A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1934 Kate Millet (Sexual Politics, The Loony-Bin Trip), St. Paul, Minn.

  DIED: 1321 Dante Alighieri (The Divine Comedy, La vita nuovo), c. 56, Ravenna, Italy

  1982 John Gardner (Grendel, The Art of Fiction), 49, Susquehanna, Pa.

  1953 The multiple rejections he had already received might explain the rather resigned cover letter a schoolteacher named William Golding sent to Faber and Faber on this day with the manuscript of his novel Strangers from Within, which, he said, “might be defined as an allegorical interpretation of a stock situation.” Faber’s reader was unimpressed, rejecting it too as an “absurd & uninteresting fantasy . . . A group of children who land in jungle-country near New Guinea. Rubbish & dull. Pointless.” But later that month a young editor, Charles Monteith, picked the manuscript off the reject pile and was intrigued, and after significant revisions and an advance of £60 that “delighted” the debut author, Faber published the novel in 1954 under its new title, Lord of the Flies.

  1968 For Nick Hornby, as for much of the rest of the world, 1968 was a year of upheaval, although the tremors in Hornby’s life weren’t assassinations, protests, and war, but divorce, a new home, and a new school. All of which left him vulnerable at age eleven, when his father took him to his first professional soccer game, to the strange mass lure of unrelenting sporting mediocrity—in other words, Arsenal in the late ’60s. Young Nick had been a Manchester United fan for about three weeks, but that first visit to Highbury converted him immediately. “The fact that I was intruding on a marriage that had gone disastrously sour lent my afternoon a particularly thrilling prurience,” he recalls in Fever Pitch, his memoir of the glorious and inexplicable tyranny that Arsenal football has held over his life ever since.

  NO YEAR The first day of the canoe trip down the river in James Dickey’s Deliverance is a quiet one, spent mainly in preparation. The four suburban men, Lewis, Ed, Bobby, and Drew, drive into the woods of north Georgia, make vaguely tense arrangements with the locals, and put their canoes in, steering and pulling down the river with amateur awkwardness until dusk forces them to make camp. And in his tent at night, stone dead from the paddling, Ed sleeps and then wakes in the absolute darkness when something hits the tent. He turns on his flashlight. Above his head the canvas is punctured, “and through it came one knuckle of a deformed fist, a long curving of claws that turned on themselves.” Well, he almost laughs, “there was nothing, after all, so dangerous about an owl.”

  1972 A bookkeeper for the Committee to Re-Elect the President, an unnamed source in All the President’s Men, tells Carl Bernstein, “If you could get John Mitchell, it would be beautiful.”

  September 15

  BORN: 1789 James Fenimore Cooper (The Last of the Mohicans), Burlington, N.J.

  1890 Agatha Christie (The Murder of Roger Ackroyd), Torquay, England

  DIED: 1938 Thomas Wolfe (Look Homeward, Angel; Of Time and the River), 37, Baltimore

  1989 Robert Penn Warren (All the King’s Men, Night Rider), 84, Stratton, Vt.

  1866 Anthony Trollope let nothing get in the way of his literary industry. He had trained himself to write in busy train cars, so working in the drawing room of the Athenaeum Club caused him no trouble until the time he overheard two clergymen there complaining of how often he reused the same characters, in particular the disagreeable Mrs. Proudie. To their surprise and embarrassment, he identified himself and declared, “As to Mrs. Proudie, I will go home and kill her before the week is over.” Whatever the truth of the tale (he told it many different ways), kill Mrs. Proudie he did in The Last Chronicle of Barset, which he completed on this day under the working title “The Story of a Cheque for Twenty Pounds and of the Mischief which it did,” and which he, and many others, considered the finest of his vast output of novels.

  1883 Seventy-two years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, Ida B. Wells refused the demand of a conductor on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway to leave the first-class ladies carriage for the crowded colored car, and indeed scratched and bit the conductor as she was pulled forcibly out of her seat. Wells won a $500 court judgment against the railway—later overturned—but the incident also helped launch her new career in journalism: she recounted the case in her first column for the Living Way. Later she turned to a pugnacious crusade against lynching, first as the editor of the Memphis Free Speech & Headlight until its offices were destroyed by an angry white mob in 1892, and then as a writer and activist in Chicago.

  1895 Thomas Hardy surprised the visiting novelist George Gissing by leaping up at the breakfast table and killing a wasp “with the flat of a table-knife!”

