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

November 17

2003 Of the thirty-seven courses in the eleven-hour lunch the novelist Jim Harrison shared with eleven fellow gourmands in France and later chronicled for The New Yorker, he declined only one: oysters and Camembert on toast, a combination that turns his tummy....

November 16

1865 ..."It is not enough," he wrote, "to be aggressively careless, inelegant, and ignorant, and to be constantly preoccupied swithyourself. It is not enough to be rude, lugubrious, and grim. You just also be serious. You must forget yourself in your ideas." Certainly the self-submerging James must have found Whitman's celebration of himself disconcerting, but he'd come to regret this review ...

November 15

1854.... It was bad enough that she had run off with Lewes, a skeptic of phrenology. But worse: how could a woman with "her brain," which Combe had once judged among the most impressive of any woman's he'd measured, have so degraded herself? He searched for an explanation, and in a later on this day he asked, is there "insanity in Miss Evan's family?"

November 14

1851 ...Is that Kerouac writing ecstatically to Ginsberg in the 1950s? No, it was Herman Melville gushing to Nathaniel Hawthorne a century before, replying to the letter—lost to history—Hawthorne sent him after he received his copy of Moby-Dick, the book Melville published on this day and dedicated to his new friend Hawthorne "in token of my admiration for his genius."

November 13

1797 ... but not before making a suggestion, involving the giant albatrosses he had read about in sailors' tales. "Suppose,' said I, 'you represent him as having killed ono of these birds on entering the South Sea, and that the tutelary Spirits of these regions take upon then to avenge the crime." After further walking and talking

November 12

1828...I have read Cooper's Last of the Mohicans, The Spy, The Pilot, and The Pioneers. If by any chance you have anything else of his, I beg you to leave it for me at the coffee-house with Frau von Bogner." It's not known if his request was granted—Europe was mad for James Fenimore Cooper in those days, and The Prairie and The Red Rover were translated into German...

November 11

NO YEAR ...Twenty years old when they met him—today is his birthday—and living "at the extreme verge of gentility" (with the anonymous abyss of poverty gaping on the other side), Leonard tries to improve himself by reading Ruskin and Ibsen, but for the Schlegel's he always seems less a man than a "cause", and when he dies in the entry hall of their house, smothered by their books, ...

November 10

NO YEAR ... Brown's novel, the first by an African American, opens with the sale at a slave auction on this day of Currer, once Jefferson's laundress, and her teenage daughters, Clotel and Althea, and nears its end, after each has succumbed to the savage caprices of slavery, with the matter-of-fact declaration, "Thus died Clotel, the daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States,...

November 9

NO YEAR ...Bbut on a rainy day in New York, humiliated by her desires the night before, she stumbles into a storefront church and, against her judgment, is consumed by the orgy of faith around her and —either lost or saved, she doesn't know—makes a choice that mires her into a life from which there's no escape. But which was the quicksand—the restless whirlpool of her earlier life...

November 8

1623 The booksellers Edward Blout and Isaac Haggard registered on this day at the Stationers' Company a new publication: "Master William Shakespeare Comedyes, Histories, and Tragedies." "As where (before) you were Abus'd with diverse stolen, and surreptitious copies, maimed, and deformed by the frauds and stealth's of injurious imposters," the editors promised, the plays "are now offer'd to your view...

November 7

1896 Eleven-year-old Ezra Pound published his first poem in the Jenkintown Times-Chronicle, a Limerick on the defeat of Willams Jennings Bryan by William McKinley that begins "There was a young man from the West."

November 6

1699 ... The men scatter ash his roar but, bravely, they soon return and what follows is a small miracle of cross-cultural communication, in which Gulliver and his captors, though they share no language, agree that he will not murder scores of them with the sweep of his giant hand and they, in return, will not torment him with the piercings of a thousand tiny arrows. The Lilliputians feed the giant...

November 5

NO YEAR The fires of Bonfire Night, lit across the Wessex heath, give a pagan glow to the opening and closing of Thomas Hardy's The Return of the Native. In the opening chapters, Eustacia Vye, the restless and bewitching "Queen of the Night," presides over the final bonfire of the evening, with which she hopes to draw a former lover, Dennis Wildeve, away from his marriage to another.

