by Tom Nissley
1967 Invited by the Kerner Commission to contribute to its official report on the riots in Detroit that left forty-three dead and thousands of buildings destroyed, John Hersey chose instead to report from the city on his own. Soon he focused on one event: the death during the riots of three black men at the hands of white policemen. In The Algiers Motel Incident, as he had with Hiroshima two decades before, Hersey immersed himself in the lives of those present at the scene on this night, but in this book he stepped forward for the first time as a character in his own reporting. “This account is too urgent, too complex, too dangerous to too many people,” he wrote, for him to hide behind “the luxury of invisibility.”
1969 A neurologist’s medical notes took on the flavor of the fables of Sleeping Beauty or Rip Van Winkle when a group of patients in a New York hospital who had been reduced for decades to catatonic dormancy after contracting “sleeping sickness” in the ’20s were treated with a new drug, L-DOPA, that caused them, in powerfully individual ways, to awaken. With the sensitive curiosity that has since become his trademark, their young neurologist Oliver Sacks told their stories in Awakenings, including that of Rose R., who, unlike others whose awakenings held for the rest of their lives, woke fully for just a few vivid weeks that peaked on this day when, “joyous and elated, and very salacious,” she regained her lively personality, with, in Sacks’s words, an “extraordinary sense of 1926-ness,” fully immersed in the events and personalities of the year she went to sleep.
1976 On a plane in the Philippines while her husband made Apocalypse Now, Eleanor Coppola started reading volume five of the Diary of Anaïs Nin. “I almost never read. I have stopped being embarrassed about it only recently. I hardly ever watch television. I am not sure exactly how I get my information.”
July 26
BORN: 1856 George Bernard Shaw (Man and Superman, Major Barbara), Dublin
1894 Aldous Huxley (Brave New World, Crome Yellow), Godalming, England
DIED: 1934 Winsor McCay (Little Nemo in Slumberland), c. 64, Brooklyn
1957 Giuseppe di Lampedusa (The Leopard), 60, Rome
1849 The industrious Anthony Trollope, employed by the post office in Ireland, set out to solve the mystery of currency vanishing in the local mails by scratching a sovereign with a knife, enclosing it in a letter, and tracking its course. When it disappeared after passing through the town of Tralee, a search was made and the coin found in the possession of a young postmistress. At her trial in July, Trollope was the principal witness for the prosecution, and the transcript of his witty exchanges on the stand with the defense counsel would have been quite at home in any of his Barchester Chronicles, punctuated as it is by notations of “(laughter),” “(loud laughter),” and “(tremendous laughter),” and ending with the paired salutations “Good morning, triumphant Post Office Inspector” and “Good morning, triumphant cross-examiner.”
1860 “Hooray!!!!!” Wilkie Collins wrote his mother, four weeks before the final episode of The Woman in White was to appear in his friend Dickens’s magazine, All the Year Round. “I have this instant written at the bottom of the four hundred and ninetieth page of my manuscript the two noblest words in the English language—The End.”
1910 In his first decade in the business, George Herriman had experimented with more than a dozen comic-strip series, from Rosy Posy—Mama’s Girl to Major Ozone’s Fresh Air, when, looking to fill up some white space at the bottom of his latest strip, The Dingbat Family, he drew a tiny mouse throwing something—a brick?—at a little black cat that was minding its own business. And so began the simplest and most enduring drama in comics: Ignatz Mouse, in fury or contempt, hurling a brick at Krazy Kat, who takes it as a token of affection from his beloved. After three years dwelling in a slot under the Dingbats, Krazy and Ignatz got their own strip, and for over thirty years of Krazy Kat Herriman composed endless variations on this barest of dramatic structures: mouse, cat, and brick.
2002 A. S. Byatt, in the Guardian, on Gustave Flaubert’s Madame Bovary: “Our sympathy for her is like our sympathy for a bird the cat has brought in and maimed. It flutters, and it will die.”
July 27
BORN: 1916 Elizabeth Hardwick (Sleepless Nights), Lexington, Ky.
