Richard Yates’s Reality: The Crushing Reality of Us All

Maddie Freeman

In literature, [realism] implies VERISIMILITUDE in subject matter and technique. […] Sometimes the term implies the use of unpleasant or sordid details....[Realism] is often contrasted to IMPRESSIONISM which is seen as a precursor to EXPRESSIONISM and SURREALISM. —Dictionary of Poetic Terms, Jack Myers & Don C. Wukasch

[E]very reader is, while he is reading, the reader of his own self. —Marcel Proust

The terms “realist novel” and “traditional novel” are often used interchangeably, though the implications of such an interchange are unfortunate: equating realism to tradition denies the former’s distinctive status. It is a genre unto itself, not a standard from which to deviate. The meticulous craft of Flaubert, for example, and the faithful rendering of

Dickens, Thackeray, and others, were reactions to Romanticism; in realism they saw an oasis in a desert of poesy, and their attachment to the genre thus became not a “return to form” so much as an advancement of the literary medium. And though the Romantics and, later, the Modernists and Postmodernists have been heralded as the avant-garde, the coterie of realists saw (and still see) realism itself as having formidable potential in terms of art and craft, for realism necessarily changes the medium because it reflects the ever- transforming world in which the medium exists. It is a mirror in which we see and examine ourselves, but as it is not a Barth-ian funhouse mirror, it reflects, with especial attention to accuracy and detail, only what we put before it.

Richard Yates realized the power of this mirror. Writing in the second half of the twentieth century, he used realism as a means to confront the reading public with the sometimes scary, often depressing America that had come into being. He faithfully— relentlessly—transcribed the suburbs, the city, and the people moving in between and across the coasts; as such he was able to cast the real America, the good and the bad, within the pages of his novels. For the purposes of this essay, I will focus on his first novel, Revolutionary Road, and another that he published in 1975, Disturbing the Peace.

The first is the epitome of the realist style that is so integral to his work, and it is useful to juxtapose with the latter, which demonstrates his own subversive application of the narrative techniques he often maligned. This intermingling of personal and popular aesthetics—by which I mean the mingling of Yates’s preferred mode of narration with that which the public regarded as “important”—is an accomplishment that should never have been disregarded as it was.

Yates published nine books during his life, and though each garnered critical attention, they were often soon lost beneath the waves of popular fiction and “cutting- edge” post-realist novels from the likes of Thomas Pynchon (Bailey 444) so despite his continued output he slid into near-obscurity through the sixties, seventies, and eighties as he watched his postmodernist colleagues receive critical and popular accolades. Ignored by both the intelligentsia and the public at large, Yates’s audience was typically a scant ten thousand or so, and this meager reception was not helped by the reviews that damned his loyalty to realism. In his review of Young Hearts Crying, Yates’s penultimate novel, eminent critic Anatole Broyard and Yates antagonist said thus in his New York Times review: “The main question in Mr. Yates’s work is whether we are being asked to see around, or beyond, the characters to some kind of symbolism—or to take them literally

[...] His characters seem shrunk by realism, robbed of invention and reduced to bleak and repetitive rituals” (Bailey 535). While even Yates himself eventually acknowledged

2 Young Hearts Crying as one of his worst novels, if not the worst, and if, as mentioned, such a criticism was common to most other of his books, there is no denying that these

“bleak and repetitive rituals” are a major component of the reality that Yates presents.

Though it is a difficult reality to read, there is something heroic, unique—jarring—about writing down these peculiar American “rituals” and exposing them to the very public that indulges them.

Still, the critics and a large segment of the reading public considered Yates’s work

“passé and sentimental” while Yates himself dismissed the “realist” appellation (Bailey

370). In an interview with Scott Bradfield given shortly before he died in 1992, Yates asserts, “[a]ll fiction is filled with technique. It’s ridiculous to suggest one technique is any more realistic than any other” (The Independent). Such a label, however, though perhaps damaging to his career, aligned him with the great writers he most admired—

Flaubert, in particular, and Fitzgerald—and in another interview twenty years before,

Yates seems perhaps more comfortable with this idea than he later lets on. He bridles when his interviewer launches a conversation on the “current rebellion against traditional fiction, and I suppose the reader can, in this context, consider realism and tradition in the same light. “I think it’s a cop-out,” argues Yates, “to say that our times are too hectic or frantic or confusing for good, traditional, formal novels to emerge. I think that’s just a cheap answer” (Ploughshares).

