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

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 ...

September 25
1930... and many other readers did too. Maugham, of course, demurred, telling Walpole that "nothing had been further from my thoughts than to describe you," but after Walpole's death he freely confessed to friends and in the introduction to a reissue of the book that he indeed had Walpole, that "ridiculous creature," in mind when he wrote what he would later say was his favorite of his own books.

September 24

1920 J. M. Murry, in the Athenaeum, on Frank Harris's Oscar Wilde; His Life and Confessions: "The personal magnetism of a man dies with him; his soldi achievement as an artist alone has substance in the eyes of posterity; and we, who are posterity for Wilde, must confess that he is rather a pale ghost as an artist."

September 23

1930 ... later would be recognized as the great Portuguese writer of his time), he composed a cryptic and woeful suicide note, laid it by a seaside chasm known as the Mouth of Hell at the moment of the autumnal equinox, and while Pessoa reported to the press that his friend had disappeared, he followed his girlfriend to Germany and watched with pleasure as the newspapers of Europe reported his death.

September 22

1598 Two days after his comedy Every Man in His Humour was first performed (with William Shakespeare in the cast), Ben Jonson set out with a fellow actor, Gabriel Spencer, to settle a quarrel with swords in Hoxton Fields. The two had been imprisoned together for their parts in a. a "lewd" and "seditious" production the year before, but now Jonson, after taking a cut on the arm, klled Spencer...

1891 For decades, biographies of Stephen Crane included. poignant romantic episode from his youth when, for a few intense weeks, he courted a "tall darkly pretty girl named Helen Trent." In conversation and letters he asked if she liked flowers and dogs, praised the virtues of naked ocean swimming, and told her, "You have the most beautiful arms I ever saw." She questions his interest I the "vile: slums of the ...

September 20

1929 "Hell, in case you're interested," Jim Thompson once wrote, "is actually the College of Agriculture of the University of Nebraska," the institution in which Thompson matriculated on this day, just a month before the stock market crash brought the start of even harder times to the Great Plains. A twenty-two-year-old high school dropout and the family breadwinner as a hotel bellboy and oil-field ...

September 18

1759 French forces at Quebec surrender to the British.

September 19

1995 Fiction may not get any. harder-boiled than Horace McCoy's They Shoot Horses, Don't They? Its a crime novel as suicide note, and it's no spoiler to reveal that the title of the book is its last line too, spoken by the narrator, Robert Syverten, as he's arrested for murder. Throughout the book as Robert And Gloria Beatty has partner in dancing and death, shuffle toward their fate through a brutal...

September 18

1840 ...and included in his collection Pulphead.. Constantine Rafiinesque, whose peers considered him ill-mannered and grotesquely corpulent, was, by his own measure, "Botanist, Naturalist, Geologist, Geographer, Historian, Poet, Philosopher, Philologist, Economist, Philanthropist," By Sullivan's measure he was a man both ahead of and behind his time, a polymath in the style of the previous century ...

September 17

1963 ...what he'd do: he just wants to get away from town, from his past, or maybe he wants the excitement of doing a job with Guitar. Everything carries weight in Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon, symbolic and otherwise, but this sack, once they get it, turns out to be lighter than expected, filled with rocks and old bones rather than gold, thereby saving the thieves from seeing their desires fulfilled.

September 16

1896 Three years after writing Maggie, a Girl of the Streets, Stephen Crane found himself—whether by chance or design is still debated—taking the side of an alleged woman of the streets. In this day's early hours, Crane, a star reporter for the Ne York Journal, saw a woman Dora Clark falsely arrested for soliciting and, despite the advice of the sergeant on duty that "if you monkey with this case,...

September 15

1883 Seventy-two years before Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat on an Alabama bus, Ida B. Wells refused the demand of a conductor on the Chesapeake & Ohio Railway to leave the first-class ladies carriage for the crowded colored car, and indeed scratched and bit the conductor as he was pulled forcibly out of her seat, Wells won a $500 court judgement against the railway—later overturned—but the...

September 14

1968 For Nick Hornby, as for much of the rest of the world, 1968 was a year of upheaval, although the tremors in Hornby's life weren't assassinations, protests, and war, but divorce, a new home, and a new school. Al of which left him vulnerable at age eleven, when his father took him to his first professional soccer game, to the strange mass lure of unrelenting sporting mediocrity—in other words, ...

September 13

1939 His stove had reverted to an old gas-burner model that smells like burned grease. His refrigerator has become an obsolete, belt-driven monster. His TV set is now an AM radio in a wood cabinet, and his polyphonic audio set a Victrola, playing a 78 of Ray Noble's "Turkish Delight," And his homeopape machine? That's just gone. Ubik, Philip K. dick's realty-bending masterpiece, i...

