The Richard Yates Archive - DeWitt Henry's "Points of Craft"

What I learned from Richard Yates was that fiction is pure, wise, and even visionary, where life is messy, culpable and baffling. For me this was a personal lesson, reinforced by reading Blake Bailey's A Tragic Honesty.

But for my students over the years, as I teach Yates's stories, I keep coming back to the wonderful things he said about Gina Berriault in a 1979 issue of Ploughshares:

"Gina Berriault knows that ill-educated or inarticulate people are as sensitive as anyone else. She renders their speech with a fine and subtle ear for the shy or strident inaccuracies, for the bewilderment of missed points and for the dim, sad music of cliches; but when she takes us into their minds, their thoughts and feelings come out in a prose as graceful, as venturesome and precise as she can make it. That's a rare ability, and reflects a rare degree of insight. It may well be one of the most valuable skills a writer can learn--which makes it disappointing to discover, time and again, how few of the most celebrated novelists have bothered to learn it at all."

How do we, as writers, address the distance between us and them? Between the class of "us"--readers, writers, the articulate and educated and presumably clear minded--and the class of "them"--people who do not write or read, the inarticulate, the muddled? Who is interpreting, paraphrasing, and feeling with the characters of Ralph and Grace, for instance, in Yates's classic story, "The Best of Everything"?

Think of the opening scene: Grace is a Manhattan secretary, surrounded by well-wishing co-workers, just before the weekend of her marriage to Ralph, a clerk, to whom she is speaking on the phone. The story opens from Grace's point of view and Yates establishes her idiom and vocabulary level both in direct speech and in her thoughts. Then we get this transitional paragraph:

"All right," she said. "I'll see you then, darling." She had been calling him 'darling' for only a short time--since it had become irrevocably clear that she was, after all, going to marry him--and the word still had an alien sound. As she straightened the stacks of stationery in her desk (because there was nothing else to do), a familiar little panic gripped her: she couldn't marry him--she hardly even knew him. Sometimes it occurred to her differently, that she couldn't marry him because she knew him too well, and either way it left her badly shaken, vulnerable to all the things that Martha, her roommate, had said from the very beginning."

Such phrases as "irrevocably clear," "alien sound," and "vulnerable" are in the writer's idiom, not Grace's; it is also the sophisticated writer whose syntax offers us the ironies of parallelism. At the same time, the very rhythms of these sentences, emotionally, are Grace's: we both feel and understand "the grip of panic"; we feel the confusion; Grace's conflict is dramatized by interpretive paraphrase.

Changing to Ralph's point of view, Yates's narrator remains omnipresent and for the most part invisible, fully submerging us in Ralph's idiom. Ralph, of course, unlike Grace, does have emotional confidantes, who share his "sad, dim music of cliches." He needs to borrow a suitcase for his wedding trip to Pennsylvania because he can't afford the new one he sees in a shop window:

A big, tawny Gladstone with a zippered compartment on the side, at thirty-nine ninety five--and Ralph had had his eye on it ever since Easter time. "Think I'll buy that," he'd told Eddie, in the same offhand way that a day or so before he had announced his engagement ("Think I'll marry the girl"). Eddie's response to both remarks had been the same: "Whaddaya--crazy?" Both times Ralph had said, "Why not?" and in defense of the bag he had added, "Gonna get married, I'll need somethin' like that." From then on it was as if the bag, almost as much as Gracie herself, had become a symbol of the new and richer life he sought. But after the ring and the new clothes and all the other expenses, he'd found that he couldn't afford it; he had settled for the loan of Eddie's, which was similar but cheaper and worn, and without the zippered compartment.

The writer's voice here almost takes on the role of "the poet" in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg stories as Yates in a sense speaks for Ralph, both with perception and with apologetic eloquence: "a symbol of the new and richer life he sought." At the same time, much of the unspoken prose of this paragraph reads like notes from a therapist's interview with Ralph. Ralph would never say "new and richer life," but Ralph would itemize the features of the bag. Why, a recording angel might ask Ralph, why do you "settle" for Eddie's bag? What's wrong with it? "Ahh, yeah," Ralph might reply in direct speech, "it's cheaper, it's worn, and besides it doesn't have the zippered compartment."

