I was the guy in the library with books piled all around him, new ones every day. I’m sure they had a name for me behind the desk. Each morning I’d walk into the stacks with a handful of authors in mind—Colette, Heinlein, Babel, Baldwin, Welty—and come back with as many fat volumes as I could balance on my laptop: biographies, diaries, novels, complete correspondences. I lived between PG and PT in the Library of Congress system, with occasional forays upstairs to BX, D, E, F, and HV and down to QH and Z. I pulled out a half-dozen Brontë books at a time, and I blew the dust off the Franz Werfel biography from the auxiliary stacks that no one had checked out for years.
And every day I foraged for stories: moments in the lives of writers, or the invented lives of their characters, that I could connect to a particular date but also to something larger. Moviemakers have never really known how to dramatize the lives of writers—how many balled-up pages thrown into the trash can you show?—but writers have always left a vivid record of the lives they lived, as well as the ones they imagined. They gossip and despair in their diaries, they grouch and boast in letters, they transform their struggles into fiction. They drive themselves into poverty to write a masterpiece, badger their agents, fall in and out of love, crash cars and planes and motorcycles, stoke feuds, read books they hate and adore, dream of fame and regret it, discover their talent and drink it away.
The book I wanted to create would hold all those things and more, not just the usual almanac staples of births and deaths and publication dates. April 15, after all, isn’t just the day that Robinson Crusoe was published, Henry James was born, and Edward Gorey died. It’s also the day that Walt Whitman mourned the death of Lincoln, Charles Dickens called the Mississippi the “beastliest river in the world,” George McGovern’s political director told Hunter S. Thompson he was worried about his health, and Thomas Higginson received four poems from a woman named Emily Dickinson with a note that began, “Are you too deeply occupied to say if my Verse is alive?”
In the piles of books around me I looked for historic events (the day Charles Dodgson invented Wonderland for Alice Liddell and her sisters, the night Mary Shelley imagined Frankenstein’s monster), but I also had my eye out for moments that were less momentous, the way the days in our lives usually are, and I’ve filled the corners of this book with reminders (Susan Sontag going to a double feature, Herman Melville playing croquet, David Foster Wallace describing his new tobacco-chewing habit to Jonathan Franzen) of the sheer dailyness of even the most eventful of lives.
Best of all was when I could find these two things—the historic and the humdrum—in the very same event. I knew how important the day Franz Kafka met Felice Bauer was to his literary life, but I didn’t know that he stepped on her foot in the revolving door when he dropped her off at her hotel. And June 14, 1950, I learned, is not only the day Charles M. Schulz signed the syndication contract for his new comic strip. It’s also the night he came home and celebrated by asking red-haired Donna Mae Johnson to marry him. (She turned him down.)
I spent a whole (and happy) year that way, collecting a year’s worth of stories for the 366 daily pages of this book. Caught up as I was in other days—consuming books, at times, as if the dates they contained were their only fruit—I never knew what day it was in my own life. Any book I opened I read with a strange and narrow radar. I skimmed indexes, tracked anecdotes from reference to reference, typed “january,” “february,” “march,” etc., into search boxes, and developed a particular appreciation for epistolary novels and a grudge against writers who didn’t date their diary entries (John Cheever, that means you). My first question, when my wife told me about a book she was reading, was always “Does it have any dates?”
Just as many of the best of these tales connect the lives of writers with the books they created, I also wanted to do something in this book that I hadn’t seen anywhere else: tell stories from the invented lives of fiction alongside those of the writers themselves. January 8 is the day Jane Austen wrote her sister about dancing with Tom Lefroy on his birthday, but it’s also the day Callie, or Cal, Stephanides was born in Jeffrey Eugenides’s Middlesex. L. Frank Baum finished the book he called then The Emerald City on October 9, the same day the mysterious title organization in Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Red-Headed League” closed its doors. Sometimes writers have connected the two themselves, knitting crucial days from their lives into their fiction. Bloomsday, James Joyce’s booklong celebration of the day he met Nora Barnacle, is the most familiar example, but Toni Morrison, Truman Capote, and J. K. Rowling are among the many who have made their own birthdays important dates in their novels.
Dates in books, I realized as I combed for them, are a literary tool like any other—dialogue, geography, physical description—to be deployed or withheld according to the effect desired. A novelist might choose, or choose not, to tell you that something happened on October 21, just as she might tell you, or not, that a character has gray eyes or lives in Knoxville. Diaries, biographies, epistolary novels, histories, and explorers’ accounts are all built on the bones of dates, as are mysteries, with their reliance on evidence and the tick-tock of police procedure. Memoirs, though, turn out to be concerned more with memory than evidence; it’s a rare memoirist, even one as careful as Mary Karr, who gets specific about the days things happened. Science fiction, to my surprise, often uses dates as a way of grounding its speculations, but fantasy rarely does, although Tolkien did pay attention to the calendars of Middle Earth. Poets mostly prefer months to days. (An exception is when they want to mark an occasion in their title: Wordsworth above Tintern Abbey, Yeats after the Easter Rebellion, Frank O’Hara on his lunch hour.) “April” is poetic; “April 18” is not. It’s too specific, too pedestrian. It’s the stuff of journalism or letters or train schedules, the muckier genres that novels have always dirtied themselves with.
Specific dates carry with them the lure of the real that the novel has always dangled, the stray facticity every good storyteller or con man knows can put a tale over. Some novelists are maestros of the date: Nabokov, Joyce, Philip K. Dick, Zadie Smith. Lovecraft’s unnameable horrors are made more dreadful by the precision of the days on which they occur, and much of the pleasure of Conan Doyle’s stories of detection comes from the details of their setting: the geography of London, the variety of its carriages, and the exact day—January 4—the five orange pips arrive. In some books a single date becomes a talisman: the August 4ths the sad story in Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier keeps circling back to, or the memory of an April 27 that becomes a fetish in Orhan Pamuk’s The Museum of Innocence.
Not every story cares about the calendar, of course. Do you ever know what day—or even month—it is in one of Kafka’s novels? Time there is both too urgent and too infinite for the mere particularity of dates. Time has a different character in Virginia Woolf’s novels too. Mrs. Dalloway, like Ulysses, is set on a single day in the middle of June, but she never says which one, leaving us no Dallowayday to celebrate the way we do Joyce’s June 16, 1904. In fiction, her sense of time had less to do with what day it was than with, as Mrs. Dalloway’s working title put it, The Hours, or, as she named one of her essays, “The Moment.”
But outside their fiction, Kafka and Woolf were two of the great artists of daily life—Kafka in his diary and especially his letters to his eternal fiancée Felice Bauer, and Woolf in her letters and especially her incomparable diary. They are among those writers whose daily impromptu autobiographies, like the diaries of Pepys, Thoreau, and Victor Klemperer or the letters of Flannery O’Connor or the James family, have become literature too. Then there are those who have the everyday art of their lives recorded by others: Dr. Johnson by his Boswell, of course, but also Herman Melville, who was no diarist but whose days appear again and again in these pages thanks to the blessed obsessiveness of biographers like Jay Leyda and Hershel Parker, and literary characters like Zora Neale Hurston and Jack Kerouac, whose self-creation made their days lastingly vivid.
Now you know how I read to make this book. How should you read it? If you’re like me, you’ll look up your birthday first. Some readers will simply open it at random, or seek out favorite names in the index, or read a single page on its appointed day before moving on to the next one, or even sit down and read it straight through. Most of all, I hope you will get detoured from this book to start opening some of the other books it’s made of. That’s what I’m going to do now that I’ve finished writing it.
Seattle, Washington
March 28, 2013