A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1890 The trouble with fictional chronologies is that sometimes the math just doesn’t add up. It sharpens our sense of Sherlock Holmes as a living presence to read such concrete details as the posted notice in one of his best-loved cases that “THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE IS DISSOLVED, October 9, 1890.” The problem, though, as generations of Holmesians have debated, is that Mr. Jabez Wilson, the red-headed dupe of the tale, says he only worked at the league for two months before it mysteriously dissolved, but also that he began there in April (six months before October). How to account for the discrepancy? Rather than blaming sloppy storytelling by Watson or his creator Arthur Conan Doyle, some imaginative readers like Brad Keefauver have credited it to a clumsy attempt by Wilson to hide the amount he earned at the league, in hopes of lowering the fee he’d owe Holmes.

  1899 “With this pencil I wrote the MS. of ‘The Emerald City.’ Finished Oct. 9th, 1899.” “The Emerald City” wasn’t the only title L. Frank Baum considered for his manuscript—he tried “The Land of Oz,” “From Kansas to Fairyland,” and “The City of the Great Oz” before settling on The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—but he felt strongly enough he had created something memorable that he framed the message above, along with the pencil. The month before Oz was published, Baum told his brother it was “the best thing I ever have written” and that his publisher expected to sell a quarter of a million copies. Although Oz didn’t match the sales of Baum’s earlier Father Goose before his publisher went bankrupt in 1902, by the time its copyright expired in 1956 there were four million copies of The Wonderful Wizard of Oz in print.

  October 10

  BORN: 1950 Nora Roberts (Angels Fall, Naked in Death), Silver Spring, Md.

  1959 Jaime Hernandez (Love and Rockets, Locas), Oxnard, Calif.

  DIED: 1837 Charles Fourier (The Theory of the Four Movements), 65, Paris

  1973 Ludwig von Mises (The Theory of Money and Credit), 92, New York City

  1914 “Married life really is the greatest institution that ever was,” P. G. Wodehouse declared ten days after his wedding. “When I look back and think of the rotten time I have been having all my life, compared with this, it makes me sick.”

  1939 George Orwell harvested five eggs from his hens and made two pounds of blackberry jelly.

  1947 Fired as a publisher’s assistant, William Styron reported to his father he was glad, since publishing is “only a counterfeit, a reflection, of really creative work.”

  1947 Edith Sitwell, in the Spectator, on Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry: A Study of William Blake: “To say it is a magnificent, extraordinary book is to praise it as it should be praised, but in doing so one gives little idea of the huge scope of the book and of its fiery understanding.”

  1986 J. D. Salinger had refused requests for an interview for over twenty years, since ending his publishing career and removing himself from the public eye in 1965, but on this day he submitted to one, under duress, at the Manhattan offices of his attorney at the Satterlee Stephens law firm. His interviewer was a lawyer representing Random House and its author Ian Hamilton, whose forthcoming biography of Salinger used quotations from his personal letters that Salinger objected to strongly enough that he was willing to sit through a deposition. The process was, by all accounts, excruciating, as the lawyer extracted from the reclusive author a description of what he had been writing since 1965—“Just a work of fiction. That’s all.”—and for hours walked him through the nearly one hundred letters Hamilton had quoted, which Salinger said were written by a “gauche” and “callow” young man he could hardly recognize.

  2006 At the center of Anthony Swofford’s third book, Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails, is a remarkable document, an eight-page handwritten letter from his father carrying six dates of composition between July and October and a final message added on this day: “I have sat on this for much too long . . . It is well past time to shred or mail. So mail here it comes. With Love, Your Father.” And so it came: a bill of grievances both petty and substantial, each with an accounting at the end: “You get a pass on that” or “No pass here.” And while Swofford’s book, Hotels, Hospitals, and Jails, is in part a raw confession of his self-destructive misbehavior after his first book, Jarhead, made him rich and famous, it is also a bill of grievances of his own, a book-length reply to his father’s letter that he feels he has to write before becoming a father himself.

