A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1924 The restless interests of Edmund Wilson—who wrote about everything from Karl Marx to modernist poets to the Zuni to the Dead Sea Scrolls—found perhaps their furthest reach when, having taken work as a press agent for the Royal Swedish Ballet, he interested his employers in Cronkhite’s Clocks, a work of his own composition that he described in a letter on this day as “a great super-ballet of New York,” written for “a Negro comedian and seventeen other characters, full of orchestra, movie machine, typewriters, radio, phonograph, riveter, electromagnet, alarm clocks, telephone bells, and jazz band,” as well as, in a starring role, Charlie Chaplin. But Chaplin, making The Gold Rush in California at the time, said he only worked on things he created, and that was the end of the ballet.

  1959 With his four children, four months’ worth of food, five hundred books, and a crew of a dozen or so ready to sail on his hundred-ton schooner, Sterling Hayden, once a wartime OSS agent in the Balkans and once promoted by Paramount Pictures as “the Beautiful Blond Viking God,” now bitterly divorced and sour on Hollywood, waited for a judge’s permission to set out for the freedom of the South Seas. The judge ruled he couldn’t take the children out of the country, but Hayden hoisted anchor anyway and sailed for Tahiti, an adventure he recounted in a memoir named after his ship, Wanderer, a brooding, two-fisted tale of the sea and Hollywood ennui published not long before his return to the screen as Gen. Jack T. Ripper in Dr. Strangelove.

  January 16

  BORN: 1933 Susan Sontag (On Photography, Against Interpretation), New York City

  1955 Mary Karr (The Liars’ Club, Cherry, Lit), Groves, Tex.

  DIED: 1794 Edward Gibbon (The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire), 56, London

  2009 John Mortimer (Rumpole of the Bailey), 85, Turville Heath, England

  1605 Published: El ingenioso hidalgo don Quixote de la Mancha, the first volume of Don Quixote, by Miguel de Cervantes (Francisco de Robles, Madrid)

  1632 It is possible that both René Descartes and Thomas Browne were in attendance when Dr. Nicolaes Tulp presented the public dissection Rembrandt immortalized in The Anatomy Lesson. The annual “anatomies” were a major social event, and both Descartes and Browne were in Holland then and had great scientific and philosophical interest in the subject (Descartes had made his own animal dissections in search of the sources of memory and emotion). The mere possibility they were there was enough for W. G. Sebald, who in the midst of a meditation on Browne in the early pages of The Rings of Saturn claims that Rembrandt, unlike Descartes, was drawn not to the mechanics of the body but to the grotesque, open-mouthed horror of the cadaver, a criminal hanged just an hour before.

  NO YEAR Before The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, Ayn Rand found her first audience on Broadway with a play called Night of January 16th. Rand had disowned it by then—on opening night she sat in the back row and yawned “out of genuine boredom”—but with its theatrical gimmick, a trial in which a jury of audience members decided on the guilt or innocence of an accused murderer, the play lasted for six months on Broadway and became a local-theater staple; in a bit of happenstance enjoyed by Robert Coover in his novel The Public Burning, the part of District Attorney Flint in the Whittier Community Players production in 1938 was played by local lawyer Richard M. Nixon.

  1966 Conrad Knickerbocker, in the New York Times, on Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood: “At a time when the external happening has become largely meaningless and our reaction to it brutalized, when we shout ‘Jump’ to the man on the ledge, Mr. Capote has restored dignity to the event. His book is also a grieving testament of faith in what used to be called the soul.”

  1979 “Proceeding with Bellefleur. Slowly, as usual.” It’s the sort of unsatisfied remark you might read in any writer’s diary, but in the Journals of Joyce Carol Oates, whose productivity—bewildering to everyone but herself—has always threatened to obscure the value of her works, it’s incongruous enough that even she took note: “I suppose since I’ve written 450 pages since Sept. 24 I can’t have gone as slowly as it seems.” Time feels different to her when she’s consumed in her stories, she added: she feels like she’s “crawling on her hands and knees” while to everyone else it seems she is sprinting, a “queer unfathomable teasing paradox.”

  January 17

  BORN: 1860 Anton Chekhov (“The Lady with the Dog,” Uncle Vanya), Taganrog, Russia

  1962 Sebastian Junger (The Perfect Storm, Fire, War), Belmont, Mass.

  DIED: 1964 T. H. White (The Once and Future King, Mistress Masham’s Repose), 57, Piraeus, Greece

  1972 Betty Smith (A Tree Grows in Brooklyn), 75, Shelton, Conn.

  1904 On Anton Chekhov’s forty-fourth birthday (six months before his death), The Cherry Orchard had its premiere at the Moscow Art Theatre, directed by Constantin Stanislavsky.

