by Tom Nissley
NO YEAR The Advent calendar Enid Lambert brings out every year on the last day of November is not the usual cardboard-windowed model. It’s hand-sewn of green felt and canvas, with two rows of twelve pockets. Each pocket holds an ornament for the tree, and the last is always reserved for the Christ child, a tiny plastic baby in a gold-painted walnut shell. As the ornaments go on the tree and Enid’s grown-up children straggle across the country toward their hometown of St. Jude, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections turns out, despite its every satirical impulse, to be a Christmas story, one that bends ever so slightly toward Enid’s outdated but fierce will.
December Did Dickens invent Christmas? It’s often said he did, rescuing the holiday from the neglect that Puritanism, Utilitarianism, and the Scrooge-like forces of the Industrial Revolution had imposed on it. But Dickens himself would hardly have said he invented the traditions he celebrated: the mission of his Ghost of Christmas Present, after all, is to show that the spirit and the customs of the holiday are alive among the people, and no humbug at all. But the appearance of A Christmas Carol in 1843 did coincide with the arrival in Victorian England of some of the modern traditions of the holiday. That same year the first commercial Christmas cards were printed in England, two years after Prince Albert brought the German custom of the Christmas tree with him to England following his marriage to Queen Victoria.
Christmas was undoubtedly Dickens’s favorite holiday, and he made it a tradition of his own. A Christmas Carol was the first of his five almost-annual Christmas books (when he skipped a year in 1847 while working on Dombey and Son, he was “very loath to lose the money. And still more so to leave any gap at Christmas firesides which I ought to fill”), and for eighteen more years he published Christmas editions of his magazines Household Words and All the Year Round. And the popular and exhausting activity that nearly took over the last decades of his career, his public reading of his own works, began with his Christmas stories. For years they remained his favorite texts to perform, whether it was December or not.
One of the Christmas traditions Dickens most wanted to celebrate was storytelling itself. The early Christmas numbers of Household Words were imagined as stories told around the fireplace, often ghost stories like A Christmas Carol. The best-known American ghost tale is told around the Christmas hearth too: “The story had held us, round the fire, sufficiently breathless,” it begins, “gruesome, as, on Christmas Eve in an old house, a strange tale should essentially be.” We learn little more about that first gruesome story, except that the one that follows is even stranger and more unsettling, a ratcheting of dread that gave Henry James its title, The Turn of the Screw.
Telling ghost stories around the hearth might have declined since Dickens’s and James’s times, but it’s striking how important the voice of the storyteller remains in more recent Christmas traditions: Dylan Thomas, nostalgic for the winters of his childhood in “A Child’s Christmas in Wales”; Jean Shepherd, nostalgic for the Red Ryder air rifles of his own childhood in In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, later adapted, with Shepherd’s own narration, into the holiday TV staple A Christmas Story; and David Sedaris, nostalgic for absolutely nothing from his years as an underpaid elf in the “SantaLand Diaries,” the NPR monologue that launched his storytelling career.
RECOMMENDED READING FOR DECEMBER
The Chemical History of a Candle by Michael Faraday (1861) Dickens was not the only Victorian with a taste for public speaking: Faraday created the series of Christmastime scientific lectures for young people at the Royal Institution, the best known of which remains his own, a classic of scientific explanation for readers of any age.
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868) If you were one of the March girls, you’d read the copies of The Pilgrim’s Progress you found under your pillow on Christmas morning, but we’ll excuse you if you prefer to read about the Marches themselves instead.
The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (1951) Holden’s not supposed to be back from Pencey Prep for Christmas vacation until Wednesday, but since he’s been kicked out anyway, he heads to the city early, figuring on taking it easy in some inexpensive hotel and going home all rested up and feeling swell.
Chilly Scenes of Winter by Ann Beattie (1976) Want to extend The Catcher in the Rye’s feeling of holiday ennui well into your twenties? Spend the days before New Year’s with Charles, love-struck over a married woman whom he keeps giving Salinger books until she can’t bear it anymore.
