Academics From The United States

"Yates viewed Gloria [Cold Spring Harbor] as the best likeness of Dookie [his own real-life mother] he ever managed: a triumph. And if she fails to win the reader's sympathies? As Yates was careful to remind himself, "the hell with the reader's sympathies". Which, in a nutshell, may explain why Cold Spring Harbor didn't sell and why, for that matter, Yates's books [kept] going out of print. To repeat the obvious, most people don't like reading about, much less identifying with, mediocre people who evade the truth until it rolls over them. And yet most of us face such a reckoning sooner or later. [...] If Yates seemed to vacillate between "acceptance and revulsion" towards his people—with a decided emphasis on the latter in the case of Gloria Drake and certain others—it was at least in pursuit of an honest synthesis."

"these lives don't seem worth the trouble he has given them."

"All of this, of course, was but a fleeting distraction from Yates's ultimate concern. "Why aren't you writing?" he'd hector Childress and the others—or, if a given story was already written (and set in type), "Why aren't you revising this? You should be constantly revising!" Nothing was finished in Yates's eyes, not even his own best work: "How could I improve it? he'd fire back [...] Such zeal had the same effect on Childress as on Monica two years before—he began to realise that if this was what a true vocation involved, then perhaps he should consider something else."

"Nor did he bother to get out much."

"Life goes wrong for the Grimes sisters [...] because "they can't help being the people they are" —Yates's explicit vision of tragedy."

"Tracing the cause of his alienation and its manifold effects, Yates would speak of his mother with a scathing, obsessive hatred that sometimes brought him to the brink of tears."

"At the time of [Richard Yates's] death the novel [Uncertain Times] was perhaps two-thirds finished: about 250 pages of narrative in various stages of revision."

""It took me a long time to figure out... that the best way to handle [the couple's dialogue] was to have them nearly always miss each other's points, to have them talk around and through and at each other. There's a great deal of dialogue between them in the finished book... but there's almost no communication." In other words Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald—namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters "in the very act of giving themselves away"."

"Another thing I have always liked about both Gatsby and Bovary, [Yates] wrote, "is that there are no villains in either one. The force of evil is felt in these novels but is never personified—neither novel is willing to let us off that easily."

"Revolutionary Road, no matter how accessible on the surface, rewards a lifetime of rereading and reflection."

"The aesthetic perfectionist, who spent hours slaving over a sentence"

"Had a dreary class tonight after which an enormous fifty-year-old matron who can neither spell, punctuate, nor write coherent English cornered me to demand, frankly, whether I thought she Had Talent. Tried to evade the question for twenty minutes, and ended up saying sure. Depressing experience.... [I've] pretty well decided that teaching does sap the old creative energy after all. Why do so many sad clowns want to be writers? It's hard, no fun, scrambles your brains and leaves you unfit for practically all other kinds of human activity. Apart from which there's no dough in it except for Leon Uris and Allen Drury."

"In later years the only regret Yates would allow himself to express publicly was over "the desolate wastes of time" that had diminished his productivity."

"On December 16, 1992, Sam Lawrence and Kurt Vonnegut hosted a memorial service for Yates at the Century Club in Manhattan. In his eulogy Vonnegut spoke of the "forced march" he'd made through all nine of Yates's books before preparing his remarks: "Not only did I fail to detect so much as an injudiciously applied semicolon; I did not find even one paragraph which, if it were read to you today, would not wow you with its power, intelligence and clarity.""

"But it was the work that ultimately mattered, and for Yates The Great Gatsby was holy writ. Encountering the novel for the first time was, quite simply, the definite milestone of his apprenticeship: Gatsby, Yates declared, was "his formal introduction to the craft." Echoes of Salingerian diction are especially audible in Yates's early work, and linger faintly in his mature style, the result of his reading over and over his five favorite stories in Nine Stories."

"twelve years [after short story "Jody Rolled the Bones" was published] [Yates] got [a letter] from Colonel Roger Little of the Office of Military Psychology and Leadership: "Jody", wrote Little, had long been used "as a reference . . . because it is such a sensitive portrayal of the basic trainee's perception of the noncommissioned officer.""

