Chapter 12 Postscript The Lonely Man Writes the Lonely Book

Alcoholism, smoking, disease, poverty, downfall, underappreciated talents, never having a big success in life, and being quickly forgotten after death, his life is in line with the common fate of literati.Richard Yates (1926-1992) was "the great writer of the Anxiety Age" and the face of America from the 1930s to the 1960s.His debut novel "Revolutionary Road" was a success as soon as it was released, and was nominated for the National Book Award with "The Movie Watcher" that year. His first collection of short stories was published in 1962, and he was even known as the "Dubliner" of New York.Then he successively wrote "God's Will" (1969), "Disturbing the Peace" (1975), "Easter Parade" (1976), "Good School" (1978), "Young Hearts Weep" (1984), " Cold Spring Harbor (1986), the last novel "Indeterminate Times" has not been published so far.

Yates's writing is simple and straightforward, but it directly touches people's hearts; what he describes is the ordinary life of ordinary people, and he writes about the loneliness, loss and despair of ordinary people.He does not play with the writing techniques of the so-called meta-fiction, and insists on describing real life, even in the novels he writes with the greatest enthusiasm.For many characters in his works, readers flinch because of deja vu during reading, "I know him, I have had his experience." Yates makes you understand in reading: the road of life sometimes turns unexpectedly, giving We are not surprised, but helpless.

In some ways, Yates was more talented than most of the small group of realist writers in the United States in the 1960s and 1970s. The novel is only comparable to John Cheever.Known as "the writer's writer", he has a large number of writer fans, including famous writers such as Kurt Vonnegut and Andre Dubois. His realistic writing style has influenced many writers. Writers, famous people like Raymond Carver.But Yates' stubborn opposition to intellectualism, insisting that fiction has nothing to do with "thoughts," made him a victim of this limitation. We always think that as long as the article is well written, the characters and the world described will live in people's hearts.Unfortunately, his books have never been bestsellers, none of which have sold more than 12,000 copies in hardcover. Maybe people don't like to reveal their scars so seriously.In this way, a writer who is admired by his peers, a writer whose work deeply touches readers, who writes about the loss of the "Age of Anxiety" as Fitzgerald wrote about the loss of the Jazz Age, and a writer who writes about the loss of the "Age of Anxiety" like Raymond Writers like Carver and Andre Du Bois who influenced a generation of American literature are gradually forgotten.Perhaps, the world has its own way of doing things.

In 1999, the well-known American writer Stuart Onan published a long article "The Lost World of Richard Yates" in the "Boston Review", after which there was a small Yates upsurge in the cultural circle.Blake Bailey wrote an in-depth biography "Yates: Tragic Honesty"; Hollywood got the copyright of "Revolutionary Road" and adapted it into a movie, directed by the famous director Sam Wenders, 2008 After the film of the same name was released in December, it was well received.Taking advantage of this wind, many of his works were reprinted, and we saw his works again on the shelves of bookstores.

Yates was born in Yonkers, New York in 1926. His family life was not stable when he was a child. His parents divorced when he was three years old. During the Great Depression, his mother took him and his sister to live in Manhattan. His mother was alcoholic and hysterical. "While they're starving or waiting to be thrown away again," their mother read aloud to them. After graduating from Evan Middle School in 1944, he did not go to university. One of the reasons was that he was influenced by Hemingway and believed that a writer should be integrated into the torrent of life and occupy a place in life through struggle.He joined the army and went to France. Like many writers in the 1950s, he experienced the war, but unfortunately contracted pneumonia in the army, recovered from treatment, retired from Germany, returned to New York, and married there. In 1951, he moved his family to Europe with his pneumonia compensation from the army. During the few years in Europe, he did nothing but write.He sat in a rented room, smoked, coughed, and wrote, article after article, without success, and The New Yorker rejected every one of his submissions. The year 1952 was of particular significance to him, the year he finally published a story in The Atlantic, one of fifteen stories he wrote after a year in Europe.

