A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  August 13

  BORN: 1940 Michael Herr (Dispatches, Walter Winchell), Syracuse, N.Y.

  1961 Tom Perrotta (Election, Little Children), Garwood, N.J.

  DIED: 2004 Julia Child (Mastering the Art of French Cooking), 91, Montecito, Calif.

  2012 Helen Gurley Brown (Sex and the Single Girl), 90, New York City

  1841 Skeptical and solitary, Nathaniel Hawthorne was always an unlikely candidate for utopia, and within months of joining the Transcendentalist experiment in communal living at Brook Farm he was lamenting that the work left him even less energy for writing than before. “Even my Custom-House experience was not such a thraldom and weariness,” he wrote his fiancée on this day. “Dost thou think it a praiseworthy matter that I have spent five golden months in providing food for cows and horses? Dearest, it is not so.” Leaving in the fall, he lightly satirized the commune a decade later in The Blithedale Romance, which those who had stayed loyal to the farm resented though it gave their short-lived experiment an immortality.

  1912 When he arrived at his friend Max Brod’s house this evening to discuss how to arrange the pieces for his first book to send to the publisher the next day, Franz Kafka was surprised and disconcerted to find a visitor, a cousin of the family, “sitting at the table” though she “looked to me like a maidservant.” Her name was Felice Bauer, and he was, apparently, repelled and attracted at once: coldly assessing her “bony, empty face” and her “blond, somewhat stiff, unattractive hair” in his diary while admitting that “by the time I was seated, I had already formed an immutable opinion.” Saying goodbye at her hotel he stumbled into a revolving door with her and nearly stepped on her foot, and the next day he apologized to Brod for any stupidity with his manuscript that night: “I was completely under the influence of the girl.” A month later he wrote his first of over five hundred letters to her, promising—falsely, as it would turn out—that he was an “erratic letter writer” and “never expect[ed] a letter to be answered by return,” and closing with words that would be innocuous, were he not Franz Kafka: “You might well give me a trial.”

  1974 It was the opening day of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in Vermont, but one of the star faculty members, John Gardner, scheduled to teach at Bread Loaf for the first time, was nowhere in sight and unreachable until, some days later, he arrived in a new Mercedes he had purchased with the proceeds from one of his recent bestsellers. Shortly after, drunk, he wrecked the Mercedes in a ditch, but despite—or because of—this entrance, he became the dominant presence at Bread Loaf for most of the next decade: combative and charismatic, holding court and hungrily engaging with students’ manuscripts, until, in the fall of 1982, he died when he crashed his Harley-Davidson near Binghamton, New York.

  August 14

  BORN: 1947 Danielle Steel (The Promise, Fine Things), New York City

  1950 Gary Larson (The Far Side), Tacoma, Wash.

  DIED: 1951 William Randolph Hearst (publisher, New York Journal), 88, Beverly Hills, Calif.

  1963 Clifford Odets (Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing!), 57, Los Angeles

  1881 According to the memoir of his wife, the naturalist Ernest Thompson Seton hated two men: the late General George Armstrong Custer, for the usual reasons, and his own father, who, following Ernest’s twenty-first birthday, brought out his massive cash book and computed the amount, beginning with the doctor’s fee for his birth, he had spent on his son through his life: $537.50. “Hitherto I have charged no interest,” he continued. “But from now on I must add the reasonable amount of six percent per annum. I shall be glad to have you reduce the amount at the earliest opportunity.” And repay him Seton did, though not before using the next money he earned to leave his Toronto home as quickly as he could, for Manitoba.

  1919 Richard Aldington, in the TLS, on Marcel Proust’s À la récherche du temps perdu, vols. 1 and 2: “That which is novel in M. Proust is the deliberate avoidance of the search for novelty. He is the antithesis of a man like Gauguin, always wandering about to find ‘quelques éléments nouveaux.’ ”

  1947 “So how did your grandmother die?” “Natural causes.” “What?” “Flood.” In his memoir Running in the Family, Michael Ondaatje recounted his family’s history in Sri Lanka in stories that retain the polished, elliptical style of legend, including the life and death of his grandmother Lalla. An eccentric, alcoholic widow who lived according to means she no longer possessed, Lalla imagined a great death for herself and found it: as storm waters rose around her, she spent this day playing cards and drinking indoors, stayed up through the night—the same night on which, though Ondaatje doesn’t mention it, neighboring India took her independence—and then in the morning walked out her door and was swept away by the floods.

