A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  2009 “Tommy,” the letter Paul Haggis wrote to Scientology spokesman Tommy Davis on this day began. “For ten months now I have been writing to ask you to make a public statement denouncing the actions of the Church of Scientology of San Diego.” And with the same opening began “The Apostate,” Lawrence Wright’s 2011 New Yorker profile of Haggis, the Oscar-winning screenwriter and director of Crash, which ended by quoting Haggis again: “I was in a cult for thirty-four years. Everyone else could see it. I don’t know why I couldn’t.” Two years later, Wright published Going Clear, in which he embedded Haggis’s story in a history of Scientology and its relationship to Hollywood, reported with the same intrepid and patient thoroughness Wright used for his Pulitzer-winning book on al-Qaeda, The Looming Tower.

  August 20

  BORN: 1890 H. P. Lovecraft (At the Mountains of Madness), Providence, R.I.

  1951 Greg Bear (The Forge of God, Darwin’s Radio), San Diego, Calif.

  DIED: 1887 Jules Laforgue (The Imitation of Our Lady the Moon), 27, Paris

  2001 Fred Hoyle (The Black Cloud), 86, Bournemouth, England

  1950 Immanuel Velikovsky asks the reader at the opening of Worlds in Collision “to consider for himself whether he is reading a book of fiction or non-fiction”; the New York Times, at least for the purposes of its bestseller list, where Worlds in Collision spent the last of its eleven weeks at #1 on this day, chose nonfiction. A scientific scandal even before it was published, Velikovsky’s book modestly proposed that as recently as 1500 B.C. Venus spun off as a comet from Jupiter and twice swept past Earth on its way to settling into planetary orbit, thereby explaining a host of ancient mythologies and refuting the theories of both Newton and Darwin. Velikovsky’s conjectures, shaky at the time, have been further undermined by later discoveries, but one element of his thought has gained some acceptance: the importance of catastrophic events in shaping evolutionary and geological history.

  1979 “So Farrah is a story,” explained George W. S. Trow, “and Farrah having a problem is a story, and Farrah talking about her problem is a story.” Many have called TV culture shallow, but none with the chilling insight—and cryptically imperious style—of Trow’s 1980 New Yorker essay “Within the Context of No Context,” which became a little book the following year. Among his evidence that America had given up cultural judgment and authority in favor of popularity: the cover of People on this day. Putting Farrah Fawcett and her problem—that she had split from Lee Majors—on the cover was not a statement of approval or disapproval of Farrah or her talent, as might have once been the case. Instead it was in the spirit of what Trow with grim relish called “the important moment in the history of television,” when Richard Dawson asked Family Feud contestants to guess, not the correct answer to a question, but what a hundred other Americans had already guessed.

  2004 Ben Ball, in the TLS, on Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity: “It paints a convincing portrait of Australia’s cheerfully brazen appeal to greed and comfort; the universities honeycombed with deconstruction; the low hum of racism and sexism; the anxiety that, underneath, there is nothing there.”

  August 21

  BORN: 1930 Joseph McElroy (Women and Men), New York City

  1937 Robert Stone (Dog Soldiers, Children of Light), Brooklyn

  DIED: 1940 Leon Trotsky (The History of the Russian Revolution), 60, Mexico City

  2007 Siobhan Dowd (Bog Child, The London Eye Mystery), 47, Oxford, England

  1888 William Seward Burroughs, founder of what became the Burroughs Corporation and grandfather of William S. Burroughs, received four patents for his adding machines.

  1909 “Do you know what a pearl is and what an opal is?” James Joyce wrote to Nora Barnacle. “My soul when you came sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings was beautiful but with the pale passionless beauty of a pearl. Your love has passed through me and now I feel my mind something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights and quick shadows and of broken music.”

