A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1956 W. H. Auden, in the New York Times, on J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Return of the King: “Either, like myself, people find it a masterpiece of its genre or they cannot abide it, and among the hostile there are some, I must confess, for whose literary judgment I have great respect.”

  1967 There may have been more prolific authors in the golden age of the pulp magazines than Harry Stephen Keeler, who died on this day in Chicago, but few possessed an imagination as vast and untethered as his. In dozens of books whose titles—The Skull of the Waltzing Clown; Finger! Finger!; Y. Cheung, Business Detective; I Killed Lincoln at 10:13!—only hint at the wonders within, Keeler cast aside traditional notions of plot, character, and consequence in favor of an extravagance of incident and invention, following a theory of fiction he called “webwork” that one of the small army of fans dedicated to resurrecting his work has described as “coincidence porn.”

  1982 Adam Mars-Jones, in the TLS, on Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love: “That’s the trick, though: to throw your voice so that it seems to be coming from the furniture, and Carver is an excellent ventriloquist.”

  January 23

  BORN: 1783 Stendhal (The Red and the Black, On Love), Grenoble, France

  1930 Derek Walcott (Omeros, In a Green Night), Castries, St. Lucia

  DIED: 1991 Northrop Frye (Anatomy of Criticism, Fearful Symmetry), 78, Toronto

  2007 Ryszard Kapuściński (The Emperor, The Soccer War), 74, Warsaw

  1759 The French Encyclopédie was a compendium of human knowledge but also a radical Enlightenment attack on superstition at a time when revolution was brewing. Finally, after eight years of publication, the royal authorities had enough. “In the shadows of a dictionary which assembles an infinity of useful and curious facts about the arts and sciences,” warned the public prosecutor on this day, “one has admitted all sorts of absurdities, of impieties spread by all authors, embellished, augmented, and shockingly obvious,” and by summer the project was officially banned. But work continued, for the Encyclopédie had important friends as well as enemies. When police searched the house of its editor, Denis Diderot, they found nothing, because the tens of thousands of pages of manuscript had been hidden by the king’s chief censor in his own office.

  1886 James Ashcroft Noble, in the Academy, on Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde: “It is, indeed, many years since English fiction has been enriched by any work at once so weirdly imaginative in conception and so faultlessly ingenious in construction as this little tale, which can be read with ease in a couple of hours.”

  1892 The Spectator on Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles: “We confess that this is a story which, in spite of its almost unrivalled power, is very difficult to read, because in almost every page the mind rebels against the steady assumptions of the author, and shrinks from the untrue picture of a universe so blank and godless.”

  1931 “10:15 p.m. Important discovery . . . found monstrous barrel-shaped fossil of wholly unknown nature . . . Arrangement reminds one of certain monsters of primal myth, especially fabled Elder Things in Necronomicon . . . 11:30 p.m. Matter of highest—I might say transcendent—importance . . . Vast field of study opened . . . I’ve got to dissect one of these things before we take any rest.” The wireless dispatches from Dr. Lake’s expedition, which has already discovered Antarctic mountains higher than the Himalayas, send the rest of his scientific party into ecstasy with their revelations. But, as readers of H. P. Lovecraft will expect, such hopes soon turn to horror, and the following day, in Lovecraft’s At the Mountains of Madness, the terror begins as the monstrous Elder Things, awakened, begin their own dissections.

  1976 Russell Davies, in the TLS, on E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime: “I am at a loss to say how this most wooden of jigsaws has come to be regarded as a powerful and impressive novel—unless it be by that uncontrollably spawning common consent that takes over when the American public realizes a publicity campaign has got too big to face failure.”

  January 24

  BORN: 1776 E. T. A. Hoffmann (The Nutcracker and the Mouse King), Königsberg, Prussia

  1862 Edith Wharton (The House of Mirth, The Age of Innocence), New York City

  DIED: 1986 L. Ron Hubbard (Dianetics, Battlefield Earth), 74, Creston, Calif.

