A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  May 23

  BORN: 1810 Margaret Fuller (Woman in the Nineteenth Century), Cambridgeport, Mass.

  1910 Margaret Wise Brown (Goodnight Moon, The Runaway Bunny), Brooklyn

  DIED: 1906 Henrik Ibsen (Hedda Gabler, A Doll’s House), 78, Christiania, Norway

  2012 Paul Fussell (The Great War and Modern Memory, Class), 88, Medford, Ore.

  1948 In an “outrageously decrepit bi-motor” airplane with fifteen cases of Moose Brand Beer stowed in the canoe lashed to the plane’s belly, Farley Mowat was flown three hundred miles northwest from Churchill, Manitoba, into Canada’s northern Barrenlands with a government mission to “spend a year or two living with a bunch of wolves.” Or that’s how he tells the story of his arrival in Never Cry Wolf, one of two controversial, bestselling books, along with People of the Deer, he wrote about his first time in the barrens. The books, fierce and funny, drew attention to the mistreatment of, respectively, wolves and the local Inuit, and drew plenty of fire to Mowat, especially from the government officials with whom he engaged in spirited combat in both tales.

  1980 At a garden party in Connecticut, two men met for the first time: Ian Hugo, who was married to Anaïs Nin from 1923 to her death in 1977, and Rupert Pole, who for much of that time was also married to Nin. Hugo hadn’t known about Pole, while Pole had known about Hugo but had thought their marriage was over, and for almost thirty years Nin had shuttled secretly between the two, Hugo in New York and Pole in Los Angeles. (When she died, the New York Times listed Hugo as her husband in her obituary, while the Los Angeles Times listed Pole.) Both men, of course, had accommodated other lovers of hers at times—Henry Miller not the least of them—and when Hugo died a few years after their belated meeting, it was Pole who, at Hugo’s request, scattered his ashes in Santa Monica Bay.

  2003 Erich von Däniken, who was a hotel manager when he wrote Chariots of the Gods?, the improbable 1968 bestseller that argued that the wonders of ancient civilization had been left behind by extraterrestrial visitors (and that, in later editions, confidently abandoned the question mark in its original title), returned to his roots in tourism when he opened Mystery Park, a theme park in Interlaken, Switzerland, in which seven pavilions explained the evidence of ancient aliens, from Stonehenge to the Mayan calendar. Three years later, citing poor attendance, the park closed.

  May 24

  BORN: 1928 William Trevor (The Old Boys, Felicia’s Journey), Mitchelstown, Ireland

  1963 Michael Chabon (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay), Washington, D.C.

  DIED: 1543 Nicolaus Copernicus (On the Revolutions of the Celestial Spheres), 70, Frombork, Poland

  1996 Joseph Mitchell (McSorley’s Wonderful Saloon), 87, New York City

  1939 Alex Haley began a twenty-year career in uniform by enlisting in the Coast Guard.

  1944 In a London car accident, Ernest Hemingway acquired a concussion and a gash in his scalp.

  1945 Indicted for treason in 1943 for his support of Fascist Italy, Ezra Pound turned himself in to American authorities after the Italian surrender and on this day was driven to a makeshift prison camp in Pisa, where, for three weeks, he was held in an open cage of steel mesh before being moved to a nearby tent. Having called Hitler “a Jeanne d’Arc, a saint” after his arrest, Pound was hardly repentant, but in his captivity he wrote—first on a sheet of toilet paper in his cage and then on a typewriter he was granted as a privilege—what became known as the Pisan Cantos, ten new sections in his ongoing poetic project that reflect on his imprisonment and the lost poetic friends of his past and that contain some of his most lyrical passages, particularly the promise that “What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross.”

  1954 “Why can’t Johnny read?” was one of the most anxious pleas of the ’50s, and in Life magazine on this day, John Hersey laid the blame on the “insipid” Dick and Jane–style primers that bored beginning readers out of their little minds. Among his solutions: bring in “wonderfully imaginative” illustrators like Dr. Seuss or Walt Disney. In response, a publisher asked Seuss to “write me a story that first-graders can’t put down,” challenging him to limit his vocabulary to 225 different words from a basic list of 348. Seuss stretched it to 236 words and came up with The Cat in the Hat, whose sales soon rivaled those of Peyton Place, although purchases by schools lagged as some considered it too unruly for classroom use.

