A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1973 On a Himalayan slope in the morning sun, Peter Matthiessen glimpsed something “much too big for a red panda, too covert for a musk deer, too dark for wolf or leopard, and much quicker than a bear.” Was it, he wondered in The Snow Leopard, a yeti?

  1996 Forty-two years to the day after seeing his first opera—Rigoletto—on his eleventh birthday in Tokyo, Japanese industrialist Katsumi Hosokawa attends another musical birthday celebration, a concert by his favorite soprano, Roxane Coss, that was organized to draw him, and his business, to an unnamed South American country. But just as a song ends, the lights are shut off, and the men with guns enter the room. In adapting the events of the Lima hostage crisis, in which Peruvian insurgents laid siege to a party at the Japanese embassy and held its guests hostage for four months, for her novel Bel Canto, Ann Patchett changed details large and small, reimagining the crisis as an ensemble piece in which captives and captors are brought together by the “beautiful singing” of the title before the siege’s violent end.

  October 23

  BORN: 1942 Michael Crichton (The Andromeda Strain, Jurassic Park), Chicago

  1961 Laurie Halse Anderson (Speak, Chains, Wintergirls), Potsdam, N.Y.

  DIED: 1939 Zane Grey (Riders of the Purple Sage), 67, Altadena, Calif.

  1996 Diana Trilling (We Must March My Darlings), 91, New York City

  1847 “I wish you had not sent me Jane Eyre,” William Makepeace Thackeray wrote to the book’s publishers a week after it was published under the pseudonym Currer Bell. “It interested me so much,” he added, “that I have lost (or won, if you like) a whole day in reading it at the busiest period, with the printers I know waiting for copy.” (They were waiting for the next installment of Vanity Fair, just then making Thackeray a literary celebrity as it was serialized in Punch.) “It is a woman’s writing, but whose?” he speculated. In turn, when the second edition of Jane Eyre appeared, Charlotte Brontë (still writing as Currer Bell) dedicated it to Thackeray, “who, to my thinking, comes before the great ones of society, much as the son of Imlah came before the throned Kings of Judah and Israel.”

  1869 “I shall leave no memoirs,” promised Isidore Ducasse, and he kept his word. Few writers left less for biographers than Ducasse, who wrote for a short, furious time as the Comte de Lautréamont, died of unknown causes in Paris at twenty-four, and left behind a poetic novel, The Songs of Maldoror, later embraced by the Surrealists. Maldoror breathes fire, declaring that unless the reader is “as fierce as what he is reading,” “the deadly emanations of this book will dissolve his soul as water does sugar,” but Ducasse took a milder tone in a rare surviving letter to his publisher, in which he argued his works were moral and shouldn’t be censored: he “sings of despair only to cast down the reader and make him desire the good as the remedy.”

  1975 Inside, issue 198 of Rolling Stone may have been full of news of George Harrison’s new record, Foghat’s fall tour, and an unknown band called Talking Heads whose lead singer “looks like the bastard offspring of an unthinkable union between Lou Reed and Ralph Nader,” but the front page had the scoop of the year. In “Tania’s World,” Howard Kohn and David Weir landed the story everyone wanted, an inside report on Patty Hearst, the heiress-turned-terrorist who had taken up arms with her kidnappers, the ragtag revolutionaries called the Symbionese Liberation Army. Hearst was arrested just before the article appeared, but “Tania’s World” gave the first glimpse into the deliciously mundane details—the anxious road trips, takeout hamburgers, pay-phone rendezvous, safe-house skinny-dipping, and copy-shop communiqués—of her fugitive days.

  1992 John Sutherland, in the TLS, on Donna Tartt’s The Secret History: “It aims to be hypnotic and finally achieves something more like narcosis. Tartt might have been wise to show her manuscript to a ruthless editor as well as to her indulgent college friends.”

  October 24

  BORN: 1933 Norman Rush (Mating, Mortals, Whites), San Francisco

  1969 Emma Donoghue (Room, Slammerkin), Dublin

  DIED: 1970 Richard Hofstadter (The Paranoid Style in American Politics), 54, New York City

  1992 Laurie Colwin (Home Cooking, A Big Storm Knocked It Over), 48, New York City

  1911 Whether “unsuitable reading material” was really one of the causes of the wave of teen suicides that swept across Germany before the First World War, as some claimed at the time, Rudolf Ditzen, who had taken to calling himself Harry after The Picture of Dorian Gray, was drawn to a literary death, along with his friend Hanss Dietrich von Necker. At first the Leipzig teens planned that the one whose writing was judged inferior (by a third party) would be shot, but then they decided instead to stage a suicide pact as if it were a duel over a girl. Ditzen survived the shots, Necker didn’t, and on this day Ditzen was arrested for murder. The charges were dropped, but the scandal was still fresh enough that when he published his first novel after the war, he took a pen name, Hans Fallada, that he kept through his tormented but often successful career.

