Reader's Block

by David Markson

  Michelangelo finished The Last Judgment in 1541. Fourteen years later Pope Paul IV ordered Daniele da Volterra to drape forty of the naked figures.

  Which Salvator Rosa would subsequently suggest made the whole wall look like a public bath.

  Die Welt ist alles, was der Fall ist.

  Charles Boyer committed suicide with an overdose of barbiturates.

  7 Eccles Street.

  The Carmina Burana. Any and all names of the original vagabond thirteenth-century poets long forgotten.

  The soprano arias in the Cour d'Amour section can fill Reader with heartache.

  The soprano arias in the Cour d*Amour section can fill Protagonist with heartache?

  Poised abstractedly amid a kind of transitory disarray. Cartons heaped and piled.

  Pausing among the graves.

  Protagonist has come to this place because he had no life back there at all.

  Boccaccio was illegitimate. And had five illegitimate children of his own by several mistresses.

  Repentant in later life, regretting even having written The Decameron, he contemplated taking Holy Orders.

  But permitted himself to be talked out of this by Petrarch.

  Sweet the nails, sweet the wood,

  Which bore so sweet a burden.

  In truth Protagonist has also come to this place because he can live infinitely more cheaply here.

  Hannah Senesch.

  Carl Orff was an anti-Semite.

  Henry James paid for lessons to ride a bicycle.

  Then we will have Homer and Don Quixote, and then we will have saunter and chat, and one more laugh before we die.

  Said William Cowper, who was mad through most of his life.

  Escaping after the German invasion of France, at seventy, Heinrich Mann crossed the Pyrenees on foot.

  Ellen Ternan. Ellen Terry.

  A one-word inquiry Reader discovers on a note sheet, its meaning now lost to him completely: Dead?

  Yukio Mishima committed suicide samurai-style.

  Having first arranged to be instantly beheaded thereafter.

  Kawabata committed suicide also.

  Goliards.

  Giotto's portrait of Dante, a reproduction of which tilts on a shelf beside Reader's desk, was probably painted after Dante died. Nonetheless it is the only one by someone who knew him.

  One does not finish a poem, one only abandons it.

  Patience, and shuffle the cards.

  An equally inexplicable similar sheet: She?

  Bjornstjerne Bjornson. Rudolf Eucken. Frans Sillanpaa. Verner von Heidenstam. Halldor Laxness. Pearl Buck. Karl Gjellerup.

  Toni Morrison.

  Because we were young and drunk and twenty, and could never die.

  Wallace Stevens was an anti-Semite.

  Tevya der Milchiger.

  Names for Protagonist's children? If such?

  Whereabouts? If known?

  Suzette Gontard, who became the Diotima of Holderlin's Hyperion after their few years of clandestine trysts, died in 1802. Holderlin lived on until 1843.

  Ah, my Diotima, thirteen sons she bore me. One is the Pope, another is the Sultan, a third is Emperor of Russia.

  May I kiss the hand that wrote Ulysses?

  No, it did lots of other things too.

  Augustine vehemently condemned all study except the Scriptures. Which is to say no natural science, no philosophy, no poetry.

  But acknowledged weeping at the death of Dido in the Aeneid.

  Mawrdew Czgowchwz.

  Has it been convincingly established that Sylvia Plath did not expect her suicide to be successful?

  Brunetto Latini. At Dante's right in the Giotto fresco.

  Jacqueline du Pre, who did not play Bach every morning for seventy years.

  But was found to have multiple sclerosis at twenty-seven.

  Does Reader still possess recordings?

  Weldon Kees committed suicide by jumping from the Golden Gate Bridge. Presumably. His car was at the site, though his body was never recovered.

  How old is Hamlet?

  If you will send for a doctor, I will see him now.

  Said Emily Bronte, an hour before her death.

  December 19, 1848.

  A Tuesday.

  You are no a de wrider, you are de espider, and we shoota de espiders in Mejico.

  The two small rough orange stones beside the Dante portrait are from Masada. Once brought to Reader as a souvenir by his daughter.

  The original Diotima was a presumably legendary priestess said to have been Socrates' teacher. In the Symposium Plato lets her voice his metaphysic of love. There would appear to be no other classical references to her.

  Eliot was an anti-Semite.

  Ad majorem Dei gloriam.

  Ariosto wrote fifty-six versions of the opening of Orlando Furioso.

  A poor virgin, sir, an ill-favored thing, sir, but mine own.

  Dead?

  She?

  Charles V once bent and picked up a paintbrush that Titian had dropped, at the time an extraordinary gesture of respect for an artist.

  Convinced he was being poisoned, Osip Mandelstam may have sometimes stolen food from other inmates in his Soviet prison camp. And been beaten for it. At the end he survived on scraps from a garbage heap.

