genuine clarity
genuine feeling
the right word
the exact English sentence
the eloquent detail
the rigorous dramatization of story
These are the words writer Richard Yates tacked above his typewriter as a list of things to strive for while he crafted incantations out of ink and paper.
But you’ve probably never heard of him.
Lost somewhere among the threads that stitch twentieth-century greats like Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Morrison, and Faulkner into the ever-growing tapestry of American literature is Yates. The WWII veteran and former speechwriter for the Kennedys devoted his life to becoming “the supreme chronicler of American solitude” (Atlantic) in works including Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962), Easter Parade (1976), and, most notably, Revolutionary Road (1961), often referred to as The Great Gatsby of the 1960s. And although later writers, such as Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, who went on to become American greats have cited Yates’s brand of realism as a direct influence, Yates himself was unable to sell more than 12,000 hardcover copies of any one of his novels. By the time he died at age 66 of cigarette-induced lung complications—before his alcohol abuse could get to him first—his books had fallen out of circulation. They remained largely forgotten until the Oscar buzz surrounding Sam Mendes’s 2008 film adaptation of Revolutionary Road starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio reawakened the public to the legacy left behind by the Bard of American Suburbia.
And although later writers, such as Raymond Carver and Richard Ford, who went on to become American greats have cited Yates’s brand of realism as a direct influence, Yates himself was unable to sell more than 12,000 hardcover copies of any one of his novels.
Before Yates became a ghostwriter for Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, the New York native, born in 1926, was barely of age to enlist in World War II. Serving in the U.S. army from 1944 to 1946 meant he spent two years in France without ever having seen combat. Although he was a constituent of the Greatest Generation, he had no way to prove neither membership nor manhood through combat experience. He was a veteran only in theory, but not in practice.
Yates was the odd one out, as he often found himself in other facets of his life. Upon returning to the U.S., he attended New York University under the benefits provided by the G.I. Bill before dropping out to pursue a career in literature. Here, too, in the literary industry, he failed to find his footing. Despite rising to fame as an acclaimed writer and lecturer for prestigious literary programs, critics had difficulty finding value in his “savage portraits of his character’s inadequacies…having nervous breakdowns, sopping up gin, they seem beyond salvaging,” James Atlas once wrote in The Atlantic.
In a way, each of his nine novels have taken on an autobiographical nature. At the same time, however, they embody the zeitgeist of a generation that failed to find their footing in post-Fat Man and Little Boy America, turning instead to putting on their best performance of conforming to what they believed were security, safety, and success.
“A quality of play-acting, of slightly false intensity, a way of seeming to speak less to him than to some romantic abstraction.”
— Richard Yates, “Revolutionary Road”
To understand Yates is to understand his crucible.
Yates and his coevals belonged to an age of anxiety rippling in the wake of Oppenheimer’s Manhattan Project and that continued seeping into the following years, taking the forms of the Cold War and the Red Scare. This anxiety, however, can be traced back to the Great Depression, into which Yates was born and spent most of his childhood. It churned on until the United States entered the Second World War in December of 1941 after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Those who reached adulthood around the late forties and early fifties had already witnessed the worst. From homelessness to starvation to child hunger, the Greatest Generation did not want to relive their harrowing past. As soon as the Allies won the war and America’s economy began to boom as the largest creditor nation in the world, Americans grasped at any and every opportunity to secure financial stability and housing security. For the first time, home ownership became the gold standard of stability. The G.I. Bill made this possible for over two million Americans by providing education and home loans for veterans returning home.
Only they came home to what they found was an increasingly independent female workforce, who had adapted to holding down home turf since 1914. From World War I to the Great Depression to World War II, back-to-back global crises meant that women who had grown used to working—and the freedom that came with it—were forced to make room for their men who would be returning for good.
Still, they tried to find their footing.
Yates hated suburbs. In fact, he hated them so much he wrote of nothing but them, scorning their insistence on reinstating the nuclear family with each member playing a well-defined role.
