A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  NO YEAR Everyone is in place: the glum pianist is playing Rachmaninoff, the liver lady has put her slabs of liver to sizzle in the pan, the boring couple is moving the Hoover around, the motorcycle enthusiast is clanging in the courtyard, and the staff is all ready behind the scenes for the first reenactment. After months of preparation and rehearsal, the narrator of Tom McCarthy’s Remainder can finally step out of his flat into a world “zinging with significance.” A provocative (and diabolically approachable) experiment in fiction, in which a man injured in an accident uses his legal settlement to construct a complex simulation to recreate the fleetingly intense moments of reality his unreliable memory can recall, Remainder exposes the limits and seductions of memory and the tyranny of unlimited power.

  July 12

  BORN: 1817 Henry David Thoreau (Walden, Civil Disobedience), Concord, Mass.

  1904 Pablo Neruda (Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair), Parral, Chile

  DIED: 1536 Erasmus (In Praise of Folly, On Civility in Children), 69, Basel, Switzerland

  2010 Harvey Pekar (American Splendor), 70, Cleveland Heights, Ohio

  1794 On the 24th day of Messidor in Year II of the French Republic (according to the new calendar proclaimed by the Revolution), Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, having been forced from his post as small-town mayor by the Jacobins, sailed for the United States, where among his most memorable adventures, recounted thirty years later in his food-lover’s classic, The Physiology of Taste, was the shooting of a wild turkey in Connecticut. While his host proclaimed the advantages of American liberty in terms that would perhaps have drawn more interest from his countryman Tocqueville, Brillat-Savarin, a man of less abstract appetites, concerned himself instead with his host’s four “buxom” daughters and with the pressing dilemma: “how best I should cook my turkey.”

  1951 The army patrol had been missing in Korea for less than four days when they encountered a marine outfit near Haeju and were returned to their own unit, where they happily testified that their sergeant, Raymond Shaw, had engaged and destroyed the enemy and saved the lives of his men—minus poor Ed Malvole and Bobby Lembeck—and that, though none of them could stand Sergeant Shaw a week before, they now believed, to a man, that he was the finest, bravest, most admirable person they’d ever known. Those missing four days, of course, in Richard Condon’s delirious Cold War fantasia, The Manchurian Candidate, were spent under the expert care of Yen Lo, the brilliant Pavlovian psychologist, who left the soldiers’ brains washed almost clean—except for those nightmares Major Marco keeps having—and transformed sour, arrogant Raymond Shaw into a war hero and a programmed assassin.

  1980 “Dear Madame Bonamitan, In reply to your letter of July twelfth 1980, it gives us great pleasure to inform you . . .” In reply to which letter? Sonore had written so many, on so many days, or rather Ti-Cirique, the local man of letters, had written them for her, sprinkling her appeals for work with literary quotations of woe from Hugo, Racine, and Lautréaumont. Finally this letter came in return, and with it an offer of temporary employment with the city office of urban services. But what interest had the city in her shanty neighborhood, called Texaco, a name borrowed or wrested or stolen from the oil refinery in whose shadow it arose: was it just a “pocket of insalubrity” to be cleared and cleansed? From that question grows the story of Patrick Chamoiseau’s Texaco, a full-throated and many-voiced defense of the motley Creole vigor and misery-built history of Chamoiseau’s island of Martinique.

  1980 A bolt of lightning exploded Farley Mowat’s chimney on Cape Breton and showered his Volvo with shards of brick.

  July 13

  BORN: 1894 Isaac Babel (Red Cavalry, Odessa Tales), Odessa, Russian Empire

  1934 Wole Soyinka (Ake, Death and the King’s Horseman), Abeokuta, Nigeria

  DIED: 1946 Alfred Stieglitz (Camera Work), 82, New York City

  1983 Gabrielle Roy (The Tin Flute, Street of Riches), 74, Quebec City

  1798 The poem’s full title is “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey, on revisiting the banks of the Wye during a tour, July 13, 1798,” and William Wordsworth would later say with pride that he had composed it fully in his head on a walk of four or five days with his sister, Dorothy, before writing it down. Presented as a reflection on the time since his last visit to the Wye five years before, when he was “in the hour of thoughtless youth,” it reveals, more particularly, the power and anxiety felt by someone who has just finished his first book. Lyrical Ballads, his collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, was already complete, they thought, but Wordsworth quickly inserted “Tintern Abbey” at its end, making a sort of afterword that showed he’d already outgrown the rest of his works in the collection.

