A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  What evil can restlessness gin up in August? “Wars begin in August,” Benny Profane declares in Pynchon’s V. “In the temperate zone and twentieth century we have this tradition.” The First World War, one of the more thorough examples of modernity’s instinct for destruction, was kicked off with two shots in Sarajevo in late June, but it was only after a month of failed diplomacy that, as the title of Barbara W. Tuchman’s definitive history of the war’s beginning described them, the guns of August began to fire. “In the month of August, 1914,” she wrote, “there was something looming, inescapable, universal that involved us all. Something in that awful gulf between perfect plans and fallible men.” In some editions, The Guns of August was called August 1914, the same title Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn used for his own book on the beginning of the war, a novel about the calamitous Battle of Tannenberg that exposed the rot under the tsar and helped bring on the years of Russian revolution.

  Not everyone is idle or evil in August. Many stay behind as the cities empty out in the heat, as Barbara Pym reminds us in Excellent Women, the best known of her witty and modestly willful novels of spinsters and others left out of the plots novelists usually concern themselves with. “ ‘Thank goodness some of one’s friends are unfashionable enough to be in town in August,’ ” William Caldicote says to Mildred Lathbury when he sees her on the street toward the end of the month. “ ‘No, I think there are a good many people who have to stay in London in August,’ ” she replies, “remembering the bus queues and the patient line of people moving with their trays in the great cafeteria.”

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR AUGUST

  Arthur Mervyn by Charles Brockden Brown (1799) The deadly yellow fever epidemic of 1793 in Philadelphia inspired Brockden Brown’s Gothic fever dream of a novel, in which disease is but one of the anxious urban dangers threatening the young hero.

  Light in August by William Faulkner (1932) Faulkner thought he would call his tale of uncertain parentage “Dark House” until he was inspired instead by those “few days somewhere about the middle of the month when suddenly there’s a foretaste of fall” and “a luminous quality to the light” to name it instead after the month in which most of its tragedy is set.

  All the King’s Men by Robert Penn Warren (1946) Embedded in Warren’s tale of compromises and betrayals is a summer interlude between Jack Burden and Anne Stanton, the kind of young romance during which, as Jack recalls, “even though the calendar said it was August I had not been able to believe that the summer, and the world, would ever end.”

  The Member of the Wedding by Carson McCullers (1946) It’s the last Friday of August in that “green and crazy summer when Frankie was twelve years old,” and on Sunday her brother is going to be married. In the two days between, Frankie does her best to do a lot of growing up and, by misdirection, she does.

  Excellent Women by Barbara Pym (1952) It’s hard to state how thrilling it is to see the expectations and supposed rules of the novel broken so quietly and confidently: not through style or structure but through one character’s intelligent self-sufficiency, and through her creator’s willingness to pay attention to her.

  The Guns of August by Barbara W. Tuchman (1962) It only added to the aura surrounding Tuchman’s breakthrough history of the first, error-filled month of the First World War that soon after it was published John F. Kennedy gave copies of the book to his aides and told his brother Bobby, “I am not going to follow a course which will allow anyone to write a comparable book about this time [called] The Missiles of October.”

  The Rings of Saturn by W. G. Sebald (1995) A book—call it a memoir or a travelogue or a novel—grounded in an August walk through Suffolk, although Sebald could hardly go a sentence without being diverted by his restless curiosity into the echoes of personal and national history he heard wherever he went.

  Kitchen Confidential by Anthony Bourdain (2000) In August, in a seaside village in southwest France, Bourdain tasted his first oyster, pulled straight from the ocean, and everything changed: “I’d not only survived—I’d enjoyed.”

  August 1

  BORN: 1815 Richard Henry Dana (Two Years Before the Mast), Cambridge, Mass.

  1819 Herman Melville (Typee, Moby-Dick), New York City

  DIED: 1743 Richard Savage (The Bastard, The Wanderer), c. 46, Bristol, England

  1963 Theodore Roethke (The Lost Son, The Waking), 55, Bainbridge Island, Wash.

  1866 On his forty-seventh birthday, Herman Melville played croquet. His sister, observing from a hammock, noted, “Herman was quite a hand at it.”