  1963 The meeting seemed to go terribly. On the invitation of Attorney General Robert Kennedy, James Baldwin brought a group including playwright Lorraine Hansberry, Lena Horne, Rip Torn, and Jerome Smith, a young activist beaten badly during the Freedom Rides, to Kennedy’s Manhattan apartment to discuss civil rights. The tension peaked when Smith said he couldn’t fight for a country that didn’t protect him from racial violence and Kennedy said if an Irish Catholic like his brother could become president blacks could too in forty years (he was off by five). Hansberry replied that if Kennedy couldn’t understand Smith’s position then “there’s no alternative to our going in the streets.” Kennedy thought he’d been ambushed, and Baldwin’s group left in despair, but later Kennedy acknowledged the meeting as a watershed in his understanding of the moral urgency of civil rights.

  May 25

  BORN: 1938 Raymond Carver (Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?), Clatskanie, Ore.

  1949 Jamaica Kincaid (Annie John, A Small Place), St. John’s, Antigua

  DIED: 1693 Madame de La Fayette (The Princess of Cleves), 59, Paris

  2008 George Garrett (Death of the Fox, The Finished Man), 78, Charlottesville, Va.

  1793 Twice in a week the works of William Godwin were greatly underestimated. First came Prime Minister William Pitt, who decided on this day not to prosecute Godwin for Political Justice, his lengthy and pricey radical treatise, because “a three guinea book could never do much harm among those who had not three shillings to spare.” (The book, in fact, sold well and widely in many forms and had an enormous effect on Romantic poets and radicals alike.) And then on the 31st Godwin’s friend James Marshal returned the manuscript of Godwin’s novel Caleb Williams, saying, “I should have thrust it in the fire. If you persist, the book will infallibly prove the grave of your literary fame.” The novel, in fact, was an immediate triumph, recognized then as one of the great novels of its age and now as the ingeniously constructed first “thriller.”

  1900 After the Spanish-American War, William James reflected on his former student Theodore Roosevelt, “a combination of slime and grit, sand and soap” that could “scour anything away, even the moral sense of the country.”

  1910 The best-known note James sent to another of his notable students, Gertrude Stein—the one that said, “Dear Miss Stein—I understand perfectly how you feel,” excusing her from the philosophy final she had abandoned in favor of a nice spring day and giving her the top grade in the class—may have been apocryphal, but the great pragmatist did write to her on this day, just months before he died. He had enjoyed the early pages of Three Lives—“This is a fine new kind of realism—Gertrude Stein is great!” he thought—but then could go no further. “You know how hard it is for me to read novels . . . As a rule reading fiction is as hard to me as trying to hit a target by hurling feathers at it. I need resistance, to cerebrate!”

  1944 “I could not stand Gaudy Night,” J. R. R. Tolkien admitted to his son Christopher. “I followed P. Wimsey from his attractive beginnings so far, by which time I conceived a loathing for him (and his creatrix) not surpassed by any other character in literature known to me.”

  1994 Of the many revelations in Andre Agassi’s appropriately titled memoir, Open, one of the most enjoyable (for the reader) takes us netside after a hard-fought loss to the Austrian Thomas Muster at the French Open, when Muster reached over and tousled Agassi’s hair. Or, rather, his hairpiece, which Agassi had been wearing secretly for years. “I stare at him with pure hatred,” he recalled. “Big mistake, Muster. Don’t touch the hair.” He vowed he’d never lose to “Muster the hair-musser”
again, and he never did.

  May 26

  BORN: 1954 Alan Hollinghurst (The Folding Star, The Line of Beauty), Stroud, England

  1974 Ben Schott (Schott’s Original Miscellany), London

  DIED: 1976 Martin Heidegger (Being and Time), 86, Freiburg, Germany

  2003 Kathleen Winsor (Forever Amber, Star Money), 83, Manhattan

  1827 Edgar Allan Poe enlisted in the army under the name Edgar A. Perry.

  1897 Published: Dracula by Bram Stoker (Constable, London)

  1911 “Polish was being spoken nearby.” So intrudes, quietly, the presence that will soon consume the life of Gustav Aschenbach in Thomas Mann’s novella Death in Venice. Aschenbach has just arrived, lonely and aimless, at his hotel in Venice when he notices a group of young people speaking Polish, among them Tadzio, a “perfectly beautiful” boy “of perhaps fourteen,” with long curls, an opulent sailor suit, and the appearance of being pampered. Mann too once arrived in Venice (on this day) and saw a beautiful boy, who has since been traced to Władysław Moes, ten at the time (Mann was only thirty-five then, not the fifty-plus of Aschenbach) and who can be seen in a photograph on the beach in Gilbert Adair’s The Real Tadzio, his delicate features almost obscured by the gigantic bow of his beach costume.

