The Richard Yates frieze

Many writers have shared my experience: within the first hour (quite literally true) at the Iowa Writers' Workshop, 1969-1971, I correctly foresaw that my mediocrity would be instantly swamped by the gifted and the skilled and the ambitious folk around me. Consequently I had two years to see what being an adequate critic was all about. In the second year I attended Richard Yates' fiction seminar; hours of smoking and coughing, but also the idea of literary reverence I have carried with me since. [Whither those in that room? David Milch, for one. And diverse narratives of grandeur and woe for the rest.] Gatsby was read. Discussions followed that were less tentative than they might have been. Then Yates' spoke, hushing the room with eloquence about the book he dared call the finest in all of literature (a phrase keenly avoided in that setting, where teaseling out the last bit of imperfection was the vernacular); he explained why he'd said that. I remember the room being especially stilled, as if we knew that Yates talking about Fitzgerald was the sort of moment of which we'd have too few in the years to come; now I see that we were witnessing a thing rarely seen: a man in love.
With which compare: attending a Susan Sontag lecture some years later. Four hundred greedies in room with three hundred seats. She first gained favor and applause by denigrating the term "post-modern." (Cheers! We confused and lazy are not alone!) Followed a long long train of coal cars, each a slightly nasty and enlisting remark, the sole purpose of which was to confect a room of temporary acolytes whose eager giggling would drown the truth that she didn't have much to say, really.