A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1967 “I do not plan to be a 79-year-old lollipop, Mr. Rich,” fifty-eight-year-old M. F. K. Fisher wrote her sixty-three-year-old boyfriend, Arnold Gingrich, publisher of Esquire. “Even for you. If I should live that long, I’ll be a bag of bones, probably rather bent and even more probably racked with arthritic pains, irascible in a barely controlled manner, very impatient of human frailties and quirks, concentrated on my own determination to stay vertical and free. Not an exactly lovable picture!”

  1967 The new film critic of the Chicago Sun-Times, Roger Ebert, debuted with a review of an “obscure French movie,” Galia: it opens with shots of the ocean, he noted, but “it’s pretty clear that what is washing ashore is the French New Wave.”

  April 8

  BORN: 1909 John Fante (Ask the Dust), Denver, Colo.

  1955 Barbara Kingsolver (Animal Dreams, The Lacuna), Annapolis, Md.

  DIED: 1958 George Jean Nathan (The Smart Set, The American Mercury), 76, New York City

  1979 Breece D’J Pancake (The Stories of Breece D’J Pancake), 26, Charlottesville, Va.

  1809 With remarkable but characteristic patience, it wasn’t until six years after her novel Susan was purchased by the publisher Richard Crosby that Jane Austen inquired about her manuscript. “I can only account for such an extraordinary circumstance,” she wrote, in a tone of passive indignation adopted by countless thwarted authors before and since, “by supposing the MS by some carelessness to have been lost.” Replying on this day, Crosby asserted that “there was not any time stipulated for its publication, neither are we bound to publish it,” and offered to sell it back to her for the £10 he had paid. Not for another seven years did Austen take him up on the offer, and not until after her death was the novel published, her brother having changed its title to the more distinctive Northanger Abbey.

  1877 Henry James deplored the social desert of London during Easter week to his sister Alice: “ ‘Every one’ goes out of town . . . and a gloomy hush broods over the place.”

  1928 “Never you mind,” Dilsey tells her daughter, who is ashamed of her mother’s open weeping as they walk from church on Easter Sunday. “I seed de beginnin, en now I sees de endin.” For “April 8, 1928,” the final section of The Sound and the Fury, William Faulkner stepped back from the voices of the three Compson brothers who had told the tale of their family’s decline to that point. He gave the story over to the voice of an outside narrator, and gave the center of it not to Caddy, the fourth Compson child, but to Dilsey, the black cook who has witnessed the Compsons’ rise and fall and who, as head of her own family, represents, perhaps, the rebirth promised by Easter.

  1999 Lionel Shriver’s agent, after reading the manuscript of We Need to Talk About Kevin and deciding there was no way she could sell “a book about a kid doing such maxed-out, over-the-top, evil things, especially when it’s written from such an unsympathetic point of view,” suggested that Shriver only “allude to” the events of this day rather than describe them in the detail that she does near the book’s end. But Shriver didn’t cut the full description of Kevin Khatchadourian’s school massacre—ripped from the headlines at the time and reflected in them more than once since—and, though her book was rejected by dozens more agents and editors, it eventually found a sizable readership for its story of an incorrigibly sociopathic child and a mother haunted by the question of whether her son made her a bad mother, or her mothering made a bad son.

  April 9

  BORN: 1821 Charles Baudelaire (Les Fleurs du mal, Paris Spleen), Paris

  1929 Paule Marshall (Brown Girl, Brownstones; Praisesong for the Widow), Brooklyn

  DIED: 1553 François Rabelais (Gargantua and Pantagruel), c. 58, Paris

  1997 Helene Hanff (84, Charing Cross Road), 80, New York City

  1909 The day Robert Peary and Mathew Henson reach what they think is the North Pole in E. L. Doctorow’s Ragtime doesn’t match the historical record, which says it happened on April 6 (and which also says Henson’s name was “Matthew”), but then again, in Doctorow’s account Peary and Henson aren’t sure from their instrument readings whether they are even at the exact pole (and historians since have largely decided that they weren’t). Nevertheless, “Give three cheers, my boy,” Doctorow’s Peary tells Henson. “And let’s fly the flag.” Composed in a naive, declarative style and populated with a cast that mixes the historically iconic (Peary, Houdini, Emma Goldman) with the anonymously generic (Mother, Father, Mameh, Tateh), each so abstracted as to be both merely and vividly representative of their times, Ragtime embraces the mythmaking at the heart of the historical novel.

