A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  November 24

  BORN: 1888 Dale Carnegie (How to Win Friends and Influence People), Maryville, Mo.

  1961 Arundhati Roy (The God of Small Things), Shillong, India

  DIED: 2002 Harriet Doerr (Stones for Ibarra), 92, Pasadena, Calif.

  2003 Hugh Kenner (The Pound Era), 80, Athens, Ga.

  1859 Published: On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life by Charles Darwin (Murray, London)

  1903 Just before midday, a well-dressed man who gave his name as George F. Robinson presented himself at the offices of the Bank of England and asked for the governor of the bank. Brought instead to the bank secretary, Kenneth Grahame (known then, until The Wind in the Willows came out five years later, as the author of The Golden Age, whose admirers included Theodore Roosevelt), he presented him with a manuscript tied with black and white ribbon. When Grahame refused to read the manuscript as asked, Robinson raised a revolver, shooting and missing three times as Grahame fled. Subdued and arrested, the gunman expressed “Socialistic views” and declared that by grasping the end of the manuscript with the black ribbon rather than the white one Grahame had proved “that Fate demanded his immediate demise.”

  1922 It was an unlikely path that led Erskine Childers to stand blindfolded on this day in front of a firing squad in Dublin. Born in England but raised partly in Ireland, he gained early fame when his novel, The Riddle of the Sands, became a sensation with its spy-thriller plot and its warning of a German buildup to war. He left fiction behind, though, to focus on military affairs and then, with a convert’s zeal, became consumed with home rule for Ireland, running guns on his yacht and becoming a leader of Irish independence. But when he resisted the compromise that created the Irish Free State, Childers, suspected a spy by some Irish and a traitor by the British, was arrested and executed by the Irish government. His last words, spoken with typical empathy and aplomb to the young men on the firing squad, were “Take a step or two forwards, lads. It will be easier that way.”

  1977 When a few fans followed the trail of the pen name James Tiptree Jr., which some had speculated hid a CIA professional or even Henry Kissinger but few had imagined was a woman, to a sixty-two-year-old psychologist in northern Virginia named Alice Sheldon, she felt she had to out herself, and so began writing to the colleagues she’d been corresponding with for years as Tiptree. On this day she confessed to Ursula Le Guin her fear that she’d lose her friends, especially among women, after her “put-on” was revealed. But Le Guin wrote back with excitement and affection: “Oh strange, most strange, most wonderful, beautiful, improbable . . . It would take an extraordinarily small soul to resent so immense, so funny, so effective and fantastic and ETHICAL a put-on.”

  November 25

  BORN: 1909 P. D. Eastman (Go, Dog. Go!; Are You My Mother?), Amherst, Mass.

  1951 Charlaine Harris (Dead Until Dark), Tunica, Miss.

  DIED: 1968 Upton Sinclair (The Jungle, Oil!, King Coal), 90, Bound Brook, N.J.

  1970 Yukio Mishima (Spring Snow, The Sound of Waves), 45, Tokyo

  1862 “I had a real funny interview” with President Lincoln, Harriet Beecher Stowe reported to her husband, “the particulars of which I will tell you.” The particulars, though, have been lost to history, including whether he greeted her with the words that have since become attached to her name, “So this is the little woman who made the great war?”

  1889 After two editors rejected his new novel called Too Late, Beloved! as morally unsuitable, Thomas Hardy tried a third, Mowbray Morris at Macmillan’s Magazine, who turned it down too. “You use the word succulent more than once,” Morris replied. “Perhaps I might say that the general impression left on me by reading your story—so far as it has gone—is one of rather too much succulence.” When the novel, which does have its moments of succulence, was eventually published as Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Morris weighed in again, in a review that said it told “a coarse and disagreeable story in a coarse and disagreeable manner.” Hardy, always rubbed raw by bad notices, was nearly fed up: “Well, if this sort of thing continues no more novel-writing for me.” Two novels later, the further hostility that met Jude the Obscure drove him to stick to poetry.

  1921 Having entered Tufts University on the strength of a forged transcript for a high school he never graduated from, Nathan Weinstein did hardly a lick of work and by Thanksgiving was encouraged by the university to withdraw with failing grades in all his classes, among them a “double F” in French and a “Not Attending” record in phys ed (his lethargy would earn him the ironic nickname “Pep”). No matter. Helping himself to the credits of a more diligent Tufts student who shared his name, Weinstein fraudulently transferred to Brown University as a sophomore, and this time managed to graduate. Two years later, before leaving for Paris to become a writer, he chose a new identity of his own by changing his name, legally this time, to Nathanael West.

