This essential collection of stories by one of the great unsung American writers of the 20th century is sublime, and will give you so much pleasure over the course of your life that it could well end up being the best value book you've ever bought. It consists of Yates's two collections of stories, Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love, together with some uncollected stories. You can read about Eleven Kinds of Loneliness elsewhere, as it's now available on its own, so I'll just give you a taste of the second half of this collection.
The stories in Liars in Love are longer than in Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and, in an entirely unexpected turn for those accustomed to Yates's chronic despair, occasionally more optimistic. At least two of the stories - Regards at Home and Yates's longest story, the 44-pager Saying Goodbye to Sally - have tempered hope in their closing lines, as well as some actual jokes. And as always, the details and the dialogues are just so, every single mot precisely juste. The uncollected stories were a surprise, too - no leaden danglers here, scraped up off the bottom of the study drawer: the stories are shorter than most of the previously published ones, but no less achieved. We get to see elements of Yates's life that he hadn't previously cannibalized in novels and stories: such as wartime experiences (rendered with astonishing vigour and clarity in flashback in The Canal) and TB wards. There's a tiny four-pager, witty and brittle, in Bells in the Morning, and a rare first person narrative (Yates's only one, apart from Regards at Home?) in A Last Fling, Like. Finally, in The Comptroller and the Wild Wind, another tale of broken marriage and so much more, we find where Yates took the title for his novel Young Hearts Crying: a poem by James Joyce entitled Watching the Needleboats at San Sabba:
"I heard their young hearts crying
Loveward above the glancing oar
And heard the prairie grasses sighing:
No more, return no more!
O hearts, O sighing grasses,
Vainly your loveblown bannerets mourn!
No more will the wild wind that passes
Return, no more return."
So there's the last word, for now, on Richard Yates: he can quote Joyce in the middle of his own work and still not seem rubbish by comparison.