  1932 Bruno Schulz, at a conference for teachers of handicrafts in Stryj, Poland, presented a lecture titled “Artistic Formation in Cardboard and Its Application in School.”

  1971 It’s a one-sided love affair. On one side, Miss Helen Sweetstory, author of The Six Bunny-Wunnies and Their Pony Cart, The Six Bunny-Wunnies Go to Long Beach, and so on, and on the other, Snoopy, aspiring author of “It Was a Dark and Stormy Night” and Miss Sweetstory’s biggest fan, who decides on this day to write his beloved a fan letter. He sends mash notes and she replies with form letters, but he still believes that a) she loves him and b) she’s going to introduce him to her agent. After all, “famous authors like to receive manuscripts from unknown writers.” Only the discovery that Miss Sweetstory owns twenty-four cats is enough to break his fever. Enough, he tells Linus: “Back to Hermann Hesse.”

  1986 May Sarton returned to her journal for the first time after a stroke at age seventy-three: “There in my bed alone the past rises like a tide, over and over, to swamp me with memories I cannot handle. I am as fragile and naked as a newborn babe.”

  April 10

  BORN: 1934 David Halberstam (The Best and the Brightest), New York City

  1941 Paul Theroux (The Great Railway Bazaar), Medford, Mass.

  DIED: 1955 Pierre Teilhard de Chardin (The Phenomenon of Man), 73, New York City

  1966 Evelyn Waugh (Scoop, Brideshead Revisited), 62, Combe Florey, England

  1881 Having chosen months of bed rest for a bladder infection instead of an operation so he could keep delivering his monthly installments of his new novel, A Laodician, to Harper’s magazine, Thomas Hardy set foot outside his house for the first time since October.

  1903 Less than three months into a penniless Paris adventure at age twenty-one, during which his mother in Dublin pawned household goods to keep him from starving, James Joyce received a telegram reading, “Mother dying come home father.” (He did; she was.) Much later, that same message, included in Ulysses as a telegram received by Stephen Dedalus, would end up at the center of scholarly controversy, with some Joyceans arguing that the original typesetters had mistakenly corrected Joyce’s typically punning revision of his own life, and that the text should read, as it does now in some editions, “Nother dying come home father.”

  1925 Despite his last-minute requests to change its “rather bad than good” title to “Trimalchio in West Egg,” “Gold-Hatted Gatsby,” or “Under the Red White and Blue,” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s third novel was published on this day by Scribner’s as The Great Gatsby. Ten days later his editor, Maxwell Perkins, cabled Fitzgerald in Paris, “Sales situation doubtful excellent reviews”; even some admiring reviewers, though, thought Gatsby, with its shiny surfaces, “trivial” story, and too-timely slang, would prove “a book of the season only.” The sales did allow Fitzgerald to pay off a substantial debt to his publisher, but they failed to reach the levels of his previous novels, and even at his death fifteen years later copies from the small second printing of Gatsby remained unsold.

  1926 Perhaps only half in jest, H. L. Mencken suggested that losing presidential candidates should be executed and tossed into the Potomac.

  1961 Susan Sontag attended a double feature of I Am a Fugitive from a Chain Gang and The Maltese Falcon at Manhattan’s New Yorker theater.

  1967 In the “cold late spring of 1967,” Joan Didion took her notebook and her eye
for entropy to meet some of the young people who were gathering in San Francisco, where she found, along with restless anarchists, trip-seeking teenagers, and a five-year-old sampling acid, a plaintive public notice beginning, “Last Easter Day / My Christopher Robin wandered away. / He called April 10th / But he hasn’t called since.” In her resulting dispatches, published in the Saturday Evening Post under the cover line “The Hippie Cult: Who They Are, What They Want, Why They Act That Way,” and later as the title essay in Slouching Toward Bethlehem, Didion diagnosed the end of the Summer of Love before it had even begun.

  April 11

  BORN: 1901 Glenway Wescott (The Pilgrim Hawk), Kewaskum, Wis.

  1949 Dorothy Allison (Bastard Out of Carolina, Cavedweller), Greenville, S.C.

  DIED: 1970 John O’Hara (Appointment in Samarra, BUtterfield 8), 65, Princeton, N.J.

