by Tom Nissley
To all my days with
Laura, Peter, and Henry
Do not remit the practice of writing down occurrences as they arise, of whatever kind, and be very punctual in annexing the dates. Chronology, you know, is the eye of history; and every man’s life is of importance to himself.
—DR. JOHNSON TO MRS. YHRALE, September 6, 1777
I hate books and articles which begin with a date of birth. Altogether I hate books and articles which adopt a biographical and chronological approach; that strikes me as the most tasteless and at the same time the most unintellectual procedure.
—THOMAS BERNHARD, Concrete
Contents
INTRODUCTION
January
February
March
April
May
June
July
August
September
October
November
December
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INDEX
Introduction
I was the guy in the library with books piled all around him, new ones every day. I’m sure they had a name for me behind the desk. Each morning I’d walk into the stacks with a handful of authors in mind—Colette, Heinlein, Babel, Baldwin, Welty—and come back with as many fat volumes as I could balance on my laptop: biographies, diaries, novels, complete correspondences. I lived between PG and PT in the Library of Congress system, with occasional forays upstairs to BX, D, E, F, and HV and down to QH and Z. I pulled out a half-dozen Brontë books at a time, and I blew the dust off the Franz Werfel biography from the auxiliary stacks that no one had checked out for years.
And every day I foraged for stories: moments in the lives of writers, or the invented lives of their characters, that I could connect to a particular date but also to something larger. Moviemakers have never really known how to dramatize the lives of writers—how many balled-up pages thrown into the trash can you show?—but writers have always left a vivid record of the lives they lived, as well as the ones they imagined. They gossip and despair in their diaries, they grouch and boast in letters, they transform their struggles into fiction. They drive themselves into poverty to write a masterpiece, badger their agents, fall in and out of love, crash cars and planes and motorcycles, stoke feuds, read books they hate and adore, dream of fame and regret it, discover their talent and drink it away.
The book I wanted to create would hold all those things and more, not just the usual almanac staples of births and deaths and publication dates. April 15, after all, isn’t just the day that Robinson Crusoe was published, Henry James was born, and Edward Gorey died. It’s also the day that Walt Whitman mourned the death of Lincoln, Charles Dickens called the Mississippi the “beastliest river in the world,” George McGovern’s political director told Hunter S. Thompson he was worried about his health, and Thomas Higginson received four poems from a woman named Emily Dickinson with a note that began, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”
In the piles of books around me I looked for historic events (the day Charles Dodgson invented Wonderland for Alice Liddell and her sisters, the night Mary Shelley imagined Frankenstein’s monster), but I also had my eye out for moments that were less momentous, the way the days in our lives usually are, and I’ve filled the corners of this book with reminders (Susan Sontag going to a double feature, Herman Melville playing croquet, David Foster Wallace describing his new tobacco-chewing habit to Jonathan Franzen) of the sheer dailyness of even the most eventful of lives.
Best of all was when I could find these two things—the historic and the humdrum—in the very same event. I knew how important the day Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer was to his literary life, but I didn’t know that he stepped on her foot in the revolving door when he dropped her off at her hotel. And June 14, 1950, I learned, is not only the day Charles M. Schulz signed the syndication contract for his new comic strip. It’s also the night he came home and celebrated by asking red-haired Donna Mae Johnson to marry him. (She turned him down.)
I spent a whole (and happy) year that way, collecting a year’s worth of stories for the 366 daily pages of this book. Caught up as I was in other days—consuming books, at times, as if the dates they contained were their only fruit—I never knew what day it was in my own life. Any book I opened I read with a strange and narrow radar. I skimmed indexes, tracked anecdotes from reference to reference, typed “january,” “february,” “march,” etc., into search boxes, and developed a particular appreciation for epistolary novels and a grudge against writers who didn’t date their diary entries (John Cheever, that means you). My first question, when my wife told me about a book she was reading, was always “Does it have any dates?”
