A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1969 Kingsley Amis, never shy of a commercial publishing idea that matched his enthusiasms (for example, his pseudonymous Book of Bond, or Every Man His Own 007), pitched an especially attractive idea to his agent Pat Kavanagh on this day: a series “On Drink and Drinking” that combined personal interest with sales potential. Best of all, he “could get something like six months’ drink off tax, which would be a tremendous achievement.” The result was the slim classic On Drink, with its complaints on the troublesomeness of wine, advice for dealing with hangovers (read Kafka and have sex on waking—not in that order), and a recipe for “The Lucky Jim” (one part vermouth, two parts cucumber juice, and a dozen parts of the cheapest British vodka you can find).

  June 4

  BORN: 1955 Val McDermid (A Place of Execution), Kirkcaldy, Scotland

  1972 Joe Hill (20th Century Ghosts, Heart-Shaped Box), Hermon, Maine

  DIED: 1967 J. R. Ackerley (My Dog Tulip, My Father and Myself), 70, London

  2010 David Markson (Wittgenstein’s Mistress, Reader’s Block), 82, New York

  1908 At the ceremony in the Pantheon to inter the remains of his most famous defender, Émile Zola, Alfred Dreyfus, in an attempted assassination, was shot in the arm.

  1940 Published: The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers (Houghton Mifflin, Boston)

  1949 “The fur can easily be removed,” C. S. Lewis responded to a reader concerned both about the mention of fur coats in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and about the danger of children getting stuck in wardrobes. “Much more serious is the undesirability of shutting oneself into a cupboard. I might add a caution—or wd. this only make things worse?” In later editions of the book, Lewis indeed added a caution, five of them throughout the story, in fact, to always leave the door open when hiding in a wardrobe.

  1972 Timothy Crouse was the other correspondent Rolling Stone assigned to cover the 1972 presidential campaign. Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 stands as an inimitable landmark of political journalism, if that’s what you call it, but The Boys on the Bus, Crouse’s look in the mirror at the pack of reporters following the campaign, may have been more influential, in both its freewheeling gossip and its foreshadowing of the way the media has increasingly made itself the story. Foremost among its larger-than-life characters is R. W. “Johnny” Apple Jr., the talented and tireless man from the New York Times who launched into a self-congratulatory monologue to Crouse over poached eggs and caviar at the Beverly Wilshire on the Sunday before the California primary: “Believe it or not, they gave me an unlimited travel budget at the Times . . .”

  2002 Unlike the NFL and NBA drafts, the Major League Baseball amateur draft takes place in a near-vacuum, a selection of players nobody’s heard of and, for the most part, nobody ever will. But the 2002 baseball draft is the first big scene in the biggest baseball book of the last four decades, Michael Lewis’s Moneyball, with maverick Oakland A’s exec Billy Beane and his staff giddily drafting diamonds in the rough no one else wanted. It’s a heady moment—“This is maybe the funnest day I have ever had in baseball,” Beane says—but its victories were less evident a decade later: most of the picks, like most others in baseball’s talent crapshoot, never panned out, including Jeremy Brown, the hard-hitting, overweight catcher who played five games for the A’s in 2006 and then retired, weary of all the publicity that followed him as a Moneyball poster boy.

  June 5

  BORN: 1939 Margaret Drabble (The Waterfall, The Millstone), Sheffield, England

  1958 Geoff Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage, But Beautiful), Cheltenham, England

  DIED: 1900 Stephen Crane (The Red Badge of Courage), 28, Badenweiler, Germany

  2012 Ray Bradbury (Dandelion Wine, The Illustrated Man), 91, Los Angeles

  1826 An epochal moment in the hothouse creative atmosphere of the Brontë parsonage occurred with the arrival of a dozen toy soldiers, brought home for young Branwell Brontë by their father and shared by him with his sisters, ages ten, seven, and six. They quickly named their favorites—Bonaparte or Sneaky (Branwell), Wellington (Charlotte), Parry (Emily), and Ross (Anne—Ross was “a queer little thing very much like herself,” remembered Charlotte)—and around them constructed a fantasy world, named variously Glasstown, Angria, and Gondal, inspired by the personalities and geography they read about in their beloved Blackwood’s Magazine. Few troves of juvenilia have received the fascinated attention the Brontë children’s “plays” and tiny handmade books have brought ever since.