  1987 Primo Levi (The Periodic Table, The Drowned and the Saved), 67, Turin, Italy

  1681 A friend offered to cure Samuel Pepys’s fever if he sent nail clippings and locks of hair.

  1773 Boswell and Johnson dined on “a very good soup, a boiled leg of lamb and spinach, a veal pye, and a rice pudding.”

  1819 Keats and Coleridge met just once, by chance, while both were walking on this day on Hampstead Heath. The young Keats was impressed and amused by the great, white-maned man, then under a doctor’s care for opium addiction: “In these two miles he broached a thousand things,” among them nightingales, dreams, mermaids, and sea monsters. “I heard his voice as he came towards me—I heard it as he moved away—I heard it all the interval.” Coleridge, meanwhile, was so busy talking he hardly noticed this “loose, slack, not well-dressed youth,” but later he would claim to have felt “death in the hand” of the young poet, who was felled by tuberculosis less than two years later.

  1953 William Peden, in the Saturday Review, on two collections by young New Yorker short-story writers: J. D. Salinger is “occasionally too aware of the fact that he is a monstrous clever fellow,” while John Cheever’s “less spectacular” stories often “improve with rereading, which is not usually true of a Salinger piece.”

  1954 In Paris, Julia Child tried to make a beurre blanc for sea bass that, to her “quite hurt surprise,” just wouldn’t blanc.

  1961 In Jerusalem, Hannah Arendt, on assignment from The New Yorker, attended the first day of the trial of former Nazi Adolf Eichmann for his role in organizing the Holocaust. Writing her husband in New York (who, like her, had fled the Nazis) she expressed an immediate disgust for Eichmann, a “ghost in a glass cage,” as well as for the entire theater of the trial. Her coldly ironic account of the proceedings, Eichmann in Jerusalem, published two years later, ignited a controversy (one that still simmers) about her portrait of the “banality of evil” and of the role of Jewish Councils during the war.

  1965 Undaunted by a plea from William Shawn that it would “thrust” the New York Herald Tribune “into the gutter,” New York magazine, then the Trib’s Sunday supplement, gleefully published “Tiny Mummies!,” the first of a two-part series by the young Tom Wolfe that mocked The New Yorker as a musty monastery led by the rumpled, whispering Shawn, reverently preserving the traditions—and the endless luxury advertising pages—of a magazine that, Wolfe argued, had never been that good to begin with.

  April 12

  BORN: 1916 Beverly Cleary (Henry Huggins, Beezus and Ramona), McMinnville, Ore.

  1947 Tom Clancy (The Hunt for Red October, Patriot Games), Baltimore, Md.

  DIED: 1988 Alan Paton (Cry, the Beloved Country), 85, Botha’s Hill, South Africa

  1991 James Schuyler (The Morning of the Poem, A Nest of Ninnies), 67, New York City

  1802 The letter has been lost to history, but Dorothy Wordsworth’s biographers have guessed, based on her response in her journals—“Every question was like the snapping of a little thread about my heart—I was so full of thought of my half-read letter and other things”—that on this day she learned of her beloved brother William’s engagement to her dear friend Mary Hutchinson. The perennial fascination with discerning the boundaries of affection among poet, sister, and wife—they continued to share a household for nearly fifty years—has extended to the poem he wrote this same day, “Among all lovely things my Love had been”: was the Love he spoke of meant for his fiancée, his sister, or both?

  1850 When Charlotte Brontë’s publishers sent her a box of books including three by Jane Austen, they might not have known she already had an opinion on the author. “I should hardly like to live with her ladies and gentlemen in their elegant but confined houses,” she had written George Henry Lewes two years before when he recommended her next book after Jane Eyre be less “melodramatic” and more like Austen. And reading Emma in 1850 didn’t change her mind: “Her business is not half so much with the human heart as with the human eyes, mouth, hands and feet,” she explained on this day, “but what throbs fast and full, though hidden, what the blood rushes through, what is the unseen seat of Life and the sentient target of Death—this Miss Austen ignores.” She added, “If this is heresy—I cannot help it.”

  1871 From his window, Edmund de Goncourt rooted for the French army against the “odious tyranny” of the revolutionary Paris Commune.

