A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  Hotel du Lac by Anita Brookner (1984) All is gray: the garden, the lake beyond, “spreading like an anaesthetic towards the invisible farther shore.” It’s late September, well into the off-season, with reduced rates for the few visitors to the Hotel du Lac, where Edith, a romance novelist with a romance problem of her own, escapes for a “mild form of sanctuary.” We’re in Switzerland, but we’re also in Brookner country, home of isolation, disappointment, and quiet determination.

  White Noise by Don DeLillo (1985) Every September the station wagons—they’d now be minivans—arrive on campus, disgorging tanned kids and dorm supplies in a ritual that begins the school year at DeLillo’s generic midwestern college, where education has become untethered from any meaning beyond a nervous self-consciousness.

  Ms. Hempel Chronicles by Sarah Shun-lien Bynum (2008) Every September Ms. Hempel turns to write on the blackboard, “First Assignment,” and soon, as in every other fall semester, the American colonists will rebel and the revolution will be won. Not much older than the middle-school kids she’s teaching, and not much more sure of what she’s becoming, Bynum’s raw young teacher is open to experience and, most thrillingly, unprotected from it.

  September 1

  BORN: 1889 Herbert Asbury (The Gangs of New York), Farmington, Mo.

  1942 C. J. Cherryh (Downbelow Station, Cyteen), St. Louis

  DIED: 1729 Richard Steele (The Tatler, The Spectator), 57, Carmarthen, Wales

  1967 Siegfried Sassoon (Counter-Attack), 80, Heytesbury, England

  1605 Though he had been in good graces with James I, England’s new Scottish king, Ben Jonson found himself writing pleading letters to a half-dozen courtiers from the “vile prison” where he had been committed without a hearing. The cause? “A Play, my Lord,” he wrote the Earl of Salisbury, embarrassed to be imprisoned for so petty a cause (he was aware of better ones, having nearly been executed for manslaughter a few years before). The play was Eastward Ho!, whose apparent crime, in the tense political atmosphere two months before the foiled Gunpowder Plot, was making fun of Scots, embracing the idea, for instance, of sending “a hundred thousand of them” to the New World, “for we are all one Countrymen now, ye know; and we should find ten times more comfort of them there, then we do here.” Though threatened with having his ears and nose cut, Jonson was freed by October.

  1838 The astonishingly compressed inspiration under which Stendhal, locking himself away for fifty-three days in November and December, wrote his final masterpiece, The Charterhouse of Parma, is legendary, but he first composed the novel’s opening under more leisurely circumstances. The scandalously witty author had taken to sitting with the daughters of the Countess de Montijo, Paca and Eugénie (who would grow up to marry Napoleon III and become the last empress of France), and telling them stories of his adventures with Napoleon’s army. On this evening he began a tale of a young soldier wandering bewildered through the Battle of Waterloo, which soon became Charterhouse’s opening scene, at the end of which, in his own copy of the novel, he noted, “For you, Paca and Eugénie.”

  1938 “Was ever a book written under greater difficulty?” The book was The Grapes of Wrath, and John Steinbeck’s difficulties were mostly those of success: selling his house and buying a ranch, hosting visitors (including Charlie Chaplin), and responding to requests for public statements. (There was also the pounding of that endless construction work on the house next door.) His main difficulty, though, was keeping up with the furious pace he’d set himself: “I am simply incapable of working any way but hard and fast.” Twice before, with “The Oklahomans” and “L’Affaire Lettuceberg,” he had tried and failed to write a novel about migrant farm workers, but after he sketched out this version in May, he averaged 2,000 words a day and was done with the book, his longest yet, by the end of October. The following year would bring a whole new set of difficulties: the “nightmare,” Steinbeck called it, of The Grapes of Wrath’s phenomenal popularity.

  September 2

  BORN: 1894 Joseph Roth (The Radetsky March), Brody, Austro-Hungarian Empire

  1918 Allen Drury (Advise and Consent, Preserve and Protect), Houston, Tex.

  DIED: 1973 J. R. R. Tolkien (The Lord of the Rings), 81, Bournemouth, England

  1997 Viktor Frankl (Man’s Search for Meaning), 92, Vienna

  1911 “Hey kids I’ll be wit you Sunday,” promised Flip, the green-faced, cigar-chomping, dream-disturbing rascal from Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland, and the next day he, Nemo, and the Princess debuted in the color pages of the New York American. William Randolph Hearst paid top dollar for cartoonists, and he had induced McCay to bring his eye-poppingly intricate dreamscapes from the New York Herald to the American under the new title In the Land of Wonderful Dreams. Nemo and Flip only lasted a few years there, though: annoyed by McCay’s lucrative sidelines in vaudeville and animated films, Hearst shut down his comics and forced him to focus on political cartooning.

