A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1962 After nearly a dozen years living in Brazil with her partner, Lota de Macedo Soares, Elizabeth Bishop found a new acquaintance of interest with a “wonderful name”: Clarice Lispector, a neighbor down the street. “Her 2 or 3 novels I don’t think are so good but her short stories are almost like the stories I’ve always thought should be written about Brazil—Tchekovian, slightly sinister and fantastic.” Lispector was already gaining recognition as Brazil’s best writer since Machado de Assis, but she was unknown in the United States, and Bishop’s interest led to a first novel translated into English, The Apple in the Dark, and to the glamorous but reserved Lispector’s appearance on this day at a conference in Texas, where her translator marveled at this “rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf.”

  2004 Five days after his church in Haiti was burned down by an armed gang, Rev. Joseph Dantica boarded a flight to Miami. He had traveled to the United States over thirty times in the decades since his brother immigrated there; this time, although he possessed a valid tourist visa, he requested asylum out of fear of the gang at home, and the border machinery caught him in its gears. Two days later, vomiting but deprived of immediate medical treatment—“I think he’s faking,” a Customs medic said—and with his niece, the novelist Edwidge Danticat, still unable to see him, Dantica died, a nightmare that Danticat recounts with calm anger in Brother, I’m Dying, a memoir of the parallel lives of her father in Brooklyn and her uncle in Haiti, the “second father” who raised her after her parents moved to America.

  October 30

  BORN: 1821 Fyodor Dostoyevsky (Crime and Punishment, The Brothers Karamazov), Moscow

  1877 Irma Rombauer (The Joy of Cooking), St. Louis

  DIED: 1987 Joseph Campbell (The Hero with a Thousand Faces), 83, Honolulu

  2009 Claude Lévi-Strauss (Tristes Tropiques, The Raw and the Cooked), 100, Paris

  1772 On October 29, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, a young German law student who favored a blue coat and yellow breeches and had developed an affection for the wife of a friend, shot himself; he died the next day. A few days later the news reached an acquaintance of his, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had been struggling to put his own flirtation with suicide into words after a similar unrequited love. “At that moment,” Goethe later wrote, “the plan of ‘Werther’ was formed . . . just as water in a vessel, which stands upon the point of freezing, is converted into hard ice by the most gentle shake.” The Sorrows of Young Werther became the sensation of the Romantic age, sparking copycat suicides, a fashion for blue coats and yellow breeches, and, once word got out about its author’s inspiration, pilgrimages to the grave of Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem.

  1915 Francis Hackett, in the New Republic, on Robert Grant’s The High Priestess: “To describe a rigid, humorless, mean, pretentious woman is certainly worth while, but to imply that her essentially low qualities are merely the hind side of feminism is to flatter the conservative view of feminism with a vengeance.”

  1933 “I work, I spend money as if my future were secure. Yet every hour I receive a warning from my heart, and I believe that my health is close to collapse and that either the tyranny will last for a long time yet or be superseded by chaos.” Nine months after Hitler became chancellor, Victor Klemperer still had his job as a professor of French in Dresden, but he had few illusions about the catastrophe building around him, and over the next dozen years, spared the Nazis’ worst cruelties as a war veteran and the husband of a non-Jew, he turned his scholarly energy to his diary, where he documented the everyday humiliations, the relentlessly incremental restrictions, and the perversions of language of the Reich. Improbably, he survived the war and so did his diaries, which, published as I Will Bear Witness, remain one of the most thorough and moving personal records of the Nazi years.

  October 31

  BORN: 1795 John Keats (“Ode to a Nightingale,” “Ode to Melancholy”), London

  1959 Neal Stephenson (Cryptonomicon, The Baroque Cycle), Fort Meade, Md.

  DIED: 1960 H. L. Davis (Honey in the Horn, Beulah Land), 66, San Antonio, Tex.

