by Tom Nissley
1999 Jean Shepherd (In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash), 78, Sanibel Island, Fla.
1892 The New York Times on Arthur Conan Doyle’s Adventures of Sherlock Holmes: “You may care for one detective story, but when there is a round dozen you may get a fit of indigestion . . . Sherlock Holmes, with all his mise en scène, has too much of premeditation about him. You weary of his perspicacity.”
1933 Evicted from her Florida apartment for unpaid back rent of $18, Zora Neale Hurston received a wire from Lippincott offering her a $200 advance for her first novel, Jonah’s Gourd Vine: “I never expect to have a greater thrill than that wire gave me. You know the feeling when you found your first pubic hair. Greater than that.”
1935 Dismissed on this day by the Nazi regime from his position at the University of Marburg because he was a Jew, Erich Auerbach arranged to resume his career in exile at Istanbul University, where he continued his labors on one of the monumental works of literary analysis, Mimesis, an imaginative and approachable multilingual survey of the literary representation of reality from Dante to Virginia Woolf. His achievement was only made more impressive by his distance from the usual reference materials he would have had in Europe, a condition he modestly deflected in his epilogue to the book: “If it had been possible for me to acquaint myself with all the work that has been done on so many subjects, I might have never reached the point of writing.”
1952 To his son in Rome, spending a year in residence at the American Academy, William Styron Sr. wrote, “Son, don’t eat so much Italian food that you will grow gross and heavy like Thomas Wolfe. Extra weight certainly shortens our lives.”
1961 Published: Mastering the Art of French Cooking, vol. 1, by Simone Beck, Louisette Bertholle, and Julia Child (Knopf, New York)
1995 However many men there actually were at the Million Man March at the National Mall in 1995, we only see a handful of them in Z. Z. Packer’s story “An Ant of the Self” in Drinking Coffee Elsewhere, and we only learn the names of two: Ray Bivens Jr. and his son, Spurgeon, who are there on an ill-fated mission to sell some black men some birds. Spurgeon—“nerdy ol’ Spurgeon”—can’t explain what makes him skip his debate tournament to drive his dad to D.C. in his mom’s car after bailing him out of a DUI, nor can he explain what drives him into a bloody battle with Ray Jr. on a suburban sidewalk in the middle of the night after the march, but there’s something in him, alongside his ambition, that wants to know the feeling of scraping bottom.
October 17
BORN: 1903 Nathanael West (Miss Lonelyhearts, The Day of the Locust), New York City
1915 Arthur Miller (Death of a Salesman, The Crucible), New York City
DIED: 1973 Ingeborg Bachmann (Malina, The Book of Franza), 47, Rome
1979 S. J. Perelman (Crazy Like a Fox, Westward Ha!), 75, New York City
1861 E. S. Dennis, in the Times, on Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations: “Faults there are in abundance, but who is going to find fault when the very essence of the fun is to commit faults?”
1945 On this day Ava Gardner became the fifth wife of the clarinet-playing lothario Artie Shaw, who put the starlet on a reading program so she might be worthy of the frequently bestowed title of “Mrs. Artie Shaw”: The Brothers Karamazov, Babbitt, Tropic of Cancer, The Origin of Species. But he’d deny the story Gardner later loved to tell, that he mocked her when he caught her reading Kathleen Winsor’s bodice-ripping bestseller Forever Amber. No doubt Gardner liked to tell it because just a few days after Shaw divorced her, he rushed down to Mexico, where Kathleen Winsor herself, sultry enough that some thought she should star in the movie of her own book, became Mrs. Artie Shaw number six.
1964 It was with great relief that Richard Hughes confirmed to his publisher on this day, after a visit to the Pinewood Studios, that “John does break his neck . . . , Emily does murder the prisoner and does bring the pirates to the gallows.” Hughes’s A High Wind in Jamaica, one of the strange and great novels of the century, had long drawn interest from movie producers, but only in 1964 did a big-budget production commence, starring Anthony Quinn and James Coburn as pirates and, as the doomed John, one of the children who prove more terrible than their pirate captors, a child actor in his only film role, the future novelist Martin Amis, who later recalled that the visiting author was “pleased, impressed, tickled” by the production, as well as “otiously tall.”
