A Reader's Book of Days Read online

  1975 “This was a safe and friendly area,” William S. Burroughs observed about the thirteenth row of seating at Madison Square Garden, where he was enjoying his first Led Zeppelin concert on assignment from Crawdaddy! magazine, “but at the same time highly charged.” He was attending the show as preparation for an interview with Jimmy Page, and to his pleasure he “found the audience well-behaved and joyous, creating the atmosphere of a high school Christmas play.” The next day at his apartment, he offered Page a session in his Reichian orgone accumulator, which the guitarist declined, and a cup of tea, which he accepted, and they discussed soccer riots, Moroccan trance music, death rays, Brian Jones, and the possibility of constructing an actual stairway to heaven.

  February 4

  BORN: 1921 Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), Peoria, Ill.

  1925 Russell Hoban (Turtle Diary, Bread and Jam for Frances), Lansdale, Pa.

  DIED: 1975 John R. Tunis (The Kid from Tomkinsville, Iron Duke), 85, Essex, Conn.

  2006 Betty Friedan (The Second Stage), 85, Washington, D.C.

  1818 Sir Walter Scott, whose wildly popular historical romances created a vogue for Scottish culture in modern Britain, took on a real-life quest with some of the romance, though little of the danger, of his heroic tales of Waverley and Ivanhoe. The Scottish crown jewels, known as the Honours of Scotland, had been unseen for a century and were feared lost or transported out of the kingdom until, on this day, Scott and a dozen officials unlocked doors of iron and wood to reach the depths of Edinburgh Castle, where, in a chamber covered six inches thick in dust, they raised the lid of a chest to find intact the crown, sword, scepter, and mace of Scotland.

  1882 Oscar Wilde’s cheeky tour of America set the good people of Boston against each other. Colonel T. W. Higginson, reformer, soldier, and Emily Dickinson’s patient patron, criticized on this day the local ladies who had welcomed into their homes this author of “mediocre” poems whose “nudities do not suggest the sacred whiteness of an antique statue, but rather the forcible unveiling of some insulting innocence.” In reply, Julia Ward Howe, already famous for her “Battle Hymn of the Republic,” defended Mr. Wilde—“a young man in whom many excellent people have found much to like”—as well as her own hospitality: “If, as alleged, the poison found in the ancient classics is seen to linger too deeply in his veins,” the cure was not scolding “but a cordial and kindly intercourse with that which is soundest, sweetest and purest in our own society.”

  1882 The death, in Leo Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich, of Ivan Ilyich.

  1906 Following the death of Charles Tyson Yerkes, the scandal-courting streetcar magnate whose unapologetic malignity shocked even that robber-baron age (his reply to payoff allegations: “Why not give us the fifty-year franchise we ask for and thus stop the bribery?”), the New York World declared on this day that only the late Balzac could have captured his life in fiction: “The tale is too intricate and various and melodramatic for any living novelist who writes the English language.” Theodore Dreiser, though, had been keeping a file on Yerkes for years and soon used the arc of his career as the basis for his Trilogy of Desire—The Financier, The Titan, and The Stoic—which traced the horrifying and fascinating rise and fall of streetcar king Frank Cowperwood.

  1938 Sixteen years before The Lord of the Rings was published, J. R. R. Tolkien sent “A Long-expected Party,” the first chapter “of a possible sequel to The Hobbit,” for his publisher and, more importantly, his publisher’s teenage son, an early fan of The Hobbit, to read.

  February 5

  BORN: 1914 William S. Burroughs (Junky, Naked Lunch), St. Louis

  1948 David Wallechinsky (The Book of Lists, The People’s Almanac), Los Angeles

  DIED: 1937 Lou Andreas-Salomé (Looking Back, The Freud Journal), 75, Göttingen, Germany

  1972 Marianne Moore (Collected Poems), 84, New York City

  1909 Futurism may have been primarily a movement in art, but it was nothing without its writing—its poems but most of all its manifestoes—and on this day the first such bomb was thrown when the Gazzetta dell’Emilia of Bologna became the first of more than a dozen newspapers across Europe to print the “Manifesto of Futurism,” an eleven-point declaration that began, “We intend to sing the love of danger, the habit of energy and fearlessness.” Signed by Filippo Tommaso Marinetti, the tireless and impudent impresario of the movement, the manifesto further celebrated the “beauty of speed,” the destruction of museums, the excitement of crowds, factories, and revolution, and the glory of war—“the world’s only hygiene.” The latter enthusiasm in particular didn’t wear well over the following European decades.

