A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  July 5

  BORN: 1958 Bill Watterson (Calvin and Hobbes), Washington, D.C.

  1972 Gary Shteyngart (The Russian Debutante’s Handbook), Leningrad, USSR

  DIED: 1948 Georges Bernanos (Diary of a Country Priest), 60, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France

  1991 Howard Nemerov (The Winter Lightning), 71, University City, Mo.

  1814 “While wading thro’ the whimsies, the puerilities, and unintelligible jargon of this work,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to John Adams after finishing Plato’s Republic for the first time, “I laid it down often to ask myself how it could have been that the world should have so long consented to give reputation to such nonsense as this?”

  1911 When Lucy Maud Montgomery, whose first Anne of Green Gables books had given her financial independence at age thirty-six, finally married the minister Ewen Macdonald on this day after rejecting a number of suitors, she had a pang of ambivalence: “I felt a sudden horrible inrush of rebellion and despair,” she wrote in her journal. “I wanted to be free!” That ambivalence hasn’t prevented her uncle’s home on Prince Edward Island from becoming a shrine where hundreds of couples, mostly from Japan, where interest in “Anne of Red Hair” was strong enough to support a Canadian World theme park in the ’90s, enact their own wedding ceremonies in the same parlor where Montgomery had hers.

  1922 Edmund Wilson, in the New Republic, on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “Since I have read it, the texture of other novelists seems intolerably loose and careless; when I come suddenly unawares upon a page that I have written myself I quake like a guilty thing surprised.”

  1925 In Paris, Edith Wharton, though she had admired The Great Gatsby, had a disastrous tea with F. Scott Fitzgerald. Wharton was stiffly formal; Fitzgerald, thirty-four years her junior, most likely was drunk.

  NO YEAR When Uncle Rondo threw a package of firecrackers into her bedroom at 6:30 in the morning, that was the last straw. They had all ganged up on her: Mama slapped her face and Papa-Daddy called her a hussy, all because Stella-Rondo came home on the Fourth of July—separated from Mr. Whitaker and with a baby named Shirley-T. she claimed was adopted—and turned them all against her. So Sister packed up the radio, the Hawaiian ukelele, and all the preserves she had put up, and headed down to the China Grove post office for good the next day, in Eudora Welty’s “Why I Live at the P.O.,” first published in the Atlantic in 1941.

  1949 At a writer’s conference in Utah, Vladimir Nabokov met, and liked, Ted Geisel, Dr. Seuss, “a charming man, one of the most gifted people” there.

  1974 After dreaming for three months of a “vast and important” book in his own library, Philip K. Dick tracked down the only book in his collection that matched the dream: The Shadow of Blooming Grove: Warren G. Harding in His Times, seven hundred pages long and “the dullest book in the world.”

  July 6

  BORN: 1946 Peter Singer (Animal Liberation, Practical Ethics), Melbourne, Australia

  1952 Hilary Mantel (Wolf Hall, Bring Up the Bodies), Glossop, England

  DIED: 1962 William Faulkner (Light in August; Absalom, Absalom!), 64, Byhalia, Miss.

  2005 Ed McBain/Evan Hunter (The Blackboard Jungle, The Mugger), 78, Weston, Conn.

  1483 “Ha! Am I king? ’Tis so. But Edward lives.” Shakespeare packed considerable drama into the nine words Richard III, perhaps his most vivid villain, speaks on taking the throne. His play, like most historians, accuses Richard of the murder of the princes Edward and Richard of Shrewsbury, his young rivals for the crown. But the boys’ disappearance remains unsolved, and Richard has had his defenders, including Josephine Tey, in whose ingenious historical mystery, The Daughter of Time, Scotland Yard inspector Alan Grant, restlessly confined to a hospital room by a broken leg, builds a case that the real Richard III, crowned on this day, was honorable, innocent, and, for that matter, not even a hunchback.

  1882 Vincent van Gogh was a passionate reader, self-taught and voracious, and his letters—which are literature themselves—mention hundreds of writers and books he’d read: Hugo, Dickens, Maupassant, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Bouvard and Pecuchet. No writer is mentioned more often than Émile Zola, the French novelist (and champion of Impressionist painters), beginning with a letter to his brother, Theo, in which, in a discussion of capturing the “curious grays” of Paris at night, Van Gogh speaks of the novelist as a fellow painter: “In Une page d’amour by Émile Zola I found several townscapes painted or drawn in a masterly, masterly fashion . . . I’m very definitely going to read everything by Zola, of whom I had only known a few fragments up to now.”

