A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  2006 Emma Tinker, in the TLS, on Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: “Fun Home is a reminder of why the graphic form is so well suited to memoir: like a quarrelling couple, words and images do not always collaborate, but undermine each other and reveal each other’s lies.”

  YEAR OF THE DEPEND ADULT UNDERGARMENT David Foster Wallace deflected questions about how he knew so much about the drug and alcohol recovery culture in Infinite Jest, saying he’d visited AA meetings as a “voyeur.” Only after his death did it become widely known that he had spent most of his adult life in recovery, including a stay at a Boston halfway house called Granada House, the model for Ennet House in the novel, where on this morning (in the book’s corporate-sponsored yearly calendar) Hal Incandenza, the brainiac high school tennis star and pot addict who is the closest thing to a stand-in for the author, nervously knocks at the front door, radiating, to the jaded eye of Ennet’s director, “high-maintenance upkeep and privilege and schools where nobody carried weapons, pretty much a whole planet of privilege away from” the lives of the house’s usual clientele.

  November 18

  BORN: 1939 Margaret Atwood (The Handmaid’s Tale, Cat’s Eye), Ottawa, Ont.

  1953 Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta), Northampton, England

  DIED: 1922 Marcel Proust (In Search of Lost Time), 51, Paris

  1999 Paul Bowles (The Sheltering Sky), 88, Tangier, Morocco

  1842 “Never was any thing more promising,” Dr. Matthew Allen, the proprietor of an insane asylum, assured Alfred Tennyson and his family about his plan to produce machine-carved wooden furniture. “All things are a lie and all things are false if this fails.” Fail it did, though, after Tennyson and his relations poured much of their inheritance into the project—on this day Tennyson attempted to intervene when he heard his brother Septimus was about to lend the doctor another £1,000, on top of the £8,000 they had already lost—although the Tennysons did regain much of their money a few years later, when a life insurance policy signed over to them was redeemed at the death of the broken Dr. Allen.

  1911 G. K. Chesterton, in the Nation, on J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan: “There is something almost anonymous about its popularity; we feel as if we had all written it. It is made out of fragments of our own forgotten dreams, and stirs the heart with sleepy unquiet, like pictures from a previous existence.”

  1963 They have the money, the plan, and the expert marksmen. All they need is a patsy and a map of the motorcade. At the end of American Tabloid, the first installment of Underworld USA, James Ellroy’s fictional trilogy of conspiracy and repression, hard guys Pete Bondurant, Kemper Boyd, and Ward Littell converge in a room at the Miami Fontainebleau. Too many people want the president dead for it not to happen—“there’s supposed to be a half-dozen or six dozen or two dozen more” plots in the works—and it’s set to go down in Miami, on November 18, until word arrives that there’s been a change of plans.

  1975 The Savage Detectives, the first of Roberto Bolaño’s two vast masterpieces, begins with one character making his way through Mexico City. Juan García Madero is seventeen, curious and companionable, studying law but idly consumed by poetry, conversation, and sex. For two months in the fall he’s drawn into a circle of poets, talkers, and lovers, and on this date he records in his diary a day (and a night) that in its passivity and pleasure—talking about poetry and shoplifting, pining for one of the lovely Font sisters and then being seduced by the other—could be exchanged for many of the others. It’s an idyll that will be upset in the coming pages, as the novel leaves García Madero behind to follow a multitude of voices and characters from Chile to Liberia, but never quite forgotten.

  2005 “I’m in awe of his productivity,” David Foster Wallace e-mailed Jonathan Franzen about their fellow novelist William T. Vollmann. “How many hours a day does this guy work?”

  November 19

  BORN: 1929 Norman Cantor (Inventing the Middle Ages), Winnipeg, Man.

  1942 Sharon Olds (The Dead and the Living, The Father), San Francisco

  DIED: 1974 Louise Fitzhugh (Harriet the Spy), 46, New Milford, Conn.

