This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

by David Markson

  Said Luther.

  From a Hemingway letter, on T. S. Eliot:

  A damned good poet and a fair critic; but he can kiss my ass as a man.

  On Scott Fitzgerald:

  A rummy and a liar.

  As I write, highly civilized human beings are flying overhead, trying to kill me.

  Begins an Orwell essay dated 1941.

  Rank vegetable growth, Rebecca West called the sentences of Henry James. One feels that if one took cuttings of them one could raise a library in the garden.

  Brussels, René Magritte died in.

  O, what a number of lies this young man has told about me.

  Said Socrates, the first time he heard Plato read one of his dialogues.

  Says a legend recorded by Diogenes Laërtius.

  Author’s pleasure in learning that the main thoroughfare through Copenhagen is named Hans Christian Andersen Boulevard.

  The Marquis de Sade, a century and a half before On the Road:

  Writing One Hundred and Twenty Days of Sodom on a single continuous forty-five-foot roll of paper.

  Brahms had blond hair.

  As did Mozart.

  And Saint Thomas Aquinas.

  Hemingway on Sherwood Anderson:

  A slob.

  The first edition of Darwin’s Origin of Species sold out in one day.

  Pope Sixtus IV, in the late fifteenth century, was forced to actually issue a bull threatening excommunication for anyone who did not return volumes borrowed from the Vatican library.

  Bach had twenty children, of whom nine survived him.

  Twenty.

  Mozart had seven, of whom two lived.

  Vladimir Mayakovsky in New York, in 1925: The filth is worse than in Minsk.

  And it is unimaginably filthy in Minsk.

  Dostoievsky wrote The Gambler in sixteen days.

  Stephen Crane wrote The Red Badge of Courage in ten. At twenty-one.

  Donizetti wrote L’Elisir d’Amore in a week.

  The friendship of Crane and Joseph Conrad.

  The night before the audition that gained her admission into the Stockholm Academy of Music, Birgit Nilsson milked ten cows on her family’s farm.

  The first signed work of visual art, a Greek vase, ca. 700 BC.

  Its signature Aristonothos.

  Caesar, asked to name the best death:

  A sudden one.

  Visiting friends, Cyril Connolly was known to mark his place in their books with anything from a string of spaghetti to a leaf of lettuce.

  And to depart leaving it there.

  Brahms had blue eyes.

  As did Abraham Lincoln.

  And Hitler.

  Giacomo Meyerbeer selflessly gave Richard Wagner all manner of aid at the start of Wagner’s career.

  For which in turn Wagner later scurrilously denigrated him in an anti-Semitic pamphlet.

  Anonymously.

  Rudyard Kipling’s only son was killed fighting with the Irish Guards in World War I.

  We have the same job, Virginia.

  Said Katherine Mansfield, in a letter to Virginia Woolf.

  The only writing I have ever been jealous of.

  Said Woolf of Mansfield.

  The credible folktale that Marco Polo and his father and uncle, disreputable and queerly dressed, were not recognized and almost denied entry to the Venice family home on their return from the East—after twenty-four years.

  Jorge Santayana, it originally was.

  Josephine was six years older than Napoleon.

  Keep apart, keep apart and preserve one’s soul alive—that is the teaching for the day. It is ill to have been born in these times, but one can make a world within a world.

  Wrote George Gissing.

  Je suis le savant au fauteuil sombre.

  Painting at the court of Sultan Mohammed II in Constantinople, Gentile Bellini improvised a severed head of John the Baptist.

  The sultan deemed it unrealistic—and on the spot had a passing slave decapitated for Bellini’s edification.

  In his comick scenes he is seldom very successful.

  Said Johnson of Shakespeare.

  Spurinna.

  Charlotte Brontë was four feet nine inches tall.

  Sarah Bernhardt was illegitimate.

  Marseilles, Rimbaud died in.

  Wondering if youngsters still in fact read Marco Polo.

  In 1490, a Rome census showed a population of roughly ninety thousand.

  Including 6,800 registered prostitutes.

  She wouldn’t care a straw whether her husband was an artist or a cobbler, said Haydn of his wife.

  Whom he also called an infernal beast.

  The Yannis Ritsos verses in which Greek antiquity and the present exist simultaneously—and Phaedra smokes too many cigarettes.

  Robert Browning outlived Elizabeth by almost thirty years.

  James Dickey flew more than one hundred combat missions in the Pacific in World War II.

  Joseph Heller flew sixty in Europe.

  Addison and Steele were schoolboys together.

  As were Jonathan Swift and William Congreve.

  As were John Dryden and John Locke.

  Blake’s portraits of Mohammed, Canute, Owen Glendower, Wat Tyler, Lot, William Wallace, and others.

  All of whom he insisted had posed for him, in visitations.

  The occasions during their collaboration when Braque and Picasso could not always say with certainty which cubist canvas had been the work of whom.

  My ex-wife, Picasso would later speak of Braque as.

  Beethoven was once seen to throw a dish at a servant. And again at a waiter.

  My musical career would no doubt at last become quite charming, if only I could live one hundred and fifty years.

  Said Berlioz, when he finally began to receive the critical esteem he deserved.

