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On this day in 1904, twenty-two year-old James Joyce moved into the Martello Tower in Sandycove, outside Dublin, with his friend Oliver St. John Gogarty. Joyce only stayed with Gogarty for a week -- and in October Joyce and Nora Barnacle would leave for Europe for good -- but their relationship and the Tower setting would become the opening chapter of Ulysses.
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September 10
On this day in 1856 Ralph Waldo Emerson spoke "On the Affairs in Kansas" at a Kansas Relief Meeting in Cambridge, Mass. His appeal "for bread, clothes, arms, and men" in aid of John Brown and the anti-slavery movement would eventually lead to another speech, that given as eulogy after Brown's hanging: "...For the arch-abolitionist, older than Brown, and older than the Shenandoah Mountains, is Love. . . ."
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September 11
On this day in 1885 D. H. Lawrence was born in Eastwood, outside Nottingham, the fourth of five children. Lawrence's autobiographical novel, Sons and Lovers (1913) made famous the tortured conditions of his upbringing: his uneducated father's pit-and-pub life, his mother's contempt for this and her self-sacrifice to escape, Lawrence's own conflicted feelings about all of it.
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September 21, 2005
On this day in 1991 the Dead Sea Scrolls were made available to the public for the first time by the Huntington Library in California. The first Scrolls were discovered in the caves of Qumran by Bedouin shepherds in 1947, but decades of delay in deciphering them prompted this controversial release of a microfilm version of "the greatest archeological find in history."
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On this day in 1957 West Side Story opened at Broadway's Winter Garden Theater for a run of 732 performances. Jerome Robbins first presented the idea of a modern Romeo and Juliet to Leonard Bernstein in 1949 -- at this point he envisioned a Jewish-Catholic conflict fought on New York City's east side -- but neither had time to develop it further. When writer Arthur Laurents and Bernstein resumed discussions in 1955, they moved the turf war to the west side, made it Puerto Rican-"American" and, wrote Bernstein in his journal of the time, "Suddenly it all springs to life. I hear rhythms and pulses, and -- most of all -- I can sort of feel the form."
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On this day in 1929 Ernest Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms was published. Hemingway took his title from a 16th century poem by George Peele, in which Peele expresses regret to Queen Elizabeth I that he is too old to bear arms for her. The 'arms' in question for Frederic Henry, Hemingway's hero, were those he and some half-million Italian soldiers gladly dropped in the retreat from Caporetto in the autumn of 1917; and those of nurse Catherine Barkley, who dies so suddenly at the end that no farewell is possible:
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On this day in 1904 Graham Greene was born. Greene's approach to Charles Dickens has been used as an approach to him: "the creative writer perceives his world once and for all in childhood and adolescence, and his whole career is an effort to illustrate his private world in terms of the great public world we all share." In Greene's case, the early worldview for the long writing career was formed primarily at his boarding school in Berkhamsted. He was a shy, sensitive, unathletic boy going in, and son of the headmaster; the sneering and scoffing led to such torment that he ran away, attempted suicide, and entered psychoanalysis. The "Greeneland" in which his fictional fringe-dwellers, wanderers and tortured souls struggle to live -- one 1991 obituary said that "If Greene's key characters had been animals one cannot help feeling that they would have been compassionately put down" -- seems to have been created from such experiences.
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On this day in 1929, William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury was published. Faulkner said it was "a splendid failure," but he also said that "the only thing in literature which would ever move me very much" was the image upon which the book was based: "Caddy climbing the pear tree to look in the window at her grandfather's funeral while Quentin and Jason and Benjy and the negroes looked up at the muddy seat of her drawers."
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On this day in 1970, Alexander Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize. Solzhenitsyn was 51 years old, but 11 years had been spent in prison and labor camps, and then in exile-rehabilitation in Kazakhstan. Although he had been writing secretly for decades, he only began to publish in 1961, with the novel One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch. This documentation of Stalin-era labor camps caused an international sensation and, until Khrushchev fell from power and a new round of censorship began, encouraged others to publish similar revelations. In the late 60s, Solzhenitsyn published First Circle and Cancer Ward, and then in the year after the Nobel, August 1914, but when the first part of The Gulag Archipelago appeared in 1973 he was severely attacked, then charged with treason and expelled in 1974. This ended in 1994, when Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia with his citizenship restored.