  1975 Elizabeth Taylor (Mrs. Palfrey at the Claremont), 63, Penn, England

  1845 Published: The Raven and Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe (Wiley & Putnam, New York)

  1849 Søren Kierkegaard’s ending of his engageme nt with Regine Olsen was one of the great literary breakups. Kierkegaard certainly thought so: having renounced their mutual passion on this day in favor of his vocations for writing and for God, he kept his thoughts of her aflame in his philosophical works for the rest of his life, while she, heartbroken, married another. After eight years of seeing her around Copenhagen without being able to speak to her, he could bear it no longer and wrote to her husband, giving him the choice of passing on to Regine a letter he had enclosed for her. Her husband returned the second letter unopened. Six years later, when Kierkegaard died and willed everything to Regine “as if I had been married to her,” it was her turn to say no.

  1956 Ernest Hemingway often promised he would write his memoirs of Paris, especially after Gertrude Stein slighted him in her Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. “I have a rat trap memory,” he told Maxwell Perkins then, “and the documents.” But his recollections got a boost when on this day the baggage men at the Ritz Hotel in Paris told him that two trunks he had stored there since the ’20s would be thrown into the garbage if he didn’t reclaim them. They turned out to be a “treasure trove” of old manuscripts and notebooks (and sandals and sweatshirts) that gave Hemingway the raw material for the reminiscences of A Moveable Feast, which settled scores with Stein, Dos Passos, and Fitzgerald and helped define—and name—an era.

  2000 Anthony Quinn, in the New York Times, on Michel Houellebecq’s The Elementary Particles: “One can only assume that France’s literary scene must have been suffering a profound torpor if it responded with such outrage to this bilious, hysterical and oddly juvenile book.”

  2008 On her fiftieth birthday, law and history professor Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Hemingses of Monticello, which kicked off an avalanche of awards for her work, including the Pulitzer Prize, a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant, and the National Humanities Medal, all of which honored her decades of research that established to a near certainty the once-dismissed assertion that Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemings’s children. In The Hemingses of Monticello, though, she went much further, painting a rich history of the family of free and enslaved blacks who shared—and helped build—the president’s hilltop home.

  November 20

  BORN: 1923 Nadine Gordimer (July’s People), Springs, South Africa

  1936 Don DeLillo (Libra, White Noise, Underworld), Bronx, N.Y.

  DIED: 1947 Wolfgang Borchert (The Man Outside), 26, Basel, Switzerland

  1995 Robie Macauley (The End of Pity, Technique in Fiction), 76, Boston

  1942 Were they a macho lark, or serious business? Ernest Hemingway’s wartime sea patrols have drawn mockery from biographers and friends alike—including his wife at the time, Martha Gellhorn—and one Cuban captain in the same waters later called him “a playboy who hunted submarines off the Cuban coast as a whim.” But however much Hemingway was prone to self-mythology, when he took his thirty-eight-foot sportfishing boat, the Pilar (named after a character in For Whom the Bell Tolls), out of Havana harbor in search of German U-boats for the first time on this day with a crew of five and an insufficient arsenal of guns and grenades, they were not just playing at war. German subs downed hundreds of ships in the Caribbean during the war and dozens in the Straits of Florida alone, and Hemingway’s was just one of the many civilian vessels, dubbed the Hooligan Navy, officially deputized to patrol sectors of the coastal waters.

  1951 “Dear Mr. Leonard,” began the letter from Marguerite E. Harper, Literary Agent. Harper had come across Elmore Leonard’s first published story, “Trail of the Apaches,” in a copy of Argosy magazine and was impressed at ho
w well he told a long story with hardly any dialogue. Was he interested in having an agent? At twenty-six, Leonard was, but to make sure he wouldn’t let the excitement get to his head, Harper warned in a letter nine days later, “DON’T GIVE UP YOUR JOB TO WRITE. I say this very seriously.” He didn’t: for another twenty years he paid the bills with advertising work in Detroit until, with the market for Westerns drying up, he made his entrance into crime fiction—and became known as one of its great masters of dialogue—with The Big Bounce in 1969.

