Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road
“The important thing, always, was to remember who you were” – so says Frank Wheeler, the protagonist of Richard Yates’s 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road.1 Frank fully
subscribes to the theory that life in the suburbs of 1950s America is dull, banal, and stiflingly conformist. However, if he can just remember who he really is – not a corporate grey-flannelled drone, but a unique individual with endless potential – then he can happily pass the time in his suburban home until something more in keeping with his personal sense of exceptionalism comes along. Given Yates’s obsession with writing about male characters in the midst of some kind of calamity, Frank is often considered part of a parade of Yates characters in books that “negotiate a crisis in masculinity characteristic of the 1950s and early 1960s.”2 Unhappily married, uncomfortably domiciled in the suburbs of
Connecticut, and unsatisfactorily employed in a corporate behemoth, Frank dreams of a grander life but repeatedly fails to make these fantasies a reality. In fact, this failure of fantasy in all of Yates’s writing suggests that something fundamental is rotten at the core of American existence, for both men and women.
Contrary to the prevailing trends in psychiatry and cultural commentary at the time, which will be discussed later in this chapter, the central tragedy of Frank Wheeler’s life is not, I contend, a crisis of his masculinity. It becomes apparent quite early in the novel that if Frank and his wife, April, are victims of anything, it is of their own pretensions to superiority. Throughout Yates’s novel, the consequences of chasing an American Dream so vaguely defined as to be inexplicable become all too evident as the Wheelers struggle to the brutally inevitable conclusion of their narrative. Given that a significant amount of writing on the masculinity crisis references representations of men in fiction and film as
1 Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road (London: Vintage, 2007), 20.
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indicative of a broader societal trend, it is, therefore, appropriate in this instance to employ examples from American fiction to present an alternative interpretation of this so-called crisis. As outlined in the Introduction, the central argument of this thesis is that the narrative of masculinity in crisis is disingenuous at best, only serving to mask more pertinent issues surrounding the construction of an American identity.
It is from this point, one of a broader scope of American identity, as a whole rather than a gender-based crisis, that we come to the writing of Richard Yates. Although his writing career spanned several decades, he was consistently – almost obsessively –
preoccupied with the mentality of 1950s America, rarely straying from the same “half-acre of pain” that one reviewer criticised him for.3 Ann Beattie has suggested that “[t]here’s
something in him of the spirit of Robert Burns, whose famous poem lamented that we cannot see ourselves as others see us. Yates’ characters don’t dare, because therein lies the tragedy.”4 This motif of willing self-deception recurs throughout Yates’s writing, and the
idea of deception and false narratives is something that is woven strongly throughout Revolutionary Road. His characters are often fully aware of how they delude themselves as to their own potential, yet they persist in these delusions, unwilling or unable to change their ways, paralysed by the fear and anxiety of being exposed as somehow less than they imagine themselves to be. They resist all exhortations to view their lives honestly.
This stands in stark contrast to Yates’s own unflinching honesty as a writer. He was a proponent of high realism, always searching for the most truthful means of making his point. He was particularly resistant to what he considered the trickery and insincerity in the writing of many of his more experimental contemporaries, resenting the plaudits that came their way for what he saw as lazy chicanery. In many ways, the overarching theme of all of his fiction is the artifice of modern society, and the pressure it places on his protagonists to be more accomplished in ever more bewildering and unknown ways.
Yates’s writing, both his novels and short stories, almost always contains some form of autobiographical element. Indeed, it is difficult to find a piece that does not have some echo of his life or personal experiences. He is notorious for the uncompromising
3 Robert Tower, “Richard Yates and his unhappy people,” The New York Times November 1, 1981
http://www.nytimes.com/1981/11/01/books/richard-yates-and-his-unhappy-people.html?pagewanted=all
4 Ann Beattie, “Out of Oblivion: A writer rejoices that Richard Yates’ stories are back in print,” San Francisco
Chronicle, May 6, 2001. http://sfgate.com/books/article/Out-of-Oblivion-A-writer-rejoices-that-Ricard- 2922737.php
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manner in which he presents his characters, resisting any semblance of a trite or happy denouement. He has been accused of being bleak, depressing, wilfully narrow in his choice of topics, and horribly sexist in his treatment of female characters. Yet despite all of these shortcomings – and there is certainly an element of truth in all of them – Yates is also considered one of the great chroniclers of what came to be known as the Age of Anxiety, and the curious phenomenon that was life in the mid-twentieth century American
suburbs.5
The almost relentless hardship of Yates’s own life provided him with ample material to draw on in his writing. Born in Yonkers in 1926, he was the son of a flighty mother with pretensions to artistic greatness and, more significantly, a desire for acceptance in the more exclusive social circles of the East Coast. His parents divorced when he was just three years old, and his childhood was beset by chronic instability as he and his older sister moved from place to place with their mother. This was often because she had found a social set that fulfilled the criteria that she aspired to, but more often it was to escape unpaid rent and bills. Yates fought in World War II, but was constantly plagued by nagging doubts about his performance as a soldier, something made abundantly clear in the novel A Special Providence. Eventually published in 1969, after a torturous
writing process that saw Yates almost buckle under the pressure of producing an adequate follow up to Revolutionary Road, the novel’s protagonist Robert Prentice is shown to be a hapless daydreamer who never fully fits in. Yates was married twice and although both unions ended acrimoniously, he was a devoted if slightly distracted father to his three daughters. The restlessness of his childhood appears to have stayed with him as he moved from place to place throughout his life, looking for any kind of writing work that would pay him enough to support himself and his daughters. He once commented to an interviewer that “as long as I’ve lived, getting out of wherever I am has seemed an appealing idea.”6
To say that Yates smoked is to vastly understate the sheer scale of damage he did to his lungs throughout his life. He was notorious for his hacking, consuming cough, was hospitalised for months with TB, and only finally gave up smoking towards the end of his
5 K.A. Cuordileone suggests on p.102 of Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War that the idea of
the Age of Anxiety took hold in popular consciousness after the publication of the W.H. Auden poem of that title in 1947.
