A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  The Pale King by David Foster Wallace (2011) Don’t expect a novel when you open up The Pale King, culled from manuscripts Wallace left behind at his suicide. Read it as a series of experiments in growing human stories out of the dry soil of bureaucratic tedium, and marvel when real life, out of this wasteland, suddenly breaks through.

  April 1

  BORN: 1929 Milan Kundera (The Unbearable Lightness of Being), Brno, Czechoslovakia

  1942 Samuel R. Delany (Dhalgren, Nova), New York City

  DIED: 1950 F. O. Matthiessen (American Renaissance), 48, Boston

  1966 Flann O’Brien (The Third Policeman, At Swim-Two-Birds), 54, Dublin

  NO YEAR The most sustained April Fool’s joke in the history of American literature begins with the appearance in St. Louis of a mute stranger in a cream-colored suit stepping on board the steamboat Fidèle bound for New Orleans. Meet the title character of Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man: His Masquerade, set on April Fool’s Day and published—by coincidence, apparently—on that day too in 1857. Its unrelenting skepticism was met with confusion and indifference, and the once-popular Melville didn’t publish another novel in the remaining thirty-four years of his life. It took another century before The Confidence-Man was rediscovered as one of his most radical and brilliant inventions.

  1936 After serving seven and a half years for robbery, Chester Himes, his stories already published in Esquire, was released from the London Prison Farm in Ohio.

  1956 On the morning of April Fool’s Day, Edward Abbey began his first workday as a national park ranger by stepping out of his government trailer and watching the sun rise over the canyonlands of Arches National Monument in Moab, Utah. Outfitted with trailer, truck, ranger shirt, tin badge, and five hundred gallons of water, Abbey was left more or less alone for six months, which he recorded in journals he typed up a decade later into the manuscript of Desert Solitaire, a cantankerous appreciation of the wild inhumanity of nature and a warning against the encroaching “Industrial Tourists” the park was already being prepared for.

  1960 There was “something intensely surprising” about witnessing the birth of his daughter Frieda, Ted Hughes later wrote a friend, and “also something infinitely disastrous and shocking about it.”

  1978 Haruki Murakami had worked day and night for four years at his small jazz club in Tokyo called the Peter Cat when, with an inexplicable and impulsive simplicity that seems right out of his fiction, he decided to try something new. He was drinking a beer in the grassy embankment beyond the outfield fence at a Yakult Swallows baseball game when Dave Hilton, a new American player on the Swallows, hit a double down the left-field line, right on the sweet spot of his bat, and Murakami thought, “You know what? I could try writing a novel.” He had no idea what the book would be about, but by the fall he finished Hear the Wind Sing. The next spring the novel won a magazine contest he forgot he’d entered, and his writing career began.

  2010 Sebastian Junger, in the New York Times, on Karl Marlantes’s Matterhorn: “It’s not a book so much as a deployment, and you will not return unaltered.”

  April 2

  BORN: 1725 Giacomo Casanova (Story of My Life), Venice, Italy

  1805 Hans Christian Andersen (“The Little Mermaid,” “The Red Shoes”), Odense, Denmark

  DIED: 1966 C. S. Forester (Horatio Hornblower series, The African Queen), 66, Fullerton, Calif.

  1796 Of the “authentic” documents from the life of William Shakespeare—original manuscripts of Lear and Hamlet, a love letter and poem to Anne Hathaway, an awkwardly scrawled note from Queen Elizabeth—that poured forth from a mysterious old chest William Henry Ireland claimed to have found, the most audacious forgery was Vortigern, an unknown play said to be in the Bard’s hand whose sole performance at Drury Lane on this evening quickly turned into farce. Even the play’s performers smelled a fraud by then, and when the star, John Kemble, repeated the line “And when this solemn mockery is ended,” with a leer at the audience, a bedlam of derision ensured the humiliation of Ireland, the play’s discoverer and its true author.

  1894 In reply to a letter from his father, the Marquess of Queensberry, about his “loathsome and disgusting relationship” with Oscar Wilde, Lord Alfred Douglas wired back, “What a funny little man you are.”

  1913 Kurt Wolff, Franz Kafka’s new publisher, wrote to the author, “Please be good enough to send me a copy or the manuscript of the bedbug story.”

