A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1865 In Henry and Clara, the first of his novels set in the political history of Washington, D.C., Thomas Mallon dramatized the night on which a forgotten couple was taken up and then tossed aside by the caprices of history. Already a bit of a scandal as a stepbrother and -sister engaged to be married, Henry Rathbone and Clara Harris, the Lincolns’ guests in their box at Ford’s Theatre, were bloodied bystanders at the assassination and were never the same afterward, Henry in particular. Stabbed nearly to death by the fleeing Booth, he slowly went mad and eighteen years later staged a bizarre reenactment of the tragedy with his wife as victim.

  1923 James Joyce attended a rugby match between France and Ireland at Stade Colombes in Paris.

  1939 For the first time, George Orwell’s goat Muriel gave a full quart of milk.

  1952 Published: Invisible Man by Ralph Ellison (Random House, New York)

  1965 Certain he had written an unprecedented masterpiece, Truman Capote had to postpone completing the final section of his “nonfiction novel,” In Cold Blood, for nearly two “excruciating” years while the machinery of justice moved to its conclusion. Finally, though, Perry Smith, one of Capote’s main characters, wrote him that “April 14 you know is the date to drop thru the trap door,” and just after midnight on that day Smith and Dick Hickock were indeed hanged by the state of Kansas, giving Capote, in attendance at the request of the condemned, an ending for the book that begins with their murders of the Clutter family four and a half years before.

  1975 Kenneth Tynan took tea in London with Mel Brooks, who had “stubby self-confidence radiating from every pore.”

  April 15

  BORN: 1843 Henry James (Portrait of a Lady, The Ambassadors), New York City

  1878 Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten, The Robbers), Biel, Switzerland

  DIED: 1942 Robert Musil (The Man Without Qualities), 61, Geneva, Switzerland

  2000 Edward Gorey (The Gashlycrumb Tinies), 75, Hyannis, Mass.

  1719Published: The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner by Daniel Defoe (W. Taylor, London)

  1842 Charles Dickens, traveling in the American Midwest, called the Mississippi the “beastliest river in the world.”

  1862 Col. Thomas Wentworth Higginson, the abolitionist, poet, and essayist, must have expected some response from the aspiring authors he addressed in his April “Letter to a Young Contributor” in the Atlantic Monthly, but nothing like the short note he received, written in a peculiar bird-scrawl that began, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?” It appeared to be unsigned until he discovered a small sub-envelope within that contained a card with the shyly penciled name “Emily Dickinson.” Enclosed also were four poems, and his curious and encouraging response, as well as the ambivalence about publishing them he shared with their author, led to a three-decade correspondence with Dickinson, she playing a coy “Scholar” and he bewildered and moved by the flights of her mind.

  1865 Working in Washington during the war, Walt Whitman developed an affectionate and personal admiration for President Lincoln, whom he often saw riding into town, but when news came of his assassination, Whitman was back in New York, where Broadway was “black with mourning” and the sky dripped with “heavy, moist black weather.” Turning his thoughts to poetry, he composed a number of memorials in the following months, including “O Captain, My Captain,” which gained an immediate popularity Whitman came to regret, and the great, exuberant elegy “When Lilacs Last in the Door-yard Bloom’d.”

  1924 Rand McNally published the first edition of their bestselling road atlas, titled, for the time being, the Rand McNally Auto Chum.

  1972 Hunter S. Thompson was intent on staying outside the clubby pack of politicos and journalists while covering the 1972 Democratic primaries for Rolling Stone, but when his favored underdog, Senator George McGovern, suddenly became the front-runner, the lines got a little blurred, as in a friendly phone exchange included in Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72, which began with McGovern’s young political director, Frank Mankiewicz, fresh from a surprise win in Wisconsin, declaring, to Thompson’s surprise, “We have it locked up!” and ended with Mankiewicz, after hearing Thompson’s difficulties finding a Wisconsin doc to inject him with his preferred cocktail of remedies, saying with concern, “Hunter, I get the feeling that you’re not very careful about your health.”

