A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  May 30

  BORN: 1951 Garrett Hongo (The River of Heaven, Volcano), Volcano, Hawaii

  1955 Colm Tóibín (The Master, Brooklyn), Enniscorthy, Ireland

  DIED: 1593 Christopher Marlowe (Tamburlaine, Doctor Faustus), 29, Deptford, England

  1960 Boris Pasternak (Doctor Zhivago; My Sister, Life), 70, Peredelkino, Russia

  1887 After an evening of exasperation at the prospect of strikes and socialism, the wealthy and idle Julian West falls into a deep sleep from which he arises to the news that he has slumbered in a trance for more than a century. West wakes in the year 2000 to a society prosperous beyond his grandest dreams, in which the labor question has been solved and women have been released from both housework and the absurd encumbrances of Victorian dress. A homegrown American Utopia, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward: 2000–1887 joined Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Ben-Hur as the runaway bestsellers of the nineteenth century, inspiring “Bellamy Clubs” across the United States with its vision of a society where, with private property abolished, work and goods would be shared equally by its citizens.

  1961 The fukú didn’t begin with Rafael Trujillo, and it certainly didn’t end with his assassination—with or without the help of the CIA—on this day. A curse brought to the New World, and to the island of Hispaniola in particular, by Columbus or by the enslaved shipped in from Africa, the fukú thrived through the generations as a contagion of calamity and injustice, and when JFK okayed the assassination of the murderously ferocious Trujillo, the Curse of the New World became the Curse of the Kennedys, or so Junot Díaz suggests in the dread-soaked overture to The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, a novel he offers as a sort of counterspell to his island’s legacy of doom.

  1971 Dee Brown was neither a Native American nor a native of the American West. He grew up in Arkansas on tales of the frontier and, alongside a career as a librarian, published fifteen books before Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee. Subtitled “An Indian History of the American West,” Bury My Heart was really a history of the three bloody decades, from 1860 to 1890, when white settlers and soldiers eroded the so-called permanent Indian frontier for good. The time was right for the book: in his New York Times review, N. Scott Momaday compared the Wounded Knee massacre to My Lai, and it hit #1 on the Times bestseller list on this day alongside counterculture classics like The Greening of America and The Female Eunuch and spent nearly the rest of the year at the top. Two years later, Lakota activists reclaimed its title’s embattled territory with their seventy-three-day occupation of the town of Wounded Knee.

  1999 Gary Krist, in the New York Times, on A. M. Homes’s Music for Torching: “To say that I loved A. M. Homes’s ‘Music for Torching’ would be a ridiculously inadequate description of my feelings about this nasty and willfully grotesque novel.”

  May 31

  BORN: 1819 Walt Whitman (Leaves of Grass, Democratic Vistas), West Hills, N.Y.

  1974 Adrian Tomine (Optic Nerve, Shortcomings), Sacramento, Calif.

  DIED: 1991 Angus Wilson (Anglo-Saxon Attitudes), 77, Bury St. Edmunds, England

  1995 Stanley Elkin (George Mills, The Franchiser), 65, St. Louis

  NO YEAR “I should like to see you when you’re tired and satiated. I shall prefer you in that state.” What a quiet and diabolical seduction Henry James places at the center of his Portrait of a Lady! Everybody desires Isabel Archer—who wouldn’t?—but only Gilbert Osmond, the villainous aesthete, has the languorous confidence to tell her just before they part in Rome that he loves her but can let her go. Isabel, meanwhile, thinks of her latent passion like her newfound wealth: “It was there like a large sum stored in a bank—which there was a terror in having to begin to spend. If she touched it, it would all come out.” She may hold back both her money and her desire for now, but in time Gilbert will have them all.

  1889 When David McCullough decided, after a dozen years as an editor, to tell a story of his own, he turned to the great Johnstown Flood, close to his childhood home of Pittsburgh. Writing and researching on nights, weekends, and lunch hours for three years, he published The Johnstown Flood in 1968, and the success of his absorbing account of the disaster—the deadliest in American history to that point—and the scandalous negligence of the wealthy Pittsburgh resort owners that caused it gave him the courage to set out as a full-time writer of history. Not wanting to become “Bad News McCullough,” though, he declined immediate offers to write about the Chicago fire and the San Francisco earthquake.