  1943 Philip Larkin wrote to a friend about Diana Gollancz: “I like publishers’ daughters. Oh I do like publishers’ daughters! The more we mix together, etc. I’d like to brush some of the dust off her myself.”

  1945 Among those lost in a plane crash off Newfoundland on this day was Colonel Denis Capel-Dunn, returning with the British delegation from the signing of the United Nations Charter in San Francisco. Capel-Dunn rose to a high rank in wartime intelligence and might have been headed for even higher office, but instead he found another sort of notoriety nearly a half-century later when Anthony Powell, the novelist whom Capel-Dunn had hired and then quickly fired as a military secretary during the war, acknowledged that he used his former boss as a model for Kenneth Widmerpool, the “fabulous monster”—ludicrously fat, extravagantly ambitious, and ridiculously boring—who is the most memorable invention in the vast cast of characters in Powell’s twelve-volume series, A Dance to the Music of Time.

  1953 Michael Straight, in the New Republic, on a new translation of Colette’s Chéri: “Colette’s preoccupation is of course with women, and she despises all of them but one.”

  July 7

  BORN: 1907 Robert A. Heinlein (Stranger in a Strange Land, Starship Troopers), Butler, Mo.

  1933 David McCullough (Truman, John Adams), Pittsburgh

  DIED: 1930 Arthur Conan Doyle (The Hound of the Baskervilles), 71, Crowborough, England

  1999 Julie Campbell (Trixie Belden and the Secret of the Mansion), 91, Alexandria, N.Y.

  1806 A month and a half after his first son was born, James Mill threw down a challenge to a fellow new father: “I intend to run a fair race with you in the education of a son. Let us have a well-disputed trial which of us twenty years hence can exhibit the most accomplished & virtuous young man.” (His competitiveness might be explained by the fact that the other father was William Forbes, who had married Wilhelmina Stuart, the love of Mill’s youth he was barred from marrying by his lower-class status.) If a race it was, it’s impossible to imagine that Mill didn’t win: the prodigious education of his son, John Stuart Mill—reading Greek at three and thoroughly versed in the classics by twelve, when he began assisting his father with his History of India—remains a legend in British education.

  1938 In a letter full of reading advice, F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote his sixteen-year-old daughter, Scottie, “Sister Carrie, almost the first piece of American realism, is damn good and is as easy reading as a True Confession.”

  NO YEAR Granner Weeks has had eighty-two birthdays before this one, but she’s still as excited as a child waiting for Santa about the party she always arranges, with flags and fireworks and cake. There used to be two parties in the same week, until she convinced her husband, Buck, to combine them. “All right by me,” he said, agreeable as always. “You won’t mind gettin your presents three days early?” “I ain’t thinking of changing my day,” she replied. “I was thinking it would be easier to change the country’s day.” Granner’s birthday party is only one of the things that bring the people of Marshboro, North Carolina—and one notable outsider—together in Jill McCorkle’s second novel, July 7th, which is set on, and named after, McCorkle’s own birthday.

  2005 David Kipen, in the San Francisco Chronicle, on Jonathan Coe’s Like a Fiery Elephant: The Story of B. S. Johnson: “It’s as if Paul McCartney wrote a song about John Cage, and it made you want to listen to them both all over again.”

>   July 8

  BORN: 1929 Shirley Ann Grau (The Keepers of the House), New Orleans

  1952 Anna Quindlen (Black and Blue, One True Thing), Philadelphia

  DIED: 1822 Percy Bysshe Shelley (Prometheus Unbound), 29, Gulf of Spezia, Italy

  1939 Havelock Ellis (Sexual Inversion, My Life), 80, Hintlesham, England

  1848 Alarmed that their novels Jane Eyre, Wuthering Heights, and Agnes Grey, written under the pseudonyms of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, were being taken as the work of a single author, Charlotte and Anne Brontë—after failing to convince their shy sister, Emily, to join them—set out on the train for London to establish their identities to their publishers. They resisted requests, though, to announce publicly that the Bell brothers, whose violent and passionate books had caused a popular scandal, were in fact three tiny country spinsters. Meanwhile, reviews of Anne’s second novel, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, published the same day, warned of the Bells’ “morbid love of the coarse,” a warning that may have contributed to the book’s immediate success, and to Charlotte’s suppression of the book after Anne’s death.

