Reader's Block

by David Markson

  Edmund Wilson once proposed marriage to Djuna Barnes.

  How often does the woman come to the grave?

  What sort of regularity is there in the visits?

  Does she sometimes fail to come?

  Roald Dahl was an anti-Semite.

  The 1941 Concise Cambridge History of English Literature said that no one would ever read Ulysses even if copies were given away.

  Protagonist shoveling some of the snow? Into and along the pathways?

  Hers?

  Gitanjalu

  Soutine died in Paris in 1943. As a Jew under the German occupation he could be given only the most unobtrusive of funerals. Picasso and Cocteau followed his coffin, however.

  Simonides concluded it was better to be rich than wise.

  Since I notice that the wise spend most of their time at the doorsteps of the rich.

  Paula Modersohn-Becker was dead at thirty-one.

  Set ye Uriah in the forefront of the hottest battle, and retire ye from him, so that he may be smitten, and die.

  Beniamino Gigli was once an apprentice in a tailor shop.

  Benjamin Jowett said he read Pickwick Papers at least twice every year.

  Not one of the philosophic essays of Charles Sanders Peirce appeared in book form in his lifetime.

  Fatwa.

  Myles na Gopaleen.

  The opening sentence of Bulwer-Lytton's Paul Clifford.

  Proust and Henri Bergson were cousins by marriage.

  Kant knew no music. And said that reading novels diluted the mind.

  Though I never saw him, or had any personal communication with him, now that he is suddenly dead I realize that he was nearer, dearer, and more important to me than anyone else.

  Said Tolstoy of Dostoievsky.

  No greater man ever walked the earth than he.

  Said Michelangelo of Dante.

  Can Reader do anything unusual with the name he puts on the stone at which the woman kneels?

  How recent will he make its dates?

  Has he even yet determined the age of the woman herself?

  Or whether Protagonist does in fact catch sight of her elsewhere?

  Counterfactual conditionals.

  Beckett's Murphy was rejected by forty-two publishers.

  Gilles Deleuze committed suicide.

  Factoryville, Pennsylvania. Donora, Pennsylvania. Gretna, Louisiana. Van Meter, Iowa.

  Quel giorno più non vi leggemmo avante.

  Gabriele D'Annunzio lost an eye in combat with the Italian air force in World War I.

  Thrushcross Grange.

  Lautréamont was born in Montevideo. Jules Laforgue was born in Montevideo. Jules Supervielie was born in Montevideo.

  Once more before I die I will read Don Quixote, said Gissing.

  Graham Greene was an anti-Semite.

  I had this story from one who had no business to tell it to me.

  O yes! I am poison'd; mother, make my bed soon,

  For I'm sick at the heart, and I fain wald lie down.

  Born with the gift of laughter and the sense that the world was mad, and that was his only patrimony.

  Has Reader made note of enough women for Protagonist's background? Considering all the years involved?

  Remembering any number of others who could readily be appropriated.

  Though leaving the critical question for Protagonist's situation still.

  Why this solitude now?

  Where the Catherine Earnshaw or the Maggie Tulliver or the Sara Monday for these denatured days?

  Rabbi Akiba was flayed alive.

  Valéry, to Gide: Do you know anything more boring than the Iliad?

  William Sidney Porter became O. Henry while sitting out three years in jail for embezzlement.

  Muschg.

  Skoonj.

  El Caballero de la Triste Figura.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins is buried in Prospect Cemetery, Glasnevin. As is Maud Gonne.

  As is Paddy Dignam.

  Mrs. Maj. John MacBride.

  Remembering a Rachel and an Anne and a Lisa and an Irene.

  And an Andrea and a Judith.

  And a second Susan.

  Among more.

  Kay Sage committed suicide.

  Andre Chénier died on the guillotine.

  Come un bel dì di maggio.

  Walafrid Strabo drowned in the Loire.

  Siger of Brabant was stabbed to death by a deranged scribe.

  Either it is raining or it is not raining.

  Habitually, Protagonist brings a newspaper or a book when he eats at the restaurant. Although he is no more intruded upon here than at the saloon.

  There being only a lunch counter and several booths in any case. Normally an indifferent short-order cook and one graying waitress. Protagonist will puzzle at how they remain in business.

  The mirror crack'd from side to side;

  The curse is come upon me, cried

  The Lady of Shalott.

  Saint John Chrysostom was an anti-Semite.

  And insisted that Jesus had never laughed.

  Dionysius of Halicarnassus. Nine volumes in the Loeb Classical Library.

  Philip Freneau died after becoming lost in a snowstorm. On his way home from a tavern.