Just as many of the best of these tales connect the lives of writers with the books they created, I also wanted to do something in this book that I hadn’t seen anywhere else: tell stories from the invented lives of fiction alongside those of the writers themselves. January 8 is the day Jane Austen wrote her sister about dancing with Tom Lefroy on his birthday, but it’s also the day Callie, or Cal, Stephanides was born in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. L. Frank Baum finished the book he called then The Emerald City on October 9, the same day the mysterious title organization in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League” closed its doors. Sometimes writers have connected the two themselves, knitting crucial days from their lives into their fiction. Bloomsday, James Joyce’s booklong celebration of the day he met Nora Barnacle, is the most familiar example, but Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, and J. K. Rowling are among the many who have made their own birthdays important dates in their novels.
Dates in books, I realized as I combed for them, are a literary tool like any other—dialogue, geography, physical description—to be deployed or withheld according to the effect desired. A novelist might choose, or choose not, to tell you that something happened on October 21, just as she might tell you, or not, that a character has gray eyes or lives in Knoxville. Diaries, biographies, epistolary novels, histories, and explorers’ accounts are all built on the bones of dates, as are mysteries, with their reliance on evidence and the tick-tock of police procedure. Memoirs, though, turn out to be concerned more with memory than evidence; it’s a rare memoirist, even one as careful as Mary Karr, who gets specific about the days things happened. Science fiction, to my surprise, often uses dates as a way of grounding its speculations, but fantasy rarely does, although Tolkien did pay attention to the calendars of Middle Earth. Poets mostly prefer months to days. (An exception is when they want to mark an occasion in their title: Wordsworth above Tintern Abbey, Yeats after the Easter Rebellion, Frank O’Hara on his lunch hour.) “April” is poetic; “April 18” is not. It’s too specific, too pedestrian. It’s the stuff of journalism or letters or train schedules, the muckier genres that novels have always dirtied themselves with.
Specific dates carry with them the lure of the real that the novel has always dangled, the stray facticity every good storyteller or con man knows can put a tale over. Some novelists are maestros of the date: Nabokov, Joyce, Philip K. Dick, Zadie Smith. Lovecraft’s unnameable horrors are made more dreadful by the precision of the days on which they occur, and much of the pleasure of Conan Doyle’s stories of detection comes from the details of their setting: the geography of London, the variety of its carriages, and the exact day—January 4—the five orange pips arrive. In some books a single date becomes a talisman: the August 4ths the sad story in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier keeps circling back to, or the memory of an April 27 that becomes a fetish in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence.
Not every story cares about the calendar, of course. Do you ever know what day—or even mo
nth—it is in one of Kafka’s novels? Time there is both too urgent and too infinite for the mere particularity of dates. Time has a different character in Virginia Woolf’s novels too. Mrs. Dalloway, like Ulysses, is set on a single day in the middle of June, but she never says which one, leaving us no Dallowayday to celebrate the way we do Joyce’s June 16, 1904. In fiction, her sense of time had less to do with what day it was than with, as Mrs. Dalloway’s working title put it, The Hours, or, as she named one of her essays, “The Moment.”
But outside their fiction, Kafka and Woolf were two of the great artists of daily life—Kafka in his diary and especially his letters to his eternal fiancée Felice Bauer, and Woolf in her letters and especially her incomparable diary. They are among those writers whose daily impromptu autobiographies, like the diaries of Pepys, Thoreau, and Victor Klemperer or the letters of Flannery O’Connor or the James family, have become literature too. Then there are those who have the everyday art of their lives recorded by others: Dr. Johnson by his Boswell, of course, but also Herman Melville, who was no diarist but whose days appear again and again in these pages thanks to the blessed obsessiveness of biographers like Jay Leyda and Hershel Parker, and literary characters like Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac, whose self-creation made their days lastingly vivid.
