by Tom Nissley
1996 On the island of Hokkaido, Haruki Murakami ran the sixty-two miles of his first and only ultramarathon in eleven hours and forty-two minutes.
June 24
BORN: 1842 Ambrose Bierce (The Devil’s Dictionary), Meigs County, Ohio
1937 Anita Desai (Clear Light of Day, In Custody), Mussoorie, India
DIED: 1909 Sarah Orne Jewett (The Country of the Pointed Firs), 59, South Berwick, Maine
1969 Frank King (Gasoline Alley), 86, Winter Park, Fla.
1937 After his sister, Rose, later the model for Laura in The Glass Menagerie, was diagnosed the day before with what would later be called schizophrenia, Tennessee Williams worried in his journal about her sanity and his own. In the evening, he “lay cowering on my bed for a while and then got up with the reflection that nobody ever died from being strong.”
1967 “Alma,” Ennis del Mar says to his wife by way of explanation, “Jack and me ain’t seen each other in four years.” Four years ago, they had parted at the end of their summer on Brokeback Mountain and Ennis found his insides so wrenched by Jack’s sudden absence he had to stop at the side of the road and dry heave in the snow. And now, on the landing outside Ennis and Alma’s little apartment over a laundry, they’re drawn together with such a jolt that Jack’s teeth draw blood from Ennis’s mouth. It’s the first of many—but not enough—reunions in Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” a love story that made its first, iconic appearance in The New Yorker in 1997.
1969 Literature and trash met atop the New York Times fiction bestseller list during this week, but which was the bigger scandal? Portnoy’s Complaint, the story of a boy’s love for his mother (and a slab of liver) by Philip Roth, later the most honored writer of his generation, or The Love Machine, the Valley of the Dolls sequel by Jacqueline Susann, whose former editor had just called her “a poor imitation of about 25 other authors” in the New York Times? Susann, who knocked Portnoy off the top of the list this week, was happy to rustle up a rivalry, telling Johnny Carson that Roth was “a fine writer, but I wouldn’t want to shake hands with him.” Roth, meanwhile, was said to shrug to friends later, “After all, it wasn’t as if André Malraux said it to François Mauriac.”
NO YEAR The Urus is scheduled to sail from New York on this day with a cargo of fertilizer for Costa Rica, or at least that’s what five men—a waiter, a cook, and three ordinary seamen—have been told before they fly from Managua to New York, happy to have found work on the ship. What they find on a Brooklyn pier, though, is a rusted-out hulk that is anything but seaworthy and that becomes for them a sort of offshore purgatory, stranding them in a stateless, unpaid limbo from which one sailor begins making intrepid forays into the borough beyond in Francisco Goldman’s marvelously humane second novel, The Ordinary Seaman.
June 25
BORN: 1903 George Orwell (Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier), Motihari, India
1929 Eric Carle (The Very Hungry Caterpillar), Syracuse, N.Y.
DIED: 1984 Michel Foucault (Discipline and Punish, Madness and Civilization), 57, Paris
1997 Jacques Cousteau (The Silent World, The Living Sea), 87, Paris
1947 Published: Het Achterhuis (The Secret Annex) by Anne Frank (Contact, Amsterdam)
1948 It’s a small house, but it’s his as long as he can keep paying the bank what he owes, and what Easy Rawlins owes is sixty-four dollars by the end of the month. That’s why, when the big white man with the white Panama hat and white suit and bone-white shoes and eyes so pale they look like robins’ eggs comes into Joppy’s looking for someone to track down a young woman named Daphne Monet—“Not bad to look at but she’s hell to find”—Easy takes the job, not quite knowing what he’s getting mixed up in. “Easy,” the man says, in Walter Mosley’s debut, Devil in a Blue Dress, “walk out your door in the morning and you’re mixed up in something. The only thing you can really worry about is if you get mixed up to the top or not.”
1949 Diana Trilling, in the Nation, on George Orwell’s 1984: “Whereas ‘Animal Farm’ was too primitive a parable to capture the emotions it wished to persuade, the new book exacerbates the emotions almost beyond endurance.”
