A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1945 On the last Saturday of August, with the war just over, they arrive to pay their respects at the large house on Long Island: the undertaker Bonasera, the baker Nazorine, the heartthrob crooner Johnny Fontane, the killer Luca Brasi, and the many other friends of Don Vito Corleone. It’s the wedding of Connie, the Don’s only daughter, and Mario Puzo uses the great event to introduce the three sons in a family that will become among the best-known in American fiction: Sonny the hothead, Freddo the dutiful coward, and Michael the skeptical independent, who sits at a far table with his future wife, Kay, and decides how much of his family’s business to reveal to her while, back in his office, the Don blandly promises Johnny Fontane that he’ll take care of the studio boss who’s been giving him trouble: “I’ll make him an offer he can’t refuse.”

  1969 Jim Bouton had two questions when a call from manager Joe Schultz woke him up in his hotel room this morning to tell him he had been traded to the Houston Astros. First, what city was he in? (Baltimore, where his Seattle Pilots were playing the Orioles.) Second, who was he traded for? (“Dooley Womack? Holy mackerel.”) For a washed-up former star making a comeback throwing knuckleballs for an expansion team, getting dealt into a pennant race, even for Dooley Womack, was not so bad, and by the end of the day, Bouton, whose notoriety for his taboo-breaking baseball memoir Ball Four can make you forget what a good book it is, found himself in St. Louis, pitching an inning for his new team and then learning the foulmouthed words to “Proud to Be an Astro” on the team bus back to the hotel.

  August 27

  BORN: 1871 Theodore Dreiser (Sister Carrie, An American Tragedy), Terre Haute, Ind.

  1959 Jeanette Winterson (The Passion, Sexing the Cherry), Manchester, England

  DIED: 1969 Ivy Compton-Burnett (Pastors and Masters, A House and Its Head), 85, London

  1971 Bennett Cerf (At Random, Shake Well Before Using), 73, Mount Kisco, N.Y.

  1784 At Comely Gardens in Edinburgh, James Tytler, having just completed seven ill-paid years as the editor of the second edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica, floated his hot-air balloon 350 feet into the air before dropping suddenly into a pile of garbage outside of the city, thereby becoming the first Briton to fly. Despite these landmark achievements, Tytler was a figure of fun in Edinburgh, memorialized by his fellow Scotsman Robert Burns as “a mortal who, though he trudges about Edinburgh as a common printer, with leaky shoes, a skylighted hat and knee buckles as unlike as ‘George-by-the-Grace-of-God and Solomon-the-Son-of-David,’ yet that same unknown drunken mortal is author and compiler of three-fourths of Elliott’s pompous ‘Encyclopedia Britannica,’ which he composed at half a guinea a week.”

  1920 Saying, “I have really no idea how a moving pictures story is composed,” Joseph Conrad went with his agent to a movie adaptation of Les Misérables: they were being paid $1,500 by an American studio for a script of his story “Gaspar Ruiz.” “I am ashamed to tell you this,” he wrote a friend, “but one must live.”

  1959 Frank O’Hara was half-joking when, at lunch on this day with LeRoi Jones, he proposed a new literary movement, “Personism,” and followed through a week later with “Personism: A Manifesto” for Jones’s magazine, Yugen. In a tone as off-handedly and evocatively conversational as his poems, he promised nothing—“What can we expect of Personism? . . . Everything, but we won’t get it”—but still managed to stand for his style as solidly as any red-blooded revolutionary. “To give you a vague idea,” he shrugged, “one of its minimal aspects is to address itself to one person (other than the poet himself), thus evoking overtones of love without destroying love’s life-giving vulgarity.” He put his theory immediately into practice, writing after lunch that day his “Personal Poem,” in which he’s curious whether “one person out of the 8,000,000 is thinking of me.”

  1967 “Her Book to Be Published Soon, Tulsa Teen Keeps Cool,” read the headline in the Tulsa World in April about local girl S. E. Hinton, whose new novel, The Outsiders, was written when she, like its subjects, was in high school. Early reviewers often didn’t know that “S. E.” was a “she,” but as interest in her novel grew, the author, now identified as Susan Hinton, age nineteen, explained to the readers of the New York Times Book Review on this day that most books for teens were told “from a stand-off, I’m-a-little-scared-to-get-close-they’re-hairy view” of grownups. The result: proms or gangs and no stories in between. “Sometimes,” she added, “I wonder which extreme does the most harm.”