  1906 A bystander at the attempted assassination of Spain’s King Alfonso by anarchists, Ezra Pound left the country in fear he would be connected to it.

  1939 Christopher Isherwood, in the New Republic, on Robert Penn Warren’s Night Rider: “So important is the theme of this novel and so considerable its achievement, that I almost wish he would rewrite it—as George Moore used to—ten years from now, when the powers already apparent in his first attempt have come to full maturity.”

  2001 Murray Thwaite, the title patriarch in Claire Messud’s novel The Emperor’s Children, has only one child, his daughter, Marina, but he also looms as an idol to be worshipped or toppled by what feels like a whole generation of young people, including Marina’s best friend, Danielle, who on this evening accepts Murray’s suggestion that he come up to her apartment. It’s a measure of the warmth of Messud’s satire that while she certainly shows her emperor, a legendary and self-satisfied liberal journalist, to be wearing no clothes (and literally so on this evening), he’s a human and complex character who nearly earns the affection he initially inspires in his young admirer.

  June is sickly sweet; it’s insipid. Is that because it’s so warm, or because it rhymes so easily? June, moon, spoon, balloon . . . But while Robert Burns happily rhymed his “red, red rose / That’s newly sprung in June” with a “melody / that’s sweetly played in tune,” Gwendolyn Brooks burned off any sugar in the terse rhythms of “We Real Cool”: her “Jazz June” is followed by “Die soon.” Thoughts of death in summer haunt—or enliven—Wallace Stevens’s “Sunday Morning” too. His heroine’s “desire for June” gains its vitality from the inevitable darkening of evening. “Death,” he writes, “is the mother of beauty.”

  June is called “midsummer,” even though it’s the beginning, not the middle, of the season. The days are longest, and the summer stretches hopefully ahead. Shakespeare’s Midsummer Night’s Dream is a comic fantasy of lovers diverted and united that ends, more or less, with a group wedding, the traditional end for a comedy and a ceremony traditionally celebrated in June. Marriage plots are supposed to reconcile all differences, but of course not every wedding ties things up so neatly. In Dorothy Baker’s Cassandra at the Wedding, the approaching June marriage of her twin sister seems to Cassandra like an abandonment, a crisis that flays open her own vivid but uncertain identity. And Mary McCarthy’s The Group begins rather than ends with a June wedding, the first among its set of Vassar grads and hardly an auspicious one (the book will come full circle to end with the funeral of its long-divorced bride).

  The wedding in The Group takes place just a week after that other modern June ritual, graduation day—or, as it’s more evocatively known, commencement, an ending that’s a beginning. It’s an occasion that brings out both hope and world-weariness in elders and advice givers. It brought David Foster Wallace, in his 2005 Kenyon College commencement address reprinted as This Is Water, perhaps as close as he ever came to the unironic statement his busy mind was long striving for. But the grammar-school graduation speech is an especially potent scene in African American literature. There’s the narrator’s friend “Shiny” in James Weldon Johnson’s Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man, speaking to a white audience like “a gladiator tossed into the arena and bade to fight for his life,” and Richard Wright, in his memoir Black Boy, giving a rough speech he’d composed himself instead of the one written for him. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man is invited to give his class speech before his town’s leading white citizens, only to find himself instea
d pitted in a “battle royal” with his classmates, while in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, a young student follows a white dignitary’s patronizing words to the graduates with an unprompted and subversive leading of the “Negro national anthem,” “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (whose lyrics were written by none other than James Weldon Johnson).

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR JUNE

  Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (1942/2004) After reading Colette’s account of the forced migration from the German occupation of Paris, Némirovsky remarked, “If that’s all she could get out of June, I’m not worried,” and continued work on her own version, “Storm in June,” the first of the two sections of her fictional suite she was able to complete.

  Ubik by Philip K. Dick (1969) It’s June 1992, a few days before Resurrection Day, when Glen Runciter comes into the Beloved Brethren Moratorium to commune with his late wife, Ella, suspended in a half-life of extended cognition. But Ella’s connection is deteriorating, and soon time itself is falling apart as well in one of Dick’s most unsettling explosions of reality.

  Jaws by Peter Benchley (1974) Is the greatest beach read ever the one that could keep you from ever wanting to go into the water again?

