The Crazies! in Revolutionary Road (1961) and Beyond
1950s Magazine Advertisement for Maytag Automatic Washing Machine
By Yoojin Shin
This review contains spoilers
Revolutionary Road (1961) by Richard Yates (1926 – 1992) tickles an uncomfortable spot: the belief that we, as individuals, are a cut above the average, the belief that we were meant for something more than the stifling mediocrity of life. That is the belief that Frank Wheeler, a handsome Columbia College graduate in the end-cusp of his twenties, has about his own life in the year of 1955: that he was a veteran and an intellectual, nothing short of the “intense, nicotine-stained Jean-Paul Sartre sort of man.” He then meets and marries April Johnson, an “exceptionally first-rate girl” and a drama school graduate, and their lives as a married couple begin on a ramshackle flat on Bethune Street, where they indulge in the hip, countercultural lifestyle of cigarettes and frisky sex and long, fervent discussions of philosophy and politics. Together, they dream of going to Paris, where lives are really lived—the perfect beginning of a Fitzgeraldian drama, set in the booming postwar era when the likes of Don Draper were pumping out advertising copies about cigarettes, refrigerators, and film reels.
But in Yates’ world, not so unlike our own, hope for extraordinariness is routinely dashed, people are always weaker than they pretend to be, and marriages teeter on triangular ends of boredom, harrowing distress, or at best, resigned compromise. Children come unwanted and unexpected, ruining all kinds of plans. Young people who once dreamt of living like Jean Paul Sartre, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald become corporate salarymen, scrawling out half-assed copies to sell computers; those who once dreamt of becoming actresses end up as disillusioned housewives who, in spite of continuously yearning for greater fulfillment, don’t have a clue what they want.
Still, Frank and April Wheeler find themselves continuously frustrated by the banality of suburban life. Frank emphasizes to everyone and anyone that he finds his job unbearably boring—it’s not interesting, it’s just for the money—and engage in earnest, fitful talks about the dreadful conformity of the suburbs (“let’s all be good consumers and have a lot of Togetherness and bring our children up in a bath of sentimentality”). April Wheeler simply doesn’t want to talk about it, until one day, an idea seizes her: Let’s go to Paris, I’ll work as a secretary, so you, Frank, can have time to find your passion!
By the standards of the 1950s, and even today, it’s a ludicrous plan: uprooting two children, selling their home in suburban Connecticut, quitting the job, and sailing across the Atlantic without the promise of anything significant on the other side of the ocean. Yet, this is exactly what the twenty-five-year-old Richard Yates did in April, 1951, with his wife Sheila Bryant, to whom Revolutionary Road is dedicated: Yates resolved to write in Paris, and to write fervently, so much so that he told himself he’d produce a short story every month. For Frank and April Wheeler, and perhaps for Richard Yates, “flying the coop”—as Frank’s work colleague judiciously put—is, and was, the only solution to their bottomless unhappiness.
In a striking parallel, however, there is John Givings, who responds in a different way to his own bottomless unhappiness: he has a nervous breakdown, throws a coffee table across the living room, cuts off the phone lines, and eventually gets committed to a mental hospital. Mrs. Givings, his mother, is a local realtor who sold the Wheelers their first suburban home; she is full of sugar-coated platitudes, which makes her business prosper and her personal relations smooth and unruffled. But unlike his mother, who clutches her complete misery in the privacy of her bedroom, John Givings lets it all bare—he says the things he shouldn’t say, asks the questions people don’t want to answer, and most tickling of all, makes fun of his mother: “‘It’s a lovely old silo, Ma,’ John said. ‘And it’s lovely news about the Wheelers, and you’re a lovely person. Isn’t she, Pop? Isn’t she a lovely person?’”
Still, Mrs. Givings tries to integrate John back into “normal” society by mingling with good young people, namely Frank and April Wheeler. So begins John’s awkward visits to the Wheelers, where Mrs. Givings rotates between her usual platitudes (lovely sun! lovely rainbow!) until she is cut off brutally by her son who wants to ask the real questions: what are you people really about, anyway?
According to a Ploughshares interview with Richard Yates, the purpose of John Givings is to “point up or spell out the story at crucial moments.” He is also a fictionalized portrayal of a young man who Yates knew at the time of writing the novel, “a long-term patient in a mental hospital who had an uncannily keen and very articulate insight into other people’s weaknesses.”
“Whaddya do it for, then?” asks John Givings to Frank Wheeler, who, per usual, described his job as stupid and uninteresting. Then John follows up with a series of ironic remarks: “Forget I said it. You want to play house, you got to have a job. You want to play very nice house, very sweet house, then you got to have a job you don’t like. Great.”
Frank Wheeler, however, agrees with him: that’s exactly why he’s quitting his job and moving his family to Paris. John is the first among the Wheelers’ acquaintances to understand, and be impressed by, their plan. Perhaps for that reason, John becomes a perfectly pleasant man throughout the rest of the visit; he talks radio programs, shakes hands, and departs with perfect civility. So after the Givingses leave, the cool, calm, and collected Frank tells April that he treated John like he treated everybody else, and amidst April’s compliments, pours himself a celebratory glass of whiskey. John Givings isn’t so crazy, after all.
But when the Wheelers’ plans to “fly the coop” turn sour with another unplanned pregnancy—after which a disastrous fight boils between April, who wants to have an abortion, and Frank, who calls her crazy for it—Frank Wheeler is unable to handle John Givings with the same kind of cool.
