Judi’s Reviews > A Reader's Book of Days: True Tales from the Lives and Works of Writers for Every Day of the Year > Status Update

May 26 1911 ...and the appearance of being pampered. Mann too once arrived in Venice (on this day) and saw a beautiful boy, who has since been traced to Wladyslaw Moss, ten at the time (Mann was only thirty-five then, not the fifty-plus of Aschenbach) and who can be seen in a photograph on the beach in Gilbert Adair's The Real Tadzio, his delicate features almost obscured by the gigantic bow of his beach costume.

May 25

1910 The best-known note James sent to another of his notable students, Gertrude Stein—the one that said, "Dear Miss Stein—I understand perfectly how you feel," excusing her from the philosophy final she had abandoned in favor of a nice print day and giving her the top grade in the class—may have been apocryphal, but the great pragmatist did write to her on this day, just months before he died. He had ...

May 24

1945 ... he wrote—first on a sheet of toilet paper in his cage and then on a typewriter he was granted as a privilege—what became known as the Pisan Cantos, ten new sections in his ongoing poetic project that reflect on his imprisonment and the lost poetic friends of his past and that contain some of his most lyrical passages, particularly the promise that "What thou lovest well remains, / the rest is dross."

May 23

1980 ...Hugo in New York, and Pole in Los Angeles. (When she died, the New York Times listed Hugo as her husband in her obituary, while the Los Angeles Times listed Pole.) Both men, of course, had accommodated other lovers of hers at times—Henry Miller not the least of them—and when Hugo died a few yers after their belated meeting, it was Pole who, at Hugo's request, scattered his ashes in Santa Monica Bay.

May 22

...countries by war, the letters begin with Emily's wariness at the early signs that some Canadians think the Japanese families among them are enemies and end abruptly when the family packs to leave their home on this day for a tiny abandoned town in the interior, the first step in an odyssey of exclusion that lasts well beyond the war in Joy Kogawa's novel Obasan, based in part on her own family's history.

May 21

1813....Of the battle, in which over 200,000 soldiers clashed and 20,000 were lost, he wrote, "We see quite well, from noon to three o'clock, everything that can be seen of a battle, which is to say, nothing," a vision he doubtless recalled when, writing under his pen name of Stendhal two decades later, he described the chaos of Waterloo in the early pages of The Charterhouse of Parma.

May 20

1953 Andrew Sean Greer's The Story of a Marriage is not the story of the marriage that takes place on this day between Anna-bel DeLawn and William Platt, just before William, finally drafted, is shipped out to train for the war in Korea. The book is, instead, the story of Pearlie and Holland Cook, married a few years earlier, after Holland's own war in the Pacific. But as Pearlie learns, no marriage—not...

May 19

1857...Sainte-Breave. "But look," he added, "I'd rather go and have a chat with you," and so they retired to a café, where Sainte-Beauve declared his disgust with philosophers and their interest in the immortality of the soul, which they know "doesn't exist any more than God does," in an atheistic tirade so fi=erce in the words of the Goncourt's, "as to bring every game of dominoes in the café to a stop."

May 18

1945 On this afternoon, Laura Chase, age twenty-five, sharply turned the wheel of her sisters care with her white-gloved hands and drove off the side of a Toronto bridge into the ravine below...

May 17

1890 ...in the subject didn't end there. In 1907 he founded both The Show Window: A Journal of Practical Window Trimming for the Merchant and Professional and the National Association of Window Trimmers of America, launching a promising career he only gave up when his children's books, beginning with Father Goose and continuing on to Oz, allowed him to devote himself to writing at the age of forty-four.