A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1962 It may have been young, disillusioned reporters like David Halberstam, Neil Sheehan, and Peter Arnett who grabbed the biggest headlines with their skeptical early dispatches from the American ensnarement in Vietnam, but it was the veteran Homer Bigart, already twice a battlefront Pulitzer winner and holder of no illusions to begin with, who showed them the way. As William Prochnau relates in Once Upon a Distant War, just before leaving the country in disgust on this day Bigart turned a quiet—too quiet—South Vietnamese mission in search of Vietcong guerrillas into a lesson for the young Sheehan. “For God’s sake, let’s go home,” Sheehan complained. “Nothing happened. There’s no story.” “No story, kid? That’s the story, k-k-kid,” Bigart stuttered back in contempt. “It doesn’t work.”

  1967 A New Jersey justice of the peace, grumbling because he missed a day of golf to perform the ceremony, interrupted his marriage of writers Kenneth Tynan and Kathleen Halton to tell one of the witnesses, Marlene Dietrich, “I wouldn’t stand with your ass to an open door in this office, lady.”

  July Perhaps this chapter should be titled “Messidor” or “Thermidor” instead: July is the month of revolutions, and why shouldn’t a revolution sweep away the calendar as well? Along with the new metric system for weights and measures (which proved longer-lived), the French Republic introduced a new calendar that not only founded a new Year I in 1792, the first year of the Republic, but created twelve new months of three ten-day weeks each. (The five or six days left over became national holidays, les jours complémentaires, at the end of the year.) New names were given to each month by the poet Fabre d’Églantine, among them Messidor (from “harvest”) and Thermidor (from “heat”), which overlapped the traditional days of July (British wags were said to have suggested “Wheaty” and “Heaty” as local equivalents). Each day of the year had an individual name too, inspired by plants, animals, and tools: for instance, Alexandre Dumas (b. July 24, 1802), was born on Bélier (Ram), the 5th of Thermidor in Year X. Luckless Fabre d’Églantine, meanwhile, was executed for corruption by his own revolution on Laitue (Lettuce), the 16th of Germinal in Year II. (He handed out his poems on the way to the guillotine.)

  America’s calendar was unaffected by its own revolution, except for the new Fourth of July celebration (which didn’t become an official federal holiday until 1870). For reading on the Fourth, along with the documents of the founders and the endless stream of biographies and histories, you can turn to Ross Lockridge Jr.’s nearly forgotten epic, Raintree County, which uses the single day of July 4, 1892, to look back on a century of American history, while George Pelecanos’s King Suckerman crackles to a final showdown at the Bicentennial celebration in Washington, D.C., and Frank Bascombe, in Richard Ford’s Independence Day (a Pulitzer winner like Raintree County), attempts a father-son reconciliation with a July Fourth weekend visit to those shrines to American male bonding, the baseball and basketball Halls of Fame. And soldier-turned-antiwar-activist Ron Kovic really was, as he titled his memoir, Born on the Fourth of July.

  For a classic small-town Independence Day story of the kind that may only exist in memory and fiction, there is the tug-of-war in John D. Fitzgerald’s The Great Brain Reforms. Based on his own childhood in Utah at the turn of the last century, the eight Great Brain books embed the Tom Sawyer–like schemes of Fitzgerald’s older brother (also named Tom) in a vividly imagined community, in which the Fitzgeralds are minority “Gentiles” among Mormon settlers, and in The Great Brain Reforms, the town’s annual Fourth of July celebration, with its parade, picnic, and tug-of-war across the irrigation canal between Gentile and Mormon kids, offers yet another chance for Tom to swindle the locals, not long before he encounters a rare and temporary comeuppance that makes this fifth book the finest and most dramatic in the series.

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR JULY

  The Federalist Papers by Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (1788) Anybody can have a revolution: the real achievement of the American experiment was building a system of government that could last, as argued for in these crucial essays on democracy and the balance of powers.

  Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1866) It’s an exceptionally hot July, and the student Raskolnikov is subject to fevers, but what is most chilling about his crimes—to him as much as anyone—is their cold-bloodedness, that they erupted from the deliberations and inexplicable resolutions of his own mind.

