A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1855 The second edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass is best known for carrying the most famous blurb in American publishing history: “I greet you at the Beginning of a Great Career—R. W. Emerson,” which, to Emerson’s dismay, Whitman put right on the cover. But inside the book, alongside Emerson’s admiring letter and other raves for the first edition of Leaves, he quoted the pans, including Rufus Griswold’s judgment on this day that the Leaves were “a mass of stupid filth”: “It is impossible to imagine how any man’s fancy could have conceived it, unless he were possessed of the soul of a sentimental donkey that had died of disappointed love.”

  1880 Is Arthur Rimbaud better remembered for the precocious age at which his poetic career began or the age, nearly as young, at which he ended it? Cut short not by death like Keats or Chatterton but by his own restlessness, Rimbaud’s voice flourished in his late teens and then fell silent. Rimbaud later surfaced as a coffee trader in Aden and then, on this day, signed a contract to become his firm’s representative in Harar, Ethiopia, where until his death of cancer in 1891 he sent a variety of goods—ivory, frankincense, panther skins, rifles—in camel caravans across the desert while in Paris the reputation of his abandoned poetry grew.

  1905 Alexander Innes Shand, in the TLS, on President Theodore Roosevelt’s Outdoor Pastimes of an American Hunter: “It may be said that he risks a valuable life too freely in treading dizzy ledges after the bighorn, in rushing in through the worrying pack of savage hounds to drive his hunting knife between the shoulders of the cougar, or in galloping a half-broken pony over slopes of shale or ground that is honeycombed with the burrows of the prairie dog. But that is the way it pleases him to take his well-earned holidays.”

  November 11

  BORN: 1922 Kurt Vonnegut (Slaughterhouse-Five, Cat’s Cradle), Indianapolis

  1954 Mary Gaitskill (Bad Behavior, Veronica), Lexington, Ky.

  DIED: 1999 Jacobo Timerman (Prisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number), 76, Buenos Aires

  2005 Peter Drucker (Concept of the Corporation), 95, Claremont, Calif.

  NO YEAR Rarely in literature does a life of reading come to such a bad end as in the case of Leonard Bast, the doomed young insurance clerk in whom the Schlegel sisters “take an interest” in E. M. Forster’s Howards End. Twenty years old when they meet him—today is his birthday—and living “at the extreme verge of gentility” (with the anonymous abyss of poverty gaping on the other side), Leonard tries to improve himself by reading Ruskin and Ibsen, but for the Schlegels he always seems less a man than a “cause,” and when he dies in the entry hall of their house, smothered by their books, one isn’t sure who is the clumsier: Leonard for pulling over the bookcase, or Forster for ending his life with such heavy symbolism.

  NO YEAR In Argentina, according to Pippi Longstocking, Christmas vacation begins on this day, ten days after the end of summer vacation.

  1948 “Hey, boy!” From his table at Les Deux Magots Richard Wright offered his familiar, smiling greeting when James Baldwin arrived in Paris for the first time. Baldwin, in fear that his hometown of New York would destroy him if he stayed, went into exile with Wright as his model, but their “pleased and conspiratorial” embrace at the café would be one of their last. Just a few months later Baldwin published “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” an essay that appeared to everyone but Baldwin to be an attack on Wright’s Native Son. Wright certainly thought so, and lit into Baldwin at another café on the day it came out. “Richard was right to be hurt,” Baldwin later admitted, when he better understood his own Oedipal motivations: “His work was a road-block in my road, the sphinx, really, whose riddles I had to answer before I could become myself.”

  196- The eleventh of November of this vaguely enumerated year (which matches the 1962 of the history books) is a Sunday, which means that Fred Exley, the narrator of the “fictional memoir” by Frederick Exley called A Fan’s Notes, is getting ready to watch a New York Giants football game at the bar of the New Parrot Restaurant in Watertown, N.Y. Exley, an English teacher and a drunk and, above all else perhaps, a Giants fan, doesn’t make it to kickoff, though: he suffers what he takes to be a heart attack but what a nurse at the nearby hospital informs him are the pains of “drinking too much.” Exley’s novel begins at this point and circles back to return to it, much the way Exley’s own sodden life is now inextricably linked to this great and graceful book.

