A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1936 Zora Neale Hurston traveled to Haiti on a Guggenheim Fellowship to collect the folklore she’d describe in Tell My Horse, but for a short time there she was consumed instead with her second novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, which she finished on this day. “It was dammed up in me,” she recalled, “and I wrote it under internal pressure in seven weeks.” What was pushing to be expressed? Memories of her Florida hometown of Eatonville, perhaps, and the distinctive voice of her heroine, Janie Crawford, but also the love of a younger man she’d set aside for her career, a Columbia grad student named Percy Punter who shared his youth with Janie’s love, Tea Cake.

  1967 Before Jerry Kramer, all-pro right guard of the Green Bay Packers, kept a diary of his 1967 season, there had been few glimpses into the mind of an offensive lineman (in fact, few suspected linemen had minds). But in Instant Replay, Kramer quoted Shakespeare without shame, analyzed the motivational genius of his coach, Vince Lombardi, observed the NFL growing from a part-time job into a big business, and revealed his weekly obsession with the defensive linemen he lined up against each Sunday. This week, it was Merlin Olsen of the Los Angeles Rams: “All I keep thinking is: Olsen, Olsen, Olsen,” he wrote, plotting how he’d react to each of Olsen’s moves while acknowledging his job was often just a matter of pushing the other guy back as hard as he could. “It’s a simple game, really.”

  1986 Asked for a blurb for The Broom of the System, the debut novel by his MFA student David Foster Wallace, Richard Elman replied that he didn’t consider Wallace’s work original, but “if you want to publish really good writing you should publish mine.”

  December 20

  BORN: 1954 Sandra Cisneros (The House on Mango Street, Caramelo), Chicago

  1960 Nalo Hopkinson (The Salt Roads), Kingston, Jamaica

  DIED: 1961 Moss Hart (Act One, The Man Who Came to Dinner), 57, Palm Springs, Calif.

  1997 Denise Levertov (Breathing the Water), 74, Seattle

  1915 The Evil Eye: A Musical Comedy in Two Acts was presented by the Princeton University Triangle Club, with book by Edmund Wilson Jr., class of 1916, and lyrics by F. Scott Fitzgerald, class of 1917.

  1998 Mary Gordon, in the New York Times, on John Bayley’s Elegy for Iris: “Its dominant notes are humility, modesty, patience and humor. The heroism is all the more admirable for its reluctance to acknowledge that heroism might be defined in such terms.”

  2002 When their client asks, “So what can you tell me about Mikael Blomkvist?” Lisbeth Salander, Milton Security’s best researcher, reports that Blomkvist is a careful reporter, was likely set up for the libel conviction that got him sentenced to three months in prison that very morning, and hates the nickname the newspapers have given him, “Kalle” Blomkvist, after Astrid Lindgren’s boy detective. “Somebody’d get a fat lip if they ever called me Pippi Longstocking,” Salander adds. They could hardly be blamed for doing so, though, since Stieg Larsson said he created her character—tattooed, abrupt to the point of surliness, and with red hair dyed black and cut “short as a fuse”—in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by imagining what Lindgren’s headstrong, red-haired Pippi would have become when she grew up.

  NO YEAR “Last day or not, he has to stick to the checklist.” Manny DeLeon is a sort of saint of the corporate economy, the manager of a Connecticut Red Lobster who follows the dictates from headquarters but keeps a kind eye on his employees and his customers too. That didn’t stop corporate from letting him know that on December 20 his location, despite a decent year of receipts, is shutting down. He’ll get a transfer to an Olive Garden in Bristol, and he can take five of his people with him, but he’s going to need a lot more than five to work the last day, even with a blizzard on its way. Set from the opening of Manny’s shift to the end, Stewart O’Nan’s Last Day at the Red Lobster is, like Manny, a modest and steady marvel.

  December 21

  BORN: 1917 Heinrich Böll (Billiards at Half-Past Nine), Cologne, Germany

  1932 Edward Hoagland (Cat Man, Sex and the River Styx), New York City

  DIED: 1375 Giovanni Boccaccio (The Decameron), 62, Certaldo, Italy

  1940 F. Scott Fitzgerald (Tender Is the Night), 44, Los Angeles

  1872 The readers of Le Temps were not discouraged from believing that the daring journey of the English gentleman-adventurer Phileas Fogg and his servant Jean Passepartout, as described in the newspaper’s daily installments of Jules Verne’s Around the World in Eighty Days, was actually taking place. After all, the dispatches ended just when the journey does, on December 22, 1872, with the travelers’ arrival in London just after the deadline for Fogg’s £20,000 wager. Or are they late after all? As Passepartout realizes in the nick of time, because they traveled east across the International Date Line, the day they believed was the 22nd was actually the 21st, and Fogg has just enough time to make it through the doors of the Reform Club and declare to those who had bet against him, “Here I am, gentlemen!”