  Twice, Remedios Varo lived with two lovers at the same time.

  Along the beach beyond the dimes. Flotsam. Odds and ends.

  A French word for such, is Reader trying to recall?

  A young child well nursed is, at a year old, a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or broiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricassee or ragout.

  Verweihle doch, du hist so schön.

  Fray Bernardino de Sahagun.

  Lemmings from Norway have been reported to migrate to a particular area in the Atlantic and then swim in circles until they drown. Flocks of birds have gone to their deaths in the same spot. Is archaic instinct drawing them back to Atlantis?

  Of ladies, knights, of love and arms,

  Of chivalry and boldest deeds I sing.

  Velazquez painted Philip IV more than forty times.

  Longinus. About whom nothing whatever is known.

  Including his real name.

  Carole Landis committed suicide.

  Biographers who conclude at the death of their subject and do not at least briefly discuss the survivors.

  Joseph Severn, who would remain in Rome through most of the next six decades. Eventually even serving as British Consul.

  Claire Clairmont, who outlived Byron by fifty-five years.

  Dora Diamant, who died in England well after World War II.

  The historical Troy, aka Troy Vila. Specified as having fallen between 1240 and 1230 B.C. Bones of prototypal Hectors lie in the roadways, and there is evidence of step-by-step destruction.

  After which the site was entirely abandoned for centuries.

  Spinoza died at forty-four of tuberculosis, surely aggravated by glass dust in his lungs from twenty years of grinding lenses for a living.

  Ben Richards.

  The Aspern Papers.

  Juana de Asbaje was illegitimate.

  Hardy may have had an illegitimate son by a cousin named Tryphena Sparks.

  The Sangreal. And/or Sangrail.

  Dost know this water-fly?

  Torquato Tasso was twice locked away as insane.

  All of Plato came down from antiquity in less maimed form than any other writings, an undeniable sign of the esteem in which it was held.

  Nonetheless when Aquinas and other medieval thinkers referred to the philosopher, with no additional identification, it was universally understood that Aristotle was meant.

  Il maestro di color che sanno.

  Primo Levi committed suicide by throwing himself down a stairwell.

  Through much of her life, Marina Tsvetayeva was forced to endure practically a beggar's existence. And with her nearest rela
tives repeatedly imprisoned.

  Akhmatova fared little better, confronted by the same family jailings, often subsisting for long periods on little more than black bread.

  Frangois Villon's mother was illiterate.

  As Nietzsche saw it, the last Christian died on the Cross.

  Ebenezer Cooke.

  Tecumseh.

  The Wittgenstein pianist/brother, Paul, who lost his right arm in World War I, subsequently commissioned Prokofiev and Ravel and Richard Strauss to compose one-handed works for him. Actually he appears to have been an unexceptional performer.

  Surely someone will call?

  Legend says that Hesiod was murdered because of seducing a friend's daughter, who had then hanged herself.

  And that when his corpse was discarded at sea it was brought back by dolphins.

  T. E. Hulme was killed in action in Flanders in 1917.

  Obviously in town, but even at the beach, Protagonist has no car. There are stores on a highway not far from the latter, however. From his entrance at the rear of the house there is a path through the brush leading that way.

  The nearest village is only a short walk also.

  One follows the highway or for that matter the beach itself to get to it.

  Tecmessa.

  Isaac Newton died a virgin.

  In Brussels, in 1873, Verlaine shot Rimbaud in the wrist and was sentenced to two years at hard labor.

  Not long thereafter Rimbaud burned all of his remaining manuscripts. At nineteen. And insofar as is known wrote no more verse.

  Mary Shelley was nineteen when she finished Frankenstein.

  Je finis par trouver sacré le désordre de mon esprit.

  Risë Stevens.

  Dewey Dell.

  Simeon Stylites, who spent thirty-six years on top of a sixty-foot pillar in the Syrian desert. For most of that time his body a mass of maggot-infested sores.

  The maggots no more than eating what God had intended for them, he said.

  Henry James was an anti-Semite.

  René Char was a saboteur for the Resistance in World War II.

  The human skull on that same shelf was given to Reader in Mexico by an archaeologist who had come upon several during a dig.

  Its origin should be more intriguing if Reader gives it to Protagonist.

  Must We Mean What We Say?

  Seneca, Lucan, and Petronius were all ordered to commit suicide by Nero. Each opened a vein.

  Lucan was twenty-five. He recited his own verses as he bled to death.

  Three years later Nero would be a suicide on his own part.

  Presumably Reader will give Protagonist photographs of his son and daughter also. Should he possess certain others?

  What mail does he receive?

  Anglican. Royalist. Classicist.

  Degas was probably impotent.

