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

March 20

1827 Unable to pay his gambling debts at the University of Virginia and, by his own account, "roaming the streets" of Richmond, Edgar Allan Poe pleaded for money from his adoptive fatter, who refused.

March 19

1944 Pablo Picasso borde the tedium and anxiety of the first winter of the German occupation of Paris in 1941 by composing in three days his first and only play, Desire Caught by the Tail. A nonsense farce in the tradition of the Surrealists and Ubu Rio, the play didn't receive a performance until a reading on this day a the apartment of the anthropologist Michel Leiris, with Picasso, Georges Braque,...

March 18

...and surmised that lichens were the product of symbiosis between fungi and algae, an idea, now comfirmed, that few believed at the time. The established botanists of her day did little to encourage a self-educated woman; and after one encounter she huffed in her journal, "It is odious to a shy person to be snubbed as conceited, especially the the shy person happened to be right, ..."

March 17

1871...although Darwin credited the book's half-baked concept of the "transmutation of species" with preparing the public for his own theory of evolution. Chambers, a prominent Scottish publisher, kept his authorship of the controversial Vestiges sect until after his death on this day, but the book he said killed him was another, a labor of love called The Book of Days, an exhaustively researched...

March 16

1937...—and of the language their father has given them in his charismatic, autocratic way, as their creator and destroyer. Christina Stead gave Samuel Pollitt a name of her own in the title of her great (and autobiographical) novel, The Man Who Loved Children. To call that description ironic—at least with the thin, tinny definition of irony we have these days—doesn't quite do justice...

March 15

NO YEAR Maqroll doubts that the remote lumber mill that's his destination will actually make his fortune, but like a modern Quixote he sets out nevertheless, a passenger on a tiny barge that battles the current of the fictional Xarandó River with "asthmatic obstinacy" and a captain never less than half drunk. "It's always the same at the start of a journey," Maqroll writes in his diary.

March 14

1858 "My dear Beth died at three this morning," Louisa May Alcott recorded. Elizabeth, the third Alcott sister and the quietest, had contacted scarlet fever two years before, much like the last illness of Beth, the third March sister—and the only one whose name matches her model in the Alcott family—in Little Women.

March 13

1601 ...invited him home after the show, "Shakespeare, overhearing their conclusion, went before, was entertained, and at his game ere Burbage came. Then message being brought that Richard the 3d. was at the door, Shakespeare"—answering "from the capon's blankets," as Stephen Dedalus retells the story in Ulysses—"caused returns to be made that William the Conqueror was before Rich the 3."

March 12

1906 George Bernard Shaw's feminism was loud, imperious, and idiosyncratic, and on at least one occasion, an interview he gave to the novelist and suffragette Maud Churton Brady, published in the Tribune on this day, it was militant. "If I were a woman," he puckishly declared, "I'd simply refuse to speak to any man or do anything for men until I'f got the vote. I'd make my husbands's life a burden...

March 11

1933 Thomas Lanier Williams, age twenty-one and the creator much later, under the name "Tennessee," of Blanche DuBois, inquired of Harriet Monroe, the editor of Poetry, "Will you do a total stranger the kindness of reading his verse?"

March 10

1812 On what exact morning was it that Lord Byron "awoke and found himself famous"? We can't say—the only source for the quotation which has acquired its own considerable fame, is Thomas Moore's 1830 biography—but his celebrity did suddenly blossom with the publication on his day of the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, the poetic memoir of his journey across Europe the previous two years.

March 9

1864 .confrontation in the waters off San Francisco between Confederate and Russian ships that, truth be told, feels more like a foggy Gulf of Tonkin moment than a real Fort Sumter exchange. And what was the extent of the martyrdom of Peter Pinguid, the Confederate commander? No, he wasn't lost at sea. He endured a more Pynchonian fate: he left the service and made a fortune speculating in L.A. real estate.

March 8

1914 From childhood, Fernando Pessoa wrote in a chorus of different voices, each with a separate name and identity, but one day in Lisbon—he later called it "the triumphal day of my life"_those voice seemed to take over "in a sort of ecstasy whose nature I could not define." Standing at the chest of drawers where he liked to write, he poured out thirty or more poems under the names Alberto Caeiro,...

March 7

1919 Back home in Illinois from the European war, glad to show off his leg full of shrapnel And expecting that the pretty nurse he'd fallen in love with in a Milan hospital would be joining him stateside, Ernest Hemingway received a letter written on this day telling him otherwise. Turning "Kid", her pet name for her young soldier—she called herself "Mrs. Kid"—into a patronizing pat on the head...

