A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  2008 George MacDonald Fraser (Flashman and the rest of the Flashman series), 82, Isle of Man

  1960 Donald Malcolm, in The New Yorker, on Robert Ruark’s Poor No More: “With breathtaking ingenuity, he has managed to include between a single set of covers a representative example of nearly every kind of bad novel . . . a sort of Golden Treasury of Commercial Narrative.”

  1995 “The escape from Glades Correctional Institution seemed the stuff of movies,” wrote one local Florida paper, and in time it would be, but only after Elmore Leonard used it to inspire the first big scene in Out of Sight, published just a year after the jailbreak. To the real-life story of Cuban inmates tunneling twenty-five yards under the prison chapel, Leonard added the characters of Jack Foley, a recidivist bank robber with even more than the usual Leonard cool who tags along with the Cubans on the way out, and Karen Sisco, a U.S. Marshal who soon discovers her weak spot for charming bank robbers. Two years later George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez, as Jack and Karen, climbed into the trunk of a car and heated up the finest of all Leonard film adaptations, which date back to 1957’s 3:10 from Yuma.

  1998 On this day in London, one of the patron saints of entertainingly excessive knowledge, Frank Muir, passed away at the age of seventy-seven. Paired for decades with Dennis Norden, Muir was ubiquitous in postwar Britain as a bow-tied wit both behind the scenes as a writer for BBC Radio and TV and a panelist on the quiz shows Call My Bluff, My Word!, and My Music, the latter two of which introduced him to American audiences via public radio. In their trademark My Word! segment, Muir and Norden spun out ingeniously convoluted shaggy-dog tales that ended on a punch-line pun, which were collected in a half-dozen books that, like his anthologies, the Oxford Book of Humorous Prose and The Frank Muir Book: An Irreverent Companion to Social History—and like his particular brand of learned drollery—are by now well out of print and fashion.

  January 3

  BORN: 1892 J. R. R. Tolkien (The Hobbit, The Fellowship of the Ring), Bloemfontein, Orange Free State

  1973 Rory Stewart (The Places in Between, The Prince of the Marshes), Hong Kong

  DIED: 1923 Jaroslav Hašek (The Good Soldier Švejk), 39, Lipnice nad Sázavou, Czechoslovakia

  2005 Will Eisner (The Spirit, A Contract with God), 87, Lauderdale Lakes, Fla.

  1889 In 1888, as he fought off the encroachment of his madness, Friedrich Nietzsche wrote some of his most lasting works: Twilight of the Idols, The Antichrist, and Ecce Homo. By December, though, his self-grandeur was overflowing—he called himself a clown and a god, plotted to destroy the German Reich by provoking a war, and wrote that “quite literally, I hold the future of humanity in my hand.” And on this day, just after the turn of the year, he collapsed in Turin, putting his arms—as the stories say, and they seem to be true—around a mistreated workhorse and falling unconscious to the street. It was the letters he wrote to friends the next day, speaking delusions far beyond his earlier grandeur, that brought them to Turin to place him in the psychiatric care under which he spent his last, silent decade.

  1951 Precocious in all things, Susan Sontag was just seventeen when, after a short engagement and an even shorter courtship (they became engaged ten days after meeting), she married her twenty-eight-year-old sociology instructor at the University of Chicago, Philip Rieff. “I marry Philip with full consciousness + fear of my will toward self-destructiveness,” she recorded in her diary, in a note far more terse than her passionate entries in the same journal on the female lovers she called “H” and “I.” Soon after, she would later recall, she read Middlemarch for the first time and “realized not only that I was Dorothea but that, a few months earlier, I had married Mr. Casaubon.” They divorced in 1959.

  1992 “Dial and see; just try me.” Rick Deckard wants his wife, Iran, to dial their Penfield mood organ to a productive setting this morning—perhaps 481, “awareness of the manifold possibilities open to me in the future,” or at least 594, “the desire to watch TV, no matter what’s on it”—but she prefers the setting she has planned for the day, “self-accusatory depression.” The mood organ is one of the features of the near-future world Philip K. Dick invented for Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? that Ridley Scott didn’t include when he adapted it into Blade Runner (the electric sheep of the title, which Deckard keeps as a pet because he can’t afford a high-status real animal, didn’t make it either), but both book and movie are concerned with the question that drove all of Dick’s visionary fiction: in an age of machines, what is real, and what is human?

