Richard Yates: Re-Writing Postwar American Culture. Phd Thesis
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McGinley, Rory (2016) Richard Yates: re-writing postwar American culture. PhD thesis. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/7797/ Copyright and moral rights for this work are retained by the author A copy can be downloaded for personal non-commercial research or study, without prior permission or charge This work cannot be reproduced or quoted extensively from without first obtaining permission in writing from the author The content must not be changed in any way or sold commercially in any format or medium without the formal permission of the author When referring to this work, full bibliographic details including the author, title, awarding institution and date of the thesis must be given Glasgow Theses Service http://theses.gla.ac.uk/ [email protected] Richard Yates: Re-writing Postwar American Culture Rory Mackay McGinley M.A., M. Litt. Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Literature School of Critical Studies College of Arts University of Glasgow June 2016 © Rory Mackay McGinley, June 2016. 1 ABSTRACT This thesis explores the fiction of American author Richard Yates to propose that his work provides an insistent questioning and alternative vision of postwar American culture. Such an approach is informed by a revisionist account of four distinct yet interconnected areas of postwar culture: the role of the non-heroic soldier stepping in and out of World War II; suburbanisation and fashioning of anti-suburban performance; demarcation of gender roles and unraveling of sexual conservatism in the 1950s; consideration of what constituted the normative within postwar discourse and representations of mental illness in Yates’ work. These four spheres of interest form the backbone to this study in its combined aim of reclaiming Yates’ fiction in line with a more progressive historical framework while shaping a new critical appreciation of his fiction. Such analysis will be primed by an opening discussion that illustrates how Yates’ fiction has frequently been ensconced in a limited interpretative lens: an approach, that I argue, has kept Yates on the periphery of the canon and ultimately resulted in the neglect of an author who provided a rich, progressive and historically significant dialogue of postwar American life. This PhD arrives at a point when Yatesian scholarship is finally gaining momentum after the cumulative impact of a comprehensive biography, a faithful film adaptation of his seminal text Revolutionary Road (1961), plus the recent re-issue of his catalogue of work. An assessment as to why he remained on the margins of success for the duration of his career is therefore of pressing interest in light of this recent critical and commercial recognition. 2 Table of Contents Abstract: 2 Acknowledgements: 4 Author’s Declaration: 5 Introduction: 6 Chapter One: Yates and Neglect: Tackling Marketability and Style 43 Chapter Two: A Hymn for Anti-Heroism: World War II and Failed Masculinity in A Special Providence 88 Chapter Three: Playing Suburbia 120 Chapter Four: Postwar Masculinity: Reframing Sexual Politics in Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade 160 Chapter Five: Defining Mental Illness in Revolutionary Road and Disturbing the Peace 197 Conclusion: 237 Bibliography: 245 3 Acknowledgements I must first thank Dr. Chris Gair who has been a source of knowledge, patience and encouragement since I started my M.Litt at the University of Glasgow. His supervision and knowledge over the past four years has been one of the main reasons I have managed to complete this thesis. I am grateful to Dr. Rhian Williams for her assistance during my first two years of doctoral study. Much gratitude must go to the Alexander & Dixon Scholarship for funding my research. Thanks, also, to the European Association of American Studies (EAAS) and College of Arts for the assistance necessary to conduct a research trip to the Richard Yates Archive at Boston University. The visit provided me with ample material for this study and the opportunity to meet DeWitt Henry, who is owed thanks for his enthusiasm about this project, stimulating conversations over lunch, and informing me that Richard Yates was a great singer. I must also thank Monica Yates for her kind words and talking so freely about her Dad’s work. I owe a massive amount of gratitude to family and friends who have shown tireless support throughout my PhD, especially over the final stretch. In particular, thank you to my parents, Clare and Matthew, for their constant belief and confidence in me, to Anna, whose smile and laughter never fails to make me happy, and to Amy for her encouragement and unwavering belief throughout this past year. 4 I declare that this thesis is entirely my own work. 5 INTRODUCTION