John Updike and Philip Roth we know - but the great forgotten novelist of 20th-century America is Richard Yates. His debut, Revolutionary Road, was a critical success in 1961, but over the decades his books were neglected and Yates sank into alcoholism and nervous collapse. Now, with his work being reissued and a film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet imminent, is this true visionary finally about to join the giants of American fiction?
One of the would-be suicides in Nick Hornby's novel A Long Way Down plans to go out in style with a copy of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road in his pocket. '[It's] a totally awesome novel,' the character, JJ, tells us. 'I was actually going to jump with a copy - not only because it would have been kinda cool, and would've added a mystique to my death but because it might have been a good way of getting more people to read it.' But JJ's plans misfire when he forgets the book; fortunately for Hornby's distinctly Yatesian novel, he decides not to kill himself. 'I wouldn't recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in a cold-water bedsit,' JJ says about Yates's masterpiece. 'It probably didn't help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer.'
I was alerted to the existence of Richard Yates by a sharp young magazine editor, in the course of a dinner conversation about books and films describing the American suburbs. I had tried, without much success, to read Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and I expressed some reservations about the surplus of fluency of John Updike's Rabbit books. 'You don't know Revolutionary Road?' she asked.
I bought the book and read it quickly. Describing Frank and April Wheeler as characters in a suburban novel is like saying that Madame Bovary is a provincial doctor's wife, but otherwise I remain deeply grateful for the recommendation. Those to whom I now hand out copies of Revolutionary Road react as I did, calling nervously, to say that the book seems very sad and again, when they have finished, promising to pass it on. Many confess to finishing the book in tears. I am now aware of the existence of a fraternity including Nick Hornby, Kate Atkinson, David Hare, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion and Richard Ford. Yatesians exchange what Ford felicitously calls 'a sort of cultural-literary handshake' when we identify each other.
Nick Hornby, who finds the novels, apart from Revolutionary Road, 'too schematically gloomy to breathe properly', tells me by email that he prefers the short stories. I wonder about this. Yates's gloom is made tolerable by his lack of heartlessness and because he believed that humans might somehow handle their own lives, even if they never appeared to do so very satisfactorily.
According to David Hare: 'Yates belongs with Fitzgerald and Hemingway as the three unarguably great American novelists of the 20th century. The highest compliment I can pay him is to say that he writes like a screenwriter, not like a novelist. He wants you to see everything he describes. Dramatic writers find novels unbearable because novelists mostly junk word on word, incident on incident... Yates describes everything with deadly precision, then goes on cutting everything closer and closer to the bone. He has a genuinely tragic sense, which comes out of an intense romanticism about the sensual things of life - cigarettes, drink, the opposite sex.' I agree with all of this except the sensuality. Can any Wasp writer truly be called sensual?
We all agree, however, that Yates's hour has come. A Yates revival is currently under way and some sort of commercial recognition appears imminent. His seven novels are being reissued. Later this year, a film of Revolutionary Road (part-financed by the BBC), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and directed by Sam Mendes, will be released in America (and in January 2009 in the UK).
In 1926, Yates was born into the heart of the American middle class in Yonkers, an unprepossessing town in New York State known, if at all, for its racetrack. His father was an electric-light salesman with a fine tenor voice, and his mother an aspiring, unsuccessful sculptress. His parents separated when Yates was four. 'A good Republican', as she liked to be called, his unstable, bigoted mother, Dookie (Yates, who plundered his life in search of copy, renames her Pookie in one story) supplied her son with a childhood he characterised as 'a hysterical odyssey'.