Revolutionary Road, published in 1961, is one such “good, traditional, formal novel,” and it is undoubtedly a novel published at the right place at the right time. V. wouldn’t come out for another two years; the nineteen-fifties, an age Yates defined by its

“general lust for conformity,” had just come to a close, and the country was still in a lull

3 before the turmoil of the sixties came to a head (Ploughshares). Revolutionary Road is about the state of the home and family in the previous decade; it is about the crisis that exists beneath the beguiling delusions of middle class conformity. Beneath the daily trips in and out of the city, the return to a comfortable home in a comfortable neighborhood, the gossip with the neighbors, there lies a maelstrom of discontent and hopelessness.

Revolutionary Road contends with the pervasive unwillingness to confront this maelstrom, and the author sets up his story around one suburban couple’s desire to do so.

April and Frank Wheeler, denizens of western Connecticut, have long considered themselves “special”—they are different from their neighbors on Revolutionary Road; they are enlightened to the illusions and delusions of American life. Although they made the move from New York City to the suburbs, they feel able to resist the forces of conformity and “hopeless emptiness” that conspire against them (Yates 200).

Of course, that is not so simple. Frank works in the Sales Promotion Department at a firm called Knox Business Machines, a company whose very name suggests the impersonal drudgery of New York career life and whose building typifies this distinct lack of character: “But for all its plainness, the Knox Building did convey a quality of massive common sense. If it lacked grandeur, at least it had bulk; if there was nothing heroic about it, there was certainly nothing frivolous; it was a building that meant business” (73). Although he initially takes his job in stride—he is not the typical Knox man; never will be—after the first year the routine begins to take its toll. By the time he and April move to Connecticut, “the joke had worn thin” and he waves off inquiries about his work by saying “he had the dullest job you could possibly imagine” (81).

4 April similarly feels trapped in their home in the suburbs. She attends to the housework while yearning for the intellectual fulfillment that has seemingly been denied her since she got married and settled down. She finds meager social refuge in their neighbors the Campbells, and joins a community theatre troupe in an attempt to rekindle her acting talent. This latter escapade culminates in disaster, however, when the Laurel

Players’ production of The Petrified Forest turns out to be a total bomb: “When the curtain fell at last it was an act of utter mercy” (10). This incident, which opens the book, fuels the fire between April and Frank; his attempts to console her on the way home are met with a biting unwillingness to discuss the night’s failure, and they end up hashing out some of their deep-seated resentment to one another in the infamous scene along Route

Twelve.

Eventually, after the heat of the argument has subsided and after the Laurel

Players have been forgotten, April tells Frank that they should move to Europe. If it is life in the suburbs that is tearing them apart from their selves and from each other, then only a place like Paris will liberate their “very essence”—“It’s what you are that’s being denied and denied and denied in this kind of life,” cries April in a burst of rhetorical pleonasm

(121). Frank relents after some goading, and for a time Paris becomes their guiding light; their raison d’être during these last months in the States.

Revolutionary Road is based on events from Richard Yates’s own life, but whereas he and his first wife Sheila eventually did make it to Europe, the Wheelers never do. They make plans and get passports and tell their friends and neighbors, but in the interim they must struggle with their familiar routines. In the light of the coming move, these routines become easier for a time—they feel a rush of “joyous derangement” for the

5 first couple weeks after making their decision—but soon tension arises (125). Their suburban reality, it seems, is almost too powerful a force to escape.