1966 The issue of Time magazine asking “Is God Dead?” is still on the table in her obstetrician’s waiting room when Rosemary Woodhouse starts to put the pieces together in Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby. The helpful—too helpful!—couple down the hall in 7A, always so insistent she doesn’t skip her vitamin drink; her doctor, who wears the same pungent good-luck charm the neighbors gave her; and even her husband, whose acting career took off after his rival went blind: they are witches, all of them, and they want her baby. When she gives birth just after midnight on this day—“exactly half the year ‘round from you-know”—they tell her the baby died, but she knows better, and when she enters apartment 7A she learns the truth about her child: “He has His Father’s eyes.”
2195 How near is the theocratic, woman-controlling near future of the Republic of Gilead in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale? Near enough to our time that the women can still smell the sweat in the converted gym where they sleep, but far enough that the messages carved in a desk—J.H. loves B.P. 1952, M. loves G. 1972—seem “incredibly ancient.” And for the twenty-second-century scholars at the Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies who meet on this day in the novel’s sardonically hopeful epilogue, it’s far enough in the past that they speak of the Republic as almost incomprehensibly distant, a “great darkness” of the past that shouldn’t be judged or censured, just understood.
June 26
BORN: 1892 Pearl S. Buck (The Good Earth, Pavilion of Women), Hillsboro, W.Va.
1969 Lev Grossman (The Magicians, The Magician King), Lexington, Mass.
DIED: 1793 Gilbert White (The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne), 72, Selborne, England
1961 Kenneth Fearing (The Big Clock, Dead Reckoning), 58, New York City
NO YEAR The plan required five men: Kelp fakes a seizure to distract one guard at the New York Coliseum, and Murch crashes a car into the main entrance to draw the rest, which gives Dortmunder, Greenwood, and Chefwick time to nab the Balabomo Emerald and get out of the building. And it all might have worked if Greenwood hadn’t gotten lost on the way out and, desperate, swallowed the giant gem. So now Dortmunder needs a new plan: spring Greenwood, and the emerald, out of jail. It won’t be the last plan he needs. Donald E. Westlake began The Hot Rock as one of the hard-boiled Parker novels he wrote as Richard Stark, but it “kept turning funny,” so instead he launched a new series under his own name featuring bumbling crook John Dortmunder.
1980 Which moment in Steven Bach’s Final Cut marked the end of a filmmaking era: when Michael Cimino, two weeks into shooting Heaven’s Gate, was already ten days behind schedule and a couple of million dollars over budget, or when the first reviews came in, which compared the film to “a forced, four-hour walking tour of one’s own living room”? Or was it this day, when Cimino delivered his first cut of the film, a year and a half late and five and a half hours long: “I felt bludgeoned,” Bach, the studio production chief in charge of the movie, wrote about the screening, “by vainglory and excess.” Although some have since reclaimed it as a neglected masterpiece, Heaven’s Gate is still inseparable from Bach’s classic insider account of the insanity of Hollywood.
1996 Friendly, foul-mouthed, and fearless, Veronica Guerin found in her short journalism career that she could get almost anyone to talk to her. When she was shot in the leg in her Dublin home after she identified the mastermind of a $4 million airport robbery, she found out from her sources who had ordered the hit and then went on crutches to tell him she wasn’t afraid. But a year and a half later, as she continued to report on Ireland’s drug trade—and two days before she was to give a speech called “Dying to Tell a Story: Journalists at Risk”—two men on a motorcycle pulled up behind her car and finished the job. Of those suspected, only one has yet been convicted of her murder.
1997 Published: Ha
rry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone by J. K. Rowling (Bloomsbury, London)
2005 Terrence Rafferty, in the New York Times, on Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days: “a book that is, in the sheer obstinacy of its wrongheadedness, itself an almost suicidal act of courage.”
June 27
BORN: 1936 Lucille Clifton (Good Woman, Blessing the Boats), Depew, N.Y.
1953 Alice McDermott (That Night, Charming Billy), Brooklyn
DIED: 1980 Carey McWilliams (Factories in the Field), 74, New York City
2001 Tove Jansson (Finn Family Moomintroll, The Summer Book), 86, Helsinki
1787 Few stories of a writer finishing a book are as romantic or as well known—to earlier generations of readers, at least—as the final hour of Edward Gibbon’s twenty years of labor on The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. “Between the hours of eleven and twelve” in the evening he put his pen down at last and took a stroll under the acacias in Lausanne, Switzerland, feeling joy at the prospect of freedom and fame but then melancholy at leaving the History, his “old and agreeable companion.” The acacias themselves became a monument to his work: Byron helped himself to a leaf on a visit, and Thomas Hardy marked the 110th anniversary of the moment with a poem, “Lausanne: In Old Gibbon’s Garden: 11–12 pm.”