  1909 While he built a career in law and insurance in his twenties and early thirties, Wallace Stevens wrote almost nothing for the public. His writing was done in letters to Elsie Moll, the woman he courted, and in two birthday collections of poems he prepared for her, a “Book of Verses” in 1908 and a “Little June Book” in 1909, soon after which they married. (Stevens’s parents, who disapproved of their son marrying a woman who had been too poor to finish high school, did not attend.) When her husband’s work began to appear in literary journals in 1914, Elsie was shocked and disappointed that he published the poems he had written for her, a skepticism toward his vocation that continued throughout their marriage.

  1940 Ever since J. B. Priestley threatened Graham Greene with a libel suit for a nasty portrait of a bestselling novelist in Stamboul Train he thought was based on him, Greene had had it in for Priestley and his “graceless sentences.” Until this day, that is, when Priestley, drafted by the BBC to speak on the radio after the disastrous but heroic evacuation of over 300,000 Allied soldiers from Dunkirk, spoke in his Yorkshire baritone of the rescue—“typically English” in both “its folly and its grandeur”—paying memorable tribute to the “fussy little” pleasure steamers that had been diverted from Brighton holiday-making to the hell of war. Priestley’s weekly addresses made him, with Churchill, the voice of British resistance in the war’s first year, and “for those dangerous months,” Greene later wrote, “he was unmistakably a great man.”

  1977 Three days sober, Raymond Carver wrote his publisher to propose the subject of his first novel, which he would never write: a World War I adventure involving the German navy in East Africa, “The African Queen seen from the other side.”

  1980 Draco Malfoy, bully in the Harry Potter series, is born.

  June 6

  BORN: 1875 Thomas Mann (Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice), Lübeck, Germany

  1923 V. C. Andrews (Flowers in the Attic, Petals on the Wind), Portsmouth, Va.

  DIED: 1961 Carl Jung (Man and His Symbols, The Red Book), 85, Zurich

  1982 Kenneth Rexroth (One Hundred Poems from the Japanese), 76, Santa Barbara, Calif.

  1761 Famed though they might be for the line of stones with which their surveying divided Maryland from Pennsylvania, Charles Mason and Jeremiah Dixon first met on another expedition of similar public fascination: their observation on this day, from the Cape of Good Hope, of the first transit of Venus across the sun in over a hundred years, an event that allowed a more accurate measure of the distance from the earth to the sun and that, in Mason & Dixon, Thomas Pynchon’s serious goof on the Age of Enlightenment, sets off an entire craze: Transit-of-Venus Wigs (“a dark little round Knot against a great white powder’d sphere”), Transit-of-Venus Pudding (“a singular black Currant upon a Circular Field of White”), and a popular sailors’ song, “’Tis ho, for the Transit of Venus!”

  1780 William Blake was a visionary thinker in a revolutionary age, but even as a young man was not one for mass movements. He was twenty-two and newly admitted to the Royal Academy of Arts when Lord George Gordon, with the cry “No Popery!,” inflamed Protestant mobs in London against the lessening of restrictions against Catholics by Parliament. For days rioters pillaged the city, and on this day they marched on Newgate Prison. Blake was walking near the house of his old engraving master when he was caught up in the front ranks of the advancing mob and carried along with it, likely against his will, to Newgate, where the crowd burned the prison and freed its i
nmates, and where Blake himself was fortunate to escape without injury or arrest.

  1951 In the summer of 1939, and William Saroyan celebrated his first Broadway hit, The Time of Your Life, by buying a new Buick and driving to California with his young cousin Ross Bagdasarian, who had played a bit part in the show. Along the way they composed a song, based on an Armenian tune with words mainly by Saroyan, “Come On My House (I’m Gonna Give You Candy).” A dozen years later, “Come On-a My House,” released on this day and sung with an Italian accent (so she’d sound a little Armenian) by Rosemary Clooney, became the hit of the summer of 1951. The royalties gave a much-needed boost to Saroyan’s income, but Bagdasarian had another hit coming: in 1958, under the name Dave Seville, he created and voiced Alvin, Simon, and Theodore and recorded “The Chipmunk Song.”

