An Irish Airman Foresees His Death
by William Butler Yeats

I know that I shall meet my fate
Somewhere among the clouds above;
Those that I fight I do not hate,
Those that I guard I do not love;
My country is Kiltartan Cross,
My countrymen Kiltartan’s poor,
No likely end could bring them loss
Or leave them happier than before.
Nor law, nor duty bade me fight,
Nor public men, nor cheering crowds,
A lonely impulse of delight
Drove to this tumult in the clouds;
I balanced all, brought all to mind,
The years to come seemed waste of breath,
A waste of breath the years behind
In balance with this life, this death.


“An Irish Airman Foresees His Death” by William Butler Yeats. Public Domain.  (buy now)

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice was published on this date in 1813 (books by this author). Austen had completed the first draft of the book — which was originally titled First Impressions — by August 1797, when she was 21. Her father queried a London bookseller about publishing the novel. The bookseller turned him down without ever looking at the manuscript, so Austen put the book aside. Fourteen years later, encouraged by the success of Sense and Sensibility, she returned to First Impressions again and began reworking it into the novel we know today. Thomas Egerton of Whitehall bought the rights for £110 and published it in three volumes. It was well received and made decent money for the publisher, but Austen never saw another penny. Although she had sold Sense and Sensibility on a commission basis and eventually made a fair amount of money, Austen sold Pride and Prejudice for one lump sum. She was widely read during her lifetime, but her name never appeared on any of her books; the title page of Pride and Prejudice read only “by the author of Sense and Sensibility.”

It’s the birthday of novelist Colette (books by this author), born Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette in Saint-Sauveur-en Puisaye, France (1873). She is known to have said “Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you're a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff's worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.”

Colette was beautiful as a young woman, always wore her hair in a long red braid. She was witty, forward, and down-to-earth. Colette wrote four novels based on her life as a girl growing up in the French countryside: Claudine à l’école (1900, Claudine at School); Claudine à Paris (1901, Claudine in Paris); Claudine en ménage (1902, Claudine Married); and Claudine s’en va (1903, Claudine and Annie).

After Claudine was made into a play, it became a cultural sensation — the name Claudine was given to pastries, soap, cigarettes, and ice cream. She wrote 50 novels, including Gigi (1944), which was made into a Broadway play and a film. Colette died in 1954, and she was the first woman in the history of France to be given a state funeral — although she was denied a Catholic burial

She said, “To be astonished is one of the surest ways of not growing old too quickly.”

Today is the birthday of artist (Paul) Jackson Pollock (works by this artist), born in Cody, Wyoming (1912). His older brother Charles was a father figure to him. An artist who moved to New York, Jackson Pollock joined him as soon as he turned 18. Pollock studied with the regionalist painter Thomas Hart Benton, and became very close with Benton and his family. During the Depression, Pollock found work with the WPA’s Federal Art Project.

He became interested in abstract art after attending an exhibition of Picasso’s work at the Museum of Modern Art. He became romantically involved with fellow painter Lee Krasner, and the two were married in 1945. Krasner began managing Pollock’s career, and he signed a contract with the art collector and patron Peggy Guggenheim, who paid him a stipend just to paint at the couple’s Long Island farm. His first solo exhibition was at Guggenheim’s New York gallery, Art of This Century, in 1943.

In the late 1940s, Pollock began experimenting with a technique in which he let the paint simply drip onto canvases laid on the floor of his studio. It was a radical departure from the Western tradition of applying paint by brush to an upright canvas on an easel. Pollock threw his whole body into his art. He described his process in a statement to Possibilities magazine:

“My painting does not come from the easel. I prefer to tack the unstretched canvas to the hard wall or the floor. I need the resistance of a hard surface. On the floor I am more at ease. I feel nearer, more part of the painting, since this way I can walk around it, work from the four sides and literally be in the painting.”

He used household paints rather than typical artists’ paints because it was more liquid in texture and dripped more easily off of whatever implements he was using: brushes, sticks, or turkey basters.

Pollock’s life was cut short by alcoholism. He lost his marriage, many of his friends, and stopped painting, due to his drinking. In August 1956, he crashed his car into a tree while driving drunk; he was thrown 50 feet out of the car, struck a tree, and died instantly.

It's the birthday of José Martí (books by this author), born in Havana, Cuba (1853). He was a poet and journalist, and he helped lead Cuba's struggle for independence from Spain. Pete Seeger's folk song "Guantanamera" is a translation of an autobiographical poem by José Martí.

 It's the birthday of the English novelist and critic David Lodge (books by this author), born in suburban London, England (1935), to a traditional Catholic family. His early novel, The Picturegoers (1960), is about a Catholic family in South London who take in a university student as a lodger. Other early novels draw on Lodge's own life: Ginger, You're Barmy (1962), about compulsory service in the British military, and The British Museum is Falling Down (1970), about a Catholic graduate student working on his thesis.  One of his most recent works, A Man of Parts (2011), is a novel based on the life of H.G. Wells.

It's the birthday of writer Sue Hubbell (books by this author), born in Kalamazoo, Michigan (1935). She became a journalist, a bookstore manager, and a librarian at Brown University, where her husband, Paul, taught. But they weren't satisfied with their lives, and they quit their jobs and bought 99 acres in the Ozarks in southern Missouri and took up beekeeping. After 30 years of marriage, the couple divorced, and Hubble found herself alone, middle-aged, living on a big farm, producing honey. At that time, she started to write down her own story. She said:

"I was writing for myself, and what I put on paper over the next couple of years was unlike anything I had written before. I traced the natural history of my hilltop from one springtime to the next, discovering by the second spring that I was in a new place and understanding the value of where I was.”

That book was A Country Year: Living the Questions (1986).

Hubbell died in 2018.

Be well, do good work, and keep in touch.^®

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