A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  May 16

  BORN: 1912 Studs Terkel (Division Street, Hard Times), New York City

  1929 Adrienne Rich (Diving into the Wreck), Baltimore, Md.

  DIED: 1928 Edmund Gosse (Father and Son, Gossip in a Library), 78, London

  1984 Irwin Shaw (The Young Lions; Rich Man, Poor Man), 71, Davos, Switzerland

  1683 Having lived alone for four and twenty years (by the reckoning of his wooden calendar) after his shipwreck off an unknown island in the Americas, Robinson Crusoe is startled by the sound of a gunshot offshore. He imagines another ship is in distress and sets a fire to signal to its survivors, but when he comes in sight of the wreck he can see there are none. Consumed by longing that one, just one, could have survived to give him a Christian companion, he salvages what he can from the ship in the following days. Shirts and fire tongs are of great use, but the bags full of gold pieces? In his isolation, they are of no more value than the dirt under his feet.

  1836 On the marriage bond for his wedding to his cousin Virginia Clemm, Edgar Allan Poe and his witness, Thomas W. Cleland, attested that the bride “is of the full age of twenty-one years.” She had not yet turned fourteen.

  1863 At the time, Romola, George Eliot’s fourth novel, seemed likely to mark the height of her success. She turned down £10,000 to serialize the book, “the most magnificent offer ever yet made for a novel,” but accepted a similar amount later, setting herself a double challenge: write a novel under the deadline pressure of a magazine, and set it not in present-day England, like her others, but in fifteenth-century Florence. The book was a struggle—“I began Romola as a young woman,” she said, “I finished it an old woman”—and on this day, nearing the end, she wrote in her journal about the death of her villain with understandable high spirits, “Finished Part XIII. Killed Tito in great excitement!”

  1934 John Dos Passos, in the New Republic, on Robert Cantwell’s The Land of Plenty: “To tell truly, and not romantically or sentimentally, about the relation between men and machines, and to describe the machine worker, are among the most important tasks before novelists today. The job has only begun. I think Robert Cantwell is as likely to discover a method of coping with machinery, which is now the core of human life, as any man writing today.”

  May 17

  BORN: 1873 Dorothy Richardson (Pointed Roofs, Pilgrimage), Abington, England

  1939 Gary Paulsen (Hatchet, Harris and Me), Minneapolis

  DIED: 1987 Gunnar Myrdal (The American Dilemma), 88, Danderyd, Sweden

  2007 Lloyd Alexander (The Black Cauldron), 83, Drexel Hill, Pa.

  1824 In the drawing room of the publisher John Murray, six men committed one of literature’s most notorious acts of destruction. The body of Lord Byron, their “mad, bad, and dangerous to know” friend, was on its way back from Greece, where he had died of fever, and they were in possession of a document that could determine his legacy: his Memoirs, entrusted to his friend Tom Moore. Moore wanted them published, but after days of argument John Cam Hobhouse, Byron’s oldest friend, who hadn’t read the memoirs but feared the effect of their scandalous content on “Lord Byron’s honor & fame” (and perhaps on his own political career), won out. To Moore’s dismay that Hobhouse could destroy the book “without even opening it, as if it were a pest bag,” the pages were torn from their bindings and fed to the fire.

  1890 In the Aberdeen Saturday Pioneer, a short-lived newspaper in South Dakota he largely wrote himself (and the latest in a series of failed business ventures), L. Frank Baum on this day published “Beautiful Displays of Novelties which Rival in Attractiveness the Famed Museums of the World,” an appreciation of a budding art form: the store display window. His interest in the subject didn’t end there. In 1907 he founded both The Show Window: A Journal of Practical Window Trimming for the Merchant and Professional and the National Association of Window Trimmers of America, launching a promising career he only gave up when his children’s books, beginning with Father Goose and continuing on to Oz, allowed him to devote himself to writing at the age of forty-four.

  1922 Robert Littell, in the New Republic, on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Beautiful and Damned: “Mr. Fitzgerald has a very small allowance of tenderness, and even less of pity, but for every pint of them his mixture contains gallons of blistering hatred. He hates, to be sure, just the things that I do, but it is a perilous mood to maintain.”