  2004 For the soldiers of Bravo Squad touring the country after an Iraqi firefight made them celebrity heroes in Ben Fountain’s satire of the home front, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, Texas Stadium on Thanksgiving Day is their Inferno, a bewildering extravaganza of Jack and Cokes, cell-phone Hollywood rumors, and backslaps and quavering thank-yous from Cowboys fans for their service. At halftime they descend to its deepest pit of hell, in which Destiny’s Child, the Prairie View A&M marching band, and infinite armies of drill girls, flag twirlers, and ROTC extras strut and gyrate around them as they stand at attention at midfield, one day before being shipped back to their desert war zone.

  November 26

  BORN: 1922 Charles M. Schulz (Peanuts), Minneapolis

  1943 Marilynne Robinson (Housekeeping, Gilead, Home), Sandpoint, Idaho

  DIED: 1974 Cyril Connolly (Enemies of Promise), 71, Eastbourne, England

  2005 Stan Berenstain (The Berenstain Bears), 82, Solebury, Pa.

  1791 “There will be very few Dates in this History,” the young author promised in her History of England, and indeed there were almost none until the final page, where she wrote, “Finis, Saturday Nov. 26 1791.” The author was Jane Austen, age fifteen, and her History, written for the pleasure of her family, summed up two and a half centuries of British rulers with a breezy impertinence promised by her opening line, “Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin and predecessor Richard the 2d, to resign it to him, and to retire for the rest of his Life to Pomfret Castle, where he happened to be murdered.” Illustrated by her sister Cassandra, Austen’s schoolgirl romp was likely inspired by the marginal notes—“Detestable Monster!” “Sweet Man!”—she left in the family copy of Goldsmith’s History of England, and by her Stuart contempt for Queen Elizabeth, “that pest of society.”

  NO YEAR “The prospect of the Netherfield ball was extremely agreeable to every female” of the Bennet family, but none is so disappointed in its outcome as the second-eldest daughter, Elizabeth. She had looked forward to dancing with the charming Mr. Wickham, who had just informed her of the perfidy of his former friend Mr. Darcy, but instead, with Wickham nowhere to be found, she finds herself paired first with the dreary clergyman Mr. Collins and then with the hated Darcy himself, whose ironic sally, “What think you of books?” gets him nowhere. The following day brings no improvement, only an unwanted but insistent proposal from Mr. Collins. Darcy’s proposal, and Elizabeth’s awakened love for him, will have to await a later season in Austen’s Pride and Prejudice.

  1922 Howard Carter had excavated in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings for five seasons with little to show for it when a workman discovered a step cut into the rock. Carter’s team soon unearthed twelve steps leading down to a door, but rather than continue, they covered up what they had found and waited for their patron Lord Carnarvon to arrive. Three weeks later, they removed the door and cleared the passage behind it, and on this day, “one whose like I can never hope to see again,” as C
arter wrote in The Tomb of Tutankhamen, he made a small breach in another sealed door, held a candle in the opening, and looked through. “Can you see anything?” asked Carnarvon from behind. “Yes, wonderful things.”

  1993 Natasha Walter, in the TLS, on Annie Proulx’s The Shipping News: “Now that Proulx has made her mark, she should aim higher and get herself some characters she can respect.”

  November 27

  BORN: 1909 James Agee (Let Us Now Praise Famous Men), Knoxville, Tenn.

  1964 David Rakoff (Half Empty, Don’t Get Too Comfortable), Montreal

  DIED: 8 B.C. Horace (Satires, Odes, Epistles), 56, Rome

  2006 Bebe Moore Campbell (Your Blues Ain’t Like Mine), 56, Los Angeles

  1886 It’s not out of rage or vengeance that Baron Innstetten challenges Major Crampas to a duel in Theodor Fontane’s Effi Briest, but a stubborn, sullen submission to the demands of Prussian society. Once the baron discovers Crampas’s love letters to the baron’s young wife, Effi, the rules of honor leave him, and his rival, no choice. And so they proceed to the dunes and mark ten paces, and so the shots ring out, and so Effi proceeds to her own inexorable, socially decreed doom. But things turned out differently for the real-life Effi. Fontane based the novel, which made him a belated success at age seventy-five, on a well-known case that ended in a similar duel on this day, but the object of that duel, Elisabeth von Ardenne, chose another fate entirely: cast out from society like Effi and deprived of her children, she gave her life to nursing and lived another sixty-five years.