  1997 Paul Quinn, in the TLS, on Philip Roth’s American Pastoral: “Roth is compelled to forgo the usual randy, rebellious, wiseacre persona for the much more difficult task of inhabiting a decent, compliant, doomed consciousness; his achievement is to show a happily shallow man’s enforced depths.”

  June 7

  BORN: 1952 Orhan Pamuk (The Black Book, My Name Is Red, Snow), Istanbul

  1954 Louise Erdrich (Love Medicine, The Round House), Little Falls, Minn.

  DIED: 1967 Dorothy Parker (Enough Rope, Here Lies), 73, New York City

  1970 E. M. Forster (Howards End, A Passage to India), 91, Coventry, England

  NO YEAR The death, in Little Women, of Pip the canary.

  1909 “I’m no bum,” Richard Marquard told the firemen who found him, asleep and penniless after five days riding the rails, in their Chicago firehouse. “I’m a ballplayer.” They believed him enough to chip in $5 to help him get home from a failed tryout in Iowa, and Marquard, just sixteen, vowed he’d pay them back when he made it big. Two years later, when his Giants came to town to play the Cubs on this day, Marquard, known by then as Rube, the nickname he’d carry to the Hall of Fame, did as promised, part of the story of his fast rise to the big leagues he told Lawrence Ritter, the baseball-loving economics professor who tracked down the sport’s aging early stars to record their stories in 1966’s The Glory of Their Times, a landmark book whose first appearance now stands as far in the past as Ritter’s subjects were from the ancient games they recalled.

  1943 Malcolm Cowley, in the New Republic, on T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets: “Four Quartets is one of those rare books that can be enjoyed without being understood.”

  1967 Hubertus Bigend, the Belgian proprietor of Blue Ant, a mysterious ad agency that traffics in cool, may not be the main character of any of William Gibson’s novels Pattern Recognition, Spook Country, and Zero History, but he presides over them all as a ubiquitous and vaguely malign presence, looking like “Tom Cruise on a diet of virgins’ blood and truffled chocolates.” The Bigend Trilogy, as Gibson has called the books, marked the first time that the science fiction visionary wrote about the present, so it’s fitting that Bigend may be the first character in literary history whose fictional Wikipedia entry (which appears in Spook Country, from which his birth on this date was gleaned) was later quoted in his actual Wikipedia entry.

  NO YEAR A few hours before, she was a person. Now she’s evidence. Once a Harvard grad and once a doctor, Lori Petersen is now just a body for another doctor, Dr. Kay Scarpetta, to work on with forceps and thermometer, already considering how this murder scene resembles the other three “Mr. Nobody,” her serial strangler, has left behind. Patricia Cornwell was working in the state medical examiner’s office in Richmond (as a writer, not a doctor) when she created Scarpetta, the chief medical examiner of Virginia, in Postmortem, an award-winning mystery debut that opened the door both to crime series led by strong-willed professional women and to the ongoing fascination with forensics in fiction, film, and television.

  June 8

  BORN: 1903 Marguerite Yourcenar (Memoirs of Hadrian, The Abyss), Brussels

  1947 Sara Paretsky (Blood Shot, Blacklist), Ames, Iowa

  DIED: 1876 George Sand (Indiana, Mauprat, Consuelo), 71, Nohant, France

  1889 Gerard Manley Hopkins (“The Wreck of the Deutschland”), 44, Dublin

  1290 We know little more about Beatrice Portinari than that she was the daughter of one wealthy Florentine banker and the wife of another, and that she died on this day at the age of twenty-four. After her death, though, she gained a kind of immortality as the “Beatrice” of the poems of Dante Alighieri, who claimed to have loved her since he met her as a child (though he had met her only once since, when she greeted him on the street while walking with a friend). In his Vita nuova, he courted sacrilege by worshipping this earthly woman, concluding, “After she had departed this life, the whole city was left as though widowed, shorn of all dignity.” And in his Divine Comedy she rises again, to take over from the pagan Virgil as Dante’s immortal guide through the heavens of Paradise.

  1949 Published: 1984 by George Orwell (Secker & Warburg, London)

  1977 Marilynne Robinson has often mentioned the PhD dissertation she wrote at the University of Washington on Shakespeare, but only to say it was the task she stole time away from to experiment with “extended metaphors,” written for no purpose but the freedom of their thought. Those metaphors turned into her first novel, the singular, visionary Housekeeping, but she didn’t entirely neglect her schoolwork, turning in a 257-page thesis on this day called “A New Look at Shakespeare’s Henry VI, Part II: Sources, Structure, Meaning,” which can still be found in the stacks of the UW library, and which makes the rather unambitious argument, with little sign of the elegant ferocity of her later essays, that this neglected work was actually a “good, sound play.”