1880 Dr. John H. Watson is struck in the shoulder by a bullet at the Battle of Maiwand, forcing his return from service in Afghanistan to London, where he soon takes shared lodgings at 221B Baker Street.
NO YEAR There may be no American writer better known for just a few pages of her work than Shirley Jackson, who despite writing one of the great ghost stories, The Haunting of Hill House, and a bestselling collection of proto-Bombeck household tales, Life Among the Savages, is known primarily for the events of the “clear and sunny” morning of June 27, when the men, women, and children of an unnamed village assemble to conduct a lottery. With its matter-of-fact narration, “The Lottery” remains among the most terrifying of tales, whose effect on its original New Yorker readers, who wrote to the magazine by the hundreds after it appeared, must have only been heightened by the date of the issue it appeared in: June 26, 1948.
1951 “I haven’t the slightest doubt but that if this novel had any other name on it than that of Howard Fast,” began Angus Cameron’s report to his fellow editors at Little, Brown on Fast’s latest book, Spartacus, “it would become a best seller.” But Fast had just spent three months in prison for contempt of Congress for refusing to name names before the Un-American Affairs Committee, and so, given the tenor of the times—the Rosenbergs were executed eight days before—Little, Brown turned down the book. So did every other publisher Fast approached, so instead he published Spartacus himself, sending out Cameron’s report—to Cameron’s dismay—in an appeal for orders. Spartacus sold nearly 50,000 copies in three months, and nine years later the film version, with Dalton Trumbo of the Hollywood Ten as screenwriter, helped end the Hollywood blacklist soon after Crown ended Fast’s exile from major publishing by reprinting the novel.
June 28
BORN: 1712 Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Confessions, Émile), Geneva
1947 Mark Helprin (Winter’s Tale, A Soldier of the Great War), New York City
DIED: 1985 Lynd Ward (God’s Man, The Biggest Bear), 80, Reston, Va.
2001 Mortimer Adler (How to Read a Book), 98, Palo Alto, Calif.
1889 Alice James, a great admirer of the novels and the courageously nonconformist life of George Eliot (and never one to mince opinions in her diaries), was disappointed in the Life of the novelist, edited by Eliot’s widower, John Cross, that came out soon after her death: “But what a monument of ponderous dreariness is the book! What a lifeless, diseased, self-conscious being she must have been! . . . She makes upon me the impression, morally and physically, of mildew, or some morbid growth—a fungus of a pendulous shape, or as of something damp to the touch.” James was not alone in her disappointment, although Prime Minister William Gladstone was rather less vivid when he merely, but famously, remarked, “It is not a Life at all. It is a Reticence, in three volumes.”
1898 “It is especially disagreeable for me,” Leo Tolstoy, who had largely left fiction behind for philosophy in his last decades, wrote in his diary, “when people who have lived little and thought little, do not believe me, and not understanding me, argue with me about moral problems. It would be the same for which a veterinary surgeon would be hurt, if people who were not familiar with his art were to argue with him.”
1991 Charles Tomlinson, in the TLS, on Pablo Neruda’s Canto General: “Neruda does not really trust us as readers. There are times when it even seems that he would like to transform us into the simple people he often talks about, so that he could play the village explainer, thus reducing us all to a role of purely passive and loving acceptance.”
1997 Lindsay Fraser, in the Scotsman, on J. K. Rowley’s [sic] Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone: “What distinguishes this novel from so many other fantasies is its grip on reality. Harry is a hugely likeable child, kind but not wet, competitive but always compassionate.”
2006 It had to happen sometime. When Henry DeTamble was first given a tour of his new workplace, Chicago’s Newberry Library, he shied at the sight of one element no one else gave a thought to: the Cage, a fenced-off, four-storey shaft in the center of a stairwell. “You can’t get into it,” he’s told, but all he can think is, “I won’t be able to get out.” And now it’s happened: he’s found himself, naked and cold, at the bottom of the Cage, but at least his explanation to his co-workers becomes more convincing when his present, clothed self shows up too, outside the Cage. As he patiently explains, Henry has the rare but increasingly common condition of chrono-impairment; he is, as you might have guessed, the husband of Audrey Niffenegger’s Time Traveler’s Wife.
