A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1939 Christopher Isherwood made his first visit to Washington, D.C.: “There is something charming, and even touching, about this city. For the size of the country it represents, it is absurdly small. The capital of a nation of shrewd, conservative farmers.”

  1950 A year and a half before, L. Ron Hubbard had written his fellow science fiction novelist Robert Heinlein that “I will soon, I hope give you a book . . . which details in full the mathematics of the human mind, solves all the problems of the ages, and gives six recipes for aphrodisiacs and plays the mouth organ with the left foot.” And on this day Hubbard published a book that, mouth organ aside, more or less made those same claims: Dianetics: The Modern Science of Mental Health. John W. Campbell, the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, who published an advance excerpt of the book, thought the problems of the ages had indeed been solved. “I know dianetics is one of, if not the greatest, discovery in all Man’s written and unwritten history,” he wrote one author, and predicted to another it would win Hubbard the Nobel Peace Prize.

  NO YEAR Pierre Broussard may be seventy, and he may have only been a “paper shuffler” when he committed his crimes of wartime collaboration all those years ago, but his vigilance is not to be taken lightly, especially when an assassin is on his trail. T. is the second man they’ve sent to do the job: the first ended up dead at the bottom of a ravine. Brian Moore was himself past seventy when The Statement, the second-to-last novel in his varied and always interesting career, came out, and in concocting this taut philosophical thriller he proved as wily and observant as his villain, Broussard, a former Nazi collaborator who has been protected by the Church ever since the war and now finds the walls closing in around him.

  May 10

  BORN: 1933 Barbara Taylor Bradford (A Woman of Substance), Leeds, England

  1939 Robert Darnton (The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Prerevolutionary France), New York City

  DIED: 1990 Walker Percy (The Moviegoer, The Last Gentleman), 73, Covington, La.

  2003 Leonard Michaels (I Would Have Saved Them if I Could), 70, Berkeley, Calif.

  1849 On one side: Washington Irving and Herman Melville, who, along with forty-seven other local dignitaries, implored William Charles Macready, the noted English actor, to attempt Macbeth again and assured his safety from the nativist hooligans who drove him off the stage at the Astor Place Opera House the night before with a barrage of eggs and vegetables and cries of “Down with the English hog!” On the other side: Ned Buntline, dime novelist, street bully, and future heavy-drinking temperance activist, who roused a mob of 10,000 supporters of Macready’s rival American thespian Edwin Forrest into the theater and the surrounding streets. Macready survived the performance, but two dozen or so ruffians and bystanders were killed by soldiers shooting into what became known as the Astor Place Riot.

  1907 Kenneth Grahame, banker and writer, had been telling bedtime stories about moles and water-rats to his difficult son, Alastair (known to all as “Mouse”), for a few years, but he first began to write them down in a birthday letter to Mouse, who had been dispatched with his governess on a separate holiday from his parents. Along with gifts and apologies for not being there with him, Grahame added news of the character who would soon become the center of The Wind in the Willows (and whose impulsive behavior may have been inspired by young Alastair himself): “Have you heard about the Toad? He was never taken prisoner at all.” He had stolen a motor-car and vanished “without even saying Poop-poop! . . . I fear he is a bad low animal.”

  1957 Explaining she was “too well educated for the job,” Zora Neale Hurston’s supervisor fired her from her last full-time employment, as a library clerk in the space program at Patrick Air Force Base in Cocoa Beach, Florida.

  2001 James Wood, in the New Republic, on J. M. Coetzee’s Disgrace: “It sometimes reads as if it were the winner of an exam whose challenge was to create the perfect specimen of a very good contemporary novel.”

  2012 David Rakoff’s essays were hard to separate from his voice; many of them began, in fact, as monologues on This American Life, the radio show he contributed to from its beginnings in the mid-’90s. Along the way, he told stories of the cancer that had first struck him at age twenty-two and then returned two decades later, and in his last appearance on the show, at a live performance recorded on this day, three months before he died, Rakoff, once a dancer, with his left arm rendered useless by his tumor and surgery, danced again, alone onstage, to Nat King Cole’s “What’ll I Do?”

  May 11

  BORN: 1896 Mari Sandoz (Old Jules, Cheyenne Autumn), Hay Springs, Neb.

