A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1903 Early in a marvelously varied career that included writing The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man and running the NAACP, James Weldon Johnson left his position as a grade-school principal in Jacksonville to take a chance on Broadway songwriting with his brother, Rosamond, and the performer Bob Cole. They were an immediate success (on this day, the New York Sun called them the “ebony Offenbachs”), and their biggest hit, “Under the Bamboo Tree,” has had as long a life—quoted by T. S. Eliot in The Waste Land and sung by Judy Garland in Meet Me in St. Louis and Steve Martin in The Man with Two Brains—as another of the Johnson brothers’ compositions, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” which came to be known as the Black National Anthem.

  1922 Rilke took an interest in another younger writer, asking their mutual publisher, Kurt Wolff, to tell him of anything new from Franz Kafka, known for just a few stories at that point: “I am among his most devoted readers.”

  1974 In the early ’70s Ted Hughes and his third wife, Carol, both raised on farms, bought a farm of their own in her wet and rough home country of North Devon. The notes he took there, he found, were liveliest when set down immediately; if he tried recollecting and refashioning them in tranquility, in the usual poetic process, they lost what freshness they’d captured. And so the lyrics collected in Moortown Diary are as rough as the country, among them “February 17,” the story of a lamb he hacked stillborn from its mother at sunrise, and “Feeding out-wintering cattle at twilight,” in which the poet, delivering hay to cows at the other end of the same day, stumbles through wind and “night-thickness” so strong he seems lucky to have escaped with his life.

  February 18

  BORN: 1929 Len Deighton (The Ipcress File, Berlin Game), London

  1957 George Pelecanos (King Suckerman, Hard Revolution), Washington, D.C.

  DIED: 1546 Martin Luther (Ninety-five Theses, Luther Bible), 62, Eisleben, Germany

  2009 Tayeb Salih (Season of Migration to the North), 80, London

  1931 Toni Morrison is one of the least autobiographical of novelists—after admitting to an audience in her home state of Ohio that she had canceled a contract for a memoir because she wasn’t interested enough in her own childhood, she said, “People say to write what you know. I’m here to tell you, no one wants to read that, ’cause you don’t know anything. So write about something you don’t know”—but on the opening page of Song of Solomon she tucked a small link to herself into an otherwise fantastic event: the day that Robert Smith, the North Carolina Mutual Life Insurance agent, announces he will take off from the cupola of Mercy Hospital at three in the afternoon and “fly away on my own wings” is February 18, 1931, the date of Morrison’s own birth in Lorain, Ohio.

  1949 Flannery O’Connor was just twenty-three, with a few short stories accepted by magazines, but she knew what she wanted, and it wasn’t being treated like “a slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl.” That’s how she thought John Selby, an editor at Rinehart, had addressed her when he told her that her resistance to criticism was “most unbecoming in a writer so young.” In a reply on this day, she resisted further: “I am amenable to criticism but only within the sphere of what I am trying to do; I will not be persuaded to do otherwise. The finished book, though I hope less angular, will be just as odd if not odder than the nine chapters you have now.” The odd book, when finished, she called Wise Blood; it was published instead by Harcourt, Brace.

  1975 The understanding of one of the classics of European literature, studied intensely for three-quarters of a century, was upended when Chinua Achebe, the most acclaimed West African novelist, presented as the Chancellor’s Lecture at the University of Massachusetts “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.” Cutting through the novel’s layers of irony with the blunt statement “Conrad was a bloody racist,” Achebe argued that even while portraying the horrors of European colonialism, Conrad couldn’t imagine a full humanity for Africans. “Africa,” he said, “is to Europe as the picture is to Dorian Gray—a carrier unto whom the master unloads his physical and moral deformities so that he may go forward, erect and immaculate.”