Always short of money, the family moved constantly in and around the West Village of Manhattan, with the odd, catastrophic foray upstate. Dookie forced her shy son to pose naked as a faun for a series of ghastly statutes, wore stained clothing and, when tipsy, would sit with her legs open so that her knickers could be seen. (Loyally, Yates insisted that she 'wasn't that bad', but one horrendous account of a drinking binge tells how she left 'a slick mouthful of puke' on the pillow adjoining her son's.) Yates attended a 'progressive' but gruesomely competitive Wasp prep school in New England at which it was made clear to him that he was the poorest pupil and where he was mercilessly bullied. Yates survived, learning to write good prose while editing the school magazine
Still a teenager, Yates shipped out to become an infantryman in the Ardennes, ruining his lungs and losing his virginity in Paris. Lanky, dandyish, dressed in clothes he bought in England and wore long after they became unpardonably shabby, the young Yates never quite managed to believe in the future to which his precocious writing talent entitled him. Unlike his contemporaries, he didn't go to college on the GI Bill. Instead, he drifted into the marginal bohemia of the West Village, doing menial journalistic work. Yates married twice, unhappily and unsuccessfully, fathered three daughters, Sharon, Monica and Gina, smoked and drank too much and in between bouts of bronchitis and tuberculosis began to experience the wild bipolar swings that wrecked his later years.
Yates's travails are comprehensively described in a brilliant biography, A Tragic Honesty (2003), by Blake Bailey. Apart from the odd, unsuccessful, Fitzgeraldian moment in Hollywood, Yates survived by doing corporate PR, living off freelance work at the Remington Rand Corporation and writing copy about generations of spanking new computers. Constantly short of cash, he drifted into teaching creative writing, though it seems that he could never bring himself to believe that writing could be taught. Curmudgeonly and attentive, he wrung a sense of what writing should be from his yellowing paperbacks even as he trashed the writers of his own day while wheezing his lung-impaired way through cigarette after cigarette. But it is clear that he always thought he was a failure - as a father, a husband and, most serious of all, as a writer.
At least 10 breakdowns are exhaustively described in A Tragic Honesty and they become more horrifying, sometimes involving stripping off in the street of LA, and protracted enforced stays in such hellholes as New York's Bellevue Hospital. There are depressing accounts of filthy, dank West Village apartments in which he lived between marriages, jobs, girlfriends or wives. Bizarrely, Yates appears to have spent 11 years eating lunch and dinner in the same booth of the unprepossessing Crossroads Irish Pub in Boston. When supplies of 'Mr Yates's horseradish' ran low, a waitress would be sent to a neighbouring supermarket. Somehow, Yates continued to fashion great sentences from these unpromising circumstances.
Yates's daughter Monica went out briefly with Larry David. The scriptwriter incorporated Yates into a Seinfeld sketch in which a grumpy, down-at-heel author based on Yates torments Jerry and George. The author refuses to let Seinfeld wear his suede jacket inside out as protection against a snowstorm, thus wrecking the jacket. Yates didn't find the show funny. 'I'd like to kill the son of a bitch,' he said.
It is easy to see why Yates so resented the success of contemporaries like Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth and John Cheever. In his last, illness-wracked years, Yates required a portable oxygen tank. He drove an old car around the university campus streets of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, puffing cigarettes and inhaling oxygen, to the horror of passengers. By the time he died, in 1992, his work was largely forgotten.
Revolutionary Road kicks off when the curtain rises on a cringe-making amateur theatrical performance in the suburbs sometime in the late 1950s. April Wheeler ('a tall, ash blonde with a patrician beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could disguise') plays the heroine, but it's clear that she cannot act. Husband Frank is succinctly described as 'an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man', edgy, harking back to his war experience, ill at ease with his 30th birthday. The two fight constantly. Frank is trapped writing copy for Knox Business machines, a company that sells an early computer (this is the first novel in which computers figure as items of everyday life rather than sci-fi props). He competes with fellow execs to see who can do the least work each day while downing the most martinis at lunch. 'I have the dullest job you can possibly imagine,' is a Frank Wheeler come-on.
Superficially, Frank and April would appear to illustrate long-forgotten sociological cliches of alienation set forth in such 1950s works as William H Whyte's The Organization Man. But the characters aren't rendered from a distance as social types. Frank and April want something more from life; above all, they want to realise some shred of themselves, even as they insist on their own ordinariness. They know they will fail, even as they struggle to escape dreary Connecticut by moving to bohemian, foreign Paris and they remain innocents.