September 12

1867 The charges for the inquest into the death of eighteen-year-old Malcolm Melville, son of Herman, whose death by pistol was ruled a suicide "while labouring under temporary insanity of mind," totaled $11.31 1/4

1979 At the centre of Janet Malcolm's The Journalist and the Murderer is a note of seduction so brazen it was nearly its author's doing: a letter from reporter Joe McGinness to Jeffrey MacDonald, who hd just been convicted of the murder of his family, assuring him that "total strangers can recognize writing five minutes that you did not received a fair trial...It's a hell of a thing—spend the summer making a new ...

September 10

1967 Djuna Barnes, author of the avant-garde landmarks Nightwood and Ryder, spent the last forty-two years of her life as "the most famous unknown in the world!" as she wrote to a friend on this day. From her tiny apartment in Greenwich Village, she guarded her legacy and her privacy with a ferocity that led one acquaintance to refer to her as "Madame Vitriol," refusing visits from some admirers,...

September 9

1907 ...not long after the earthquake everyone in Paris was eager to hear about, and called on her friends Michael and Sarah Stein. There with them was Michael's younger sister Gertrude, "a golden brown presence" in a "warm brown corduroy suit," as Alice recalled in her actual autobiography with a voice "deep, full, velvety like a great contralto's, like two voices." Much later, with her two voices, ...

September 8

1883 "You are quite right, little princess," Sigmund Freud wrote to his fiancée, Martha Bernays, about the book they were both reading, Don Quixote, "it is no reading matter for girls, I had quite forgotten the many coarse and in themselves nauseating passages when I sent it to you." But the book made him split his sides with laughter anyway, and he kept writing to her about it, insisting on this day,...

September 7

1923 Published: Harmonium by Wallace Stevens (Knopf, New York)

September 6

1914 ...to the tortuous punishment then being inflicted on hunger-striking British suffragists: first her nostrils were sprayed by the doctor "with a mixture of cocaine and disinfectant," then came the milk, through a red rubber tube: "Every drop seemed a quart, and every quart slid over and down into space. I had lapsed int a physical mechanism without toper to oppose or resent the outrage to my will."

September 5

1902 Constance Fletcher, in the TLS, on Henry James's The Wings of the Dove: "This is, we repeat, an extraordinarily interesting performance, but it is not an easy book to read, It will not do for short railway journeys or for drowsy hammocks, or even to amuse sporting nem and the active Young Person."

September 4

1920 In the inscription in the copy of his first book of stories, Flappers and Philosophers, that F. Scott Fitzgerald sent his hero H. L. Mencken, he divided its contents into "Worth Reading" ("The Ice Palace," "The Cut-Glass Bowl," "Benediction," "Dalyrimple Goes Wrong"), "Amusing" ("The Offshore Pirate"), and "Trash" ("Head and Shoulders,""The Four Fists," "Bernice Bobs Her Hair").

September 3

1838 ...more than fifteen years after slavery's abolition, did he feel he could safely reveal the details of his escape, which involved borrowing the documents of a friend (who did not much resemble him), dressing like a sailor (and speaking like an "old salt"), jumping on a train north from Baltimore, and facing the moment of truth when the conductor asked, "I suppose you have your free papers?"

1932 As Ray Bradbury often told it, on the day before his uncle's Labor Day funeral, young Ray, age twelve, waled down to a lakefront carnival in his hometown of Waukegan, Illinois, where, in a sideshow tent, he encountered a performer named Mr, Electrico who changed his life. Coursing with electricity that stood hi hair on end, Mr. Electrico chose Ray from out of a crowd of children, tapped him with his electrified

September 1

1605... the tense political atmosphere two months before the foiled Gunpowder Plot, was making fun of Scots, embracing the idea, for instanc , of sending "a hundred thousand of them" to the the New World, "for we are all one Countrymen now, ye know; and we should find ten times more comfort of them there, then we do here." Though threatened with having his ears and nose cut, Jonson was freed by October.

August 31

1925 Margaret Mead arrived for the first time in Samoa.

August 30

1923 Midway through writing Mrs. Dalloway, Virginia Woolf recorded a "discovery" about her way of writing: "How I dig out beautiful caves behind my characters: I think that gives exactly what I want; humanity, humour, depth. The idea is that the caves shall connect and each comes to daylight at the present moment."

August 29

1948 ...his race for Senate against "Mr. Texas," Coke Stevenson. Johnson stole the race, Caro establishes, when on this day, one day after the primary runoff and two days after his fortieth birthday, his men began to work the phones and stuff enough ballot boxes to insure their candidate won by eighty-seven votes in a manner, Caro writes, that "violated even the notably loose boundaries of Texas politics."