A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  March 27

  BORN: 1901 Carl Barks (Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories), Merrill, Ore.

  1950 Julia Alvarez (How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents), New York City

  DIED: 1989 Malcolm Cowley (Exile’s Return, Blue Juniata), 90, New Milford, Conn.

  2006 Stanislaw Lem (Solaris, Memoirs Found in a Bathtub), 84, Krakow, Poland

  1915 The New Republic on James Joyce’s Dubliners: “He is a sanely reflective observer of a pettily bourgeois city, and he proves his sympathy chiefly by his attentiveness to disregarded men and women, his fidelity to life in its working clothes.”

  1922 On a visit to his parents in Berlin for the Easter holidays during his last year of university at Cambridge, Vladimir Nabokov boxed playfully with his beloved father and, in pajamas before bed, talked with him about his brother and the opera Boris Godunov. The next evening, while his mother plays solitaire and Vladimir reads poetry after a “heavenly day,” the phone in the hall will ring: “Something terrible has happened to your father.” A car will rush them to a meeting of Russian émigrés where the elder Nabokov has been shot while disarming a Russian monarchist attempting to assassinate the speaker. Vladimir’s last memory of his father will be the sight of his hand passing him newspapers through an open door on his way to bed the night before.

  1964 Wilfrid Sheed, in Commonweal, on Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique and Simone de Beauvoir’s The Second Sex: “Thus it comes about that the louder Simone de Beauvoir and Mrs. Friedan shout the funnier they seem . . . It is quite possible that serious injustice has been done to women: yet there remains a strange aura of frivolity about the whole question.”

  2004 In which Sherlock Holmes adventure is a renowned scholar, after warning of an unnamed “American” trying to destroy him, found garroted in his bedroom? “The Purloined Archives”? “The Deceased Irregular”? “The Thwarted Biography”? None of the above: it happens in “Mysterious Circumstances,” the opening chapter in The Devil and Sherlock Holmes, David Grann’s collection of his New Yorker reporting. The circumstances surrounding the death of Richard Lancelyn Green, the foremost expert on the life and works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, were indeed mysterious—cryptic messages, lost manuscripts, an ancient curse, and the murderous use of a shoelace on a victim who wore only slip-on shoes—and Grann makes of them a Holmes-worthy case that points to a surprising cause for these well-arranged clues.

  March 28

  BORN: 1936 Mario Vargas Llosa (Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter), Arequipa, Peru

  1940 Russell Banks (Continental Drift, The Sweet Hereafter), Newton, Mass.

  DIED: 1941 Virginia Woolf (The Waves, A Room of One’s Own), 59, Lewes, England

  2000 Anthony Powell (A Dance to the Music of Time), 94, Frome, England

  1860 The New York Times on Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species: “Shall we frankly declare that, after the most deliberate consideration of Mr. Darwin’s arguments, we remain unconvinced? The book is full of a most interesting and impressive series of minor verifications; but he fails to show the points of junction between these, and no where rises to complete logical statement.”

  1886 After “five years of knocking about in newspapers,” supplementing his small income as a doctor by churning out short sketches under the pen name Antoshe Chekhonte, Anton Chekhov received a letter that came “like a flash of lightning”: a note from D. V. Grigorovich, an established literary man from the generation of Turgenev and Dostoyevsky, that declared he had “real talent” and would commit “a grievous moral sin” if he neglected it. In a grateful reply, Chekhov confessed he had taken his talent lightly—“I don’t remember a single story at which I worked for more than a day, and ‘The Sportsman,’ which you liked, I wrote in a bathing-shed!”—and promised to reform. To a literary friend, though, he was more blasé about the praise, saying that “the old boy . . . has rather laid it on with a trowel.”

  1888 “At Walt’s this evening,” Horace Traubel began. They had known each other for a decade, but on this day Traubel began to record his visits with Walt Whitman. The poet was sixty-eight, slowed by a stroke but still dynamic. His young Boswell was twenty-nine, a printer and poet in the spirit of his hero, whose last four years he chronicled, unprettified as Whitman requested, in the nine volumes of With Walt Whitman in Camden.