  1917 Dr. Franz Kafka, after seven years as a law clerk at the Workmen’s Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, requested a promotion and a raise to the “fourth bracket of the third salary classification.”

  1960 Sent a novel called Confessions of a Moviegoer by an agent, perhaps because he had just become the movie critic for the New Republic, Stanley Kauffmann, an editor at Knopf, sent an encouraging rejection letter to its author, first-time novelist Walker Percy, and then worked with him on revisions through the next six months. On this day, though, he wrote Percy again, saying he had been unable to convince his fellow editors to accept the novel without a thorough rewriting. Knopf did finally take the novel, but let Kauffmann go soon after, leaving The Moviegoer, its revised title, as an unwanted orphan on its list until, to everyone’s surprise, it won the National Book Award in 1962, despite not having been nominated by its own publisher.

  2003 Jonathan Coe spent what would have been B. S. Johnson’s seventieth birthday composing one of the most difficult scenes of his biography of the writer, his death. A rather traditional novelist himself, Coe met the challenge of telling the story of Johnson’s life—and his suicide at age forty in 1973—with an inventively structured and brilliantly sympathetic biography, Like a Fiery Elephant, that shares some of the impatience with formal conventions of its subject, who held in contempt any writer who stuck to the form of the nineteenth-century novel—how could they, after Ulysses? Johnson created his own, lonely avant-garde in books like The Unfortunates, which he presented as twenty-seven separately bound sections shuffled in a box, and Albert Angelo, in which he cut a hole through two pages so readers could see through to an event later in the story and broke in on page 161 with an authorial howl, “OH, FUCK ALL THIS LYING.”

  February 6

  BORN: 1898 Melvin Tolson (Harlem Gallery, Dark Symphony), Moberly, Mo.

  1955 Michael Pollan (The Omnivore’s Dilemma), Long Island, N.Y.

  DIED: 1989 Barbara W. Tuchman (The Guns of August, The First Salute), 77, Greenwich, Conn.

  1994 Jack Kirby (Fantastic Four, X-Men), 76, Thousand Oaks, Calif.

  1853 According to his first biographer, February 1853 was a momentous time for Horatio Alger Jr. Living in Paris, the timid Harvard grad was introduced to the sinful pleasures of the body by a plump café chanteuse named Elise. “I was a fool to have waited so long,” he told his diary on the 4th, and on this day he added, “She says she knows I wanted to.” But in truth there was no diary, no Elise, and no trip to Paris: his French initiation, like nearly everything else in Alger: A Biography Without a Hero, was concocted by its author, Herbert R. Mayes, in 1927. Mayes planned the book as a spoof, but he kept quiet as it was taken seriously by reviewers and became the authoritative source on the life of the once-popular master of juvenile uplift stories. Only fifty years later did he confess, as Gary Scharnhorst and Jack Bales detailed in their own Alger biography, that he had invented almost everything in what he called a “miserable, maudlin piece of claptrap.”

  1910 Writing was rarely easy for Joseph Conrad, and his health was often poor, but his struggles with both peaked with the novel he called Razumov (after its main character) until settling on Under Western Eyes. In December 1908 he told his agent the novel was complete, but a year later, with the book still not done, the agent threatened to stop the weekly £6
checks he sent the heavily indebted author. Furious, Conrad submitted the full manuscript in late January and immediately broke down, overcome by a nervous breakdown and his chronic gout. By this day, his wife, Jessie, wrote to friends, “he lives mixed up in the scenes and holds converse with the characters.” The novel’s sales did little to relieve his debt; not until his next book, Chance, did he find the success and relative security he had struggled toward for years.

  1964 Ralph Ellison, in the New York Review of Books, on LeRoi Jones’s Blues People: “The tremendous burden of sociology which Jones would place upon this body of music is enough to give even the blues the blues.”

