MODERN TRAGEDIES

...In another story, a class of endlessly forgiving school children ask simply that their teacher open herself to the love they have to give her...

...He is inviting the reader to see the proximity of his character to cliche, and yet implicitly insisting that he nevertheless transcends any cliche...

...a bisexual sailor...

...It is in the inevitability with which his characters' lives proceed that Yates shows that tragic art is still possible...

...Disturbing the Peace, which chronicles the descent of John Wilder through alcohol into madness, belongs to a literary sub-genre that treats of that particular form of self-destruction, books including Lowry's Under the Volcano, Exley's A Fan's Notes, and Berryman's Recovery...

...The book's title refers to an Easter Parade in which Sarah Grimes, at 20, enjoyed probably the grandest moments of her life...

...a no longer luminescent poet who teaches in the Writers' Workshop at the State University of Iowa (where Yates himself has taught...

...When he gets out of Bellevue he's scared and lost but he doesn't know where to turn...

...Lord God- talk about fantasies coming to life...

...She goes to visit her nephew Peter, the only one of Sarah's three boys to have made something of himself, and to Peter she admits the confusion of her whole life, and in so doing defines it to herself and offers some promise, in the book's last ambiguous pages, of finding personal renewal...

...It is easy to make even the greatest literature sound banal and silly...

...The Easter Parade tells the story of two sisters, Sarah and Emily Grimes, from childhood into early middle age...

...This list can surely be extended, though I doubt very far, but it will imperatively include a dozen or more characters in the work of Richard Yates, not only his protagonists but also slighter figures like John Givings in Revolutionary Road and Charlie and Dr...

...For years that volume equaled nearly one third of Yates's production...

...The fact is all the more remarkable when one considers the kind of writer Yates is: careful, scrupulous, exact, faultless, every inch a purveyor of le mot juste, the antithesis of someone like, say, Thomas Wolfe...

...And so are hospitals: public and private institutions, VA hospitals, tuberculosis wards, state hospitals for the insane and the neglected, Bellevue, Camarillo, Islip...

...It is to be wondered whether Yates has now recovered some sacred significance from this most secular of celebrations...

...The title also suggests, naturally, Irving Berlin's song, a verse of which is sung in an early Yates story, "The Best of Everything...

...This is astonishing, because only once before, by my calculation, has a fiction of Richard Yates's had anything approximating a happy ending...

...Peter is an Episcopalian priest, and the language in which the normally mildly-spoken Emily addresses him, however profane, has an implied frame of reference absent from her earlier discourse: "Jesus, Peter, I hope you do better than that in your sermons...

...What's that, for God's sake...

...there were also two novels, Revolutionary Road (1961) and A Special Providence (1969), plus a handful of other short stories not reprinted in book form...

...Emily often recalls that time...

...Such an invitation, however, entails the obvious and considerable risk of getting one hoist by his own petard...

...these, and others, all of whom come wonderfully alive in a few or many pages...

...the classic exhibit here is Tolstoy's rendition of King Lear...

...Indeed, it may well be part of Yates's achievement, here and elsewhere, to posit something about the reaction of the artist to the stresses of the modern world...

...Yates is throwing down the gauntlet...

...These people are not necessarily without announced purposes...

...she can't...

...Most of Yates's fiction "works" for exactly these reasons, especially the first: the incidents that constitute the plot seem always to grow out of the characters and never to be arbitrary...

...His pages must have been reworked many times, but it is impossible, seeing them in print, to imagine them in any other, earlier state...

...In one story a woman dutifully visits her husband, dying in a tuberculosis ward...

...He's solidly middle class...

...Loneliness is part of it, what Yates has himself called "the spectre of personal isolation that haunts everyone...

...For all Yates's supreme mastery over his materials, it sometimes seems a wonder he can go on...

...Out of context this sentence looks unremarkable, but I happened to read the story in which it occurs before I had read any of Yates's novels, and then when I did come to the novels, these few words about Sergeant Reece and his mark TAYLOR cotnributes a regular column to these pages...

