A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  2008 At first, Abdul bolted. Not far: just to the storeroom attached to his family’s shack, where he listened to the police officers arrive next door as he perched as silently as he could on the tower of garbage that, sorted for resale, represented their liquid capital. But the next morning he ran instead to the police station, to turn himself in for a crime he hadn’t committed—that no one had committed—of driving their neighbor to light herself on fire. Will Abdul get justice? It might be a central question in a different book, or a different place, but in Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers, the product of three and a half years of reporting in a tiny slum neighborhood in the shadow of Mumbai’s luxury hotels and international airport, justice is an afterthought, overwhelmed by the contingencies of poverty, corruption, disease, and personality, and the rough judgments of good and bad fortune.

  July 19

  BORN: 1893 Vladimir Mayakovsky (The Bedbug), Baghdati, Russian Empire

  1952 Jayne Anne Phillips (Machine Dreams, Lark and Termite), Buckhannon, W.Va.

  DIED: 2005 Edward Bunker (Education of a Felon, Dog Eat Dog), 71, Burbank, Calif.

  2009 Frank McCourt (Angela’s Ashes, Teacher Man), 78, New York City

  1374 Petrarch died, bequeathing Boccaccio fifty florins to buy a dressing gown to warm him during “winter study and lucubrations by night.”

  1850 After four years in Europe as a foreign correspondent for the New York Tribune, the last three of which she’d also spent aiding the democratic revolution in Rome, Margaret Fuller returned to the United States with Giovanni Angelo Ossoli, the Italian revolutionary she may have married, and their son, Nino. But in the early hours of this morning, a freak hurricane drove their ship into a sandbar off Fire Island and, while locals gathered to watch from the shore without organizing a rescue, the Ossolis drowned. Five days later, Henry David Thoreau arrived at the beach, sent by Fuller’s friend Emerson to search for any sign of their bodies or possessions, in particular the manuscript of Fuller’s book on the Roman revolution, which her admirers had hoped would have been the great work they always expected her intellect would produce.

  1896 The sight of a thistle on this day, broken and dusty but still flowering on the edge of a plowed field at midsummer, evoked in Leo Tolstoy a memory of forty years before and sparked his great final story, “Hadji Murat,” at a time when he had largely abandoned fiction for philosophy. In 1852 Tolstoy had fought in the tsar’s army against Muslim Chechen guerrillas, among the most famous of whom was Hadji Murat, an admirable warrior who allied himself for a time with the Russians against a Chechen rival but then escaped, only to be killed by the Russians, his head brought back as a trophy for the decadent empire. “It stood firm,” Tolstoy wrote of the hardy thistle that reminded him of Murat, “and did not surrender to man who had destroyed all its brothers around it.”

  NO YEAR “Do you mind if I marry Wilf? she asks.” She is Lydia, an actress and filmmaker, and even though she’s only marrying Wilf in a movie, Gabriel, the narrator of Michael Winter’s This All Happened and the man who has been talking about marrying her for the two years they’ve been together, does mind, enough that his jealousy evokes the strongest pang of love he’s felt all year. Gabriel began the year with two resolutions: “to decide on Lydia and to finish a novel.” The novel, we quickly realize, is the diary we’re reading, and deciding on Lydia (or waiting for Lydia to decide for him) is just one of its subjects. Set in the tiny bohemia of St. John’s, Newfoundland, This All Happened is a year’s record that conceals in its day-by-day meandering a subtle and sharp portrait of jealousy, friendship, and creative ambition.

  July 20

  BORN: 1924 Thomas Berger (Little Big Man, Neighbors, The Feud), Cincinnati

  1933 Cormac McCarthy (Blood Meridian, The Road), Providence, R.I.

  DIED: 1912 Andrew Lang (The Blue Fairy Book), 68, Banchory, Scotland

  1945 Paul Valéry (La Jeune Parque, Monsieur Teste), 73, Paris

  1754 Robert Louis Stevenson always said that Treasure Island began with a map he sketched to entertain his stepson. At first he called the story it inspired The Sea Cook; only when it neared publication did the book take the name of the map itself, and not until the book’s second edition did it include a woodcut of the map, which featured a detail written in its margins but not mentioned in the text of the story, “Given by above J.F. to Mr W. Bones Maste of ye Walrus Savannah this twenty July 1754 W B.” Perhaps it’s fitting that, like the treasure in the story, this lucrative creation was long fought over: for years, though Stevenson denied it, his stepson claimed that he had drawn the original map himself.