"Had dinner tonight with an old boyhood friend from the years 1937-39 when I lived in a town called Scarborough [i.e. Stephen Benedict], whose amateur theatre group ("The Beechwood Players") served as the original for "The Laurel Players" in my book. He found it incredible, and I found it spooky, that I had completely failed to remember the name of a winding blacktop road in that town on which he and I and many of our schoolmates used to pass the most impressionable hours of our formative years: "Revolutionary Road"."

"I've also discovered at long last what you knew from the beginning—that my "broods" do not stem from any dark, Hamlet-like neurosis, incurable and tragic, but from plain laziness . . . I've pulled myself out of [several really major broods since you left] by the more painful but no less effective method of telling myself to shut up and get back to the typewriter. I'm not saying I've overcome them—I had a bad one just the other day—but I'm holding my own against the bastards. They don't immobilize me any more, and I'm confident it won't be long before I'll be able to brush them off like flies. Yates appears here as an almost perfect character out of his own imagination—one of those deterministic victims who "rush around trying to do their best . . . doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are.""

"It occurred to Jack that if he held the phone well away from his head Sally's voice would dwindle and flatten out and be lost in tinny gibberish, like the voice of an idiot midget."

"Aspirando et perseverando was and is the Avon Old Farms school motto"

"Charlie was Charlie: possessed of "an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people's weaknesses," as Yates put it. Footnote by Blake Bailey: The quote is taken from the 1972 Ploughshares interview. Yates was explaining how his brother-in-law's personality was similar to that of John Givings in "Revolutionary Road"."

"As [Richard Yates] explained in a 1972 interview, his characters "all 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 on the calamity at the end." Yates's compassion for human weakness, for the flaws that make failure so inevitable, is everywhere in his work [...]. Yates also tended to be hard on characters based on himself. But all are worthy of our sympathy in at least one respect: They try to do their best but fail because of limitations over which they have no control."

"then he came back and faced her again, trembling. "'Nice,'" he said. "'Nice,' Is that what you want? You want the world to be 'nice'? Because listen, baby. Listen, sweetheart. The world is about as nice as shit. The world is struggle and rape and humilation and death. The world is no fucking place for dreamy little rich girls from St. Louis, do you understand me?""

"if self-deception was an illness she was well into its advanced stages."

"Well, I think Phil's got a fairly good chance of getting in there, maybe even on a scholarship. It sounds fine; still, all I know about Harvard is the reputation, you know - the outside view. And that's sort of like the Empire State Building, right? You see it from a distance, maybe at sunset, and it's this majestic, beautiful thing. Then you get inside, you walk around a couple of the lower floors, and it turns out to be one of the sleaziest office buildings in New York: there's nothing in there but small-time insurance agencies and costume-jewellery wholesalers. There isn't any reason for the tallest building in the world. So you ride all the way up to the top and your eardrums hurt and you're out there at the parapet looking out, looking down, and even that's a disappointment because you've seen it all in photographs so many times. Right? So I don't know; I think Phil and I'd better go up to Harvard for a couple of days and kind of snoop around."

"Because you see there are millions and millions of people in New York - more people than you can possibly imagine, ever - and most of them are doing something that makes sound. Maybe talking, or playing the radio, maybe closing doors, maybe putting their forks down on their plates if they're having dinner, or dropping their shoes if they're going to bed - and because there are so many of them, all those little sounds add up and come together in a kind of hum. But it's so faint - so very, very faint - that you can't hear it unless you listen very carefully for a long time."

"I had read [ Flaubert's Madame Bovary ] before but hadn't studied it the way I'd studied Gatsby and other books; now it seemed ideally suited to serve as a guide, if not a model, for the novel that was taking shape in my mind. I wanted that kind of balance and quiet resonance on every page, that kind of foreboding mixed with comedy, that kind of inexorable destiny in the heart of a lonely, romantic girl. And all of it, of course, would have to be done with an F. Scott Fitzgerald kind of freshness and grace."

"She too was a divorced mother, though her former husband had vanished long ago and was referred to only as "that bastard" or "that cowardly son of a bitch"."

