A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  September 21

  BORN: 1866 H. G. Wells (The War of the Worlds, Tono-Bungay), Bromley, England

  1947 Stephen King (Carrie, The Stand, The Dark Tower), Portland, Maine

  DIED: 19 B.C. Virgil (The Aeneid, The Eclogues), 50, Brundisium, Roman Empire

  1918 Jacqueline Susann (Valley of the Dolls, The Love Machine), 56, New York City

  1853 Charles Dickens protested publicly that any similarity between his improvident friend Leigh Hunt and Harold Skimpole, the villainous sponger in Bleak House—a similarity that haunted Hunt for the last years of his life—was “the wildest delusions of the wildest lunatics.” But in a letter to a friend on this day Dickens, a frequent target of Hunt’s own sponging, confessed otherwise. “I suppose he is the most exact portrait that ever was painted in words!” he boasted. “There is not an atom of exaggeration or suppression. It is an absolute reproduction of a real man.”

  1891 For decades, biographies of Stephen Crane included a poignant romantic episode from his youth when, for a few intense weeks, he courted a “tall darkly pretty girl named Helen Trent.” In conversation and letters he asked if she liked flowers and dogs, praised the virtues of naked ocean swimming, and told her, “You have the most beautiful arms I ever saw.” She questioned his interest in the “vile” slums of the Bowery and then on this day informed him she was marrying someone else. But did “Helen Trent” even exist? Later scholars, especially Stanley Wertheim and Paul Sorrentino, have argued convincingly that Crane’s friend and early biographer, Thomas Beer (best known as the author of an eccentrically memorable history of the 1890s, The Mauve Decade), concocted the letters Crane allegedly wrote her, and most likely invented the “well-bred” Miss Trent as well.

  1939 Living in exile from the Nazis in London, with his suffering from terminal mouth cancer nearly unbearable, Sigmund Freud selected his reading from his library with care. On September 20, he read his final book, La peau de chagrin, Balzac’s tale of a man who finds a magic hide that grants him wishes but shrinks, along with his remaining life, with each wish. “This was the proper book for me to read,” he remarked to his doctor, Max Schur; “it deals with shrinking and starvation.” The following day, he reminded Schur of his promise “not to forsake me when the time comes.” Schur hadn’t forgotten, and over the next two days administered doses of morphine strong enough that Freud never woke from their effects.

  1973 John Spurling, in the New Statesman, on J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur: “For a novel to be witty is one thing, to tell a good story is another, to be serious is yet another, but to be all three is surely enough to make it a masterpiece.”

  2005 The appearance of a copy of Flann O’Brien’s The Third Policeman, carried by Desmond in the opening episode of the second season of Lost, caused sales of the 1967 novel to balloon.

  September 22

  BORN: 1924 Rosamunde Pilcher (The Shell Seekers), Lelant, England

  1931 Fay Weldon (The Lives and Loves of a She-Devil), Birmingham, England

  DIED: 1914 Henri Alain-Fournier (The Lost Estate), 27, Vaux-lès-Palameix, France

  1968 Charles Jackson (The Lost Weekend), 65, New York City

  YEAR 1401 (by Shire-reckoning) Even the unpleasant Sackville-Bagginses were invited to Bag End for the birthday celebrations for Bilbo Baggins, turning the venerable age of eleventy-one nearly sixty years after he returned from the travels celebrated in The Hobbit, and his adopted heir, Frodo, who was reaching his hobbit’s “coming of age” at thirty-three. What a party it was, with fireworks, a great feast, presents for everyone, a rare appearance by Gandalf the Wizard, and, to the surprise of all, Bilbo’s sudden disappearance in a flash of light. And late in the evening Frodo received the gift, left by Bilbo, that was the true reason for the entire affair, a golden ring that would be the cause of Frodo’s own great adventure.

  1598 Two days after his comedy Every Man in His Humour was first performed (with William Shakespeare in the cast), Ben Jonson set out with a fellow actor, Gabriel Spencer, to settle a quarrel with swords in Hoxton Fields. The two had been imprisoned together for their parts in a “lewd” and “seditious” production the year before, but now Jonson, after taking a cut on the arm, killed Spencer with a thrust into his side. Sentenced to hang for murder, Johnson was able to avoid the noose by pleading “benefit of clergy,” a privilege by then extended to anyone who could read from the Bible before the court. Jonson was set free, but his worldly goods were confiscated and a T was branded on his thumb to mark him, since no one could plead benefit of clergy twice.