  1928 With roughly 95 percent voting in favor, a local civic league in California’s San Fernando Valley officially named its town Tarzana, after the local estate of Tarzan of the Apes creator Edgar Rice Burroughs.

  1945 Patrick O’Brian was both an intensely private man and a fabulist about his own history, so not until after his Aubrey-Maturin series of naval adventures had become internationally beloved was it widely revealed that he had lived the first thirty-one years of his life under a different name, Patrick Russ, legally changing his last name to O’Brian on this day, just weeks after his second marriage. Why the change? He never explained, but along with his original name he left behind a first marriage and a child, animal tales he published as a teenager, and various financial crises. Over time, with the new name, he created a new identity—Irish, Catholic, and experienced at sea—that more closely matched the stories he was writing.

  1969 “The day man landed on the moon,” Philip Larkin noted, “I landed in the Nuffield,” a hospital in Hull, for the removal of a nasal polyp.

  2019 Nothing dates as quickly as a vision of the future. Few writers have been as eager to look far ahead as the novelist Arthur C. Clarke, and in 1986 he assembled a book called July 20, 2019 that imagined daily human (and robot) life on the fiftieth anniversary of the moon landing. Read in retrospect as the day of its prophecy approaches, the book offers plenty of errant predictions—moon colonies, computer-controlled waterbeds, West Germany at war with the Soviet Union—although many of its other, sensibly incremental ideas are not as far from the world we know. What’s most noticeable, though, is how much Clarke’s 2019 looks like 1986: even with all the airbrushing in the world, it’s still hard to imagine oneself out of one’s own time.

  July 21

  BORN: 1899 Ernest Hemingway (The Sun Also Rises, A Farewell to Arms), Oak Park, Ill.

  1899 Hart Crane (The Bridge, White Buildings), Garrettsville, Ohio

  1966 Sarah Waters (Tipping the Velvet, Fingersmith), Neyland, Wales

  DIED: 1796 Robert Burns (“A Red Red Rose,” “To a Louse”), 37, Dumfries, Scotland

  1938 Owen Wister (The Virginian, Roosevelt), 78, Saunderstown, R.I.

  1940 In May, H. A. Rey put aside his book illustrations so he and his wife, Margret, German Jews who had met in Brazil and returned to Paris, could begin preparing to leave France ahead of the Nazi invasion. In June, the Reys left Paris on bicycles H. A. had built from spare parts, carrying manuscripts and drawings in their baskets, including one, about a mischievous monkey, called The Adventures of Fifi. On this day they sailed from Lisbon for Rio, in October they arrived in New York, and in November they signed a contract for four books based on the work they had brought with them from France, including Fifi, which was soon renamed Curious George.

  1974 On the forty-fourth and final day of Brian Clough’s disastrous reign as manager of Leeds United, the soccer club that had once been his bitterest rival, he discussed his firing on a TV panel show nearly as dramatic and unlikely as his decision, seven weeks before, to manage the club. Joining him on the panel was none other than the man he hated and had replaced: former Leeds manager Don Revie, happy to dance on Cloughie’s grave in the most polite of sporting language. It’s a scene that David Peace, in his fictional version of Cloughie’s ordeal, The Damned Utd, could hardly resist, and their tense exchange, preening and vulnerable and nearly ve
rbatim, makes a fitting end to a novel whose propulsive and obsessive treatment of its subject has led many to call it the greatest novel on English football.

  1980 “Kaufman meeting—disaster.” By the beginning of the eighties, William Goldman, Oscar-winning screenwriter of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and All the President’s Men, knew his way around Hollywood enough to sense that his first meeting with Philip Kaufman, the director of his next movie, The Right Stuff, had gone terribly. And he was right: of the 148 pages of Goldman’s script, Kaufman, more interested in the story of test pilot Chuck Yeager than in the Mercury astronauts, wanted to keep six. Who won? As Goldman wrote in Adventures in the Screen Trade, his beloved—and not unloving—memoir of Hollywood, “Whenever someone asks, ‘How much power does a screenwriter have?’ my mind goes only to those terrible days in Los Angeles. The answer, now and forever: in the crunch, none.”