  The Public Burning by Robert Coover (1977) We’ve never quite known what to do with The Public Burning, Coover’s wild American pageant starring Nixon, the Rosenbergs, and a foul and folksy Uncle Sam: it’s too long, too angry, too crazy, and, for the publishers’ lawyers who said it couldn’t be released while its main character, the recently deposed president, was still alive, it was too soon.

  Sleepless Nights by Elizabeth Hardwick (1979) Like Ubik, Sleepless Nights begins anchored in a hot, blinding June but soon fragments across time, in this case into memories from the narrator’s life—which closely resembles Hardwick’s—and stories from the lives of others, a method that has the paradoxical effect of heightening time’s power.

  Clockers by Richard Price (1992) It’s often said that no modern novel can match the storytelling power of The Wire, but its creators drew inspiration from Price’s novel of an unsolved summertime murder in the low-level New Jersey crack trade, and for their third season they added Price to their scriptwriting team.

  When the World Was Steady by Claire Messud (1995) Bali is hot in June, but dry; the Isle of Skye is gray and wet, at least until the weather makes yet another change. Messud’s first novel follows two English sisters just on the far side of middle age who find themselves on those distant and different islands, reckoning with the choices they’ve made and suddenly open to the life around them.

  Three Junes by Julia Glass (2002) Three Junes might well be called “Three Funerals”—each of its three sections, set in summers that stretch across a decade, takes place in the wake of a death. But the warm month in her title hints at the story inside, and the way her characters hold on to life wherever they find it.

  June 1

  BORN: 1932 Christopher Lasch (The Culture of Narcissism), Omaha, Neb.

  1937 Colleen McCullough (The Thorn Birds), Wellington, Australia

  DIED: 1952 John Dewey (Democracy and Education), 92, New York City

  1968 Helen Keller (The Story of My Life), 87, Easton, Conn.

  NO YEAR Oyster soup, sea bass and barracuda, a calf’s head in oil and a gigantic roast goose, rice pudding, stewed prunes, and strawberry ice cream, lemonade and a case of champagne that the groom calls “the best beer I ever drank”: Frank Norris’s 1899 novel McTeague is unmatched as a tale of excess, greed, and desire, and the feast celebrating the wedding of McTeague, the brutish dentist, and Trina, his tiny bride, is just one of its orgies of consumption. At its end, with the partygoers gone and their new apartment dark, empty, and quiet, the couple is left alone in their new life together, with nothing more to consume but each other. “Oh, you must be good to me—very, very good to me, dear,” Trina whispers to McTeague, “for you’re all that I have in the world now.”

  1932 Colette opened a beauty institute in Paris, featuring her own cosmetics and creams. (It closed a year later.)

  1974 The speakers at the gala reopening of Sandstone, an open-sexuality resort in Topanga Canyon, California, included Dr. Alex Comfort, author of the bestselling Joy of Sex, Al Goldstein, publisher of Screw magazine, and Gay Talese, who was under contract to write a book on sex in America and who, for months at a stretch, had lived at Sandstone. The scandal of Talese’s enthusiastic research on the sexual revolution has always overshadowed that book, Thy Neighbor’s Wife, but the book itself delves into its subject with a calm curiosity that’s best evoked in the final chapter, where “Gay Talese” enters the narrative in the third person, enjoying massage parlors and orgies as both observer and participant, and never entirely separating the two.

  1976 “The telephone rings at four. ‘This is C.B.C. John Updike has been in a fatal automobile accident. Do you care to comment?’ ” Bewildered and weeping, John Cheever couldn’t get back to sleep after the news, and in his journal sketched a eulogy. “He was a prince,” he wrote, though they had often been anxious and envious rivals. “One misses his brightness—one misses it painfully.” But in the daylight, the prank was revealed: an unnamed novelist was the caller, Updike was still alive, and he lived long enough to eulogize Cheever at his funeral six years later.

  June 2

  BORN: 1840 Thomas Hardy (The Return of the Native), Stinsford, England

  1929 Norton Juster (The Phantom Tollbooth, The Dot and the Line), Brooklyn

  DIED: 1961 George S. Kaufman (The Man Who Came to Dinner), 71, New York City

  1989 Frederic Prokosch (The Asiatics), 89, Le-Plan-de-Grasse, France

  1816 William Hazlitt, in The Examiner, on Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel: “He is a man of that universality of genius, that his mind hangs suspended between poetry and prose, truth and falsehood, and an infinity of other things, and from an excess of capacity, he does little or nothing.”

