A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1879 Horse thief, bank robber, murderer, and national hero, Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne in his mid-twenties but lived on in Australia as a legend of bush rebellion against the colonial authorities, helped in part by a notorious letter he handed in to a small-town newspaper on this day after robbing the local bank. Ferociously bitter toward his enemies—the “big ugly fat-necked wombat headed big bellied magpie legged narrow hipped splaw-footed sons of Irish Bailiffs or english landlords which is better known as Officers of Justice or Victorian Police”—and righteous in the cause of the poor, the Jerilderie Letter has a raw and vivid charisma that gave Peter Carey a voice for The True History of the Kelly Gang, his Booker Prize–winning 2000 re-creation of Kelly’s short and infamous career.

  1971 “You can play guitar, right?” “Yeah, I like to play guitar.” “Well, could you play a car crash with an electric guitar?” That was the extent of Lenny Kaye’s job interview to accompany Patti Smith in her first poetry reading at St. Mark’s Church in New York City, as recalled in Just Kids, her National Book Award–winning memoir of her bohemian youth. That first reading, with Kaye’s electric feedback behind her, sent her on a long and fruitful detour from writing into rock ‘n’ roll: the first lines of “Oath,” a poem she read that night, would soon be transformed into the first lines of “Gloria,” the opening song on her debut album, Horses: “Christ died for somebody’s sins / But not mine.”

  February 11

  BORN: 1944 Joy Williams (Taking Care, The Quick and the Dead), Chelmsford, Mass.

  1968 Mo Willems (Don’t Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus!), New Orleans

  DIED: 1650 René Descartes (Discourse on the Method), 53, Stockholm

  1963 Sylvia Plath (Ariel, Crossing the Water), 30, London

  1860 In Europe, after serving as American consul in Liverpool, Nathaniel Hawthorne made a literary discovery he was eager to share with his American publisher, James T. Fields: “Have you ever read the novels of Anthony Trollope? They precisely suit my taste; solid and substantial, written on the strength of beef and through the inspiration of ale, and just as real as if some giant had hewn a great lump out of the earth and put it under a glass case, with all its inhabitants going about their daily business and not suspecting that they were made a show of.” When Fields dined with Trollope in London a few months later and passed along Hawthorne’s praise, Trollope was so pleased he copied it down so he might carry it around with him.

  1917 When Virginia Woolf, the patrician novelist still early in her public career, and Katherine Mansfield, a vulgar young New Zealander with an unsavory reputation, finally met, their early encounters, at least on Woolf’s side, were not auspicious: she wrote her sister on this day that Mansfield was “a forcible and utterly unscrupulous character” and later recalled her first impression that she “stinks like a—well, civet cat that had taken to street walking.” But their short friendship was intense and immeasurably influential, each finding in the other a woman she could speak with about her work as with no one else, and when Woolf learned of Mansfield’s death from tuberculosis in 1923, she wrote, “It seemed to me there was no point in writing. Katherine won’t read it. Katherine’s my rival no longer.”

  1992 “By the second week in February,” begins one of the single-page comic-strip tales in Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, “the city’s wholesale calendar salesmen pack up their samples and enter a state of self-induced hibernation.” Now they can sleep late, “luxuriate in the passage of unmarked time,” encounter their products hanging, ignored, on the walls of restaurants and small businesses, and leave the seasonal work to the Christmas-decoration salesmen. Katchor’s Knipl strips, populated by liquid-soap technicians, freelance clarinetists, former elastic-waistband entrepreneurs, and the underemployed but always curious Mr. Knipl himself, imbue the minor industries and fading establishments of their unnamed city with a profound, though paunchy, elegance.

  February 12

  BORN: 1809 Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species), Shrewsbury, England

  1938 Judy Blume (Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret; Forever), Elizabeth, N.J.

  DIED: 1984 Julio Cortázar (Hopscotch, Blow-Up), 69, Paris

  2000 Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts), 77, Santa Rosa, Calif.

