| I started Early – Took my Dog
by Emily Dickinson
I started Early – Took my Dog –
And visited the Sea –
The Mermaids in the Basement
Came out to look at me –
And Frigates – in the Upper Floor
Extended Hempen Hands –
Presuming Me to be a Mouse –
Aground – opon the Sands –
But no Man moved Me – till the Tide
Went past my simple Shoe –
And past my Apron – and my Belt
And past my Boddice – too –
And made as He would eat me up –
As wholly as a Dew
Opon a Dandelion's Sleeve –
And then – I started – too –
And He – He followed – close behind –
I felt His Silver Heel
Opon my Ancle – Then My Shoes
Would overflow with Pearl –
Until We met the Solid Town –
No One He seemed to know –
And bowing – with a Mighty look –
At me – The Sea withdrew –
“I started Early – Took my Dog” by Emily Dickinson. Public domain. (buy now)
It’s the birthday of translator, writer, soldier, and all-around adventurer Richard Francis Burton (books by this author), born in Torquay, England (1821). Growing up, he loved languages, and he learned French, Italian, and Latin, and local dialects as his family traveled around Europe — his father was an officer in the British army. He hated Oxford, but he learned Arabic there and went on to fight in the East India Company and learn Hindu, Persian, and quite a few local Indian languages. He wrote about his travels in Asia, Africa, and the Americas, and he often disguised himself in local clothing. He became famous when he published A Personal Narrative of a Pilgrimage to Al-Medinah and Meccah (1855) about his experience disguising himself to make the Hajj, the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca, which is forbidden for non-Muslims. He wrote the definitive English translation of A Thousand Nights and a Night, (usually referred to as The Arabian Nights), and it was he who introduced The Kama Sutra to Western audiences.
It’s the birthday of Russian writer Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol (books by this author), (March 31st according to the Old Calendar), born in Great Sorochintsy, Ukraine (1809). After failing as an actor he tried writing prose, short stories rooted in the folklore and culture of rural Ukraine, and his first book, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka (1831), was a big success. A few years later he produced a comic play, The Government Inspector (1836). The satirical play mocked the ineptitude of the Russian bureaucracy, but it was extremely popular, and even Czar Nicholas loved it — he is reported to have said, “Everyone gets the business here. Me most of all.” Gogol produced several more books of short stories; his most famous stories include “The Nose,” about a nose that takes off on its own, dressed in uniform and acting like any other human being; and “The Overcoat,” which has been endlessly interpreted. Dostoevsky is rumored to have said, about himself and his contemporaries, “We all emerged from Gogol’s overcoat.”
It was on this day in 1842 that Honoré de Balzac’s play Les Ressources de Quinola opened at the Odéon Theater in Paris (books by this author). Balzac was a prolific novelist and playwright who drank 50 cups of coffee each day, which he said was like “sparks shooting all the way up to the brain.” He was also a well-known literary celebrity, and for this play, he attempted a publicity stunt that totally failed. He started a rumor that tickets for the play were completely sold out, assuming that people would turn out en masse to see what all the excitement was about. Instead, assuming that they couldn’t get tickets, no one came and the theater was almost empty for opening night.
It’s the birthday of novelist Philip Roth (books by this author), born in Newark, New Jersey (1933). He grew up in a Jewish family; his father sold insurance, and his mother, he said, “raised housekeeping in America to a great art.” The neighborhood was mostly Jewish, and Newark itself was an industrial city--full of immigrants from Eastern Europe, Italy, and Ireland, as well as African-Americans. Roth was an excellent student who graduated from high school at the age of 16. Roth graduated from Bucknell, went to Chicago for graduate work in English literature, and served for two years in the U.S. Army. He was able to make a few thousand dollars a year teaching, and he started publishing some short fiction, but his writing career didn’t seem promising. The Paris Review published his novella “Goodbye, Columbus” and two short stories, but paid him just $100 for all three. When he was 27 years old, he published his first book, Goodbye, Columbus (1959) — the novella accompanied by five short stories. The title novella was the story of Neil Klugman, a teenage Jewish boy from Newark, and his summer romance with a wealthy suburban Radcliffe student. Roth won a Guggenheim fellowship and took off for Rome. While he was there he learned that Goodbye, Columbus had won the National Book Award. The book went into a paperback edition and suddenly Roth was famous. Writing a preface for the book 30 years later, Roth wrote about himself as a young writer in the third person: “In the beginning it simply amazed him that any truly literate audience could seriously be interested in his store of tribal secrets, in what he knew, as a child of his neighborhood, about the rites and taboos of his clan — about their aversions, their aspirations, their fears of deviance and defection, their underlying embarrassments and their ideas of success.” Roth went on to write many more books, including Portnoy’s Complaint (1969), Sabbath’s Theater (1995), American Pastoral (1997), The Plot Against America (2004), and Nemesis (2010). In 2012, Roth announced that he had retired from writing fiction. First he reread all 31 of his books — to be sure he hadn’t wasted his time. He said: “After that, I decided that I was finished with fiction. I don’t want to read it, I don’t want to write it, and I don’t even want to talk about it anymore. I dedicated my life to the novel. I studied them, I taught them, I wrote them, and I read them. At the exclusion of nearly everything else. It’s enough!” Philip Roth died in New York in 2018 at the age of 85. Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.® | 