  2013 Richard G. Stern (Other Men’s Daughters), 84, Tybee Island, Ga.

  1922 A champion of T. S. Eliot since he called “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” the “best poem I have yet had or seen from an American,” Ezra Pound eagerly became the hands-on editor of The Waste Land in 1921. Much as Gordon Lish would do with Raymond Carver’s stories sixty years later, he pruned half of Eliot’s manuscript away, leaving a compact and opaque masterpiece that Eliot largely accepted, saying later that “I should wish the blue penciling . . . to be preserved as evidence of Pound’s critical genius.” Pound happily accepted credit, writing Eliot on this day to congratulate him on the revisions and attaching a little ditty saying that if readers wanted to know how The Waste Land was born, “Ezra performed the Caesarian Operation.”

  1934 T. H. Mathews, in the New Republic, on Dashiell Hammett’s The Thin Man: a “first-rate murder story,” but by writing a more conventional detective tale outside his “gangster-political” milieu, “perhaps Mr. Hammett is coasting.”

  1949 There are few more evocative accounts of the writing of a book than the notes, terse but full of sentiment, that appear at the end of Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memoirs of Hadrian. Her “Reflections on the Composition of Memoirs of Hadrian” reecounts the story of a love affair—taken up in youth, abandoned, and taken up again in maturity—between a writer and her subject, the Roman emperor Hadrian. Possessed by his character in the 1920s, Yourcenar worked fitfully on the story in the ’30s and then put it aside as impossible through most of the ’40s until, while sorting through a trunk stored during the war in Switzerland, she came across yellowed sheets from her lost manuscript, which she immediately took up again in a passion that consumed her for the next three years until Hadrian was complete.

  1954 In a safari plane crash, Ernest Hemingway ruptured his kidney, spleen, and liver and suffered a concussion, burns, and two crushed vertebrae.

  January 25

  BORN: 1882 Virginia Woolf (To the Lighthouse, Mrs. Dalloway), London

  1950 Gloria Naylor (The Women of Brewster Place), New York City

  DIED: 1640 Robert Burton (The Anatomy of Melancholy), 62, Oxford, England

  1855 Dorothy Wordsworth (Grasmere Journals), 83, Rydal, England

  1533 It’s the most storied and significant marriage in European history, but in Hilary Mantel’s telling the wedding between Henry VIII and Anne Boleyn, the second wife for whom he rebelled against the pope, takes place “almost in secret, with no celebration, just a huddle of witnesses, the married pair both speechless except for the small admissions of intent forced out of them by the ceremony.” Among the witnesses, Thomas Cromwell exchanges threats with his fellow courtier William Brereton, who three years later will be executed, at Cromwell’s bidding, along with the new queen. As often as their tale has been told, Mantel gave it new life—with a surprisingly sympathetic Cromwell, one of history’s villains, at its center—in the Booker Prize–winning Wolf Hall and its Booker-winning sequel, Bring Up the Bodies.

  1836 Chasing promises of payment for writing he’d already done, Nathaniel Hawthorne moved to Boston at thirty-one to take the editorship of the American Magazine of Useful and Entertaining Knowledge, a hodgepodge periodical of mostly regurgitated fact and advice. Writing and editing nearly the entire magazine on his own, he enlisted his older sister, Elizabeth, to help. “Concoct, concoct, concoct,” he wrote her on this day. “I make nothing of writing a history or biography before dinner. Do you the same.” Promised $500 for a year’s work, he lasted half the year and only received $20. Giving up in exhaustion and dismay, he realized, as he wrote his younger sister, “this world is as full of rogues as Beelzebub”—hi
s cat—“is of fleas.”

  1851 The Spectator on the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning: “Like all bad artists, she never knows when she has said enough, and does not spend sufficient time upon her poems to make them short. She labours under the mistake that two-hundred-and-forty pence make a pound in the coinage of Parnassus.”

  1973 Mary McCarthy, in the New York Review of Books, on David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest: “Despite the tone of concern and commitment, the book has less to contribute to the public interest . . . than to consumer appetites for unauthorized prowls down the corridors of power.”

  January 26

  BORN: 1929 Jules Feiffer (Feiffer, Little Murders), Bronx, N.Y.