  NO YEAR On November 19, Jerome Belsey e-mailed his father from London, “We’re in love! The Kipps girl and me! I’m going to ask her to marry me, Dad!” On November 21, he e-mailed again, “Dad—mistake. Shouldn’t have said anything. Completely over—if it ever began.” In between, though, Howard Belsey, his father, an English academic in Massachusetts, has already set out across the Atlantic in an anxious fury to confront his errant son as well as Monte Kipps, the father of the “Kipps girl” and his eternal academic rival in Zadie Smith’s On Beauty, her “homage” to E. M. Forster’s Howards End, which also begins with two messages, “I do not know what you will say: Paul and I are in love” and “All over. Wish I had never written. Tell no one,” that come before and after a journey that, once begun, can’t be called back.

  November 21

  BORN: 1694 Voltaire (Candide, Philosophical Dictionary), Paris

  1932 Beryl Bainbridge (An Awfully Big Adventure), Liverpool, England

  DIED: 1970 Anzia Yezierska (Bread Givers, Hungry Hearts), c. 85, Ontario, Calif.

  2011 Anne McCaffrey (The Dragonriders of Pern), 85, County Wicklow, Ireland

  1811 Fulfilling a suicide pact both delirious and deliberate, Heinrich von Kleist, a young dramatist and novelist considered by his family a parasite and a wastrel, shot Henriette Vogel, a woman with terminal cancer who had captivated him with her passion for death, and then himself at a rural inn outside Berlin. The two spent their final moments drinking coffee and rum and chasing each other like children, after writing letters of reconciliation and explanation to family and friends, assuring them that their souls were about to ascend “like two joyous balloonists” and making arrangements for their death, including, in Vogel’s case, ordering a commemorative cup for her husband’s Christmas present and, in Kleist’s, asking the Prussian secretary of war to pay a final barber’s bill he had forgotten.

  1829 To the question “Whether the poems of Shelley have an immoral tendency” at a meeting of the Cambridge Apostles, Arthur Hallam and Alfred Tennyson voted “no.”

  1853 Charles Dickens updated his wife on Wilkie Collins’s growing mustache: ‘You remember how the corners of his mouth go down, and how he looks through his spectacles and manages his legs. I don’t know how it is, but the moustache is a horrible aggravation of all this. He smoothes it down over his mouth, in imitation of the present great Original, and in all kinds of carriages is continually doing it.”

  1959 Hugh Kenner, in the National Review, on Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce: “Much energy has gone into chronicling the shillings various men lent him, how many, on what date, and whether they were repaid; but as for his books, it suffices to inventory their scenes and identify their characters . . . So much for the thirty-five years of a great writer’s time.”

  NO YEAR “Mr. Ewell, would you tell us in your own words what happened on the evening of November twenty-first, please?” asks the prosecutor, Mr. Gilmer. What happened at the Ewell home on that evening is what the jury, with the guidance of Mr. Gilmer and the defense attorney, Mr. Atticus Finch, must judge in Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Did Tom Robinson beat and rape Mayella Ewell, as Mayella and her father tell the court, or, as Tom testifies, did her father beat Mayella after she asked Tom in to do a chore and tried to kiss him? The jury—“twelve reasonable men in everyday life”—is out a long time considering its verdict, almost long enough to offer the hope that justice might, this time, prevail.

  1982 On the same night the killer of J. R. Ewing was revealed on Dallas, rock critic Lester Bangs and the Delinquents opened for Talking Heads at the Armadillo World Headquarters in Austin.

  November 22

  BORN: 1819 George Eliot (Adam Bede, The Mill on the Floss), Nuneaton, England

  1969 Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis, Chicken with Plums), Rasht, Iran

  DIED: 1916 Jack London (The Call of the Wild), 40, Glen Ellen, Calif.

  1993 Anthony Burgess (A Clockwork Orange), 76, London

  1890 “My wretched birthday,” George Gissing wrote in his diary, in the midst of writing his greatest book, New Grub Street. “Am 33 yrs old.”

  1907 One of the most fascinating invented characters in recent American writing was born on this day. Duke Wolff is the main character in one novelist’s book, Geoffrey Wolff’s The Duke of Deception, and a supporting character in another, Tobias Wolff’s This Boy’s Life, but in both cases—the books are memoirs—the inventing was done not by the authors, Duke’s two sons, but by the Duke himself, who claimed to have graduated from Yale and the Sorbonne, piloted test planes, and parachuted into Normandy. Records show that he did none of the above, and instead skipped out on bills, jumped bail, and committed check fraud in a lifelong con that makes him, in his sons’ superb memoirs, both a monster and a wonder.