  1940 W. H. Auden, in the New Republic, on The Wartime Letters of Rainer Maria Rilke: 1914–1921: “Now in this second and even more dreadful war, there are few writers to whom we can more profitably turn, not for comfort—he offers none—but for strength to resist the treacherous temptations that approach us disguised as righteous duties.”

  1980 At eight in the morning after a sleepless and tormented night, Raymond Carver wrote a 2,000-word letter to his editor, Gordon Lish, that carries the compressed and complex emotional weight of his best stories. Surprised by the massive cuts Lish had made to the stories in his upcoming collection, What We Talk About When We Talk About Love, Carver pleaded for Lish to either reinstate the lost material or cancel the book. He was grateful to Lish for helping him become one of the most admired story writers in the country, but if the book was published as edited, he said, “I’m liable to croak.” Just two days later he wrote a conciliatory follow-up letter, and the stories were published largely as Lish had edited them, but later, in his final collection, Carver returned three of the stories to their original form.

  1983 Harriett Gilbert, in the New Statesman, on Granta 8: Dirty Realism, the influential issue collecting stories by Carver, Richard Ford, Bobbie Ann Mason, Tobias Wolff, and other Americans: “This realism’s ‘dirtiness’ has little to do with decadence or ripe, organic decay. It is closer to the sadness of yesterday’s rubbish being blown down an empty street. But it also contains an element that synopsis cannot convey—a terrible edge of violence, a violence that slowly runs its thumb down the blade of each hard, tight sentence.”

  July 9

  BORN: 1933 Oliver Sacks (Awakenings, Uncle Tungsten), London

  1951 Larry Brown (Dirty Work, Joe, Father and Son), Oxford, Miss.

  DIED: 1797 Edmund Burke (Reflections on the Revolution in France), 68, Beaconsfield, England

  1977 Loren Eiseley (The Immense Journey, The Firmament of Time), 69, Philadelphia

  1846 “Ah Flush!, Flush!—he did not hurt you really?” Elizabeth Barrett inquired. “The truth is he hates all unpetticoated people, and though he does not hate you, he has a certain distrust of you.” The unpetticoated person in question, of course, was Miss Barrett’s suitor, Robert Browning, and Flush was her dog, the spaniel who found a further literary fame when Virginia Woolf, exhausted after finishing The Waves, amused herself by writing a “Life” of the Brownings’ dog, including a dog’s-eye retelling of this day: “At last his teeth met in the immaculate cloth of Mr. Browning’s trousers!” Flush was a popular success, but it soon lost its humor for Woolf, who called it a “silly book” about an “abominable dog.”

  1875 The police surveillance of Fyodor Dostoyevsky, in place since his return from Siberian exile sixteen years before, ended.

  1937 Though they were two of the prize horses in the stable of the great editor Maxwell Perkins at Scribner’s, Thomas Wolfe and F. Scott Fitzgerald had never had much to say to each other, so Wolfe was surprised to receive a letter out of the blue from Fitzgerald, although he wasn’t surprised at Fitzgerald’s advice, which he’d heard many times before: he should discipline his “unmatchable” talent by leaving more stuff out of his vast novels. Wolfe’s response, naturally, was eight times as long, but it is a marvel of disciplined and cordial dissent, claiming his place among Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Dostoyevsky, the “great putter-inners” (rather than “taker-outers”) of literature, and declaring that he was heading into the woods to do the best work of his life. (He’d be dead within the year, though, and Fitzgerald wasn’t far behind him.)

  1937 “It is indeed getting more and more difficult, even pointless, for me to write in formal English,” Samuel Beckett wrote in German to Axel Kaun, a friend in Berlin, declaring he wanted to tear the language apart “in order to get to those things (or the nothingness) lying behind it.” At least in this letter he had the “consolation,” he added, “of being allowed to violate a foreign language as involuntarily as, with knowledge and intention, I would like to do against my own language, and—Deo juvante—shall do.” A decade later, Beckett abandoned his native English to write in French, beginning with Molloy, Malone Dies, and Waiting for Godot.

  1961 James Dickey, in the New York Times, on Allen Ginsberg’s Kaddish: “Confession is not enough, and neither is the assumption that the truth of one’s experience will emerge if only one can keep talking long enough in a whipped-up state of excitement. It takes more than this to make poetry. It just does.”