1969 “The plain fact is, Mr. Hayes, I have earned this job—through great love of the short story and great labor to know it.” Gordon Lish was thirty-five, a frustrated and restless textbook editor, when he heard that one of the biggest jobs in his little business, fiction editor at Esquire, was open. “I want this job,” he declared in a long letter to editor in chief Harold Hayes, “and I want it with more eagerness than is becoming to a man of my age because this is the work I was meant to do, and because I have not been doing it.” Esquire took a chance on him and for the next seven years, calling himself “Captain Fiction,” Lish championed new writers like Barry Hannah, Richard Ford, and his old friend Raymond Carver.
1978 “The evidence of copying,” expert witness Michael Wood testified in the trial of whether Alex Haley had plagiarized portions of Roots from Harold Courlander’s The African, “is clear and irrefutable.”
October 18
BORN: 1777 Heinrich von Kleist (The Marquise of O—), Frankfurt, Germany
1948 Ntozake Shange (For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf), Trenton, N.J.
DIED: 1973 Walt Kelly (Pogo), 60, Woodland Hills, Calif.
1973 Leo Strauss (Natural Right and History), 74, Annapolis, Md.
1831 Alexis de Tocqueville, living on “Street No. 3” while visiting Philadelphia, found the regularity of the city’s design “tiresome but convenient.” “Don’t you find that only a people whose imagination is frozen could invent such a system?” he asked. “These people here know only arithmetic.”
1859 Nine years after she stayed with the Swiss painter François d’Albert Durade while depressed after her father’s death, George Eliot wrote to him of her success as a novelist, so he could know “that one whom you knew when she was not very happy and when her life seemed to serve no purpose of much worth, has been at last blessed with the sense that she has done something worth living and suffering for.”
1917 Virginia Woolf, in the TLS, on Henry James’s last memoir, The Middle Years: “He comes to his task with an indescribable air of one so charged and laden with precious stuff that he hardly knows how to divest himself of it all.”
1921 Through six years in an orphanage, six more as a hobo, ten years as a traveling tree surgeon, and dozens of bouts as a professional featherweight, Jim Tully most wanted to be a writer, and finally, at the age of thirty-five, he received a telegram from Harcourt, Brace accepting his first novel, Emmett Lawler, launching one of the most unlikely literary careers of the century. His next book, Beggars of Life, became a bestselling hobo classic, while Tully, charming and pugnacious at five foot three, became the toast of Hollywood. Admired by Mencken, employed by Chaplin, and befriended by Jack Dempsey and W. C. Fields, he knocked out matinee idol John Gilbert with one punch and then costarred with him in Way for a Sailor before his career flamed out in the thirties and left him forgotten by the fifties.
1980 At first he was described only as “a free-lance writer named Bill,” one of the Kansas City locals who joined Roger Angell after the fourth game of the Royals-Phillies World Series for a dinner of ribs and baseball talk that Angell distilled, in his lyrical way, into a “murmurous Missouri of baseball memories” in The New Yorker. But by the time the essay reappeared in Angell’s Late Innings two years later, “Bill” was further identified as “Bill James, a lanky, bearded, thirty-two-year-old baseball scholar who writes the invaluable Baseball Abstract.” By then Daniel Okrent’s profile of James in Sports Illustrated had made him nearly famous; by the end of the century, his iconoclastic statistical theories made him one of the most influential figur
es in the sport.
October 19
BORN: 1931 John le Carré (Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy), Poole, England
1938 Renata Adler (Speedboat, Reckless Disregard), Milan, Italy
DIED: 1682 Thomas Browne (Religio Medici, Urn Burial), 77, Norwich, England
1745 Jonathan Swift (Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal), 77, Dublin
1908 Before there was a Macondo, the legendary setting of One Hundred Years of Solitude, there was Aracataca, the remote Colombian town where Gabriel García Márquez was born, and where his maternal grandfather, Colonel Nicolás Márquez, loomed as its leading citizen. And before Aracataca there was the dark moment in the family history, when Colonel Márquez killed another man in a “matter of honor” in a manner that may or may not have been honorable. The details were hazy—was his victim armed or not?—but the outcome was clear: the colonel was forced to leave town and make his fortune on the other side of the mountains. For the young novelist, given puzzling pieces of the story as a child, it was “the first incident from real life that stirred my writer’s instincts,” and one he was never “able to exorcise,” even after he transformed it, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, into the moment when José Arcadio Buendía hurls a spear “with the strength of a bull” into the neck of his rival.
