A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  129 Many have noticed that on April 21, the traditional anniversary of the founding of Rome, the open oculus at the top of the rotunda in the city’s Pantheon causes a circle of sunlight to shine on the temple’s doorway. Did the emperor Hadrian, who oversaw the building’s completion, arrange to have his ceremonial entrance on this date so illuminated? In Marguerite Yourcenar’s novel Memoirs of Hadrian, the emperor speaks with pride of the temple’s dedication and of the “disk of daylight . . . suspended there like a shield of gold.” As she mentions in her fascinating afternotes to the novel, Yourcenar visited the Pantheon herself on that same day of the year to check where the sunlight would fall.

  1883 In remarks he’d later disown, Oscar Wilde described Algernon Swinburne as “a braggart of vice, who has done everything he could to convince his fellow citizens of his homosexuality and bestiality, without being in the slightest degree a homosexual or a bestializer.”

  1992 “It was,” Mr. McAlister, the faculty adviser to the Student Government Association, has to admit, “the most interesting election I’d seen in my nine years at Winwood.” There’s Tracy Flick, smoldering with “110 pounds of the rawest, nakedest ambition” (and fresh off a scandalous fling with her English teacher); Paul Warren, the genial varsity fullback and Mr. M’s secret protégé; and the wild card, Paul’s sister, Tammy, whose campaign slogan is “Who cares about this stupid election?” And there’s Mr. M himself, who drops two crucial votes in a trash can on election day and ruins his life. Before Reese Witherspoon and Matthew Broderick made Tracy and Mr. M their own, there was Tom Perrotta’s Election, a breezily challenging novel about messy American democracy in the Bush-Clinton era.

  1995 A mentor to his favorite cartoonists but competitive with them all, Charles M. Schulz developed a particularly affectionate friendship with Lynn Johnston, whose For Better or For Worse approached his Peanuts in popularity for a time. Her realistic strip, like few others, followed its characters through real time, and eventually Johnston had to deal with death, beginning with the sheepdog Farley, who died in this day’s strip after rescuing little April Patterson from a swollen river. “You cannot kill off the family dog,” Schulz told Johnston when she first previewed the storyline for him. “If you do this story, I am going to have Snoopy get hit by a truck and go to the hospital, and everybody will worry about Snoopy, and nobody’s going to read your stupid story.”

  April 22

  BORN: 1899 Vladimir Nabokov (Laughter in the Dark, Lolita), St. Petersburg, Russia

  1923 Paula Fox (Desperate Characters, Borrowed Finery), New York City

  DIED: 1984 Ansel Adams (Parmelian Prints of the High Sierra), 82, Monterey, Calif.

  1996 Erma Bombeck (The Grass Is Always Greener over the Septic Tank), 69, San Francisco

  1848 Having forgotten her birthday the day before, Charlotte Brontë lamented, “I am now 32. Youth is gone—gone—and will never come back.”

  1910 One of Sigmund Freud’s most famous—and favorite—patients was one he only knew from a book. Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge in Leipzig who had suffered a mental breakdown, wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness to argue (successfully) for release from his asylum in 1902; Freud was so intrigued by his account he jokingly wrote Carl Jung on this day that Schreber “should have been made a professor of psychiatry and director of a mental hospital.” It’s no surprise he was drawn to the book: Schreber’s fantastic and detailed visions—of turning into a woman, of being penetrated by rays and by crowds of people, of his “soul murder” at the hands of his former doctor—provide a rich text for Freud’s analysis in The Schreber Case of the source of the patient’s paranoia. (Surprise: it’s his father.)

  1949 After his ex-con friend Little Jack Melody crashed his car in a police chase—with Ginsberg and a load of stolen jewelry and furs in the back seat—twenty-one-year-old Allen Ginsberg was arrested for grand larceny and attempting to run over a policeman.

  1951 The legend of Jack Kerouac’s frenzied composition of On the Road both is and isn’t true. He spent years drafting and revising the novel, but it is true that for three weeks, ending on this day, he typed a complete, 125,000-word draft on a 120-foot roll of paper he had taped together. Soon after, he proudly unrolled the scroll in the office of Robert Giroux, to that point his champion in New York publishing, who replied, “How the hell can the printer work from this?” His revised version finally saw print in 1957, but fifty years later the draft was published as On the Road: The Original Scroll, with the characters Dean Moriarty and Carlo Marx restored to their original names, Neal Cassady and Allen Ginsberg.

