A Reader's Book of Days
Page 13
1929 Published: The Innocent Voyage (later A High Wind in Jamaica) by Richard Hughes (Harper & Row, New York)
1929 W.T., in the New Republic, on Elizabeth Bowen’s The Last September: “Blind parasites of every land will discover their lineaments in her mirror.”
2001 Chapter four of Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma is a Western of sorts. Pollan, in the process of tracking where his—and our—food comes from, follows the classic romance of a cattle drive: in this case the journey of steer 534, a calf he purchased at the Blair Ranch in South Dakota. Born on this day in late winter, 534 fed for six months on the grass of the Great Plains before being trucked to a massive feedlot in Kansas, a city of 37,000 temporary residents—known as a Confined Animal Feeding Operation—where he beefed up to a thousand pounds on a year-long, unnatural diet of corn, antibiotics, and fat and protein supplements while standing in the grayish mud of his and his neighbors’ manure, a “short, unhappy life” that “represents the ultimate triumph of industrial thinking over the logic of evolution.”
2012 Encyclopædia Britannica announced the end of its print edition.
March 14
BORN: 1920 Hank Ketcham (Dennis the Menace), Seattle
1923 Diane Arbus (Family Albums, Revelations), New York City
DIED: 1883 Karl Marx (Capital, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Napoleon), 64, London
2003 Amanda Davis (Wonder When You’ll Miss Me), 32, McDowell County, N.C.
44 B.C. It’s a stormy night, full of portents, on the day that Caesar returns in triumph, declines the crown of Rome three times, and hears the soothsayer’s warning, “Beware the ides of March!” Cassius, fearing Caesar’s growing power, gathers a conspiracy against him and even uses the weather for his purposes. The “dreadful night,” he says to one ally, is heaven’s warning of a monster in the Capitol who “thunders, lightens, opens graves, and roars.” Brutus, the most necessary and ambivalent conspirator, spends the night awake, tormented by the morrow’s action. “Is not to-morrow, boy, the ides of March?” he asks a servant before the morning. “Look in the calendar, and bring me word.” The boy returns with news the day has already turned: “Sir, March is wasted fifteen days.”
1858 “My dear Beth died at three this morning,” Louisa May Alcott recorded. Elizabeth, the third Alcott sister and the quietest, had contracted scarlet fever two years before, much like the last illness of Beth, the third March sister—and the only one whose name matches her model in the Alcott family—in Little Women. Alcott also noted a “curious thing”: that just after Beth breathed her last, “I saw a light mist rise from the body, and float up and vanish in the air.” Her mother saw the same, and the family doctor explained, “It was the life departing visibly.” The following day, her sister’s pallbearers included “Mr. Emerson” and “Henry Thoreau.”
1889 At Clongowes school in Dublin, soon after he turned seven, James Joyce was given four “pandies on his open palm,” punished, not for the last time, for the infraction of “vulgar language.”
2004 Will Blythe, in the New York Times, on Tom Perrotta’s Little Children: “ ‘Little Children’ raises the question of how a writer can be so entertainingly vicious and yet so full of fellow feeling.”
80 F.E. As the eightieth anniversary of the new era approaches in Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, the future has been calculated, but by a science no one left can understand. All the residents of the Foundation, an outpost on the periphery of the crumbling Galactic Empire, have to go on is the archived knowledge they’ve inherited and the veiled prophecies left by the great seer Hari Seldon, who estimated, with 98.4 percent probability, that the Foundation would develop according to the Plan over its first eighty years. His predictions have proved correct, but even when his second prophecy is revealed on this anniversary day, it explains little more, for too much advance knowledge would upset the balance of his calculations. “Gentlemen, nine hundred and twenty years of the Plan stretch ahead of you. The problem is yours!”
March 15
BORN: 1852 Lady Gregory (Cuchulain of Muirthemne), Roxborough, Ireland
1918 Richard Ellmann (James Joyce, Oscar Wilde, Yeats), Highland Park, Mich.
DIED: 1937 H. P. Lovecraft (The Shadow Over Innsmouth), 46, Providence, R.I.