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On this day in 1849 Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee," was published, just two days after his death: "It was many and many a year ago, / In a kingdom by the sea, / That a maiden there lived whom you may know / By the name of Annabel Lee. . . ." Many and many a year after that, Nabokov would take "Kingdom by the Sea" as his first title for Lolita and make Annabel Leigh his first nymphet.
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On this day in 1854, Oscar Wilde was born in Dublin. Though we may not have or want any conventional explanation for Oscar Wilde's personality, it seems cut from his parents' (or perhaps just his mother's) cloth. Lady Wilde was a poet who took license in many things. She was "Francesca Speranza Wilde" or just "Speranza" in letters to Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and the like -- "Francesca" from her given Frances, and "Speranza" (i.e. hope) from the motto on her stationary. She reduced her age by five years whenever convenient, and complied cheerily whenever Oscar reduced his. As host of a regular Saturday afternoon salon-party attended by hundreds, she dressed to be noticed -- bizarre jewelry, often a headdress although she was almost six feet tall -- and spoke to match. When asked to receive a young, "respectable" woman she replied, "You must never employ that description in this house. It is only tradespeople who are respectable. We are above respectability." When forced to relocate to London after her husband's death, she felt "the agony and loss of all that made life endurable, and my singing robes are trailed in London clay." She was, she said, related to Dante and to an eagle in previous lives.
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On this day in 1896 Anton Chekhov's The Seagull opened in St. Petersburg. This is the first-written of Chekhov's four masterpieces -- Uncle Vanya, Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard are the others -- and though now regarded as one of the most influential plays in modern drama, its opening night was an infamous flop. During the writing, Chekhov admitted that he was "flagrantly disregarding the basic tenets of the stage," not only for having so much talk and so little action, but for having "started it forte and ended it pianissimo." During rehearsal he had implored the actors and the director to give up the usual bombastic style and give his understatements a chance: "The point is, my friends, there's no use being theatrical. None whatever. The whole thing is very simple. The characters are simple, ordinary people." Convinced of disaster, he nearly withdrew his permission for the production, and then nearly did not attend the opening himself; by Act Two he was hiding backstage from the booing and jeering; at two a.m. he was still walking the streets alone. When he finally returned home, he declared to a friend, "Not if I live to be seven hundred will I write another play."
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On this day in 1833, Alfred Nobel was born in Stockholm. Why someone self-described as "a nomadic" excluded from "love, happiness, joy, pulsating life, caring and being cared for, caressing and being caressed," and who regarded friendship as something found "at the cloudy bottom of fleeing illusions or attached to the clattering sound of collected coins" should leave his money to mankind is something of a puzzle.
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"We are here to help eat other get through this thing, whatever it is."
oops..that's "each other"...not eat
On this day in 1885 Arthur Rimbaud wrote to his mother that he had decided to give up his more sedate job as a coffee-trader in Ethiopia, so beginning the last phase of his wild, infamous and short life: "... Several thousand rifles are on their way to me from Europe. I am going to set up a caravan, and carry this merchandise to Menelik, the king of Shoa...."
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On this day in 1958 Raymond Chandler began his last novel, the never-completed (by him) Poodle Springs. This was Chandler's name for Palm Springs, where "every third elegant creature you see has at least one poodle," and where Philip Marlowe thought he might settle down with his new wife, the socialite Linda Loring. Chandler lost interest after a few chapters; Marlowe probably would have too.
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October 25
On this day in 1984 Richard Brautigan's body was found in his California home, a suicide some weeks earlier. The literary critics have never been kind to the writing, and the biographers have been unable to penetrate the writer's life, but Brautigan was a counter-culture hero in the late sixties and seventies; by the time of his death, the cult, the counter-culture, and his own mental health were pretty much gone.
