A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  Oddly, the best-known novels with “March” in their titles have nothing to do with the month: Middlemarch, though it sounds like a synonym for the day of Caesar’s death, refers to a town, not a time. (It’s a fall book more than anything.) And in 2006, the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction went to Geraldine Brooks’s March, about the March girls’ absent father in Little Women, while one of the finalists it beat out, E. L. Doctorow’s The March, already the winner of the National Book Critics Circle and PEN/Faulkner prizes, is the story of Sherman’s march through the South, which took place in the fall, not the spring, of 1864.

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR MARCH

  Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare (1599) There may be no literary character more famously forewarned than this would-be emperor, who, in his own play, is spoken of far more than he speaks himself and dies halfway through the action.

  David Copperfield by Charles Dickens (1850) On a Friday in March at the stroke of midnight, a baby boy is born to the widow Copperfield, into “a world not at all excited about his arrival,” thereby beginning—with “all that David Copperfield kind of crap”—Dickens’s favorite of his novels, and his most personal.

  Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery (1908) It’s still winter on Prince Edward Island when Anne Shirley’s birthday arrives every March, allowing her to eagerly mark the next milestone in what remains one of the most beloved coming-of-age stories.

  The Long Ships by Frans Bengtsson (1941–45) With the first stirrings of spring, set sail from Scandia in search of plunder with Red Orm and his restless Vikings on their yearly raids in Bengtsson’s epic, based on the Icelandic sagas but fully modern in its detached good humor.

  Rabbit, Run by John Updike (1960) Updike’s Rabbit Angstrom novels grew, a book at a time, into an unplanned epic with each book tied to a season. The first one begins, appropriately, in spring, with Rabbit still young enough to feel the aches of age for the first time.

  The Moviegoer by Walker Percy (1961) Binx Bolling’s story is set in New Orleans during Mardi Gras, but Binx does his best to avoid the hoo-ha, distracting himself instead with drives along the Gulf Coast with his secretaries and with the movies, whose “peculiar reality” contrasts with the potent sense of unreality he’s burdened with.

  Caesar by Adrian Goldsworthy (2006) To sweep away the mist of legend and prophecy, turn to this portrait of the ruthless but many-sided general and dictator whose name remains a synonym for leadership.

  Animal, Vegetable, Miracle by Barbara Kingsolver (2007) The Kingsolver family chose to begin their “food sabbatical”—a year of living only on what they grew, or close to it—in late March, with the arrival of the first Virginia asparagus. By the following March they were looking forward to reclaiming a few imported luxuries in their diet but were otherwise well fed and gratifyingly educated by the acre that had sustained them.

  March 1

  BORN: 1913 Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man, Going to the Territory), Oklahoma City

  1917 Robert Lowell (Life Studies, For the Union Dead), Boston

  DIED: 1978 Paul Scott (The Raj Quartet, Staying On), 57, London

  1983 Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon, The Ghost in the Machine), 77, London

  1921 At the Mi-carême Ball, the last big charity event of the Atlanta social season, Margaret “Peggy” Mitchell, a young debutante, scandalized society by performing an “Apache dance” inspired by the Valentino movies of the day, in which an undergraduate beau from Georgia Tech flung her shrieking about the ballroom of the Georgian Terrace and gave her a suggestive kiss. The newspapers were still talking of the sensation months later, and the following year society columnist “Polly Peachtree” marveled at Mitchell’s “pretty wit” and “fearlessness,” which had given her “more honest-to-goodness suitors than almost any other girl in Atlanta.” But Mitchell once again confounded social expectations by going from debutante to working reporter at the Atlanta Journal, and soon she began a secret project: an epic novel of the Civil War.

  1937 “He’s my enemy,” Jane Auer told a friend after first meeting Paul Bowles in the lobby of New York’s Plaza Hotel. Despite (or because of) this strong reaction, the next time they met she invited herself along on Bowles’s impromptu trip to Mexico and immediately called her mother, who said to Bowles, “If my daughter’s going to Mexico with you, I think I should meet you first, don’t you think?” They did meet, Mrs. Auer immediately approved—perhaps because it had been so hard to get her daughter to look for a suitor—and on this day Jane and Paul got on a bus for Mexico. Nearly a year later they were married, beginning a thirty-five-year personal and artistic alliance, through lovers of both sexes, that proved remarkably durable.