...He winds up in an asylum that makes Bellevue look like nothing...

...For Emily, and Sarah, too, is a writer manquee: she starts numerous stories and books that come to nothing...

...the scenes and narrative sections fit into each other without much transitional fooling around...

...it is through her eyes that we watch the action unfold, it is her continuing disasters that we experience first-hand, it is her friends and lovers whom we come to know, and it is her final gesture in the book that suggests something very new in Yates's fiction...

...The conclusion of The Easter Parade is astonishing, furthermore, because if it is happy, it is partly so in Christian terms...

...Toward the end of that novel John Wilder and his girlfriend Pamela have gone to Hollywood to try to peddle the story of Wilder's life-his business success, extreme drunkenness, family problems, breakdown, confinement in Bellevue, partial recovery, release, still uncertain future-to the men who make movies...

...They lurk at the end of every road, or even before the end...

...II I am aware that my summary of The Easter Parade does an insufficient job of showing what is new and different about the novel-different not only from Yates's own earlier books but also from other tales of poor victimized girls who somehow manage to straighten themselves out at the end...

...MODERN TRAGEDIES MARK TAYLOR The Easter Parade RICHARD YATES Delacorte, $7.95 I At the beginning of an early short story about an infantry platoon going through basic training toward the close of the second World War, Richard Yates's narrator describes the platoon's drill instructor, Sergeant Reece, as "typical-almost a prototype -of the men who had drifted into the Regular Army in the thirties and stayed to form the cadres of the great wartime training centers...

...Still, Yates gets away with it, and partly because it is their hovering nearness to cliche that enables many great fictional creations to become enduring cultural types...

...Thus, in Disturbing the Peace Haines projects the future of the movie character: "He systematically destroys everything that's still bright and promising in his life, including the girl's love, and he sinks into a depression so deep as to be irrevocable...

...Yates has justified the abiding affection for an early short story, "A Really Good Jazz Piano," that led to his letting it represent him in a recent anthology (Writer's Choice, ed...

...Why this should be so may be demonstrated by two very brave things Yates does in Disturbing the Peace...

...It is as if these words and the patience and love of her gentle nephew release something within Emily and allow a connection that none of her innumerable liaisons made possible...

...This is one large question with which a reader will await his next work...

...It is the sort of thing, as novelists say, that other novelists can appreciate...

...that was A Special Providence, whose ending is nevertheless equivocal: good for Robert Prentice, bad for his mother Alice...

...a lawyer still in love with his estranged wife...

...And, of course, Emily drifts along through the lives of men, and men through her life: the soldier who takes her virginity in Central Park...

...the pace may not be fast but does seem to gather momentum at just about the necessary speed...

...This is daring...

...Reduce books to plot outlines, deny characters the full context they inhabit, above all, take away the author's language, and how much literature becomes soap opera or grotesquerie...

...And yet it is the only game and, paradoxically in the face of the characters' apparent drifting, its rules are unalterable...

...It is an act of total surrender, which may signal an upward turn...

...And the creative outburst is more remarkable still when one considers the consuming desolation of Yates's world, perfectly uniform in its misery throughout the five books...

...And then, when she seems about ready for the state hospital into which have drifted most of her family, an astonishing thing happens...

...His characters need, as Forster wrote in Howards End, "only connect," and yet they almost never can...

...an impotent philosophy student...

...it was reprinted in 1962 in a collection of Yates's stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness...

...It appeared self-evident that Yates, who is now fifty, was not, and would not become, a prolific writer, and then, suddenly, two more novels in two years, Disturbing the Peace last fall and The Easter Parade now...

...Spivack in Disturbing the Peace...

...It may be, however, that now he has arrived somewhere we had every reason to hope for and no reason to expect...

...She gets older, less able to hold her liquor, less attractive to desirable men, less able to attend to the tedious details of her job...

...It is the first verb, "drifted," I think, that has given the sentence such emblematic significance for me, because almost all of Yates's characters appear to have arrived wherever they have arrived by some species of drifting, of motiveless and ineffective participation in their own lives, of only token interference with the dread forces that shape and direct them...