  August 28

  BORN: 1749 Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther), Frankfurt

  1828 Leo Tolstoy (War and Peace, Anna Karenina), Yasnaya Polyana, Russia

  DIED: 1989 Joseph Alsop (I’ve Seen the Best of It), 78, Washington, D.C.

  1993 E. P. Thompson (The Making of the English Working Class), 69, Worcester, England

  1833 When William Wordsworth stood in his garden and, like a schoolboy, recited three of his sonnets to his visitor, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Emerson nearly laughed at first but soon thought better of it: after all, “I had come thus far to see a poet, and he was chaunting poems to me, I saw, that he was right, and I was wrong, and gladly gave myself up to hear.”

  1956 The scandal of Peyton Place was set in motion even before the book was published. Expecting a modest sale for the first novel of New Hampshire housewife Grace Metalious, her publisher indulged in a hired publicist who visited Metalious’s small town of Gilmanton, got an earful of the local gossip, and realized what an asset he had in Metalious herself, who, a few months later, obliged by giving an Associated Press reporter a quote that would follow the book, and haunt Metalious, for years after it appeared on this day: “To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture. But if you go beneath that picture, it’s like turning over a rock with your foot—all kinds of strange things crawl out.” When Peyton Place was finally published the following month, it was already #4 on the New York Times bestseller list and its author—a “Pandora in blue jeans”—an instant celebrity.

  NO YEAR It’s a simple proposition at the end of a night of poker: cut the cards, and if Nashe and Pozzi get the high card, they get the $5,000 back they owe, but if Flower and Stone win, then Nashe and Pozzi are down $10,000 they don’t have. The result—seven of hearts for Flower, four of diamonds for Nashe—leads to another proposition: the losers can pay off their debt by building a massive wall from the stones of a fifteenth-century castle on Flower and Stone’s remote estate, where this disastrous card game has taken place. It’s late August now. Working ten hours a day, they’ll be square by mid-October, a date that looms ahead of them like a dream—at least until they reach it—in Paul Auster’s elegant fable of fate and freedom, The Music of Chance.

  August 29

  BORN: 1929 Thom Gunn (The Man with Night Sweats), Gravesend, England

  1947 Temple Grandin (Thinking in Pictures, Animals in Translation), Boston

  DIED: 1769 Edmond Hoyle (A Short Treatise on the Game of Whist), c. 97, London

  1981 Lowell Thomas (With Lawrence in Arabia), 89, Pawling, N.Y.

  1948 Robert Caro, Lyndon Baines Johnson’s eternal biographer, writes of the “bright and dark” threads—Johnson’s bright achievements of equality and his dark hunger for power—that ran through his subject’s career. In the period covered by Caro’s second volume, The Means of Ascent, though, all the threads were dark. Stalled in his political ambition, LBJ used the 1940s—and his government influence—to make himself rich, but the darkest moment of that time for Caro, and the center of his book, was his race for Senate against “Mr. Texas,” Coke Stevenson. Johnson stole the race, Caro establishes, when on this day, one day after the primary runoff and two days after his fortieth birthday, his men began to work the phones and stuff enough ballot boxes to ensure their candidate won by eighty-seven votes in a manner, Caro writes, that “violated even the notably loose boundaries of Texas politics.”

  1959 Robert Phelps, in the National Review, on Robert Lowell’s Life Studies:
“To hold out the palms of one’s own hands, the veins in one’s own wrists, the self-judgment in one’s own heart, and at the same time to make surable, breathing structures out of words, is simply to make the rarest, the most permanent literature we are going to have.”

  1974 “It was August 29, 1974. The air smelled like somebody’s arm up close.” Nixon had just quit, and Dylan Ebdus, heading into fifth grade, and Mingus Rude, heading into sixth and new to the Brooklyn neighborhood—call it Boerum Hill or Gowanus, depending on whether you were trying to gentrify or not—had just met. Dylan, white, was local but uncomfortable there; Mingus, new, made himself at home, the son of a white, absent mom and a black dad whom, Dylan’s mom had told him even before Mingus showed him the gold records, she had once seen open for the Stones. She also predicted to Dylan that he and Mingus were going to be best friends, and she was right, their alliance providing the central spine in Jonathan Lethem’s sprawling novel The Fortress of Solitude.

