A Reader's Book of Days Read online

1938 Jorge Guillermo Borges died, soon after making a final request that his son, Jorge Luis, rewrite his only novel, El Caudillo: “I put many metaphors in to please you, but they are very poor and you must get rid of them.”

  1950 After updating Stanley Unwin, the publisher of The Hobbit, for more than a dozen years on the piecemeal progress of its sequel, which had grown into an epic far beyond the scope of the earlier book, J. R. R. Tolkien reported, with some horror, that it was finally done: “Now I look at it, the magnitude of the disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped from my control, and I have produced a monster: an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody).” In part, he was sandbagging, since he’d decided he wanted to move to a different publisher, but when his other suitor said that The Lord of the Rings “urgently demanded cutting,” Tolkien returned to Unwin’s firm, though neither expected more than modest sales for the massive, three-volume novel.

  1954 With the hardcover edition of Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, going out of print, his editor sent a last, tiny royalty check to Vonnegut’s agent with the note “I hope it helps this guy out, and I’m only sorry that it’s not for a larger amount.”

  1963 Asked to contribute to a special issue of the Sunday Times in London on “As Others See Us,” Jean Genet submitted “What I Like About the English Is That They Are Such Liars.”

  1972 “NOVELIST, neo-surrealist, 24, male, genius,” read an ad in the New York Review of Books personals. “Desires female patron. Expenses absolutely minimal. Platonic relationship. Will move to NY if no offers in Frisco.”

  1998 “You really are such a repulsive pervert, David.” David Boring is not even twenty, but he has the posture and the resigned acceptance of his compulsions of an old man when his story begins on this day in Daniel Clowes’s graphic novel, which bears his pedestrian name. He lives with his lesbian friend Dot, who makes drily appreciative comments like the one above, and he narrates his adventures in a self-consciously hard-boiled style that seems inappropriate to his humdrum life until things begin to happen: the murder of a friend, a brush with death, an encounter with a woman who fulfills his every fetish, and the impending end of the world on a remote island, none of which alters David’s drab affect, but which create an oddly engrossing tale of chance and compulsion.

  February 25

  BORN: 1949 Jack Handey (Deep Thoughts, What I’d Say to the Martians), San Antonio

  1962 John Lanchester (The Debt to Pleasure, Capital), Hamburg, Germany

  DIED: 1983 Tennessee Williams (A Streetcar Named Desire), 71, New York City

  2001 A. R. Ammons (Sphere, Garbage), 75, Ithaca, N.Y.

  1830 The savviest stage management for the premiere of Victor Hugo’s drama Hernani at Paris’s venerable Comédie Française took place off the stage as the young Hugo, angling to become the icon of the Romantic movement, organized his youthful supporters in the audience. Some hired and some recruited, they came to the performance dressed in their outlandishly outdated fashions, banqueted for hours in the theater before the curtain rose, and then wildly cheered Hugo’s subversions of the rules of classical French theater while the so-called knee-heads, the balding old guard, hissed. (Watching a later performance, Hugo happily noted all the crowd’s reactions, from “laughter” to “sniggering,” in the margins of his script.) So began the “Battle of Hernani,” a theatrical revolution that lasted for the run of the show, just a few short months before the July Revolution that overthrew Charles X, France’s last Bourbon king.

  1917 It was “the last day of old Russia”: with the February Revolution under way, the Berberovs held one final evening party, with dancing, singing, and ice cream until 5 a.m., but already their daughter, Nina Berberova, had moved on to the new Russia. With the zestful impatience that characterized her entire life, both in Russia and then in exile in Paris and America, she wrote about the day of the party a half-century later in her memoir, The Italics Are Mine: “I am seventeen, I am nobody—I accept it as that ground on which I will sprout . . . The past? I don’t need it. The breaking up of the old? I don’t want even to remember those bits and broken pieces . . . Someone near me says that all is lost, but I don’t believe this, I never will.”