  February 7

  BORN: 1812 Charles Dickens (David Copperfield, Dombey and Son), Landport, England

  1932 Gay Talese (Honor Thy Father, Thy Neighbor’s Wife), Ocean City, N.J.

  DIED: 1958 Betty MacDonald (The Egg and I, Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle), 49, Seattle

  1995 James Merrill (The Changing Light at Sandover), 68, Tucson, Ariz.

  1584 Someone must have denounced Domenico Scandella to the authorities, because he was arrested by the Holy Office and on this day was interrogated by the Inquisition for his blasphemy. Scandella was just a poor miller of fifty-two, but he had long been known in his town for the scandalous, self-taught ideas he’d argue to anyone who’d listen, among them that the Virgin Mary could not have been a virgin and that the earth had formed out of a mass of chaos like cheese out of milk, after which “worms appeared in it, and these were the angels.” The records of his interrogations and of the trial fifteen years later that resulted in his execution provided Carlo Ginzburg a rare chance, in his influential and entertaining microhistory The Cheese and the Worms, to piece together one of the lower-class lives that were often unrecorded and largely untouched by the Renaissance.

  1968 At the center of Michael Herr’s Dispatches, his immersed, anguished, and stylish book about the Vietnam War, is a long chapter called “Khe Sanh.” Khe Sanh was a combat base in the mountains near the border with Laos, an outpost, surrounded by North Vietnamese, that grew in strategic importance as the war continued until, in Herr’s words, it “became like the planted jar in Wallace Stevens’ poem. It took dominion everywhere.” For some time the feeling of an uneasy, bunkered truce held there, while reporters like Herr read The Battle of Dienbienphu and Hell in a Very Small Place to prepare for the siege they expected, but on this day the mood got darker. A nearby Special Forces camp called Langvei had been overrun, with “weapons and tactics which no one imagined” the North Vietnamese had. And now all Khe Sanh was consumed by the terrible thought: “Jesus, they had tanks. Tanks!”

  1980 A basketball fan with a hazy sense of NBA history, when told that one of the great basketball books was written about a season with the late-’70s Portland Trailblazers, might assume that David Halberstam’s The Breaks of the Game is about the Blazers’ 1977 championship team. But it isn’t, or rather it’s about that team three years later, as they succumbed to the entropic forces of injury, age, success, and the business of professional basketball, which all came to a head on one late-season road trip to San Diego, when two of the title team’s stalwarts, Maurice Lucas and Lionel Hollins, were traded away as the Blazers prepared to play against their former star, Bill Walton, hobbled himself by a broken foot. “We were pretty good once, weren’t we, Bill?” Hollins asked Walton after the trades. “Yeah,” Walton replied. “We were pretty good.”

  February 8

  BORN: 1850 Kate Chopin (The Awakening, Bayou Folk), St. Louis

  1955 John Grisham (The Firm, The Client, A Time to Kill), Jonesboro, Ark.

  DIED: 1998 Halldór Laxness (Independent People), 95, Reykjavik, Iceland

  1999 Iris Murdoch (Under the Net, The Black Prince), 79, Oxfordshire, England

  1918 Taking its name from a handful of short-lived Civil War newspapers, The Stars and Stripes was founded by the American Expeditionary Force in World War I France as a paper written by soldiers for soldiers. Among the shoestring editorial staff were Captain Franklin P. Adams, already a famous humor columnist stateside, and the young Private Harold Ross, who would found The New Yorker seven years later. Joining them soon after was the unlikely figure of Sergeant Alexander Woollcott, a plump drama critic who for years afterward would dine out at New York’s Algonquin Round Table on tales of his reporting exploits in “the theater of war.”

  1926 Fiction doesn’t get more speculative than “How Much Shall We Bet?,” a tale in Cosmicomics, Italo Calvino’s collection of scientific fables, in which two proto-beings, Qfwfq and his old friend (k)yK, gamble idly on the universe as it develops. From the most basic of wagers—will matter condense into atoms?—Qfwfq progresses, out of boredom and curiosity, toward recklessly arcane predictions set billions of years in the future: the winner of an Arsenal vs. Real Madrid match, a treaty between Turkey and Japan, and, most poignantly, the sort of question that novelists have to decide every day: “On February 8, 1926, at Santhià, in the Province of Vercelli . . . Signorina Giuseppina Pensotti, aged twenty-two, leaves her home at quarter to six in the afternoon: does she turn right or left?”