  1945 When Isaiah Berlin, whose family had fled the Soviet Union when he was a child, returned as a British diplomat to one of the cities of his youth, now known as Leningrad, he asked after a poet from the past, Anna Akhmatova. To his shock, she was still alive, and he could meet her that day. In her tiny apartment they talked through the night, discussing literature and art, exchanging news of exiled Russians and those who had—often tragically—stayed, and unburdening themselves of their lives’ intimate details. They met only once again, but the visit proved epochal for Akhmatova especially: Berlin immediately became a figure in her poetry as the “Guest from the Future,” and nearly as quickly her persecution began, as the Soviet regime called Berlin a British spy and denounced Akhmatova as “half nun, half harlot.”

  September 16

  BORN: 1898 H. A. Rey (Curious George, The Stars), Hamburg, Germany

  1950 Henry Louis Gates Jr. (Colored People, The Signifying Monkey), Keyser, W.Va.

  DIED: 1672 Anne Bradstreet (The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung Up in America), c. 60, North Andover, Mass.

  2007 Robert Jordan (Wheel of Time series), 58, Charleston, S.C.

  1704 Diderot and d’Alembert may have been given the lion’s share of the credit for the great Encyclopédie, but the workhorse of the immense project was the Chevalier de Jaucourt, whom his colleagues mocked for his “merciless compiling” even as they were grateful for his industry. A wealthy nobleman whose mother excused his embarrassing scholarly efforts by saying, “A professor of medicine may be ridiculous, but it is not really a vice,” de Jaucourt, who was born on this day, joined the Encyclopédie after his own work, a medical dictionary, was lost in a shipwreck after twenty years’ labor. At his busiest, with the help of a handful of secretaries he once sold a house to keep paying, he composed over 15,000 encyclopedia articles in six years, covering subjects from Pharmacy to Hydraulics to Chess.

  1896 Three years after writing Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane found himself—whether by chance or design is still debated—taking the side of an alleged woman of the streets. In this day’s early hours, Crane, a star reporter for the New York Journal, saw a woman named Dora Clark falsely arrested for soliciting and, despite the advice of the sergeant on duty that “if you monkey with this case, you are pretty sure to come out with mud all over you,” testified successfully in her favor and wrote up his experience as a “reluctant witness” in the newspaper sketch “Adventures of a Novelist.” A month later, though, Crane testified in her favor again, and this time the police were ready with the mud they’d promised, turning the trial into an inquisition into the reporter’s own morals.

  1936 Malcolm Cowley, in the New Republic, on Margaret Mitchell’s Gone with the Wind: “I would never, never say that she has written a great novel, but in the midst of triteness and sentimentality her book has a simple-minded courage that suggests the great novelists of the past. No wonder it is going like the wind.”

  1944 It may have been that the only way Mary McCarthy could extract herself from her disastrous marriage with Edmund Wilson was to write her way out. Wilson, the most powerful critic of his day (with the possible exception of McCarthy), had already read “The Weeds,” her blistering portrait of a woman who gets up the nerve to leave her domineering, Wilsonian husband only to return to him miserably at the end, but when The New Yorker published it on t
his day it ended their marriage for good. When McCarthy asked her husband why the story made him so mad now, since she had shown it to him before, he replied, “But you’ve improved it!”

  September 17

  BORN: 1932 Robert B. Parker (Promised Land, Early Autumn), Springfield, Mass.

  1935 Ken Kesey (Sometimes a Great Notion), La Junta, Colo.

  DIED: 1771 Tobias Smollett (The Adventures of Roderick Random), 50, Livorno, Italy

  1948 Ruth Benedict (The Chrysanthemum and the Sword), 61, New York City

  1835 Charles Darwin, experimenting with the birds on Chatham Island in the Galápagos, which had never known human predators, pushed a large hawk off a branch with the end of his gun.

  1963 It’s like old times when childhood friends Guitar and Milkman get together and spend the day talking about how they might get the sack full of gold they are sure Pilate has hanging from the roof of her shack, and how they’ll spend it once they have it. Guitar thinks he could bankroll a mission to avenge the bombing that killed four little girls in Birmingham the Sunday before; Milkman isn’t sure what he’d do: he just wants to get away from town, from his past, or maybe he wants the excitement of doing a job with Guitar. Everything carries weight in Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, symbolic and otherwise, but this sack, once they get it, turns out to be lighter than expected, filled with rocks and old bones rather than gold, thereby saving the thieves from seeing their desires fulfilled.

