Cover
Title Page
Copyright
About the Author
Acknowledgements
Preface: 2 July
1 January: Peter Pan: eternal boy, eternal copyright
2 January: The SS Commodore sinks off the coast of Florida, leaving Stephen Crane adrift in an open boat
3 January: Construction begins on the Brooklyn Bridge, long-standing icon of American modernism
4 January: The death of T.S. Eliot
5 January: Dumas fights a duel
6 January: The Feast of Fools and the end of the world
7 January: John Berryman follows his paternal destiny
8 January: Villon escapes the rope, and is never heard of again
9 January: Deconstruction deconstructed?
10 January: In Philadelphia, Thomas Paine publishes a pamphlet that will change the world
11 January: Lorna Sage dies as her memoir triumphs
12 January: Agatha Christie, the queen of mystery, and Dame of the British Empire, dies
13 January: Truth on the march
14 January: A.S. Byatt fights for her local
15 January: The youngest novelist in English literature dies, aged 89
16 January: Samuel Clemens, aged fifteen, publishes his first story in his hometown paper, the Hannibal, Missouri Western Union, edited by his older brother
17 January: Gary Gilmore is executed by firing squad in Salt Lake City, Utah, ending nearly a decade’s moratorium on the death penalty in the US
18 January: Imagists, ex-Rhymers and aesthetes dine on roast peacock at Wilfred Scawen Blunt’s stud farm
19 January: The Irish author Christopher Nolan wins the Whitbread Prize
20 January: The European Union enjoys itself
21 January: George Moore, the ‘English Zola’, dies
22 January: Anthony Powell’s great dance begins
23 January: After the failure of his stage play, Guy Domville, Henry James resolves to ‘take up my own old pen again’
24 January: Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe are divorced in Ciudad Juarez, Mexico
25 January: Rabbie Burns: whisky, literature and lassies
26 January: James Frey confesses his fact is fiction, and wins twice over
27 January: The US Congress sets up an Indian Territory in what is now Oklahoma
28 January: Horace Walpole coins the word ‘serendipity’
29 January: The death of George III elegised and satirised
30 January: King Charles I of England is beheaded. A fortnight later John Milton will risk his life to defend the act in a pamphlet
31 January: Louis Asa-Asa tells how he was captured in Africa and sold there six times before a storm forced his landing in Cornwall
1 February: The New York Review of Books is first published
2 February: Long Day’s Journey into Night’s long road to performance
3 February: The Reverend George Crabbe dies in Trowbridge, far from his family and roots in East Anglia, leaving many volumes of unpublished poems behind him
4 February: Rupert Brooke goes off to his corner of a foreign field
5 February: Longmans digs in for a very long stay
6 February: Raymond Chandler publishes his first novel-length detective fiction, The Big Sleep, at the advanced age of 51
7 February: Madame Bovary in the dock
8 February: The Pickwick Papers are launched and almost sink
9 February: Frank O’Hara sees a headline that Lana Turner has ‘collapsed’ and immediately writes a poem
10 February: The king of the cuckolds dies
11 February: Sylvia Plath commits suicide, in the coldest winter in England for fifteen years
12 February: Alexander Solzhenitsyn is stripped of his Soviet citizenship
13 February: Allied air forces firebomb Dresden
14 February: Salman Rushdie goes to ground
15 February: Francis Parkman launches The Oregon Trail
16 February: The Thirties are over. Belatedly
17 February: John Sadleir, the greatest financial swindler (to that date) in British commercial history, commits suicide by poison on Hampstead Heath
18 February: Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn is published in the US, delayed by an obscene engraving
19 February: Ezra Pound’s The Pisan Cantos wins the first-ever Bollingen Prize for poetry
20 February: F.T. Marinetti publishes the Futurist Manifesto on the front page of Le Figaro, Paris
21 February: Dead, but not yet buried
22 February: Coetzee’s Gulliverism
23 February: The print run begins of the Gutenberg Bible, in Mainz, Germany
24 February: The Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, burns down, prompting a laconic quip from its newly ruined owner
25 February: The other Naipaul dies. Prematurely
26 February: In Paris, Ernest Hemingway receives two cables from New York accepting his manuscript of In Our Time
27 February: Poet meets drummer
28 February: F.R. Leavis demolishes C.P. Snow
29 February: Gay’s ‘Newgate Pastoral’ will do
1 March: The witch trials open in Ingersoll’s Tavern, Salem Village, Massachusetts
2 March: Lucky Jim is conceived
3 March: The Birth of a Nation is released: literature meets film
4 March: Kidnapped by Native Americans, Mary Rowlandson is carried dry-shod over the Baquaug River, which proves an impassable barrier to the English army pursuing them
5 March: Shakespeare comes to America. Very slowly
6 March: Poe meets Dickens. Ravens fly
7 March: Alice B. Toklas dies at 89, 21 years after the death of her companion, Gertrude Stein
8 March: The author of The Wind in the Willows is born
9 March: Rand’s religion: the almighty dollar
10 March: The first two Cantos of Byron’s Childe Harold are published; Walter Scott sensibly turns to writing novels
11 March: Following the defeat of the French in Egypt, the British army presents the Rosetta Stone to the Society of Antiquaries in London
