by Tom Nissley
1948 Ross Lockridge Jr. piled success on success before his suicide, earning the highest grade average in the history of Indiana University and winning a $150,000 prize from MGM and a Book-of-the-Month Club main selection for his thousand-page debut novel, Raintree County. But on the day before his book reached the top spot on one national bestseller list (where it was soon joined by his Bloomington neighbor Alfred Kinsey’s Sexual Behavior in the Human Male), Lockridge, exhausted into depression by seven years of work on the book, battles with his publisher, a backlash of bad reviews, and perhaps by the anticlimax he found at the end of his frantic ambition, shut the doors of his garage and turned on his car.
1975 Donald Davie, in the New York Review of Books, on A. R. Ammons’s Sphere: “How could I be anything but exasperated by it, profoundly distrustful, sure I was being bamboozled, sure I was being threatened? And how is it, then, that I was on the contrary enraptured?”
March 7
BORN: 1952 William Boyd (A Good Man in Africa, Any Human Heart), Accra, Gold Coast
1964 Bret Easton Ellis (Less than Zero, American Psycho), Los Angeles
DIED: 1274 Thomas Aquinas (Summa theologiae, Summa contra gentiles), c. 49, Fossanova, Papal States
1897 Harriet Jacobs (Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl), 84, Washington, D.C.
1835 The merchant brig Pilgrim had been on the California coast for two months, gathering cow hides at the tiny Mexican ports of Santa Barbara, Monterey, and San Pedro, and all was not well on board. Nothing was done well or fast enough for the captain, who directed a special ire at a slow-moving sailor named Sam. “I’ll flog you, by God!” he declared. “I’m no negro slave,” replied Sam. “Then I’ll make you one!” shouted the captain. Looking on, Richard Henry Dana, who had left Harvard and signed on to the Pilgrim as a common sailor, vowed then that he would “do something to redress the grievances and relieve the sufferings of that poor class of beings, of whom I then was one.” His seafaring memoir, Two Years Before the Mast, published in 1840, was a stirring bestseller, and he followed it with years of work as a lawyer for sailors and fugitive slaves.
1919 Back home in Illinois from the European war, glad to show off his leg full of shrapnel and expecting that the pretty nurse he’d fallen in love with in a Milan hospital would be joining him stateside, Ernest Hemingway received a letter written on this day telling him otherwise. Turning “Kid,” her pet name for her young soldier—she called herself “Mrs. Kid”—into a patronizing pat on the head, Agnes von Kurowsky, twenty-seven to his nineteen, wrote, “I can’t get away from the fact that you’re just a boy—a kid,” and revealed she planned to marry an Italian lieutenant (who soon threw her over in turn). They never met again, but Hemingway turned again and again to this first romance in his fiction, most memorably in the love affair between Lieutenant Frederic Henry and the doomed nurse Catherine Barkley in A Farewell to Arms.
NO YEAR March 7 is a noteworthy date in the otherwise lamentable life of the narrator of Flann O’Brien’s novel The Third Policeman, for that is the day he discovered the great but erratic thinker de Selby. De Selby’s theories, explained in preposterously long footnotes that threaten at times to take over the novel, propose that, among other notions, night is caused by “accumulations of ‘black air’ ” and the earth is “sausage-shaped,” providing a comic undertone to a twisted murder mystery whose hilarity otherwise turns decidedly toward the menacing. Considered too strange to find a publisher during O’Brien’s abbreviated lifetime, it has found a rabid core of readers ever since.
March 8
BORN: 1931 John McPhee (Coming into the Country, Oranges), Princeton, N.J.
1960 Jeffrey Eugenides (Middlesex, The Virgin Suicides), Detroit
DIED: 1941 Sherwood Anderson (Winesburg, Ohio; Poor White), 64, Colón, Panama
1999 Adolfo Bioy Casares (The Invention of Morel), 84, Buenos Aires
1870 Though her cousins William and Henry James found it hard to imagine the “extinction of that immense little spirit,” Minny Temple died of tuberculosis in Pelham, New York, at the age of twenty-four. William responded with silence, leaving a page of his diary blank except for a drawing of a tombstone. Henry, though, was immediately moved in the opposite direction, writing his brother in a lengthy letter, “The more I think of her the more perfectly satisfied I am to have her translated from this changing realm of fact to the steady realm of thought.” Her reckless vitality inspired his later heroines Isabel Archer (in The Portrait of a Lady) and Milly Theale (in The Wings of the Dove), and he ended his memoir Notes of a Son and Brother, in some of his last published words, by remembering that her death marked “the end of our youth.”
