A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1992 Frederick Exley (A Fan’s Notes, Pages from a Cold Island), 63, Alexandria Bay, N.Y.

  1904 After midnight in James Joyce’s Ulysses, Stephen Dedalus flourishes his ashplant, smashes a chandelier, and gives Corley a loan; Leopold Bloom buys a lukewarm pig’s crubeen and a cold sheep’s trotter at a late-night butcher and feeds a stray dog, gives Zoe Higgins his potato and retrieves it, and makes cocoa for Stephen; Stephen and Bloom pee in Bloom’s garden and look at the stars; Bloom kisses Molly’s rear and falls asleep; and Molly wakes and thinks of Blazes Boylan, lieutenants Mulvey and Garvey, and the time Bloom asked to marry her and she said yes.

  1943 The elderly Norwegian novelist Knut Hamsun, passionate in his hatred of England and fervent in his belief in the German spirit, sent the medal for his Nobel Prize for Literature to Joseph Goebbels as a gift to the Nazi cause, saying to the propaganda chief, “I know of no one, Minister, who has so idealistically and tirelessly written and preached the case for Europe, and for mankind, year in and year out, as yourself.” Less than a week later, in a speech in Vienna (in English, oddly enough), he declared, “England must be brought to her knees!” and on the 26th he was granted an audience with Hitler himself. The meeting, however, was a debacle. Hamsun, nearly deaf and weeping, berated Hitler for the brutality and “Prussian ways” of the German occupation of Norway. The Führer shouted in reply, “Quiet, you understand nothing of this!” and the meeting was over.

  1959 Frank O’Hara had seen Billie Holiday sing a few times in her last years of decline, and in early 1959, he stood by the bathroom door at the Five Spot when her pianist, Mal Waldron, accompanied a poetry reading by Kenneth Koch and Holiday, despite being banned from performing in bars after her heroin conviction, stepped up to sing. On this day just a few months later, with police waiting outside her hotel room to arrest her again, Holiday was dead, and O’Hara, writing poems during the lunch hour of his job at the Museum of Modern Art, gathered the moments of his afternoon into “The Day Lady Died”: the train schedule to Long Island, a shoeshine, the “quandariness” of choosing a book, the sweat of summer, and the memory of how Lady Day once took his breath away.

  1960 Anthony Cronin, in the TLS, on Samuel Beckett’s Molloy, Malone Dies, and The Unnameable: “Critics have applied the words ‘despairing’ and ‘unbearable’ to Mr. Beckett’s work, yet the true despair is to cease from contemplation of the mystery, and the true gaiety that which is born of the courage to contemplate the worst. Mr. Beckett has seen the gorgon’s head; but he has not been turned to stone.”

  June 18

  BORN: 1953 Amy Bloom (Come to Me, Away), New York City

  1957 Richard Powers (Galatea 2.2, The Echo Maker), Evanston, Ill.

  DIED: 1902 Samuel Butler (The Way of All Flesh, Erewhon), 66, London

  2010 José Saramago (Blindness, The Stone Raft), 87, Tías, Canary Islands

  1815 “Depend upon it, there is no such place as Waterloo!” Jonathan Strange, the personal magician to the Duke of Wellington, possesses many powers in Susanna Clarke’s prodigiously inventive historical fantasy, Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell—glimpsing faraway armies in his silver basin, bringing rain to slow Napoleon’s progress, moving the city of Bruxelles to North America for the day—but they don’t include a thorough knowledge of Belgian geography. There is such a place as Waterloo, and on its muddy, bloody fields (the mud his own doing) Strange pits his magic against the nearly supernatural powers of the French emperor. By nightfall the French are in ragged retreat, but Wellington’s victory table, surrounded by acres of dead no spells could save, is somber and nearly empty.

  1918 Joe Zmuda, one of the hundred-plus souls who tell their stories in Working, the best known of Studs Terkel’s unparalleled oral-history collections, isn’t working anymore. Retired for ten years, he was a felt cutter for fifteen years and before that a shipping clerk for twenty-five more. And before that? “I was a roving Romeo.” He can recall one day in particular—“I have a very, very good, darn good memory”: June 18, 1918, when he and a friend went dancing and met two sisters. He kissed one, and she told him and anyone else who could hear, “If I don’t marry you, Joe, I’ll never marry another person in this world.” Did they marry? No. Did she marry anyone else? He doesn’t say, but for her seventieth birthday—just the other day—he “called her up, wished her a happy birthday, and that’s all. I could have married her, but—.”