12 March: The author of the nation’s anthems is born in Covent Garden, London
13 March: A play is anathematised, a movement is born
14 March: Mrs Beeton, arbiter of household management, is born
15 March: The Ides of March: Julius Caesar is assassinated
16 March: Lytton Strachey declines to do battle
17 March: Marx waxes literary over the Crimean War
18 March: Philip Massinger joins the eminent literary company in Southwark Cathedral
19 March: As Philip Roth turns 74, his alter ego begins to feel his age
20 March: After being serialised over 40 weeks in an abolitionist periodical, Uncle Tom’s Cabin comes out as a book
21 March: Thomas Cranmer, author of the Book of Common Prayer, is burned at the stake for heresy in St Giles, Oxford
22 March: Goethe’s last words – and the other last words
23 March: Sexual intercourse has begun – or has it?
24 March: Nietzsche’s typewriting course ends
25 March: The Annunciation and Good Friday fall on the same day; John Donne doesn’t know whether to feast or fast
26 March: Modernist meets Anthroposophist
27 March: The Vicar of Wakefield is published, never to go out of print
28 March: Isaac Rosenberg sends his last poem to Edward Marsh
29 March: Brave New World is liberated in Australia
30 March: John Cheever (‘Chekhov of the Suburbs’) makes the front cover of Time magazine
31 March: Titanic poetry
1 April: Scientifiction blasts off
2 April: Alexis de Tocqueville sets sail from Le Havre to examine the American prison system
3 April: Mr Pooter decides to keep a diary
4 April: Winston Smith begins his diary
5 April: Pocahontas marries John Rolfe in Jamestown, Virginia
6 April: Francis Petrarch catches his first sight of Laura, and will go on to write 366 sonnets about his love for her
7 April: Edith Wharton entertains Morton Fullerton to dinner. Later that night she will write in her diary: ‘Non vi leggemmo avante’
8 April: Henry James writes of an idea for a novel that will ‘show that I can write an American story’
9 April: Dylan gets a Pulitzer
10 April: Revolution averted – without too much trouble
11 April: Frankenstein’s Volcano begins to subside
12 April: As forces of the Confederate States of America bombard Fort Sumter, the American Civil War begins
13 April: ‘Houston, we have a problem’
14 April: Roy Campbell punches Stephen Spender on the nose
15 April: The Dust Bowl gets its name and the Great Depression gets its dominant image
16 April: Britain’s first novelist (and first woman novelist) dies
17 April: ‘Holy Thursday’, William Blake’s ‘Song of Experience’
18 April: Paul Revere gallops through the night from Boston to Lexington, Massachusetts, to warn patriots that the British are coming
19 April: Samuel Johnson publishes Rasselas, his conte philosophique, written in one week to pay for his mother’s funeral
20 April: Amiel comes home in triumph
21 April: Jane Carlyle’s dubious post-mortem
22 April: In Household Words, the weekly periodical he ‘conducts’, Charles Dickens publishes ‘Ground in the Mill’ alongside the fourth number of Hard Times
23 April: Death of Poets Day
24 April: A terrible beauty is born
25 April: The novel is invented, but its inventor has no name for it
26 April: George Herbert is inducted as rector of the parish of Fugglestone-cum-Bemerton, near Salisbury
27 April: Encounter’s CIA connection revealed
28 April: The British bestseller list arrives (belatedly)
29 April: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano is published: fact or fiction?
30 April: The United States buys the entire Middle West from the French for $15 million, more than doubling the size of the country. Fenimore Cooper has his doubts
1 May: The nine-year-old Dante Alighieri first meets the eight-year-old Beatrice Portinari when his father takes him to their family home for a May Day party
2 May: An unnoticed revolution in books
3 May: Chekhov’s last visit to Moscow
4 May: Sherlock Holmes dies at the Reichenbach Falls
5 May: John Scopes is charged with teaching evolution in a Tennessee school
6 May: The Washington office of the Federal Writers’ Project writes to the south-eastern region to praise their life history of ex-slave Betty Cofer
7 May: Even though Richard Wright has broken with the Communist party, the FBI Director memoes the New York office to keep a Security Index Card on the African-American author
8 May: Nobbled
9 May: Everyman’s publisher dies; Everyman books live on
10 May: Bibliocaust
11 May: Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses is published
12 May: As Kenneth Tynan lauds Look Back in Anger in the Sunday Observer, a ‘small miracle in British culture’ ensues
13 May: De Quincey writes to Wordsworth
14 May: John Smith lands in Virginia
15 May: Amazon’s stream strengthens to flood force
16 May: Burgess reviews Burgess (favourably)
17 May: Héloise is buried alongside Abelard in the cemetery at the nunnery that he had built for her
18 May: Proust, Joyce, Picasso, Stravinsky and Diaghilev sit down to the modernist dinner from hell
19 May: Mounted settlers from surrounding towns attack the natives at Peskeompskut; language poet Susan Howe scrambles the history
