This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

by David Markson

  Samuel Johnson was forced to drop out of Oxford because his family could not manage the costs.

  And became Doctor Johnson only at sixty-four when he was granted an honorary degree.

  Haydn’s Oxford Symphony.

  After an honorary degree of his own.

  Filippo Lippi’s reputation as a womanizer. To the extent that Cosimo de’ Medici once had him locked in, in an effort to keep him at his pigments.

  The legend that Goya, at twenty-four, in Rome, broke into a convent and abducted a nun.

  Charles Lamb and Samuel Taylor Coleridge were schoolboys together.

  In later years, as a government clerk, Lamb stole as many as two hundred steel pens for Coleridge’s use.

  Donatello. Brunelleschi. Uccello. Michelozzo. Antonio Pollaiuolo.

  All of whom at one time or another assisted Lorenzo Ghiberti in designing or casting his doors for the Florence Baptistery

  One London newspaper ran an actual news-style obituary when John Galsworthy killed off Soames Forsyte late in The Forsyte Saga.

  Hannah Pritchard, the finest tragic actress of the eighteenth century—who allegedly never read a book.

  An inspired idiot, Johnson called her.

  Mr. Eliot’s work is no doubt brilliant, but it is not exactly the kind of material we care to add to our list.

  Said the British publisher John Lane of a submission—after Eliot had published Prufrock.

  The publisher did not care to add brilliant material to his list.

  Ingram Frizer, who stabbed Marlowe, pleaded self-defense and went unpunished.

  Superb administrative talent, Kafka’s superiors at the insurance company said he possessed.

  Brahms so respected Dvořák as a colleague that he several times willingly assumed the chore of reading proofs of his scores for him.

  Typewriter ribbons, too, Author finds it harder and harder to locate.

  And typing erasers.

  Did El Greco use hashish?

  Tacitus, on Britain, a century after the Roman conquest:

  A rude, scattered, and warlike people.

  Hemingway was extremely slow to offer a guest a drink, said Virgil Thomson.

  Schiller, writing to tell Goethe that Kant would contribute to a periodical he was editing—

  And referring to Kant as the old bird.

  Cleopatra never learned to speak Latin.

  Evidently bedding Caesar and Antony via Greek.

  The friendship of Picasso and Stravinsky.

  Orbilius, a teacher of grammar. Remembered for two thousand years because Horace was one of his pupils—and named him the Whacker, for thrashings with his switch.

  A letter written in Asia Minor, in 1615, and eventually delivered in London to:

  The right worshipful fraternity of sirenical gentlemen, that meet the first Friday of every month, at the sign of the Mermaid in Bread Street.

  January 1889, in Turin. Nietzsche, weeping, throws his arms around the neck of a mare being beaten by a coachman and then collapses in the street. Essentially the point of no return into his final madness.

  To dress before her long-remembered 1939 concert at the Lincoln Memorial, Marian Anderson had to seek out someone’s private home:

  The Washington hotels would not take us.

  Dostoievsky’s profound, criminal, saintly face, Thomas Mann remarks.

  Trash, Lenin viewed him as.

  A volume of Sherlock Holmes, which fictional Leopold Bloom has borrowed from a Dublin library and which is thirteen days overdue on fictional June 16, 1904, was listed as missing by the actual library in 1906.

  380 AD Saint Gregory of Nazianzus, Bishop of Constantinople—ordered Sappho’s poems to be burned.

  1073 AD Pope Gregory VII—ordered Sappho’s poems to be burned.

  Why is Orestes so central in so much of surviving Greek drama?

  Or should the question be why bloodying one’s mother was so popular a topic?

  The man’s simplicity was nothing short of astounding.

  Said Abélard, regarding the uncle of Héloise who arranged for him to actually move into their home while tutoring her.

  The inner truth and greatness of Nazism, Martin Heidegger spoke of.

  A fatherly type, Knut Hamsun called Hitler.

  Erich Kleiber held more than 130 rehearsals before conducting the world premiere of Wozzeck at the Berlin State Opera in 1925.

  We are dealing here, from a musical viewpoint, with a capital offense, said one of the next morning’s reviews.

  Youngsters, marching in what they announce as Indian file.

  Who hearing them would know that the phrase comes from Fenimore Cooper?

  Nahum Tate’s once regularly staged version of King Lear.

  In which Cordelia and Edgar fall in love and live happily ever after.

  I have met no one who has seen a sea on the west side of Europe. The truth is, no one has discovered if Europe is surrounded by water or not.

  Said Herodotus, ca. 445 BC.

  Elizabeth Barrett Browning so admired George Sand that she knelt and kissed her hand when they met.

  Which Beethoven had once done with Haydn.

  Geoffrey Chaucer was once accused of rape. And paid an unrecorded sum for the woman to withdraw her suit.

  Coleridge, in acute financial need during a period of his severest addiction to opium, was given an anonymous gift of one hundred pounds.

  From Thomas De Quincey.

  Homer himself left no inheritance.

  Said Ovid’s father, wishing his son might pursue a more remunerative occupation.

  The erotic drawings that John Ruskin came upon in Turner’s studio after Turner’s funeral—and burned.