  1957 “I was overwhelmed to get the little book, filched from the library, and I hope I deserve it,” E. B. White wrote in thanks to his Cornell classmate H. A. Stevenson. “What a book, what a man!” The man was William Strunk Jr., and the book was The Elements of Style, a privately printed (and stapled) writing manual from 1918 known to Strunk’s Cornell students as “the little book.” In July White wrote an appreciation of the book and its bold strictures in The New Yorker and sent it to an editor at Macmillan to see if they might bring it back into print. Before long, “the little book,” with White’s edits and additions, was known instead, to a much wider audience, as “Strunk and White.”

  1990 The remains of Jack Arthur Dodds, which fit tidily into a screw-top plastic jar the size of a pint glass, may not be as unwieldy as the coffin that carried the body of Addie Bundren in As I Lay Dying, and Graham Swift’s narrative pyrotechnics may be more modest than William Faulkner’s, but Last Orders, his quiet and generous story of four men fulfilling Jack’s final request by carrying his ashes to the sea, gathers a weight of its own while following a funereal path similar to the one Faulkner laid down. On their pilgrimage, which begins with pints and a shot in Bermondsey and ends in wind and rain on a pier in Margate, some secrets are revealed between these old friends, but far more stay buried where they have been for years, to be confessed only to us.

  April 3

  BORN: 1593 George Herbert (The Temple), Montgomery, Wales

  1916 Herb Caen (San Francisco Chronicle columnist), Sacramento, Calif.

  DIED: 1971 Manfred Lee (half of the Ellery Queen pseudonym), 66, Waterbury, Conn.

  1991 Graham Greene (The End of the Affair), 86, Vevey, Switzerland

  1878 Dining at Zola’s new house with Flaubert and Edmond de Goncourt, the novelist Alphonse Daudet compared the grouse to “an old courtesan’s flesh marinated in a bidet.”

  1882 It was still the evening of the same day as the killing when Bob Ford, with eager and self-regarding confidence, took the stand at the inquest and testified that from six feet away that morning he had shot the outlaw Jesse James while he was unarmed and dusting a picture frame. He hadn’t confessed so freely, though, when he made his escape after the gunshot, according to Ron Hansen’s meticulously researched and imagined novel, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford. “Bob, have you done this?” James’s freshly widowed wife wailed. “I swear to God that I didn’t,” he replied, and then ran to the telegraph office with his brother to wire the governor of Missouri, who had authorized a $10,000 reward for his death or capture, “I have killed Jesse James. Bob Ford.”

  1920 Zelda Sayre, the daughter of Anthony Dickinson Sayre, justice of the Supreme Court of Alabama, and Minerva Machen Sayre, of Montgomery, Alabama, wed Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald, the son of Edward Fitzgerald, formerly of Procter & Gamble, and Mollie McQuillan Fitzgerald, of St. Paul, Minnesota, at St. Patrick’s Cathedral in Manhattan. The bride was a graduate of Sidney Lanier High School; the groom was graduated from Princeton University and recently published his first novel, This Side of Paradise.

  1952 Julia Child, the wife of an American diplomat in Paris, reading what she called an “able diatribe” by Bernard DeVoto in Harper’s on the poor quality of American kitchen knives, sent DeVoto a French paring knife in appreciation. In thanks, DeVoto’s wife, Avis, replied to Child on this day with a long, friendly letter on cutlery and cuisine, and so began a correspondence and collaboration that resulted in the publication nearly a decade later of the first volume of Child’s groundbreaking Masteri
ng the Art of French Cooking. Meanwhile, As Always, Julia, the collection of letters between Child and DeVoto published in 2010, is itself a minor classic of food writing and friendship.

  April 4

  BORN: 1914 Marguerite Duras (The Lover, The Ravishing of Lol Stein), Saigon

  1928 Maya Angelou (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings), St. Louis

  DIED: 1991 Max Frisch (I’m Not Stiller, Homo Faber), 79, Zurich, Switzerland

  2013 Roger Ebert (The Great Movies, Life Itself), 70, Chicago

  1846 Gustave Flaubert sat with the body of his deceased friend Alfred Le Poittevin for two days and two nights and then wrapped him in shrouds and placed him in his coffin for burial.

  1886 A close friendship begun over thirty years before, when Émile Zola, age fourteen, met a “large, ungainly boy” named Paul Cézanne in boarding school in Aix-en-Provence, ended with a chilly note on this day from the painter to the novelist that began, “I have just received L’Oeuvre, which you arranged to send me.” L’Oeuvre, Zola’s fictional portrait of a novelist’s relationship with a painter resembling Cézanne and his fellow Impressionists who descends into madness and failure, drew the ire of Monet, Renoir, and Pissarro, while Cézanne, who had long chafed under Zola’s more rapid success, said nothing more to his old friend about the book. In fact, the two of them never spoke to nor saw each other again.