  1973 Concrete Island is not the only novel of J. G. Ballard’s that begins with an automobile crash. But unlike the erotic violence of Crash, this accident, in which a blown tire sends Robert Maitland’s Jaguar onto the embankment of a highway interchange in central London, leaves its victim unscathed. And what follows is less a story of violence than of isolation, of a man marooned in the midst of a metropolis. Unable at first to attract a rescuer from the flow of traffic, as he’s left to his own resources and those of his few tramp neighbors, he becomes unwilling to leave his concrete island on any terms but his own.

  April 23

  BORN: 1895 Ngaio Marsh (Enter a Murderer), Christchurch, New Zealand

  1942 Barry Hannah (Airships, Geronimo Rex), Meridian, Miss.

  DIED: 1915 Rupert Brooke (1914 and Other Poems), 27, Skyros, Greece

  1996 P. L. Travers (Mary Poppins), 96, London

  1374 Has a poet been more glamorously compensated than when Edward III, during the feast of St. George at Windsor Castle, granted Geoffrey Chaucer a pitcher of wine a day for life, to be picked up daily from the king’s butler? It is not certain that the reward—extravagant even for its time—was for poetry; some have connected it instead to his recent mission to Florence or his new position as controller of the Wool Custom. Whatever its cause, the impracticality of the gift was such that four years later Edward’s successor, Richard II, turned it into a regular cash payment.

  1616 Did Shakespeare and Cervantes, the two great founders of modern literature, really die on the same day, as is often said? Not quite: Shakespeare died on this day in the old Julian calendar, while Cervantes died eleven days earlier, on April 22 in the Gregorian calendar, and was buried on the 23rd.

  1857 Nearing forty, Henry David Thoreau might have felt he had encountered his own youthful self in the person of a twenty-year-old woman when he met Kate Brady. An admirer of Walden and a lover of nature, she told Thoreau that like him she wanted to “live free.” “Her own sex, so tamely bred, only jeer at her for entertaining such an idea,” Thoreau wrote a week later, “but she has a strong head and a love for good reading, which may carry her through.” Then, as if to banish any thought that she might be a companion for him, he added, “How rarely a man’s love for nature becomes a ruling principle with him, like a youth’s affection for a maiden, but more enduring! All nature is my bride.”

  1916 His new job as head of the Surety Claims Department of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company often took Wallace Stevens, who had just begun publishing poems in literary journals, on the road, and on Easter Sunday he wrote his wife from Miami. “Florida,” he reported, “is not really amazing in itself but in what it becomes under cultivation . . . There are brilliant birds and strange things but they must be observed,” the stirrings of a thought he’d expand and complicate twenty years later in his portrait, in “The Idea of Order at Key West,” of a singer who “Knew that there never was a world for her / Except the one she sang and, singing, made.”

  1975 Longtime correspondents Barbara Pym and Philip Larkin met in person for the first time for lunch, Pym having informed Larkin beforehand, “I shall probably be wearing a beige tweed suit or a Welsh tweed cape if colder. I shall be looking rather anxious, I expect.”

  April 24

  BORN: 1815 Anthony Trollope (Barchester Towers, The Way We Live Now), London

  1940 Sue Grafton (“A” Is for Alibi, “B�
�� Is for Burglar), Chicago

  DIED: 1731 Daniel Defoe (Robinson Crusoe, Moll Flanders), c. 70, London

  1942 L. M. Montgomery (Anne of Green Gables, Emily of New Moon), 67, Toronto

  1814 Edward Barrett sent his eight-year-old daughter, Elizabeth, ten shillings in exchange for a poem “on virtue,” calling her the “Poet Laureate of Hope End.”

  1895 “I had resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895, was fair, at noon I weighed anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston.” Not far past the docks, Joshua Slocum, piloting the thirty-seven-foot sloop Spray alone, passed a steamship that had broken on the rocks and noted, “I was already farther on my voyage than she.” Slocum sailed 46,000 more miles before returning to New England over three years later as the first to circumnavigate the globe solo. By then the newspapers that were his early sponsors had lost interest in his dispatches, but his full account, published as Sailing Alone Around the World, was an immediate international success and remains one of the finest of adventure yarns.

