A Tragic Honesty (36 page)

Finally two insightful and appreciative reviews appeared later that summer: F. J. Warnke in the
Yale Review
made the useful point that the “novel is really about the inadequacy of human beings to their own aspirations, and its target is not America but existence,” while Theodore Solotaroff in
Commentary
noted that “Yates has the superior novelist's instinct for the nuances by which people give themselves away.” Both reviewers had a few sober misgivings as well: Warnke found the narrative point of view unfocused in such a way that Frank Wheeler and others are alternately sympathetic and the objects of “savage contempt,” while Solotaroff objected that the Wheelers' “determinative childhoods” undermined the clarity of the book's social criticism (“the Wheelers probably would have failed under the best of circumstances”).

As with his beloved
Gatsby,
Yates's novel got a rather mixed reception despite what many agreed to be its manifest excellence, and like
Gatsby,
too, it would pass in and out of print for many years to the bewilderment of those (especially writers) who continue to think it deserves the status of an American classic. Twenty years ago James Atlas wrote that
Revolutionary Road
“remains one of the few novels I know that could be called flawless,” and Richard Ford, in his introduction to the recent Vintage edition, called it “a cultish standard.” That it remains a cultish rather than popular standard is perhaps due to two broad factors: (
1
) as the writer Fred Chappell pointed out, the book “strikes too close to home”—that is, the educated general reader is all too likely to identify, depressingly, with a pretentious pseudointellectual such as Frank Wheeler; (
2
) the book's artistic merit is lost on academic canon-makers who tend to regard it as “merely” another realistic novel about the suburbs. Yates's meaning seems all too plain for the purpose of scholarly explication, and yet this is one of the most misunderstood American novels, both in terms of its meaning and aesthetic approach. As Ford noted, “Realism, naturalism, social satire—the standard critical bracketry—all go begging before this splendid book.
Revolutionary Road
is simply
Revolutionary Road,
and to invoke it enacts a sort of cultural-literary secret handshake among its devotees.”

The book's deceptively simple language is like the glassy surface of a deep and murky loch. The first thing one may see is a rippled image of oneself, and then the churning shadows beneath. That Warnke found the Wheelers both sympathetic and repugnant is very much to the point in a novel full of mirrors, windows, and shifting points of view. “I don't suppose one picture window is going to destroy our personalities,” Frank remarks when they first examine the house in Revolutionary Estates—and indeed the garish window sometimes rewards Frank with a nocturnal image of himself as “the brave beginnings of a personage,” while other windows and “passing mirrors” sometime surprise him with a very different view: “[His face was] round and full of weakness, and he stared at it with loathing.”
*
And so too with the more admirable April, who from the beginning is shown as two women (at least), filtered through the mingled perspectives of Frank and the rest of the audience at
The Petrified Forest
: She is both “a tall ash blonde with a patrician kind of beauty that no amount of amateur lighting could destroy” as well as the “graceless, suffering creature whose existence [Frank] tried every day of his life to deny.” Thus the protean Wheelers embody the thematic (and psychologically valid) discrepancy between romantic and elusively “authentic” selves, a split that applies to every major character in the novel with one notable exception—the madly literal John Givings. Such deliberate blurring has led to a certain amount of misinterpretation, as it should.
Revolutionary Road,
no matter how accessible on the surface, rewards a lifetime of rereading and reflection.

Some who view the novel as more or less straight social satire (or social criticism, depending on whether one finds any humor in it) tend to see the Wheelers as an essentially gifted, decent, but flawed young couple who wither amid the sterility of midcentury America as reflected in its suburban ethos. Yates himself dismissed such a reading out of hand. “The Wheelers may have thought the suburbs were to blame for all their problems,” he told
Ploughshares,
“but I meant it to be implicit in the text that that was
their
delusion,
their
problem, not mine.” It seems fair to assume, then, that the Wheelers “would have failed under the best of circumstances” as Solotaroff points out (deploringly), and hence the need for their “determinative childhoods” by way of explaining the cause, or anyway
one
cause, of this failure. But if the Wheelers are abnormally weak or even mentally ill (as Orville Prescott would have it), where is the universal interest? And if the novel is “really about the inadequacy of human beings to their own aspirations, and its target is not America but existence,” as Warnke suggests, why so much harping on suburbia in the first place? Why the suggestive title,
Revolutionary Road
?

