A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1950 “Well! Here comes ol’ Charlie Brown!” says Shermy to Patty in the first line in Charles M. Schulz’s new comic strip. “How I hate him!”

  1957 Julia Child wrote to Avis DeVoto that she had caught up with the bestselling Peyton Place: “Those women, stroked in the right places until they quiver like old Stradivarii! Quite enjoyed it, though feeling an underlying abyss of trash.”

  1968 Djuna Barnes remarked to a friend on Anaïs Nin: “Something of a pathological ‘little girl’ lost—sometimes a bit ‘sticky,’ she sees too much, she knows too much, it is intolerable.”

  1975 Ann Rule’s career as the “Queen of True Crime” began with a haunting coincidence. A mother of four, she was writing for True Detective magazine under the pen name Andy Stark and taking forensic science classes when an old friend she had worked nights with on a crisis hotline called to ask if she knew why police were looking into his records. A few days later, on this day, that friend, Ted Bundy, was arrested in Utah for kidnapping, and the next morning wired a message to Rule in Seattle: “Ted Bundy wants you to know that he is all right, that things will work out.” Rule’s first book, The Stranger Beside Me, describes how things did work out, and how Rule came to learn the true story of the serial killer she had once thought of as “almost the perfect man.”

  October 3

  BORN: 1924 Harvey Kurtzman (editor of Mad and Help!, Little Annie Fanny), Brooklyn

  1925 Gore Vidal (Burr, Julian, Myra Breckinridge), West Point, N.Y.

  DIED: 1896 William Morris (News from Nowhere, Kelmscott Press), 62, London

  1967 Woody Guthrie (Bound for Glory), 55, New York City

  1802 On the night before her brother, William, married her friend Mary Hutchinson, Dorothy Wordsworth wore Mary’s wedding ring on her own finger while she slept.

  1860 Sailing north from the equator toward San Francisco, his last novel published three years before, Herman Melville marked this passage in his copy of Chapman’s Homer with an underline and an exclamation: “The work that I was born to do is done!”

  1918 It wasn’t until he was thirty-seven, with four novels published and one, Maurice, written but kept secret because of the gay relationship at its heart, that E. M. Forster first had sex. Stationed in Egypt with the Red Cross during the war, he confessed in coded language to a friend, “Yesterday, for the first time in my life I parted with respectability. I have felt the step would be taken for many months. I have tried to take it before. It has left me curiously sad.” But he wasn’t sad at all when, a few years later, he fell in love with an Egyptian man. “I am so happy,” he wrote on this day. “I wish I was writing the latter half of Maurice now. I know so much more. It is awful to think of the thousands who go through youth without ever knowing.”

  1933 Lacking the $1.83 in postage to submit the manuscript of her first book, Jonah’s Gourd Vine, to a publisher, Zora Neale Hurston prevailed upon the local chapter of the Daughter Elks to borrow the funds from their treasury.

  1951 It’s the set piece to end all set pieces: Sinatra, Gleason, and Hoover in the stands, Durocher, Maglie, Robinson, and Mays on the field, Ross Hodges on the mic, and the Giants and the Dodgers playing for the pennant. Branca throws to Thomson, Gleason throws up on Sinatra’s shoes, Pafko goes back to the wall, the Giants win the pennant, and a kid named Cotter Martin runs off with the ball. Published as a special insert in Harper’s in 1992 and as a book of its own in 2001, “Pafko at the Wall” also stands as the masterful prologue to Don DeLillo’s 1997 epic, Underworld.

  1999 Verlyn Klinkenborg, in the New York Times, on Kent Haruf’s Plainsong: “Haruf has made a novel so foursquare, so delicate and lovely, that it has the power to exalt the reader.”

  2008 Will Heinrich, in the New York Observer, on Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo: “To call the dialogue wooden would be an insult to longbows and violins. And yet, I had no trouble finishing the book—on the contrary, I raced through it, even while I disliked it, and myself for reading it.”

  October 4

  BORN: 1937 Jackie Collins (Hollywood Wives, The Stud), London

  1941 Anne Rice (Interview with the Vampire), New Orleans

  DIED: 1974 Anne Sexton (The Awful Rowing Toward God), 45, Weston, Mass.

