A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  April 28

  BORN: 1926 Harper Lee (To Kill a Mockingbird), Monroeville, Ala.

  1953 Roberto Bolaño (The Savage Detectives, Distant Star), Santiago, Chile

  DIED: 1992 Iceberg Slim (Trick Baby, Pimp), 73, Los Angeles

  1997 Ann Petry (The Street, The Narrows), 88, Old Saybrook, Conn.

  1873 After a night out with Flaubert, George Sand had had enough of her “young friend”: “I’m very fond of him, but he gives me a splitting headache. He doesn’t like noise, but he doesn’t mind the din he makes himself.”

  1937 Sherwood Anderson watched from the stands at the Polo Grounds as the Dodgers, behind Van Lingle Mungo, topped the Giants, 3–2.

  1952 How do you make a spider beguiling? A pig, or a little girl: no problem. But Garth Williams’s greatest challenge in illustrating E. B. White’s Charlotte’s Web was drawing Charlotte herself in a way that would be both natural and appealing. Williams sketched Charlotte with a variety of anthropomorphic eyes, eyebrows, and mouths—at one point going so far as to borrow the face of the Mona Lisa—but White and his editor, Ursula Nordstrom, pushed him to make her more “spider-y,” and on this day Nordstrom sent White, who felt that “the book must at all odds have a beguiling Charlotte,” the latest batch of Williams’s sketches, agreeing that their heroine should look “less like a person”: “After all, Charlotte is a spider.”

  1962 On this morning, two detectives arrested Kenneth Halliwell and Joe Orton for stealing seventy-two library books and cutting pages from 1,653 art books to decorate the walls of their flat. The two had also doctored dozens of library book covers—replacing Henry VIII’s head with a monkey’s, for instance, and adding mildly obscene jacket blurbs to Dorothy Sayers novels. For these crimes the “frustrated authors,” in the words of the prosecutor, were sentenced to six months in prison, which changed their lives. Halliwell attempted suicide shortly after their release, while Orton, finally unlocking the detachment and anger his writing needed, wrote a series of hit plays over the next five years, beginning with Entertaining Mr. Sloane, before being murdered by Halliwell in the same flat.

  1966 Muriel Spark watched her horse Lifeboat, which she bought from the queen, race at Fontwell Park.

  April 29

  BORN: 1931 Robert Gottlieb (editor of Catch-22 and The New Yorker), New York City

  DIED: 1997 Mike Royko (Boss; I May Be Wrong, but I Doubt It), 64, Chicago

  2011 Joanna Russ (The Female Man, Picnic on Paradise), 74, Tucson

  1863 and 1933 The seventy years of Constantine Cavafy’s life, between his birth on this day in 1863 and his death on the same day in 1933, were spent largely outside the public eye. Though he wrote in Greek, he lived nearly all his life in Alexandria, Egypt, where his father, an export merchant, had compiled a fortune that was mostly lost by Cavafy’s youth. For over thirty years he worked as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works, while living, like Borges, with his mother, pursuing an active, though secret, homosexual life, and writing poems that, over time, found a voice of distilled irony to express his passions for the vanished byways of classical Greece and the beauty of men.

  1939 In his mid-thirties, James Beard left Portland, Oregon, for New York City to make one last attempt at a theater career. Like many actors, he found more work in catering, and he joined with his friends Bill and Irma Rhode to launch Hors d’Oeuvre, Inc., which on this day attracted the notice of the Herald Tribune’s urbane columnist Lucius Beebe. Bill got the public credit from Beebe—“He has turtle livers flown in from Florida, the finest of Danish hams and caviars, anchovies, lobsters and game pastes in every known combination”—but the next year Beard, to Rhode’s fury, adapted the company’s name into his first cookbook, Hors d’Oeuvre and Canapés. Their partnership soon dissolved, but Beard’s book remained in print for decades as he became the dean of American food writers.