  1888 National Geographic Magazine made its debut.

  1912 In the space of four days in September, Franz Kafka completed two short but momentous works: the first letter in what would become his passionately ambivalent correspondence with Felice Bauer and, two days later, his story “The Judgment.” The letter, less than four hundred words long, took him ten careful days of composing before he could put it in the mail, while the more than four thousand words of the story poured out of him in a single night, from ten in the evening on this day to six in the morning the next, when he proudly burst into his sister Ottla’s room to read the results. It “quite literally came out of me like a regular birth,” he wrote, “covered with filth and slime,” and, understanding perhaps who had loosed such powers within him, he dedicated it to “Miss Felice B.”

  1948 Leaving Hollywood for good to write serious books, James M. Cain rented a small house for $165 a month in Hyattsville, Maryland, “the churlish little state from which I fled.”

  September 23

  BORN: 1865 Baroness Emmuska Orczy (The Scarlet Pimpernel), Tarnaörs, Hungary

  1907 Pauline Réage (The Story of O), Rochefort, France

  DIED: 1889 Wilkie Collins (The Woman in White, The Moonstone), 65, London

  1939 Sigmund Freud (Civilization and Its Discontents), 83, London

  1930 Aleister Crowley, the occultist, poet, mountaineer, libertine, and would-be prophet who by then had settled comfortably into his role as “the wickedest man in the world,” arrived in Lisbon to begin what a friend called “some stunt,” a round-the-world travelogue with his girlfriend. But when she left him, Crowley improvised another stunt entirely. With the assistance of Fernando Pessoa, a local writer who took an interest in mystical arcana (and who later would be recognized as the great Portuguese writer of his time), he composed a cryptic and woeful suicide note, laid it by a seaside chasm known as the Mouth of Hell at the moment of the autumnal equinox, and while Pessoa reported to the press that his friend had disappeared, he followed his girlfriend to Germany and watched with pleasure as the newspapers of Europe reported his death.

  1957 The unlikely friendship between Henry Green, the enigmatic English manufacturer-novelist, and Terry Southern, the American satirist nineteen years his junior, began with a fan letter from the younger writer to his elder and may have reached its peak with their collaboration on Green’s Paris Review interview in 1957. One of the finest in that venerable series, the interview is both deliciously sly (at one point Green purposefully mishears “suttee” for “subtle”) and theoretically serious, and was clearly stage-managed by its participants. Though the introduction falsely claimed the discussion took place on a winter’s night “in the author’s firelit study” (it was composed via letter in the late summer), their put-on did not include Green’s suggestion, in a letter on this day, that “The last sentence might be ‘and at this Mr. Green drifted off into the rain as sad as a grey dead starved pigeon wet in the ash can.’ ”

  1986 Nicholson Baker dreamed that John Updike, drunk in New Orleans, had to work his way back home as a train conductor.

  2000 Like architects, comics artists build boxes to hold human lives, and no one has taken the architectural possibilities of the form farther than Chris Ware. To the intricately nested and diagrammed boxes in earlier books like Jimmy Corrigan, he added another in Building Stories: the briefcase-sized cardboard container that holds fourteen loose books and pa
mphlets inside. One of those books, “September 23, 2000,” tells the story of a single day in an ordinary Chicago three-flat building: a sniping couple, a lonely young woman, the equally lonely landlady, a cat named Mr. Kitty, rain on the roof, plumbing problems, and a quiet Saturday that seems so morosely typical that it spins its inhabitants into despair until, for one of them at least, it becomes an anniversary to remember.

  September 24

  BORN: 1896 F. Scott Fitzgerald (This Side of Paradise, The Great Gatsby), St. Paul, Minn.

  1944 Eavan Boland (Against Love Poetry, In a Time of Violence), Dublin

  DIED: 1991 Dr. Seuss (Green Eggs and Ham, The Lorax), 87, La Jolla, Calif.

  2004 Françoise Sagan (Bonjour Tristesse, A Certain Smile), 69, Honfleur, France

  1853 George Brimley, in the Spectator, on Dickens’s Bleak House: “Bleak House is, even more than any of its predecessors, chargeable with not simply faults, but absolute want of construction.”