  Berlioz fell in love with Harriet Smithson when he saw her as Ophelia in Kemble's Hamlet In later life she became a shrew.

  Ah, what an artist dies with me!

  Rossini wrote The Barber of Seville in less than two weeks.

  Welshman. Drunkard. Heterosexual.

  Oliver Goldsmith was almost always indigent. Samuel Johnson once rushed money to keep him from being evicted. Goldsmith spent it on drink.

  Rilke was eternally someone's houseguest. Once he had fifty different addresses in four years.

  Kätchen Schönkopf.

  Frederike Brion.

  Lotte Buff.

  Lili Schönemann.

  Charlotte von Stein.

  Christiane Vulpius.

  Marianne von Willemer.

  Lorenzo Ghiberti devoted twenty-eight years to the East Door of the Florence Baptistry. Michelangelo would say it could have served as the entrance to Paradise.

  Five hundred years later, Reader would stand staring where five of the door's ten panels lay heaped amid muck after having been wrenched away in the Great Flood of November 4, 1966. The night before.

  The honor of having been the first documented alcoholic author evidently falls to Aeschylus.

  Shaw lived with his mother until he was forty-two. And then had an unconsummated marriage.

  John Stuart Mill was Bertrand Russell's godfather.

  James Russell Lowell was Virginia Woolf s.

  Maurice Ravel died of a brain tumor.

  Will Protagonist have spent time in Italy?

  In Mexico?

  At seventeen, when she became Abelard's pupil, Heloise was already fluent in Latin, Greek, and Hebrew.

  Balzac wrote eighty-five novels in twenty years.

  And made uncountable revisions in the proof sheets of each.

  Thomas Wolfe was an anti-Semite.

  Robinson Crusoe is on his island for twenty-eight years, two months, and nineteen days.

  Fray Luis de Leon.

  Would Protagonist's son or daughter one day want his books?

  Thackeray's wife was insane. But was cared for in a private home rather than an institution.

  Judah Halevi.

  Bitter Honeymoon.

  Ella Ferris Pell was buried in a pauper's grave.

  Her Salome.

  Auschwitz. Dachau. Treblinka. Maidanek. Sobibor. Chelmno. Mauthausen. Ravensbriick. Birkenau. Belzec. Theresienstadt.

  There is no verifiable portrait of Jane Austen.

  An otherwise anonymous Madame Delphine Delamare, who after numerous adulteries as the wife of an inattentive country doctor committed suicide with poison in 1850.

  And became the model for Emma Bovary.

  I declare to you before God, and as an honest man, that your son is the greatest composer I know, either personally or by name.

  And Buchenwald. Six miles from Weimar. On what had been a pleasant wooded hillside.

  The more significant women in Protagonist's life?

  Once, obviously, more of an existence than his books and the headstones of strangers.

  Children depart, miscellaneous relationships wither. Friends move to distant places.

  Friends die.

  Salman Rushdie lost the tip of one of his fingers as a boy. As does a character in Midnight's Children.

  Tolstoy was twice cited for bravery as a cavalry officer in the Caucasus.

  And Bergen-Belsen. Where Anne Frank died.

  Of starvation and typhus.

  God wrote the book. I took his dictation.

  Cartons like an impermanent sculpture of found objects. On a stairway ending at a sealed-off door.

  I do not love thee, Dr. Fell.

  Non amo te, Sabidi.

  Does a lone woman walk the beach, perhaps, and with a certain regularity, as Reader visualizes one visiting at one of the graves?

  A less than anonymous Paris prostitute named Marie Du-plessis, who was dead at twenty-three.

  And became the model for La Dame anx Camelias.

  Hart Crane committed suicide by jumping from a freighter in the Caribbean.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald was an anti-Semite.

  Molloy. Malone. Estragon.

  Simonetta Vespucci. Who was painted by Piero di Cosimo. And one of whose relatives the Americas are named after.

  Ilya Ilych Oblomov.

  D. S. Mirsky died in Siberia in one of Stalin's purges.

  Sempre libera.

  The question of truth versus legend in Alexander's having razed Persepolis at the bidding of Thais.

  The fair certainty that excessive wine played a part.

  Charles Bally and Albert Sechehaye.

  Maribarbola and Nicolasito.

  Erostratus burned down the Temple of Artemis at Ephesus in 356 B.C., so that his name would be remembered through history.

  One of those who remembered it was Cervantes, who lets Don Quixote tell Sancho Panza the story.

  And that Alexander was born on the same night.

  Adrienne Monnier committed suicide.

  Where Reader more broadly sees the cemetery is in a town that in its entirety is comprised of little other than those shoddy
small brick row houses and fissured streets. And would seem as if perpetually guised in winter light.