  1946 Married and ambitious, Kenneth and Margaret Millar worked closely together on their writing, trading ideas and edits, but by early 1946 Margaret had six mystery novels to her name while Kenneth, detoured by grad school and the navy, had just one. When Margaret’s sixth, The Iron Gates, became a bestseller and sold to the movies, he wrote anxiously from his ship to the new family breadwinner, chafing at being a “complacent gigolo”: “Don’t you see that a man whose wife makes more money than he . . . is in a difficult dilemma?” She signed her testy reply “Margaret Millar,” emphasizing the pronunciation she would use from then on to differentiate her name from that of her husband, who soon found his own success under a completely different pen name, Ross Macdonald.

  1958 Introducing herself as “the author of a three act dramatic play on Negro family life,” twenty-seven-year-old Lorraine Hansberry wrote Langston Hughes for permission to use a phrase of his for her title, A Raisin in the Sun.

  February 9

  BORN: 1940 J. M. Coetzee (Waiting for the Barbarians, Disgrace), Cape Town, South Africa

  1944 Alice Walker (The Color Purple, Meridian), Eatonton, Ga.

  DIED: 1906 Paul Laurence Dunbar (Lyrics of Lowly Life), 33, Dayton, Ohio

  1979 Allen Tate (Collected Poems, Stonewall Jackson), 79, Nashville, Tenn.

  1878 After showing a deficit in his accounts for more than a decade, Harper’s sent notice to Herman Melville that thanks to sales of 190 copies of his novels in the past year they now owed him $64.38 in royalties.

  1879 Rather than send his older brother Orion a letter his wife thought was too cruel, Samuel Clemens sent it to William Dean Howells instead, with the command, “You must put him in a book or a play right away.” Exasperated and fascinated by his brother’s improvident restlessness—Orion had passed through five religions as well as atheism, worked at newspapering, chicken farming, lawyering, and cross-country lecturing as “Mark Twain’s Brother,” and now asked for a raise in the $500 annual pension Clemens was giving him—Clemens professed to Orion his “ineradicable faith in your unsteadfastness.”

  1927 “Having no longer, I think, any claims to beauty,” Virginia Woolf had her hair “shingled,” that is, cut. “In front there is no change; behind I’m like the rump of a partridge.”

  1976 When John Edgar Wideman learned his younger brother Robby was wanted for murder and armed robbery, “the distance I’d put between my brother’s world and mine,” he wrote, “suddenly collapsed.” After three months Robby’s fugitive whereabouts were still unknown, but Wideman, whose career as a Rhodes scholar, novelist, and professor had brought him from the Homewood neighborhood of Pittsburgh to the University of Wyoming, felt sure his brother was approaching, and on this day he wrote Robby a long unmailed letter, sensing his presence “just over my shoulder.” Two days later, his brother called from a Laramie bowling alley and Wideman
drove down in his Volvo to pick him up for his last night of freedom. Afterward, as Robby began a life sentence for murder, Wideman expanded his letter into Brothers and Keepers, a memoir in dialogue of their parallel lives.

  1977 “Eva, my love, it’s over,” Stieg Larsson wrote his girlfriend, Eva Gabrielsson. “As I leave for Africa, I’m aware of what’s waiting for me . . . I think this trip might lead to my death.” At twenty-two Larsson, a science fiction fanzine editor and Trotskyite, was setting out for Africa, where he would put his Swedish national service training to use by teaching a group of female guerrilla fighters in the Eritrean People’s Liberation Front to fire mortars in their independence struggle against Ethiopia. Certain he’d die there, he made out the only will of his life before leaving, a will that, at his death twenty-seven years later with his Millennium Trilogy yet to be published, left Gabrielsson, still his girlfriend, without control of his estate, his works, or even their shared apartment.

  February 10

  BORN: 1898 Bertolt Brecht (The Threepenny Opera, Life of Galileo), Augsburg, Germany

  1930 E. L. Konigsburg (From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler), New York City

  DIED: 1957 Laura Ingalls Wilder (Little House in the Big Woods), 90, Mansfield, Mo.

  1992 Alex Haley (Roots, The Autobiography of Malcolm X), 70, Seattle

  1828 Mrs. Frances Trollope’s disappointment with her adopted home of Cincinnati, where she and three of her children arrived on this day (her youngest son, the future novelist Anthony, stayed in England), became one of the scandals of the century. The raw frontier town had been advertised to her as a “wonder of the West,” but for two heavily indebted years she struggled to build a glamorous department store there. Only after she returned to England did she make her fortune with Domestic Manners of the Americans, a sharp-tongued and coolly observant bestseller both in England and in the United States, where “the more it was abused the more rapidly did the printers issue new editions.”