  November 12

  BORN: 1915 Roland Barthes (Mythologies, S/Z), Cherbourg, France

  1945 Tracy Kidder (Mountains Beyond Mountains), New York City

  DIED: 1984 Chester Himes (If He Hollers Let Him Go), 75, Moraira, Spain

  2007 Ira Levin (Rosemary’s Baby, The Stepford Wives), 78, New York City

  1828 A symphony wasn’t all that Franz Schubert left unfinished when he died at the age of thirty-one. On this day, quickly deteriorating, he made a special request to his friend and librettist Franz von Schober in what turned out to be his final letter, “Please be so good as to come to my aid in this desperate condition with something to read. I have read Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot, and The Pioneers. If by any chance you have anything else of his, I beg you to leave it for me at the coffee-house with Frau von Bogner.” It’s not known if his request was granted—Europe was mad for James Fenimore Cooper in those days, and The Prairie and The Red Rover were translated into German as soon as they were published in English—but Schubert quickly fell further into spells of delirium and fever and died a week later.

  1969 It wasn’t quite a secret that American troops had massacred hundreds of unarmed civilians in a Vietnamese hamlet known as My Lai on March 16, 1968. Word soon got out within the army, and thanks to an ex-soldier whistle-blower, the following summer Lieutenant William Calley was quietly charged with murder. But no reporter had talked to Calley himself until Seymour Hersh followed a tip and traveled to Fort Benning, where, after midnight, he shared a few drinks with the young lieutenant, who had the look of “an earnest freshman one might find at an agricultural college, anxious about making a fraternity.” Later on this day, Hersh wrote up his findings for the first of a series of newspaper articles that, as photographs of the incident and further eyewitness testimony appeared, broke open one of the biggest scandals of the war.

  2008 Jonathan Lethem, in the New York Times, on Roberto Bolaño’s 2666: “By writing across the grain of his doubts about what literature can do, how much it can discover or dare pronounce the names of our world’s disasters, Bolaño has proven it can do anything, and for an instant, at least, given a name to the unnamable.”

  November 13

  BORN: 354 St. Augustine (Confessions, City of God), Thagaste, Roman Africa

  1850 Robert Louis Stevenson (Treasure Island, Kidnapped), Edinburgh

  DIED: 1955 Bernard DeVoto (Across the Wide Missouri), 58, New York City

  2012 Jack Gilbert (Views of Jeopardy, Refusing Heaven), 87, Berkeley, Calif.

  1797 They had thought to make some money by collaborating on a popular poem for the new Monthly Magazine, so on a winter’s walk on this evening Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth began to plan a ballad about a sea journey. Wordsworth quickly realized how different their working styles were and dropped out of the project, but not before making a suggestion, involving the giant albatrosses he had read about in sailors’ tales: “ ‘Suppose,’ said I, ‘you represent him as having killed one of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary Spirits of these regions take upon them to avenge the crime.’ ” After further walking and talking, and then five months of intense poetic labor, Coleridge completed “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.”

  1849 Herman Melville paid half a crown to stand on an adjacent roof to watch the execution of Mr. and Mrs. Manning, convicted murderers, in London: “The man & wife were hung side by side—still unreconciled to each other—What a change from the time they stood up to be married, together!”

  1874 Mark Twain was just a few books into
his remarkable career, but his celebrity was advanced enough that when he announced by telegram that he and his good friend Rev. Joseph Twichell would be walking from his home in Hartford to Boston, over a hundred miles away, the Associated Press sent out bulletins on their progress. Whether they actually planned to complete the stunt or not, the pilgrims lasted a day and a half and thirty-five miles and finished the journey by train. William Dean Howells welcomed the weary travelers with a feast in Boston and reported, “I never saw a more used-up, hungrier man than Clemens. It was something fearful to see him eat escalloped oysters.”

  1952 Though she was just forty-two, Margaret Wise Brown had nearly a hundred children’s books to her name when she took ill while traveling in Europe. Treated for an ovarian cyst, she grew fond of the nuns at the hospital and, to show one how well she was doing before being released, kicked a foot high in the air from her hospital bed, dislodging a blood clot in her leg that quickly traveled to her brain and killed her. With typically impulsive generosity—and little imagining it would take effect so soon or that its value would increase so significantly—she had recently revised her will to leave the copyright to most of her books, including Goodnight Moon and The Runaway Bunny, to a friend’s eight-year-old son, who spent most of his adult life as a drifter, arrested for petty crimes and living off his ever-growing royalty checks.

