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

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...

December 14

1882... William's letter is as accepting of death ("If you go, it will not be an inharmonious thing") as his father, who welcomed it, and touchingly Jamesian in its combination of affections and analysis: "It comes strangely over me in bidding you good bye, how a life is but a day and expresses mainly but a single note—it is so much like the act of bidding an ordinary good night..

December 13

1908 ..."I do think it is impossible for you to work so hard and yet have your gifts mature as they should," she wrote. "Your vivid, exciting companionship in the office must not be your audience, you must find your own quiet centre of life. "She stuck a nerve: Cather replied quickly, confessing her fear that she remained a beginner at writing fiction,...

December 12

1775 Gilbert Whites...but he had an eye for human behaviour as well, as on this day, when he described an "idiot-boy" in the in the village who thought and cared only about bees, or, rather, their honey. He'd spend the winter torpid like his quarry , but in the summer he would take the bees bare-handed, "dosa, them pf their weaons. and suck their bodies for the sake pf their honey-bags,"...

December 11

1920 ..Some thought the story of an aging courtesan and her young lover was vulgar, but others were won over, often to their surprise, including the novelist André Gide. "I am myself completely astonished to be writing to you, completely astonished by the great pleasure I've had in reading you," he confessed to her on this day. "I already want to reread it, and I'm afraid to. Suppose I like it less?...

December 10

1513 ...On the threshold I take off my workday clothes, covered with mud and dirt, and put on the garments of our and palace. Fitted out appropriately, I step inside the venerable courts of the ancients...ad for four hours at a time I feel no boredom, I forget all my troubles, I do not dread poverty, and I am not terrified by death."

December 9

1825 ... Before he was twenty—not even old enough to take out a loan by himself—young Disraeli got caught up in the English mania for South American mining investments that finally collapse at the end of 1825, with four London banks failing on this day. Saddled with a debt it took him decades to repay, Disraeli turned to fiction, publishing Vivian Grey the following year, ...

December 8

1888 ...The struggles were Hamman's own, but unlike the novel's narrator, Hamsun found his life immediately transformed when the first fragment of Hunger appeared in a Danish journal. While fielding offers from publishers and seeing himself compared to Dostoyevsky, Hamsun on tis day warmly thanked one publisher for an advance of 200 kroner, recalling the madness of his poverty in the words above...

December 7

1976 It's among the most familiar tales of discovery in American literature, and among the most inspiring to the unpublished (though few would want to emulate its sad path to success): Mrs. Thelma Toole, who had been unable ty phone to convince Walker Percy to read the novel left behind by her son after his suicide, arrived in a limousine at Percy's Loyola University office with a box full of smudged...

December 6

1885 Clover Adams... (Her sharp wit also caused her to be suspected as the author of Adam's scandalous Washington satire, Democracy.) But she has become best known as a literary absence: after she killed herself following months of harrowing depression after the death of her father, her mourning husband burned all her letters to him and is said to have never spoken her name again...

December 5

1890 ...The subject of his next novel, New Grub Street, was one he knew well, the degrading poverty of the scribblers on the edges of commercial literary life, and on the same day he wrote the final page of the book he also noted in his diary an invitation to a respectable dinner party: "Of course I must refuse. I have sold my dress-suit, so that I couldn't go, even if I had no other reason....

December 4

17- ... Throughout the novel Valmont and Merteuil have played their amoral, amorous games of manipulation on others, but now they are left to face each other, The Marquise, valuing her self-made independence from such entanglements, tries to put off Valmont, but he won't have it any longer. It's either yes or no, love or hate, peace or war, he demands. "Very well, then," she replies. "War!"

December 3

1926 Late on this evening, the young novelist Agatha Christie left her country home without explanation. The discovery of her abandoned car five miles away the next morning made her disappearance the talk of England, drawing thousands, including Arthur Conan Doyle and Dorothy Sayers, to search for her body before she was finally discovered residing under a pseudonym at a luxury spa,...

December 2

1865 At the end of the Battle of Austerlitz, and the close of book three of War and Peace, Prince Andrei lies unconscious, left to die from his wounds, Napoleon himself makes a cameo appearance, remarking, "That's a fine death!" Hearing him, Andrei finds the little emperor, until now his hero, suddenly insignificant compared to the beauty of the "lofty and everlasting sky" he has just glimpsed...

