The Canal by Richard Yates, 1952
The magic trick:
Deftly giving us multiple perspectives, performances, and audiences throughout a single party conversation
I looked for a story to highlight today on the SSMT site; something about gratitude or giving thanks; or at least about turkeys.
Nothing seemed to fit.
So here we are with Richard Yates’s early piece about his service in World War II. Where’s the Thanksgiving connection?
The connection is that this Thanksgiving I find that I am very grateful for the short stories of Richard Yates. I wasn’t very familiar with his work until about two months ago, and then I’m in the midst of a full-on reading obsession. He’s just so good.
My obsession has extended to the excellent Yates biography, A Tragic Honesty, by Blake Bailey. In it, he notes that Yates lifts much of war scenes from “The Canal” a decade later in his novel A Special Providence. “The Canal” consists of a dinner party conversation between our Yates protagonist and a fellow World War II veteran. The two didn’t know each other during the war, but it turns out they served very near each other at the same time. The similarities stop there.
Lew, the Yates protagonist downplays his service and belittles his performance at every turn. His fellow party attendee, on the other hand, is a braggart, happy to turn every conversation point into a comment about the manly glory of war.
I think the story is brilliant. Apparently, it wasn’t even published until 2001 – posthumously as his first story in The New Yorker. It slyly adds in multiple perspectives as the conversation goes. We get both men’s words. We get access to Lew’s internal monologue often contradicting the words he speaks. We get both men’s wives’ reactions and additions. Then, as a cherry on the sundae, we briefly get Lew’s wife telling him privately at the end of the night what she really thinks about it all.
It’s just amazing all the layers so deftly packed into such a small story.
Bailey, in the biography, posits that Yates was convinced to see his World War II service in a more positive light during the decade between “The Canal” and A Special Providence. In the novel (I haven’t read it), apparently the moment near the end of “The Canal” when Lew is reprimanded by his superior for shabby soldiering, there is a radically different response from the Lew character. Instead of hanging his head in shame, he rejects the assessment entirely.
Now, was that a reflection of Yates’s positive feelings about his wartime service? Certainly, that seems possible. But I also think you can see Lew in “The Canal” taking some pride in his service. I don’t interpret his self-deprecating storytelling here at the party as only being self-loathing. It strikes me more as being his way of controlling the experience in his memory. We know from his wife’s comments that he doesn’t like to talk about the war. So it makes sense that when a situation like this party arises and he has to trot out some war stories that he employs a defense mechanism like dousing his contributions to the army in a self-effacing humor.
But, really, the point here that it’s remarkable that a story rooted in a single conversation could generate such rich material for interpretation. Something to be grateful for today!
And that’s quite a trick on Yates’s part.
The selection:
Watching Brace and nodding, but listening to the women, Miller heard Nancy Brace say, “Honestly, I don’t know how they lived through it—any of and she shuddered. “But I never get tired of Tom’s war stories; he makes it all so vivid for me, somehow—sometimes I feel as if I’d been over there myself”
“I envy you,” Betty Miller said softly, in a tone that Miller knew was calculated for dramatic effect. “Lew never talks about the war.” And Miller realized uneasily that for Betty there was a special kind of women’s-magazine romanticism in having a husband who never talked about the war a faintly tragic, sensitive husband, perhaps, or at any rate a charmingly modest one— so that it really didn’t matter if Nancy Brace’s husband was more handsome, more solid in his Brooks Brothers suit, and, once, more dashing in his trim lieutenant’s uniform. It was ludicrous, and the worst part of it was that Betty knew better. She knew perfectly well that he had seen almost nothing of the war compared with a man like Brace, that he’d spent most of his service at a public-relations desk in North Carolina, until they transferred him to the infantry, in 1944. Secretly, he was pleased, of course—it only meant that she loved him—but he would have to tell her later, when they were alone, that he wished she’d stop making him a hero whenever anybody mentioned the war. Suddenly he was aware that Brace had asked him a question. “How’s that, Tom?”
“I said, how’d you have it, going across? What kind of resistance they give you?”
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