A Reader's Book of Days

by Tom Nissley

  1970 The Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull, whose construction Philip Larkin, as head librarian, had carefully overseen for fifteen years, and which he described to Barbara Pym the year before as “an odd building with a curious glaring drabness and far too little space,” was officially opened.

  1997 It was a rainy, gray day on the Gulf Coast when Frederick and Steven Barthelme, on the advice of their attorney, drove down from Hattiesburg, Mississippi, where they taught fiction at the university, to surrender at the Harrison County Jail in Gulfport on a felony charge of conspiring to defraud the nearby Grand Casino. The fraud was alleged, bewilderingly, to have been committed with a blackjack dealer they hardly knew, on a night they lost nearly ten grand between them, during a period in which they gambled away hundreds of thousands of dollars of their inheritances. The only good fortune is that such a tale fell into the hands of two skilled storytellers, who used the same laconic, heart-weary humor of their fiction to write Double Down, the story of their gambling mania and the even more irrational workings of the justice system that eventually cleared them.

  1999 James R. Kincaid, in the New York Times, on Charles Palliser’s The Unburied: “You won’t want a plot summary, but I went to such trouble getting it straight that I’m not going to throw it all away.”

  December 13

  BORN: 1871 Emily Carr (Klee Wyck, The House of All Sorts), Victoria, B.C.

  1915 Ross Macdonald (The Drowning Pool), Los Gatos, Calif.

  DIED: 1784 Samuel Johnson (The Idler, Lives of the Poets), 75, London

  1972 L. P. Hartley (The Go-Between, Eustace and Hilda), 76, London

  1908 When Willa Cather first met Sarah Orne Jewett in February 1908, Cather was a spirited young journalist at McClure’s Magazine, and Jewett, though nearly sixty, still looked to Cather “very much like the youthful picture of herself in the game of ‘Authors’ I had played as a child.” By December Jewett took the liberty of writing a long and remarkable letter full of kind advice to her new friend. “I do think it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should,” she wrote. “Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life.” She struck a nerve: Cather replied quickly, confessing her fear that she remained a beginner at writing fiction, unable to learn and too busy with journalism to try.

  1936 Knowing only the abstract characters and landscapes of Samuel Beckett’s plays, it’s surprising to learn that earlier in his career, long before Waiting for Godot was first produced, he filled notebooks with his plans for a play about the relationship between Samuel Johnson and Hester Thrale. “Can’t think why there hasn’t been a film of Johnson, with [Charles] Laughton,” he wrote to a friend on this day. “There are 50 plays in his life.” In a later letter to the same friend, though, he sounds more like the Beckett we know: “It isn’t Boswell’s wit and wisdom machine that means anything to me, but the miseries that he never talked of . . . The horror of annihilation, the horror of madness, the horrified love of Mrs. Thrale, the whole mental monster ridden swamp that after hours of silence could only give some ghastly bubble like ‘Lord have mercy upon us.’ ”

  2001 Andrew O’Hagan, in the London Review of Books, on Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections: “Today’s big novel is the type of book which aims at bigness with the notion that all other big books are folded inside. The example is not War and Peace but the World Wide Web.”

  NO YEAR “Greetings from sunny Seattle,” Bernadette’s letter begins. “Have I mentioned how much I hate it here?” To this point, Maria Semple’s Where’d You Go, Bernadette? has been an on-the-nose, up-to-the-minute satirical flurry of e-mails, text messages, invoices, and emergency-room bills, and for much of Bernadette’s letter to Paul Jellinek, an old architecture colleague in L.A., the mood is the same: bristling, scattershot one-liners about the rain, the ugliness, and the slow-moving, self-satisfied, Subaru-driving boredom of her adopted home. Then, in the middle of the letter—in the middle of the book—Bernadette sighs, “Oh, Paul,” and begins to reveal depths beneath her frantic facade, and the satire becomes a story.

  December 14

  BORN: 1916 Shirley Jackson (“The Lottery,” The Haunting of Hill House), San Francisco

  1951 Amy Hempel (Reasons to Live, The Dog of the Marriage), Chicago

  DIED: 1953 Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings (The Yearling), 57, St. Augustine, Fla.

