morning.

Dubus belonged in another category—perhaps the closest thing to a soulmate Yates ever had (though both men would have cringed at the term). Dubus was a shy, plain-spoken ex-marine who became raucous and swaggering when he drank. As his third wife Peggy Rambach observed, “Andre wanted to be a tough guy. He was picked on a lot as a kid, and both he and Dick grew up in a time when men couldn't be sensitive.” The two friends would sit drinking on Dubus's porch for hours—sometimes bellowing at each other amid skirls of laughter, sometimes hushed—and Dubus got to where he could mimic Yates so perfectly that others couldn't tell them apart. Along with their temperamental affinities, both had unqualified admiration for the other's work. Within three weeks of his arrival Yates decided that Dubus was by far the most talented student at Iowa: “Most of the clowns here will never be writers,” he wrote Miller Williams, “and it's depressing to think of their getting degrees called ‘Master of Fine Arts'—Good God!—but [Dubus] is one of the very few exceptions to the rule. I haven't read much of his work—he's Verlin Cassill's student here, not mine—but I read a story he published in the
Sewanee Review
a while back that really knocked me out. He's also a fine guy, which supports my rather shaky theory that good writers tend to be good men.” Almost seven years later, when Yates left Iowa for good, he still considered Dubus the most talented student he'd ever encountered there, while in turn Dubus revered Yates as a master comparable to Chekhov.
*
As he wrote in a 1989 tribute, “Richard Yates is one of our great writers with too few readers, and no matter how many readers he finally ends up with, they will still be too few, unless there are hundreds of thousands in most nations of the world.”