"I much prefer the kind of story 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 is human and therefore infinitely fallible."
-- Richard Yates
"Madame Bovary, c'est moi."
-- Gustave Flaubert
A follow-up to my previous post on "Revolutionary Road":
I'm reading Blake Bailey's 2003 biography of Richard Yates, whose "Revolutionary Road" and "The Easter Parade" are among the novels I hold dearest. It's called "A Tragic Honesty," and I think Yates would hate the title. But maybe there are layers to it that I haven't yet discovered. I'm only up to 1959 and, despite a lifetime of alcoholism, emphysema, bipolar depression and a host of other physical and mental troubles, Yates survived until 1992. Perhaps the notion of "tragic honesty" is illustrated below, in Yates' sharp observations about the interplay between story and character in his own work and that of artists he admired. They're applicable to just about any narrative form:
"Another thing I have always liked about ["The Great Gatsby"] and ["Madame Bovary"]," he wrote, "is that there are no villains in either one. The force of evil is felt in these novels but never personified -- neither novel is willing to let us off that easily." [...]
Yates's determinism, like Flaubert's, was a matter of knowing his characters well enough to know their fates, and making the reader see this, too. Just as one never expects Emma [Bovary] to repent of her infidelity and embrace provincial life, one also figures the Wheelers [of "Revolutionary Road"] won't move to Europe and live happily ever after. Their weaknesses, well defined at the outset, mark them for a bad end.
In an interview from the early 1970s, Yates said:
Most of my first drafts read like soap opera. I have to go over and over a scene before I get deep enough to bring it off. I think I'd be a slick, superficial writer if I didn't revise all the time. The first draft of "Revolutionary Road" was very thin, very sentimental.... I made the Wheelers sort of nice young folks with whom any careless reader could identify. Everything they said was exactly what they meant, and they talked very earnestly together even when they were quarreling, like people in a Sloan Wilson novel ["The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit"]. It took me a long time to figure out what a mistake that was -- that the best way to handle it was to have them nearly always miss each other's points, to have them talk around and through and at each other. There's a great dealof dialogue between them in the finished book... but there's almost no communication.
"In other words," writes Bailey, "Yates had remembered the lesson of his first great master, Fitzgerald -- namely, that people rarely say what they mean, and good dialogue is a matter of catching one's characters 'in the very act of giving themselves away.' "
If I could pinpoint just one essential quality that separates flat realization from vivid realization (not just dialogue, but characterization and storytelling, through writing and direction and performance), that would be it.
P.S. A killer footnote from page 193 of Bailey's book. Yates' first wife Sheila, on whom the character of April Wheeler is based, and whose arguments with her husband were incorporated into "Revolutionary Road," claimed she hadn't read the novel until 2000 -- in part because in many respects she'd lived it. Bailey writes:
For what it's worth, I myself am convinced that Sheila -- whose memory is clear as a bell in most respects -- has sincerely persuaded herself over the past forty years that she never read the published novel. Yates once mentioned to his psychiatrist that Sheila, a few years after the divorce, told him the book had hurt her feelings and that she'd never read his work since. Yates was crushed.
NOTE: Despite some rave reviews and a significant marketing campaign, "
Revolutionary Road" sold only 8,900 hardback copies in its initial printing and (like "The Great Gatsby") went out of print for years. According to today's New York Times, the movie tie-in edition is currently the #1 paperback best-seller in America. (!!!)
Thanks Jim. I'm going to cite that central quote about revising for my writing students when we read Yates. It just really captures how any story in its early drafts starts off being simplistic, shallow, and not very artful, but it's simply a matter of revising again and again (and again) to discover the artful moments that can still be created if someone's dedicated enough to find something truthful and meaningful -- rather than something "any careless reader can [easily] identify."
I've had that Yates bio on my shelf for a while, and I guess it's high time I finally mined it for further gold....
Kind of off-topic: Do you hear an accent when Kate Winslet speaks with an American dialect as she does in this film? Becuase I do, even though I am not a native speaker of English. I find it very off-putting to hear those mid-Atlantic vowels creeping in.
Wasn't Homais, the druggist, pretty clearly the, or a, bad guy? Banal, yes, but I think Flaubert had, and showed, nothing but contempt for him. He even ended the book on him, to show that the banal, evil idiots win in the world. But I don't think Yates will respond to me, so I'll desist.