  1932 As Ray Bradbury often told it, on the day before his uncle’s Labor Day funeral, young Ray, age twelve, walked down to a lakefront carnival in his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, where, in a sideshow tent, he encountered a performer named Mr. Electrico who changed his life. Coursing with electricity that stood his hair on end, Mr. Electrico chose Ray from out of a crowd of children, tapped him with his electrified sword, and commanded him, “Live forever!” Certain he had been chosen for a reason, Bradbury took the words as a command to create: “Just weeks after Mr. Electrico said this to me, I started writing every day. I never stopped.” Even his biographer’s later discovery that his uncle actually died almost two months later never altered Bradbury’s memory of that fateful moment when he chose life in the face of death.

  1933 Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary about Testament of Youth: “I am reading with extreme greed a book by Vera Brittain. Not that I much like her. A stringy metallic mind, with I suppose, the sort of taste I should dislike in real life. But her story, told in detail, without reserve, of the war, and how she lost lover and brother, and dabbled her hands in entrails, and was forever seeing the dead, and eating scraps, and sitting five on one WC, runs rapidly, vividly across my eyes.”

  1940 Conrad Aiken, in the New Republic, on Federico García Lorca’s A Poet in New York: “There has been no more terribly acute critic of America than this steel-conscious and death-conscious Spaniard . . . He hated us, and rightly, for the right reasons.”

  September 3

  BORN: 1940 Eduardo Galeano (Open Veins of Latin America), Montevideo, Uruguay

  1963 Malcolm Gladwell (The Tipping Point, Outliers), Fareham, England

  DIED: 1883 Ivan Turgenev (Fathers and Sons, Torrents of Spring), 64, Bougival, France

  2001 Pauline Kael (I Lost It at the Movies), 82, Great Barrington, Mass.

  1838 One of the most momentous events in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass is also, by necessity, one of the most discreetly told. “On the third day of September, 1838,” he wrote, “I left my chains, and succeeded in reaching New York without the slightest interruption of any kind. How I did so,—what means I adopted,—what direction I traveled, and by what mode of conveyance,—I must leave unexplained.” Only in his third autobiography, the Life and Times of Frederick Douglass, published more than fifteen years after slavery’s abolition, did he feel he could safely reveal the details of his escape, which involved borrowing the documents of a friend (who did not much resemble him), dressing like a sailor (and speaking like an “old salt”), jumping on a train north from Baltimore, and facing the moment of truth when the conductor asked, “I suppose you have your free papers?”

  NO YEAR They part at midnight. Rodolphe has the passports? And they will meet at the Hôtel de Provence at noon the next day? Of course, of course. Emma Bovary imagines that the moment they are borne off together in the mail coach will be like going off in a balloon, rising into the clouds. When Rodolphe returns home, though, he doesn’t go to bed to dream but to his writing desk, to write the kind of le
tter he has written before. Forget me, Emma! Oh, we were lunatics! “Fate is to blame—only fate!” (Ah, “that is a word that always has a nice effect.”) His duty done, he smokes three pipes and goes to bed, and the following morning places the letter at the bottom of a basket of apricots for delivery. Emma reads the letter in shock and despair. Her husband, Charles, enjoys the apricots.

  1933 Storm Jameson, in the Sunday Times, on Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth: “Its mere pressure on mind and senses makes it unforgettable. The cumulative effect of these pages, on a contemporary, is indescribably troubling and exalting.”

  1947 Published: Goodnight Moon by Margaret Wise Brown (Harper & Bros., New York)

  September 4

  BORN: 1905 Mary Renault (The King Must Die), Forest Gate, England

  1908 Richard Wright (Black Boy, Uncle Tom’s Children), Roxie, Miss.

  DIED: 1977 E. F. Schumacher (Small Is Beautiful), 66, Romont, Switzerland

  1989 Georges Simenon (Dirty Snow, My Friend Maigret), 86, Lausanne, Switzerland

  1907 Oh, how they pounced when Ambrose Bierce, the most poisonous pen in the West, wrote, for once, honeyed words of praise! When late in his career Bierce took a young writer named George Sterling under his wing and compared his poem “A Wine of Wizardry” to Keats, Coleridge, and Spenser with a purple fulsomeness matched only by the poem itself, the response was immediate and gleefully savage. The San Francisco Examiner claimed on this day that five lines from the poem “would drive a man to beat a cripple, and ten lines would send him to the bottom of the river.” Under attack, Bierce was now in his element and returned fire with satisfaction: “Shall these Toms, Dicks and Harrys of the slums and cornfields set up their meager acquirements as metes and bounds beyond which a writer shall not go?”

