by Richard Yates
p. 1962 (Stories written between 1951 and 1961)
It was the title that snagged me; I had never heard of
Richard Yates, though I realized later, I’d heard of at least one of his
novels, if only because it had been made into a movie a few years back—Revolutionary Road (which famously reunited
Titanic costars DiCaprio and Winslet in a much different setting). This
collection of short stories, released one year after the aforementioned novel,
is a simple yet introspective reflection on the mundane life of 1950s Americans,
and in my subsequent research on Yates’ legacy, I’ve come to understand that it
not only embodies the spirit of what is known as the “Age of Anxiety,” but that
Yates is generally regarded as the type of author that authors love... and one
who is criminally under-read.
I’ll talk about this Age of Anxiety thing first, as that is
a concept that was unfamiliar to me, and it guides a lot of my views on Yates’
collection. The term comes from a W.H. Auden poem (and later the Leonard
Bernstein symphony upon which it was based). From what I understand, it refers
to an era from the 1940s on when American society was unsettled, tense, trying
to find their footing but feeling displaced in an increasingly industrialized
world.
Well, I suppose there were a lot of things to feel tense
about in the 1950s. Fresh off of one war and finding ourselves in another, the implementation of nuclear technology and the subsequent Cold War atmosphere,
McCarthyism and Red Scare, and the wave of technology designed to bring us
closer but irrevocably driving us further apart.
Unlike my beloved pulp sci-fi novels, which capitalize on
Cold War fear and technological advances to create tension and intrigue, Yates’
work focuses more on the domestic—the subtle ways in which these changes affect
our every day lives. The recurring theme in these eleven stark tales is, of
course, loneliness, but not so much of the literal kind as the alone-in-a-crowd
kind. I found that often times the central figure to each story (and almost all
of the stories were told from a perspective outside of the subject) was someone
with ‘vision,’ someone who possesses unique if unpopular traits that Yates
believed should be more widely appreciated. It is a retrospective on the
American Dream—not on the bright, shining possibilities and Land of Opportunity
dogma you always hear about—but on what comes after, when you realize that perhaps that American Dream was not
all it was cracked up to be and you must now struggle to find your place in a
changing world that doesn’t care about your dreams.
If that sounds depressing then I’m doing it right, because
these were eleven ridiculously depressing tales with very little relief.
Seriously, I couldn’t read more than one in a single sitting because I needed
to take a break for something lighter.
What makes it so much worse is that reading about the Age of
Anxiety—fear of constant war, of religious fundamentalism, of out of touch
politicians running things, of degradation of society, of a crumbling environment,
of technology isolating us even while it ‘unites’ us—you realize that all of
these things are as alarmingly applicable to today’s society as they were then.
Sure, some of the details have changed, but the loneliness prevails. I need
only look at my friends and family struggling with unemployment and displacement
after decades of hard work—or at myself even, 26 and working a job unsuited to
my own ‘dreams’ and aspirations—and I realize that we’re still deeply embedded
in our own version of the Age of Anxiety. Perhaps reading Yates’ eleven tales
of lonely people in a lonely world is so very depressing because it hits all
too close to home.
I can’t say that Richard Yates’ writing style resonated with
me—the prose is spartan and not very poetic, and he relies a bit too heavily on
the cliched Italian-American ‘New Yawkah’ dialect but in spite of this the
characters are deeply drawn and for the first time since this project of mine
began, I can say I’ve encountered the first example of a story written in the
1950s that presented women as complex characters, perhaps not quite equal to
men, but nonetheless relatively positive in their representation. The pulp
sci-fi authors who think they’re
doing women a favor by including them in the action could have learned a lesson
or two from Yates about giving them a soul and a voice, but sadly, as I’ve come
to find out, Yates wasn’t appreciated in his own time. He never sold more than
12,000 copies of any of his first editions and wasn’t recognized until after
his death. He’s still not widely recognized today, which is a shame, because
while his writing is simplistic, his ideas are far from such.
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