Richard Yates

George Starbuck suggested I might want to try a fiction course, perhaps to relieve myself of the regular quartering I’d endured for the first year in the poetry workshops (Jane Delynn, Norman Dubie, and other banks of jagged teeth). Seymour Krim bullied that his course would take prose as a guerrilla form, and so I turned to Richard Yates’ seminars.

I don’t remember who was in the class, by name, but the querulous presence later called Milch was much in evidence. But he was beautiful too; and debated Yates about prosody and Django Reinhardt. We’re here in the Majors.

Dick was talking about Gatsby. It was lyrical; his esteem for Fitzgerald’s writing was rhapsodic. And his love looked just like remorse.