  1945 Thom Jones (The Pugilist at Rest, Cold Snap), Aurora, Ill.

  DIED: 1996 Harold Brodkey (First Love and Other Sorrows), 65, New York City

  2000 Jean-Claude Izzo (Total Chaos, Chourmo, Solea), 54, Marseille, France

  1901 Unable at first to interest a publisher in her tale of a mischievous rabbit, Beatrix Potter undertook to print privately an edition of 250 of The Tale of Peter Rabbit herself, in one copy of which she wrote a eulogy for the real-life model for her hero: “In affectionate remembrance of poor old Peter Rabbit, who died on the 26th. of January 1901 at the end of his 9th. year. He was bought, at a very tender age, in the Uxbridge Road, Shepherds Bush, for the exorbitant sum of 4/6 . . . [W]hatever the limitations of his intellection or outward shortcomings of his fur, and his ears and toes, his disposition was uniformly amiable and his temper unfailingly sweet. An affectionate companion and a quiet friend.”

  1931 On a winter’s evening, Charles Fort, who would much rather have been sitting in the New York Public Library or at his kitchen table in the Bronx adding to the tens of thousands of tiny slips of paper he had filled with notes about phenomena unexplained by science, was induced to make his way down to the Savoy Plaza Hotel, where he was surprised by the first meeting of the Fortean Society, an organization founded to promote Fort’s odd brand of mystical skepticism of science and religion, which he outlined in compendiums such as Lo! and The Book of the Damned. Among the society’s founders: Ben Hecht, Booth Tarkington, and Theodore Dreiser, who called Fort “the most fascinating literary figure since Poe.” Among the unconvinced: H. G. Wells, who thought him “one of the most damnable bores who ever cut scraps from out of the way newspapers.”

  1963 At the end of a stay in New York at the height of her American success, Muriel Spark threw herself a farewell party and set about matchmaking between two fellow New Yorker contributors. Her shy new friend Shirley Hazzard was just thirty-two and hardly known as a writer, while Francis Steegmuller was a fifty-seven-year-old widower of rather magnificent reputation as a translator and writer, but Spark thought they should marry and, after a two-hour conversation at the party and a year’s courtship, they did, beginning a literary alliance of rare charm and endurance. When they returned from their honeymoon, Spark sent a photo of her apartment building with the inscription “The Scene of the First Encounter between Shirley Hazzard and Francis Steegmuller by Muriel Spark. (Her best book ever.)”

  January 27

  BORN: 1832 Lewis Carroll (Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland), Daresbury, England

  1957 Frank Miller (Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, Sin City), Olney, Md.

  DIED: 2009 John Updike (Rabbit at Rest, The Witches of Eastwick), 76, Danvers, Mass.

  2010 J. D. Salinger (The Catcher in the Rye, Nine Stories), 91, Cornish, N.H.

  1837 In an echo of the climactic duel in his poem Eugene Onegin, in which the dandy Onegin kills the poet Lansky, Alexander Pushkin was mortally wounded in the abdomen from a dozen paces away by Georges-Charles d’Anthès, an exiled French gallant who had publicly courted Pushkin’s wife, Natalya, for years (before surprising St. Petersburg society by marrying her plainer sister). With his return shot, Pushkin, who spurred the duel by insulting d’Anthès after he flirted with Natalya at a ball, managed only to break two of his rival’s ribs. Two days later, ending a short career that later saw him acclaimed as Russia’s greatest poet, he succumbed in his library at home; it is said that when a doctor suggested he see his friends before he died, he looked at the books surrounding him and replied, “Farewell, my friends.”

  1939 Samuel Beckett asked Stanley Hayter to engrave a stone from the Liffey River for the upcoming fifty-seventh birthday of James Joyce.

  1945 “So for us even the hour of liberty rang out grave and muffled, and filled our souls with joy and yet with a painful sense of pudency, so that we should have liked to wash our consciences and memories clean from the foulness that lay upon them.” On this day, nine days after the German abandonment of the Auschwitz concentration camp, Russian troops arrived to find only a few thousand prisoners remaining, among them Primo Levi, left behind from the murderous Nazi evacuation because of his scarlet fever. That “hour of liberty,” such as it was, stands as the hinge between Levi’s two memoirs, Survival in Auschwitz and The Re-awakening (or If This Is a Man and The Truce, in their better British titles), published sixteen years apart but linked by the day that ends one book and begins the next.

