A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1934 “Wealthy Tarleton Powers, fearing death by a gang headed by ‘the Top,’ sends for Secret Agent X-9—despite X-9’s presence Powers is mysteriously shot! On with the story!” Newspaper readers of the new comic strip Secret Agent X-9 might indeed have required this recap after its busy first week, which launched with a flurry of publicity and inexplicable action. Trying to compete with the success of Dick Tracy and Dan Dunn, Secret Operative 48, King Features had paired Dashiell Hammett, then at the top of his game as a detective novelist, with young illustrator Alex Raymond. The results, featuring a two-fisted government agent moonlighting as a private eye, were disappointing, though: Hammett left the strip after a year (and never wrote another novel), and Raymond soon followed, to focus on Flash Gordon.

  1944 Emporia, Kansas, is a town of modest size, and it was even smaller when William Allen White, a native of the town, came home, after working as a reporter in Kansas City, to buy the Emporia Gazette in 1895 at the age of twenty-seven. The following year, his editorial attack on populist politics, “What’s the Matter with Kansas?” (a title echoed a century later by Kansas native Thomas Frank), made him nationally known. But though he kept his national profile through editorials, bestselling books, and his role as a Progressive force in Republican politics, he refused offers to leave Emporia for a bigger pond, and by the time of his death on this day, he was already a figure of nostalgia, “the small-town boy,” in the words of Life, “who made good at home.”

  January 30

  BORN: 1912 Barbara W. Tuchman (The Guns of August, A Distant Mirror), New York City

  1931 Shirley Hazzard (The Transit of Venus, The Great Fire), Sydney, Australia

  DIED: 2006 Wendy Wasserstein (The Heidi Chronicles), 55, New York City

  2007 Sidney Sheldon (The Other Side of Midnight), 89, Rancho Mirage, Calif.

  1890 Not every battle on the American frontier was bloody. The historian Angie Debo, who was born on this day near Beattie, Kansas, before moving with her family at age ten to Oklahoma, where she spent the balance of her ninety-eight years, made a specialty of what she called “the second stage of dispossession of the Indians,” when the rifle “was replaced by the legislative enactment and court decrees of the legal exploiter, and the lease, mortgage and deed of the land shark.” With few academic jobs open to a woman, Debo worked mainly as a freelance historian, digging through bureaucratic archives to write a series of books including And Still the Waters Run: The Betrayal of the Five Civilized Tribes, which pointed enough fingers at prominent, living Oklahomans that the University of Oklahoma Press dropped its contract for the book, which had to be published out of state.

  1913 Leaving poultry farming and teaching behind at thirty-eight, Robert Frost, a self-described “Yank from Yankville,” moved his family to England and set about a poetic career with new ambition. On this day, the same day the page proofs for his first book, A Boy’s Will, arrived, a new British friend sent the calling card of a fellow American he ought to see, Ezra Pound. By March Pound was writing with pride to the editors of Poetry, “Have just discovered another Amur’kn. VURRY Amur’k’n, with, I think, the seeds of grace.” Frost began by calling Pound his “dazzling friend” but soon chafed against his “bullying” patronage, resisting, unlike T. S. Eliot, Pound’s strong editorial hand and resenting Pound’s portrait of him as a fellow poor and bitter exile.

  1935 The day Richard Brautigan died is shrouded in mystery, since his body wasn’t found until more than a month after he shot himself at the age of forty-nine, but the day of his birth is not exactly brightly illuminated either, by himself least of all. Brautigan was born on this day to a waitress in Tacoma, who never told the man she had left months before that he had a son. Known as Dick Porterfield, after his stepfather, for much of his childhood, Brautigan left the Northwest for California at age twenty-one and never looked back, writing great quantities of poetry and fiction before striking the generational mother lode with the idiosyncratic bestseller Trout Fishing in America, after which he spent two decades alternately chasing after and rejecting the success he had improbably found.