20 May: W.H. Auden becomes an American citizen
21 May: Henry Pye is appointed Poet Laureate
22 May: Allen Lane launches Penguin Books
23 May: John Banville throws a spanner in Ian McEwan’s works
24 May: Guy Burgess tries to telephone W.H. Auden just before defecting to Moscow
25 May: Oscar Wilde is convicted of gross indecency and sentenced to two years’ hard labour
26 May: Born: iconographer of the Great Depression
27 May: Cromwell returns, bloodily, from Ireland to be greeted, ironically, by Andrew Marvell
28 May: The first Hay Festival
29 May: H.G. Wells publishes his first (timeless) ‘scientific romance’
30 May: Dramatist Christopher Marlowe is murdered in Deptford, London: assassination or drunken brawl?
31 May: Evelyn Waugh looks on as No. 3 Commando blow up a tree for Lord Glasgow
1 June: Sydney Smith defends his style as the model English clergyman
2 June: Thomas Hardy is born, dies, and is reborn
3 June: Enoch’s melancholy return
4 June: Perón becomes president. Borges becomes an inspector of chickens
5 June: Daring novelist dies, no longer daring
6 June: Wallace Stevens writes to the editor of Poetry allowing her to change his most famous poem – for the worse
7 June: Washington Irving greets his native land after seventeen years living abroad
8 June: Mr Higginson gets a letter from Miss Dickinson
9 June: Dickens’s heroism at the Staplehurst rail accident
10 June: Registering a new word every 98 minutes, the vocabulary of English reaches one million words, more than the sum of Italian, French, Spanish and German combined
11 June: Owen Wister sets the scene for the western movie – literally
12 June: Conrad enters the Heart of Darkness
13 June: Charles A. Lindbergh receives a ticker-tape reception as he parades down 5th Avenue, New York
14 June: William Brazel comes across a ‘large area of bright wreckage made up of rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks’ while working on the Foster homestead, near Roswell, New Mexico
15 June: The ball before the cannon balls flew
16 June: James Joyce goes out on his first date with his future wife, Norah Barnacle
17 June: The death of Joseph Addison. Bibles and brandy
18 June: Crossing the country on his way to the California Gold Rush, Edward Tomkins tries to describe the buttes and pinnacles in the Platte Valley
19 June: Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are executed by electric chair at Sing Sing Prison, Ossining, New York
20 June: After one of Anne Bradstreet’s many grandchildren dies at three years and seven months, her grandmother writes a poem on the brittleness of life
21 June: Isaac Asimov submits his first SF story, ‘The Cosmic Corkscrew’, to John W. Campbell of Astounding Science Fiction
22 June: The Un-American Activities Committee of the House of Representatives publishes its ‘Red Channels’ blacklist
23 June: Lady Mary Wortley Montagu writes a novelette of London gossip to her clinically depressed sister in Paris
24 June: The day before the Battle of Little Bighorn, Jack Crabb is appointed official jester to the commander of the 7th Cavalry, George Armstrong Custer
25 June: T.S. Eliot writes to his lawyer, patron and friend John Quinn that he has ‘written a long poem of about 450 lines’
26 June: The writers’ writer dies at Deauville
27 June: John Fowles despairs too early
28 June: Lawrence fails an examination, disgustedly
29 June: Theodore Roosevelt writes to Brander Matthews, professor of literature at Columbia: ‘What a miserable little snob Henry James is! His polished, pointless, uninteresting stories about the upper classes in England make one blush to think that he was once an American’
30 June: The United States passes the Pure Food and Drug Act
1 July: No smoking day
2 July: Blast deafens philistine opposition, until the blasts of war destroy it
3 July: To save face, Francis Bacon asks Robert Cecil for a knighthood
4 July: Two American founding fathers die on the 50th anniversary of the United States they did so much to establish
5 July: Rebecca Butterworth writes to her father from ‘The Back Woods of America’ asking him to pay her way back to England
6 July: The first Nobel laureate blogs his principles
7 July: Ida L. Moore interviews the Haithcocks of West Durham, North Carolina
8 July: Ralph Waldo Emerson prepares to deny the miracles of Christ – sort of
9 July: Mrs Gothic is born
10 July: Poet shoots poet
11 July: To Kill a Mockingbird is published
12 July: The end of blasphemy
13 July: William Carlos Williams writes to James Laughlin at New Directions: ‘Working like hell on Paterson. It’s coming too. … You’ll see, it’ll be a book’
14 July: La Marseillaise – to sing, or not to sing?
15 July: The fictional origins of Scott’s great work of fiction
16 July: J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye is published. It will go on to sell 60 million copies and be translated into almost all the world’s languages
17 July: Alexander Pope and his doctor
18 July: Led by white officers, including Henry James’s brother, the 54th Massachusetts Regiment of black soldiers attack Fort Wagner with courage and terrible loss of life
19 July: Jeffrey Archer goes down
20 July: The Modern Library proclaims the 20th century’s 100 best novels in English
21 July: Pottermania is good for you – or is it?
22 July: Robert Graves: the War Office regrets, then doesn’t
23 July: Henry David Thoreau spends a night in jail for refusing to pay his poll tax
24 July: Sailing the Atlantic, Francis Higginson shows why there will be no room for blasphemers and sodomites in the ‘new paradise of New England’
25 July: At the height of the Potsdam Conference, Tyrone Slothrop, disguised as Rocketman and cradling a twelve-pound bag of hashish, sees Mickey Rooney leaning over the balcony of no. 2 Kaiserstrasse
