A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  2002 A. O. Scott, in the New York Times, on Donna Tartt’s The Little Friend: “ ‘The Little Friend’ seems destined to become a special kind of classic—a book that precocious young readers pluck from their parents’ shelves and devour with surreptitious eagerness, thrilled to discover a writer who seems at once to read their minds and to offer up the sweet-and-sour fruits of exotic, forbidden knowledge.”

  November 4

  BORN: 1879 Will Rogers (Letters of a Self-Made Diplomat to His President), Oologah, Okla.

  1950 Charles Frazier (Cold Mountain, Nightwoods), Asheville, N.C.

  DIED: 1918 Wilfred Owen (“Anthem for Doomed Youth”), 25, Sambre-Oise Canal, France

  1933 John Jay Chapman (Emerson and Other Essays), 71, Poughkeepsie, N.Y.

  1899 Published: Die Traumdeutung (The Interpretation of Dreams) by Sigmund Freud (Franz Deuticke, Leipzig). Only six hundred copies were sold in the next eight years.

  1911 The Athenaeum on Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson: “This is the wittiest and most amusing of extravaganzas.”

  1968 Eight months after signing a blood oath to defend the Fatherland with eleven young followers, and a few weeks after the Nobel Prize for Literature, which many had expected would go to him, was given to his mentor Yasunari Kawabata, Yukio Mishima held a press conference in uniform to announce the formation of the Tatenokai (the “Shield Society”), a small private army organized to protect the emperor. The press mocked “Captain Mishima’s Toy Army,” but Mishima was deadly serious, and two years later, after a halfhearted coup attempt, he committed the ritual suicide of seppuku with the help of his closest followers, having been given the courage to “die a hero’s death” by the ferocity of the young warriors he had assembled around him.

  NO YEAR “Was—was it always like this?” It’s Thursday, just after midnight in the firehouse, and the playing cards are ticking on the tabletop and the Mechanical Hound is quiet in its kennel, sleeping but not sleeping. And Montag the fireman is starting to ask questions. “Didn’t firemen prevent fires rather than stoke them up and get them going?” But there’s hardly enough time for the other firemen to pull out their rulebooks and reply before the next alarm sounds, calling them out in their “mighty metal thunder” to douse a house full of forbidden books with kerosene in Fahrenheit 451, a novel Ray Bradbury wrote surrounded by books, feeding dimes to keep the typewriter humming in the basement of the UCLA library and walking through the stacks touching the books when the dimes ran out.

  NO YEAR “Is it cold yet?” his fiancée asks from the absolute cold of orbit. “Is Manhattan beautiful?” They have, in his words, “the greatest long-distance relationship in the history of the cosmos. Or at least the long-distantest”: Chase Insteadman, once a child TV star and now a dinner-party ornament, and Janice Trumbull, the lost astronaut, trapped on the international space station. Her letters to him make human-interest headlines, and they make Chase—well, the more public their sad romance becomes, the farther away it feels. Meanwhile Chase finds distractions closer to home as he and his new friend Perkus Tooth make their way through the bohemian edges and power-hungry center (which, oddly, often abut each other) of Manhattan in Jonathan Lethem’s Chronic City.

  November 5

  BORN: 1926 John Berger (Ways of Seeing, G.), London

  1943 Sam Shepard (Buried Child, True West), Fort Sheridan, Ill.

  DIED: 1977 René Goscinny (Asterix, Lucky Luke), 51, Paris

  2005 John Fowles (The French Lieutenant’s Woman), 79, Lyme Regis, England

  1718 Tristram Shandy, Gentleman, according to his Life and Opinions, was “brought forth into this scurvy and disastrous world of ours.”

  NO YEAR The fires of Bonfire Night, lit across the Wessex heath, give a pagan glow to the opening and closing of Thomas Hardy’s The Return of the Native. In the opening chapters, Eustacia Vye, the restless and bewitching “Queen of Night,” presides over the final bonfire of the evening, with which she hopes to draw a former lover, Damon Wildeve, away from his marriage to another. A year later to the day, with her own marriage to the earnest Clym Yeobright in trouble, another fire draws Eustacia and Damon together again and sets off the chain of events through which, in their restlessness, they will be destroyed.