  1939 At age twenty-three, after just a year of grad school at Columbia, Alfred Kazin outlined in a Guggenheim grant application his ambitious plan for a history of American writing over the previous forty years. He got his Guggenheim, and spent four years—while the world outside convulsed into war—researching in the great reading room of the New York Public Library. The result was On Native Grounds, which brought its “boy wonder” author, the son of Yiddish-speaking immigrants, an almost unheard-of reception—“Now and then the publication of a book is not only a literary but a moral event,” gushed the New York Herald Tribune—and remains one of the best accounts of its era.

  1963 Following the failure of his historical novel Mignon after twelve years of labor, James M. Cain sold off his thousand-book research collection on the Civil War.

  2012 To mark his seventy-sixth birthday, Mario Vargas Llosa announced he would donate his 30,000-book personal library to his hometown of Arequipa, Peru.

  March 29

  BORN: 1957 Elizabeth Hand (Waking the Moon, Generation Loss), Yonkers, N.Y.

  1961 Amy Sedaris (Wigfield, I Like You, Simple Times), Endicott, N.Y.

  DIED: 1772 Emanuel Swedenborg (Heaven and Hell, True Christian Religion), 84, London

  1957 Joyce Cary (The Horse’s Mouth, Mister Johnson), 68, Oxford, England

  1944 On this day, Anne Frank’s diary became an autobiography. Gathered around their radio, the eight residents of the hidden apartment in Amsterdam heard a minister from the Dutch government in exile suggest that the letters and diaries of the people of Holland could provide a record for the future of what the war had been like. “Of course,” she wrote that night, “they all made a rush at my diary immediately,” but no one more quickly than Anne herself. “Just imagine,” she continued, “how interesting it would be if I were to publish a romance of the ‘Secret Annex.’ The title alone would be enough to make people think it was a detective story.” From that day, she continued to write her daily letters to “Kitty,” but she also went back through the past two years, revising and shaping her account, no longer writing to herself but to history.

  1948 The U.S. Supreme Court struck down on this day a New York law that banned “pictures and stories of deeds of bloodshed, lust or crime,” but only in the hope that more specific and effective laws could be passed against the “evil” of gore-splattered and wildly popular comic books. On the same day, in a Time article headlined “Puddles of Blood,” a new standard-bearer for those laws appeared: psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who cited the pathogen of comic books as a direct cause of juvenile delinquency. Wertham first made his name by setting up a free psychiatric clinic in Harlem, supported by his friends Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison, but, as David Hajdu describes in The Ten-Cent Plague, through his Senate testimony, his book Seduction of the Innocent, and his influence on a new Comics Code he became best known as the scourge of the comics industry.

  1975 If you lived in Baltimore then, you’d still remember their story, even after thirty years: “The Bethany girls. Easter weekend, 1975.” Two sisters, one fifteen and one a few days short of twelve, took the bus to the Security Square Mall and never came back. But now one of them has returned, or so she says: Heather Bethany, who has been living under an identity she won’t reveal—just one of a series of names she’s taken in her life—and who tells a story about what happened to her and her older sister that no one who hears it is quite willing to believe. Like many a cold case, the twisty and character-rich mystery in Laura Lippman’s What the Dead Know is full of long-held secrets, and it holds a solution few of its survivors thought they’d live to see.

  March 30

  BORN: 1820 Anna
Sewell (Black Beauty), Great Yarmouth, England

  1928 Tom Sharpe (Wilt, Riotous Assembly, Porterhouse Blue), London

  DIED: 1964 Nella Larsen (Quicksand, Passing), 72, Brooklyn

  1967 Jean Toomer (Cane, The Blue Meridian), 72, Doylestown, Pa.

  1925 “Of all the poisonous, foul, ghastly places,” P. G. Wodehouse wrote from the French Riviera, “Cannes takes the biscuit with absurd ease.”