1970 When Donald Goines was released from Jackson State Penitentiary in December 1970 after a stint for attempted larceny—following ones for armed robbery, abetting prostitution, and the unlicensed distilling of whiskey—he left with the manuscript of a novel and a contract for its publication, signed on this day. Inspired by the underworld stories of Iceberg Slim, Goines had signed with Slim’s Los Angeles publisher, Holloway House, who released Dopefiend and Whoreson, the first two novels in Goines’s short but prolific career as one of the pioneers of street fiction. Murdered in Detroit in 1974, Goines was rediscovered thirty years later by a new generation of hip-hop artists, with movies based on his works starring DMX, Ice-T, and Snoop Dogg.
1988 Three years after a forced marriage between two corporate titans, R. J. Reynolds and Nabisco, created RJR Nabisco, it was clear the awkward alliance between cigarettes and Oreos wasn’t taking, and Russ Johnson, the company’s flamboyant, mop-headed CEO, had an idea: a leveraged buyout that would split the two companies and, by the way, allow management to reap an obscene windfall. He sold his board on the plan at a meeting on this day, kicking off the greatest corporate frenzy of the go-go ’80s, a bidding war that nearly tripled the company’s stock price in six weeks and provided the dramatic material for one of the iconic narratives of the decade, Bryan Burrough and John Helyar’s Barbarians at the Gate.
October 20
BORN: 1854 Arthur Rimbaud (A Season in Hell), Charleville, France
1946 Elfriede Jelinek (The Piano Teacher), Mürzzuschlag, Austria
DIED: 1890 Richard Francis Burton (The Book of the Thousand Nights and a Night), 69, Trieste
1994 Francis Steegmuller (Flaubert and Madame Bovary), 88, Naples, Italy
NO YEAR “Enough,” the groom declares. “There will be no wedding to-day.” The wedding is off, in this quiet country church, because a stranger has stepped forward to testify that on October 20, fifteen years before, the groom, Edward Fairfax Rochester of Thornfield Hall, married Bertha Antoinetta Mason in Spanish Town, Jamaica, and that Mrs. Bertha Rochester is still alive. In fact, she resides in, of all places, Thornfield Hall, and Rochester’s thwarted second bride, Jane Eyre, is about to be introduced to her. Charlotte Brontë said little more about this earlier marriage in Jane Eyre, but in Wide Sargasso Sea Jean Rhys imagined the story of the first Mrs. Rochester and their doomed wedding, which in her telling Rochester greets with the words “So it was all over.”
1854 Not long after their honeymoon, Brontë’s new husband, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, took hold of the reins of her correspondence, telling his wife that letters like hers, which comment so freely about their acquaintances, “are dangerous as lucifer matches.” She must refrain from writing her opinions to her good friend Ellen Nussey, he declared, or Ellen must burn her letters after reading. For the good fortune of later readers, neither woman obeyed, allowing us to read, among other things, Charlotte’s comments about Arthur himself: “Men don’t seem to understand making letters a vehicle of communication—they always seem to think us incautious . . . I can’t help laughing—this seems to me so funny. Arthur however says he is quite ‘serious’ and looks it, I assure you—he is bending over the desk with his eyes full of concern.”
1962 During a cultural thaw that had just a few months remaining, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev broke a decades-long taboo by approving the publication of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, an unsparing novel by former prisoner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn about the brutal life in one of Stalin’s labor camps. To those in the Politburo who feared its revelations about the camp, the premier retorted, as he proudly recounted on this day to Solzhenitsyn’s editor, “What do you think it was, a holiday resort?” The novel was an immediate success in the USSR and in the West, but within two years Khrushchev was forced out of office by Brezhnev, within five Ivan Denisovich was quietly removed from Soviet libraries, and within twelve Solzhenitsyn himself was forcibly exiled to the West.
1973 John Updike, in The New Yorker, on Günter Grass’s From the Diary of a Snail: “Imaginations seem to be as choosy as mollusks about the soil they inhabit; amid a great deal of mental travelogue, this one episode dankly, grotesquely lives.”
