Richard Yates
Richard Yates shone bright upon the publication of his first novel, Revolutionary Road, which was nominated for the National Book Award in 1961. It drew unbridled praise and branded Yates an important, new writer. Kurt Vonnegut claimed that Revolutionary Road was The Great Gatsby of his time. William Styron described it as "A deft, ironic, beautiful novel that deserves to be a classic." Tennessee Williams went one further and said, "Here is more than fine writing; here is what, added to fine writing, makes a book come immediately, intensely, and brilliantly alive. If more is needed to make a masterpiece in modern American fiction, I am sure I don't know what it is."
In 1962 Eleven Kinds of Loneliness was published, his first collection of short stories. It too had praise heaped upon it. Kurt Vonnegut said it was "the best short-story collection ever written by an American."
Yates' writing skills were further utilized when, upon returning from Los Angeles, he began working as a speechwriter for then-Senator Robert F. Kennedy until the assassination of JFK. From there he moved onto Iowa where, as a creative writing teacher, he would influence and inspire writers such as Andre Dubus and Dewitt Henry.
His third novel, Disturbing the Peace, was published in 1975. Perhaps his second most well-known novel, The Easter Parade, was published in 1976. The story follows the lives of the Grimes sisters and ends in typical Yatesian fashion, replicating the disappointed lives of Revolutionary Road.
However, Yates began to find himself as a writer cut adrift in a sea fast turning towards postmodernism; yet, he would stay true to realism. His heroes and influences remained the classics of F. Scott Fitzgerald, Flaubert and short-story master, Chekov.
It was to his school and army days that Richard turned to for his next novel, A Good School, which was quickly followed by his second collection of short stories, Liars in Love. Young Hearts Crying emerged in 1984 followed two years later with Cold Spring Harbour, which would prove to be his final completed novel.
Like the fate of his hero, Flaubert, whose novel Madame Bovary influenced Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade, Richard Yates' works are enjoying a posthumous renaissance, attracting newly devoted fans across the Atlantic and beyond.
“Synchronize watches at oh six hundred' says the infantry captain, and each of his huddled lieutenants finds respite from fear in the act of bringing two tiny pointers into jeweled alignment while tons of heavy artillery go fluttering overhead: the prosaic, civilian-looking dial of the watch has restored, however briefly, an illusion of personal control. Good, it counsels, looking tidily up from the hairs and veins of each terribly vulnerable wrist; fine: so far, everything's happening right on time.”
“if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
“Now you’ve said it. The hopeless emptiness. Hell, plenty of people are on to the emptiness part; out where I used to work, on the Coast, that’s all we ever talked about. We’d sit around talking about emptiness all night. Nobody ever said ‘hopeless,’ though; that’s where we’d chicken out. Because maybe it does take a certain amount of guts to see the emptiness, but it takes a whole hell of a lot more to see the hopelessness. And I guess when you do see the hopelessness, that’s when there’s nothing to do but take off. If you can”
“The Revolutionary Hill Estates had not been designed to accommodate a tragedy. Even at night, as if on purpose, the development held no looming shadows and no gaunt silhouettes. It was invincibly cheerful, a toyland of white and pastel houses whose bright, uncurtained windows winked blandly through a dappling of green and yellow leaves … A man running down these streets in desperate grief was indecently out of place.”
“She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted something to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone.”
“Dying for love might be pitiable, but it wasn't much different, finally, from any other kind of dying.”
“He took each fact as it came and let it slip painlessly into the back of his mind, thinking, Okay, okay, I'll think about that one later; and that one; and that one; so that the alert, front part of his mind could remain free enough to keep him in command of the situation.”
“If my work has a theme, I suspect it is a simple one: that most human beings are inescapably alone, and therein lies their tragedy.”
“It took Emily a long time to realize that Sarah was dead. Sometimes, waking from a dream of childhood filled with Sarah's face and Sarah's voice, she would go and study her own face in the bright bathroom mirror until she found assurance that it was still the face of Sarah's sister, and that it didn't look old.”
“God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us.”
“He couldn't even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive.”
“He had won but he didn't feel like a winner.”
“I'm only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.”