  1953 On assignment as a summertime guest college editor at Mademoiselle, Sylvia Plath interviewed Elizabeth Bowen at May Sarton’s house in Cambridge.

  1985 In the New York Times Book Review on this day, critic Ken Tucker reviewed a book that wasn’t a book yet and helped to make it one. Since 1980 Art Spiegelman had been telling the story of his father’s survival of the Holocaust in “Maus,” a series in his avant-garde comics magazine, Raw, and, after countless rejections—including a particularly obtuse one by Knopf’s Robert Gottlieb, who said they were publishing enough “comic strip-cartoon type books” already—had even found a publisher for the whole series at Pantheon, but when Tucker’s piece came out, calling “Maus” an “unfolding literary event” that few were aware of, Pantheon was convinced to release the first half of the book ahead of schedule, to surprising acclaim that made it one of the most important books of the decade.

  May 27

  BORN: 1894 Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon), St. Mary’s County, Md.

  1894 Louis-Ferdinand Céline (Journey to the End of the Night), Courbevoie, France

  1912 John Cheever (The Wapshot Scandal, Stories, Journals), Quincy, Mass.

  DIED: 1564 John Calvin (The Institutes of the Christian Religion), 54, Geneva, Switzerland

  1949 Robert Ripley (Believe It or Not!), 58, New York City

  1891 Arthur Rimbaud’s right leg was amputated.

  1943 Rising before dawn, Second Lieutenant Louis Zamperini, with a jeep to pace him on the runway in Oahu where he was stationed, ran a 4:12 mile, just seconds off the NCAA record he’d set while training for the 1940 Olympics that were canceled by the war. By the end of the same day, after their B-24 crashed in the Pacific while searching for another downed plane, Zamperini and his fellow airmen “Phil” Phillips and Francis McNamara were drifting in the ocean on two rafts lashed together, circled by sharks. Zamperini and Phillips survived a record forty-seven days afloat before coming ashore in the Marshall Islands, where they became prisoners of the Japanese. And only then, as Laura Hillenbrand masterfully recounts in Unbroken, did their true ordeal begin.

  1963 After a series of profiles of Malcolm X, including a prominent interview in Playboy, Alex Haley, despite his mainstream career and integrationist politics, had gained enough of the trust of the Nation of Islam’s fiery spokesman that Malcolm agreed to collaborate with him on a book. On this day they agreed to split the proceeds of what became The Autobiography of Malcolm X equally, with Malcolm requesting that his share go directly to the Nation’s Mosque No. 2 in Chicago, the flagship congregation led by his mentor Elijah Muhammad. He also drafted a dedication to Muhammad, who “made me the man that I am today.” Neither the dedication, nor the share of the proceeds, survived Malcolm’s break with the Nation and his subsequent assassination by three of its members.

  1979 “Remember, it’s YOUR prom; make it one to remember always!” With over 400 dead in the town and the school gymnasium a charred and blood-soaked ruin, it’s not likely that anyone—assuming they survived it—will forget the 1979 Ewen High School senior prom anytime soon. Stephen King was scraping by as a high school English teacher in Maine, selling stories to men’s magazines to help support his young family, when he wrote a few pages about a telekinetic girl bullied in the school showers. He threw them in the trash, but his wife, Tabitha, pulled them out, and they became the opening of Carrie, King’s first published novel and, after a lucrative sale of the paperback rights, his own ticket out of high school.

  May 28

  BORN: 1908 Ian Fleming (Casino Royale, Live and Let Die), London

  1912 Patrick White (Voss, The Vivisector, Riders in the Chariot), London

  DIED: 1843 Noah Webster (An American Dictionary of the English Language), 84, New Haven, Conn.