  February 19

  BORN: 1958 Helen Fielding (Bridget Jones’s Diary, Cause Celeb), Morley, England

  1964 Jonathan Lethem (The Fortress of Solitude, Motherless Brooklyn), Brooklyn

  DIED: 1951 André Gide (The Counterfeiters, The Immoralist), 81, Paris

  1952 Knut Hamsun (Hunger, The Growth of the Soil), 92, Grimstad, Norway

  1834 Fantastic stories of whales were general in New England, even among those who didn’t go to sea. On this day Ralph Waldo Emerson noted in his journal the tale he had heard while sharing a stagecoach with a sailor, of “an old sperm whale which he called a white whale which was known for many years by the whalemen as Old Tom & who rushed upon the boats which attacked him & crushed the boats to small chips in his jaws.” Seventeen years later, of course, Herman Melville built a novel around such a white whale, but he didn’t need to depend on Emerson’s tale for it. Melville had sailed for whales himself, and knew, as he writes in Moby-Dick, of the legendary giants—Timor Tom, New England Jack, Don Miguel—whose death-dealing had made them celebrities with an “ocean-wide renown.”

  1895 The idea of university creative writing programs was still decades away when Frank Norris left the University of California to spend a year at Harvard, but in English 22, a two-semester course taught there by Lewis E. Gates, he found what the annual herds of MFA students are looking for. Writing open-ended weekly themes, Norris drafted the first pages of both Vandover and the Brute and, most memorably, McTeague, the novel he dedicated to Gates, “its Godfather and Sponsor.” One of the teaching assistants in the course, though, didn’t approve of Norris’s vivid style. “Morbid and repulsive,” he wrote about one passage, and in response to Trina McTeague’s death scene—she expired “with a rapid series of hiccoughs, that stirred the great pool of blood in which she lay”—he commented, “Not a toothsome subject.”

  1924 “To me you are the last Englishman,” D. H. Lawrence wrote to E. M. Forster. “And I am the one after that.”

  1958 In the lonely, exhausted quiet of Ash Wednesday in New Orleans after the end of Mardi Gras, John Rechy realized he had to get out of town. A young woman at the Delta Airlines counter lent him the money to fly back home to El Paso, and the next day, “grasping for God knows what,” he wrote a letter to a friend looking back on the weeks of carnival that had brought to a head his restless years of traveling and hustling around the country. The letter, which he discarded, retrieved, and revised, became a story, “Mardi Gras,” published in the Evergreen Review, and in 1963 the story became City of Night, a raw and yearning novel that was a walk-on-the-wild-side bestseller and a barrier-breaking touchstone for gay writing in America.

  1963 Published: The Feminine Mystique by Betty Friedan (Norton, New York)

  February 20

  BORN: 1926 Richard Matheson (I Am Legend, The Shrinking Man), Allendale, N.J.

  1941 Alan Furst (Night Soldiers, Dark Star), New York City

  DIED: 1895 Frederick Douglass (Narrative of the Life), c. 77, Washington, D.C.

  2005 Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72), 67, Woody Creek, Colo.

  1824 With his family living beyond the means of his father’s salary as a navy clerk, his older sister studying piano at the Royal Academy of Music, and his mother’s plan to open a school a complete failure, it was left to Charles Dickens, just turned twelve, to be put out to work pasting labels onto shoe-polish pots at six shillings for a sixty-hour week. His family’s humiliating descent from middle-class gentility continued when his father was imprisoned on this day for an unpaid debt to a baker of £40. A few months later, John Dickens was out of prison, but Charles remained at work, perhaps for a year, a traumatic episode that shaded the rest of his life and inspired, most directly, David Copperfield.

  1843 Published: Enten—Eller [Either/Or] by Søren Kierkegaard (Reitzel, Copenhagen)

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nbsp; 1943 Beautiful, rich, and vivacious, the celebrity debutantes Oona O’Neill (daughter of the playwright) and Carol Marcus (the original for Holly Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffany’s) attracted publicity and men, including, in Oona’s case, the young Jerry Salinger, not yet published in The New Yorker, and in Carol’s, William Saroyan. Stationed in Georgia during the war, Salinger wrote long love letters to O’Neill, who showed them to Marcus, who, fearing she wasn’t witty enough for her own writer beau, copied passages from them into her letters to Saroyan. O’Neill and Salinger’s romance fizzled (she soon wed Charlie Chaplin), but on this day Marcus married Saroyan for the first of two times, despite his disappointment at the “lousy glib letters” she had cribbed from Salinger.

