A Tragic Honesty (65 page)

It would take almost three years for a somewhat recovered Yates to apologize; meanwhile he decided not to submit “Forms of Entertainment” elsewhere, and the manuscript doesn't survive.

“It was a Jekyll and Hyde thing,” Martha said of her husband's abrupt decline. “It was like something clicked in his brain: Suddenly he wasn't there anymore. He was irrational, drunk all the time, and it was willful, in-your-face drinking.” Consumed with self-loathing over his work and desperately anxious about the future, Yates began to suspect that the world was conspiring against him. Shortly after the
Esquire
contretemps, he called Styron and held the man captive for some two hours while he railed against all the people who'd let him down: friends, family, Hollywood people, Iowa people, on and on. Soon Martha became the enemy—particularly when Yates discovered a paperback on alcoholism she'd recently purchased and stashed in a drawer. “He hit the ceiling,” she recalled. “
Furious
. I couldn't deny it was to read about him; it was the first time, by default, I'd confronted him that I thought he was an alcoholic.” Many “endless conversations” followed—the long lesson in futility that Sheila had learned so thoroughly more than a decade before. As ever, Yates proved an adept, indefatigable arguer, and would
never
concede that he was an “alcoholic.” The word enraged him: Whoever used it didn't understand where the “real ‘problem'” lay.

Into this nightmare came his daughter Monica, who for fifteen years had somehow been spared the knowledge of her father's mental problems. This time he was too far gone to pull himself together for her visit, though during the daytime, at least, he was sober if morose. But night after night she'd hear him pacing the hours away and hissing abuse at his wife, the word
bitch
recurring every so often amid the general mutter. One morning she found Martha sitting in the kitchen weeping. “Why is he being so
mean
?” Monica asked, and the hollow-eyed woman said he had a “drinking problem.” By then Martha herself was so depressed that she'd stopped doing housework, and Monica tried to cheer things up by mopping floors and taking care of the baby. But mostly she stayed away on her bicycle, and when she returned to Mahopac she asked her mother about Yates's “problem.” Sheila had made it a point never to malign her ex-husband to the children (though “she
always
spoke badly of him later,” Monica points out), but this time she calmly explained that, yes, he was an alcoholic. “I am your daughter and I love you,” Monica wrote her father, “and I hereby order you to be no longer depressed or sad or feeling blue.… When you finish reading this I want you to go look at your neato wife and your little cute daughter and think of your two big daughters and be overjoyed.”

But Yates was almost beyond noticing his wife and daughter, much less deriving comfort from them. As Martha put it, “He was so self-absorbed by then he couldn't part the curtains of his own problems and relate to the world.” Determined to confront him with indisputable proof of his sickness (and also, perhaps, to have something to show a doctor when the time came), Martha prepared a list of symptoms that gives a vivid idea of what it was like to live with Yates at his worst, and why it was sometimes difficult to make a proper distinction between alcoholism and mental illness. According to the memo, Yates had taken to “spook[ing]” around the house in his underwear (“usually fanatic about body exposed,” Martha noted, “—skinny legs, etc.”), and sometimes standing still for long intervals, obliviously, as if in deep concentration. He was now smoking
“constantly”
and “inhal[ing] deeply,” though all the while he was obsessed with a fear of death from lung cancer or heart disease. Like his idol Fitzgerald, he made constant lists in “very emphatic script” while “talking to self and constant whispering (extreme).” Sometimes his grandiosity was such that he became convinced he had an urgent “message to the world” and was on the “verge of something big.” But perhaps the most definitive symptom was an agitated inability to communicate, to understand and make himself understood amid the depths of his own bewildered dread. As Martha wrote:

Mostly quiet and brooding but when gets to talking easily worked up into panicky declarations: “I
hate
psychiatrists.” “What do
you
know” “They
do
watch what you're wearing.” … Increasingly jumpy to being asked simple question while working or charged with simple tasks or put something on calendar. [E.g.,] “Breakfast is ready.” “God
damn
it.” Time—calendar and clock great source of consternation, confusion and panic.… Simple phrases and cliches are not understood for their common meaning. [E.g.,] “Which Saturday is this Saturday?” (It could be any in the year) … Recurring conversation. D: Martha? M: What, honey? D: Oh nothing. Recurring: “I'll be okay just as soon as … Don't go away.[…] How am I doing? […] I'm all right. […] Who says I'm crazy? (then a hug) […] How could you love a crazy man? […] What's going to become of me? [”] … As time passes more and more fearful of hospitalization or being doped up and brought down too far (a legitimate fear) and more suspect of my motives—“You think I'm crazy” “
You
don't understand.”