  The seventy or more drawings by Degas of women from Paris brothels—with which one of Degas’ brothers did the same.

  In research for his biography of Henry James, Leon Edel read fifteen thousand James letters.

  Including those on which the frequent exhortation Burn this, please had obviously been ignored.

  Why does it seem like the earliest fragment of American history that Author can remember ever having learned—

  That Dolley Madison saved Gilbert Stuart’s portrait of George Washington when the British burned the White House in 1814?

  Is Plautus the first author ever to refer to Alexander of Macedon as Alexander the Great?

  Bach spent the last twenty-seven years of his life as cantor at the Thomasschule in Leipzig.

  As the best musicians are not available, we must accept a man of moderate ability—had said a member of the Leipzig Municipal Council in hiring him.

  Isadora Duncan lost two children when a chauffeur forgot to set the brake while cranking an automobile and it lurched into the Seine.

  Alle Menschen müssen sterben.

  In the First Pythian Ode, Pindar describes an eruption of Mount Etna.

  In Prometheus Bound, Aeschylus describes an eruption of Mount Etna.

  In Aeneid III, Virgil describes an eruption of Mount Etna.

  But I will pull out of all this in Taormina. Under Etna, wait and see.

  Said Malcolm Lowry, depressed after an eviction and awaiting freighter passage from New York to Sicily.

  Asses loaded with books.

  Mohammed, who could not read or write, dismissed the ews as.

  Emily Dickinson left behind 1,775 poems.

  Meaning a fraction less than one per week from every week of her adult life.

  Dolley Madison also saved the silver.

  How can I tell what I think until I see what I say?

  Nothing written by Dante’s hand is known to exist—no manuscript, no document of any sort, nor is there even a signature.

  Cf. six authenticated signatures of Shakespeare’s—among other items.

  Athens, in the era of the ranking dramatists, or even as late as Plato, had no public library.

  The ancient Romans built their greatest masterpieces of architecture—for wild beasts to fight in.
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  Grumbled Voltaire.

  At certain seasons he kept those boots on for such a length of time that when he drew them off, the skin came away altogether with the leather.

  Said Ascanio Condivi, a friend of Michelangelo’s.

  As if painted with mud. Hideous. Irremediable. Like the designs schoolchildren make by squeezing flies between the folds of a sheet of paper. Worse.

  Being but few of the more typical critical comments on Cezanne in the year or so before his death.

  Wallace Stevens’ wife Elsie had an eighth-grade education.

  Nora Joyce had a year or two less.

  Among Annabella Milbanke’s charges, when seeking a separation from Byron:

  That he shot off pistols in a drawing room while she lay one floor above in labor.

  Truman Capote could not publish In Cold Blood until the two murderers, with whom he had become inordinately intimate, were executed.

  I’m beside myself with joy, he was heard to say when a date was set.

  Billie Holiday sang with an Artie Shaw band in a New York hotel ballroom in 1938.

  And was not only not allowed in the hotel dining room, but made to come and go through the hotel kitchen.

  Hillel. Unable to afford tuition.

  And who almost froze to death listening to classroom lectures on an outside window ledge.

  Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona, in which characters depart Verona by ship—when the city is nowhere near the sea.

  Shakespeare’s King John—in which the Magna Carta is not once mentioned.

  Santa Monica, California, Miles Davis died in.

  At forty-two, teaching at the University of Chicago, Thorstein Veblen had still not been promoted above the rank of instructor.

  Brahms was forty-three before he completed his first symphony.

  A symphony is no joke—unquote.

  This will never do.

  Pronounced the opening sentence of a review by Francis Jeffrey of Wordsworth’s The Excursion.

  It is rain upon rocks. Who can understand him. Said Byron of the same poem.

  Five hundred years, virtually to the year, before the Taliban:

  Ornaments, women’s jewelry, perfumes, mirrors, cosmetics, chessboards, playing cards, lutes, harps, carnival masks, books, illuminated manuscripts, paintings especially of women, more—

  Into Savonarola’s Bonfires of the Vanities.

  The friendship of Wittgenstein and John Maynard Keynes.

  The many to whom, for years, Robert Schumann was known only as Clara Wieck’s husband.

  And are you musical too, Mr. Schumann?

  Melville, late along, possessed no copies of his own books.

  Pope’s legs were so thin that he wore three pairs of stockings to partially disguise them.

  Kant, in the same predicament, had to contrive special devices to keep his stockings up at all.

  José da Silva, the Portuguese-Jewish playwright who was forcibly converted to Christianity—and then was burned alive by the Inquisition for secretly continuing to practice Judaism.

  With one of his plays being performed in a Lisbon theater on the same afternoon.

  Sophocles may have choked to death on a grape. Well past ninety.

  Any number of literary works were flung into Savonarola’s conflagrations with the rest. With printing still in its essential infancy, how many irreplaceable single copies of Greek and Latin manuscripts were lost?

  The fact that Isaac Babel was executed in a Moscow prison cellar.

  The strong possibility that the manuscript of a novel confiscated at his arrest still exists in Stalin-era files.

