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7 Realism, Form, and Technique It is well documented that by the early 1960s, the literati—the scholars and editors of literature—regarded realist fiction as passé. Sharon Monteith describes a sense of the shift away from realism when she examines “the turn in the literary tide”: “The emphasis on in­ di­ vidual awakening and rebellion is part of the reason that realist fiction delineating ‘social norms’ is felt to recede in the 1960s, despite Richard Yates and John Cheever, and perhaps because their characters are chronic dreamers who worry less about social revolution or the spirit of reform than about being tortured by conformity and deadened by suburbia, concerns that animated the Cold War fifties.”1 Mon­ teith goes on to make the point that “narratives about the 1950s began to feel ‘his­ tori­ cal’ very quickly unless they weighed in with ‘sixties’ issues”2 and typifies the change in direction for fiction as “a movement [that] coalesced around writers for whom alienation became absurdist disaffection.”3 In the light of her comments, Richard Yates had given himself a steep hill to climb if his work was to be recognized and applauded. Stewart O’Nan, writing about the weak reception of Yates’s sec­ ond novel, A Special Providence, emphasizes this issue of timing in ways that chime 8. Yates on a bench in Fahnestock State Park, New York, circa 1961 or 1962. Courtesy of Grace Schulman. Realism, Form, and Technique 121 with Monteith’s encapsulations of the 1960s literary landscape: “All in all, [the book was] a success, except that in the past few years Ameri­ can writing , like the rest of the culture, had changed drastically. The metafictionalists were in, as were fantasy and sci-­ fi, and mad satire. Donald Barthelme’s surrealistic fictions ran nearly monthly in the New Yorker [sic]. Compared to the experimentalists, Yates’s traditional approach seemed a throwback, easily ignored.”4 Writing about writers is one means of challenging the limitations of traditional realist fiction while at the same time valorizing it. Yates does this with the full knowledge that it is a very difficult, and in some senses unappealing , thing to do: “Writers who write about writers can easily bring on the worst kind of literary miscarriage; everybody knows that.”5 He describes with some relish one of his first writer/characters (a relish detectable under his surface apology) and suggests that writers are of­ten very difficult people: “I can guarantee that he won’t get away with being the only Sensitive Person among the characters, but we’re going to be stuck with him right along and you’d better count on his being as awkward and obtrusive as writers nearly always are, in fiction or in life.”6 His intention, as his tongue-­ in-­ cheek tone suggests in this short story, is to demystify the hallowed ground the writer traditionally occupies. He wanted to present a realistic, gritty, and three-­ dimensional account of what kind of life writers of the mid-­ twentieth century , writers such as he was, actually led. A slow, painstaking author, Yates was always dissatisfied with the early drafts of his work, and the process of revision was time consuming and expensive for him. He explained the need for meticulous corrections and revisions in the Ploughshares interview: “Most of my first drafts read like soap opera . I have to go over and over a scene before I get deep enough into it to bring it off. I think I’d be a slick, superficial writer if I didn’t revise all the time.”7 However, Yates knew that he could never change and write with a speed and confidence that he saw in the work of others. In a letter to DeWitt Henry, Yates suggested that the time it took to write a book bore no relation to its worth: “Maybe it takes you and me a long time to write our books, but it took Fitzgerald exactly ten months to write Gatsby, and Wallant less than a year to write The Pawnbroker. Working time, in other words, has nothing whatever to do with quality.”8 In the light of the comment that follows, this seems disingenuous. Thinking back to a time following the publication of his first novel and first book of short stories, Yates’s highly self-­ criti­ cal nature and his frustration with his own writing methods is revealed: “What happened after those two books was my own fault, nobody else’s...

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