The more Martha begged him to get help, the more sarcastic and spitefully drunken he became. And though he was wholly dependent on her (
Don't go away
), he seemed unmoved by the distress he caused with such obnoxious behavior. When she finally lost her temper and flew at him with her fists, the inebriated Yates seemed to enjoy the spectacle, holding her off and laughing.

After a while she gave up. “I remember sitting on the couch,” she said, “holding Gina, my tears falling on her, and Dick yelling at me. It was so senseless it sticks in my head:
What's wrong with this picture?
” Since she didn't argue anymore, Yates seemed to assume he'd finally brought her around to his point of view—namely, that he
didn't
need help, that all would be well as soon as certain enigmatic factors fell into place. In fact she'd made “a cool-headed, deliberate decision”: She'd do whatever was necessary to help him get back to New York (“I felt responsible for Wichita”), then wait a year or so “for him to be lucid enough to fend for himself.” Then she'd take the baby and leave.

*   *   *

By the time Yates's luck changed he was in no condition to enjoy it. His red letter day was March 21, 1973, when he was offered a part-time position at Columbia beginning with the spring 1974 semester; far more importantly, a lucrative deal (by Yates's standards) was finalized that same day with Sam Lawrence, who offered a fifty-thousand-dollar advance for
Disturbing the Peace
. At the time Yates was too relieved to be bothered much by the somewhat eccentric method of payment, which would persist for the rest of their association: He was to receive twelve thousand dollars on signing, and then equal monthly payments of fifteen hundred dollars until he delivered the manuscript on July 1, 1974, whereupon he'd receive the balance of twenty thousand dollars—or rather, he'd receive ten thousand dollars for delivery and another ten thousand dollars when the book was published. The idea was to provide a steady long-term income for an unpredictable man. “Those monthly payments were a kind of salary,” Lawrence proudly observed, “and they sustained him.”

They also signaled the beginning of an even more ambivalent phase of the friendship. When sane and solvent, Yates was mostly grateful for Lawrence's belief in him as a writer, for his financial as well as moral support. (“How much do you need, Dick?” Lawrence had said when Yates complained of his Wichita predicament.) It was true that he thought Lawrence a bit pompous, but, as he wrote a friend, “at his best he's a solid man with good instincts”—moreover, “he'll never try to fuck around with your manuscripts, as many editors do; he's never asked me to change a word.” After the “carefully-edited sloppiness” of Knopf, Yates had decided that Lawrence's laissez-faire approach was a virtue after all; as for the man's “good instincts,” he found favor with Yates by turning down such novels as
The World According to Garp
(“On the other hand,” Yates noted, “he's an enthusiastic supporter of Richard Brautigan, so what the hell are we going to do?”). Lawrence's view of Yates, meanwhile, was characterized by a kind of complicated magnanimity—“a mixture of admiration and concern,” as their mutual friend Dan Wakefield put it.

It was the “concern” part that rankled. Concern meant that he was mawkishly aware of Yates's failings—his drinking and instability and general incapacity to care for himself. Lawrence, too, was a heavy drinker and rather strange man in his own right, but he was also prosperous, and proprietary toward his authors; what he demanded (implicitly) in return for his largess was that they do their work and show a seemly gratitude, a sentiment Yates sometimes felt and sometimes didn't. Lawrence's later eulogy of his old friend, while touching in parts, reads almost like a litany of unacknowledged favors, as it's largely comprised of data relating to their various contracts. “Dad would've
hated
that eulogy,” said Monica Yates. “[Lawrence] went on and on about the money.… That was a love-hate relationship big-time.” Another aspect of Lawrence's
concern
that bothered Yates was the fact that it was mostly transmitted at arm's length (usually in the form of a check)—all the more so later, when Lawrence seemed unwilling to “soil himself” with Yates's difficult life. Yates would mimic him bitterly—“D-d-d-don't m-m-mix b-b-business with puh-pleasure!”—or so Lawrence liked to tell Yates, though the former's social life was actually consumed by “business” with and on behalf of his authors. “Yates was always angry at Lawrence,” said psychiatrist Winthrop Burr, “but at the same time he wanted to be more accepted by him.”