1914 From childhood, Fernando Pessoa wrote in a chorus of different voices, each with a separate name and identity, but one day in Lisbon—he later called it “the triumphal day of my life”—those voices seemed to take over “in a sort of ecstasy whose nature I could not define.” Standing at the chest of drawers where he liked to write, he poured out thirty or more poems under the names Alberto Caeiro, Ricardo Reis, and Álvaro de Campos (and his own name as well), identities that, he felt, took form within him as he wrote. For two more decades, while working as a translator of business correspondence in the city, Pessoa wrote under the influence of more than seventy such identities, constructing a vast assemblage of poems and prose that was largely unknown during his lifetime but after his death caused him to be recognized as the great Portuguese writer of the century.
NO YEAR Margaret Ann Simon’s twelfth birthday starts out perfect but ends up rotten. She gets a savings bond and a plane ticket to Florida from her grandma and the new Mice Men record from her fellow Pre-Teen Sensations, Nancy, Janie, and Gretchen, and, maybe best of all, uses her mom’s deodorant for the first time. But then Mr. Benedict assigns her to a project group with Laura Danker (with the big you know whats), Norman Fishbein (a drip!), and Philip Leroy (#1 in her Boy Book), who pinches her on the arm and says, “That’s a pinch to grow an inch. And you know where you need that inch!” After Judy Blume’s Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret, sixth grade (or at least books about sixth grade) would never be the same.
March 9
BORN: 1892 Vita Sackville-West (The Edwardians, All Passion Spent), Kent, England
1918 Mickey Spillane (I, the Jury; Vengeance Is Mine!), Brooklyn
DIED: 1918 Frank Wedekind (Spring Awakening, Pandora’s Box), 53, Munich
1994 Charles Bukowski (Ham on Rye, Post Office), 73, San Pedro, Calif.
1776 Published: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith (Strahan & Cadell, London)
1864 Like pretty much everyone in Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, Mike Fallopian is both a connoisseur of underground paranoia and an underground paranoiac himself. Mike’s particular bag is March 9, 1864, a “day now held sacred” by his fellow members of the ultra-right-wing Peter Pinguid Society in honor of a proto–Cold War confrontation in the waters off San Francisco between Confederate and Russian ships that, truth be told, feels more like a foggy Gulf of Tonkin moment than a real Fort Sumter exchange. And what was the extent of the martyrdom of Peter Pinguid, the Confederate commander? No, he wasn’t lost at sea. He endured a more Pynchonian fate: he left the service and made a fortune speculating in L.A. real estate.
1874 Willam Ewart Gladstone, after handing over the British government to his rival Benjamin Disraeli, turned in his leisure to reading Disraeli’s first novel, published nearly fifty years before: “Finished Vivian Grey. The first quarter extremely clever, the rest trash.”
1929 E.E.K., in the New Statesman, on Marcel Proust’s Cities of the Plain: “As a rule there is but little to reconcile one to the repulsiveness of the theme; and the young man who inspects these earth-worms so curiously is such a worm himself that one finds oneself preferring the scrutinised to the scrutiniser.”
1963 Two pairs of men, each partners for a little more than a week, converged curbside on Carlos Avenue in Hollywood:
Ian Campbell and Karl Hettinger, cops working felony car theft from an unmarked vehicle, and Greg Powell and Jimmy Smith, planning a felony themselves that night, though not the capital crime they ended up committing. Joseph Wambaugh was an LAPD cop too, with two police novels, including the bestselling The New Centurions, under his belt, when he turned to nonfiction in 1973 with The Onion Field, the story of a traffic stop a decade earlier that turned, on one criminal’s impulse, into a double kidnapping and then the murder of a police officer in the farm country between Los Angeles and Bakersfield.