One of the great moments--there are many--in this story is when Yates first dramatizes Eddie's surprise party for Ralph and the gift of the Gladstone bag as a consummation of male/male love ("But Ralph couldn't speak and couldn't smile. He could hardly even see") and later has Ralph attempt to narrate the event to Grace in dialogue: "His fingers tightened again, trembling. 'I cried, Gracie,' he whispered. 'I couldn't help it. I don't think the fellas saw or anything, but I was cryin'.'" At which point, he lapses into a catalogue of the terrific meal Eddie's mother fed them, and Grace, preoccupied with romantic anticipation, can only reply: "Wasn't that nice." Thanks to Yates's earlier eloquence in Ralph's behalf, we understand the consummation that Ralph himself can't relate and that Grace doesn't want to hear; we also understand Grace's vulnerability and expectation.

Earlier in the story, Yates has taken us into Grace's mind as she imagines their honeymoon: "Then the church and the ceremony, and then the reception...and finally the train to Atlantic City, and to the hotel. But from the hotel on she couldn't plan any more. A door would lock behind her and there would be a wild, fantastic silence and nobody in all the world but Ralph to lead the way." Again, the breathless rhythms convey her excitement, but we need the writer's idiom of "wild, fantastic silence" to articulate the feeling. We know that Gracie has prepared for Ralph's visit as a romantic consummation, given the surprise chance of having her apartment to herself: "In her bedroom, from the rustling tissues of an expensive white box, she drew the prizes of her trousseau--a sheer nightgown of white nylon and a matching negligee--put them on, and went to the mirror again. She had never worn anything like this before, or felt like this, and the thought of letting Ralph see her like this sent her into the kitchenette for a glass of the special dry sherry Martha kept for cocktail parties." With this masterful paraphrase, we feel Grace's heart-thudding gulps at each "like this."

The vision that Yates offers us is excruciating, hilarious, and compassionate as expectations collide and communication fails. Ralph finally gets the point of Grace's amorous offer, but has promised the fellas that he would return to the bachelor party. Yates tells us: "She blazed to her feet, but the cry that was meant for a woman's appeal came out, through her tightening lips, as the whine of a wife. 'Can't they wait?'" The writer speaks for her in "blazed...woman's appeal...whine of a wife," articulating both what she feels and what she perceives, but that she can't fully express to Ralph. Ralph reacts defensively, echoing Eddie's expression: "Whaddaya--crazy?" And Yates drops into Ralph's point of view, paraphrasing Ralph's unspoken thoughts: "He backed away; eyes round with righteousness. She would have to understand. If this was the way she was before the wedding, how the hell was it going to be afterwards? 'Have a heart, willya? Keep the fellas waitin' tonight? After all they done for me?'....After a second or two, during which her face became less pretty than he had ever seen it before, she was able to smile. 'Of course not, darling. You're right.'" We read that "during which her face became less pretty" from both points of view, aware of her complex anger and resignation, and aware of Ralph's glimpse into the threat of her humanity, and of his relief as she retreats behind a mask of compliance. He will exit, in Yates's words, "a husband reassured." The narrator's sensitive regard for his characters contrasts to their own fallible and defensive rejections of each other. The marriage will go forward, but the aspiration for a fuller and richer life on both sides has been replaced by resignation and a dispiriting social conformity.

Which brings us to the "rare degree of insight" reflected by such craft. Yates's narrative skill prevents us from either sentimentalizing or patronizing Grace and Ralph. The more articulate minor characters in this story, Mr. Atwood the boss, and Martha the sophisticated roommate fare no better. If Ralph and Grace can't speak what they feel, Yates suggests, perhaps nobody can. From Robert Prentice, the talented and sophisticated writer in "Builders" to Frank and April Wheeler in Revolutionary Road: our sad and hilarious state is only to be made clear rather than to make ourselves clear. Clarity comes from distance; to make sense of our lot, as writers, we are never privileged in our lives.