  1916 Camilo José Cela (The Family of Pascual Duarte, The Hive), Padrón, Spain

  DIED: 1920 William Dean Howells (A Hazard of New Fortunes), 83, New York City

  1985 Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), 84, Woodstock, Ill.

  1831 On May 12 New York’s Mercantile Advertiser announced a notable arrival in the city the previous day: “We understand that two magistrates, Messrs. de Beaumont and de Tonqueville, have arrived in the ship Havre, sent here by order of the Minister of the Interior, to examine the various prisons in our country, and make a report on their return to France.” The two men did indeed produce a report on American prisons after their journey through the young republic, but two years later, one of them, whose name was properly spelled Alexis de Tocqueville, published the first volume of the book that was his true purpose for the visit, Democracy in America. (In 2010, Peter Carey used the travelers’ descriptions of their arrival in New York in his novel inspired by de Tocqueville, Parrot and Olivier in America.)

  1924 Drawn to a new apartment in Brooklyn Heights by his first love, a Danish sailor whose father lived in the building, Hart Crane was also attracted by another local feature: the view of the Brooklyn Bridge, “the most superb piece of construction in the modern world,” he wrote his mother on this day. “For the first time in many weeks I am beginning to further elaborate my plans for my Bridge poem.” The connection of his new home to what would become his masterwork, The Bridge, only increased when he learned that his own windows were the very ones from which Washington Roebling, invalided by an accident during the building of the support towers, had overseen by telescope the construction of the bridge he and his father had designed.

  1996 The climb should have been over. At around seven the night before, Jon Krakauer had stumbled back to his tent after summiting Everest and descending through a gathering storm. But when he woke this morning he learned that one of his guides, Andy Harris, had disappeared; another, Rob Hall, was still on the summit ridge; and three or more of the climbers they had led were dead. By the end of this sunny, windy, and miserable day of searching and waiting, eight climbers were lost on the mountain—and two miraculously saved—and Krakauer was left, in despair and guilt, to sort out what went wrong in Into Thin Air.

  May 12

  BORN: 1812 Edward Lear (The Owl and the Pussycat, A Book of Nonsense), Holloway, England

  1916 Albert Murray (The Omni-Americans, Stomping the Blues), Nokomis, Ala.

  DIED: 1907 J.-K. Huysmans (Against Nature, The Damned), 59, Paris

  2008 Oakley Hall (Warlock, The Downhill Racers), 87, Nevada City, Calif.

  1897 Before he met Lou Andreas-Salomé, the thirty-six-year-old married intellectual who had been called by Friedrich Nietzsche—once her spurned suitor—“the smartest woman I ever knew,” at a friend’s Munich apartment on this day, René Maria Rilke, only twenty-one, had courted her with anonymous notes and poems, and after their meeting he continued his seduction with a flurry of letters. Within weeks they were lovers—she admiring his “human qualities” more than his poems—and by the fall she had convinced him to change his name from the affected-sounding René to the “beautiful, simple, and German” Rainer.

  1904 Following disappointing sales for his previous two books, The House Behind the Cedars and The Marrow of Tradition, Houghton Mifflin turned down Charles W. Chesnutt’s new novel, The Colonel’s Dream, regretting that “the
public has failed to respond adequately to your other admirable work in this line.” Agreeing with Houghton that “the public does not care for books in which the principal characters are colored people,” Chesnutt concentrated instead on his thriving legal stenography business, setting aside a literary career that had made him the most prominent African American novelist yet and that later generations would recognize produced some of the most incisive fiction of its era.

  1948 Adventurer Apsley Cherry-Garrard, author of The Worst Journey in the World, purchased the “Aylesford copy” of a Shakespeare First Folio for £7,100.

  1957 Margaret S. Libby, in the New York Herald Tribune, on Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat: “Restricting his vocabulary to a mere 223 words (all in the reading range of a six- or seven-year-old) and shortening his verse has given a certain riotous and extravagant unity, a wild restraint that is pleasing.”

  1961 A fire in the Hollywood Hills destroyed the home of Aldous and Laura Huxley, sparing only a few clothes and books, a violin, the manuscript of Aldous’s Island, and, oddly, their firewood.

