Today In Literature

December 03

On this day in 1894 Robert Louis Stevenson died, and on this day in 1896 Hilaire Belloc's A Bad Child's Book of Beasts (2nd edition) was published. Stevenson's A Child's Garden of Verses was one of his most popular books, and Belloc's Beasts sold out within days of publication; both books are part of the "Golden Age of Children's Literature," a half-century span which includes Carroll, Kipling, Barrie, Graham and others.
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December 04

On this day in 1903 the crime writer Cornell Woolrich was born. Woolrich wrote two dozen novels and over two hundred stories, most of them so dark that he has been called "the Poe of the 20th century." Looking at the many movies made from his work -- most famously, Hitchcock's Rear Window and Truffaut's The Bride Wore Black -- many have also dubbed him the "Father of Film Noir." Woolrich's private life was almost as bleak and black.
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On this day in 1830 Christina Rossetti was born. Although she was only peripherally involved with her brother's Pre-Raphaelites, and claimed to be "content in my shady crevice," Rossetti was not quite the "recluse, saint and renunciatory spinster" commonly portrayed. To those familiar only with her devotional or children's verse, her classic "Goblin Market" will raise eyebrows.

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December 12th

1731 - Dr Erasmus Darwin, poet & physiologist, born

1757 - Colley Cibber, dramatist, died

December 12

On this day in 1976 Saul Bellow made his Nobel Prize acceptance speech. He won the award for a body of work filled with, "exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion," and his response to it seemed to suit: "After years of the most arduous mental labor, I stand before you in the costume of a headwaiter" and "All I started out to do was show up my brothers. I didn't have to go this far."
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December 13

On this day in 1784 Samuel Johnson died. Johnson's last years have been told According to Queeney (Beryl Bainbridge, 2001) and many others, but his large personality seems to escape any one perspective. According to Harold Bloom, Johnson may be beyond reach in all ways: "There is no bad faith in or about Dr. Johnson, who was as good as he was great, yet also refreshingly, wildly strange to the highest degree."
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December 14

On this day in 1640 Aphra Behn was baptized. The details of her birth and much of her "shady and amorous" life are unclear, but her place in literary history is certain: first epistolary novel, first philosophical novel, and a fifteen-play career which made her the first woman to earn her living by writing. "All women together ought to let flowers fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn," wrote Virginia Woolf, "for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds."
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On this day in 1922 T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land (originally titled "He Do the Police in Different Voices") was published. Like many friends and acquaintances, Virginia Woolf thought Eliot an odd case, but her diary notes how compelling she found his after-dinner reading of his poem: "He sang it & chanted it & rhymed it. It has great beauty and force of phrase; symmetry; & tensity. What connects it together, I'm not so sure..."

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On this day in 1901 Beatrix Potter published The Tale of Peter Rabbit. Having been turned down by a half-dozen publishers, Potter financed this first edition herself -- 250 copies with her own black and white illustrations, given away or sold at a half-penny each because, as she put it, "little rabbits cannot afford to spend 6 shillings."

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'Goblin Market' is brilliant. What can I say? Read it.

December 18


On this day in 1946 Damon Runyon's ashes were scattered over Broadway by his son, in a plane flown by Eddie Rickenbacker. Runyon was born in Manhattan, Kansas; he arrived at the bigger apple at the age of thirty, to be a sportswriter and to try out at Mindy's and the Stork Club and any betting window available his crap-shoot worldview: "All of life is six to five against." Broadway became his special beat, and in story collections like Guys and Dolls he developed the colorful characters -- Harry the Horse, the Lemon Drop Kid, Last Card Louie -- and the gangster patois that would swept America throughout the thirties and forties.

Stories like "Social Error" even poked fun at the "underworld complex" that was making him so famous. Socialite Miss Harriet Mackyle is a Doll-wannabe, the kind who "thinks it smart to tell her swell friends she dances with a safe blower." Guy-wannabes like Basil Valentine get "all pleasured up by this attention ... because Miss Harriet Mackyle may not look a million, but she has a couple, and you can see enough of her in her evening clothes to know that nothing about her is phony." Nothing that Basil will ever see, anyway. When Handsome Jack takes out his equalizer and accidentally plugs Miss Harriet's favorite parrot, and Basil puts up two grand to make like he's shot Handsome Jack in order to impress Miss Harriet, and Red Henry for revenge on Jack works a quick change to replace the blanks for real slugs, and Midgie Muldoon jumps in front of her Jack just as Basil raises his rod and turns it on . . . well, Miss Harriet and Basil can't wait to escape to Italy and get married, just as they deserve.