  1926 H. L. Mencken, editor of the American Mercury, traveled to Boston to get himself arrested for selling the April 1926 issue of his magazine to the Reverend J. Frank Chase, described in that very issue as “a Methodist vice-hunter of long practice and great native talent.” Whatever Chase thought of that, he had the issue banned in Boston because of the “filthy and degrading descriptions” in another article, Herbert Asbury’s reminiscence of a prostitute in his Missouri hometown who serviced her clients in the local cemeteries. For the amusement of the reporters he’d invited, Mencken bit the half-dollar Chase gave him, and when a judge overturned the arrest two days later he celebrated with Harvard students. Asbury, meanwhile, took advantage of the publicity to start a career as his generation’s most celebrated chronicler of American vice in The Gangs of New York, The Barbary Coast, and elsewhere.

  1935 Clifton Fadiman, in The New Yorker, on William Faulkner’s Pylon: “I’ve read it twice, once slowly and again in a burst of desperate speed, on the assumption that the first time I might not have seen the forest for the trees. It has licked me a dozen ways. Reaction analysis: one part repulsion, one part terror, one part admiration, three parts puzzlement, four parts boredom.”

  1972 The air was so electric at a George Wallace rally at Serb Hall in Milwaukee that Hunter S. Thompson, in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, had a sense that “the bastard had somehow levitated himself and was hovering above us. It reminded me of a Janis Joplin concert.”

  1997 Larry Wolff, in the New York Times, on W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants: “Sebald has created an end-of-century meditation that explores the most delicate, most painful, most nervously repressed and carefully concealed lesions of the last hundred years.”

  March 31

  BORN: 1823 Mary Chesnut (Mary Chesnut’s Civil War), Stateburg, S.C.

  1914 Octavio Paz (The Labyrinth of Solitude, Collected Poems), Mexico City

  DIED: 1797 Olaudah Equiano (The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano), c. 51, London

  1855 Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, Shirley), 38, Haworth, England

  1903 “A TOURNAMENT FOR READERS!” blared a full-page advertisement in the Times of London. The contestant who best answered sixty general-interest questions would win the grand prize: a scholarship to Oxford or Cambridge (or, in the case of a lady winner, Girton College). In the following weeks, the advertising campaign revealed its sponsor: the tenth edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, the only book in the world that “contains all human knowledge from the time when the Temple of El-lil was built at Niffer,” part of a promotional push by which two Americans, the encyclopedia’s new publisher, Horace Everett Hooper, and its breathless ad writer, Henry Haxton, brought hundreds of thousands of Britannica sets into middle-class British homes.

  1934 From his father, “the one man I hate as utterly as I love you” (he wrote his wife), Wallace Stegner received a present of shirts and ties.

  1934 “I should like to meet the pilgrim half-way,” Marianne Moore wrote to her friend Ann Borden, a librarian at Vassar who had a young poetical “protégée” who wanted to meet the famous poet. And so Miss Moore came in from Brooklyn and met Elizabeth Bishop, the Vassar senior, at the New York Public Library, where Bishop overcame her nerves enough to invite Moore to the circus. Moore replied that she “always went to the circus,” sealing a friendship that lasted another thirty-eight years, until the older poet’s death. On a Saturday soon after (perhaps this one), Bishop fed brown bread to the elephants at Madison Square Garden while Moore, whose elephant-hair bracelet needed repair, leaned over the rope to snip a few replacement hairs with her nail scissors.

  NO YEAR For a man knocked out by the side of a road the night before in Raymond Chandler’s Farewell, My Lovely, Philip Marlowe can get a lot done in a day: a morning visit from a pretty amateur sleuth who gives him three marijuana cigarettes she palmed off a dead body; a couple of sour conversations with cops; and house calls on a slack-faced widow with a tiny revolver, a lapis-eyed blonde who gives him a smile he “could feel in my hip pocket,” and an ageless, soulless psychic. The evening brings another battering, a visit from a cop he calls “Hemingway” because he “keeps saying the same thing over and over until you begin to believe it must be good,” and finally a slug that knocks him back out. And he still doesn’t have a client in the case—only his dangerous curiosity.

  1942 Sketching the structure of her wartime novel Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky noted that while Tolstoy wrote from the distance of history, “I work on burning lava.”