  2001 Near Lake Baikal, on his way across Siberia with two Russian guides, Ian Frazier’s van caught fire.

  August 30

  BORN: 1797 Mary Shelley (Frankenstein), London

  1943 Robert Crumb (Fritz the Cat, Zap Comix), Philadelphia

  DIED: 1989 Seymour Krim (Shake It for the World, Smartass), 67, New York City

  2006 Naguib Mahfouz (Palace Walk, Midaq Alley), 94, Cairo

  1869 By this last day of the Powell expedition, after three months and almost a thousand miles on rough and often uncharted canyon waters, their four small boats had been reduced to three, the ten explorers had attritted to six, and ten months of provisions had shrunk to ten pounds of flour, fifteen of dried apples, and seventy or so of coffee. Led by John Wesley Powell, the one-armed geology professor who recalled the journey years later in his laconic classic, The Exploration of the Colorado River and Its Canyons, the expedition made the first known passage through the Grand Canyon, where, just two days before the journey’s end, three of its members balked at the river’s last, unknown dangers and set out on their own, never to be seen again.

  1923 Midway through writing Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf recorded a “discovery” about her way of writing: “How I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment.”

  1960 The juvenile authorities in Montana worked more slowly back then. Four days after his parents crossed over into North Dakota and robbed the Agricultural National Bank in Creekmore of $2,500, and two days after they were taken away in handcuffs for the crime, fifteen-year-old Del Parsons, alone at home after his twin sister decided to run away, is picked up by a family friend and driven north to Canada. His life has ruptured unimaginably twice in three days, and as he crosses the border, he accepts the changes—not the last he’ll face before Richard Ford’s Canada is over—with the question that strikes him as the only one he can ask, “What do I have to lose?” The answer is no less inevitable: “very little.”

  1968 Ten days or so after the Russian tanks rolled into Czechoslovakia, four days after Czech leader Alexander Dubček made his stuttering, humiliated return from Moscow, and seven years after Tereza, a young woman from the country, arrived in Prague and upset the comfortable bachelor life that Tomas had arranged for himself by making him fall in love with her, Tomas is given a choice: take a job in exile in Switzerland or remain in Prague. He chooses Switzerland because he thinks Tereza wants it too, but when she realizes she can’t live in exile and returns, irrevocably, behind the Iron Curtain, Tomas has another choice: stay abroad and resume his old, light bachelor’s way of life, or follow her back home and accept the weight of love in Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being.

  August 31

  BORN: 1885 DuBose Heyward (Porgy, Mamba’s Daughters), Charleston, S.C.

  1908 William Saroyan (The Human Comedy), Fresno, Calif.

  DIED: 1688 John Bunyan (The Pilgrim’s Progress), 59, London

  1951 Abraham Cahan (The Rise of David Levinsky), 91, New York City

  1872 Born of myth or a mother, Martin Dressler entered the world on this day, destined to reshape the cityscape of turn-of-the-century Manhattan, or at least the Manhattan imagined by Steven Millhauser in Martin Dressler, one of the more gratifyingly odd tales to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Buoyed by the pluck of a Horatio Alger hero, Dressler rises quickly in his chosen art: the construction of a series of ever more fantastic hotels. He opens the Hotel Dressler on his twenty-seventh birthday and the New Dressler on his thirtieth, but when his most fabulous creation, the Grand Cosmo, with its indoor wooded countrysides, lagoons, and even opium dens, is delayed from opening on his thirty-third birthday “by a flaw in the refrigerated-air system,” it’s a sign that Martin may finally have dreamed too large.