The most vivid portrayal of this tragedy is in Yates’s exposing the thoughts and opinions of his characters through the seamless weaving of narration and dialogue. These thoughts and opinions simply reflect their world more often than they comment on and evaluate it; thus insight and meaning are subsumed by cliché. These characters inhabit a world of clichés. For example, just before suffering through The Petrified Forest, the members of the “better than average crowd”—“in terms of education and employment and good health”—exchange their knowing opinions on the production: “[I]t was, after all, a fine theater piece with a basic point of view that was every bit as valid today as in the thirties, “[e]ven more valid,” one man kept telling his wife, who chewed her lips and nodded, seeing what he meant; “even more valid, when you think about it” (7). The possible validity of his own statement is immediately undermined by his complete reliance on cliché: phrases like “when you think about it” and “I see what you mean”

(ingeniously implied in the narrative) are useless, flimsy “filler” phrases meant to convey intellectual understanding, but are, in essence, totally devoid of actual meaning. Yates incorporates such clichés throughout the book—throughout his entire oeuvre, in fact—in order to show the forceful resistance to meaningful rumination and communication.

Thus, like the actors they are about to see, it is as if the husband and wife are reading from a script, and though they’d like to believe the contrary, Frank and April are not totally immune to a script of their own. In some ways they are smarter than most of their neighbors—i.e., they actively protest against the stultifying effect of the suburbs instead of laughing it off in the parlance of the middle class—but at the same time they

6 rehearse their little speeches to each other and move about their environments, work and home, in ways carefully studied and managed. Yates never misses an opportunity to point out one of these affectations. Frank often tries out facial expressions in the mirror; April announces her plans for Europe with an “odd, theatrical emphasis” that Frank initially doesn’t “feel equipped to deal with” just after they make love (112-3). Even in resisting the predetermined limits of the life they have chosen to lead, they’ve fallen prey to another script that governs their very body movements and vocal registers.

Such is the reality of artifice: Frank and April walk a curious tightrope between self-awareness and “self-abasement” (117). Added to the stress of this tightrope-walk, they must negotiate the impending move to Europe. How to tell their friends and neighbors? What should they take and what should they leave behind? Soon it becomes evident that uprooting their life in the suburbs won’t necessarily solve their problems, and things reach an impasse when April unexpectedly becomes pregnant. Frank, who has had reservations about Europe the entire time, uses April’s pregnancy as an excuse to fight for staying in Connecticut. April, however, would rather abort the child than forget

Europe, but after Frank questions her sanity she relents. When they break the news of the aborted move to their neighbors the Givings, the book reaches its boiling point: John

Givings, a former mathematician confined to a mental institution, accuses them, particularly Frank, of deciding that “it’s more comfy here in the old Hopeless Emptiness after all” (301). John, who throughout the novel is half-admirable, half-despicable for his merciless truth-telling, has struck the final nerve. Frank counters with his own angry tirade, and the Givings leave in a cloud of embarrassment and anger. But John has

7 unwittingly set the tragedy in motion: the next day, April self-administers the abortion she fought for. It causes an internal hemorrhage, and by the evening, she is dead.

If Revolutionary Road is about “abortion in various forms,” then it is difficult to pick out which abortion is the most tragic (Bailey 177). The book does not beg such an exercise—indeed it seems a bit morbid, if not somehow insensitive—but it is worth noting that the abortion of the baby does not posit itself as the main contender. The baby’s short existence is so fraught with arguments above and beyond it that for Frank and April, and thus for the reader as well, the baby is never more than symbolic. The

Wheelers turn it into a symbol of the gulf between them: what is life?, they seem to be asking, and their answers differ tremendously. They are subject to the exact same reality, but their individual interaction with and resistance to this reality denies them unity of spirit.

In this manner reality turns into literary realism, and that is what makes Yates’s technique so stunning. He manages to turn reality into grotesquerie, yet the transformation lies not in any manipulation on his part but rather in the sheer intensity of his focus on the caprice of the bourgeoisie. His treatment of people and place is merciless but true. Not once do April, Frank, and all the others say something out of character, something designed solely to advance the plot or highlight some particularly nasty detail of suburban life, but then, they don’t have to. The tragedy exists firmly within their circumstances; Yates does not need to conjure it out of the ether.