  19– Tom Ripley slept well on the train to Naples—confident and content as never before—and after disposing of Dickie’s toothbrush, hairbrush, raincoat, and bloodstained trousers in an alley, he takes the bus to the town they’d left a few days before. Tom hadn’t planned to kill Dickie, or rather he had planned it just a few hours before he took the oar in his hand and did it, and from now on he’ll have to keep improvising, keep looking just a little ahead of himself. It begins right away, when Dickie’s girlfriend, Marge, asks, “Where’s Dickie?” Tom, calm and prepared, has the answer ready: “He’s in Rome.” Soon, in Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr. Ripley, Tom himself will be in Rome, living Dickie’s wonderful life.

  1947 Over the Thanksgiving holiday, after Saul Bellow’s second novel, The Victim, was published, his father offered to make him a mine supervisor at $10,000 a year.

  2006 Only nine months before, Boss Wang and Boss Gao had opened their new bra-ring factory in Lishui, taking advantage of a new expressway from the coast to the southern Chinese town, but by November 28, the auspicious eighth day of the Chinese lunar month, they were ready to move to a different city. They didn’t tell the workers until the 26th, which left this day for Master Luo to negotiate with the Tao family about whether their efficient teenage daughters—“Yufeng can do ten thousand pairs of wires in a day. Where are you going to find a new worker who’s that fast?”—would move with the factory, just one of the everyday moments through which Peter Hessler, in his brilliantly observed Country Driving, tells the story of China’s massive and sudden transformations as well as any epic history could.

  November 28

  BORN: 1757 William Blake (Songs of Innocence and Experience), London

  1881 Stefan Zweig (Beware of Pity, The World of Yesterday), Vienna

  DIED: 1859 Washington Irving (The Legend of Sleepy Hollow), 76, Tarrytown, N.Y.

  1968 Enid Blyton (Five on a Treasure Island), 71, Hampstead, England

  1582 William Shakespeare paid £40 for a license for his marriage to Anne Hathaway.

  1928 At twenty-one, with her mother dead and her father dying, Virginia Woolf had written in her diary, “If your father & mother die you have lost something that the longest life can never bring again.” A quarter century later, though, she was ruthlessly grateful that at least her father, Leslie Stephen, was gone. On his birthday this day, she noted he could still have been alive—he would have been ninety-six—“but mercifully was not.” Though he had encouraged her, “his life would have entirely ended mine. What would have happened? No writing, no books;—inconceivable.” Now, having buried her “unhealthy” obsession with her parents in To the Lighthouse, she can think of him safely again: “He comes back now more as a contemporary. I must read him some day.”

  1947 When a letter from his uncle Alex landed on the desk of Kurt Vonnegut, a junior PR man at General Electric, requesting a photo of his nephew (and Kurt’s brother) Bernard, a famous scientist there, Kurt decided to have some fun. “We have a lot more to do than piddle with penny-ante requests like yours,” he wrote back as “Guy Fawkes.” “This office made your nephew, and we can break him in a minute—like an egg shell.” His uncle, Vonnegut later recalled, neither got nor appreciated the joke.

  1966 “Mr. Truman Capote requests the pleasure of your company at a Black and White Dance on Monday, the twenty-eighth of November at ten o’clock, Grand Ballroom, The Plaza.” Norman Mailer, Marianne Moore, and Ralph Ellison were there, along with Frank Sinatra and Mia Farrow, the Maharajah of Jaipur, and eleven friends Capote made in Kansas while researching In Cold Blood. Greta Garbo, Jackie Kennedy, and Robert McNamara declined, and Carson McCullers, to her fury, was not invited. For months leading up to the night, Capote carried around a composition book filled not with notes for his next book but with the names on his ever-changing guest list. The Black and White Ball, crowning the year of his incredible success with In Cold Blood, was, as many have said, Capote’s last great work.