  1849 Anne Brontë (Agnes Grey, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall), 29, Scarborough, England

  1899 Though reclaimed as a classic by later generations, Kate Chopin’s The Awakening was scorned by reviewers of its day as “morbid,” “vulgar,” and “nauseating” for its apparent refusal to judge the unruly passions of Edna Pontellier. One young reviewer, the twenty-three-year-old Willa Cather, did admire Chopin’s style but thought her “trite and sordid” theme made Emma’s story merely “a Creole Bovary.” Chopin, meanwhile, responded to her critics with a shrug of her shoulders—“I never dreamed of Mrs. Pontellier making such a mess of things and working out her own damnation as she did,” she drily commented—but her short professional writing career never recovered from the attacks before she died five years later.

  1948 England! It’s the word that rushed Hortense Roberts and Gilbert Joseph into what is more of a business partnership than a marriage. Five days after they met, the banns were published; three weeks later they were wed, each “astonished to see the other looking so elegant,” and the next day Gilbert sailed on the Empire Windrush for England, funded by the prudent savings Hortense had offered along with her hand. Six months later, in Andrea Levy’s Small Island, Hortense too left their island of Jamaica to join him on the larger one of Great Britain, in an immigrants’ alliance in which their disappointment at what they find in their idealized England is leavened by their ability to adapt.

  1955 On a slow train to London from his home in Hull, Philip Larkin, traveling alone, noticed that the train filled at each stop with couples just wed on Whit Saturday who were heading into the city for their honeymoons. “Every time you stopped fresh emotion climbed aboard,” he’d later say. For three years after—taking the same trip each year to refresh the experience—he worked on transforming his journey into the ten stanzas of one of his longest poems, “The Whitsun Weddings,” which, with its lonely vision of new marriages aimed into an unknown future like arrows shot into the sky, became the poem that more than any other evoked a sense of community for postwar Britain, though it was written by a man legendary for his misanthropy.

  May 29

  BORN: 1880 Oswald Spengler (The Decline of the West), Blankenburg, Germany

  1935 André Brink (A Dry White Season, An Act of Terror), Vrede, South Africa

  DIED: 1911 W. S. Gilbert (The Mikado, H.M.S. Pinafore), 74, London

  1970 John Gunther (Inside U.S.A., Death Be Not Proud), 68, New York City

  1847 Apologizing for his delay in writing to a colleague, the young historian Francis Parkman blamed “the extremely bad state of my eyes,” which had forced him to design a wooden frame fixed with wires to guide his pencil so he could write without looking at the page. Energetic and ambitious, Parkman had traveled through the West in 1846 but returned to a debilitating nervous condition that left him blind, distracted, and prostrate most of his days. Nevertheless, he persisted in writing his first two books, The Ore
gon Trail and The Conspiracy of Pontiac, under remarkable conditions, having friends read to him for periods “never, without injury, much exceeding half an hour” and making notes with his wire-guided method at a rate that “averaged about six lines a day.”

  1895 With his parents still hoping that Marcel Proust might find a respectable profession, and with Proust himself perhaps imagining it might not interfere with his literary activities, he took an examination on this day to become an unpaid assistant at the Bibliothèque Mazarine. When he didn’t like his assignment, he pleaded ill health and requested a better one; the chief librarian replied, “If he was so weak that he was unable to endure five hours of work every other day, he was wrong to apply.” Proust made just a few appearances in the library before being granted a series of sick leaves that lasted until 1900, after which no more pretense was made that he would have any career other than a literary one.

  1925 As the valedictorian of his ninth-grade class at Smith Robertson Elementary School in Jackson, Mississippi, Richard Wright wrote a graduation speech, but his black principal, W. H. Lanier, had no intention of letting him use his own words. “Listen, boy, you’re going to speak to both white and colored people that night,” he said with a laugh in Wright’s memoir Black Boy. “What can you alone think of saying to them?” Lanier threatened to cut off his promising path to Jackson’s black educated class, but Wright, already set on leaving for Chicago, said, “I want to learn, professor. But there are some things I don’t want to know.” Nervous and halting, he gave his own speech and then walked home alone, readier than ever to leave his old life behind.

  1966 Madeleine Chapsal, in L’Express, on Michel Foucault’s Les mots et les choses (a review that made the book a French bestseller): “A young man has come on the intellectual scene in order to announce the excellent news: the death of Man and, at the same time, the renewal of the one who invented him, then destroyed him, the Philosopher. This demands notice.”