  2001 W. G. Sebald (Vertigo, Austerlitz), 57, Norfolk, England

  1882 As Henry James Sr., the mercurial patriarch who cultivated a family of geniuses, approached his death, his daughter, Alice, took to her bed, his son Henry embarked for home by ship from London, and his son William, also in London, wrote a farewell letter on this day that, like Henry Jr., arrived in Boston too late to greet his “blessed old father” before he passed. William’s letter is as accepting of death (“If you go, it will not be an inharmonious thing”) as his father, who welcomed it, and touchingly Jamesian in its combination of affection and analysis: “It comes strangely over me in bidding you good bye, how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note—it is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good night. Good night my sacred old Father.”

  1951 The “quiet American” in Graham Greene’s novel by that name is Alden Pyle, the disastrously idealistic Harvard grad full of theories about Indochina, but the ugliest American in the book is the bullying, cynical reporter named Granger. Greene denied the other characters in The Quiet American had real-life models, but Granger, he admitted, was based directly on an American reporter named Larry Allen, whose “harsh rudeness” at a press conference in Hanoi Greene recorded in his journal on this day. Allen had won a Pulitzer for his fearless reporting in World War II, but to Greene’s eye he had become lazy and “oafish,” the sort who could proudly growl, as Granger does, “Stephen Crane could describe a war without seeing one. Why shouldn’t I?”

  1972 After two months marooned with a band of survivors on the side of a mountain following the plane crash in the Andes described in Alive, Piers Paul Read’s survival classic, Nando Parrado climbed to the top of a ridge only to find on the other side, not the green valleys of Chile he had hoped for, but more icy peaks as far as he could see. After a day and night of debate, Parrado, the calm and determined leader of the survivors, and Roberto Canessa, his tempestuous and stubborn fellow scout, finally sent a third colleague back to camp to conserve their only sustenance (the meat from the bodies of those who hadn’t survived the crash) and set out through the mountains with Roberto’s words, as Parrado recalled in his 2006 memoir, Miracle in the Andes, “You and I are friends, Nando. Now let’s go die together.”

  1999 Suffering from cancer and a series of strokes, Charles M. Schulz announced his retirement and the end of Peanuts, whose last Sunday strip appeared in newspapers the following February 13, alongside news of Schulz’s death the night before.

  December 15

  BORN: 1930 Edna O’Brien (The Country Girls), Tuamgraney, Ireland

  1943 Peter Guralnick (Sweet Soul Music, Last Train to Memphis), Boston

  DIED: 1683 Izaak Walton (The Compleat Angler), 90, Winchester, England

  2011 Christopher Hitchens (God Is Not Great, Hitch-22), 62, Houston, Tex.

  1850 From France, Gustave Flaubert’s mother asked the eternal maternal question: When would he be married? Never, he declared from Constantinople. Travel might change a man, he said, but not him. He would bring home “a few less hairs on my head and considerably more landscapes within it” (and a venereal disease too, though he didn’t mention that), but the idea of marriage remained “an apostasy which it appalls me to think of.” As an artist, he had no choice: “You can depict wine, love, and women on the condition that you are not a drunkard, a lover, or a husband. If you are involved in life, you see it badly.” No, he assured her, she would never have a rival. “Some will perhaps mount to the threshold of the temple, but none will enter.”

  1960
On the third day of the unsuccessful coup against Ethiopian emperor Haile Selassie, with the emperor still absent from the capital city and his inner circle held hostage in the palace, General Mengistu Newal, a leader of the coup, held up a piece of dry bread to the students at Haile Selassie University and said, “This is what we fed to the dignitaries today, so they will know what our people live on. You must help us.” It’s a rare moment of direct confrontation in The Emperor, Ryszard Kapuściński’s account of the decline of Selassie’s long reign, which is otherwise full of the whispers of palace protocol and intrigue, a subtly damning portrait that is among the finest in Kapuściński’s career of either transcending the limits of journalism or abusing its standards of truth, depending on whom you ask.

  1963 Inspired by a roll of adding-machine tape in a store—“narrow, long, / unbroken”—A. R. Ammons conceived a “fool use for it”: a poem, Tape for the Turn of the Year, he would type on the fly for as long as the tape lasted, fitting his days and thoughts into its slim margins. On his tenth day of typing, Ammons had to go out of town, so he took the poem with him, reversing the unspooled yards back across the platen and stowing it in a paper bag in his glove compartment and then rewinding it back into the machine at the end of the day to make his record. It was a shorter entry than most because, reluctantly, he’d given “the day to myself & not / to the poem.”