He is right that Gatsby has no one who is identifiable as an easy bad guy, and that Fitzgerald had empathy for every character. But his talking about Fitz's dialogue is interesting because Hemingway went after him specifically for writing unconvincing dialogue, saying he'd been too drunk to pay attention to how people really talked at parties, or interacted with each other generally.
Please forgive the fact that I'm only half way through the film of Revolutionary Road, and just beginning the second series of Mad Men, but the connection between the two appears more than stylistic.
Mad Men is clearly better written and directed than the movie, but it has the great advantage of being a TV series. Revolutionary Road, in it's I guess 2 hours, has to suggest a huge amount of subtle character and plot development, but it can never do so as subtly as the TV series which as I guess 15 hours a season to play with. In Mad Men an episode can turn on, for instance, whether a character decides to negotiate to pay for a car repair or pay the full amount. In a film you can never spend so long with a character, getting to know their quirks and subtle motivations. Of course it's not the case that movies haven't succeeded at doing this in the past, but as a piece of work of such quality as Mad Men exists, a film on the same subject is never going to shine by comparison.
What also struck me was that Mendes just hasn't had time to develop as a director. He has completed maybe 10 hours of cut footage in total. How can he compete against the best of the TV directors, who can see the consequences of their shooting choices over and over again, season after season.
The point I'm trying to make is that ultimately, TV is now better than film. Which is ironic for me as I'm trying to get my first feature made, but at least I'm grateful for all the practice that TV has given me.
Apologies for the long post, but a lot of issues have been percolating since you first started discussing Revolutionary Road.
First, a quick digression on one of the quotes you pulled (emp. mine):
Why should she, when provincial life is so soul-deadening? For Flaubert the tragedy of modern life is that we either succumb to the banality of everyday life or we lose ourselves in delusions: a true existential dilemma. In the end nothing makes Emma's fate any more tragic than Charles', really (apart from death, but it comes for everyone eventually.)
Now, on the post at hand:
This is partially a response to your earlier post on the adaptation of RR, as well. I don't know much about Yates, but from what you've pulled here he's clearly a literary descendant of Chekhov. Dialogue as disconnected from the speaker as from the recipient; the true self only being revealed indirectly due to the self-image we project in our interactions; these are all the marks of Chekhov's innovations in literature.
And I think there's a specific reason for it, too: Chekhov was equally skilled in prose and drama (a rare combination), and you can see the development of his type of theatre as an attempt to carry over the strengths of his prose.
Literature is subjective by nature; theatre is not. That's not to say we can't write literature that aims for objectivity à la Perec, or that we can't write drama that tries to be subjective à la Tennessee Williams; but ultimately it's ingrained in the medium that the written word invites subjectivity in a way that visual performance doesn't. (Ditto film. To make a "subjective" movie, you have to very clear about its trappings: Rashomon told us outright, Election used a (literary) voiceover, etc.)
So Chekhov, who's built up quite a reputation for his short stories finds that the qualities he can rely on in prose don't necessarily translate to theatre. Consequently his dialogue starts becoming richer, more complex, and more misleading. Actors walk around the stage and talk through each other; angry characters pull guns but fail to use them. By the end of his life, his plays are nearly plotless, and what "happens" is really between the lines rather than in the lines.
Funny thing, though: Chekhov is nearly impossible to act well. The dialogue is so rich, and all the characters are themselves playing characters, so it usually falls apart into a mess. And sure enough, there are almost no good film adaptations of Chekhov in English. Vanya on 42nd is good, but it's its own beast. (Russian cinema has had better luck.)
Anyway, the point of this long post is this: Yates' concerns with authenticity and artistic representation are part of an important literary heritage, and it's founded directly on the need for transferring a level of subjectivity to visual performance. In that respect it shows why his work might seem ripe for film adaptation - and also why it'd be so hard to pull off well.
At his peak Woody Allen got it.
What irks me about 99.9% of adaptations is that they don't understand just how key this subjectivity is to the meaning of the text. You get outlines of the plot, which is usually of secondary importance to the text. It's also why 'bad' literature often makes for better films: they tend to be more superficial, so the translation is easier. (Gross generalizations, yes.)