  1988 Geoffrey Household (Rogue Male), 87, Banbury, England

  1866 Made desperate by his debts, Fyodor Dostoyevsky reluctantly signed in July 1865 an agreement whose predatory conditions might well have come from a fairy tale: if he failed to complete a 160-page novel by November 1, 1866, his publisher would have the right to all his works for the next nine years without compensation. He paid off some creditors with the rubles and gambled away the rest, but, busy with another book, Crime and Punishment, he put off the contracted novel until this day, less than a month before his deadline, when he finally engaged a young stenographer, Anna Grigorievna, to help him. He dictated the story of The Gambler to her every afternoon, turned in the manuscript two hours before the deadline, and then, when they met a week later to resume his work on Crime and Punishment, asked for Anna’s hand in marriage, which she granted.

  1981 Bernd Heinrich was a quickly rising star professor in the field of entomology (he had published extensively on bumblebees), and was beginning a career in nature writing that would later include The Mind of the Raven and Winter World, but to the other runners at the start of the North American 100 km ultramarathon championship he was an unknown (though he had won the Masters Division of the Boston Marathon the year before). He’d never competed at any length beyond the marathon before, but, using his expertise in animal physiology, he’d trained all summer in the Maine woods while doing his biological fieldwork and by the end of the race he had set, at age forty-one, a new American 100 km record of 6:38:20 (that’s sixty-two 6:40 miles), a mark that stood for over a decade and an experience that’s the climax of his book on the human and animal capacities for endurance, Why We Run.

  1986 The New York District Attorney’s office may have eventually been satisfied that the wondrously bizarre attack on Dan Rather this evening—in which the CBS newsman was beaten by two well-dressed men shouting, “Kenneth, what is the frequency?”—was perpetrated by a paranoid delusional named William Tager, but Paul Limbert Allman has suggested another suspect: the late, bearded fabulist Donald Barthelme. Writing in Harper’s in 2001 (and later adapting his article for the stage), Allman assembled his clues—the striking appearance of the phrase “What is the frequency?” and a character named Kenneth in Barthelme’s Sixty Stories, along with the fact that Rather and Barthelme, Texans born just six months apart, likely knew each other as reporters in Houston in the 1960s—into a deadpan tale that, if it never quite reaches plausibility, at least has the makings of a good Barthelme story.

  October 5

  BORN: 1949 Bill James (Bill James Baseball Abstract), Holton, Kans.

  1952 Clive Barker (Books of Blood, Weaveworld, Abarat), Liverpool

  DIED: 1962 Sylvia Beach (Shakespeare & Company), 75, Paris

  2003 Neil Postman (Amusing Ourselves to Death), 72, New York City

  1814 Percy Bysshe Shelley read Coleridge’s “Rime of the Ancient Mariner” aloud to Mary Godwin.

  1927 She had been mulling the idea for months—a fictional biography of her friend Vita Sackville-West, with whom she’d had a short affair and a long fascination—and on this day, her other work done, Virginia Woolf allowed herself to begin it: “a biography beginning in the year 1500 & continuing to the present day, called Orlando: Vita; only with a change about from one sex to another.” She quickly gave herself up “to the pure delight of this farce,” and then asked her subject’s permission to write about “the lusts of your flesh and the lure of your mind.” Vita was equally delighted: “What fun for you; what fun for me,” she replied. “Yes, go ahead, toss up your pancake, brown it nicely on both sides, pour brandy over it, and serve hot.”

  1937 Richard Wright, in the New Masses, on Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God: “Her n
ovel is not addressed to the Negro, but to a white audience whose chauvinistic tastes she knows how to satisfy.”

  1949 “Gentlemen: Your ad in the Saturday Review of Literature says that you specialize in out-of-print books.” So began, with uncharacteristic formality, the first letter Helene Hanff, a television scriptwriter and book-loving Anglophile in New York, sent to Marks & Co., a London bookshop located at 84, Charing Cross Road, in search of essays by Hazlitt, Stevenson, and Hunt. She soon sloughed off her initial propriety (“I hope ‘madam’ doesn’t mean over there what it does over here,” she remarked in her second letter), but it took over two years for her London bookselling correspondent, Frank Doel, to drop the “Miss Hanff” for “Helene” and more than two decades for Hanff to cross the Atlantic for her long-promised visit to the shop. By that time Doel had died, but their letters had already been immortalized in the collection 84, Charing Cross Road.

