Readers Place

Richard Yates interview/review

An Interview with Richard Yates by DeWitt Henry & Geoffrey Clark, Winter 1972

1. From Ploughshares In Revolutionary Road, was the ending thought out before you began?

Yes. I thought of that girl dying in that way, and then the whole problem was to construct a book that would justify that ending. And it wasn’t easy.

1. When you first planned the book, did you have John Givings in there?

No, I didn’t. He occurred to me as a character about midway through the writing of the book. I felt I needed somebody in there to point up or spell out the story at crucial moments, and I did know a young man very much like that at the time, a long-term patient in a mental hospital who had an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people’s weaknesses, so I worked a fictionalized version of him into the book.

1. You really lambasted the suburbs.

I didn’t mean to. The book was widely read as an anti-suburban novel, and that disappointed me. The Wheelers may have thought the suburbs were to blame for all their problems, but I meant it to be implicit in the text that that was their delusion, their problem, not mine.

1. Doesn’t the title suggest an attack on The System?

I think I meant it more as an indictment of American life in the nineteen-fifties. Because during the Fifties there was a general lust for conformity all 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 Joe McCarthy witch-hunts. Anyway, a great many Americans were deeply disturbed by all that – felt it to be an outright betrayal of our best and bravest revolutionary spirit – and that was the spirit I tried to embody in the character of April Wheeler. 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.

1. You weren’t knocking marriage?

Oh, of course not. That’s another false interpretation too many people put on the book. And in a way Alfred Kazin was at least partially responsible for that, however inadvertently. The publishers sent the book to him in manuscript, and he wrote back a very nice letter that said in part – only in part – “This novel locates the American tragedy squarely on the field of marriage.” So the publishers grabbed up that one quote out of context and plastered it all over the dust-jacket, in big red print – they thought it would “sell” – along with a cheap, vulgar illustration. And I let them do it, like an idiot, because I guess I thought they knew their business, but I’ve regretted it ever since. Oh, maybe it did help sell copies to people snooping around bookstores in search of an anti-marriage polemic or something, but I think it must have repelled and turned away a good many other, more intelligent readers. After all, who but a maniac or a God damn fool would sit down and write a novel attacking marriage? And who’d want to read such a novel? Don’t misunderstand, I’m not blaming Kazin – I’ve always respected him as a critic and still do. It was my own damn fault, for letting them package the book that way.

1. In any case, that was a most unfortunate, misleading blurb. Still, your image of marriage in the book is hardly optimistic. All the families in time past or present, with the exception of the Campbells’ are broken, or they all result in abortions one way or another .

Abortions, yes. Everything gets aborted in the book. That was supposed to be the theme of the book. I remember when I was first working on it and feeling my way into it, somebody at a party asked me what I was writing a novel about, and I said I thought I was writing a novel about abortion. And the guy said what do you mean by that? And I said, it’s going to be built on a series of abortions, of all kinds – an aborted play, several aborted careers, any number of aborted ambitions and aborted plans and aborted dreams – all leading up to a real, physical abortion, and a death at the end. And maybe that’s about as close to a real summation of the book as I’ve ever come. And yet the Campbells seem to weather all those abortions. Because somebody had to go on living in the story, right? Somebody had to come through with a kind of qualified hope at the end, and I meant it to be Shep Campbell. I meant his to be the one small voice of affirmation after the tragedy. But I guess “tragedy” is too lofty a word to use in talking about my own book – certainly it’s a much-debased word, and a word I’ve always tended to throw around all too easily. “Calamity” might be more appropriate, or “downfall.”