  François Villon’s mother was illiterate.

  As was Walt Whitman’s.

  As was D. H. Lawrence’s father.

  Not long after Scott Fitzgerald’s death, Scribner’s let The Great Gatsby go out of print.

  And then rejected the collection called The Crack-Up.

  I am Cinna the poet. I am not Cinna the conspirator.

  Claude Monet’s love of the sea:

  When I die, I should like to be buried in a buoy.

  Heinrich Heine’s grave in Montmartre was deliberately despoiled by the Nazis in World War II.

  An image that has lingered in Author’s mind: Nelly Sachs and Paul Celan, some few years afterward, silently bearing flowers to the site.

  Almost nothing whatever is known about Livy.

  Rome’s historian has no history, as Taine put it.

  Virtually nothing is known about Lucretius either.

  Ignoring Saint Jerome’s silliness about him having been driven mad by a love potion.

  Zora Neale Hurston’s jesting claim that she once avoided a pedestrian traffic ticket by telling the police officer that since she always saw white people cross on green, she naturally therefore assumed the red was for her.

  The Calvary sculpted by Claus Sluter in the late fourteenth century which included the figure of Jeremiah—wearing eyeglasses.

  Be silent, good people. I am the Protestant whore.

  Called Nell Gwyn out a carriage window to an anti-Catholic London mob.

  Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Whose 1944 Free French reconnaissance flight went down without a sign somewhere off Corsica.

  Where they burn books, they’ll end up burning people, said Heine.

  In 1821.

  The painter’s painter, Whistler called Velazquez.

  Everything that Velazquez does may be regarded as absolutely right, said Ruskin.

  Leopold Bloom, thinking of the overheard tinkle into a chamber pot as a kind of chamber music.

  The likelihood that Joyce adopted the title for his poems from the same pun.

  Tamerlane, in 1398, seeking justification in the Koran for an attack on
Delhi and given a verse by the mullahs: 0 Prophet, make war upon the infidels and unbelievers, and treat them with harshness.

  Whereupon he massacred one hundred thousand unarmed prisoners.

  The First Crusade, achieving Jerusalem three hundred years before that, as witnessed by the priest Raymond of Agiles:

  Wonderful things were to be viewed. Numbers of the Saracens were beheaded. Others were tortured for several days and then burned in flames. In the streets were seen piles of heads and hands and feet.

  A decorator tainted with insanity, Harper’s Weekly once called Gauguin.

  Whitman never saw Europe.

  Wallace Stevens did not either.

  Thunder occurs when clouds collide.

  Said Anaxagoras.

  Teacher, look! The birds are on fire!

  Fra Angelico. Who never painted without first offering a brief prayer.

  Bach. Who would not compose without doing so also.

  Thanks to God, I have always remained an athiest.

  Said Luis Buñuel.

  Euripides died in Macedonia. Athens subsequently sent formal emissaries asking that his remains be returned for burial in his homeland. Macedonia said no, electing to retain the honor.

  Tchaikovsky’s utterly ill-conceived marriage, which lasted only weeks.

  And in fleeing from which he initially attempted suicide—and then underwent a nervous breakdown.

  Physics is much too difficult for me. I wish I were a film comedian.

  Said Wolfgang Pauli.

  Kuesnacht, near Zurich, Carl Jung died in.

  The correspondence between T. S. Eliot and Groucho Marx.

  Initiated by Eliot.

  Vesalius passed his final examinations at the University of Padua with such astonishingly high grades that the following morning he was appointed a professor of surgery.

  For all that later sensibilities would find it mawkish, Dickens himself always wept when he read the death of Little Nell in public.

  Puccini admitted that he did the same after writing Mimi’s death in La Bohème.

  From a letter of 1682, to the effect that a ship carrying Quakers is en route to Cape Cod:

  Much spoil can be made of selling the whole lot to Barbadoes, where slaves fetch good prices in rum and sugar and we shall do the Lord great good by punishing the wicked. Yours in the bowels of Christ—

  Cotton Mather.

  Forks were first introduced in England in 1611.

  Which is to say, about the time Shakespeare was writing The Winter’s Tale and/or The Tempest and preparing to retire to Stratford.

  Milton treated his three daughters so sternly that when he decided to marry for a third time, one of them said that news of a wedding was of no consequence:

  But might I hear of his death, that were something.

  Realizing that through the entire Middle Ages, Italian merchants still kept their books in Roman numerals.

  The curiosity that Jesus never appears to condemn slavery, though mentioning it in passing more than once.

  The best-selling novels in five of the first fourteen years of the twentieth century were by Winston Churchill.

  An earlier Winston Churchill.

  There are eighty-six chapters in Middlemarch.

  And eighty-six epigraphs.

  For years, Vachel Lindsay sold his poetry on street corners. The first time he did so, in New York in 1905, he took in thirteen cents.

  And was overjoyed.

  No single book or manuscript is listed among Shakespeare’s possessions in his will.

  There was a man and a dog too this time.

  The barometer of his emotional nature was set for a spell of riot.

  Hackenbush.