As the American residential landscape switched from rural to suburban, seventy-five percent of new housing in the U.S. began to follow the Levittown model, a preplanned mass-produced housing project and the first of its kind. These “swollen villages,” as Yates referred to them, made possible by the ever-expanding highway system, were isolated White swathes of land far away from the smells, languages, crime, and cultures of urban centers. Yates hated suburbs. In fact, he hated them so much he wrote of nothing but them, scorning their insistence on reinstating the nuclear family with each member playing a well-defined role.
This was America’s perverted response to the looming threat of nuclear apocalypse and Communist infiltration that began in 1947 with Senator McCarthy’s Zeal for Democracy Act. Before they knew it, Americans found themselves putting on a play of sorts, with the women pretending to be far less professionally capable than they were and the men acting as though it was them, and not the Russians on the Eastern Front, who had single-handedly saved the world from speaking German. They pretended their “swollen villages” of uniform mediocrity buttressed them from the collapse of the lives they built after escaping the poverty of their past.
“Proving, proving; and for no other reason than that he was married to a woman who had somehow managed to put him forever on the defensive, who loved him when she was nice, who lived according to what she happened to feel like doing and who might at any time—this was the hell of it—who might at any time of day or night just happen to feel like leaving him. It was as ludicrous and as simple as that.”
— Richard Yates, “Revolutionary Road”
It feels apt, therefore, that Yates’s debut novel Revolutionary Road opens with a failed play featuring April Wheeler as her husband Frank watches from the audience, both proving, proving to the other that they are what they say they are: wife and husband.
Yates captured life as it was in its most pathetic state through the lens of a biased third-person omniscient narrator who switched perspectives over and over throughout the course of a novel like handing off a baton from one unreliable narrator to the next. His meager sympathy for his characters did not sit well with the critics of his day. Today’s market demands writing that is either plot-driven or character-driven–bonus points for both. Writers are expected to conjure mythos and persons that the audience can relate to or root for, at the very least. While this certainly makes for quick, profitable entertainment, writing that seeks to reward its readers by resolving contrived tension fails to capture real life. Yates’s writing, on the other hand, anchors itself neither in plot nor in character. For him, the focus was always the human condition. Fully-fleshed characters remain stagnant in bourgeois pockets frozen in time while the reader is forced to witness them fail to resolve their problems. Most of them are phonies, half of them are serial cheaters, and the other half are so insufferable you find yourself praying for their downfall. Yates’s story-people must inevitably become the very bastardized caricatures they swore they’d never be: this is the human crisis. Try as we might, we are inextricably tied to our conditions. This is why his books have been subject to the harshest lashings from critics for his depictions of the women he writes about.
The women that occupy Yates’s stories suffer from chronic and thematic objectification and sexualization. Some die, several are cheated on (or do the cheating), and most of them do not pursue careers outside of the home despite wishing otherwise. However, his male characters are not exempt from this treatment either. Frank Wheeler from Revolutionary Road, for one, might have married his wife for her potential to raise his social status, but he pays the price by chasing validation for the rest of his life–in his career, his appearance, and in other women. And that’s the thing about Yates’s writing. While they may depict real life, they’re never meant to be taken at face value. Sexist stereotypes are dramatized to force the reader into fleeing for a path outside of the status quo. He reflects, not enforces, the human condition. His stories are like a warning, a mirror the reader holds up to themselves to see how far off they are from the story-people.
His stories are like a warning, a mirror the reader holds up to themselves to see how far off they are from the story-people.
But we’re not so different from them, are we? Because at their core, Yates’s protagonists harbor a secret hope for something more and to pursue it by escaping suburbia. But no one escapes suburbia—American mediocrity—alive.
Not even Yates himself. For all the years he devoted to his craft, he was never able to prove himself a writer worthy of finding his way into the bookshelves of posterity.
Richard Yates (1926-1992) was born in 1926 in New York and lived in California. His prize-winning stories began to appear in 1953 and his first novel, Revolutionary Road, was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. He is the author of eight other works, including the novels A Good School, The Easter Parade, and Disturbing the Peace, and two collections of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love. He died in 1992.
Revolutionary Road (1961) can be purchased here.
Berkeley Fiction Review 
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