  1936 James Agee was halfway through a letter to his mentor, Father James Harold Flye, when he broke in and added, “Later: I must cut this short and do a week’s worth in next 20 hours or so: have been assigned to do a story on: a sharecropper family (daily & yearly life).” He was ecstatic at the assignment, and thrilled about the photographer he’d be working with, Walker Evans. “Best break I ever had on Fortune,” he added, though he had doubts about his own ability to pull it off and, prophetically, “Fortune’s ultimate willingness to use it.” The magazine ultimately rejected what he and Evans submitted about the three tenant farmers they visited, and for the next five years Agee doggedly reworked the material into what became the one-of-a-kind book Let Us Now Praise Famous Men.

  1982 At age seventy in Ossining, New York; age eighty in Franklin Park, New Jersey; and age ninety in New York City, respectively, John Cheever, Granville Hicks, and Djuna Barnes died.

  June 19

  BORN: 1945 Tobias Wolff (This Boy’s Life, The Barracks Thief), Birmingham, Ala.

  1947 Salman Rushdie (Midnight’s Children, The Satanic Verses), Bombay

  DIED: 1937 J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan, The Admirable Crichton), 77, London

  1993 William Golding (Lord of the Flies), 81, Perranarworthal, England

  1948 Robert Lowell, in the Nation, on William Carlos Williams’s Paterson, Book Two: “It is a book in which the best readers, as well as the simple reader, are likely to find everything.”

  1953 It was “a queer sultry summer, the summer they executed the Rosenbergs,” and Sylvia Plath, like her character Esther Greenwood in The Bell Jar, was “supposed to be having the time of my life,” spending a month in Manhattan as one of a team of collegians chosen to guest-edit the August issue of Mademoiselle. But she was miserable, and the impending electrocution of the atomic spies became the focus of her anxieties, as it does for Esther. One fellow editor remembered Plath at breakfast the morning of the execution asking “how I could eat when the Rosenbergs were about to be fried just like the eggs on my plate.” In her journal, Plath recorded another editor yawning nastily about the prospect, much as in the novel her colleague Hilda’s “pale orange mouth opened on a large darkness” to say, “I’m so glad they’re going to die.”

  1972 It was the day after the Watergate break-in went public, and White House counsel John Dean was busy putting out fires. He knew one conversation was too toxic to have indoors, so he took G. Gordon Liddy, who had organized the break-in, out to Seventeenth Street to talk about what had gone wrong. And there, next to the Ellipse and across from the Corcoran Gallery of Art, in an exchange that appears in both Blind Ambition, Dean’s riveting memoir, and Will, Liddy’s own bestseller, Dean suggested to Liddy that they not speak about the matter any more and Liddy replied, “I want you to know one thing, John. This is my fault. I’m prepared to accept responsibility for it. And if somebody wants to shoot me on a street corner, I’m prepared to have that done. You just let me know when and where, and I’ll be there.”

  2008 Novelist and Seattle SuperSonics season-ticket holder Sherman Alexie testified in the city’s lawsuit to stop the team’s move to Oklahoma City that “I want two more years of the Greek gods.”

  June 20

  BORN: 1905 Lillian Hellman (The Children’s Hour, Pentimento), New Orleans

  1952 Vikram Seth (A Suitable Boy, The Golden Gate), Kolkata, India

  DIED: 1995 E. M. Cioran (The Temptation to Exist, The Trouble with Being Born), 84, Paris

  1999 Clifton Fadiman (The Lifetime Reading Plan, Party of One), 95, Sanibel, Fla.

  1901 Edward Cu
llen was born, a fact he revealed to Bella Swan a century later as “the light of the setting orb glittered off his skin in ruby-tinged sparkles.”

  1925 The New Statesman on Ivy Compton-Burnett’s Pastors and Masters: “It is astonishing, amazing. It is like nothing else in the world. It is a work of genius. How to describe it—since there is nothing of which to take hold?”

  1945 In a car crash on the way to the airport in New York, Ernest Hemingway bruised his head and broke four ribs.

  1958 It would have disappointed Herbert Bayard Swope greatly to learn that his wonderful name is by now largely forgotten. The greatest reporter of his time, the preposterously dynamic editor of the New York World in its heyday, and the intimate and peer of the powerful throughout the first half of the twentieth century, Swope, who died on this day, might best be remembered now as a model for F. Scott Fitzgerald’s Gatsby, or at least for Gatsby’s parties. At the endless all-night affairs Swope threw at his Great Neck mansion, gamblers and prizefighters mingled with debutantes, Supreme Court justices, and the Fitzgeralds themselves in what Swope’s wife called “an absolutely seething bordello of interesting people.” Ring Lardner, who lived across the way, complained that he had to go into New York to get any writing done, thanks to all the guests roaming the woods.

