by Blake Bailey
* The woman declined to be interviewed, and clearly preferred that her full name not be given.
* Many observed how the older Yates tended to smack his lips and roll his tongue around the inside of his mouth—a common side-effect of lithium and other such medications.
* The woman’s last name, given in the actual title, is omitted.
* For whatever reason she decided to keep the man’s name, though to Yates she would always be Wendy Sears (or “Serious”). To avoid confusion I will refer to Wendy Sears Grassi by her maiden name.
* “Liars in Love”—the story that repelled Angell the most—would seem the favorite of at least one celebrated Yates admirer, Richard Ford, who selected it for The Granta Book of the American Short Story.
* Sometime in the late eighties Yates made a list of these fifteen books, including the nine he’d already published: Number ten was to be Uncertain Times, while number eleven was The World on Fire, based on Yates’s experiences promoting the UNIVAC for Remington Rand (as already noted, he wrote a 1989 film treatment with the same title, about which more below). The entries for numbers twelve and thirteen are blank, as Yates was saving his other two gestating ideas for last, perhaps because of the valedictory resonance of their titles: A Cheer for Realized Men (14) and Dying on the Riviera (15).
* Published posthumously as Kafka Was All the Rage.
* Again, Grand Street accepted the essay and set it in type, but never published it.
* “I know that you have not been tremendously pleased with the quality of [Yates’s] last two books,” Douglas wrote Jackie Farber, “and frankly I don’t see the situation getting any better.” One of the two books was Liars in Love.
* Larry David used Monica as a partial model for the character Elaine Benes in the series.
* All three covers were illustrated by Theo Rudnak, who in fact offered alternative—but equally surreal—art for Revolutionary Road and The Easter Parade: The first depicted the back of a man in a business suit, both in and out of a jail cell (the bars come down on either side of him à la an M. C. Escher effect), gazing out the window at a suburban scene; the second depicted dangling chromium styluses in female shape. Yates was presumably appalled.
* Earley went on to a distinguished career: Author of the novel Jim the Boy and other works, he was chosen by Granta in 1996 (along with Yates’s former student Melanie Rae Thon) as one of twenty “Best Young American Novelists.” Another of Yates’s caretaker-students at Alabama, Tim Parrish, has published an acclaimed story collection, Red Stick Men.
* Monica suspects her father was more pleased than not by the Seinfeld episode and only waxed indignant in front of the graduate students because he felt it was expected of him: “I was just so relieved at Larry’s choices,” said Monica. “He could have focused on the physical infirmity, the frailness, the runny nose, the drinking—all the things I dreaded when people met Dad during those Boston years. But what he saw was gruffness, the inherent power of Dad’s opinions and intelligence, the humor of his old-time masculinity.”
* Later husband and wife. Shelley Hippler had a reputation for toughness—more than equal to the task of “handling” Yates: “She’d get annoyed as shit at some of the [chauvinistic] things he said,” Dan Childress noted, “but she knew he meant well.”
* Nursing school had ended Monica’s writing career for good. “The day I got accepted at Columbia,” she said, “I thought Fuck this, I’m free!—and dropped the entire manuscript of my reworked novel down the garbage chute.”
* Esquire never published the excerpt, though Hills had returned a ninety-page edited typescript to Yates with a note on the first page: “These are passages extracted to make a narrative from the unfinished novel, Uncertain Times, by Richard Yates. [Signed] Rust Hills.” Yates kept the excerpted segment with the rest of his manuscript. On the last page Hills had written the word “END,” and this was probably the bottom page of the manuscript Allen Wier found after Yates’s death.
* He sent the novel (What Are We Doing in Latin America?) “for old times’ sake” to Yates, who replied graciously: “Reading about ‘Pritchard Bates’ did inflict an acute little cut, but it was mercifully brief and therefore hardly comparable to my own more extended and clumsy swiping at ‘Bill Brock’ in a failed ’84 novel that I’ll always regret having written.” Yates sent a glowing blurb to the publisher in behalf of Riche’s book.
