by Tom Nissley
NO YEAR Charles Highway, in Martin Amis’s The Rachel Papers, has “five hours of teenage to go” before he turns twenty, five hours left “to re-experience the tail-end of my youth.” Amis wasn’t much past his own teenage himself when he wrote this tale of an Oxford-cramming adolescent who, like his creator, wears his withering precocity on his snotty sleeves. Charles spends much of the novel, when he’s not plotting the seduction of the Rachel of the title, ginning up a bitter “Letter to My Father,” but the whole book can be seen as a (less bitter) letter to Amis’s own father, a declaration that like his dad, Kingsley (who made a precociously disillusioned debut with Lucky Jim nineteen years before), he can write.
2012 Dwight Garner, in the New York Times, on Richard Bradford’s Martin Amis: “Reading ‘Martin Amis: The Biography’ is like watching a moose try to describe a leopard, using only its front hooves.”
December 6
BORN: 1919 Eric Newby (A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush), London
1942 Peter Handke (The Goalie’s Anxiety at the Penalty Kick), Griffen, Austria
DIED: 1951 Harold Ross (editor, The New Yorker), 59, Boston
1961 Frantz Fanon (The Wretched of the Earth), 35, Bethesda, Md.
1885 Witty, independent, and opinionated, Clover Adams was once called by Henry James “a perfect Voltaire in petticoats” and has often been thought a model for his lively American heroines Daisy Miller and Isabel Archer, as well as, more directly, for the title character of the anonymously published novel Esther, by her husband, Henry Adams. (Her sharp wit also caused her to be suspected as the author of Adams’s scandalous Washington satire, Democracy.) But she has become best known as a literary absence: after she killed herself following months of harrowing depression after the death of her father, her mourning husband burned all her letters to him and is said to have never spoken her name again. And nowhere in the many pages of that most ironically detached of American autobiographies, The Education of Henry Adams, is there a mention of her name.
1902 James Joyce, age twenty, reported to his family that Yeats, the famous poet, had spent the day making introductions for him in London and, best of all, had paid for their breakfast, lunch, and dinner together and all their cab and bus fares.
1925 At twenty-three, Langston Hughes had had his first book of poems, The Weary Blues, accepted by Knopf and been the subject of a feature in Vanity Fair, but he still had to earn a living. Dissatisfied with his position as assistant to historian Carter G. Woodson, he took a job as a hotel busboy in Washington, D.C., for lower pay but better hours for writing. There, spotting the famous poet Vachel Lindsay in the dining room, he slipped him a few of his poems and woke up the next day to find himself “discovered” again, after Lindsay praised the “bellboy poet” at a public reading the night before. Newspaper photographers wanted Hughes’s picture, while Lindsay left behind an inscribed book for him with the message “Do not let any lionizers stampede you. Hide and write and study and think.”
1947 G. W. Stonier, in the New Statesman and Nation, on Frederic Wertham’s Dark Legend: A Study of Murder: “A murder story, psychological detection, myth, taboo, insanity, literary creation: such are the stages of Dr. Wertham’s exploring. Dark Legend may well, I feel, become a classic of its kind.”
1990 John Banville, in the New York Review of Books, on John McGahern’s Amongst Women: “Amongst Women, despite the quietness of its tone and the limits deliberately imposed upon it by the author, is an example of the novelist’s art at its finest, a work the heart of which beats to the rhythm of the world and of life itself. It will endure.”
December 7
BORN: 1873 Willa Cather (My Ántonia, Death Comes for the Archbishop), Gore, Va.
1928 Noam Chomsky (Syntactic Structures, Manufacturing Consent), Philadelphia
DIED: 1975 Thornton Wilder (Our Town, The Bridge of San Luis Rey), 78, Hamden, Conn.