When Yates was building his literary home with words, the real home collapsed, and the relationship with his wife broke down. The wife brought their daughter back to the United States from London, separated temporarily, and officially divorced in 1959. Custody goes to the wife. After returning from Europe, he worked successively at United Press International and Remington-Rand Corporation.In order to pay the bills, he is a knife for others and writes for others. In 1962, in Breedlove's writer's creation class, he ran around naked and declared himself the Messiah; he followed Fitzgerald's unsuccessful old path and went to Hollywood to write screenplays. In 1963, he wrote a speech for then-Attorney General Robert Kennedy. After John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he accepted a teaching position in the writer's creation class at the University of Iowa, but that experience was not pleasant, just another failure.

For many years, he lived alone.He spent the last year of his life in Boston, and students and colleagues who visited his home were all moved by the simplicity of the room: a typewriter on a desk, coffee, beer and bourbon in the refrigerator, It's a picture of my daughter.Two dim lights, trampled cockroaches everywhere, and dirty pans in the cupboard.It is in such a small room that he writes desolately. Writing never stops.It seemed like a terrible sentence—sentencing him to write for life.Writing allowed Yates' mind to outlive his body.Writing was his life force, it was just the alcohol that slowed things down.

In the last ten years, his health has deteriorated extremely, due to tuberculosis, he has difficulty breathing, coughing and wheezing constantly, but he still smokes like burning a stove, even when he has to use an oxygen mask to breathe in the last year , Smoking has not been interrupted.Drinking was another of his obsessions, and the history of American literature has an unusually close relationship with it (Faulkner, Fitzgerald, Hart Crane, Hemingway, Berryman, Cheever), but no Few writers can devote themselves to alcohol like Yates.He doesn't drink during the day, he wants to write, but at night he is always drunk and unconscious.At one point he had a nervous breakdown, he was hospitalized several times, and he himself said, "Yeah, I was in and out of a mental hospital." As if he wanted to exhaust himself as quickly as possible, Yates died in November 1992 of emphysema and Complications, only sixty-six years old.

It is Yates's first collection of short stories, and it is the peak of early American novel creation after World War II. The New York Times called it "Dubliners" of New York. Yates once said in an interview: "I guess I'm less interested in successful people, I think I'm more interested in failure." He also said: "All I write about is family, and family is what I want. written." It was about outsiders who wanted to enter a world and were rejected.This world may be a classroom, it may be an army, or it may be a family.White-collar workers waiting to be fired in Manhattan office buildings; taxi drivers with rich imaginations; The jazz pianist of the famous jazz pianist, the empty rich kids in France; the depressed military officers, retired soldiers, and the neglected women they yearn for.In the novel, a woman, accompanied by her lover, goes to the tuberculosis hospital in Long Island to visit her long-sick husband. It has nothing to do with love or not, but obedience to reality.And in "Dr. Jack-O-Lantern," the new transfer boy Vincent Sabella is ostracized by his fellow students.On the one hand, it is the children's world shown through the dialogue, and on the other hand, it is the young female teacher's good intentions to change the boy, and the two run counter to each other.The conflict between the two ends in disaster: Vincent Sabella ends up attacking his teacher - the only one who wants to be close to him and be nice to him.

As Greek tragedies reveal their fatal flaws, so Yates' novels reveal their desperation.He ruthlessly portrays the line drawings of the characters one after another, making the reader's reading a cold journey.We recognize Yates in his work, his characters, and the disappointments and miscalculations in our own lives.Yates doesn't want to give in, he doesn't want to humiliate himself with comedy, and when he needs to face the worst ending, he never escapes.Readers cringe before these scenes even begin, in the same way horror movie audiences can't bear to watch knowing the victim is about to open the wrong door.In fact, just like Dostoyevsky, he didn't know the horror of humiliation, but he knew helplessly that life would continue like this.