  1949 Jean Rhys had fallen out of the literary life since her last novel was published a decade earlier, but not far enough that she didn’t see a notice placed in the New Statesman and Nation on this day: “Jean Rhys (Mrs Tilden Smith) author of Voyage in the Dark, After Leaving Mr Mackenzie, Good Morning, Midnight, etc. Will anyone knowing her whereabouts kindly communicate with Dr H. W. Egli.” Replying to the ad led Rhys to Selma Vaz Dias, Dr. Egli’s wife, who had adapted Good Morning, Midnight for the stage, and who would become a domineering champion of her work through Rhys’s many more years of poverty, drunkenness, illness, and obscurity until late in life—too late, Rhys always said—her novel Wide Sargasso Sea made her a literary celebrity in 1966.

  1986 The giddiest moment in Alan Hollinghurst’s Man Booker Prize–winning novel, The Line of Beauty, comes at a silver anniversary party for a politically ambitious couple when a lower-class friend of the family, Nick Guest, the aptly named hero of the story whose confidence has just been boosted by a bump of cocaine, asks the party’s guest of honor, whose arrival has sent the entire house into near hysterics of excitement, to dance. The guest of honor is Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher, the song is “Get Off of My Cloud,” and the moment is giddy not just because of Nick’s daringly successful impudence, but also because of Hollinghurst’s own audacity in pulling recent history into his own story with such style.

  1987 Thomas R. Edwards, in the New York Review of Books, on Toni Morrison’s Beloved: “One can only try to suggest something of what it is like to find one’s way through an extraordinary act of imagination while knowing that one has missed much, that later reading will find more, and that no reader will ever see all the way in.”

  November 6

  BORN: 1921 James Jones (From Here to Eternity, The Thin Red Line), Robinson, Ill.

  1952 Michael Cunningham (The Hours), Cincinnati

  DIED: 1901 Kate Greenaway (Under the Window, Marigold Garden), 55, London

  1999 George V. Higgins (The Friends of Eddie Coyle), 59, Milton, Mass.

  1699 The only survivor of a shipwreck somewhere northwest of Tasmania, Lemuel Gulliver awakens bound to the ground, unable to move any part of his body and with forty or so tiny men, armed with bows and arrows, advancing across his prone torso. The men scatter at his roar but, bravely, they soon return, and what follows is a small miracle of cross-cultural communication, in which Gulliver and his captors, though they share no language, agree that he will not murder scores of them with the sweep of his giant hand and they, in return, will not torment him with the piercings of a thousand tiny arrows. The Lilliputians feed the giant as best they can and comprehend his needs well enough to loosen his bonds so that he can, to the peril of those nearby, “ease myself with making water; which I very plentifully did, to the great astonishment of the people.”

  1839 At noon on this fall Wednesday, twenty-five New England women assembled in the Boston apartment of Mary Peabody for the first “Conversation” in a new series hosted by Margaret Fuller, already gaining at age twenty-nine a reputation as a remarkable intellect. Scheduled on Wednesdays so the attendees could stay in town for her friend Emerson’s “Present Age” lecture series in the evening, the Conversations began as more of a monologue by the charismatic Fuller on her subject of the Greek myths, but in the five years she led the discussions she became the “nucleus of conversation,” “call[ing] out the thought of others” toward her aim that women should not just be superficially educated but, like men, should “reproduce” what they learn, in conversation with each other if not out in the public world where they were less free to operate.

  1932 Over 3,000 people died in the Cuba hurricane of 1932, one of the century’s deadliest, but none of them were aboard the SS Phemius, a 7,400-ton m
erchant steamer whose massive central funnel was blown overboard by winds topping 200 mph. The ship and crew were dragged across the sea by the storm for five brutal days, and the captain’s report on their improbable survival so moved the chairman of his shipping line that he passed it along to novelist Richard Hughes, whose strange sea story, A High Wind in Jamaica, had just been a great success, in hopes he could record an event “that must never be forgotten.” Six years later, Hughes produced In Hazard, a short, taut novel that holds tight to the dramatic details of the Phemius’s ordeal.

