A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1964 Not since Ulysses was a book analyzed more closely than the 888-page volume published on this day, officially titled the Report of the President’s Commission on the Assassination of President John F. Kennedy but known almost immediately as the Warren Report. Selling 12,000 copies at government offices on its first day, the report, including its twenty-six volumes of supplementary documents published two months later, has been pored over ever since by historians, conspiracy theorists, and those who revere it as a magnificent repository of American life. It’s “the Oxford English Dictionary of the assassination and also the Joycean novel,” Don DeLillo said after mining it for Libra, “the one document that captures the full richness and madness and meaning of the event . . . When I came across the dental records of Jack Ruby’s mother I felt a surge of admiration. Did they really put this in?”

  1998 Courtney Weaver, in the New York Times, on Irvine Welsh’s Filth: “Welsh writes with such vile, relentless intensity that he makes Louis-Ferdinand Céline, the French master of defilement, look like Little Miss Muffet.”

  September 28

  BORN: 1943 George W. S. Trow (Within the Context of No Context), Greenwich, Conn.

  1944 Simon Winchester (The Professor and the Madman), London

  DIED: 1891 Herman Melville (The Confidence-Man, Billy Budd), 72, New York City

  1970 John Dos Passos (The 42nd Parallel, 1919, The Big Money), 74, Baltimore

  1909 The crowds are fearfully large but somehow reassuring: “Where there is no room, one needn’t look for it.” And above them all there is the open sky, “which is, after all, the thing that matters here.” Franz Kafka and Max and Otto Brod have come to Italy, through the chaos of crowds, automobiles, and locomotives, to see an airplane show. It’s less than two months since Blériot became the first to fly across the Channel, and he’s here. Curtiss the American, with his massive biplane, is here. And in the crowd, celebrities: d’Annunzio, Puccini, and, according to Guy Davenport’s retelling of the same episode, Wittgenstein. Kafka’s report in Bohemia on this day, “The Aeroplanes at Brescia,” one of his first published pieces, made him a pioneer of sorts too: the first in German literature to write about airplanes.

  1959 It’s the year of Debbie, Eddie, and Liz, and the influence of that archetypal Hollywood love triangle has seeped even into Miss Mandible’s sixth-grade class at Horace Greeley Elementary: spurned Debbie Reynolds is Sue Ann Brownly, Liz Taylor the seductress is Miss Mandible herself, and disloyal Eddie Fisher is the unnamed diarist of Donald Barthelme’s “Me and Miss Mandible,” the breakout story in his playfully provocative career. The narrator has somehow been transported, at the age of thirty-five, from a failed career in insurance adjusting into a normal-sized kid’s desk in Miss Mandible’s classroom, where he hulks like Gulliver and causes passions to stir. Sue Ann, on this day, kicks him viciously in the shins, while Miss Mandible, even though she knows it will lead to her destruction, lets “her hands rest on my shoulders too warmly, and too long.”

  1984 Anthony Burgess, in the TLS, on Gore Vidal’s Lincoln: “There is something in the puritanical American mind which is scared of the imaginative writer but not of the pedantic one who seems to humanize facts without committing himself to the inventions which are really lies.”

  2001 Robert Macfarlane, in the TLS, on Ian McEwan’s Atonement: “The dust jacket proclaims Atonement his ‘finest achievement,’ and although publishers are prone to this Whiggishly perfectible view of their authors’ talents, in this case they are triumphantly right.”

  September 29

  BORN: 1547 Miguel de Cervantes (Don Quixote), Alcalá de Henares, Spain

  1810 Elizabeth Gaskell (Cranford, North and South), London

  DIED: 1902 Émile Zola (Germinal, L’Assommoir, Nana), 62, Paris

  1967 Carson McCullers (The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter), 50, Nyack, N.Y.

  1767 “On September 29, 1967,” Alex Haley wrote in the final chapter of Roots, “I felt I should be nowhere else in the world except standing on a pier at Annapolis.” And that’s where he was, on the two-hundredth anniversary of the arrival there of a British slave ship, the Lord Ligonier, which had sailed from the mouth of the Gambia River with a cargo of 3,265 elephant tusks, 3,700 pounds of beeswax, 800 pounds of raw cotton, 32 ounces of gold, and 98 “choice healthy slaves,” a journey whose documents allowed Haley to connect chains of oral history in his own family and in West Africa and imagine the story of his enslaved ancestor Kunta Kinte and the line of descendants to himself that became the bestselling book and epochal TV miniseries.

