Preface：
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, the topic is somehow sensitive. But instead of avoid reading it, I chose it as my book to do with my book-report. With the development of national economy and the advancement of the modern science and technology, it becomes more and more convenient for us to communicate. However, it also brought us Internet, which makes us spent many a lot of hours surf on it. We seldom go shopping with our friends in boutiques. We talk less and less with each other even when we live under the same roof. We seldom go out for a walk but stay the wholly day in the room sitting before the computer. How many times the man felt so boring and want to shut down the computer; how many times he tried to invite his friends to hang around outside but finally found no where to go and no people to go with. Everyone lives in their own world. Everyone feels lonely but they just feel so. The two lonely persons never be together and be lively. Seldom can we enjoy the touch of the nature; seldom can we play in the fields chasing after butterflies; seldom can we sit on the roof count the stars. With high paced urbanization, we struggle in our lonely cold room, breathing the noisome air, listening the noisy noise, rush in the busy street and living in the chaos city. Even there’s no time for us to feel lonely. According to such a condition, I try to live my life an easy one. I prefer the countryside to the city and mean to live there even when I had to grow crops with my hands. With the company of nature, though I may be alone, I will never feel lonely. That’s why I’m so interest in this sensitive topic. Hope what I show here makes some sense to you. Since what I read is Chinese version, some sentences may not the same as the English version. But the meaning is there to show.
Abstract：
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is a collection of short stories written by Richard Yates from 1951 to 1961. It was published in 1962, a year following his first novel, Revolutionary Road. This sublime collection of stories seems even more powerful today. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness follows the lives of average Manhattan citizens: office workers, a cab driver with visions of immortality, frustrated would-be novelists, suburban men and their yearning, neglected women, the postwar world of dissatisfied veterans, young men swaying uneasily on the lower rungs of the career ladder, married to unsatisfactory women without whose typing job they would be destitute; ambitious but miserable young writers trapped in inappropriate jobs; unglamorous pre-dinner martinis, jazz bars, teachers despised by their pupils….Richard Yates creates a haunting mosaic of the 1950s, the era when the American dream was finally coming true — and just beginning to ring a little hollow. All of the stories in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness also appeared in the posthumously released Collected Stories of Richard Yates (2001). The topic, if there’s one, of Eleven Kinds of Loneliness should be: “Everyone is lonely. No one can escape from that. And this is the tragedy they have. ”
Key words: Richard Yates; Loneliness; Alone but bot lonely
Alone but not Lonely
1. Brief Introduction of Richard Yates
Richard Yates (February 3, 1926 – November 7, 1992) was an American novelist and short story writer, known for his exploration of mid-20th century life.
Born in Yonkers, New York, Yates came from an unstable home. His parents divorced when he was three and much of his childhood was spent in many different towns and residences. Yates first became interested in journalism and writing while attending Avon Old Farms School in Avon, Connecticut. After leaving Avon, Yates joined the Army, serving in France and Germany during World War II. By the middle of 1946, he was back in New York. Upon his return to New York he worked as a journalist, freelance ghost writer (briefly writing speeches for Attorney General Robert Kennedy) and publicity writer for Remington Rand Corporation. His career as a novelist began in 1961 with the publication of the widely heralded Revolutionary Road. He subsequently taught writing at Columbia University, the New School for Social Research, Boston University(where his papers are archived), at the University of Iowa Writer's Workshop, at Wichita State University, the University of Southern California Master of Professional Writing Program, and at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
In 1962, he wrote the screenplay for a film adaptation of William Styron's Lie Down in Darkness. Twice divorced, Yates was the father of three daughters: Sharon, Monica and Gina. In 1992, he died of emphysema and complications from minor surgery in Birmingham, Alabama.
His daughter Monica once dated Seinfeld co-creator Larry David; David's first meeting with the writer was the basis for "The Jacket" episode of Seinfeld's second season.
Yates's first novel, Revolutionary Road, was a finalist for the National Book Award that year (alongside Walker Percy's The Moviegoer, which won, and Joseph Heller's Catch-22). Yates was championed by writers as diverse as Kurt Vonnegut, Dorothy Parker, William Styron, Tennessee Williams and John Cheever. Yates's brand of realism was a direct influence on writers such as Andre Dubus, Raymond Carver and Richard Ford.
For much of his life, Yates's work met almost universal critical acclaim, yet not one of his books sold over 12,000 copies in hardcover first edition. All of his novels were out of print in the years after his death, though his reputation has substantially increased posthumously and many of his novels have since been reissued in new editions. This current success can be largely traced to the influence of Stewart O'Nan's 1999 essay in the Boston Review, "The Lost World of Richard Yates: How the great writer of the Age of Anxiety disappeared from print".