  December 16

  BORN: 1775 Jane Austen (Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice), Steventon, England

  1899 Noel Coward (Blithe Spirit, Private Lives), Teddington, England

  1928 Philip K. Dick (The Man in the High Castle, Martian Time Slip), Chicago

  DIED: 1897 Alphonse Daudet (Letters from My Windmill), 57, Paris

  1965 Somerset Maugham (The Moon and Sixpence), 91, Nice, France

  1850 In the vasty deeps of Moby-Dick, the author himself surfaces just once, when noting in the chapter “The Fountain” that the contents of a whale’s spout have remained a mystery through thousands of years of whale-observing “down to this blessed minute (fifteen and a quarter minutes past one o’clock p.m. of this sixteenth day of December, A.D. 1850).” Is it a coincidence that Melville presents himself with such sudden specificity in a chapter concerning the unknowability—and the danger—of the whale and its spout? “I have heard it said,” he relates, “and I do not doubt it, that if the jet is fairly spouted into your eyes, it will blind you. The wisest thing the investigator can do then, it seems to me, is to let this deadly spout alone.” And so is it best, too, to let the author alone to his unfathomable submarine life and content ourselves with what he shows us on the surface?

  1865 The Athenaeum on Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll: “We fancy that any child might be more puzzled than enchanted by this stiff, overwrought story.”

  1901 Published: The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter, in a privately printed edition of 250.

  1955 In a warehouse the size of a football field, from a calmly authoritative man with white hair, white mustache, and an impeccable black suit, Loren Haris learns that he is, or was, or may be Enzo Samax. Born on this day, he was orphaned once, when his mother gave him up for adoption as a baby and died soon after, and orphaned again when his adoptive parents were killed in an accident, but now, on his tenth birthday, he’s been reclaimed—well, “kidnapped” is the legal term for it—by his extended birth family, pulled away from a trip to a Manhattan planetarium into a waiting sedan and spirited off with his mysteriously prosperous new uncle to Las Vegas, the first of many transformations and adventures in Nicholas Christopher’s lavishly learned, near-magical novel A Trip to the Stars.

  1971 Christopher Ricks, in the New York Review of Books, on John Updike’s Rabbit Redux: “It never decides just what the artistic reasons (sales and nostalgia are another matter) were for bringing back Rabbit instead of starting anew; its existence is likely to do retroactive damage to that better book Rabbit, Run.”

  2001 Andrew Sullivan, in the New York Times, on Nadine Gordimer’s The Pickup: “It’s extremely hard to write beautifully about the power of sex, of its capacity to elevate humans out of worlds that would divide them, of its occasionally transcendent quality. But Gordimer writes about it so easily we barely notice the accomplishment.”

  December 17

  BORN: 1873 Ford Madox Ford (The Good Soldier, Parade’s End), Merton, England

  1916 Penelope Fitzgerald (The Blue Flower, The Bookshop), Lincoln, England

  DIED: 1957 Dorothy L. Sayers (Gaudy Night, Whose Body?), 64, Witham, England

  1999 C. Vann Woodward (The Strange Career of Jim Crow), 91, Hamden, Conn.

  1920 Anzia Yezierska may have been a greenhorn when publishing her first book, Hungry Hearts, but she was wise enough to amend her contract to retain the motion picture rights to her stories of immigrants in New York City, and it was no doubt with some pride that she wrote to her editor at Houghton Mifflin on this day to let him know that she had been offered $10,000 for the film rights to the book, dwarfing the $200 she had received as an advance. A month later she was on the train to Hollywood, where, despite being celebrated as the “sweatshop Cinderella,” she soon lost her taste for the huckster Babylon she found there and returned east to focus on her fiction, writing five more books, including Bread Givers, before falling back into the silence of obscurity.

