Yesterday's Burdens

by Robert M. Coates, Malcolm Cowley (Afterword)

A memorable period piece, remarkable for its vivid language and thematic structure, Yesterday’s Burdens is an obsessive Story of New York life in the 1930s.

 

Malcolm Cowley, a close personal friend of Robert Coates, has pointed out in his Afterword to this new edition the aptness of this novel to its time. Yesterday’s Bur­dens is an informal story of an unconven­tional young man of the 1930s. The cen­tral character, Henderson, typifies the successful young New Yorker, whose life style reflects the restless, seeking, discon­tented mood of his time. With him, the reader crisscrosses Manhattan, visits speak­easies, crashes parties, and participates in Henderson’s sexual activities and his pos­sible suicide (the novel has three end­ings).

 

Frankly experimental in technique, the novel attempts the universal in its ap­peal. Readers today no doubt will appre­ciate the unexpected tenderness and pas­sion with which the author endows his very ordinary characters.

Genres: Fiction, New York

280 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1933

Reviews

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Coates is a classic case of the BURIED. And I'm not alone in this judgement. Listen.

The edition I read is part of the series "Lost American Fiction" from South Illinois University Press, edited by Matthew J. Bruccoli who happens to be a Fitzgerald scholar.

This edition [1975] printed by offset lithography in the U[...]S[...]ofA[...] Designed by Gary Gore

First edition is from 1933. Listen to what Bruccoli has to say about this series of Lost American Fiction ::

The title for this series, Lost American Fiction, is not wholly satisfactory. A more accurate designation would be "Forgotten [Usof! but sic!] American Works of Fiction That Deserve a New Public"--which states the rationale for reprinting these titles. We are reprinting some works that are worth rereading because they are now social documents (Dry Martini and The Cubical City) or literary documents (The Professors Like Vodka and Predestined).
It isn't simple, for Southern Illinois University Press is a scholarly publisher; we have serious ambitions for the series. We expect that these titles will revive some books and authors from undeserved obscurity and plug some of the holes in American literary history. Of course, we hope to recover an ocasional [sic!] lost masterpiece. Weeds was one. And this may be another. One of the volumes, The Devil's Hand is truly a lost novel, for it remained unpublished for almost forty years. The Press is particularly proud of this discovery. It is our special ambition to resurrect more worthwhile BURIED novels [MY emphasis ; but isn't it nice to not have an original idea in nomenclature? ; )]
At this point eight titles have been published in this series, with three more in production. The response has been encouraging. We are gratified that many readers share our conviction that one of the proper functions of a university press is to rescue good writing from oblivion.

Let's not waste any more time. Here are the 29 titles thus far pub'd ::
• Aleck Maury, Sportsman, Caroline Gordon, afterword by the author
• Contending Forces: A Romance Illustrative of Negro Life North and South, Pauline E. Hopkins, afterword by Gwendolyn Brooks
• Delilah, Marcus Goodrich, afterword by James A. Michener
• The Devil's Hand, Edith Summers Kelley, afterword by Matthew J. Bruccoli
• Dry Martini: A Gentleman Turns to Love, John Thomas, afterword by Morrill Cody
• Fast One, Paul Cain (pseudonym of George Carrol Sims), afterword by Irvin Faust
• A Hasty Bunch, Robert McAlmon, introduced by Kay Boyle
• Flesh is Heir: An Historical Romance, Lincoln Kirstein, afterword by the author
• The Great Big Doorstep, E.P. O’Donnell, afterword by Eudora Welty
• Infants of the Spring, Wallace Thurman, afterword by John A. Williams
• Inn of That Journey, Emerson Price, afterword by the author
• The Landsmen, Peter Martin, afterword by Wallace Markfield
• The Cubical City, Janet Flanner, afterword by the author
• Mr. and Mrs. Haddock Abroad, Donald Ogden Stewart, afterword by the author
• The Plastic Age, Percy Marks, afterword by R.V. Cassill
• The Professors Like Vodka, Harold Loeb, afterword by Harold Loeb
• Predestined: A Novel of New York Life, Stephen French Whitman, afterword by Alden Whitman
• Queer People, Carroll and Garrett Graham, afterword by Budd Schulberg
• Rain on the Just, Kathleen Morehouse, afterword by the author
• The Red Napoleon, Floyd Gibbons, afterword by John Gardner
• Salt: Or, the Education of Griffith Adams, Charles G. Norris, afterword by Louis Auchincloss
• The Science Fiction of Mark Clifton, Mark Clifton, ed. by Barry N. Malzberg and Martin H. Greenberg
• Single Lady, John Monk Saunders, afterword by Stephen Longstreet
• Susan Lenox: Her Rise and Fall, David Graham Phillips, afterword by Elizabeth Janeway
• They Don't Dance Much, James Ross, afterword by George V. Higgins
• Through the Wheat, Thomas Boyd, afterword by James Dickey
• The Wedding, Grace Lumpkin, afterword by Lillian Barnard Gilkes
• Weeds, Edith Summers Kelley, afterword by Matthew Bruccoli
• Yesterday's Burdens, Robert M. Coates, afterword by Malcolm Cowley