  January 31

  BORN: 1915 Thomas Merton (The Seven Storey Mountain), Prades, France

  1923 Norman Mailer (The Naked and the Dead, Advertisements for Myself), Long Branch, N.J.

  DIED: 1956 A. A. Milne (The House at Pooh Corner, Now We Are Six), 74, Hartfield, England

  2007 Molly Ivins (Molly Ivins Can’t Say That, Can She?), 62, Austin, Tex.

  1852 John Payne Collier was among the most productive of Shakespeare scholars and the most destructive. Indefatigable in both his authentic research and his forgeries, he left later generations a tangled record of true discoveries and misleading falsehoods, as well as the enduring mystery of why so prominent and able a writer would have been so easily tempted by corruption. On this day his career reached its highest and lowest points when he announced in the Athenaeum the discovery of the “Perkins Folio,” a tattered Second Folio of Shakespeare’s works that included thousands of handwritten notations presumed to be by an “Old Corrector” with direct knowledge of the playwright’s intentions, but shown within the decade to be a modern fraud, most likely by Collier’s own hand.

  1903 John Masefield, in the Speaker, on Joseph Conrad’s Youth and Two Other Stories (including “Heart of Darkness”): “His narrative is not vigorous, direct, effective, like that of Mr. Kipling. It is not clear and fresh like that of Stevenson, nor simple, delicate, and beautiful like that of Mr. Yeats. It reminds one rather of a cobweb abounding in gold threads.”

  1928 On assignment to collect African American folk material, Zora Neale Hurston took up temporary residence at the Everglades Cypress Lumber Company in Florida.

  1938 Hans Fallada had endured his share of persecution in the early years of the Nazi regime—his bestselling novel Little Man, What Now? was removed from libraries, and the authorities declared him an “undesirable author”—but perhaps the most terrifying episode began when the Nazi propaganda chief, Joseph Goebbels, wrote in his diary on this day that Fallada’s new novel, A Wolf Among Wolves, was “a super book.” Taken up by Goebbels, Fallada spent the rest of the regime in a delicate and miserable negotiation with the Reich, reluctantly altering his next novel toward a pro-Nazi storyline and then spending the war years in an insane asylum, acquiring scarce supplies in the guise of writing an anti-Semitic novel but composing instead a condemnation of life under the Nazis, published after the war as The Drinker.

  February By the time it gets to February, in the northern parts of North America at least, there’s a weariness to the winter. The days are longer but often no warmer, hibernation’s novelty has long worn out, and the fruits of the harvest are running low. Thoreau, writing on the coldest day of 1855, noted the old saying that “by the 1st of February the meal and grain for a horse are half out.” (He spent the rest of that frozen month skating on the local rivers.) “It is February,” writes Anne Carson from even farther north. “Ice is general.”

  But the calendar calls to break the ice with romance in the middle of the month. Why February 14? There are a handful of historical St. Valentines whose martyrdom became associated with that day, but scholars have found little evidence that they or the date was linked to a celebration of romantic love until the late fourteenth century, when Geoffrey Chaucer, first artificer of so much in our language, joined St. Valentine’s Day to matchmaking in a number of poems, most prominently in the mating of birds in his Parliament of Fowls, “on Seynt Valentynes day, / Whan every foul cometh there to chese his make.”

  But even he might not have been thinking of love in February: one of those scholars has argued at length that Chaucer had in mind a festival for a St. Valentine in Italy in May, a date whose suitability for romance might, if you do the gestational math, explain why February is also known as a month for birthdays. James Joyce was born on the 2nd, and on his fortieth birthday Shakespeare & Company published the first edition of Ulysses in Paris. Toni Morrison was born on
the 18th in 1931, the very same day that insurance agent Robert Smith, in the opening paragraph of Song of Solomon, promises to jump from the top of Mercy Hospital and fly across Lake Superior on his own wings. The February birthdays of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln are the reason Carter G. Woodson chose its second week for Negro History Week, later institutionalized as Black History Month. And lovers of calendars and coincidence have long marveled that perhaps the two greatest figures in the English-speaking nineteenth century, Lincoln and Charles Darwin—neither known foremost for his writing but each a communicator of great power—were born an ocean apart on the same day, February 12, 1809.

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR FEBRUARY

  Persuasion by Jane Austen (1818) Austen readers looking for a love story in the month of valentines have many choices, but her last novel, the story of an overlooked but independent woman finding love despite obstacles of her own creation, offers perhaps the most moving moment in all her work, the unexpected delivery of a love letter upon which all depends.

  Far from the Madding Crowd by Thomas Hardy (1874) There are plenty of obstacles between Bathsheba Everdene and true love in Hardy’s breakthrough novel, beginning with an idle and frolicsome Valentine’s Day joke that turns deadly serious and is followed by—this being Hardy, after all—yet more dead bodies in her path.