People have babies in Europe, John says. Money’s a good reason, but it’s never the real reason. Then after a scrutinizing stare, John becomes ruthless, grabbing a hold of Frank’s weakness and throttling it open for everybody to see: “‘What happened? You get cold feet, or what? You decide you like it here after all? You figure it’s more comfy here in the old Hopeless Emptiness after all, or—Wow, that did it! Look at his face! What’s the matter, Wheeler? Am I getting warm?’”
John Givings’s condemnation of Frank Wheeler is bare of platitudes and sentimentalities. In delivery of his speech, he’s aggressive, rude, and sarcastic—in sum, he’s not, well, very nice about it. So it produces a visceral reaction in Frank Wheeler: the cool and collected Frank, who had previously celebrated his own treatment of John as a “normal person,” lashes out at the Givingses and tells April with “impassioned earnestness” that “the man is insane.”
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In today’s world, insanity is more a legal definition than a psychological one. According to the Legal Dictionary provided by Law.com, insanity is defined as: mental illness of such a severe nature that a person cannot distinguish fantasy from reality, cannot conduct her/his affairs due to psychosis, or is subject to uncontrollable impulsive behavior. Insanity, then, is a severe mental illness that prevents a person from carrying out their normal functions.
In a criminal court, the insanity defense is used to nullify the malicious intent behind a crime. It argues that the perpetrator was not aware of their own actions, thereby deserving pity and treatment over harsh punishment. The idea is a plainly patronizing one: it robs a person’s purpose and agency behind their actions.
Outside of the courtroom, a milder version of the insanity defense abounds, in and out of the fictional world. In the Wheelers’ home, Frank suggests that April’s desire to have an abortion might be assuaged by psychotherapy, implying that she is not in full control of her faculties. Indeed, such sentiments were commonplace in the 50s, alongside similar perceptions of homosexuality. An even milder version is exemplified by Mrs. Givings’ response to the Wheelers’ plan, pitilessly voiced by John Givings in front of the Wheelers: “You’re going to Europe, right? Yeah, I remember. She didn’t say why, though; she just said it was ‘very strange.’”
Strange. Strange people, strange behaviors, strange manner of speech—it seems that they’re labels we adopt to describe things that we aren’t used to.
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I’ve thought up a nicer, sanitized version of John’s speech, written here side-by-side with the original for your viewing pleasure:
“‘What happened? You get cold feet, or what? You decide you like it here after all? You figure it’s more comfy here in the old Hopeless Emptiness after all, or—Wow, that did it! Look at his face! What’s the matter, Wheeler? Am I getting warm?’”
“Oh yes, I understand. It is, after all, kind of nice here, isn’t it? It’s safer, you see, and there are lots of great schools around, and oh, that’s so wonderful about your promotion, Frank! With your raise, you could go on vacation every summer to Paris, maybe think about moving to a bigger house down the block—it’s all great news!”
*
Towards the end of his life, Richard Yates saw himself as a failure. All of his books—despite high critical acclaim and copious praise from literary big-names like Kurt Vonnegut, Tennessee Williams, and William Styron—never sold very well and quickly went out of print; his two marriages failed and he lost custody of his three daughters; he was persistently short of cash; he suffered from emphysema and bouts of tuberculosis, to which he lost a lung. He was plagued by depression and swallowed liquor like a fish, smoked even while tethered to oxygen tanks. Like John Givings, he suffered from multiple nervous breakdowns and was hospitalized for them (In A Tragic Honesty, a biography of Yates published in 2003, Blake Bailey records that Yates ran around naked at the 1962 Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, claiming that he was the Messiah).
Like Frank and April Wheeler, he held onto the idea of “flying the coop” as a single ameliorative strand in his life. In 1989, he told the Los Angeles Times: “as long as I’ve lived, getting out of wherever I am has seemed an appealing idea.” As a result, he wrote out of Paris, London, New York, Washington D.C., Massachusetts, Iowa, Kansas, California, and Alabama in dismal solitude, finding his temporary home in a series of small, rented, and cockroach-infested rooms, stocking his fridge with nothing but beer, coffee, and liquor.
Still, Yates continued to write, persistently and stubbornly. Repeated flights from the coop were temporary reliefs that allowed him to endure his terribly distressing fate: to write, day after day, as his body wore down and his life collapsed around him.
Would he have been happier if he had led the life Frank Wheeler did? Maybe. Perhaps he might’ve found small pleasures in his suburban life, in watching his children grow up and attend colleges, and in growing old with his wife. If he had committed himself to a lifetime’s work at Remington Rand Corporation (where he briefly worked as a publicity writer), he might’ve enjoyed steady paychecks that could afford him a clean house without cockroaches and occasional vacations to the Mediterranean. Perhaps he could’ve even written in his spare time, publishing occasional stories and novels.
In the case of the Wheelers, however, that particular path in life ended in a greater tragedy: April Wheeler, after a prolonged stretch of debilitating sadness, induces a self-abortion in her bathtub, eventually meeting her untimely death. The Wheeler children are shipped upstate to live with their relatives, while Frank becomes a shadow of a man he used to be. To escape to Paris, to experience destitution, humiliation, resignation, and the eventual return to American suburbia, defeated and abject, would have been an infinitely better outcome than what awaited the Wheelers by the end of the novel.
In real life, however, such retrospections cannot guide us through our everyday choices. Unconventional life choices may lead to anywhere between crippling poverty and wealth; sanguine health and a poor, deteriorating one; mediocrity and ravishing career success. The truth is, we have absolutely no idea. All we can do, crazy or not, is to do what we believe to be true and hope to escape the terrible fates of Frank and April Wheeler.
Yoojin Shin is a writer, editor, and translator who has been nurturing a lifelong love for the creative arts. After accumulating an eclectic range of experiences in journalism, research, and the fine arts, she launched the Baram House with a friend over a plate of cheesecake.