  Milton was paid five pounds for Paradise Lost.

  Yeats once asked Hardy how he coped with the endless copies of his books sent to him with requests for inscriptions.

  Hardy led Yeats to a back closet. Piled from floor to ceiling.

  Even with the idea of feeble stolen electricity at the gatehouse dismissed, Reader remains locked in on a nighttime image of only the faintest glow from a single bulb beyond one shaded downstairs window.

  Protagonist squinting beneath the dimmest of reading lamps.

  The restaurant in the same Hopper wintry-sun mode as the saloon, however.

  Isabel Rawsthorne.

  According to Kenneth Tynan, a corrida with Antonio Ordonez was more stirring than any other performance by any other sort of artist he might name.

  Ernst Ludwig Kirchner committed suicide.

  Los Pasos Perdidos.

  Rosalba Camera was blind in the last years of her life. Mary Cassatt was blind in the last years of her life.

  Chidiock Tichborne. Who may have been as young as eighteen when he was executed at the Tower for plotting against Elizabeth in 1586.

  And was disemboweled before he was extinct, as the Tower's report had it.

  Jean Francois Champollion.

  Hayim Lenski died of starvation in a Soviet labor camp. Sent there for having written poems in Hebrew.

  Die Zauberflöte.

  Der Zauberberg.

  For a certain period in his mid-twenties Vincent Van Gogh could not pass a church without breaking into tears.

  And went unbathed, which he construed as sanctifying.

  I want to be buried with this novel clasped to my heart.

  The day is past, and yet I saw no sun,

  And now I live, and now my life is done.

  Jerzy Kosinski committed suicide by asphyxiating himself with a plastic bag.

  Giuseppe Berto was a prisoner of war in Texas at the end of World War II.

  Wyndham Lewis was an anti-Semite.

  An audience of fully three thousand gave Akhmatova a standing ovation after a reading in Moscow in 1944.

  About which Stalin, hearing of it: Who organized this response?

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

  Giuseppina Strepponi. Busseto.

  Poe was probably impotent.

  Byron, Scott, Shelley, and Wordsworth all particularly admired the poetry of Felicia Dorothea Hemans.

  Felicia Dorothea Hemans wrote The boy stood on the burning deck.

  We had roast pig to eat before Pickett's charge.

  Samuel Johnson's acquaintance Oliver Edwards, who might have been a philosopher.

  But that cheerfulness was always breaking in.

  Jacob Epstein, to a niece: Call me Epstein. Woul
d you have called him Uncle Donatello?

  Enrico Fermi: Where are they?

  The books Shelley had with him when he drowned were a Keats and a Sophocles.

  The Marquis de Sade died in a lunatic asylum.

  Otherwise well-informed readers who would be surprised to learn that the site of ancient Troy is in Turkey.

  Where Nazim Hikmet's work was banned through virtually all of his writing life.

  While being translated into more languages than probably any other twentieth-century poet's.

  Hilda Doolittle was once a patient of Freud's.

  Was Sir Thomas Wyatt one of Anne Boleyn's lovers? Is it certain she had lovers?

  Dollars damn me.

  Fata morgana.

  Some few friends, at least, from that earlier existence, with whom Reader should have Protagonist correspond?

  Other writers?

  She has no wit, but enough sound human sense to be able to fulfill her duties as a wife and mother.

  Said Mozart of Constanze.

  At Walden, Thoreau was borrowing land owned by Emerson.

  And was no more than a ten-minute stroll from Concord.

  Paul Celan drowned himself in the Seine.

  I. G. Farben.

  Delacroix was almost surely the illegitimate son of Talleyrand.

  A gone shipmate, like any other man, is gone forever; and I never met one of them again.

  Dear Cicero. Regards, Protagonist.

  Philip Larkin: Who's Jorge Luis Borges?

  Are Protagonist's few books known at all? Ever read?

  Paul Ancel. Or Antschel.

  They do not move.

  Cervantes is buried at a convent in Madrid, though exactly where in its cemetery is not known. Nor is there a known portrait of him.

  And she came through the mist and the rain to me

  From the soft warm lights of the town.

  Ingeborg Bachmann died at forty-seven after setting fire to a mattress with a cigarette.

  Giacomo Casabianca.

  Mystified by the ear of a poet who would call a volume Where Water Comes Together with Other Water.

  La Vida Breve.

  Roy Campbell was an anti-Semite.

  And was one of the few writers or artists aligned with the fascists during the Spanish Civil War.

  Like Dali.

  Why is Reader always momentarily startled to recall that Keats was a fully licensed surgeon?