  November 14

  BORN: 1907 Astrid Lindgren (Pippi Longstocking), Vimmerby, Sweden

  1907 William Steig (Shrek!, Sylvester and the Magic Pebble), Brooklyn

  DIED: 1831 G. W. F. Hegel (Phenomenology of Spirit), 61, Berlin

  1965 Dawn Powell (The Locusts Have No King), 68, New York City

  1851 “I should have a paper-mill established at one end of my house, and so have an endless riband of foolscap rolling in upon my desk; and upon that endless riband I should write a thousand—a million—billion thoughts, all under the form of a letter to you. The divine magnet is on you, and my magnet responds. Which is the biggest? A foolish question—they are One.” Is that Kerouac writing ecstatically to Ginsberg in the 1950s? No, it was Herman Melville gushing to Nathaniel Hawthorne a century before, replying to the letter—lost to history—Hawthorne sent him after he received his copy of Moby-Dick, the book Melville published on this day and dedicated to his new friend Hawthorne “in token of my admiration for his genius.”

  1916 During a break in the dark early-morning hours of the Battle of the Ancre, H. H. Munro, a lance sergeant known under the pen name Saki, spoke his last words to a fellow soldier before being shot by a German sniper: “Put that bloody cigarette out.”

  1928 The tales of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s drinking are “exaggerated” and he’s “a very nice chap indeed,” P. G. Wodehouse reported to his stepdaughter. “The only thing is, he goes into New York with a scruffy chin, looking perfectly foul. I suppose he gets a shave when he arrives there, but it doesn’t show him at his best in Great Neck.”

  1930 After three years in Paris, where he worked with James Joyce and published his first essays, Samuel Beckett returned to Dublin as a lecturer in French at his old university, Trinity College. Bored and restless, he diverted his energies into a spoof lecture he presented in French to the Modern Language Society there on Jean du Chas, a poet he had invented. He gave du Chas his own birthday, April 13, 1906, and concocted for him a literary movement, “Le Concentrisme,” whose central concept was the hotel concierge as a figure of God. “That amused me for a couple of days,” he wrote a friend on this day. “I wish to God I were in Paris again, even Germany, Nuremberg, annulled in beer.”

  November 15

  BORN: 1930 J. G. Ballard (Crash, Empire of the Sun), Shanghai

  1941 Daniel Pinkwater (The Hoboken Chicken Emergency), Memphis

  DIED: 1932 Charles W. Chesnutt (The Marrow of Tradition), 74, Cleveland

  1978 Margaret Mead (Coming of Age in Samoa), 76, New York City

  1854 The elopement of Marian Evans (not yet known as George Eliot, the novelist she’d become) with George Henry Lewes, a married man, caused a fizz of scandal among their friends in England. Perhaps the most offended was George Combe, the leading English exponent of the new science of phrenology, the assessment of character through brain measurement. It was bad enough that she had run off with Lewes, a skeptic of phrenology. But worse: how could a woman with “her brain,” which Combe had once judged among the most impressive of any woman’s he’d measured, have so degraded herself? He searched for an explanation, and in a letter on this day he asked, is there “insanity in Miss Evans’s family?”

  1905 “For the first time the veil has been lifted from New York society,” promised the ad wrapped around Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, and on the New York Times letters page controversy soon erupted between readers who named themselves after society enclaves Wharton knew well, “Newport” and “Lenox.” After Newport argued on this day that the book, with its “detestable story” and “Henry Jamesey style,” should be retitled “The House of Lies,” Lenox came to the defense of Wharton’s “true literature.” Newport then admitted that what irked him wasn’t so much the truth of Wharton’s portrait as the airing of it: “In society, we regale ourselves with the latest scandal about Mrs. X., but we don’t shout it out in a Subway car.”

  1945 Albert Camus’s The Stranger was his “American” novel, breaking from French traditions with a hard-boiled style borrowed from Hemingway, Steinbeck, Erskine Caldwell, and James M. Cain. Camus acknowledged his debts in an interview on this day, three years after The Stranger was published, but he assured French readers his borrowing was a one-time thing. Writing only in the American style would create merely a “universe of robots and of instincts.” He would trade a hundred Hemingways, he added, for a single one of his countrymen like Stendhal or Benjamin Constant.