  October 6

  BORN: 1895 Caroline Gordon (None Shall Look Back), Todd County, Ky.

  1914 Thor Heyerdahl (Kon-Tiki, Aku-Aku), Larvik, Norway

  DIED: 1892 Alfred Tennyson (In Memoriam A.H.H., Idylls of the King), 83, Lurgashall, England

  1979 Elizabeth Bishop (North & South, A Cold Spring), 68, Boston

  1536 The unapproved possession of a Bible translated into English was a crime in England punishable by excommunication or death when William Tyndale, a graduate of Oxford with half a dozen languages at his command, moved to Germany in 1524 and began his own translation of the New Testament. By 1526 copies of his translation were being smuggled back into England, and a decade later, while living in Antwerp, Tyndale was arrested and convicted of heresy by the Holy Roman Emperor. Tradition has it that this is the day he was strangled and burned to death, with the final words “Lord, open the King of England’s eyes.” Not long after, Henry VIII did indeed approve an English translation of the Bible, and when King James commissioned his own version in the next century, a majority of its words were taken from Tyndale’s once-heretical translation.

  1834 From 1832, when a woman in Odessa sent him an anonymous fan letter signed “The Stranger,” to 1850, just months before his death, when he married his admirer, who turned out to be a Polish noblewoman named Eveline Hańska, Honoré de Balzac carried on the most passionate correspondence of his life. He had to wait for her hand until the death of her husband and then had to compete with, among others, Franz Liszt for her affections. In return, he always declared she only had one competitor for his heart: his work on the vast series of novels called the Comédie humaine he outlined to her on this day. “I have now shown you my real mistress,” he confessed. “I have removed her veils . . . [T]here is she who takes my nights, my days, who puts a price on this very letter, taken from hours of study—but with delight.”

  1919 When she moved into shared lodgings with Ivy Compton-Burnett on this day, Margaret Jourdain was already a grand figure: a poet, an admired authority on English furniture and interior design, and the sharp-tongued center of an active social circle. Ivy was the opposite: withdrawn and drab, fading into the wallpaper (the provenance of which Margaret was no doubt an expert). So when Ivy began in the next decade to gain a small but shocking celebrity from her novels, their circle was horrified, not only at the vaguely disreputable activity of novel-writing, but that it was Ivy, the nonentity, who was becoming known by scribbling away behind her silent facade. Even Margaret claimed she had been unaware that her companion had published a novel at all until she produced Pastors and Masters “from under the bedclothes.”

  October 7

  BORN: 1964 Dan Savage (Savage Love, The Kid), Chicago

  1966 Sherman Alexie (The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian), Wellpinit, Wash.

  DIED: 1849 Edgar Allan Poe (“The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Purloined Letter”), 40, Baltimore

  1943 Radclyffe Hall (The Well of Loneliness, Adam’s Breed), 63, London

  1804 It’s not until halfway through his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater that Thomas de Quincey eats his first opium. After twenty days of unbearable pain from toothache and rheumatism he went out on a “wet and cheerless” London Sunday that one biographer places in early October, met a college friend who suggested opium, and obtained a tincture at a druggist. It did not merely ease his pain. “Here was a panacea,” he remembered almost twenty years later when he was in the depths of addiction, “for all human woes . . . Happiness might now be bought for a penny, and carried in the waistcoat-pocket.” His daily doses didn’t begin for another decade, but the forty years after that were consumed in desperate cycles of consumption and withdrawal.

  1924 Having finally read the manuscript of T. E. Lawrence’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom after spending two years attempting to arrange its publication, George Bernard Shaw reprimanded the young soldier about his punctuation: “You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of mental defectiveness, probably induced by camp life.”

  1955 Jack Kerouac, passing jugs of red wine around the audience, couldn’t be convinced to come up and read his work, but the crowd of a hundred or so at a San Francisco auto-repair-shop-turned-performance-space called Six Gallery recognized that the five poets who did read—Philip Lamantia, Michael McClure, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder—had done something rare: they had changed poetry. Or rather Ginsberg had, in just his second public performance and his first reading of Howl, the first part of which he had composed a month and a half before in one blow, “sounding like you,” he wrote Kerouac, “an imitation practically.” At the reading, as Ginsberg built to his anguished and ecstatic climax, Kerouac drummed on a wine jug and yelled “Go!” from the audience for rhythm.