1985 Robert Graves (I, Claudius; Good-bye to All That), 90, Deià, Spain
1853 Harper & Bros. paid Herman Melville a $300 advance for a book, which he never completed, “on ‘Tortoises’ and ‘Tortoise Hunting.’ ”
1976 It’s among the most familiar tales of discovery in American literature, and among the most inspiring to the unpublished (though few would want to emulate its sad path to success): Mrs. Thelma Toole, who had been unable by phone to convince Walker Percy to read the novel left behind by her son after his suicide, arrived in a limousine at Percy’s Loyola University office with a box full of smudged typescript. Percy finally read the novel, first with reluctance and then excitement, and wrote her back on this day, saying that Ignatius Reilly, the book’s hero, “is an original—a cross between Don Quixote and W. C. Fields.” He later added “a mad Oliver Hardy” and “a perverse Thomas Aquinas” to those forebears when he wrote the foreword to the published edition of John Kennedy Toole’s A Confederacy of Dunces, which went on to win the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, something Percy himself never achieved.
1976 “In 1976,” Tom Clark wrote in No Big Deal, “Mark Fidrych hit baseball in the face with a pie containing money.” Fidrych, you may remember, was the Bird, a gangly and guileless rookie pitcher who came out of nowhere to thrill and charm baseball for one improbable summer. Before he blew out his arm the next spring, he holed up with Clark in the L.A. Hilton for five days in December to produce No Big Deal, a quickie jock autobiography far better than most. A phenom once himself—he became the poetry editor of the Paris Review in his early twenties—Clark had written poems on pitchers Vic Raschi and Dock Ellis and an entire book on the Charlie Finley A’s and knew enough in No Big Deal to step out of the way and let the Bird’s fresh torrent of language flow.
1986 William Hamilton, in the New York Times, on Art Spiegelman’s Maus: “To express yourself as an artist, you must find a form that leaves you in control but doesn’t leave you by yourself. That’s how ‘Maus’ looks to me—a way Mr. Spiegelman found of making art.”
December 8
BORN: 1945 John Banville (The Book of Evidence, The Sea), Wexford, Ireland
1951 Bill Bryson (A Walk in the Woods), Des Moines, Iowa
DIED: 1859 Thomas de Quincey (Confessions of an English Opium-Eater), 74, Edinburgh
1992 William Shawn (editor, The New Yorker), 85, New York City
1888 “During the last six weeks, I have had to wrap a kerchief round my left hand while I wrote because I couldn’t even bear the sensation of my own breath on it.” Starving and driven nearly mad, the unnamed narrator of Knut Hamsun’s Hunger struggles in a desperate cycle of poverty and exhaustion, not eating enough to write and not writing enough to eat. The struggles were Hamsun’s own, but unlike the novel’s narrator, Hamsun found his life immediately transformed when the first fragment of Hunger appeared in a Danish journal. While fielding offers from publishers and seeing himself compared to Dostoyevsky, Hamsun on this day warmly thanked one publisher for an advance of 200 kroner, recalling the madness of his poverty in the words above, which he would later reuse, almost verbatim, in the novel.
1927 The party of the first part, Charlotte L. Mason, contracted on this day to pay the party of the second part, Zora Hurston, $200 a month and provide “one moving picture camera and one Ford automobile.” In return, Hurston would “lay before” Mrs. Mason all the material relating to the “music, folklore, poetry, voodoo, conjure, manifestations of art, and kindred matters existing among American Negroes” she could collect, and was forbidden to share it with anyone else without permission. Mason, a wealthy white patron of the Harlem Renaissance who liked to be called “Godmother” by those she helped, drove Langston Hughes, another of her so-called children, away with her overbearing insistence on “primitive” expression, but Hurston lasted five ambivalent years in her employ before setting out on her own.
1939 Margaret Mead, by then the world’s best-known anthropologist and an expert in rituals, did not leave the arrangements to chance when, at age thirty-seven, she gave birth to her only child. Having completed an a
rticle for the Encyclopædia Britannica the day before (as, she noted, her mother had before her own birth), Mead was joined in her delivery room by a team of nurses who had already been shown her short film “First Days in the Life of a New Guinea Baby,” a movie photographer, an obstetrician, a child psychologist, and the baby’s pediatrician, Dr. Benjamin Spock, whose later bestselling manual, Baby and Child Care, would incorporate some of Mead’s ideas about child rearing. The procedure must be deemed a success: her daughter, Mary Catherine Bateson, went on to become a prominent anthropologist herself.
1955 Commissioned by the Ford Motor Company to suggest names for their new car, which they eventually called the Edsel, Marianne Moore, having already sent “Thunderblender,” “Mongoose Civique,” and dozens more, submitted her last, “Utopian Turtletop.”