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life when he was almost constantly connected to oxygen tanks, surprising himself with how easy it was to quit. As an alcoholic, he recklessly exacerbated his bipolar disorder, refusing to curb his drinking despite repeated warnings from doctors about the health risks he could face from the toxic interaction of his anti-psychotic medication with alcohol. Reading his excellent biography, written by Blake Bailey and published in 2003, reveals a man who suffered numerous mental breakdowns that often ended in his committal to an institution. These episodes became increasingly severe as he grew older. And yet,
somehow, he managed to live to the age of 66 and produced seven novels and two short story collections. As James Wood remarks in The New Yorker, “smoking and drinking […] they only killed him, while writing plainly kept him alive.”7
Yates never wrote while drunk. Despite this one concession to discipline, however, he was a slow writer, experienced regular blocks, agonised over every word he set down on the page, and was infuriated by what he saw as his own laborious lack of speed. He never felt that his work received the recognition it deserved and was caustic in his dismissal of some of his contemporaries, partly out of jealousy of the apparent ease with which they produced work and earned seemingly endless plaudits, and partly out of an honest contempt for what he saw as the flashy emptiness of much contemporary writing. Throughout his life, he was tormented by the thoughts of his own failings as a writer, something which only seemed to make him even more compulsive in his dedication to his craft. A victim of a combination of terrible timing and his own self-destructive tendencies, apart from a brief window of celebration following the publication of Revolutionary Road in 1961, he would never feel that he had exploited his full potential. As early as 1972 in an interview for Ploughshares, he could already see that his relative lack of recognition was partly his own fault:
in my more arrogant or petulant moments, I still think Revolutionary Road ought to be famous. I was sore as hell when it first went out of print, and when Norman Podhoretz made a very small reference to it in his book several years ago as an “unfairly neglected novel” I wanted every reader in America to stand up and cheer. But of course deep down I know that kind of thinking is nonsense […] What happened after those two books was my own fault, nobody else’s […] I can’t
7 James Wood, “Like Men Betrayed,” The New Yorker, December 15, 2008.
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honestly claim that my stuff has been neglected; it’s probably received just about the degree of attention it deserves. I simply haven’t published enough to expect more.8
In his later years, Yates would often be found in his favourite booth at his local bar in Boston listing his published work, as he raced against time to reach his own, ultimately unfulfilled, personal goal of fifteen books.9
Over the years, Yates’s writing would go in and out of fashion, and print, with alarming regularity. Only the efforts of other writers such as his friends Kurt Vonnegut and Andre Dubus, and more lately Richard Ford, have kept his name alive in literary circles. All of his books were out of print until very recently. Revolutionary Road was reissued by Vintage in 2000, and an Everyman collection of Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published in 2009. Vintage later reissued all of Yates’s work in 2008 around the same time that the director Sam Mendes finally brought a film version of Revolutionary Road, starring Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, to the screen.
Yates was considered a master of the short story form, publishing two collections – Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) and Liars in Love (1981). In spite of the almost universal acknowledgement of his skill in this particular form, The New Yorker rejected every single piece he submitted during his lifetime, something that Yates obsessed over. Somewhat perversely, they eventually published one of his stories, “The Canal,” nine years after his death to coincide with the publication of the The Collected Stories of Richard Yates in 2001. The earlier collection in particular indicated the tone and topics that Yates would
repeatedly return to over the course of his career touching on lonely outsiders, frustrated ambitions, and failures of communication. “The Best of Everything” can almost be seen as a prequel to the unhappy marriages that would populate Yates’s longer form fiction, but this collection also includes a broader range of characters and situations, many of them more urban-centred than the suburban, domestic setting of Revolutionary Road.