  1965 Malcolm X checked in with Alex Haley about the manuscript for his Autobiography, which Haley reported would be sent to Doubleday in a week. Doubleday, though, canceled the book’s contract after Malcolm X was assassinated the next day.

  1974 Philip K. Dick had certainly had visions before, but when a young woman rang his doorbell on this day to deliver prescription Darvon after his oral surgery he tipped over into what he later described as “total psychosis.” Her “fascinating gold necklace,” with a fish symbol he connected to the early Christians, spurred in him a month-long experience of wakefulness and urgent immortality he referred to thereafter as “2-3-74” (for February and March 1974). The vision inspired his late novels Valis, The Divine Invasions, and The Transmigration of Timothy Archer as well as an 8,000-page collection of writings he called his Exegesis, in which he obsessively recorded his immersion in an exploded reality straight out of his own fiction.

  February 21

  BORN: 1962 David Foster Wallace (Infinite Jest, Girl with Curious Hair), Ithaca, N.Y.

  1962 Chuck Palahniuk (Fight Club, Choke, Lullaby), Pasco, Wash.

  DIED: 1677 Baruch Spinoza (Ethics, Theological-Political Treatise), 44, The Hague, Netherlands

  1998 Angie Debo (And Still the Waters Run, Geronimo), 98, Enid, Okla.

  1599 The day after performing before Queen Elizabeth at Richmond Palace (perhaps in a revival of A Midsummer Night’s Dream or an early performance of As You Like It), seven members of the Lord Chamberlain’s Men signed a thirty-one-year lease on a marshy lot in Southwark along the Thames. Among the seven was William Shakespeare, playwright and actor, who made the risky investment of about £70 for a one-tenth share as part of the first agreement that gave London actors ownership of their own stage. Using timber claimed in December from their previous theater on the other side of the Thames, their new home, known as the Globe, was built over the next few months, opening during the summer with a performance of either Henry V or Julius Caesar.

  1864 William James, having given up painting for medical school, wrote a friend, “I embraced the medical profession a couple of months ago. My first impressions are that there is much humbug therein.”

  1911 Marcel Proust, a new subscriber to the “theatrophone” service that broadcast performances over telephone wires, listened to the Opéra-Comique’s performance of Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande from his bedroom.

  1980 “Bizarre letter from Mom today,” Alison Bechdel, off at college, noted in her diary. With two undemonstrative English teachers as parents, Bechdel’s family life often seemed conducted—even within the same house—through reading and writing: shared books, private diaries. So it was fitting that when Bechdel came out as a lesbian to her parents, she did so in a letter, and that her mom answered in the same way. “I have had to deal with this problem,” her mother cryptically replied, “in another form that almost resulted in catastrophe.” A few days later she revealed the truth about Bechdel’s father, whose closeted gay life, in parallel with his daughter’s, would become the subject of Bechdel’s graphic memoir, Fun Home, itself an intricate construction of documents and literary references.

  February 22

  BORN: 1892 Edna St. Vincent Millay (A Few Figs from Thistles), Rockland, Maine

  1938 Ishmael Reed (Mumbo Jumbo, Flight to Canada), Chattanooga, Tenn.

  DIED: 1810 Charles Brockden Brown (Wieland, Arthur Mervyn), 39, Philadelphia

  1973 Elizabeth Bowen (The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day), 73, London

  1632 The book that Galileo Galilei presented to his patron, the Grand Duke of Tuscany, on this day has come to be known as the Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, but it originally carried a lengthier and more delicately phrased subtitle: “Where, in the meetings of four days, there is discussion concerning the two Chief Systems of the World, Ptolemaic and Copernican, propounding inconclusively the philosophical and physical reasons as much for one side as the other.” The pope’s censor in Rome had approved the book, but when Pope Urban VIII himself found his belief in an Earth-centered universe defended unconvincingly in the book by a character named Simplicio, he wasn’t fooled by the spurious evenhandedness of the title and had the book banned and Galileo tried for heresy.