  1992 Blue van Meer’s memories of her mother are fleeting and sketchy, as they are of the day, when Blue was five, that her mother’s white Plymouth Horizon went through a Mississippi State Highway guardrail into a line of trees. On any other day Blue would have been in that car too (and perhaps would have kept her mother from falling asleep at the wheel), but it’s a hint of the story to come in Marisha Pessl’s Specialty Topics in Calamity Physics that she had instead been whisked off from kindergarten that day by her mercurial, intellectual father to spend the afternoon learning about rural deer-management programs, the beginning, it turns out, of a vagabond fatherly tutorial that leaves Blue a precocious (and pedantic) student susceptible to the most dangerously baroque of intellectual plots.

  2000 Sven Birkerts, in the New York Times, on Joseph Brodsky’s Collected Poems: “Brodsky charged at the world with full intensity and wrestled his perceptions into lines that fairly vibrate with what they are asked to hold. There is no voice, no vision, remotely like it.”

  September 18

  BORN: 1709 Samuel Johnson (A Dictionary of the English Language), Lichfield, England

  1954 Steven Pinker (The Language Instinct, The Blank Slate), Montreal

  DIED: 1830 William Hazlitt (Table-Talk, The Spirit of the Age), 52, London

  1951 Gelett Burgess (Goops, and How to Be Them), 85, Carmel, Calif.

  1768 “I have now begun the sixtieth year of my life,” Samuel Johnson reflected on his birthday. “How the last year has passed I am unwilling to terrify myself with thinking . . . I have found myself somewhat relieved by reading, which I therefore intend to practise when I am able. This day it came into my mind to write the history of my melancholy. On this I purpose to deliberate. I know not whether it may not too much disturb me.”

  1840 Did Rafinesque—a friend of Audubon and correspondent of Jefferson who died on this day—really exist? His name sounds like an obsolete art movement or a vaguely disreputable adjective. And his life? It’s the stuff of a fabulist, a Barth or Pynchon, even in John Jeremiah Sullivan’s apparently factual biographical essay, first published as the Kentucky representative in the anthology State by State, and subsequently included in his collection Pulphead. Constantine Rafinesque, whose peers considered him ill-mannered and grotesquely corpulent, was, by his own measure, “Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, Philanthropist.” By Sullivan’s measure he was a man both ahead of and behind his time, a polymath in the style of the previous century who held advanced but often incoherent ideas on evolution, nature, and race that in their ragged, hungry mystery make, to Sullivan’s mind, as good a foundation as any for an American religion.

  1917 The young writer Aldous Huxley took up residence at Eton, where he taught (poorly, by his own account) for a year. Among his pupils was Eric Blair, who would grow up to become his rival in dystopian fiction, George Orwell.

  1959 Burns Singer, in the TLS, on Jack Kerouac’s The Dharma Bums: “The way in which comfort is piled on comfort (there is a never-ending stream of drink) adds to the sense of the fairytale where everything can be had for the wishing.”

  1970 Peter Morris Green, in the TLS, on Gore Vidal’s Two Sisters: “Even a mature and world-weary cat can be playfully wicked, and while always ending up by pouncing playfully into our laps, will pretend from time to time to aim for our throats.”

  September 19

  BORN: 1920 Roger Angell (The Summer Game, Let Me Finish), New York City

  1921 Paulo Freire (The Pedagogy of the Oppressed), Recife, Brazil

  DIED: 1942 Condé Nast (publisher of Vogue, Vanity Fair), 69, New York City

  1985 Italo Calvino (If on a winter’s night a traveler), 61, Siena, Italy

  1876 General Lew Wallace had already led an adventurous life—fighting at Fort Donelson and Shiloh as the youngest major general in the Union Army, meeting secretly with Billy the Kid as governor of New Mexico—when he turned to writing. Fascinated by the biblical story of the three wise men, he was drawn to turn that story into a book by an encounter on a train on this day with a fellow Shiloh veteran, Robert Ingersoll, known as the “Great Agnostic” and considered the finest orator of his day, whose love of arguing the finer points of belief drove Wallace, until then indifferent to religion, to study the life of Jesus and build a novel around it: Ben-Hur: A Story of the Christ, which became the biggest American blockbuster of the nineteenth century.