Yet Revolutionary Road is not just a triumph of the realist genre; it is a triumph of twentieth-century American literature. While the postmodernists might play subversive mind games with their prose, Yates took the trouble to seek out and expose the games we

8 play with ourselves, thus proving that reality provides more than enough fodder for a meaningful, incisive critique of American society. This fodder must have been exceedingly difficult and taxing to work with in light of the fact that it took Yates about six years to write the book, and setting down these troubles on paper seems to have compounded that effect: Yates articulates this anxiety in his Ploughshares interview, evoking the name of his realist forefather: “I imagine Flaubert’s times seemed every bit as bewildering and brain-scrambling to him as ours seem to us.” But why conjure up tricks and illusions, he implicitly asks, when reality does that for us?

If Revolutionary Road is a fictional treatment of Yates’s relationship with Sheila, then Disturbing the Peace is a treatment of his anxiety. Yates suffered numerous mental breakdowns throughout his life, and Disturbing the Peace culminates in the recounting of a particularly severe psychotic episode that happened when he lived in Los Angeles.

Yates’s keen insight into reality seems to have been a blessing and a curse. He was often brutal toward his friends and loved ones, pointing out their flaws and railing against the injustices of life, and time and again he pushed himself over the edge, attempting to make sense of the realities of life (Bailey).

Disturbing the Peace, published in 1975, is like Revolutionary Road in its meticulous craft and attention to detail. It too deals with issues of family living, and sets the tone on page two with a confused telephone exchange between John Wilder and his wife Janice:

‘What do you mean, you ‘can’t’ come home? [asks Janice] Where are you? At LaGuardia?’ ‘No, thank God; I finally got out of that son of a bitch.’ […] ‘Just tell me where you’re calling from.’

9 ‘I don’t know; some kind of stand-up phone booth, and my legs are about to—Grand Central. The Biltmore. No, wait: the Commodore. I’m having a drink at the Commodore.’ ‘Well, dear, that’s practically around the corner. All you have to do is—’ ‘God damn it, aren’t you listening? I just got through telling you I can’t come home.’ (Peace 2)

John Wilder is prone to such sudden outbursts and malfunctions. He eventually leaves his wife for a younger, prettier woman, and the two of them move across the country to Los

Angeles in order to develop an ill-considered movie deal. Once in Los Angeles, life together soon becomes unbearable; John’s instability drives Pamela away, and when she moves out John is left alone in their apartment, a place just barely considered

“habitable…as impersonal and transient as a motel suite” (Peace 205). In this apartment

John will succumb to madness. He spends five or so days wandering the streets of Los

Angeles and drinking whiskey in his apartment; finally he suffers through a wrenching

Christ delusion. “He paced the apartment with both hands over his ears, but when he closed his eyes he saw a tabloid newspaper headline: SAVIOUR OR FRAUD?” (253).

By the end of the book, John Wilder is a permanent resident in a California state mental hospital.

Despite this recapitulation, what follows is a discussion on the narrative technique of Disturbing the Peace rather than a discussion on the substance of the narrative, as in the section on Revolutionary Road. My aim now is to show how Yates co-opted a trademark technique of his postmodernist colleagues and worked it into the structure and narrative of his realist novel. The main passage under consideration occurs toward the end, on pages 218 through 221: John and Pamela are at a meeting with Hollywood producer Carl Munchin and a screenwriter, a “tall, fat, nervous man named Jack Haines”

10 (218). They have a script for a movie about John’s weeklong stay in the Bellevue mental hospital, and Carl and Jack offer their opinions on how to expand it:

‘…I see him as a married man, [says Jack]… He’s unhappily married and he’s got kids he can’t relate to and he feels trapped. He’s solidly middle class. I don’t know what he does for a living, but let’s say it’s something well paid and essentially meaningless, like advertising. When he gets out of Bellevue he’s scared and lost but he doesn’t know where to turn. Maybe he gets involved with a quack psychoanalyst, that’d give us an opportunity for some humor—black humor—and then he meets a girl. The girl—’ ‘Hold it right there, Jack,’ Carl Munchin said. ‘I can tell you’ve given this a lot of thought, but I can’t help feeling there’s a quality of cliché about everything you’ve said so far.’ (Peace 220)