  April 16

  BORN: 1871 J. M. Synge (The Playboy of the Western World), Rathfarnham, Ireland

  1922 Kingsley Amis (Lucky Jim, The Old Devils), London

  DIED: 1689 Aphra Behn (The Rover, Oronooko), 48, England

  1994 Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, Shadow and Act), 80, New York City

  1911 Apsley Cherry-Garrard and the Scott Antarctica party spent Easter in a “howling blizzard,” dining on tinned haddock and “cheese hoosh” and reading Bleak House.

  1912 On a foggy night in London, only a day after news of the sinking of the Titanic, an odd and “quaint” figure surprised the editor of Nash’s Magazine in his darkened office: Joseph Conrad, the novelist and former seaman, who was agitated at the blame quickly falling on the crew of the ship. Would they publish an article by him? Four hours later, a cable from the magazine’s New York office replied, “Who is Conrad? Do not want his story.” (Undaunted, Conrad vented his anger at the arrogance of building a “45,000 ton hotel of thin steel plates to secure the patronage of, say, a couple of thousand rich people” in the English Review instead.)

  1933 Precariously and unrewardingly employed as an art teacher in his hometown of Drohobycz, Poland, Bruno Schulz found an outlet for the vivid world inside his head in stories he embroidered with a richly mythologized history of the town. His friends pressed to get them published until finally the timid Schulz traveled to Warsaw to present them to a well-known writer, Zofia Nałkowska, and waited, trembling, for her response. It came by telephone just before he had to leave for his return train: “This is the most sensational discovery in our literature!” By the end of the year, the collection was published as Cinnamon Shops; not until 1963, two decades after Schulz’s murder by an SS soldier in Drohobycz, was it translated into English and acclaimed in the United States as The Street of Crocodiles.

  1963 “My dear fellow clergymen”: so began the message Martin Luther King scribbled in the margins of newspapers in the Birmingham jail, where he was held for defying an injunction against protest in the city. While demonstrators in the streets of Birmingham faced the police dogs and fire hoses of the arch-segregationist “Bull” Connor, King expressed a growing frustration with those who had at times been his allies, the “white moderates” who had counseled patience rather than protest in their own open letter four days before. Little noted at the time, King’s passionately reasoned “Letter from Birmingham Jail” became his best-known piece of writing after the Birmingham campaign, with its dramatic images of assaulted protesters, grew into one of the most influential of the civil rights movement.

  1972 Charlie Brown told Peppermint Patty that the “secret to living is owning a convertible and a lake.”

  2002 Published: Everything Is Illuminated by Jonathan Safran Foer (Houghton Mifflin, Boston)

  April 17

  BORN: 1885 Isak Dinesen (Seven Gothic Tales, Out of Africa), Rungsted, Denmark

  1928 Cynthia Ozick (The Shawl, The Puttermesser Papers), New York City

  DIED: 1790 Benjamin Franklin (Autobiography, Poor Richard’s Almanack), 84, Philadelphia

  1986 Bessie Head (A Question of Power), 48, Serowe, Botswana

  1907 Edgar Rice Burroughs, still five years away from creating Tarzan and John Carter of Mars, was promoted to manager of the Stenographic Department at Sears, Roebuck, and Co. in Chicago.

  1926 Experiencing “silent convulsions of joy” as his train from New York approached his ancestral home in Rhode Island, H. P. Lovecraft could hardly contain his “surges of ecstasy” at his arrival at “HOME—UNION STATION—PROVIDENCE!!!!” “There is no other pla
ce for me,” he wrote. “My world is Providence.” For two years he’d been doomed to the heterogeneous metropolis of Brooklyn, whose “hateful chaos” of “non-Nordic” races spurred in him what one biographer has called a “genocidal frenzy.” Released to the relative purity of Rhode Island (and from the marriage that had taken him to New York), Lovecraft never moved away again and in the next decade before his death channeled his genius for disgust into the most memorably unsettling of his tales of horror.

  1926 Carrying an amateur camera but hoping to become a writer, Walker Evans, like so many other Americans of his generation, arrived in Paris in search of an artistic education and a bohemian life. Somehow, though, despite becoming a regular at Sylvia Beach’s Shakespeare & Company bookshop, he missed out on the “moveable feast.” Lonely and shy, he connected with none of the famed expatriates, and when offered an introduction to James Joyce refused it in fear of meeting the great man. But while he wrote little, he read a lot, and at the Paris cafés he learned how to observe: “I got my license at the Deux Magots,” he later wrote. “Stare. It is the way to educate your eye and more. Stare, pry, listen, eavesdrop. Die knowing something.”

