A Tragic Honesty (89 page)

An abiding feature of Yates's legend at Alabama is the way he “trashed the Strode House” with his constant smoking—by the time he departed, the furniture was scored with burn marks, the carpet was grayish with ground-in ashes, the curtains sagged with assimilated nicotine. For Yates it seemed a point of pride to keep smoking, and to hell with oxygen tanks. (Another aspect of Earley's duties, so the joke went, was to be ready at any time to douse Yates when he burst into flames.) Yates's coughing fits were so violent and extended that one scarcely expected the man to survive them; after ten minutes or so, he'd at last subside with a deep shuddery sigh and light another cigarette. For an ashtray he used a large salad bowl that didn't have to be emptied so often; he also used it as a receptacle for the profusion of Kleenex required for a cold he suffered more or less constantly. A graduate student, Tim Parrish, once stopped by the Strode House to give Yates a lift, and the latter flicked his butt into the bowl and began to shuffle away. A wad of Kleenex ignited with an emphatic finger of flame. This posed a problem for Parrish: If he rushed to extinguish the fire himself, Yates would be humiliated and hence furious. Meanwhile smoke was billowing out of the bowl. “Uh, Dick, are you sure that cigarette is out?” Yates turned around. “Oh fuck!” he roared.
“Fuck!”

A wheelchair was kept in the building where Yates taught, but he still had to walk a few yards from the car, and the effort would leave him gasping with exhaustion; wherever he went, then, he liked to arrive early so he could get his wind back and finish coughing without being ogled. As the chair writer, Yates was required to give at least one public reading—a well-attended event which his handlers had been dreading. Earley asked if he wanted a chair on stage and a clip-on microphone, but Yates refused. He insisted on climbing the stairs to the podium and standing, by his own power, and he wanted the wheelchair stashed out of sight before anyone arrived. When the time came, Earley and the others could hardly bear to watch. “Dick climbed the stairs and didn't even hold the podium,” Earley recalled. “It was magnificent: he read in a deep, strong voice with a lot of feeling. Then he went back to the front row.” After the last well-wisher had departed—but not before—Yates doubled over in his chair.

One benefit of his infirmity was that he could indulge his gruffness as a teacher; whatever he said was at the expense of precious air, and he wasn't expected to waste himself on idle blandishment. Thus in his literature course Yates luxuriated in his own dogma, and those who begged to differ “were screwed” as one student put it. The second half of
Lord Jim,
Yates declared, was little more than a boy's adventure story; Conrad should have allowed Jim to fail, and cut the whole “phony redemption” business. When one student modestly opined that he thought the novel “worked as a whole,” Yates dogged the youth for months, in class and out, determined to make him admit his error. It was in workshops, though, where Yates showed the full extent of his mettle. After three decades of discussing student work, he'd become purified into a grim ghost of the man who, in his docile salad days, used to “appease every difference of opinion in the room.” No more. Yates advised one student with a “good ear for dialogue” to cultivate deafness, and in the margin of another student's admittedly “terrible” story, Yates scribbled (
re
one character's disparagement of another), “That's the understatement of the fucking century!”

The odd wrathful critique depended somewhat on Yates's mood—a sick man is apt to be crabby—but he'd later agonize over the wounds he'd inflicted. In a copy of
The Easter Parade
owned by the author of the “terrible” story, Yates wrote, “To Bill, with heartfelt apologies for an episode he has been gracious enough to forget.” And then there was the sequel to the burning salad bowl. “Dick was agitated that night and his blood was up,” said Parrish, who drove Yates to Allen Wier's workshop after they'd put the fire out. The first story under discussion was a bit of “Magical Beautyshop Realism,” as Tony Earley described it, about a spooky barber who gives bad haircuts and strange advice. Yates hated the story, denouncing its heavy-handed whimsy in no uncertain terms. The author sat biting her lip and trying not to cry; the rest of the class was too stunned to speak. Finally—to break the silence, and perhaps because he was dating the author—Earley offered a few words in the story's defense. Yates regarded him sadly: “Tony, Tony, Tony…” Earley's own story “Aliceville” was next, and he was somewhat hopeful since Yates had liked his previous effort, “My Father's Heart.” “‘My Father's Heart' was like good sex,” Yates began. “‘Aliceville' is like masturbation.” Yates later apologized to Earley, though probably not to the woman who wrote the barbershop story.