June 29
BORN: 1798 Giacomo Leopardi (Canti, Zibaldone), Recanati, Italy
1900 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry (The Little Prince, Night Flight), Lyon, France
DIED: 1861 Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Sonnets from the Portuguese), 55, Florence, Italy
1990 Irving Wallace (The Chapman Report, The Book of Lists), 74, Los Angeles
NO YEAR Witty, wearily grandiose, and distinctly unreliable, Frederick Charles St. John Vanderveld Montgomery—“Freddie” to everyone except himself—takes advantage of the forced leisure of his incarceration for the murder of a servant girl to confess his sins, with a chilling emptiness, in John Banville’s The Book of Evidence. The emptiness is not limited to himself, though: he operates in a world of decadent and diluted wealth in which, in his own mind at least, everyone stands at the same icy and bewildered remove from any sense of morality or even identity. For ten days after the crime he hid in plain sight at the home of an art dealer he knows, a perverse interlude that ended with a sad, drunken party on this night and then the next morning the knock of the police on the door, which gave him his last hope of finding meaning.
NO YEAR Patrick Kenzie greets the dawn in a chair. He’s been sitting up and brooding all night in the apartment of a stranger because he has a job to do and because he doesn’t have anything better to go home to. His job: finding a woman named Jenna Angeline and the documents he’s been told she ran off with when she skipped out on her job as a cleaning woman in the Massachusetts State House. He’s found Jenna and extracted a grudging promise to see the documents, but by the end of the day, his assignment will have blown up into something else entirely, putting him in danger and on the front page of the Boston papers in A Drink Before the War, Dennis Lehane’s first novel and the debut of his flirty and flawed investigators, Kenzie and his partner Angie Gennaro.
NO YEAR In his stories, Edward P. Jones maps Washington, D.C., with a precision that often reaches the detail of individual street addresses. Even in “Lost in the City,” the title story in his first collection, when Lydia Walsh hands two twenties to the cabbie she called to take her to the hospital where her mother has died and tells him to get her l
ost instead, he keeps driving past places she knows too well: 1122 5th Street, where her father died when she was four; 457 Ridge Street, where she and her mother took a downstairs apartment; the spot on Rhode Island Avenue, a Safeway now, where they lived on the same floor as a woman driven crazy by the certainty her husband would leave her. The addresses have a concrete persistence, much like the people Jones writes about, the District’s lifelong residents who are often ignored in favor of their city’s high-profile transients.
June 30
BORN: 1685 John Gay (The Beggar’s Opera), Barnstaple, England
1911 Czesław Miłosz (The Captive Mind, Collected Poems), Szetejnie, Russian Empire
DIED: 1973 Nancy Mitford (The Pursuit of Love), 68, Versailles, France
2003 Robert McCloskey (Blueberries for Sal), 88, Deer Isle, Maine
1835 “$100 REWARD will be given for the apprehension and delivery of my Servant Girl, HARRIET,” read a notice placed in the Norfolk, Virginia, American Beacon by Dr. James Norcom. “As this girl absconded from the plantation of my son without any known cause or provocation, it is probable she designs to transport herself to the North.” She had indeed absconded, in fear of Norcom’s designs on her, but hadn’t gone far: for the next seven years, Harriet Jacobs hid in a crawlspace in the attic of her grandmother’s house less than a block from Norcom’s office, before she was able to escape north and, in 1861, publish Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, an account little noticed at the time but rediscovered and acclaimed in the 1980s, when the improbable details of Jacobs’s escape were also confirmed.
1950 On this day, “right in the middle of the twentieth century,” Fleur Talbot, in Muriel Spark’s Loitering with Intent, sensed her life change. Sitting in a park, she felt “more than ever how good it was to be a woman and an artist there and then.” The following day her feelings were confirmed when a publisher accepted her first novel, placing a satisfying seal on the previous ten months, whose often terrible events came to resemble, with a precision that neither surprised nor dismayed her, the ones she had already described in the book. Fleur’s story (which bears some resemblance to Spark’s own early history as a writer) is a delicious and sharp-witted tale of the novelist’s amoral hunger for experience—preferably that of others. As Fleur herself admits, “I do dearly love a turn of events.”