  1944 J. R. R. Tolkien buried a hen and grease-banded his apple trees.

  November 7

  BORN: 1913 Albert Camus (The Stranger, The Plague, The Fall), Dréan, French Algeria

  1954 Guy Gavriel Kay (Tigana, The Summer Tree), Weyburn, Sask.

  DIED: 1910 Leo Tolstoy (The Death of Ivan Ilyich), 82, Astapovo, Russia

  1992 Richard Yates (Revolutionary Road), 66, Birmingham, Ala.

  1874 In the Times of London, Arthur Rimbaud placed an advertisement: “A PARISIAN (20), of high literary and linguistic attainments, excellent conversation, will be glad to ACCOMPANY a GENTLEMAN (artists preferred) or a family wishing to travel in southern or eastern countries. Good references. A.R. No. 165, King’s-road, Reading.”

  1896 Eleven-year-old Ezra Pound published his first poem in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle, a limerick on the defeat of Williams Jennings Bryan by William McKinley that begins “There was a young man from the West.”

  1900 Perhaps it was his immersion in the culture of the twelfth century for the study that would become Mont Saint Michel and Chartres that made Henry Adams so receptive to the shock of the new twentieth century at the Paris Exhibition of 1900. In a November letter to his old friend John Hay, Adams marveled at the mysterious power of the electric dynamos on display there, and over the next seven years this shock became the engine behind his singular autobiography, The Education of Henry Adams, driven by the contrast between the forces of medieval and modern life (“the Virgin and the Dynamo,” in his words) and by Adams’s own history as a child of the colonial era making his way in the modern one, “his historical neck broken by the sudden irruption of forces totally new.”

  1955 While traveling the country for what would become one of the most influential photography books of the century, The Americans, Robert Frank was arrested in McGehee, Arkansas, and interrogated for twelve hours in the city jail—“Who are you? Where are you going? Why do you have foreign whiskey in your glove compartment? Are you Jewish? Why did they let you shoot photos at the Ford plant? Why did you take pictures in Scottsboro? Do you know what a commie is?”—before being released.

  1972 Flying home from Rome to Colorado on this day to vote for McGovern, James Salter assured Robert Phelps, “Your life is the correct life . . . Your desk is the desk of a man who cannot be bought.” In their mutually affectionate and admiring correspondence, which began with a fan letter from Phelps about Salter’s novel A Sport and a Pastime, Salter was the novelist more admired than popular and Phelps the impossibly well-read journalist who lived in fear of never rising above what he considered hackwork to write something great: “You are wrong about my ‘life,’ ” he replied to Salter. “For 20 years, I have only scrounged at making a living . . . Somewhere I took a wrong turning. I should not have tried to earn my living with my typewriter. I should have become a surveyor, or an airline ticket salesman, or a cat burglar.”

  November 8

  BORN: 1900 Margaret Mitchell (Gone with the Wind), Atlanta

  1954 Kazuo Ishiguro (Never Let Me Go), Nagasaki, Japan

  DIED: 1674 John Milton (Paradise Regained, Samson Agonistes), 65, London

  1998 Rumer Godden (Black Narcissus), 90, Courance, Scotland

  1602 The Oxford University library, having been emptied in an anti-Catholic purge, was reborn with money from Sir Thomas Bodley, who had married a widow made wealthy by the sardine trade, and reopened on this day as the Bodleian Library.

  1623 The booksellers Edward Blount and Isaac Jaggard registered on this day at the Stationers’ Company a new publication: “Master William Shakspears Comedyes, Histories, and Tragedies.” “As where (before) you were abus’d with diverse stolne, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealthes of injurious impostors,” the editors promised, the plays “are now offer’d to your view cur’d, and perfect of their limbes.” Copies of what became known as the First Folio sold for roughly fifteen shillings (binding was extra), but the late author’s reputation was slow in climbing to the level of his peers like Ben Jonson. The first recorded auction sale of a secondhand First Folio, which would later command upwards of $6 million, was for eight and a half shillings, barely half its original price.

  1763 It says something about the market for intellectuals in the eighteenth century that Adam Smith, having made his philosophical reputation by publishing his Theory of Moral Sentiments, found it an easy decision to resign his post as Professor of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow to become instead the tutor to a teenager, the young, wealthy, and well-connected Duke of Buccleuch. The benefits of his new position included a doubled salary, a lifetime pension, a new appreciation for expensive clothes and the opera, and entree to the intellectual salons of Europe, where he met Voltaire and others and further developed the ideas he would spend the ten years after his return to Great Britain in 1766 fashioning into his masterwork, The Wealth of Nations.