  1979 Though he was only thirty-one, still at the peak of a Hall of Fame goaltending career, Ken Dryden went into the 1978–79 season knowing it would be his last in pro hockey. The Game, his memoir of that final season, acclaimed ever since as the great hockey book (if you like your sports books heavier on analysis than action), doesn’t reach its emotional peak at the season’s end, when Dryden’s Montreal Canadiens won their fourth straight Stanley Cup, but midway through, when the Canadiens traveled to Boston for another hard-fought game against the Bruins, their great rivals, and Dryden—whose cerebral stardom made him the Bill Bradley of hockey—was reminded that every Ali needs a Frazier to push him to greatness.

  January 28

  BORN: 1873 Colette (Chéri, Claudine at School, Gigi), Yonne, France

  1936 Ismail Kadare (The General of the Dead Army), Gjirokastër, Albania

  DIED: 1939 W. B. Yeats (The Tower, “The Second Coming”), 73, Menton, France

  1996 Jerry Siegel (Superman), 81, Los Angeles

  1728 On this evening Jonathan Swift received a message he had been dreading, announcing the death of Esther Johnson and, with it, the end of the great friendship of his life. They met when he was twenty-one and she just eight: he tutored her as a child, nicknaming her Stella, and when she reached maturity she followed him to Dublin. Biographers doubt the rumors they were married in secret and generally trust Swift’s assertions of their celibacy, but the passion between them was unmistakable: as Swift wrote to a friend, “Believe me that violent friendship is much more lasting, and as much engaging, as violent love.” After her death, Swift confessed in “On the Death of Mrs. Johnson” that he was too heartsick to attend her funeral, and indeed had to move away from a window through which he could see the light from the church where it was being held.

  1856 In Beloved, Toni Morrison made a ghost story out of one of the most haunting public episodes in the history of American slavery. On a snowy January night, a family of eight slaves in Boone County, Kentucky, took horses and a sled from their masters and broke for freedom across the frozen Ohio River to Cincinnati. Just hours later, though, a posse tracked them down to the house where they were hiding and entered to find Margaret Garner, having cut the throat of her two-year-old daughter, threatening to kill her other children to keep them from being returned to slavery. Garner’s dramatic trial became a cause célèbre, and her story was retold by Harriet Beecher Stowe in Dred. Morrison discovered the story in a newspaper clipping when editing two documentary books in the early ’70s, but chose to learn no more about Garner as she imagined her characters Sethe and Beloved. “The rest,” she said, “was novel writing.”

  1913 A long morning trip by train and elephant, after an exhausting night in which he made his last declaration of love to his friend Syed Ross Masood, left E. M. Forster susceptible to the echoes of the Barabar Caves,
an experience he’d turn during the next decade into the pivotal Marabar Caves scene in A Passage to India.

  January 29

  BORN: 1927 Edward Abbey (Desert Solitaire, The Monkey Wrench Gang), Indiana, Pa.

  1939 Germaine Greer (The Female Eunuch), Melbourne, Australia

  DIED: 1963 Robert Frost (North of Boston, New Hampshire), 88, Boston

  2004 Janet Frame (Owls Do Cry, An Angel at My Table), 79, Dunedin, New Zealand

  1888 The last years of Edward Lear were melancholy, as was the entire life of the man known for his nonsense, afflicted as he was by epilepsy and depression. He had after years of travels settled in San Remo on the Italian Mediterranean, and as his heart wore down in his last years he buried his friend and servant Giorgio Cocali and his cat Foss but did have the pleasure of finishing his series of two hundred illustrations of his great friend Tennyson’s poems. And though the funeral after his death on this day was a lonely affair, too sudden and distant for any of his English friends to make it, he also left a wall covered with the photographs of his loved ones, as he described in his last letter to the Tennysons: “There! it ain’t everybody as has such friends! Goodbye, E. L.”

  1898 The Spectator on H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds: “Any man can be original if he may be also vague and inexpressive. Mr. Wells when he is most giving wings to his imagination is careful to be concrete and specific.”