  October 11

  BORN: 1925 Elmore Leonard (Hombre, Rum Punch, Out of Sight), New Orleans

  1962 Anne Enright (The Gathering, What Are You Like?), Dublin

  DIED: 1809 Meriwether Lewis (The Journals of Lewis and Clark), 35, Hohenwald, Tenn.

  1963 Jean Cocteau (The Holy Terrors), 74, Milly-la-Forêt, France

  1843 “Began the Chinese tale,” Hans Christian Andersen noted tersely in his diary on this day. By the next evening he had finished “The Nightingale,” the story of a songbird whose voice is so beautiful it draws death away from the dying emperor, a tale whose inspiration he’d recorded just a month before in the same diary, and with equal concision. “Jenny Lind’s first performance as Alice,” he wrote of the young singer already stirring a frenzy as the “Swedish Nightingale.” “In love.” He spent nearly all of the next ten days with her, giving her poems, a portrait of himself, a briefcase, and, just as she was leaving town, most likely a marriage proposal. She didn’t accept the latter, remaining friends with Andersen for the rest of their lives but always being careful to refer to them as “brother” and “sister.”

  1928 Arthur Sydney McDowell, in the TLS, on Virginia Woolf’s Orlando: “It is a fantasy, impossible but delicious; existing in its own right by the colour of imagination and an exuberance of life and wit.”

  1947 Published: Se questo è un uomo (If This Is a Man/Survival in Auschwitz) by Primo Levi (De Silva, Turin)

  1949 Richard Wright had fielded offers before to turn Native Son into a movie (MGM, astoundingly, had once been interested in filming it with an all-white cast), but when French director Pierre Chenal suggested making the movie in Argentina, he accepted. But who would play the lead role of Bigger Thomas? Wright suggested Canada Lee, a sensation in Orson Welles’s stage version, but Chenal had an improbable idea: why not Wright himself? Even more improbably, Wright took the role, and on this day, having trimmed twenty-five pounds on the voyage, he arrived in Buenos Aires to begin shooting what they hoped would be the biggest movie ever made in South America. Acclaimed in Argentina, the film was panned after being chopped by a third for U.S. and European distribution.

  2007 Greeted by reporters on her London doorstep with the news that she had won the Nobel Prize for Literature at age eighty-seven, Doris Lessing put her grocery bags down and sighed, “Oh, Christ.”

  October 12

  BORN: 1939 James Crumley (The Last Good Kiss), Three Rivers, Tex.

  1949 Richard Price (Clockers, Lush Life), Bronx, N.Y.

  DIED: 1926 Edwin A. Abbott (Flatland), 87, London

  2010 Belva Plain (Evergreen, Promises), 95, Short Hills, N.J.

  1713 Surely it’s no coincidence that Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle, his three-volume, nearly 3,000-page epic of the Age of Enlightenment, begins on this day with the execution of a witch: the triumph of rationality is never a sure, or linear, outcome. On the same day, Enoch Root arrives at the bustling frontier outpost of Boston to deliver a letter to one of its many immigrants, Daniel Waterhouse. Waterhouse, once a friend of both Newton and Leibniz and now the founder of a misbegotten academy, the Massachusetts Bay Colony Institute of Technologickal Arts, has been summoned back to Europe to mediate the supremely irrational dispute between the two inventors of the calculus and thereby rescue the path toward progress that Root promises, with Stephenson’s usual brand of anachronistic cheek, will ultimately make Waterhouse’s own institute a glorious campus dedicated to the “art of automatic computing.”

  1927 Edith Wharton married Teddy Wharton and had her most passionate affair with Morton Fullerton, but it was about Walter Van Rensselaer
Berry that she wrote in her diary after his death, “The Love of all my life died today, & I with him.” Berry had not taken either of his two clear opportunities to propose to her, once when they first met in Maine in their youth and once after she finally divorced the miserable Teddy twenty years later, but they were close allies in public and private for the second half of her life. The social columnists considered him the model for Selden in The House of Mirth, and her friends assumed they were lovers, but her biographers have been less sure, in part because she got into his apartment soon after his death and burned nearly all the letters she’d written him.

