by Tom Nissley
1984 No one would think of George Orwell as a poet of the pastoral (he was drawn more to disgust), but listen to him: “Under the trees to the left of them the ground was misty with bluebells. The air seemed to kiss one’s skin. It was the second of May.” Readers of 1984 will likely recall this thrillingly unlikely rural interlude, when Winston meets Julia alone for the first time and she flings her scarlet chastity sash from the Junior Anti-Sex League aside in a sun-dappled forest grove. Of course their joys won’t last—Winston knows they won’t—but the liquid song of a thrush they hear in that grove stands in the novel as an uncorrupted life force that somehow exists outside the power of Big Brother.
1989 David Foster Wallace’s new habit of chewing tobacco, he explained to Jonathan Franzen, “is stupid and dangerous, and involves goobing big dun honkers every thirty seconds.”
May 3
BORN: 1469 Niccolò Machiavelli (The Prince, Discourses on Livy), Florence, Italy
1896 Dodie Smith (I Capture the Castle, The 101 Dalmatians), Whitefield, England
DIED: 1991 Jerzy Kozinski (Being There, The Painted Bird), 57, New York City
1810 Lord Byron did like to swim, and he liked to write about what he had swum. In 1809 he crossed the wide mouth of the Tagus River, near Lisbon, a feat his traveling companion John Hobhouse considered more daring than the one, undertaken a year later, that brought him greater fame, not least by his own efforts. Following the Greek myth of the youth Leander who swam every night to his lover, Hero, across the Hellespont, the strait dividing Europe from Asia, Byron and a ship’s lieutenant attempted the crossing themselves. Driven back once by cold and current, they tried again a week later and made the four-mile crossing in a little more than an hour, an achievement he celebrated in a short poem and mentioned again nearly a decade later in Don Juan. The hazardous current, he wrote to one friend, made him “doubt whether Leander’s conjugal powers must not have been exhausted in his passage to paradise.”
1939 Malcolm Cowley, in the New Republic, on John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: “What one remembers most of all is Steinbeck’s sympathy for the migrants—not pity, for that would mean he was putting himself above them; not love, for that would blind him to their faults, but rather a deep fellow feeling.”
1978 After a visit to the Eastman archives in Rochester spent watching the silent films of Louise Brooks, “this shameless urchin tomboy, this unbroken, unbreakable porcelain filly” whose image had “run through my life like an unbroken thread,” Kenneth Tynan returned for a second day of conversations at a nearby apartment building with a tiny, elderly woman, barefoot in a nightgown and bed jacket: Louise Brooks. “You’re doing a terrible thing to me,” she said. “I’ve been killing myself for twenty years, and you’re going to bring me back to life.” For three days she recalled her years of notoriety and obscurity, flirted with her younger fan, and shared her own love of the movies, with Tynan taking notes for his classic New Yorker profile “The Girl in the Black Helmet,” which became the introduction to Brooks’s own sharp-witted book of memoir and film criticism, Lulu in Hollywood.
May 4
BORN: 1939 Amos Oz (Black Box, A Tale of Love and Darkness), Jerusalem
1949 Graham Swift (Waterland, Shuttlecock, Last Orders), London
DIED: 1973 Jane Bowles (Two Serious Ladies, In the Summer House), 56, Malaga, Spain
1852 “What day of the month is it?” asked the Hatter, looking at his watch. “Alice considered a little, and then said, ‘The fourth.’ ‘Two days wrong!’ sighed the Hatter. ‘I told you butter wouldn’t suit the works!’ ” It’s only natural that sensible Alice would know this date—it was the birthday of the girl who inspired the tale, Alice Liddell. She was ten when Charles Dodgson first told the story to the Liddell sisters on a rowboat, thirteen when he published Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland under the name Lewis Carroll, and nineteen when its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass, appeared, which included an acrostic poem that spells out “Alice Pleasance Liddell.”
1896 Why did Edith Wharton and her husband purchase a brownstone in an unfashionable Upper East Side neighborhood? “On account of the bicycling,” she explained.
1928 Virginia Woolf found her fame “becoming vulgar and a nuisance. It means nothing; and yet takes one’s time. Americans perpetually.”
1929 “You must be married at once very obtrusively,” Evelyn Waugh advised Henry Green on learning of his engagement. “A fashionable wedding is worth a four column review in the Times Literary Supplement to a novelist.”