  The Worst Journey in the World by Apsley Cherry-Garrard (1922) No Antarctic tourist would choose the height of the southern winter for a visit, but that’s when emperor penguins nest, and so Cherry-Garrard and two companions set out on a foolhardy scientific expedition across the Ross Ice Shelf in the darkness of the Antarctic July, the “Winter Journey” that became the centerpiece of Cherry-Garrard’s classic account of the otherwise doomed Scott Expedition.

  The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara (1974) “It rained all that night. The next day was Saturday, the Fourth of July.” Those are the final words of The Killer Angels, but there’s no danger of spoiling the story of Shaara’s Pulitzer-winning novel of Gettysburg, the battle that more than any other reclaimed the Union that had been founded four score and seven years before.

  Saturday Night by Susan Orlean (1990) Orlean’s first book, a traveling celebration of the ways Americans spend their traditional night of leisure—dancing, cruising, dining out, staying in—follows no particular season, but it’s an ideal match for July, the Saturday night of months, when you are just far enough into summer to enjoy it without a care for the inevitable approach of fall.

  Paris Stories by Mavis Gallant (2002) What better way to celebrate Canada Day and Bastille Day (and Independence Day too, for that matter) than with the stories of Montreal’s great expatriate writer, who left for Paris empty-handed except for the plan to make herself a writer of fiction before she was thirty, and has been publishing her stories in The New Yorker for six decades since.

  Call Me by Your Name by André Aciman (2007) “This summer’s houseguest. Another bore.” Hardly: the young American academic who intruded on Elio’s family’s Italian villa set off a summer’s passion whose intensity upended his life and still sears his memory in Aciman’s elegant story of remembered, inelegant desire.

  Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn (2012) Five years are all it’s taken for the marriage of Amy and Nick, a once-high-flying media couple, to curdle, and Amy’s disappearance on their wedding anniversary, July 5, sets off this twisted autopsy of a marriage gone violently wrong.

  July 1

  BORN: 1869 William Strunk Jr. (The Elements of Style), Cincinnati

  1915 Jean Stafford (The Mountain Lion, The Collected Stories), Covina, Calif.

  DIED: 1896 Harriet Beecher Stowe (Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Dred), 85, Hartford, Conn.

  1983 Buckminster Fuller (Nine Chains to the Moon, Synergetics), 87, Los Angeles

  1660 Samuel Pepys brought home a “fine Camlett cloak, with gold buttons, and a silk suit”: “I pray God to make me able to pay for it.”

  1858 Neither author was present—Alfred Russel Wallace was specimen-hunting in Malaysia, and Charles Darwin was mourning the death of his tenth and last child—when their papers on natural selection were presented at a meeting of the Linnean Society in London on this day. Squeezed onto the program by Darwin’s friends after Wallace had surprised Darwin with an essay whose ideas matched the ones Darwin had been long developing, the papers caused little remark at the time, and the revolution they represented only began to be recognized when they were published in August, two months before Wallace, still in the jungles of Asia, learned they had been made public at all.

  1916 “CECIL TEUCER VALANCE MC,” the tomb reads, with the dead man chiseled in marble in “magnificently proper” style, “FELL AT MARICOURT JULY 1 1916.” The death of Cecil Valance, the young poet taken before his time like so many in the First World War, is the event at the center of Alan Hollinghurst’s novel The Stranger’s Child, but it hardly seems to have happened at all, or at least C
ecil, in all his unformed, demanding magnificence, seems hardly to have existed. His few poems will last, enough to make an industry at least, but the endless attempts to retrieve Cecil’s presence to accompany them are doomed. As one of those who loved him says gloomily ten years later, “One sees the anniversaries stretching out for ever.”

  1923 Young reporter Margaret Mitchell, while interviewing Rudolf Valentino, was carried through a window by the screen star amid “gasps of admiration from a crowd of ladies.” “But,” he told her, “there are as many men that come to see me as the ladies.”

  1931 There may be no other American novel that mentions money so often as James M. Cain’s Mildred Pierce. Nearly every page has a sum or a calculation, from the pennies Mildred pinches when she’s trying to get by as a single mother in the early days of the Depression to the extravagances she can’t deny herself and her monstrous daughter when their careers both take off. The book’s early chapters are haunted by the first day of July, the due date of the mortgage Mildred’s shiftless husband put on their house, which drives her to start her own pie-making business and to turn, not for the last time, to Wally, her husband’s old partner and her indifferent lover, for a loan.