'My characters all rush around trying to do their best, trying to live well within their known and unknown limitations,' Yates explains. 'Doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are.' This tragic sense is what singles him out from a legion of lesser contemporary chroniclers of failed middle-class lives. 'He sees how valiantly people try, how they struggle with their own mediocrity,' says Hare. 'They're half-good, half-gifted, and it isn't enough against the immense forces of luck and circumstance.'
America has always abhorred failure, punishing its exponents in a variety of ways. For Yates's postwar generation of literary overachievers, the rewards were much greater than ever before and perhaps because of this, the cost of failure proved to be high. Yates belonged to no literary faction and he hated the world of reviewing and literary fashion. He declined to call himself a realist, suggesting that all novels came 'filled with techniques'. In the surviving, somehow inevitably poor recordings of Yates available on the internet, his booming, distracted voice tells us that he is merely following the example of the writers he loves - Scott Fitzgerald and Flaubert. 'The emotions of fiction are autobiographical,' he observes, 'but the facts never are.'
Yates's problem wasn't just blackness of vision, but persistently bad timing. His books appeared either passé when they dealt with the time in which he was growing up or dangerously at odds with prevailing wisdom. Criticising the shallowness of American corporate life was one thing, so long as it was done with appropriate sententiousness. To imply that, far from pursuing the approved dream, executives in corporations didn't really do much work, was something not even Jack Lemmon could have conveyed to the American public in Yates's heyday.
In Disturbing the Peace, written in 1975, Yates ventured on to the taboo subject of madness through a thinly fictionalised account of his own terrifying incarceration. One of his best stories, 'Liars in Love' (selected by Richard Ford in the New Granta Book of the American Short Story), recounts a series of perfunctory encounters of a timid Fulbright scholar in search of sex in seedy, postwar London, and an East End family living off their prostitute daughters. So many years later, the rawness of Yates's dialogue still has the power to shock. In the 1960s, Yates the veteran defended American GIs, alienating campus opponents of the Vietnam War. At the height of the antiwar movement, he bravely published A Special Providence, a heartrending account of what it means to be a frightened boy at war.
Yates was an anti-feminist, grandly patronising women in the old style. In The Easter Parade (1976), which many, including Hare, regard as his second masterpiece, Yates satirises the pretensions of the women's movement while rendering the lives of two wholly sympathetic women characters as they struggle to survive over three decades in their relationships with a series of dishonest, brutish men.
But Yates's view of life's prospects was too brutal to appeal to the genteel literary culture of his time. 'Meaningless characters leading meaningless lives,' is how the New Yorker reviewer described Revolutionary Road when it was published. Yates tried to sell story after story to the magazine and with each failure asked why 'John fucking Updike' enjoyed the New Yorker's patronage and not Richard Yates. In the end, fiction editor Roger Angell came clean about Yates's prospects. 'It seems clearer and clearer that his kind of fiction is not what we're looking for,' he wrote snootily to Yates's agent in 1981. 'I wonder if it wouldn't save a lot of time and disappointment in the end if you and he could come to the same conclusion.'
However, literary tastes have changed and the world appears to have adjusted itself to the relative absence of hope in Yates's vision. In the 1980s, his years of drudgery bore fruit as younger writers, some of them pupils, discovered the books. 'Writers coming through the path of creative writing courses began to find out about Yates,' explains literary agent and publisher Peter Straus. 'That in time led to an impact on the wider world and Yates's fame was rebuilt, with the foundation of a new generation.'