March 6

1831 Cadet Edgar Allan Poe was expelled from West Point for "gross neglect of duty" and :disobedience of orders."

March 5

1807 Arrested as a Prussian spy by the French while traveling through Berlin, Heinrich von Kleist was imprisoned in the granite dungeon in the Fort de Joux, the same prison where the Haitian revolutionary Toussaint L'Ouverture died four years before.

March 4

1857 Young Samuel Clemens thought a lot about the romance of piloting a Mississippi steamboat, but not much about its difficulty: "I supposed that all a pilot had to do was to keep his boat in the river, and I did not consider that that could be much of a trick, since it was so mid." But when on this afternoon in the crowded waters along the lever at New Orleans, the pilot of the Colonel Crossmand said...

March 3

1900 W. L. Alden, in the New York Times: "The other day I read Conrad's 'Heart of Darkness,' which was published in Blackwood's Magazine. Good Heavens! How that man can write! The scene of the story is laid on the Congo, and in truth there is very little story to it, but how it grips and holds one!"

March 2

1936 Samuel Beckett, unsure of his career path, applied to study with Sergei Eisenstein at the Moscow State School of Cinematography. (He never heard back.)

March 1

1937 "He's my enemy," Jane Auer told a friend after first meeting Paul Bowl3s in the lobby of New York's Plaza Hotel. Despite (or because of) this strong reaction, the next time they met she invited herself along on Bowles's impromptu trip to Mexico and immediately caller her mother, who said to Bowles, "If my daughter is going to Mexico with you, I think I should meet you first, don't you think?"

February 29

NO YEAR

On a wintry day during the last snowfall of the year, a "singular person fell out of infinity" into the village of Iping. bundled thoroughly against the cold, he arrived at the inn, threw down a couple of sovereigns, and demanded a room, a fire, and, above all, privacy. But curiosity will have its ay, sovereigns or no, especially when the stranger reveals that his head is thoroughly bandaged...

February 28

1815 Alexandre Dumas set the pivotal moment in his action-packed tale The Count of Monte Cristo on the day before Napoleon returned from exile to France to reclaim his command. On that day, young Edmond Dantès, an upstanding and talented sailor who has just celebrated his wedding, is framed for conspiring to overthrow the king in favor of the returning emperor and condemned for life to an island fortress

February 27

1952 When Allen Ginsberg struck up a correspondence with his fellow New Jerseyan William Carlos Williams—"from me, an unknown young poet, to you, an unknown old poet, who live in the same rusty county of the world"—he first sent him samples of traditional, rhymed poems.

February 26

1922 Colette, the music-hall-performer-turned-novelist, appeared onstage for the first time in ten years as Lea in the hundredth performance of the adaptation of her novel Chéri.

February 25

1830 ... the so-called knee heads,the balding old guard, hissed. (Watching a later performance, Hugo happily noted all the crowd's reactions, from "laughter" to "sniggering," in the margins of his script.) So began the "Battle of Hernani," a theatrical revolution that lasted for the run of the show, just a few short months before the July revolution that overthrew Charles X, France's last Bourbon king.

February 24

1950 ...an immensely long, complex, rather bitter, and very terrifying romance, quite unfit for children (if fit for anybody)." In part, he was sandbagging, since he'd decided he wanted to move to a different publisher, but when his other suitor said that The Lord of the Rings "urgently demanded cutting," Tolkien returned to Unwin's firm, though neither expected more than modest sales...

February 23

1942 Unlike some of his fellow Jewish writers, Stefan Zweig had stayed well ahead of the Nazis. In 1934, the most translated author in Europe at the time, he left Austria for London, and in 1940, with Germany moving across Europe, Zweig, calling his occupation "formerly writer, now expert in visas," moved again with his wife, to New York and then Brazil.

February 22

1882 On this day was born Eric Gill, a singular artist the clarity of who works, in sculpture, ink, and type, was Brough forth from a life of contradiction and idiosyncratic conviction. Deeply religious and heretically hedonistic, Gill created for himself and his small community a life of work and worship and love and sex—including, as was revealed long after his death, incest with both his sisters...

February 21

1864 William James, having given up painting for medical school, wrote a friend, "I embraced the medical profession a couple of months ago. My first impressions are that there is much hum ug therein."