Intertextual Transformation and Textual Erasure in Richard Yates’ Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
Leif Bull
This article will focus on Richard Yates’ first collection of short stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962). The collection draws attention to a number of conflicts that would appear throughout Yates’ work. As in the rest of his work, these conflicts were not necessarily set up simply to be neatly resolved. Problems of interpretation, as well as awkward tensions between form and content, were central elements of his literary project: formally as well as thematically, Yates focused on discomfort, misunderstanding, and unease. In particular, the collection can be viewed as a self-conscious encryption and subversion of a familiar apprentice narrative: that of how the writer came to write, and by extension, how the writer came to master his craft. It achieves this not only by virtue of being a collection of stories published in magazines prior to the publication of Revolutionary Road, Yates’ first novel, but also through various stories’ explicit engagement with apprentice writers, and the problems of writing. Through its reflexive uncertainty, the collection simultaneously employs and problematises a realist mode of writing.
Intertextual Transformation
In his engagement with the short story form, Yates often drew on classic novels in intertextual play in order to highlight generic difference between the short story and the novel, to enact it as well as embody it, as any successful short story would. That one seemingly trivial defining feature of the short story – that it is short – has far-reaching implications. Spatial and temporal limitations apply. The former have had enormous impact on the genre’s choice of favoured characters. In his influential study of the short story, The Lonely Voice, Frank O’Connor highlights the generic emphasis on the lonely individual: ‘outlawed figures wandering about the fringes of society, superimposed sometimes on symbolic figures whom they caricature and echo – Christ, Socrates, Moses’.[1] The short story displays ‘an intense awareness of human loneliness’ (ibid.), an awareness which, crucially, O’Connor deems rare in the novel. While O’Connor’s reading of the genre has a romantic bent, with an emphasis on the existential lone wolves, it is a perspective that resonates with much scholarship on the genre. Clare Hanson calls the short story ‘ex-centric’ in focus, engaging with the experiences of those ‘not part of official or “high” hegemony’, a genre that has historically ‘offered itself to losers and loners, exiles, women, blacks – writers who for one reason or another have not been part of the ruling “narrative” or epistemological/experiential framework of their society’.[2] Iain Reid, meanwhile, highlights the genre’s preoccupation with ‘ordinary people, apparent nonentities’, and its especial suitability for ‘the portrayal of regional life, or of individuals who, though situated in a city, lived there as aliens’.[3]
O’Connor’s loners resist identification with the reader; the appeal lies not in recognizing oneself in, to borrow an example from O’Connor, ‘The Overcoat’’s protagonist Akakey Akakeivitch. Rather, the quintessential short story strategy invented by Gogol consists of taking an otherwise unromantic character, lacking in allure or admirable qualities – ‘the absurd little copying clerk’ – and ‘[imposing] his image over that of the crucified Jesus, so that even while we laugh we are filled with horror at the resemblance’ (O’Connor, p. 16). In the absence of a hero, the short story has what O’Connor unhappily calls ‘a submerged population group’ (ibid., p. 19) – the unprivileged, the minor, the inarticulate, the unsophisticated. As for the temporal limitations of the genre, O’Connor identifies time as the novelist’s ‘greatest asset’: ‘the chronological development of character or incident is essential form as we see it in life, and the novelist flouts it at his own peril’.[4] Conversely, the short story must choose a particular moment – stop time, rather than have it unfold. This resonates with Georg Lukacs’ assertion that ‘[the] short story is the most purely artistic form’.[5] The focus on a single moment, a single mood, renders the short story ‘abstract’, i.e. it becomes a ‘pure’ art object (Lukacs, p. 51). By not attempting to represent the world as such, the tiny moments that form the genre’s chief domain insist on their own autonomy. Yates dramatises this generic difference by extracting moments from classic novels, blowing them up, freezing them, and subsequently highlighting the ‘short story-ness’ of his texts.