Ellen Barkin read Yates's books at college and she is now producing a film of Easter Parade. She has recruited Naomi Watts to play one of the sisters. 'Fiction doesn't come any better than Richard Yates,' Barkin explains to me in what becomes a rapturously engaged 45-minute phone conversation. 'Brits immediately get Yates - maybe because they have never bought into anything as dumb as the American dream. There's no "glad morning" in his books. Maybe Yates is for Americans now, after eight years of disillusionment and George W Bush. I found my dog-eared copy from college the other day, when I was moving house. What draws an actress like myself to such a project? Well, the acknowledgement that what you've loved, you always will love.'
Literary failure comes in many, equally cruel forms. Obviously, you can try and get nowhere. It is possible for an author to have one book published, and garlanded with praise, only to sink into oblivion. The experience of half-success over a long career is commonplace. Rarer (and most frustrating) is the writer who is always praised, but whose books never sell, and whose failure to reach a sizable readership rankles, causing much bitterness and an irremediable, wholly baseless sense of failure. Such proved to be the sad fate of Richard Yates.
Yates probably needed so much failure in order to write such disabused books. But the Yates years weren't always so irredeemably awful. In 1961, the young author, flush with the critical success of Revolutionary Road, was recommended to Bobby Kennedy as a speechwriter by his friend William Styron. Kennedy needed someone to spell out his commitment to civil liberties and for a whole year, Yates worked out of Washington. He did come to like and even admire RFK, who kept him on despite an FBI report identifying his speechwriter as an alcoholic, a manic-depressive and thus a security risk. Yates detested the Camelot crowd of toadies. He was in the Justice Department the day JFK was shot, watching TV coverage from Dallas. 'They shot the President,' he muttered incredulously. 'They shot the fucking President.'
In his last novel, Uncertain Times, Yates puzzled over why Camelot seemed so filled with fakery; he wanted to show how you could never be really honest in political life. Alas, he never finished the book, leaving behind a sheaf of scribbled over pages stored for safety in his Tuscaloosa refrigerator. It seems a pity to let such promising, highly contemporary themes go to waste. Maybe there's an ultimate Yates screenplay about hopes aroused and dashed lurking among the fragments. After the Yates movie, can we perhaps have a movie about the young and brilliant Yates?
One of the would-be suicides in Nick Hornby's novel A Long Way Down plans to go out in style with a copy of Richard Yates's Revolutionary Road in his pocket. '[It's] a totally awesome novel,' the character, JJ, tells us. 'I was actually going to jump with a copy - not only because it would have been kinda cool, and would've added a mystique to my death but because it might have been a good way of getting more people to read it.' But JJ's plans misfire when he forgets the book; fortunately for Hornby's distinctly Yatesian novel, he decides not to kill himself. 'I wouldn't recommend finishing it on Christmas Day, in a cold-water bedsit,' JJ says about Yates's masterpiece. 'It probably didn't help my general sense of well-being, if you know what I mean, because the ending is a real downer.'
I was alerted to the existence of Richard Yates by a sharp young magazine editor, in the course of a dinner conversation about books and films describing the American suburbs. I had tried, without much success, to read Sloan Wilson's The Man in the Grey Flannel Suit and I expressed some reservations about the surplus of fluency of John Updike's Rabbit books. 'You don't know Revolutionary Road?' she asked.
I bought the book and read it quickly. Describing Frank and April Wheeler as characters in a suburban novel is like saying that Madame Bovary is a provincial doctor's wife, but otherwise I remain deeply grateful for the recommendation. Those to whom I now hand out copies of Revolutionary Road react as I did, calling nervously, to say that the book seems very sad and again, when they have finished, promising to pass it on. Many confess to finishing the book in tears. I am now aware of the existence of a fraternity including Nick Hornby, Kate Atkinson, David Hare, Raymond Carver, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion and Richard Ford. Yatesians exchange what Ford felicitously calls 'a sort of cultural-literary handshake' when we identify each other.
Nick Hornby, who finds the novels, apart from Revolutionary Road, 'too schematically gloomy to breathe properly', tells me by email that he prefers the short stories. I wonder about this. Yates's gloom is made tolerable by his lack of heartlessness and because he believed that humans might somehow handle their own lives, even if they never appeared to do so very satisfactorily.