26 July: John Muir spends ‘a day that will never end’ among the trees and crystals at the top of Mount Hoffman
27 July: President Franklin Delano Roosevelt signs the Federal Writers’ Project into law
28 July: Last Exit to Brooklyn, the censor’s last throw
29 July: The USS Indianapolis is sunk by a Japanese torpedo
30 July: Better late than never?
31 July: Daniel Defoe is pilloried – literally – for The Shortest Way with the Dissenters
1 August: Shakespeare’s little helper is laid to rest in St George’s church, Southwark
2 August: Murdoch’s brain
3 August: John Rut writes the first letter home from the New World
4 August: Out West for the first time, Owen Wister is underwhelmed by cowboys
5 August: Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville meet for the first time
6 August: The poet Robert Lowell receives his letter drafting him for service in the US armed forces. He declines the invitation
7 August: Rumour has it the Scottish play is first performed – though not in the usual place
8 August: Elizabeth rallies her mariners
9 August: Edgar Allan Poe invents the detective story, then disparages his achievement
10 August: The Vikings defeat the Anglo-Saxons in the Battle of Maldon, early testimony to the English cult of defeat
11 August: Enid Blyton is born in a flat above a shop in Lordship Lane, East Dulwich, London
12 August: Who or what killed J.G. Farrell?
13 August: The Duke of Marlborough leads an army of northern European forces against the French at Blindheim, to win a famous victory
14 August: John Updike publishes his first contribution to the New Yorker. It is a comic poem entitled ‘Duet with Muffled Brake Drums’
15 August: Disguised as a snake, the Devil invades a meeting of the Synod in Cambridge, Massachusetts, but Mr Thomson, an elder of Braintree and a man of much faith, treads it under foot
16 August: Massacre of Peterloo
17 August: Charlotte Perkins Gilman commits suicide
18 August: Lolita is published in the US
19 August: The New York Herald breaks the news of the California Gold Rush
20 August: England’s finest naturalist–novelist is buried
21 August: The first of two English sisters arrives in Montreal to kick-start Canadian literature
22 August: Jack London’s Wolf House burns down
23 August: Unconquerable
24 August: Rosencrantz and Guildenstern live again
25 August: Born in Belfast: the man who will overturn the American western film
26 August: The last southern gentleman dies, aged 70
27 August: Spain’s most popular and prolific playwright dies at 73. His state funeral will attract vast crowds and last nine days
28 August: Sebastopol falls, a great novelist rises
29 August: As the Cuban missile crisis looms, Robert Frost leaves on a goodwill tour of the USSR
30 August: The hotline between the leaders of the US and the Soviet Union goes operational
31 August: Richard III is killed as the Tudors defeat the Plantagenets at Bosworth Field, bringing the Wars of the Roses to an end
1 September: Somerset Maugham, literary travel agent
2 September: Pepys – eye-witness to the Great Fire of London
3 September: William Wordsworth has to kill London in order to love it
4 September: Dame Shirley, writing from the California gold mines, entertains the local blacksmith
5 September: Born: father of the Edinburgh Festival
6 September: Thus perish all heretics
7 September: French and Russian armies clash at the Battle of Borodino
8 September: Edward Bellamy’s cousin reveres the flag
9 September: In Cologne, William Caxton completes his translation of The Recuyell of the Histories of Troye; three years later he will produce it as the first printed book in English
10 September: The death of Amy Levy
11 September: Fateful date in fiction – fatal in real life
12 September: Death of a literary louse
13 September: On reaching its 1,998th performance, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap becomes Britain’s longest-running straight play
14 September: After speculating on ring-ousel migration, Gilbert White comes down on the side of local natural history
15 September: Stephen King is honoured, but not respected
16 September: The Great Preston Lockout
17 September: Maggie Joy Blunt follows a woman hoarding salt
18 September: Edie Rutherford supports the communist squatters
19 September: Amiri Baraka is de-laureated
20 September: Born: the midwife of the modern American novel
21 September: Publius Vergilius Maro dies, his Aeneid not quite finished
22 September: Death of the worthiest knight that ever lived
23 September: ‘An important Jew dies in exile’
24 September: 60 Minutes gets its first showing on CBS television
25 September: Queen Victoria delays her diamond jubilee. Rudyard Kipling delays publication of his celebratory poem
26 September: Stage censorship finally ends in Britain
27 September: Midwich survives
28 September: Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo lands near what is now San Diego, to become the first European to set foot in California
29 September: The Greek fleet swamps the Persians in the Battle of Salamis; Aeschylus writes it up
30 September: The first part of Little Women comes out – to instant and lasting acclaim
1 October: Wuthering Heights and the long journey of the four-letter word
2 October: Sarah Kemble Knight begins her epic journey from Boston to New York
3 October: Poet meets leech-gatherer; poem ensues
4 October: Printing of the Coverdale Bible is finished, the first complete Bible to be published in English
5 October: Steinbeck begins a series of articles in a San Francisco paper; they will change his life
6 October: William Golding’s sour-tasting Nobel Prize
7 October: As Allen Ginsberg first reads Howl aloud at the Six Gallery, San Francisco, the Beat Generation comes of age
8 October: Herta Müller wins the Nobel. Handkerchiefs flutter in celebration
9 October: Dario Fo wins the Nobel for Literature
10 October: A True Leveller is baptised somewhere in the parish of Wigan
11 October: Where’s Charley? opens a long run on Broadway
12 October: Tennyson crosses the bar
13 October: Sonia Brownell marries George Orwell in his room in University College Hospital, London, the hospital chaplain officiating
14 October: The Normans defeat the English at the Battle of Hastings, changing the English language for ever
15 October: Winston Churchill, novelist
16 October: Abraham Lincoln deconstructs ‘the sacred right of self-government’