  1956 “A small note after a large orgy,” began a rather long entry in Sylvia Plath’s journal on February 26. The night before, at a party for a poetry review in Cambridge, England, she met “the one man in the room who was as big as his poems, huge, with hulk and dynamic chunks of words.” The man, Ted Hughes, poured her a drink and kissed her, and she “bit him long and hard on the cheek” so that when they came back out into the party “blood was running down his face.” He’d never come looking for her again, Plath thought then—her date, as they stumbled home from the party, called Hughes “the biggest seducer in Cambridge” but “oh, to give myself crashing, fighting, to you,” she wrote. They were married in June.

  February 26

  BORN: 1907 Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates, Steve Canyon), Hillsboro, Ohio

  1956 Michel Houellebecq (The Elementary Particles, Platform), Réunion

  DIED: 1969 Karl Jaspers (Philosophy of Existence), 86, Basel, Switzerland

  1870 Shortly after being named a justice of the peace, Wyatt Outlaw, one of the leading African American politicians in North Carolina’s Alamance County, was lynched on this day by a mob of Ku Klux Klansmen outside the county courthouse where Judge Albion W. Tourgée, the most prominent white Republican in the state, presided. A decade later, writing out of anger and despair at the end of Reconstruction and the violent suppression of black civil rights, Tourgée recast Outlaw’s murder as one of the central events in A Fool’s Errand, a caustic autobiographical novel that caused an immediate publishing sensation, drawing comparisons—which still hold true—to Twain for its sharp satire and Stowe for the moral fervor that made it the Uncle Tom’s Cabin of the postwar era.

  1922 Colette, the music-hall-performer-turned-novelist, appeared onstage for the first time in ten years as Lea in the hundredth performance of the adaptation of her novel Chéri.

  1981 For thirty years, The New Yorker rejected every story Richard Yates (or his agent) sent them. Sometimes they encouraged him to try again, but on this day the magazine’s fiction editor, Roger Angell, shut the door. Having declined his “mean-spirited” story “A Natural Girl” three days before, Angell wrote Yates’s agent that “Liars in Love” “didn’t even come close.” “It seems clearer and clearer to me,” he added, in a letter Yates would sourly read aloud to visitors in the last years of his life, “that his kind of fiction is not what we’re looking for.” Not everyone agreed: Richard Ford later included “Liars in Love” in The Granta Book of the American Short Story, and in 2001, eight years after his death, Yates finally made The New Yorker when they published “The Canal,” an early story they had rejected with a form letter in 1952.

  1984 Miami in the ’80s had the lurid glamour of bright pastels and easy violence: the Miami of Scarface and Crockett and Tubbs, and of Edna Buchanan, the hard-boiled Miami Herald police reporter who became as big as the stories she covered. Murder was cheap in south Florida, and Buchanan tried to cover it all with the motto “Every murder is major to the victim,” including Rosario Gonzalez, a young model who went missing on this day during the Miami Grand Prix. Buchanan tracked down the most likely suspect, a rich sports-car enthusiast named Christopher Wilder, but the cops didn’t, and he embarked on a cross-country murder spree that ended with his death in Vermont, one of the dozens of stories she collected in The Corpse Had a Familiar Face, a year after she won the Pulitzer Prize for General News Reporting in 1986.

  February 27

  BORN: 1902 John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath, East of Eden), Salinas, Calif.

  1934 N. Scott Momaday (House Made of Dawn, The Way to Rainy Mountain), Lawton, Okla.

  DIED: 1977 Edward Dahlberg (Bottom Dogs, Because I Was Flesh), 76, Santa Barbara, Calif.

  200
8 William F. Buckley (God and Man at Yale, Saving the Queen), 82, Stamford, Conn.

  1872 After word got out that railroad freight rates for oil had just been jacked up for every producer in Pennsylvania’s oil region except the members of a shadowy outfit named the South Improvement Company, 3,000 angry oilmen filled the Titusville Opera House, including Franklin Tarbell, whose livelihood, like everyone else’s there, was about to be destroyed. Thirty years later, Tarbell’s daughter, Ida, who had watched her father storm off to the meeting, told the story of the Oil War of 1872 as part of her History of the Standard Oil Company, a tireless feat of reporting that launched the age of muckraking journalism by tying Titusville and countless other schemes to the ruthless machinations of the country’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller.