October 21
BORN: 1772 Samuel Taylor Coleridge (“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”), Ottery St. Mary, England
1929 Ursula K. Le Guin (A Wizard of Earthsea), Berkeley, Calif.
DIED: 1969 Jack Kerouac (The Dharma Bums), 47, St. Petersburg, Fla.
1974 Donald Goines (Dopefiend, Whoreson), 37, Detroit
1920 J. R. Ackerley’s My Father and Myself is a disarmingly frank memoir of a life—or rather two lives—of secrecy. Ackerley’s secrecy was forced on him—being a homosexual was a crime then in England—but in his writing he told all, both about his own life and what he learned of his father’s, a prosperous and respectable Edwardian who once hinted to his son that “in the matter of sex there was nothing he had not done, no experience he hadn’t tasted.” Only after his death was that revealed to include bigamy: he left his son two letters, the first dated on this day, that confessed he had a second family, including three children who knew him only as Uncle Bodger. “I’m not going to make any excuses, old man,” he added. Neither did his son.
1967 “How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?” The critical tide had already turned in favor of Bonnie and Clyde when on this day The New Yorker published Pauline Kael’s 7,000-word defense of the movie, which began with the plea above. Lively and combative, Kael’s review ended up being an audition for the regular reviewing gig she kept at the magazine for the next twenty-three years. Meanwhile, in the New York Times, the movie and its stylish but unsettling violence forced the end of another career: Bosley Crowther’s tone-deaf campaign against the picture, which he called a “cheap piece of bald-faced slapstick comedy,” was the final straw that drove him out of the powerful reviewing chair he had held there for twenty-seven years.
1967 There is something of The Red Badge of Courage in The Armies of the Night, Norman Mailer’s autobiographical history-as-novel: the confused and comic figure muddling through the periphery of a mass event with little control over its outcome. In this case, though, it’s not a war the figure was muddling through but a protest against a war—the March on the Pentagon on this day—and the comic figure is Mailer, with a highly tuned sense of the absurd but also a drive to push to the center of things and make a spectacle of himself. The result is one of his best books: both grandiose and self-deflating, and attuned to the danger of something happening, or of nothing happening at all.
1990 Jay Parini, in the New York Times, on A. S. Byatt’s Possession: “A. S. Byatt is a writer in mid-caree
r whose time has certainly come, because ‘Possession’ is a tour de force that opens every narrative device of English fiction to inspection without, for a moment, ceasing to delight.”
October 22
BORN: 1919 Doris Lessing (The Golden Notebook, The Four-Gated City), Kermanshah, Iran
1965 A. L. Kennedy (Paradise, On Bullfighting), Dundee, Scotland
DIED: 1982 Richard Hugo (The Real West Marginal Way), 58, Seattle
1998 Eric Ambler (Journey into Fear,
The Light of Day), 89, London
1942 Raymond Chandler was always touchy about how his books were talked about, especially when it came to James M. Cain, with whom Chandler and Dashiell Hammett were often lumped as “hard-boiled” writers. Hammett, he wrote his publisher Blanche Knopf on this day, was “all right,” but Cain? “He is every kind of writer I detest, a faux naif, a Proust in greasy overalls, a dirty little boy with a piece of chalk and a board fence and nobody looking . . . Do I, for God’s sake, sound like that?” Despite this disdain, within a year Chandler was under contract to sound like Cain, as the co-writer of Billy Wilder’s adaptation of Cain’s Double Indemnity, for which Chandler would share his first Academy Award nomination for best screenplay.
1961 Richard Stern, in the New York Times, on Catch-22: “Its author, Joseph Heller, is like a brilliant painter who decides to throw all the ideas in his sketchbooks onto one canvas, relying on their charm and shock to compensate for the lack of design.”
1962 Well into his last years of drunkenness, delusion, and lingering charisma, Delmore Schwartz read his poems at the first National Poetry Festival in Washington, D.C., in a tremulously declamatory voice. That evening he “hurt his hotel room” (in the words of Richard Wilbur) and was brought, raging, to a police station, where his release was arranged by Wilbur and John Berryman, whose waiting taxi Schwartz then rode off in alone. Later, his great friend Berryman recalled that night in grief—as well as Schwartz’s earlier years of “unstained promise”—in “Dream Song #149.”