  1928 Harold Coxe, in the New Republic, on the Mémoires de Joséphine Baker: “They are stimulating in a certain freshness and absurdity which is not often to be found, and they make you feel that, waiving prejudice, you would like Miss Baker.”

  1950 “To go abroad could fracture one’s life,” V. S. Naipaul later wrote about the moment when, headed to Oxford at age seventeen, he left Trinidad and flew for the first time to New York to meet his ship to London. His attention having already turned toward the future, away from the family he wouldn’t see for another six years, he wrote his observations in a diary bought for that purpose—asking the stewardess to sharpen his pencil “to taste the luxuriousness of air travel”—but made no note then of the family farewell at the Trinidad airport nor of his first meal in New York: a roasted chicken brought from home, whose humble consumption—eaten without fork or plate over the trash basket in his hotel room, ashamed of the smell and the oil—he would nevertheless still intensely recall when he returned to his past in the autobiographical novel The Enigma of Arrival.

  1956 In the hours after midnight sometime in April, Jean Shepherd, the radio host whose improvised, late-night monologues had drawn a cult audience, suggested a stunt, a prank of his fellow “Night People” against the “Day People” and their regimented lives. He sent his listeners out to ask in bookstores for a fictitious title, I, Libertine by Frederick R. Ewing, and they did in numbers enough to create a buzz in the publishing world for a book that didn’t exist. The stunt didn’t end there: as the Wall Street Journal and Village Voice reported on this day, publisher Ian Ballantine, embracing the hoax, arranged with Shepherd and novelist Theodore Sturgeon to write a book to match the title, a pastiche of eighteenth-century bawdiness that Ballantine released in the fall with a press run of 130,000 copies.

  1963 Richard Chopping, commissioned to paint a toad for the original cover of Ian Fleming’s You Only Live Twice, reported back to Fleming’s editor that, “proud, do-it-yourself masochist” that he was, he had spent the previous day trudging through the swamps of Suffolk to find a suitable specimen, which now lived on mealworms under a glass dome in his studio.

  August 2

  BORN: 1924 James Baldwin (Notes of a Native Son, Giovanni’s Room), New York City

  1942 Isabel Allende (The House of the Spirits), Lima, Peru

  DIED: 1988 Raymond Carver (Cathedral, Fires), 50, Port Angeles, Wash.

  1997 William S. Burroughs (The Soft Machine), 83, Lawrence, Kans.

  1779 Fanny Burney’s play The Witlings seemed to amuse its audience of family and friends at its first reading, but afterward her beloved father and their close family friend Samuel Crisp, fearing scandal from its satire, wrote her what she called a “hissing, groaning, catcalling epistle,” demanding she suppress it. Burney, already celebrated as the author of the novel Evelina, was stunned—“I expected many objections to be raised—a thousand errors to be pointed out—and a million of alterations to be proposed,” she wrote her father, “but the suppression of the piece were words I did not expect”—but accepted their judgment. “I shall wipe it from my memory,” she promised bitterly, though in fact she recycled much of its plot for her next novel, Cecilia, from whose text Jane Austen soon borrowed a title phrase, Pride and Prejudice.

  1805 In the first of over two hundred annual Eton-Harrow cricket matches, the longest-running rivalry in the sport, Lord Byron made 7 and 2 for the Harrow eleven. “Byron played ve
ry badly,” his captain noted; afterward, according to Byron, players from both teams made a drunken spectacle in a box at the Haymarket Theatre.

  1845 Replying to his mother, who had been unhappy with a previous letter critical of the Old Testament, William Makepeace Thackeray asked: “What right have you to say I am without God because I can’t believe that God ordered Abraham to kill Isaac or that he ordered the bears to eat the little children who laughed at Elisha for being bald. You don’t believe it yourself.”

  1891 Ill from tuberculosis after a lengthy trip to Africa, the African American historian George Washington Williams died in London on this day at the age of forty-one. A year before, reporting from the Congo, he had published a blistering open letter to the colony’s overseer, Leopold II of Belgium, about the “deceit, fraud, robberies, arson, murder, slave-raiding, and general policy of cruelty” of his administration, the final public act in Williams’s short but remarkable career. Though W. E. B. DuBois later remembered him as “the greatest historian of the race” and John Hope Franklin called him “one of the small heroes of the world,” Williams, whose unprecedented, thousand-page History of the Negro Race from 1619 to 1880 is one of the landmarks of African American scholarship, has largely been left out of the history that he was the first in so many cases to record.