  1929 Toad of Toad Hall, A. A. Milne’s stage adaptation of The Wind in the Willows, premiered in London.

  1944 “ ‘Tell me, Mr. Pyle, how does it feel to be an assault correspondent?’ Being a man of few words, I said, ‘It feels awful.’ ” Professionally, of course, Ernie Pyle couldn’t be a man of few words: he had to file his column for the Scripps-Howard papers six times a week. But his laconic modesty endeared him to readers and the soldiers he wrote about, as did his willingness to endure the danger and deprivation of the front lines along with them. His columns made him a symbol of the infantrymen he celebrated, and his second collection, Brave Men, which followed the Allied invasions of Sicily and Normandy through to the liberation of Paris, reached #1 on the New York Times bestseller list on this day. It was still at the top of the list four months later when Pyle, who had left his beloved infantry to chronicle the naval war in the Pacific, was killed by a Japanese sniper on a small island west of Okinawa.

  1956 William Esty, in the New Republic, on James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room: “This sounds like a painful novel, which it certainly is. It also sounds like a meretriciously fashionable-sensational one, which it is not.”

  December 18

  BORN: 1939 Michael Moorcock (Mother London), London

  1961 A. M. Homes (Music for Torching), Washington, D.C.

  DIED: 2002 Lucy Grealy (Autobiography of a Face), 39, New York City

  2011 Václav Havel (The Power of the Powerless), 75, Hrádeček, Czech Republic

  1679 The business of poetic satire became a dangerous one when John Dryden, the poet laureate of England, was beaten by three men in London’s Rose Alley while walking home from a coffeehouse. The extent of his injuries has remained unknown, as have the identity and motives of his attackers, even though Dryden offered a £50 reward for their names. While some have suspected they were sent by the Duchess of Portsmouth, one of the mistresses of Charles II, most have pointed the finger at the Earl of Rochester, a courtier, poet, and shameless libertine, who, though he was dying at the time of syphilis, gonorrhea, and/or alcoholism, may have sought revenge for Dryden’s satirical jabs, which themselves were payment for Rochester once calling the plump poet laureate the “Poet Squab,” an insult that lasted longer than his bruises.

  1818 A month or so after writing to his brother and sister-in-law, newly emigrated to America, that the “generality of women . . . appear to me as children to whom I would rather give a Sugar Plum than my time,” John Keats met Fanny Brawne. “Shall I give you Miss Brawne?” he wrote on this day in his next long letter to America. His assessment: “Her mouth is bad and good . . . Her shape is very graceful and so are
her movements. Her Arms are good, her hands baddish, her feet tolerable. She is not seventeen [she was eighteen, in fact], but she is ignorant, monstrous in her behaviour, flying out in all directions, calling people such names that I was forced lately to make use of the term Minx.” As both the familiarity of “lately” and the fascinated flirtiness of “Minx” imply, Miss Brawne was, for Keats, not among the mere generality of women.

  1967 In “Vanadium,” the second-to-last of the autobiographical tales that make up Primo Levi’s Periodic Table, the two main threads of his story—his career as a chemist and his ordeal under the Nazis in Auschwitz—come together in the person of “Dr. Müller,” a fellow chemist with a German company who writes Levi on business and who Levi imagines—correctly it turns out—is the same Dr. Müller who treated him with less inhumanity than his other supervisors in the small lab where Levi worked at Auschwitz. They exchange letters—Müller’s with a clumsy mix of repentance and self-justification, Levi’s formal and ambivalent—but before they can meet, Levi receives word of Müller’s death, just as, on this day in real life, Levi heard of the death of Ferdinand Meyer, the model for Müller.

  December 19

  BORN: 1910 Jean Genet (The Thief’s Journal, The Maids), Paris

  1924 Michel Tournier (The Ogre, Friday, Gemini), Paris

  DIED: 1848 Emily Brontë (Wuthering Heights), 30, Haworth, England

  1982 Dwight Macdonald (Discriminations), 76, New York City

  1931 In the time Eric Blair—not yet writing as George Orwell—had spent living with and writing about the poor, one experience he hadn’t shared with his tramping acquaintances was jail, and his plan was to spend Christmas there and write about it. But how to get inside? He considered arson and theft before deciding to get as drunk in public as he could. He managed to get himself arrested, rather gently, on this day, but after caroling with fellow prisoners in the Black Maria on the way to court, he found himself put back out on the street just a couple of days later. Neither drunkenness nor begging could get him jailed again in time for the holiday, nor did he find a taker for “Clink,” the article he wrote about his efforts.