Passionate about literature, Thomas Stewart pens his thoughts to his favorite writer.
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Dear Richard,
(Mr. Yates)
{I read once that people called you Dick}
You said, “I’m only interested in stories that are about the crushing of the human heart.” I didn’t know you said that when I first discovered you. It was an unromantic beginning – or rather, a different sort of romance. I didn’t find you in words. I found you on the screen. I found April and Frank Wheeler – I couple that would ignite a literary obsession – angry, ambitious and audacious. The film didn’t have much of an impact on me. I re-watched it months later and found the book.
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I bet it crossed your mind when you were alive that someone, maybe, possibly, could one day write a book about you.
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I remember reading Revolutionary Road in the summer. I remember the windows glowing blue, the sun falling out of the sky, everything becoming golden. I remember listening to Thomas Newman’s score and reading the words. I imagined you writing them on an Underwood typewriter, similar to the one I would receive as a present from my boyfriend years later. I imagined your honesty, fragments of yourself within the lines, the speeches, the desires of the Wheelers, onto the white blank page no longer.
I began to mimic you. I wrote stories – one a complete rip-off of your novel, the others were my attempts to write something anything as good as yours. Of course, it didn’t work. I hadn’t learnt then that I couldn’t become you then and shouldn’t want to. I think that happened when I read other books because of you, other writers who were following your literary path in their own way.
*Mr. Yates, I have to admit something.
Our love is flawed.
Or mine is.
The truth is I don’t actually love that many of your other books – A Good School felt too small and imbalanced, Young Hearts Crying has pushed me away three times, I still haven’t completed it. I took it to Milan when I was there working on my MA project. I sat on the balcony, wine and cigarette in tow, an attempted Italian renaissance, but Michael Davenport did not speak to me. As I write to you, the majority of your books I don’t own are on their way via post, and as they speed through the post world I wish Michael will one day come to me as the Grimes sisters did.
The Easter Parade sat on my shelf for longer than I wanted. Of course, I related to Emily. I presume you did also although I’ve learned never to presume anything. The brutality of their lives and love/hatred for one another was something beyond what we’ve read about sibling love and rivalry. This was something different. This was two sisters taking two very different paths – one of domestic, one of career. But I saw Emily as more than someone who wanted a career – I saw her as someone who demanded from life what April Wheeler demanded also – fulfilment. Emily wanted to achieve, to advance, to fulfil her dreams and desires – those being something far more fundamental than what a stereotypical wife could offer her.
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Our love, Mr Yates, is tainted, bruised almost, but blossoming. I stand in front of my bookshelf, as I always do, as I imagine you did.
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As well as reading your books – loving and not-so-loving them – I’ve gone back and forth to Blake Bailey’s A Tragic Honesty. A book about you. I bet it crossed your mind when you were alive that someone, maybe, possibly, could one day write a book about you. And it’s a big book. I found it in Cardiff library, immediately rushing to the pages about Revolutionary Road, longing for behind-the-scenes details. When people ask me which dead guy I’d want to have dinner with, I say your name and their faces resemble something between confusion and disappointment. But to sit around a table with you, especially with wine, you may find me somewhat annoying. I would have too many questions.
Our love, Mr Yates, is tainted, bruised almost, but blossoming. I stand in front of my bookshelf, as I always do, as I imagine you did. I see Nicholson Baker’s U & I, a book to John Updike, the writer he loves, the man that spoke to him. I re-read sections feeling like some kind of fraud. Baker’s love seems purer. Not just because of his admiration for most of Updike’s words but because he even met Updike, then again I can’t blame you or myself for time and geography.
But like all the men I have loved, I hide you away. Your name is usually the fourth I list when people ask my favorite writer, you are an old, familiar thought. “Richard Yates,” I say, again, as if it only just came to me. I forget you and I remember you, I realize you. I forget that it was you that sparked my fascination with suburbia, suburban fiction, the crushing of the human heart, as you say, or, as I see it, an examination of people. I forget your words, your portrayal of April and the Grimes sisters and Mrs. Givings crying in her bedroom with her swollen feet, sparked something inside me that made me want to write about people. That made character the most important thing, let them drive things forward, let them make mistakes, be flawed and brilliant people. You taught me to let characters be who they are.
You taught me what it means to care and push past rejection, to crush my own human heart and mend it along the way.
Your reader,
T.
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Photo: GettyImages