  NO YEAR It’s Sunday on the first weekend of the summer season, and husbands are lying asleep on the beach at Amity, Long Island, while their wives read Helen MacInnes and John Cheever and their kids play in the surf. A boy of six on a raft kicks idly a few times to bring himself back toward shore, while below the great fish rises, drawn to the surface by the vibrations. By the end of the afternoon, a great white shark “as large as a station wagon” will have taken its second and third victims in a week and an entire summer of tourism will be in danger. Meanwhile, it’s safe to say that any actual husbands and wives on the shores of Long Island in 1974 left their MacInnes and Cheever back at the cottage in favor of the book everyone was reading that summer: Peter Benchley’s Jaws.

  1999 Adam Goodheart, in the New York Times, on David Foster Wallace’s Brief Interviews with Hideous Men: “Calling Wallace’s talent unruly doesn’t go nearly far enough. It is fiendish, infantile; it takes as much pleasure in acts of destruction as it does in creation.”

  June 21

  BORN: 1905 Jean-Paul Sartre (Nausea, No Exit, Being and Nothingness), Paris

  1948 Ian McEwan (Atonement, The Cement Garden), Aldershot, England

  DIED: 2002 Timothy Findley (The Wars, Not Wanted on the Voyage), 71, Brignoles, France

  2003 Leon Uris (Exodus, Trinity, Mila 18), 78, Shelter Island, N.Y.

  528 Finding himself, inexplicably, in ancient England and, more specifically, near-naked in a dungeon sentenced to be burned at the stake at noon the following day, Hank Morgan, Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, has an inspiration. “Tell the king,” he thunders, “that at that hour I will smother the whole world in the dead blackness of midnight; I will blot out the sun.” As it happens, Hank knows the only solar eclipse in the sixth century will begin at three minutes after noon on the very day of his execution, and when his prophecy is fulfilled he is untied from the stake and named the king’s right-hand man. Meanwhile, the eclipse also confirms, to his own Yankee skepticism, that he has indeed been transported thirteen centuries into the past.

  1858 A. S. Byatt launches Possession, her Booker Prize–winning literary romance, with the discovery by a young scholar of two letters to an unknown woman, written on this day in the unmistakable hand of the great (and fictional) Victorian poet Randolph Henry Ash, whose comic circumlocutions and crossed-out words betray a hidden passion: “I cannot but feel . . . that you must in some way share my eagerness that further conversation could be mutually profitable that we must meet.” Those submerged desires, revealed after a century and a half, set off an academic and romantic quest both endearingly musty and cuttingly modern, in which Byatt’s scholars manage, despite their intellectual self-consciousness, to unearth their own buried passions.

  1941 Irène Némirovsky planned five sections for her Suite Française, the set of novels she imagined as a War and Peace for the German occupation of France, to be written as the events unfolded. The second of these, “Dolce,” she saw as a short, sweet interlude in the drama, with the relations between occupying German soldiers and their unwilling hosts in a French village culminating on this day in a celebration the Germans arrange on the anniversary of their regiment’s arrival in Paris. The villagers look on, happy almost in spite of themselves, and the sweetness is not false, but neither will it last: the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union will soon draw these soldiers to the Eastern Front. And “Dolce” would be the last section of the novel Némirovsky completed before she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz in 1942.

  1964 “I sometimes think that you do not really understand what will be the effect of this book. There has never been, at least not in our time, any other book like it,” Alex Haley wrote to Malcolm X about his Autobiography. “Do you realize that to do these things you will have to be alive?”

  June 22

  BORN: 1856 H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines, She), Bradenham, England

  1964 Dan Brown (The Da Vinci Code, Angels & Demons), Exeter, N.H.

  DIED: 1947 Jim Tully (Beggars of Life, Circus Parade), 61, Los Angeles

  1992 M. F. K. Fisher (The Art of Eating, How to Cook a Wolf), 83, Glen Ellen, Calif.

  YEAR 1342 (by Shire-reckoning) Bilbo Baggins, in The Hobbit, returns to Bag-End.