1939 William Eggleston (William Eggleston’s Guide), Memphis, Tenn.
DIED: 1946 Gertrude Stein (The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas), 72, Neuilly-sur-Seine, France
1948 Susan Glaspell (Fidelity, A Jury of Her Peers), 72, Provincetown, Mass.
1656 “Cursed be he by day and cursed be he by night; cursed be he when he lies down, and cursed be he when he rises up; cursed be he when he goes out, and cursed be he when he comes in,” read the decree of expulsion of Baruch Spinoza for heresy from the Jewish community in Amsterdam on this day. “We order that no one should communicate with him orally or in writing, or show him any favor, or stay with him under the same roof, or within four ells of him, or read anything composed or written by him.”
1921 Telling him to stop his “lazy loafing” and “trading on your handsome face” and become a real man, “with brawn and muscle, moral as well as physical,” Grace Hemingway evicted her son Ernest, newly turned twenty-one, from her Michigan cottage.
1966 The regular mail flights made Wednesdays the high point of the week for Edward Hoagland, who recorded in Notes from the Century Before the “exuberant, staccato summer” he spent in the former gold-rush outposts of northwest British Columbia, where he could still glimpse the old ways, especially with a man named Dan McPhee, who had spent thirty-five years in the bush as road-maintainer, trapper, deputy, gravedigger, and the only socialist in Telegraph Creek, and whose hospitality Hoagland flew back to enjoy on this day. A man in town, seeing him back, asked, “What do you have, some sort of a gold mine here?” Hoagland laughed and said “no, thinking yes.”
2007 Roz Kaveney, in the TLS: “If Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows is, for all its weaknesses, a far more satisfying work than some of its predecessors, it is because J. K. Rowling is an intelligent writer for whom writing the most popular children’s books in history has been an education in responsibility and power not unlike that of her boy wizard hero.”
2010 Schonberg’s Lives of the Great Composers ($7.50), Djuna Barnes’s Nightwood ($7.50), Stephen Joyce’s copy of Dead Souls (price unknown): a month after the novelist David Markson died, browsers started noticing books from his personal library—with his underlines and comments in the margins—on the eighteen miles of bookshelves at the Strand in New York. Alex Abramovich was first tipped off when a friend passed on Markson’s marginal comments on White Noise (“I’ve finally solved this book, it’s sci-fi!”), and he posted about his finds on the LRB blog, where the comments section soon included his further purchases on this day (Montaigne’s Essays [$7.50]) and a lengthy debate about whether Markson’s library should be reconsolidated or, as the author seemed to intend, dispersed among his fellow patrons of the Strand.
July 28
BORN: 1866 Beatrix Potter (The Tale of Peter Rabbit), London
1959 William T. Vollmann (Europe Central, Imperial), Los Angeles
DIED: 1995 Don Carpenter (Hard Rain Falling, Turnaround), 64, Mill Valley, Calif.
1996 Roger Tory Peterson (Field Guide to the Birds of North America), 87, Old Lyme, Conn.
1841 The discovery in the Hudson River of the body of a young woman, soon identified as that of Mary Rogers, a beautiful cigar-shop clerk who had disappeared three days before, became the story of the summer in the New York newspapers. A year later, when no murderer had been found, Edgar Allan Poe proposed to solve the crime himself, through the person of C. Auguste Dupin, the fictional detective he had introduced in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (considered by many the first detective story). Transposing the details of the murder to Paris, Poe claimed in “The Mystery of Marie Roget” to have pointed to the culprit merely by following the evidence in newspaper accounts. Despite his efforts, the crime remains unsolved to this day.
&nbs
p; 1945 There’s a balance in summer in this remote New Mexico canyon, “a seasonal equation of well-being and alertness,” from the urgent speed of roadrunners in the canyon’s depths to the golden eagles nesting on its highest peaks. They have “tenure in the land” in N. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn, unlike the domesticated latecomers, the farm animals and house cats, whose place in the canyon can be blown away like dust. Poised uneasily somewhere between them is Abel, a young Indian back from the war who on this day finds himself unable to speak to his grandfather in “the old rhythm of the tongue.” Later in the day, though, alone in the canyon and looking down on the valley below, he finds himself approaching a peace he is still years from achieving.
1969 From the index to Stephen Davis’s rock-excess classic, Hammer of the Gods: The Led Zeppelin Saga, “Seattle, Washington, Shark Episode, 78–80.”
