A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1992 When Joe Sacco first arrived in Gorazde in 1995, the Bosnian war wasn’t over, but the worst days of the siege seemed to be. In a few years Gorazde, once a small Yugoslav city, had become an “enclave” of mostly Muslim Bosnians, besieged by the surrounding ethnic Serbs as the Yugoslav federation was torn apart. While peace talks continued in Ohio, Sacco drank, smoked, and listened to the Bosnians—who, unlike him, couldn’t take the UN’s protected Blue Route out of their city—as they recounted the horrors of the siege and waited for their lives to resume. With each of the dates, mostly in 1992, they mentioned—May 4, May 22, June 10, April 17—came a terrible story that Sacco, the pioneering comics journalist, turned into the grim testimony and dark laughter of Safe Area Gorazde.

  1997 Though he later had one of his characters, Aidan Donahue in The Song Is You, commit the mortifying game-show sin of blurting out an inadvertent anti-Semitic slur after winning three games on Jeopardy!, Arthur Phillips, then a “speechwriter from Boston” and not yet a published novelist, made it unscathed through his own run on America’s Favorite Quiz Show™, winning five games before retiring (as the show then required in the pre–Ken Jennings era) as an undefeated champion. Perhaps his finest moment came in his third game, when he swept the “Shakespearean Characters” category, revealing an expertise he’d later use in his fifth novel, The Tragedy of Arthur, which includes a complete, and completely made up, lost Shakespeare play by the same name.

  June 11

  BORN: 1925 William Styron (Sophie’s Choice, Darkness Visible), Newport News, Va.

  1947 Allan Gurganus (Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All), Rocky Mount, N.C.

  DIED: 1936 Robert E. Howard (Conan the Barbarian), 30, Cross Plains, Tex.

  1998 Catherine Cookson (The Fifteen Streets), 91, Newcastle, England

  1687 Robinson Crusoe returns to England after thirty-six years.

  1850 Death is general throughout Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, meted out and suffered and sparing no one save Judge Holden—the judge who, he says himself, will never die. But for everyone and everything else in the story the end is ever-present. The marauders in Glanton’s gang, whose murderous swarming across the Southwest makes up much of the novel, band together and disband without sentiment or permanence, and on this day the fighter known as the “kid,” long gone from the gang himself, witnesses a moment emblematic of many others. Standing in a crowd at a public hanging, he watches as “abruptly two bound figures rose vertically from among their fellows to the top of the gatehouse and there they hung and there they died.” That the two figures are Toadvine and Brown, men he’d traveled and killed with, holds hardly any more value for the kid than that they are all fellows in the same fate.

  1865 Friedrich Nietzsche was hardly the only twenty-year-old to lose his faith in God, but few have done it with such eloquent finality, or such lasting influence. Having announced his apostasy to the distress of his family, he replied (in a joking and affectionate letter otherwise full of news of a music festival) to his sister’s defense of the Christian faith she thought they had shared, “Is it the most important thing to arrive at that particular view of God, world and reconciliation that makes us feel most comfortable? . . . Here the ways of men divide: if you wish to strive for peace of soul and happiness, then believe; if you wish to be a disciple of truth, then inquire.”

  1906 “Here you are,” W. C. Fields greeted Winsor McCay in their shared dressing room before the Little Nemo cartoonist made his vaudeville debut as a “lightning-sketch” artist. “A little scotch for my little Scotch friend.”

  1927 “Alceste,” in The New Yorker, on Mary Agnes Best’s Thomas Paine: “When Roosevelt . . . called Paine ‘a filthy little atheist,’ he was following in the footsteps of all Paine’s traducers. There is nothing wrong with the statement except three facts: Paine was not an atheist; he was not a little man, either physically or mentally; and he was neither careless or dirty in his habits and appearance.”

  2000 W. S. Di Piero, in the New York Times, on W. G. Sebald’s Vertigo: “Sebald is a thrilling, original writer. He makes narration a state of investigative bliss.”

  June 12

  BORN: 1892 Djuna Barnes (Nightwood, Ladies Almanack), Cornwall-on-Hudson, N.Y.