  1938 Anaïs Nin was an unknown author when her lover Henry Miller declared in the Criterion that the diary she’d been keeping since age eleven was “a monumental confession which when given to the world will take its place beside the revelations of St. Augustine, Petronius, Rousseau, Proust, and others.” Nin was ambivalent about giving that confession to the world—“I have tried both to uncover the secret and hide myself. Henry’s essay in the Criterion gave me away,” she wrote (in her diary, of course)—but with her consent Miller announced that “by March 1st 1938, failing a world war or a collapse of the monetary systems of the world,” he would publish the diary’s first volume. But he couldn’t raise the funds, and the diaries remained unpublished until 1966 (unexpurgated editions didn’t appear until after her death, in 1986).

  1969 Anatole Broyard, in the New York Times, on Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint: “The book is a kind of Catch-22 of sexuality, and much funnier,” but Jewish comics like Lenny Bruce and Nichols and May “were working Portnoy’s territory more than ten years ago.”

  March 2

  BORN: 1904 Dr. Seuss (The Cat in the Hat, Horton Hears a Who!), Springfield, Mass.

  1931 Tom Wolfe (The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test), Richmond, Va.

  1942 John Irving (A Prayer for Owen Meany), Exeter, N.H.

  DIED: 1930 D. H. Lawrence (Women in Love, Lady Chatterley’s Lover), 44, Vence, France

  1982 Philip K. Dick (Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?), 53, Santa Ana, Calif.

  1909 Living in London, across the world from her family in New Zealand, and carrying the child of a young man who declined to marry her, Katherine Mansfield abruptly accepted the proposal of her older, thoroughly respectable singing teacher, George Bowden, and wed him at the Paddington registry office on this day. That night, though, she had a change of heart, and after breakfast the next morning, their marriage unconsummated, she left him, and later that year she lost the baby. The encumbrances of English law and decorum delayed their divorce, and her subsequent marriage to John Middleton Murry, for nearly a decade.

  1936 Samuel Beckett, unsure of his career path, applied to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Moscow State School of Cinematography. (He never heard back.)

  1976 Did Ishmael Reed really finish writing Flight to Canada a minute after midnight on Fat Tuesday in room 127 of the Tamanaca Hotel in New Orleans, as the last page of his novel implies? If so, it was a fitting way to spend Mardi Gras: Flight to Canada is a novel made for Carnival, upending history while never forgetting it, putting Abe Lincoln (“Gary Cooper-awkward”) and Harriet Beecher Stowe in a gleefully anachronistic plot alongside Raven Quickskill, a fugitive slave and poet who takes a “non-stop jumbo jet” to the North, and Princess Quaw Quaw Tralaralara, an Ivy League grad who earns a living doing “ethnic dances” for grant money and who, come to think of it, would be right at home sitting poolside at the actual teepee-themed Tamanaca in downtown New Orleans.

  1976 John Cheever and his son wrote a parody of Gabriel García Márquez together (they both “think he’s terrible”).

  2004 Declaring, “I’ve waited two years for this. You spat on my book!” Richard Ford spat on Colson Whitehead at a literary party, two years after Whitehead panned A Multitude of Sins in the New York Times. Whitehead later remarked, “This wasn’t the first time
some old coot had drooled on me.”

  2011 It was unprecedented for Prime Minister Ahmed Shafik to answer unscripted questions on a discussion panel on Egyptian TV, but the moment became even more historic when a fellow panelist, Alaa Al Aswany, longtime pro-democracy activist, practicing dentist, and the country’s leading novelist since the publication of his bestseller The Yacoubian Building in 2002, challenged him about the government’s murders of protesters in Tahrir Square. After their exchange escalated into a shouting match—“This is unacceptable!” “You are the one who is unacceptable!”—Aswany demanded that Shafik resign. And the next morning, to the country’s surprise, he did.