  1982 Dying of cancer, John Cheever steered his son Fred away from a career he was considering: “On librarians I do speak with prejudice. The profession in general has always seemed to me like the legitimization and financing of an impulse to collect old socks.”

  2002 At the Elliott Bay Book Company in Seattle, Ben Marcus, author of the excellent Age of Wire and String, graciously corrected the author of this book, who had confused him with Ben Metcalf, author of the superb essay “American Heartworm.”

  April 18

  BORN: 1918 André Bazin (What Is Cinema?), Angers, France

  1959 Susan Faludi (Backlash, Stiffed), Queens, N.Y.

  DIED: 1945 Ernie Pyle (Here Is Your War, Brave Men), 44, Iejima, Japan

  1964 Ben Hecht (The Front Page, A Child of the Century), 70, New York City

  NO YEAR They may not be the details you recall most vividly from your school reading, but The Canterbury Tales contain as much useful information about medieval astronomy, a fascination of Chaucer’s, as they do about the methods for cuckolding a carpenter. In his introduction to the Man of Law’s Tale, for instance, the Host mentions the only specific date in the poem—“the eightetethe of Aprill”—and estimates from the latitude and the length of shadows that it is ten in the morning. Scholars ever since have speculated about the actual dates of this fictional pilgrimage, placing it anywhere from 1385 to 1394 and giving it any length from four days and three nights to a single day’s journey taken at a canter, a word derived, after all, from the “Canterbury gallop” used by monks on their way to the cathedral.

  1800 “If you really must beat the measure, sir, let me entreat you to do so in time, and not half a beat ahead.” Such is the cold, whispered greeting that Stephen Maturin gives to Lieutenant Jack Aubrey—soon to become Captain Aubrey—in their first meeting, at a concert in Port Mahon, Minorca, in the opening pages of Patrick O’Brian’s Master and Commander. They part equally coldly that night but are reconciled the following morning by their common musical enthusiasm and a shared pot of chocolate. Soon Aubrey asks Maturin to be the ship’s surgeon on his new command, the HMS Sophie, and their durable alliance of opposites—Aubrey large, bluff, and cheerful; Maturin small and introspective—provides the emotional backbone of the twenty further volumes in O’Brian’s beloved Aubrey-Maturin series.

  1927 Fitzgerald wrote Hemingway that the first line of “In Another Country,” “In the fall the war was always there but we did not go to it any more,” was “one of the most beautiful prose sentences I have ever read.”

  1981 “She ate the egg. Then another egg.” And that’s when June Kashpaw began to decide that her bus ticket out of town would be just as good any other day and she could stick around with the man who had bought her a beer and peeled her an egg, and then another, and then another. The eggs felt lucky, and this man could be different. “You got to be,” she breathed to him. “You got to be different.” Got to be or not, he turns out to be beside the point: it’s June who feels different, pure and naked like an egg under her crackling skin, and able to walk across the fields in the deep April snow, even as it buries her, in the sudden blizzard that opens Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine.

  April 19

  BORN: 1900 Richard Hughes (A High Wind in Jamaica, In Hazard), Weybridge, England

  1943 Rikki Ducornet (The Jade Cabinet), Canton, N.Y.

  DIED: 1824 Lord Byron (Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage), 36, Missolonghi, Ottoman Empire

  1882 Charles Darwin (On the Origin of Species), 73, Downe, England

  1854 Henry David Thoreau declined a neighbor’s offer of a two-headed calf: “I am not interested in mere phenomena.”

  1862 Lionel Tennyson, age eight, explained to a visitor to the household, Lewis Carroll, the conditions under which he would show Carroll some poems he had written: Carroll must play chess with him, and must allow Lionel to give him “one blow on the head with a mallet.”