  1910 The ghosts of Albany remember Francis Phelan when he returns, in William Kennedy’s Ironweed, and so do some of the living, including the family he left behind twenty-two years ago, after his baby son died from his negligence. “You don’t just pop up one day with a turkey and all is forgiven,” says his daughter, Peg, and Francis would be the first to agree. But there’s something like forgiveness in an old letter from her he finds upstairs, the only one he had kept in his former life as a traveling ballplayer. “Dear Poppy,” she wrote on this day, “I suppose you never think that you have a daughter that is waiting for a letter since you went away.”

  1963 Former car thief Jacky Maglia, a protégé of Jean Genet, won a race in Belgium in a Lotus that Genet had paid for with a sizable loan from his publisher.

  1977 Not yet forty, Raymond Carver had hit bottom and sobered up before, but never for long. After his first book of stories, Will You Please Be Quiet, Please?, was nominated for a National Book Award in March, he stayed sober for a few weeks, but at the booksellers convention in San Francisco he went on a final bender. Drunk and hungover at the same time, he drove his publisher to Sausalito for lunch and Bloody Marys, and after the publisher offered him $5,000 to write a novel, his first book advance, Carver went to the bathroom to cry and then to the liquor store to celebrate. But on this day four days later, at a bar in Arcata, California, he took the last drink of his life.

  1978 After not seeing his difficult father, Vladek, for a couple of years, Art Spiegelman went out to Queens to remind him he still wanted to draw a comic book about his life in Poland during the war. Spiegelman had begun to record his father’s memories six years before, but now he sat down with him in earnest and began sketching out the pages that he would fashion, over the next thirteen years, into the two volumes of Maus, the history of his father’s survival of the war and Auschwitz. “I want to start with Mom. Tell me how you met,” Art asks in Maus. “I lived then in Czestochowa,” Vladek begins, “a small city not far from the border of Germany . . .”

  June 3

  B
ORN: 1930 Marion Zimmer Bradley (The Mists of Avalon), Albany, N.Y.

  1936 Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show), Archer City, Tex.

  DIED: 1924 Franz Kafka (The Trial, The Castle), 40, Kierling, Austria

  1992 Bill Gaines (publisher of Mad, EC Comics), 70, New York City

  1906 Neither D. H. Lawrence, the son of a miner, nor Jessie Chambers, the daughter of a tenant farmer, had reason to expect a literary life, but they read hungrily together anyway in a teenage idyll. Then, just after his family told him to either propose to Jessie or drop her—he did neither—Lawrence began to write, and on this Whitsun holiday he showed her the first pages of a novel. For the next half-dozen years she was his reader, editor, and agent, submitting his poems for publication and, after their relationship unhappily turned romantic, commenting on his manuscript of Sons and Lovers. “Astonishing misconception,” she wrote in the margin about one description of Miriam, whose portrayal, modeled after her, she later said “gave the death-blow to our friendship.”

  1933 Clifton Fadiman, in The New Yorker, on Jules Romains’s Men of Good Will: “He is one of the few living writers who point unhesitatingly straight toward the future. At some later date, when the little ones ask you ‘Grandfather, what did you do before the revolution?,’ perhaps the only answer many of us will be able to make will be ‘I was a contemporary of Jules Romains.’ ”

  NO YEAR “There’s nothing so dark as a railroad track in the middle of the night,” and that’s where Walter Huff finds himself after dropping off the back of a slow-moving train dressed as H. S. Nirdlinger, the man whose wife he sold an accident insurance policy to in February, and the man whose neck he just broke. James M. Cain didn’t think much of Double Indemnity—he wrote it fast for money, to satisfy his editors’ hunger for another Postman Always Rings Twice—but thanks in part to their portrayal by Fred McMurray and Barbara Stanwyck in Billy Wilder’s 1944 film version, Huff and Phyllis Nirdlinger (renamed Dietrichson in the movie) remain one of the most memorably doomed couples in American literature.