  2008 Zadie Smith, in the New York Review of Books, on The BBC Talks of E. M. Forster: “To love Forster is to reconcile oneself to the admixture of banality and brilliance that was his, as he had done himself. In this book that blend is perhaps more perfectly represented than ever before. Whether that’s a good thing or not is difficult to say.”

  August 15

  BORN: 1771 Walter Scott (Ivanhoe, Rob Roy, Waverley), Edinburgh

  1885 Edna Ferber (So Big, Show Boat, Giant), Kalamazoo, Mich.

  DIED: 2009 Richard Poirier (A World Elsewhere), 83, New York City

  2012 Harry Harrison (Make Room! Make Room!), 87, Brighton, England

  1788 In the Almanach des honnêts gens, a radical new calendar in which the French poet and revolutionary Sylvain Maréchal replaced the saints’ names honored in the Christian calendar with the names of philosophers, poets, scientists, and even a courtesan, he left one day blank for future generations to fill: August 15, the date of his own birth.

  1947 No literary character is more beholden to the “occult tyrannies” of the calendar than Saleem Sinai, a.k.a. “Snotnose, Stainface, Baldy, Sniffer, Buddha, and even Piece-of-the-Moon,” who was born in the city of Bombay not only on the day of India’s independence from the British Empire (and its partition from Pakistan), but at its very moment, at the midnight hour between August 14 and 15. In Midnight’s Children, his second novel, Salman Rushdie, who himself was born in Bombay two months before Saleem, embraced the narrative possibilities offered by a child born along with his country, going beyond mere symbolism by imagining his hero as one of a handful of children whose midnight births brought them each a superpower, as if they were the X-Men of independent, divided India.

  1973 Passing herself off as Zora Neale Hurston’s niece to discourage “foot-dragging” among those who could tell her something about the late writer, who had died in poverty and obscurity thirteen years before, Alice Walker arrived in Eatonville, Florida, the tiny, all-black town Hurston had grown up in. Soon she and a fellow Hurston scholar, Charlotte Hunt, were directed to the graveyard in nearby Fort Pierce where Hurston had been buried without a stone to mark her and, wading into knee-high, snake-friendly weeds, chose a spot for the small monument Walker commissioned reading, “Zora Neale Hurston, ‘A Genius of the South.’ ” Walker’s moving, bittersweet account of their adventure, “In Search of Zora Neale Hurston,” appeared in Ms. in March 1975 and sparked the revival of interest in Hurston that continues to this day.

  1982 As someone whose best-known book, and lifelong project, is called Ten Thousand Lives, Ko Un has lived a fair amount of lives himself. A Buddhist monk in his twenties and a poet and teacher (and suicidal alcoholic) in his thirties, he became a leader of the resistance against the South Korean military dictatorship and spent much of his forties in prison, where, in solitary confinement under a life sentence, he began in the darkness of his cell to imagine the faces of all the people he’d known and compose his ongoing poem about their lives as well as those of figures from legend and history. Released from prison under a general amnesty on this day, he has become, in his fifties, sixties, and seventies, the most acclaimed Korean poet.

  August 16

  BORN: 1902 Georgette Heyer (The Black Moth, The Gr
and Sophy), London

  1902 Wallace Thurman (The Blacker the Berry), Salt Lake City

  DIED: 1949 Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), 48, Atlanta

  1998 Dorothy West (The Wedding, The Living Is Easy), 91, Boston

  1884 Hugo Gernsback, who was born in Luxembourg on this day, cultivated early interests in electronics, Mars, and the United States, and immigrated to the latter in 1903, where, a fan of Mark Twain, he called himself “Huck” and quickly became a radio entrepreneur. Building a fleet of electronics magazines, he published fiction along with the science, including his own novel Ralph 124C41+, one of the founding books of modern science fiction, though it has been described since as “pitiable,” “simply dreadful,” and “appallingly bad.” In 1926 he launched Amazing Stories, the first magazine devoted to what he called “scientifiction,” starting a ten-year run in which he published many of the early innovators of science fiction while frustrating them with his pathological unwillingness to pay for their work.