  November 29

  BORN: 1898 C. S. Lewis (The Chronicles of Narnia, The Screwtape Letters), Belfast, Ireland

  1918 Madeleine L’Engle (A Wrinkle in Time), New York City

  DIED: 1980 Dorothy Day (The Long Loneliness), 83, New York City

  1991 Frank Yerby (The Foxes of Harrow), 75, Madrid

  1921 “I like being a detective, like the work,” Dashiell Hammett’s Continental Op once said. “I can’t imagine a pleasanter future than twenty-some years more of it.” Hammett himself only lasted about six years as a detective for the legendary Pinkerton agency—strike-breaking, snooping at roadhouses, nabbing pickpockets—until, too sick with TB to continue, he turned to writing stories. Hammett liked to say his career ended on this day with the cracking of the Sonoma gold-specie case, in which a quarter of a million dollars in gold coins disappeared from the strongroom of a Pacific freighter. Set for a cushy undercover job investigating the theft on the ship’s return trip to Hawaii and Australia, he cost himself a free trip across the Pacific when he discovered the coins hidden onboard just before they sailed.

  1934 On the same day she went to see the first sound movie of her novel Anne of Green Gables, starring Dawn O’Day (who from that point on took the name of her character, Anne Shirley, as her stage name), L. M. Montgomery pasted into her journal the photo she had used years before as a model for Anne, “a photograph of a real girl somewhere in the U.S., but I have no idea who she was or where she lived.” As scholars have since pointed out, the “real girl” was Evelyn Nesbit, the most famous model of her day and the subject of its most notorious scandal when her husband, Harry Thaw, murdered the architect Stanford White for “ruining” Nesbit when he seduced her at age sixteen, the same age she was when she posed for the photograph that inspired Anne.

  1948 Fired as general secretary of the Poetry Society and editor of the Poetry Review, Muriel Spark spent her final days there copying the group’s mailing list to use for a new journal she planned to edit.

  1967 When Ralph and Fanny Ellison bought their first house, a 246-year-old summer home on ninety-seven acres in Plainfield, Massachusetts, in the spring of 1967, he had already been working on his second novel, after Invisible Man, for fourteen years, distracted at times by his public role in the debates of the ’50s and ’60s and burdened by characters that struggled to cohere into a story. Ellison piled up hundreds of pages and sent out word he was nearly done with the novel, but on this day they returned to their house on a sunny aftern
oon to find it engulfed in smoke and flames, his manuscript inside. What did he lose? At first he told friends he only lost the work he’d done that summer, but over time, as the novel remained unfinished, the loss, in his telling, would grow.

  November 30

  BORN: 1667 Jonathan Swift (A Tale of the Tub), Dublin

  1835 Mark Twain (Tom Sawyer, Huckleberry Finn), Florida, Mo.

  DIED: 1900 Oscar Wilde (The Importance of Being Earnest), 46, Paris

  1997 Kathy Acker (Blood and Guts in High School), c. 50, Tijuana, Mexico

  1951 Struggling with alcoholic binges in New York, Elizabeth Bishop took advantage of a fellowship to embark by freighter for a trip around South America. Arriving in Rio on this day, she planned a two-week visit but ended up staying far longer. While visiting with acquaintances from New York, including an aristocratic Brazilian named Lota de Macedo Soares, something, possibly a cashew, caused Bishop’s face to swell so much she couldn’t see—“I didn’t know one could swell so much”—and as Lota nursed her back to health, they fell in love. Soon Bishop acquired a toucan, moved into a writing studio Lota built near her country home, and stayed for sixteen often blissful and sometimes alcoholic years until Lota’s overdose of tranquilizers in 1967.

  1954 “I like it less than anything else of yours I have read,” Edmund Wilson wrote to his good friend Vladimir Nabokov after “hastily” reading the manuscript of Lolita. “Nasty subjects may make fine books; but I don’t feel you have got away with this.”

  1979 Rosemary Dinnage, in the TLS, on Joan Didion’s The White Album: “Didion has been around—Hollywood, Waikiki, Bogotá; she has a superb sense of place—and has come back with a message: It doesn’t matter.”

  1982 At 4 a.m. on the day of her deadline, Sandra Cisneros finished the last of the stories for her first book of fiction, The House on Mango Street. She had started them in 1977 at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, “to write about something my classmates couldn’t,” and she continued composing her spare and evocative vignettes in Chicago and Massachusetts, finishing the last of them—“Mango Says Goodbye Sometimes,” “The Monkey Garden,” and the most difficult, “Red Clowns”—on an island in Greece. Soon after she wrote a friend, “I will have to live with its permanent imperfections,” but she spent the next two years revising and perfecting the book that, since its first, tiny publication with Arte Publico Press, has sold over two million copies.