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

October 21

1967 "How do you make a good movie in this country without being jumped on?" The critical tide had already turned in favor of Bonnie and Clyde when on this day The New Yorker published Pauline Kael's 7,000-word defence of the movie, which began with the plea above. Lively and combative, Kael's review ended up being an audition for the regular reviewing gig she dept at the magazine for the next ...

October 20

1854 Not long after they honeymoon, Brontë's new husband, the Reverend Arthur Bell Nicholls, took hold of the reins of her correspondence, telling his wife that letters like hers, which comment so freely about their acquaintances, "are dangerous as lucifer matches." She must refrain from writing her opinions to her good friend Ellen Nussey, he declared, or Ellen must burn her letters after reading.

October 19

1908 ... —other side of the mountains. For the young novelist, given puzzling pieces of the story as a child, it was "the first incident from real life that stirred my writer's instincts," and one he was never "able to exorcise," even after he transformed it, in One Hundred Years of Solitude, into the moment when José Arcadio Buendía hurls a spear "with the strength of a bull" into the neck of his rival.

October 18

1917 Virginia Woolf, in the TLS, on Henry James's last memoir, The Middle Years: "He comes to his task with an indescribable air of one so charged and laden with precious stuff that he hardly knows how to divest himself of it all."

October 17

1945 ...the story Gardner later loved to tell, that he mocked her when he caught her reading Kathleen Winsor's bodice-ripping bestseller Forever Amber. No doubt Gardner liked to tell it because just a few days after Shaw divorced her, hr rushed down to Mexico, where Kathleen Winsor herself, sultry enough that some thought she should star in the movie of her own book, became Mrs. Artie Shaw number six.

October 16

1935 Dismissed on this day by the Nazi regime from his position at the University of Marburg because he was a Jew, Erich Auerbach arranged to resume his career in exile at Istanbul University, where he continued his labor on one of the monumental works of literary analysis. Mimesis, an imaginative and approachable multilingual survey of the literary representation of reality from Date to Virginia Wolfe.

October 15

1920 Katherine Mansfield, in the Athenaeum, on Gertrude Stein's Three Lives: "Miss Gertrude Stein has discovered a new way of writing stories. It is just to keep right on writing them. Don't mind how often you go back to the beginning, don't hesitate to say the same thing over and over again—people are always repeating themselves—don't be put off if the words sound funny at times: just keep right on, ...

October 14

1939 Ambitious and prolific, Thomas Merton spent his twenty-fifth summer with two friends in a cottage in upstate New York, each writing a novel he thought would make his name. Back in New York City in the fall, Merton got a publishers rejection slip for his novel on this day; when he called to ask why, they said it was dull and badly written, and Merton realized he agreed. But by that time his mind...

October 13

1926 "We have so many bedbugs," Isaac Babel wrote his mother from Moscow, "that it has b become. legend among the other dwellers in our apartment."

October 12

1713 ... Bay Colony Institute of Technological Arts, has been summoned back to Europe to mediate the supremely irrational dispute between the two inventors of the calculus and thereby rescue the path toward progress that Root promises, with Stephenson's usual brand of anachronistic cheek, will ultimately make Waterhouse's own institute a glorious campus dedicated to the "art of automatic computing."

October 11

1928 Arthur Sydney McDowell, in the TLS, on Virginia Woolf's Orlando: "It is a fantasy, impossible but delicious; existing in its own right by the colour of imagination and exuberance of life and wit."

October 10

19047 Fired as a publisher's assistant, William Styron reported to his father he was glad, since publishing is "only a counterfeit, a reflection, of really creative work."

October 9

1890 The trouble with fictional chronologies is that sometimes the math just doesn't add up. It sharpens our sense of Sherlock Holmes as a living presence to read such concrete details as the posted notice in one of his best-loved cases that "THE RED-HEADED LEAGUE IS DISSOLVED, October 9, 1890." The problem, though, as generations of Holmesians have debated, is the Mr. Jabez Wilson the red-headed dupe ...

October 8

1818 ...showed a resilient indifference in a letter to his publisher on this day. He was his now fiercest critic, after all: "My own domestic criticism has given me pain without comparison beyond what Blackwood or the Quarterly could possibly inflict." With his "slipshod Endymion," he added, he had :leaped headlong into the Sea, and thereby have become better acquainted with the Soundings,...