The Ghost Writer by Philip Roth (1979) The brash and eventful fictional life of Nathan Zuckerman, which Roth followed through another eight books, starts quietly, with his abashed arrival on a December afternoon at the country retreat of his idol, the reclusive novelist E. I. Lonoff, where, by the end of this short novel (one of Roth’s best), he will think he’s falling in love with a young woman he’s sure is, yes, Anne Frank.
The Orchid Thief by Susan Orlean (1998) Head south with the snowbirds to the swamps of Florida as Orlean investigates the December theft of over two hundred orchids from state swampland and, in particular, its strangely charismatic primary perpetrator, John Laroche.
Stalingrad by Antony Beevor (1998) Or perhaps your December isn’t cold enough. Beevor’s authoritative account of the siege of Stalingrad, the wintry graveyard of Hitler’s plans to conquer Russia, captures the nearly incomprehensible human drama that changed the course of the war at a cost of a million lives.
December by Alexander Kluge and Gerhard Richter (2012) Two German artists reinvent the calendar book, with Richter’s photographs of snowy, implacable winter and Kluge’s enigmatic anecdotes from Decembers past, drawing from 21,999 B.C. to 2009 A.D. but circling back obsessively to the two empires, Nazi and Soviet, that met at Stalingrad.
December 1
BORN: 1935 Woody Allen (Getting Even, Without Feathers), Bronx, N.Y.
1958 Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City), Glastonbury, Conn.
DIED: 1947 Aleister Crowley (The Book of the Law, The Book of Lies), 72, Hastings, England
2011 Christa Wolf (Cassandra, The Quest for Christa T.), 82, Berlin
1816 Leigh Hunt, in the Examiner, on John Keats: “He has not yet published any thing except in a newspaper; but a set of his manuscripts was handed us the other day, and fairly surprised us with the truth of their ambition, and ardent grappling with Nature.”
1825 Setting out for St. Petersburg after the death of the tsar, Alexander Pushkin was saved from joining the doomed Decembrist uprising when he took a pack of hares running across the path of his carriage as an omen of bad luck and turned back.
1911 Edgar Rice Burroughs had either a diligent habit of personal recordkeeping or a premonition of his later fame when, not long after the failure of his latest business venture (selling wholesale pencil sharpeners), he noted that at 8 p.m. on December 1, 1911, he wrote the opening words of his second serial for The All-Story magazine: “I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me, or to any other.” Six months later, he recorded that at 10:25 p.m. on May 14, 1912, he wrote the final words of the tale: “ ‘My mother was an ape, and of course she couldn’t tell me anything about it—and I never knew who my father was.’ ” The first installment of “Tarzan of the Apes” appeared in All-Story in October; Tarzan made his movie debut in 1918.
1948 The death of an unidentified man found on Somerton Beach in Adelaide, South Australia, on this day might not have remained one of Australia’s most intriguing unsolved mysteries were it not for the two words on a piece of paper found in the fob pocket of his trousers: tamam shud, Persian for “the end” and the final line torn from a copy of one of the most popular books of the age, The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam.
1960 David Halberstam opened The Best and the Brightest, his history of the American ensnarement in Vietnam, with the entrance of a figure who would play almost no direct role in the rest of the book. On a “cold day in December,” Robert A. Lovett, one of the “wise men” of establishment Washington, arrived at the Georgetown h
ome of a man two decades his junior, John F. Kennedy, who was building his cabinet after his election the previous month. Kennedy, or so he told reporters, was willing to offer Lovett his choice of Defense (a job he’d held under Truman), State, or Treasury; Lovett declined them all but suggested the men, including Dean Rusk for State and Robert McNamara for Defense, who would become the central figures in the administration’s stumble toward a disastrous war.
December 2
BORN: 1958 George Saunders (CivilWarLand in Bad Decline), Amarillo, Tex.
1963 Ann Patchett (Bel Canto, State of Wonder), Los Angeles
DIED: 1814 Marquis de Sade (Justine, The 120 Days of Sodom), 74, Charenton, France
1995 Robertson Davies (Fifth Business), 82, Orangeville, Ont.
1793 Samuel Taylor Coleridge enlisted with the 15th Light Dragoons as “Silas Tomkyn Comberbach.” In April, with his brother’s help, he was discharged as “insane.”