By 1990 the zeitgeist of the American campus, even in the South, was sufficiently altered for Yates to seem either a quaint midcentury relic or a throwback, depending on how you looked at it. Most students were amused by his somewhat archaic Ivy League uniform of tweeds, flannels, and desert boots, his hair that seemed to stay short whether he cut it or not, his careful manners, his cultivated distance from a changing world. Yates loved to talk about the old days—radio programs, McCarthyism, the movies of his youth—and once when Earley admitted he didn't know a particular Hoagy Carmichael tune, Yates sang it to him verse after verse. (“The most extraordinary thing that ever happened to me in the literary community,” said Earley.) Young women, alas, tended to be less amused by Yates. “I wish I had a little girl to make potatoes for
me,
” he said with wistful gallantry at a potluck dinner, while the subject of this pleasantry lapsed into wondering silence along with the rest of the guests. Worse were the women who actually stood up for themselves and their sex. “What's
that
got to do with anything?” a student's wife snapped at Yates—who'd just observed, neutrally enough, that a new addition to the English faculty “[wasn't] very pretty.”

Yates didn't get it. “Earley, get over here,” he'd say, after some courtly bon mot had gone mysteriously awry. “What the hell's the problem? What'd I
say
?” Any attempt to explain would only vex him further, and soon such women began to seem foreign as Martians to Yates, who treated them with a kind of wary restraint. The truth was, what Yates had always regarded as courtesy seemed creepy and affected to certain of his female students, who made a point of avoiding him; if he hadn't been so pitifully frail, it would have been worse. The situation pained Yates deeply. He'd regale his young male companions with tales of the old
Revolutionary Road
days when he could get almost any girl he wanted—a girl who goddammit
looked
like a girl too, in a proper
dress
—but now he wasn't even regarded as a sexual being anymore. To Dan Childress, who later became Yates's main caretaker, he confessed a poignant recurring dream of running, sprinting—
virility
—though he hadn't been able to run or much else in many years.

Nor could Yates have known that the beloved authors he'd always taught—Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Conrad, Ford, et al.—were now viewed as a veritable rogues gallery of dead white males. At the beginning of the semester he broke out his hoary assortment of marked-up paperbacks, the same that had stood him in good stead since his Iowa days, and read aloud the beloved bits of dialogue, objective correlatives, character details, and whatnot. When the students requested a bit more open discussion, the haggard Yates was only too happy to oblige; he noticed, however, that three or four students rarely spoke and indeed seemed to be boycotting the books in question. It might have been when somebody pointed out the absence of women or “people of color” among the assigned authors that a bemused Yates called one student “a pantywaist”—and perhaps the lunar silence that followed was what persuaded him, finally, that he'd better relent a little. He asked the students to suggest a book that
they
wanted to read. All but unanimously they picked Toni Morrison's
Beloved,
which Yates professed to like all right.

*   *   *

Toward the end of Yates's semester as chair writer—on December 20, 1990, to be exact—he and a few others gathered at Tim Parrish's house to watch the
Seinfeld
episode based on Yates's dinner with Larry David five years before. Monica had watched the show's taping and thought her father might get a kick out of it. The Yates character—a great but neglected writer called “Alton Benes,” also Elaine's father—was played by an imposing stone-faced actor named Lawrence Tierney, known for his gruff gangster roles. In this episode, titled “The Jacket,” Elaine begs her friends Jerry and George to have dinner with her and her father: “I need a buffer,” she says. The evening is a disaster. Elaine is late, and Jerry and George are forced to make conversation with the dour Benes, who greets them with a coughing fit and scowls at their nonalcoholic beverages. “Which one's the funny guy?” he asks, and when George indicates Jerry, Benes fixes him with a baleful look and says, “We had a funny guy with us in Korea. Tail gunner. They blew his brains out all over the Pacific.” Jerry escapes to the bathroom, and George unctuously remarks that he really enjoyed Benes's novel
Fair Game
. “Drivel!” says Benes. “Well, maybe
some
parts,” George concedes uncomfortably, and Benes snaps
“What parts?”
—after which George pleads a phone call and joins Jerry in the bathroom, where the desperate men discuss their predicament (“How could she leave us alone with this lunatic?”). At last Elaine arrives, and as the four prepare to go to dinner, Jerry turns his expensive new suede jacket inside out so it won't be ruined by the snow. Elaine's father sees the jacket's candy-striped lining and stops Jerry at the door: “You're not walking down the street with me and my daughter dressed like that,” he growls. “That's for damn sure.” The terrified Jerry reverses the lining, and the jacket is ruined.