  1952 When Allen Ginsberg struck up a correspondence with his fellow New Jerseyan William Carlos Williams—“from me, an unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county of the world”—he first sent him samples of traditional, rhymed poems. Williams didn’t much like them, so two years later Ginsberg pulled out some “short crappy scraps” from his journals and tried those instead. Those the old poet liked (he also liked Ginsberg’s letters, which he later quoted at length in the fourth book of Paterson), and his enthusiastic response on this day—“You must have a book. I shall see that you get it. Don’t throw anything away. These are it.”—led Ginsberg to write his pals Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady that this was their big break: “We’ll have a huge collected anthology of American Kicks and Mental Muse-eries.”

  2008 At 11:43 at night in his apartment in Malmö, Sweden, with his second wife and their three children sleeping in the rooms around him as if they had been placed there by alien spirits, Karl Ove Knausgaard looks at the deep furrows in his forehead and cheeks and asks, “What has engraved itself on my face?” with the sort of perplexed intensity toward his past and present that characterizes My Struggle, a six-volume autobiographical novel that became an immediate phenomenon in his native Norway. Written rapidly with close attention to the banal minutiae of everyday life, My Struggle nevertheless gathers a great personal and philosophical power from Knausgaard’s commitment to an honest and exhaustive account of his life, an “act of literary suicide,” in his own words, that made him a literary celebrity at age forty-three but unsure if he’d ever write again.

  February 28

  BORN: 1533 Michel de Montaigne (Essays), Château de Montaigne, France

  1970 Lemony Snicket/Daniel Handler (A Series of Unfortunate Events, The Basic Eight), San Francisco

  DIED: 1916 Henry James (The Ambassadors, The Wings of the Dove), 72, London

  1930 C. K. Scott Moncrieff (translator of Remembrance of Things Past), 40, Rome

  1571 In one of the best-known—and most productive—midlife crises in literary history, Michel de Montaigne retreated from the Bordeaux Parlement after thirteen years as a magistrate to a tower library where he could read every day a message painted on the wall in Latin: “In the year of Christ 1571, at the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, anniversary of his birth, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the servitude of the court and of public employments, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned Virgins, where in calm and freedom from all cares he will spend what little remains of his life now more than half run out. If the fates permit he will complete this abode, this sweet ancestral retreat; and he has consecrated it to his freedom, tranquility, and leisure.”

  1815 Alexandre Dumas set the pivotal moment in his action-packed tale The Count of Monte Cristo on the day before Napoleon returned from exile to France to reclaim his command. On that day, young Edmond Dantès, an upstanding and talented sailor who has just celebrated his wedding, is framed for conspiring to overthrow the king in favor of the returning emperor and condemned for life to an island fortress known as the Château d’If. Fourteen years later to the very day, Edmond escapes from the château in a burial sack, takes on a new identity as the wealthy Count of Monte Cristo, and begins to seek his revenge against those who unjustly imprisoned him.

  1939 The short and unheralded life of “dord” came to an end on this day when an editor of Webster’s New International Dictionary noticed that a tiny entry on page 771 was missing its etymology. It turned out on further investigation that “dord” had no etymology because it wasn’t a word. In 1931 a slip reading “D or d, cont. density,” which meant to add “density” to the list of terms abbreviated as “D,” was misread as “Dord” and filed as a separate word. Soon, through sheer inertia, “dord” acquired a part of speech, “n.,” and a pronunciation, “(dôrd),” and found its way into early editions of the dictionary before it was discovered. “Probably too bad,” wrote Webster’s editor in chief Philip B. Gove in 1953, hinting at the open-mindedness that would make the next edition of Webster’s the most controversial dictionary in American history, “for why shouldn’t dord mean ‘density’?”

  2005 In the finals of the first annual Tournament of Books, created by the Morning News as a complement (or alternative) to the NCAA basketball tournament, David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas defeated Philip Roth’s The Plot Against America by a vote of ten to five.

  February 29

  BORN: 1908 Dee Brown (Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee), Alberta, La.