  2008 Studs Terkel (Working, The Great War), 96, Chicago

  1615 Miguel de Cervantes hinted at the end of the first book of Don Quixote that further adventures might be forthcoming, but before he could complete his own sequel, a rival appeared that credited another author, Alonso Fernández de Avellaneda, on the title page and insulted Cervantes as old, friendless, and boring. Cervantes, meanwhile, took advantage of being second by adding a scene in which Don Quixote and Sancho Panza themselves mock the false sequel. In the second book’s dedication, written on this day, he mentioned “the loathing and disgust caused by another Don Quixote,” and in the book’s preface he completed his revenge: humbly declining to abuse his usurper, he instead told a tale of a madman who, after inflating a dog from behind through a hollow reed, asks, “Do your worships think, now, that it is an easy thing to blow up a dog?” “Does your worship think now,” added Cervantes, “that it is an easy thing to write a book?”

  1967 Published: Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan (Four Seasons, San Francisco)

  1980 “Does it matter that he is 20 years old? That he grew up in rural West Virginia and later on the streets of San Francisco?” Catherine Texier asked about the author in her New York Times review of JT Leroy’s debut novel, Sarah. “It does. And yet it shouldn’t.” Those sorts of questions were asked throughout the heady, mysterious rise of Leroy, who claimed to have been born on this day into a childhood of abuse and street hustling, until it became clear that behind his veiled persona wasn’t the twiggy, bewigged figure who made shy public appearances as JT but a forty-year-old woman named Laura Albert, who said she invented Leroy’s identity as an “avatar” for her fiction, not a hoax. Did it matter that he wasn’t twenty years old? It did. And yet, perhaps, it shouldn’t.

  1981 As you might expect among wizards, October 31 is a celebrated day in the calendar. There is the traditional Halloween feast at Hogwarts, with candy-filled pumpkins, decorations, masses of live bats, and, at Harry Potter’s fourth Hogwarts Halloween, the Goblet of Fire, which declares him the surprise fourth Triwizard champion. It’s also the anniversary of the incomplete decapitation in 1492 of Sir Nicholas de Mimsy-Porpington, whose ghost was known forever after as Nearly Headless Nick. And of course it’s on this day that Lord Voldemort himself stepped into the Potter cottage and with the Killing Curse—“Avada Kedavra!”—murdered James and Lily Potter but failed to kill the baby Harry, nearly destroying himself in the process and leaving behind, in the lightning-shaped scar on Harry’s forehead, a part of his soul.

  November is the anti-April: gray and dreary, the beginning of the end of things rather than their rebirth. It’s the month you hunker down—that is, if you don’t give up entirely. When Ishmael leaves Manhattan for New Bedford and the sea in Moby-Dick, it may be December on the calendar, but he’s driven there, to the openness of oceans, by “a damp, drizzly November in my soul.” And where else could Dickens’s Bleak House begin but, bleakly, in “implacable November,” with dogs and horses mired in mud, pedestrians “jostling one another’s umbrellas in a general infection of ill temper” (not unlike Ishmael “deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people’s hats off”), and, of course, the English fog:

  “Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river, where it rolls defiled among the tiers of shipping and the waterside pollutions of a great (and dirty) city. Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats.”

  Shall I go on? Jane Eyre begins on a “drear November day,” with a “pale blank of mist and cloud” and “ceaseless rain sweeping away wildly before a long and lamentable blast.” And it’s on a “dreary night in November,” as “rain pattered dismally against the pan
es,” that Victor Frankenstein, blindly engrossed in his profane labors as the seasons have passed by outside, first sees the spark of life in the watery eyes of his creation. Is it any wonder that Meg in Little Women thinks that “November is the most disagreeable month in the whole year”?

  Not everyone agrees that it’s disagreeable. In his Sand County Almanac, Aldo Leopold, who finds value in each of the seasons, calls November “the month for the axe” because, in Wisconsin at least, it’s “warm enough to grind an axe without freezing, but cold enough to fell a tree in comfort.” With the hardwoods having lost their leaves, he can see the year’s growth for the first time: “Without this clear view of treetops, one cannot be sure which tree, if any, needs felling for the good of the land.” The season’s first starkness, in other words, brings clarity to the work of the conservationist, whose labors in managing his forest are done with axe not pen, “humbly aware that with each stroke he is writing his signature on the face of his land.”

  RECOMMENDED READING FOR NOVEMBER

  Frankenstein by Mary Shelley (1818) The horrified, fascinated romance between creator and created begins with an electric spark in the gloom of November and ends on the September ice of the Arctic, with the monster, having outlived the man who called him into being, heading out to perish in the darkness.

