by Tom Nissley
1827 Unable to pay his gambling debts at the University of Virginia and, by his own account, “roaming the streets” of Richmond, Edgar Allan Poe pleaded for money from his adoptive father, who refused.
1846 Elizabeth Barrett, having received The Raven and Other Poems from Poe, who dedicated the book to her though they had never met, wrote to a friend for advice: “What is to be said, I wonder, when a man calls you the ‘noblest of your sex’? ‘Sir, you are the most discerning of yours.’ ”
1963 Having published six novels with Jonathan Cape, Barbara Pym received word by post that they were not interested in her seventh, An Unsuitable Attachment. (“While we have not exactly lost any money,” a second letter explained, “we have not made any as a result of publishing these six novels.”) Unable, in the era of James Bond and the Beatles, to find another publisher for her stories of spinsters and jumble sales, Pym didn’t publish another novel until 1977, when her nomination as the most underrated novelist of the century in the TLS sparked a revival of interest in her work. When An Unsuitable Attachment was finally released after her death a few years later, one reviewer wrote, “The publisher must have been mad to reject this jewel.”
1987 Ludo Newman has been counting down to his sixth birthday all year, but he’s concerned less with his birth than with his conception. As a birthday gift, along with the Oxford-Duden Japanese Pictorial Dictionary, his mother allows him to ask as many questions as he wants. He has just one: “Who is my father?” Of the many recent novels told through the eyes of precocious youngsters, Helen DeWitt’s The Last Samurai, about a boy in search of his father and the mother trying to educate him, is the most brilliant, an intellectual and emotional adventure worthy of comparison with Ludo and his mom’s favorite Kurosawa film, The Seven Samurai.
March 21
BORN: 1905 Phyllis McGinley (Times Three, Husbands Are Difficult), Ontario, Ore.
1949 Slavoj Žižek (The Sublime Object of Ideology), Ljubljana, Slovenia
DIED: 1997 Rev. W. Awdry (Thomas the Tank Engine), 85, Rodborough, England
2013 Chinua Achebe (Arrow of God, Anthills of the Savannah), 82, Boston
NO YEAR Why has Mrs. Badger in Dickens’s Bleak House wed all three of her husbands “upon the twenty-first of March at eleven in the forenoon,” in the proud words of husband number three? “I had become attached to the day,” she explains.
1868 Standing on an Antarctic peak at noon on the Southern Hemisphere’s autumnal equinox, Captain Nemo unfurls a black flag bearing a golden N and claims the polar continent in his name as the sun begins its half-yearly journey to the other side of the earth. “Disappear, O radiant orb! Retire beneath this open sea, and let six months of night spread their shadows over my new domains!” he declares before returning with his fascinated captive, Professor Aronnax, to his magnificent submarine, the Nautilus, and resuming the undersea peregrinations that are his restless fate in Jules Verne’s 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea.
1888 “Good-night, Mister Sherlock Holmes,” says a “slim youth in an ulster” to the detective outside his Baker Street lodgings, in the final, cheeky sally of a day that ranks among the most memorable in Holmes’s career. The “youth” is none other than the incomparable Irene Adler, the diminutive opera singer and would-be blackmailer of “A Scandal in Bohemia.” Or, rather, she’s now Mrs. Irene Norton, for by that time of the day Holmes has already, in bedraggled disguise, served as a witness at her impromptu wedding, before later, disguised this time as a clergyman, gaining entrance to her home and causing her to reveal where she had secreted her incriminating photograph. It’s only on the following day that Holmes, realizing that she had seen through his disguises and outwitted him in turn, begins to refer to her, with uncharacteristic sentiment, as “the woman.”
1915 Oak Park High School sophomore Ernest Hemingway pledged in his school notebook to “do pioneering or exploring work in the 3 last great frontiers Africa, central south America or the country around and north of Hudson Bay.”
1972 Elizabeth Bishop had been trying to compose the letter for weeks. “It’s hell to write this,” she told her great friend Robert Lowell, “so please first do believe I think Dolphin is magnificent poetry.” But out of love and admiration, she warned him he’d gone too far in using—and changing—his wife Elizabeth Hardwick’s letters in his poems. “One can use one’s life as material—one does, anyway—but these letters—aren’t you violating a trust?” she asked. “Art just isn’t worth that much.” Even Lowell, after first thinking her concerns “extreme paranoia,” later admitted to her, after the poems (and Hardwick herself) were savaged in the press, that perhaps, in this case, the art wasn’t worth it.