  1950 After banging his head docking his fishing boat in Cuba, Ernest Hemingway needed three stitches.

  July 2

  BORN: 1877 Hermann Hesse (Siddhartha, Steppenwolf), Calw, Germany

  1919 Jean Craighead George (My Side of the Mountain), Washington, D.C.

  DIED: 1904 Anton Chekhov (The Three Sisters), 44, Badenweiler, Germany

  1961 Ernest Hemingway (For Whom the Bell Tolls), 61, Ketchum, Idaho

  1977 Vladimir Nabokov (Pnin, Pale Fire), 78, Montreux, Switzerland

  1861 Searching for the Great Comet of 1861 in the “murky” London sky, George Eliot reported she could only see the red light of a “distant gin-shop.”

  1863 Told from the documents of history and from the gallant perspective of the officers whose names—Longstreet, Chamberlain, Lee, Armistead, Buford—have been tied to the Battle of Gettysburg ever since, Michael Shaara’s novel The Killer Angels has been embraced as one of the most vivid accounts of the Civil War’s turning point. The battle’s own turning point comes on this middle day, as the armies engage in their full force. “We must attack,” Lee tells Longstreet, and so they do, even though Longstreet soon finds that the Union forces he thought were on Cemetery Ridge had moved forward into the orchard below. Meanwhile, the Union’s Colonel Vincent, who won’t survive his wounds from the day, tells Chamberlain up on Little Round Top, “Looks like you’re the flank, Colonel,” which means one thing: “You must defend this place to the last.”

  1925 On a summer day at a hotel in Santa Fe, Willa Cather happened on a privately published biography, The Life of the Right Reverend Joseph P. Machebeuf, by a fellow priest named Father Howlett. After reading through the night in a frenzy of inspiration, by the following day Cather had already mapped out the story of Death Comes for the Archbishop, which took the lives of Machebeuf and Jean-Baptiste Lamy as the models for its portrait of the missionary fathers Vaillant and Latour. We don’t have an exact date for Cather’s inspiration, but by early July she was already writing her friend Mabel Dodge Luhan that she was on the hunt for old priests from the area for further research, and by November Death Comes for the Archbishop was completed.

  1977 On June 21, 1977, the Japanese ship Tsimtsum leaves Madras, India, for North America with a cargo of sedated zoo animals and a family of former zookeepers on board, including sixteen-year-old Pi Patel. None of them will reach their destination, though. After an explosion sinks the ship on this day, only Pi, a hyena, an orangutan, a zebra, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker—and soon only Pi and Richard Parker—are left to share a lifeboat, on which, if his story is to be believed, Pi and the tiger survive another 226 days before landing in Mexico. It is, admittedly, an unlikely story, but then everything about Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi is unlikely: that the novel could actually succeed with such a preposterous premise, and that such a novel, by an unknown Canadian writer, could win the U.K.’s most prestigious literary award, the Booker Prize.

  July 3

  BORN: 1883 Franz Kafka (The Metamorphosis, Amerika), Prague

  1937 Tom Stoppard (Arcadia, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead), Zlin, Czechoslovkia

  DIED: 1904 Theodor Herzl (The Jewish State, The Old New Land), 44, Edlach, Austria

  2001 Mordecai Richler (The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz), 70, Montreal

  1778 After Voltaire’s death in May, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart wrote to his father: “That godless archvillain Voltaire has died like a dog, like an animal—that’s his reward!”

  1910 Considering himself at age sixteen already educated beyond the capabilities of the University of Wisconsin, on his third day there Ben Hecht ran off to Chicago, where his audition as a reporter for the Chicago Daily Journal, at least as he remembered it in his lively memoir, A Child of the Century, consisted of the impromptu composition of a humorous poem about a bull that swallowed a bumblebee. Hired, he received his first introduction to the line of work he’d fondly immortalize in the play (and then film) The Front Page when his new editor, after telling him to report for work the next morning at six, answered his objection that the following day was the Fourth of July, “Allow me to contradict you, Mr. Hecht. There are no holidays in this dreadful profession you have chosen.”