Yates, having made the point that the suburbs are hardly “to blame” for the Wheelers' tragedy, goes on to assert that the book's main target is indeed American culture. “I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the nineteen-fifties,” said Yates.

Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity over this country, by no means only in the suburbs—a kind of blind, desperate clinging to safety and security at any price, as exemplified politically in the Eisenhower administration and the McCarthy witch-hunts.… I meant the title to suggest that the revolutionary road of 1776 had come to something very much like a dead end in the Fifties.

The suburbs (or American culture at large) are not, then, a mass of malign external forces that combine to thwart the Wheelers' dreams; rather the Wheelers—in all their weakness and preposterous self-deceit—are themselves definitive figures of that culture, determinative childhoods and all. Granted, they are somewhat less mediocre than most: They can wax eloquent about the “outrageous state of the nation” as well as the “endlessly absorbing subject of Conformity and The Suburbs,” until they begin to convince themselves that they and their friends the Campbells compose “an embattled, dwindling intellectual underground” that is “painfully alive in a drugged and dying culture.” But when it comes to the point of leaving the “hopeless emptiness” of it all—or even completing a stone path that would connect their home to Revolutionary Road—Frank, at least, would rather not. As for April, she might never have found herself married to such a man, or living in such a place, were it not for the vulnerabilities created by her “determinative childhood.”

In the end, of course, neither Frank nor April can be entirely summed up in social or historical terms, and certainly the novel is “about” human frailty at any time or place. But in 1955 the Wheelers end up in the suburbs for a reason, even while they and any number of bright, skeptical citizens imagined themselves destined for something better. As Chappell noted, such “fuzzy dreams of freedom and ‘self-realization'” tend to be peculiar to certain fortuitous moments in history: “[P]lentiful money is required and an easy ignoble means of acquiring it, a good spotty liberal education is needed, and there must be a lack of strong ties to family or even to place.… ‘If only I didn't have to'—that's probably the commonest excuse we give ourselves.” Amid the affluence of postwar America, the temptation was particularly keen to accept the easy rewards of suburban comfort, an undemanding job, and to fill the emptiness that followed with dreams of potential greatness or adventure. But to pursue such dreams in fact—as Yates well knew—required a resilient sense of autonomy that resisted the siren call of, say, a comfortable ranch house in Redding as opposed to a roach-infested basement in the Village. As the mad John Givings says, “You want to play house, you got to a have a job. You want to play very
nice
house, very
sweet
house, then you got to have a job you don't like.” And in a society where one's status depends almost entirely on the nice house and “good” job, one must possess a formidable sense of self-worth, and perhaps formidable talent as well, to risk failure by leaving the beaten path. Frank Wheeler, like most, would prefer to believe he's special without putting the matter to a test; meanwhile his sense of inadequacy as the bumbling son of an ineffectual father, coupled with a better-than-average intellect, makes him strident (and almost convincingly so) in his insistence that he's superior to his fate. And April's own deprived childhood helps, in part, to account for her desperate need to believe him.

As characters the Wheelers are meant to be representative and somewhat stylized, but also rounded and plausible individuals in their own right, the better for the reader to identify with them on the one hand, while maintaining a certain judgmental detachment on the other. Yates achieves this kind of double vision—though some would call it inconsistency—with a limited omniscient viewpoint that shifts from character to character, then at apposite moments becomes godlike. For example, the Wheelers' argument during their drive home from the Laurel Players fiasco is given through Frank's point of view, and his frustration toward what seems his wife's unwarranted bitchiness tends to evoke our sympathy; when she jumps out of the car and runs away (“a little too wide in the hips”), we follow with Frank until a car approaches, whereupon we are suddenly looking
at
rather than
through
him: “His arms flapped and fell; then, as the sound and the lights of an approaching car came up behind them, he put one hand in his pocket and assumed a conversational slouch for the sake of appearances.” One's heart goes out to the embattled, well-meaning, if rather pathetic man who would have it known he's more than just a “dumb, insensitive suburban husband,” while the laughable puppet (“His arms flapped and fell”) who worries about “appearances” is contemptible. And yet they are convincingly the same man.

