by Blake Bailey
Yates did not lack company during this time. Bread Loaf had widened his circle of acquaintance, and nowadays he was nothing if not socially available. The Irishman Arthur Roth was a good companion, as Yates not only admired him as a writer, but as a drinker almost as heedless as he. Yates and Roth enjoyed baiting each other while in their cups, and one night during a party at Bob Riche’s apartment the two got in a violent, careening, “kidding” wrestling match that culminated amid broken glass in an empty bathtub, where Riche doused them both with a bucket of water.
At Bread Loaf there was also a group of writerly Rutgers students (the poet John Ciardi, then the director of the conference, was on the Rutgers faculty), who looked up to the hard-drinking Yates as a rather romantic role model. Alan Cheuse, editor of the undergraduate literary magazine, remembered the invariable routine involved in a visit to Yates’s apartment: “Dick would hand you a tumbler of bourbon as soon as you arrived. It’d be five or six in the evening and he’d be drunk already. You’d drink and talk, then have dinner at the Blue Mill and drink some more. After that Dick would go back to his apartment and pass out. He was always kind—he took a real interest in you—but clearly he didn’t like sober people.” Perhaps closest among the Rutgers crowd was Ed Kessler, who joined Yates for such anomalous outings as a Robert Lowell reading at Columbia, after which they adjourned downtown until, several blurred hours later, a groggy Kessler woke up on a cot in Yates’s basement. Both Kessler and Cheuse arranged for Yates to give paid readings and lectures at Rutgers, an ordeal that was new to him then: “For God’s sake if you have any ideas about what I ought to say in my lecture,” he wrote Kessler, “please don’t keep them to yourself. Should I take the Beatniks over the jumps?… Or discuss Eliot’s objective correlative as exemplified in Looney Tunes (‘That’s all, Folks’)? Or do a double buck and wing soft-shoe routine and recite Kipling’s ‘If’ for an encore? I mean like HELP me in this thing, Kessler.” The lecture went without a hitch, but the party afterward ended badly. The young writer Maureen Howard was there (her husband was on the faculty), and to everybody’s surprise the drunken Yates had a bone to pick with her. He’d read her stories in the best-of-the-year anthologies, and didn’t like the way she stylized her characters in terms of their tastes—what they wore, what they ate, and so on. He thought it was simplistic and condescending, and he was very emphatic about it. “Maureen seemed like a tough person,” said Kessler, “but Dick could destroy somebody if he wanted.” She left the party in tears.
It had been a long ten months since Yates had finished his novel, and mercifully the suspense was almost over, if not the hysteria. One way or the other Yates had much to be proud of: Kazin, Styron, Updike* and many others had blessed his work, and two days before publication a further blurb was wired from Tennessee Williams of all people, who rarely bothered with that sort of thing: “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.” Sam Lawrence assured Yates that such praise was disinterested (“Don’t be concerned about your virility”), and added, “We have never had this kind of response for a first novel since I can remember.… This is what makes publishing worthwhile.” The two men planned to meet at the Harvard Club on publication day, March 1, to celebrate the fruitful consummation of a long and often dreary ordeal.
* * *
Yates was never one to ignore reviews, or for that matter dismiss them with a mandarin chuckle when they were bad. “Oh yes,” he responded when an interviewer asked if he paid attention to them, and added with typical candor that he sometimes read them “five or six times over”: “When they’re helpful is when they’re good, and they make me furious when they’re bad, which is to say they’re probably not helpful at all.”
