A Reader's Book of Days Page 3

  January 9

  BORN: 1901 Chic Young (Blondie, Dumb Dora), Chicago

  1908 Simone de Beauvoir (The Second Sex, The Mandarins), Paris

  DIED: 1324 Marco Polo (The Travels of Marco Polo), c. 69, Venice

  1923 Katherine Mansfield (The Garden Party, The Journals), 34, Fontainebleau, France

  1873 Twenty years after he wrote “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and sixteen since he’d last published a novel, Herman Melville’s own position as a self-effacing clerk was given a poignant portrait in a letter from his brother-in-law to George Boutwell, the secretary of the treasury. Was there anything Boutwell could do to assure Melville “the undisturbed enjoyment of his modest, hard-earned salary” of $4 a day as a customs inspector? Making no mention of Melville’s forgotten fame as an author, the letter emphasized his principled ability to, like Bartleby, say no: “Surrounded by low venality, he puts it all quietly aside,—quietly declining offers of money for special services,—quietly returning money which has been thrust into his pockets behind his back.”

  1922 At 74 rue Cardinal Lemoine in the Latin Quarter, Ernest and Hadley Hemingway rented their first Paris apartment.

  1927 Writing to his mother that everyone at Oxford was either “rich and vapid or poor and vapid,” Henry Yorke, with his first novel already published the previous fall under the name Henry Green, left without his degree to work instead on the shop floor of the Birmingham manufacturer of bathroom plumbing and brewery equipment owned by his father. After two years he rose to management, a career that ran alongside, and even outlasted, his writing life as Henry Green, whose best-known novels—all of them subtle and thrillingly innovative—inhabit both sides of Yorke’s life: Living, the workers on the factory floor, Party Going, the upper class into which he was born, and Loving, an upstairs-downstairs tale of both.

  1944 Francis T. P. Plimpton, one of the most prominent lawyers in New York City, was a man of great discipline and industry, and expected the same from his children. His eldest, George, was less able to harness his own considerable energies, and when he ran into trouble at Exeter his father sent him on New Year’s Day a typed list of eight “Resolutions,” twenty-six “Supplementary Resolutions” (among them “I will not day dream” and “I will stand up straight, and walk as if I were carrying a pail of water on my head”), and four justifications for immediate withdrawal from the school, including failure to write his parents “every day.” Young George did make an effort—in his letter on this day he reported, “Followed schedule perfectly”—but just weeks before his graduation he was, to his shame, expelled for surprising his housemaster with a Revolutionary War–era musket and yelling, “Bang bang! You’re dead.”

  January 10

  BORN: 1928 Philip Levine (What Work Is, Ashes), Detroit

  1953 Dennis Cooper (Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, Period), Pasadena, Calif.

  DIED: 1951 Sinclair Lewis (Main Street, Babbitt, Elmer Gantry), 65, Rome

  1961 Dashiell Hammett (Red Harvest, The Maltese Falcon), 66, New York City

  1776 Published: Common Sense; Addressed to the Inhabitants of America by “an Englishman” (R. Bell, Philadelphia). (Its author, Thomas Paine, donated his considerable profits, from 500,000 copies sold in the first year, to the Continental Army.)

  1846 Be careful what you ask for. That appears to be the lesson of the “Corsair affair,” one of the strangest in the odd and passionate philosophical career of Søren Kierkegaard. Stung by attacks on his writing in the Corsair, a satirical scandal sheet read by everyone from servants to royalty in Copenhagen, Kierkegaard made a perverse public request for more abuse. He got it, and was especially wounded by caricatures in the paper that depicted him as a hunchbacked eccentric who had the cuffs of his trousers cut at different lengths as a sign of his genius. Once a proud walker of the city who delighted in speaking to anyone he met, Kierkegaard found himself a laughingstock, a wound he nursed for the rest of his life. Even his tailor suggested he take his business elsewhere.

  18– The metamorphosis of respectable Dr. Jekyll into murderous Mr. Hyde is a basic scene in our mythology of horror, but in the original tale, Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, it’s the reverse transformation that is so terrifying it kills the man who witnesses it. Given the choice, just after midnight on this day, not to see the effects of the chemical mixture he has delivered, on Jekyll’s request, to Mr. Hyde, Dr. Lanyon replies, “I have gone too far in the way of inexplicable services to pause before I see the end.” The end he sees is the terrible Hyde turned before his eyes, “like a man restored from death,” into his friend Henry Jekyll. “I must die,” Lanyon wrote afterward, “and yet I shall die incredulous.”