  1925 Laura Ingalls Wilder had written for the Missouri Ruralist, a farm newspaper, for over a dozen years, but her short article “My Ozark Kitchen,” in Country Gentleman on this day, was among her first for a national audience. Her move to a wider readership was pushed by her daughter, Rose Wilder Lane, already one of the best-paid freelance writers in the country. “I’m trying to train you as a writer for the big market,” Rose wrote. “You must understand that what sold was your article, edited . . . So that next time you can do the editing yourself.” Seven years later Rose edited her mother’s childhood stories into a book called Little House in the Big Woods, the beginning of a series whose true authorship—by mother or daughter or, most likely, both—has been debated ever since.

  1929 For ten years, Olive Oyl, her tiny and ambitious brother, Castor, and her meathead boyfriend, Ham Gravy, had been starring in E. C. Segar’s The Thimble Theatre in Hearst’s New York Journal, along with a series of oddball minor characters who cycled in and out of the series. In this day’s episode, Castor Oyl went in search of someone to captain a boat he had bought as part of his latest get-rich-quick scheme (involving a good-luck bird named the Whiffle Hen). “Hey there! Are you a sailor?” he shouted at a man on the dock. “ ’Ja think I’m a cowboy?” came the reply from a man in a sailor suit with a corncob pipe and massive, tattooed forearms. And so was born Popeye, who soon took over the strip and long outlived his creator, who died of leukemia in 1938.

  1971 Joseph Epstein’s “liberal” expression of disgust with homosexuality—and its alleged new vogue—in a Harper’s essay brought post-Stonewall protesters into the Harper’s offices and pushed Merle Miller, a novelist, reporter, screenwriter, and former Harper’s editor, to make his own statement in the New York Times Magazine. In “What It Means to Be a Homosexual,” Miller came out at age fifty-one, recounting a history of being called “sissy,” finding love among young outcasts, and living a closeted life in a culture that despised his sexuality, often under the cloak of “toleration.” While Epstein declared he could think of nothing worse for his sons than to be gay, Miller closed his piece, which spurred a record 2,000 letters to the Times, most of them grateful, by saying, “I would not choose to be anyone or any place else.”

  January 18

  BORN: 1882 A. A. Milne (Winnie-the-Pooh, When We Were Very Young), London

  1925 Gilles Deleuze (Anti-Oedipus, A Thousand Plateaus), Paris

  DIED: 1936 Rudyard Kipling (Kim, The Jungle Book), 70, London

  1989 Bruce Chatwin (In Patagonia, The Songlines), 48, Nice, France

  1902 “As for my not having read Stevenson’s letters—my dear child!” Jack London wrote to Anna Strunsky, his fellow Socialist and the woman to whom he would have rather been married. “When the day comes that I have achieved a fairly fit scientific foundation and a bank account of a thousand dollars, then come & be with me when I lie on my back all day long and read, & read, & read, & read.”

  1939 With E. M. Forster and a young friend of Isherwood’s to see them off on the boat train from London, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood left England for America. Well traveled, this time they were leaving for good, each for his own reasons—
Auden to escape the cage of his celebrity and Isherwood out of a general restlessness: “I couldn’t stop traveling.” But their departure, on the eve of war, was seen as a betrayal by some at home. The Daily Mail called Auden a “disgrace to poetry,” and Evelyn Waugh, in his next novel, Put Out More Flags, satirized them as Parsnip and Pimpernell. Arriving to a snowstorm in New York eight days later, the two, friends for a decade and a half and sometimes lovers, soon parted, with Auden settling into the city, and Isherwood heading to California in May.

  1947 Raymond Chandler asked his editor at the Atlantic Monthly to pass along a message to his zealous copy editor: “When I split an infinitive, God damn it, I split it so it will stay split.”

  1960 Mikael Blomkvist, crusading editor in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy, is born.

  1969 George Steiner, in The New Yorker, on Hermann Hesse: “Why the Hesse vogue? Possibly a fairly rude, simple answer is in order. The young have read little and compared less.”

  1999 Daphne Merkin, in The New Yorker, on A. L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss: “This is one of those books that makes you curious to meet the author; you wonder how Kennedy came to dream up Helen and Edward and how, at the age of thirty-three, she understands so much about the existential unease that wafts, unremarked on, through ordinary life.”

