A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1666 Recently widowed but still well connected at the court of Charles II, Aphra Behn entered the king’s service as a spy. Sent to Antwerp to report on English exiles plotting against Charles after the Restoration (and to turn one of them, William Scott, an old friend, back to loyalty), she made her first report on this day, on the initial meeting between “Celladon” and “Astrea,” her code names for Scott and herself. Less than a year later she returned to London so deeply in debt she was sent to prison, after which she turned to a profession as unlikely for a woman then as espionage. As a poet, playwright, and novelist—sometimes under the same name, “Astrea”—she became, in Vita Sackville-West’s definitive phrase, “the first woman in England to earn her living by her pen.”

  1945 When the great, silent flash came over the city, Miss Toshiko Sasaki was at her office desk, Dr. Masakazu Fujii and Dr. Terufumi Sasaki were in their hospitals, Mrs. Hatsuyo Nakamura was at the window in her kitchen, Father Wilhelm Kleinsorge was reading a magazine in his underwear, and the Reverend Mr. Kiyoski Tanimoto was at the doorway of a house in the suburbs. Soon after the Japanese surrender, John Hersey gathered the stories of these six survivors of the atomic blast into Hiroshima, a spare, declarative account that was given an entire issue of The New Yorker, read aloud for four straight nights on ABC radio, and sent for free to all Book-of-the-Month Club members, although the Allied occupying authorities kept it from circulating in Japan.

  1989 At 9:46 in the morning on this day John Updike was still alive, and suddenly to Nicholson Baker that meant he had to write about him now. Baker had made vague plans before to examine his “obsession with Updike,” but he had thought it would be better done when his subject was dead. But now, having seen the way his thoughts about Donald Barthelme, after Barthelme’s death a few weeks before, had congealed into “sad-clown sorrowfulness” or “valedictory grand-old-man reverence,” Baker felt he had to capture his admiration for Updike while it was still anxious and dangerous, while the man and his writing were still alive. Most anxious of all, as Baker wrote in his strange and delightful book U and I, “if he dies, he won’t know how I feel about him.”

  1997 The San Antonio Historic Design and Review Commission ruled that the shade of purple Sandra Cisneros had painted her house (Sherwin Williams Corsican Purple) was not historically appropriate to the King William Historic District, though, as she argued, it evoked a local history a thousand years older than the district.

  August 7

  BORN: 1942 Garrison Keillor (Lake Wobegon Days, WLT), Anoka, Minn.

  1953 Anne Fadiman (The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down), New York City

  DIED: 1941 Rabindranath Tagore (Gitanjali, The Home and the World), 80, Calcutta

  1995 Brigid Brophy (Hackenfeller’s Ape, Black Ship to Hell), 66, Louth, England

  1836 The “opening salvo” of New England Transcendentalism came in the form of a book of conversations with children. In 1835, Elizabeth Peabody, a teacher at the Temple School of Bronson Alcott (whose students did not yet include his daughter Louisa May), published Record of a School, composed from the open-ended dialogues of Alcott and his students. But by the time her book, and thereby his school, became acclaimed for their brilliance, their partnership had soured. The final straw for Peabody, who resigned from the school on this day, was Alcott’s next book, Conversations with Children on the Gospels, whose frank discussions of the physical basis of creation—six-year-old Josiah Quincy commented that the body was formed out of “the naughtiness of other people”—were condemned in the Boston press as “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene,” leading three-quarters of the school’s pupils to withdraw.

  1958 There are two Chaneysville incidents in The Chaneysville Incident: one, more a part of legend than history, in which thirteen slaves, about to be captured as they made their way through southern Pennsylvania on the Underground Railroad, chose to take their own lives rather than give them up again to slavery, and a second, on this day more than a century later, when Moses Washington, a black moonshiner and a man of mysterious wealth and local power, “went hunting and came home dead.” In David Bradley’s novel, it becomes the obsessive burden of Moses’s son John, a professor of history, to return to his hometown and unearth the truth behind both incidents and the connection between them, a task that will require his scholarly skills as well as the full measure of his humanity to fulfill.