  NO YEAR Joining the African American migration from the South to the South Side of Chicago, Richard Wright found work at the city’s massive post office and wrote his first novel, Cesspool, a violent and raunchy satire of the lives of postal worker Jake Jackson and his friends that places the mechanical tedium of their mail sorting and their talk of sex, food, and Joe Louis in ironic counterpoint to the solemn uplift of radio celebrations of Lincoln’s birthday. The book found no takers; one agent replied, “I have a suspicion that you may have been under the influence of Joyce’s Ulysses in attempting to relate the events in one day in the life of a negro, and while I can see excellent possibilities in such treatment, you have unfortunately not realized any of them.” Only in 1963, after Wright’s death, was the novel published, under the new title Lawd Today.

  1976 The best of friends when they both lived in Barcelona during the “Boom” in Latin American fiction, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez had already begun to drift apart, thanks to both politics and personality, when they met in Mexico City at the premiere of Survivors of the Andes, a film of a Uruguayan plane crash (the same one recounted in Alive) for which Vargas Llosa had written the screenplay. “Brother!” cried García Márquez and raised his arms for an embrace, but Vargas Llosa punched his old friend in the face and knocked him to the ground, shouting, “That’s for what you said”—or “did,” according to other witnesses—“to Patricia,” Mario’s wife. They were the last words either writer—both Nobel laureates now—has spoken to the other.

  1989 The death of Thomas Bernhard by assisted suicide on this day, after years of illness, was, by his request, not revealed to the public until four days later, following a small private funeral. Also revealed was Bernhard’s final joke on the native country he had spent his career despising: a will that stipulated that none of his writings “shall be produced, printed, or even just recited within the borders of the Austrian state, however that state defines itself, for the duration of the legal copyright.” But like the artistic efforts of so many of his novels’ characters, this last gesture was a failure: ten years after his death, Bernhard’s heirs let the ban on production of his plays in Austria lapse, allowing his compatriots to enjoy, once again, his mockery of them.

  1996 Walter Kirn, in New York, on David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest: “It’s as though Paul Bunyan had joined the NFL or Wittgenstein had gone on ‘Jeopardy!’ The novel is that colossally disruptive. And that spectacularly good.”

  February 13

  BORN: 1903 Georges Simenon (Tropic Moon, The Hotel Majestic), Liège, Belgium

  1945 Simon Schama (Citizens, Rembrandt’s Eyes), London

  DIED: 1571 Benvenuto Cellini (Autobiography), 70, Florence, Italy

  1952 Josephine Tey (The Daughter of Time, The Franchise Affair), 55, London

  1605 The great exception to the contempt in which “literature by committee” is usually held is the King James Bible, a thoroughly bureaucratic undertaking fulfilled by a largely forgotten staff of dozens. Given their marching orders by the king in 1604, the translators were divided into six “companies,” among them the Second Oxford Company, which had perhaps the most crucial assignment of all: the Gospels, as well as the Acts of the Apostles and Revelation. A group of men versed in both the holy word and the worldly power struggles of the English Church, they met for the first time on this day in the Merton College rooms of the most worldly of them all, Sir Henry Savile, the only translator not to have taken holy orders and a true man of the Renaissance, as curious about mathematics and the unsettling ideas of Copernicus as he was about holy writ.

  1945 Held in Dresden as a German prisoner during the final convulsions of World War II, Kurt Vonnegut witnessed the Allied f
irestorm that consumed the city beginning on this night. For twenty years he tried to turn the experience into fiction—“I came home in 1945, started writing about it, and wrote about it, and wrote about it, and WROTE ABOUT IT”—before arriving at the jumbled and fragmented form of Slaughterhouse-Five, a novel that, amid its time travel and green spacemen, returns relentlessly to the inexplicable carnage of those days, echoed in the life of a time-traveling American prisoner who knows that “I, Billy Pilgrim, will die, have died, and always will die on February thirteenth, 1976,” the anniversary of the bombing.

  1953 We have no autobiographical evidence of Archimedes shouting “Eureka!” in the streets and only secondhand reports of Newton’s falling apple, but thanks to The Double Helix, James Watson’s account of the discovery of the structure of DNA, we do have, firsthand, the story of the day when Watson and his colleague Francis Crick solved the puzzle of the genetic molecule. Watson’s memoir, written fifteen years after the discovery, remains fresh with the brashness of its author’s youth, but even the unapologetically ambitious Watson confessed he was left “slightly queasy” when Crick, no less brash than he, burst into the Eagle, their regular Cambridge pub, and announced to “everyone within hearing distance that we had found the secret of life.”