  1890 Vastly prolific and sourly misanthropic, Ambrose Bierce established himself as one of the best-known newspapermen on the West Coast when William Randolph Hearst hired him to write for his newly acquired San Francisco Examiner in 1887, where he contributed columns, essays, and stories, including one story, published on this day, that has likely been read more times than all his other writing combined. Anthologized and adapted almost to the point of oblivion in the years since, “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge” still packs a clean wallop, held together as it is by, in a phrase Bierce cut from the final paragraph after this first appearance of the story, “as stout a rope as ever rewarded the zeal of a civilian patriot in war-time.”

  1928 Was there a real Charlie Chan? Earl Derr Biggers, who introduced the detective as a secondary character in 1925’s The House Without a Key, habitually deflected reports that Chan was modeled on an intrepid Honolulu detective named Chang Apana, but he came to embrace the idea after the two met in Hawaii. The Charlie Chan of the six books and forty-seven movies was urbane and fat, known for his fortune-cookie aphorisms, while Apana, as described in Charlie Chan, Yunte Huang’s dual biography of the man and the character, was a wiry ex-ranchhand who once wielded a five-foot bullwhip to round up a den of illegal gamblers (according to a Honolulu newspaper report on this day) and thought his English was too poor for him to accept a cameo role in the Charlie Chan movies he was offered.

  July 14

  BORN: 1916 Natalia Ginzburg (The City and the House), Palermo, Italy

  1966 Brian Selznick (The Invention of Hugo Cabret), East Brunswick, N.J.

  DIED: 1817 Germaine de Staël (Delphine; Corinne, or Italy), 51, Paris

  1984 Ernest Tidyman (Shaft, Shaft’s Big Score), 56, London

  1831 The governor of New York, hosting the French visitors Alexis de Tocqueville and Gustave de Beaumont, ran into his house for a gun after sighting a squirrel, but “the big man,” in Beaumont’s words, “had the clumsiness to miss him four times in succession.”

  1914 F.H., in the New Republic, on Edith Wharton’s Summer: “A good shipwreck, moral or physical, is by no means the least satisfactory of fictional themes, but no author has a right to run up and down the shore line waving a harmless heroine to destruction.”

  1920 In Isaac Babel’s 1920 Diary, the tersely observant record of his travels with brutal Cossack troops in the Bolshevik war against Poland that became the basis for his stories in Red Cavalry, a downed American pilot makes a single, memorable appearance, “barefoot but elegant, neck like a pillar, dazzlingly white teeth,” chatting with Babel about Bolshevism and Conan Doyle. Babel was right to suspect his name, Frank Mosher, was fake: the pilot, Captain Merian C. Cooper, had found the name written in his second-hand underwear. Meanwhile, in a fact Elif Batuman has great fun with in The Possessed, her romp through Russian literature, Captain Cooper went on to his own fame as the director of King Kong, and in the movie’s climactic scene he can be seen in the air again as the pilot of one of the planes attacking the giant ape.

  1931 The “curious dismembered volume” that Henry Frobisher mentions he has discovered in a letter on this day also, winkingly, describes the novel his story is part of, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas. “To my great annoyance,” Frobisher complains, “the pages cease, midsenten
ce.” He’s referring to a journal written during the California gold rush by a traveler named Adam Ewing that he’s come across in the library of a Belgian château, but pages ceasing abruptly is the common affliction of five of Cloud Atlas’s six stories, which are folded inside each other like the leaves of a book, with Frobisher’s letters making up chapters two and ten and Ewing’s journal chapters one and eleven, each story linked with the next by bonds both arbitrary and meaningful.

  1956 In high school in Chicago, he was the prodigy, leading his friend Saul Bellow “by the nose,” one classmate said. Among the New York intellectuals, he was, Irving Howe remembered, “our golden boy, more so than Bellow.” But Isaac Rosenfeld soon became a bohemian cautionary tale, the young man whose brilliance had taken him into a thicket of filthy basement apartments and homemade Reichian orgone boxes by the time he died at his desk of a heart attack on this day at thirty-eight.

