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

May 7

1911 ...Camus had begun the wr as a declared pacifist and open its first years working on his novels The Stranger and The Plague while considering returning to Algeria, but late in 1943 he committee himself to staying in German-occupied Paris and joined the newspaper of the Resistance, Combat, as a writer and editor.

May 6

1850 Emily Dickinson— "I heard a well-known rap," she wrote a teenage confidant, "and a friend I love so dearly came and asked me to ride in the woods, the sweet still woods, and I want to exceedingly—I told him I could not go, and he said he was disappointed, he wanted me very much." She conquered her tears, calling it "a kind of helpless victory," and returned to her work, "humming a little air" ...

May t

1593 ...The poem's authors are unknown, but they were surely playgoers: the poem was signed "Tamberlaine," the murderous hero of one Christopher Marlowe play, and it alluded to two of his other violent dramas: The Jew of Malta and The Massacre of Paris. The quarters of playwright Thomas Kyd were searched, but they turned up evidence of a different crime: atheist papers that Kyd, under torture, ...

May 4

1852...Alice Liddell. She was ten when Charles Dodgson first told the story to the Liddell sisters on a rowboat, thirteen when he published Alice's Adventures in Wonderland under the name Lewis Carroll, and nineteen when its sequel, Through the Looking-Glass appeared, which included the acrostic poem that spells out "Alice Pleasance Liddell."

May 3

1810 ... Following the Greek myth of the youth Leander who swam every night to his lover, Hero, across the Hellespont, the strait dividing Europe from Asia, Byron and a ship's lieutenant attempted the crossing themselves. Driven back once by cold and current, they tried again a week later and made the four-mile crossing in a little more than an hour, an achievement he celebrated in a short poem...

May 2

1970 ...He and his bearded British illustrator, Ralph Steadman, along for the ride for the first time, managed to miss, more or less, both the race itself and whatever crowd violence there was (the violence seemed mainly to be in Thompson's head), but his scabrous report,
"The Kentucky Derby Is Decadent and Depraved," published in the short-lived Scanlan's Monthly,...

May 1

1908 About to give his "The Poet of Democracy" lecture to a local literary society in Appleton, Wisconsin, Carl Sandburg confessed, "A sort of devilry possesses me at times among these—to talk their slangiest slang, speak their homely, beautiful home-speech about all the common things—suddenly rub a knife into they snobbery—then swing out into a crag-land of granite and azure where they can't follow...

April 30

...Julian finds her black mourning gown flattering, and soon, encouraged by his own romantic imitation of Napoleon, they fall for each other. Later in their story, the legend that La Mole's severed head was buried by his lover (herself the subject of Alexandre Dumas's La Reine Margot) will have its ironic echo.

April 29

1863 and 1933 ... For over 30 years he worked as a clerk in the Irrigation Office of the Ministry of Public Works, while living , like Borges, with his mother, pursuing an active, though secret, homosexual life, and writing poems that, over time, found a voice of distilled irony to express his passions for the vanished byways of classical Greece and the beauty of men.

April 28

1937 Sherwood Anderson watched from the stands at the Polo Grounds as the Dodgers, behind Van Lingle Mungo, topped the Giants, 3—2.

April 27

1934 ... Allen was immediately interested but, as Peterson told it, tested Peterson's illustrations by asking a Harvard ornithologist to identify the pictured birds from the other end of a long conference table. The paintings passed the test, and Peterson's Field Guide to the Birds was published on this day in the following year. The first printing of 2,000 copies sold out in a week...

April 26

1336...The fame of his adventure rests on an account he claimed to have written the night of his descent: full of earthly pleasure at the view from the 1,912-meter summit, he opened his pocket copy of St. Augustine's Confessions and was chastened and exalted by the passage he turned to by chance: ...

April 25

387 ... To that point Augustine's path had taken him through sin and spiritual yearning to the moment when he saw the light in a garden in Milan; a year later that serene vision of his sins absolved was granted by his baptism in the same city. The Confessions still has four books remaining at that point, but the confession is over: the rest is less about Augustine the man the about his God.

