by Tom Nissley
1930 “Julian, lost in the coonskins, felt the tremendous excitement, the great thrilling lump in the chest and abdomen that comes before the administering of an unknown, well-deserved punishment. He knew he was in for it.” It’s the end of a long night—Christmas night, in fact—that Julian spent at a roadhouse and then in his car in the parking lot with a gangster’s girl, and he knows, as he’s driven home, that he’s been a bad boy. Julian English’s three-day spiral to a lonely end in John O’Hara’s Appointment in Samarra is inexplicable, inevitable, and compelling, the inexplicability of his self-destruction only adding to his isolation. He spends one more day burning every bridge he can in Gibbsville, Pennsylvania, and then calls out to his empty home before heading out to the garage to administer his final self-punishment, “Anybody in this house? Any, body, in, this, house?”
1952 Four days after her mother signed a consent form for her lobotomy and just days before it was scheduled to be performed, newspapers across New Zealand carried the news that Janet Frame had won the country’s most prestigious literary prize, the Hubert Church Memorial Award, for her first book, Lagoon and Other Stories. The prize, which she had never heard of, earned her £25, and a reprieve. The superintendent of her mental hospital happened to see one of the articles and called off the surgery, telling her, “I’ve decided that you should stay as you are. I don’t want you changed.” Two and a half years later, she was released to a literary life that made her the most celebrated New Zealand writer since Katherine Mansfield, writing books that often drew from her time in the institutions where she had spent most of the first decade of her adult life.
December 27
BORN: 1910 Charles Olson (The Maximus Poems), Worcester, Mass.
1969 Sarah Vowell (Assassination Vacation), Muskogee, Okla.
DIED: 1992 Kay Boyle (My Next Bride, 50 Stories), 90, Mill Valley, Calif.
1997 Brendan Gill (Here at The New Yorker), 83, New York City
1817 There have been many terms for the idea—“disinterestedness,” “receptivity”—but the name that has stuck was used just once by its creator, John Keats, in a letter to his brothers most likely on this day: “I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.” Shakespeare had it, Keats added, but Coleridge, “incapable of remaining content with half knowledge,” didn’t, and neither did Keats’s obstinate friend Charles Wentworth Dilke. A walk with Dilke, in fact, had inspired Keats’s insight: “pleasant” though Dilke might be, he was someone, as Keats summed him up elsewhere, “who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made his mind up about everything.”
1908 Dunny Ramsay, like any boy where it’s cold enough to snow, has a sense of when a snowball is coming, and so, naturally, he ducks, and the snowball, carrying inside it an egg-shaped stone hidden there by his antagonist, Percy Staunton, instead hits Mrs. Mary Dempster, the pregnant young wife of the Baptist minister, knocking her to the ground, bringing on a lifelong madness, and hastening the birth of her son Paul, who grows up to be the famous magician Magnus Eisengrim, and who, in the circular way of Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business, may well be the one who, almost sixty years later, places that same egg-shaped stone in Percy’s mouth when he is found drowned in his convertible in Toronto harbor.
1950 Neal Cassady’s survival in literary history has mainly been secondhand, as a character in The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test and inspiration for On the Road’s Dean Moriarty and One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest’s Randle McMurphy, but at least for a moment his friend Jack Kerouac thought he’d make it there as a writer. On this day Kerouac, having found a massive letter from Cassady on his doorstep, wrote back in awe of “your poolhall musings, your excruciating details about streets, appointment times, hotel rooms, bar locations, window measurements, smells, heights of trees.” Allen Ginsberg loved the letter too, but Cassady modestly, and accurately, replied, “All the crazy falldarall you two boys make over my Big Letter just thrills the gurgles out of me, but we still know I’m a whiff and a dream.” The letter also became a whiff and a dream: it’s been lost to history except for fragments.
1950 A conversation with Ralph Ellison, who was working with diligent focus on Invisible Man, made Langston Hughes feel that, many decades into his writing career, he was still spreading his talents too thin. “I am a literary sharecropper,” he wrote Arna Bontemps.
