Be sure and don't move your lips when you read Proust

July 9: Romance novelist Barbara Cartland was born on this day in 1901.

"If you want to get rich from writing, write the sort of thing that's read by persons who move their lips when they're reading to themselves." -- Don Marquis.

Yesterday: French novelist Marcel Proust was born on July 10, 1871.

"I think he (Proust) was mentally defective." -- Evelyn Waugh.

Just this one line makes us slightly ill

American writer Stanley Elkin was born on this day in 1930. He wrote:

"If you can't make people miserable by writing, what's the point?"

   He’d set out to be a writer, once and for all. Thirty-six years old, turning over a new leaf. He’d sworn off drinking for a while. Sober, industrious as a squirrel, he didn’t answer the door. He ate soup and crackers, potpies, Spam. Holed up in his garret, he wrote and wrote. Short stories, poems, a novel, and then another. The memoirs of a rat, the one who’d started the Great Plague. Essays. Epistles, letters of defamation, of denunciation. Diatribes. He was angry. Athletic career over, Cutterback dead, Rae Ann done for. His marriage a smoldering ruin. Like Achilles’, his anger encompassed the cosmos, he imagined.  --  Chapter 11, The Misforgotten.

Beat from all that typing

American beat writer Jack Kerouac was born on this day in 1922.

"That's not writing, that's typing." -- Truman Capote, on Kerouac's famous novel, On The Road.

And we're making history right now

The great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy was born on this day in 1828. He wrote:

"History is nothing but a collection of fables and useless trifles, cluttered up with a mass of unnecessary figures and proper names."

If you believe you'll have another beer, you won't write anything

Playwright Lillian Hellman (The Little Foxes) died on this day in 1984. She wrote:

"If you believe, as the Greeks did, that man is at the mercy of the gods, then you write tragedy. The end is inevitable from the beginning. But if you believe that man can solve his own problems and is at nobody's mercy, then you will probably write melodrama."

And writers, too, no doubt

English author Evelyn Waugh died on this day in 1966.

"If politicians and scientists were lazier," Waugh wrote, "how much happier we should all be."

For more on Waugh, visit Today in Farewells

A hero of my own life

Charles Dickens, the world's greatest novelist (in my highly subjective opinion), was born on this day 150 years ago.

Dickens captured my imagination and my compulsive attention when I was a kid of 12 or so. One summer I lay on the couch day after day, reading his books one after the other.

"There is perhaps no person living who can remember reading David Copperfield for the first time," wrote Virginia Woolf, but I can, vividly. It was the work of Dickens' that I first essayed, and I was a goner after the opening pages, when David talks about the father he never knew, buried in the churchyard close by their house, and "the indefinable compassion I used to feel for (him) lying out alone there in the dark night."

(My own father had died a couple of years before.)

I re-read Dickens through high school, and in college I had a Dickens seminar, during which our professor would expound, noteless, for three hours at a stretch, twice weekly, about the man and his work. It was a thrilling experience -- here was someone even more in love with Dickens than I was. He particularly loved Copperfield , probably because Dickens himself loved the novel above all his others. ("I have my favourite child, and his name is David Copperfield," Dickens wrote.)

What Woolf meant was that reading this particular novel of Dickens is one of those timeless experiences:

"Like Robinson Crusoe and Grimm's Fairy Tales...Pickwick and David Copperfield are not books, but stories communicated by word of mouth in those tender years when fact and fiction merge, and thus belong to those myths and memories of life...

"We remodel our psychological geography when we read Dickens...What we remember is the ardour, the excitement, the humour; the oddity of people's characters; the smell and soot and savor of London; the incredible coincidences which hook the most remote lives together; the city, the law courts; this man's limp, that man's nose; some scene under and archway or on the high road; and above all some gigantic and dominating figure...stuffed and swollen with life."

Contrary to his wish to be buried in Rochester Cathedral, Dickens was laid to rest in the Poets' Corner of Westminster Abbey. The inscription on his tomb reads:

"He was a sympathiser to the poor, the suffering, and the oppressed; and by his death, one of England's greatest writers is lost to the world."

"Dickens did not merely believe in the brotherhood of man in the weak modern way," wrote G. K. Chesterton; "he was the brotherhood of man, and knew it was a brotherhood in sin as well as in aspiration."

And she came out smelling like a rose like a rose like a rose

American writer Gertrude Stein was born on this day in 1874.

"Miss Stein was a past master in making nothing happen very slowly." -- Clifton Fadiman.

The lost count of Monte Cristo

Alexandre Dumas pere was born July 24, 1802.