  1921 On his first birthday, Christopher Milne, known later to everyone but family and friends as Christopher Robin, received a teddy bear that he called “Edward Bear” before settling on “Winnie-the-Pooh.” Four years later, the first Pooh story appeared in print, a Christmastime tale based on the ones Christopher’s father, A. A. Milne, told about him and his stuffed animals Pooh, Eeyore, and Piglet, and in 1926 the book Winnie-the-Pooh was published with illustrations by E. H. Shepard. Shepard based his drawings of Christopher Robin on the real Christopher Milne (who like his father would later weary of the way these stories defined him to the world), but as his model for the immortal Bear of Very Little Brain Shepard used not the real “Pooh” but a teddy bear, known as “Growler,” owned by his own son Graham.

  NO YEAR “My mother would not have wanted me to spend my life with this man.” Ellen’s mother, at this point in Amy Bloom’s “Love Is Not a Pie,” is a little box of ashes, but her memory and the presence at her funeral of those who loved her are enough to convince her daughter that “August 21 did not seem like a good date, John Wescott did not seem like a good person to marry, and I couldn’t see myself in the long white silk gown Mrs. Wescott had offered me.” Later that day she’ll hear the words her mother once used to describe the rare and true path her own heart took, “Love is not a pie, dear,” a motto that, like Bloom’s story, happily confounds the limited expectations we—and no doubt John Westcott—often bring to plots involving marriage and adultery.

  August 22

  BORN: 1920 Ray Bradbury (The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451), Waukegan, Ill.

  1935 Annie Proulx (Brokeback Mountain, The Shipping News), Norwich, Conn.

  DIED: 1979 James T. Farrell (Young Lonigan, Judgment Day), 75, New York City

  2007 Grace Paley (Enormous Changes at the Last Minute), 84, Thetford, Vt.

  1603 “In brief, this is my case: I have completely lost the ability to think or speak coherently about anything at all,” confessed young Philipp, Lord Chandos, in a letter on this day to the writer and philosopher Francis Bacon. Having once written with confidence from within a universe that seemed “one great unity,” he was now overcome by skepticism. The world, especially its humblest elements—a watering can, earthworms under a rotting board, rats suffering death throes from poison—still spoke to him with thrilling intensity, but in a way he could no longer find the words for, so he had to give up writing. It’s a fascinating and challenging declaration—that our words aren’t equal to the world—but one made more ambiguous by the sheer eloquence with which its author proclaims the insufficiency of language. That its author was not the fictitious Lord Chandos, writing in 1603, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal, writing in 1902—and that Hofmannsthal did not give up writing after publishing it—only adds to the letter’s ambiguity, and its fascination.

  1762 Edward Gibbon dined with a Captain Perkins, who afterward led him “into an intemperance we have not known for some time past.”

  1903 One reason William James has remained an interesting thinker is that he paired a desire to establish a Big Idea with a skepticism that such a thing was possible or even worthwhile. “I am convinced that the desire to formulate truths is a virulent disease,” he wrote a friend on this day while struggling to compose a major work of philosophy. “I actually dread to die until I have settled the Universe’s hash in one more book . . . Childish idiot—as if formulas about the Universe could ruffle its majesty, and as if the common-sense world and its duties were not eternally the really real!” And so it’s appropriate that the next book he published, Pragmatism, has ever since been taken by some as a slight work of little philosophical importance, and by others as every bit the “epochmaking” work James had childishly hoped for.

  1930 After his horse bolted in Wyoming, Ernest Hemingway required stitches on his chin.

  1934 Malcolm Cowley, in the New Republic, on the stories of Somerset Maugham: “Reading these thirty stories one after another is like si
tting for a long time in a room where people are playing bridge and gossiping in even voices. The room may be east or west, in London or Singapore, but the people in it are always the same: they are the Britons of good family who administer the Empire under the direction of its actual rulers. They know what is done and what is not done.”