  1958 An unsentimental account of an emotional roller coaster, Diana Athill’s Instead of a Letter recounts a blissful childhood and adolescence that turned suddenly into “twenty years of unhappiness” when her fiancé wrote to say he was marrying someone else, just before he died in the war. But those “years leprous with boredom, drained by the war of meaning,” ended on this day, Athill’s forty-first birthday, when the small happiness she had found in writing was “fanned into a glorious glow” by the news she had won the Observer’s short-story prize: “Bury me, dear friends, with a copy of the Observer folded under my head, for it was the Observer’s prize that woke me up to the fact that I had become happy.”

  1994 It was a small notice in a newspaper—that four men, one white and three Seminole, had been arrested on this day while leaving the Fakahatchee swamp with four pillowcases full of orchids and other endangered flowers—that drew reporter Susan Orlean from New York to Florida, and it was John Laroche who kept her there for two years to follow his story. Skinny, bedraggled, oddly handsome, and eccentrically passionate, Laroche was the sort of person who would tell the judge in his trial, “I’m probably the smartest person I know,” and his quixotic pursuit of a rare plant, the ghost orchid, became the center of Orlean’s The Orchid Thief (and, a decade later, embedded in layers of self-reflexive fiction, Spike Jonze and Charlie Kaufman’s movie adaptation, Adaptation).

  1999 A week after Charles M. Schulz announced he was retiring from Peanuts, Bill Watterson, who ended Calvin and Hobbes four years before, lauded him in the Los Angeles Times. “How a cartoonist maintains this level of quality decade after decade,” wrote the cartoonist whose own strip lasted just a single decade, “I have no insight.”

  December 22

  BORN: 1935 Donald Harington (The Architecture of the Arkansas Ozarks), Little Rock, Ark.

  1951 Charles de Lint (Moonheart, Jack of Kinrowan), Bussum, the Netherlands

  DIED: 1880 George Eliot (Middlemarch, Daniel Deronda), 61, London

  1989 Samuel Beckett (Endgame, Krapp’s Last Tape), 83, Paris

  1849 For a harrowing few minutes he later retold in The Idiot, Fyodor Dostoyevsky and twenty-two of his fellow prisoners thought their lives were about to end in front of a firing squad. Only after the first three men were tied to stakes and the rifles aimed—with Dostoyevsky next in line for execution—did an aide to Nicholas I arrive with a reprieve, completing the bit of theater the tsar had planned a month before for these members of a secret society who had been arrested for reading and discussing forbidden literature. Dostoyevsky, twenty-eight and with just a handful of published stories to his name, was immediately shackled for his sentence of four years of hard labor in Siberia; in a letter he was permitted to write to his brother, he said, “There are few things left now that can frighten me.”

  1940 Nathanael West was a notoriously bad driver, and he likely wasn’t paying attention when, speeding back to Los Angeles from a hunting trip in Mexico—perhaps to attend the funeral of his friend and fellow Hollywood novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had died
the day before—he ran a stop sign outside El Centro, California, and collided with another car. The reports of his death called him a “Hollywood scenarist” and took little note of his poor-selling novels, including Miss Lonelyhearts and The Day of the Locust; they focused instead on his wife, Eileen, who died in the crash too, just four days before My Sister Eileen, the Broadway play based on her sister Ruth McKenney’s bestselling memoir (and later the source for the musical Wonderful Town), had its hit opening night.

  1993 While they were in Italy on her husband Douglas’s sabbatical, Carol Ann Brush Hofstadter died without warning of a brain tumor at the age of forty-two. In his shock and grief, her husband turned again to the questions of human consciousness and pattern-making that had consumed him since his first book, Gödel, Escher, Bach. What, exactly, was he grieving? What of this lost person remained? He braided memories of her, and the thoughts they had shared, into his book on translation, Le Ton Beau de Marot, and when he considered what makes a “self”—an “I”—in his next major book, I Am a Strange Loop, she was central again. The self, for Hofstadter, is a permeable thing, constructed by the web of thoughts we share with others, and in I Am a Strange Loop he argues poignantly and convincingly that in his own mind and those of others who knew her, Carol’s consciousness remains alive in a real, if limited, way.