  2002 Craig Seligman, in the New York Times, on Adam Haslett’s You Are Not a Stranger Here: “Haslett may have talent to burn and the grades to get him into Yale, but his prose exudes a desolation so choking that it can come only from somewhere deep inside.”

  July 22

  BORN: 1936 Tom Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues), Blowing Rock, N.C.

  1948 S. E. Hinton (The Outsiders; That Was Then, This Is Now), Tulsa, Okla.

  DIED: 1990 Manuel Puig (Kiss of the Spider Woman), 57, Cuernavaca, Mexico

  1996 Jessica Mitford (Hons and Rebels), 78, Oakland, Calif.

  1848 John Forster, Examiner, on W. M. Thackeray’s Vanity Fair: “We are seldom permitted to enjoy the appreciation of all gentle and kind things which we continually meet within the book, without some neighbouring quip or sneer that would seem to show the author ashamed of what he yet cannot help giving way to.”

  1951 This month the Oxford University Press published a natural history of the ocean by a little-known researcher at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, whose only previous book, a decade before, had earned her just $689.17 in royalties. Thanks, though, to a three-part serialization in The New Yorker and the enthusiasm of readers for her poetic approach to explaining the science of the oceans, Rachel Carson’s The Sea Around Us quickly hit the New York Times nonfiction bestseller list. This week was her second on the list, and helped by a National Book Award in January (and despite her academic publisher’s struggles to keep up with demand), she remained there for a then-record eighty-six weeks, thirty-two of them at #1.

  1975 The economy’s going haywire—the prime rate yo-yoing, the cost of sugar and gas accelerating—and Ben Flesh’s body is too, ravaged by multiple sclerosis. And so the great franchiser is selling everything—his Baskin-Robbinses, his HoJos, his Western Autos—and putting all his chips in a single Travel Inn in Ringgold, Georgia, ideally situated halfway between Chicago and Disney World: two storeys, 150 rooms, opening for business on this day. Stanley Elkin’s The Franchiser is an American road novel in which all the roads, or at least the roadside attractions, look the same: trademarked golden arches, trademarked orange roofs, and trademarked turquoise towers, multiplying like the empire of Ben Flesh, who has, until now, embodied their insatiable logic of growth.

  1990 Army Man, “America’s Only Magazine,” was priced at $15 for six photocopied issues mailed from the editor’s condominium in Boulder, Colorado, but it only lasted for three. On this day, George Meyer, who moved to Boulder when he soured on TV writing after stints with David Letterman and Saturday Night Live, wrote the subscribers to his homemade comedy newsletter, “I have some news for you, and I’m not going to sugar-coat it. I might varnish it . . . no, I’m not even going to varnish it. Army Man is suspending publication.” Army Man was already becoming a word-of-mouth legend, but Meyer was too busy to continue: he had been hired to write for The Simpsons along with Army Man contributors Jon Vitti and John Schwartzwelder. It was Schwartzwelder who wrote what Meyer has called “the quintessential Army Man joke: ‘They can kill the Kennedys. Why can’t they make a cup of coffee that tastes good?’ ”

  July 23

  BORN: 1888 Raymond Chandler (The Big Sleep; Farewell, My Lovely), Chicago

  1907 Elspeth Huxley (The Flame Trees of Thika, Red Strangers), London

  DIED: 2002 Chaim Potok (The Chosen, My Name Is Asher Lev), 73, Merion, Pa.

  2009 E. Lynn Harris (Invisible Life, Just as I Am), 54, Los Angeles

  1943 The romance of a poet dying young is difficult to resist, and Max Harris, the editor of the Australian poetry journal Angry Penguins, didn’t resist it at all when he received a packet of poems by an unknown writer named Ern Malley from someone claiming to be Malley’s sister, who said her brother had left the poems behind when he died on this day at age twenty-five. In truth, though, Malley was a product of the imaginations of James McAuley and Harold Stewart, who, fed up with the experiments of modern poetry, composed the seventeen Malley poems, which they considered nonsense, in their army barracks in a single day. Harris took the bait and devoted a special issue to announcing his discovery, and the hoax soon exploded into Australia’s greatest literary scandal, but the biggest joke of all may be that the “fake” poems of Ern Malley have outlasted those of anyone involved.

  1969 Through a haze of sleeping pills, Jacqueline Susann watched Truman Capote tell Johnny Carson on The Tonight Show that she “looks like a truck driver in drag.”