  1891 Following the line “I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist,” Herman Melville, seventy-one years old and five months from his death, added the words “End of Book.” He may have intended that line, the final one in a ballad called “Billy in the Darbies,” as the end of his book, but the book itself, Billy Budd, was unfinished and would remain so. The first novel he’d written in three decades, it was only discovered as a manuscript among his papers after nearly three more decades, when it was acclaimed as his last masterpiece.

  1913 The Athenaeum on Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams: “The results he reaches are hardly commensurate with the labour expended, and reveal a seamy side of life in Vienna which might well have been left alone.”

  1951 Noel Coward had “nearly finished Little Dorrit—what a beastly girl, but what a wonderful novel.”

  1956 The long friendship between Albert Murray and Ralph Ellison began in New York during the war when they realized they both, as southern transplants and African American writers, “had accepted the challenge of William Faulkner’s complex literary image of the South,” as Murray later put it. But by 1956 they were losing patience with Faulkner. “Nuts!” Ellison wrote from Rome about Faulkner’s “Go slow now” essay about civil rights in Life. “He thinks that Negroes exist simply to give ironic overtone to the viciousness of white folks.” Murray, replying on this day from Casablanca, where he was stationed with the air force, was more blunt: “Son of a bitch prefers a handful of anachronistic crackers to everything that really gives him a reason not only for being but for writing. I’m watching his ass but close forevermore.”

  April 20

  BORN: 1950 Steve Erickson (Days Between Stations, Zeroville), Los Angeles

  1953 Robert Crais (L.A. Requiem, The Two-Minute Rule), Independence, La.

  DIED: 1912 Bram Stoker (Dracula, The Lair of the White Worm), 64, London

  1996 Christopher Robin Milne (The Enchanted Place), 75, Totnes, England

  1746 Giacomo Casanova was a seducer not just of women but of patrons. Born poor, he had by the age of twenty-one already been a lawyer, a clergyman, a soldier, and finally a mediocre violinist when, after fiddling at a wedding in Venice, he retrieved a letter a nobleman dropped while stepping into his gondola. The nobleman offered him a ride home but suffered a stroke along the way, and Casanova, taking charge of his recovery and convincing him meanwhile that he was a master of the occult, made himself so useful that the nobleman—a Venetian senator, it turned out—adopted him as a son and, “at one bound,” as he recalled in his Story of My Life, raised him into the idle pleasures of the nobility.

  1827 Charles and Alfred Tennyson, ages eighteen and seventeen, celebrated the publication of Poems by Two Brothers by riding to the coast and shouting their verses into the wind and waves.

  1926 When The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man appeared in 1912, its author, James Weldon Johnson, thought it would
make more of a splash published anonymously so it could be taken as the true confession of a black narrator who had passed into the white world. As it turned out, the novel hardly made a splash at all, receiving few sales or reviews (although the Nashville Tennessean did go to the trouble of declaring its title an impossibility: “once a negro, always a negro”). It was only in the following decade, during the flourishing of the Harlem Renaissance, that Blanche Knopf wrote Johnson on this day, “There is no question that we want The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man,” bringing back into print one of the subtlest and most challenging examinations of identity in American fiction.

  1936 William Faulkner piloted a Waco F biplane in his first solo flight.

  1984 At five in the morning on Good Friday in the opening pages of Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter, Frank Bascombe climbs over the cemetery fence behind his house to meet his ex-wife in remembrance of the birthday of their son, Ralph. Four years before, Ralph died at the age of nine, and two years after that Frank and “X,” as she’s known in the book, were divorced. Frank has brought a poem to read this year at Ralph’s grave: Theodore Roethke’s “Meditation,” a poem he likes and she dislikes for its assurance of the happiness that can be found in the everyday, an assurance that will be tested throughout The Sportswriter and the Bascombe novels that follow, Independence Day and The Lay of the Land.

  April 21

  BORN: 1816 Charlotte Brontë (Jane Eyre, Villette), Thornton, England

  1838 John Muir (The Mountains of California), Dunbar, Scotland

  DIED: 1910 Mark Twain (Life on the Mississippi, Pudd’nhead Wilson), 74, Redding, Conn.

  1946 John Maynard Keynes (The General Theory of Employment, Interest, and Money), 62, Firie, England