  1962 On a fall night in Harlem, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, James Brown recorded a show that turned him from a chitlin’-circuit headliner into a nationwide star. Live at the Apollo is the name of both the resulting record and a little book by Douglas Wolk about the record, one of the standout entries in the marvelous 33 1/3 series of books on individual albums. Cramming as much drama and abrupt intensity into his tiny book as Brown did into his thirty-one-minute LP, Wolk lovingly diagrams the intricate web of performers’ lives, R&B riffs, and hit recordings that put that single night’s performance into context and make even the most fleeting of pop pleasures seem full of meaning.

  1992 At 11:00 p.m., James Frey, a recent graduate of local Denison University, was cited by Granville, Ohio, police for driving under the influence and driving without a license after he drove his tire up onto a curb. Five hours later, Frey was released and never jailed again, which means that, among other events described in his memoirs A Million Little Pieces and My Friend Leonard, he wasn’t beaten by Granville cops with billy clubs or charged with Attempted Incitement of a Riot and Felony Mayhem, he did not get hit in the back of the head with a metal tray on the first of his eighty-seven days in a county facility for violent and felonious offenders by a three-hundred-pound illiterate black man named Porterhouse, nor did he read Don Quixote, Leaves of Grass, and East of Eden to Porterhouse, nor did Porterhouse cry when Anatole betrayed Natasha in War and Peace, nor did Porterhouse sleep with War and Peace and cradle it as if it were his child.

  October 25

  BORN: 1941 Anne Tyler (The Accidental Tourist, Breathing Lessons), Minneapolis

  1975 Zadie Smith (White Teeth, On Beauty, NW), London

  DIED: 1400 Geoffrey Chaucer (The Canterbury Tales), c. 57, London

  1989 Mary McCarthy (Memories of a Catholic Girlhood), 77, New York City

  1851 The Athenaeum on Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick: An “ill-compounded mixture of romance and matter-of-fact . . . Mr. Melville has to thank himself only if his horrors and his heroics are flung aside by the general reader, as so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature,—since he seems not so much unable to learn as disdainful of learning the craft of an artist.”

  1859 George Eliot read Balzac’s Père Goriot, “a hateful book.”

  1946 Did Ludwig Wittgenstein threaten Karl Popper with a poker the only time they met, at a session of the Cambridge Moral Science Club on this afternoon—or did the two philosophers even attack each other, as some rumors soon had it? A more interesting question, as David Edmonds and John Eidinow explain in their enlightening history of the incident, Wittgenstein’s Poker, was why the meeting exploded in undeniable hostility. The two men, both products of the cultural hothouse of Vienna, were spoiling for a fight: Wittgenstein impatient and exacting, engaged with puzzles of language and sure there were no other questions, and Popper certain that philosophy had an obligation to confront the political problems of the world, as he just had in The Open Society and Its Enemie
s, a defense of liberalism against the Fascism that had nearly consumed Europe.

  1972 It was the lowest point in their Watergate investigation. Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein woke to find their latest Washington Post story, which tied Nixon aide H. R. Haldeman to the slush fund that paid the Watergate burglars, denied by their main source and the Post pilloried as reckless and partisan like never before. By the end of the day, which also included a meeting pitching their book proposal for All the President’s Men to their future publisher, the reporters were able to confirm that Haldeman did run the fund, but Deep Throat, Woodward’s best inside source, was still worried. The next time they met, Deep Throat growled they had set back their story by months: “You’ve got people feeling sorry for Haldeman. I didn’t think that was possible.”

  2012 Faulkner Literary Rights, LLC, filed suit in Mississippi against Sony Pictures Classics claiming that Owen Wilson’s paraphrase in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris of two sentences from Requiem for a Nun—“The past is not dead! Actually, it’s not even past,” in Wilson’s version—violated the Faulkner estate’s copyright on the sentences.

