The Last Novel

by David Markson

Pronounced the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem — well before a State of Israel existed.

  While also citing Adolf Eichmann as both gallant and noble.

  To sit for John Singer Sargent, Yeats appeared in a velvet coat and a billowing bow tie — and then carefully arranged a lock of hair to fall across his forehead.

  All this to remind himself of his importance as an artist, Sargent said he said.

  The last time anyone mentioned William Saroyan.

  Eleusis, Aeschylus was born in.

  Colonus, Sophocles.

  Salamis, Euripides.

  T. S. Eliot missed military service in World War I because of a hernia.

  Pound had astigmatism.

  Andrea del Castagno’s masterwork, a last supper, was painted at the Convent of Sant’Apollonia in Florence in 1447.

  And was not seen by other artists for four hundred years — because of the convent being closed to laypersons.

  The state should keep me, Schubert once suggested. I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose.

  Now that a certain portion of mankind does not believe at all in the existence of the gods, a rational legislation ought to do away with the oaths.

  Wrote Plato — 2,310 years before an act of the United States Congress added the phrase under God to the Pledge of Allegiance.

  Suddenly taking a moment to wonder — does anyone any longer make use of Morse code?

  I pay well. But the wenches are all whores and pigs.

  Says a Michelangelo letter about a servant problem.

  André Malraux had reached Spain within two days of the start of the Civil War in 1936.

  Living the classic impoverished artist’s life while a student in Milan, Giacomo Puccini was once forced to pawn his overcoat — as he allows one of his characters to do in La Bohème.

  In El Diario de Madrid, February 1799, a first advertisement for prints of Goya’s Caprichos:

  On sale at No. 1 Calle del Desengaño, the perfume and liquor store.

  Beatrix Potter had to pay to publish The Tale of Peter Rabbit.

  I am hungry. I am cold. When I grow up I want to be a German, and then I shall no longer be hungry and cold.

  Wrote a Jewish youngster in the Warsaw Ghetto.

  Not long before his death, Toulouse-Lautrec spent several months in a mental institution, being released only in care of a guardian whose portrait he then painted.

  My keeper when I was mad, he inscribed it.

  Ludwig Wittgenstein’s shockingly limited aesthetic sensibilities in every area except music. His virtual consecration of third-rate American pulp fiction detective stories, for instance.

  Or his unashamed admission that Carmen Miranda and Betty Hutton ranked as his two favorite film actresses.

  The earliest known reference to London by name, dated as long ago as 61 AD — in Tacitus.

  Columbus, Mississippi, Tennessee Williams was born in.

  In an Episcopal rectory.

  Moments in which Novelist does something like leaving his desk to retrieve a book from across the room — and finding himself staring vacantly into the refrigerator.

  Or tossing his keys into a drawer — without having opened the drawer.

  In Meleager’s first-century BC anthology of Greek verse, an epigram in honor of an extraordinary woman —

  The one who slept with only one man in her life.

  Gerard Manley Hopkins, on realizing that he feels a certain kinship with Whitman:

  As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a very pleasant confession.

  Don’t go into Mr. McGregor’s garden: your father had an accident there.

  John von Neumann was twenty-nine when he was appointed to the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton — for life.

  André Gide had a sexless marriage with a first cousin.

  In spite of his admitted homosexuality, he also had an illegitimate child by another woman.

  In Vermeer’s paintings, repeatedly, letters being read or written.

  In the real world — not one known word of any sort in Vermeer’s own hand.

  Manet’s earliest major canvas, The Absinthe Drinker.

  The only absinthe drinker here is the painter who perpetrated this madness, said Couture.

  I’d rather not sing than sing quiet.

  Janis Joplin said.

  The Hiroshima survivor who remembered rushing into the street amid the chaos and tripping over someone’s severed head.

  And hysterically calling out Excuse me.

  A stark naked man standing in the rain with his eyeball in his hand.

  Another survivor recalled.

  The ashes of Shelley’s heart. Which Trelawney had scooped from the flames when the corpse was burned on the beach at Viareggio in 1822, and which were passed on to Mary — and were found in her copy of Adonais after her death in 1851.

  Any asino can conduct. But to make music, eh? Is difficile!

  Said Toscanini.

  Rubens, in his early sixties — with arthritis so severe that both hands were paralyzed.

  Rubens.

  I’ve never read Shakespeare because the print’s too small.

  Says someone in Odets.

  Wondering how things worked at the Institute for Advanced Study. Come noon, might von Neumann casually poke his head into Einstein’s office and ask if he felt like lunch?

  J. D. Salinger was awarded five battle stars as a staff sergeant in the European Theater in World War II.

  Evelyn Waugh saw combat as a major with British commando units in North Africa, Crete, and Yugoslavia.

  The Medieval poet Probus, whom Walafrid Strabo deemed superior to Virgil or Horace or Ovid — and whom no one any longer knows anything whatsoever about.

  Paganini’s legendary showmanship. Which included sometimes deliberately breaking a string midway through a performance — and going on with only the remaining three.

  Wallpaper, George Steiner dismissed much of Jackson Pollock as.

