* * *

It was 1967, an hour before class, and Dick Yates was sitting in an Iowa City bar called the Airliner, in a total, cold-sweat panic. One of his best students --someone with not only a big reputation but a book contract--had a chapter up for discussion; most of us liked it but Dick thought it was lousy and had just realized there was no graceful way out. He would have to say so in class.

Would he hurt the guy's feelings? Wouldn't he just seem envious, or worse, anti-intellectual to the students--all these overeducated kids with diplomas from Harvard or Tufts while he had none.

Glass after golden glass of Hamms beer. Cigarette after cigarette stubbed out in the ashtray. "Okay, let's go," he said, finally.

As if marching to his execution he made himself stride into the class and--as usual--in his cigarette-coarsened voice picked apart the manuscript with such precision he left us chagrined at our own low standards. Then he left, stuffing himself into his yellow VW to drive the four miles out to the stone cottage where he lived then, convinced he had destroyed his reputation forever.

That's the kind of thing I remember about Richard Yates, now dead six years but in the mid-1960s a writer with a group of acolytes at Iowa because of the insight informing his writing and teaching.

We were a group hard to impress. In Hemingway's time would-be writers could head for Paris; in 1966 writers needed a student deferment. Hundreds of us wound up at Iowa.

The campus bubbled with a seething mix of creative ferment and rage about the Vietnam War. John Irving was there, and Andre Dubus, Gail Godwin, Jonathan Penner and John Casey, John Wideman and Jim McPherson and Bill Kittredge and Dave Milch. To walk into Borders these days and poke around the fiction shelves is virtually to see an Iowa alumni list from those days.

But was writing what we wanted? Our lives were dominated by Vietnam. At parties, or over coffee in the Student Union, or in our offices, we would argue about whether it was moral to even think about writing one more novel of manners when we were napalming children in Southeast Asia. Vonnegut, another good and generous teacher, told me not to worry about spending time doing antiwar work; even if I didn't write a word he had no intention of handing out F's.

Into this cauldron came Dick, back from a miserable year in Hollywood. He had been at Iowa in '64 and already had a group of fans commanded by Dubus, the burly leader of a group of older students, all veterans. Soon us younger writers joined the group.

And why not? How could you not love stories like "Builders," "A Really Good Jazz Piano," or "The Best of Everything?" with their shapeliness, mimetic dialogue, and devastating final scenes? How could you not respond to Yates' ability to create strong narrative revolving so wholly about character?

How could a budding writer not love even the little things: Yates' signature way of using a parenthesis to remind you of the essentials of a past scene ("Okay, let's go."), or the way he had of presenting the rational course of action for his character, then starting the next paragraph with "The trouble was …" and dissecting all the emotions that would inevitably get in the way?

Yates had no doubt that writing was important. Unlike some of the other writers on faculty--Nelson Algren, for example, who was shocked that he had to actually read student work--Dick threw himself into helping us.

By now, of course, actual conversations have long since left my brain cells. But I remember long conversations about books--why All the King's Men was so overrated and why Gatsby wasn't--and getting back manuscripts with his scrawling comments over them ("You think he'd really say it that way? I doubt it."); and listening to him go over stories as he stood draped over a lectern in the (to our minds) antiseptically bright classrooms in EPB.

We wanted him to have a happier life. I remember the way we massed outside the church after his marriage to Martha. Was it Vance Bourjaily pressing packets of rice into everybody's hands, so we, grudgingly accepting this World War II-era custom, could heave it at the two of them?

He would not have a happy life. I also remember one class session when he came in, clearly upset, his voice even raspier than usual, and stunned us with a long, rambling, only partly coherent monologue about a writer who turned out to have the luck of being a great writer and married a woman of great wealth--the punch line of which was that it was William Styron. The next day Yates had checked into the hospital to recover from what in those days we called a "breakdown."

Once, disappointed by the neglect of his later books, he told me he thought his obituary would mention only Revolutionary Road. I, convinced that eventually excellence is recognized, demurred. Now, when that is the only book of his left on the shelves even of the big stores, I know better.

It's too bad. He deserves to be remembered for many more.

But I also hope people remember his character.

Yates wouldn't approve. "Who cares about a writer's character, for Chrissakes," I can hear him growl. "It's the books, the goddamn books."

Still, we don't have to remember the dead in precisely the way they want.

"I can't tell you how often," Bill Kittredge once wrote, "I have sat looking at some shabby, ambitious nonsense I just wrote, and imagined Dick Yates looking at me with those sad old eyes, shaking his head."

There are dozens--no, hundreds--of us who still have him in our heads in precisely the same way.

This wonderful writers, whose character was always thought to have inhibited his career was also a man great character; a man who fought mental illness to produce book after fine wrought book; who was dedicated to his students and friends and children; and who, above all, was agonizingly loyal to telling the truth, whether in one of his own short stories or in summoning up the nerve to tell a hotshot writer and a class full of his friends that he, and by implication, we, could do a little bit better.