  1929 Edmund Wilson, in the New Republic, on D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, nineteen years before Wilson’s own novel, Memoirs of Hecate County, was upheld as obscene by the U.S. Supreme Court: “His courageous experiment . . . should make it easier for the English writers of the future to deal more searchingly and plainly, as they are certainly destined to do, with the phenomena of sexual experience.”

  1941 July 1941 was the darkest month in P. G. Wodehouse’s sunny life. Released in June from nearly a year in a German internment camp, which he described as “really great fun,” he recorded a series of radio broadcasts in Berlin with the encouragement of the Nazi authorities. They were a disaster. Bafflingly naive about his hosts and the war, which he seemed to think was one big Edwardian comedy, his comments were taken at home as signs of irresponsibility or even collaboration. Among the most furious was his fellow clubman and humorist A. A. Milne, who, long envious of Wodehouse’s more durable success, attacked him on this day for thinking politics was what “the grown-ups talk about at dinner when one is hiding under the table.” Wodehouse later got his mild revenge on Milne with his portrait of Rodney Spelvin, a hapless poet who hovered about his son’s nursery gathering material for “horribly whimsical” verses about a boy named “Timothy Bobbin.”

  2006 James Wood, in the New Republic, on John Updike’s Terrorist: “Updike should have run a thousand miles away from this subject—at least as soon as he saw the results on the page.”

  July 4

  BORN: 1804 Nathaniel Hawthorne (The Scarlet Letter, Twice-Told Tales), Salem, Mass.

  1918 Eppie Lederer (Ann Landers) and Pauline Phillips (Dear Abby), Sioux City, Iowa

  DIED: 1761 Samuel Richardson (Pamela, Clarissa), 71, London

  1826 Thomas Jefferson (Notes on the State of Virginia), 83, Charlottesville, Va.

  1846 Charlotte Brontë submitted the Brontë sisters’ first three manuscripts (The Professor, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey) to H. Colborn, beginning a year of rejection by London publishers.

  1855 Published: Leaves of Grass by Walt Whitman (self-published, Brooklyn)

  1862 Charles Dodgson frequently took the Liddell sisters, Lorina, Edith, and Alice, on rowboat outings on the Thames, but one “golden afternoon” in July was especially remembered for the story he told the girls, in which he sent his “heroine straight down a rabbit-hole, to begin with, without the least idea what was to happen next.” Alice, the youngest, asked him to write out the adventures of her namesake, but it was another two years, during which the Liddells made a mysterious break with him t
hat may or may not have been caused by his interest in their daughter, before he presented her with a hand-written and -illustrated pamphlet he called Alice’s Adventures Under Ground. When the story appeared in print as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland a year later, Dodgson asked his publisher to send a copy to Alice Liddell on July 4, the anniversary of their outing.

  1922 “Few people love the writings of Sir Thomas Browne,” Virginia Woolf wrote in 1923, “but those who do are the salt of the Earth.” Over the centuries the fans of Browne’s Religio Medici and Urn Burial, his 1658 meditation on fate and death provoked by the recent unearthing of ancient Roman graves, have included Dr. Johnson, Coleridge, Poe, Emerson, Melville, Joyce, Borges, and W. G. Sebald, who in The Rings of Saturn noted the odd but appropriate fact that Browne’s own bones suffered a fate entirely in keeping with his essay’s melancholy meditations about mortality: disinterred by mistake in 1840, his skull was kept on display in a Norwich hospital until on this day it was buried once again in his tomb.

  1935 No American writer was more closely identified with his editor than Thomas Wolfe with Maxwell Perkins, known for wrestling Wolfe’s giant manuscripts into bestselling novels, and Wolfe grew to resent it, finally making a public break with Perkins and his publisher, Scribner’s. But when Wolfe was dying in a Seattle hospital at age thirty-seven, he reached out to his old editor, and in his final written words he fondly reminded Perkins of the Fourth of July three years before when Wolfe arrived home from Europe to find himself famous. Perkins was waiting for him at the dock, and they spent the night celebrating, capped by the dignified editor leading a climb up a fire escape to the garret in which Wolfe had written Look Homeward, Angel, and where Wolfe that night scrawled on the wall, “Thomas Wolfe lived here.”