However, his typical characters are "little men in battle" who are in a depressing situation, who hate their jobs, who drink too much, who recall times when they were close to success, maybe just once, and missed it ; and the salvation of love, family, and society somehow always fails to come true. Sergeant Reese in "Jordy's Big Fortune" is upright, strict, and unreasonable. He hopes to turn recruits into soldiers through training, but even the army outside the secular world cannot tolerate him, and he is finally squeezed Let's go, and after the training is over, the recruits have become soldiers. In "Wrestling with Sharks", Sobel, an idealistic literati who uses a pen as a weapon, pursues his own ideals and gives up his high salary to come to this newspaper.As a result, my dream was shattered and my job was lost.Taste the work carefully, with a hint of ridicule in the seriousness.Yates handles everyday situations with mastery, slipping us into unexpected, yet utterly believable situations.His straightforward and simple description makes every movement of the characters so real and believable.For example, Sobel's love for hats, Yates briefly outlines several situations in which he wears hats, and writes about Sobel's yearning for literati and his pride in finally becoming a literati. The ex-soldier in "Browning Automatic Rifleman" has a dull and boring life. After an argument with his wife one night, he wanders alone in the street. Then he meets two soldiers in a bar. He wants to hook up with a girl in the bar who is not interested in him. , thinking with all his heart that he would take her away later, take off her clothes and possess her "in some ignorant bedroom".Next, Yates changed his pen, and the soldiers and girls, ignoring his efforts to please, deserted him.He felt like a fool and ended up venting elsewhere until he was arrested. These stories are exactly the same as Raymond Carver's novels. This is the unfortunate world in Carver's novels, but there is no cold humor in Carver's novels, and there is no glimmer of hope left by the end of Carver's novels.The world of Yates's novels is neither deceitful nor whimsical, but simple, sad, and fateful.How, one wonders, can a writer begin with sympathy for his heroes, and then condemn them to various tortures without giving them a glimmer of hope?I think it's because of Yates' insistence on the theme of failure.Failure is far more common than success.Family and love can never be met, no one can be rescued by luck, no one can be rescued by coincidence, and no lover, friend, parent, and child who understand each other can make the unbearable days a little bit happier.Destiny never changes, it only takes you to a dead end along the inevitable track, and leaves you there.Yates just described it truthfully, he didn't whitewash it, he didn't mock it, and he didn't soak the work in sentimental tears. Yates is relentless, and he leaves little comfort for the reader. Finally, let me tell you a little story between me and this book. Frankly speaking, when Sun Zhongxu first saw his introduction to Yates on his blog, it was the title of the book that attracted me.I think what kind of "eleven kinds of loneliness" would that be?After a little search on the Internet, I learned that this book has the reputation of New York's "Dubliners", and I couldn't stop my desire to read it quickly.After reading it, I made up my mind to translate it, because I like it, and I want to share such a good book with all book lovers, and I want domestic book lovers to know about this author. In 2007, I selected four of them and translated them, which were published in the sixth issue of 2007 in the "Translation" magazine.Seeing that "Translation" magazine was interested in this, I thought why not recommend this book to them. As far as I know, domestic publishing circles have not published any works by Richard Yates.At the end of that year, I recommended this book to Ms. Li Yuyao, the editor-in-charge of this book. I never thought that we coincided with each other, so I declared the topic.Then there was a long wait, firstly waiting for the publishing house to choose the topic, then getting stuck when negotiating copyright with the foreign party, and then getting the translator's qualification approval, the joy and worry during the process were hard to describe in words.Fortunately, the end result is gratifying.However, the time has come to 2009!After several ups and downs, after losing and regaining, although I was happy, I was more apprehensive, lest my ability was limited, and it would be difficult to show the real "eleven kinds of loneliness" and the real Richard Yates to everyone. The translation of this book was interrupted several times, and it took more than two years to complete. In order to seek credibility, expressiveness, and elegance, I did three Chinese and English proofreadings and revisions in addition to general schooling.Thanks to the responsible editor, Ms. Li Yuyao, thanks to her sharp vision and strong support, I finally translated this book into Chinese.Thanks to Shanghai Translation Publishing House, Yates' novels are presented to Chinese readers for the first time.Thanks to my friend and teacher Sun Zhongxu, from whom I knew Yates for the first time, and I boldly borrowed "Yates' Short Stories Collection" from him to read. It is not an exaggeration to be a leader.I would also like to thank my husband Wang Xiaoqi, we are like-minded and support each other, he is the first reader of my translation, and even the first critic.After the first revision, I was full of doubts about myself, and felt that there was not much improvement compared with the first draft, and I dared not read it again. After reading it carefully, he pointed out many problems and made me regain my confidence to do the second draft. Two or three revisions.Although this translation has been published, there are still some mistranslations and omissions, and readers are kindly requested to enlighten me.

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