17 October: A St Louis newspaper interviews Walt Whitman on the future of American literature
18 October: Bosavern Penlez hangs, for being in the wrong place at the wrong time
19 October: Dylan Thomas leaves on his fourth trip to the US – his second that year – a voyage from which he will never return
20 October: John Florio’s translation of Montaigne’s Essais is entered in the Stationer’s Register in London
21 October: Poststructuralism comes to America
22 October: Sartre wins the Nobel Prize, rejects it, then thinks – ‘Well, why not? It’s a lot of money’
23 October: Beowulf escapes incineration
24 October: Martin Amis joins the ranks of the literary breast-men
25 October: St Crispin’s Day: two kinds of glory in British military history
26 October: A gunfight breaks out at the O.K. Corral in Tombstone, Arizona, when Marshal Virgil Earp, his brothers Wyatt and Morgan and Doc Holliday try to disarm Billy Clanton and Frank McLaury
27 October: Maxine Ting Ting Hong is born in Stockton, California
28 October: Henry David Thoreau reclaims from his publisher 703 unsold copies of his first book, out of 1,000 printed
29 October: Sir Walter Raleigh’s sharp medicine
30 October: The abolitionist and suffragette Amy Post authenticates Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, and vouches for its author, Linda Brent
31 October: Brecht, having baffled HUAC, leaves the USA
1 November: W.H. Smith open their first bookstall at Euston station
2 November: Spenser’s tomb is dug up
3 November: Boris Pasternak is offered the chance to leave the Soviet Union and refuses
4 November: Anthony Trollope’s mother emigrates to America – temporarily
5 November: William of Orange arrives in England to take up the offer of the throne, and Dryden loses his job
6 November: The first (but by no means the last) death of Count Dracula
7 November: F. Scott Fitzgerald writes to his publisher with the definitive title of his new novel. It is to be called Trimalchio in West Egg
8 November: Theodore Dreiser’s Sister Carrie is published but not publicised
9 November: Hitler’s beer hall putsch
10 November: Lady Chat goes on sale
11 November: The Pilgrim Fathers land in America. Ten years later, William Bradford will turn the event into New England’s founding myth
12 November: John Bunyan is arrested for preaching outside the established church. ‘Not so much a prison as an office’
13 November: Kenneth Tynan ejaculates the word ‘fuck’ (‘fuff-fuff-fuff-uck’) on BBC TV: a first – for TV, not Tynan
14 November: Lawrence’s Rainbow goes up in flames
15 November: The Scrooby Separatists set off to explore the New World
16 November: Britain’s pioneer lesbian novel is judged obscene
17 November: Sir Walter Raleigh goes on trial for treason
18 November: Walt Disney launches Steamboat Willie
19 November: After a sound night’s sleep at the Willard Hotel, Washington, DC, Julia Ward Howe wakes early in the dawn with the words of ‘The Battle Hymn of the Republic’ in her head
20 November: Melville and Hawthorne meet for (nearly) the last time, and take a walk in the sand dunes of Southport, Lancashire
21 November: Jane Welsh Carlyle confronts the taxman on behalf of her husband
22 November: Norman Mailer, uxoricide
23 November: Berger spurns Booker
24 November: James Boswell conquers in armour
25 November: Yukio Mishima’s good career move
26 November: The great(est) storm
27 November: Heine’s credo
28 November: Edward Taylor loses his way en route to the town on the Massachusetts frontier where he will spend the rest of his life
29 November: President Lyndon B. Johnson sets up the Warren Commission to investigate the assassination of John F. Kennedy
30 November: A comet blazes, Mark Twain is born. It blazes again at his death
1 December: American Declaration of Independence (e-text version) proclaimed
2 December: Would Jane Bigg-Wither have written better, or worse, or not at all?
3 December: A Streetcar Named Desire opens at the Ethel Barrymore Theater on Broadway, launching the career of 23-year-old Marlon Brando
4 December: Currer Bell meets Michaelangelo Titmarsh
5 December: Burton concludes his great work (not for the only time)
6 December: Hopkins’s ‘great dragon’
7 December: Harold Pinter hurls his stick of Nobel dynamite at America and Britain
8 December: The Saturday Evening Post publishes Zora Neale Hurston’s ‘A Negro Voter Sizes up Taft’
9 December: Peanuts gets its first of many outings on television
10 December: Mikhail Sholokhov collects his Nobel Prize for Literature in Stockholm: how an apparatchik became an unperson
11 December: Damon Runyon tells it as it is as he takes off for the poker game in the sky
12 December: Edgar Wallace sees Hollywood and dies
13 December: E.M. Forster finds salvation
14 December: Two giants of modernism meet
15 December: Fanny Hill seized – still banned
16 December: A literal hatchet job
17 December: Dr Martin Luther King attends the world premiere of Gone with the Wind (in a sense)
18 December: Dryden mugged
19 December: The first Poor Richard’s Almanack is printed
20 December: Phileas Fogg arrives on the right day, but does not know it
21 December: Dostoyevsky’s last night on earth
22 December: Nathanael West dies
23 December: Scientists at AT&T’s Bell Laboratories first demonstrate the transistor
24 December: Booth Tarkington makes the cover of Time
25 December: Bing Crosby first sings ‘White Christmas’ on his NBC radio show, The Kraft Music Hall
26 December: Just three weeks after Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt sets the day for Thanksgiving
27 December: Alfred Nobel’s last will and testament
28 December: The Tay Bridge collapses in a violent storm, dashing a trainload of passengers to their deaths
29 December: The destruction of Paternoster Row
30 December: Betwixt ‘Yol and Nwe Yer’ a green knight rides into King Arthur’s court
31 December: Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road is published, his classic novel of a doomed marriage in American 1950s suburbia
Text acknowledgements
Index
John Sutherland is Lord Northcliffe Professor Emeritus at University College London. He has taught at Edinburgh University, UCL, and the California Institute of Technology. He has two honorary doctorates (Surrey and Leicester Universities) for ‘services to literary criticism’. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, he is also President of the Society of Indexers, and was Chair of the Man-Booker Prize panel, 2005.