According to David Hare: 'Yates belongs with Fitzgerald and Hemingway as the three unarguably great American novelists of the 20th century. The highest compliment I can pay him is to say that he writes like a screenwriter, not like a novelist. He wants you to see everything he describes. Dramatic writers find novels unbearable because novelists mostly junk word on word, incident on incident... Yates describes everything with deadly precision, then goes on cutting everything closer and closer to the bone. He has a genuinely tragic sense, which comes out of an intense romanticism about the sensual things of life - cigarettes, drink, the opposite sex.' I agree with all of this except the sensuality. Can any Wasp writer truly be called sensual?
We all agree, however, that Yates's hour has come. A Yates revival is currently under way and some sort of commercial recognition appears imminent. His seven novels are being reissued. Later this year, a film of Revolutionary Road (part-financed by the BBC), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet and directed by Sam Mendes, will be released in America (and in January 2009 in the UK).
In 1926, Yates was born into the heart of the American middle class in Yonkers, an unprepossessing town in New York State known, if at all, for its racetrack. His father was an electric-light salesman with a fine tenor voice, and his mother an aspiring, unsuccessful sculptress. His parents separated when Yates was four. 'A good Republican', as she liked to be called, his unstable, bigoted mother, Dookie (Yates, who plundered his life in search of copy, renames her Pookie in one story) supplied her son with a childhood he characterised as 'a hysterical odyssey'.
Always short of money, the family moved constantly in and around the West Village of Manhattan, with the odd, catastrophic foray upstate. Dookie forced her shy son to pose naked as a faun for a series of ghastly statutes, wore stained clothing and, when tipsy, would sit with her legs open so that her knickers could be seen. (Loyally, Yates insisted that she 'wasn't that bad', but one horrendous account of a drinking binge tells how she left 'a slick mouthful of puke' on the pillow adjoining her son's.) Yates attended a 'progressive' but gruesomely competitive Wasp prep school in New England at which it was made clear to him that he was the poorest pupil and where he was mercilessly bullied. Yates survived, learning to write good prose while editing the school magazine
Still a teenager, Yates shipped out to become an infantryman in the Ardennes, ruining his lungs and losing his virginity in Paris. Lanky, dandyish, dressed in clothes he bought in England and wore long after they became unpardonably shabby, the young Yates never quite managed to believe in the future to which his precocious writing talent entitled him. Unlike his contemporaries, he didn't go to college on the GI Bill. Instead, he drifted into the marginal bohemia of the West Village, doing menial journalistic work. Yates married twice, unhappily and unsuccessfully, fathered three daughters, Sharon, Monica and Gina, smoked and drank too much and in between bouts of bronchitis and tuberculosis began to experience the wild bipolar swings that wrecked his later years.
Yates's travails are comprehensively described in a brilliant biography, A Tragic Honesty (2003), by Blake Bailey. Apart from the odd, unsuccessful, Fitzgeraldian moment in Hollywood, Yates survived by doing corporate PR, living off freelance work at the Remington Rand Corporation and writing copy about generations of spanking new computers. Constantly short of cash, he drifted into teaching creative writing, though it seems that he could never bring himself to believe that writing could be taught. Curmudgeonly and attentive, he wrung a sense of what writing should be from his yellowing paperbacks even as he trashed the writers of his own day while wheezing his lung-impaired way through cigarette after cigarette. But it is clear that he always thought he was a failure - as a father, a husband and, most serious of all, as a writer.
At least 10 breakdowns are exhaustively described in A Tragic Honesty and they become more horrifying, sometimes involving stripping off in the street of LA, and protracted enforced stays in such hellholes as New York's Bellevue Hospital. There are depressing accounts of filthy, dank West Village apartments in which he lived between marriages, jobs, girlfriends or wives. Bizarrely, Yates appears to have spent 11 years eating lunch and dinner in the same booth of the unprepossessing Crossroads Irish Pub in Boston. When supplies of 'Mr Yates's horseradish' ran low, a waitress would be sent to a neighbouring supermarket. Somehow, Yates continued to fashion great sentences from these unpromising circumstances.