  1925 Margaret Mead arrived for the first time in Samoa.

  1931 Isak Dinesen arrived home from Africa, never to return.

  1949 “Congratulations to Miss Alice Laidlaw,” began a notice on this day in the Wingham Advance-Times itemizing the $1,350 in scholarships earned by a local girl who was “ranked first in English of all students applying for the University of Western Ontario.” Even then, though, Miss Laidlaw knew that with no family money to support her, two years at university would be all she could afford, and at the end of that time, she and her new husband headed west to Vancouver, where, writing under her married name of Alice Munro, she began to draw on the experience of being a scholarship student, one of that “dribble of the children of the poor who are brash & brainy & scornful & lucky too sometimes under their meekness in ways their betters can’t suspect.”

  2005 Abdulrahman Zeitoun woke in the tent on the roof of his garage and looked out over the flood around him. The waters from Hurricane Katrina had reached just a foot deep in his neighborhood during the storm and then receded, but on the 30th they had rushed back: the levees, he knew, must have broken. Now, after his first night on the roof, Zeitoun wondered what he would do until he saw his canoe floating nearby, nine feet above his yard. For the rest of the day, he paddled through his neighborhood, feeling a strange peace, and helped five trapped neighbors to safety, and when evening came he grilled chicken and vegetables on his roof, prayed, and went to sleep, exhausted, in his tent. The next six days, as Dave Eggers recounts in Zeitoun, he spent in much the same way, until, mistaken for a looter, he began another, more terrible, odyssey through the flooded city.

  September , tucked modestly away three-quarters into the calendar, is the start of many things: school years, fall, football season, the return to work after the end of summer. It’s also the beginning of months whose awkwardly Latinate names rhyme with little except themselves. Some poets, understandably, neglect them: in all his works, for instance, Shakespeare makes no mention of September, October, or November. But in a title “September” can stand squarely; it’s weightier and more declarative than the short and flighty names of the summer and spring months. There’s “September, 1819,” for instance, in which Wordsworth found spring and summer “unfaded, yet prepared to fade.” Transposing just two digits in her title a century later in “September, 1918,” Amy Lowell caught the familiar beauties of early fall—including an afternoon that’s “the colour of water falling through sunlight”—but she stored them away without tasting them, like a harvest of berries. With the war not yet over, she was too busy balancing herself “upon a broken world” to enjoy them yet.

  The best-known September poem also was born in a broken world, at the beginning of the next world war. In the days after Germany invaded Poland, W. H. Auden wrote “September 1, 1939,” in which the stench of war and dictatorship reached even those who might have considered themselves safe in his newly adopted home of New York City. Auden spent the rest of his life disowning the poem and its popularity, or at least “loathing” the “trash” of its hopeful line “We must love one another or die,” which he quickly came to see as se
lf-congratulatory (in one later version he substituted “We must love one another and die”). But that line, among others, is what has brought people back to the poem in later Septembers. Lyndon Johnson came close to quoting it, ending his apocalyptic “Daisy” ad (which aired just once, on September 7, 1964) with the words “We must either love each other, or we must die.” And the entire poem began circulating again in mass media and in forwarded e-mails in September 2001, when its visions of Manhattan skyscrapers and death in September—along with those declarations of hope that had rung false so soon to Auden’s ears—felt suddenly, movingly contemporary.

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR SEPTEMBER

  The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton (1905) September is early in the New York social season, but for Lily Bart it’s getting a little late. She still has her beauty, but she’s twenty-nine and has no money of her own, and the decisions she makes—and doesn’t make—in the first month of Wharton’s great novel will set her course for its remainder.

  Harriet the Spy by Louise Fitzhugh (1964) “JANIE GETS STRANGER EVERY YEAR. MISS WHITEHEAD’S FEET LOOK LARGER THIS YEAR.” Return to school with Harriet M. Welsch, self-appointed sixth-grade spy and future writer, who reckoned with the slippery ethics of observing and reporting long before Janet Malcolm wrote The Journalist and the Murderer.

  Stoner by John Williams (1965) The “campus novel” is almost always a comedy, but Stoner, long overlooked but now becoming a classic, is a campus tragedy, and not less of one because of the petty academic quarrels, which in other hands might be turned into farce, that drive its hero’s inexorable disappointment.

  Deliverance by James Dickey (1970) It’s a little weekend trip for four men from the suburbs into the nearby wilderness—canoeing down a Georgia river about to be dammed. If everything goes right, they’ll get back in time for the second half of the Sunday football game on TV, and in the meantime, they might get in touch with something real.