  1916 The factions of Irish nationalism were many, and when word reached him in England of the Rising in Dublin against the British that began on this Easter Monday, W. B. Yeats didn’t think much of some of the conspirators—a dreamer, a drunk, and a madwoman among them, he thought. But by May, when British firing squads began executing the rebels, he had already composed the famous refrain—“a terrible beauty has been born”—of the poem “Easter, 1916,” which he would complete in September. It wasn’t until 1920, though, with World War I over and the Irish War of Independence begun, that he found the times right to publish his ambivalent song of martyrdom.

  1944 With Under the Volcano, his own novel of alcoholic descent, still unpublished, Malcolm Lowry wrote a friend, “Have you read a novel The Lost Weekend by one Charles Jackson, a radioman from New York? It is perhaps not a very fine novel but admirably about a drunkard and hangovers and alcoholic wards as they have never been done (save by me of course).”

  1963 Eight years after he first mocked up a tiny book called Where the Wild Horses Are, Maurice Sendak drafted the opening lines of what would be his first solo picture book. The story began, “Once a boy asked where the wild horses are. Nobody could tell him,” and it involved a magic garden and a mother who turned into a wolf. Within a month, though, the horses had become “things”—“I couldn’t really draw horses,” Sendak said—inspired by the frightening relatives who invaded his childhood home on Sundays, saying, “You’re so cute I could eat you up,” and in the fall Where the Wild Things Are was published, to great consternation and delight.

  April 25

  BORN: 1949 James Fenton (The Memory of War), Lincoln, England

  1952 Padgett Powell (Edisto, The Interrogative Mood), Gainesville, Fla.

  DIED: 1944 George Herriman (Krazy Kat), 63, Los Angeles

  2006 Jane Jacobs (The Death and Life of Great American Cities), 89, Toronto

  387 St. Augustine may have invented the modern autobiography with his Confessions, but his own autobiography, or at least the modern part of it, ends midway through that book with the words describing this day: “And we were baptized, and anxiety for our past life vanished from us.” To that point Augustine’s path has taken him through sin and spiritual yearning to the moment when he saw the light in a garden in Milan; a year later that serene vision of his sins absolved was granted by his baptism in the same city. The Confessions still has four books remaining at that point, but the confessing is over: the rest is less about Augustine the man than about his God.

  1811 Jane Austen, asked by her sister about Sense and Sensibility, soon to be published, replied, “I am never too busy to think of S&S. I can no more forget it, than a mother can forget her sucking child.”

  1929 With his second novel on its way, Henry Green was able to make his engagement with Mary Biddulph official when their fathers, after months of negotiation, settled on an £1,800 annual income for the young couple.

  1931 “Constant Reader,” in The New Yorker, on Dashiell Hammett’s The Glass Key: “All I can say is that anybody who doesn’t read him misses much of modern America . . . Dashiell Hammett is as American as a sawed-off shotgun.”

  1983 It took only three days for one of the greatest scoops in modern journalism to unravel. On April 22, the German newsweekly Stern announced the discovery of a treasure trove for historians: the diaries kept by Adolf Hitler between 1932 and 1945, which had been authenticated in a Swiss bank vault by experts swayed by the sight of over sixty handwritten notebooks, a number no forger, surely, would have had the audacity or stamina to fabricate. The next day the distinguished historian Hugh Trevor-Roper wrote that history as we knew it would “have to be revised,” but by the 25th, when Stern and Newsweek first published excerpts, the fraud was coming undone. (Among the clues: the A in the Gothic initials “AH” glued onto each volume was, in fact, an F.) The diaries, it was soon revealed, were a collaboration between journalist Gerd Heidemann and career forger Konrad Kujau.

  2008 Michel Faber, in the Guardian, on James Kelman’s Kieron Smith, Boy: “I suspect Kelman knew exactly what he was doing. And what he has done here is both revolutionary and very, very dull.”

  April 26

  BORN: 1889 Ludwig Wittgenstein (Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus), Vienna

  1914 Bernard Malamud (The Natural, The Fixer), Brooklyn

  DIED: 1991 A. B. Guthrie Jr. (The Big Sky, The Way West), 90, Choteau, Mont.

  2004 Hubert Selby Jr. (Last Exit to Brooklyn, Requiem for a Dream), 75, Los Angeles

  1336 Did the poet Petrarch invent mountaineering when he ascended Mont Ventoux? Some historians have claimed it, but some have questioned whether he climbed the mountain—best known now as one of the great cyclist’s challenges in the Tour de France—at all. The fame of his adventure rests on an account he claimed to have written the night of his descent: full of earthly pleasure at the view from the 1,912-meter summit, he opened his pocket copy of St. Augustine’s Confessions and was chastened and exalted by the passage he turned to by chance: “And men go to admire the high mountains, the vast floods of the sea, the huge streams of the rivers, the circumference of the ocean and the revolutions of the stars—and desert themselves.”