  1940 Tennessee Williams “saw a silly picture called 1,000,000 Years B.C.”

  1946 Published: The Portable Faulkner by William Faulkner, edited by Malcolm Cowley (Viking, New York)

  1974 When President Richard Nixon announced on this day that, in response to a House subpoena, he would release 1,200 pages of edited transcripts of the taped White House discussions of the Watergate break-in, “blemishes and all,” he made an offering not only to history but to readers as well. The transcripts and the tapes, which continued to trickle out over the following decades and are best collected in Stanley I. Kutler’s Abuse of Power, are a rich trove of conversation made under stress, full of conspiracy, self-dealing, and indirection. “In many places on the tapes,” the president said in his address, “there were ambiguities,” and there are, if not always where he claimed. What could be more compelling for a reader than a book full of both smoking guns and ambiguous gaps, with an eighteen-and-a-half-minute absence at its heart that rivals the great unnameables of Beckett, Lovecraft, or Dickinson in its power and mystery?

  April 30

  BORN: 1877 Alice B. Toklas (The Alice B. Toklas Cookbook), San Francisco

  1945 Annie Dillard (Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, The Maytrees), Pittsburgh

  DIED: 1982 Lester Bangs (Psychotic Reactions and Carburetor Dung), 33, New York City

  1994 Richard Scarry (What Do People Do All Day?), 74, Gstaad, Switzerland

  1574 Rich and bored, the young Mathilde de La Mole, daughter of the employer of Julian Sorel, Stendhal’s antiheroic upstart in The Red and the Black, has cultivated a passion for what she supposes to have been a more heroic age, mourning the day, April 30, 1574, when her ancestor Boniface de La Mole was beheaded for a daring threat to the Crown. Julian finds her black mourning gown flattering, and soon, encouraged by his own romantic imitation of Napoleon, they fall for each other. Later in their story, the legend that La Mole’s severed head was buried by his lover (herself the subject of Alexandre Dumas’s La Reine Margot) will have its ironic echo.

  1746 Samuel Johnson, until then a literary journeyman of moderate reputation, submitted to a group of booksellers “A Short Scheme for Compiling a New Dictionary of the English Language,” leading to a contract in June for the substantial sum of £1,575. “The great Labour is yet to come,” he wrote, “the labour of interpreting these words and phrases, with brevity, fulness, and perspicuity,” and indeed, it was only after nine years of “harmless drudgery” that A Dictionary of the English Language, a nearly one-man production that remained the standard English dictionary for almost two hundred years, was published and made his fame.

  1861 Jilted by Ashley Wilkes, Scarlett O’Hara marries Charles Hamilton the day before Ashley’s wedding to Charles’s sister Melanie, as both grooms prepare to go off to war.

  1926 Working with an unprecedented fluency, Virginia Woolf wrote most of the first section of To the Lighthouse in a few months in early 1926, and on this day recorded in her diary that she had finished the first part and begun the lyrical middle interlude, “Time Passes,” in which she gave herself the “most difficult abstract” challenge of writing of time and a place without characters. After dashing out the first two pages, she wondered, “Is it nonsense, is it brilliance?”

  1966 After a party celebrating both the twenty-first birthday of his wife, Mimi Baez, with whom he’d recorded two folk-rock albums, and the release of his first novel, Been Down So Long It Looks Like Up to Me, Richard Fariña said, “Let’s go for a ride!” and climbed behind a casual acquaintance onto the back of his red Harley-Davidson Sportster. You can guess what happened next. Up in the Carmel hills over the Pacific, the bike failed to navigate a curve at a speed later estimated at ninety and threw Fariña off, killing him instantly. Less than two months later, his friend Bob Dylan nearly met the same fate when he crashed his Triumph 500 near Woodstock, New York.

  May is blooming and fertile, spring in its full flower. Unlike the storms of March and the “uncertain glory” of April, Shakespeare’s May, with its “darling buds,” is always sweet, and ever the month for love. Traditionally—before the
international labor movement claimed May 1st in honor of the Haymarket riot—May Days were holidays of love too, white-gowned fertility celebrations. It’s on a May Day that Thomas Hardy, always attuned to ancient rites, introduces Tess Durbeyfield, whose “bouncing handsome womanliness” among the country girls “under whose bodices the life throbbed quick and warm” still reveals flashes of the child she recently was.