  1898 When the unnamed narrator of Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile after seven years studying in Europe, he wants it to be as it was when he left: the people, his familiar bed, the sound of the wind through the palm trees. But there is a stranger in the village, a man called Mustafa Sa’eed, to whom he’s drawn by an unspoken mutual interest until Mustafa stuns him first by reciting a Ford Madox Ford poem at the end of a drunken evening and then by thrusting a bundle of documents into his hands, including a birth certificate and passport showing years of European travel and a birth date on this day. Mustafa soon disappears from the village, but not before burdening the narrator with the tragic story of his own travels north. For years after, like a figure out of Poe, Mustafa haunts him as a phantom, a double whose legacy he feels doomed to follow.

  1922 You’d think Virginia Woolf would have been an ideal reader for Ulysses. Almost exactly Joyce’s age, she was similarly weary of the mechanics of traditional fiction and a fellow experimenter with her characters’ moment-by-moment consciousness. But she could hardly bear to read it. “An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me,” she wrote in her diary on this day after working through the first two hundred pages, “the book of a self-taught working man, & we all know how distressing they are, how egotistic, insistent, raw, striking, & ultimately nauseating. When one can have cooked flesh, why have the raw?” Violently snobbish toward Joyce’s “indecency” and no doubt competitive toward his innovations—“what I’m doing is probably being better done by Mr. Joyce,” she once noted—she finished the book with impatient boredom, eager to get back to reading Proust and to writing Mrs. Dalloway, her own stream-of-consciousness novel set on a single June day.

  August 17

  BORN: 1932 V. S. Naipaul (A House for Mr. Biswas, A Bend in the River), Chaguanas, Trinidad

  1959 Jonathan Franzen (The Corrections, Freedom), Western Spring, Ill.

  DIED: 1935 Charlotte Perkins Gilman (The Yellow Wallpaper), 75, Pasadena, Calif.

  1973 Conrad Aiken (The Charnel Rose, Ushant), 84, Savannah, Ga.

  1854 Bigamy! Insanity! False identities! Arson! The thrillingly convoluted plot of Lady Audley’s Secret, Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s triple-decker novel of Victorian sensation and anxiety, made it one of the most popular novels of the age. Writing soon after the Constance Kent murder case captured English headlines with a similar story of family hatreds and high-profile detective work, Braddon constructed one of the first detective thrillers around the discovery that Lady Audley, the beautiful young wife of wealthy old Sir Michael Audley, wasn’t who she said she was: she had abandoned her old identity (and her previous marriage) and on this day created a new one from scratch, a history, it soon turns out, she is prepared to murder to conceal.

  1902 After praising her historical novel, The Valley of Decision, Henry James urged Edith Wharton to write about an American subject, contemporary New York: “the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist’s that it waits for . . . Profit, be warned, by my awful example of exile and ignorance.”

  1918 Louis Untermeyer, in the New Republic, on Ezra Pound’s Pavannes and Divisions: “It is the record of a creative talent grown sterile, of a disorderly retreat into the mazes of technique and pedantry.”

  1924 A sixteenth-century alchemist who declares, “I am wiser by seventy than all such cod-merchants”; a Kansas City lawyer who thinks, “According to the mileage on the speedometer it was time once again to have the Reo lubricated”; his wife, “who was sure that in some way—because she willed it to be so—her wants and her expectations would be the same”; a San Francisco clerk besieged by the ’60s, who fumes, “It could be that Hate is the only reality.” These varied voices, and many others, came from the pen of Evan S. Connell, born on this day, who restlessly transformed himself in book after book, working odd jobs to support his writing for decades until his brilliantly expansive biography of Custer, Son of the Morning Star, became a late-career bestseller.

  1936 The Macmillan Company announced that two printing plants were turning out copies of Gone with the Wind for three eight-hour shifts a day, and that if all the copies published so far were stacked, they would reach fifty times the height of the Empire State Building.

  1958 Elizabeth Janeway, in the New York Times, on Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: “The first time I read Lolita I thought it was one of the funniest books I’d ever come on . . . The second time I read it . . . I thought it was one of the saddest.”