The story ‘Doctor Jack O’Lantern’ sees Yates directly referencing Flaubert’s Madame Bovary. Its opening scene, where a new boy, Vincent Sabella, is introduced in class, his name mispronounced by the teacher, echoes Flaubert’s opening scene, in which Charles Bovary becomes Charbovari to his fellow students’ amusement:
‘What would you like us to call you, Vincent?’ Miss Price inquired. ‘I mean, do you prefer Vincent, or Vince, or – or what?’ (It was purely an academic question; even Miss Price knew that the boys would call him ‘Sabella’ and that the girls wouldn’t call him anything at all.)‘Vinny’s okay,’ he said in a strange, croaking voice that had evidently yelled itself hoarse down the ugly streets of his home.
‘I’m afraid I didn’t hear you,’ she said, craning her pretty head forward and to one side so that a heavy lock of hair swung free of one shoulder. ‘Did you say ‘Vince’?’
‘Vinny, I said,’ he said again, squirming.
‘Vincent, is it? All right then, Vincent.’ A few of the class giggled, but nobody bothered to correct her; it would be more fun to let the mistake continue.[6]
We see here a recurring theme of Yates’ work: the epistemological uncertainty born out of characters misunderstanding and misinterpreting the world around them, their own perspective shutting out valuable information. This pattern proves pivotal to the story. In a fit of embarrassed anger after being chastised by Miss Price, Vinny writes all the swear words he knows – all four of them – on a school wall. Some of his classmates see him; when they tell him how this will land him in trouble with Miss Price, he impresses them with his tough demeanour, exploiting his inner-city, working class background in the face of their suburban softness. He maintains this illusion after being found out, convincing the other boys that Miss Price beat him after class, when in fact she had talked gently to him about how her feelings had been hurt by him, called him ‘dear’ and unknowingly angered him further, as her treatment of him as a pitied teacher’s pet had contributed to his being shunned by the other pupils. His lie appears to finally help him gain acceptance among the other boys, who listen rapt as he tells of Miss Price taking the ruler to his knuckles. This exchange is seen, but not heard, by Miss Price, who crucially misinterprets the situation. As she doesn’t realise his newfound popularity rests on the notion that he is a rebel, she ruins everything by complimenting Vinny on his windbreaker, exposing his lie in the process. Once again, his classmates turn on him, pushing him and coining the nickname which gives the story its title. As a final gesture, in a bid to sever his ties to Miss Price, he draws a portrait of her on the school wall, complete with pubic hair. It is as necessary as it is cruel, and the effectiveness of the act relies on Miss Price failing to understand his intentions. She must take it personally.This deliberately small-scale narrative draws attention to crucial, genre-specific differences between itself and the canonical novel it references. Madame Bovary spans decades, moves from character to character: most significantly, the focus shifts from Charles to Emma, taking in the manners and mores of the provincial bourgeoisie along the way. ‘Doctor Jack O’Lantern’, on the other hand, freezes Charles Bovary’s initial moment of embarrassment and effectively turns it into a short story. Every significant event that befalls Vincent – from the first day at school, to getting caught out in lying to the class about his eventful evening, to getting caught out in lying about Miss Price’s reaction – is a reworking of the same event: a boy mocked and ostracised by his peers. By replaying Madame Bovary’s opening scene over and over, the story highlights the microperspective inherent to the short story genre. To echo O’Connor: you could never write a novel about Vincent Sabella’s little rebellion, any more than you could turn Madame Bovary, with its representation of time marching slowly, tediously on in the French provinces, into a short story.
Textual Erasure
The collection repeatedly evokes anxieties related to the process of writing, whether said writing is journalism, fiction, letters home or obscene graffiti. The text is always at risk from abortion or erasure, the writer in varied stages of impotence. As Ronald J. Nelson has pointed out, Yates represents Vincent Sabella’s graffiti writing as if he were describing ‘an artist contemplating his medium and its possibilities’:[7]
For a minute or two he just stood there, looking at the blankness of the concrete wall; then he found a piece of chalk in his pocket and wrote out all the dirty words he could think of, in block letters a foot high. He had put down four words and was trying to remember a fifth when he heard a shuffling at the door behind him (Yates, p. 12).