Now you know how I read to make this book. How should you read it? If you’re like me, you’ll look up your birthday first. Some readers will simply open it at random, or seek out favorite names in the index, or read a single page on its appointed day before moving on to the next one, or even sit down and read it straight through. Most of all, I hope you will get detoured from this book to start opening some of the other books it’s made of. That’s what I’m going to do now that I’ve finished writing it.
Seattle, Washington
March 28, 2013
January You’d think more books would start in January. Does it not feel original enough to open a story with the new year? Or do we find more natural beginnings in the spring, or when we return to work or school after the summer? What, after all, is born in the dead month of January besides a new calendar?
There are exceptions. There’s Archie Jones, in Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, roused to life on New Year’s Day from his attempt to gas himself in his car in the delivery zone of a halal butcher’s shop, and Bridget Jones, sourly recording in her diary the fourteen alcohol units, twenty-two cigarettes, and 5,424 calories she consumed on New Year’s Eve the day (and night) before. And there are January beginnings that seem like endings: the death just hours after midnight on January 1, 2021, of the last human born before the species became infertile in P. D. James’s The Children of Men, and the New Year’s deadline haunting Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, when the crowded but temporary Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, is set to revert to local control.
Calendars do begin in January, although that wasn’t always the case. In 1579 March was still, officially at least, the first month of the year in England, but Edmund Spenser justified beginning his pastoral poem The Shepheardes Calender in January because it was the first month after the rebirth of the “decayed world” through the birth of Christ. In colonial America the calendar was a printer’s bread and butter: an almanac was often the only book a household would buy during the year, which drew Benjamin Franklin, like many of his fellow printers, to create his own. The first edition of Poor Richard’s Almanack, which soon became the colonies’ favorite, included a tongue-in-cheek prediction that one of his main rivals, the American Almanac’s compiler Titan Leeds, would die, “by my Calculation made at his Request,” at 3:29 P.M. on October 17 of the coming year. (Leeds was not amused, but survived the year.)
In his Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold was more content to observe than predict, and for him the barely detectable stirrings of January in Wisconsin—the venturing forth of a skunk from hibernation, the skittering of a meadow mouse from the melting shelter of the thawing snow—make observation “almost as simple and peaceful as snow, and almost continuous as cold. There is time not only to see who has done what, but to speculate why.”
RECOMMENDED READING FOR JANUARY
A Calendar of Wisdom by Leo Tolstoy (1909) What did Tolstoy, in his last years, believe was the great work of his life? War and Peace? Anna Karenina? No, this anthology he spent fifteen years gathering, which mixed his own aphorisms with those of the “best and wisest thinkers of the world,” organized by a theme for each day of the year.
At the Mountains of Madness by H. P. Lovecraft (1936) As the southern summer opens up the South Pole for exploration, a scientific expedition led by professors Dyer and Lake discovers behind a range of unknown Antarctic mountains a vast, dead, and ancient city, one of the most evil and benighted of Lovecraft’s inhuman horrors.
“New Year Letter” by W. H. Auden (1940) With hatreds convulsing the world “like a baffling crime,” Auden composed one of his great long poems as a letter to “dear friend Elizabeth,” whose hospitality in his adopted home of New York helped him toward this vision of order in art and life during a time of tyranny.
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? by Philip K. Dick (1968) Many more people know Blade Runner than its source novel, set on a single January day in a post-nuclear 1992, which features, rather than Ridley Scott’s rainy, neon glamour, Dick’s equally thrilling and disturbing brand of stripped-down noir.
Airport by Arthur Hailey (1968) Arthur Hailey wrote blockbusters like no one else, earnest and fact-filled dramas set in a series of massive industrial monoliths: banks, hotels, power plants, and, in this case, Lincoln International Airport in Illinois during the worst winter storm of the decade, with one jetliner stuck at the end of a runway and another coming in fast with a bomb on board.