March 10
BORN: 1903 Clare Booth Luce (The Women), New York City
1920 Boris Vian (Foam of the Daze), Ville-d’Avray, France
DIED: 1940 Mikhail Bulgakov (The Master and Margarita), 48, Moscow
1948 Zelda Fitzgerald (Save Me the Waltz), 47, Asheville, N.C.
1302 Convicted in absentia in January by a rival political faction on trumped-up charges of financial corruption, Dante Alighieri found his temporary exile from Florence made permanent on this day when it was decreed that he would be burned to death if he ever returned to his home city. He never did, and he spent the last two decades of his life in a wandering exile he never failed to speak of as bitter and despairing but that, in releasing him from the duties and intrigues of politics, allowed him to become what he calls in his Divine Comedy “a party by yourself.” While traveling through Verona, Arezzo, Padua, Venice, Lucca, and elsewhere, he conceived of and composed the Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, finally completing his masterwork in the tranquility of Ravenna.
1812 On what exact morning was it that Lord Byron “awoke and found himself famous”? We can’t say—the only source for the quotation, which has acquired its own considerable fame, is Thomas Moore’s 1830 biography—but his celebrity did suddenly blossom with the publication on this day of the first two cantos of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the poetic memoir of his journey across Europe the previous two years. In three days the complete printing of 500 expensive quarto editions sold out, and within six years 20,000 more affordable copies had been sold, a bestseller by any standard at the time. Moore was as shocked as his friend Byron: “His fame had not to wait for any of the ordinary gradations, but seemed to spring up, like the palace of a fairy tale, in a night.”
1964 To the Credit Department at Marshall Field & Co., Moses Herzog writes, “I am no longer responsible for the debts of Madeleine P. Herzog. As of March 10, we ceased to be husband and wife.” The ceasing wasn’t Herzog’s idea: his wife, dressed for the moment and glowing with her decision, had informed him that she had never loved him, never could, and wanted a divorce. (What she didn’t tell him at the time was that she had taken up with his best friend, Valentine Gersbach, he of the wooden leg and the full head of red hair.) And so Herzog, perhaps Saul Bellow’s greatest creation, is left alone with his fine but restless mind, writing unsent letters in his head full of explanation, injustice, and confusion and trying to think of whether there’s an escape from thinking.
March 11
BORN: 1916 Ezra Jack Keats (The Snowy Day, Whistle for Willie), Brooklyn
1952 Douglas Adams (The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy), Cambridge, England
DIED: 1969 John Wyndham (The Day of the Triffids), 65, Petersfield, England
1970 Erle Stanley Gardner (The Case of the Velvet Claws, The Case of the Sulky Girl), 80, Temecula, Calif.
1661 Samuel Pepys returned home to find that his wife had a new set of teeth, which with he was quite pleased.
1818 Published: Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (Lackington, Hughes, London)
1933 Thomas Lanier Williams, age twenty-one and the creator much later, under the name “Tennessee,” of Blanche DuBois, inquired of Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, “Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?”
1935 “A short story can be written on a bottle,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to his editor Maxwell Perkins, but “it has become increasingly plain to me that the very excellent organization of a long book or the finest perceptions and judgment in time of revision do not go well with liquor.” In a hopeful and almost surely false postscript, he added, “I haven’t had a drink for almost six weeks and haven’t had the faintest temptation yet.” Later in the year, still scrambling to pay his debts by writing magazine stories—including a series of medieval tales he thought could make a book called The Count of Darkness—Fitzgerald “cracked like a plate,” suffering a harrowing alcoholic breakdown that gave him one of his last great subjects.
1936 T.S.M., in the New Republic, on Dorothy L. Sayers’s Gaudy Night: “Isn’t it possible to write a murder story and have it taken seriously as literature? Well, there’s always ‘Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ and ‘The Brothers Karamazov.’ But when it comes to Miss Sayers’ kind, I’d rather take mine straight. Give me an Edgar Wallace.”
1965 Published: I Lost It at the Movies by Pauline Kael (Atlantic–Little, Brown, Boston)
1966 In an author’s note at the opening of Joyce Carol Oates’s fourth novel, them, she claims, with an apparent sincerity that many readers took as the truth, that her story was based on the confessions of a former night student of hers named Maureen Wendall. Nevertheless, it’s a surprising moment when, in the middle of her otherwise straightforward narrative, Maureen, the main character of the book, speaks directly to the author. “Dear Miss Oates. The books you taught us are mainly lies I can tell you,” Maureen writes. and it feels like a cry not just against the poverty and violence of her life, but against the story her author is trying make that life fit into.