  1935 Fiction may not get any harder-boiled than Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? It’s a crime novel as suicide note, and it’s no spoiler to reveal that the title of the book is its last line too, spoken by the narrator, Robert Syverten, as he’s arrested for murder. Throughout the book, as Robert and Gloria Beatty, his partner in dancing and death, shuffle toward their fate through a brutal and endless dance marathon on the outskirts of Hollywood at the bottom of the Depression, the voice of Robert’s judge intones his final judgment, to be fulfilled “upon the 19th day of the month of September in the year of our Lord, 1935, in the manner provided by the laws of the State of California.” Robert may not have known where their story was headed, but Gloria did, and she died with a smile on her face.

  1963 Twelve years after their marriage and nine before their divorce, Alice and James Munro moved to Victoria, British Columbia, and opened Munro’s Books.

  1967 On this evening, CBS devoted an hour of its prime-time television schedule to Eric Sevareid’s interview with a retired longshoreman, and was rewarded for it. Eric Hoffer had by then published four books of self-taught philosophy and social commentary, beginning with The True Believer, all written in a chiseled, aphoristic style during his off-hours as a San Francisco stevedore. As singular as Hoffer and his story might already have seemed on the page, his presence on the screen—smoking, shouting, mopping his brow, and nearly leaping out of his chair with intellectual passion—was charismatic and compelling and made Hoffer a national celebrity, drawing so much interest that the special was repeated two months later.

  1979 Hermione Granger (from the Harry Potter series) is born.

  September 20

  BORN: 1948 George R. R. Martin (A Game of Thrones), Bayonne, N.J.

  1951 Javier Marías (Your Face Tomorrow), Madrid

  DIED: 1863 Jacob Grimm (Grimm’s Fairy Tales, Deutsches Wörterbuch), 78, Berlin

  1933 Annie Besant (The Ancient Wisdom, Occult Chemistry), 85, Adyar, India

  1879 Though a “seven-percent solution” of cocaine in water was Sherlock Holmes’s preferred vice, there is n
o evidence that Arthur Conan Doyle experimented with the drug himself, as so many did in the late nineteenth century before its harmful effects were understood. But he was not averse to testing other remedies on himself, as he reported as a twenty-year-old medical student in his first professional publication, “Gelseminum as a Poison,” in the British Medical Journal. Curious about how much tincture of gelseminum, or jasmine root, a popular pain reliever at the time, he could take without poisoning himself, he investigated. Doubling the standard dose led to short-term giddiness; quadrupling it caused severe headache, depression, “extreme lassitude,” and “diarrhoea . . . so persistent and prostrating” that he ceased the experiment.

  1929 “Hell, in case you’re interested,” Jim Thompson once wrote, “is actually the College of Agriculture of the University of Nebraska,” the institution at which Thompson matriculated on this day, just a month before the stock market crash brought the start of even harder times to the Great Plains. A twenty-two-year-old high school dropout and the family breadwinner as a hotel bellboy and oil-field roughneck, he had been told the ag school was the sensible route to steady work, but when his punishing schedule of part-time jobs dried up he had to drop out. He spent the next two years hoboing around the plains looking for work until, with the fact-gathering help of his mother, sister, and newlywed wife, he started churning out true-crime tales for magazines in a fifteen-year apprenticeship before his great crime novels of the 1950s.

  1998 James McManus, in the New York Times, on Lorrie Moore’s Birds of America: “Fluid, cracked, mordant, colloquial, Moore’s sentences hold, even startle, us as they glide beneath the radar of ideological theories of behavior to evoke the messy, god-awful behavior itself.”

  2001 Teju Cole’s Open City is the story of Julius, a Nigerian American psychiatry resident who wanders through New York, listening and observing. Julius’s finely defined intelligence makes the listening and observing full of vitality, but never more so than when he leaves for a few weeks in Belgium and gets to know Farouq, the manager of an Internet shop who takes over the middle of the novel with his own intelligence. A self-taught intellectual from Morocco who reminds Julius both of Marx, anonymous in London, and De Niro as the young Vito Corleone, Farouq talks to Julius of Paul de Man, Edward Said, Hezbollah, and Mohammed and traces his angry disillusionment with the promise of Europe to this day, when his grad-school committee rejected his master’s thesis without explanation, nine days after the Twin Towers fell.