  1952 Tim Powers (The Anubis Gates, On Stranger Tides), Buffalo, N.Y.

  DIED: 1940 E. F. Benson (Mapp and Lucia, Dodo, David Blaize), 72, London

  2012 James Trager (The People’s Chronology), 86, New York City

  1876 “Dear Sir,” George Bernard Shaw, age nineteen, began his letter to his employer, “I beg to give you notice that at the end of next month, I shall leave your office.” Young Shaw had proved so conscientious a clerk at his real estate firm that his salary had quadrupled in four years, but he was done with the job, and with Dublin. “My reason,” he continued, “is that I object to receive a salary for which I give no adequate value. Not having enough to do, it follows that the little I have is not well done.” When he arrived in London for good in April, he declared that “on no account will I enter an office again.”

  NO YEAR On a wintry day during the last snowfall of the year, a “singular person fell out of infinity” into the village of Iping. Bundled thoroughly against the cold, he arrived at the inn, threw down a couple of sovereigns, and demanded a room, a fire, and, above all, privacy. But curiosity will have its way, sovereigns or no, especially when the stranger reveals that his head is thoroughly bandaged under his hat and scarf and undertakes mysterious “experiments” behind the locked door of his room. Soon the villagers learn the truth of the title of H. G. Wells’s novel The Invisible Man, a tale that methodically demonstrates how easily one of humanity’s most desired discoveries can become a curse.

  NO YEAR It’s easy to lose track of time on Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, although Hans Castorp, the earnest engineer, tries to keep to the calendar. But even the calendar’s orderly structure offers him a day without rules: Mardi Gras, a holiday when Hans can cast his propriety aside and confess his love to Clavdia Chauchat, even—gulp—going so far as to address her by the informal pronoun! It was, as he explains later, “an evening outside of any schedule, almost outside the calendar, an hors d’oeuvre, so to speak, an extra evening, a leap-year evening, the twenty-ninth of February.” Whether it was actually the twenty-ninth of February, that magical day on which Fat Tuesday occasionally does fall, Mann doesn’t say, but then why, when speaking of such a day, would you want to concern yourself with mere facts?

  March Emily Dickinson liked March: it brings a light like no other time of the year, a color “that science cannot overtake / But human nature feels.” “Come in!” she wrote. “Oh, March, come right upstairs with me / I have so much to tell.” But she also knew the dangers of the life that March’s thaw awakens: when the “snows come hurrying in from the hills” they can flood the banks of that “Brook in your little heart” that “nobody knows.” “Why, look out for that l
ittle brook in March,” she warned: it might wash out all your bridges.

  We don’t know quite what to do with March. We’re excited and frightened by its power and variability. Do we really think that the lion it comes in as can lie down with the lamb it becomes? It seems appropriate that halfway between the month’s two ends, where the lion and lamb meet, are the ides of March, full of Shakespeare’s storms and portents. Casca, one of those plotting the death of Julius Caesar, witnesses not only the “tempests” and “threatening clouds” of a “world too saucy with the gods” but also a real March lion strolling unnaturally through Rome, “who gazed upon me and went surly by.” Even the only lamb mentioned in Julius Caesar hides violence in its mildness: Brutus, arguing with Cassius after Caesar is dead, calls himself “a lamb / That carries anger as the flint bears fire.”

  March’s name came from Mars, the god of war, marking the time of year when Rome would take up arms again after the winter. But armies take a while to muster: with few exceptions, history’s great battles have taken place later in the spring or in summer or fall, not March. The Red Badge of Courage does open in early spring, with the Union Army awakening “as the landscape changed from brown to green,” but their first promises of action prove false. Stephen Crane is thought to have based his account—famously grounded in no war experience of his own—on the Battle of Chancellorsville, which didn’t commence until the last day of April.

  In some years, like the one described in Walker Percy’s The Moviegoer, Mardi Gras comes late enough to fall in March, and in others an early Easter arrives before the end of the month, but in almost every year March includes most of the Lenten days between Fat Tuesday and Easter Sunday, and so, amid all this first growth and awakening, March is for many a season of, in George Herbert’s words, “sweet abstinence.” The Moviegoer takes place mostly during Mardi Gras, but it ends on Ash Wednesday and carries some of its spirit of repentance.