  July 10

  BORN: 1871 Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), Auteuil, France

  1931 Alice Munro (Open Secrets, The Love of a Good Woman), Wingham, Ont.

  DIED: 1993 Ruth Krauss (A Hole Is to Dig, The Carrot Seed), 91, Westport, Conn.

  2007 Doug Marlette (Kudzu, The Bridge), 57, Holly Springs, Miss.

  1666 Less than two months before the Great Fire of London, a smaller blaze swept through Anne Bradstreet’s home in North Andover, Massachusetts, destroying her family’s library—massive for the time—of eight hundred volumes and leading her to write the “Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10, 1666” that bless that grace of God that “gave and took”: “It was his own it was not mine / Far be it that I should repine.”

  1792 Daughter of one minister to Louis XVI and lover of another, the novelist, political theorist, and brilliant conversationalist Madame de Staël was sympathetic to the French Revolution and was no admirer of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, who despised her in return. But around this time, after her disgust at the rabble that forced their way into the Tuileries Palace in late June, she concocted a plan for the escape of the royal couple to England. She would buy an estate in Normandy, across the Channel from England, and travel there a number of times with servants who resembled the king and queen, and then make the same journey a few weeks later with the royal family disguised as the servants. Word was returned from the palace, though, that the queen, whether out of naiveté, fatalism, or distrust of her would-be rescuer, declined the offer.

  1873 In the final argument of their two-year relationship, Paul Verlaine, in a drunken rage, shot Arthur Rimbaud in the arm.

  1958 Jack Kerouac was the jock of the Beats, and though a broken leg derailed his football career at Columbia he kept up another sporting interest through his entire life, playing hundreds of games a year in a homemade baseball simulation of his own devising that used cards and a chart on the wall he’d throw things at to determine the plays. Even after On the Road made him one of the best-known writers of his generation, he continued to type up news reports (later archived in Kerouac at Bat) about his invented teams and players, including an issue on this day of his Baseball News that announced that young “Sugar Ray” Sims, hitting .368 in the Cuban League, had been brought up by the fourth-place St. Louis Blues to replace first baseman Joe Boston, who had broken his arm in the shower at home.

  1960 Frank H
. Lyell, in the New York Times, on Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird: “Movie-going readers will be able to cast most of the roles very quickly, but it is no disparagement of Miss Lee’s winning book to say that it could be the basis of an excellent film.”

  July 11

  BORN: 1899 E. B. White (Charlotte’s Web, Here Is New York), Mount Vernon, N.Y.

  1967 Jhumpa Lahiri (Interpreter of Maladies, The Namesake), London

  DIED: 1966 Delmore Schwartz (In Dreams Begin Responsibilities), 52, New York City

  2012 Donald J. Sobol (Encyclopedia Brown, Boy Detective), 87, Miami, Fla.

  1790 From his deathbed, Adam Smith oversaw the burning of over a dozen uncompleted volumes, including manuscripts for planned “great works” on literature and government.

  1890 To the consternation of friends and family, Anton Chekhov, dissatisfied with his literary life in Moscow and looking for some kind of heroic action as he turned thirty, resolved to travel to the far eastern island of Sakhalin to inspect the penal colony there. After an arduous three-month journey—the last 3,000 miles by horse-drawn coach—he arrived in July carrying no more authority than his journalist’s credentials but soon received permission to tour the entire island, which he did, filling out over 10,000 self-designed census cards (still archived at the Russian State Library) about the prisoners, and describing their miserable conditions in an influential report, about which he wrote, “I’m glad that this rough convict’s smock will hang in my fictional wardrobe.”

  1942 On this morning, three days after all books by Jewish authors were banned from sale in occupied France, Irène Némirovsky took a walk in the woods in the village of Issy-l’Évêque, where she had fled from Paris in 1940. She brought with her the second volume of Anna Karenina, the Journal of Katherine Mansfield, and an orange, and sat “in the middle of an ocean of leaves, wet and rotting from last night’s storm, as if on a raft.” That same day, she wrote her editor, “I’ve written a great deal lately. I suppose they will be posthumous books but it still makes the time go by.” Two days later she was seized by the French police and four days after that shipped in a cattle car to Auschwitz, where she died a month later, sixty years before Suite Française, the book she left unfinished, was discovered and published.