  1961 The loudest explosion in the salvo of contempt that greeted the publication of Webster’s Third New International Dictionary was launched from the heights of the New York Times editorial page. Mocking the Webster’s lexicographers with some of their own approved language as “double-domes” who “have been confabbing and yakking for twenty-seven years,” the Times called for a return to the old Webster’s Second. Outrage against the Third’s “permissiveness” became infectious: critics misled by the dictionary’s own press release knocked it for okaying slang with headlines like “Saying Ain’t Ain’t Wrong,” Dwight Macdonald published a twenty-page takedown of the dictionary in The New Yorker, and in Gambit Rex Stout had his fastidious sleuth Nero Wolfe feed pages from the Third into the fire.

  1979 Published: The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy by Douglas Adams (Arthur Barker, London)

  October 13

  BORN: 1890 Conrad Richter (The Light in the Forest), Pine Grove, Pa.

  1902 Arna Bontemps (Black Thunder), Alexandria, La.

  DIED: 1995 Henry Roth (Call It Sleep), 89, Albuquerque, N.M.

  2002 Stephen E. Ambrose (Undaunted Courage), 66, Bay St. Louis, Miss.

  1819 John Keats, twenty-three, was already ill with the tuberculosis that would kill him less than two years later when his love for the young Fanny Brawne reached its feverish height. On this day, in a dash-filled letter, he struggled to find a language for his passion: “I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion—I have shudder’d at it—I shudder no more—I could be martyr’d for my Religion—Love is my religion—I could die for that—I could die for you.” A few days later, it is thought, he gave her a ring to seal their secret engagement. It’s also speculated that this was the same week he found a more disciplined language for his love in the sonnet that begins “Bright star! would I were steadfast as thou art,” which for two centuries since has set its readers to swooning.

  1926 “We have so many bedbugs,” Isaac Babel wrote his mother from Moscow, “that it has become a legend among the other dwellers in our apartment.”

  1958 At a Buddhist temple on the Upper West Side on this day, as described in How I Became Hettie Jones, her memoir of bohemian life among the Beats, Hettie Cohen became Hettie Jones, marrying LeRoi Jones, a poet she’d met when they both worked for a small Greenwich Village magazine for record collectors. Her husband would later change his own name, to Amiri Baraka, when he moved to Harlem in 1965 and helped launch the Black Arts movement, while Hettie Jones (whom Baraka, to add to the confusion of names, called “Nellie Kohn” in his own memoir, The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones) stayed in lower Manhattan with their two daughters and remained Hettie Jones.

  1958 Published: A Bear Called Paddington by Michael Bond (Collins, London)

  1997 David Foster Wallace, in the New York Observer, on John Updike’s Toward the End of Time: “A novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.”

  2001 Chided again by critic James Wood for the “hysterical realism” he said her fiction shared with DeLillo, Rushdie, Wallace, and others, Zadie Smith wryly admitted in the Guardian that although in her first novel she may have aspired to the spareness of Kafka, she “wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. Such is life.” Now, though, in the weeks after September 11, she added, she was “sitting here in my pants, looking at a blank screen, finding nothing funny, scared out of my mind like everybody else.”

  October 14

  BORN: 1894 E. E. Cummings (The Enormous Room), Cambridge, Mass.

  1942 Péter Nádas (A Book of Memories), Budapest

  DIED: 1959 Errol Flynn (My Wicked, Wicked Ways), 50, Vancouver, B.C.

  1997 Harold Robbins (The Carpetbaggers), 81, Palm Springs, Calif.

  1667 Having been expelled from his Jewish community in Amsterdam in 1656 for his heretical teachings, the philosopher Baruch Spinoza taught himself to grind lenses, a craft of newfound interest in that age of explorations with the telescope and the microscope, and one in keeping with his radical belief in a God of nature, not of man. Over time, his skills increased to where his fame as a lens grinder approached his infamy as the “atheist Jew”; in a letter on this day, Christiaan Huygens, the discoverer of Saturn’s moon Titan, praised the lenses of “the Jew of Voorburg” for their “admirable polish.” Over time, however, the grinding may have also hastened Spinoza’s death from a lung disease often blamed on the glass dust he inhaled every day.