  1971 Michael Ratcliffe, in the Times, on E. M. Forster’s posthumous Maurice: “It doesn’t work . . . Two of Forster’s strongest cards—the spirit of place and the fringe of emasculating women—are scarcely played at all, though he holds them in his hand and needs them to win this particular game like no other.”

  October 8

  BORN: 1917 Walter Lord (A Night to Remember, Day of Infamy), Baltimore

  1920 Frank Herbert (Dune, God Emperor of Dune), Tacoma, Wash.

  DIED: 1754 Henry Fielding (Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews), 47, Lisbon

  1945 Felix Salten (Bambi, Josephine Mutzenbacher), 76, Zurich

  1762 After receiving a turtle on his nomination to local office, Edward Gibbon hosted a dinner for forty-eight supporters consisting of “six dishes of turtle, eight of Game with jellies, Syllabubs, tarts, puddings, pine apples, in all three and twenty things besides a large piece of roast beef on the side.”

  1818 The vicious, class-baiting contempt with which John Keats’s Endymion was greeted is well known: “Back to the shop Mr John, back to plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,” scoffed Blackwood’s about his “imperturbable drivelling idiocy.” Some, including Lord Byron, have claimed the bad reviews drove the young poet to his death, but Keats himself, though wounded, showed a resilient indifference in a letter to his publisher on this day. He was his own fiercest critic, after all: “My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict.” With his “slipshod Endymion,” he added, he had “leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings, the quicksands, and the rocks, than if I had stayed upon the green shore, and piped a silly pipe, and took tea and comfortable advice. I was never afraid of failure; for I would sooner fail than not be among the greatest.”

  1846 To Louise Colet, jealous of a letter he had written an old flame, Gustave Flaubert protested that he didn’t seriously love the other woman, or rather, that he did, “but only when I was writing.”

  1945 One story begins, “He came into the world in the middle of a thicket, in one of those little, hidden forest glades.” The other opens, “The saying is that young whores eventually become old religious crones, but that was not my case.” During his prolific Viennese career, Felix Salten, who d
ied on this day, was best known as the author of the first novel, Bambi, which became an American bestseller (translated by Alger Hiss’s future antagonist, Whittaker Chambers) well before it found its way to Walt Disney. Disney adapted two more of Salten’s stories, but he never would have touched the second book above: Josephine Mutzenbacher, a legendary, often banned, and anonymously published pornographic novel that has sold millions. Salten never acknowledged he wrote it, but scholars have come to believe the speculation that he did, and after his death his family even sued (unsuccessfully) to claim its significant royalties.

  1964 His Canadian publisher, Jack McClelland, informed Mordecai Richler that “you are absolutely out of your mind. Why in hell anybody would turn down an offer of $7,000 to go to Africa to write a film script, I’m damned if I know. You must have more money than brains.”

  October 9

  BORN: 1899 Bruce Catton (A Stillness at Appomattox), Petoskey, Mich.

  1934 Jill Ker Conway (The Road from Coorain), Hillston, Australia

  DIED: 2003 Carolyn Heilbrun (Writing a Woman’s Life, Amanda Cross novels), 77, New York City

  2004 Jacques Derrida (Of Grammatology), 74, Paris

  1849 Rarely has the choice of a literary executor been so poorly made as when Edgar Allan Poe, ailing at age forty, asked a fellow editor—and sometimes rival—named Rufus W. Griswold to oversee the publication of his works after his death. When Poe died in a delirium a few months later, Griswold fulfilled his obligation by publishing a vicious obituary in the New York Tribune on this day that portrayed Poe as a talented but friendless madman whose death no one mourned. The following year, he continued his attack with an edition of Poe’s works in which he made up scurrilous quotes from Poe’s unpublished letters and falsely claimed the late author had plagiarized, been expelled from college, deserted the army, and seduced his stepmother, a portrait that became the dominant image of Poe for decades to come.