  1929 Percy Hutchinson, in the New York Times, on Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms: “Mr. Hemingway’s manner does not seem to be quite an enduring thing, any more than was Victorian heaviness enduring. But . . . seldom has a literary style so precisely jumped with the time.”

  1935 The history of The Escapist began with a failed escape. Josef Kavalier was just fourteen when he formally invited Prague’s club of magicians “to witness another astounding feat of autoliberation by that prodigy of escapistry, Cavalieri, at Charles Bridge, Sunday, 29 September 1935.” But his one rehearsal of his Houdini-like stunt failed—his younger brother nearly died in the cold River Moldau—and Josef’s true escape had to wait until four years later, when, hidden in a coffin, he evaded the Nazi grip on Prague and made his way to New York, where, in Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, he and his cousin Sammy Clay invent their Nazi-fighting comic-book superhero, the Escapist.

  1939 One of the most unlikely—and successful—acts of Allied espionage in World War II was birthed in the mind of one spy-turned-novelist and promoted by another. In the early days of the war a top-secret intelligence memo written by future James Bond creator Ian Fleming suggested various far-fetched deceptions, including one scenario borrowed from The Milliner’s Hat Mystery, a 1937 novel by former spycatcher Basil Thomson: the planting of false documents on the body of an apparent accident victim. Carried out with meticulous brilliance in 1943, the planting of such a body on the Spanish coast, as retold by Ben Macintyre in his thoroughly entertaining Operation Mincemeat, fooled the Nazis enough to open the door for the Allied invasion of Sicily.

  1961 Burns Singer, in the TLS, on V. S. Naipaul’s A House for Mr. Biswas: “Mr. Biswas is simply not worth all the detail that Mr. Naipaul spins so laboriously about him.”

  September 30

  BORN: 1207 Rumi (The Masnavi, The Shams), Wakhsh, Persia

  1924 Truman Capote (Other Voices, Other Rooms), New Orleans

  DIED: 1990 Michel Leiris (Manhood, The Rules of the Game), 89, Saint-Hilaire, France

  2006 André Schwartz-Bart (The Last of the Just), 78, Pointe-à-Pitre, Guadeloupe

  1905 At the age of fifty-five, already granted a kind of immortality as one of the figures in Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party (he’s the dandy in the top hat), Charles Ephrussi, art connoisseur and champion of the Impressionists, died in Paris after a short illness. In just a few years his friend Marcel Proust gave him further life as a model for Charles Swann, the Jewish aesthete in the first book of In Search of Lost Time. And a century later he returned, under his own name, as a central figure in The Hare with Amber Eyes, a dramatic family history by Edmund de Waal, a descendant of the Ephrussis who traces his family’s rise and fall through the collection of tiny ceramic netsuke Charles imported from Japan, one of the few legacies that survived the family’s destruction by the Nazis.

  1934 In the apparently exhaustive list of the works of Pierre Menard enumerated by the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges’s tale “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” there is at least one document missing: the letter that Menard wrote the narrator on this day explaining his masterpiece, his unfinished attempt to write Cervantes’s Don Quixote—not merely to copy it but to write it himself, word for word but as if from scratch, a task made admirable by its difficulty, for, as he points out, “composing the Quixote in the early seventeenth century was a reasonable, necessary, perhaps even inevitable
undertaking; in the early twentieth, it is virtually impossible.” It is a measure of Borges’s audacious ingenuity that, in this most delicious of his intellectual tales, he somehow convinces you that such a creation would be a masterpiece.

  1944 It’s his birthday (and it was his author’s birthday too), but that’s not why this September 30 sticks out for the narrator of Truman Capote’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s as “a day unlike any other I’ve lived.” There’s the runaway horse that carries him through Central Park until his friend Holly Golightly and a cop head it off. And then there are the headlines in the evening papers, alongside Holly’s photograph: “PLAYGIRL ARRESTED IN NARCOTICS SCANDAL,” “ARREST DOPE-SMUGGLING ACTRESS.” “Don’t forget,” Holly says as the cops take her down the stairs, “please feed the cat.” The cat sticks around, but Holly is soon gone—to Brazil, to Buenos Aires, to Africa, to another life, though she’s impossible to forget. She may be a phony, it’s true, but she’s “a real phony, you know?”