  1953 Writing in her journal at midnight in her parents’ house in London, Iris Murdoch recounted one of her first nights with Elias Canetti: “We laughed very much, C. keeping up a stream of pompous-sounding discussion in an audible voice for my parents’ benefit in intervals of kissing me violently.” For three years they kept up a secret affair and for forty years a friendship, until his death. Dominating both in his arrogance and his intense receptiveness, Canetti seemed to her that night like a “beast” and an “angel,” and his presence can be seen in the terrible attraction of characters in many of her novels, from The Flight from the Enchanter, published the year after their breakup, to The Sea, the Sea, which won the Booker Prize in 1978, three years before Canetti received the Nobel Prize for Literature.

  January 11

  BORN: 1842 William James (The Varieties of Religious Experience), New York City

  1952 Diana Gabaldon (Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber), Arizona

  DIED: 1928 Thomas Hardy (Tess of the d’Urbervilles, Jude the Obscure), 87, Dorchester, England

  1980 Barbara Pym (Excellent Women, Quartet in Autumn), 66, Finstock, England

  1842 On New Year’s Day, John Thoreau Jr. cut a tiny piece of skin off the tip of his ring finger while stropping his razor. He hardly gave it a thought until seven days later, when he removed the bandage and found the wound had “mortified.” The next day, the terrible spasms of lockjaw took hold, and on this day, having calmly said to his friends, “The cup that my father gives me, shall I not drink it?” he died in the arms of his younger brother, Henry, with whom he had founded a grammar school and taken the trip Henry later memorialized in A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers. For a time afterward, Henry grieved quietly, but then, on the 22nd, though he had no injury to cause it, he began to suffer from the precise symptoms of lockjaw himself. He convulsed for two days before recovering, and for the rest of his life suffered awful dreams on the anniversary of his brother’s death.

  1844 Having just struck up a correspondence with the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker, Charles Darwin broached a delicate subject with an almost shameful hesitancy: “I am almost convinced (quite contrary to opinion I started with) that species are not (it is like confessing a murder) immutable.” He added, “I think I have found out (here’s presumption!) the simple way by which species become exquisitely adapted to various ends.— You will now groan, & think to yourself ‘on what a man have I been wasting my time in writing to.’— I shd, five years ago, have thought so.” His hesitancy would remain: it was another fourteen years before he announced his theory in public, and a year after that until the publication of On the Origin of Species.

  1914 The Nouvelle revue française was one of the publishers that rejected the first volume of Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time—they hardly read it, put off by “its enormous size and because Proust had a reputation as a snob”—but Proust’s revenge was quick and sweet. After the book was published André Gide, novelist and editor of NRF, wrote with his abject apologies: “For several days I have not put down your book; I am supersaturating myself in it, rapturously, wallowing in it. Alas! why must it be so painful for me to like it so much?” Proust replied that his joy at Gide’s change of heart far outweighed the pain of the earlier rejection: “I finally obtained that pleasur
e, not as I hoped, not when I hoped, but later, and differently, and far more splendidly, in the form of this letter from you. In that form, too, I ‘recaptured’ Lost Time.”

  January 12

  BORN: 1949 Haruki Murakami (Norwegian Wood, 1Q84), Kyoto, Japan

  1969 David Mitchell (Cloud Atlas, number9dream), Southport, England

  DIED: 1965 Lorraine Hansberry (A Raisin in the Sun, Les Blancs), 34, New York City

  1976 Agatha Christie (Murder on the Orient Express), 85, Wallingford, England

  1926 A hurricane brought in the new year, sweeping nearly everything aside on the Samoan island of Ta’u. As the storm rose, Margaret Mead, coming of age herself at twenty-four while she did the fieldwork for what would be her first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, was “absorbed in the enormous and satisfying extravagance” of making hard sauce for a holiday fruit cake, but the winds started tearing the village to shreds. Taking refuge with two babies in the bottom of an emptied water tank, Mead rode out the storm and emerged in the morning to a village “weaving furiously” to reconstruct itself. Finally, on this day, in response to frantic telegrams from her teacher and friend Ruth Benedict, who had heard of the hurricane in New York, she wired back a single word, “Well.”

