In what follows I correct the digitized version of Broyard's review which first appeared in The New York Times on 28 October 1984. Yates' novel appeared in the same year. Blake Bailey masterfully recounts the book's reception in A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador 2003), pp. 529-541, with special attention to Broyard's trenchant and somewhat mean-spirited review. Yates made it as a novelist; despite his considerable literary promise, Broyard never did and his envy shows.
Broyard was quite a character, "the greatest cocksman in New York for a decade" (Bailey, 201, quoting a former girlfriend of Broyard) and "the only spade among the Beat Generation” as he is described here. A light-skinned black, he tried to pass himself off as white.
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Anatole Broyard is an editor of The Book Review.
YOUNG HEARTS CRYING
By Richard Yates. 347 pp. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press. $16.95.
THERE seems to be an element of relief in some of the critical praise given to the novels and short stories of Richard Yates. William Styron called ''Revolutionary Road,'' Yates's first novel, ''classic'' and Ann Beattie used the same word for ''Liars in Love,'' his second collection of stories. ''Realistic'' and ''craft'' are two more terms that are often applied to his work. The way these words are used is interesting: they are the visible half of an implicit opposition, suggesting that most novels and stories are not so conspicuously classical, realistic and well crafted.
Mr. Yates is seen as turning the tide, or holding the line, against a general moral and esthetic deterioration. We know where we are with him: in the American mainstream. Hemingway and Fitzgerald are waving from the banks of the stream and they can be heard in Mr. Yates's pages. Like Hemingway's heroes, Mr. Yates's male protagonists worry about their masculinity and talk at length about the integrity of art. Like Fitzgerald's men, they care about style and status and drink a lot to keep up their courage.
Mr. Yates's heroes are classical in the nature of their adversary relation to culture, for it's not the war in Vietnam or the civil rights struggle that arouses their moral indignation, but the mediocrity, emptiness and conformity - all Mr. Yates's words - of American life itself. When, in ''Revolutionary Road,'' Frank Wheeler talks of throwing up his job at the Knox Business Machine Company and ''finding himself'' in Europe, he is closer to Henry Miller and the expatriates of the 1920's than to the people of John Updike, John Cheever or Donald and Frederick Barthelme. In fact, he may be closer to Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Wolfe.
While characters in contemporary fiction often suffer from a kind of agoraphobia, a fear of all the psychological space at their disposal, Mr. Yates's people are trapped in ordinary lives from which they try desperately to escape. But even when they do, they carry their trapped feeling along with them. Lucy, Michael's first wife, is presumably free after she leaves him, yet she can't seem to move out of the ordinariness she dreads. She tries acting, painting and writing, only to prove, as someone said, that an insufficient talent is the cruelest of all temptations.
If art always runs the risk of phoniness or failure, and life without it never transcends the ordinary, where is there for Mr. Yates's people to turn? The answer is that they can turn only as the worm turns, and this is the pathos, the dying fall, of his fiction. His ordinary people lack the idiosyncrasy that redeems the narrow lives in, say, Frederick Barthelme's work. They are designed to be defeated or humiliated in carefully crafted scenes. In a sense, they are literary cannon fodder.
Mr. Yates's men enjoy sex, drinking and talking: they suffer art. When Michael Davenport meets a new woman, he immediately thinks of her in bed. She must be ''pretty,'' have ''good legs,'' find him ''marvellous'' as a lover. He calls his women ''baby.'' Carl Traynor, a novelist who is Lucy's creative writing teacher, also calls women baby. Both he and Michael like to confide in their various women, but they dislike even the most constructive criticism.
After Michael and Lucy marry, she tells him that she has, in her own right, $3 million or $4 million. When he refuses to touch her money or to let her use it in their life together, we are invited to regard him as admirable, independent or proud, but after we learn that her money threatens his ''manhood,'' we begin to wonder. It may also be possible to see him as rigid, insecure or unimaginative in his response to money. A psychoanalyst might even say that he is afraid of the freedom it can bring.
Though Michael is a published poet, we never see a single line of any of his poems, and this is odd and unconvincing. He doesn't talk like a poet, even less so, in fact, than Hemingway did, and we wonder where he keeps his poetry hidden about his personality. We read only that he is working on a new poem ''that gave every promise of excellence.'' In another passage, he reflects that ''the things he'd learned about professionalism over the years could be sensed on every page.''
As even admiring critics have pointed out, Mr. Yates's men are terribly self-conscious, always striking poses and rehearsing their emotions. It's tempting to say that only their mistakes are spontaneous. And what mistakes - these at least are of heroic proportions. Michael, a boxer when he was in the army, twice trades punches to the belly with other men at parties, and in spite of his drinking and sedentary life, he knocks both of them ''unconscious'' with a single hook. This is macho with a horseshoe in the glove.
Several critics have praised Mr. Yates's ''precision'' and his style. It's not clear in the context what precision means. A devil's advocate might say that his characters are so simple and unambiguous that they can be ''precisely'' described. So far as style is concerned, there doesn't seem to be any, and perhaps this is by design, an emblem of Mr. Yates's realism, his refusal to embellish or distort his characters with authorial eloquence.
The main question in Mr. Yates's work is whether we are being asked to see around, or beyond, the characters to some kind of symbolism - or to take them literally. Are we supposed to forgive their shortcomings and their failures as God does, or are they being offered up as intrinsically interesting, without extenuation? Is his perspective metaphysical or entomological? His characters seem shrunk by realism, robbed of invention and reduced to bleak and repetitive rituals.
In one of his philosophical meditations, A. S. Eddington remarked that to be or not to be is a primitive form of thinking. In the same mood, we might ask whether, in the 1980's, we have not passed beyond what we are accustomed to refer to as the real, or whether this is still a useful term in writing about fiction. There is a similar difficulty with the word classical. What does it mean now?
Just as Raymond Carver's characters, or Frederick Barthelme's, may exasperate us with their improbability, so Mr. Yates's people may try our patience too, for the contrary reason. The modern reader is in the position of Buridan's logical jackass, immobilized between two equidistant bales of hay. It seems that our writers either go too far, or not far enough. Since the too far is gaining on us, we should be grateful to Richard Yates. Even if his flues need cleaning, he does try to keep the home fires burning.
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