  1920 In the inscription in the copy of his first book of stories, Flappers and Philosophers, that F. Scott Fitzgerald sent his hero H. L. Mencken, he divided its contents into “Worth Reading” (“The Ice Palace,” “The Cut-Glass Bowl,” “Benediction,” “Dalyrimple Goes Wrong”), “Amusing” (“The Offshore Pirate”), and “Trash” (“Head and Shoulders,” “The Four Fists,” “Bernice Bobs Her Hair”).

  1957 His publisher had heard there’d be a review of On the Road in the next day’s Times, so just before midnight Jack Kerouac and Joyce Johnson climbed out of bed and bought the first copy off the truck at the newsstand at Sixty-sixth and Broadway. “It’s good, isn’t it?” Jack said. “Yes,” said Joyce, and they took it to a bar and read it three more times “like students poring over a difficult text for which they sense they’re going to be held responsible,” as Johnson remembered in her memoir Minor Characters. Then they went back up to their apartment, where Jack, not sure why he wasn’t happier at the news, “lay down obscure for the last time in his life.”

  1962 He was just fifteen, but on his second day of work as an assistant engineer at EMI’s Abbey Road studios Geoff Emerick found himself in the control room when a young band from Liverpool—whose members were only a few years older than him—made their first recording, of “Love Me Do” and “How Do You Do It.” For the rest of the decade, Emerick became increasingly important in forming the Beatles’ sound—he took over as engineer in 1966 on Revolver, just as the band’s urge to experiment began to explode—and his 2006 memoir, Here, There, and Everywhere, is a charming and insightful glimpse into what it was like to grow up inside the bubble of Beatlemania.

  September 5

  BORN: 1935 Ward Just (An Unfinished Season, Echo House), Michigan City, Ind.

  1950 Cathy Guisewite (Cathy), Dayton, Ohio

  DIED: 1803 Pierre Choderlos de Laclos (Les liaisons dangereuses), 61, Taranto, Italy

  1997 Leon Edel (Henry James), 89, Honolulu

  1893 The letter Beatrix Potter wrote on September 4 to Noel Moore, the eldest son of one of her closest friends, is understandably famous: in it, she told—and illustrated—the story that became her first book, The Tale of Peter Rabbit. But the following day, not wanting Noel’s younger brother, Eric, to feel left out, she wrote one to him about “a frog called Mr. Jeremy Fisher” who tries and fails to catch a lunch of minnows for his friends and dines instead on “a roasted grasshopper with lady-bird sauce.” (“I think it must have been nasty,” she added.) Many years later, after her story became The Tale of Mr. Jeremy Fisher, she explained to another correspondent her standards for animal realism, in response to Kenneth Grahame’s Toad, who combed his hair: “A frog may wear galoshes, but I don’t hold with toads having beards or wigs.”

  1902 Constance Fletcher, in the TLS, on Henry James’s The Wings of the Dove: “This is, we repeat, an extraordinarily interesting performance, but it is not an easy book to read. It will not do for short railway journeys or for drowsy hammocks, or even to amuse sporting men and the active Young Person.”

  1914 “Out of sheer rage,” D. H. Lawrence wrote his agent on this day, “I’ve begun my book about Thomas Hardy. It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid.” Enraged less by Hardy than by the “colossal idiocy” of the war that had just begun, Lawrence was right about his Study of Thomas Hardy being about everything but its declared subject. Over eighty years later Geoff Dyer used Lawrence’s letter for the epigraph and the title of Out of Sheer Rage, a book less about Lawrence than about Dyer’s infinite postponement of his desire to “write a Lawrence book,” which, as the quotation above implies, makes it very much about Lawrence after all, and also one of the most eccentrically enlightening books about books in recent memory.

  2004 Gregory Maguire, in the New York Times, on Susanna Clarke’s Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell: “Clarke’s imagination is prodigious, her pacing is masterly and she knows how to employ dry humor in the service of majesty.”