1983 Rebecca West (Black Lamb and Grey Falcon), 90, London
1945 At the tail end of a war nearly won, fighting over a small piece of ground in Alsace, Second Lieutenant Paul Fussell, twenty years old, was wounded in the back and leg by shrapnel that killed the two soldiers lying next to him atop a German bunker. Fussell’s combat career ended that day, but the war, and his fury at the way it ground men up, stayed with him for the rest of his life. Returning to the world of words he’d been drawn to before he was drafted, he wrote a series of books driven by the fierce skepticism his time in the army had given him, including the one that made his name, The Great War and Modern Memory, a gripping and deeply personal account of the experience of the world war before his that nonetheless, as he says, “was an act of implicit autobiography.”
NO YEAR Maqroll doubts that the remote lumber mill that’s his destination will actually make his fortune, but like a modern Quixote he sets out nevertheless, a passenger on a tiny barge that battles the current of the fictional Xurandó River with “asthmatic obstinacy” and a captain never less than half-drunk. “It’s always the same at the start of a journey,” Maqroll writes in his diary. “Then comes a soothing indifference that makes everything all right. I can’t wait for it to arrive.” When Álvaro Mutis, a poet—and a South American executive for American oil and film companies—for four decades, wrote the story of Maqroll’s journey, his first long fiction, he sent it to his agent with the message “I don’t know what the devil this is.” What it became was The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, an open-ended series of tales that made Mutis, late in life, one of the most celebrated South American novelists.
1958 Best known in later years as an uncompromising historian of the horrors of Soviet Communism, Robert Conquest in the ’50s was a poet and, with his friends Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin, a tireless prankster. Conquest took the fun furthest of all, most memorably with Larkin, to whom, knowing the shy poet’s extracurricular reading interests, he mailed a warning, claiming to be from the Scotland Yard Vice Squad, that Larkin might be prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act. After a nervous day at his solicitor’s, Larkin angrily sent the £10 legal bill to Conquest on this day, with the suggestion “Why can’t you play your japes on David Wright or Christopher Logue or some bastard who wd benefit from a cold sweat or two? Instead of plaguing your old pals.” Even the louche Amis recalled the episode with a slight horror.
March 16
BORN: 1952 Alice Hoffman (Practical Magic, Here on Earth), New York City
1961 Todd McFarlane (Spawn, Amazing Spider-Man), Calgary, Alb.
DIED: 1898 Aubrey Beardsley (The Yellow Book, Lysistrata), 25, Menton, France
1940 Selma Lagerlöf (The Wonderful Adventures of Nils), 81, Värmland, Sweden
1924 With Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas as godmothers, John Hadley Nicanor Hemingway, the first child of Ernest Hemingway, born in October, was baptized in Paris.
1937 The children call themselves by the private names he’s given them: Looloo, Ernest-Paynim-Pigsney-Princeps, Sawbones, and Samulam. And they call him Father, Dad, and one he’s chosen for himself, Sam-the-Bold. The packet of family letters that arrives for Samuel Clemens Pollitt is full of what he calls the “un-news” of family life—“We are well. Mother is not well.”—and of the language their father has given them in his charismatic, autocratic way, as their creator and destroyer. Christina Stead gave Samuel Pollitt a name of her own in the title of her great (and autobiographical) novel, The Man Who Loved Children. To call that description ironic—at least with the thin, tinny definition of irony we have these days—doesn’t quite do justice to the vast distance between what Sam Pollitt imagines for himself and what he does.
1997 Laura Miller, in the New York Times, on David Foster Wallace’s A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again: “This collection . . . reveals Mr. Wallace in ways that his fiction has of yet managed to dodge: as a writer struggling mightily to understand and capture his times, as a critic who cares deeply about ‘serious’ art, and as a mensch.”