  1929 Anne Frank (The Diary of a Young Girl), Frankfurt, Germany

  DIED: 1936 Karl Kraus (Die Fackel, The Third Walpurgis Night), 62, Vienna

  1972 Edmund Wilson (Axel’s Castle, To the Finland Station), 77, Talcottville, N.Y.

  1857 When no one came to shave him on his first morning as a guest at the country home of Charles Dickens, Hans Christian Andersen sent for his host’s eldest son to perform the service. This may have put him on the wrong side of the Dickens children, who found his stay interminable. As Kate Dickens remembered, “He was a bony bore, and stayed on and on.” Having suggested he would visit for a week or two, Andersen stayed for five, and though he entertained the children with his ingenious paper cutouts, he could tell they despised him. Their busy father was friendlier, but after Andersen finally went home to Denmark, Dickens posted a card in his guest room that read, “Hans Andersen slept in this room for five weeks—which seemed to the family AGES!”

  1915 Theodore Dreiser, in the New Republic, on The Good Soldier by Ford Madox Ford: “The interlacings, the cross-references, the re-re-references to all sorts of things which subsequently are told somewhere in full, irritate one to the point of one’s laying down the book.”

  1963 On the day that Medgar Evers, the Mississippi field representative of the NAACP, was shot in the back outside his home in Jackson, James Baldwin was writing Blues for Mister Charlie, a play about another notorious murder of a black man in Mississippi. When he learned of Evers’s death he “resolved that nothing under heaven would prevent me from getting this play done.” Meanwhile, when Evers’s fellow Jackson resident Eudora Welty heard of the murder, she wrote “Where Is the Voice Coming From?,” a story told from the mind of the killer that was published in The New Yorker within weeks. When later that year Byron De La Beckwith, from a higher class than the poor white Welty had imagined as the murderer, was arrested for the crime (he wasn’t convicted until 1994), a Faulkner-reading friend told her, “You thought he was a Snopes, but he was a Compson.”

  1971 Charles Joseph Samuels, in the New Republic, on Kurt Vonnegut: “He can tell us nothing worth knowing except what his rise itself indicates: ours is an age in which adolescent ridicule can become a mode of upward mobility.”

  June 13

  BORN: 1752 Fanny Burney (Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla), King’s Lynn, England

  1888 Fernando Pessoa (The Book of Disquiet), Lisbon

  DIED: 1965 Martin Buber (I and Thou, The Way of Man), 87, Jerusalem

  1998 Reg Smythe (Andy Capp), 80, Hartlepool, England

  1863 Darwin’s Origin of Species took a year or so to make its way to New Zealand, but once it did, Samuel Butler, who had taken up sheep farming there to escape the English upbringing he’d later savage in the posthumous novel The Way of All Flesh, pounced on its ideas. On this day, in the essay “Darwin Among the Machines,” he declared our machines would be the next to evolve, leaving humans where horses and dogs were today: “There is nothing which our infatuated race would desire more than to see a fertile union between two steam engines.” He extended the idea in his utopian satire, Erewhon, and it took hold again a century and a half later, as the intelligence of machines grew, in books like George Dyson’s Darwin Among the Machines.

  1954 Saul Bellow, in the New York Times, on Ben Hecht’s A Child of the Century: “His manners are not always nice, but then nice manners do not always make interesting autobiographies, and this autobiography has the merit of being intensely interesting.”

  1963 Kenzaburō Ōe was already known as the precocious, rebellious voice of his postwar generation in Japan when he and his wife were presented with a grim dilemma: their son was born with a growth from his skull that their doctors said would kill him if left untouched but tu
rn him into a vegetable if removed. The Ōes’ decision to operate and, against cultural traditions, integrate Hikari, their handicapped child, into their lives transformed Ōe’s writing life immediately, beginning with his novel A Personal Matter, in which a young father has to decide what to do with his “monster” child. Ōe’s great subject remained his son, who against all expectations found a vocation in musical composition that made him nearly as well known around the world as his Nobel Prize–winning father.

  1965 Long delayed by a Polish bureaucracy annoyed that a national sex symbol wanted to marry a New York Times correspondent who had already been threatened with expulsion for his reporting, the wedding between Elżbieta Czyżewska and David Halberstam took place in Warsaw before Czyżewska rushed off to receive the Golden Mask award as Poland’s most popular TV actress for 1965. Halberstam, who had left his Pulitzer-winning work in Vietnam to report from behind the Iron Curtain, finally wore out his welcome and was thrown out of the country at the end of the year; Czyżewska followed him but struggled to find acting work in her adopted country, where her vividly Eastern European use of English was said to inspire the speech patterns of the title character in her friend William Styron’s Sophie’s Choice.

