THE FOUNDER September 2021
LITERARY REVIEWS 17
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) by Richard Yates LIAM ELVISH| LITERARY REVIEW EDITOR
R
ichard Yates is an author who has been dead for nearly three decades - yet only now, after a lengthy spell of unjust obscurity, is his name gaining some prominence as one of the true literary talents of the United States in the late Twentieth Century. Following his seminal work Revolutionary Road (1961), a powerful account of American suburban monotony, Yates once more magnifies his perceptive glance upon everyday existence in his 1962 collection of short stories, beautifully detailing the lives and losses of eleven separate people. Individual in their experiences, but collective in their hopelessness, these eleven figures represent the flawed myth of the ‘American Dream’ in the immediate post-war period. Largely set in and around New York, the prevailing despair of city life is reminiscent of an Edward Hopper painting. From the tragi-comic ‘A Glutton for Punishment’, detailing the domestic implications for timid Walter Henderson after being fired from his Manhattan office job, to ‘A Wrestler with Sharks’, exploring the cut-throat environment of the newspaper industry (of which Yates himself had first-hand experience), each sketches the turmoil of ordinary men and women in the urban sprawl.
Fallon is the literary archetype of an embittered ex-armed forces worker; a man with a grievance of inferiority, resorting to the language of fists, the only language in which he has been trained to express himself. The story raises questions of the nature of blind human rage, of its weakness in being swayed by reactionary publicity within the modern world. Other stories in the collection include ‘No Pain Whatsoever’ and ‘Out with the Old’, both dealing with the treatment of the invalid and elderly within the hospital system, a regime of tedium where neglect is merely a gentle waiting-game for departure. ‘Fun with a Stranger’ is set in an elementary school in which the dreary Miss Snell acts as demonstrative proof to her class of life’s perpetual disappointments. It is most painfully evoked after raising their hopes for Christmas gifts shortly before the holidays, before dashing them coldly with her bland offering of stationary - a reminder of how childhood can be marred by rigid traditionalism at the expense of spontaneity. If Germany in the 1930s was governed by conformity with a machinegun, then America in the 1950s was governed by conformity with a smiley face on a cereal-box; and it is Yates’s writings which are most emphatic of all its ghastly effects.
The monstrous flaws of McCarthyism in 1950s America are evoked throughout. ‘The B.A.R. Man’ is a visceral statement on the ignorance of a propaganda-fuelled populace of laymen against the persecuted freethinker, the conformist whip of army brutality versus the tolerant rebelliousness of liberal intellectualism. Skilfully, the crux of the argument is not revealed by Yates until the final few pages, in which an academic departs from a public gathering only to be greeted with hostility by a crowd of anticommunist protestors. John Fallon, scorned by an attractive younger woman amongst a group of night-crawlers who promptly desert him, heads out into the streets of Manhattan, drunk and disorderly, unaware of his state or of time itself, and eager in his bitterness to chase after something, anything. Caught up in the confrontation between protestors and the maverick university professor, Fallon’s intemperate anger results in his instigating an unprovoked assault upon the academic, and his own subsequent arrest.
Source: shop4mu.com
