A Tragic Honesty by Blake Bailey

Author:Blake Bailey [Bailey, Blake]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Picador
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER ELEVEN

A Natural Girl: 1966-1968

Yates drove straight to Iowa City from Hollywood, but when he arrived he couldn’t find his new apartment at 800 North Van Buren. His old friend Loree Wilson—who’d recently finished her thesis and was about to leave town—was with a new arrival, Mark Costello, when the phone rang. Yates was at the Airliner and needed her help, but there was no hurry. (“Dick’s helplessness over logistical details was learned,” said Costello; “he didn’t want to fuck with it and wanted other people to take care of him.”) When they arrived at the bar Yates was “drunk out of his gourd”; happily he only had a few more blocks to drive.

A year ago he’d been depressed about being in Hollywood, but grateful at least that it wasn’t Iowa; now it was the other way around. He’d returned almost a month earlier than necessary, simply because he couldn’t wait any longer and hoped to “get [his] brains into some kind of focus” before classes began and his “fair Texan” arrived with her daughter. (He and Carole had decided to live together.) He’d been in Iowa less than a week when he got some very good news: Along with such writers as Grace Paley and Tillie Olsen, he’d been awarded that ten-thousand-dollar grant from the National Arts Council. “So I’m no longer in much financial stress and can pay off some of my debts,” Yates wrote, “and I guess it tends to prove that I’m a good deal luckier than I care to believe.”

So it seemed. The old Bourjaily place where he now found himself was on the ground floor of a stately Victorian mansion, and his typewriter was parked beneath a crystal chandelier; the dusty baubles gave him something to look at, but still the place struck him as big and empty and strange. Really, he didn’t feel lucky at all. The change of scenery hadn’t affected his writer’s block a whit, and what the hell was he doing back in Iowa anyway? Why had he invited some feckless woman (and her two-year-old daughter) to live with him? After a couple of weeks beneath the chandelier he was miserable enough to write a rare letter to his sister, the contents of which are suggested by her reply: “If we stick together,” Ruth wrote, “we’ll both live through it.” (By “it” she meant life in general.) “Don’t ‘adapt,’ dear; persevere.”

It wasn’t half-bad advice. By the second week of September, the gloom had lifted somewhat: Workshop people were back in town, and the first big social event was a welcome-back-from-Hollywood party for Yates. There was a swimming pool and Sinatra tunes, old faces as well as new, and the guest of honor was in good form—just drunk enough to wax droll on the subject of Hollywood without becoming bitter and obsessive about it. Once again he was the most glamorous writer in Iowa, certainly the best dressed, and what’s more he seemed to sense as much. Suavely he approached one

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