  2009 It had been over three years since George R. R. Martin promised in a postscript to A Feast of Crows, the long-awaited and frustratingly unresolved fourth volume of his Song of Fire and Ice series, that the fifth book in the series would be done within a year, and his readers were getting restless, commenting impatiently online and creating entire websites with names like Finish the Book, George. Finally on this day his fellow author Neil Gaiman weighed in, responding to a reader who asked if Martin and fellow series authors had a responsibility to the readers waiting for their next book with the memorable phrase “George R. R. Martin is not your bitch.” In 2011, book five in the series, A Dance with Dragons, was published.

  May 13

  BORN: 1907 Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca, Jamaica Inn), London

  1944 Armistead Maupin (Tales of the City, The Night Listener), Washington, D.C.

  DIED: 1916 Sholem Aleichem (Tevye and His Daughters), 57, New York City

  2001 R. K. Narayan (Malgudi Days, The English Teacher), 94, Chennai, India

  1860 With Garibaldi and his Redshirts just days away from conquering Sicily for united Italy, Don Fabrizio, an aging Sicilian prince, can foresee the inevitable but is unwilling to abandon his familiar pleasures, unlike his favorite nephew, Tancredi, who joins with the Redshirts in hopes of saving the aristocracy: “If we want things to stay as they are,” he tells his uncle, “things will have to change.” Giuseppe di Lampedusa, himself a Sicilian prince, wrote The Leopard, based on the life of his grandfather, at the end of a solitary, bookish life. Rejected by publishers before his death in 1958, it became the most popular and admired Italian novel of the century, a subtle and graceful portrait of character in the middle of historical upheaval.

  1871 “You will not understand at all,” Arthur Rimbaud, age sixteen, wrote his teacher and mentor George Izambard, but for a poet “the idea is to reach the unknown by the derangement of all the senses.”

  1937 J. R. R. Tolkien agreed that illustrations could be added to the U.S. edition of The Hobbit, so long as they were not “from or influenced by the Disney studios (for all whose works I have a heartfelt loathing).”

  1958 Unlike Hamlet’s birth, on the same day his father defeated old Fortinbras, the birth of Edgar Sawtelle on this date marked no special occasion, except the arrival of a first child to a mother and father who’d begun to think they might never have one. But the Sawtelles’ family drama soon mirrors Hamlet’s, with the suspicious death of Edgar’s father and the quick insinuation of his uncle Claude into the bed of his mother, Trudy. David Wroblewski built The Story of Edgar Sawtelle from the bones of Shakespeare’s tragedy, but he added another lineage: “the Sawtelles” refers both to Edgar’s family and to the breed of dogs they have raised, bred for a near-telepathic level of companionship that mute Edgar understands better than anyone else. And like young Fortinbras entering the scene of slaughter at Hamlet’s end, those canine Sawtelles will remain to survive the collapse of the Sawtelle line.

  1961 William Maxwell, in The New Yorker, on a reissue of Francis Kilvert’s Diary: “The day-by-day record he kept is not all of equal interest; it is not above silliness; it contains sentiments that are not now acceptable (some are even shocking) and a good many ‘literary’ descriptions that don’t come off. But these are minor flaws, no journal is without them, and so long as English diaries are read, Kilvert’s humble and uneventful life will not pass altogether away.”

  May 14

  BORN: 1930 María Irene Fornés (And What of the Night?), Havana

  1965 Eoin Colfer (Artemis Fowl), Wexford, Ireland

  DIED: 1912 August Strindberg (Miss Julie, The Red Room), 63, Stockholm

  1979 Jean Rhys (Wide Sargasso Sea), 88, Exeter, England

  1920 Katherine Mansfield, in the Athenaeum, on Compton Mackenzie’s The Vanity Girl: “We should not waste space upon so pretentious and stupid a book were it not that we have believed in his gifts and desire to protest that he should so betray them.”

  1944 For half a dozen years, Ayn Rand tried to meet with Frank Lloyd Wright to discuss the novel she was writing about an architect. “My hero is not you,” she assured him. “But his spirit is yours.” Wright proved elusive, and said he didn’t like the name “Roark” or Roark’s red hair in the sample she sent, but she forged on with the book, and in April 1944 she received a letter from Wright. “My Dear Miss Rand: I’ve read every word of The Fountainhead. Your thesis is the great one,” he wrote. “So I suppose you will be set up in the marketplace and burned as a witch.” “Thank you,” she replied on this day, but she wasn’t worried: “I think I am made of asbestos.” And then she came to the point: “Now, would you be willing to build a house for me?” (He designed one, but it was never built.)