  1928 Evelyn Waugh wrote to the TLS with a complaint: “Your reviewer refers to me throughout as ‘Miss Waugh.’ My Christian name, I know, is occasionally regarded by people of limited social experience as belonging exclusively to one or other sex; but it is unnecessary to go further into my book than the paragraph charitably placed inside the wrapper for the guidance of unleisured critics, to find my name with its correct prefix of ‘Mr.’ ”

  May 18

  BORN: 1048 Omar Khayyam (Rubaiyat), Nishapur, Iran

  1944 W. G. Sebald (The Emigrants, The Rings of Saturn), Wertach, Germany

  DIED: 1909 George Meredith (The Egoist, Modern Love), 81, Box Hill, England

  2006 Gilbert Sorrentino (Mulligan Stew, Aberration of Starlight), 77, Brooklyn

  1916 Though often placed on May 16, 1915—perhaps so it would fall exactly forty years to the day before James Agee’s own early death—it was on this morning that Hugh James Agee, known as Jay, driving at high speed, turned his Ford over on the Clinton Pike on his way back to Knoxville and died in the crash. His adoring son James, just six and known then as Rufus, spent much of his life putting the events of that day into words, culminating in A Death in the Family, his autobiographical novel that won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction when it was released unfinished after his own death, in which he remembered seeing his father’s body at the funeral two days later: “His face looked more remote than before and much more ordinary and it was as if he were tired or bored.”

  1943 At the Lincoln University commencement ceremonies, Langston Hughes, on the stage to receive an honorary doctorate from his alma mater, “got both hungry and sleepy” as Carl Sandburg spoke on Abraham Lincoln for three and a half hours.

  1945 On this afternoon, Laura Chase, age twenty-five, sharply turned the wheel of her sister’s car with her white-gloved hands and drove off the side of a Toronto bridge into the ravine below. Laura’s death, reported first by her sister, Iris, and then in the flat tones of the Toronto Star, is just the first piece in the ingeniously constructed puzzle of Margaret Atwood’s Booker Prize–winning novel, The Blind Assassin, a nest of boxes made of family and national history, science fiction, and newspaper reports that finally reveals at its center the traditional fictional engines of passion and betrayal.

  2000 Was it as a gambler or a journalist that James McManus felt himself luckier when, having gone to Las Vegas to cover the World Series of Poker for Harper’s, he found himself at the final table of the WSOP’s no-limit hold-’em main event? Parlaying $4,000 the magazine hadn’t intended as a bankroll into play-in fees, McManus, a forty-year veteran of home poker games, played his way into the main event and then outlasted dozens of the game’s legends to join, among others, T. J. Cloutier, author of McManus’s instructional bible, Championship No-Limit and Pot-Limit Hold’em, at the final table. McManus’s eventual fifth-place finish (and $247,760 prize) made for the ultimate insider account, which, in Positively Fifth Street, he expanded to include the story that brought him out to Nevada in the first place, the murder of Vegas scion Ted Binion.

  May 19

  BORN: 1932 Elena Poniatowska (Massacre in Mexico; Here’s to You, Jesusa), Paris

  1941 Nora Ephron (Heartburn, Wallflower at the Orgy), New York City

  DIED: 1864 Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Blithedale Romance), 59, Plymouth, N.H.

  1935 T. E. Lawrence (Seven Pillars of Wisdom, The Mint), 46, Dorset, England

  1821 The Literary Gazette on Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Queen Mab: “We have spoken of Shelley’s genius, and it is doubtless of a high order; but when we look at the purposes to which it is directed, a
nd contemplate the infernal character of all its efforts, our souls revolt with tenfold horror at the energy it exhibits, and we feel as if one of the darkest of the fiends had been clothed with a human body, to enable him to gratify his enmity against the human race, and as if the supernatural atrocity of his hate were only heightened by his power to do injury.”

  1857 In a scene, recorded on this day in the Goncourt Journals, that encapsulates much of nineteenth-century French literary life, the poet Charles Baudelaire, “coming out of a tart’s rooms,” met the critic Charles-Augustin Sainte-Beauve. “Ah! I know where you’re going!” said Baudelaire. “And I know where you’ve been,” replied Sainte-Beauve. “But look,” he added, “I’d rather go and have a chat with you,” and so they retired to a café, where Sainte-Beauve declared his disgust with philosophers and their interest in the immortality of the soul, which they know “doesn’t exist any more than God does,” in an atheistic tirade so fierce, in the words of the Goncourts, “as to bring every game of dominoes in the café to a stop.”