  October 26

  BORN: 1902 Beryl Markham (West with the Night), Ashwell, England

  1945 Pat Conroy (The Great Santini, The Prince of Tides), Atlanta

  DIED: 1957 Nikos Kazantzakis (Zorba the Greek), 74, Freiburg, Germany

  2008 Tony Hillerman (The Wailing Wind), 83, Albuquerque, N.M.

  1726 Published: Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World by Lemuel Gulliver, later revealed as Jonathan Swift (Benjamin Motte, London)

  1849 When the time came for Flaubert to set off with his friend Maxime Du Camp for his long-imagined trip to Greece and Egypt, he nearly balked at the idea of leaving his mother for the two-year journey. The day they parted was “atrocious,” “the worst I have ever spent”; finally he just kissed her and dashed away, listening to her screams from behind the door he shut behind him. After midnight he composed himself enough to write and send her a “thousand kisses,” and after he woke, on this day, he wrote again, saying, “I keep thinking of your sad face.” That evening, Du Camp returned to his Paris apartment to find his friend prostrate and sighing on the floor of his study. “Never again will I see my mother or my country! This journey is too long, too distant, it is tempting Providence! What madness!”

  1913 When the body of Frederick Rolfe was discovered in his apartment in Venice after his death at age fifty-three the night before, he left behind, in the words of one biographer, “letters, drawings and notebooks sufficient to cause a hundred scandals,” as well as a small army of literary pseudonyms and identities including Frederick Austin, Frank English, George Arthur Rose, Nicholas Crabbe, and, best known of all, Baron Corvo, under which he published Hadrian the Seventh, a novel of an Englishman living alone with his cat who, after being rejected from the priesthood, is suddenly elevated to the papacy. Two decades after his death, Rolfe was blessed with the most appropriately idiosyncratic of biographers, A. J. A. Symons, whose Quest for Corvo has gained a cult following equal to that of Hadrian’s. Fellow connoisseurs and eccentrics—and connoisseurs of eccentricity—Symons and Rolfe always seemed to reserve their greatest curiosity for themselves.

  1977 “First wedding night. But first mourning night?” The day after Henriette Barthes died at eighty-four, her son Roland, who had lived with her most of his life, penciled those lines on a scrap of paper. There are common words for the moment of marriage, he seems to say, but not for the moment of loss, especially for an unmarried, gay man like Barthes, for whom an “innocently conjugal” affection for his mother (in Brian Dillon’s words) is a kind of unspeakable scandal. Over the next year, curious but fearful about the idea of making literature of thoughts that often seemed banal, he tracked his grief in hundreds of similarly fragmentary notes, which twenty-five years later, long after his own death, were published as his Mourning Diary.

  October 27

  BORN: 1914 Dylan Thomas (A Child’s Christmas in Wales), Swansea, Wales

  1932 Sylvia Plath (The Colossus, The Bell Jar), Boston

  DIED: 1975 Rex Stout (Fer-de-Lance, Some Buried Caesar), 88, Danbury, Conn.

  1977 James M. Cain (Double Indemnity, Mildred Pierce), 85, University Park, Md.

  1883 The Spectator on Anthony Trollope’s Autobiography: “Mr. Trollope seems to be one of the few men who have fully reached their ideal, and enjoyed reaching it to the full.”

  1909 A short visit back to Dublin from Trieste made James Joyce eager to return to exile: “I felt proud to think that my son . . . will always be a foreigner in Ireland, a man speaking another language and bred in a different tradition. I loathe Ireland and the Irish. They themselves stare at me in the street though I was born among them. Perhaps they read my hatred of them in my eyes.”

  1917 The marriage of William Butler Yeats at fifty-two to twenty-five-year-old Georgie Hyde-Lees—just weeks after a different young woman had declined his proposal—plunged him into a torment of second thoughts until, in their hotel room a week later, Georgie declared an urge to write. The “automatic writing” she produced broke through his gloom with its message—“all is well at heart”—and its invitation into a realm of spiritual communication the poet had long yearned for. Their frequent writing sessions, in which Yeats asked for guidance from the “Instructors” she channeled, transformed their marriage and his own writing, culminating in A Vision, an occult autobiography of sorts that he considered the great work of his life and that was met with incomprehension and scorn when it was published in 1925.