In Nelson’s words, this is ‘the artist as a young thug’: the writing process enacted by a character without any storytelling ability, and a knowing nod to James Joyce.[8] His nickname comes from telling an entirely unbelievable story in class, transparently misappropriating elements of stories told by his classmates. ‘Doctor Jack O’Lantern’ is part of his mishearing of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, a film he claims he, too, has seen. In light of Yates’ obvious debt to Flaubert in the writing of this story, we can read this scene as a bit of knowingly self-deprecating commentary on any given text’s dependence on the texts that came before, on what Harold Bloom would later call ‘strong misreading’ when establishing his theory of the anxiety of influence: ‘an act of creative correction that is actually and necessarily a misinterpretation’.[9] (Vincent Sabella’s misreading is obviously not very strong – in this reading, this passage amounts to Yates bowing down to Flaubert.) A sense of writerly impotence, complete with castration anxiety, is found in Miss Price forcing him to wash the swear words off the wall after a fellow pupil – a girl, appropriately in this context – tells on him. Similar fears related to female teachers are replayed in the story ‘Fun with a Stranger’. The strict (and scary) Miss Snell is to give her third grade pupils a present at the end of the year, but what will it be? The children’s hopes for jackknives, pocket torches, toy soldiers and miniature dolls are dashed on the rocks of the cheap erasers she presents to them with ‘the soft, tremulous smile of a giver’ (Yates, p. 93).
In ‘Out with the Old’, writer’s block makes an appearance in the form of McIntyre, an inpatient at a TB ward struggling to write a letter to his daughter, who is pregnant out of wedlock. We follow McIntyre’s writing process, we read his words as he creates them, we see him discard them – we read four versions of page 3 of the letter, a page he abandons mid-sentence:
But from there on, the pen lay dead in his cramped fingers. It was as if all the letters of the alphabet, all the combinations of letters into words, all the infinite possibilities of handwritten language had ceased to exist (Yates, p. 136).The collection’s concluding story, ‘Builders’ embodies the most explicit engagement with writing, both through its narrative and its many illusion-breaking devices. The anxieties alluded to in earlier stories are enacted on a larger scale, any climactic sense of mastery deliberately withheld. From its opening sentence, it sets out to negotiate not only the narrative strategies of fiction, but the reflexive treatment of said strategies as well:
Writers who write about writers can easily bring on the worst kind of literary miscarriage; everybody knows that. Start a story off with ‘Craig crushed out his cigarette and lunged for the typewriter,’ and there isn’t an editor in the United States who’ll feel like reading your next sentence (Yates, p. 141).
Not simply metafiction in the sense of being a fiction about the nature of fiction, this opening passage takes on the quality of meta-metafiction: a fictional treatment of the fictional treatment of the writing of fiction, moving in a spiral of reflexivity. It continues:So don’t worry, this is going to be a straight, no-nonsense piece of fiction about a cabdriver, a movie star, and an eminent child psychologist, and that’s a promise. But you’ll have to be patient for a minute, because there’s going to be a writer in it too. I won’t call him ‘Craig’, and 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 (Ibid.).
The story insists upon its own artifice, with the narrator owning up to his command of the characters – ‘I won’t call him Craig’. The narrator’s role is then given a further twist, as it becomes clear that the writer in question is the narrator himself. In other words, the narrator is his own creation, the ‘I’ of the text undermined by himself from the start, both puppet-master and puppet simultaneously. The historical Yates and his alter ego, here named Bob Prentice – further undermining his authority – are involved in a complex struggle for textual control.The narrative deals with the narrator’s early days as a writer, working as a rewrite man for the UP, handling financial news items he doesn’t understand. This young writer is portrayed as vain and floundering:
[E]very morning I could turn up at the Daily News building wearing a jaded look, a cheap trench coat that had shrunk a size too small for me, and a much-handled brown fedora (‘Battered’ is the way I would have described it then, and I’m grateful that I know a little more now about honesty in the use of words. It was a handled hat, handled by endless nervous pinchings and shapings and reshapings; it wasn’t battered at all). What I’m getting at is that just for those few minutes each day, walking up the slight hill of the last hundred yards between the subway exit and the News building, I was Ernest Hemingway reporting for work at the Kansas City Star (Yates, pp. 141-142).