  October If you like fall, you like October. It’s the height of the season, the fieriest in its orange, the briskest in its breezes. “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers,” exclaims the irrepressible Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables. “It would be terrible if we just skipped from September to November, wouldn’t it?” October at Green Gables is “when the birches in the hollow turned as golden as sunshine and the maples behind the orchard were royal crimson” and “the fields sunned themselves in aftermaths”: it’s a “beautiful month.”

  Katherine Mansfield would have disagreed. October, she wrote in her journal, “is my unfortunate month. I dislike exceedingly to have to pass through it—each day fills me with terror.” (It was the month of her birthday.) And Gabriel García Márquez’s biographer notes that October, the month of the greatest disaster in his family history, when his grandfather killed a man in 1908, “would always be the gloomiest month, the time of evil augury” in his novels.

  Some people, of course, seek out evil augury in October. It’s the month in which we domesticate horror, as best we can, into costumes, candy, and slasher films. Frankenstein’s monster may not have been animated until the full gloom of November, but it’s in early October that Count Dracula visits Mina Harker in the night and forces her to drink his blood, making her flesh of his flesh. And it’s in October that the Overlook Hotel shuts down for the season, leaving Jack Torrance alone for the winter with his family and his typewriter in The Shining, and it’s in October that his son, Danny, starts saying “Redrum.”

  Can you domesticate horror by telling scary tales? Just as the camp counselor frightening the campers around the fire is likely the first one to get picked off when the murders begin, the four elderly members (who used to be five) of the Chowder Society in Peter Straub’s Ghost Story, who have dealt with the disturbing death of one of their own the previous October by telling each other ghost stories, prove anything but immune to sudden terror themselves until they can trace their curse to a horrible secret they shared during an October fifty years before—just after, as it happens, another kind of modern horror, the stock market crash of 1929. In the odd patterns that human irrationality often follows, those financial terrors, the Black Thursdays and Black Mondays, tend to arrive in October too.

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR OCTOBER

  The Gambler by Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1867) Those planning to celebrate National Novel Writing Month in November can take heart—or heed—from Dostoyevsky’s bold wager in October 1866, made to pay off his gambling debts, that if he couldn’t write a novel in a month he would lose the rights to his next nine years of work. The subject he chose won’t surprise you.

  Ghost Stories of an Antiquary by M. R. James (1904) James had modest aims for the wittily unsettling tales, often set among the libraries and ancient archives that were his professional haunts, that he wrote to entertain his students at Eton and Cambridge. But their skillful manipulation of disgust has made them perennial favorites for connoisseurs of the macabre.

  Ten Days That Shook the World by John Reed (1919) Oddly, one effect of the Russian Revolution was to modernize the calendar so the October Revolution, in retrospect, took place in November. But wherever you place those ten days, Reed, the partisan young American reporter, was there, moving through Petrograd—soon to be Leningrad—as the very ground shifted underneath him.

  Peyton Place by Grace Metalious (1956) The leaves are turning red, brown, and yellow in the small New England town, while the sky is blue and the days are unseasonably warm: it must be Indian summer. But let’s hear Grace Metalious tell it: “Indian summer is like a woman. Ripe, hotly passionate, but fickle.”

  A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L’Engle (1962) It’s a dark and stormy October night when Meg comes downstairs to find Charles Wallace waiting precociously for her with milk warming on the stove. Soon after, blown in by the storm, arrives their strange new neighbor Mrs. Whatsit, “her mouth puckered like an autumn apple.”

  The Dog of the South by Charles Portis (1979) There’s no particular reason to read The Dog of the South in October except that it begins in that month, when the leaves in Texas have gone straight from green to dead, and Ray Midge’s wife, Norma, has run off with his credit cards, his Ford Torino, and his ex-friend Guy Dupree. Any month is a good month to read Charles Portis.