  July 15

  BORN: 1892 Walter Benjamin (Illuminations, The Arcades Project), Berlin

  1949 Richard Russo (Empire Falls, Straight Man), Johnstown, N.Y.

  DIED: 1999 Gina Berriault (Women in Their Beds, The Son), 73, Greenbrae, Calif.

  2003 Roberto Bolaño (2666, By Night in Chile, Amulet), 50, Barcelona

  1677 or 1684 The illustrated adventures of Tintin take place in an abstracted geography bearing only an incomplete resemblance to our own. The intrepid boy reporter’s travels take him to countries you could once easily find on a map—Egypt, Tibet, the Soviet Union—but also to more fanciful nations like Syldavia and San Theodoros. And then there is Marlinspike Hall, the ancestral home of Sir Francis Haddock so gloriously regained by his descendant Captain Haddock at the end of Red Rackham’s Treasure. Where can it be found? For English readers, an envelope address in The Secret of the Unicorn places the mansion in England, granted to Sir Francis on this day in 1677 by Charles II. But in the original French editions, le château de Moulinsart is in Belgium, a gift on the same day in 1684 from Louis XIV. Blistering barnacles, which is to be believed?

  1955 With the delivery of the mail on this day J. P. Donleavy thought his literary career was over. Included was a parcel from Paris containing two copies of his first novel, The Ginger Man, which only then did he learn his publisher, the Olympia Press, had included in their smutty “Traveller’s Companion Series” alongside such offerings as Tender Was My Flesh, School for Sin, and White Thighs. Vowing revenge, Donleavy spent the next twenty years battling with Maurice Girodias, Olympia’s publisher, over the international rights to his novel, which became more valuable every year as the notorious book became a bestseller. Finally, vengefully, Donleavy bought control of Olympia, his enemy, at a bankruptcy auction, but even then the litigation between them continued.

  1988 “I can imagine you at forty,” Emma says to Dexter. “I can picture it right now.” She has the future Dexter figured out: a tiny sports car, a little paunch, a tan like a basted turkey. And he’s sure he has Emma’s number as well, as an artsy campus radical: Chagalls and manifestos on the wall, The Unbearable Lightness of Being at the side of the bed. We think we know what’s coming in the story too, after these opposites spend a night together in an Edinburgh flat, but David Nicholls has some surprises in store. In his novel One Day Nicholls revisits Emma and Dexter on July 15 every year for two decades and within that structure tells the story of their mostly parallel, sometimes passionately intersecting lives in a convincing way, by creating two people who you can imagine spend all the other days of the year thinking about each other.

  1995 Amazon.com sold its first book, a copy of Douglas Hofstadter’s Fluid Concepts and Creative Analogies: Computer Models of the Fundamental Mechanisms of Thought.

  July 16

  BORN: 1920 Anatole Broyard (Intoxicated by My Illness, Kafka Was the Rage), New Orleans

  1928 Anita Brookner (Hotel du Lac, Look at Me), London

  DIED: 1995 May Sarton (Mrs. Stevens Hears the Mermaids Singing), 83, York, Maine

  1995 Stephen Spender (World Within World, The Temple), 86, London

  1948 With Jean Genet’s many arrests for thievery and other crimes threatening to send him to prison for life just as his novels—often veiled portraits of his life outside the law—were becoming celebrated, Jean Cocteau and Jean-Paul Sartre published an open letter on this day to French president Vincent Auriol requesting a pardon for Genet, so he could devote himself to his work. The pardon was granted, and Genet never returned to prison, but he also never wrote another novel and for a half-dozen years he wrote almost nothing at all, a fallow period perhaps caused, as his biographer Edmund White has suggested, by the unfamiliarity of his acceptance by society, which only increased with the publication in 1952 of Sartre’s massive analysis of his life and work, Saint Genet.