Firstly, this passage contains an echo of a different story in the collection, ‘A Wrestler with Sharks’, in which one character, Sobel – described mockingly in the third person by a narrator very similar to Bob Prentice, and held up as a terrible, barely literate writer – has an unflattering cloth hat which he uses in a fashion similar to Bob and his much-handled fedora. For Bob, like for Sobel, the hat takes on the power of metaphor, both falsely claiming writerly authority through external signifiers. The crushing portrayal of Sobel leaves permanent stains on Bob, smudging him upon contact. The back-and-forth exchange of the two stories creates a tension which is never fully resolved. On one hand, ‘Builders’ is a skilled performance in which the narrator reflexively mocks his own inept apprentice period, all the while building a complex textual structure. On the other, there are signs that the narrator’s superiority is far from stable. Bob’s concluding doubts surrounding his own narrative (which I’ll return to) suggest that he has been made to perform certain tasks, his apparently eagle-eyed narration undermined by his own obvious fictionality vis-à-vis his author. The text operates in the gap explored by Paul de Man, that of the inherent irony of all narration. To de Man, all writing produces ‘a gap or distance between a text and what it signifies.’[10] What is unique to literature, among all acts of writing, is that it ‘acknowledges that it creates through narrative, rather than presenting narrative as the representation of some mythical prior reality.’ (Colebrook, p. 110). This acknowledgement culminates in the final irony – appropriately enough – of achieving a form of authenticity unavailable to other forms of writing.Bob’s retrospective rumination on his hat evokes another recurring theme of Yates’ work: the inherent tension between language and the world. Pondering the difference between ‘battered’ and ‘much-handled’, the narrator’s view of the language/reality conundrum is ultimately optimistic: it is difficult, yet possible, to accurately describe the world. The search for the right words is given verbal expression throughout the story: upon seeing a piece of furniture, the narrator comments that he doesn’t know what to call it, but guesses at the word ‘credenza’.(Yates, p. 143) His work is another site of uncertainty, as he ignorantly parrots business jargon which in turn is reproduced in newspapers across the country:
‘Domestic corporate bonds moved irregularly higher in the moderately active trading today…’ That was the kind of prose I wrote all day long for the UP wire, and ‘Rising oil shares paced a lively curb market,’ and ‘Directors of Timken Roller Bearing today declared’ – hundreds and hundreds of words that I never really understood (What in the name of God are puts and calls, and what is a sinking fund debenture? I’m still damned if I know) […] (Yates, p. 142).The irony of a writer not understanding a word he writes is obvious, and it is a founding principle of the story that this young writer is, simply put, not very good. He is perfectly aware that all the outward similarities between his own life and the narrative arc of Hemingway’s are of no consequence to the actual stories he produces on his typewriter – ‘always, always something bad’ – and it is due to this mediocrity that he discovers an ad in a magazine (read when he should have been writing) for an ‘unusual free-lance opportunity for talented writer’ offered by a man called Bernard Silver. (Ibid., pp. 142-143) The introduction of this element of the story offers a parody of Hemingway’s poetics of omission, creating a hole in the story by deliberately obscuring some events due to their mundane nature:
I won’t bother you with the dry, witty, Hemingway dialogue that took place when I came out from behind the screen that night and Joan turned around from the sink, with her hands dripping soapsuds on the open magazine, and we can also skip my cordial, unenlightening chat with Bernard Silver on the phone. I’ll just move on ahead to a couple of nights later, when I rode the subway for an hour and found my way at last to his apartment (Ibid., p. 143).The mechanics of narrative pacing are exposed, the processes of exclusion and selection inherent in maintaining the drive of realist fiction acknowledged.
Bernard Silver is looking for a writer in order to turn his experiences as a cab driver – the veracity of which is questionable at best – into first-person narratives for publication, possibly even filming: sentimental yarns of how he saved marriages, prevented suicides and robberies, all from the driver’s seat of his taxi. He offers his ideas on the craft of storytelling to Bob, who just about manages to conceal his disgust.