March 17
BORN: 1904 Patrick Hamilton (The Slaves of Solitude, Hangover Square), Hassocks, England
1948 William Gibson (Neuromancer, Pattern Recognition), Conway, S.C.
DIED: 180 Marcus Aurelius (Meditations), 58, Vindobona, Roman Empire
2005 Andre Norton (Witch World, The Stars Are Ours!), 93, Murfreesboro, Tenn.
1846 Published: Typee: A Peep at Polynesian Life by Herman Melville (Wiley and Putnam, New York)
1871 “That book,” Robert Chambers would say near the end of his life, “was my death-blow.” Those few who remember Chambers might imagine the book he meant was Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation, a bestselling sensation of Victorian speculative science that drew the ire of clergymen and the ridicule of scientists, although Darwin credited the book’s half-baked concept of the “transmutation of species” with preparing the public for his own theory of evolution. Chambers, a prominent Scottish publisher, kept his authorship of the controversial Vestiges secret until after his death on this day, but the book he said killed him was another, a labor of love called The Book of Days, an exhaustively researched multivolume miscellany of anecdotes and biographies from history, literature, religion, and science, which he organized, perversely, by the days of the calendar.
1974 In the latest and last of the reclamations of Jean Rhys during her unhappy lifetime, A. Alvarez in the New York Times wrote that “she is, quite simply, the best living English novelist”: “There is no one else now writing who combines such emotional penetration and formal artistry or approaches her unemphatic, unblinking truthfulness.”
2002 Michael Pye, in the New York Times, on Jamie O’Neill’s At Swim, Two Boys: “Love between men is for once not a limit but a starting point. It does not require excuses or boasts or provocation. It can be tragic and comic, but all in the context of the wider world of rebellion, courage, idiocy and history. “
2011 Two days after they were captured by soldiers loyal to Muammar el-Qaddafi, four New York Times journalists, including Pulitzer winner Anthony Shadid, were able to get word out that they were alive. The four had entered the country without a visa to cover the uprising against Qaddafi; caught at a checkpoint, they were spared execution when one soldier said, in Arabic, “No, they’re American.” (Their Libyan driver, they later learned, was killed.) They were released four days later, but the following February, Shadid, an Oklahoma City native who had covered the Middle East for nearly two decades, snuck across yet another border to report on the rebellion in Syria, where he died from an asthma attack brought on by his allergy to horses. His Times photographer, Tyler Hicks, one of those captured with him in Libya, carried his body back across the border to Turkey after his death.
March 18
BORN: 1927 George Plimpton (Paper Lion, Edie, The Paris Review), New York City
1932 John Updike (Rabbit, Run; The Centaur; Couples), Reading, Pa.
DIED: 1768 Laurence Sterne (The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman), 54, London
1986 Bernard Malamud (The Fixer, The Magic Barrel), 71, New York City
1819 Picking up a cricket bat for the first time, John Keats took a ball in the face. The leech a friend applied to his eyelid did not prevent a black eye.
1897 An enthusiastic and talented amateur naturalist, Beatrix Potter cultivated a particular interest in mycology, the perennially unglamorous study of fungi. Working in the field and in her kitchen—and making drawings whose lovely detail her later readers would not be surprised to see—she developed a rare ability to germinate spores and surmised that lichens were the product of symbiosis between fungi and algae, an idea, now confirmed, that few believed at the time. The established botanists of her day did little to encourage a self-educated woman; after one encounter she huffed in her journal, “It is odious to a shy person to be snubbed as conceited, especially when the shy person happened to be right, and under the temptation of sauciness.” On this day, though, she was allowed to submit a paper, “On the Germination of the Spores of Agaricineae,” to be presented at the general meeting of the prestigious Linnean Society, though Potter, as a woman, was not allowed to attend. Decades later, the society officially acknowledged that Miss Potter had been “treated scurvily” by some of its members.
1939 R. D. Charques, in the TLS, on Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds: “Mr. Flann O’Brien will hardly be surprised if a reviewer is at a loss how to describe this book of his.”
1960 Raymond Carver, the co-editor of the new literary magazine at Chico State College in Northern California, was, according to a profile in the school paper on this day, one of the “most harried-looking people on campus.” Twenty-one but married for three years already, with a baby girl and boy and a wife who, as she did for years, was working to support them, Carver had signed up in his second year of school for English 20A, Creative Writing. His professor, John Gardner, new to the school, was just twenty-six himself and, like Carver, still more than a decade away from the books that would make him famous, but he had a PhD and plenty of theories about writing fiction, and his ambition and his standards for what fiction should be made his student “wild with discovery.”