  1951 Published: The Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger (Little, Brown, Boston)

  1969 John Updike had rarely encountered the present tense in fiction when he tried it out in Rabbit, Run. It felt “exhilaratingly speedy and free,” and it remained a perfect match for the Rabbit series, in which, at the end of every decade, Updike checked in on his flawed hero as he was transformed by time and by the times. In the second book, Rabbit Redux, the headlines from that turbulent era begin to invade the lives of his small-town Pennsylvania characters with a bewildering insistence, although as the novel opens, the private news that Rabbit’s father has for him—that Rabbit’s wife is having an affair—still dwarfs the event in the background on the TV, the endless replays of Apollo 11 blasting off for the moon.

  July 17

  BORN: 1902 Christina Stead (The Man Who Loved Children), Rockdale, Australia

  1951 Mark Bowden (Black Hawk Down, Guests of the Ayatollah), St. Louis

  DIED: 1790 Adam Smith (The Wealth of Nations), 67, Edinburgh

  2001 Katherine Graham (Personal History), 84, Boise, Idaho

  NO YEAR When Agatha Christie was challenged by a friend to try writing one of the detective stories she enjoyed so much, she began with the crime. And an ingenious one it was: in the early hours of July 17, Emily Inglethorpe, a wealthy matriarch who had just married a much younger man whom her family considered a fortune-hunting bounder, went into violent convulsions that finally killed her, an intricately planned murder whose details are revealed only when the Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, stranded nearby as a wartime refugee, is brought into the case. Written when Christie was twenty-five, The Mysterious Affair at Styles sat unread at her future publisher, the Bodley Head, for two years; finally published to superb reviews in 1921, it introduced Poirot to the world and earned its author £25.

  1948 P. H. Newby, in the New Statesman and Nation, on Raymond Queneau: “To the inexperienced eye a thoroughbred racehorse looks much too thin to be healthy. One can make the same mistake over good writing. Raymond Queneau’s A Hard Winter is only half the length of an average novel, but it is twice as effective. The speed, grace and intelligence of the writing give shock after shock of pleasure.”

  1960 “There’s a difference between knowing and yapping.” That’s the law of the house when the narrator of Alice Munro’s “Before the Change” returns from Toronto to stay with her father for a time. Some things—many things, nearly everything—are better off not spoken about, especially the women who come to see her father, the local doctor, in the evenings. But sometimes, to her “dismay and satisfaction,” she finds herself speaking to him of the unspoken subjects: saying the word “abortion,” for instance, or, in the last thing she tells him before his death, that she herself on July 17 had a baby and gave it away, and isn’t that ironic, given what she has finally realized about why those women come under the cover of night to see him.

  1996 Everybody knew that Jack and Susan Stanton in the novel Primary Colors stood for Bill and Hillary Clinton. The question was: who was Anonymous, the secret author of one of the few political novels in memory to which the adjective “acclaimed” could legitimately be attached? Finally, six months after the book hit the bestseller lists and
five months after Newsweek columnist Joe Klein heatedly denied early reports that pointed the finger at him, Klein fessed up at a press conference hastily arranged after a handwriting analysis of a manuscript of the book revealed him as the author after all, thereby bringing upon himself just the sort of temporary journalistic fury he had decried in his novel.

  July 18

  BORN: 1937 Hunter S. Thompson (Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas), Louisville, Ky.

  1969 Elizabeth Gilbert (Eat, Pray, Love; The Last American Man), Waterbury, Conn.

  DIED: 1817 Jane Austen (Emma, Northanger Abbey, Persuasion), 41, Winchester, England

  1899 Horatio Alger Jr. (Ragged Dick, Luck and Pluck), 67, Natick, Mass.

  1818 Writing to a friend of his disappointment that women, whom he had thought were ethereal, superior creatures, turned out to be roughly equal to men, Keats declined to say any more: “After all I do think better of Womankind than to suppose they care whether Mister John Keats five feet high likes them or not.”

  1946 You’d have gotten into a fistfight with Stradlater too, if he’d come back to your room after a date and given you a hard time for writing a composition for him about how your brother Allie used to write poems on his baseball glove in green ink to give him something to read in the outfield, when you were supposed to write it about a room or a house—it was a goddam favor—and on top of that he’d just come back from a date with Jane Gallagher, who used to keep all her kings in the back row when she played you in checkers and who was the only one you’d ever shown Allie’s glove, which you kept ever since Allie died of leukemia on this day and you broke all the windows in the garage with your fist, in J. D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.