On an autumn Saturday in 1944 Private Robert Prentice, an 18-year-old rifleman trainee, makes a long journey from his camp in Virginia to New York City, to see his mother. He is soon to be sent abroad, France most likely, and there he’ll see action, which will at least be a change from tedious, thankless camp duties. ‘Oh, Bobby!’ exclaims his ageing mother as she greets him. ‘My soldier! My big, wonderful soldier!’ A touching tableau, one would think, except that it’s riddled with falsity. Alice Prentice is a self-centred, self-indulgent, attitudinising spendthrift, who will occupy herself during Bobby’s long and endangered absence with plans for him to rescue her from an indigence largely her own fault. And Bobby himself — who perhaps would have preferred losing his virginity in some whorehouse to traipsing up to New York — is no model soldier either. A gangly six foot three, he is decidedly clumsy, and slow on the uptake whenever orders are given him. He asks questions of everybody like a boy younger even than his years, rubbing people’s backs up in the process. He was no success as a pupil, despite his mother’s having sent him to a good school, the fees for which she couldn’t always pay. His army career seems set to be equally undistinguished — or worse.
This situation is of Richard Yates’ very essence. In each of his enthralling novels quick with humanity he gives us people who, however hard they try to live up to codes of society’s making and to ideals of their own, come up against obstinate elements in their personalities which threaten to depose both of these. In Yates’ first novel, Revolutionary Road (1961) — which now seems to have regained the classic status it once deservedly enjoyed — Frank and April Wheeler sustain for a surprisingly long time two conflicting images of how their married life should be, for neither of which are they qualified. They are too ordinary to justify any picture of themselves as dissidents from the suburbia they elected to join; on the other hand private miseries dating back to earliest years mar all attempts at being a copybook couple. In what is for me Yates’ subtlest novel, Cold Spring Harbor (1986), two young brothers-in-law compete for the rewards due to the conventionally successful male in a dysfunctional family. Lack of brains hampers the one, an unresolved sexual prurience the other, and there’s little either can do about this. On one level all Richard Yates’ books are pleas for stoicism in the face of stark reality.
A Special Providence (1969) was Yates’ second novel, and it has never been published in Britain before. Its construction is such that its subject — the conflict between the true and the inauthentic — is viewed from differing but complementary vantage-points. After the opening cameo of Bobby’s weekend with his mother, we move with him to France and watch him engage, or strive to, with members of ‘A’ company as they proceed to an Alsace on the violent brink of surrender. Yates has an extraordinarily attuned ear for the rhythms of soldiers’ talk, combining as it does matiness with cold exclusions, uncertainties with displays of bravado and, sometimes, moral courage. Private Prentice forces himself towards what he hopes will be combat with an ardour that touches us, even while we recognise in it a certain disregard of realities. We leave him falling seriously ill to enter Part Two, a brilliantly done history of his earlier life with his feckless mother. We watch Alice succumb to delusions that she is about to make it as a sculptor, despite her all too obvious limitations of talent, that her rightful home is a ghastly artistic ‘colony’, which shortage of cash precludes her ever properly joining, and that this or that man will be her and Bobby’s salvation. Yet we can’t quite dislike her, silly as she is; Yates’ apprehension of her is too full, too shot with deeply felt ambiguities. In her faded way she achieves a dignity. Yet when we return to Bobby in France and Germany, we do so knowing that if he is to attain individuation, he mustn’t surrender to her any more.
Part Three has, I think, a peculiar brilliance. Bobby has been getting on the nerves of Walker, an aggressive, not very appealing youth; they have a fight. The fight — so gratuitous an item in a world that has known nothing but fighting for so long — seems to both boys a needed measurement of masculinity. Its resolution is extremely moving. Yates has entered his characters’ muscles as well as their minds, but in doing so he penetrates their psyches as well. Bobby is left the richer. It is feats of empathy like this that make Richard Yates (1926-92) come as near to greatness as makes no matter. Methuen are to be congratulated on making him available to us.
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