  April is, by proclamation and curriculum now, the poet’s month. “April” (or “Aprill”) is the third word of one of the first great poems in the English language, The Canterbury Tales, and the first word in what does its best to feel like the last great English poem, The Waste Land. April—“spungy,” “proud-pied,” and “well-apparel’d” April—is also, along with its springtime neighbor May, the most-mentioned month in Shakespeare, and has given a poetic subject to Dickinson, Larkin, Plath, Glück, and countless others. Why? Do we like its promise of rebirth, its green and messy fecundity? Its hopefulness is easy to celebrate or, if you’re T. S. Eliot, cruelly undercut, rooting his lilacs in the wasteland of death.

  Eliot wasn’t the only one a little tired of the ease of April’s imagery. In 1936 Tennessee Williams received a note from a poetic acquaintance, a high school student named Mary Louise Lange who had recently won “third honorable mention” in the junior division of a local contest. “Yes, I think April is a fine month to write poetry,” she mused. “All the little spear-points of green pricking up, all the little beginnings of new poetic thoughts, all the shafts of thoughts that will grow to future loveliness.” A few days later, Williams, oppressed by the springtime St. Louis heat, despairing of his own youthful literary prospects, and perhaps distracted by all those “spear-points” and “shafts,” confessed to his diary that he was bored and lonely enough to consider calling on her: “Maybe I’ll visit that little girl poet but her latest letter sounded a little trite and affectatious—‘little spear points of green’—It might be impossible.”

  In our man-made calendars, the yearly rebirth of Easter arrives most often in April, and novelists from Faulkner in A Fable to Richard Ford in The Sportswriter have been drawn to the structure and portent of Holy Week. Publishers annually bring us new spring books on religion and on the green pastimes of baseball and golf. But the April date most prominent in our lives now is associated more with death than birth: April 15, the American tax day since 1955. Lincoln, who died that day, had Whitman to mourn him, but Tax Day found few literary chroniclers until David Foster Wallace’s last, unfinished novel, The Pale King, which turns the traditional celebrations of the eternal seasons into the flat, mechanical repetition of modern bureaucratic boredom. In the IRS’s Peoria Regional Examination Center where Wallace’s characters toil, the year has no natural center, just a deadline imposed by federal fiat and a daily in-box of Sisyphean tasks, a calendar that in its very featureless tedium provides at least the opportunity to test the human capacity for endurance and even quiet heroism.

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR APRIL

  The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer (late 14th century) When you feel the tender shoots and buds of April quickening again, set out in the company of Chaucer’s nine and twenty very worldly devouts, in what has always been the most bawdily approachable of English literature’s founding classics.

  The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville (1857) It’s no coincidence that the steamboat in Melville’s great, late novel begins it
s journey down the Mississippi on April Fool’s Day: The Confidence-Man is the darkest vision of foolishness and imposture—and one of the funniest extended jokes—in American literature.

  “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d” by Walt Whitman (1865) and The Waste Land by T. S. Eliot (1922) Whitman’s elegy, composed soon after Lincoln’s murder, heaps bouquets onto his coffin, and a livelier and more joyful vision of death you’re not likely to find. You certainly won’t in The Waste Land, written after a war equally bloody and seemingly barren of everything but allusions (to Whitman’s funeral lilacs among many others).

  The Sportswriter by Richard Ford (1986) Beginning with a Good Friday reunion with his ex-wife on the anniversary of their son’s death, Ford’s indelible ex-sportswriter Frank Bascombe reckons with balancing the small, heart-lifting pleasures of everydayness with the possibilities of disappointment and tragedy that gape underneath them.

  The Age of Grief by Jane Smiley (1987) Smiley’s early novella is still her masterpiece, a story of a family swept through by flu and a young marriage struggling to survive the end of its springtime that’s as close to an American version of “The Dead” as anyone has written.

  My Garden (Book): by Jamaica Kincaid (1999) “How vexed I often am when I am in the garden, and how happy I am to be so vexed”: Midway through life, Kincaid started planting in her yard in most “ungardenlike” ways, and her garden book is willful and lovely, made of notes in which she cultivates her hatreds as passionately as her affections.

  The Likeness by Tana French (2008) Ireland’s French crafted an intrigue with equal elements of the Troubles and The Secret History in her second novel, in which Detective Cassie Maddox is seduced by the mid-April murder of a student who had been playing with an identity disturbingly close to her own.