When the show was over, Yates sat smacking his lips. “Well,” he said. “What'd you think?” Sensing Yates's chagrin throughout, the others had tried not to laugh, and now they could see how “scalded” he looked. “Well,” somebody broke the silence, “it was
kind
of funny, Dick.”
“I'd like to kill that son of a bitch!”
Yates erupted, and shambled out of the room. Later, speaking to Monica about it, he picked over details they'd gotten “wrong”: Benes had worn a broad-brimmed hat, said Yates, while he himself had never worn a hat in his life (perhaps he'd forgotten the “much-handled brown fedora” he'd affected as a young UP reporter); he'd fought in WWII,
not
Korea; and Monica never told stories in the present-tense à la Elaine. And so on. “I'm not
that
scary,” he said at last.
*

That month Yates moved out of the Strode House and stayed with the Parrishes for a week or so until he found a place of his own. He'd decided to remain in Tuscaloosa for at least as long as it took to finish his novel: The cost of living was low, and the university had arranged for him to receive a modest stipend for reading manuscripts and working with students privately—though perhaps the main reason, as Earley put it, was “because he'd made friends there who looked out for him and were kind to him.” Still, it made Yates queasy to be the object of kindness, as it churned up a lot of bitterness over being poor and relatively forgotten—a charity case, in short. While at Parrish's house he talked obsessively about Vonnegut: a nice guy and good writer, he said, though he (Yates) was at
least
as good, and look at the difference in their lives! At one point he fretfully lit a cigarette while a fresh one burned in the ashtray. “Oh
shit,
” he said when his host reminded him. “Goddamn it. Listen, Parrish: I used to smoke five fucking packs a day, and it was
great
.…”

Yates's last apartment was a small two-bedroom duplex on Alaca Place. He installed an L-shaped desk in the spare bedroom, bought a few other derelict scraps of furniture from the Salvation Army, and arranged his daughters' photos on the wall. The other bit of decoration was a quote from Adlai Stevenson that he taped over his desk (he was considering it as an epigraph to
Uncertain Times
): “Americans have always assumed, subconsciously, that every story will have a happy ending.” Mark Costello, who succeeded Yates as the fiction chair writer, remarked with amazement that the dark little bungalow was “even
more
grim than Boston”: “It was as if Dick's indifference to his surroundings was catching up with him. I had to remind myself that Dick didn't care, because otherwise the place depressed me. I couldn't stay there. I had to get out.”

Yates's health had improved over the past few months: What with oxygen and steady care, his color was better and he seemed a bit stronger. The ordeal of looking after him, though, had been of such Sisyphean proportions that one wondered what would become of him in the absence of a coordinated, pluralistic effort. What anyone in Yates's condition needed, at the very least, was a full-time nurse: There were oxygen tanks to replace, meals to provide (for a man who often neglected to eat), and the constant possibility he'd get sick and require immediate medical attention. Graduate students such as Earley, Parrish, and J. R. Jones continued to invite Yates over and visit from time to time, while Ron Sielenski and Shelley Hippler (his “research assistants” as chair writer)
*
cleaned his apartment and ran the odd errand; but Yates's main caretaker was a rough-hewn student/car-mechanic named Dan Childress. “Dan was closest to Dick in temperament,” Tim Parrish observed. “Both became isolated from women and other people, and both were conflicted about their writing. It was a real kinship. Dick was a hero to Dan—he loved the man and took good care of him.”