Stephen Fender was born in San Francisco, and educated at Stanford and the Universities of Wales and Manchester. He has taught English and American literature at the University of Edinburgh, University College London and Sussex University, where he was Professor of American Studies from 1985 to 2001, and founding Director of the Graduate Research Centre in the Humanities. He has also taught in the USA at Santa Clara, Williams and Dartmouth Colleges, and while at UCL he designed and taught MA-level courses at the Institute for US Studies, London. At present he is an Honorary Professor of English at UCL.
Stephen Fender would like to thank Winifred Campbell, Brian Oatley, Peter Nicholls, Janet Pressley, Anna Ranson, and Jennifer Wall for their ideas and comments.
2010 On this day, as the authors of this book put their heads together to write their preface (traditionally the last thing to be written), Beryl Bainbridge died. She was well on in years and was known to be frail. The obituaries were all in stock and up to date. They appeared, some of them, the same day – virtually before the novelist’s body had cooled.
Bainbridge was much loved – one of the ‘national teddy-bear’ authors, along with her NW1 neighbour, Alan Bennett. The other image that attached to her was that of perpetual bridesmaid. She was forever being shortlisted, or touted, for the Booker Prize, the UK’s major award in fiction, but never quite won it. The British love a good loser, and none was a more gracious loser than Beryl.
The anecdotes about her were, many of them, chestnuts, but still relished because she was so liked. She was expelled from school at fourteen as a ‘corrupting influence’, having lost her virginity to a German POW called Franz the year before. Her subsequent life, which included a walk-on part in Coronation Street, was rackety. As the Guardian obituarist, Janet Watts, records:
One day her elderly former mother-in-law appeared at the front door, took a loaded gun from her handbag and fired. Beryl foiled that attack, and the episode appears in The Bottle Factory Outing, which won the Guardian fiction prize.
One of us – John Sutherland – also lives in Camden, where Bainbridge, now a ‘dame’, used to take a shortcut in front of where he lives. Her lungs were ruined by years of smoking and she would often take a minute or two’s wheezing rest on a doorstep with a street drunk called Tom, with whom, she said, she discussed such things as W.B. Yeats’s late poetry.
It was a remarkable life. But – prepared as the world was for it – no one knew precisely when it would end. Her death was a wholly random event. She herself confidently expected to die in her 71st year (the age her mother and grandmother passed away) and made a touching TV programme, Beryl’s Last Year, a kind of Ignatian meditation on her own end. She was, as it happened, wrong – surviving, as she did, three more years.
Life (and death) are – unless you are facing execution like Gary Gilmore (see our entry for 17 January) – random events. Literature itself comprises nothing but a mass of randomness. If a novel, or poem, is rejected early on, a major writer may never happen. Any author’s life is full of accidents, tosses of the coin that can fall either way up – one leading to literary creation, the other to silence. What if Dickens had been killed in the Staplehurst crash (see our entry for 9 June)?
For our convenience we package literature into syllabuses, curricula, canons, genres, Dewey Decimal Sectors. But literature is vast, growing (ever faster) and inherently miscellaneous. This book, using a calendrical frame, is a tribute to that miscellaneity. Anything can happen anywhere anytime. As can ‘nothing’, as Philip Larkin sagely reminds us.
The authors have between them a hundred years of scholarship, teaching and conversing about literature (often between themselves). What they know is like two crammed attics – full of interesting junk. But that junk is worth having. The world of books, they believe, is something forever to be explored, never comprehensively mapped. As you read this book, diurnal entry by diurnal entry, stop and try to predict (without peeking) what is going to happen on the next day. Chances are you won’t be anywhere close.
Stephen Fender, a pioneer of American Studies in the UK (and an expatriate American) is responsible for many, but not all, of the New World entries. John Sutherland, a Victorianist by speciality, is responsible for many, but not all, in that period.
1988 The copyright history of James Barrie’s most famous creation, Peter Pan, is vexed – and legally unique.
The origin of the character was in stories Barrie told to the children of one of his friends. One of them was called Peter. The image of Pan – thanks to cultish 1890s literary paganism – was current in the Edwardian period (the mischievous goaty-god makes an entry, for example, into another favourite children’s book of the period, The Wind in the Willows).
At the time Barrie was best known as a novelist. His contemporaries would have predicted that his reputation with posterity would rest on such works as Auld Licht Idylls, or The Little Minister. These are out of print nowadays and largely forgotten, while Peter Pan, thanks to the Christmas pantomime, is set to fly on till the crack of doom.
The character was first introduced in Barrie’s 1902 novel for adults, The Little White Bird. The play (aimed at children, principally) Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up had its premiere in London on 27 December 1904. The novel Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens was spun off as a follow-up to the play in 1906. Barrie then adapted the play into another novel, Peter and Wendy (usually shortened to Peter Pan), in 1911. In 1929 Barrie, who had no children of his own, donated the work, and all the Peter Pan revenues, to the Great Ormond Street Hospital for Children, in London.