  1963 Aldous Huxley, dying of laryngeal cancer and speaking only with difficulty, wrote a request to his wife, Laura, for a final injection: “Try LSD 100 mm intramuscular.” She went to retrieve the drug from the next room, where Huxley’s doctor and nurse, as well as the rest of the household, were watching a television that was rarely used. “This is madness,” Laura thought, “these people looking at television when Aldous is dying,” but as she opened the box of LSD vials, she heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Despite the doctor’s uneasiness and her own trembling hands, Laura injected the psychedelic herself and said to her husband, much as Susila says to the dying Lakshmi in Huxley’s last novel, Island, “Light and free you let go, darling; forward and up.” Huxley spoke or wrote no more before dying peacefully six hours later.

  1963 On the same day Huxley died in Los Angeles and the president died in Dallas, C. S. Lewis collapsed and died in London, two days after telling his brother, “I have done all that I was sent into the world to do, and I am ready to go.”

  1998 Michael Wood, in the New York Times, on Michael Cunningham’s The Hours: “The connections between the two books, after the initial, perhaps overelaborate laying out of repetitions and divergences, are so rich and subtle and offbeat that not to read ‘Mrs. Dalloway’ after we’ve read ‘The Hours’ seems like a horrible denial of a readily available pleasure—as if we were to leave a concert just when the variations were getting interesting.”

  November 23

  BORN: 1920 Paul Celan (“Death Fugue”), Cernauti, Romania

  1949 Gayl Jones (Corregidora, The Healing), Lexington, Ky.

  DIED: 1976 André Malraux (Man’s Fate), 75, Créteil, France

  1990 Roald Dahl (Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Twits), 74, Oxford, England

  1833 Honoré de Balzac’s chair broke from overwork, the second to collapse under him in recent days.

  1859 On the day before its publication, George Eliot began reading Darwin’s On the Origin of Species. “Not impressive,” she recorded at first, although two days later she realized the book “makes an epoch.”

  1905 Sometimes your brother is not your best reader. William and Henry James were well into their celebrated, but dissimilar, writing careers when William confessed his puzzlement at the “interminable elaboration of suggestive reference” in his younger brother’s novel The Golden Bowl. “But why won’t you, just to please Brother, sit down and write a new book, with no twilight or mustiness in the plot, with great vigor and decisiveness in the action . . . Publish it in my name, I will acknowledge it, and give you half the proceeds.” Henry, replying on this day, was a little miffed: “I shall greatly be humiliated if you do like it, & thereby lump it, in your affection, with t
hings, of the current age, that I have heard you express admiration for & that I would sooner descend to a dishonoured grave than have written.”

  1973 “The bowl,” on this cold Friday night, the day after Thanksgiving in New Canaan, Connecticut, “went around like the wine at Eucharist.” The soundtrack from Hair is on the hi-fi, talk of Milton Friedman and Jonathan Livingston Seagull is in the air, and a key party is, it seems, what you’re supposed to be open-minded enough to try as the straggly ends of the ’60s reach the suburbs in Rick Moody’s The Ice Storm, where the parents have no more idea what do with their desires and their dismay than their children do. In the Halfords’ living room, hands reach eagerly or anxiously or indifferently into the white salad bowl for the house keys of someone else’s spouse, as the roads and power lines outside become treacherous with ice.

  1987 Lawrence Weschler’s impishly serious curiosity has rarely had such room to operate as it did in Boggs, his profile of the artist J. S. G. Boggs, whose trial for illegally reproducing Her Majesty’s paper currency began at the Old Bailey in London on this day. Boggs made a provocative conceptual career out of attempting to pay for goods and services with his own drawings of money, which meticulously matched the details of an official bill on one side but usually left the other side blank. (It was a good bargain for those who accepted: his bills were worth more as pieces of art than their face value.) The Bank of England was not amused, but Boggs’s jury acquitted and then congratulated him.