  1854 Henry David Thoreau took a bath, likely his last of the year.

  1920 J. M. Murry, in the Athenaeum, on Frank Harris’s Oscar Wilde: His Life and Confessions: “The personal magnetism of a man dies with him; his solid achievement as an artist alone has substance in the eyes of posterity; and we, who are posterity for Wilde, must confess that he is rather a pale ghost as an artist.”

  1930 “Is success in any other profession,” Moss Hart asks near the end of his memoir, Act One, “as dazzling, as deeply satisfying, as it is in the theatre?” By that point, you are more than willing to agree with him: certainly there are few successes more deeply satisfying to read about than the story Hart tells in Act One. Following a dramatic and unfailingly charming series of setbacks and breakthroughs, his transformation from stage-struck nobody to hit playwright climaxes in its final pages with the opening-night smash on this day of his Broadway debut, Once in a Lifetime. His later successes, from You Can’t Take It with You to A Star Is Born, were left for another volume, which a fatal heart attack at age fifty-seven kept him from ever writing.

  1952 Clarice Lispector arrived with her husband for a diplomatic posting in Washington, D.C., a “vague and inorganic city” that Lispector acknowledged was “beautiful, according to various laws of beauty that are not my own.”

  1956 Published: Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (Messner, New York)

  1964 Eve Auchincloss, in the New York Review of Books, on Brigid Brophy’s The Snow Ball and The Finishing Touch: “Brigid Brophy flings herself upon the novel as if it were an exercise machine and she a programmatic gymnast.”

  2001 Three weeks after his novel The Corrections was released to largely ecstatic reviews, Jonathan Franzen spent a day driving around St. Louis, the city of his youth and the lightly disguised terrain of much of the novel, to shoot B-roll footage for the Oprah Winfrey Show, awkwardly attempting to look contemplative at local and personal landmarks although he declined the one thing the producer most wanted, a visit to his old house. That same morning, Winfrey announced on her show that she had chosen The Corrections for her book club, but the footage never aired: she soon withdrew the invitation after Franzen, with similar awkwardness, expressed public ambivalence about his selection.

  September 25

  BORN: 1897 William Faulkner (The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying), New Albany, Miss.

  1930 Shel Silverstein (Where the Sidewalk Ends, A Light in the Attic), Chicago

  DIED: 1968 Cornell Woolrich (The Bride Wore Black), 64, New York City

  1970 Erich Maria Remarque (All Quiet on the Western Front), 72, Locarno, Switzerland

  1930 As chairman of the selection committee of the Book Society, Britain’s answer to the Book-of-the-Month Club, Hugh Walpole got an early look at Somerset Maugham’s latest novel, Cakes and Ale. But after opening it up before bed on this night, he “read on with increasing horror. Unmistakable portrait of myself,” he wrote in his diary. “Never slept!” Walpole saw himself—“the very accents of my voice”—in Alroy Kear, the favor-currying, self-promoting novelist of Maugham’s sharp satire, and many other readers did too. Maugham, of course, demurred, telling Walpole that “nothing had been further from my thoughts than to describe you,” but after Walpole’s death he freely confessed to friends and in the introduction to a reissue of the book that he indeed had Walpole, that “ridiculous creature,” in mind when he wrote what he would later say was his favorite of his own books.

  1940 It was perhaps not naiveté but his too-knowing skepticism that delayed the flight of Walter Benjamin from occupied France until the last minute. An exile since the Nazis took power in Germany in 1932, Benjamin, a German Jewish essayist of unique brilliance, joined the flood of refugees heading to the south of France ahead of the Nazi invasion in 1940 and in September, though his papers were not quite in order, made an attempt to cross the Spanish border en route to America. The story of his death is incomplete, but it is thought that, fearing he would be sent back to France, he took enough morphine to kill himself. “In a situation with no way out, I have no choice but to end it. My life will finish in a little village in the Pyrenees where no one knows me,” he is said to have written on a postcard to a friend on this night. “There is not enough time to write all the letters I had wanted to write.”

  1953 On the same day Saul Bellow called Anthony West, who had just panned The Adventures of Augie March in The New Yorker, a mamzer in a letter to his publisher, he protested to The New Yorker’s Katharine White that West had, “out of his own turbulence, thoughtlessness and pedantry,” attacked a “mad symbolical novel” that Bellow had never written. A month later he happily thanked her for the magazine’s “precedent-breaking offer” to let him respond in its pages, though he declined. The review’s confusion was too “vast, involved and peculiar” to even argue with.