December 9
BORN: 1608 John Milton (Lycidas, Paradise Lost), London
1899 Jean de Brunhoff (The Story of Babar), Paris
DIED: 1977 Clarice Lispector (The Passion According to G.H.), 56, Rio de Janeiro
1995 Toni Cade Bambara (The Salt Eaters; Gorilla, My Love), 56, Philadelphia
1825 In Vivian Grey, the bookish father Horace Grey warns his son, “Vivian, beware of endeavoring to become a great man in a hurry.” But Vivian is very much in a hurry, as was his creator, Benjamin Disraeli, also the son of a literary man. Before he was twenty—not even old enough to take out a loan by himself—young Disraeli got caught up in the English mania for South American mining investments that finally collapsed at the end of 1825, with four London banks failing on this day. Saddled with a debt it took him decades to repay, Disraeli turned to fiction, publishing Vivian Grey the following year, an anonymous but autobiographical novel that didn’t stay anonymous for long, and the first of the more than a dozen novels he wrote before twice becoming prime minister.
1874 “I DON’T KNOW WHETHER I AM OGING TO MAKE THIS TYPE-WRITING MACHINE GO OR NTO,” Mark Twain wrote William Dean Howells on his new capital-letters-only typewriter. “THAT LAST WORD WAS INTENDRED FOR N-NOT: BUT I GUESS I SHALL MAKE SOME SORT OF A SUCC SS OF IT BEFORE I RUN IT VERY LO G. I AM SO THICK-FINGERED THAT I MISS THE KEYS.”
1934 In a full-page ad in his own magazine, New Yorker columnist Alexander Woollcott endorsed the 1934 Airflow Chrysler, calling it “the world’s first sensible motor car.” In the following week’s issue, E. B. White mocked him as “that fabulous old motorist . . . admittedly the country’s leading exponent of the flagging torso.”
1935 You might not associate Minnesota with mob murders, but in the ’30s and ’40s, three reporters were gunned down in Minneapolis while investigating ties between organized crime and government, most famously Walter W. Liggett, who in the space of a few months in 1935 was beaten by gangsters, framed on a morals charge, and finally shot five times in an alley after returning home with his family from the offices of the crusading newspaper he’d founded, the Midwest American. Though his wife and another eyewitness identified Kid Cann, whose violently maintained interests in gambling and liquor made him the Al Capone of the Twin Cities, as the shooter, Cann was acquitted and continued to flourish in the rackets there for another twenty-five years.
1961 Whitney Balliett, in The New Yorker, on Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot: “Writers who attract cults are, like lap dogs, a pitiable lot. Their worshippers coddle them, overcelebrate their virtues, shush their faults, and frighten away prospective and perhaps skeptical readers with an apologist’s fervor.”
December 10
BORN: 1830 Emily Dickinson (Poems), Amherst, Mass.
1949 August Kleinzahler (Sleeping It Off in Rapid City), Jersey City, N.J.
DIED: 1936 Luigi Pirandello (Six Characters in Search of an Author), 69, Rome
1946 Damon Runyon (Guys and Dolls), 66, New York City
1513 Overthrown as a Florentine statesman and then imprisoned, tortured, and exiled, Niccolò Machiavelli had to settle for a more contemplative political life at his estate in Tuscany. Writing to a friend in Rome, he described his daily life in retreat: overseeing his woodcutters, reading Petrarch by a spring, gambling with townspeople, and then in the evening entering his study: “On the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of court and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients . . . and for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death.” He had, he added, “composed a short study, De principatibus,” a treatise known to us as The Prince.
1896 The tumult that erupted when Fermin Gémier, costumed in an enormous papier-mâché belly, stepped onstage at the Theatre l’Oeuvre and pronounced the first word of Alfred Jarry’s play Ubu Roi—“Merdre!”—was not entirely spontaneous. In addition to much of literary Paris—Colette, Yeats, and Gide were all there—Jarry packed his opening night with a friendly rabble he instructed to howl if the rest of the crowd was applauding or cheer if the others were booing: “The performance must not be allowed to reach its conclusion, the theater must explode.” The play did finish, amid shouts, whistles, and fistfights, and Jarry himself was thoroughly satisfied at the spectacle, though Ubu would never be performed again in his short lifetime.