  Hobbes. Descartes. Pascal. Spinoza. Locke. Leibniz. Hume. Kant. Schopenhauer. Kierkegaard. Nietzsche. Santayana. Wittgenstein.

  Not one of whom ever married.

  Think you, if Laura had been Petrarch’s wife,

  He would have written sonnets all his life?

  Clement Greenberg was asked to deliver the eulogy at Jackson Pollock’s funeral, but refused—outraged that Pollock had caused the death of an innocent passenger in the crash that killed him.

  As if written illegally, under fear of the police.

  Bertolt Brecht said of Kafka’s fiction.

  Like a naked man among people wearing clothes.

  Milena Jesenská perceived him.

  An illegitimate wretch who is a scholar is more worthy than an ignorant high priest.

  Said Maimonides.

  The Regents of the Old Men’s Almshouse.

  Hals himself was eighty-four.

  Athens, 399 BC. A jury of 501 male citizens over the age of thirty.

  Guilty, 281 to 220.

  Goethe wrote Werther in four weeks.

  Schiller wrote William Tell in six.

  Laurence Olivier, shoring up the confidence of a young Alec Guinness during a rehearsal of Twelfth Night:

  Fascinating. I’d never realized before that Malvolio could be played as a bore.

  Agathon, the first Greek dramatist to write a tragedy without using a subject from myth, and at whose home Plato situates the Symposium—and by whom not one play remains.

  Modern critical interpretations of Oedipus Rex that suggest Jocasta knows all along.

  Commentary on the pigeons in the Piazza San Marco dates from as early as the mid-I200s.

  Elie Wiesel’s advance against royalties for the first American edition of Night was $100.

  Daniele da Volterra, who was commissioned by Pope Paul IV to conceal some of the nudity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.

  And was thereafter referred to as the Breeches-Maker.

  Michelangelo was still alive at the time of the pope’s decision.

  Tell his Holiness to look to setting the world in order. To reform a picture costs no great trouble.

  Montaigne, in all of his autobiographical pages, mentions his wife only less than does Dante in his.

  The Wandering Jew was claimed to have been seen in Hamburg in 1542, 1547, and 1564.

  And in Vienna in 1599.

  Caedmon, sing me something!

  As Plutarch reports it, after Socrates’ trial—and his death—his accusers were looked upon with such disfavor that they eventually hanged themselves.

  Alfred North Whitehead was made to retire at Imperial College, London, at the age of sixty-two.

  Harvard was quite content to have him move there and teach for an additional thirteen years.

  Rome, Ingeborg Bachmann died in.

  Anthony Powell, George Orwell, Henry Green, and Cyril Connolly all attended Eton at the same time.

  Along with Ian Fleming.

  Malcolm Lowry, William Empson, Kathleen Raine, and Michael Redgrave were contemporaries at Cambridge.

  Along with Guy Burgess, Donald Maclean, Anthony Blunt, and Kim Philby.

  Dost thou think, because thou art virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

  The First Folio Shakespeare, in 1623, was only the second Workes of a playwright published in England. Ben Jonson’s had been the first, seven years earlier—and to a certain ridicule, for seeming pretentious.

  Francis Beaumont, of Beaumont and. So astute a critical reader that even Jonson himself, according to Dryden, asked him to look through his manuscripts and suggest revisions.

  The Black Death, 1348-49. Presumably brought to Europe on shipboard by rats from the Near East.

  Nonetheless leading to tens of thousands of Jews being massacred across Spain and France and Germany, accused of poisoning wells.

  Salvador Dali, once lecturing at the Sorbonne, began by removing his right shoe and sock—and then soaked his bare foot in a pan of milk throughout.

  God hath made man upright; but they have sought out many inventions.

  An anonymous Cynic philosopher, re the Odyssey:

  I do not find that Odysseus the Wise does anything but dine and chase women.

  T. E. Lawrence, who spe
nt four years working on a new translation of same—

  And then decided he fundamentally agreed with the antique earlier judgment.

  D. H. Lawrence, on a difference between the novel and older poetic epics:

  In a novel, you know there is a water closet on the premises.

  In a letter from Florence Hardy, mentioning that her husband is at his desk:

  Writing an intensely dismal poem with great spirits.

  Eliot took private French lessons in Paris from Alain-Fournier, evidently just when the latter had begun writing Le Grand Meaulnes.

  And four years before he would be shot and killed in a German ambush in World War I.

  Remembering that a faithful small-scale copy of The Last Judgment by Marcello Venusti, made before garments were added, exists in Naples.

  Gigantic Emily Brontë Emily Dickinson called her.

  A Wayward Nun, Dickinson called herself.

  David Garrick, retiring from the stage:

  Now I will sit down and read Shakespeare.

  Schrödinger’s cat.

  Captain Gardiner, I will not do it. Even now I lose time. Good bye, good bye. God bless ye, man, and may I forgive myself, but I must go.

  Theories that Milton’s blindness was caused by glaucoma. Or by detached retinas.

  Or congenital syphilis.

  Above Rodin’s grave at Meudon:

  A cast of The Thinker.

  Like Alexander with the Iliad, Napoleon carried a copy of Plutarch’s Lives with him eternally.