  June 14

  BORN: 1899 Yasunari Kawabata (Snow Country, A Thousand Cranes), Osaka, Japan

  1941 John Edgar Wideman (Brothers and Keepers), Washington, D.C.

  DIED: 1936 G. K. Chesterton (The Man Who Was Thursday), 62, Beaconsfield, England

  1986 Jorge Luis Borges (The Garden of Forking Paths), 86, Geneva, Switzerland

  1728 It’s a measure of the outrage stirred up by a small satirical pamphlet called The Dunciad, which mocked the horde of London scribblers as followers of the goddess of Dulness, that its author, Alexander Pope, had to take out a newspaper advertisement on this day asserting that, despite the claims of a rival pamphlet titled A Popp upon Pope, he had not been whipped on his “naked Posteriors” by two assailants in a park along the Thames, nor was he carried away bleeding in a lady friend’s apron. Though his biographer calls publishing The Dunciad the “greatest folly” of Pope’s career, the poet likely would have been gratified to know that being named in his satire would end up as most of his targets’ only claim to literary immortality.

  1949 Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus survived World War II amphibious landings in New Guinea and the Philippines, but he barely came out alive from a night at the Edgewater Beach Hotel in Chicago, when Ruth Ann Steinhagen, a nineteen-year-old obsessed with Waitkus since his days with the Cubs, asked him up to her room and shot him in the chest with a rifle. Waitkus returned to the Phillies lineup within a year, though, and was still playing in 1952 when Bernard Malamud transformed the incident into mythology in The Natural, in which Roy Hobbs, an unknown pitching prospect who has just struck out the legendary Walter “the Whammer” Whambold in a carnival dare, is shot by the mysterious Harriet Bird in her hotel room.

  1950 Fresh from signing a national syndication contract for his new comic strip, Li’l Folk, Charles Schulz celebrated with a steak dinner on the train from New York and, upon arriving in the Twin Cities, went directly to the home of Donna Mae Johnson, the petite, red-haired fellow employee at Art Instruction, Inc., he’d been courting for months, and proposed. She replied, “I don’t want to marry anybody, I just wish everybody would leave me alone,” but in October, the same month Schulz’s strip made its newspaper debut—with a new name, Peanuts, that he’d always despise—she married Schulz’s rival, her childhood sweetheart Al Wold. Forty years later, a grandmother and still Mrs. Al Wold, she would be discovered as the original for Charlie Brown’s eternal unrequited crush, the Little Red-Haired Girl.

  1951 Rachel Carson, author of the year’s surprise bestseller, The Sea Around Us, agreed to write the liner notes to Leopold Stokowski and the NBC Symphony Orchestra’s recording of Debussy’s La mer.

  1998 In one of the forty meals he took at Jack’s Outback in Yarmouthport, Massachusetts, this month, Edward Gorey ordered two poached eggs, ham, white toast, and fruit cup.

  June 15

  BORN: 1914 Saul Steinberg (The Discovery of America), Râmnicu Sărat, Romania

  1939 Brian Jacques (Redwall, Castaways of the Flying Dutchman), Liverpool

  DIED: 1941 Evelyn Underhill (Mysticism, The Spiritual Life), 65, London

  1984 Meredith Willson (The Music Man), 82, Santa Monica, Calif.

  1904 Five days after he met Nora Barnacle in the street and one day after she stood him up for their first date, James Joyce sent her a note: “I may be blind. I looked for a long time at a head of reddish brown hair and decided it was not yours. I went home quite dejected.” They met the next day.

  1935 “Wouldn’t Old Jules snort if he knew that his story won the $5,000 Atlantic Monthly press prize?” Two days after a telegram arrived announcing the prize for Old Jules, Mari Sandoz’s biography of her pioneer father, Sandoz wrote her mother with the news. On his deathbed Jules Sandoz had made a request to his daughter, “Why don’t you write my life some time?”—a surprising suggestion because just a few days before he had scribbled a note to her: “You know I consider artists and writers the maggots of society.” Despite his domineering distaste for her work, she kept to her vocation, indefatigably chronicling the settlers of the sandhills of Nebraska and—in books like Crazy Horse and Cheyenne Autumn—those they displaced.