“In California: Morning, Evening, Late January” by Denise Levertov (1989) Levertov’s pastoral is unseasonal in the temperate lushness of its California winter, and unsettling in its vision of the industrial forces invading and managing its beauty.
The Children of Men by P. D. James (1992) Another novel overshadowed by its movie adaptation, The Children of Men, in a startling departure from James’s Adam Dalgliesh mysteries, uses the premise of a world in which human fertility has disappeared to examine the nature and lure of power.
White Teeth by Zadie Smith (2000) Smith’s debut, which begins with Archie Jones’s failed January suicide, has too much life to begin with a death: it overflows with not only the variety of multiethnic London but the exuberance of Smith taking her brilliant talent for its first walk out on the stage.
The Omnivore’s Dilemma by Michael Pollan (2006) One of the omnivore’s dilemmas is how to navigate a world whose technology and global trade have accustomed even New Englanders to unseasonal luxuries like sweet corn and asparagus in the middle of January.
January 1
BORN: 1879 E. M. Forster (Where Angels Fear to Tread, A Room with a View), London
1919 J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye, Franny and Zooey), New York City
DIED: 2002 Julia Phillips (You’ll Never Eat Lunch in This Town Again), 57, West Hollywood, Calif.
2007 Tillie Olsen (Tell Me a Riddle, Silences), 94, Oakland, Calif.
1803 Perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised that the rise of the restaurant in post-revolutionary France coincided with the rise of the restaurant guide. On New Year’s Day a man-about-town named Alexandre Balthazar Laurent Grimod de La Reynière published his first Almanach des Gourmands, a pocket-sized, almost annual guide to eating aimed, with a slyly decadent style, at the “purely animal pleasures” unleashed by the upheaval of the Revolution (through which Grimod himself had successfully maneuvered, despite his noble birth). The judgments of the Almanach were drawn in part from the Jury Dégustateur, a group of gourmands who met weekly at Grimod’s mansion for five-hour tasting sessions: the Michelin or Yelp of their day.
1926 Isaac Babel confessed to his diary that he hadn’t “done a thing as far as serious literature goes for about ten months, but have
simply been hanging around in Moscow in search of big pay-offs.”
1947 In a Guide to Your Child’s Development she has purchased for the purpose, Charlotte Haze notes on the twelfth birthday of her daughter, Dolores, that the girl is fifty-seven inches tall and possesses an IQ of 121. She also completes an inventory of the child’s qualities: “aggressive, boisterous, critical, distrustful, impatient, irritable, inquisitive, listless, negativistic (underlined twice) and obstinate.” For Charlotte’s new husband, Humbert Humbert, this list of epithets is “maddening” in its viciousness toward the girl he calls Lolita and claims to love. But he has his own reasons to revolt at the child’s birthdays: after just a few more of them she’ll no longer be a “nymphet,” and soon after that she’ll be—“horror of horrors”—“a ‘college girl.’ ”
1970 Detached from the rhythms of any planet’s orbit or rotation, the star-faring trading culture of the Qeng Ho in Vernor Vinge’s 1999 Hugo-winning novel, A Deepness in the Sky, measures time in seconds rather than days or years: kiloseconds, megaseconds, gigaseconds. When did their clock begin ticking? Not, as many assume, at the moment thousands of earth-years before, when the first human set foot on the moon, but about fifteen megaseconds later, at “the 0-second of one of Humankind’s first computer operating systems”: the Unix system, which indeed started its counter at midnight on New Year’s Day in 1970. It’s a telling shift in the history of science fiction, which has mirrored technology by turning its imagination from the exploration of space to the development of machine intelligence.
January 2
BORN: 1951 André Aciman (Call Me by Your Name, Out of Egypt), Alexandria, Egypt
1956 Lynda Barry (Ernie Pook’s Comeek, What It Is), Richland Center, Wis.
DIED: 2000 Patrick O’Brian (Master and Commander and the rest of the Aubrey-Maturin series), 85, Dublin