  1945 Former high school athletes don’t fare too well in American literature, so it’s with a vague sense of doom that we read, in the opening pages of Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, of Seymour “Swede” Levov, whose exploits in football, basketball, and baseball—along with his blond hair and blue eyes—made him the “household Apollo of the Weequahic Jews.” Does his downfall come when he joins the marines the day after his graduation on this day from Weequahic High? No, the atom bomb saves him. Does it come when he turns down a contract with the Giants to join his father’s glove business, or when he marries Miss New Jersey 1949? Well, not right away, but give it time. His apparent American pastoral will yet meet what Roth calls the “indigenous American berserk.”

  1958 “Son, your mother’s been killed,” they told ten-year-old James Ellroy when he got out of a cab his divorced dad had put him in and found police cars around his mother’s house in suburban L.A. Photographers posed him in a toolshed for the news stories and called him “brave.” In his memoir, My Dark Places, forty years later, Ellroy, blunt and luridly obsessive as always, turned noir inside-out with his true-crime investigation into his mother’s unsolved murder, not just acknowledging that the violent men and redheaded women in his own fiction were born that day, but wallowing in it, telling the story of Jean Ellroy’s cheap death—and his own rage and budding perversity—with the same hepcat brutality of his novels.

  1975 Though Frank Conroy was best known for a book about himself, his memoir Stop-Time, when he profiled the Rolling Stones for the New York Times Magazine on this day he left out a personal moment other writers would have made their lead: finding no Stones home at the Long Island estate they were renting from Andy Warhol, Conroy, who had often supported himself as a jazz pianist, sat down and started playing some Thelonious Monk. He was so caught up in the music that when a drummer joined in he didn’t look up until fifty bars later, and when he did, he didn’t recognize him—he had never had much interest in rock music. The drummer, Charlie Watts, recognized him, though: he reminded Conroy they had played together two decades before at a jazz club in London.

  June 23

  BORN: 1894 Alfred Kinsey (Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, Sexual Behavior in the Human Female), Hoboken, N.J.

  1961 David Leavitt (Family Dancing, The Indian Clerk), Pittsburgh

  DIED: 1836 James Mill (The History of British India), 63, London

  1956 Michael Arlen (The Green Hat), 60, New York City


  1959 Was Boris Vian killed by a movie? It makes for a good story: ten minutes into a screening of the film adaptation of his novel I Spit on Your Graves, Vian stood up, protested, “These guys are supposed to be American? My ass!” collapsed of a heart attack, and died. The story may be apocryphal—although, as Louis Malle wrote about his old friend, “like anything else, the cinema can kill”—but Vian did die at the movie in Paris on this day at age thirty-nine, after a lifetime of heart trouble in which he packed decades of ambition into the time on earth he knew would be short. He had written I Spit on Your Graves, for example, in two weeks on a dare; passed off at first as the translated work of an African American writer named Vernon Sullivan, it made him wealthy and famous after it was banned by the French government.

  1975 It’s eight o’clock in the evening, and Percival Bartlebooth, a reclusive English millionaire, has died in his third-floor flat holding the last piece to a nearly finished jigsaw puzzle, a W-shaped piece for an X-shaped hole. Isabelle Gratiolet is building a house of cards, Cinoc is eating a tin of pilchards, and Geneviève Foulerot is taking a bath. Two kittens and a dog named Poker Dice are sleeping. The elevator is broken. And Serge Valene, just a few weeks before his death, shares his tiny room with a nearly blank canvas on which he has long planned to paint the lives of his fellow residents in their Paris apartment building. In his novel Life, a User’s Manual, Georges Perec set himself the same task, using a battery of playful mathematical methods to populate the rooms of 11 rue Simon-Crubellier with a host of very human lives but leaving an unfinished puzzle of its own.

  1979 It’s the summer of gas shortages, of knowing “the great American ride is ending,” but Rabbit Angstrom, for a change, is sitting pretty. Ten years after getting laid off from his Linotype machine and twenty after he was demoing kitchen gadgets in five-and-dimes, Rabbit is selling Toyotas, the little cars everybody wants, at the dealership he and his wife, Janice, inherited from his father-in-law. “I did not know, when I abandoned to motel sleep the couple with a burnt-out house and a traumatized child,” John Updike has written about the space between Rabbit Redux and Rabbit Is Rich, his third Rabbit novel, which begins on this day, “that they would wake to such prosperity.”