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October 26
On this day in 1822, seventeen-year-old Hans Christian Andersen enrolled in school, taking his place in a second form classroom of eleven-year-olds. Andersen's school experiences would lead to a gallery of outcast and misfit heros in his stories, and though his own life would take fairytale shape, he had lifelong nightmares of mocking laughter and of headmaster Meisling, "in front of whom I stood miserable and awkward."
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October 27
On this day in 1922 Virginia Woolf's Jacob's Room was published. This was the first full-length book put out by the Woolfs' Hogarth Press, with a Post-Impressionistic cover designed by sister Vanessa. It was "a new form for a new novel," wrote Woolf before starting; afterwards, she felt confident "that I have found out how to begin (at 40) to say something in my own voice," and that "Either I am a great writer or a nincompoop."
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On this day in 1895 Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure was published. Early critics called it "Jude the Obscene," and dubbed its author "Hardy the Degenerate." Dismayed by such criticism, and mindful of what had been said about his earlier books, Hardy thereafter wrote only poetry: "If Galileo had said in verse that the world moved, the Inquisition might have let him alone."
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On this day in 1950 George Bernard Shaw died at the age of ninety-four. Up to his very last months, Shaw was able to maintain his writing and political campaigning; to the very end, he maintained his often irascible, always redoubtable spirit. One young journalist who had interviewed Shaw on his 90th birthday, and had said he hoped to interview him again on his 100th, was told: "I don't see why not; you look healthy enough to me." But the barrage of tribute and wonder that came with each passing birthday found Shaw less receptive and, said his housekeeper, "a prisoner in his own house." By his 94th birthday, and after having read in The Times that he had spent a "restful" day, Shaw was ready to explode:
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On this day in 1918 twenty-five-year-old Wilfred Owen died in France, killed by machine-gun fire while leading his men across a canal by raft. While teaching in France in 1914, Owen began to visit the wounded soldiers in a nearby hospital; moved by their suffering and courage, he returned to England to enlist, and was himself fighting in France by the beginning of 1917.
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Thanks,Guys !!So many messagers about today in history!!
On this day in 1894 twenty-year-old Robert Frost departed for the Dismal Swamp on the Virginia-North Carolina border. He was poor, jobless, unpublished, expelled from Dartmouth College and recently spurned by his high school sweetheart. Adding it all up, Frost packed a small bag, took a train to New York, a steamer to Virginia, and began walking into a soggy heart of darkness.
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Hello,
I've just joined and am hooked. Will be back soon and often. Thanks for keeping this going, and for so many interesting posts!
Hello Gracie and Yulaichen,
Welcome to the Forum! The posts come from todayinliterature.com.
On this day in 1816 Percy Bysshe Shelley's first wife, Harriet Westbrook, drowned herself. She and Shelley had eloped in 1811 -- he upper-class and nineteen, she the sixteen-year-old daughter of a tavern owner -- but then Shelley eloped with another sixteen-year-old, and Harriet saw few options: "I could never be anything but a source of vexation and misery to you all.... Too wretched to exert myself, lowered in the opinion of everyone, why should I drag on a miserable existence?"
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On this day in 1851 Herman Melville's Moby-Dick was published in the United States. The British edition had been published the previous month, with a botched ending; the American edition corrected this, but even if the American reviewers read to the end they sided with the British: "...so much trash belonging to the worst school of Bedlam literature." Many see the book's reception as a turning-point in Melville's life.
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Novermber 21
On this day in 1694 Voltaire (Francois Marie Arouet) was born. Few could have predicted his Age-defining stature, but apparently the young Voltaire showed every sign of becoming, as biographer Theodore Besterman puts it, "one of those over-life-size personages who seem perpetually to attract equally extraordinary events." He would be applauded and attacked for most of his life, and it is hard to find a portrait of him in which he is not smiling.