  1962 “I was cured all right”: Alex’s cheekily ironic final line in Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange matches the ending that first greeted American readers of Anthony Burgess’s novel. But the original U.K. edition (published on this day) includes an additional, more hopeful chapter in which Alex contemplates giving up the droogs and becoming a husband and father someday. That chapter was restored to all editions in the 1980s after Burgess complained that his American editor had cut it against his will, but the editor remembered otherwise; Burgess, he said, didn’t like the “Pollyanna ending” then any more than he did. The controversy was unresolved, but Burgess’s ambivalence about the ending is clear in a note written just before the final chapter on his 1961 typescript of the novel: “Should we end here? An optional ‘epilogue’ follows.”

  202- Packed with characters, locations, and narrative styles, A Visit from the Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan’s prize-sweeping novel (or collection of linked stories, if you prefer), is also a book of empty spaces, the long, unnarrated stretches of time between her stories that connect them as strongly as the events she describes. In the penultimate chapter—told in PowerPoint slides—time stretches out into the 2020s, when the teenage son of Sasha Blake, the character with whom the novel began, has become obsessed with the pauses in pop songs, the one- or two-second gaps—when the song seems to be over but isn’t—that hold within their empty spaces the emotions of anticipation, release, and relief.

  May 15

  BORN: 1890 Katherine Anne Porter (Pale Horse, Pale Rider), Indian Creek, Tex.

  1967 Laura Hillenbrand (Seabiscuit, Unbroken), Fairfax, Va.

  DIED: 1886 Emily Dickinson (Poems), 55, Amherst, Mass.

  1996 John Hawkes (The Beetle Leg, The Lime Twig), 72, Providence, R.I.

  1853 The Reverend Arthur Nicholls, his proposal of marriage rejected by Charlotte Brontë, broke down while officiating at a public communion service. (She accepted his renewed suit the following year.)

  1939 The fame of Isaac Babel in the Soviet Union and abroad could not protect him when Stalin’s secret police finally came to the door of his dacha on this morning and took him to the Lubyanka prison, where he endured six months of interro
gation and was forced to write a bloodstained confession before being summoned in January to a twenty-minute nighttime trial in the private offices of Lavrenti Beria, the chief of Stalin’s secret police. He was executed in the early hours of the following morning, though his family was not told of his death until fourteen years later. “I was not given time to finish,” he was heard to say at his arrest, a plea he repeated to Beria when he made his final request, “Let me finish my work.”

  1950 Mountain climbing was a different affair in those days. When Maurice Herzog and his team of French climbers set out for the Himalayas, they had no reliable map and weren’t even sure which mountain they would attempt. After weeks of exploring, they ruled out the apparently inaccessible peak of Dhaulagiri and settled on the still-mysterious Annapurna, for which Herzog set out on this morning. He returned more than a month later, having lost his toes and most of his fingers to frostbite and having become with Louis Lachenal the first to scale an 8,000-meter peak. Higher peaks have since been conquered, but Herzog’s Annapurna remains at the pinnacle of mountaineering lore.

  1956 Circumstance—the discovery of a letter not meant to be sent, a mishap with a hot air balloon—can be almost as dangerous as desire in the world of Ian McEwan. In The Innocent, Leonard Marnham, a young Englishman in divided Berlin at the height of the Cold War, didn’t plan to be running around the city with two equipment cases filled with the dismembered body of the ex-husband of his German fiancée, Maria, but circumstance and desire brought him to that desperate point. And on this day they bring him to another, when, as Maria waves to him from across the airport as he leaves for London, he sees an American friend of theirs arrive unexpectedly at her side, and he makes a sudden decision that irreparably alters the rest of their lives.

  1981 Valentine Cunningham, in the TLS, on Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children: “What makes it so vertiginously exciting a reading experience is the way it takes in not just the whole apple cart of India but also, and this with the unflagging zest of a Tristram Shandy, the business of being a novel at all.”