These differing initiation dates, originating conceptions and ownership issues have caused copyright confusion (as has the fact that there is, in Anglo-American law, no copyright in ideas, scenarios or characters – only in the verbal forms in which they are expressed).
Further confusion has arisen in the decades since Barrie’s death, in 1937. The work, popularised by such (copyright licensed) adaptations as Walt Disney’s in 1953, has been a major source of revenue for the hospital. The normal term of copyright in the UK is 50 years post mortem, which meant that Peter Pan entered the public domain at the end of 1987.
It then re-entered copyright protection with the EU ‘harmony’ regulations of 1995, which extended copyright to 70 years post mortem. This was done largely to compensate German literary estates, which had lost out on international copyright revenue during the Second World War. Along with Mein Kampf (whose copyright had expired in 1995) Peter Pan was given a new lease of copyright life until 2007, when – in the normal course of events – it would have popped back into the public domain on the 70th anniversary of Barrie’s death.
This process, however, was forestalled by a measure introduced by the Labour government in 1998 (interested in keeping a healthy income stream into the NHS). This extraordinary amendment to the law affecting intellectual property:
conferred on trustees for the benefit of the Hospital for Sick Children, Great Ormond Street, London, a right to a royalty in respect of the public performance, commercial publication, broadcasting or inclusion in a cable programme service of the play ‘Peter Pan’ by Sir James Matthew Barrie, or of any adaptation of that work, notwithstanding that copyright in the work expired on 31 December 1987.
The situation (particularly in the US) is tangled and has led to serial litigation. But in essence the situation is simple. Peter, the perpetual boy, has – from 1 January 1988 onwards – perpetual copyright. For ever and ever, amen.
1897 Leaving Jacksonville, Florida, for Cuba, the ship struck a sandbar that damaged the hull and started a leak in the boiler room. When the pumps failed she settled in the water and finally sank some sixteen miles offshore. Aboard was Stephen Crane, poet and novelist, renowned author of Maggie, a Girl of the Streets (1893) and The Red Badge of Courage (1895). When the crew took to the lifeboats, Crane found himself in a ten-foot dinghy along with the injured ship’s captain, its cook and an engine-room oiler.
What followed was his best-remembered short story, ‘The Open Boat’, which he would publish in Scribner’s Magazine just four months later. The narrative is freighted with portentous, third-person irony to reflect the seriousness of the men’s situation. Only the oiler Billie is named; the others are just ‘the correspondent’ (Crane’s stand-in), ‘the captain’ and ‘the cook’.
‘None of them knew the color of the sky’, as the famous opening words have it. Crane is good on contrasting points of view. ‘Viewed from a balcony, the whole thing would doubtlessly have been weirdly picturesque’, but what the men see are the huge waves that threaten to swamp them if not kept a close eye on. They know the colour of those all right.
The men support each other, taking turns at the oars without complaint, doing their best to steer in the heaving seas. But set against the fellowship of comrades is the indifference of nature. They catch sight of land but it’s out of reach. ‘If I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned – if I am going to be drowned, why in the name of the seven mad gods who rule the sea, was I allowed to come thus far and contemplate sand and trees?’ Nature’s answer to this question – as to all others – is a ‘high cold star on a winter’s night’. Finally they get ashore, but only after the dinghy has capsized in the surf, forcing the men to swim for it. Billie is drowned. The nameless ones survive.
The truth fell short of this elemental struggle between nature and humanity. In real life the Commodore, not much larger than an inshore trawler, had been loaded to the gunwales with munitions for the Cuban insurrection against Spain. Crane had been sent along as a reporter for the Bacheller-Johnson newspaper syndicate to get the story. The whole adventure took just a day and a night. Just four days after the Commodore went down, Stephen Crane was back in the arms of his new girlfriend, a brothel madam named Cora Taylor whom he had met in Jacksonville before leaving for Cuba.
1870 It took thirteen years to build, but when it was done it spanned more than a mile over the East River between Manhattan and Brooklyn, then the longest suspension bridge in the world and the first to be held up by filaments of steel wire.
Even before the bridge was started, the idea of crossing that stretch of water had fascinated the poet Walt Whitman as an image of links between work and home, between fellow voyagers, even between the poet and his future readers. This is from ‘Crossing Brooklyn Ferry’ (1860):
I too saw the reflection of the summer night in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Looked at the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the water,
Looked on the haze on the hills southward and south westward,
Looked on the vapor as it flew in fleeces tinged with violet.
But it took the bridge to bring technology into the optimistic future vision, in the aesthetics of the machine age. Precisionist painters like Charles Sheeler, Joseph Stella and George Ault rendered factories, skyscrapers and grain elevators almost cubistically – as simplified planes of light and colour. In two paintings by Stella and a film photographed by Sheeler and Paul Stand (Manhatta, 1920) the Bridge is imaged head-on, its suspension cables focusing on the arches of its pillars.
Not just painting but poetry too had to accommodate the commonplace present – and especially modern industrial technology. ‘For unless poetry can absorb the machine,’ Hart Crane wrote in 1929, it will have ‘failed of its full contemporary function.’ Crane’s ambitious sequence The Bridge (1930) both begins and ends with the Brooklyn Bridge, imagining it as the first link westwards and backwards in time to an American past to be recuperated for use in the present.