  December 23

  BORN: 1902 Norman Maclean (A River Runs Through It), Clarinda, Iowa

  1963 Donna Tartt (The Secret History, The Little Friend), Greenwood, Miss.

  DIED: 1763 Abbé Prévost (Manon Lescaut), 66, Chantilly, France

  1966 Heimito von Doderer (The Demons, The Waterfalls of Slunj), 70, Vienna

  1951 Working as a poet and a critic had only earned her £31 the previous year, but Muriel Spark had given little thought to writing fiction before she entered a Christmas story competition in the Observer, sending in a quickly written entry on a lark, drawn by the £250 prize. Two months later, after she had forgotten about the contest, the editor of the Observer arrived at her flat early this morning with the paper containing her story, “The Seraph and the Zambesi,” and the news that she had bested 7,000 competitors to win the prize. Set in a fiercely hot Christmas season in southern Africa, where Spark had once lived, the story convinced the paper’s editors they had found a new talent, and their confidence convinced Spark as well, though her first novel, The Comforters, wouldn’t appear until 1957.

  NO YEAR Angus Wilson was an admirer, and later a biographer, of Charles Dickens, and at the opening of his novel Anglo-Saxon Attitudes, he makes his main character, Gerald Middleton, a bit of a Scrooge. Gerald is “a man of mildly but persistently depressive temperament,” and “such men are not at their best at breakfast, nor is the week before Christmas their happiest time.” He’s only a bit of a Scrooge, though. He may be, by his own sour measure, a “sixty-year-old failure,” but he’s “that most boring kind, a failure with a conscience.” Whether that conscience means he’ll reckon, Scrooge-style, with the ghosts of his own past or just continue on his comfortably dyspeptic way becomes the small question at the heart of Wilson’s brilliantly expansive and humanely satirical portrait of postwar Britain.

  1974 Douglas Adams, a young screenwriter who had not yet concocted The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, sat in the audience for the first taping of Fawlty Towers and was disappointed it wasn’t more like Monty Python.

  2005 Daniel Swift, in the TLS, on Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking: “That suffering has given a great writer a great subject seems a cold, formal observation, but The Year of Magical Thinking is a profoundly formal book.”

  December 24

  BORN: 1944 Karl Marlantes (Matterhorn), Astoria, Ore.

  1973 Stephenie Meyer (Twilight, New Moon, Eclipse), Hartford, Conn.

  DIED: 1994 John Osborne (Look Back in Anger), 65, Clunton, England

  2008 Harold Pinter (The Homecoming, The Birthday Party), 78, London

  NO YEAR Great Expectations was not one of Charles Dickens’s Christmas tales, but it opens on a “raw” Christmas Eve when young Pip walks out to the graveyard in the marshes where his parents are buried and a man with a convict’s iron on his legs and the mud of the marshes all over him accosts Pip among the graves and demands food and a file to break his chains. Out of fear and kindness, Pip sneaks the man a hearty Christmas breakfast the next morning, an act of mercy that the convict, arrested again that day and transported to Australia, remembers well when he makes his fortune abroad, only revealing his true name to Pip when he returns to England a wealthy though haunted man.

  1936 George Orwell spent his Christmas traveling to Barcelona to join in the fight against Fascism in Spain, but on the way he stopped in Paris and met Henry Miller for the first time. Orwell had called Miller’s Tropic of Cancer a “remarkable book” the previous year, but the two, one ascetic and the other hedonistic, had little else in common, especially concerning Orwell’s destination. Going to Spain, Miller told the Englishman, was the “act of an idiot,” and the idea of combating Fascism was “baloney.” Orwell defended self-sacrifice and argued that the liberty Miller celebrated sometimes required defending. They agreed to disagree and parted amicably, with Miller giving Orwell a corduroy coat that surely would be better for fighting in than the blue suit he had on.

  1948 Robert Lowell celebrated Christmas Eve at Yaddo by reading Pride and Prejudice to Flannery O’Connor and Clifford Wright.