  1974 It was a moment that felt lighter than air, but as substantial as the towers themselves. Two days before Nixon resigned, a man appeared in the space between the tops of Manhattan’s Twin Towers, balanced on a cable that was nearly invisible from the street below, where “the whole August morning was blown wide open, and the watchers stood rooted,” as Colum McCann describes it in Let the Great World Spin, his novel of New York stories drawn together by the man on a wire above them. From above, the man on the wire himself, Philippe Petit, had this view: “The city has changed face. Its maddening daily rush has transformed into a magnificent motionlessness. It listens. It watches. It ponders.” That’s how he remembered the moment in To Reach the Clouds, the memoir of his daring coup, which he published the year after the towers came down.

  August 8

  BORN: 1922 Gertrude Himmelfarb (The Roads to Modernity), Brooklyn

  1931 Roger Penrose (The Road to Reality), Colchester, England

  DIED: 1984 Ellen Raskin (The Westing Game), 56, New York City

  2008 Ted Solotaroff (Truth Comes in Blows), 79, East Quogue, N.Y.

  1920 Katherine Mansfield, in the Athenaeum, on E. M. Forster’s “Story of a Siren”: “So aware is he of his sensitiveness, of his sense of humour, that they are become two spectators who follow him wherever he goes, and are for ever on the look-out for a display of feeling.”

  NO YEAR “Oh yes, I’ve no doubt in my mind that we have been invited here by a madman—probably a dangerous homicidal maniac,” Mr. Justice Wargrave remarks. Ten of them, including the judge—all strangers to each other except a married couple—have arrived for either a summer holiday or summer employment at remote Indian Island, where, by a voice on gramophone, they are charged with each having caused the death of someone in their past. And then, one by one, they begin to die. And Then There Were None (which has had nearly as many nursery-rhyme titles as it has victims) is perhaps the most intricate in Agatha Christie’s career of homicidal puzzles, a locked-room mystery that takes place on an entire island, and one, she later admitted, she was tremendously pleased to have constructed.

  1969 When her friend Rex Reed decided he was too tired to go out that night, Jacqueline Susann called Sharon Tate, who had starred in the movie of her book Valley of the Dolls, and told her she wouldn’t be able to make her dinner party.

  1969 The murders of seven people, including actress Sharon Tate, over two nights in the Los Angeles hills went unsolved for nearly four months, but in early 1971 Vincent Bugliosi, an L.A. prosecutor, obtained guilty verdicts against Charles Manson and three of his followers. That same year Ed Sanders, Beat poet and former member of the Fugs, writing from within the counterculture that had curdled into evil in Manson’s hands, told the story of the crimes in The Family, and in 1974 Helter Skelter, Bugliosi’s own massive, fact-heavy account of the murders and the prosecution—part Warren Report and part In Cold Blood—became a massive bestseller and one of the pop-culture tombstones marking the end of the ’60s.

  August 9

  BORN: 1922 Philip Larkin (“The Whitsun Weddings,” High Windows), Coventry, England

  1949 Jonathan Kellerman (When the Bough Breaks), New York City

  DIED: 1967 Joe Orton (Entertaining Mr. Sloane, Loot), 34, London

  2008 Mahmoud Darwish (Unfortunately, It Was Paradise), 67, Houston, Tex.

  1853 From the seaside, George Eliot wrote that the “sacraments” of swimming and beer-drinking have been “very efficacious.”

  1912 “Will you stand by me in a crisis?” P. G. Wodehouse wrote apologetically to Arthur Conan Doyle
. “A New York lady journalist, a friend of mine, is over here gunning for you. She said ‘You know Conan Doyle, don’t you?’ I said, ‘I do. It is my only claim to fame’. She then insisted on my taking her to see you . . . Can you stand this invasion? If so, we will arrive in the afternoon.”

  1925 “You are right about Gatsby being blurred and patchy,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote to John Peale Bishop. “I never at any one time saw him clear myself—for he started as one man I knew and then changed into myself—the amalgam was never complete in my mind.”

  1945 “Did I tell you what Jean-Paul Sartre said about your work? He’s a little man with bad teeth, absolutely the best talker I ever met,” Malcolm Cowley wrote to William Faulkner. “Pour les jeunes en France, Faulkner c’est un dieu.” Faulkner, mired in Hollywood with his books out of print, could hardly have minded being called a god, nor did he resist Cowley’s pitch in the same letter to construct a Portable Faulkner, a one-volume anthology that would introduce his writing as an interconnected Mississippi saga and also give a “bayonet prick in the ass of Random House to reprint” his books. Faulkner agreed—“By all means let us make a Golden Book of my apocryphal county”—and The Portable Faulkner, published to great success in 1946, followed by Faulkner’s Nobel Prize in 1949, cemented his reputation as, indeed, a god among American novelists.