It’s interesting to imagine Yates reading certain reviews of Revolutionary Road, much less five or six times over, and perhaps it’s safe to say that most of them weren’t very helpful. With a few exceptions, the good reviews tended to make fairly obvious points, while the bad ones were what Walker Percy called “bad-bad”—that is, bad in every sense: negative, badly written, in bad faith. An early review in Library Journal seemed to bode well: “Seldom has the talk of a desperate, ineffectual man been captured with such uncanny precision as in this novel,” it noted, and also made the nice point that the book hardly lacked humor in the midst of its general unpleasantness (“such is the nature of life that some of the most pathetic moments are also the most comical”). But at least two of the major reviews on Sunday, March 5, took the line that Revolutionary Road must be negligible because it dealt with the tired subject of suburban discontent: “No amount of contrived symbolism can hide what has become a hackneyed theme in the contemporary American novel,” wrote R. D. Spector in the New York Herald Tribune, and W. E. Preece of the Chicago Tribune went further, claiming the book read like an “intentional parody of all the similarly type-cast novels that went before it.” Happily, Martin Levin provided a strong corrective in that Sunday’s New York Times Book Review. The “excellence” of the book, wrote Levin, lay in the “integrity” of its approach: “Eschewing the pitfalls of obvious caricature or patent moralizing, Mr. Yates chooses the more difficult path of allowing his characters to reveal themselves—which they do with an intensity that excites the reader’s compassion as well as his interest.”
Leave it to Orville Prescott, the dean of bad-bad reviewers, to rebut in the daily Times on behalf of low middlebrows everywhere. The novel, he wrote, was a “brilliantly dismal” tour de force about “two psychopathic characters and their miserable haste to self-destruction.” Having thus established that the Wheelers are mentally ill—indeed, Frank is an “absolute psychotic”—Prescott could only wag his head at the folly of such a “superior” writer as Yates wasting his time and talent on characters “so far gone into mental illness that they are incapable of responsible decisions and unaware of the duty and necessity of making them.” And lest one forget the main point, he concluded: “No fair-minded reader could finish Revolutionary Road without admiration for Mr. Yates’s impressive skill; but whether the mentally ill Wheelers deserve the five years of labor Mr. Yates has lavished upon them is another question.”
Magazine reviews were mostly positive, though the approval of The New Yorker continued to elude Yates: “The Wheelers are young, pathetic, trapped, half educated, and without humor—meaningless characters leading meaningless lives,” remarked the anonymous reviewer in the “Briefly Noted” section. “Mr. Yates’s attempt to lend drama to their predicament, through an unconvincing introduction of madness and violence in the story, serves only to emphasize the flimsy nature of his work.” This weirdly peevish squib was offset by more considered treatment in the Saturday Review and the New Republic, whose reviewers—David Boroff and Jeremy Larner respectively—made large claims for the novel. Boroff called Yates “a writer of commanding gifts,” whose “prose is urbane yet sensitive, with passion and irony held deftly in balance,” while Larner discussed not only technique but also the book’s sociological significance: “To read Revolutionary Road is to have forced upon us a fresh sense of our critical modern shortcomings: failures of work, education, community, family, marriage … and plain nerve.” Even Newsweek called it “the find of the year,” though Yates was perhaps most pleased by Dorothy Parker’s panegyric in the June Esquire: “A treasure, a jewel, a whole trove is Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road.… Mr. Yates’s eyes and ears are gifts from heaven. I think I know of no recent novel that has so impressed me, for the manners and mores of his people are, it seems to me, perfectly observed.”
Finally two insightful and appreciative reviews appeared later that summer: F. J. Warnke in the Yale Review made the useful point that the “novel is really about the inadequacy of human beings to their own aspirations, and its target is not America but existence,” while Theodore Solotaroff in Comment
ary noted that “Yates has the superior novelist’s instinct for the nuances by which people give themselves away.” Both reviewers had a few sober misgivings as well: Warnke found the narrative point of view unfocused in such a way that Frank Wheeler and others are alternately sympathetic and the objects of “savage contempt,” while Solotaroff objected that the Wheelers’ “determinative childhoods” undermined the clarity of the book’s social criticism (“the Wheelers probably would have failed under the best of circumstances”).