March 22
BORN: 1908 Louis L’Amour (Hondo, The Rustlers of West Fork), Jamestown, N.D.
1947 James Patterson (Kiss the Girls, 1st to Die), Newburgh, N.Y.
DIED: 1758 Jonathan Edwards (“Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God”), 54, Princeton, N.J.
1832 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship), 82, Weimar, Germany
1540 Following a furious and vengeful six-year campaign of robbery, arson, and pillage across Saxony after he failed to gain redress in the courts for the theft of two horses by a nobleman, the merchant Hans Kohlhase and his associate Georg Nagelschmidt were broken on the wheel in Berlin. Two and a half centuries later, Heinrich von Kleist transformed Kohlhase’s chronicle into one of the most relentless and efficient narrative machines ever constructed: Michael Kohlhaas, a tale of justice pursued at any cost whose influence continued to flourish in the twentieth century, as one of Franz Kafka’s favorite stories and as a model for E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime, the name of whose hero, Coalhouse Walker, is a nod to “Kohlhaas.”
1861 One of many office seekers descending on the new president, Herman Melville met Lincoln at a White House party soon after his inauguration: “Old Abe is much better looking [than] I expected & younger looking. He shook hands like a good fellow—working hard at it like a man sawing wood at so much per cord.”
1897 “Errand,” Raymond Carver’s story of the final illness of Anton Chekhov, begins on this evening when, as Chekhov dines with a friend at the finest restaurant in Moscow, “suddenly, without warning, blood began gushing from his mouth.” It was the first hemorrhage of Chekhov’s tuberculosis, and the story soon moves to the night of his death seven years later when an unnamed young Russian runs two errands, one for a bottle of champagne and the other for a mortician. A tale far in both space and time from Carver’s usual settings, “Errand” was the last published in his lifetime: within a year of writing it Carver coughed up blood himself, the first sign of the cancer that killed him in 1988, after which he was eulogized as “America’s Chekhov.”
NO YEAR The diary entries of Lorelei Lee, a character inspired by a “golden-haired birdbrain” Anita Loos saw entrancing every man on the cross-country train to Hollywood, became the smash novel of 1926, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. Among the first of those smitten with Lorelei is an English novelist who, as Lorelei records on this day, takes an interest in her education by sending her some of his own novels, which “all seem to be about middle age English gentlemen who live in the country over in London and seem to ride bicycles.” He also sends a complete set of Joseph Conrad, about which she’s more hopeful: “I have always liked novels about ocean travel,” she notes, “because I always say that a girl never really looks as well as she does on board a steamship, or even a yacht.”
March 23
BORN: 1956 Julia Glass (Three Junes, The Whole World Over), Boston
1964 Jonathan Ames (The Extra Man, Wake Up Sir!), New York City
DIED: 1842 Stendhal (The Charterhouse of Parma), 59, Paris
1992 Friedrich von Hayek (The Road to Serfdom), 92, Freiburg, Germany
1917 In the year since his arrest for refusing to continue teaching at the University of Ghent during the German occupation of Belgium, the historian Henri Pirenne had lectured to hundreds in the prison barracks.
But when he was transferred to house arrest in a small village (for having abused the “hospitality of Germany”), he embarked on another project, a long-dreamed-of History of Europe, which he began on this day and which, in his isolation, he composed entirely from memory. He was able to cover the thousand years from the end of the Roman Empire to the early Renaissance before the armistice ended his exile, and his History, which wasn’t published until after his death, remains wonderfully lively and bewilderingly authoritative, even without the knowledge of the heroic conditions under which it was written.
1925 “Scattered cases of uneasy but formless nocturnal impressions appear here and there” in H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Call of Chthulu.”