‘Do you see where writing a story is […] [l]ike building a house?’ And he was so pleased with his own creation of this image that he didn’t even wait to take in the careful, congratulatory nod I awarded him for it. ‘I mean a house has got to have a roof, but you’re going to be in trouble if you build your roof first, right? Before you build your roof you got to build your walls. Before you build your walls you got to lay your foundation – and I mean all the way down the line. Before you build your foundation you got to bulldoze and dig yourself the right kind of hole in the ground. Am I right? […] So all right, supposing you build a house like that. Then what? What’s the first question you got to ask yourself about it when it’s done? […] Where are the windows?’ he demanded, spreading his hands. ‘That’s the question. Where does the light come in? Because do you see what I mean about the light coming in, Bob? I mean the – the philosophy of your story; the truth of it; the –’‘The illumination of it, sort of,’ I said, and he quit groping for his third noun with a profound and happy snap of his fingers (Ibid., pp. 148-149).
Once again characters struggle to find the right words, and this time the implicit mockery of the unsophisticated Bernard extends to his ‘poetics’. His insistence on ‘truth’ and ‘philosophy’ is really a demand for the kind of neat, optimistic message of hope and redemption that will make the Reader’s Digest buy his stories, subjecting the words themselves to a kind of linguistic entropy. Nevertheless, Bob takes the job, as the extra money will help him and his wife realise their dream of moving to Paris so that he can focus on his writing, just like Hemingway.Following Bernard’s recipe for success, acting in bad faith throughout, Bob finds that he can write the kind of story he has been hired to write without too much trouble:
I took that little bastard of a story and I built the hell out of it. First I bulldozed and laid myself a real good foundation, then I got the lumber out and bang, bang, bang – up went the walls and on went the roof and up went the cute little chimney top. Oh, I put plenty of windows in it too – big, square ones – and when the light came pouring in it left no earthly shadow of a doubt that Bernie Silver was the wisest, gentlest, bravest and most lovable man who ever said ‘folks’ (Ibid., pp. 151-152).The sarcastic briskness of the tone mocks the simplistic writing required of him. The metaphor of the windows also serves to comment on Yates’ work beyond this particular story, as the other short stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness are also decidedly short on the kind of ‘philosophy’ and ‘truth’ that are employed to bring a little light into the lives of readers, or, to put it in terms used by Lyotard about literary realism in general: ‘to deceive, to seduce, and to reassure’.[11] As the narrative progresses, the project Bob has been hired for degenerates further, as initial possible routes to publication are blocked. After the initial tall tales of Bernie Silver’s acts of selfless kindness and bravery fail to metamorphose into Reader’s Digest riches or Hollywood success, Bernie changes the concept into a form of infomercial disguised as short story, campaigning for the election of a Vincent J. Poletti for Congressman. The mock autobiography of Bob’s earlier stories is to be replaced with disingenuous political careerism, as Bernie, a racist Republican gives his support to the local Democrat Poletti, whose up-and-coming status would make him an opportune horse to back. This idea is viciously mocked by Bob to Bernie’s face, but he agrees to the assignment anyway, the promise of cash impossible to resist now that his wife is pregnant. Whereas the earlier stories had been constructed according to Bernie’s formula, this time the process proved even less inspired:
In the end I built – oh, built, schmilt. I put page one and then page two and then page three into the old machine and I wrote the son of a bitch. […] What does a public servant do when he really wants to go out of his way to help people? Gives them money, that’s what he does; and pretty soon I had Poletti forking over more than he could count. It got so that anybody in the Bronx who was even faintly up against it had only to climb into Bernie Silver’s cab and say ‘The Poletti place’, and their troubles were over. And the worst part of it was my own grim conviction that it was the best I could do (Yates, p. 166).
Unsurprisingly, Bernie doesn’t like this story much, and their creative partnership ends. Eventually, so does Bob’s employment at the UP, and when Bernie calls him up some time later, Bob can tell him that he is, in fact, writing a novel, and is therefore unable to write for him any more. What Bob fails to realise until later, is that Bernie didn’t want to rehire him as a writer, but rather to utilise his position within the UP to gain access to the lucrative syndicated comic-strip market – the latest incarnation of the adventures of Bernie Silver is in strip form. Bernie’s adventures are thus subjected to a kind of narrative entropy, although here the material was pretty banal from the start – from the ‘heart-warming’, sentimental, but carefully put together, to hastily assembled, sycophantic political propaganda, to a few frames in the funny pages.The story concludes with a rumination on the story just told:
And where are the windows? Where does the light come in?Bernie, old friend, forgive me, but I haven’t got the answer to that one. I’m not even sure there are any windows in this particular house. Maybe the light is just going to have to come in as best it can, through whatever chinks and cracks have been left in the builder’s faulty craftsmanship, and if that’s the case you can be sure that nobody feels worse about it than I do. God knows, Bernie; God knows there certainly ought to be a window around here somewhere, for all of us (Ibid., p. 173).