  1974 Six weeks after The Gulag Archipelago was first published in the West, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn was forcibly exiled from the USSR and flown by the KGB to Frankfurt, where he was given five hundred German marks and driven to the country home of his friend Heinrich Böll.

  February 14

  BORN: 1856 Frank Harris (My Life and Loves), Galway, Ireland

  1944 Carl Bernstein (All the President’s Men), Washington, D.C.

  DIED: 1975 P. G. Wodehouse (The Code of the Woosters), 93, Southampton, N.Y.

  2010 Dick Francis (Dead Cert, Nerve, Forfeit), 89, Grand Cayman Island

  1886 “I have assigned my surname and family crest to medicine,” Anton Chekhov wrote to a friend, “and I shall cleave to that until my dying day. As for authorship, sooner or later I’ll have to give it up. Besides, medicine takes itself seriously, and requires a different label from toying with literature.”

  1932 Vladimir Nabokov, in goal as always, played his first match with a new Russian émigré soccer team in Berlin. A few weeks later, after he was knocked unconscious by a team of factory workers, his wife, Vera, put an end to his soccer career.

  1935 Samuel Beckett wrote to Tom McGreevy on Jane Austen, “Now I am reading the divine Jane. I think she has much to teach me.”

  1971 In Oaxaca, Mexico, Clifford Irving got the call he had flown there to receive, from a “friend of Octavio’s,” the code name for Howard Hughes, the pathologically reclusive billionaire who soon agreed—without shaking hands, of course—to collaborate with Irving on an authorized biography. Or at least that’s the story Irving told his editors at McGraw-Hill a few days later, leading them to eagerly advance $500,000 for “the most fantastic project of the decade.” In reality, as would be scandalously revealed a year later, his Oaxaca trip was just one element in an elaborate hoax: rather than meeting with Hughes, he spent Valentine’s Day there trysting with his mistress, the Danish pop star Nina van Pallandt.

  1989 At a memorial service in London for the writer Bruce Chatwin, Paul Theroux leaned forward and said to his friend Salman Rushdie, sitting in the pew in front of him, “I suppose we’ll be here for you next week, Salman.” It was Valentine’s Day, and that morning a BBC reporter had called Rushdie and asked, “How does it feel to know that you have just been sentenced to death by Ayatollah Khomeini?” Khomeini’s fatwa against Rushdie and “all those involved in” the publication of his novel The Satanic Verses drove the author into hiding for much of the next decade, which he later wrote about in Joseph Anton, a memoir named after the police alias he created from the first names of Conrad and Chekhov.

  February 15

  BORN: 1948 Art Spiegelman (Maus, Raw, Breakdowns), Stockholm

  1954 Matt Groening (Life in Hell), Portland, Ore.

  DIED: 1988 Richard Feynman (Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman!), 69, Los Angeles

  1998 Martha Gellhorn (The Face of War), 89, London

  1912 In her first sentence in The Freewoman, a spirited new feminist journal, nineteen-year-old Cecily Fairfield came out with a bang: “There are two kinds of imperialists—imperialists and bloody imperialists.” But by her second review, an attack on the anti-suffragist novelist Mrs. Humphry Ward, Fairfield decided, for the sake of her mother, to take a pseudonym. “Rebecca West born February 15, 1912,” she wrote in her scrapbook, borrowing a name from an outspoken character in Ibsen’s play Rosmersholm, and she quickly made a name for West with similarly stylish lines like these: “Mr Harold Owen is a natural slave, having no conception of liberty nor any use for it. So, as a Freewoman, I review his antifeminist thesis, Woman Adrift, with chivalrous reluctance, feeling that a steam engine ought not to crush a butterfly.”

  1941 J. D. Salinger embarked as a member of the entertainment staff of the SS Kungsholm, a Swedish American Line cruise ship.