  September 6

  BORN: 1928 Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance), Minneapolis

  1972 China Miéville (Perdido Street Station), Norwich, England

  DIED: 1939 Arthur Rackham (illustrator of Grimm’s Fairy Tales), 71, Limpsfield, England

  1994 James Clavell (Shōgun, Noble House), 69, Vevey, Switzerland

  1888 “I shall have a fine book of travels,” Robert Louis Stevenson wrote to a friend while steaming for the Pacific. “I feel sure; and will tell you more of the South Seas after very few months than any other writer has done—except Herman Melville perhaps, who is a howling cheese” (a compliment, by the way).

  1914 Before Djuna Barnes moved to Paris and wrote her modernist masterpiece, Nightwood, she scribbled for nearly every newspaper in New York, interviewing celebrities from Florenz Ziegfeld and Billy Sunday to Jack Dempsey and Dinah the gorilla. And she wrote “stunt stories,” most dramatically “How It Feels to Be Forcibly Fed,” which appeared on this day in the New York World, and in which she submitted to the torturous punishment then being inflicted on hunger-striking British suffragists: first her nostrils were sprayed by the doctor “with a mixture of cocaine and disinfectant,” then came the milk, through a red rubber tube: “Every drop seemed a quart, and every quart slid over and down into space. I had lapsed into a physical mechanism without power to oppose or resent the outrage to my will.”

  1958 As on every other morning at nine-thirty sharp, the desk clerk of the Prince Heinrich Hotel hands the key to the billiard room to Robert Faehmel, and the bellboy brings up a double cognac and shuts the door behind them; they are not to be disturbed until eleven. On this morning, though, an old acquaintance from before the war—an enemy, in fact, though he’d like that forgotten—insists that he be shown in to see Faehmel, and throughout the day history’s disturbances continue in Heinrich Böll’s Billiards at Half-Past Nine: it’s the day Robert’s father, a fellow architect, celebrates his eightieth birthday, and it’s the day Robert’s mother comes out of the asylum where she’s been held since she was judged insane for refusing to go along with the Nazi madness.

  1976 Harry Mathews, the first American member of Oulipo, the French group of experimental writers known for c
onstraining their language in various mechanical ways, made an experiment of another kind when he agreed to translate The Laurels of Lake Constance, the first novel by Marie Chaix. Smitten by her author photo, he drafted a handwritten note “in which I deployed every seductive wile my experience as a writer could supply.” But when second thoughts made that approach seem “shabby,” he sent instead a short, typed letter in his most formal French that, nonetheless, had the seductive effect he’d originally intended, thus confirming, to his delight, the power of “classical restraint.” She left her marriage for him on this day, and they have remained together ever since.

  September 7

  BORN: 1900 Taylor Caldwell (Captains and the Kings), Manchester, England

  1962 Jennifer Egan (A Visit from the Goon Squad, Look at Me), Chicago

  DIED: 1962 Isak Dinesen (Winter’s Tales), 77, Rungsted, Denmark

  1990 A. J. P. Taylor (The Struggle for Mastery in Europe), 84, London

  1923 Langston Hughes may have said, about Jean Toomer’s first and only novel, “Cane contains the finest prose written by a Negro in America,” but Toomer himself would have resisted such a description, and in a letter on this day to his publisher, Horace Liveright, he did. When Liveright said that in the biographical note to Cane, “there should be a definite note sounded about your colored blood,” Toomer, who had grown up among blacks and whites and identified at times with each—and with neither—replied, “My racial composition and my position in the world are realities which I alone may determine.” Liveright could “feature Negro” in ads for the book, he added, but shouldn’t expect him to do the same: “For myself, I have sufficiently featured Negro in Cane.”

  1923 Published: Harmonium by Wallace Stevens (Knopf, New York)

  1977 After more than four years in prison, the longest time served by any Watergate conspirator, G. Gordon Liddy was released on parole after President Carter commuted his sentence. Among the advocates for his release was an unlikely one: George V. Higgins, who had kept his legal practice even after he became the author of a series of crime-fiction bestsellers beginning with the masterful Friends of Eddie Coyle and whose previous high-profile client was the Black Panther Eldridge Cleaver. In April, having argued successfully for clemency from the president, Higgins expressed his confidence that his client would be the rare Watergate figure not to sign a lucrative book deal: “I’d bet on it. He’s a standup guy. That’s how he got into this mess in the first place.” Three years later, Liddy’s memoir, Will, spent fourteen weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.