  1939 Ambitious and prolific, Thomas Merton spent his twenty-fifth summer with two friends in a cottage in upstate New York, each writing a novel he thought would make his name. Back in New York City in the fall, Merton got a publisher’s rejection slip for his novel on this day; when he called to ask why, they said it was dull and badly written, and Merton realized he agreed. But by that time his mind had moved on to other things: in a jazz club that same month, disgusted with his life, he realized he wanted to become a priest. A decade later he told the story of his awakening in The Seven Storey Mountain, a memoir written from his new life in a Trappist monastery that, neither dull nor badly written, became an immediate bestseller and a Catholic touchstone.

  1972 The New Republic on Hunter S. Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas: “This is more hype than book. It needs some humanity and a better idea of what time it is.”

  1994 As he did every Friday afternoon for years, Naguib Mahfouz, frail and nearly blind and deaf at age eighty-two, crossed from his apartment to the waiting car of a friend who would drive him to a café for his weekly meeting with other Cairo writers and intellectuals. From the sidewalk a young man greeted him, as many did, but when Mahfouz reached out through the open car window to shake his hand, the man stabbed him in the neck. The attack, which Mahfouz outlived by a dozen years, came on the sixth anniversary of his Nobel Prize for Literature—the first for an Arabic writer—but what was the cause? Mahfouz’s condemnation of the fatwa against Salman Rushdie for The Satanic Verses, or his own controversial religious allegory, Children of Gebelaawi, which had been judged heretical and banned in Egypt thirty-five years before?

  October 15

  BORN: 1844 Friedrich Nietzsche (Thus Spoke Zarathustra), Röcken, Prussia

  1881 P. G. Wodehouse (Carry On, Jeeves), Guildford, England

  1923 Italo Calvino (Invisible Cities), Santiago de las Vegas, Cuba

  DIED: 1968 Virginia Lee Burton (Mike Mulligan and His Steam Shovel), 59, Boston

  1764 By his own account, Edward Gibbon, on his first visit to the Eternal City, was inspired to write The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by the presence of its glorious but deteriorating past: “It was at Rome on the fifteenth of October 1764, as I sat musing amidst the ruins of the Capitol while the barefooted fryars were singing Vespers in the temple of Jupiter, that the idea of writing the decline and fall of the City first started to my mind.” Some later historians have been skeptical of the exactness of this memory, which he didn’t describe until thirty years later, but few were skeptical of the Decline and Fall itself, whose innovative use of primary sources created the standard for modern history.

  1920 Katherine Mansfield, in the Athenaeum, on Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives: “Miss Gertrude Stein has discovered a new way of writing stories. It is just to keep right on writing
them. Don’t mind how often you go back to the beginning, don’t hesitate to say the same thing over and over again—people are always repeating themselves—don’t be put off if the words sound funny at times: just keep right on, and by the time you’ve done writing you’ll have produced your effect.”

  1967 The standing ovation Richard Burton received when he read from David Jones’s In Parenthesis on the same stage as W. H. Auden left Auden with, at least according to Burton’s diary, a “ghostly smile” and a look of “surprise, malice, and envy.”

  1976 Among the things Eleanor Coppola took note of on this day while her husband, Francis, was shooting thirty-eight takes of a scene at Colonel Kurtz’s compound for Apocalypse Now: the severed heads played by local people, who were buried in the ground all day, drinking Cokes; a man giving a boa constrictor a sip of water; fake blood being used up fast at $35 a gallon; kids “putting chunks of dry ice in film cans and making the lids pop off.” Coppola was on set in the Philippines to shoot a documentary about the making of the picture; the documentary, the wonderful Hearts of Darkness, wasn’t released until 1991, but her diary of the production, Notes, was published in 1979, the same year the movie came out, and it’s a calm and observant record of a tumultuous experience.

  2012 James Wood, in The New Yorker, on Tom Wolfe’s Back to Blood: “In the regime of the enforced exclamation mark, everyone is equal.”

  October 16

  BORN: 1854 Oscar Wilde (The Picture of Dorian Gray), Dublin

  1888 Eugene O’Neill (A Long Day’s Journey into Night), New York City

  DIED: 1997 James A. Michener (Hawaii, Chesapeake, Space), 90, Austin, Tex.