For a while, though, it sufficed that Lawrence had rescued him from Wichita, and Yates lost no time traveling to New York, alone, to find an apartment. Needless to say, he was in no shape for such a trip, which would serve as a bleak foreshadowing of the move to come. Perhaps the first blow was his discovery that he couldn't afford to live in Manhattan after all; he'd have to settle for one of the outer boroughs, which to Yates was only a slight step up from Kansas. For that and any number of other reasons, he began drinking even harder than before, which provoked a fresh and frightening symptom of advanced alcoholism: epileptic seizures. His first attack took place at Bill Reardon's apartment in the Village, and later that day he had another in Jerry Schulman's car, while the latter drove him to Staten Island to view an apartment. Yates—already drunk and semideranged when Schulman arrived to pick him up—began thrashing and frothing at the mouth while they passed through the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel, then tried to jump out of the car. Schulman had to hold the writhing man in place until they could turn around.

After a phone call to Nathan S. Kline, Yates thought he was calm enough to make the trip back to Staten Island, but once they arrived he had another seizure, this time in the presence of his prospective landlord. As his convulsions subsided he tried to stand up and tripped on a toy car, which (according to Schulman) prompted “a stream of hideous invective.” The landlord proved remarkably sympathetic; no doubt mollified by the relative sanity of Yates's companion, he agreed to rent the apartment to this disturbed man, perhaps on the theory that he was having a bad day. It continued badly. Schulman drove his friend to the airport, where Yates began to have second thoughts about catching his flight: It was late, he felt lousy, and besides he usually called Monica at this time of day. When Schulman offered to take Yates to a hospital, Yates became indignant: “Don't tell me what to do!” he shouted, and staggered off to find a phone. Schulman, meanwhile, called Martha in Kansas and asked her advice: With a baby screaming in the background, she mentioned a number of pills her husband should take and urged Schulman to get him on the plane no matter what. When the exhausted man tried to do as he was told, Yates exploded as if mortally offended by his friend's presumption. “It was humiliating to be with him,” said Schulman. “After that I realized you couldn't do the right thing for Dick, because he'd always insist on taking care of himself.”

The episode officially killed whatever was left of Yates's friendship with the Schulmans. Grace had been drifting away for some time—apart from a general exasperation with Yates, her life had simply settled in such a way that commotion makers were no longer welcome: She was a professor at Baruch College as well as poetry editor of
The Nation
and director of the 92nd Street Y Poetry Center; also, she was sick of “literary people” who exploited her husband's good nature. “Often I had to be the heavy in protecting [Jerry] from what I felt to be insulting responses to him for his kindness,” she said. “And when I heard about his patience with Dick that day, I thought—enough. Enough of Dick's bad behavior.” As for Jerry, he accepted a last goodwill invitation to dine with the Yateses in Staten Island, but the evening was awkward and neither man made an effort to contact the other again.

By the time they moved to New York in June, Yates was a “total wreck,” as Martha put it; even he himself admitted, a month after their arrival, that he'd “become such a wallowing whiskey-head” (not to be confused with
alcoholic
) that he could “barely hold a pencil straight.” As ever, his drinking both worsened and commingled with the vagaries of mental illness, such that it was impossible to predict what he would do or say next. Shortly before leaving Kansas, he'd invited his daughter Sharon to come take his car off his hands, as long as she agreed to arrange such matters as insurance and title transfer; after she'd done so, she called from Iowa to apprise him of her progress (“Okay, I got the insurance; now we have to—”) and Yates blew up:
“What d'you think I am? Some sort of Jewish father?!”
Sharon didn't know what to make of this (certainly the ethnic slur was uncharacteristic): Was he angry because she'd called about practical affairs and hadn't attended to the proper daughterly preliminaries?