November 4

1911 The Athenaeum on Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson: "this is the wittiest and most amusing of extravaganzas."

November 3

1792 ... De Gourges transformed herself from a small-town butcher's daughter into a wealthy and sophisticated Parisian socialite, playwright, and political activist, culminating in her "Declaration of the Rights of Women," which, with pointed irony, exposed the absence of women in the French Revolution's doctrine of universal equality, the "Declaration of the Rights of Man."

November 2

1938 Malcolm and Jan Lowry arrived in Mexico for the first time on October 30, 1936, though Malcolm, superstitious, liked to say it was three days later, on the Day of the Dead. The new day Malcolm, whose alcoholism had already led him to check into Bellevue Hospital in New York in May, had his first test of mescal; by the middle of the month they had settled in the resort town of Cuernavaca...

November 1

1755 Would it be too much to say that the terrible earthquake and tsunami in Lisbon, which levelled one of the great cities of Europe and killed a fifth of its inhabitants, laid equal waste to European philosophy? Hundreds of writers attempted to make sense o the quake, including the young Immanuel Kant, who, unlike most, blamed the upheaval on geological forces rather than God...

October 31

1615 ...Cervantes, meanwhile, told advantage of being second by adding a scene in Don Quixote and Sancho Panza themselves mock the fake sequel. In the second book's dedication, written on this day, he mentioned "the loathing and disgust caused bh another Don Quixote," and in the book's preface he completed his revenge humbly declining to abuse his usurper, he instead told a tale of a madman...

1772 "At that moment, Goeth later wrote, "the plan of 'Werther' was formed...just as water in a vessel, which stands upon the point of freezing, is converted into hard ice by the most gentle shake." The Sorrows of Young Werther became the sensation of the Romantic age, sparking copycat suicides, a fashion for blue coats and yellow breeches, and, once word got out about its author's inspiration, pilgrimages...

October 30

1772 On October 29, Karl Wilhelm Jerusalem, a young German law student who favored a blue coat and yellow breeches and had developed an affection for the wife of a friend, shot himself; he died the next day. A few days later the news reached an acquaintance of his, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, who had been struggling to put his own flirtation with suicide into words after a similar unrequited love.

October 29

1692 Daniel Dafoe...His losses accumulated, however, and with the cats already seized for nonpayment, his creditors had him committed to the Fleet Prison with £17,000 in debts. He negotiate with his creditors to secure his release, but for the rest of his life they hounded him for the debts, even after he left business behind for the new and more successful profession of authorship.

October 28

1910 At eighty-two, oppressed by the rivalry between his wife and his disciples and unhappy with the luxury in which the all lived, Leo Tolstoy stole away from his rural estate in the darkness of the early morning , leaving a note to his wife, Sophia, asking "to live the last days of my life in peace and solitude."

October 27

A short visit back to Dublin from Trieste made James Joyce eager to return to exile: "I feel proud to think that my son...will always be a foreigner in Ireland, a man seeking another language and bred in a different tradition. I loath Ireland and the Irish. They themselves stare at me in the street though I was born among them. Perhaps they read my hatred of them in my eyes."

October 26

1849 When the time came for Flaubert to set off with his friend Maxime Du Camp for his long-imagined trip to Greece and Egypt, he nearly balked at the idea of leaving his mother for the two-year journey. The day they parted was "atrocious," " the worst I have ever spent"; finally he just kissed her and dashed away, listening to her screams from behind the door he shut behind him...

October 25

1859 George Eliot read Balzac's Père Griot, "a hateful book."

October 24

1911 ... At first the Leipzig teens planned that the one whose writing was judged inferior (by a third party) would be shot, but then they decided instead to stage a suicide pact as if it were a duel over a girl. Ditzen survived the shots, Neker didn't, and on this day Ditzen was arrested for murder. The charges were dropped, but the scandal was still fresh enough that when he published his first novel...