"And she was halfway up the stairs before he decided that his best reply was to make no reply at all."

"He wrote almost every word of [ Avon Old Farms school's ] newspaper, much of the yearbook and literary magazine, and performed all community-service hours in the school's eighteenth-century printshop. "Dick ran everything of a literary nature," said classmate Gilman Ordway. "He might have been the only one of us who knew exactly what he wanted to do with his life—become a writer of fiction.""

"Where are the windows?" he demanded, spreading his hands. "That's the question. Where does the light come in?"

"This tendency to become deeply attached to unlikely people would remain one of [Yates's] most poignant and self-destructive qualities."

"Flaubert offered a further tutorial on the proper use of the "objective correlative"—the telling detail that transmits meaning and emotion without labouring the point."

"But late that night, as Irving Berlin himself might say, something kind of wonderful happened. I took that little bastard of a story and I built the hell out of it."

""Keep a tight asshole" became a favourite motto in times of adversity."

"Then she asked me if I wanted to know something, and without waiting to find out whether I did or not, she told me."

"From the day of his talkative, overconfident arrival at Irving he had failed and failed at learning how not to behave like a jerk; and everybody knew what kind of life a jerk could expect at prep school."

"And he didn't mind at all. Downstairs and outdoors and alone again, back in the trampled dust in front of the place, he pitied the drab supervisor and all her quick, harried, frowning children because none of them looked as though they had anything worth waiting for, tonight or ever."

""Well, she's - sweet," he told her. "She's very sweet, and I guess that's part of the trouble. She's like a little girl - is a little girl."

"Rachel became slowly aware now, even while talking and listening to her own voice, that there might well be something universal about the pleasure a grown girl could take in disparaging her mother. Maybe it happened with sons and their fathers, too, or with all grown children and the ever-diminishing presence of parents in their lives; in any case, the knowledge didn't prevent her from pressing on, as if to see how far she would dare to go."

"And he didn't know how to answer her (Well, maybe; maybe not; yes and no); so he didn't say anything. He opened a cold beer and sat down with it, knowing he'd need a little time and quiet to sort things out. "Look: just sit now, okay?" he told her. "Sit. Sit." And it sounded like a command given to a nervous, well-trained dog, but she obeyed him."

"Sometimes the world was just too fucking much."

"One advantage of the very low lighting in this room, he'd decided, was that it could make almost any girl look like a million dollars."

"And he was afraid she might be taking this much too seriously, so he reached out to stroke or tousle her hair, but that didn't work because she'd just been to the hairdresser and didn't want to get it messed up."

"I don't get it," Laura said. "How come boys can do whatever they feel like and girls can't?" "Because they're boys," Lucy cried. "Boys have done whatever they've felt like since the beginning of time, don't you even know that? Haven't you ever learned that yet, you poor, ignorant little - how smart do you have to be to know a thing like that? They're irresponsible and self-indulgent and careless and cruel, and they get away with it all their lives because they're boys."

"exchanging agreeable remarks for no other purpose than to keep silence from closing in."

"It's funny, you know? Distance doesn't matter anymore. It's almost as if geography didn't exist. All you do is doze and float in a pressurised cabin for a while - and it doesn't even matter how long, because time isn't important, either - and before you know it you're in Los Angeles, or London, or Tokyo. Then if you don't happen to like wherever it is you find yourself, you can doze and float again until you find yourself somewhere else."

"Yeah, well, sure, 'remarkably intelligent'. Look, baby, the world is crawling with these diamond-in-the-rough types, these salt-of-the-earth characters, and they're all remarkably intelligent. My God, I knew half-literate guys in the Army who could scare the shit out of you with their intelligence."

"All I'm trying to say is that I'm afraid I got a kind of who-cares feeling out of this. Very strong writing, fine writing; still, the material kept making me think, Yeah, yeah, I get it, but who cares?"

"Yeah, well, you're right, but what the hell; there's nothing anybody can do about it. Besides, that's ancient history now. I don't even think about it much any more, from - you know - from day to day." "Good," she said. "It's always important to keep the day-to-day stuff separate from the ancient history, isn't it."