  1984 Walter Tevis, who described himself as a “good American writer of the second rank,” died on this day at the age of fifty-six, with his novels obscured by the glare of the movies a few of them had become, by his cussed indifference to keeping to a single genre of storytelling, and perhaps by his own blunt self-effacement. His promising first novel, The Hustler, became a hit movie with Paul Newman and Jackie Gleason. His second, The Man Who Fell to Earth, confounded expectations with its switch to science fiction but became the source for David Bowie’s most vivid screen role. Tevis then spent seventeen years mostly teaching and drinking, but in his last years he turned again to writing and published a flurry of books, including the Hustler sequel, The Color of Money, and two novels, The Queen’s Gambit and Mockingbird, that have developed devoted followings without the benefit, or curse, of a movie adaptation.

  August 10

  BORN: 1962 Suzanne Collins (The Hunger Games, Catching Fire), Hartford, Conn.

  1963 Andrew Sullivan (Virtually Normal), South Godstone, England

  DIED: 1948 Montague Summers (The History of Witchcraft and Demonology), 68, Richmond, England

  1914 In early August, as the European powers gathered themselves for battle, two speedy German ships of war, the Goeben and the Breslau, were pursued east across the Mediterranean by a fleet of British cruisers that exchanged fire with the Germans but couldn’t prevent their escape to the waters of their new Turkish ally. As Barbara W. Tuchman mentioned in The Guns of August, “the daughter, son-in-law, and three grandchildren of the American ambassador Mr. Henry Morgenthau” observed the gunfire from a “small Italian passenger steamer,” and Morgenthau’s daughter gave an account of the confrontation to the German and Austrian ambassadors in Constantinople on this day. What Tuchman didn’t mention is that the eyewitness was her own mother, and that the “three grandchildren” on the steamer were her sisters, Josephine and Anne, and herself, age two.

  1945 Graham Greene, in the Evening Standard, on George Orwell’s Animal Farm: “If Mr Walt Disney is looking for a real subject, here it is: it has all the necessary humour, and it has, too, the subdued lyrical quality he can sometimes express so well. But it is perhaps a little too real for him?”

  1958 Glenn Gould was not averse to placing his idiosyncratically brilliant piano career in a literary context, as in a self-interview he conducted in which he suggested to himself that the Salzburg Festspielhaus, where he played a concert on this day, would, with its “Kafka-like setting at the base of a cliff,” be a perfect site for “the martyr’s end you so desire.” And others have been equally willing to use him as a character, most memorably in Thomas Bernhard’s novel, The Loser, the story of two gifted piano students driven to give up the instrument (and in one case to suicide) by the greater talent of their fellow student Gould. Bernhard plays loose with the details of Gould’s life, but he too mentions a Salzburg concert and imagines, as Gould did, a sort of martyrdom to music: in his story Gould dies of a stroke, not while sleeping as in real life, but while playing the Goldberg Variations.

  1967 Among Kurt Vonnegut’s advice to a friend coming to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop: “Go to all the football games,” “Cancel classes whenever you damn please,” and “Don’t ball undergraduates. Their parents are still watching.”

  2012 Contemplating retirement after fifty-five years as a book dealer and hoping to “seed the clouds” of the used-book market, Larry McMurtry opened Booked Up, his four-building store in his hometown of Archer City, Texas, to what he called, in a nod to one of his early novels, the Last Book Sale, selling off two-thirds of his 400,000-book stock by auction.

  August 11

  BORN: 1897 Louise Bogan (The Blue Estuaries), Livermore Falls, Maine

  1922 Mavis Gallant (From the Fifteenth District), Montreal

  DIED: 1890 John Henry Newman (Apologia pro vita sua), 89, Edgbaston, England

  1979 J. G. Farrell (Troubles, The Siege of Krishnapur), 44, Bantry Bay, Ireland

  NO YEAR Ever since the strange wreck of a ship nearby, with no apparent survivors save an immense dog that bounded out of sight, the beautiful Lucy Westenra has had restless nights, and in the early, dark hours of August 11 her dear friend Mena wakes to discover Lucy’s bed empty and Lucy nowhere to be found. Searching for her out on the cliffs, Mena sees in the ruined abbey across the harbor something dark bending over a white figure, but when she reaches the abbey Lucy is alone and sleeping. All seems well the next morning, in the best-known novel by Irish theatrical manager Bram Stoker, Dracula, except for those two pinpricks on Lucy’s neck, which Mena must have caused when she clumsily used a safety pin to wrap a shawl around her in the night.