O sleepless as the river under thee,
Vaulting the sea, the prairies’ dreaming sod,
Unto us lowliest sometime sweep, descend
And of the curveship lend a myth to God.
1965 No British poet’s death was more momentous (particularly among his fellow poets) than that of T.S. Eliot on this day. It was his stature as a patron, as much as a practitioner, which rendered his death the end of a literary period.
In his private journal, Ted Hughes (all of whose major works had been published by Faber, of which Eliot was senior editor) recorded that the death was
like a crack over the head. I’ve so tangled him in my thoughts, dreamt of him so clearly and unambiguously. At once I feel windswept, unsafe. He was in my mind constantly, like a rather over-watchful, over-powerful father. And now he has gone.
In the genuinely windswept wastes of Siberia, where he was in exile, Josef Brodsky wrote, on 12 January, the elegy ‘Verses on the Death of T.S. Eliot’. It begins (translated from the Russian): ‘He died at start of year, in January’ and clearly evokes Auden’s poem on the death of Yeats.
A continent away, in the Sewanee Review, Allen Tate wrote, with Dantean flourishes:
It was only several days later that I understood that T.S. Eliot was dead. One dies every day one’s own death, but one cannot imagine the death of the man who was il maestro di color che sanno1 – or, since he was an artist and not after his young manhood a philosopher: il maestro di color che scrivonno.2
Those who were not poets were less poetic in their response. Groucho Marx wrote in a letter:
I was saddened by the death of T.S. Eliot. My wife and I had dinner at his home a few months ago and I realized then that he was not long for this world. He was a nice man, the best epitaph any man can have.
The authors of this book were junior lecturers at Edinburgh University in 1965. On hearing the news of Eliot’s death, a less excited colleague remarked: ‘Then I don’t suppose he’ll be turning again.’
1 ‘The master of men who know.’ (Dante, Inferno, Canto IV, describing Aristotle.)
2 ‘The master of men who write.’
1825 It’s not an easy statistic to gather but, given the nature of his plots (musketeers and Counts of Monte Cristo), no novelist features more duels in his fiction, nor features them more climactically, than Alexandre Dumas (père).
The twenty-year-old Dumas came to Paris with the restoration of the monarchy in 1822. It would be seven years before he made his name as a writer (of plays, initially), and twenty years before, with the D’Artagnan romances, he would become the most popular writer of fiction in France – specialising in the clash of swords (although the plot of The Three Musketeers hinges, initially, on duels being banned). Initially he worked at the Palais Royal, in the office of the Duc D’Orléans.
In his memoirs Dumas recalls fighting a duel. It began over a game of billiards when one of the company chose to be sarcastic about the dandyish Dumas’s dress. The affair was arranged by the seconds, with the normal rituals, for 5 January – traditionally they were fought at dawn. Dumas was the challenger.
Pistols were initially the chosen weapon. In the event it was changed to swords. The site was a snow-swept quarry. Dumas’s opponent slept in, however, and the date was pushed back to the sixth and the place changed to Montmartre. The event quickly descended into farce as quarry workers (who left their beds earlier than the high-born duellists) gathered to watch the fun and Dumas’s sword proved, on the routine measurement of rapiers, to be shorter than his adversary’s. Nor were things helped by Dumas’s adversary experiencing difficulty (having forgotten his braces) in keeping his trousers up. There was a serious likelihood of his expiring in his underpants. Both of them were somewhat less skilled in swordplay than Edmond Dantès.
Honour was satisfied when Dumas drew blood by nicking his opponent in the shoulder. Duels were always more glamorous in Dumas’s later fiction and doubly so in the innumerable stage and movie versions of it.
1482 No novel opens with a more precise calendrical reference than Victor Hugo’s The Hunchback of Notre Dame (the melodramatic translation of the author’s more neutral Notre Dame de Paris):
Three hundred and forty-eight years, six months, and nineteen days ago to-day, the Parisians awoke to the sound of all the bells in the triple circuit of the city, the university, and the town ringing a full peal. The sixth of January, 1482, is not, however, a day of which history has preserved the memory.
Fiction has preserved it. The day, we learn, is notable to the citizens of Hugo’s Paris as the ‘double solemnity, united from time immemorial, of the Epiphany and the Feast of Fools’. On this day the lay populace elect their ‘Pope of Fools’. On 6 January 1482 the street vote goes to the bell-ringer of Notre Dame – principally because of his hilarious physical deformity. He is a living satire less of the Pontiff than of humanity itself:
His whole person was a grimace. A huge head, bristling with red hair; between his shoulders an enormous hump, a counterpart perceptible in front; a system of thighs and legs so strangely astray that they could touch each other only at the knees, and, viewed from the front, resembled the crescents of two scythes joined by the handles; large feet, monstrous hands; and, with all this deformity, an indescribable and redoubtable air of vigour, agility, and courage, – strange exception to the eternal rule which wills that force as well as beauty shall be the result of harmony. Such was the pope whom the fools had just chosen for themselves.
Is this the image of God? Quasimodo’s grotesque anatomy and indomitable willpower have become folkloric: as much for Charles Laughton’s classic depiction in the 1939 film as for Hugo’s 1831 novel.
There is another significance to the date than the street festival. Hugo sees 1482 as an epochal literary moment. The point is made by ‘the sworn bookseller of the university, Master Andry Musnier’ in conversation with ‘the furrier of the king’s robes, Master Gilles Lecornu’:
printing