  January 19

  BORN: 1809 Edgar Allan Poe (“The Raven,” The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket), Boston

  1929 Patricia Highsmith (The Talented Mr. Ripley), Fort Worth, Tex.

  DIED: 1997 James Dickey (Deliverance, Buckdancer’s Choice), 73, Columbia, S.C.

  2011 Wilfrid Sheed (A Middle Class Education), 80, Great Barrington, Mass.

  1813 Among the most unsettling of American tales is “William Wilson,” the story of a man haunted from youth by a double who shares his name, his size, his features, and even this date as his birthday. Intimate rivals as schoolboys, the two Wilsons part ways, but the narrator finds, as he leads a life of cruelty and extravagant debauchery across Europe, that his double appears again and again at his side to remind him of his nature in low, insinuating whispers. When, finally, the narrator is driven to murder his twin, he finds, as Fight Club fans might not be surprised to hear, that he has murdered himself. In a further blurring of identity, the Wilsons share their birthday (though not its year) with their creator, Edgar Allan Poe.

  1921 “So long.” “See you tomorrow.” For a short time one winter, two boys played together in the unfinished house the father of one of them was building and, when evening came each day, parted with those words, until one day one boy didn’t come back. William Maxwell built his short novel So Long, See You Tomorrow from two events over a half-century old that still caused him a vertigo not unlike what you might feel walking along an unfinished beam with the risk of falling below: the death of his mother in 1918 and the sudden absence of his friend Cletus, who didn’t return to play after his father killed a man and then himself.

  1943 One night at Patsy’s Bar and Grill in Harlem, a fellow patron called Langston Hughes over to join him and a friend. As the man explained, with a stubborn fatalism, that he didn’t know what kind of cranks he was building in his war-plant job—“I don’t crank with those cranks. I just make ’em”—his friend said, “You sound right simple.” On this day soon after, Hughes added a new character to his weekly column in the Chicago Defender, “My Simple Minded Friend,” who commented on the news of the day with the same plain-spoken sensibility and who, over time, developed into Jessie B. Semple, the hero of Hughes’s “Simple” stories and the most popular creation in his wide-ranging career.

  January 20

  BORN: 1804 Eugène Sue (The Mysteries of Paris), Paris

  1959 Tami Hoag (Night Sins, Kill the Messenger), Cresco, Iowa

  DIED: 1900 John Ruskin (The Stones of Venice, Modern Painters), 80, Brantwood, England

  2011 Reynolds Price (A Long and Happy Life, Kate Vaiden), 77, Durham, N.C.

  1006 It’s fortunate that any details at all about the life of Murasaki Shikibu have survived the thousand years since she lived, much less that her epic of courtly life, The Tale of Genji, has itself endured to be considered by many the first novel. Murasaki was a court nickname for a woman whose real name and birth date aren’t certain, but we do know, thanks to a diary entry, that she entered service in the emperor’s court on “the twenty-ninth of the twelfth month,” the last day of the year in the imperial Japanese calendar and the equivalent in the West, as some scholars measure it, of January 20, 1006. By that point, it’s thought, she had already written much of The Tale of Genji; its early episodes, meant to entertain the aristocracy, may have been what won their author her place in the empress’s entourage.

  1775 Samuel Johnson had long been an irascible skeptic of the “Ossian” poems then taking Europe by storm, which the Scottish poet James Macpherson claimed he had translated from the work of a third-century Gaelic bard. Asked in 1763 whether any modern man could have composed such poetry, he growled, “Yes, Sir, many men, many women, and many children.” And his final reply in his exchange with the equally fractious Macpherson is legendary: “You want me to retract. What shall I retract? I thought your book an imposture from the beginning . . . Your rage I defy . . . and what I have heard of your morals disposes me to pay regard not to what you shall say, but what you can prove.” But though most came to agree with Johnson that the poems were a fraud, their popularity only increased, gaining admirers from Goethe and Wordsworth to Jefferson and Napoleon.

  1988 With more pounds of dog food in his backpack than pennies in his pocket and a vague hope of finding a job and a place to stay in California, Lars Eighner, out of work for a year and about to be evicted, set up on the shoulder of Highway 290 west out of Austin, Texas, with his dog Lizbeth and a sign reading, “To L.A. with Dog.” Eighner made it to L.A. but soon hitched back to Austin, where he spent the next few years surviving on the streets and writing what became, after his essay “On Dumpster Diving” was an instantly anthologized hit, Travels with Lizbeth, a memoir whose wry elegance contrasts with the desperation of his circumstances.