  1906 The Spectator on Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle: “This is not a book to be read for pleasure or recreation. It deals with the elementary problems of life so frankly that it can only be recommended with a grave caution, since there are scenes in it so horrible as to leave an indelible impression on the mind of the reader.”

  1927 T. E. Lawrence spent the last half of his life attempting to escape his fame as “Lawrence of Arabia,” or at least manage it from a distance. Having had his cover blown when he first attempted to disappear into the ranks by enlisting in the Royal Air Force as “John Hume Ross,” he signed up again as “T. E. Shaw” and by 1927, as Revolt in the Desert, the abridged version of his memoir Seven Pillars of Wisdom, was selling tens of thousands of copies a week, he was stationed as an aircraftman second class in Karachi, overhauling engines while corresponding with Churchill, E. M. Forster, and Bernard Shaw (who may have inspired his assumed name). In one letter he explained his time abroad as “exile, endured for a specific purpose, to let the book-fuss pass over”; in another, on this day, he wrote, “I languish for my sins in publishing a little bit of the Seven Pillars called Revolt in the Desert.”

  May 20

  BORN: 1806 John Stuart Mill (Autobiography, On Liberty), London

  1952 Walter Isaacson (Steve Jobs, Einstein, Benjamin Franklin), New Orleans

  DIED: 1956 Max Beerbohm (Zuleika Dobson), 83, Rapallo, Italy

  2002 Stephen Jay Gould (The Mismeasure of Man), 60, New York City

  1845 “Thursday, May 20, 1845, 3-4½ p.m.” With this notation, which became his standard habit to mark their visits, Robert Browning recorded on the envelope of her most recent letter his first meeting with Elizabeth Barrett at her home—indeed, in her bedroom, for she was an invalid—on Wimpole Street. He had first written her in January in a letter that began, “I love your verses with all my heart, Miss Barrett,” but there were many barriers in the way of their meeting: her famously tyrannical father, violently skeptical of the prospect of marriage for his sickly daughter, as well as her own fear that she’d merely “make a company-show of an infirmity” for Browning and “hold a beggar’s hat for sympathy.” Meet they did, though, on this afternoon, the first of ninety visits—always with her father safely out of the house—before their elopement to Italy.

  1915 E. M. Forster had chicken pox.

  1953 Andrew Sean Greer’s The Story of a Marriage is not the story of the marriage that takes place on this day between Annabel DeLawn and William Platt, just before William, finally drafted, is shipped out to train for the war in Korea. The book is, instead, the story of Pearlie and Holland Cook, married a few years earlier, after Holland’s own war in the Pacific. But as Pearlie learns, no marriage—not her marriage, at least—is between just two people. In Greer’s intricate and often indirect tale, she discovers that her beautiful husband has drawn desire to him from more sources than her, and returned it too, and so she forces another couple together—Annabel and William—in the hope that her husband will then focus his desire on just one.

  1990 Harry Bosch’s Sunday morning begins with a call about a body in a pipe, the body of a man he knew twenty years before. When Michael Connelly, a young crime reporter on the Los Angeles Times, introduced LAPD Detective Harry Bosch in his first novel, The Black Echo, he gave Bosch a history of high-profile cases that had made him a pariah in his own department. The body in the pipe takes him even further back, to the nightmare of his time as a “tunnel rat” in Vietnam, in a case where the strongest clues were planted years before, the last of which Bosch, fittingly, tracks down at the funeral of a fellow soldier at a veterans cemetery on Memorial Day.

  NO YEAR In Fifty Shades of Grey, Christian Grey sends Ana Steele, after her final exam on Thomas Hardy, a three-volume first edition of Tess of the d’Urbervilles that must be worth a fortune.