  Bleak House by Charles Dickens (1853) Not quite as muddy and befogged as the November afternoon on which it begins—nor as interminable as the legal case, Jarndyce v. Jarndyce, in which its story is enmeshed—Bleak House is actually one of Dickens’s sharpest and best-constructed tales.

  New Grub Street by George Gissing (1891) Set in a London institution nearly as foggy as Dickens’s Chancery—the world of small-time literary foragers that Gissing knew from intimate experience—New Grub Street is a bracingly and winningly unsentimental look at two delicate and unpromising financial propositions: literature and marriage.

  The Friends of Eddie Coyle by George V. Higgins (1970) Eddie Coyle was caught driving a truck through New Hampshire with about two hundred cases of Canadian Club that didn’t belong to him, and now he has a court date in January. So he spends the fall trying to make a deal—trying to make a number of deals, in fact, in Higgins’s debut, glorious with conversation and double-crossing, which Elmore Leonard has, correctly, called “the best crime novel ever written.”

  The Death of Jim Loney by James Welch (1979) The fall is indeed bleak in the Montana of Welch’s second novel, in which Loney, a young man with a white father and an Indian mother—both lost to him—stumbles toward his fate like Ivan Ilyich, unsure of what it means to live.

  The Ice Storm by Rick Moody (1994) Thanksgiving and family dysfunction go together like turkey and gravy, but Moody deftly sidesteps the usual holiday plot in his Watergate-era tale of suburbanites unmoored by affluence and moral rot by setting his domestic implosion on the day and night after Thanksgiving, as an early-winter storm seals Connecticut in ice.

  A Century of November by W. D. Wetherell (2004) November 1918 may have meant the end of the Great War, but for Charles Marden, who lost his wife to the flu and his son to the trenches, it means a pilgrimage, driven by unspoken despair, from his orchard on Vancouver Island to the muddy field in Belgium where his son died, an expanse still blanketed with barbed wire and mustard-gas mist that seem to carry another hundred years’ worth of war in them.

  November 1

  BORN: 1959 Susanna Clarke (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell), Nottingham, England

  1965 James Wood (How Fiction Works, The Broken Estate), Durham, England

  DIED: 1907 Alfred Jarry (Ubu Roi, The Supermale), 34, Paris

  1972 Ezra Pound (The Cantos, Hugh Selwyn Mauberley), 89, Venice, Italy

  1604 The King’s Men gave The Tragedy of Othello, the Moor of Venice its first recorded performance at Whitehall Palace in London.

  1755 Would it be too much to say that the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Lisbon, which leveled one of the great cities of Europe and killed a fifth of its inhabitants, laid equal waste to European philosophy? Hundreds of writers attempted to make sense of the quake, including the young Immanuel Kant, who, unlike most, blamed the upheaval on geological forces rather than God, and the popular, optimistic theory of God’s benevolence, summed up by Leibniz’s claim that we live in “the best of all possible worlds,” could hardly hold against the arbitrary suffering of thousands—on All Saints’ Day, no less. Nor could it withstand the withering assaults of Voltaire, who wrote his skeptical “Poem on the Lisbon Disaster” within a month of the calamity and made the earthquake central to his sarcastic masterpiece, Candide.

  1930 Ernest Hemingway swerved into a ditch in Billings, Montana, and broke his arm. His passenger, John Dos Passos, was unhurt.

  1976 Justice, for once, moved swiftly in the case of Gary Gilmore, but not as fast as he wanted. In July he shot two men in Utah, and by early October he was convicted and sentenced to death. His case would have made headlines anyway, since no one had been executed in the United States in nearly ten years, but when on this day he waived his right to appeal and demanded to die, it became a circus. Reviled and celebrated for his outlaw nihilism, Gilmore was executed in January, but his notoriety didn’t end there. He had sold the rights to his story to reporter Lawrence Schiller, whose researches became the foundation of Norman Mailer’s epic “true life novel,” The Executioner’s Song. And years later, Gilmore’s younger brother, Mikal, a Rolling Stone writer, reckoned with his family’s history of violence and his own attempt to escape it in the harrowing memoir Shot in the Heart.