1953 Under the supervision of Dr. Humphry Osmond, a Saskatchewan psychiatrist who later coined the term “psychedelic,” Aldous Huxley took mescaline for the first time at his home in Los Angeles. Overcome at first by lassitude, he walked with his wife and Osmond to the World’s Biggest Drug Store at Beverly and La Cienega boulevards, where, in an aisle of art books, the brushstrokes of Botticelli overwhelmed him with a splendor that made a drive later that evening to see the hilly vistas over Hollywood an anticlimax by comparison, a vision that became the centerpiece of his account of the experience, The Doors of Perception.
1976 Mike Royko had been battling the Daley Machine in his Chicago Daily News column for years, so making fun of Frank Sinatra and his “army of flunkies” for the free, around-the-clock police protection the Chicago police provided the singer at his hotel was no big deal. But Ol’ Blue Eyes didn’t think it was funny, writing Royko on this day to call him a “pimp” and ask “why people don’t spit in your eye three or four times a day.” Royko obligingly printed the letter in his next column and then auctioned off the original to the highest bidder, Vie Carlson of Rockford, Illinois. Three decades later, Vie, whose son Brad, as it happens, was in the music business too, drumming for Cheap Trick under the stage name Bun E. Carlos, brought her letter onto the PBS show Antiques Roadshow, where it was appraised at $15,000.
May 5
BORN: 1813 Søren Kierkegaard (Either/Or, Fear and Trembling), Copenhagen
1818 Karl Marx (The German Ideology, The Communist Manifesto), Trier, Prussia
DIED: 1988 Michael Shaara (The Killer Angels, For Love of the Game), 59, Tallahassee, Fla.
1997 Murray Kempton (Part of Our Time, The Briar Patch), 79, New York City
1593 With London scourged by plague and war, some looked for scapegoats among the city’s immigrants, and on this night a vicious poem was posted on the wall of a Dutch church, warning “you strangers that inhabit this land” that “we’ll cut your throats, in your temples praying.” The poem’s authors are unknown, but they were surely playgoers: the poem was signed “Tamberlaine,” the murderous hero of one Christopher Marlowe play, and it alluded to two of his other violent dramas: The Jew of Malta and The Massacre of Paris. The quarters of playwright Thomas Kyd were searched, but they turned up evidence of a different crime: atheist papers that Kyd, under torture, said were Marlowe’s. Ordered arrested for heresy on the 18th, Marlowe was dead on the 30th, killed in a mysterious brawl that has ever since been suspected to be an assassination.
1857 At a dinner at Boston’s Parker House, assembled by the publisher Moses Phillips, eight leading literary men, including Emerson, Longfellow, Lowell, and Oliver Wendell Holmes, met to found the Atlantic. “Imagine your uncle at the head of such guests,” blushed Phillips to his niece two weeks later. “It was the proudest moment of my life.”
1862 Arthur Blomfield, in search of a “young Gothic draughtsman who could restore and design churches and rectory-homes,” hired as an architectural assistant at £110 a year twenty-one-year-old Thomas Hardy, who had arrived in London three weeks before.
1943 Five days after his discharge from the army after recovering from a nervous breakdown, Mervyn Peake wrote to a friend he had made just before the war, Graham Greene, “I’ll be able to concentrate on Gormenghast. It’s a grand feeling.” Already known by this time as a painter and as “the greatest illustrator of his day,” Peake had spoken before to Greene of the novel he’d been working on. But w
hen he sent him the final draft a few months later, Greene’s response was devastating: “I was very disappointed in a lot of it and frequently wanted to wring your neck because it seems to me you were spoiling a first class book by laziness.” Greene hadn’t given up on the book, though—he suggested they “duel” about it over whiskey—and after Peake’s thorough revisions it was published as Titus Groan, the first volume in his long-loved cult classic, the Gormenghast Trilogy.
1946 Caroline Gordon, in the New York Times, on The Portable Faulkner: “He writes like a man who so loves his land that he is fearful for the well-being of every creature that springs from it.”
May 6
BORN: 1856 Sigmund Freud (The Interpretation of Dreams), Freiberg in Mähren, Austrian Empire
1914 Randall Jarrell (The Woman at the Washington Zoo), Nashville, Tenn.
DIED: 1862 Henry David Thoreau (The Maine Woods), 44, Concord, Mass.
