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

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."

August 28

1956 ... obliged by given an Associated Press reporter a quote that would follow the good, and haunt Metalious, for years after it appeared on this day: "To a tourist these towns look as peaceful as a postcard picture. But if you go beneath that picture, it's like turning over a rock with your foot—all kinds of strange things crawl out." When Peyton Place was finally published the following month,...

August 27

1920 Saying "I have really no idea how a moving pictures story is composed," Joseph Conrad went with his agent to a movie adaptation of Les Misérables: they were being paid $1,500 by an American studio for a script of his story "Gaspar Ruiz." "I am ashamed to tell you this," he wrote a friend, "but one must live."

August 26

1945 On the last Saturday of August, with the war just over, they drive to pay their respects at the large house on Long Island: the undertaker Bonasera, the baker Nazorine, the heartthrob crooner Johnny Fontane, the killer Luca Brasi, and the many other friends of Don Vito Corleone. It's the wedding of Connie the Don's only daughter, and Mario Puzo uses the great event to introduce the three sons ...

August 25

1900 In the last of a three-day match between Marylebone Cricket Club and London County, Arthur Conan Doyle, taking a turn at bowling, dismissed the batter considered the greatest cricketer of all time, W. G. Grace, for his only first-class wicket.

August 24

1814 At the ugly house they had just been forced by poverty to rent in Switzerland, Mary and Percy Bysshe Shelley walked to the nearby lakeshore and read Tacitus's description of the Siege of Jerusalem. Then "we come home, look out the window, and go to bed."

August 23

1948 Before he set out with Neal Cassady, Jack Kerouac jotted down in his journal an idea for a future book, "about two guys hitch-hiking to California in search of something they don't really find, and losing themselves on the road, and coming all the way back hopeful of something else."

August 22

1603 ...—that our words aren't equal to the world—but one made more ambiguous by the sheer eloquence with which its author proclaims the insufficiency of language. That its author was not the fictitious Lord Chandos, writing in 1603, but Hugo von Hofmannsthal, writing in 1902—and that Hofmannsthal did not give up writing after publishing it—only adds to the letter's ambiguity, and its fascination.

August 21

1909 ...a pear is and what an opal is?" James Joyce wrote to Nra Barnacle. "My soul when you cam sauntering to me first through those sweet summer evenings wa beautiful ut with the pale passionless beauty of a pearler. You love has passed through hem and now I feel my minds something like an opal, that is, full of strange uncertain hues and colours, of warm lights, and quick shadows and of broken music."

August 20

1950 ... past Earth on its way to settling into planetary orbit, thereby explaining a host of ancient mythologies and refuting the theories of both Newton and Darwin. Velikovsky's conjectures, shaky at the time, have been further undermined by later discoveries, but one element of his thought has gained some acceptance: the importance of catastrophic events in shaping evolutionary and geological history,

August 19

1903 ... into "Monk Eastman, Purveyor of Iniquities," one of the bloody tales in A Universal History of Infamy, his first collection of fiction. In Borges's imagination Monk Eastman seems less a real-life Tammany enforcer than a character from Borges's library; more specifically from Herbert Asbury's Gangs of New York, from which Borges drew whatever facts about Eastman he didn't invent out of thin air.

August 18

1912 Among the dozens of poets she wrote to before the launch of her new magazine, Poetry, Harriet Monroe sent a short note to Ezra Pound (via his father, Horner L. Pound, assistant assayer at the U.S. Mint), and on this day Pound replied quickly from London. "I am interested,," he began, sending two poems and offering to keep her "in touch with whatever is most dynamic in artistic thought...

August 17

1902 After praising her historical novel, The Valley of Decision Henry James urged Edith Wharton to write about an American subject, contemporary New York: "the immediate, the real, the ours, the yours, the novelist's that it waits for...Profit, be warned, by my awful example of exile and ignorance,"

1898 When the unnamed narrator of Tayeb Salih's Season of Migration to the North returns to his village along the Nile after seven years studying in Europe, he wants it to be as it was when he left: the people, his familiar bed, the sound of the wind through the palm trees. But there is a stranger in the village, a man called Mustafa Sa'eed, to whom he's drawn by an unspoken mutual interest until Mustafa stuns him...

August 15

1947 .... In Midnight's Children, his second novel, Salman Rushdie, who himself was born in Bombay two months before Salem, embraced the narrative possibilities offered by a child born along with his country, going beyond mere symbolism by imagining his hero as one of a handful of children whose midnight births brought them each a superpower, as if they were the X-Men of independent, divided India.

August 14

1919 Richard Aldington, in the TLS, on Marcel Proust's À la récherche du temps perdu, vols. 1 and 2: "That which is novel in M. Proust is the deliberate avoidance of the search for novelty. He is the antithesis of a man like Gauguin, always wandering about to find 'quelques éléments nouveaux.'"

August 13

1912 When he arrived at his friend Max Brod's house this evening to discuss how to arrange the pieces for his first book to send to the publisher the next day, Franz Kafka was surprised and disconcerted to find a visitor, a cousin of the family, "sitting at the table" though she "looked to me like a maid-servant." Her name was Felice Bauer, and he was, apparently, repelled and attracted at once: coldly ...