Yates's daughter Monica went out briefly with Larry David. The scriptwriter incorporated Yates into a Seinfeld sketch in which a grumpy, down-at-heel author based on Yates torments Jerry and George. The author refuses to let Seinfeld wear his suede jacket inside out as protection against a snowstorm, thus wrecking the jacket. Yates didn't find the show funny. 'I'd like to kill the son of a bitch,' he said.
It is easy to see why Yates so resented the success of contemporaries like Saul Bellow, John Updike, Philip Roth and John Cheever. In his last, illness-wracked years, Yates required a portable oxygen tank. He drove an old car around the university campus streets of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, puffing cigarettes and inhaling oxygen, to the horror of passengers. By the time he died, in 1992, his work was largely forgotten.
Revolutionary Road kicks off when the curtain rises on a cringe-making amateur theatrical performance in the suburbs sometime in the late 1950s. April Wheeler ('a tall, ash blonde with a patrician beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could disguise') plays the heroine, but it's clear that she cannot act. Husband Frank is succinctly described as 'an intense, nicotine-stained, Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man', edgy, harking back to his war experience, ill at ease with his 30th birthday. The two fight constantly. Frank is trapped writing copy for Knox Business machines, a company that sells an early computer (this is the first novel in which computers figure as items of everyday life rather than sci-fi props). He competes with fellow execs to see who can do the least work each day while downing the most martinis at lunch. 'I have the dullest job you can possibly imagine,' is a Frank Wheeler come-on.
Superficially, Frank and April would appear to illustrate long-forgotten sociological cliches of alienation set forth in such 1950s works as William H Whyte's The Organization Man. But the characters aren't rendered from a distance as social types. Frank and April want something more from life; above all, they want to realise some shred of themselves, even as they insist on their own ordinariness. They know they will fail, even as they struggle to escape dreary Connecticut by moving to bohemian, foreign Paris and they remain innocents.
'My characters all rush around trying to do their best, trying to live well within their known and unknown limitations,' Yates explains. 'Doing what they can't help doing, ultimately and inevitably failing because they can't help being the people they are.' This tragic sense is what singles him out from a legion of lesser contemporary chroniclers of failed middle-class lives. 'He sees how valiantly people try, how they struggle with their own mediocrity,' says Hare. 'They're half-good, half-gifted, and it isn't enough against the immense forces of luck and circumstance.'
America has always abhorred failure, punishing its exponents in a variety of ways. For Yates's postwar generation of literary overachievers, the rewards were much greater than ever before and perhaps because of this, the cost of failure proved to be high. Yates belonged to no literary faction and he hated the world of reviewing and literary fashion. He declined to call himself a realist, suggesting that all novels came 'filled with techniques'. In the surviving, somehow inevitably poor recordings of Yates available on the internet, his booming, distracted voice tells us that he is merely following the example of the writers he loves - Scott Fitzgerald and Flaubert. 'The emotions of fiction are autobiographical,' he observes, 'but the facts never are.'
Yates's problem wasn't just blackness of vision, but persistently bad timing. His books appeared either passé when they dealt with the time in which he was growing up or dangerously at odds with prevailing wisdom. Criticising the shallowness of American corporate life was one thing, so long as it was done with appropriate sententiousness. To imply that, far from pursuing the approved dream, executives in corporations didn't really do much work, was something not even Jack Lemmon could have conveyed to the American public in Yates's heyday.
In Disturbing the Peace, written in 1975, Yates ventured on to the taboo subject of madness through a thinly fictionalised account of his own terrifying incarceration. One of his best stories, 'Liars in Love' (selected by Richard Ford in the New Granta Book of the American Short Story), recounts a series of perfunctory encounters of a timid Fulbright scholar in search of sex in seedy, postwar London, and an East End family living off their prostitute daughters. So many years later, the rawness of Yates's dialogue still has the power to shock. In the 1960s, Yates the veteran defended American GIs, alienating campus opponents of the Vietnam War. At the height of the antiwar movement, he bravely published A Special Providence, a heartrending account of what it means to be a frightened boy at war.