1919 L. Frank Baum (The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Ozma of Oz), 62, Hollywood, Calif.
1850 Emily Dickinson—at least at the age of nineteen—wasn’t always a homebody by choice. With her mother laid up by acute neuralgia, Dickinson sat attentively by her side and remained there even when temptation called. “I heard a well-known rap,” she wrote a teenage confidant, “and a friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet still woods, and I wanted to exceedingly—I told him I could not go, and he said he was disappointed, he wanted me very much.” She conquered her tears, calling it “a kind of helpless victory,” and returned to her work, “humming a little air” until her mother was asleep, but then she “cried with all my might.” The young man who invited her out has never been identified.
1871 When the great man arrived in the Yosemite Valley, the word went out: “Emerson is here!” John Muir joined the crowd around him but was too awed to approach. Later, though, he sent a note inviting Emerson to stay for “a month’s worship” in the woods, and the next morning Emerson rode up to the hill to meet the young man. No longer shy, Muir made an eager guide and insisted that on his last night in the valley the author of “Nature,” though sixty-seven, more than twice his age, camp out with him under the giant trees of the Mariposa Grove. Emerson agreed, but when evening came those less adventurous in his party urged him instead into the staler comforts of an inn, disappointing Muir that his hero “was now a child in the hands of his affectionate but sadly civilized friends.”
1908 The imaginative materials that Marcel Proust would weave into the volumes of In Search of Lost Time started to come together in 1908. “Sickened” by his efforts to pastiche the styles of Balzac, Flaubert, and others, he turned instead to writing a series of fragmentary pieces. The subjects might have seemed disconnected, but his later readers would certainly recognize in them the connective tissue of his vast novel. “I have in hand,” he described the elements to a friend either on this day or the previous one, “a study on the nobility, a Parisian novel, an essay on Sainte-Beuve and Flaubert, an essay on women, an essay on pederasty (not easy to publish), a study on stained-glass windows, a study on tombstones, a study on the novel.”
1948 Italo Calvino, in L’Unità, on Primo Levi’s Se questo è un uomo (Survival in Auschwitz): a book of “authentic narrative power, which will remain . . . amongst the most beautiful of the literature of the Second World War.”
May 7
BORN: 1931 Gene Wolfe (The Book of the New Sun), New York City
1943 Peter Carey (Oscar and Lucinda), Bacchus Marsh, Australia
DIED: 1941 Sir James George Frazer (The Golden Bough), 87, Cambridge, England
1994 Clement Greenberg (“Avant-Garde and Kitsch”), 85, New York City
1911 The life of Albert Mathé, French journalist, began in 1943 at the age of thirty-two, when false papers and an identity card under that name were created by the French Resistance for Albert Camus, including a forged birth certificate that said Mathé was born on this day in Choisy-le-Roi, France, far from Camus’s own birthplace in Algeria. Camus had begun the war as a declared pacifist and spent its first years working on his novels The Stranger and The Plague while considering returning to Algeria, but late in 1943 he committed himself to staying in German-occupied Paris and joined the newspaper of the Resistance, Combat, as a writer and editor.
1932 At the height of his most prodigiously creative period, with The Sound and the Fury and As I Lay Dying recently published and Light in August on its way, William Faulkner reported for work as a screenwriter at the Culver City offices of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer. Bleeding from a small head wound—he said he had been struck by a cab—he announced: “I’ve got an idea for Mickey Mouse” (not, as it happened, an MGM property). Or, he suggested, he could write for newsreels; “newsreels and Mickey Mouse, these are the only pictures I like.” And then he went missing. The studio assumed he’d gone home to Mississippi, but two days later he reappeared, claiming to have been wandering in Death Valley, and commenced with the work that would occupy him—and take time away from his fiction—for much of the next dozen years.
1933 It’s almost the same name, “a mere translation of the German compound,” but for Marjorie Morgenstern, a sophomore at Hunter College sure she’s destined to become a famous actress, it’s a “white streak of revelation,” “a name that could blaze and thunder on Broadway.” “MARJORIE MORNINGSTAR,” she prints in pencil in her Hunter College biology notebook. “Marjorie Morningstar, May 7, 1933,” she tries signing in a sophisticated hand. A bestseller when it was published in 1955, Herman Wouk’s Marjorie Morningstar has had a longer life than most blockbusters, winning readers for generations even though—or perhaps because—it’s the story of Marjorie’s transformation not into Marjorie Morningstar, star of stage and screen, but into Mrs. Milton Schwartz.