  1937 Stephen Spender, in the New Republic, on Franz Kafka’s The Trial and The Metamorphosis: “However roundabout it may seem, his approach to reality is direct: he is not building up an allegory in order to illustrate a metaphysic, he is penetrating reality in order to discover a system of truth.”

  1948 Dropout anthropologist, failed reporter, and now a miserable junior PR man for General Electric, Kurt Vonnegut couldn’t sell the stories he wrote on mornings and weekends until the day that, he would later say, “looms like Stonehenge beside my own little footpath from birth to death.” Arriving home after work, he found a check for $675 in the mail from Collier’s magazine for “Report on the Barnhouse Effect,” his first published story. The next day, he wrote his father that when he sold a few more, “I will then quit this goddamn nightmare job, and never take another one so long as I live, so help me God,” a letter his father put up on his mantel with a quote from The Merchant of Venice written on the back, “An oath, I have an oath in Heaven: Shall I lay perjury on my soul?”

  October 28

  BORN: 1818 Ivan Turgenev (A Sportsman’s Notebook, First Love), Oryol, Russia

  1903 Evelyn Waugh (Decline and Fall, Vile Bodies), London

  DIED: 1704 John Locke (Two Treatises of Government), 72, Essex, England

  1998 Ted Hughes (The Hawk in the Rain, Birthday Letters), 68, London

  1882 The engagement of Edith Jones to young millionaire heir Henry Stevens was broken, according to Town Topics, because of “an alleged preponderance of intellectuality on the part of the intended bride. Miss Jones is an ambitious authoress, and it is said that, in the eyes of Mr. Stevens, ambition is a grievous fault.” (Miss Jones instead married Teddy Wharton in 1885.)

  1910 At eighty-two, oppressed by the rivalry between his wife and his disciples and unhappy with the luxury in which they all lived, Leo Tolstoy stole away from his rural estate in the darkness of the early morning, leaving a note to his wife, Sophia, asking “to live the last days of my life in peace and solitude.” After a day of railway travel while Sophia tried to kill herself by wading into a pond, Tolstoy wrote to his daughter asking for the books he was reading, including Montaigne’s Essays, The Brothers Karamazov, and Maupassant’s A Woman’s Life. He soon grew ill, though, and took refuge in the house of the stationmaster in Astopovo, where his presence drew not the peace he had sought but a horde of journalists, photographers, dignitaries, and other onlookers
for the final days before his death on November 7.

  1937 In what may be the most notorious of all movie reviews, Graham Greene took on a sacred object: Shirley Temple. Having the year before compared her “oddly precocious body” to Marlene Dietrich’s, Greene wrote that in Wee Willie Winkie Miss Temple, age nine, was now “a complete totsy,” measuring “a man with agile studio eyes, with dimpled depravity.” Temple’s studio sued for libel in London and won, and Greene had to pay the tot and Twentieth Century Fox £500, which equaled the advance for his next book. For years after, until his house was destroyed in the war, he proudly displayed on his bathroom wall the studio’s legal complaint that he had falsely accused them of “procuring” the child star “for immoral purposes.”

  1952 Flannery O’Connor told Robie Macauley she had purchased a hen and rooster peafowl and four peachicks from Florida.

  October 29

  BORN: 1740 James Boswell (Life of Johnson), Edinburgh

  1905 Henry Green (Living, Loving, Party Going), Tewkesbury, England

  DIED: 1911 Joseph Pulitzer (publisher, New York World), 64, Charleston, S.C.

  1924 Frances Hodgson Burnett (The Secret Garden), 74, Plandome, N.Y.

  1692 A tireless and ambitious businessman, Daniel Defoe invested in a variety of enterprises: wholesale hosiery, cargo shipping, trade in spirits and tobacco, a diving bell to recover sunken treasure, and most memorably, seventy civet cats from which he planned to manufacture perfume from the musk recovered, by spatula, from their anal glands. His losses accumulated, however, and with the cats already seized for nonpayment, his creditors had him committed to the Fleet Prison with £17,000 in debts. He negotiated with his creditors to secure his release, but for the rest of his life they hounded him for the debts, even after he left business behind for the new and more successful profession of authorship.

  1888 Hoping to capitalize on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, Lewis Carroll designed the “Wonderland Postage-Stamp Case,” including illustrations of Alice holding a pig and the Cheshire Cat, slots for various stamp denominations, and a short essay, “Eight or Nine Wise Words About Letter-Writing.”