  May has long been the month for mothers as well as maidens, even before Anna Jarvis chose the second Sunday in May in 1908 for Mother’s Day to honor the death of her own mother. The mother of them all, the Virgin Mary, was celebrated for centuries as the Queen of May, and in “The May Magnificat” Gerard Manley Hopkins reminds us that “May is Mary’s month,” and asks why. “All things rising,” he answers, “all things sizing / Mary sees, sympathizing / with that world of good, / Nature’s motherhood.”

  May’s meanings can get to be too much, though. When the mother in The Furies, Janet Hobhouse’s fictional memoir of a life caught up in isolated family dependence, chooses Memorial Day to end her own life, her daughter mournfully riffs on May in an overdetermined frenzy of meaning: “month of mothers, month of Mary, month of heroes, the beginning of heat and abandonment, of the rich leaving the poor to the cities, May as in Maybe Maybe not, as in yes, finally you may, as in Mayday, the call for help and the sound of the bailout, and also, now that I think of it, as in her middle name, Maida.”

  The “may” in “May” had another meaning for Elizabeth Barrett, who wrote to Robert Browning from her invalid’s bed during the “implacable weather” of March that “April is coming. There will be both a May & a June if we live to see such things, & perhaps, after all, we may.” She wasn’t only speaking of better weather coming: since they began to write each other in January they had spoken of meeting in person for the first time—he especially—but she, without refusing, had put him off, excusing herself as “a recluse, with nerves that have been all broken on the rack, & now hang loosely.” When May arrived, she wrote him, “Shall I have courage to see you soon, I wonder! . . . But oh, this make-believe May—it can’t be May after all!” And then on May 20 she met him, beginning a secret courtship, against her father’s wishes, that ended in their elopement in September of the following year.

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR MAY

  Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll (1865) She may have met a March Hare that was mad as a hatter, but it was in the month of May—the birthday month of Alice Liddell, Charles Dodgson’s model for his heroine—that Alice followed a rabbit with a watch in his waistcoat pocket down a hole and began her adventures underground.

  Tess of the d’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy (1891) Angel is first drawn, fleetingly, to young Tess at a May Day dance at Whitsun time. By late spring two years later, her womanly blossoming is almost overwhelming—she’s working alongside him as a milkmaid, for goodness sake—but by then Hardy has arranged their fates to make her bloom a cruel joke on both of them.

  Death in Venice by Thomas Mann (1912) A false taste of summer in May in his northern home drives the middle-aged writer Gustav Aschenbach south for freshness and inspiration to Venice, where he will be drawn into an impotent attraction to a young Polish boy amid the humid miasma of cholera.

  Lucky Jim by Kingsley Amis (1954) There’s no better cure for end-of-term apathy than the campus novel that, for better or worse, launched the genre (along with Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, published the same year). But it may make you never want to go back to class at all, especially if you’re lecturing, miserably, on medieval history at a provincial English university.

  “The Whitsun Weddings” by Philip Larkin (1964) Amis based Lucky Jim on, and dedicated it to, his good friend Larkin, who made his own mark on postwar British culture with this ambivalent ode to the hopeful mass pairing-up of springtime, three years before the Kinks captured the same lonely-in-the-city melancholy in “Waterloo Sunset.”

  Frog and Toad Are Friends by Arnold Lobel (1970) The lesson of “Spring,” the opening tale in Lobel’s thrillingly calm series for early readers, is, apparently, that there is honor in deception, as Frog fools hibernating Toad into joining him on a fine April day by tearing an extra page off the calendar to prove it is, in fact, May.

  Awakenings by Oliver Sacks (1973) Awed equally by chemistry and human adaptability, Sacks recorded in the second book of his remarkable career the moment in May 1969 when he began to administer a new “miracle drug” to a few dozen patients subdued for decades by a rare illness contracted in the ’20s.

  Reborn: Journals & Notebooks, 1947–1963 by Susan Sontag (2008) “I AM REBORN IN THE TIME RETOLD IN THIS NOTEBOOK,” sixteen-year-old Sontag scribbled on the inside cover of her journal for May 1949, marking a moment when she was colossally precocious—rereading Mann, Hopkins, and Dante—and falling in love for the first time, with a young woman in San Francisco.