  1924 No one was entirely happy when Mabel Dodge Luhan, whose bohemian magnetism drew D. H. and Frieda Lawrence—among many other writers and artists—to Taos, New Mexico, took a run-down ranch she had given her son and bestowed it on Frieda instead. The Lawrences did enjoy being homeowners for the first time in their restless lives but felt beholden to Luhan, so in exchange they gave her the manuscript of Sons and Lovers, which Luhan took as an offense to her generosity and which the Lawrences later discovered, to their dismay, was worth far more than the ranch. D. H. Lawrence’s tuberculosis prevented him from staying there long, but after his death in 1930 Frieda made the ranch her permanent home.

  1925 Carl Sandburg telegraphed news of his Lincoln biography to his wife, Paula, “Harcourt wires book serial rights sold to Pictorial Review for $20,000. Fix the flivver and buy a wild Easter hat.”

  1968 Many stories move with a weary fate toward the assassination of Martin Luther King. Charles Johnson’s Dreamer, the imagined story of a man hired to double for King, nears its close on the balcony of Memphis’s Lorraine Motel, as does Taylor Branch’s three-volume history, America in the King Years, which devotes seven of its nearly 3,000 pages to the hours between King’s last public words, “Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord,” and his final ones in private, “Ben, make sure you play ‘Precious Lord, Take My Hand,’ in the meeting tonight. Play it real pretty.” Meanwhile, George Pelecanos’s Hard Revolution, the most ambitious of his encyclopedic series of DC crime novels, builds toward the aftermath of the assassination, when violence swept through the nation’s capital along with the news.

  April 5

  BORN: 1588 Thomas Hobbes (Leviathan), Westport, England

  1920 Arthur Hailey (Airport, Hotel, Wheels), Luton, England

  DIED: 1997 Allen Ginsberg (Howl, Kaddish), 70, New York City

  2005 Saul Bellow (Herzog, Humboldt’s Gift, Ravelstein), 89, Brookline, Mass.

  1832 Despite his vow to quit gambling, William Makepeace Thackeray played cards until four in the morning, losing eight pounds, seven shillings.

  1919 Katherine Mansfield wrote to Virginia Woolf that her cat, Charlie Chaplin, had given birth to kittens named Athenaeum and April.

  1919 After a performance of his play Judith, Arnold Bennett lamented, “Terrible silly mishaps occurred with the sack containing Holofernes’s head in the third act, despite the most precise instructions to the crowd.”

  1936 By the time of the elaborate Founder’s Day festivities at the Tuskegee Institute, three years after he arrived from Oklahoma City as an eager and optimistic music major, Ralph Ellison had soured on the college and turned his interests to literature, so he listened to the language of the featured speaker with a skeptical but attentive ear. The speaker was Dr. Emmett J. Scott, the longtime right-hand man of Tuskegee’s charismatic founder, Booker T. Washington, and his tribute to Washington that day planted the seeds of the oration of Rev. Homer A. Barbee—“Thus, my young friends, does the light of the Founder still burn”—in Invisible Man, the novel that made Ellison one of Tuskegee’s best-known alumni.

  1952 “In lots of the books I read,” deputy sheriff Lou Ford opines, “the writer seems to go haywire every time he reaches a high point.” That won’t happen with his story, Ford promises us: “I’ll tell you everything.” And tell everything he does in The Killer Inside Me, the blackest of Jim Thompson’s string of sly and brutal noir novels from the ’50s and ’60s. Most obsessively of all, Ford confesses that on the 5th of April in 1952 he killed Amy Stanton, the woman who thought she was about to marry him. It’s neither the first nor the last death Ford orchestrates; the final one, in an explosion of shots and shouts, is his own.

  1969 Lester Bangs was selling shoes in El Cajon, California, and taking classes at San Diego State when a cover profile of the MC5 in Rolling Stone led him to buy their debut, Kick Out the Jams. He thought the record was a derivative fraud, though, and wrote Rolling Stone to tell them so, adding that he could write as well as anyone they had. They agreed, at least enough to print his review in their April 5 issue, launching Bangs on a critical career that matched the live-fast, die-young arc of his rock heroes. Bangs’s reviews and manifestos, collected in Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung, read like uninhibited mash notes from a love affair with rock ‘n’ roll: passionate, besotted, and angry; vigilant for signs of betrayal but animated at all times by the hope of transcendence.