  1975 The Washerwomen had run before. Calling themselves “priests without a parish,” the Washerwomen—three middle-aged sisters, Gina, Karen, and Rose—rewrote the Bible (replacing “Israelites” with “Negroes,” among other things) and preached, with a vitality that attracted a loyal few, that “every church was broken” except their own. They first fled from Jacksonville, Florida—where they had, in their righteousness, murdered the rest of their family—to found their church in Queens, and now they were packed and ready, along with their tiny flock, to run again. But with the police at the door, their flight became another massacre, a “Night of Thunder” from which few escaped, among them Ricky Rice, a child who, in Victor LaValle’s intricate novel of doubt and belief, Big Machine, grows up to find himself in battle against another suicidal cult.

  November 9

  BORN: 1924 Robert Frank (The Americans, The Lines of My Hand), Zurich

  1934 Carl Sagan (Cosmos, Contact, The Dragons of Eden), Brooklyn

  DIED: 2001 Dorothy Dunnett (The Game of Kings), 78, Edinburgh

  2004 Stieg Larsson (The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo), 50, Stockholm

  NO YEAR You might wonder at first what the Quicksand in the title of Nella Larsen’s first novel, which made her a bright light of the Harlem Renaissance before she suddenly abandoned writing a few years later, refers to, since Helga Crane, her heroine, is always on the move, from the South to Chicago to Harlem to Denmark and back to Harlem again, restlessly unsure of where she belongs. But on a rainy day in New York, humiliated by her desires the night before, she stumbles into a storefront church and, against her judgment, is consumed by the orgy of faith around her and—either lost or saved, she doesn’t know—makes a choice that mires her into a life from which there’s no escape. But which was the quicksand—the restless whirlpool of her earlier life, or the thoughtless sinking toward its end?

  1965 “You’re wasting your time. What you got there,” Frank Sinatra said on this day as he watched himself sing on a TV studio monitor, “is a man with a cold.” It’s part of the legend of Gay Talese’s great profile, “Frank Sinatra Has a Cold,” that he never spoke directly with Sinatra while reporting it, but he didn’t need to hear it straight from Frank to know his health. “A Sinatra with a cold can,” Talese wrote, “in a small way, send vibrations through the entertainment industry and beyond.” With its portrait of a celebrity through those whose lives orbit around him—the bodyguard scanning a room for approaching trouble, the staffers repainting his jeep in the middle of the night in response to an off
hand remark—“Frank Sinatra Has a Cold” made its own waves when it appeared in Esquire in 1966.

  1967 Rolling Stone, called “sort of a magazine and sort of a newspaper” by editor Jann Wenner, debuted.

  2011 Christopher Hitchens’s hospital room in the M. D. Anderson Cancer Center in Houston was, as Ian McEwan put it, raised temporarily “to the condition of a good university library.” It was Hitch’s last home, and when McEwan made his final visit there Hitchens borrowed the Peter Ackroyd book his friend had been reading on the plane and finished it that night. Hitchens would be dead in a little more than a month—and had few illusions it would be otherwise—but still he worked away, weakened by pain and morphine, at a 3,000-word review of a Chesterton biography, while talking of Dreiser, Browning, and The Magic Mountain with his friends. McEwan, by Hitchens’s request, read Larkin’s “Whitsun Weddings” aloud, and their debate about its ending’s ambiguous arrows continued, unresolved, into the last e-mails that followed their in-person goodbyes.

  November 10

  BORN: 1893 John P. Marquand (The Late George Apley), Wilmington, Del.

  1960 Neil Gaiman (The Sandman, American Gods), Portchester, England

  DIED: 1995 Ken Saro-Wiwa (Sozaboy, A Month and a Day), 54, Port Harcourt, Nigeria

  2007 Norman Mailer (The Armies of the Night), 84, New York City

  NO YEAR Long before historians confirmed that Thomas Jefferson was the father of his slave Sally Hemings’s children, the rumors of his paternity were common enough that William Wells Brown could make the fate of two such children the basis of his 1853 novel, Clotel; or, The President’s Daughter. Brown’s novel, the first by an African American, opens with the sale at a slave auction on this day of Currer, once Jefferson’s laundress, and her teenage daughters, Clotel and Althesa, and nears its end, after each has succumbed to the savage caprices of slavery, with the matter-of-fact declaration, “Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; a man distinguished as the author of the Declaration of American Independence, and one of the first statesmen of that country.”