  1993 It is November 1, 1993, and somewhere in Britain Hazel Burns and Spencer Kelly are born. But it’s also November 1, 1993, when Hazel and Spencer, as young adults, wake up together in his bed after their first, life-changing night together. Using two narrative conceits for his story—all its events, past, present, and future, take place on November 1, 1993 (the day the European Union was founded), and all its nouns (with only twelve exceptions, he assures us) are borrowed from those used in the Times on that day—Richard Beard constructed Damascus, a serious and playful novel of time, fate, love, and chance; of crowds, countries, and a few individual lives.

  November 2

  BORN: 1927 Steve Ditko (The Amazing Spider-Man, Tales to Astonish), Johnstown, Pa.

  1949 Lois McMaster Bujold (Paladin of Souls), Columbus, Ohio

  DIED: 1950 George Bernard Shaw (Pygmalion), 94, Ayot St. Lawrence, England

  1961 James Thurber (My Life and Hard Times, The 13 Clocks), 66, New York City

  1918 F.H., in the New Republic, on Booth Tarkington’s The Magnificent Ambersons: “Almost nothing that is necessary to creating a study of this American reality is lacking in Mr. Tarkington except the temper of a master novelist.”

  1938 Malcolm and Jan Lowry arrived in Mexico for the first time on October 30, 1936, though Malcolm, superstitious, liked to say it was three days later, on the Day of the Dead. The next day Malcolm, whose alcoholism had already led him to check into Bellevue Hospital in New York in May, had his first taste of mescal; by the middle of the month they had settled in the resort town of Cuernavaca, in the shadow of its two nearby volcanoes; and by the end of the next year Jan had left him when he refused to stop drinking. By then, he had already completed a rough draft of Under the Volcano, which, after many revisions, would begin on the Day of the Dead 1939, as two men in white tennis flannels recall the destruction and death of the mescal-soaked consul, Geoffrey Fermin, on the same day the year before.

  1962 Stanley Kubrick was well into preproduction for his seventh feature, Red Alert, an atom-bomb thriller based on the novel by the same name by Peter George, when he realized he had to radically shift its tone: the only way to express the absurd reality of nuclear holocaust was with what he would call “nightmare comedy.” He knew where to go for help, to a writer whose satirical novel The Magic Christian Peter Sellers had given him while they were making Lolita, and so on this day he sent Terry Southern a telegram reading, “I have
a proposition which would profitably occupy you in London for next eight weeks.” Red Alert soon became Dr. Strangelove, and Southern, for better or worse for his writing career and his health, soon became one of the hottest screenwriters in the business.

  November 3

  BORN: 1903 Walker Evans (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), St. Louis

  1942 Martin Cruz Smith (Gorky Park, Stalin’s Ghost), Reading, Pa.

  DIED: 1957 Wilhelm Reich (The Mass Psychology of Fascism), 60, Lewisburg, Pa.

  2001 E. H. Gombrich (The Story of Art, Art and Illusion), 92, London

  1793 The quotation for which Olympe de Gouges is best remembered—“Women have the right to mount the scaffold; they must also have the right to mount the speaker’s platform”—proved dismayingly prophetic. De Gouges transformed herself from a small-town butcher’s daughter into a wealthy and sophisticated Parisian socialite, playwright, and political activist, culminating in her “Declaration of the Rights of Women,” which, with pointed irony, exposed the absence of women in the French Revolution’s doctrine of universal equality, the “Declaration of the Rights of Man.” But on this day, for her stubborn public protests against the radicals who had taken over the revolution, she was guillotined by the Jacobins, who ridiculed her as an example of what could happen if women neglected the domestic duties given them by nature.

  1844 After the success of A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens struggled to repeat his holiday hit the next year until he came upon the idea for The Chimes, a similar tale in which a father watches as a ghost as his loved ones are crushed by poverty, only to wake, as if from a dream, to a happy ending. Dickens wrote the story in less than a month and reported that he finished it on this day at 2:30 p.m. with “what women call ‘a real good cry.’ ” When he read it aloud to friends in December—his first taste of the public performances that came to consume the last decades of his life—he thrilled when they shared his tears: “If you had seen Macready last night—undisguisedly sobbing and crying on the sofa, as I read—you would have felt (as I did) what a thing it is to have Power.”