April 24

1895 "I have resolved on a voyage around the world, and as the wind on the morning of April 24, 1895 was fair, at noon I weighted anchor, set sail, and filled away from Boston." Not far past the docks, Joshua Slocum, piloting the thirty-seven-foot sleep Spray alone, passed a steamship that had broken on the rocks and noted, "I was already farther on my voyage than she." Slocum sailed 46,000 more miles...

April 23

1374 ...Edward III,... granted Geoffrey Chaucer a pitcher of wine a day for life...It is not certain that the reward...was for poetry; some have connected it instead to his recent mission to Florence or his new position as controller of the Wool Custom. Whatever its cause, the impracticality of the gift was such that four yeas later Edward's successor, Richard II, turned it into a regular cash payment.

April 22

1910 One of Sigmund Freud's most famous—and favourite—patients was one he only knew from a book. Daniel Paul Schreber, a judge in Leipzig who had suffered a mental breakdown, wrote Memoirs of My Nervous Illness to argue (successfully) for release from his asylum in 1902; Freud was so intrigued by his account he jokingly wrote Carl Jung on this day that Schreber "should have been made a professor...

April 21

129... In Marguerite Youcernar's novel Memoirs of Hadrian, the emperor speaks with pride of the temple's dedication and of the "disk of daylight...suspended there like a shield of gold." As she mentions in her fascinating afternotes to the novel, Yourcenar visited the Pantheon herself on that same day of the year to check where the sunlight would fall.

April 20

1746 ...The nobleman offered him a ride home but suffered a stroke along the way, and Casanova, taking charge of his recovery and convincing him meanwhile that he was a master of the occult, made himself so useful that the nobleman—a Venetian senator, it turned out—adopted him as a son and "at one bound", as he recalled in his Story of My Life, raised him into the idle pleasures of the nobility.

April 19

1862 Lionel Tennyson, age eight, explained to a visitor to the household, Lewis Carroll, the conditions under which he would show Carroll some poems he had written: Carroll must play chess with him, and must allow Lionel to give him "one blow on th3 head with a mallet."

April 18

NO YEAR. ...In his intorduction to the Man of Law's Tale, for instance, the Host mentions the only specific date in the poem — "the eightetethe of Aprill"—and estimates that the latitude and the length of shadows that it is ten in the morning. Scholars ever since have speculated about the actual dates of this fictional pilgrimage, placing it anywhere from 1385 to 1394 and giving it any length from ...

April 17

1926 Experiencing "silent convulsions of joy" as his train from New York approached his ancestral home in Rhode Island, H.P. Lovecraft could hardly contain his "surges of ecstasy" at his arrival at "HOME—UNION STATION—PROVIDENCE!!!!" "There is no other place for me," he wrote. "My world is Providence."

April 16

1912 On a foggy night in London, only a day after news of the sinking of the Titanic, an odd and "quaint" figure surprised the editor of Nash's Magazine in his darkened office: Joseph Conrad, the novelist and former seaman, who was agitated at the blame quickly falling on the crew of the ship. Would they publish an article by him?...

April 15

1842 Charles Dickens, traveling in the American Midwest, called the Mississippi the "beastliest river in the world."

April 14

1824 ... Roused from his bed to meet the artist, Lawson told him his pictures "were ill drawn, not true to nature, and anatomically incorrect." When Audubon protested later, "Sir, I have been instructed seven years by the greatest masters in France," Lawson replied, "Then you have made damned bad use of your time."

April 13

1877 ... Guy de Maupassant placed an unsigned squib into the Rèpublique des lettres advertising a dinner... purée Bovary" and "Liqueur de l'Assommoir." The dinner place, at Paris's Restaurant Trapp; the menu, though was likely fictional, and of the young writers not two, J.K. Huysmans and, naturally, Maupassant himself, would achieve any lasting literary celebrity.

April 12

1802 ... of her beloved brother William's engagement to her dear friend Mary Hutchinson. The perennial fascination with discerning the boundaries of affection among poet, sister, and wife—they continued to share a household for nearly fifty years—has extended to the poem he wrote this same day, "Among all lovely things my Love had been": was the Love he spoke of meant of rhis fiancée, his sister, or both?