1805 At the end of the Battle of Austerlitz, and the close of book three of War and Peace, Prince Andrei lies unconscious, left to die from his wounds. Napoleon himself makes a cameo appearance, remarking, “That’s a fine death!” Hearing him, Andrei finds the little emperor, until now his hero, suddenly insignificant compared to the beauty of the “lofty and everlasting sky” he has just glimpsed at the point of death. Like Napoleon, Tolstoy at first thought Andrei wouldn’t survive, as he explained to a friend as he worked on the novel: “I needed a brilliant young man to be killed at the battle of Austerlitz . . . Then he began to interest me; I imagined a part for him to play in the further course of the novel and I took pity on him, merely wounding him seriously instead of killing him.”
1919 Having lost the manuscript for Seven Pillars of Wisdom, his memoir of his role in the Arab revolt against the Turks, when he left it in a briefcase at Reading station, T. E. Lawrence began on this day to write the book again. Working day and night from memory and battle reports while wearing a flying suit to keep warm in an unheated office and living off sandwiches purchased at nearby railway stations, he rewrote nearly all of a draft of 400,000 words in thirty days. He spent the next few years obsessively revising the book before publishing it—perversely, given the worldwide interest in his story, or shrewdly, given the way it added to his mystique—only in a limited edition whose lavish production put him into debt for years.
1945 At a party at the Hollywood estate of Preston Sturges while en route to Mexico from his beach shack in British Columbia, Malcolm Lowry defeated a national Ping-Pong champion, twice.
2001 Patrick McGrath, in the New York Times, on Peter Ackroyd’s London: A Biography: “Just what is it about this damp, gray town, the suicide capital of Europe in the 19th century, that can make a grown man cry, or at least inspire him to write such a robust, passionate and exhaustively researched book as this?”
December 3
BORN: 1857 Joseph Conrad (Heart of Darkness, Lord Jim), Berdychiv, Russian Empire
1953 Patrick Chamoiseau (Texaco, School Days), Fort-de-France, Martinique
DIED: 1910 Mary Baker Eddy (Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures), 89, Newton, Mass.
2000 Gwendolyn Brooks (Annie Allen, Maud Martha), 83, Chicago
1897 Edith Wharton published her first book, The Decoration of Houses, an illustrated guide for wealthy homeowners, co-written with Ogden Codman, that argued against the excesses of the Gilded Age and proved a surprising success.
1926 Late on this evening, the young novelist Agatha Christie left her country home without explanation. The discovery of her abandoned car five miles away the next morning made her disappearance the talk of England, drawing thousands, including Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers, to search for her body before she was finally discovered residing under a pseudonym at a luxury spa, where she claimed temporary amnesia. The mystery has never been definitively solved, though scholar Jared Cade has argued convincingly that she staged her disappearance—never suspecting it would cause such an uproar—to embarrass her husband, whose affair was ending their marriage, a scenario made only more plausible by the name under which she registered at the spa: Mrs. Teresa Neele, which borrowed a last name from Nancy Neele, the rival her husband soon married after their divorce.
1929 C. S. Lewis had known the new Professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford for more than three years before a late night of talk about northern myths sealed their friendship. “I was up till 2.30 on Monday, talking to the Anglo Saxon professor Tolkien,” he recounted in a letter to a friend on this day, ”discoursing of the gods and giants of Asgard for three hours, then departing in the wind and rain.” Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien shared many more late-night discussions in their three decades as Oxford colleagues, including another in 1931 whose importance Lewis described in a letter to that same friend: “I have just passed from believing in God to definitely believing in Christ . . . My long night talk with Dyson and Tolkien had a good deal to do with it.”
2006 Erica Wagner, in the New York Times, on Roald Dahl’s Collected Stories: “These stories are never less than enjoyable; most are also utterly heartless. That doesn’t matter.”