...some of them, like Frank Wheeler in Revolutionary Road, are veritable demons of self-improvement, at moments, anyway, and in their conscious intentions, but seen with the ironical and uncompromising vision that Yates shares with his readers, they seem somehow not to know the rules of the deadly game they play...

...an English major at Barnard, and the darling of academic cocktail parties during her undergraduate years ("I could've sworn you were a grad student...

...an author shouldn't perhaps, alert critics to those spots in his work that bear even a specious semblance of weakness...

...Actually, the book belongs to Emily much more than to her older sister...

...Unhappy advertising man, gray flannel suit and all that...

...They have some letters of introduction, and at first things go well: contacts are made, a production company is formed, and a preliminary conference of Wilder, Pamela, the director Munchin, and a writer, Jack Haines, gets under way...

...But even where excessive drinking is not Yates's nominal subject, it is still a pervasive condition of the lives of all his adult characters...

...But the direction of Emily's drifting is always, if often imperceptibly, downward...

...I don't know what he does for a living, but let's say it's something well paid and essentially meaningless, like advertising...

...Rust Hills, New York: David McKay, 1974): "To use a standard writers' word whose elusive meaning often seems clear only to editors and critics, I think [the story] 'works.' It seems to grow out of its characters rather than being imposed on them...

...she would rather be elsewhere, and he would rather have her elsewhere...

...This is the other brave thing Yates does, for the forecast corresponds precisely to the way the rest of Wilder's life will unfold...

...Since Emily's redemption is couched, in this way, in theological terms, it may be permissible to see her fundamental sin as sloth (is this the besetting sin of all Yates's drifters...

...in outline, it does not leave a reader marveling over inventiveness and originality as, for instance, Gravity's Rainbow and JR do, even in outline...

...A recent essay by Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books got a friend and me to talking about some of the limitations of contemporary fiction...

...Emily is a bright and articulate girl...

...It is a perceptible fact about Yates's fiction that any paraphrase or abridgment of it trivializes it and flattens it out almost beyond recognition...

...We tried to name exceptions to this generalization, characters who inspired the happy fallacy of having one regard them as people independent of the books where they live (as one can regard Jake Barnes and Jay Gatsby), and didn't get very far: Holden Caul-field, Sebastian Dangerfield, a few of Bellow's creations...

...There is no more certain sign of Yates's importance among our writers...

...You seem very sure of yourself," one boyfriend tells her), she goes on to a succession of never-quite-literary jobs like trade journals and ad agencies, which frustrate the talent she never wholly defines...

...But then Munchin interrupts him: "I can see you've given this a lot of thought, but I can't help feeling there's a quality of cliche about everything you've said so far...

...Profound human inadequacy is part of Yates's world, and so, more superficially, are alcohol and hospitals...

...Haines goes on a while longer in this vein, and what he is doing, of course, is offering an abstract but perfectly accurate sketch of John Wilder as he has developed to this point, about fifty pages from the end of the book...

...Generally agreeing with Vidal's severe critique of several of our most prominent writers, my friend said that the problem with our fiction-he meant American novels since World War II -was its dearth of characters who were convincing and, more, memorable as characters, who led the reader to be genuinely concerned with them as with complicated, sympathetic, real, and yet individualized human beings...

...confreres kept returning to mind, unsought...

...The story about Sergeant Reece is "Jody Rolled the Bones...

...Yates can tell us in advance because he knows that the character he has drawn can behave no other way, and we know it, too...

...You have a very-I don't know...

...Christ, what a cop-out...

...Jack Haines's summary of Wilder-a cliche in the way that almost anyone put in five or six sentences becomes a cliche -is in a sense a brief for the integrity of a text, an arguing of the inviolable association of plot and characters...

...After a few perfunctory words, he starts reading the magazines she has brought along...

...Haines begins by describing the character he is envisioning for the film: "He's unhappily married and he's got kids he can't relate to and he feels trapped...

...what people in the Middle Ages knew as acedia: the paralysis of the will, the inability to direct oneself toward the good...