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

Notes

Notes Introduction 1. Richard Yates, “Some Very Good Masters,” New York Times Book Review, April 19, 1981, 3. 2. Revolutionary Road, directed by Sam Mendes; featuring Kate Winslet, Leonardo DiCaprio, and Kathy Bates (DreamWorks SKG in association with BBC Films, released De­ cem­ ber 2008 [USA] Janu­ ary 2009 [UK]). 3. Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Works of Richard Yates (Lon­don: Methuen, 2004, first published 2003), 359. 4. Nick Fraser, “Rebirth of a Dark Genius,” The Observer, February 17, 2008, http://www.theguardian.com/books/2008/feb/17/biography.fiction, accessed Febru­ ary 20, 2008. 5. Tennessee Williams, Kurt Vonnegut Jr., Joan Didion, and Andre Dubus are just some of the people who publicly praised Yates’s work. 6. Vance Bourjaily in Bailey, A Tragic Honesty, 126. 7. Unnamed Harper’s editor to Monica McCall, ibid. 8. Dan DeLuca, “The Collected Stories of Richard Yates,” Knight Ridder/­Tribune News Service, June 13, 2001, http://www.highbeam.com/doc/1G1-­ 75512763.html, accessed Sep­ tem­ ber 20, 2013. 9. David Castronovo and Steven Goldleaf, Richard Yates, Twayne’s United States Authors (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1996), 7. 10. Review of Revolutionary Road, The New Yorker, April 1, 1961, http://www .richardyates.org/bib_rrnyorker.html, accessed Sep­ tem­ ber 20, 2013. 11. Kurt Vonnegut in Bailey, A Tragic Honesty, 295. 12. Richard Russo, introduction to The Collected Stories of Richard Yates (Lon­ don: Methuen, 2004, first published 2001), xviii. 13. Richard Yates in DeWitt Henry and Geoffrey Clark, “An Interview with Richard Yates,” Ploughshares 1, no. 3 (1972): 76. 228 Notes 14. Richard Yates, Young Hearts Crying (Lon­ don: Methuen, 1986, first published 1984), 208. 15. F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (Lon­ don: Penguin, 1950, first published 1926), 188. 16. Salinger’s first novel, The Catcher in the Rye (1951), is devoted to exposing inauthenticity , performative behavior, and social codes and undoubtedly helped shape Yates’s views on these subjects. 17. Bailey, A Tragic Honesty, 114. 18. Yates in Henry and Clark, “An Interview with Richard Yates,” 67. 19. In his novel A Long Way Down, one of Nick Hornby’s suicidal protagonists explains, “Earlier that week . . . I’d finished Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, which is a totally awesome novel. I was going to jump with a copy—not only because it would have been kinda cool, and would’ve added a little mystique to my death, but because it might have been a good way of getting more people to read it.” (Nick Hornby, A Long Way Down [Lon­ don: Penguin, 2006, first published 2005], 22.) 20. Richard Ford, introduction to Revolutionary Road (Lon­don: Methuen, 2001), xiii. 21. Benjamin Lytal, “Reconsiderations: Richard Yates’s ‘Revolutionary Road,’’’ New York Sun, July 2, 2008, http://www.nysun.com/arts/reconsiderations-­ richard-­ yatess -­ revolutionary-­ road/81093/, accessed August 9, 2008. 22. Morris Dickstein, “Fiction and Society, 1940–1970,” in The Cambridge His­ tory of Ameri­ can Literature, vol. 7, ed. Sacvan Bercovitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). 23. Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, introduction by Richard Ford (Lon­ don: Methuen, 2001). 24. Richard Yates, The Collected Stories of Richard Yates, introduction by Richard Russo (Lon­ don: Methuen, 2004). 25. Richard Yates: Revolutionary Road, The Easter Parade, and Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, introduction by Richard Price (New York: Everyman’s Library, Alfred A. Knopf, 2009). 26. Martin Naparsteck, Richard Yates Up Close: The Writer and His Works (Jefferson , NC: McFarland, 2012). Chapter 1 1. Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road, introduction by Richard Ford (Lon­ don: Methuen, 2001, first published 1961), 3. 2. Ibid. 3. Erving Goffman, The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life (Lon­ don: Penguin, 1959), 28. 4. J. D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (Lon­ don: Penguin, 1994, first published 1951), 114. 5. Yates, Revolutionary Road, 6. 6. Ibid. Notes 229 7. Blake Bailey, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Lon­don: Methuen, 2004, first published 2003), 230. 8. Yates, Revolutionary Road, 7. 9. Ibid. 10. Ibid. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid. 13. Ibid., 13. 14. Ibid. 15. I am reminded of Nina’s words toward the end of The Seagull, when she describes the paralyzing sense of her own inadequacy on the stage: “I never knew what to do with my hands, and I could not walk properly or control my voice. You cannot imagine the state of mind of one who knows as he goes through a play how terribly...