December 4
BORN: 1795 Thomas Carlyle (Sartor Resartus), Ecclefechan, Scotland
1875 Rainer Maria Rilke (Duino Elegies), Prague
DIED: 1975 Hannah Arendt (The Origins of Totalitarianism), 69, New York City
1987 Arnold Lobel (Frog and Toad Are Friends), 54, New York City
17– The game theorists of nuclear war who conceived of Mutually Assured Destruction two centuries later would have understood the Vicomte de Valmont in Choderlos de Laclos’s Dangerous Liaisons when he writes to the Marquise de Merteuil “that each of us possesses what we need to ruin the other, and that we must mutually consider each other’s interests.” Throughout the novel Valmont and Merteuil have played their amoral, amorous games of manipulation on others, but now they are left to face each other. The Marquise, valuing her self-made independence from such entanglements, tries to put off Valmont, but he won’t have it any longer. It’s either yes or no, love or hate, peace or war, he demands. “Very well, then,” she replies. “War!”
1875 Entering New York harbor after thirty-eight years in Europe, Charles Schermerhorn Schuyler can’t help but think in terms of the stories he might be paid to write about his return: “The United States in the Year of the Centennial,” “Old New York: A Knickerbocker’s Memories.” In 1876, the third novel in his fictional romp through American history (published, impishly, during the self-congratulation of the Bicentennial year), Gore Vidal skewered both his country’s habitual corruption and his own scribbling profession as Schuyler, a refined gentleman forced by a financial collapse to “ply his wares on foot, as it were, in streets where once triumphantly he rode,” takes to his lowlier calling, as did the aristocratic Vidal himself, with shrugging aplomb: “Well, no self-pity. The world is not easy.”
NO YEAR The season has turned sharply for the worse, and so it seems has nature itself. The birds, more restless than usual all fall, are now massing in the sudden cold of winter, species joining with species and attacking. Hitchcock transplanted the unsettling idea of mass avian malevolence in Daphne du Maurier’s story “The Birds” from the blustery coast of England to the Technicolor brightness of California, but du Maurier’s original, told with the terse modesty of postwar austerity, still carries a greater horror, as Nat, a rural handyman, survives an early attack and quickly adapts to the tidal rhythms of the giant waiting flocks, making a fortress of his family’s small cottage while his neighbors outside fall prey. But the birds are adapting too . . .
2009 Moshi Kōkō Yakyū no Joshi Manager ga Drucker no “Management” o Yondara (What If the Female Manager of a High School Baseball Team Read Drucker’s Management), a fictional guide to economics by Natsumi Iwasaki with a plot summarized exactly by its title, was published on this day and became the bestselling book in Japan in 2010, with a spin-off film and animated series.
December 5
BORN: 1934
Joan Didion (Slouching Toward Bethlehem), Sacramento, Calif.
1935 Calvin Trillin (Killings; Alice, Let’s Eat), Kansas City, Mo.
DIED: 1784 Phillis Wheatley (Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral), 31, Boston
1870 Alexandre Dumas père (The Count of Monte Cristo), 68, Puys, France
1890 His last novel, his eighth already at age thirty-three, had sold no better than the others, forcing George Gissing to sell the books off of his shelves to support his meager existence. The subject of his next novel, New Grub Street, was one he knew well, the degrading poverty of the scribblers on the edges of commercial literary life, and on the same day he wrote the final page of the book he also noted in his diary an invitation to a respectable dinner party: “Of course I must refuse. I have sold my dress-suit, so that I couldn’t go, even if I had no other reason. But I suppose I shall never again sit at a civilized table.” New Grub Street made him little more money than his previous books, but it made his reputation, and he was able to return to civilized tables and look forward to a place in the posterity he always said he was writing for.
1945 Fresh off his successful screenplay adaptations of Pride and Prejudice and Jane Eyre and looking forward to a Hollywood version of his novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley contracted with Disney to turn Alice in Wonderland into a film script. It was not a good match. His script changed Alice’s rabbit hole into a Narnian cabinet door and brought Lewis Carroll into the story to tell Alice, in words that sound like Huxley’s later psychedelic experiments, “You’ve got to find the little door inside your own head first.” After an awkward meeting, Walt Disney rejected Huxley’s scenario as “so literary I could understand only every third word,” and when Disney’s animated version appeared in 1951, Huxley was not credited.