  April 6

  BORN: 1866 Lincoln Steffens (The Shame of the City), San Francisco

  1926 Gil Kane (Green Lantern, The Atom), Riga, Latvia

  DIED: 1992 Isaac Asimov (I, Robot; Foundation), 72, New York City

  2005 Frank Conroy (Stop-Time, Body and Soul), 69, Iowa City, Iowa

  1862 The Battle of Shiloh at the end of the Civil War’s first year was the bloodiest by far in American history and marked a new stage in the war’s carnage that stunned the nation. Despite the Union’s ultimate victory after two days of fighting, blame was spread widely, and most of it settled on Lew Wallace, a major general at age thirty-four, whose “lost division” spent the battle’s first day marching back and forth behind the front lines following an ambiguous message from General Grant. Wallace was relieved of his command and for the next two decades protested his scapegoating, with satisfaction coming only when Grant acknowledged Wallace’s innocence in a reluctant footnote in his Memoirs and when Wallace’s fame for his bestselling 1880 novel, Ben-Hur, finally eclipsed his infamy at Shiloh.

  1924 After finishing chapter eighteen of An American Tragedy, Theodore Dreiser had two hot dogs and a cup of coffee at a restaurant at Fourteenth Street and Seventh Avenue and then walked in the rain to Fifty-ninth Street, full of “many odd thoughts about the city.”

  1934 M. F. K. Fisher, having “settled at a steady pace of about fifteen pages at a time,” read Ulysses on the beach at Laguna, occasionally turning herself “neatly to brown on both sides in the sun.” Later, she made a chocolate cake.

  1987 For a few years in the mid-’80s, Jonathan Franzen found an ideal job for a frugal young writer: working weekends reading data at a Harvard seismic lab, which supported him and his wife while he wrote his first novel, The Twenty-Seventh City, the rest of the week. It also gave him a subject for his rich and undercelebrated second novel, Strong Motion, whose story hinges on clusters of small earthquakes in the Boston area that may or may not be caused by the pumping of industrial waste into deep underground wells. The first of the tremors, despite its mild 4.7 magnitude, claims on this day its only victim, the step-grandmother of his protagonist, Louis Holland, when it knocks her off a barstool.

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sp; April 7

  BORN: 1770 William Wordsworth (The Prelude, “Tintern Abbey”), Cockermouth, England

  1931 Donald Barthelme (Snow White; Come Back, Dr. Caligari), Philadelphia

  DIED: 1836 William Godwin (Caleb Williams), 80, London

  1977 Jim Thompson (The Killer Inside Me, Pop. 1280), 70, Los Angeles.

  1874 “Look here—what day is Easter this year?” “Why, of course, the first week in April. Why?” “I’m going to be married in a month.” A half hour before, Newland Archer had been convincing the beautiful and worldly Countess Olenska to abandon their promises to others and be together when a telegram from his fiancée arrived: “Parents consent wedding Tuesday after Easter at twelve Grace Church eight bridesmaids please see Rector so happy love May.” In The Age of Innocence, Edith Wharton’s great novel of renunciation, Newland keeps his promise to May to marry, though he doesn’t forget the countess, who, after all, has just told him, “I can’t love you unless I give you up.”

  1919 Though he started with high hopes on this day, working on commission as the advertising manager of the Little Review, Hart Crane managed to sell only two ads, for Mary Garden Chocolates and “Stanislaw Portapovitch—Maître de Danse” over the next several months before giving up.

  1935 While John Dos Passos filmed the proceedings, Ernest Hemingway shot himself through both legs when a bullet ricocheted that was meant to kill a shark they had hooked onboard.

  1962 The ideas suggested by Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land took hold with surprising speed after it was published in 1961: “grok” soon entered the language, and some readers began to take its vision of religion, sex, and justice as gospel. On this day two college friends, Tim Zell and Lance Christie, having been “seized with an ecstatic sense of recognition” by the novel, performed a water-sharing ceremony modeled after the book and later formed the Church of All Worlds, which called science fiction the “new mythology of our age.” Heinlein kept a polite distance from such acolytes, and in 1972 responded to a letter from Zell by saying, “Anyone who takes that book as answers is cheating himself. It is an invitation to think—not to believe.”