Yates provokes a moral judgment from readers, but not at the expense of their sympathy: “I much prefer the kind of story,” he said, “where the reader is left wondering who's to blame until it begins to dawn on him (the reader) that he himself must bear some of the responsibility because he's human and therefore infinitely fallible.” This involves, again and again, an uncomfortable sense of
Frank Wheeler—c'est moi
on the part of the reader, though almost any of Yates's better characters will fit this Flaubertian formula. We may not, at first, identify with the silly Helen Givings, a recognizable type of suburban busybody whose insipid patter and hobbies seem a pitiful form of self-hypnotic escapism. It's easy to feel superior to such a person, but less so when suddenly confronted with her despair—as Helen glances at her feet (“like two toads”) and begins to cry: “She cried because she was fifty-six years old and her feet were ugly and swollen and horrible; she cried because none of the girls had liked her at school and none of the boys had liked her later; she cried because Howard Givings was the only man who'd ever asked her to marry him, and because she'd done it, and because her only child was insane.” This is sad, but later Yates incites us to judgment again: Helen is a woman who can feel pity for herself, but is ready enough to abandon her son to a mental hospital on the convenient pretext that he somehow contributed to April's suicide. Such callousness is at the heart of Helen's shallow everyday pretending—and yet we don't forget her despair either.
*

*   *   *

While Yates tried to recover from the psychological fallout of
Revolutionary Road
—the long gestation, revision, relinquishment, and finally the Chinese water torture of its reviews—he was gratified, perhaps, by the epistolary response. For a man who was once a miserable, stammering, skinny kid hiding away in movie theaters or shabby apartments, it must have been gratifying to be told of his greatness by family, friends, and strangers all over the world. His sister Ruth sent a valentine of loving praise; Aunt Elsa (now in her seventies and still looking after her sister somewhat) was especially pleased that her nephew's novel stressed the importance of a loving childhood; and one can only imagine Dookie's proud maternal bliss.
*
Yates also heard from his favorite English teacher at Avon, Richard Knowles, who was now in his eighties and more admiring of his pupil than ever, while another English teacher in Houston, Ernest “Bick” Wright, was all but beside himself. For years Wright had scanned the shelves of libraries and bookstores in search of some evidence that his old friend's early dedication had borne fruit, and had almost abandoned hope when
Revolutionary Road
appeared. Wright thought the novel exquisite both as a work of art and a vision of life, and afterward would speak of its author as an almost holy figure who'd devoted everything to the cultivation of his talent.

A few representative bits of mail from the general reader are worth mentioning. A blustery but prescient fellow named Andrew Sinats warned Yates, “You threaten the intellectuals who would accept and receive your work.… At the beginning of the book I hated Frank Wheeler, hated you for writing such an awful characterization, and hated that part of myself that was like Frank Wheeler. I even hated you for being right.” Donn C. McInturff, a suburban husband and father of two, also identified with Frank, and wondered if the character resembled his creator: “If this was indeed your existence, [how] did you manage to escape from it to get your book written? Was it to Paris?” At the age of thirty-six, McInturff himself wanted to sell his house and “pound out this [novel] that lives in [him]” because (despite an “excellent” credit rating) he was “starving from the inside.” And finally Yates received a parcel from one Thalia Gorham Kelly, an elderly lady from San Diego, who wrote in what can only be called a fine old spidery hand, “Not knowing where else to dispense of two such repugnant books as
Revolutionary Road
and
May This House Be Free from Tigers,
†
I am sending them to you … the author who so industriously presented weak, inferior types.” Mrs. Kelly strongly suggested that Yates “enlarge [his] acquaintance” to include “people who face their problems and manage to find other solutions than drunkenness, sex perversion and adultery.”