  Black Robe by Brian Moore (1985) It’s Indian summer in Black Robe too, but the warm days are ending and winter’s coming on when Father Laforgue begins his journey to a remote Huron settlement. Based on the letters sent by seventeenth-century Jesuit missionaries in North America, Black Robe dramatizes the familiar clash of cultures in deeply unfamiliar but sympathetic ways.

  The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006) The landscape McCarthy’s father and son travel has been razed of all civilization, and calendars have gone with it, but as their story begins the man thinks it might be October. All he knows is that they won’t last another winter without finding their way south.

  October 1

  BORN: 1914 Daniel J. Boorstin (The Image, The Discoverers), Atlanta

  1946 Tim O’Brien (The Things They Carried), Austin, Minn.

  DIED: 2004 Richard Avedon (Portraits), 81, San Antonio

  2012 Eric Hobsbawm (The Age of Revolution), 95, London

  1835 “Doves & Finches swarmed round its margin,” Charles Darwin wrote on this day about a tiny pool of water on Albemarle Island in the Galápagos, the only mention he made in the diaries of his five-year journey on the HMS Beagle of the birds that would play a central role in his theory of natural selection and that would later bear his name. Nevertheless, he brought samples of them home, as he did of countless of the islands’ species, and by the time he published his account of the trip in The Voyage of the Beagle in 1839, he was able to theorize that the remarkable variation in the small group of bird species later known as “Darwin’s finches” was due to their isolation from each other on the various islands of the archipelago.

  1888 L. Frank Baum opened Baum’s Bazaar on Main Street in Aberdeen, South Dakota, offering housewares, toys, and the “latest novelties in Japanese Goods, Plush, Oxidized Brass and Leather Novelties.” It failed a year later.

  NO YEAR Danny the Champion of the World, set in a countryside much like that in which Roald Dahl’s tiny writing shed stood, was one of Dahl’s own favorites. It’s the least fantastic of his tales for children, except that few things are more fantastic for a boy than to have “the most marvelous and exciting father any boy ever had,” especially one who conspires with his son to capture over a hundred tranquilized pheasants and construct a Special Extra-large Poacher’s Model baby carriage to transport them, thereby ruining the grand shooting party hosted every year on the opening day of pheasant season by Mr. Victor Hazell, the piggy-eyed snob with the “glistening, gleaming Rolls-Royce” that won’t be so glistening or gleaming once the pheasants have done with it.

  2008 Having been named the “chief artist” of the newspaper Izvestia a year before on his 108th birthday, politic
al cartoonist Boris Yefimov died on this day in Moscow at the age of 109. Born in Kiev at the end of the nineteenth century, he lived his childhood under the tsar and then for ninety years chronicled the tumultuous history of the Soviet Union and its dissolution, caricaturing its enemies as they changed and always keeping close enough to the party line to survive its many purges (his first book had a foreword by his friend Trotsky, whom he soon had to draw as an enemy of the state). After Stalin executed his brother, a famous journalist who was the model for Karkov in Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls, Yefimov thought he’d be next, but he even survived the experience of having Stalin personally suggest and edit his cartoons.

  October 2

  BORN: 1879 Wallace Stevens (Harmonium, Ideas of Order), Reading, Pa.

  1904 Graham Greene (The Heart of the Matter), Berkhamsted, England

  DIED: 2002 Norman O. Brown (Life Against Death), 89, Santa Cruz, Calif.

  2005 August Wilson (The Piano Lesson, Fences), 60, Seattle

  1822 Mary Shelley began her journal again for the first time since Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned in July: “Now I am alone—oh, how alone! The stars may behold my tears, and the winds drink my sighs; but my thoughts are a sealed treasure, which I can confide to none.”

  1830 In the two days since she met the Reverend Edward Casaubon, who seemed at once the “most interesting man she had ever seen” and the “most distinguished-looking,” young Dorothea Brooke’s affection for this sallow, middle-aged bookworm has blossomed. After all, she notes decisively to her flightier sister, “Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology.” And when Mr. Casaubon, on making his goodbyes on this brisk day, alludes drily to his need for young companionship, Dorothea, glowing with the prospect of matrimony, prepares for an ill-fated decision that George Eliot is too good a novelist, and Middlemarch too great a novel, to make the end of her story.