  1903 On Easter Sunday, Jack London accidentally cut off the tip of his thumb.

  2010 Operating out of a tiny office in New York’s Bellevue Hospital with the mandate to bridge the gap between medicine and literature, the Bellevue Literary Press had published just a couple of dozen books when one of its first fiction releases, Paul Harding’s Tinkers, was plucked from obscurity for the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, the first small-press book to win in almost twenty years. Even before its prize Tinkers had stirred word-of-mouth enthusiasm for the intensity of its attention to memory and the senses, with Transcendentalist echoes that make it a spiritual cousin to the Pulitzer winner of five years before, Gilead, by Harding’s former teacher Marilynne Robinson.

  2010 Eight years after Yann Martel’s Life of Pi won the Booker Prize, the New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani called his follow-up novel, Beatrice and Virgil, “every bit as misconceived and offensive as his earlier book was fetching.”

  April 13

  BORN: 1906 Samuel Beckett (Waiting for Godot, Molloy), Dublin

  1909 Eudora Welty (The Collected Stories, Delta Wedding), Jackson, Miss.

  DIED: 1993 Wallace Stegner (Angle of Repose, Crossing to Safety), 84, Santa Fe, N.M.

  2006 Muriel Spark (The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, Memento Mori), 88, Florence, Italy

  1877 Never shy of concocting literary publicity, the young Guy de Maupassant placed an unsigned squib into the République des lettres advertising a dinner at which “six young and enthusiastic naturalists destined for celebrity” would honor their masters, Flaubert, Zola, and Edmond de Goncourt, with a menu inspired by their works, including “Potage purée Bovary” and “Liqueur de l’Assommoir.” The dinner place, at Paris’s Restaurant Trapp; the menu, though, was likely fictional, and of the young writers only two, J.-K. Huysmans and, naturally, Maupassant himself, would achieve any lasting literary celebrity.

  1924 Among the few facts known about one of the most widely read, or at least distributed, authors in American history is his birth date. Born on this day in Los Angeles, Jack T. Chick, by his own account, was a troublemaking youth with a hobby in drawing until he found the Lord and published Why No Revival?, the first “Chick tract” in a series that now numbers in the hundreds, with over half a billion “soul winning” copies in print. Tiny, vivid comic books preaching hellfire for sinners and nonbelievers, especially for the Vatican’s minions of Satan, Chick tracts can traditionally be found piled up at bus stations and in the collections of hipsters transfixed by the vigor of the hate they contain.

  1924 In response to Franz Kafka’s question about his tubercular larynx, “I wonder what it looks like inside?” his nurse responded, “Like the witch’s kitchen.”

  1929 Reader “H.W.” wrote to the Ne
w Statesman, regarding Proust’s Cities of the Plain, that sexual “inversion” “does not belong to fiction, in spite of the prevailing craze for decadent literature.”

  1933 Robert M. Coates, in The New Yorker, on Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts: “the crispest and the cleverest, the most impishly ironical and sharply epigrammatic book I’ve read in months and months.”

  1940 In the third of his fifty-eight years as a staff writer at The New Yorker, Joseph Mitchell profiled McSorley’s, the oldest saloon in New York City, an establishment that trafficked largely in ale, onions, gloomy fellowship, and vigilantly sustained traditions, including a refusal to admit women that would stand until the Supreme Court intervened. A few years later, the business gave its name to Mitchell’s first book, McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon, a collection of portraits of the city’s eccentrics and battered bohemians who, like McSorley’s and Mitchell himself, pursued their idiosyncrasies with unassuming persistence.

  1963 Flannery O’Connor confessed to a friend, “The other day I postponed my work an hour to look at W. C. Fields in Never Give a Sucker an Even Break.”

  April 14

  BORN: 1897 Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?), Pegram, Tenn.

  1961 Daniel Clowes (Ghost World, Eightball), Chicago

  DIED: 1964 Rachel Carson (The Sea Around Us, Silent Spring), 56, Silver Spring, Md.

  1986 Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, The Mandarins), 78, Paris

  1824 When he returned to Philadelphia after years on the American frontier, John James Audubon hoped he might find a publisher for his paintings of the country’s birds. He found admirers, but Alexander Lawson, likely the only American engraver who could have handled the job as Audubon imagined it, was not among them. Roused from his bed to meet the artist, Lawson told him his pictures “were ill drawn, not true to nature, and anatomically incorrect.” When Audubon protested later, “Sir, I have been instructed seven years by the greatest masters in France,” Lawson replied, “Then you have made damned bad use of your time.” Rebuffed in Philadelphia, Audubon had to travel to Great Britain to find the engravers and patrons to produce his lavish Birds of America.