  May 21

  BORN: 1688 Alexander Pope (The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad), London

  1926 Robert Creeley (For Love, Hello, Later), Arlington, Mass.

  DIED: 1926 Ronald Firbank (Valmouth, The Flower Beneath the Foot), 40, Rome

  2000 Barbara Cartland (The Elusive Earl, Not Love Alone), 98, Hatfield, England

  1749 Writing on this day to her young lover, the marquise du Châtelet described the daily regimen she had to follow to finish her life’s work, her translation of Newton’s Principia Mathematica, by her deadline, the birth of her fourth child less than four months away: wake at eight or nine and work till three; stop for coffee and then work again from four to ten, when she dined alone and took time to talk with Voltaire, the former lover with whom she was sharing a Paris house; and then back to work from midnight to five in the morning. She did finish the book, just before she died, as she had feared, of complications from the birth of her daughter. Her book nearly perished too, but was finally published ten years later, and it remains the standard translation of Newton in France.

  1813 By the time Henri Beyle rejoined Napoleon’s army at the Battle of Bautzen, the witty urban dandy was sick of war. He had survived the disastrous retreat from Russia the previous winter, and the prospect of observing more carnage, even from a comfortable distance, made him ill. “It’s like a man who has drunk too much punch and has been forced to throw it up; he is disgusted with it for life.” Of the battle, in which over 200,000 soldiers clashed and 20,000 were lost, he wrote, “We see quite well, from noon to three o’clock, everything that can be seen of a battle, which is to say, nothing,” a vision he doubtless recalled when, writing under his pen name of Stendhal two decades later, he described the chaos of Waterloo in the early pages of The Charterhouse of Parma.

  1924 One of the details in “Tiny Mummies,” Tom Wolfe’s mockery of The New Yorker, that most irritated those it mocked was its gleeful furtherance of the long-standing rumor that William Shawn, The New Yorker’s editor, had as a child in Chicago been considered as a possible victim by the murderers Leopold and Loeb before they killed his classmate Bobby Franks on this day. Was it so? Wolfe claimed he saw in court records the name “William” on a list prepared by the killers, but Renata Adler, in Gone, was adamant there was no such thing, and the magazine’s most recent historian, Ben Yagoda, called the story “nonsense.” But Lillian Ross, in her memoir of her long, secret relationship with Shawn, said Shawn told her Leopold and Loeb had indeed come to his house and looked him over “as a candidate for what they were going to do.” The deeply private Shawn, of course, never said a word about it on the record.

  May 22

  BORN: 1859 Arthur Conan Doyle (A Study in Scarlet, The Sign of the Four), Edinburgh

  1907 Hergé (Red Rackham’s Treasure, Tintin in Tibet), Etterbeek, Belgium

  DIED: 1885 Victor Hugo (Les Misérables, The Hunchback of Notre Dame), 83, Paris

  2010 Martin Gardner (The Ambidextrous Universe), 95, Norman, Okla.

  1867 Fleeing the grasping of creditors and family, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and his new wife, Anna, embarked on a European trip funde
d by pawning the jewelry and silver of her dowry. Dostoyevsky held out a mad hope that he might cure their debts at the roulette table, and early in the trip he set out alone for the resort town of Bad Homburg, planning to return in just a few days. After nearly a week of losing, he wrote his wife, “If one plays coolly, calmly and with calculation, it is quite impossible to lose! I swear—it is an absolute impossibility!” (The problem, he added, was that he couldn’t keep calm.) He assured her he was leaving Homburg, though if he could just stay four more days he’d be certain to win everything back! He did stay, continued to lose, and over their next few years of travel pawned their wedding rings countless times.

  1942 When Naomi Nakane sits down in 1972 to read the unsent letters her aunt Emily wrote to Naomi’s mother thirty years before, it’s like finding her “childhood house filled with rooms and corners I’ve never seen.” Written from Vancouver to Japan, where Naomi’s mother had returned to take care of their own mother before the attack on Pearl Harbor divided the countries by war, the letters begin with Emily’s wariness at the early signs that some Canadians think the Japanese families among them are enemies and end abruptly when the family packs to leave their home on this day for a tiny abandoned town in the interior, the first step in an odyssey of exclusion that lasts well beyond the war in Joy Kogawa’s novel Obasan, based in part on her own family’s history.

  1944 J. R. R. Tolkien, still a decade from publishing The Lord of the Rings, mentioned to a friend that he had brought Frodo “to the very brink of Mordor,” while Gollum, he added, “continues to develop into a most intriguing character.”

  1980 Children’s book editor Ursula Nordstrom confessed to her author Mary Stolz her wish she “could look EXACTLY like Dick Cavett”: “I dote on his neat, tidy spare face.”