Status Updates From A Reader's Book of Days: Tr...

March 9

1864 .confrontation in the waters off San Francisco between Confederate and Russian ships that, truth be told, feels more like a foggy Gulf of Tonkin moment than a real Fort Sumter exchange. And what was the extent of the martyrdom of Peter Pinguid, the Confederate commander? No, he wasn't lost at sea. He endured a more Pynchonian fate: he left the service and made a fortune speculating in L.A. real estate.

March 8

1914 From childhood, Fernando Pessoa wrote in a chorus of different voices, each with a separate name and identity, but one day in Lisbon—he later called it "the triumphal day of my life"_those voice seemed to take over "in a sort of ecstasy whose nature I could not define." Standing at the chest of drawers where he liked to write, he poured out thirty or more poems under the names Alberto Caeiro,...

March 7

1919 Back home in Illinois from the European war, glad to show off his leg full of shrapnel And expecting that the pretty nurse he'd fallen in love with in a Milan hospital would be joining him stateside, Ernest Hemingway received a letter written on this day telling him otherwise. Turning "Kid", her pet name for her young soldier—she called herself "Mrs. Kid"—into a patronizing pat on the head...

March 6

1831 Cadet Edgar Allan Poe was expelled from West Point for "gross neglect of duty" and :disobedience of orders."

March 5

1807 Arrested as a Prussian spy by the French while traveling through Berlin, Heinrich von Kleist was imprisoned in the granite dungeon in the Fort de Joux, the same prison where the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture died four years before.

March 4

1857 Young Samuel Clemens thought a lot about the romance of piloting a Mississippi steamboat, but not much about its difficulty: "I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it was so mid." But when on this afternoon in the crowded waters along the lever at New Orleans, the pilot of the Colonel Crossmand said...

March 3

1900 W. L. Alden, in the New York Times: "The other day I read Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,' which was published in Blackwood's Magazine. Good Heavens! How that man can write! The scene of the story is laid on the Congo, and in truth there is very little story to it, but how it grips and holds one!"

March 2

1936 Samuel Beckett, unsure of his career path, applied to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Moscow State School of Cinematography. (He never heard back.)

March 1

1937 "He's my enemy," Jane Auer told a friend after first meeting Paul Bowl3s in the lobby of New York's Plaza Hotel. Despite (or because of) this strong reaction, the next time they met she invited herself along on Bowles's impromptu trip to Mexico and immediately caller her mother, who said to Bowles, "If my daughter is going to Mexico with you, I think I should meet you first, don't you think?"

February 29

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 ay, sovereigns or no, especially when the stranger reveals that his head is thoroughly bandaged...

February 28

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

February 27

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.

February 26

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.

February 25

1830 ... 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.

February 24

1950 ...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...

February 23

1942 Unlike some of his fellow Jewish writers, Stefan Zweig had stayed well ahead of the Nazis. In 1934, the most translated author in Europe at the time, he left Austria for London, and in 1940, with Germany moving across Europe, Zweig, calling his occupation "formerly writer, now expert in visas," moved again with his wife, to New York and then Brazil.

February 22

1882 On this day was born Eric Gill, a singular artist the clarity of who works, in sculpture, ink, and type, was Brough forth from a life of contradiction and idiosyncratic conviction. Deeply religious and heretically hedonistic, Gill created for himself and his small community a life of work and worship and love and sex—including, as was revealed long after his death, incest with both his sisters...

February 21

1864 William James, having given up painting for medical school, wrote a friend, "I embraced the medical profession a couple of months ago. My first impressions are that there is much hum ug therein."

February 20

1843 Published: Enten—Eller [Either/Or] by Søren Kierkegaard (Reitzel, Copenhagen).

February 19

1895 The idea of university creative writing programs was still decades away when Frank Norris left the University of California to spend a year at Harvard, but in English 22, a two-semester course taught there by Lewis E. Gates, he found what the annual herds of MFA students are looking for. Writing open-ended weekly themes, Norris drafted the first pages of both Vandover and the Brute and...

February 18

1949 Flannery O'Connor was just twenty-three, with a few short stories accepted by magazines, but she knew what she wanted, and it wasn't being treated like "a slightly dim-witted Camp Fire Girl." That's how she thought John Selby, an editor at Rinehart, had addressed her when he told her that her resistance to criticism was "most unbecoming in a writer so young."

February 17

1903 Kappus was a nineteen-year-old student at a military academy in Vienna when he discovered that Rilke had preceded him, miserably, there. He sent Rilke some poems to critique, but in reply the poet—who was only twenty-seven himself-had less to say about how to write than how to live. Young poets have been looking within themselves and asking "Must I write?" ever since.

February 16

2946 V. S. Pritchett, in the New Statesman and Nation, on George Orwell's Critical Essays: "To say, for example, that Mr. Orwell's mind appears to be fixed in the boyish satisfactions and rebellions of 1910, tells us nothing about his quality. We all have to be fixed somewhere."

1941 J. D. Salinger embarked as a member of the entertainment staff of the SS Kungsholm, a Swedish American Line cruise ship.

February 14

1935 Samuel Beckett wrote to Tom McGeevy on Jane Austen, "Now I am reading the divine Jane. I think she has much to teach me,"

February 13

... A group or men versed in both the holy word and the worldly power struggles of the English Church, they met for the first time on this day in the Merton College rooms of the most worldly of them all, Sir Henry Savile, the only translator not to have taken holy orders and a true man of the Renaissance, as curious about mathematics and the unsettling ideas of Copernicus as he was about holy writ.

February 12

1976 The best of friends when they both lived in Barcelona during the "Boom" in Latin American fiction, Mario Vargas Llosa and Gabriel García Márquez had already begun to drift apart, thanks to both politics and personality, when they met in Mexico City at the premiere of Survivors of the Andes, a film of a Uruguayan plane crash (the same one recounted in Alive) for which Vargas Llosa had written...

February 11

1917 When Virginia Woolf, the patrician novelist still early in her public career, and Katherine Mansfield, a vulgar young New Zealander with an unsavoury reputation, finally met, their early encounters, at least on Woolf's side, were not auspicious: she wrote her sister on this day that Mansfield was "a forcible and utterly unscrupulous character"...

February 10

1879 Horse thief, bank robber, murderer, and national hero, Ned Kelly was hanged in Melbourne in his mid-twenties but lived on in Australia as a legged of bush rebellion against the colonial authorities, helped in part by a notorious letter he handed in to a small-town newspaper on this day after robbing the local bank.