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

January 12

1926 ... 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 hear of the hurricane in New York, she wired back a single word, "Well"

January 11

...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 injuries 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.

January 10

1846 ... especially wounded by caricatures in the paper that depicted him as a hunch-backed eccentric who had the cuffs of his trousers cut at different lengths as a s 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.

January 9

1873 ...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 penalty, he puts it all quietly aside,—quietly declining offers of money for special services,—quietly retuning money which has been thrust into his pockets behind his back."

January 8

1938 At the age of thirty-eight, with his father nearing death, Jorge Luis Borges began his first full-time job, as an assistant at a remote branch of the Buenos Aires Municipal Library. Told by his colleagues to slow his cataloguing of the library's paltry holdings or else they'd all be out of a job, he limited his work to an hour a day and spent the remainder reading and writing while his co-workers...

January 7

1938 Stabbed by an unknown assailant on a Paris street just after midnight, Samuel Beckett woke in the hospital to see his concerned employer, James Joyce, who soon brought him a reading lamp and paid for a private room for his recovery,

January 6

1952 Amos Oz ends A Tale of Love and Darkness, his memoir of his youth in the early days of Israel, with the event the book has been circling around: his mother's suicide, when she was thirty-eight and Oz was twelve. Worn down by sadness and insomnia while visiting her sister, she spent he day walking the cold and rainy streets of Tel Aviv following her doctor's prescription...

January 5

1895 Too nervous to attend the opening night of his own play, Buy Domville, Henry James, who had spent five years attempting to conquer the London stage, distracted himself by going instead to Oscar Wilde's latest success, An Ideal Husband. Returning in time to witness his play's final lines, he missed one hostile exchange—when his hero lamented, "I'm the last, mu lord, of the Danville's!" ...

January 4

1946 After a four-day bender with his second wife, Margery Bonner, in Cuernavaca, Mexico, the site of the alcohol-soaked dissolution of his first marriage, Malcolm Lowry noticed—and hoped his wife wouldn't—a tree in the Borda Garden carved with the message "Jan and Malcolm December 1936—Remember me."

January 3

1889 ...And on this day, just after the turn of the year, he collapsed in Turin, putting his arms—as the stories say, and they seem to be true—around a mistreated workhorse and falling unconscious in the street. It was the letters he wrote to friends the next day, speaking delusions far beyond his earlier grandeur, that brought them to Turin to place him in the psychiatric care under which he spent...

January 2

1995 ...To the real-life story of Cuban inmates tunneling twenty-five yards under the prison chapel, Leonard added the characters of Jack Foley, a recidivist bank robber with even more than the usual Leonard cool who tags along with the Cubans on the way out, and Karen Sisco, a U.A. Marshal who soon discovers her weak spot for charming bank robbers. Two years later George Clooney and Jennifer Lopez...

January 1

1926 Isaac Babel confessed to his diary that he hadn't :done a thing as far as serious literature goes for about ten months, but have simply been having around in Moscow in search of big payoffs."

December 31

1908 Invited to a New Year's party at Max Brod's, Franz Kafka told him he'd rather stay home and read Flaubert's Temptation of St. Anthony.

December 30

1935 The legend of Antoine de Saint-Exupéry the aviator was built on his failures...A month afterward he began a series of newspaper articles on the crash and his trek through the desert for survival that became Wind, Sand, and Stars, an acclaimed bestseller in France and the United States. And in 1942, living unhappily by then in New York, he was once again inspired by the idea of an aviator stranded...

December 29

1913 It's stiff upper-lip bravado has made it the subject of T-shirts as well as the first entry in Julian Watkins's 100 Greatest Adverstiments, but it may be too good to be true that polar explorer Ernest Shackleton ever ran a classified ad reading, "MEN WANTED for hazardous journey. Smal wages, bitter cold, long months of complete darkness, constant danger, safe return doubtful.

December 28

NO YEAR Everything is orderly and comfortable in the dutch home of Kees Popinga, the head manager for a prosperous ship's outfitters, until by chance on this winter evening he discovers that the firm is bankrupt and its owner is fleeing in ruin, With chaos seeping into his tidy life, Kees suddenly decides to break it open entirely, setting out on a greedily debauched course across Europe that begins...

December 27

1817 ...Shakespeare had it, Keats added, but Coleridge, "incapable of remaining content with half knowledge," didn't, and neither did Keats's obstinate friend Charles Wentworth Dilke. A walk with Dilke, in fact, had inspired Keats's insight: "pleasant" though Dilke might be, he was someone, as Keats summed him up elsewhere, "who cannot feel he has a personal identity unless he has made his mind up...

December 26

1915 Planning to spend Boxing Day with her fiancé,...Vera Brittain...learned instead that he had died... But the time the armistice arrived, Britain would also get news of the deaths in the war of her brother, Edward,, and his and Roland's two closest friends, the loss of a generation that became the centrepiece of her memoir Testament of Youth, a bestseller at the time and a wartime classic ever since.

December 25

NO YEAR ... Rock Crystal, Adalbert Stifter's 1845 novella, is a Christmas tale of sparkling simplicity, in which a small brother and sister find their familiar path home made strange and spend a wakeful night in an ice cave on a glacier as the Northern Lights—which the girl takes as a visit from the Holy Child—flood the dark skies above them.

December 24

NO YEAR Great Expectations...Out of fear and kindness, Pip sneaks the man a hearty Christmas breakfast the next morning, an act of mercy that the convict, arrested again the next day an transported to Australia, remembers well when he makes his fortune abroad, only revealing his true name to Pip when he returns to England a wealthy though haunted man.

December 23

1951 Two months later, after she had forgotten about the contest, the editor of the Observer arrived at her flat early this morning with the paper containing her story, "The Seraph and the Zambezi," and the news that she had bested 7,000 competitors to win the prize. Set in a fiercely hot Christmas season in Southern Africa, where Spark had once lived, the story convinced the paper's editors...

December 22

1849...Only after the first three men were tied to stakes and the rifles aimed—with Dostoyevsky next in line for execution—did an aide to Nicholas I arrive with a reprieve, completing the bit of theatre the tsar had planned a month before for these members of a secret society who had been arrested for reading and discussing forbidden literature. Dostoyevsky, twenty-eight and with just a handful of...

December 21

1872 After all, the dispatches ended just when the journey does, December 22, 1872, with the travellers arrival in London just after the deadline for Fogg's £20,000 wager. Or are they late after all? As Passepartout realizes in the nick of time, because they traveled east across the International Date Line, the day they believed was the 22nd was actually the 21st, ...

December 20

1998 Mary Gordon, in the New York Times, on John Bayley's Elegy for Iris: "Its dominant notes are humility, modesty, patience and humour. The heroism is all the more admirable for its reluctance to acknowledge that heroism might be defined in such terms.

December 19

1931 Eric Blair... 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.

December 18

1679 ...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 th time of syphilis, gonorrhoea, and/or alcoholism, may have sought revenge for Dryden's satirical jabs, which themselves were payment for Rochester once calling...

December 17

1920 Anzia Yezierska...wrote to her editor at Houghton Mifflin on this day to let him know that she had been offered $10,000 for the ilm rights to the book, dwarfing the $200 advance 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...

December 16

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."...

December 15

1850 ...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...