  1882 On this day was born Eric Gill, a singular artist the clarity of whose works, in sculpture, ink, and type, was brought forth from a life of contradiction and idiosyncratic conviction. Deeply religious and heretically hedonistic, Gill created for himself and his small community a life of work and worship and love and sex—including, as was revealed long after his death, incest with both his sisters and his daughters—that produced some of the most memorable public sculpture in twentieth-century Britain, a series of books of autobiography and philosophy (including Trousers and the Most Precious Ornament, which argued that pants restricted the male organ—he preferred tunics and smocks), and two of the most elegant and lasting of modern typefaces, Perpetua and Gill Sans, the latter of which, with its deliberate echoes of Edward Johnston’s London Underground face, was a natural choice for the titles of Penguin’s classic midcentury paperbacks.

  1938 On his thirteenth birthday, Edward Gorey joined the crowd at a Sonja Henie ice show in a snowball-throwing riot.

  1947 Nine years in the writing—through poverty, alcohol, and a fire that burned his squatter’s beach shack—and rejected by a dozen publishers, Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano was finally released to a reception that met even Lowry’s hopes for his great work. “It has not let me alone,” John Woodburn wrote most rapturously in the Saturday Review on this day. “In the street, in my room, where it has set its sorrowful music to the metronome of my clock, in the company of many or only one, it has been with me insistently.” The praise left Lowry, who had traveled from Vancouver Island to New York for the release, nearly paralyzed, drinking immensely even by his standards and returning greetings at a party that night with grinding teeth and silence. His long-awaited success was, he wrote a friend, “just like a great disaster.”

  February 23

  BORN: 1633 Samuel Pepys (Diary), London

  1868 W. E. B. Du Bois (The Souls of Black Folk), Great Barrington, Mass.

  DIED: 1821 John Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode on Melancholy”), 25, Rome

  1968 Fannie Hurst (Imitation of Life, Back Street), 78, New York City

  1798 Written in a ten-week frenzy and published when its author was just twenty, Matthew Lewis’s Gothic romance, The Monk, caused a sensation with the unprecedented detail—or, in Coleridge’s disturbed phrase, the “libidinous minuteness”—with which it described its horrors. As his book gained popularity, Lewis, who had become a Member of Parliament—“Yes! the author of the Monk signs himself a LEGISLATOR! We stare and tremble,” cried Coleridge—began to regret his own excess, removing the most offensive passages and changing, for instance, “ravisher” to “intruder” in later editions, and, on this day, writing to his father in apology for his youthful indiscretion, “TWENTY is not the age at which prudence is most to be expected.”

  1942 Unlike some of his fellow Jewish writers, Stefan Zweig had stayed well ahead of the Nazis. In 1934, the most translated author in Europe at the time, he left Austria for London, and in 1940, with Germany moving across Europe, Zwei
g, calling his occupation “formerly writer, now expert in visas,” moved again with his wife, to New York and then Brazil. But even at a distance his horror at the collapse of Europe and his sense that the world he knew had ended was overwhelming. Though he found Brazil peaceful and wrote an optimistic travelogue about his new home, Brazil: A Land of the Future, Zweig took a lethal dose of veronal with his wife a few days after visiting Rio for a night of Carnival. On this day, the following afternoon, their bodies were discovered in their bedroom.

  1981 It was the most startling and memorable moment in recent Spanish history: two hundred Civil Guards, armed with submachine guns, entered Spain’s Congress of Deputies, led by Lieutenant Colonel Antonio Tejero, who took to the rostrum in his tricornered hat, gun in hand, and declared a coup. Thirty years later, the novelist Javier Cercas felt that the moment was already fading into fiction, even though the coup had been caught on film. Its being televised, Cercas argued, was “at once its guarantee of reality and its guarantee of unreality.” At first Cercas tried to defeat that unreality by writing a novel about February 23, but, like the coup itself, it failed, and out of his failure he wrote The Anatomy of a Moment instead, a compelling history told with the skills of a novelist but also with a thorough skepticism about the forces that want to turn history into myth.

  February 24

  BORN: 1903 Irène Némirovsky (Suite Française, David Golder), Kiev

  1943 Kent Haruf (Plainsong, The Tie That Binds), Pueblo, Colo.

  DIED: 1999 Andre Dubus (Voices from the Moon), 62, Haverhill, Mass.

  2006 Octavia Butler (Kindred, Parable of the Sower), 58, Lake Forest Park, Wash.