December 1

1825 Setting out for St. Petersburg after the death of the tsar, Alexander Pushkin was saved fro joining th doomed Decembrist uprising when he took a pack of hares running across the path of his carriage as an omen of bad luck and returned back.

November 30

1951 ... While visiting with acquaintances from New York, including the aristocratic Brazilian name Lola de Macedo Soares, something, possibly a cashew, caused Bishop's face to swell so much she couldn't see—‚"I didn't know one could swell so much"—and as Lota nursed her back to health, they fell in love. Soon bishop acquired a toucan, moved into a writing studio Lota built near her country house...

November 29

1921...Hammett liked to say his career ended on this day with the cracking of the Sonoma gold-specie case, in which a quarter of a million dollars in gold coins disappeared from the strongroom of a Pacific freighter. Set for a cushy undercover job investigating the theft on the ship's return trip to Hawaii and Australia, he cost himself a free trip across the Pacific when he discovered the coins...

November 28

1928 At twenty-one, with her mother dead and her father dying, Virginia Woolf had written in her diary, "If your father & mother die you have lost something that the longest life can never bring again." A quarter century later, though, she was ruthlessly grateful that at least her father, Leslie Stephen, was gone. On his birthday this day, she noted he could still have been alive...

November 27

1886... And so they proceed to the dunes and mark ten paces , and so the shots ring out, and so Effi proceeds to her own inexorable, socially decreed doom. But things turned out differently for the real-life Effi. Fontane based the novel, which made him a belated success at age seventy-five, on a well-known case that ended in a similar duel on this day, but the object of that duel,...

November 26

1791... The author was Jane Austen, age fifteen, and her History, written for the pleasure of her family, summed up two and a half centuries of British rulers with a breezy impertinence promised by her opening line, "Henry the 4th ascended the throne of England much to his own satisfaction in the year 1399, after having prevailed on his cousin and predecessor Richard the 2d, to resign it to him,...

November 25

1889 After two editors rejected his new novel called Too Late, Beloved! as morally unsuitable, Thomas Hardy tried a third, Mowbrey Morris at Macmillan's Magazine, who turned it down too, "You use the word succulent more than once," Morris replied. "Perhaps I might say that the general impression left on me by reading your story—so far as it is gone—is one of rather too much succulence."..

November 24

1903 Just before midday, a well-dressed man who gave his name as George F. Robinson presented himself at the offices of the Bank of England and asked of rthe governor of the bank. Brought instead to the bank secretary, Kenneth Grahame (known then, until The Wind in the Willows came out five years later, as the author of The Golden Age, whose admirers included Theodore Roosevelt),...

November 23

1859 On the day before its publication, George Eliot began reading Darwin's On the Origin of Species. "Not impressive," she recorded at first, although two days late she realized the book "makes an epoch."

November 22

1907 ...Duke Wolff is the main character in..., Geoffrey Wolff's The Duke of Deception, and a supporting character in another, Tobias Wolff's This Boys Life, but in both cases—the books are memoirs—the inventing was done not by the authors, Duke's two sons, but by the Duke himself, who claimed to have graduated from Yale and the Sorbonne, piloted test planes, and parachuted into Normandy.

November 21

1811...The two spent their final moments drinking coffee and rum and chasing each other like children, after writing letters of reconciliation and explanation to family and friends, assuring them that their souls were about to ascent "like two joyous balloonists" and making arrangements for their death, including, in Vogel's case, ordering a commemorative cup for her husband's Christmas present...

November 20

1942 ... But however much Hemingway was prone to self-mythology, when he took his thirty-eight-foot sport fishing boat, the Pilar (named after a character in For Whom The Bell tolls), out of Havana harbor in search of German U-boats for the first time on this day with a crew of five and an insufficient arsenal of guns and grenades, they were not just playing at war. ..

November 19

1849 Søren Kierkegaard's ending of his engagement with Regine Olsen was on of the great literary breakups. Kierkegaard certainly thought so: having renounced their mutual passion on this day in favor of his vocation for writing and for God, he kept his thoughts of her aflame in his philosophical works for the rest of his life, while she, heartbroken, married another. ..