In contrast to the roster of characters in his short stories, his longer fiction is almost exclusively, and often brutally, autobiographical. Representations of his mother, his father, his sister, his wives, of him, repeatedly appear in his novels. Although he is
unflinchingly direct in the portrayal of every character, sometimes painfully so, Yates reserves the most microscopic interrogation for those characters based on himself and his
8 Richard Yates, “From the Archive: An Interview with Richard Yates,” by DeWitt Henry and Geoffrey
Clark, Ploughshares 37.3 (2011): https://www.pshares.org/issues/fall-2011/archive-interview-richard-yates
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mother. Through these portraits, he examines the destructive impact of the clash between fantasy and reality, between improbable dreams and the practicalities of day-to-day life. These characters, traced from the outline of his mother and himself, always believe they could get more from life, that they are not fulfilling their potential as individuals. However, this is persistently undermined by a creeping suspicion that they are fully aware of their own limitations, but choose to ignore them.
The sense of compulsion in Yates’s fiction is powerful. This compulsion to write, to the detriment of his health, financial security, and personal relationships, is reflected in his characters who are also compelled to see out the unhappy conclusions of their
narratives. The reader, and the author, can see the dangers inherent in the delusions his characters entertain, but we are also painfully aware that they can never alter their course. To do so would be to fundamentally change who they are. Through an unrelenting examination of his own struggles as a writer, and as a troubled individual, Yates suggests that there is something more complicated at work than simply wanting what you cannot have. In his own words, his characters “rush around trying to do their best – trying to live well, within their known or unknown limitations, doing what they can’t help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can’t help being the people they are. That’s what brings the calamity at the end.”10
The majority of his protagonists are men who struggle with almost every facet of their lives: their jobs, their marriages, their relationships with women and other men, their own sense of individuality. These are not high achievers. They dream of being
accomplished but are doomed to be even more pathetic Walter Mittys. This tendency to focus on male characters goes hand in hand with the fact that Yates was unashamedly anti- feminist. He accused his second wife of taking up with “women’s libbers” when she finally decided to leave him. He held very traditional views about the role of women – mainly that they should stay at home and have lots of babies. He once got into a heated argument with a female writer with whom he was in competition for a Guggenheim award, which ended with him pointing out that she didn’t deserve to win because “you’re a girl, and you’ve got a baby.”11 However, in his fiction we see, somewhat surprisingly, a more complex version
of the American woman who appears to be just as prone to the same travails as the male characters who usually dominate his narratives. He may undoubtedly have been a sexist
10 Ibid., 17. 11 Ibid., 245.
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with infuriatingly old-fashioned attitudes to the women in his life, but that does not save his female characters from the same discontent that haunts his men. Both his male and female characters are ordinary people equally cursed with just enough awareness to wish they were extraordinary.
It is this desire to be something other than ordinary that creates much of the conflict in Yates’s writing. He writes of an America that demanded two fundamentally contradictory ways of being from its citizens: to conform to the dominant, accepted trends but also to stand out from the crowd in some way. These conflicting burdens bring us to a point where we must re-examine the narrative surrounding representations of American masculinity in crisis. The men of Yates’s uncomfortably familiar fictional universe are blighted with personalities prone to dramatic, hysterical crises, but the same can also be said of his women. All of his characters suffer from a particularly American malaise. They all long for the right to consider themselves exceptional. They all yearn to be considered unique. Yet none of them are entirely sure how any of this can be achieved.
The America that Yates writes of is populated with people struggling to reconcile the day-to-day banality of their lives with a culturally engrained set of beliefs that tells them they can be anything they want to be. This manifests itself in a misguided belief that all desires should be fulfilled, that everyone is entitled to see their wildest dreams come true. But it also creates a crippling discontent; when everyone else subscribes to a similar belief, it makes it almost impossible to define what is exceptional about one’s own existence, resulting in a sensation of stalling, of immobility. Consequently, we are confronted with a plethora of issues arising out of this stagnant American dream which are fundamentally at odds with the hope and potential that marked the foundation of the state. Yates himself indicated that the title of Revolutionary Road was “meant to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 […] our best and bravest revolutionary spirit had come to something very much like a dead end in the 50s.”12 Without ever explicitly mentioning it, Yates therefore
calls into question the validity of the American Dream and all its attendant complications. A country that was essentially founded as a concept had, to Yates, run out of ideas. In the same way that the closing of the frontier is alluded to in the opening of Sinclair Lewis’s