  March 3

  BORN: 1756 William Godwin (Caleb Williams, Political Justice), Wisbech, England

  1926 James Merrill (The Changing Light at Sandover), New York City

  DIED: 1982 Georges Perec (Life, a User’s Manual; A Void), 45, Ivry-sur-Seine, France

  1994 John Williams (Stoner, Butcher’s Crossing), 71, Fayetteville, Ark.

  1896 “How are your stomachs, gentlemen?” It’s not the unsettling height of the watchtowers of the unfinished Williamsburg Bridge, far above the black waters of the East River, that Police Commissioner Theodore Roosevelt warns his visitors about, but the mutilated body of a boy. Caleb Carr’s The Alienist places Roosevelt, a reforming top cop just a few years away from the White House, in the middle of a murder mystery notable for both the imaginative brutality of its crimes and its lovingly detailed evocation of a particular moment in the history of New York City: the tenements packed with immigrants, the muscular reforms of the Progressives, the advent of modern psychology and forensics, and, of course, the green turtle soup au clair at Delmonico’s.

  1900 W. L. Alden, in the New York Times: “The other day I read Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness,’ which was published in Blackwood’s Magazine. Good Heavens! How that man can write! The scene of the story is laid on the Congo, and in truth there is very little story to it, but how it grips and holds one!”

  1923 T. S. Eliot’s new poem, The Waste Land, was so impenetrable, speculated the Books column in the debut issue of Time magazine, that it might be a hoax.

  1924 After spending the morning scrambling to finish his final draft of “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs,” a Weird Tales horror story ghostwritten for Harry Houdini, H. P. Lovecraft rushed off to join Sonia Haft Greene in ill-fated matrimony.

  1958 Dan Pinck, in the New Republic, on Jack Kerouac’s The Subterraneans: “Were there any sign in any of his three books that Kerouac possessed an intellect, it might be possible to consider The Subterraneans as a joke of his on the public and on the critics. It is not a joke. Kerouac is simply ignorant, but a name-dropper supreme.”

  1983 When the physician on duty on this day at the Merced Community Medical Center in California diagnosed Lia Lee, an eight-month-old girl in the throes of a seizure, with epilepsy, her Hmong family had already made the same diagnosis. But their understanding of the disease and its treatment was far different than Lia’s doctors’, and that difference becomes tragic in Anne Fadiman’s The Spirit Catches You and You Fall Down, which takes its name from the translation of qaug dab peg, the Hmong name for Lia’s condition. Fadiman’s own sensitivity to the power of cultural differences has made her subtle portrait of good intentions clashing across a chasm of misunderstanding required reading for medical students across the country and one of the most indelible works of American journalism.

  2005 Published: Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (Faber & Faber, London)

  March 4

  BORN: 1948 James Ellroy (American Tabloid, L.A. Confidential), Los Angeles

  1965 Khaled Hosseini (The Kite Runner), Kabul, Afghanistan

  DIED: 1963 William Carlos Williams (Paterson), 79, Paterson, N.J.

  1986 Elizabeth Smart (By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept), 72, London

  1845 With countless novels published under his name filling the newspapers and bookshops of France, the prolific Alexandre Dumas drew the envy and ire of rivals, including the young writer Eugène de Mirecourt, who published a pamphlet, Fabrique des Romans, accusing Dumas of running a “novel factory” and lashing his workers like slaves. Dumas successfully sued Mirecourt for libel, and he also asked his most prominent collaborator, Auguste Maquet, to write a testimonial letter on this day that proudly listed the many works they wrote together (including The Three Musketeers and The Count of Monte Cristo) and disavowed any further compensation for his work. Nevertheless, after their relationship soured, Maquet himself sued Dumas a dozen years later for a share of their work; once again, Dumas won in court.

  1857 Young Samuel Clemens thought a lot about the romance of piloting a Mississippi steamboat, but not much about its difficulty: “I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it was so wide.” But when on this afternoon, in the crowded waters along the levee at New Orleans, the pilot of the Colonel Crossman said, “Here, take her; shave those steamships as close as you’d peel an apple,” and handed over the wheel, Clemens, who had begged himself into an apprenticeship as a cub pilot, didn’t last long, panicking and steering the boat out into the rougher open water, avoiding the traffic but drawing an earful from his master, the beginning of his river education in Mark Twain’s Life on the Mississippi.

  1866 Collapsed in a cave in the mountains of Arizona, Captain John Carter, a Confederate-vet-turned-prospector who has just struck a valuable vein of gold, finds himself transformed. Rising naked from his lifeless body, he is “drawn with the suddenness of thought through the trackless immensity of space” to a landscape he immediately recognizes as Mars but which, as he soon learns, its inhabitants call “Barsoom.” And so Edgar Rice Burroughs, in “Under the Moons of Mars,” his first published story (his second was “Tarzan of the Apes”), introduced the character of John Carter of Mars, whose relative strength on the smaller planet leads him, after many journeys through the portal of death between Earth and its red neighbor, to be proclaimed “Warlord of Barsoom.”