With the revival of interest in Yates's life and work after his death, Blake Bailey published the first in-depth biography of Yates, A Tragic Honesty: The Life and Work of Richard Yates (2003). Film director Sam Mendes directed Revolutionary Road, a film reuniting the lead actors of Titanic, Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet(Mendes's then wife). It was released on 26 December 2008. The film was nominated for many film awards including BAFTAs, Golden Globes and Academy Awards. After Kate Winslet won her Golden Globe Best Actress Award for Revolutionary Road in 2009 she thanked Richard Yates for writing such a powerful novel and providing such a strong role for a woman.
Yates was also an acclaimed author of short stories. Despite this, only one of his short stories appeared in The New Yorker (after repeated rejections). This story, "The Canal," was published in the magazine nine years after the author's death to celebrate the 2001 release of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates.
The works of Yates are as follows: Revolutionary Road (1961); Eleven Kinds of Loneliness (1962) (stories); A Special Providence (1969); Disturbing the Peace (1975); The Easter Parade (1976); A Good School (1978); Liars in Love (1981) (stories); Young Hearts Crying (1984); Cold Spring Harbor (1986); The Collected Stories Of Richard Yates (2001); Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules (2005) (the short story "Oh Joseph, I'm So Tired" appears in this anthology edited by David Sedaris)
2. Plot and Character Analysis:
In Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, Yates gives us exactly that, eleven stories, each of them dealing with the loneliness of an individual. The self-destructive Vincent Sabella, who had spent most of his life in some kind of orphanage. Sergeant Reece, the tyrannical Tennessean soldier who insists on doing his job. And Bob Prentice, the mediocre writer who sees himself as Ernest Hemingway or F. Scott-Fitzgerald, but who in reality is not much good at anything. Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is not Dubliners, but each of the stories is a gem, giving us insight into the emptiness of our own lives and people close to us and those we love. Richard Yates spares us nothing. He is a brave and truthful writer and in order to stay with him as a reader, you have to be prepared for the worst. As the book Eleven Kinds of Loneliness is a collection of stories. Here, I would like to issure each plot together with the characters:
1. Doctor Jack-o'-lantern: It is a story between a warm-hearted teacher and an isolated child. The self-destructive Vincent Sabella, who had spent most of his life in some kind of orphanage, is not getting on well with his classmates. Every time when he was under attack, the teacher was ready to help him and console him. However, Vincent Sabella didn’t appreciate her kindness at all. Instead of being thankful to the teacher, the freaky Vincent who lies a lot, takes his uneasy and solitude as an assurd thing and bold with justice. He scrawled the naked portrait of the teacher on the wall and scribed the vulgar scold words beside the portrait. Compared with the twisty cognition of the child and the kindness of the teacher, we can see what twisty heart the child hold and what a man he is to be in the future.
2. The Best of Everything: It’s about a man and a woman who are about to get married. The woman is hesitated at frist but late chosed him and hope to have a nice night before the day. But that night, the man is irritable and distressed. He can’t leave his dear friends who brought his travel bag which he hopes for so long a time. Instead of have fun with his lover, he spent the night with his buddies. This story shows not only one person’s loneliness but two.
3. Jody Rolled The Bones: It’s about Sergeant Reece, the tyrannical Tennessean soldier who insists on doing his job. He does what a soldier should do and train the new soldiers with the same spirit. However, after he is transferred to other place, the soldiers again be as worse as before. The true soldier never regard as a “good soldier” and has no chance to be promoted. That is the loneliness the solider hold.
4. No Pain Whatsoever: It is about a wife went to see her husband in the hospital. But the husband only focused on his books during the visiting time. And the friends who drived her here was so exciting playing. Compared with them, her loneliness is much more lonely.
5. A Glutton for Punishment: Talks about young man swaying uneasily on the lower rungs of the career ladder. The man who lost his job but can’t tell the truth to his wife. Before he find a new job, he had to hang out here and there to kill the time, to be as if he still has work. It shows the loneliness of a man who can’t share the sadness with his wife and the helpless of him. It’s not easy to earn a life.
6. A Wrestler with Sharks: About an ambitious but miserable young writer trapped in inappropriate jobs. He did as what he think is the best but not satisfied by others. Finaly he quit the job. He never be understood by others.
7. Fun with a Stranger: A teacher cares much about the pupils but not accepted by the pupils.
8. The B.A.R. Man: A postwar world of dissatisfied veterans, where people has forget the time they fight for their country. The veteran tells his stories as a rifleman but people seldom knows about that.
