Dismembering the American Dream: The Life and Fiction of Richard Yates

2. Richard Yates and Hollywood

2 Richard Yates and Hollywood How Richard Yates related to Hollywood demands more than just a few cursory phrases; it was a difficult relationship and reflected the complexity of the role Hollywood played in relation to the nation. Throughout his fiction Yates makes ample use of cinematic metaphor as a way of pointing out the influence film had on the society in which he lived. The era in which he grew up and first experienced the power of the movies was the 1930s and early 1940s. This era of filmmaking most closely influenced his views on the power and significance of Hollywood and on the representation of the social realities Hollywood disseminated. As a youth, and a youth who was not a keen reader, the cinema was the main source of entertainment. Divorced, on her own, and averse to housework, Yates’s mother used to take her two young children, when they were still young and out of school, to watch films in order to pass the time: “The three of them were together constantly, and their principal way of killing time was going to the movies . . . he of­ten startled friends with detailed and rather emotional accounts of the movies he’d seen in the thirties.”1 Fascinated by the cinema, Yates acknowledges it as a spur to his very early writing: “It must have been the movies of the 1930s more than any other influence that got me into the habit of thinking like a writer. I wasn’t a bookish child; reading was such hard work for me that I avoided it wherever possible.”2 In several novels, Yates invokes film and an 3. Richard and Sheila Yates, Paris, circa 1952. Richard Yates and Hollywood 31 obsession with cinematic storytelling as an indicator of a character’s immaturity and as a signal to the reader that the character in question is prepared to absorb make-­ believe (film) over reality (literature). Undoubtedly enticed by the promise of wealth and fame that Hollywood might offer an impoverished writer, this is, nevertheless, Yates’s way of charting his own and his characters’ intellectual development. In Disturbing the Peace, for instance, the narrative makes reference to John Wilder’s life-­long obsession with movies. As the character tells his friend Paul Borg within the first few pages of the novel, “All my life, I’ve never been realistic . I ever tell you how I wanted to make movies?”3 Later, he tells his therapist , “I’m a very, very slow reader. Guess that’s the main reason I’ve spent most of my life watching movies.”4 Yates, too, was a very slow reader and was similarly fascinated by film, even if to his mind it was not an art form and could not be compared to literature. Despite his early fascination with film, Yates was dismissive of cinematic narratives through­out his “mature” life: “I almost never go to a movie now . . . because movies are for children.”5 From this position of maturity, his fictional characters are repeatedly undercut by film metaphors to indicate the models by which the dream of the good life in 1950s America was sustained. In the “roles” they provide, films are an updated version of medieval romances for Don Quixotes desperate to perform. Therefore, in a manner similar to J. D. Salinger, Yates ridicules movies as unreliable, distorted, sentimentalized versions of reality in whose heroes and reassurances people are too ready to believe . Holden Caulfield, for instance, is explicit about how his writer brother, a brother whose stories he greatly admires, has “sold out.” He used to go to a nightclub in Greenwich Village, he says, “before he went out to Hollywood and prostituted himself.”6 For Yates, despising phoniness as much as Salinger does, the fear of selling out was very real. In the interwar years, films were produced that were in part stimulated by contemporary po­liti­cal issues such as Prohibition and racketeering. Similarly , the Great Depression provided fertile ground for films about families overcoming hardship. Writing about this era, Ian Scott talks of Hollywood as offering “its own version of exceptionalism and manifest destiny.”7 He goes on to argue that in the 1930s “this was of course predicated upon a very vital need; the United States was fighting an ideological battle, a battle for the hearts and minds of a people who had begun to suspect that America’s great democratic experiment was, in the face of the Depression, all...