1944 Published: Dangling Man by Saul Bellow (Vanguard, New York)
1986 As bad reviews go, it could have been worse. Alice Hoffman, writing in the New York Times, called Richard Ford a “daring and intelligent novelist” with “an extraordinary ear for dialogue,” but she thought his third novel, The Sportswriter, was “a risk that ultimately does not pay off.” Ford, though, had a lot riding on the book—and he was right to, since it became his breakthrough—and that wasn’t what he, or his wife, wanted to read. So they took Hoffman’s own latest novel out in their Mississippi backyard, shot it, and mailed her the results. “People make such a big deal out of it—shooting a book,” he shrugged years later. “It’s not like I shot her.” Hoffman, meanwhile, had her own ways of dealing with hostile reviewers, tweeting the home phone number of the “moron” in the Boston Globe who called her 2009 novel The Story Sisters “tired” and “contrived.”
March 24
BORN: 1916 Donald Hamilton (The Silencers, The Ravagers), Uppsala, Sweden
1919 Lawrence Ferlinghetti (A Coney Island of the Mind), Yonkers, N.Y.
DIED: 1976 Ernest Howard Shepard (illustrator of Winnie-the-Pooh), 96, Midhurst, England
1993 John Hersey (Hiroshima, The Wall), 78, Key West, Fla.
1857 Idling in Paris, Tolstoy wrote to a friend in Russia on this day, “I can’t foresee the time when the city will have lost its interest for me, or the life its charm.” But by the time he finished the letter the next day, it had. What happened? On that morning, he was “stupid and callous enough” to attend an execution by guillotine: “If a man had been torn to pieces before my eyes it wouldn’t have been so revolting as this ingenious and elegant machine by means of which a strong, hale and hearty man was killed in an instant.” Disgusted with Paris, he couldn’t sleep for days and soon left the city, and his disgust transformed his outlook in a way that never left him. “The law of man—what nonsense!” he wrote that day. “The truth is that the state is a conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens.”
1956 In the home stretch of the Grand National, with the thirty jumps of the steeplechase cleared, his nearest rival sixteen lengths back, and a record time for the race just seconds away, Devon Loch looked, to borrow the title of his jockey Dick Francis’s first novel, a “dead cert.” But suddenly the horse, owned by the Queen Mother and a favorite of the crowd, collapsed, uninjured, as the field, and the championship, passed him by. While Devon Loch’s inexplicable slip may not be, as one Liverpool paper claimed, “the greatest tragedy in the history of sport,” it has remained one of its most enduring enigmas. His jockey, Francis, once England’s champion rider, retired soon after, and in 1962 Dead Cert became the first of his over forty bestselling racetrack mysteries.
2005 Nine chapters into the unfinished manuscript published as David Foster Wallace’s final novel, The Pale King, arrives what might be a disconcerting element: an “Author’s Foreword,” claiming to be a message from the “real author, the living human holding the pencil,” self-identified as “David Wallace, age forty, SS no. 975-04-2012,” writing on the “fifth day of spring, 2005.” Disconcerting because no one expects a foreword on page 68 and because this David Wallace’s bona fides don’t quite match those we can look up about the author, who, among other things, was forty-three in 2005. But at the same time it’s the most comfortable part of the book, a familiar triple-back-flip postmodern move that brings into the story the characteristic DFW voice, full of qualifying subclauses and massive footnotes. In that sense perhaps it’s an authentic message from the author after all.
March 25
BORN: 1347 St. Catherine of Siena (Letters, The Dialogue of Divine Providence), Siena, Italy
1925 Flannery O’Connor (Everything That Rises Must Converge), Savannah, Ga.
DIED: 1951 Oscar Micheaux (The Conquest, The Homesteader), 67, Charlotte, N.C.
2009 John Hope Franklin (From Slavery to Freedom), 94, Durham, N.C.
1769 Thomas Chatterton, only sixteen but already an experienced artificer of “ancient” manuscripts, thought that Horace Walpole, the wealthy politician who had passed off a novel, The Castle of Otranto, as an old Italian manuscript before revealing it as his own, might have some interest in writings by a medieval monk he claimed to have discovered. Walpole replied politely, but when Chatterton sent more and revealed his age, Walpole sniffed a forgery and recommended the boy stick to his apprenticeship. Furious, Chatterton shot back, “I am obliged to you sir, for your advice and will go a little beyond it, by destroying all my useless lumber of literature and by never using my pen but in the law.” His revenge was posthumous: after Chatterton’s suicide the next year, Walpole’s rejection was blamed for driving the young poet to his death.