1974 It’s just a two-hour drive from Islington to Stratford-upon-Avon, but when Richard Adams piled his daughters (with their Shakespearean names, Juliet and Rosamond) into the car to go see Twelfth Night, eight-year-old Juliet demanded, “Now Daddy, we’re going on a long car journey, so we want you to while away the time by telling us a completely new story, one that we have never heard before and without any delay. Please start now!” When, at Juliet’s further insistence, he wrote the story down—and greatly expanded it—in spare evenings and holidays from his civil service job, he named it Hazel and Fiver, after two of its rabbit characters, but the publisher who took the novel after many others had rejected it thought a better title might be Watership Down. On this day, two years after it was first published, Watership Down spent the last of its thirteen weeks at #1 on the New York Times fiction bestseller list.
July 29
BORN: 1805 Alexis de Tocqueville (Democracy in America), Paris
1965 Chang-Rae Lee (A Gesture Life, Native Speaker), Seoul, South Korea
DIED: 1833 William Wilberforce (A Letter on the Abolition of the Slave Trade), 73, London
1979 Herbert Marcuse (One-Dimensional Man), 81, Starnberg, Germany
1835 Charlotte Brontë began work as a teacher at Miss Wooler’s School.
1890 In the evening, after writing two and a half pages of a novel he later tore up, George Gissing “broke down with wretchedness.”
1935 Fresh out of college, with literary aspirations but ten siblings to support, Brian O’Nolan was one of just a few of the hundreds who had applied with him to be sworn on this day into the bureaucratic safety of the Irish Civil Service. O’Nolan’s position offered enviable economic security but also required him to divert his spare-time literary activities into an endless proliferation of pseudonyms, including Myles na gCopaleen, whose satirical “Cruiskeen Lawn” columns in the Irish Times made him a household name in Dublin during his lifetime, and Flann O’Brien, whose inventively subversive novels At Swim-Two-Birds and The Third Policeman belatedly placed him in the company of Joyce and Beckett as Ireland’s great modern novelists.
1943 “On the 29th of July, of 1943,” James Baldwin begins “Notes of a Native Son,” his stepfather, whom Baldwin called his father, died, three days before the riots in Harlem that left an apocalyptic landscape of broken glass along the route to his burial. Baldwin had struggled to understand his father, the “most bitter man I have ever met,” until the year before, when Baldwin, at nineteen, worked in defense plants in New Jersey. “I acted in New Jersey as I had always acted, that is as though I thought a great deal of myself—I had to act that way,” but the results “were, simply, unbelievable”: a “unanimous, active, and unbearably vocal hostility” against him (and his race) that gave him a “rage in his blood,” a rage that, finally, made him his father’s son.
July 30
BORN: 1818 Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights), Thornton, England
1924 William Gass (Omensetter’s Luck, The Tunnel), Fargo, N.D.
DIED: 1992 Joe Shuster (Superman), 78, Los Angeles
2012 Maeve Binchy (Circle of Friends, Tara Road), 72, Dublin
1915 Confronted by game wardens with a dead blue heron in his boat on Walloon Lake in Michigan, fifteen-year-old Ernest Hemingway denied that he had shot the bird. He later admitted his crime to a judge and paid a $15 fine.
1918 Captain Hubert Young, tasked with revising the supply plan for the capture of Damascus according to the scheme of T. E. Lawrence, chafed against “the sight of the little man reading the Morte d’Arthur in a corner of the mess-tent with an impish smile on his face.”
1935 Support for the innovation was hardly unanimous—George Orwell called it a “disaster” for publishers, authors, and booksellers—but the reaction of the market was immediate when Allen Lane introduced the first ten books in his new Penguin line of six-penny paperbacks (a fifteenth of the price of the standard hardcover). Reordered by booksellers within days, the Penguins, whose trademark mascot was chosen for its “dignified flippancy,” went on to sell three million copies in their first year from a list that began with André Maurois’s Ariel and included in its first batch Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms and Agatha Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, as well as less widely remembered releases such as Beverley Nichols’s Twenty-Five, Eric Linklater’s Poet’s Pub, and Susan Ertz’s Madame Claire.