As with his beloved Gatsby, Yates’s novel got a rather mixed reception despite what many agreed to be its manifest excellence, and like Gatsby, too, it would pass in and out of print for many years to the bewilderment of those (especially writers) who continue to think it deserves the status of an American classic. Twenty years ago James Atlas wrote that Revolutionary Road “remains one of the few novels I know that could be called flawless,” and Richard Ford, in his introduction to the recent Vintage edition, called it “a cultish standard.” That it remains a cultish rather than popular standard is perhaps due to two broad factors: (1) as the writer Fred Chappell pointed out, the book “strikes too close to home”—that is, the educated general reader is all too likely to identify, depressingly, with a pretentious pseudointellectual such as Frank Wheeler; (2) the book’s artistic merit is lost on academic canon-makers who tend to regard it as “merely” another realistic novel about the suburbs. Yates’s meaning seems all too plain for the purpose of scholarly explication, and yet this is one of the most misunderstood American novels, both in terms of its meaning and aesthetic approach. As Ford noted, “Realism, naturalism, social satire—the standard critical bracketry—all go begging before this splendid book. Revolutionary Road is simply Revolutionary Road, and to invoke it enacts a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees.”
The book’s deceptively simple language is like the glassy surface of a deep and murky loch. The first thing one may see is a rippled image of oneself, and then the churning shadows beneath. That Warnke found the Wheelers both sympathetic and repugnant is very much to the point in a novel full of mirrors, windows, and shifting points of view. “I don’t suppose one picture window is going to destroy our personalities,” Frank remarks when they first examine the house in Revolutionary Estates—and indeed the garish window sometimes rewards Frank with a nocturnal image of himself as “the brave beginnings of a personage,” while other windows and “passing mirrors” sometime surprise him with a very different view: “[His face was] round and full of weakness, and he stared at it with loathing.”* And so too with the more admirable April, who from the beginning is shown as two women (at least), filtered through the mingled perspectives of Frank and the rest of the audience at The Petrified Forest: She is both “a tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could destroy” as well as the “graceless, suffering creature whose existence [Frank] tried every day of his life to deny.” Thus the protean Wheelers embody the thematic (and psychologically valid) discrepancy between romantic and elusively “authentic” selves, a split that applies to every major character in the novel with one notable exception—the madly literal John Givings. Such deliberate blurring has led to a certain amount of misinterpretation, as it should. Revolutionary Road, no matter how accessible on the surface, rewards a lifetime of rereading and reflection.
Some who view the novel as more or less straight social satire (or social criticism, depending on whether one finds any humor in it) tend to see the Wheelers as an essentially gifted, decent, but flawed young couple who wither amid the sterility of midcentury America as reflected in its suburban ethos. Yates himself dismissed such a reading out of hand. “The Wheelers may have thought the suburbs were to blame for all their problems,” he told Ploughshares, “but I meant it to be implicit in the text that that was their delusion, their problem, not mine.” It seems fair to assume, then, that the Wheelers “would have failed under the best of circumstances” as Solotaroff points out (deploringly), and hence the need for their “determinative childhoods” by way of explaining the cause, or anyway one cause, of this failure. But if the Wheelers are abnormally weak or even mentally ill (as Orville Prescott would have it), where is the universal interest? And if the novel is “really about the inadequacy of human beings to their own aspirations, and its target is not America but existence,” as Warnke suggests, why so much harping on suburbia in the first place? Why the suggestive title, Revolutionary Road?
Yates, having made the point that the suburbs are hardly “to blame” for the Wheelers’ tragedy, goes on to assert that the book’s main target is indeed American culture. “I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the nineteen-fifties,” said Yates.
Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the McCarthy witch-hunts.… I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties.
The suburbs (or American culture at large) are not, then, a mass of malign external forces that combine to thwart the Wheelers’ dreams; rather the Wheelers—in all their weakness and preposterous self-deceit—are themselves definitive figures of that culture, determinative childhoods and all. Granted, they are somewhat less mediocre than most: They can wax eloquent about the “outrageous state of the nation” as well as the “endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity and The Suburbs,” until they begin to convince themselves that they and their friends the Campbells compose “an embattled, dwindling intellectual underground” that is “painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.” But when it comes to the point of leaving the “hopeless emptiness” of it all—or even completing a stone path that would connect their home to Revolutionary Road—Frank, at least, would rather not. As for April, she might never have found herself married to such a man, or living in such a place, were it not for the vulnerabilities created by her “determinative childhood.”
