The Richard Yates and Henry James Collections

In 2008, The Times reviewed The Collected Stories of Richard Yates so enthusiastically that I was persuaded to get myself one. It turned out they were right. I did my best to get involved in the Yates revival and collected all the novels via abebooks, most of them having to be sent from America. The film of Revolutionary Road appeared and a few months after I was about as complete as one can get in Yates, all the titles were re-issued in Britain. Still, my library has more interesting editions.

Now, last Saturday, Jem Calder celebrates The Easter Parade in the same paper's 'Rereading' feature and the great joy and benefit of having every worthwhile book one knows about was being able to go upstairs to fetch it and reread it myself. Explaining about him to a bookshop proprietor on Tuesday, she said he sounded like the American answer to the Angry Young Men and in some ways she's got it except maybe Yates is more middle class and a better prose writer than Alan Sillitoe. 

The Easter Parade follows Sarah and Emily, two sisters, through their disintegrating lives. Sarah, the elder, stays in a twenty year abusive marriage while Emily trawls her way through a litany of men who all seem suitable to begin with but prove not to be. As Yates invariably is, it's relentless in its downward spiral, the compensation only being the women's hope, or belief, that it will be for the best. It's heavy irony, it's brilliantly written. I'm not sure, as Jem Calder diagnoses, that,

the horror is just time's passing.  

That can be applied to most lives, or stories. In Yates it is more specifically the almost wilful self-deception of the two main characters and that they don't appear to have other options.

But that's what all those books upstairs are there for. To be returned to exactly as and when required. Yates remains right up at the top end of prose fiction and this latest return to him only proved that he's not going to be shifted from such a position.  

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The Yates collection has been in place for years whereas the Henry James collection has sprung up in the last ten days. Following the immense success of The Aspern Papers/The Turn of the Screw, part of my mission on Tuesday in Chichester was to load up on whatever was to be found. I hadn't realized that the newly reopened premises where once were three storeys of second-hand books was now independent and new books. Impressed with her knowledge and charm, which I realized later is the salesmanship necessary to survive in the perilous world of retail books, I returned to pay the going rate for The Golden Bowl after a quick excursion to Oxfam where I was glad to find four other titles for only a bit more than the price of the pristine copy. I don't suppose she needed me to show her what she's up against in her admirable custodianship of the bookseller's dream life. Spending similar amounts in two bookshops and the flapjack shop, the flapjacks lasted three days, The Golden Bowl will last two or maybe three weeks and the four titles from Oxfam two or three months but I'll always be able to have the books again, which can't be said for the flapjacks.

At first sight, Washington Square isn't as good as the two novellas but it's still fine. It possibly anticipates at least Emily's story in The Easter Parade in how Catherine's relationship with the apparently feckless Morris Townsend doesn't work out, with some help from her severe father, who might have been right.

But, on further consideration, it's an open question. At first thinking it owed something to Jane Austen, or what I imagine Jane Austen to be like, it is perhaps anti-Austen in its beautiful, unrequited, possibly even Larkin-esque ending. Excellent reading.

And now, with all reason for hope, I go intrpeidly towards the big books. The Portrait of a Lady is all but 600 pages with James presumably indulging himself in his reams of prose but, as with Proust, that may not be a bad thing.