1924 Edwin Muir, in the New Republic, on James Joyce’s Ulysses: “The danger is not that it will become unrecognized, but that in time it will overshadow every other potentiality of our age.”
1924 Witter Bynner, in the New Republic, on Edna St. Vincent Millay’s “Renascence”: “Where there had been nothing, no whisper of her, stood a whole poet. Few were aware, but how aware were those few.”
NO YEAR Cruelty and kindness fill the stories of George Saunders, each amplified by the presence, or at least the possibility, of the other: that we can be cruel to each other makes the kindness more heroic; that we could be kind makes our cruelty more terrible. So when, in “Tenth of December,” the title story in Saunders’s fourth collection, an overweight, dreamy boy wanders out into the snowy woods and chances his way across the wet ice of a pond, crossing paths with a chemo-wracked old man planning to hasten his own demise, you are not sure whether the world’s well-practiced viciousness toward them will only be increased by their encounter, or whether their suffering, shared, will be lessened.
December 11
BORN: 1922 Grace Paley (The Little Disturbances of Man), Bronx, N.Y.
1937 Jim Harrison (Dalva, Legends of the Fall), Grayling, Mich.
1939 Thomas McGuane (Ninety-Two in the Shade), Wyandotte, Mich.
DIED: 1757 Colley Cibber (An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber), 86, London
1920 Olive Schreiner (The Story of an African Farm), 65, Wynberg, South Africa
1920 Colette’s path to literary respectability, via the scandalous schoolgirl novels she ghostwrote for her husband and an even more disreputable career as a dance hall performer, wasn’t the usual one, but when she finished Chéri, she was sure that for the first time she had “written a novel for which I need neither blush nor doubt.” Some thought the story of an aging courtesan and her young lover was vulgar, but others were won over, often to their surprise, including the novelist André Gide. “I am myself completely astonished to be writing to you, completely astonished by the great pleasure I’ve had in reading you,” he confessed to her on this day. “I already want to reread it, and I’m afraid to. Suppose I liked it less? Quick, let me post this letter before I throw it into a drawer.”
1934 In a movement built on personal testimony, the first confession was Bill W.’s, the stock investor in New York who on this day, with his drinking destroying his career and his life, bought four beers at a grocery to keep himself from going into withdrawal on the way to a Manhattan drying-out clinic. He’d checked into the clinic three times before, but this time those beers he bought became his last, on a day whose anniversary he would celebrate thirty-six times. Five years later, “Bill’s Story” became the opening chapter of Alcoholics Anon
ymous, the book, often known as The Big Book, that became the bible of the organization Bill W. founded.
1974 “Harvey St. Jean had it made.” That was Edna Buchanan’s lead in the Miami Herald after St. Jean, the city’s top defense lawyer, was found shot to death in his Cadillac, and it was the title Calvin Trillin chose for his chapter on the murder in Killings, a collection of his New Yorker crime reporting. Most of the murders he wrote about were the kind found in small, wire-service newspaper reports, but Harvey St. Jean lived on the front page, and that’s where he landed in death too; as Buchanan wrote, in a title she used for her own crime collection, “the corpse had a familiar face.”
December 12
BORN: 1821 Gustave Flaubert (Madame Bovary, Salammbô), Rouen, France
1905 Vasily Grossman (Life and Fate), Berdychiv, Russian Empire
DIED: 1889 Robert Browning (The Ring and the Book), 77, Venice
1995 Andrew Lytle (The Velvet Horn), 92, Monteagle, Tenn.
1775 Gilbert White, the great English naturalist of his day, whose Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne, a collection of letters to two fellow zoologists, has never been out of print—through hundreds of editions—since 1789, was a humble and patient observer of local fauna from tortoises to swallows, but he had an eye for human behavior as well, as on this day, when he described an “idiot-boy” in the village who thought and cared only about bees, or, rather, their honey. He’d spend the winter torpid like his quarry, but in the summer he would take the bees bare-handed, “disarm them of their weapons, and suck their bodies for the sake of their honey-bags,” filling his shirt with their bodies and making “a humming noise with his lips, resembling the buzzing of bees.”