2001 Jim Squires, in the New York Times, on Laura Hillenbrand’s Seabiscuit: “If plans to make a film of the story work out, and if the film is as good as the book, the horse’s name may once again be known to almost everyone.”
March 12
BORN: 1922 Jack Kerouac (On the Road, Visions of Cody), Lowell, Mass.
1970 Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Zeitoun), Boston
DIED: 2001 Robert Ludlum (The Bourne Identity, The Osterman Weekend), 73, Naples, Fla.
2003 Howard Fast (Citizen Tom Paine, Spartacus), 88, Greenwich, Conn.
1714 The Rape of the Lock, Alexander Pope reported, had sold 3,000 copies in four days, a sensational amount at the time.
1851 Arriving at the home of Nathaniel Hawthorne and family at dusk, Herman Melville was “entertained with Champagne foam—manufactured of beaten eggs, loaf sugar, & champagne.”
1906 George Bernard Shaw’s feminism was loud, imperious, and idiosyncratic, and on at least one occasion, an interview he gave to the novelist and suffragette Maud Churton Braby, published in the Tribune on this day, it was militant. “If I were a woman,” he puckishly declared, “I’d simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I’d got the vote. I’d make my husband’s life a burden, and everybody miserable generally. Women should have a resolution—they should shoot, kill, maim, destroy—until they are given a vote.” In later years, when the numbers of women voting had hardly budged their numbers in Parliament, he made a further suggestion: “The representative unit must not be a man or a woman. Every vote, to be valid, must be for a human pair, with the result that the elected body must consist of men and women in equal numbers.”
1991 Lisbeth Salander refers to it as “All the Evil,” although there’s plenty more evil to go around in Stieg Larsson’s Millennium Trilogy. But the effects of the events on this day—which are described in a suppressed report that’s only revealed partway through the trilogy’s middle book, The Girl Who Played with Fire—are endless: Lisbeth’s father was maimed for life, her mother could no longer take care of her children, her twin sister was put in foster care. And twelve-year-old Lisbeth herself, confined to the St. Stefan’s Psychiatric Clinic for Children, acquired an official diagnosis that put her in the power of the very sort of men she was already learning to arm herself against.
1999 Denis Donoghue, in the TLS, on Harold Bloom’s Shakespeare:
“Bloom’s theory, an opportunistic mixture of Blake, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud, for which I hold none of those sages to blame, is one of the most nefarious instruments of American individualism, and an ideology that provokes and gratifies one’s most selfish impulses.”
2009 Geoffrey Wolff, in the New York Times, on Blake Bailey’s Cheever: “The business of this biography is to explore the varieties and costs of unreliability not only in the expression of art, but also in the society of family and the prison of an obsessed self. This mission makes Bailey’s biography of Cheever both arresting and disturbing, a disturbance of the peace, if you will.”
March 13
BORN: 1892 Janet Flanner (Paris Was Yesterday, Paris Journal), Indianapolis
1958 Caryl Phillips (The Final Passage, Crossing the River), St. Kitts
DIED: 1971 Rockwell Kent (Wilderness, N by E, Salamina), 88, Plattsburgh, N.Y.
2009 James Purdy (Eustace Chisholm and the Works, Malcolm), 94, Englewood, N.J.
1601 The traces left in the archives by the daily life of William Shakespeare are famously scant and, for the most part, dry and businesslike, hardly hinting at the full-bodied humanity of his plays and poems. But among the property and tax records there is one mention that, in its identity-shifting japery, seems taken directly from one of his comedies. In his gossipy diaries, London lawyer John Manningham told the story of an Elizabethan groupie who, taken by Richard Burbage’s performance as Richard III, invited him home after the show. “Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was intertained, and at his game ere Burbidge came. Then message being brought that Richard the 3d. was at the door, Shakespeare”—answering “from the capon’s blankets,” as Stephen Dedalus retells the story in Ulysses—“caused returne to be made that William the Conquerour was before Rich the 3.”