  1947 Maurice Lane Richardson, in the TLS, on Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: “In spite of all its pretentiousness and affectation, its total humourlessness, the book does impart a feeling of sincerity, a genuine concern for architecture.”

  November 16

  BORN: 1930 Chinua Achebe (Things Fall Apart, No Longer at Ease), Ogidi, Nigeria

  1954 Andrea Barrett (Ship Fever, The Voyage of the Narwhal), Boston

  DIED: 1973 Alan Watts (The Way of Zen), 58, Druid Heights, Calif.

  2006 Milton Friedman (Capitalism and Freedom), 94, San Francisco

  1865 “It has been a melancholy task to read this book; and it is a still more melancholy one to write about it.” Just a year into his literary career, Henry James reviewed in the Nation a new book of verse: Drum-Taps, by Walt Whitman. James’s melancholy mood was brought on not by the poems’ solemn subject, the Civil War, but by their “monstrous” author: “It is not enough,” he wrote, “to be aggressively careless, inelegant, and ignorant, and to be constantly preoccupied with yourself. It is not enough to be rude, lugubrious, and grim. You must also be serious. You must forget yourself in your ideas.” Certainly the self-submerging James must have found Whitman’s celebration of himself disconcerting, but he’d come to regret this review as a “little atrocity perpetrated in the gross impudence of youth.”

  1928 Three months after James Douglas, the editor of the Sunday Express, launched a campaign against “A Book That Must Be Suppressed,” Chief Magistrate Sir Chartres Biron agreed, ruling Radclyffe Hall’s novel The Well of Loneliness obscene for portraying the physical love between women “in the most alluring terms.” The defense counsel at first had tried to argue the book wasn’t about sex at all but later in the trial admitted, after Hall insisted he do so, that in fact it was about sex. Meanwhile, Sir Chartres rejected the dozens of expert witnesses prepared to defend the book, including Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster, remarking, “I don’t think people are entitled to express an opinion upon a matter which is the decision of the court.” When Sir Chartres gave his verdict, Hall, unable to testify herself, expressed her own opinion from the gallery: “It is shameful.”

  1952 Humbert Humbert, in Loli
ta, dies from coronary thrombosis, a few days before his trial for murder was to begin.

  1961 Robert A. Heinlein reported to his agent that his “bomb shelter is completed and stocked.”

  1970 With the money from the film of his bestselling novel, The Liberation of Lord Byron Jones, the story of a black undertaker shot by a white policeman who was sleeping with his wife, Jesse Hill Ford built an estate in Tennessee he called Canterfield, and there, on this day, his novel found an awful parallel in his own life when he shot and killed the black driver of a car parked in his driveway. Having written a novel about a white man acquitted of murder in the death of a black man, Ford was himself acquitted in a trial whose ironies drew the attention and scorn of the national press and, by his own account, sapped his capacity to imagine the complex and empathetic fiction that had once made his name.

  November 17

  BORN: 1916 Shelby Foote (The Civil War, Shiloh), Greenville, Miss.

  1983 Christopher Paolini (Eragon, Eldest), Los Angeles

  DIED: 1968 Mervyn Peake (Titus Groan, Gormenghast), 57, Burcot, England

  1992 Audre Lorde (Zami, Sister Outsider), 58, St. Croix

  1868 Anthony Trollope, running as a Liberal candidate for Parliament in what turned out to be “the most wretched fortnight of my manhood,” finished fourth among four candidates.

  2003 Of the thirty-seven courses in the eleven-hour lunch the novelist Jim Harrison shared with eleven fellow gourmands in France and later chronicled for The New Yorker, he declined only one: oysters and cream of Camembert on toast, a combination that turns his tummy. The other thirty-six, all based on archival recipes from the history of French cookery, he happily and/or dutifully consumed; he particularly enjoyed the “tart of calf’s brains with shelled peas” and the “filet of sole with champagne sauce accompanied by monkfish livers.” And to those who might question the excess of a meal that “cost as much as a new Volvo station wagon,” he can only reply, “Life is a near-death experience, and our devious minds will do anything to make it interesting.”