9. A Really Good Jazz Piano: which shows two wealthy young Americans on the loose in Cannes, but they manage to be quite as flawed, deluded and internally impoverished as anyone else Yates turns his weary but steady gaze on. The shaping incident at the end of the story hinges on race and is so pitilessly and exactly observed.
10. Out with the Old: This time we talk about the story of a group who lives in the patient court. In the eyes of their families, they are to be lonely there. However, to themselves, they are not lonely. They try to live dignity even in the patient court.
11. Builders:It tells the tale of a young ambitious literary writer, obviously based on Yates himself, who takes on hack work knocking up "real life" stories on commission for a working class cab driver. The cab driver, Bernie Silver, writes the bare bones of his actual experiences as a cab driver, while the writer, Bob Prentice, fleshes them out as fully fledged stories.Bernie Silver comes up with the charming concept of the stories he commissions as being houses, with him as their "builder". Hence each house / story is attractively designed with windows, doors and the final dainty piece, the chimney top. In the end, the writer character of the story, Bob Prentice, takes on the building metaphor and gives the reader his own "chimney top", in this case his failed marriage to wife Joan.
Above all the eleven stories, I enjoy Doctor Jack-o'-lantern, Out with the Old and Builders very much. These three are especially unipue.
3. comment:
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, it seems obvious that Yates was crafting his fiction along more conventional short story lines. These early stories were written originally as submissions for literary magazines and the like, over a ten year period. Often the reader can sense the tension between Yates's desire to write successfully for magazine publication and to follow his own natural writer's voice. Ironically enough, even though Yates was writing with a view to commercial success, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness only sold 2000 copies on first release. Some 500 copies were distributed to reviewers and as promotional freebies.
Where Yates jettisons the meticulous short story format, he gets the best results. The stand out example is the last story, Builders.Yates's stories may not be a bundle of laughs (though there is a grim humour in "Builders", the final story here, about a cab driver who hires a young writer to turn his experiences into fiction), but he can describe a world, and the state of mind it creates, so economically, so persuasively, that you stay your hand even as it reaches for the full bottle of paracetamol or opened razor. A man in a TB ward drafts a letter to his daughter, whom he has just discovered is now pregnant (and refusing to name the father): "Your old dad may not be good for much any more but he does know a thing or two about life and especially one important thing, and that is" - and here Yates steps in to say: "That was as far as the letter went." It is an excruciating moment, a joke and not a joke at all; also one would have expected nothing else.
"I'm grateful that I know a little more now about honesty in the use of words," says the narrator of "Builders". For all that the narrator may be at that point not quite as honest as he avers, this honest use of language is Yates's central concern, and the reason his stories are so fulfilling, so rich, even as they delineate their characters' internal poverty. I have perhaps not made these stories seem enticing, but I assure you they are: you may groan with second-hand despair as you read, but they are still the kind of stories you sneak off to read when you should be doing something else. That's how good they are.
The other stories in the collection, despite their careful, almost self-conscious structure, show the basic themes of Richard Yates's fiction in embryo. His characters struggle to cope with the modern world of business, education, friendship, work and marriage. The individual more often than not finds themselves drowning not waving on life's indifferent seas. American life demands so much success of its people, so much individualism, leaving empty, lonely failures as a result.
Eleven Kinds of Loneliness shows a young Richard Yates finding his own literary style. The structure and format of the stories seem somewhat dated and 1950s-ish, yet it is fascinating to detect the emergence of the more authentic Yates voice in many of his brilliant early characterisations.
Conclusion:
Every character let me into their little part of the world and showed their rawest and deepest emotion. As a writer, Yates honors his craft and I would suggest an aspiring writer to pick this up and learn from his work. Some of his stories had a profound effect on me.
The lonely person write about the loneliness; the hollow eyes see the illness of the whole world that era. At the very ending of Eleven Kinds of loneliness, Richard Yates shows us about the windows. Whether there’s a window or not, I have no idea. There may be sunshine from the tear workers left. Where is the window? Nobody knows only the God. This is not a window belong only to Yates, but to us all. This is a window of our heart. Is there a way for us to feel not so lonely? The answer may be yes. You may be alone, but you are not lonely if you let others live in your heart. Though you are afar from each other, you are alone but not lonely.
To put it simply: you must read this book. It is the most depressing, uplifting, poignant, ironic book I've read. That may seem like a contradiction in terms, but if you've read the book, you know what I'm talking about. And the original one is better if you can get one.
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