  Does Protagonist even have a telephone?

  Medieval legend says that Aquinas's corpse was boiled and his bones preserved as relics. In actuality he was buried in Toulouse.

  Ed Delehanty may have committed suicide. Having either jumped or fallen from a bridge at Niagara Falls.

  El Greco would appear to have been almost impoverished at his death, though he left behind 147 canvases. Whether because he could not sell them, or would not, remains moot.

  That man writes really too sloppily, said Joyce of D. H. Lawrence.

  Sue Bridehead.

  Hugo van der Goes died insane.

  Haydn and Beethoven each nominated Handel as the greatest of composers.

  Berlioz called him a tub of pork and beer.

  Solomon Ibn Gabirol.

  Wittgenstein had a close friend named Eccles.

  Arnold Bennett died of typhoid fever after drinking Paris tap water. Deliberately drinking it, to prove to someone it was safe.

  I'm Captain Jinks of the horse marines.

  Yasnaya Polyana. Max Gate. Rowan Oak. Thoor Ballylee. I Tatti.

  New Place.

  Isaac Rosenberg was killed in France in World War I.

  Charlotte Mew committed suicide by drinking creosote.

  Alma Mahler was an anti-Semite.

  Two of Alma Mahler's three husbands, Mahler and Franz Werfel, were Jews.

  Axel Springer Verlag.

  Euripides was more frequently quoted by both Plato and Aristotle than was any other playwright. Plutarch says that Alexander quoted him repeatedly also. At a banquet not long before his death he recited an entire scene.

  When John Stuart Mill's maid inadvertently burned the only manuscript of the first volume of Carlyle's French Revolution, Carlyle had already destroyed his notes. He would tell Tennyson that rewriting it was like swimming without water.

  Oscar Wilde said that Henry James composed novels as if it were a painful duty.

  Henry James said that Oscar Wilde was a fatuous fool. And an unclean beast.

  Gropius.

  Lou Andreas-Salome.

  Before leaving New York: Protagonist wandering for some hours one afternoon along the Hudson River docks on West Street. Near Gansevoort.

  Finding only that even the specific address no longer exists.

  Vivaldi was buried in a pauper's grave.

  Alfred H. Hunter died in Dublin four years after the publication of Ulysses, forever unaware of his immortality.

  Byron's letters record approximately as many instances of gonorrhea as do Boswell's journals.

  Kant almost certainly died a virgin.

  Daunty, Gouty, and Shopkeeper.

  A Girl of the Limberlost.

  To place our purpose within definite limits, we must first investigate the nature and domain of sacred doctrine.

  It is the same old druid Time as ever.

  Jascha Heifetz. David Oistrakh. Nathan Milstein. Isaac Stern. Benno Moiseiwitsch. Emil Gilels. Odessa, all.

  René Crevel committed suicide.

  Who is speaking, and says, We were in study-hall, in the first sentence of Madame Bovary?

  Like Wallace Stevens, Charles Ives worked in insurance. Like Kafka.

  Herder was an anti-Semite.

  The poems of Catullus were lost for a millennium. Tradition has it that the single manuscript discovered in Verona in the fourteenth century had been used to stop a bunghole.

  Kneeling at the grave, or standing head bowed?

  And why does Reader always envision dusk?

  Irony and Pity, Inc.

  Yvor Winters called T. Sturge Moore a better poet than Yeats.

  And Elizabeth Daryush as good or better than either.

  The Pali canon.

  Remembering a Sarah.

  And a Robin and a Beth.

  And a Karen, who wrote verse.

  Some undeniably casual, some fugitive.

  And over so many years.

  Nonetheless.

  And can any of them, with whom he has mostly long now lost touch, be even now dead?

  She?

  This is just the book to give your sister if she's a loud, dirty, boozy girl.

  Wolfram von Eschenbach.

  A letter of Baudelaire's intimates that his mistress Jeanne Duval was sleeping with her own brother when the brother once moved in with them.

  If die I must, let me die drinking in an inn, said Walter Map.

  Patrick Kavanagh was married for the first time at sixty-three. And died the same year.

  Pedicabo ego uos et irrumabo,

  Aureli pathice et cinaede Furi.

  Good Master Schoolmaster, do not English this.

  T. S. Eliot and William Burroughs' mother walked to dancing classes together as children in St. Louis.

  Along the way passing Prufrock's Furniture Store.

  General Jacques Aupick.

  The phrase down these mean streets comes from an essay by Raymond Chandler.

  And is an allusion to Tales of Mean Streets by Arthur Morrison.

  René Magritte's mother drowned herself.