  1953 “Men’s courses will foreshadow certain ends, to which, if persevered in, they must lead. But if the courses be departed from, the ends will change. Say it is thus with what you show me.” So says Ebenezer Scrooge to the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, and so says Mr. Fish to Owen Meany as they play those roles in the Gravesend Players production of A Christmas Carol in John Irving’s Prayer for Owen Meany. But while playing the ghost Owen has a vision of his own future, seeing his own name and the date of his death on the tombstone prop meant for Scrooge and fainting onstage. “IT SAID THE WHOLE THING,” he cries afterward in his odd, high-pitched voice, and once again Owen’s story bends itself toward an end that may be his to choose, or that may have been chosen for him.

  1970 After putting the Vargas Llosa children to bed in their apartment in Barcelona, Julio Cortázar and Mario Vargas Llosa raced the electric cars the children had been given for Christmas.

  December 25

  BORN: 1924 Rod Serling (Stories from the Twilight Zone), Syracuse, N.Y.

  1925 Carlos Castaneda (The Teachings of Don Juan), Cajamarca, Peru

  DIED: 1938 Karel Čapek (R.U.R. [Rossum’s Universal Robots]), 48, Prague

  1956 Robert Walser (Jakob von Gunten), 78, Herisau, Switzerland

  NO YEAR The morning is bright and mild when the children leave for their grandmother’s house in the village on the other side of the mountain pass, but as they set out to return after Christmas Eve dinner with their packs full of food and gifts snowflakes begin to fall, first lightly and then with a blinding whiteness. Rock Crystal, Adalbert Stifter’s 1845 novella, is a Christmas tale of sparkling simplicity, in which a small brother and sister find their familiar path home made strange and spend a wakeful night in an ice cave on a glacier as the Northern Lights—which the girl takes as a visit from the Holy Child—flood the dark skies above them.

  1905 Jessie Chambers gave Blake’s Songs of Innocence and Experience to D. H. Lawrence for Christmas.

  1915 Theodore Dreiser, in the New Republic, on Somerset Maugham’s On Human Bondage: “It is as though a symphony of great beauty by a master, Strauss or Beethoven, had just been completed and the bud notes and flower tones were filling the air with their elusive message, fluttering and dying.”

  1932 Christmas morning comes early at the Normandie Hotel. “Are you asleep?” Nora Charles asks Nick at what he soon discovers is almost five o’clock in the morning. She’s been up all night reading the memoirs of a Russian opera star, and he’s still drunk from Christmas Eve. When the phone rings announcing that Dorothy Wynant, a beaut
iful young blonde from a mixed-up and possibly murderous family, is on her way up, it’s time to order sandwiches and coffee to go with the Scotch and soda Nick already has in his hand. Breakfast can wait until the afternoon in The Thin Man, Dashiell Hammett’s final novel, published when he was just thirty-nine before Hollywood, left-wing politics, and booze kept him busy for the last decades of his life.

  1956 Kept from going home to Alabama for Christmas by her job as an airline ticket agent, Harper Lee spent the holiday in New York with Broadway songwriter Michael Brown and his wife, Joy, close friends she had met through Truman Capote. Because Lee didn’t have much money they had agreed to exchange inexpensive gifts, but when they woke on Christmas morning the Browns presented her with an envelope containing this note: “You have one year off from your job to write whatever you please. Merry Christmas.” Given the humbling gift of “paper, pen, and privacy,” Lee quit her job and set to work, and by the end of February she had written a couple of hundred pages of a manuscript that was first called Go Set a Watchman, then Atticus, and finally To Kill a Mockingbird.

  December 26

  BORN: 1891 Henry Miller (Tropic of Cancer, Black Spring), New York City

  1956 David Sedaris (Me Talk Pretty One Day), Johnson City, N.Y.

  DIED: 1931 Melvil Dewey (founder, Library Journal and Dewey Decimal System), 80, Lake Placid, Fla.

  1933 H. W. Fowler (A Dictionary of Modern English Usage), 75, Hinton St. George, England

  1915 Planning to spend Boxing Day with her fiancé, Roland Leighton, who had been given a short Christmas leave from the trenches of northern France, Vera Brittain was called to the telephone, where she learned instead that he had died three days before, shot while inspecting the barbed wire in a stretch of No Man’s Land that had otherwise seen little action for months. By the time the armistice arrived, Brittain would also get news of the deaths in the war of her brother, Edward, and his and Roland’s two closest friends, the loss of a generation that became the centerpiece of her memoir Testament of Youth, a bestseller at the time and a wartime classic ever since.