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June 16th
June 16th is, for me, a particularly significant day. All my life, it has been the eve of my birthday; so that, in childhood, it was always quite an exciting evening, one on which I was able to sleep very little if at all.
On that date in 1816, a Sunday, in the wee hours of its morning, nineteen year old Mary Godwin experienced the waking nightmare which inspired what she had intended to be a short story; but which, after encouragement from her boy friend (the poet P. B. Shelley, whom she subsequently married), she extended to novel length, for her first and most famous novel, Frankenstein. Mary Shelley was the first novelist whose work fascinated me. She was the subject of my undergrad sophomore project, in defiance of the History Department; and, at a private reunion lunch twenty-one years after I took my degree, my faculty advisor greeted me with the words, "Is Mary Shelley still your girl?"
On that date in 1904, a Thursday, James Joyce set the action of his novel, Ulysses---the entire action of which (through some seven hundred or so pages) takes place on that date. Despite the repeated recommendations of my high school mentor, I have never been able to read the entire novel. I have, however, read episode nine, which recounts a discussion in the National Library of Dublin, and episode eighteen, which is Molly Bloom's long soliloquy, one of the most poetic prose compositions I have ever read. The ninth episode also features, as a character, the then living poet Goerge Russell, who signed all of his publications with the initials, A. E. And A. E. was the first poet, and the first pseudonymous poet, of whom I ever read, in the summer of 1965, in a brief article in an old first volume of the Funk And Wagnalls Encyclopedia, which had been abandoned at my maternal grandmother's home after she had passed away.
On that date in 1958, a Monday, my birth-mother's labor was induced, with castor oil, so that she delivered me on the morning of June 17th. Her father, who possessed a PhD in Chenistry, and was a director of research for General Motoros (and was also an elder in the Prebyterian Church and a Freemason of the 32nd Degree of the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite) had arranged, through bribery, to separate me from my mother immediately. (My adoption file, which was read to me by an employee of the Clerk of Courts in 1995, apparently contains a list of the bribes my birth-grandfather paid out, and to whom; the list being kept by the judge whom, according to what I was then told, had also been bribed by dear old grand-dad.)
Lastly, I will add an unrelated bit of trivia from the spring of 1976. My first Beloved (of the baggy jeans, midnight blue socks, and shoes kicked off) played for me a top forty song, "December, 1963," by the Four Seasons. I have been told that the song is about an encounter with a prostitute, but for me, it is about my first encounter with Mary Shelley's great novel, on Christmas night of 1963, when my parents began to assemble one of my Christmas gifts, the Aurora Plastics Comapny model of Universal Studio's version of the Frankenstein Monster. Although the model's face and posture was shaped more like Glenn Strange's performance than Karloff's, it led me to my grear admiration for Karloff's seminal interpretation of the role, which, of course, led me, at the age of nine years old, to seek to acquire a copy of the novel. This was given to me on Sunday the 16th or the 23rd (I forget exactly which) by my cousin Jeannie, at a gift exchange, at the annual Christmas Party held by my mother's siblings. Being excessively naive, I presumed that the novel would follow, in order, Universal's seven films that featured the character (six of which I had already viewed; the Ghost Of Frankenstein did not seem to get any airplay in my vicinity). But, in 1976, in the presence of my First Beloved (and between my somewhat lustful thoughts about those socks), I realized that the coy details of the Four Seasons' song, which did not feature any prurient detail but merely celebrated the experience as a "first time," apparently, also fit my first time of experiencing the effects of what Mary Shelley, the adolescent girl friend of one of England's premiere poets, a homeschooled lover of literature whose troubled childhood reflected my own (and thus she comfoted me in some of my worst moments), had begun to created on Sunday morning, June 16th, 1816.
Starward