  1947 Gabriel Marcel, in the TLS, on Albert Camus’s La peste: “No doubt translations will soon appear; and then it may be that the book will be recognized as the most important which has appeared in France since the impressive novels of M. Malraux.”

  August 3

  BORN: 1920 P. D. James (Death in Holy Orders, The Children of Men), Oxford, England

  1943 Steven Millhauser (Martin Dressler, Edwin Mullhouse), New York City

  DIED: 1924 Joseph Conrad (Nostromo, Victory), 66, Bishopsbourne, England

  2008 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (The Gulag Archipelago), 89, Moscow

  1890 When John Addington Symonds encountered the “Calamus” poems, with their celebration of love between men, in Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass in the 1860s, he said they “made another man of me.” For the next two decades he wrote to Whitman—and sometimes exasperated him—with his admiration, but finally on this day, with both their lives nearly over, he made his questions as explicit as he could: did Whitman agree that “those semi-sexual emotions and actions which no doubt do occur between men” were not entirely “prejudicial to social interests”? Whitman denied such “morbid inferences” should be made from his poetry and replied that the “one great difference between you and me, temperament & theory, is restraint.” He also asserted, by the way, that “tho’ always unmarried I have had six children,” a fact otherwise undocumented in his biography.

  1915 Jack Burden is just a historical researcher in search of the truth, or so he tells himself while in the sullied employ of Governor Willie Stark, the charismatic despot of Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men. The governor expects, correctly, that even the upstanding Judge Irwin, the hero of Jack’s youth, has a secret worthy of blackmail, and at the end of a trail across the South of old stock transactions, real estate records, and the recollections of elderly women, Jack finds it, in a letter written on this day whose plainspoken revelations cause Jack’s last illusions about the nature of men, or of one man in particular, to collapse.

  1916 Harold Hannyngton Child, in the TLS, on O. Henry: “Reading him is like catching prawns with the hands. With infinite patience you close your hands over the prey, and at the very last second, when the hole for escape is all but closed, flick! the quarry has gone.”

  2003 “This is America,” one immigrant chides another in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland. “Hit the ball in the air, man.” The first immigrant is Chuck Ramkissoon, a Trinidadian whose restless, self-made schemes include the building of a quality cricket ground in the far reaches of Brooklyn; the second is Hans van den Broek, a Dutch Wall Street analyst (and middling batsman) who has been drawn into Chuck’s outer-borough world. “It’s not how I bat,” Hans protests, but on this day, in the last game of the season, he finds his free-swinging form. “I’d done it,” he thinks. “I’d hit the ball in the air like an American cricketer; and I’d done so without injury to my sense of myself.” For a moment—though it turns out to be fleeting—Hans can imagine that yes, “I am at last naturalized.”

  August 4

  BORN: 1961 Barack Obama (Dreams from My Father), Honolulu

  1965 Dennis Lehane (A Drink Before the War, Mystic River), Boston

  DIED: 1875 Hans Christian Andersen (“Thumbelina,” “The Ugly Duckling”), 70, Copenhagen

  2003 James Welch (Fool’s Crow, Winter in the Blood), 62, Missoula, Mont.

  1866 John Morley, in the Saturday Review, on Algernon Swinburne’s Poems and Ballads: “No language is too strong to condemn the mixed vileness and childishness of depicting the spurious passion of a putrescent imagination, the unnamed lusts of sated wantons, as if they were the crown of character and their enjoyment the great glory of human life.”

