“Fatal Motor Accident in Bois de Boulogne”
Damocles is drunk. He has imbibed a stock of whisky, a warehouse of gin and a dockyard of champagne. Before slumping over the steering-wheel, he declares that the negro hostess of the joint he is leaving is his true and only mother; the other one, the blood relative, no longer counts at all.
Damocles drives on, now jerking upright, now falling asleep. The car lurches perilously: decidedly, it would be wiser to stop. Damocles abandons his car in the heart of the Bois and sets off on foot. He talks. His voice and his words are suspended in his delirium. He walks. He talks. The trees, the planets, the earth, the sky, all seem simple to him. He fears nothing, neither the bludgeon of the police nor the assassin’s knife.
Damocles returns to the civilized parts of town. His former wrath revives. He would like to knock down a house with his fist. “All — all are heartless. They sleep. They make babies. They do not know the horror of it all.” Further on, before a butcher shop, he emits atrocious yells. In a public park, he sees a drunk asleep on a bench. Damocles thinks himself an angel or in a dream.
At dawn, Damocles rings the bell of the apartment house where he lives with his mother. In a corner of the vestibule, weeping, his mother stands in her nightgown. The concierge, attired in her petticoat, is repeating: “Your son was killed tonight in a motor accident. They have just telephoned.”
Damocles feels himself all over and discovers that he has lost his arms and legs. Now he understands why it seemed to him that night for the first time, that he had come face to face with himself.
— Michel Leiris
365 Days is an anthology of flash fiction published decades before the form had a name. American novelist Kay Boyle and her then-husband Laurence Vail were in Austria at the start of 1934 — a year, as they wrote in the preface, “that was to be characterized by almost universal unrest, by civil war, revolution, by strikes and unemployment figures reaching monstrous proportions.” They decided to “compile a record in fiction form not only of that year’s nationally or internationally important events but as well of the ordinary individual’s life.”
They collected American, English, French, German, Austrian, and Italian newspapers, along with some from as far away as Australia and Singapore. From these they selected stories they thought representative of the year’s events, movements, and attitudes. With the help of their friend Nina Conarain, an Englishwoman who later published dozens of Mills & Boon romances as Elizabeth Hoy, they wrote or contacted fellow writers and asked they to write 300-word pieces, usually imaginative, based on these stories.
Some ignored these requests. Some just wrote one or two. William Saroyan sent in an entire year’s worth of material. Boyle, Vail, and Conarain knew they would have to fill in any gaps with their own pieces, but by the time submissions stopped flowing in, it was obvious that there were well over 100 days’ worth of material still to be written. Vail contributed some, including some of the most imaginative ones, but he began to lose interest in the project as his interest in his new lover, the heiress and art collector Peggy Guggenheim, began to heat up. In the end, it was Boyle, pregnant with her third child, who wrote over a quarter of the book’s contents, demonstrating exceptional versatility in her choice of subjects and styles.
Halfway through the year, much of the edited material for the book was destroyed when a pro-Nazi group set fire to the offices of an Austrian anti-Nazi newspaper, Tyrolia, and a burning package was tossed into the beer garden of Boyle and Vail’s hotel room and exploded. Less than two weeks later, Boyle gave birth to their daughter Katherine.
When the book was finally published in 1936, reviewers seemed to delight in dismissing the project as a novelty and to note how few of the stories met their critical standards. Now, however, it is a fascinating document featuring an impressive range of contributors. Raymond Queneau’s two days are his first work to be translated into English. James T. Farrell and Henry Miller provided pieces, as did now less well-known writers as Bessie Breuer, Grace Flandrau, Arthur Calder-Marshall, William March, Evelyn Scott, and Malachi Whitaker. The overall tone is empathetic, anti-fascist, activist, and angry, yet it rarely descends into propaganda. Indeed, one wishes that a collection of contemporary writers would take on a similar project for one of our own tumultuous years.
I have been reading my way through 365 Days a day at a time and will be posting other pieces from it through the rest of this year.