Credit where due :: The Neglected Books Page
https://neglectedbooks.com/?page_id=67


Non=scientific survey suggests that nearly all of those 29 are STILL BURIED. Make yourself a LIST and start hitting The Village Bookshops. HARD.

[Adrian Alvarez · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an important novel. A novel processing and dispensing a reaction: harnessing a movement (Dadaism) and maintaining its relevance nearly 90 years after it was written. We are so lucky to have this reissue. This is such an important time to receive it.

This is a novel with no conventional plotting but using stylistic innovation and a tender eye for poignant details about people and the natural world Coates manages to recover the spirit of a time.

There is a political heart within the Dadaist movement. It is a desire to counter capitalism's failings by reclaiming language any way it can, trimming it of all connotative abuses accumulated over time. To that end, Coates innovates with a rhythm of colons and parentheticals that capture, remarkably, a spirit of thoughtfulness and interruption familiar to anyone who has walked a city street, more, for anyone who has left the city to the country and noticed the arrant change in mind. As a counter it allows the reader to know Henderson, the stand in for Coates, the stand in for the country living protagonist.

I am so impressed by this work and grateful it has been reprinted. If there are any others like it please clue me in.

[Charles Beauregard · Rating 5 out of 5]

Coates is now one of my favorite authors. I wish the book was longer.

[Robert Wechsler · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the best things to come from On The Decay Of Criticism: The Complete Essays Of W. M. Spackman was the recommendation to read this amazing experimental novel. I had read nearly all of Spackman's other recommendations, as he had made them to me back in the 80s. But this one seems to have missed my ear, even though it was dedicated to a writer I was then crazy about, James Thurber, who for me epitomized the humorist who was funny as you read him, and sad as you thought about what you’d read. This is Burdens in a sentence, and it does appear, as the dedications says, that Thurber “helped a lot.”

Was this the novel that Thurber had always wanted to write? Did Thurber’s love for Henry James get in the way of him doing it himself, since James’ long sentences and long-windedness were so far from what Thurber was best at (and then there’s James’ lack of humor). But we must be what we aren’t sometimes, though often we can’t do it alone.

Not that Burdens is humor, or even all that light, but there is a similar tension between its form and its content. However, what is most special about the novel’s form is that, as with the last novel I read, C. E. Morgan’s The Sport of Kings, the style changes, or here, more exactly, styles recur. Because it is a novel of styles, rather than just one incessant one, the experiment doesn’t get tired or bogged down. And yet it is also a novel of repetition, more kinds of repetition than I’ve ever seen in one work, but not too often, or at least not to someone like me who reveres repetition.

It’s also a novel where character is fluid, where the narrator and a named but ambiguous protagonist are nearly all there is, and they never coalesce. But no matter. With the often gorgeous prose, like no other (the parenthesis will never be the same (nor will the adverb), with the playfully special sex scenes, with the street signs of all sorts, characters are superfluous. This novel is a joy to read. This is the best back-to-back novels I can recall. Thank you, Tough Poets Press, for keeping this book in print.

[Steve Shilstone · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sort of an Edward Hopper painting 250 page literary etching set in 1930 Manhattan among the wildly flapping roarers of the Twenties.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Masterpiece.

[Bill · Rating 4 out of 5]

My favorite of his novels.