The Rise and Fall of Richard Yates

“A sad, gray, deathly world–dreams without substance–aging without maturity: this is Yates’s world, and it is a disturbing one.” - Joyce Carol Oates.

American novelist Richard Yates has become the forgotten man of a golden generation of authors that emerged from the United States during the 20th Century. As a realist novelist, Yates understood people’s pretensions and self-delusions as well as any other author I have ever read. Previously, I did not know exactly what it was about Yates’ stories that spoke so much to me. I have never lived in suburban America, nor have I had a successfully paid job in New York, served in a war or succumbed to alcoholism.

There is something mesmerising about how Yates’ work has such a wide reach. I have thought about why this is for a long time, but maybe once I have completed his collection of novels and short stories I will have a more concrete hypothesis for our readers. What I can say today is that the tragic honesty with which Yates wrote his characters (many of whom had drinking problems) was in fact so sober in its delivery that it gave readers a poignant portrait of real-life anguish.

Today, I want to explore the years which I believe most defined Yates. I have read his first three novels and his first short story collection and been fascinated by the immense contrast in fortunes Yates experienced between 1961 and 1975, the years he published his resoundingly successful debut, Revolutionary Road, and his widely dismissed ‘failure’, Disturbing The Peace.

Yates became an overnight success with Revolutionary Road and followed this up with a sublime collection of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, capturing a moment in time of the lives of Manhattan office workers, aspiring novelists and suburban men saddled by their primitive yearnings. Revolutionary Road was published in the afterglow of a post-war decade of American prosperity and introduced us to Frank and Alice Wheeler, a married couple who dared to dream of an existence not merely defined by conformity and convention. Not only was Yates’ storytelling brilliant, but the novel was symbolic in its characterisation of a ‘time’ in American domestic history. Much like F.Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, there was something for everyone in Yates’ heart-breaking debut. It matched Fitzgerald’s oeuvre in its catastrophe and in its depiction of prosperous America. Yates very much capitalised on being in the right place at the right time in capturing the ‘Age of Anxiety’ as neatly as Fitzgerald defined America’s ‘Jazz Age’ in the 1920s.

In Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, published in 1962, Yates continued this formula for success. The innocence of youth, marital conflict and the general disillusionment of the pursuit of the ‘American Dream’ made up the eleven stories which Yates collated for this exquisite collection, teasing readers with more realistic depictions of middle-class East Coast life. This beautiful mosaic of stories served to elevate Yates’ status and it appeared that a successful decade lay ahead of him in the early 1960s.

Unfortunately, readers had to wait until 1969 for Yates’ next novel, A Special Providence. The novel’s narrative alternated between Alice Prentice’s failing career as a sculptor, and her son Robert Prentice’s service during World War Two. The novel was widely dismissed by critics as Yates became a victim of his earlier success, expectations were unfortunately not met. Although he wrote a poignant, heartfelt tale and depicted Alice’s strife with extreme emotion, the novel did not deliver on the same qualities that so many readers appreciated in Revolutionary Road and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness.

Furthermore, as Stewart O’Nan has noted, the nostalgia of A Special Providence was somewhat misplaced by Yates because “people had moved on from the war.” During the Cold War ‘Age of Anxiety’, societal middle-class norms and the fusion of dystopian science-fiction visions appealed to many more readers, take the work of Ray Bradbury as a pioneering example of this. For Yates, in being more autobiographical and writing with a heightened personal honesty, he actually sacrificed his acerbic social commentary. Many took the nostalgia of A Special Providence as a merely dated portrait: “It spoke for no generation–or perhaps for one that had long since been eclipsed.”

As Yates suffered from his own marital issues and heavy drinking after the publication of A Special Providence, he denied himself a quick redemption following the disappointment of his second novel. For those still interested in Yates, he returned in 1975 with Disturbing The Peace, his most autobiographical work yet. The novel felt like an extended short story out of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and promised a lot: John Wilder is in his mid-thirties, holds down a well-paid job in advertising and lives in a stylish Manhattan apartment with his wife and young son.

What was not to like? Unfortunately, as Yates’ own career had gradually become, Disturbing The Peace offered a lot but was underwhelming. On one hand, I believe that it is Yates at his most revealing. There is something fascinating about how much Yates put more of his own soul into the novel as he did in developing Wilder’s character, who is an innately flawed protagonist. In Disturbing The Peace, Yates arrived at a dramatic denouement of such uncomfortable disorder that, although unspectacular in its lack of climactic drama, it was at least true to his own experiences of life and initial material success.

On the other hand, although Yates revealed a lot about his own life in Disturbing the Peace, it came at the wrong time professionally. Just when his career was at its lowest ebb, Yates could not afford to produce a novel which was so subjective and lacking in the adept realistic context which he used to propel his stories of the early 1960s forward. The legacy which was ultimately left of this era post-Revolutionary Road and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was of a man out of touch with the times, uncaring about how he was received.

Before I enjoy his last four novels and second short story collection, Liars in Love, I believe that it is worth taking a moment to remember how far Yates’ stock fell as a novelist, especially considering the remarkable success which followed. From what I have read about his career, there was some redemption for Yates merely one year after his darkest hour, when The Easter Parade was published in 1976. Although he experienced something of a fall from grace in the last sixties and early seventies, the lucidity and elegance with which Yates wrote is undeniable. Stay tuned for more waxing lyrical over this American genius in the months to come.

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