  2001 The wheels were already starting to loosen on the Enron juggernaut when new CEO Jeff Skilling spent an agitated twenty minutes on the phone with Fortune reporter Bethany McLean, insisting that his company’s finances were “not a black box” before hanging up on her. On this morning, the next day, Enron CFO Andy Fastow flew to New York to unconvincingly address her concerns, finally ending their meeting with a confidential aside, “I don’t care what you say about the company. Just don’t make me look bad.” Soon after, McLean’s headline in Fortune, the magazine that had named Enron “America’s Most Innovative Company” for each of the last six years, read, “Is Enron Overpriced?” In 2003, after Enron had collapsed in scandal and bankruptcy, her conversations with Skilling and Fastow became one of the more astonishing episodes in her history, co-written with Peter Elkind, of Enron’s rise and fall, The Smartest Guys in the Room.

  2301 It’s a bitter winter morning when Ben Reich, the richest (and angriest) man in New York City, wakes up screaming once again. With a quick glance at his multi-clock he can take in, simultaneously, the time in the eight nearby inhabited worlds from Venus to Triton, but all that’s on his mind is one man, his great rival Craye D’Courtney. Telepathic surveillance may have kept the city murder-free for seventy-five years, but Reich has just allowed himself a forbidden thought: he must kill D’Courtney. Winning the first Hugo Award in 1953, Alfred Bester’s The Demolished Man helped usher in modern science fiction with a high-wire story of predatory corporations and mind-reading that paved the way for the coming innovations of Philip K. Dick and William Gibson.

  February 16

  BORN: 1838 Henry Adams (The Education of Henry Adams, Democracy), Boston

  1944 Richard Ford (The Sportswriter, Rock Springs), Jackson, Miss.

  DIED: 1992 Angela Carter (The Bloody Chamber, Wise Children), 51, London

  2012 Anthony Shadid (Night Draws Near, House of Stone), 43, Syria

  1845 and 1904 As Ian Frazier notes in Travels in Siberia, the two Americans who have written most influentially about Russia shared the same name and the same birthday, fifty-nine years apart. The younger of the two, George F. Kennan, the diplomat and architect of the Cold War “containment” strategy, was born in 1904 and named after his first cousin twice removed, George Kennan, born in 1845, who wrote Tent Life in Siberia, an affectionate and dramatic account of his adventures as a twenty-year-old from Ohio helping to survey a telegraph line across Russia. Two decades later, the elder Kennan returned to write Siberia and the Exile System, a scathing indictment of the tsar admired by both Twain and Tolstoy.

  1946 V. S. Pritchett, in the New Statesman and Nation, on George Orwell’s Critical Essays: “To say, for example, that Mr. Orwell’s mind appears to be fixed in the boyish satisfactions and rebellions of 1910, tells us nothing about his quality. We all have to be fixed somewhere.”

  1985 There was no single day when John M. Hull went blind. F
rom childhood, the dark shadows in his vision waxed and waned, but they finally grew until he could no longer tell day from night. His memoir, Touching the Rock, begins after that point, a record of complete blindness written by someone who once knew full sight but found himself forgetting what it was like. It’s a modestly extraordinary book, a diary of acute and often surprising philosophical and physical observations, among them the basic lesson of this February day that snow is dangerous for the blind not, as many assume, because it’s slippery, but because it makes the whole world disappear, muffling sounds and blanketing the landmarks that make the world navigable by ear and touch.

  February 17

  BORN: 1930 Ruth Rendell (A Demon in My View, A Fatal Inversion), London

  1955 Mo Yan (Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out), Gaomi, China

  DIED: 1994 Randy Shilts (And the Band Played On), 42, Guerneville, Calif.

  2006 Sybille Bedford (A Legacy, Jigsaw, Quicksand), 94, London

  1847 After Thomas Dunn English called him “thoroughly unprincipled, base and depraved . . . not alone an assassin in morals, but a quack in literature,” Edgar Allan Poe was awarded $225 in damages for libel, as well as six cents for costs.

  1903 “No one can advise or help you—no one.” That paradoxical disclaimer is at the heart of perhaps the most beloved book of writing advice, Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet, which Franz Kappus, the young poet of the title, published after Rilke’s death. Kappus was a nineteen-year-old student at a military academy in Vienna when he discovered that Rilke had preceded him, miserably, there. He sent Rilke some poems to critique, but in reply the poet—who was only twenty-seven himself—had less to say about how to write than how to live. Young poets have been looking within themselves and asking, “Must I write?” ever since.