  August 23

  BORN: 1926 Clifford Geertz (The Interpretation of Cultures), San Francisco

  1975 Curtis Sittenfeld (Prep, American Wife), Cincinnati

  DIED: 1723 Increase Mather (A Further Account of the Tryals of the New-England Witches), 84, Boston

  2012 James Fogle (Drugstore Cowboy), 75, Monroe, Wash.

  1872 The Pickwick Portfolio, the household newspaper written by the March girls in Little Women, is, Louisa May Alcott assures her readers, “a bona fide copy of one written by bona fide girls once upon a time”—one in fact, that Alcott and her sisters produced during her own childhood. Her story later came full circle when five sisters in Pennsylvania, the Lukens, were inspired by the March girls to start their own homemade journal, Little Things. Handwritten at first but typeset by its third issue, in two years the Lukens’ journal had a thousand subscribers, including Miss Alcott herself, who wrote them on this day, “I admire your pluck and perseverance and heartily believe in women’s right to any branch of labor for which they prove their fitness.”

  1948 Before he ever set out with Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac jotted down in his journal an idea for a future book, “about two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don’t really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else.”

  1956 Attacked by the Nazis in Germany and hounded out of Norway in the ’30s, Wilhelm Reich, the radical psychoanalyst who claimed to have discovered a life force known as “orgone energy,” had a quieter time of it during his first eight years in the United States, where his work attracted the attention of, among others, Norman Mailer and William Steig. But after a series of articles in the New Republic in 1947 warned of a “growing Reich cult,” the Federal Drug Administration challenged the medical claims for the therapeutic boxes he called “orgone accumulators,” and in 1956 began the destruction of his work, arresting Reich, chopping up the orgone boxes at his headquarters in Orgonon, Maine, and, on this day, forcing his associates to feed six tons of his journals and books into the New York City Sanitation Department’s Gansevoort Street incinerator in the West Village.

  NO YEAR It was two years after Christopher’s mother went to the hospital and died—or so he’d been told—that he found, in a box in his father’s closet, a stack of letters he’d never been shown, all addressed to him and dated—May 3, September 18, August 23—after she died. Telling of her new life in London and explaining why she had to leave their family, the letters add another mystery to the ones Christopher, the autistic narrator of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is already investigating: the death of the dog next door and the constant riddle of the human emotions he finds so incomprehensible.

  August 24

  BORN: 1899 Jorge Luis Borges (A Universal History of Infamy), Buenos Aires

  1977 John Green (Paper Towns, The Fault in Our Stars), Indianapolis

  DIED: 1943 Simone Weil (Waiting for God, The Need for Roots), 34, Ashford, England

  2004 Elisabeth Kübler-Ross (On Death and Dying), 78, Scottsdale, Ariz.

  1770 Thomas Chatterton gained little of the fame he desired during his life, but his apparent suicide by arsenic on this day at the age of seventeen has reverberated through the following centuries. The Romantics took up his memory—Keats wrote him a sonnet, and Wordsworth called him the “marvellous boy”—and in 1856 the painter Henry Wallis posed the poet George Meredith, sprawled red-haired in a garret, for his popular portrait Death of Chatterton. And in the following century Peter Ackroyd put the poet’s death at the heart of Chatterton, a multilayered novel that takes advantage of the irresistible biographical detail that less than a year after Wallis painted Meredith, Meredith’s wife, Mary, left her husband for the man who had posed him as the doomed poet.

  1814 At the ugly house they had just been forced by poverty to rent in Switzerland, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley walked to the nearby lakeshore and read Tacitus’s description of the Siege of Jerusalem. Then “we come home, look out the window, and go to bed.”

  1935 “The thing I think about most,” Evelyn Waugh wrote to Laura Herbert from Ethiopia, “is your eyelashes making a noise like a bat on the pillow.”

  1962 Having traveled by bus up to northern California’s Portola Valley from Mexico City, where he had secluded himself from the buzz created when his first novel, V., was published that spring, Thomas Pynchon stood as best man in the wedding of his close college friend—and soon-to-be fellow novelist—Richard Fariña to Mimi Baez, the eighteen-year-old sister of Joan Baez (whose boyfriend Bob Dylan did not attend). In photographs taken by the mother of the groom but never publicly released, the reclusive best man, dressed in a dark suit, is said to sport a giant mustache that may or may not have been fake.

  1975 “To learn to write at all,” Joanna Russ wrote James Tiptree Jr. (who later revealed herself to be a woman named Alice Sheldon), “I had to begin by thinking of myself as a sort of fake man, something that ended only with feminism.”