  May 1

  BORN: 1923 Joseph Heller (Catch-22, Something Happened), Brooklyn

  1924 Terry Southern (Candy, The Magic Christian), Alvarado, Tex.

  DIED: 1700 John Dryden (MacFlecknoe, Marriage à la Mode), 68, London

  1978 Sylvia Townsend Warner (Lolly Willowes), 84, Maiden Newton, England

  1841 Reviewing Dickens’s Barnaby Rudge in the middle of its serialization, Edgar Allan Poe correctly predicted the identity of the murderer.

  1908 About to give his “The Poet of Democracy” lecture to a local literary society in Appleton, Wisconsin, Carl Sandburg confessed, “A sort of deviltry possesses me at times among these—to talk their slangiest slang, speak their homely, beautiful home-speech about all the common things—suddenly run a knife into their snobbery—then swing out into a crag-land of granite and azure where they can’t follow but sit motionless following my flight with their eyes.”

  1934 The early comic-book adventures of Tintin are unthinkingly accepting of European stereotypes of foreign lands (in the regrettable Tintin in the Congo, to be precise), but when Hergé, Tintin’s young Belgian creator, turned to China as a subject for his fifth tale, his Catholic advisers wisely recommended he be less culturally careless, and introduced him to a visiting Chinese sculptor named Chang Chong Chen on this day. The two young artists hit it off immediately, and Hergé paid tribute to their friendship with a character named after his friend in The Blue Lotus. Nearly a half-century later, fact and fiction reversed: after Hergé had Tintin search for his old friend Chang in Tintin in Tibet, the real-life Chang, having survived the Cultural Revolution, reappeared in Belgium for a well-publicized reunion with Hergé.

  1935 Israel Joshua Singer was always ahead of his younger brother, Isaac Bashevis: born a decade earlier, he was the first to find success in writing and the first to immigrate to America (where his novel Yoshe Kalb had already become a popular play). When his brother followed him to New York on this day, Israel Joshua met him at the dock, and a photograph of the two together appeared in the Forward, the city’s Yiddish newspaper where the elder brother worked, with the caption, “Two Brothers and Both Writers.” For years Isaac worked at the Forward under his brother’s shadow, but after Israel’s sudden death of a heart attack in 1944, it was the younger Singer who continued at the paper for more than half a century, and who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1978.

  1941 If The Escapist had ended its run before this day, it would doubtless have disappeared like its countless, disposable comic-book peers. But all that changed, because on the 1st of May, in Michael Chabon’s The Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Joe Kavalier and Sammy Clay saw Citizen Kane. Afterward, their ambition aflame with the possibilities of narration matched with image, Joe looked over at Sammy and said, “I want to do something like that.”

  May 2

  BORN: 1838 Albion W. Tourgée (A Fool’s Errand, Bricks Without Straw), Williamsfield, Ohio

  1900 W. J. Cash (The Mind of the South), Gaffney, S.C.

  DIED: 1519 Leonardo da Vinci (Treatise on Painting, Notebooks), 67, Amboise, Fran
ce

  1963 Van Wyck Brooks (The Flowering of New England), 77, Bridgewater, Conn.

  1970 Though a son of Louisville himself, Hunter S. Thompson tried to put family ties aside when he returned for the ninety-sixth running of the local horse race. His self-appointed job was to pin down the “whole doomed atavistic culture that makes the Kentucky Derby what it is,” which meant embarking on a “vicious, drunken nightmare” inside the press box and out. He and his bearded British illustrator, Ralph Steadman, along for the ride for the first time, managed to miss, more or less, both the race itself and whatever crowd violence there was (the violence seemed mainly to be in Thompson’s head), but his scabrous report, “The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved,” published in the short-lived Scanlan’s Monthly, became the first Thompson piece to earn the adjective he’d proudly wear the rest of his life: “gonzo.”

  1981 Jim Williams did not deny that he shot Danny Hansford in the office of his carefully restored and furnished Savannah mansion shortly after midnight. He just said Danny shot first (and second and third). It wasn’t this murder that drew John Berendt to Savannah to write Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil: he had already fallen for the city and its mix of gossipy gentility and down-market style, and he already knew both the deceased, a volatile young hustler, and the wealthy man who would be convicted twice and acquitted once of shooting him. He was there to hear the tongues wagging before and after the crime, which is what makes his book so delicious—and kept it on the bestseller list for over four years.