  1986 When he came to, on the center median of I-93 out of Boston, Andre Dubus first carefully explained to the police officer that he had three guns and was licensed to carry them. Then the pain hit. Dubus had pulled his car over to assist a woman and her brother who had just hit an abandoned motorcycle in the highway and had helped them to the median when another driver, avoiding the wreck, swerved off the highway and killed the brother and crushed Dubus’s legs. Dubus, recognized already as one of his generation’s finest short-story writers, lost one leg and the use of the other and lived in pain and depression for much of the last thirteen years of his life, but he continued to write, often about the accident and its consequences, saying more than once that having learned he had saved the woman by pushing her out of the way of the car, “Now I can never be angry at myself for stopping that night.”

  July 24

  BORN: 1802 Alexandre Dumas père (The Three Musketeers), Villers-Cotterêts, France

  1916 John D. MacDonald (The Deep Blue Good-by), Sharon, Pa.

  DIED: 1969 Witold Gombrowicz (Ferdydurke, Trans-Atlantyk), 64, Vence, France

  1991 Isaac Bashevis Singer (Enemies, a Love Story; The Slave), 91, Surfside, Fla.

  1895 Sigmund Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams had sold only a handful of copies when the doctor wrote to his colleague Wilhelm Fleiss, “Do you suppose that someday one will read on a marble tablet on this house: ‘Here, on July 24, 1895, the secret of the dream revealed itself to Dr. Sigm. Freud.’ So far there is little prospect of it.” Freud’s dream that fateful night, about a patient named Irma, was central to his book, where he interpreted it as an expression of his desire not to be blamed for her continuing symptoms. (Later analysts have argued Freud’s anxiety in the dream was in fact about his friend Fleiss, who had nearly killed Irma by leaving a foot and a half of gauze in her nose during an operation.) Freud’s self-fulfilling prophecy was indeed fulfilled when a marble tablet was erected at the site in 1963.

  1901 William Sydney Porter, already writing stories under the name O. Henry, was released from prison after serving thirty-nine months for embezzling from his former employer, the First National Bank in Austin, Texas.

  NO YEAR At a crime scene just after midnight, detectives banter until they find that the man down is one of their own, 87th Precinct detective Mike Reardon. When Evan Hunter began his 87th Precinct series with Cop Hater in 1956, making your detective a cop instead of a private eye or an elderly spinster was a new idea, as was basing a mystery series around a group of investigators (some of whom, like Detective Reardon, might die) rather than a single character. Also new was the name Hunter chose as his pseudonym for the ser
ies so there wouldn’t be any confusion with his “serious” novels like The Blackboard Jungle: Ed McBain. Hunter chose the name casually, but over time, as his 87th Precinct series grew to more than fifty police procedurals, its fame eclipsed his own.

  1959 Russell Hoban was an illustrator and ad copywriter as well as a fledgling children’s book author when he submitted a picture-book manuscript called Who’s Afraid? to his editor, Ursula Nordstrom. “I’m afraid it’s going to need a lot more work, Russ,” she told him, advising him to rethink the pacing as well as the species of his young heroine, Frances: “I sort of wish any other creature but a vole which looks like a mouse. I think it is terribly difficult to draw ATTRACTIVE mice.” Over the following months both problems were solved, as Hoban reconstructed the story (and renamed it Bedtime for Frances) and illustrator Garth Williams did away with the voles: as Nordstrom informed Hoban in a later letter, “He has decided to make these people badgers.”

  July 25

  BORN: 1902 Eric Hoffer (The True Believer, The Passionate State of Mind), New York City

  1905 Elias Canetti (Auto-da-Fé, Crowds and Power), Ruse, Bulgaria

  DIED: 1834 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Kubla Khan), 61, Highgate, England

  1966 Frank O’Hara (Meditations in an Emergency), 40, Fire Island, N.Y.

  1914 At age eleven, while sailing from Barcelona to New York, Anaïs Nin began her diary.

  1938 When his German publishers asked about his ancestry, J. R. R. Tolkien drafted a response saying that “if I am to understand that you are enquiring whether I am of Jewish origin, I can only reply that I regret that I appear to have no ancestors of that gifted people.” He has been glad of his German name, he added, but “if impertinent and irrelevant inquiries of this sort are to become the rule in matters of literature, then the time is not far distant when a German name will no longer be a source of pride.”