  William Harvey’s medical practice fell off radically after the publication of his treatise on the circulation of the blood.

  ’Twas believed by the vulgar that he was crack-brained, explains John Aubrey.

  Georges Seurat, who was dead at thirty-one.

  And had sold only two paintings in his life.

  Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein, who both studied under Leopold Auer.

  Who studied under Joseph Joachim.

  To whom Brahms dedicated his only violin concerto.

  When in Rome, do as the Romans do.

  Said Cervantes, in Part II of Don Quixote in 1615.

  Said Robert Burton, in The Anatomy of Melancholy in 1621.

  Said Saint Ambrose—in the late fourth century.

  Raphael’s stanze in the Vatican—

  Where horses were stabled during the sack of Rome by armies of Charles V.

  Picasso, in his seventies, discussing form and structure in art.

  Then tossing aside an ink-stained desk blotter with the comment: Jackson Pollock.

  Author still uses a typewriter instead of a computer because?

  Can he really say? Why does he still listen to music on 33⅓ rpm long-playing vinyl phonograph records?

  The still extant bill of sale for fifty-eight pairs of gloves that Balzac purchased at one time.

  Many of Ronsard’s poems were set to music in his lifetime.

  Deaf from sixteen, he never heard them.

  Giorgio de Chirico’s habit of doing new versions of his better known works, with faked dates decades after the fact, and then insisting that these were the originals.

  Ouspensky, at the very commencement of World War I, taking note of a military truck loaded with crutches.

  For limbs that had not yet been lost.

  In 1827, an earliest Paris production of Hamlet, in English. With Hugo, Dumas, Eugene Delacroix, Berlioz, Alfred de Vigny, Sainte-Beuve, and Gerard de Nerval all known to have attended.

  If it would please God that I might go and tend sheep with my sister and brother.

  Said Joan of Arc, after her first several victories.

  Clemenceau, to a new private secretary:

  Certain letters you will have to draft yourself. Now listen: a sentence consists of a noun and a verb. If you want to use an adjective, come and ask me first.

  Tolstoy kept a portrait of Dickens on the wall in his study.

  Handel hung in Gluck’s bedroom.

  Women, in ancient Greece, were not permitted to do the shopping.

  Shakespeare’s sonnets, published in 1609, many probably written in the 1590s.

  The realization that there had never been a sonnet in English at all until ca. 1540, when Sir Thomas Wyatt translated Petrarch.

  Vaslav Nijinsky spent the last thirty-two years of his life in an insane asylum.

  Thirty-two.

  In addition to his native German, Heinrich Schliemann spoke English, French, Dutch, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Swedish, Polish, Greek, Russian, Arabic, and Latin.

  Most of which he had taught himself.

  In addition to his native French, Jean-Francois Champollion spoke Latin, Greek, Hebrew, Arabic, Coptic, Chaldean, Sanskrit, Persian, and Chinese.

  And possibly others.

  For some years, Marcel Duchamp was the second-ranked chess master in France.

  Giordano’s Andrea Chénier—which concludes with Chénier and Madeleine di Coigny strolling off hand in hand toward the guillotine.

  Who in real life probably never met.

  Claudio Muzio. Elisabeth Rethberg. Rosa Ponselle. Zinka Milanov.

  Jane Austen, at the thought of attending an opera:

  Very tiresome.

  Priests ought never to have children—except by married women.

  Says Rousseau in the Confessions.

  The lunatic woman’s suffrage demonstrator, affronted by its nudity, who repeatedly slashed the Rokeby Venus in the National Gallery in London in 1914.

  Lucrezia, wife of Andrea del Sarto, model for so many of his exotic Madonnas. Long after his death, a young apprentice is rendering a copy of one in a Tuscany church when an ancient shawled creature who had been at prayer pauses beside him. At last a hand lifts:

  It was I, she says, and shuffles on.

  Keats showed On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer to Cowden Clarke the morn
ing after he wrote it.

  Apparently Clarke did not know the difference between Cortés and Balboa either.

  Chapman. Who in his day was far better known as a playwright than for his translations.

  And yet existed at times in calamitous poverty.

  I am merry when I have nere a penny in my purse.

  Says a letter of Thomas Nashe, who himself saw moments that must have sometimes changed his tone.

  Xenophanes, who lived to be one hundred.

  And buried his sons.

  As did Anaxagoras.

  Maurice Ravel’s refusal of the Legion of Honor—

  On the premise that government had no right to judge artists.

  After a bench heaved from a window during a 1527 political uprising in Florence smashed the left arm of Michelangelo’s David, Giorgio Vasari was one of two sixteen-year-old boys who managed to salvage the pieces.

  Alexander A. Alekhine.

  Undesirable originality, Beethoven’s Eroica was once condemned for.

  Obscure, uncouth, barbaric, and affected, someone labeled an early volume of Yeats.

  Very great is the number of the stupid. Said Galileo.

  There are always more fools in the majority than in the minority.

  Said Anatole France.

  One of C. P. Cavafy’s earliest pieces of writing, an essay, in English:

  Give Back the Elgin Marbles.

  I wish women would repeat the Lord’s Prayer before opening up their mouths.