Author: Bill Vallicella

In what follows I correct the digitized version of Broyard's review which first appeared in The New York Times on 28 October 1984. Yates' novel appeared in the same year. Blake Bailey masterfully recounts the book's reception in A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (Picador 2003), pp. 529-541, with special attention to Broyard's trenchant and somewhat mean-spirited review. Yates made it as a novelist; despite his considerable literary promise, Broyard never did and his envy shows. 

Broyard was quite a character, "the greatest cocksman in New York for a decade" (Bailey, 201, quoting a former girlfriend of Broyard) and "the only spade among the Beat Generation” as he is described here. A light-skinned black, he tried to pass himself off as white.

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Anatole Broyard is an editor of The Book Review.

YOUNG HEARTS CRYING

By Richard Yates. 347 pp. New York: Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press. $16.95.

THERE seems to be an element of relief in some of the critical praise given to the novels and short stories of Richard Yates. William Styron called ''Revolutionary Road,'' Yates's first novel, ''classic'' and Ann Beattie used the same word for ''Liars in Love,'' his second collection of stories. ''Realistic'' and ''craft'' are two more terms that are often applied to his work. The way these words are used is interesting: they are the visible half of an implicit opposition, suggesting that most novels and stories are not so conspicuously classical, realistic and well crafted.

Mr. Yates is seen as turning the tide, or holding the line, against a general moral and esthetic deterioration. We know where we are with him: in the American mainstream. Hemingway and Fitzgerald are waving from the banks of the stream and they can be heard in Mr. Yates's pages. Like Hemingway's heroes, Mr. Yates's male protagonists worry about their masculinity and talk at length about the integrity of art. Like Fitzgerald's men, they care about style and status and drink a lot to keep up their courage.

Mr. Yates's heroes are classical in the nature of their adversary relation to culture, for it's not the war in Vietnam or the civil rights struggle that arouses their moral indignation, but the mediocrity, emptiness and conformity – all Mr. Yates's words – of American life itself. When, in ''Revolutionary Road,'' Frank Wheeler talks of throwing up his job at the Knox Business Machine Company and ''finding himself'' in Europe, he is closer to Henry Miller and the expatriates of the 1920's than to the people of John Updike, John Cheever or Donald and Frederick Barthelme. In fact, he may be closer to Theodore Dreiser and Thomas Wolfe.

 

IT must have been the movies of the 1930's 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 whenever possible. But I wasn't exactly the rough-and ready type either, and so the movies filled a double need: They gave me an awful lot of cheap story material and a good place to hide.

When I was about 14, I started submitting movie-haunted stories to my English teachers, as if to prove there was something I could do, but it wasn't until three or four years later that reading, both fiction and poetry, began to sweep the movies into a dark and vaguely shameful corner of my mind, where they have remained ever since. I almost never go to a movie now, and have been known to explain loftily, if not quite at the top of my lungs, that this is because movies are for children.