  1952 Though he had been commissioned only to write a three-hundred-word review, Meyer Levin’s enthusiasm for Anne Frank’s Diary of a Young Girl convinced the editors of the New York Times Book Review to give him their entire front page on this day. His praise—“It is so wondrously alive, so near, that one feels overwhelmingly the universalities of human nature”—led the book’s first edition to be sold out in a week. It also spurred a rush to adapt the diary for the stage, which Levin was already enmeshed in, since he had agreed with Frank’s father, Otto, to turn it into a play himself. When his version of the play was rejected, though, he refused to let go, and spent the final thirty years of his life consumed in a single-minded combat with Frank and others that even he called, in a 1973 memoir, The Obsession.

  2001 Misha Vainberg, the grossly overweight and U.S.-educated son of the 1,238th-richest man in the new Russia, prefers improvising hip-hop rhymes to declaiming Pushkin while relaxing at an upscale nightspot in downscale St. Petersburg, until news arrives that his Beloved Papa has been murdered. The crimes of that same papa were what stranded Misha in his homeland in the first place—knocking off a businessman from Oklahoma is no way to get your son an American visa—but his death sends Misha on a renewed quest to return to the complacent pleasures of the States and to his South Bronx sweetheart, across the barely-stranger-than-truth landscape of Gary Shteyngart’s surprisingly poignant satire, Absurdistan.

  June 16

  BORN: 1937 Erich Segal (Love Story, The Death of Comedy), Brooklyn

  1938 Joyce Carol Oates (them, We Were the Mulvaneys), Lockport, N.Y.

  DIED: 1944 Marc Bloch (French Rural History), 57, Saint-Didier-de-Formans, France

  2006 Barbara Epstein (editor, The New York Review of Books), 77, New York City

  1816 When was Frankenstein made? (The story, that is, not the monster.) The moment of Mary Shelley’s creation has been nearly as enshrouded in legend as the “dreary night of November” when Victor Frankenstein gave the reanimating jolt to his monster. It was, as the story goes, a wet and dreary June in Switzerland when Lord Byron suggested to his guests—Dr. Polidori, who had just sprained his ankle, and the scandalously not-yet-married couple, Percy Shelley and Mary Godwin—that they each write a ghost story. As Mary Shelley recalled it later, after the men told their stories she had a vision in her bedroom of a scientist terrified by his creation as it begins to stir with the spark of life. Terrified too by her vision, she rose to the sight of moonlight over the Alps, a detail that a Texas astronomer has, with methodical literal-mindedness, traced to a single possible hour for her inspiration, between two a
nd three in the early morning of June 16.

  1904 James Joyce went on his first outing with his future wife, Nora Barnacle, a rooming-house chambermaid he’d met in the street six days before. They went walking at Ringsend, where, at least as he reminded her in a letter five years later, “it was you who slid your hand down down inside my trousers” while “gazing at me out of your quiet saintlike eyes.”

  1904 Buck Mulligan shaves himself; Mr. Deasy tells anti-Semitic jokes; Stephen Dedalus says God is “a shout in the street,” picks his nose, analyzes Hamlet, owes George William Russell money, and drinks absinthe; Leopold Bloom grills a kidney, steps over a hopscotch game, samples Sweets of Sin from a bookcart, buys it for his wife, and tidies up after fireworks on the beach; Patrick Dignam is laid to rest; J. J. O’Molloy asks Myles Crawford for a loan; Blazes Boylan places a losing bet on Sceptre, peeks down the front of a shopgirl’s blouse, and cuckolds Bloom; Bantam Lyons picks the winning longshot Throwaway; John Eglinton doubts that Shakespeare was a Jew; Martin Cunningham takes up a collection for the widowed Mrs. Dignam; Cissy Caffrey asks Bloom the time; Gerty MacDowell raises her skirt; Mortimer Edward Purefoy is born to Mina; John Howard Parnell plays chess against himself; Ben Dollard sings “The Croppy Boy”; and Bob Doran passes out on the bar in James Joyce’s Ulysses.

  1965 “When you write that you have never lied to her about what she might expect, I think you exaggerate,” John Cheever advised Frederick Exley, whose wife had just returned to him. “Neither you nor I nor anyone else can describe the volcanic landscapes a poor girl strays into when she marries a literary man.”

  June 17

  BORN: 1871 James Weldon Johnson (The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man), Jacksonville, Fla.

  1880 Carl Van Vechten (Nigger Heaven, Firecrackers), Cedar Rapids, Iowa

  DIED: 1947 Maxwell Perkins (editor of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Wolfe), 62, Stamford, Conn.