1811 For publishing a pamphlet titled The Necessity of Atheism, Percy Bysshe Shelley and his friend Thomas Jefferson Hogg were expelled from Oxford.
1914 Heading straight from Greenwich Village to Juarez on a magazine assignment to cover a possible revolution in Mexico in 1913, poet and bohemian journalist John Reed, twenty-six years old, soon managed to ingratiate himself with the bandit-turned-general Pancho Villa and his tattered troops. His reports back, as Villa’s increasingly disciplined army advanced toward Mexico City, were full of the romance of his own adventurous exploits as well as Villa’s, and they made him immediately famous as an “American Kipling,” with his college friend Walter Lippmann writing him in awe on this day, “I want to hug you, Jack. If all history had been reported as you are doing this, Lord—I say that with Jack Reed reporting begins.”
1968 Spoiler alert! Jason Bourne—the amnesiac with the skills (and Swiss bank account) of a trained assassin who reconstructs his life while fending off a series of killers across Europe in The Bourne Identity, the first installment in Robert Ludlum’s Bourne Trilogy and the high point of modern espionage action—is not actually Jason Bourne. The real Jason Charles Bourne was a double agent for the North Vietnamese, shot on this day in the jungles of Tam Quan by an operative for the top-secret elite American unit known as Medusa. Which means the man we know as “Jason Bourne” is actually . . .
2004 Michael Chabon, in the New York Review of Books, on Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials: “The question of whether or not His Dark Materials is meant or even suitable for young readers not only remains open but grows ever more difficult to answer as the series progresses.”
March 26
BORN: 1941 Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene, The God Delusion), Nairobi, Kenya
1943 Bob Woodward (All the President’s Men, The Brethren), Geneva, Ill.
DIED: 1892 Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, Specimen Days), 72, Camden, N.J.
1959 Raymond Chandler (The Lady in the Lake, The Long Goodbye), 70, La Jolla, Calif.
1830 Six and a half years after Joseph Smith said he was directed by the angel Moroni to a book of golden plates buried in a hill in Manchester, New York, and roughly fifteen centuries after the prophet Mormon was said to have engraved the plates with a hieroglyphic account of his people’s history in the Americas, the Book of Mormon first went on sale at the shop of its printer, E. B. Grandin, in Palmyra, New York. Translated from its ancient language by Smith by means of a “seer stone” he placed at the bottom of his hat, this new scripture, he claimed, was ju
st a fragment—like the Bible—of the divine records left of God’s work through human history. Eleven days later, on the authority of the book and the continuing revelations granted him by God, Smith founded the Church of Christ, soon renamed the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
1969 Who was B. Traven, the secretive author of a series of novels set among the exploited in the 1920s and ’30s? Was he Otto Feige, the son of a potter born in Germany? Or Ret Marut, a German (or maybe American) anarchist and actor last seen when he was released from prison in England? Or Traven Torsvan, a reclusive innkeeper in Mexico known as El Gringo? Or Hal Croves, who showed up on the set when John Huston was filming Traven’s best-known book, The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, and introduced himself as Traven’s “agent”? Or perhaps all of the above. The theories are many, but most now believe that when Hal Croves died in Mexico City on this day, B. Traven died with him, and perhaps all his other identities as well.
1980 Headline writers could hardly resist the obvious when Roland Barthes, the French theorist best known for his essay “The Death of the Author,” died on this day at sixty-five. A month and a day before, walking back from a luncheon hosted by France’s next president, François Mitterand, he stepped into the rue des Ecoles and was struck down by a laundry van. He spent the next month in the hospital before succumbing, leaving behind an unfinished essay on Stendhal in his typewriter, the book Camera Lucida, which had just been published to hostile reviews but would become a classic, and his Mourning Diary, which, published much later, revealed the grieving for his beloved mother that some friends thought had already taken his will to live.
2000 Robert Kelly, in the New York Times, on Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves: “I fell for it—the scholastic, footnoted, typographical fun house aspect of the book. I love the difficult, since it makes the easy seem finally possible.”