  1957 Robert Phelps, in the National Review, on The Old Farmer’s Almanac: “The wish for a chronology of significant events is as persistent as it is involuntary . . . Simply to know, to be a squinting, amateur witness to so much precision and progression, is delightful.”

  1974 A groundbreaking scrapbook of three hundred years of African American history, The Black Book, published on this day, is now itself a piece of history, a record of a moment when someone like Toni Morrison, then an editor at Random House and the author of a single novel, had gained the authority to see a project like it into print. Working with collectors who had been gathering the materials for decades, Morrison and Middleton Harris curated a loving hodgepodge of newspaper clippings, minstrel-show placards, slave-auction records, patent diagrams, biographical sketches, voodoo spells, and portraits of the famous and the anonymous. “I was scared,” Morrison said at the time, “that the world would fall away before somebody put together a thing that got close to the way we really were.”

  1997 You don’t find out the birthday of one of the most memorable of modern characters until late in the story, when Dave Bowman, stranded on a spacecraft half a billion miles from Earth, realizes he needs to destroy the only other intelligence left on the ship. As he removes its memory blocks, the mind of his companion is reduced to its most basic elements: “I am a HAL Nine Thousand computer Production Number 3. I became operational at the Hal Plant in Urbana, Illinois, on January 12, 1997.” If you can’t help but hear the disturbingly soothing voice of Douglas Rain speaking those words as you read Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, don’t worry you’re doing literature a disservice: 2001 was a rare novel written alongside the screenplay, as two versions of the same imagined world.

  January 13

  BORN: 1940 Edmund White (A Boy’s Own Story, The Beautiful Room Is Empty), Cincinnati

  1957 Lorrie Moore (Self-Help, The Gate at the Stairs), Glens Falls, N.Y.

  DIED: 1599 Edmund Spenser (The Faerie Queen, Epithalamion), c. 46, London

  1941 James Joyce (Ulysses, Finnegans Wake), 58, Zurich

  1898 Émile Zola had written on the Dreyfus Affair before, in essays so scathing that Le Figaro refused to print any more, but his open letter to French president Félix Faure in the newspaper L’Aurore, known immediately by its headline, “J’accuse” (given it by the paper’s publisher, future prime minister Georges Clemenceau), galvanized the entire country. Putting his life and his position as France’s leading novelist on the line amid anti-Semitic riots, Zola defended Major Dreyfus, the Jewish officer who had spent four years on Devil’s Island after a trumped-up conviction for treason, and courted arrest for libel by naming those he thought responsible. He was indeed twice convicted, but the force of his essay and the evidence brought out in his libel trials transformed public opinion and led to Dreyfus’s exoneration in 1906.

  1909 On his first anniversary as a lawyer at the American Bonding Company, Wallace Stevens wrote his future wife, “I certainly do not exist from nine to six, when I am at the office . . . At night I strut my individual state once more—soon in a night-cap.”

  1934 M. F. K. Fisher, reading Samuel Butler’s The Way of All Flesh, wished “to have, someday, a style one nth as direct.”

  1970 It was just a few months after the Stonewall riot, at which he had been a skeptical but interested observer, that Edmund White, on his thirtieth birthday, decided to shake off the shame of not yet having a book to his name by moving to Rome. He didn’t make the most of it—his friend and mentor Richard Howard wagged his finger from afar, “Here you are in the central city of Western culture and you’ve managed to turn it into some kicky version of Scranton”—and when he returned after six months to New York he found that “the 1970s had finally begun,” the gay, post-Stonewall ’70s, that is: “I couldn’t believe how unleashed New York had become.”

  1987 There may be no better window into the passive-aggressive hothouse of The New Yorker during the later William Shawn years than the account in Renata Adler’s Gone of a mass staff meeting on the day word got out that Shawn, the magazine’s editor for thirty-five years, was being replaced. As voices, variously querulous and strident, were raised about whether or not to write a letter of protest to the magazine’s owner, Adler, an active courtier in the palace intrigue herself, filtered the inconclusive proceedings through her imperious style, cutting toward her enemies, alternately adoring of and exasperated with Shawn himself, and mournful for a magazine that to her mind, no matter its later incarnations, was now forever gone.