  1974 On the cover of the debut issue of People magazine: Mia Farrow as The Great Gatsby’s Daisy Buchanan.

  March 5

  BORN: 1870 Frank Norris (McTeague, The Octopus, The Pit), Chicago

  1948 Leslie Marmon Silko (Ceremony, Storyteller), Albuquerque, N.M.

  DIED: 1966 Anna Akhmatova (Requiem, Poem Without a Hero), 76, Leningrad

  2003 John Sanford (The People from Heaven), 98, Montecito, Calif.

  1046 When the Persian bureaucrat Nasir Khusraw set out for Mecca on this day (by his calendar the 23rd day of Sha’ban in the year 437) from his home in Merv, at that time one of the great trading cities of the world, it was not his first journey. Earlier in the year, on a business trip to a nearby city, he’d spent a month “constantly drunk on wine.” But in a dream at the end of his binge he was transformed: waking from what he called a sleep of forty years, he took leave from his job and began a seven-year pilgrimage that took him to Mecca four times, a circuitous journey through the Middle East he later recorded in the Safarnama, or the Book of Travels, a memoir consulted ever since for its meticulous descriptions of eleventh-century Cairo and Jerusalem and for its rare insight into the mind of a traveler during the Islamic golden age.

  1807 Arrested as a Prussian spy by the French while traveling through Berlin, Heinrich von Kleist was imprisoned in the granite dungeon in the Fort de Joux, the same prison where the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L’Ouverture died four years before.

  1982 The plum role of Ignatius J. Reilly in the long-rumored movie adaptation of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces has been slated for nearly every weight-challenged funnyman in Hollywood: John Candy, Chris Farley, Divine, John Goodman, Will Ferrell, Zach Galifianakis. But first on the list was John Belushi, until he overdosed at the Chateau Marmont on this day, not long before a scheduled studio meeting on the picture (also set to star Richard Pryor as Burma Jones). That
’s not the only intriguing role from recent fiction Belushi’s death derailed: he was also lined up to play Ellerbee, the Job figure in Stanley Elkin’s The Living End, with Ken Russell directing and Peter O’Toole, naturally, cast as God.

  2004 A. S. Byatt, in the Guardian, on David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas: “David Mitchell entices his readers on to a rollercoaster, and at first they wonder if they want to get off. Then—at least in my case—they can’t bear the journey to end.”

  March 6

  BORN: 1885 Ring Lardner (You Know Me Al, Haircut), Niles, Mich.

  1927 Gabriel García Márquez (One Hundred Years of Solitude), Aracataca, Colombia

  DIED: 1888 Louisa May Alcott (Little Women, Jo’s Boys, Little Men), 55, Boston

  1982 Ayn Rand (Atlas Shrugged, The Fountainhead), 77, New York City

  1718 In one of the clearer bits of timekeeping in a story whose digressions continually confound chronology, Tristram Shandy introduces his Life and Opinions by tracing his troubles to the moment of his conception, “in the night, betwixt the first Sunday and the first Monday in the month of March.” He can place the date precisely because of the regularity of his father’s habits, which included the winding of the large house-clock on the first Sunday of every month, a task he combined, for the sake of efficiency, with other husbandly duties. Such a habit, Tristram has reason to believe, caused his mother to interrupt his begetting with the question, “Have you not forgotten to wind up the clock?”—a disruption he is certain caused the unfortunate scattering of his animal spirits just at the moment of their transmission from father to son.

  1831 Cadet Edgar Allan Poe was expelled from West Point for “gross neglect of duty” and “disobedience of orders.”

  1928 After pulling a skylight down on his head in Paris, Ernest Hemingway required stitches.

  1943 Especially after the death of his mother when he was fourteen, William Styron was close and affectionate with his father, an engineer with an appreciation for the arts, but on this day during his freshman year at Davidson, “taken aback” by a letter full of criticism, he replied to his father on fraternity stationery. “Pop, I realize that I have done very little to further my ‘scholastic record,’ if you can call it that,” his “worthless son” wrote. “The only consolation I have is that I have made no academic failing large enough to actually ‘flunk me out’ of school.”