October 7

1924 Having finally read the manuscript of T.E. Lawrence's Seven Pillars of Wisdom after spending two years attempting to arrange its publication, George Bernard Shaw reprimanded the young soldier about his punctuation: "You practically do not use semicolons at all. This is a symptom of metal defectiveness, probably induced by camp life."

October 6

1536 ...by the Holy Roman Emperor. Tradition has it that this is the day he was strangled and burned to death, with the final words "Lord, open the King of England's eyes." Not long after, Henry VIII did indeed approve an English translation of the Bible, and when King James commissioned his own version in the next century, a majority of its words were taken from Tyndale's once-heretical translation.

October 5

1927 ... only with a change from one sex to another." She quickly gave herself up "to the pure delight of this farce," and then asked her subject's permission to write about "the lusts of your flea; and the lure of your mind." vita ws equally delighted: "What fun for you; what fun for m," she replied. "Yes, go ahead, toss up your pancake, brown it nicely on both sides, put Brandy over it, and serve hot."

October 4

1866 ... contracted novel until this day, less than a month before his deadline, when he finally engaged a young stenographer, Anna Grigorievna, to help him. He dictated the story of The Gambler to her every afternoon, turned in the manuscript two hours before the deadline, and then, when they net a week later to resume his work on Crime and Punishment, asked for Anna's hand in marriage, which she granted.

October 3

1918 It wasn't until he was thirty-seven, with four novels published and one, Maurice, written but kept secret because of the gay relationship at its heart, that E. M. Forster first had sex. Stationed in Egypt with the Red Cross during the war, he confessed in coded language to a friend, "Yesterday, for the first time in my life I parted with respectability. I have felt the step would be taken for many...

October 2

1830

... "Everything I see in him corresponds to his pamphlet on Biblical Cosmology." And when Mr. Casaubon, on making his goodbyes on this brisk day, alludes drily to his need for young companionship, Dorothea, glowing with the prospect of matrimony, prepares for an ill-fated decision that George Eliot is too good a novelist, and Middlemarch too great a move., to make the end of her story.

October 1

1888 L. Frank Baum opened Baum's Bazaar on Main Street in Aberdeen, South Dakota, offering housewares, toys, and the "latest novelties in Japanese Goods, Plush, Oxidized Brass and Leather Novelties." It failed a year later.

September 30

1934 In the apparently exhaustive list of the works of Pierre Menard enumerated by the narrator of Jorge Luis Borges's tale "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" there is at least one document missing: the letter that Menard wrote the narrator on this day explaining his masterpiece, his unfinished attempt to write Cervantes's Don Quixote—not merely to copy it but to write it himself word for word...

September 29

1929 Percy Hutchinson, in the New York Times, on Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms: "Mr. Hemingway's manner does not seem to be quite an enduring thing, any more than was Victoria heaviness enduring. But ... seldom has a literary style so precisely jumped with the time.'

September 28

1909 ...Curtiss the American, with his massive biplane, is here. And in the crowd, celebrities: D'Annunzio, Puccini, and, according to Guy Davenport's retelling of the same episode, Wittgenstein. Kafka's report in Bohemia on this day, "The Aeroplanes at Brescia," one of. his first published pieces, made him a pioneer of sorts too: the first in German literature to write about airplanes,

September 27

1960 Out of the invitation of the Soviet newspaper Izvestia to describe a single day in her life Christa Wolf made a life's obsession, returning every September 27 to record her day and thereby creating One Day a Year, a memoir accumulated from everyday moments lived amid the upheavals of history and the self-conscious drama of a life dedicated to writing. And what upheavals: from this day in 1960,...

September 26

1950 Raymond Chandler accepted Strangers on a Train, his last job as a Hollywood screenwriter, out of curiosity: he wanted to work with Alfred Hitchcock, and Hitchcock wanted to work with him, even if it meant driving a hundred miles to Chandlers's home in La Jolla for story meetings But it didn't go well. On this day, after eight weeks and $40,000 (which nearly equaled the writer's lifetime book ...