The Modern Story

Drawing the Curtains for Richard Yates

by Morten Jensen

Richard Yates was never a writer du jour. At a time when a variety of new American voices were emerging, he seemed somewhat unremarkable. After all, he didn’t cover the intellectual ground that Saul Bellow did, he wasn’t as exciting as Philip Roth, and he didn’t write like John Updike. His writing was the perfect antithesis to the fictional innovation of postmodernists like Thomas Pynchon and John Barth whose novels were becoming increasingly popular. If anything, Richard Yates’ prose was derivative of Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald, two writers he is often likened to (And not always for literary reasons).

His famous unsuccess, however, probably owes more to what he was writing than how he did it. With the American post-war economy booming and a general sense of ease and optimism permeating the country, it would have been hard to find an audience for Yates’s stories and novels of self-deception, despondent lives and failing marriages – even with writers as diverse as Tennessee Williams, Dorothy Parker, Kurt Vonnegut and Julian Barnes singing his praises.

Yet Richard Yates’ oeuvre deals at length with this kind of post-war self-deception. In Revolutionary Road (1961), for example, his brilliant literary debut, he most successfully portrays a promising young couple’s inability to deal with the shattered illusions of life in the suburbs. Of the more powerful passages in the book is one in which the setting of the novel is truly brought into focus:

The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves. Proud floodlights were trained on some of the lawns, on some of the neat front doors and on the hips of some of the berthed, ice-cream colored automobiles.

A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place…

The Revolutionary Hill Estates serve as a microcosm for an America unwilling to “accommodate a tragedy”, an America absorbed in illusions of domestic prosperity, an America Richard Yates sought to awaken from its spiritual slumber.But Revolutionary Road, like The Great Gatsby is not simply a social critique. And neither is it merely a novel of marital decline but, rather, an intense and intimate portrayal of two individuals – Frank and April Wheeler – whose hopes and dreams are torn apart by self-betrayal, adultery and the deceptive glamor of a happy life in the American suburbs. All the “standard critical bracketry”, as Richard Ford puts it, goes “begging before this splendid book. Revolutionary Road is simply Revolutionary Road”.

The Easter Parade (1976) is Yates’ other masterpiece. Though relatively short (the Picador edition comes to 229 pages), it spans four decades in the life of the Grimes sisters, with particular focus on Emily, the younger one. It sounds ambitious for its length but from the very start with its famous opening sentence (“Neither of the Grimes sisters would have a happy life, and looking back it always seemed that the trouble began with their parent’s divorce”.) the separate lives of the two sisters are eloquently interwoven and perfectly alternated between, creating a narrative of remarkable fluency and skillful craftsmanship. As the reader follows Emily Grimes into old age, Yates examines the harsh and brutal consequences of growing up in a broken home as well as the impact of the 60’s and 70’s generation that just wanted to be free. Emily Grimes is certainly free, but it gradually dawns on the reader that her generation’s dream of freedom was ill-conceived, and so Emily (“poor, sensitive Emily Grimes whom nobody understood, and who understood nothing”) leads a life free of values, free of purpose and free of commitment, a tragic existence that brings her nothing but loneliness and recurring disappointment.

In his short stories Yates is an obvious precursor to the likes of Raymond Carver and Richard Ford (Ford would acknowledge his debt to Yates in his brilliant story collection Women with Men) and the style that would later be dubbed ‘dirty realism’. His two collections of stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and Liars in Love (1981) are equally brilliant, unrivalled in their unsentimental and honest portrayals of men and women teetering on the brink of despair, haunted by professional and romantic disappointments, always unable to find the source of all this unhappiness. And this, surely, is a key aspect of Yates’ fiction. There is hardly ever anyone to blame. “I much prefer the kind of story”, he once said in an interview, “where the reader is left wondering who’s to blame until it begins to dawn on him that he himself must bear some of the responsibility because he’s human and therefore infinitely fallible”. No one like Richard Yates has reminded us of our human inadequacies. It is no surprise he was never a best-seller.

Never one for bitterness, however, Richard Yates only blamed himself. Shortly before his death he was asked in an interview if he was happy with the way his career had turned out. He replied: “Oh no, no, no. I should have written much more, about twice as many books as I have. But I had various problems over the years - periods of being blocked, having to do so many other things to make a living and so on, teaching creative writing courses, or writing in Hollywood”. One senses a similar tone in the very moving, very beautiful final paragraph of “Builders”, his best short story:

And where are the windows? Where does the light come in? Bernie, old friend, forgive me, but I haven’t got the answer to that one. I’m not even sure if there are any windows in this particular house. Maybe the light is just going to have to come in as best as it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder’s faulty craftsmanship, and if that’s the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.

When he died, his novels had quietly drifted into obscurity and out of print. He never achieved the literary glory so many other writers did, even though he was, in his lack of pretensions, in his deep-felt honesty, better than many of them. Unbeknownst to himself, Richard Yates lived in a house with brilliant windows. We draw the curtains for the light to come in.

Morten Jensen is the editor of The Modern Story.