  January 4

  BORN: 1943 Doris Kearns Goodwin (Team of Rivals, No Ordinary Time), Brooklyn

  1962 Harlan Coben (Tell No One, Gone for Good), Newark, N.J.

  DIED: 1986 Christopher Isherwood (The Berlin Stories), 81, Santa Monica, Calif.

  2005 Guy Davenport (The Jules Verne Steam Balloon), 77, Lexington, Ky.

  1912 “Two desperate and notorious criminals,” reported the San Francisco Call, took “French leave” from the Ingleside jail on this day, escaping their steel cells for parts unknown: Harry Davenport, a well-known pickpocket, and “Thomas Callaghan, alias Jack Black, ‘dope fiend,’ burglar, murderous thug, about to go to Folsom to serve a term of 25 years.” Fourteen years later, that same Jack Black was the librarian of that same San Francisco Call, having in the meantime reformed himself, more or less, and written You Can’t Win, a bestselling memoir of his underworld life that was kept alive for decades by the appreciation of William S. Burroughs, who borrowed its style—and a hoodlum character named Jack—for his first novel, Junky.

  1946 After a four-day bender with his second wife, Margery Bonner, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, the site of the alcohol-soaked dissolution of his first marriage, Malcolm Lowry noticed—and hoped his wife wouldn’t—a tree in the Borda Garden carved with the message “Jan and Malcolm December 1936—Remember me.”

  1958 Lewis Mumford, whose The Culture of Cities had made him a leading voice on urban America for two decades, found an ally and a protégée in Jane Jacobs, the Greenwich Village neighborhood activist and writer. “There are half a dozen publishers who’d snap up a ms. of yours on the city,” he wrote her on this day. “There’s no one else who’s had so many fresh and sensible things to say about the city.” But when it came out three years later, Jacobs’s book, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, dismissed The Culture of Cities as a city-hating “morbid and biased catalog of ills.” Mumford returned fire in The New Yorker, praising her fresh and shrewd activism but dismissing her “schoolgirl howlers.” Nevertheless, in the same month his review came out, Jacobs and Mumford joined forces to help block Robert Moses’s proposed Lower Manhattan Expressway.

  1991 It’s “like V-E Day and V-J Day all rolled into one” when Frannie Goldsmith has her baby, Peter, in the tiny Free Zone community in Boulder, Colorado. With one immune parent, there’s a chance he’ll be the first child born in the Free Zone to survive the superflu that wiped out 99.4 percent of humanity since it escaped from a U.S. Army lab, although after a couple of days Peter too starts showing the familiar signs of illness. There are dozens more pregnant women in the Free Zone, so not everything is riding on his survival; nevertheless, the hopes of the small community of survivors—and of all those who have read the thousand or so pages of Stephen King’s The Stand to that point—rest on his tiny shoulders.

  January 5

  BORN: 1932 Umberto Eco (The Name of the Rose, Foucault’s Pendulum), Alessandria, Italy

  1938 Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (The River Between, Wizard of the Crow), Kamiriithu, Kenya

  DIED: 1987 Margaret Laurence (The Stone Angel, The Diviners), 60, Lakefield, Ont.

  1996 Lincoln Kirstein (What Ballet Is All About), 88, New York City

  1889 Mark Twain’s enthusiasm for business ventures was as unquenchable as his judgment was poor. And no investment was more disastrous than the Paige Compositor, a typesetting machine Twain was certain would make such previous innovations as the telephone and the locomotive seem “mer
e toys, simplicities.” Twain took over full ownership of its development in 1886 and on this day thought he had witnessed history: “Saturday, January 5, 1889, 12:20 PM. EUREKA! I have seen a line of movable type, spaced and justified by machinery!” The temperamental machine, though, lost the race to market to the more reliable Linotype, and Twain was driven into bankruptcy after $300,000 in losses, believing all the way that James W. Paige, its inventor, was a “Shakespeare of mechanical invention.”

  1895 Too nervous to attend the opening night of his own play, Guy Domville, Henry James, who had spent five years attempting to conquer the London stage, distracted himself by going instead to Oscar Wilde’s latest success, An Ideal Husband. Returning in time to witness his play’s final lines, he missed one hostile exchange—when his hero lamented, “I’m the last, my lord, of the Domvilles!” a shout from the audience was said to have replied, “It’s a bloody good thing y’are”—but wasn’t spared the wrath of the gallery when, in response to the cheers of his friends in the crowd, he took a curtain call and was met with howls and catcalls from the cheap seats. The fiasco—“the most horrible hours of my life”—forever haunted James, but it also cured him for good of the theater bug and returned him to the grand fictional ambitions of his late period.