  August 18

  BORN: 1922 Alain Robbe-Grillet (The Voyeur, The Erasers), Brest, France

  1974 Nicole Krauss (The History of Love, Great House), New York City

  DIED: 1850 Honoré de Balzac (Père Goriot, Eugénie Grandet), 51, Paris

  1981 Anita Loos (Gentlemen Prefer Blondes), 92, New York City

  1563 Though as a teenager he wrote a political essay against tyranny, “On Voluntary Slavery,” that is still read to this day, Étienne de La Boétie is largely remembered for one reason: as the bosom friend of Michel de Montaigne, who, having spent the previous ten days at La Boétie’s side despite the threat of contagion, recorded his death from plague at 3 a.m. on this day. They had known each other only six years, but it’s often been thought that Montaigne’s retreat to a life of writing, almost a decade after La Boétie’s death, was a way of keeping himself company in the absence of his friend, about whom he wrote, in the essay titled, naturally, “Of Friendship,” “We were halves throughout, to a degree, I think, that by outliving him, I defraud him of his part.”

  1912 Among the dozens of poets she wrote to before the launch of her new magazine, Poetry, Harriet Monroe sent a short note to Ezra Pound (via his father, Homer L. Pound, assistant assayer at the U.S. Mint), and on this day Pound replied quickly from London. “I am interested,” he began, sending two poems and offering to keep her “in touch with whatever is most dynamic in artistic thought . . . I do see nearly everyone that matters.” Over the next few years he brought T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, and H.D., among others, to Poetry before breaking with the magazine in a series of letters whose tone he hinted at in this first note when he added, “However I need not bore you with jeremiads.”

  1943 Orville Prescott, in the New York Times, on Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn: “If you miss ‘A Tree Grows in Brooklyn’ you will deny yourself a rich experience, many hours of delightful entertainment (for it is long), and the pleasant tingle that comes from a sense of discovery.”

  1974 It was getting late in the summer, and Rodney Parker, as always, was working the phones: a college basketball coach happy with the two players he sent his way; a fellow fixer who might know a junior college for some of his other kids; a high school coach despondent because Albert King, the impossibly talented 6´5˝ fourteen-year-old, was slipping out of their influence. For a summer, when Brooklyn was a battle zone and the basketball talent pipeline was still a cottage industry, Rick Telander—a white jock nearly as young as the black kids he coa
ched, played against, and wrote about—tried to keep up with Parker’s hustling while gathering the stories for Heaven Is a Playground, a book that over time has gathered for itself some of the aura of the playground legends he chronicled.

  August 19

  BORN: 1902 Ogden Nash (I’m a Stranger Here Myself), Rye, N.Y.

  1903 James Gould Cozzens (Guard of Honor, By Love Possessed), Chicago

  DIED: 1662 Blaise Pascal (Pensées, Provincial Letters), 39, Paris

  1936 Federico García Lorca (Poet in New York, Blood Wedding), 38, Alfacar, Spain

  1890 “I was never fond of towns, houses, society or (it seems) civilization,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to Henry James, predicting he’d only return to Britain once, to die (he never made it back at all). “I simply prefer Samoa.”

  1903 Did the bloody Battle of Rivington Street between Monk Eastman’s gang and the hooligans loyal to his rival Paul Kelly take place in New York on this day or a month later? The historical evidence points to the latter, but that was of little concern to Jorge Luis Borges when he adjusted and compressed the facts and legends of Eastman’s brutal life into “Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities,” one of the bloody tales in A Universal History of Infamy, his first collection of fiction. In Borges’s imagination Monk Eastman seems less a real-life Tammany enforcer than a character from Borges’s library; more specifically from Herbert Asbury’s Gangs of New York, from which Borges drew whatever facts about Eastman he didn’t invent out of thin air.

  1938 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s card tricks convinced André Gide he must be clairvoyant.

  1946 It tells you a lot about Rosa Burger’s upbringing to know that her parents shoehorned their wedding on this day into the time between their arrest during the black miners’ strike on the Witwatersrand and their court appearance ten days later. Two years afterward, in the same month that the charges were dropped and the Afrikaner nationalist government took office, Rosa, their only daughter, was born, beginning a life in which she has to learn to define for herself an identity as the child of Lionel and Carol Berger, famous enemies of the state, and as a white in the apartheid system, a story that Nadine Gordimer, in Burger’s Daughter, based on the white South African activist families she knew around her.