March 19
BORN: 1809 Nikolai Gogol (Dead Souls, The Nose), Sorochyntsi, Russian Empire
1933 Philip Roth (The Ghost Writer, The Counterlife), Newark, N.J.
DIED: 1950 Edgar Rice Burroughs (Tarzan of the Apes, A Princess of Mars), 74, Encino, Calif.
2008 Arthur C. Clarke (2001, 2010, Rendezvous with Rama), 90, Colombo, Sri Lanka
1914 Chance, late in Joseph Conrad’s hardworking and chronically indebted career, was his first great popular success, but not with his friend Henry James, who in a two-part article beginning on this day criticized the book as the work of “a beautiful and generous mind in conditions comparatively thankless.” Conrad later said it was “the only time a criticism affected me painfully.”
1924 Edmund Wilson, in the New Republic, on Wallace Stevens’s Harmonium: “When you read a few poems of Mr. Stevens, you get the impression from the richness of his verbal imagination that he is a poet of rich personality, but when you come to read the whole volume through you are struck by a sort of aridity.”
1944 Pablo Picasso broke the tedium and anxiety of the first winter of the German occupation of Paris in 1941 by composing in three days his first and only play, Desire Caught by the Tail. A nonsense farce in the tradition of the Surrealists and Ubu Roi, the play didn’t receive a performance until a reading on this day at the apartment of the anthropologist Michel Leiris, with Picasso, Georges Braque, and Georges Bataille in the audience and an all-star cast that included Albert Camus as the narrator, Leiris as “Big Foot,” Jean-Paul Sartre as “Round Morsel,” and Simone de Beauvoir and Raymond Queneau as “the Cousin” and “the Onion,” who at one point enter singing, “Oboy . . . We’re bringing you shrimps! Oboy, oboy, we’re bringing you shrimps!” It is unlikely, under the wartime conditions, that the stage directions calling for a giant b
athtub full of soapsuds and a bed covered in fried potatoes were followed.
1962 The publication date of her first book, Sex and the Single Girl, was still two months away, but Helen Gurley Brown (future editor of Cosmopolitan) and her publicist Letty Cottin (a future founding editor of Ms.) had high hopes for one way to make her sure-to-be-controversial guide a hit: provoking someone to ban the book. “I don’t know how to get a public denunciation—a nice, strong, snarly, vocal one—from some religious leader,” Brown wrote on this day, “but it is a possibility.” They sent advance copies to the Little Rock public library, Catholic groups, and the Daughters of the American Revolution, but no one took the bait, which perhaps was a sign that America in the early ’60s was ready for Brown after all. Without any help from the censors, the book was an immediate bestseller.
1963 The New York Times on Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange: “a tour-de-force in nastiness, an inventive primer in total violence, a savage satire on the distortions of the single and collective minds.”
March 20
BORN: 43 B.C. Ovid (Metamorphoses, Ars amatoria), Sulmo, Roman Republic
1937 Lois Lowry (The Giver, Number the Stars), Honolulu
DIED: 1727 Isaac Newton (Principia Mathematica), 84, Kensington, England
1962 C. Wright Mills (The Power Elite, White Collar), 45, West Nyack, N.Y.
1784 Just after midnight, a “puny, seven months’ child” named Catherine is born. Two hours later, her sickly mother, also named Catherine, dies without ever having wakened to meet her daughter. In the morning the mother’s fair and mild husband, Edgar, lies prostrate beside her corpse, while Heathcliff, her true love, rages outside in the garden, dashing his savage brow against a tree. Sixteen years later, young Cathy celebrates her birthday—always neglected by mourning over her mother’s death—with a ramble on the moors, where she meets her estranged uncle, that same Heathcliff, and in the tightly confined drama of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, the sins of one generation—and perhaps their hopes—can once again be passed on to the next.