There’s a point in Richard Yates’ unfinished novel Uncertain Times when its protagonist William Grove—a thinly veiled incarnation of the author himself—sits with two other men in Duke Zeibert’s restaurant in Washington. Grove has recently been appointed as speechwriter to the then Attorney General, Bobby Kennedy, and along with the aides, Warren Turner and Jim Bailey, decides on a celebratory lunch. Zeibert’s —known for its celebrity patronage in D.C. with luminaries adorning the walls—emits the air of 1960s America at a business lunch as Grove takes in his surroundings: the heady throng of customers talking Capitol Hill; the cool aroma of oysters and gin breaking through the clouds of cigarette smoke; the first cleansing, eager sip of Martini with the promise of more. After disposing of their first drinks, the conversation switches to John F. Kennedy, and Turner suggests meeting the President will be forever memorable for Grove. The dialogue runs: ‘”You can feel it in hairs on the back of your neck. Gooseflesh, he explained. “That’s the kind of presence the man has.” Grove knew he wasn’t expected to make any comment but he did, and with an incautious lack of reserve. “Well, okay, Warren, but I don’t know. I don’t think I’d feel anything like that. The point is, you see, I still think Adlai Stevenson ought to be President.” There was a very brief moment before Warren Turner’s smile of indulgence came back. “That’s a little on the anachronistic side,” he said kindly, “wouldn’t you say?’” “Maybe.”1 Up until this point, Grove is a barely concealed cut-out of Yates’ career as an author: set in 1963, Grove is 37, the same age as Yates at this point, has a literary biography that encompasses one novel nominated for the National Book Award, Revolutionary Road (1961), a well-received collection of short stories Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962), a six- month stint in Hollywood writing a screenplay (this isn’t directly referenced, but relates to the author’s work on William Styron’s Lie Down in Darkness) and, just as Yates would have been in 1963, Grove is in the process of writing a novel about the final stages of World War II, A Special Providence (1969). On top of the literary parallels, there are the 1 A section of Richard Yates’ Uncertain Times was published in. Open City: 3 ed. Thomas Buller (New York: Open City Books, 2001), p 68. 6 shared biographical features: Grove has been divorced for four years, struggling with alcoholism and has already suffered from a series of breakdowns. Again like Yates, Grove is rakishly thin with lank hair and a “face as haunted and sad as the tone of his best work,” a clear reference to Revolutionary Road.2 The scene above arrives in the second chapter of Uncertain Times and it is unclear whether Yates intended it to be a purely confessional text or a thinly disguised roman à clef. With this in consideration, the anachronistic nature of Grove’s preference for Stevenson, picked up by Turner, is of significance due to the parallels that can be drawn with Yates’ fiction and how it presents recurring threads of criticism that have also been levied at the author: whether his work, so historically tied to the postwar years, is tethered to an era long since bypassed, out of step with political (and literary) trends, and, in the clear biographical parallels that can be drawn with Yates, whether his novels rise to the level of fiction. The last inscription on the manuscript (which was found in Yates’ freezer shortly after his death) to Uncertain Times is dated August 1992, some thirty years on from the point in which the scene with Grove and Turner is set: Zeibert’s restaurant, meanwhile, closed its doors in 1980.3 Author Benjamin Anastas begins his review of Blake Bailey’s A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (2003), a work that spearheaded the author’s revival, by tackling Yates’ fiction on this, and one other, key point. Anastas outlines the founding conceit of the biographical form: the contours of our lives are shaped from page to page, our progress charted from introduction to index. For the critic, what separates us from subjects within the confines of the biographical genre is, that as living beings, we depend on the possibility of being able to choose a different path, or “break from the failures of the past and the eventuality of death.”4 The parallel Anastas draws between Yates and Bailey’s text is clear: Yates lived a ‘singularly sad life’ with a ‘dogged persistence’ that could be mapped out by a fleeting glance at the glossary. The trajectory of Yates’ life is central to Bailey’s methodology; Bailey interweaves biographical details with how these inflect, or rather, become directly transposed, into Yates’ fiction. As a corollary, Yates’ subject is consistently governed by and enclosed within an acutely defined range.