  August 25

  BORN: 1921 Brian Moore (Black Robe, Lies of Silence), Belfast, Northern Ireland

  1949 Martin Amis (Money, Time’s Arrow), Swansea, Wales

  DIED: 1900 Friedrich Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil), 55, Weimar, Germany

  1984 Truman Capote (Breakfast at Tiffany’s, In Cold Blood), 59, Los Angeles

  1793 When contemporary readers of Charles Brockden Brown’s novel Arthur Mervyn saw its opening line, “I was resident in this city during the year 1793,” they knew exactly what his narrator was speaking of. The city was Brown’s own, Philadelphia, the largest in the new country. And the year 1793 meant fever: the yellow fever epidemic that killed over 4,000 of the city’s 50,000 residents. Nearly half of those residents fled the city, especially after the local doctors on this day published a list of measures to corral the spread of the disease. Brockden Brown—not the first American novelist but the first good one—vividly describes that flight in Arthur Mervyn, a wonderfully intense Gothic drama in which urban disease and commerce are equal causes of anxiety and intrigue.

  1900 In the last of a three-day match between Marylebone Cricket Club and London County, Arthur Conan Doyle, taking a turn at bowling, dismissed the batter considered the greatest cricketer of all time, W. G. Grace, for his only first-class wicket.

  1909 Fat and thin, Catholic and skeptic, individualist and socialist, carnivore and vegetarian, tippler and teetotaler, mustachioed and bearded: G. K. Chesterton and G. B. Shaw were seen as almost comical opposites when they regularly and affectionately locked antlers at the turn of the twentieth century, a combat that culminated in Chesterton’s biography of Shaw in 1909, which Shaw himself reviewed in the Nation on this day. Shaw called its “account of my doctrine” “either frankly deficient and uproariously careless or else recalcitrantly and . . . madly wrong,” but nevertheless called himself “proud to have been the painter’s model.” Another reviewer, meanwhile, suggested that Shaw had wearied of his beliefs but couldn’t give up the fame they had brought him, and so invented his amicable opponent, “Chesterton.”

  1938 Running as a Democrat for California assemblyman in the 59th District, Robert A. Heinlein lost to the incumbent by 450 votes.

  1950 With an operating budget of $1,434,789 and the ambivalent support of its studio, MGM, John Huston’s prestige production of The Red Badge of Courage began shooting its first battle scenes on a day in Chico, California, that reached 108 degrees. On the set was Lillian Ross, the New Yorker reporter whose genial unobtrusiveness and flawless recall of dialogue captured, among other details, the comments a few weeks later of an MGM publicity man: “Two things sell tickets. One, sta
rs. Two, stories. No stars, no stories here.” When preview audiences for the movie agreed and tore the picture to shreds, Ross had a story of her own to tell, and Picture, her groundbreaking inside account of the shooting of the movie (and its panicked re-editing), found a success its subject didn’t.

  August 26

  BORN: 1880 Guillaume Apollinaire (Calligrammes, Alcools), Rome

  1941 Barbara Ehrenreich (Nickel and Dimed, Fear of Falling), Butte, Mont.

  DIED: 1945 Franz Werfel (The Forty Days of Musa Degh), 54, Los Angeles

  1989 Irving Stone (Lust for Life, The Agony and the Ecstasy), 86, Los Angeles

  1881 “I wonder again,” Henry Holmes Goodpasture writes in his journal at the opening of Oakley Hall’s Warlock, “how we manage to obtain deputies at all.” Yet another has just been run off from the town of Warlock, a good one at that, but too prudent not to leave when Abe McQuown started firing into the air in the middle of town. Nevertheless, on this day the good Mr. Goodpasture can report that the ad hoc Citizens’ Committee has brought in a man of significant reputation as marshal, one Clay Blaisedell, who carries a renown embodied in the gold-handled Colts he is known to brandish. A free-handed rewrite of the already-familiar events of the Gunfight at the OK Corral, Warlock is a refreshingly impure, almost effortlessly hilarious, and claustrophobically bleak epic of the West.