  Life and Times of Frederick Douglass by Frederick Douglass (1881; 1892) The third autobiography of Douglass, who chose to celebrate his unrecorded birthday on Valentine’s Day, doesn’t carry the compact power of his original 1845 slave narrative, but it’s a fascinating and ambivalent self-portrait of a half-century in the public life that the bestselling Narrative launched.

  Charlie and the Chocolate Factory by Roald Dahl (1964) Every day is more or less the same at the Buckets’ tiny ramshackle house—watery cabbage soup for dinner and the winter wind whistling through the cracks—until young Charlie Bucket finds a dollar in the snow and then a Golden Ticket in his Wonka bar.

  The Left Hand of Darkness by Ursula K. LeGuin (1969) One of the most challenging and imaginative of love stories takes place entirely in winter, as an envoy from Earth has to learn to negotiate an ice-bound planet populated by an androgynous people who can take the role of either sex during their monthly heat.

  Moortown Diary by Ted Hughes (1979) These poems from the decade Hughes and his third wife took to farming in North Devon, the country of her birth, are journal entries hewn rough into verse, wet and wintry like the country and full of the blood and being of animals.

  The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam (1981) February is doldrums season in the National Basketball Association, well into the slog of the schedule but still far from the urgency of the playoffs, and few have captured the everyday human business of the itinerant professional athlete better than Halberstam in his portrait of the ’79-’80 Trailblazers’ otherwise forgettable season.

  Ravens in Winter by Bernd Heinrich (1989) Over four Maine winters, showing as much ingenuity and persistence as his intelligent subjects and an infectious excitement for the drama of the natural world—the “greatest show on earth”—Heinrich tried to solve the mystery of cooperation among these solitary birds, better known as literary symbols than as objects of study.

  February 1

  BORN: 1902 Langston Hughes (The Weary Blues, Montage of a Dream Deferred), Joplin, Mo.

  1957 Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets, Palomar), Oxnard, Calif.

  DIED: 1851 Mary Shelley (Frankenstein, The Last Man), 53, London

  2012 Wisława Szymborska (View with a Grain of Sand), 88, Krakow, Poland

  1853 Fitz-James O’Brien, in Putnam’s Monthly, on Herman Melville’s Pierre: “He totters on the edge of a precipice, over which all his hard-earned fame may tumble with such another weight as Pierre attached to it.”

  1929 Published: Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett (Knopf, New York)

  NO YEAR At ten o’clock sharp outside the factory gates five children appear with their grown-up chaperones: Augustus Gloop, Veruca Salt, Violet Beauregard, Mike Teavee, and Charlie Bucket, one day after he found a dollar in the snow (fifty pence in the original British edition) and the final Golden Ticket inside his second Wonka’s Whipple-Scrumptious Fudgemallow Delight. By the end of the day, of course, only Charlie and his Grandpa Joe remain, and from up in the great glass elevator they can see Augustus (slimmer after being squeezed through a pipe), Violet (her face still purple—nothing to be done about that!), Veruca (covered in garbage), and Mike (stretched out so tall on the gum-stretching machine every basketball team will want him), each driving away with a lifetime’s supply of candy from the chocolate factory Charlie soon will own.

  1963 Among the many unintended consequences of the 114-day New York newspaper strike—new magazine careers for Gay Talese and Tom Wolfe, slow sales at florists without obituaries to announce the dead—was the realization of five editors and writers, Robert Silvers, Barbara and Jason Epstein, Elizabeth Hardwick, and Robert Lowell, that with publishers starved to promote their books it was the perfect time to launch a book review. The first issue of the New York Review of Books, published on this day, carried a star-studded table of contents, including poems by Lowell, John Berryman, and Adrienne Rich, Mary McCarthy on Naked Lunch, Susan Sontag on Simone Weil, Philip Rahv on Solzhenitsyn, Berryman on Auden, Auden on David Jones, Steven Marcus on Salinger, and Lowell on Robert Frost, who had died just three days before.

  2002 Bored with his “office job” as The New Yorker’s fiction editor and in search of another immersive adventure after his hooligan-like-me memoir, Among the Thugs, Bill Buford talked himself into a lowly kitchen job at Babbo, the three-star Manhattan restaurant run by his friend Mario Batali. His education began, as he recalled it in Heat, when he was directed by the dismissive prep chef to his first task: boning ducks, something he vaguely remembered having done as a home cook once a decade ago. Two dozen mangled ducks later, he had sliced his forefinger so deeply that the plastic glove he put on over a Band-Aid so he could keep working had filled with blood like a water balloon.