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November 22
On this day in 1962 George Bernard Shaw's Androcles and the Lion was published in a new "fonetic alfabet," as commissioned by his will. Those who wished to attempt Shaw's cheaper, more rational system were instructed to "Keep the back of the book pressed against your lips, and advance toward the mirror until you are able to see the individual characters clearly enough to be able to copy them...."
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On this day in 1678, "Ephelia" had her first public writing licensed by the King's censor, thereby marking her official entry into the world of Restoration literature. The writing in question is Ephelia's poem on the Popish Plot that was rocking the Court and all of England, but more interesting than poem or Plot is Ephelia herself -- especially now that we know who she was.
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On this day in 1947, John Steinbeck's The Pearl was published. Although he could have taken the all-that-glitters-is-not-gold theme from his own troubles with fame and fortune, Steinbeck's source was a Mexican folk tale. It could as easily have been the Bible, or Shakespeare's Othello, who "loved not wisely but too well," and "Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away / Richer than all his tribe."
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On this day in 1909 James Agee was born
in Knoxville, Tennessee. He was a poet,
a film critic, a social documetarist, a screenwriter.
But he is best known for his autobiographical novel
" A death in the family"
On this day in 1919, twenty-two-year-old William Faulkner published his first prose, a short story entitled "Landing in Luck." It is a lighthearted tale about an air force cadet's first solo flight, and it gives little sign of the style or fame to come, but the autobiographical details behind its telling are pure, playful Faulkner.
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On this day in 1960 Richard Wright, the expatriate Amarican writer
of Black Roy and Native Son, died in Paris. "He came like a sledgehammer,
like a giant out of the with a sledgehammer, writing with a sledgehammer",
said historian John Henrik Clarcke. Of all the things Wright wanted to smash
in racist America,the last may have been the Hollywood producer who asked
to film "Native Son" with a white hero.
On this day in 1811, a notice appeared in the Richmond, Virginia Inquirer asking for donations in aid of Eliza Poe, a young actress now "lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children." Though two-year-old Edgar would be rescued by the Allan family, the life of poverty, abandonment and hand-outs so familiar to his mother would eventually return to stay.
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November 30
On this day in 1667 Jonathan Swift was born in Dublin, the exact location seemingly pregnant with significance: a few blocks from St. Patrick's Cathedral, where Swift would be Dean; almost in the backyard of Dublin Castle, representing the Englishness he would both covet and skewer; the specific address, 7 Hoey's Court, almost perfect for perhaps the most famous scoffer in literature.
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December 1
On this day in 1821 Percy Shelley's "Adonais," his elegy to John Keats, was published in England. A cornerstone of both Romantic poetry and the myth of the Romantic, the poem paints Keats as Adonis in pursuit of Beauty and Truth, brought down by those less noble and talented. This was a fate Shelley predicted for himself, and he died before Keats's gravestone had been erected.
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On this day in 1867 Charles Dickens gave the first reading of his American tour. Like all but a few over the five months, the evening was a sell-out, some having slept out overnight to beat a ticket line almost a half-mile long. This first-night audience included all the great and triple-named of the New England literary elite -- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes, James Russell Lowell, Charles Eliot Norton -- though not all were impressed. Emerson complained that the performance was too polished for his taste, as Twain would say later that the New Year's Eve reading he attended was but "glittering frostwork." But this was the minority view, and from two used to getting the lecture-hall praise and dollars that now went to Dickens -- some $140,000 profit for this tour, and an estimated two million dollars in today's money for Dickens's last two years of readings at home and abroad.
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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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On this day in 1882 Anthony Trollope died. In 1993 a commemorative plaque to Trollope was placed in Poets' Corner, Westminster Abbey, upon which is inscribed the last sentence from his Autobiography, published the year after his death: "Now I stretch out my hand, and from the further shore I bid adieu to all who have cared to read any among the many words that I have written." The "many words" amount to forty-seven novels; this is ten more than the other literary giants of his time -- Dickens, Thackeray, George Eliot, the Brontës -- combined. And many hands continue to reach out to them: virtually all of Trollope's books are currently in print, bought in unrivalled quantities, says biographer N. John Hall, "not by students, forced to do so, but by people who read them because they enjoy them."