  1959 After a quiet marriage ceremony in Beverly Hills, Helen Gurley, future author of Sex and the Single Girl and editor of Cosmopolitan, and her new husband, David Brown, went out for dinner and then to see Candy Barr on the Sunset Strip: “Candy is a damned fine stripper,” said the new Mrs. Brown, “and I thought it a perfectly fine place to spend our wedding night.”

  September 26

  BORN: 1888 T. S. Eliot (The Waste Land, Four Quartets), St. Louis

  1949 Jane Smiley (A Thousand Acres, The Age of Grief), Los Angeles

  DIED: 1936 Harriet Monroe (editor, Poetry), 75, Arequipa, Peru

  1990 Alberto Moravia (The Conformist, Contempt, Boredom), 82, Rome

  1929 “We very much like your title The Secret of the Old Clock,” wrote L. F. Reed of Grosset & Dunlap to Edward Stratemeyer about his latest idea for a girl detective series. However, Reed didn’t like most of the names Stratemeyer suggested for his teen heroine: “Stella Strong,” “Nell Cody,” and “Diana Dare.” He preferred “Nancy Drew.” Stratemeyer already had a thirty-year track record of creating series like the Rover Boys, Tom Swift, and, most recently, the Hardy Boys, so he confidently put the new sleuth in the hands of a young journalist named Mildred Wirt, and beginning with The Secret of the Old Clock, Wirt wrote nearly all of the first twenty-five Nancy Drew books published under the pen name of Carolyn Keene.

  1950 Raymond Chandler accepted Strangers on a Train, his last job as a Hollywood screenwriter, out of curiosity: he wanted to work with Alfred Hitchcock, and Hitchcock wanted to work with him, even if it meant driving a hundred miles to Chandler’s home in La Jolla for story meetings. But it didn’t go well. On this day, after eight weeks and $40,000 (which nearly equaled the writer’s lifetime book royalties to that point), Hitch fired Chandler. Later, when meeting with Chandler’s replacement, Hitchcock is said to have held his nose and dropped Chandler’s screenplay in the trash. Chandler, meanwhile, after he saw the final shooting script a couple of months later, wrote Hitch, “If you wanted something written in skim milk, why on earth did you bother to come to me in the first place?”

  1964 John Updike, in the New Republic, on Vladimir Nabokov’s The Defense: “His sentences are beautifu
l out of context and doubly beautiful in it. He writes prose the only way it should be written—that is, ecstatically.”

  1997 M. John Harrison, in the TLS, on Kurt Vonnegut’s Timequake: “Kurt Vonnegut is old, and bored with the novel—do we have to be too?”

  September 27

  BORN: 1955 Charles Burns (Black Hole, Big Baby), Washington, D.C.

  1958 Irvine Welsh (Trainspotting, The Acid House), Edinburgh

  DIED: 1961 H.D. (Helen in Egypt, Trilogy), 75, Zurich

  2009 William Safire (On Language, Safire’s Political Dictionary), 79, Rockville, Md.

  1912 When Rebecca West, not yet twenty, called H. G. Wells, one of the world’s best-known writers and an apostle of free love in his married middle age, “the old maid among novelists” in a review of his latest book, Marriage, he was intrigued and invited her to lunch with his wife. In person, he was even more interested—“I had never met anything like her before”—and so was she: “I found him one of the most interesting men I have ever met. He talked straight on from 1:15 till 6:30 with immense vitality and a kind of hunger for ideas.” (His wife, meanwhile, she thought was “charming, but a little effaced.”) A year later, they began an affair that lasted a decade and produced a son, the writer Anthony West, who grew up with West but preferred Wells.

  1960 Out of the invitation of the Soviet newspaper Izvestia to describe a single day in her life Christa Wolf made a life’s obsession, returning every September 27 to record her day and thereby creating One Day a Year, a memoir accumulated from everyday moments lived amid the upheavals of history and the self-conscious drama of a life dedicated to writing. And what upheavals: from this day in 1960, when she prepared her daughter’s birthday cake in Halle, East Germany, and discussed Lenin with her husband and a factory work brigade, to 2000, by which time Wolf had become the most prominent writer—a “loyal dissenter” controversial to all—in a country that no longer existed, subsumed in the unified Germany in which she now made her uneasy home.