  1892 Angela Carter is best known for her merrily subversive transformations of traditional European fables in books like The Bloody Chamber, but she turned the folk tales of America inside-out as well. Those legends are, of course, of a more recent vintage: the drunken lurchings of Edgar Allan Poe, the frontier dramas of Indian captivity narratives and John Ford Westerns, and, most vividly, the murders of Lizzie Borden’s father and stepmother on this day for which Borden was acquitted by a jury but convicted by popular opinion. Carter’s retelling of Lizzie’s story, “The Fall River Axe Murders,” is a fever dream of New England humidity and repression that will cause you to feel the squeeze of a corset, the jaw-clench of parsimony, and the hovering presence of the angel of death.

  1913 The date of August 4 runs through the life of Florence Dowell like a line of fate, or of determination. She was born on that day, and on that day in 1901 she married John Dowell, the narrator of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier. On August 4ths in between she set off on a trip around the world and made herself the mistress of a cabin boy. And on this August 4, Florence takes a lethal dose of prussic acid and lies down, for the last time, on their hotel bed, after which her husband comes to learn the truth of the Dowells’ friendship with Edward and Leonora Ashburnham and understands that what had seemed to him “nine years of uninterrupted tranquility” were, he now assures us, “the saddest story I have ever heard.”

  1947 After approaching land for the first time in ninety-seven days and nearly 4,000 nautical miles across the Pacific, Thor Heyerdahl and his Scandinavian crew spent this day maneuvering their raft Kon-Tiki to avoid a reef while offering cigarettes to the Polynesian islanders who came by canoe to investigate. Four days later they landed on another island, planting a South American coconut to symbolize Heyerdahl’s theory that South Americans on such rafts could have populated the islands, and completing an adventure tale that became a bestseller named after their raft.

  1961 Orville Prescott, in the New York Times, on Robert A. Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land: a “disastrous mishmash of science fiction, laborious humor, dreary social satire, and cheap eroticism.”

  August 5

  BORN: 1850 Guy de Maupassant (Bel-Ami, “Boule de Suif”), Dieppe, France

  1934 Wendell Berry (Jayber Crow, The Unsettling of America), Henry County, Ky.

  DIED: 1895 Friedrich Engels (The Condition of the Working Class in England), 74, London

  2009 Budd Schulberg (What Makes Sammy Run?), 95, Quogue, N.Y.

  1920 Writing Jacob’s Room every morning, Virginia Woolf felt “each day’s work like a fence which I have to ride at, my heart in my mouth till it’s over, and I’ve cleared, or knocked the bar out.”

  1925 The legend of B. Traven began with the publication in a German socialist newspaper of The Cotton-Pickers, a series of stories of proletarian life that the author claimed were drawn from his own experiences. On this day, writing to his publisher from Mexico, Traven expanded on the legend, describing the
tropical torments under which he worked—“one’s bleeding hands and legs and cheeks, stung through and through by mosquitoes and other hellish insects”—while adamantly deflecting any attempts to identify himself to the public. An explosion of novels under his name in the next decade, including The Death Ship and The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, made Traven internationally known, only increasing interest in the author’s identity despite, or because of, his insistence that the work, not the man, should matter.

  1944 When the motorcycle he was riding with photographer Robert Capa came under fire in France, Ernest Hemingway threw himself into a ditch and suffered a concussion on a boulder.

  2006 What It Is, the title of Lynda Barry’s 2008 book, either begs or answers the question, “What is it?” What is the book itself? It’s a scrapbook and/or a memoir and/or a guidebook to creativity, and far better than any of that sounds. But, more importantly, what is “it”? Depending on the page in the book, “it” is images, or experiences, or reflection, or thoughts, or writing, or any other word we have for things that can open up a feeling of “aliveness,” that by distraction or discipline or some combination of the two allow us to pay attention to what’s around us, and to ourselves. Part personal collage, part storytelling along the lines of her old Ernie Pook’s Comeek, part activity book, What It Is is a book-long pep talk that leads by example. For instance, as she records on page 193, Lynda Barry spent this entire day drawing people dancing.

  August 6

  BORN: 1934 Diane di Prima (Loba, Memoirs of a Beatnik), Brooklyn

  1934 Piers Anthony (A Spell for Chameleon, Split Infinity), Oxford, England

  DIED: 2010 Tony Judt (Postwar, The Memory Chalet), 62, New York City

  2012 Robert Hughes (The Fatal Shore, The Shock of the New), 74, Bronx, N.Y.