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On this day in 1980 Mark David Chapman murdered John Lennon. He then sat down to read The Catcher in the Rye, his copy inscribed on the inside cover with "This is my statement. Holden Caulfield, Catcher in the Rye." Chapman's previous days had also been made to parallel Holden's -- a lonely, pre-Christmas wandering in New York, a prostitute, a talk about the ducks, all distorted by his voices and hollow point bullets.
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On this day in 1911 the Nobel Prize-winning Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was born. He is the author of some forty novels and story collections, and estimated to be the most read Arabic novelist both outside of and within the Arab world -- though some of his books were ominously banned, and remain so. His epic social chronicles -- most notably the Cairo Trilogy, which covers much of the first half of the 20th century -- are compared to, and were in fact written in emulation of, those by Dickens, Tolstoy and Balzac. At the other end of the range, his novella The Day the Leader Was Killed provides a cultural snapshot for the 1981 assassination of Anwar Sadat. One of its central characters, the alienated, café-drifting Elwan, has the options and opinions of those who might have done it -- or of those born a little afterwards but to a similar Egypt, such as Mohammad Atta, who would grow up to do worse:
We are a people more acclimatized to defeat than to victory. It is just a Mafia which controls us -- no more, no less. Where are the good old days?... My pride wounded, my heart broken, I have come to this café as a refuge from the pain of loneliness.... How many nations live side by side in this one nation of ours? How many millionaires are there? Relatives and parasites? Smugglers and pimps? Shi'ites and Sunnis? --stories far better than A Thousand and One Nights. What do eggs cost today? This is my concern. Yet, as the same time, singers and belly dancers in the nightclubs on Pyramid Road are showered with banknotes and gratuities. What did the imam of the mosque say within earshot of the soldiers of the Central Security Force? There is not one public lavatory in this entire neighborhood.... [Sadat is] a failure -- "my friend Begin, my friend Kissinger," is all he can say; his uniform is Hitler's; his act, the act of Charlie Chaplin. He's rented our entire country -- furnished -- to the United States....
Mahfouz would be the last person to recommend terrorism. Muslim fundamentalists attacked him verbally for backing the Camp David Accord in 1978, and then his Children of Gebelawi was considered so blasphemous that it was banned in Egypt, and Omar Abdul-Rahman pronounced a fatwa against him. This was very nearly carried out in 1994, the 83-year-old Mahfouz stabbed in the neck and severely wounded just outside his apartment. "This incident," he said later, "is an opportunity to ask God to make the police defeat terrorists and to plead for the country to be purified of this evil in defense of people, liberty and Islam."
On this day in 1991 Salman Rushdie made his first appearance after three years in hiding from the fatwa against him -- the issuing of which would not have been necessary, according to Omar Abdul-Rahman, had Mahfouz been made an example of earlier, when he first started to offend terrorist sensibilities.
On this day in 1976 Saul Bellow delivered his speech in acceptance of the Nobel Prize. At this point, Bellow had written only fifteen of his twenty-nine (and still counting) books, but among these are his major prize-winners -- The Adventures of Augie March (1953), Henderson the Rain King (1959), Herzog (1964), Mr. Sammler's Planet (1970), and Humboldt's Gift (1975). These were proof enough, said the Academy, of Bellow's "exuberant ideas, flashing irony, hilarious comedy and burning compassion." His characters are anti-heroes more or less lost in a ram-shackle world, but they keep their chin up even as they stick their neck out, and are funny. In his acceptance speech, Bellow seemed to make an appeal on their behalf, urging modern writers to stick to the human comedy, and build their novels as if "a sort of latter-day lean-to, a hovel in which the spirit takes shelter" from the dehumanizing storm.
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Thanks Scher. I've never read Saul Bellow, other than a short story or two. I've wanted to. I have some of his important novels in my library, but have never gotten to them. I'm not a fast reader, but you reminded me that I need to read at least one of those. Any particular one you recommend?