December 28
BORN: 1922 Stan Lee (Spider-Man, Fantastic Four, X-Men), New York City
1967 Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan, Building Stories), Omaha, Neb.
DIED: 1903 George Gissing (New Grub Street, The Odd Women), 46, Ispoure, France
1963 A. J. Liebling (The Sweet Science, Between Meals), 59, New York City
1896 On his first wedding anniversary, Robert Frost pled guilty to assaulting his friend and tenant for calling him a coward. The judge called Frost “riffraff” and fined him $10.
NO YEAR Everything is orderly and comfortable in the Dutch home of Kees Popinga, the head manager for a prosperous ship’s outfitters, until by chance on this winter evening he discovers that the firm is bankrupt and its owner is fleeing its ruin. With chaos seeping into his tidy life, Kees suddenly decides to break it open entirely, setting out on a greedily debauched course across Europe that begins with an accidental murder. The Man Who Watched Trains Go By was just one of a dozen or so novels the impossibly prolific Georges Simenon published in 1938 and one of hundreds he wrote in his lifetime, divided mostly between his Maigret mysteries and his romans durs (“hard novels”), of which The Man Who Watched Trains Go By is a memorably flinty example.
1949 “E, F, and I interrogated God this evening at six.” How young was Susan Sontag when she sat in her car with friends, “immobilized with awe” outside Thomas Mann’s house in Los Angeles, practicing her questions before being welcomed into his study to discuss Nietzsche, Joyce, and her favorite book, The Magic Mountain? Her diary places the meeting on this day, when she was sixteen and already at the University of Chicago, but in a later memoir she said she was only fourteen when Mann, with his German formality, asked about her studies and she thought, stricken with embarrassment, “Could he imagine what a world away from the Gymnasium in his native Lübeck . . . was North Hollywood High School, alma mater of Alan Ladd and Farley Granger?”
1969 “DICK GIBSON MAGNIFICENT STOP CONGRATULATIONS AND ADMIRATION,” cabled Random House editor Joe Fox to Stanley Elkin on receipt of the manuscript for his third novel, The Dick Gibson Show, a story made of the voices of Dick Gibson and his obsessive guests, floating out over the midwestern night on high-wattage radio waves. Elkin’s own voice was irrepressible, but even his admiring editor tried to rein him in at times. “Less is more,” Fox wrote in the margins when striking out a paragraph, but Elkin, who believed that “more is more . . . less is less, fat fat, thin thin, and enough is enough,” stetted him right back: “You can’t cut this. It’s really as good as I get.” And it stayed, although Dick Gibson, in the end, continued Elkin’s lifelong struggle with magnificence unmatched by readership.
December 29
BORN: 1893 Vera Brittain (Testament of Youth), Newcastle-under-Lyme, England
1922 William Gaddis (The Recognitions, J R), New York City
DIED: 1894 Christina Rossetti (Goblin Market), 64, London
1926 Rainer Maria Rilke (Sonnets to Orpheus), 51, Montreux, Switzerland
1881 Baum’s Opera House, built for L. Frank Baum by his oil-rich father, opened in Richburg, New York, two months before burning down.
1913 Its stiff-upper-lip bravado has made it the subject of T-shirts as well as the first entry in Julian Watkins’s 100 Greatest Advertisements, but it may be too good to be true that polar explorer Ernest Shackleton ever ran a classified ad reading, “MEN WANTED for hazardous journey. Small wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.” It is true,
though, that a letter from Shackleton, announcing the expedition to make the first crossing of Antarctica that he later recounted in the adventure classic South, appeared in the Times on this day. What may also be apocryphal, however, is the claim of one early Shackleton biographer that the explorer classified the responses to this letter into “three large drawers labeled respectively, ‘Mad,’ ‘Hopeless,’ and ‘Possible.’ ”
1962 Whitney Balliett, in The New Yorker, on Henry Miller’s Tropic of Capricorn: “Publicly celebrating one’s libido is closely related to that other parlor pastime—recounting one’s most recent operation.”