  1920 The successful London stage premiere of A. A. Milne’s Mr. Pim Passes By, starring Leslie Howard (the future Ashley Wilkes), made the author’s fortune before he ever wrote about a silly old bear.

  1943 Eleven novels into a career always promising to tip over from critical to popular acclaim, Dawn Powell had an idea for her twelfth. “I could write a novel about the Destroyers,” she wrote in her diary, “that cruel, unhappy, ever-dissatisfied group who feed on frustrations (Dorothy Parker, Wolcott Gibbs, Arthur Kober, etc.) . . . If people are in love, they must mar it with laughter; if people are laughing, they must stop it with ‘Your slip is showing.’ ” Five years later, the book became The Locusts Have No King, both a satire of ambitious literary New Yorkers that many fans consider her finest and, in her words, a “great true romance” of love held tightly in spite of the Destroyers (and the atom bomb).

  January 6

  BORN: 1883 Kahlil Gibran (The Prophet, Broken Wings), Bsharri, Ottoman Syria

  1931 E. L. Doctorow (Ragtime, The Book of Daniel, The March), Bronx, N.Y.

  DIED: 1944 Ida Tarbell (The History of the Standard Oil Company), 86, Bridgeport, Conn.

  2000 Don Martin (Don Martin Steps Out, The Mad Adventures of Captain Klutz), 68, Miami, Fla.

  1892 As homebound women living in the heart of New England’s intellectual ferment who turned their brilliance inward in private writings only published and celebrated after their deaths, Emily Dickinson and Alice James have often been compared. James lived just long enough to make the comparison herself, quoting Dickinson’s lines with approval in her diary just two months before her death: “How dreary to be somebody / How public, like a frog / To tell your name the livelong day / To an admiring bog!” “Dr. Tucky asked me the other day whether I had ever written for the press” like her brothers Henry and William, she added. “I vehemently disclaimed the imputation. How sad it is that the purely innocuous should always be supposed to have the trail of the family serpent upon them.”

  1952 Amos Oz ends A Tale of Love and Darkness, his memoir of his youth in the early days of Israel, with the event the book has been circling around: his mother’s suicide, when she was thirty-eight and Oz was twelve. Worn down by sadness and insomnia while visiting her sister, she spent the day walking the cold and rainy streets of Tel Aviv following her doctor’s prescription to “look for handsome young men” and then took all her sleeping pills at some point during the night and never woke up. At their apartment in Jerusalem, meanwhile, her husband and son, who was still a few years away from running off to a kibbutz and changing his name from Klausner to Oz, spent the same evening reading, writing, and playing checkers before going off to bed.

  1975 She made her first appearances in the Talk of the Town section of The New Yorker as “Sassy Antiguan Jamaica Kincaid,” whose observations were quoted extensively by her friend George W. S. Trow; on this day, in a report on lunchtime disco dancers, she confessed her favorite song was “Kung Fu Fighting.” But in those days Talk of the Town pieces didn’t carry bylines, so it was only when her name didn’t appear in the magazine that Kincaid really started writing for it. With her first book still almost a decade away, she gathered her forces under the magazine’s cloak of anonymity, apprenticing on subjects such as taking the train from Cleveland, a promotional event for cheese, and Boz Scaggs.

  1975 John Updike, in The New Yorker, on Iris Murdoch’s The Sacred and Profane Love Machine: “Let it be asked now: What other living novelist in the language is the peer of Iris Murdoch at inventing characters and moving them fascinatingly, at least as long as the book is in our hands?”

  January 7

  BORN: 1891 Zora Neale Hurston (Their Eyes Were Watching God), Notasulga, Ala.