  1853 Reading Montaigne in bed, Flaubert wrote to Louise Colet: “I know of no more soothing book, none more conducive to peace of mind. It is so healthy, so down to earth!”

  1884 Leo Tolstoy, one of Russia’s best-known men, set out to visit a bookshop in Moscow but turned back when no one on the streetcar would change a ten-ruble note. “They all thought I was a swindler.”

  1942 After his daring entrance into the war, in which he crashed his plane in the Sahara and then joined his RAF squadron in the dogfights of the Battle of Athens, Roald Dahl’s posting to Washington, D.C., seemed dull. But when C. S. Forester, whose Horatio Hornblower maritime adventures Dahl had loved as a child, asked him to sit down and describe his exploits so Forester could write them up for the Saturday Evening Post, Dahl was transformed. “For the first time in my life,” he said, “I became totally absorbed in what I was doing.” Forester saw it too: he passed Dahl’s draft, unedited, on to the magazine, which published it in August and began Roald Dahl’s new career as a writer.

  2007 Colm Tóibín must surely have been alluding to the opening scene in Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love when he wrote admiringly in the London Review of Books of McEwan’s control of tone in On Chesil Beach, “It is like putting just enough air in a hot-air balloon to allow it to fly, making sure, however, that it can land as well.”

  April 27

  BORN: 1759 Mary Wollstonecraft (Vindication of the Rights of Women), London

  1898 Ludwig Bemelmans (Madeline, Hotel Splendide), Meran, Austria-Hungary

  DIED: 1882 Ralph Waldo Emerson (Nature, Self-Reliance), 78, Concord, Mass.

  1932 Hart Crane (The Bridge, White Buildings), 32, Gulf of Mexico

  1934 Unable to interest New York publishers in his prop
osal for a new bird guide, twenty-four-year-old naturalist and painter Roger Tory Peterson discovered that the head of the Massachusetts Audubon Society, Francis Allen, was also a senior editor at the Boston house of Houghton Mifflin. Allen was immediately interested but, as Peterson told it, tested Peterson’s illustrations by asking a Harvard ornithologist to identify the pictured birds from the other end of a long conference table. The paintings passed the test, and Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds was published on this day in the following year. The first printing of 2,000 copies sold out in a week; by Peterson’s death in 1996, he had sold over seven million bird guides.

  1948 Gore Vidal reminded Christopher Isherwood, whom he had just met in Paris, “of a teddy bear, sometimes of a duck”; he also seemed “a pretty shrewd operator.”

  1959 “Poor thing,” Robert Lowell wrote Elizabeth Bishop about a visit from Theodore Roethke, “mammoth yet elfinlike, hairless, red-faced, beginning the day with a shot of bourbon, speechless except for shrewd grunted asides—behind him nervous breakdowns, before him—what?”

  1975 On April 27, 2012, four years after his novel The Museum of Innocence was published, Orhan Pamuk opened an actual Museum of Innocence in Istanbul, in a house he purchased and filled (at a cost he estimated as equal to his Nobel Prize) with thousands of objects—school reports, hairclips, cigarette stubs—from the imagined affair between the novel’s two lovers, Kemal and Füsun. For years, as he wrote their story, he stocked the museum as well, and the opening celebrated the thirty-seventh anniversary of the moment that launched their affair (and its long, melancholy aftermath), when Kemal’s future wife admired a handbag in the window of a posh boutique, causing him to return the next day to buy the bag and see Füsun, a young cousin working there who had grown beautiful since he’d seen her last.

  1979 Rebecca Stead’s When You Reach Me swept a handful of prizes for young readers, including the 2010 Newbery Medal, thanks to its intensely evoked atmosphere of late-’70s Upper West Side Manhattan and its ingenious (and affecting) time-travel plot. At the center of the story’s chronological swirl one date holds firm: April 27, 1979, the day Miranda’s mom is scheduled to be a contestant on Dick Clark’s $20,000 Pyramid, just as a mysterious correspondent from the future had predicted in his final note to Miranda. And on that day, as her mom’s round in the Winner’s Circle begins, all the clues Miranda has been unraveling through the story begin to fall into place.