  January 21

  BORN: 1952 Louis Menand (The Metaphysical Club, American Studies), Syracuse, N.Y.

  1962 Tyler Cowen (Discover Your Inner Economist), Kearny, N.J.

  DIED: 1932 Lytton Strachey (Eminent Victorians, Queen Victoria), 51, Ham, England

  1950 George Orwell (1984, Animal Farm, Homage to Catalonia), 46, London

  1846 “How do you write, o my poet?” Elizabeth Barrett, in a question echoed at thousands of author appearances since, asked Robert Browning, “with steel pens, or Bramah pens, or goosequills or crowquills?” In her case she asked because she had a gift for him, “a penholder which was given to me when I was a child, & which I have used both then & since in the production of various great epics & immortal ‘works.’ ” She had replaced it with a lighter one, and asked, “Will you have it dearest? Yes—because you can’t help it.”

  1849 “Do you know Sarah Helen Whitman?” Horace Greeley wrote his fellow editor Rufus Griswold about a poet of their acquaintance. “Of course, you have heard it rumored that she is to marry Poe. Well, she has seemed to me a good girl, and—you know what Poe is . . . Has Mrs. Whitman no friend within your knowledge that can faithfully explain Poe to her?”

  1863 Few of Emily Dickinson’s poems were published during her lifetime, but that doesn’t mean none of the others had readers. When her uncle Loring Norcross died, a few years after his wife, Emily’s beloved aunt Lavinia, Dickinson wrote in sympathy to her cousins Loo and Fanny, and closed the letter, “Good night. Let Emily sing for you because she cannot pray.” The twelve lines that followed, which begin “ ’Tis not that dying hurts us so— / ’Tis living—hurts us more—,” were not written for the occasion—death was no stranger to Dickinson, and she had composed them during the previous year—but they were appropriate to a New England January, with their description of the living as birds who, unlike the dead they mourn,
don’t fly south to a “Better Latitude” when the frost approaches. “We—” she said to her grieving cousins, “are the Birds—that stay.”

  1870 Philip Henry Gosse was a Victorian naturalist of some repute who, in addition to popularizing the aquarium, spent much of his busy career attempting to reconcile the geologic evidence of the earth’s age with the biblical story of creation. For readers, though, he has survived as the other title character in his son Edmund’s classic memoir, Father and Son. Entrusted after his wife’s death with the spiritual development of young Edmund, the elder Gosse and his Protestant sect descended on the child with a spiritual intensity that had the unintended effect of propelling Edmund into fierce secularism, a “horrid, insidious infidelity” that Gosse Sr. lamented in a lengthy letter on this day that his son, more than three decades later, used to close his memoir and to demonstrate their final irreconcilability.

  January 22

  BORN: 1788 Lord Byron (Don Juan, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), London

  1937 Joseph Wambaugh (The New Centurions, The Onion Field), East Pittsburgh, Pa.

  DIED: 1993 Kobo Abe (The Woman in the Dunes, The Ruined Map), 68, Tokyo

  2003 Bill Mauldin (Up Front, Back Home), 81, Newport Beach, Calif.

  1824 Even in 1824 the age of thirty-six was not elderly, but for Lord Byron it was. Mired in the rain in Missolonghi, where he had hoped to be the savior of Greek independence but was finding he was mainly its banker, and where a beautiful, black-eyed teenage page named Loukas had similarly shown more interest in his gifts than in his affections, Byron wrote one of his final poems, “On This Day I Complete My Thirty-Sixth Year,” in which he declares that since, at his advanced age, he can no longer rouse the hearts of others, he has nothing left but to seek a “Soldier’s Grave” in the “Land of honourable Death.” And die he did, three months later, though from sepsis, not the sword.

  1948 Despite his success in placing his early stories in national magazines, J. D. Salinger still hadn’t been embraced by the one he wanted most, The New Yorker, which had accepted his first Holden Caulfield story but kept it on the shelf for five years. Finally New Yorker editor William Maxwell wrote to Salinger’s agent to say, “We like parts of ‘The Bananafish’ by J. D. Salinger very much, but it seems to lack any discoverable story or point.” Salinger eagerly made the extensive changes they requested, and on this day, a year later, their long back-and-forth about the story ended with a final editorial query before “A Perfect Day for Bananafish” could be published: is “bananafish” one word or two?