Very soon it is evident that they are describing John’s life; they have delineated the failure of his first marriage and will go on to foreshadow his future in a mental institution. This passage would almost be funny if the life described were less tragic, yet even John’s unease is subtly made light of: “Who the hell was this Jack Haines? How did he know so much?” runs his inner monologue (220). Having his entire adult life laid out by two Hollywood hacks reduces it to the ignoble status of cliché, but Yates turns the tables with Munchin’s acknowledgement of the cliché. This also serves to widen the scope of the narrative to imply the presence of Yates himself—more than a useful plot point, it is his comment on the nature of realist fiction. So often, literary realism is confused with the bastard art of cliché with the implication that realist authors, in order to tell their story, are forced to rely on the clichés that we have come to substitute for our inscrutable reality. Yet the discerning reader will be in on the dark joke that the life of the nameless movie character is the life of John Wilder is the life Richard Yates. Art imitates life imitates—well, real life. Yates is not saying that cliché is unavoidable for the realist writer; as in Revolutionary Road, he is instead saying that we are either too dependent on

11 cliché itself or too quick to brand reality as a mélange of clichés. Our “bleak and repetitive rituals,” to recall Anatole Broyard’s phrase—and expand it to include Wilder’s recurring mental instability—are the stuff of art—no postmodernist chicanery necessary.

In another subversively postmodernist move (subverting postmodernism itself, that is), Yates compounds the metafiction by posing himself as the Jack Haines character as well as the John Wilder character: attempting to assuage John’s and Pamela’s doubts about Jack, Carl Munchin says: “[R]emember, Haines is expendable. All I know about

Haines is that he published two obscure novels some years ago and he’s got a list of television credits as long as your arm. We can do better” (221). This, obviously, is another part of Yates’s autobiography, one he inserts with a cavalier sense of humor. In doing so, he impels the first and second characters to essentially size each other up and judge the disparate parts of his own character, particularly his forgotten-writer persona and his instable mental-patient persona. Yes, this seems to confirm, reality is twisted, strange, and nuanced enough to make the stuff of art.

If the preceding section dwelled too heavily on the postmodernist insinuations of

Disturbing the Peace, it should be stressed that the book remains a seminal piece of realist fiction. John Wilder’s struggles are transcribed with a faithful realism; the autobiographical elements are not greatly manipulated, nor is John Wilder’s character, even in his fits of psychosis, made to do anything extreme or illogical. This increases the emotional impact of the book all the more, for the reader realizes that John’s Christ delusion, physical seclusion, and eventual surrender to life in the mental hospital are all very real. As in Revolutionary Road, it is truth that is stranger, more horrifying, than fantasy.

12 Since Yates has had some lasting success with Revolutionary Road, just recently made into a movie, then that book could ostensibly be recognized as the high point of a career with a decades-long dénouement. He never again achieved the critical popularity nor perfection of style that distinguishes that book; even Disturbing the Peace doesn’t match its caustic pathos. However, in the past couple years there has been a small Yates resurgence—Sam Mendes’ film was well received, and several of his books have been reissued. Although the current avant garde, the postmodernists, still enjoy critical and intellectual popularity, perhaps Yates will have the last laugh. Realism stands not only as the venerated style of Flaubert and the Victorians, but as a testament to its time. As no one recorded the twentieth-century tragedy of the American middle class better than

Yates, perhaps his novels will one day reach their deserved place in the world canon.

13 Work Cited

Bailey, Blake. A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates. New York: Picador, 2003.

Myers, Jack Elliott. Dictionary of Poetic Terms. Denton, TX: U of North Texas, 2003.

Yates, Richard. “An Interview With Richard Yates.” Interview by DeWitt Henry and Geoffrey Clark. Ploughshares. (Winter 1972). Web.

---. Disturbing the Peace. New York: Delta, 1975.

---. “Follow the Long and Revolutionary Road.” Interview by Scott Bradfield. A Website For Richard Yates. The Independent 21 Nov. 1992. Web. .

---. Revolutionary Road. New York: Vintage Contemporaries, 1961.

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