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6 The Writer/Character In Richard Yates’s fiction we see a recurring fascination with the role of the writer in Ameri­ can suburban society. He is fascinated by the promise of status , independence, and material success as much as he is frustrated by the writer’s inability to deliver any of those things in spite of hard work and commitment to an ideal. For Yates there is no hint of triumphalism, no suggestion that the terms of his artistic endeavor are in any way extraordinary, and no suggestion that either he or indeed his writer/characters have achieved anything unusual. He reflects his pessimistic and somewhat misanthropic perception that people are flawed; not only are his writers not exempt from these flaws, but also their imperfections are the most egregious. However, the fact remains that in their attempt to shape and order the ravages of life, and the reality of their own lives, writers are gently applauded whether they can be said to make a difference or not. Drawing very closely on his own biography, Yates’s mid-­twentieth-­century characters live for the most part on the East Coast. Like Alice Munro’s stories (although there are many dissimilarities in the way the details of their lives are used), Yates’s work might now be called autobiographical fiction. Yates did not feel there was anything remarkable or difficult about mining and remining aspects of his own experience or about writing his own character into his work as long as he didn’t slip into sentimentality and nostalgia. Each time 7. Yates looking out the door of the pump house, circa 1958. Courtesy of the Richard Yates Estate. 96 Chapter 6 the reader finds narrative overlap in plot, theme, or character trait, there will be subtle shifts that render the event unique. Among the many tropes that align Yates’s fictions with his biography is the fig­ ure of the writer/character. Yates’s artists and writers are predominantly self-­ deluded, self-­ centered individuals who display a mediocre talent at best. In a world where they appear to value so little, they nevertheless nurture that talent and are wholly absorbed by it, usually to the detriment of all other considerations. Consistently , his writers make a stand against postmodernism in a fight against frivolity and for the serious business of a modern form of social realism. In Yates’s fiction, his writers offer the only form of consolation available in the hard process of living. Redemption is not available, but there are fragments of hope and chinks of light, to borrow the central metaphor from his short story “Builders”;1 those fragments are attached to creative endeavor and writing in particular. In his essay “The Performing Self,” Richard Poirier addresses the performance the writer gives as he sets about his task. He describes the writerly act as performative in ways that accord with Yates’s style, but while this is described in Poirier’s essay in the manner of a revelation, or as an astute criticism, in Yates’s work the writer’s performance is assumed from the start.­Poirier illustrates his ideas about the “performing self” by looking at the work of authors—Robert Frost, Henry James, and Norman Mailer—who witnessed and then transformed in their work real events (though, of course, this was not all they did): “I can’t imagine a scene of whatever terror or pathos in which they would not at every step in their account of it be watching and measuring their moment by moment participation. And their participation would be measured by powers of rendition rather then by effots of understanding .”2 Yates does not do this. He may insert himself, as a writer, into his fictions, and in that sense he performs as Poirier describes it in his essay, but he is performing on a fictional stage and not recording events from life. Furthermore, his efforts of understanding are always central to his narrative perspective. The pub­ lic acts Poirier’s writers imaginatively describe do not accord with Yates’s themes. In Poirier’s opinion, the writer’s pub­ lic performance has a built-­ in arrogance and self-­ satisfaction we would have to look hard to find in Yates’s life or work. Poirier’s writer makes a self-­ conscious act of presentation, “spruce, smiling, now a pub­ lic man, [as he] gives the finished work to the world.”3 To illustrate this, Poirier later talks of the poet Robert Frost...

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