The reflexivity of the opening paragraph returns, the narrator openly acknowledging the manufactured nature of this story starring himself. The deliberately trite metaphor of storytelling as house building is recast as a reminder of fiction’s uphill struggle towards ‘truth’, ‘philosophy’ and ‘illumination’. Strategically placed at the end of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, it becomes, literally, the last word; a final note of uncertainty, a string of qualifying ‘maybes’ and ‘not sures’ and ‘God knows’, refusing the possibility of a climactic sense of mastery. It is a refusal that ultimately serves to question the formal conditions of the collection itself as a work of literary realism. Realism rests on a trust in everyday language as a means to portray observable reality. As shown, everyday language in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is a site of uncertainty, confusion, even meaninglessness. By assuming this position, rather than one in which everyday language is a window to the world – where does the light come in, indeed – Yates crafted a realism that avoids the pitfalls of naivety.
Bibliography
Bloom, Harold, The Anxiety of Influence (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973)
Colebrook, Claire, Irony (London: Routledge, 2004)
Hanson, Clare, ‘Introduction’, in Hanson (ed.), Re-Reading the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1989)
Joyce, James, Portrait of the Artist of the Young Man (New York: W. B. Huebsch, 1916; repr. London: Wordsworth Classics, 1992)
Lukacs, Georg: The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1978)
Lyotard, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984)
Nelson, Ronald J., ‘Richard Yates’ portrait of the artist as a young thug: ‘Doctor Jack-O’-Lantern’’, in Studies in Short Fiction, 32 (1995)
O’Connor, Frank, The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1963)
Reid, Ian, The Short Story (London: Methuen, 1977)
Yates, Richard, The Collected Short Stories (London: Methuen, 2004)
Notes
[1] The Lonely Voice: A Study of the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1963), p. 19. Further references to this volume will be given after quotations in the text.[2] ‘Introduction’ in Clare Hanson (ed.): Re-Reading the Short Story (London: Macmillan, 1989), pp. 1-9 (p. 2).
[3] The Short Story (London: Methuen, 1977), p. 24.
[4] Frank O’Connor: The Lonely Voice, p. 15.
[5] Georg Lukacs: The Theory of the Novel (London: Merlin Press, 1978), p. 51. Further references to this volume are given after quotations in the text.
[6] Richard Yates: The Collected Short Stories (London: Methuen, 2004), p. 4. Further references to this volume are given after quotations in the text.
[7] Ronald J. Nelson: ‘Richard Yates’ portrait of the artist as a young thug: ‘Doctor Jack-O’-Lantern’’, in Studies in Short Fiction, 32 (1995).
[8] What Nelson leaves largely unexplored, beyond this knowing title, is Yates’ obvious debt to Joyce, as well as Flaubert, in the writing of this story: Portrait of the Artist of the Young Man (New York: W. B. Huebsch, 1916; repr. London: Wordsworth Classics, 1992) features both a bullied schoolboy and a scribbled-on wall. In Vincent Sabella, sensitive boy-artist Stephen Dedalus and his vandalising tormentors are arguably synthesised into one character: crude, yet lonely; inarticulate, yet feeling. Rather than detract from this paper’s emphasis on the link to Flaubert, Yates’ explicit allusion to Joyce’s first novel stresses further his commitment to text, rather than to a reductively mimetic conception of realism.
[9] Harold Bloom: The Anxiety of Influence (New York; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 30, original italics.
[10] Claire Colebrook: Irony (London: Routledge, 2004), p. 108. Further references to this volume are given after quotations in the text.
[11] Jean-Francois Lyotard: The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984), p. 74.