1948 Orville Prescott, in the New York Times, on Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead: “Mr. Mailer is as certain to become famous as any fledgling novelist can be. Unfortunately, he is just as likely to become notorious.”
1968 After Allen Ginsberg, accompanying himself on harmonium, performed the Hare Krishna chant on Firing Line, host William F. Buckley drawled, “That’s the most unhurried Krishna I’ve ever heard.”
May 8
BORN: 1937 Thomas Pynchon (The Crying of Lot 49, Gravity’s Rainbow), Glen Cove, N.Y.
1943 Pat Barker (Regeneration, Union Street), Thornaby-on-Tees, England
DIED: 1880 Gustave Flaubert (Sentimental Education), 58, Rouen, France
2012 Maurice Sendak (Where the Wild Things Are, In the Night Kitchen), 83, Danbury, Conn.
1897 “Silly these philanderings,” Beatrice Webb wrote about her friend George Bernard Shaw. “He imagines that he gets to know women by making them in love with him. Just the contrary . . . His sensuality has all drifted into sexual vanity, delight in being the candle to the moths, with a dash of intellectual curiosity to give flavour.”
1948 As he turned up the hill from Cannery Row, a few blocks from the Pacific Biological Laboratories he had founded, Ed Ricketts was blindsided in his 1936 Buick by the evening train from San Francisco. An indefatigable marine researcher and a larger-than-life presence in Monterey, Ricketts was at the center of an intellectual and social circle that included Joseph Campbell, Henry Miller, and, most prominently, John Steinbeck, who collaborated with Ricketts on Sea of Cortez, a travelogue and research record of their expedition in the Gulf of California, and made him famous as the model for “Doc” in Cannery Row. “The greatest man in the world is dying,” Steinbeck drunkenly told a friend in New York as he waited for a flight west, “and there is nothing I can do.”
1998 “Um.” Stephen Glass hesitated. “I’m increasingly beginning to think I was duped.” On this morning, Glass and his New Republic editor, Charles Lane, were on a call with two outside reporters who thought Glass’s latest piece—on a fifteen-year-old hacker who blackmailed software companies after breaking into their databases, shouting, implausibly, “I want a Miata! I want a lifetime subscription to Playb
oy! Show me the money!”—was fabricated. Lane thought so too, and later that day he had Glass drive him to the building in suburban Bethesda where he claimed a “National Association of Hackers” conference had been held and where, clearly, no such thing had taken place. By the end of the day, Glass was suspended, and by the end of its investigation, the New Republic determined that at least two-thirds of the articles Glass had written for them were faked in some way.
NO YEAR Katniss Everdeen starts making dangerous bargains early in Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games. Near-starving on her family’s scavenged diet, she can hardly wait until she reaches her twelfth birthday on this day, when she can sign up at the District 12 Justice Building for yearly credits for grain and oil for herself, her sister, and her mother. All she has to do in return: add three more slips of paper with her name on them to the big glass ball on reaping day, raising the chance she’ll be selected for the dubious privilege of representing her district in the annual Hunger Games, from which only one of twenty-four children emerges alive.
May 9
BORN: 1920 Richard Adams (Watership Down, Shardik), Newbury, England
1938 Charles Simic (The World Doesn’t End), Belgrade, Yugoslavia
DIED: 1981 Nelson Algren (The Man with the Golden Arm), 72, Sag Harbor, N.Y.
2008 Nuala O’Faolain (Are You Somebody?, My Dream of You), 68, Dublin
1931 “I was aware of the risk I was taking in opening Tanne’s letter to you,” Ingeborg Dinesen wrote to her son, Thomas, on this day. “Tanne” was her daughter, Karen, the Baroness Blixen, who was returning, reluctantly, to Denmark after the failure of her coffee farm in Kenya. The letter her mother opened was blunt—Karen would rather die than rejoin the bourgeois life she led, she declared, and she needed money from her family to begin her new life as a writer—but lovely too, with a clear-eyed sense of the beauty of the world she was leaving behind. It’s a tone she captured again in the opening of Out of Africa, written in Denmark after she took the pen name Isak Dinesen: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.”