  February 2

  BORN: 1882 James Joyce (Dubliners, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man), Rathgar, Ireland

  1940 Thomas M. Disch (Camp Concentration, 334), Des Moines, Iowa

  DIED: 1826 Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin (The Physiology of Taste), 70, Paris

  2002 Claude Brown (Manchild in the Promised Land), 64, New York City

  1902 E. M. Forster broke his right arm falling down the steps of St. Peter’s in Rome.

  1922 To say that James Joyce’s Ulysses was published on this day is a little like saying that it’s the story of a man out for a walk one day in Dublin. It was a little more complicated than that. Many sections of the book had already appeared in the Little Review and the Egoist (and caused a stir, both aesthetically and legally, leading the book to be banned as obscene in the U.K. and U.S. until the ’30s). But dates, like many details, were obsessively important to Joyce, and so it was crucial to him that the book be published on this day, his fortieth birthday. So it was, barely: two copies were delivered by train to Paris in the morning to Sylvia Beach, his publisher, who displayed one in her shop, Shakespeare & Company, while Joyce took the other out to celebrate their shared birthday, wearing a new ring he’d promised himself for the occasion. Endless printers’ errors kept the rest of the first edition of 1,000 coming slowly to its subscribers, and to this day bickering scholars continue to publish “correct” editions, each claiming to be the first to match the author’s original intentions.

  1941 For a time, chickadee 65287 was destined for immortality. At their farm in the “sand countries” of central Wisconsin, the family of Aldo Leopold was banding birds, as they did every winter, and on this day they caught the chickadee with band number 65287 for the fourth straight year, the most of any bird they tracked. That fall, drafting one of his first nature essays, Leopold paid tribute to 65287 and its lively longevity: “Everyone laughs at so small a bundle of large enthusiasms.�
� But in December he had to revise the essay, after a different chickadee, number 65290, returned to the family trap for the fifth straight year, and when Leopold’s essays were collected after his death in A Sand County Almanac, it was chickadee 65290 that Leopold’s millions of readers would get to know.

  February 3

  BORN: 1874 Gertrude Stein (Three Lives, The Making of Americans), Allegheny, Pa.

  1947 Paul Auster (The Invention of Solitude, City of Glass), Newark, N.J.

  DIED: 1468 Johannes Gutenberg (Gutenberg Bible), c. 70, Mainz, Germany

  1988 Robert Duncan (The Opening of the Field), 69, San Francisco

  1898 Timofey Pnin lives a life in between: between the Russia of his birth and the American college campus where he plies his marginal, untenured trade as a professor, and between the Russian language that still rules his tongue and the English he can’t get his mouth around. He’s even lost between birthdays: his original birthday, on this date in the old-style Justinian calendar, was made obsolete by the Russian Revolution, and now it “sidled by in a Gregorian disguise (thirteen—no, twelve days late).” Pnin shared this birthday slippage with his creator, Valdimir Nabokov, who, born on April 10, 1898, in the old calendar, celebrated his modernized birthday on both April 22 and 23, since the gap between the Justinian and Gregorian calendars had increased from twelve to thirteen days in 1900.

  1936 Walking through northern England on a “frightfully cold” day to research The Road to Wigan Pier, George Orwell made a detour to Rudyard Lake as a tribute to Rudyard Kipling, who had died two weeks before and whose parents had named him after this favorite picnic spot.

  1971 Was it just bad luck when Frank Serpico caught a .22 bullet in the cheek while trying to make an undercover drug buy in a Williamsburg tenement just before midnight, or was he set up, as payback for testifying against endemic corruption in the New York Police Department? Not all his luck was bad: the bullet veered away from his spinal cord and stopped just short of his carotid artery, and Officer Serpico survived to receive the NYPD’s Medal of Honor for, in his words, being “stupid enough to have been shot in the face.” Before Al Pacino played him onscreen and indelibly embodied his hip-cop-in-Greenwich-Village style, his story was told by Peter Maas in Serpico, a million-seller that left unanswered the question of whether his fellow cops had anything to do with what happened that night in Brooklyn.