2007 There is no wilderness anymore, not even within the Aldo Leopold Wilderness in New Mexico’s Black Range, where Philip Connors has taken to spending his summers as a solo fire lookout in a tower perched over the tree line. His diary of one summer there, Fire Season, is a thoughtful portrait of the beauty of solitude but also a vivid on-the-ground (or, rather, fifty-five feet off the ground) report on the ethics and strategy of managing nature, in which the mistakes have been both large and small, from the often misguided history of fire prevention across the West to Connors’s own failed attempt on this day to rescue a fawn that may not have needed rescuing, which ends, to his misery and shame, in the death of the fawn and, fittingly, a fire.
July 31
BORN: 1919 Primo Levi (If This Is a Man, The Truce), Turin, Italy
1965 J. K. Rowling (Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone), Yate, England
DIED: 1784 Denis Diderot (Jacques the Fatalist, Rameau’s Nephew), 70, Paris
2000 William Maxwell (So Long, See You Tomorrow), 91, New York City
1771 Benjamin Franklin was sixty-five, an old man by his own estimation but still caught up in the ferment of his time, when he took advantage of two weeks’ leisure at the home of the bishop of St. Asaph in Hampshire, England, to begin his Autobiography, most likely on this day. Tradition has it that each evening he read the day’s draft for the entertainment of the bishop’s family, but those first pages were formally addressed to another audience: his son William, at that time the governor of New Jersey. But by the time Franklin took the project up again a dozen years later—“The Affairs of the Revolution occasion’d the Interruption,” he explained, understandably—he made no more mention of William, whose loyalty to the British crown had caused an irreparable break with his father in the meantime, as he worked aggressively for the suppression of the rebellion of which his father was a leader.
1943 Wounded by machine-gun fire on the Solomon Islands on this day in World War II, Private Rodger W. Young, in the words of his Medal of Honor history, “continued his heroic advance, attracting enemy fire and answering with rifle fire,” providing cover for his platoon to escape an attack he didn’t survive. Two years later, Broadway composer and fellow private Frank Loesser, wanting to write a song to celebrate the infantry, composed “The Ballad of Rodger Young,” which became a hit for Burl Ives and Nelson Eddy, and which stayed in the ears of Robert A. Heinlein as he wrote Starship Troopers in the late ’50s: the song’s refrain echoes through the compartments of the starship itself, christened the TFCT Rodger Young.
1980 According to the prophecy of Sybill Trelawney, as recalled in Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, “the one with the power to vanquish the Dark Lord” was “born to those who have thrice defied him,
born as the seventh month dies.” There are two wizard children who match the profile—Neville Longbottom, born on July 30, and Harry Potter, born a day later (and exactly fifteen years after his creator J. K. Rowling’s own date of birth)—but of course only Harry has been marked by the Dark Lord himself as his equal and his nemesis.
2005 Joe Queenan, in the New York Times, on Edward Klein’s The Truth About Hillary: What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President: “If Klein purposely set out to write the sleaziest, most derivative, most despicable political biography ever, he has failed both himself and his readers miserably. ‘The Truth About Hillary’ is only about the 16th sleaziest book I have ever read.”
August is the only month whose name is also an adjective. But is August august? There’s nothing majestic or venerable about it. It’s sultry and lazy. It’s the height of the dog days, named after the dog star, Sirius, which was thought to reign over the hottest time of the year with a malignity that brings on lassitude, disease, and madness. “These are strange and breathless days, the dog days,” promises the opening of Tuck Everlasting, “when people are led to do things they are sure to be sorry for after.”
It’s not only the heat that can drive one mad; it’s the idleness. Without something to keep you occupied, there’s a danger your thoughts and actions will fall out of order. It was during the dog days of August when W. G. Sebald set out on a walking tour in the east of England in The Rings of Saturn, “in the hopes of dispelling the emptiness that takes hold of me whenever I have completed a long stint of work.” But he couldn’t just enjoy his freedom; he became preoccupied by it, and by the “paralyzing horror” of the “traces of destruction” his leisured observation opened his eyes to. It strikes him as no coincidence at all that exactly a year later he checked into a local hospital “in a state of almost total immobility.”