  1937 When Max Eastman wrote in “Bull in the Afternoon,” his lengthy takedown of his old friend Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon in the New Republic in 1933, “that Hemingway lacks the serene confidence that he is a full-sized man,” and compared his literary style to “wearing false hair on the chest,” it was, well, like waving a red flag in front of his subject. Hemingway fumed and wrote public letters asserting his “potency,” and four years later, when he found Eastman in his editor Maxwell Perkins’s office, he pulled open his shirt to reveal his full, authentic pelt. Before long the two men were grappling on the floor. They continued their battle for days in the New York papers, with Eastman claiming he had stood the younger man on his head while Hemingway offered a rematch: for $1,000, they would be left alone in a room and “the best man unlocks the door.”

  1994 There may never have been a more inspired pairing of book reviewer and subject than when the New York Review of Books commissioned Nicholson Baker to review volume one (A–G) of the Historical Dictionary of American Slang, edited by J. H. Lighter. Baker, the author of both the micro-epics The Mezzanine and Room Temperature and the highbrow smut of Vox and, later, House of Holes, was like a pig in, uh, slop, celebrating the way the reference book made worn lingo like “broke-dick” and “dingleberry” freshly funny again—thanks in part to the recurring, deadpan punch line “(usu. considered vulgar)”—and constructing a homemade grid charting the various combinations of prefixes (cheese-, dirt-, scum-) and suffixes (-ball!, -bag!, -wad!) that the ingenuity of human insult had, so far, concocted.

  August 12

  BORN: 1937 Walter Dean Myers (Fallen Angels, Monster), Martinsburg, W.Va.

  1964 Katherine Boo (Behind the Beautiful Forevers), Washington, D.C.

  DIED: 1955 Thomas Mann (The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus), 80, Zurich

  1964 Ian Fleming (Dr. No, Chitty-Chitty-Bang-Bang), 56, Canterbury, England

  1803 With Napoleon’s armies massing on the other side of the English
Channel, Britain hastily deployed troops in the towns along the coast, including Felpham, the tiny Sussex village where William Blake had moved a few years before, and where he had an altercation with a Private Schofield that nearly cost him his freedom. The soldier claimed Blake had shouted words of sedition, “Damn the King. The soldiers are all slaves,” and that Blake’s wife added that she would fight for Napoleon “as long as I am able.” Blake was no admirer of the king, but he was quickly acquitted at trial when no witnesses would support the soldier. In his later poetry, he would celebrate “sweet Felpham,” and forever curse “Skofield” as a “minister of evil.”

  1967 It is nearly impossible to think of Scott Spencer’s third novel without being reminded of the young Brooke Shields or without hearing Diana Ross and Lionel Richie breathe its title, Endless Love, in your mind’s ear, but behind that gauzy scrim there’s a novel that engages directly with the kind of overwhelming teen passion usually left to pop songwriters. The story begins with a fire, a small flame that David Axelrod lights on the porch of the girl—and the entire family—he loves, for no better reason than that they would come out and see him. The flame becomes a blaze, and years later, he tells us, “the night of August 12, 1967, still divides my life.” Much of the power of Spencer’s story, though, is that even years later David doesn’t seem that far from the seventeen-year-old who acted that night “in full obedience to my heart’s most urgent commands.”

  1984 Published: Bright Lights, Big City by Jay McInerney (Vintage Contemporaries, New York)

  2006 He wrote the book, David Grossman said later, with the hope it would somehow protect his sons. As Jonathan, the elder son, and then Uri, the younger, enlisted for their military service, Grossman wrote To the End of the Land, the story of an Israeli mother of a soldier, who sets out on a hike through the Galilee with the similar hope that her absence from home will keep away from her door the messengers who deliver the army’s bad news. But the book couldn’t keep them from Grossman’s own door: early on this morning the news arrived that Uri and three soldiers he commanded had been killed by a Hezbollah rocket, just a day before a cease-fire Grossman himself had argued for in a public speech. After sitting shiva, Grossman saw the novel to its finish: “What changed, above all,” he wrote, “was the echo of the reality in which the final draft was written.”