The ending to the real life was not so happy, romantically or otherwise. Runyon's wife of fourteen years had left him -- she formerly a Spanish dancer at the Silver Slipper, first met at a Mexican racetrack when she was a kid running messages for Pancho Villa, Runyon a reporter running Villa to ground. Throat cancer, probably caused by a lifetime of Turkish Ovals, made things worse, and forced all communication to be via notepad. This could produce some pretty funny barroom one-liners -- Walter Winchell: "Damon, this is a kid from San Francisco who imitates me better than anybody in the business." Runyon, on his notepad: "Faint Praise." -- but it could also produce this letter to Damon Runyon Jr., which expresses more 'stacked deck' than 'six-to-five against':

I notice you do a lot of thinking about yourself and your problems. Sometimes when you are in a mood for thought give one to your old man who in two years was stricken by the most terrible malady known to mankind and left voiceless with a death sentence hanging over his head, who had a big career stopped cold, and had his domestic life shattered by divorce and his savings largely dissipated through the combination of evil circumstances.... Try that on your zither some day, my boy, especially when those low moods you mention strike you.
Runyon's very last note to Damon Jr. was the regards-to-Broadway request about his ashes.

On this day in 1848 Emily Bronte died at the age of thirty. Of all the death and drama in the Bronte household over the surrounding eight months -- events which now stand as famous and poignant as any in the Bronte novels -- none seems to impress or import more than Emily's. Her "powerful and peculiar" character, said Charlotte, inspired "an anguish of wonder and love."

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On this day in 1929 D. H. Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover was banned in the United States. This was only one of a string of bannings from the book's first publication the year before until the landmark obscenity trials in 1959 (U.S.) and 1960 (Britain), but for Lawrence personally it may have been the most devastating. For Philip Larkin, on the other hand, life began "Between the end of the Chatterley ban / And the Beatles' first LP..."

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On this day in 1879 Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House opened in Copenhagen. One critic compared the play to the dropping of "a bomb into contemporary life," and "a death sentence on accepted social ethics"; another described Nora's exit from her house and her gender-roles at the end of Act V as "a door slam heard 'round the world."

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On this day in 1937 Don Marquis died. Although also a playwright and a novelist, Marquis is most famous for the "Archy and Mehitabel" poetry he wrote for his newspaper column -- Archy being the soul of a "vers libre bard" in the body of a cockroach, Mehitabel being an alley cat on her ninth life and "bound / for a journey down the sound / in the midst of a refuse mound / but wotthehell wotthehell."

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January 4

On this day in 1960 Albert Camus was killed in a car crash outside Paris, at the age of forty-seven. The incomplete manuscript of The First Man, the autobiographical novel that Camus was working on at his death, was found in the mud at the accident site and published by his daughter in 1995. Camus hoped that it would be his masterpiece and some critics think it is, even unfinished.
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January 5

On this day in 1825, twenty-three-year-old Alexandre Dumas (Sr.) embarked on his self-proclaimed "career as a romantic" by fighting his first duel, and having his pants fall down. Dumas's memoirs are about as reliable as his mountain of historical fiction and drama, but they tell the pants story in glorious, comedy-of-errors, Three Musketeers detail.
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January 6

On this day in 1840 Fanny Burney died. Burney's four novels have earned her favorable comparisons to other giants of the genre-Austen, Richardson, Dickens-and Virginia Woolf's declaration that she is "the mother of English fiction." If a best-seller and a celebrity in her own day, it is as a diarist that Burney is now best known-one who was eye-witness to The Madness of King George, and who enlivened the later years of Samuel Johnson.
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On this day in 1972 the American poet John Berryman committed suicide at the age of fifty-seven. His 77 Dream Songs won the 1964 Pulitzer, and the writing of some 300 more over the subsequent years earned Berryman international fame, but his personal problems kept pace; by the end, his hopes for religion, writing, teaching, marriage and change all seemed out of reach.

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January 08

On this day in 1824 the mystery novelist Wilkie Collins was born. Collins's "gaslight thrillers" were as popular among Victorian readers as the books of his friend, Charles Dickens; two of them, The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868) have not only stayed in print but grown in reputation. Crime historians say much is owed to characters such as Sergeant Cuff, and to his stylish back-of-my-hand.
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January 09

On this day in 1923 Katherine Mansfield died of tuberculosis at the age of thirty-four. Near the end Mansfield scoffed at "my little stories like birds bred in cages," and admitted to having had a lifelong "chaos within." Her biographers have agreed with the chaos, and the literary historians are unequivocal about the accomplishment: "A symbol of liberation, innovation and unconventionality. Her life was new, her manners and dress was new, her art was new."
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