1989 A year of European miracles ended with the unlikely ascent of a dissident playwright to the presidency of Czechoslovakia. One year before, Václav Havel was in police custody, unable to attend his play, Tomorrow, which imagined how Alois Rašín, one of the country’s founders, experienced the first hours of Czech independence in 1918. Now, as the Soviet empire collapsed, Havel found himself preparing to take power himself, but he said it felt more like watching Ubu Roi than his own play to see the Communist members of the federal assembly, who had approved his imprisonment just weeks before, unanimously endorse his election. In his first days in Prague Castle, he laughed with his friends in the new government at this absurd turn of history and thought that even as president he could carry on some semblance of his former life as a citizen. He learned otherwise, though: “The Castle swallowed me up whole.”
December 30
BORN: 1869 Stephen Leacock (Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town), Swanmore, England
1961 Douglas Coupland (Generation X, Microserfs), Baden-Söllingen, West Germany
DIED: 1948 Denton Welch (In Youth Is Pleasure), 33, Sevenoaks, England
2005 Rona Jaffe (The Best of Everything), 74, London
1935 The legend of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry the aviator was built on his failures. The last of these was his final disappearance over the Mediterranean in 1944, but it was an earlier crash in the sands of the Sahara while attempting, with laughably casual preparation, to claim a prize for the fastest flight from Paris to Saigon, that he was able to transform into a legend himself. A month afterward he began a series of newspaper articles on the crash and his trek through the desert for survival that became Wind, Sand, and Stars, an acclaimed bestseller in France and the United States. And in 1942, living unhappily by then in New York, he was once again inspired by the idea of an aviator stranded in the dunes, making it the beginning of his fanciful tale for children, The Little Prince.
1983 “In the end,” Mme. Landau tells the narrator of W. G. Sebald’s The Emigrants, “it is hard to know what it is that someone dies of.” Paul Bereyter died on this day at the age of seventy-four by lying down on the railway tracks outside his German hometown. Like the other three men profiled in Sebald’s novel—if “novel” is what you want to call it—Bereyter emigrated from Germany, but he was the only one of the four to return, becoming a soldier and then a teacher again in the town where his family had once been condemned for their Jewish ancestry. But what did he die of? What caused him to lie down on the tracks? Sebald’s narrator, once a student of Bereyter’s and an emigrant himself, claims no answer, merely writing down what he knows of his former teacher: his interest in railways, his lonely melancholy, his passionately inventive teaching, and the coarse attacks on his family during the Nazi years.
2003 “You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends. The question of self-pity.” A few days after her husband, John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly of a heart attack as she tossed the salad for dinner, Joan Didion—known for, among many things, her essay “On Keeping a Notebook”—opened a Word file called “Notes on change.doc” and recorded the thoughts above, but they were the last words she wrote for months. Finally, in the fall, she began to gather notes again on her husband’s sudden death, their daughter’s equally sudden illness at the same time, and what she called The Year of Magical Thinking, which lasted from this day until December 31, 2004, the first day, she realized to her sorrow, that John hadn’t seen the year before.
December 31
BORN: 1945 Connie Willis (Doomsday Book), Denver, Colo.
1968 Junot Díaz (Drown, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao), Santo Domingo, D.R.
DIED: 1980 Marshall McLuhan (Understanding Media), 69, Toronto
2008 Donald E. Westlake (The Hot Rock, The Hunter), 75, San Tancho, Mexico
1867 Mark Twain, out for the first time with his future wife (and her family), was disappointed by Charles Dickens’s public reading in New York from David Copperfield, which, Twain thought, was “glittering frost-work, with no heart.”
1908 Invited to a New Year’s party at Max Brod’s, Franz Kafka told him he’d rather stay home and read Flaubert’s Temptation of St. Anthony.
1979 It should have been his big break; maybe it was. Harvey Pekar, always scrounging for recognition for his slice-of-life American Splendor comic books, got a lengthy and perceptive rave from Carola Dibbell in the Village Voice. What did it lead to? Not much, he sourly reported in a later comic, just wasted time and money, as short-lived enthusiasts (and movie producers) promised work but never followed up. It was just the first in a series of “big breaks” for Pekar—including his grouchy Letterman appearances in the late ’80s and the Oscar-nominated American Splendor movie in the early 2000s—that never quite made Pekar the star he would have been uncomfortable being.