  January 14

  BORN: 1886 Hugh Lofting (The Story of Doctor Dolittle), Maidenhead, England

  1947 Taylor Branch (Parting the Waters), Atlanta

  DIED: 1898 Lewis Carroll (Through the Looking Glass), 65, Guildford, England

  1977 Anaïs Nin (Delta of Venus, Henry and June), 73, Los Angeles

  1928 Dr. Seuss’s first contribution to the common language was not “A person’s a person, no matter how small” but “Quick, Henry, the Flit!”—the tagline for his series of ads for Standard Oil’s insecticide, which became a ’30s catchphrase on radio and in song. (Seuss was hired after the wife of an ad exec saw his cartoon in this day’s issue of Judge, a satirical weekly, with the punch line “Darn it all, another Dragon. And just after I’d sprayed the whole castle with Flit!”) As Seuss often said, his work for the petroleum giant directed the course of his later career: “I would like to say I went into children’s book writing because of my great understanding of children. I went in because it wasn’t excluded by my Standard Oil contract.”

  1939 “When I read through this book I’m appalled at myself!” Tennessee Williams wrote in his journal just after moving to New Orleans. “It is valuable as a record of one man’s incredible idiocy! . . . Am I all animal, all willful, blind, stupid beast?”

  1973 The date and the year are unnamed, but let’s assume that it’s on this January Sunday that the New York Giants, starring Billy Clyde Puckett, stud hoss of a running back, and Shake Tiller, semi-intellectual split end and fellow ex-TCU All-American, take on the dog-ass New York Jets in the Super Bowl in front of 92,000, among them Barbara Jane Bookman, a childhood friend to both Giants and “so damned pretty it makes your eyes blur.” It’s the most amiable of love triangles in the most foul-mouthed of sports classics, Dan Jenkins’s Semi-Tough, as narrated by Billy Clyde himself with a glass of Scotch and a little tape recorder in his and Shake’s “palatial suite here at the Beverly Stars Hotel in Beverly Hills, California.”

  2010 Tony Judt’s essay “Night,” in the New York Review of Books on this day, began with a statement of fact shocking to readers who had known him only as a prolific historian and essayist: “I suffer from a motor neuron disorder, in my case a variant
of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS): Lou Gehrig’s disease.” A further shock came on its heels: his disease had progressed enough that he was, more or less, a quadriplegic, living in the cage of his own body, nearly immobile but still able to feel sensation and, with full clarity, think. And so, having recently completed a massive and masterful work of synthetic history, Postwar, Judt turned to tiny, hard-won essays of memory, observation, and reflection, composed during his lonely, sleepless nights, dictated during the days, and collected after his death that summer in The Memory Chalet.

  January 15

  BORN: 1622 Molière (Tartuffe, The Misanthrope), Paris

  1933 Ernest J. Gaines (A Lesson Before Dying), Pointe Coupee Parish, La.

  DIED: 1893 Fanny Kemble (Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation), 83, London

  1982 Red Smith (To Absent Friends, The Red Smith Reader), 76, Stamford, Conn.

  1848 Douglas Jerrod’s Weekly Newspaper on the new novel by “Ellis Bell”: “In Wuthering Heights the reader is shocked, disgusted, almost sickened by details of cruelty, inhumanity, and the most diabolical hate and vengeance, and anon come passages of powerful testimony to the supreme power of love.”

  1895 Poor Hurstwood: his decline in Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie matches the rise of Carrie, his former protégée, but he’s inspired to make one last, ill-fated grab toward his old vitality by a notice in the papers that the Brooklyn streetcar lines, facing a strike by their motormen, are hiring replacements. His day out on the lines, though, is a nightmare: mobs of strikers assault him as a scab in scenes Dreiser based on the massive Brooklyn streetcar strike in January 1895, a strike Dreiser had covered himself for the New York World, struggling, much like the striking motormen, against a horde of other bottom-feeding reporters to cobble together a daily living.

  1907 Calling the book “a rather strained rhapsody with whaling for a subject,” Joseph Conrad declined an offer to write a preface for Moby-Dick.