In the end, of course, neither Frank nor April can be entirely summed up in social or historical terms, and certainly the novel is “about” human frailty at any time or place. But in 1955 the Wheelers end up in the suburbs for a reason, even while they and any number of bright, skeptical citizens imagined themselves destined for something better. As Chappell noted, such “fuzzy dreams of freedom and ‘self-realization’” tend to be peculiar to certain fortuitous moments in history: “[P]lentiful money is required and an easy ignoble means of acquiring it, a good spotty liberal education is needed, and there must be a lack of strong ties to family or even to place.… ‘If only I didn’t have to’—that’s probably the commonest excuse we give ourselves.” Amid the affluence of postwar America, the temptation was particularly keen to accept the easy rewards of suburban comfort, an undemanding job, and to fill the emptiness that followed with dreams of potential greatness or adventure. But to pursue such dreams in fact—as Yates well knew—required a resilient sense of autonomy that resisted the siren call of, say, a comfortable ranch house in Redding as opposed to a roach-infested basement in the Village. As the mad John Givings says, “You want to play house, you got to a have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don’t like.” And in a society where one’s status depends almost entirely on the nice house and “good” job, one must possess a formidable sense of self-worth, and perhaps formidable talent as well, to risk failure by leaving the beaten path. Frank Wheeler, like most, would prefer to believe he’s special without putting the matter to a test; meanwhile his sense of inadequacy as the bumbling son of an ineffectual father, coupled with a better-than-average intellect, makes him strident (and almost convincingly so) in his insistence that he’s superior to his fate. And April’s own deprived childhood helps, in part, to account for her desperate need to believe him.
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p; As characters the Wheelers are meant to be representative and somewhat stylized, but also rounded and plausible individuals in their own right, the better for the reader to identify with them on the one hand, while maintaining a certain judgmental detachment on the other. Yates achieves this kind of double vision—though some would call it inconsistency—with a limited omniscient viewpoint that shifts from character to character, then at apposite moments becomes godlike. For example, the Wheelers’ argument during their drive home from the Laurel Players fiasco is given through Frank’s point of view, and his frustration toward what seems his wife’s unwarranted bitchiness tends to evoke our sympathy; when she jumps out of the car and runs away (“a little too wide in the hips”), we follow with Frank until a car approaches, whereupon we are suddenly looking at rather than through him: “His arms flapped and fell; then, as the sound and the lights of an approaching car came up behind them, he put one hand in his pocket and assumed a conversational slouch for the sake of appearances.” One’s heart goes out to the embattled, well-meaning, if rather pathetic man who would have it known he’s more than just a “dumb, insensitive suburban husband,” while the laughable puppet (“His arms flapped and fell”) who worries about “appearances” is contemptible. And yet they are convincingly the same man.
Yates provokes a moral judgment from readers, but not at the expense of their sympathy: “I much prefer the kind of story,” he said, “where the reader is left wondering who’s to blame until it begins to dawn on him (the reader) that he himself must bear some of the responsibility because he’s human and therefore infinitely fallible.” This involves, again and again, an uncomfortable sense of Frank Wheeler—c’est moi on the part of the reader, though almost any of Yates’s better characters will fit this Flaubertian formula. We may not, at first, identify with the silly Helen Givings, a recognizable type of suburban busybody whose insipid patter and hobbies seem a pitiful form of self-hypnotic escapism. It’s easy to feel superior to such a person, but less so when suddenly confronted with her despair—as Helen glances at her feet (“like two toads”) and begins to cry: “She cried because she was fifty-six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who’d ever asked her to marry him, and because she’d done it, and because her only child was insane.” This is sad, but later Yates incites us to judgment again: Helen is a woman who can feel pity for herself, but is ready enough to abandon her son to a mental hospital on the convenient pretext that he somehow contributed to April’s suicide. Such callousness is at the heart of Helen’s shallow everyday pretending—and yet we don’t forget her despair either.*