Yates was an anti-feminist, grandly patronising women in the old style. In The Easter Parade (1976), which many, including Hare, regard as his second masterpiece, Yates satirises the pretensions of the women's movement while rendering the lives of two wholly sympathetic women characters as they struggle to survive over three decades in their relationships with a series of dishonest, brutish men.
But Yates's view of life's prospects was too brutal to appeal to the genteel literary culture of his time. 'Meaningless characters leading meaningless lives,' is how the New Yorker reviewer described Revolutionary Road when it was published. Yates tried to sell story after story to the magazine and with each failure asked why 'John fucking Updike' enjoyed the New Yorker's patronage and not Richard Yates. In the end, fiction editor Roger Angell came clean about Yates's prospects. 'It seems clearer and clearer that his kind of fiction is not what we're looking for,' he wrote snootily to Yates's agent in 1981. 'I wonder if it wouldn't save a lot of time and disappointment in the end if you and he could come to the same conclusion.'
However, literary tastes have changed and the world appears to have adjusted itself to the relative absence of hope in Yates's vision. In the 1980s, his years of drudgery bore fruit as younger writers, some of them pupils, discovered the books. 'Writers coming through the path of creative writing courses began to find out about Yates,' explains literary agent and publisher Peter Straus. 'That in time led to an impact on the wider world and Yates's fame was rebuilt, with the foundation of a new generation.'
Ellen Barkin read Yates's books at college and she is now producing a film of Easter Parade. She has recruited Naomi Watts to play one of the sisters. 'Fiction doesn't come any better than Richard Yates,' Barkin explains to me in what becomes a rapturously engaged 45-minute phone conversation. 'Brits immediately get Yates - maybe because they have never bought into anything as dumb as the American dream. There's no "glad morning" in his books. Maybe Yates is for Americans now, after eight years of disillusionment and George W Bush. I found my dog-eared copy from college the other day, when I was moving house. What draws an actress like myself to such a project? Well, the acknowledgement that what you've loved, you always will love.'
Literary failure comes in many, equally cruel forms. Obviously, you can try and get nowhere. It is possible for an author to have one book published, and garlanded with praise, only to sink into oblivion. The experience of half-success over a long career is commonplace. Rarer (and most frustrating) is the writer who is always praised, but whose books never sell, and whose failure to reach a sizable readership rankles, causing much bitterness and an irremediable, wholly baseless sense of failure. Such proved to be the sad fate of Richard Yates.
Yates probably needed so much failure in order to write such disabused books. But the Yates years weren't always so irredeemably awful. In 1961, the young author, flush with the critical success of Revolutionary Road, was recommended to Bobby Kennedy as a speechwriter by his friend William Styron. Kennedy needed someone to spell out his commitment to civil liberties and for a whole year, Yates worked out of Washington. He did come to like and even admire RFK, who kept him on despite an FBI report identifying his speechwriter as an alcoholic, a manic-depressive and thus a security risk. Yates detested the Camelot crowd of toadies. He was in the Justice Department the day JFK was shot, watching TV coverage from Dallas. 'They shot the President,' he muttered incredulously. 'They shot the fucking President.'
In his last novel, Uncertain Times, Yates puzzled over why Camelot seemed so filled with fakery; he wanted to show how you could never be really honest in political life. Alas, he never finished the book, leaving behind a sheaf of scribbled over pages stored for safety in his Tuscaloosa refrigerator. It seems a pity to let such promising, highly contemporary themes go to waste. Maybe there's an ultimate Yates screenplay about hopes aroused and dashed lurking among the fragments. After the Yates movie, can we perhaps have a movie about the young and brilliant Yates?