  1978 Invited to give the commencement address at Harvard after two years of living in exile in the United States, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn proclaimed that the West, with all its material abundance, was weakened by cowardice, decadence, mediocrity, and spiritual exhaustion.

  June 9

  BORN: 1954 Gregory Maguire (Wicked, Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister), Albany, N.Y.

  1956 Patricia Cornwell (Postmortem, Body of Evidence), Miami, Fla.

  DIED: 1870 Charles Dickens (Great Expectations, A Tale of Two Cities), 58, Higham, England

  1974 Miguel Angel Asturias (Men of Maize, The President), 74, Madrid

  1865 The inattention of a work crew on this day caused six of the seven first-class coaches in the express train from the English Channel to plunge into a gap in the rails in Staplehurst, England. Left dangling over the abyss in the seventh were the young actress Ellen Ternan, her mother, and her secret paramour, Charles Dickens, who crawled out through a window and spent the next few hours ministering to the victims below with water he carried from the river with his top hat and brandy he retrieved from the carriage. He also retrieved the manuscript of the latest installment of Our Mutual Friend, and when the novel was published later that year, Dickens rather light-heartedly mentioned the rescue of his book in a final note, but the carnage of the crash, in which ten died and two score were seriously injured, haunted him the rest of his life, as did the near-discovery of his relationship with Miss Ternan.

  1941 At the time, neither Vladimir nor Vera Nabokov knew how to drive, so when Stanford University offered Vladimir a summer teaching position, they accepted the suggestion of one of his Russian-language students, Dorothy Leuthold, that she drive them from New York to California in her new car. At a stop at the Grand Canyon, Vladimir, never without a butterfly net, had the thrill of his lepidopteral career when on a trail just under the canyon’s rim Dorothy disturbed into flight an unknown brown butterfly. Bringing two specimens back to the car, he found Vera had caught two of the same, and in a paper the following year he named the new species, the first he had identified, after their traveling companion, Neonympha dorothea.

  1976 The mud came from somewhere. When Dana Franklin disappears from her California apartment and then reappears a few seconds later, wet, muddy, and frightened, having spent the time
in between on a riverbank she doesn’t recognize, where she saves a drowning boy and is nearly shot by his father, she and her husband try to hold to the facts of what, unbelievably, has happened: the mud had to come from somewhere. And when it happens again and again, she adds to her facts: she travels when the boy is in danger, she returns when she’s in danger, and the place she goes to is on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in 1815, where, as a black woman, she must live as a slave. Most of Octavia Butler’s fiction was set in the future, but with Kindred she brought her readers bodily into the past in a story that grounds the fantastic, uneasily, in the matter-of-fact.

  June 10

  BORN: 1915 Saul Bellow (The Adventures of Augie March), Lachine, Quebec

  1925 James Salter (A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years), New York City

  DIED: 1949 Sigrid Undset (Kristin Lavransdatter), 67, Lillehammer, Norway

  2011 Patrick Leigh Fermor (A Time of Gifts), 96, Dumbleton, England

  1928 Among the hidden private references in the dream cityscape of In the Night Kitchen—allusions to Maurice Sendak’s friends, his childhood addresses, his dog, and the hospital where he recovered from a heart attack—is a carton labeled “COCOANUT,” “Patented June 10th, 1928,” the date of the author’s birth.

  1964 In 1955, Flannery O’Connor quickly replied to a letter from a woman she didn’t know who asked about the presence of God in her work. “I would like to know who this is who understands my stories,” she wrote, beginning an exchange of hundreds of letters with an Atlanta clerk named Betty Hester, who chose to be identified only as “A” when O’Connor’s letters were first published in The Habit of Being. They wrote about God, as Hester joined the Catholic Church but then lost her faith, and they wrote about their lives and their reading, trading books and opinions in a correspondence that lasted until her last letter to Hester, in which she wrote on this day from the hospital, “I sure don’t look like I’ll ever get out of this joint.”