1997 New Year’s Eve in Sing Sing prison was quiet but wakeful as the night began. “Another year,” one inmate said. “Yeah,” replied a neighbor, “another year closer to goin’ home, you heard?” Ted Conover, meanwhile, was going home. He’d already handed in his resignation as a corrections officer, but he signed up for one last shift to see what New Year’s was like on the cell block. “The first fires,” he wrote in Newjack, his memoir of a year working as a prison guard, “started maybe ten minutes before midnight,” and soon blazes in the galleries, made of trash and papers lit by matches flicked from the cells, were five feet high and filling the prison with smoke: not quite dangerous, but not comfortable either for those on guard.
NO YEAR The narrative clock in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union ticks not only toward the resolution of its mystery—in this case detective Meyer Landsman’s investigation of the murder of Mendel Shpilman, who may or may not have been the Messiah—but toward an outcome more uncertain and ominous, known as the Reversion. In Chabon’s invented history (based on an actual proposal to make a temporary homeland for European Jews in Alaska), the federal Jewish settlement in Sitka, Alaska, which has grown to over three million after taking in refugees from the Nazis and the destruction of Israel, is set, after a sixty-year “interim,” to revert to state control at the end of the year. The weary despair of its Jewish residents, preparing to join the diaspora again, is matched only by Chabon’s clear delight in the alternative world he has created.
Acknowledgments
THANKS first to my collaborators. To Matt Weiland, editor, friend, and co-conspirator: thank you for believing there are books in my book-drunk head. To Joanna Neborsky: the moment I saw “A Partial Inventory of Gustave Flaubert’s Personal Effects” was the first time I could imagine what this book could look like, and the moment I saw Theodore Dreiser with his hot dogs I knew I was right. To Morgan Davies, wading through the stacks in Morningside Heights while I was doing the same in Seattle, whose marginal comments on the gems she found were as delightful as Miss Austen’s in her family copy of Goldsmith’s History of England. To India Cooper, ToC ’92, for close reading and Harper Lee fact-checking. To Jim Rutman, for when things get more complicated after this. To Sam MacLaughlin, for good humor and that little bit of Anne Carson when I needed it, and to everyone else at Norton.
THANKS to the institutions that, without knowing they were doing so, made this book possible. Most of all, to the Suzzallo and Allen Libraries at the University of Washington, where I burrowed in an earlier life and never expected I would again, fo
r full, open stacks, generous alumni borrowing privileges, and the loveliest working space I could hope for. To the Seattle Public Library, for a superb, accessible collection and an equally lovely downtown reading room. (And to Peet’s in Fremont and Zoka in Tangletown, my other favorite offices.) To the hundreds and thousands of biographers and editors this book depended on, and whose meticulous labor I appreciate like never before. To Wikipedia, mocked and mistrusted and, by now, absolutely indispensable: almost never the end of my search, but more often than not the beginning. To search engines that make the world’s knowledge porous and available, and to the old-fashioned physical books that continue to make it readable.
AND thanks to all of my reading friends, many of whom I thought of when writing about the books I know you love. To Connie and Peter Nissley for making my first book-filled house, and to Elinor Nissley, once and future collaborator and calendar- and book-making inspiration. And to Laura, Henry, and Peter Silverstein, who stepped around my stacks of books (while making a few of their own), who thought that when I left my job that might mean they would see more of me, and whose excitement for this book, and for everything else we share, always increases my own.
Index
Abbey, Edward, 34, 106
Abbott, Edwin A., 323
Abe, Kobo, 27
About Alice (Trillin), 288
Abramovich, Alex, 235
Absurdistan (Shteyngart), 188
Abuse of Power (Kutler), 134
Achebe, Chinua, 57, 92, 361
Aciman, André, 7, 208
Acker, Kathy, 375