"Nobody has read everything of Dumas, not even Dumas himself." -- Anonymous.

No hemming and hawing about it

Ernest Hemingway was born on this day in 1899.

"Always ready to lend a helping hand to the one above him." -- F. Scott Fitzgerald on Hemingway.

He idolized Hemingway. The writer sits down each day to face eternity, or the lack of it, he intoned. Bullshit, Sully told him. The writer sits down to face a blank page. Maybe that was what was wrong with Hemingway.

"What?” Cutterback said.
“He had to make a rite out of it?”
“A write? What the fuck are you talking about?”
“A rite. A ceremony.”
“He was a great fucking writer,” Cutterback growled.
“Sure he was. Did he even say that?”
“What?”
“What you just said. About eternity.”
“Yes, he did.”
“He’s full of shit, then.”
  --  Chapter 17, The Misforgotten.

The absurdity is that it goes on and on

The great Czech writer Franz Kafka was born on this day in 1883.

"The meaning of life is that it stops," Kafka wrote.

This day in hysteria

Edward Gibbon completed The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire on this day in 1787. The six-volume work was the labor of almost 15 years. On the occasion he wrote:


"It was on the ...night of the 27th of June, 1787, between the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last page in a summer-house in my garden. ... I will not dissemble the first emotions of joy on the recovery of my freedom; and perhaps the establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled, and a sober melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken my everlasting leave of an old and agreeable friend."

In Decline and Fall Gibbon wrote:

"History is little more than the register of the crimes, follies and misfortunes of mankind."

The call of the wild accusation

Ambrose Bierce, author of The Devil's Dictionary and the patron saint of cynics, was born on this day in 1842.


"Bierce would bury his best friend with a sigh of relief, and express satisfaction that he was done with him." -- Jack London.

Since April 5, 2005, to be exact

Birthday of novelist and Nobel Prize-winner Saul Bellow, born 1915.


"Saul Bellow is a nothing writer. He doesn't exist." -- Truman Capote.

Pick your poison

French novelist Louise-Ferdinand Celine was born on this day in 1894. In Journey to the End of the Night, he wrote:

"For the poor of this world, two major ways of expiring are available: either by the absolute indifference of your fellow men in peace time, or by the homicidal passion of these same when war breaks out."

Death cured him

English poet Alexander Pope was born on this day in 1688. He was the greatest poet of the 18th century and is one of the most-quoted writers ever. ("A little learning's a dangerous thing;" "An honest man's the noblest work of God;" "The proper study of Mankind is Man").

Pope was afflicted with a type of tuberculosis that affected his spine -- he never grew past 4' 6", and was a hunchback -- and which ended his life at the age of 56. Here is how he summed things up:

"This long disease, my life."
 

Let’s just let it go, he’d told him. The cancer. Let it go. Forget about it. Don’t even bring it up.
“Let it go?” Plume had said, staring.
“That’s right.”
“I’m afraid I can’t countenance that.”
“Oh, really? If it’s saving face you’re worried about…”
“You know what I mean. It’s not something I can--”
“I know.”
“Of course I can’t compel you to…”
“No, you can’t.”
“Can I ask you what your reasoning is?”
“Sure. Go ahead.”
“All right.” Plume almost cracked a smile. “What’s your reasoning?”
“I guess it’s just something I don’t want to go through with.”
What he’d meant by that, Sully supposed, was that no matter how it turned out, whether he lived or died, he’d be disappointed. So why go to all the trouble? Besides, Plume had told him that he wouldn’t be able to drink and undergo chemotherapy. And if he couldn’t drink he might as well die.  --  Chapter 21, The Misforgotten.

And he was quite sure about that

Writer, mathematician, philosopher and humanitarian Bertrand Russell was born on this day in 1872.

"I have always felt respectable people scoundrels," he wrote. And also:

"The fundamental cause of trouble in the world today is that the stupid are cocksure while the intelligent are full of doubt."

Better read, then dead

English novelist Daphne du Maurier was born on this day in 1907. She wrote the novel Rebecca. She also wrote:


"Writers should be read, but neither seen nor heard."

Whatever you say, dear

Autnor J. M. Barrie (Peter Pan) was born on this day in 1860.

"Every man that is high up," Barrie wrote, "likes to think that he has done it all by himself; and the wife smiles, and lets it go at that."

All the really acute readers are from Mars

Author Thornton Wilder (The Bridge of San Luis Rey) was born on this day in 1897 He wrote, in that novel:


"The public for which masterpieces are intended is not on this earth."