  1957 Nicholson Baker (The Mezzanine, U and I, Vox), New York City

  DIED: 1967 David Goodis (Down There, Dark Passage), 49, Philadelphia

  1972 John Berryman (The Dream Songs), 57, Minneapolis

  1877 Completed on this day when its author was not yet fifteen, Fast and Loose: A Novelette certainly promises illicit fun. As one reviewer noted, “The very title suggests something desperate. Who is fast? What is loose? . . . We prophesy 128 pages of racy trash & are glad to think we shall be wasting our time agreeably.” The reviewer, though, was none other than the author, Edith Jones, who not only wrote the book (for the enjoyment of a friend) but attached three wittily scathing reviews—“the whole thing a fiasco,” said another—mocking her own efforts. Eight years later, Miss Jones married and became Edith Wharton, but despite this precocious beginning it wasn’t until she was thirty-eight that she published her first novel, The Touchstone.

  1938 Stabbed by an unknown assailant on a Paris street just after midnight, Samuel Beckett woke in the hospital to see his concerned employer, James Joyce, who soon brought him a reading lamp and paid for a private room for his recovery.

  1950 “I shall keep a diary.” Those words have been known to start a novel—and of course any number of diaries—but in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook, they don’t appear until a third of the way through the story. Finding herself turning a household event into a short story, Anna Wulf asks, “Why do I never write down, simply, what happens? . . . Obviously, my changing everything into fiction is simply a means of concealing something from myself.” And so she begins recording her life more directly, in her Blue Notebook. Or so she thinks. In Lessing’s nested story of self-discovery, that notebook proves no more satisfactory than the others: “The Blue Notebook, which I had expected to be the most truthful of the notebooks, is worse than any of them.”

  2000 What was a “McG”? To the cognoscenti, they were portraits of the recently deceased—usually those with only a fleeting or obscure relation to the mainstream of history—crafted on deadline for the New York Times obituary page by Robert McG. Thomas Jr. with an unusual and sympathetic enthusiasm for the eccentricities of personality and fate. In the short period of his flourishing in the late 1990s, as celebrated in the collection 52 McGs, Thomas profiled, among many others, “Lewis J. Gorin Jr, Instigator of a 1930’s Craze,” “Charles McCartney, Known for Travels with Goats,” and “Toots Barger, the Queen of Duckpins’ Wobbly World,” but on this day his own name came up on the Times obit assignment desk. The headline the next day read, “Robert McG. Thomas Jr., 60, Chronicler of Unsung Lives”: “The cause was abdominal cancer, said his wife, Joan.”

  January 8

  BORN: 1909 Evelyn Wood (speed-reading impresario), Logan, Utah

  1942 Stephen Hawking (A Brief History of Time), Oxford, England

  DIED: 1642 Galileo Galilei (Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems), 77, Arcetri, Italy

  1896 Paul Verlaine (Romances sans paroles), 51, Paris

>   1796 The earliest surviving letter by Jane Austen began with birthday greetings to her sister Cassandra, but its strongest sentiments were reserved for one whose birthday was the day before, a young Irishman named Tom Lefroy. At “an exceeding good ball” that night, Jane reported, “I am almost afraid to tell you how my Irish friend and I behaved. Imagine to yourself everything most profligate and shocking in the way of dancing and sitting down together.” But in Austen’s England, the promising young Lefroy, who in old age confessed a “boyish love” for Austen, couldn’t court a woman without property. Marrying an heiress instead, he returned to Ireland, where, a half century later, long after Austen’s death, he became Lord Chief Justice.

  1938 At the age of thirty-eight, with his father nearing death, Jorge Luis Borges began his first full-time job, as an assistant at a remote branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. Told by his colleagues to slow his cataloguing of the library’s paltry holdings or else they’d all be out of a job, he limited his work to an hour a day and spent the remainder reading and writing while his co-workers talked about sports and women. Though he was despondent at the “menial and dismal existence” he’d made for himself from his aristocratic legacy, during these years he wrote his most distinctive works, the stories of The Garden of Forking Paths, including “The Library of Babel,” the tale of an archive whose infinite contents drive its librarians to despair.

  1960 As she tells us on the first page of Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex, Callie—or Cal—was born for the first time on this day, as a girl in Detroit. Even before that day, though, two genes, “a pair of miscreants—or revolutionaries, depending on your view,” had given her a genetic and genital legacy that would result, fourteen and a half years later, in a discovery that she calls her second birth, as a boy, in a hospital in northern Michigan—Hemingway country, fittingly. But on this day, however complicated her eventual path from Callie to Cal, her father proudly took part in the simple, binary ritual of handing out cigars ribboned in pink.