  Extremely expensive wallpaper, Kenneth Rexroth made it.

  Someone once asked Caruso if he considered himself the world’s greatest tenor.

  Not unless John McCormack has suddenly become a baritone, Caruso said.

  Why Diogenes had been noticed begging alms from a statue, a citizen wished to know.

  To get into practice at being ignored, Diogenes explained.

  The so-called Wicked Bible. Dated London 1632.

  In which the word not was omitted in the seventh commandment.

  Samuel Johnson’s compulsive inability to stroll past a picket fence without superstitiously touching each separate picket as he went.

  Remembering that in the Odyssey Odysseus himself is not first seen until Book V.

  And then is seen weeping.

  Rudolph Valentino was dead at thirty-one.

  Mithridates, he died old.

  If you think you understand it, that only shows you don’t know the first thing about it.

  Said Niels Bohr re quantum mechanics.

  In an era when singers frequently embellished music to their own taste, Rossini once complimented Adelina Patti on an aria from The Barber of Seville — and then asked her who the composer was.

  Claude Lorrain’s Coast View with Acis and Galatea, which Dostoievsky once saw in Dresden and writes in A Raw Youth of having dreamed about.

  And writes in The Possessed of having dreamed about.

  And writes in The Dream of a Ridiculous Man of having dreamed about.

  Emily Dickinson’s refusal to sit for a photographer.

  Henrik Ibsen was virtually never known to take off his hat without immediately combing his hair — having even glued a small mirror inside the hat to make use of when he did so.

  September 23, 1835, Vincenzo Bellini died on.

  April 8, 1848, Gaetano Donizetti died on.

  There was no memorial of any sort for Byron in Westminster Abbey until 1969.

  Still always slightly surprised to recall — that John McCo
rmack died an American citizen.

  The so-called anarchist artist who in 1988 smeared a large X in his own blood on a wall in the Museum of Modern Art — and in the process splattered an adjacent Picasso.

  I can’t understand these chaps who go round American universities explaining how they write poems; it’s like going round explaining how you sleep with your wife.

  Quoth Philip Larkin.

  The sound of Bix Beiderbecke’s cornet:

  Like a girl saying yes, Eddie Condon said.

  The sound of Paul Desmond’s alto saxophone:

  Like a dry martini, being what Desmond himself said he wanted.

  Exactly the right tone of thought and feeling to appeal to grocers.

  Leslie Stephen credited Dickens with.

  Napoleon was five feet six inches tall.

  A dozen or fifteen years before much of the nudity in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment would be concealed by papal order, a ranking Vatican cardinal voiced the first complaint about same.

  And shortly discovered his own portrait on the wall — in hell.

  As almost happened similarly to a prior in Milan after his complaints about Leonardo’s apparent desultoriness in work on The Last Supper — complaints that abruptly ceased at Leonardo’s hint regarding who might become the model for Judas.

  Kindly see me safe up. As for coming down I shall shift for myself.

  Said Sir Thomas More — being led to the gallows.

  In Robert Schumann’s diary, after a first meeting with Berlioz:

  There is something very pleasant about his laugh.

  Thou shalt commit adultery.

  The brains of a ram, Shaw attributed to Sophocles.

  Of a third-rate village policeman — to Brahms.

  Poor England, when such a despicable abortion is named genius.

  Said Thomas Carlyle of Charles Lamb.

  Anybody can be nobody.

  Said Eugene V. Debs.

  Novelist’s personal genre. For all its seeming fragmentation, nonetheless obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic interconnective syntax.

  Wondering why one is surprised to realize that Thoreau was dead at forty-five.

  A lament of Schopenhauer’s:

  Over how frequently the mere purchase of a book is mistaken for the appropriation of its contents.

  Two pages of The Mill on the Floss are enough to start me crying.

  Said Proust.

  Sour of speech, averse to laughter, unable to be merry even over the wine, but what he writes is full of honey and the Sirens.

  Says a line of uncertain attribution re Euripides.

  Lope de Vega had at least three illegitimate children.

  Gustav Klimt may have had as many as fourteen.

  Though the courts recognized only four, in regard to his estate.

  Utterly crazy about women.

  Suidas says of Menander.

  Looking at them in society, one fancies there’s something in them, but there’s nothing, nothing, nothing. No, don’t marry, my dear fellow, don’t marry.

  Repulsive, an early New York Times review called Degas.

  Pigs at the pastry cart.

  John Updike called critics.

  Says a 1796 London jestbook:

  Shakespear seeing Ben Jonson in a necessary-house, with a book in his hand reading it very attentively, said he was sorry his memory was so bad, that he could not sh-te without a Book.

  Dürer’s hausfrau wife.

  Whom he on occasion remanded to eat with their maid.

  Lenin played tennis.

  The sign in the window says Pants Pressed Here. But when you bring in your pants, you discover that it is the sign that is for sale.

  Being Kierkegaard — on the typical obscurity of what normally passes for philosophy.

  The first use of the phrase stream of consciousness.

  In a review by May Sinclair of Dorothy Richardson’s Pointed Roofs — in April 1918.

  The remedies of all our diseases will be discovered after we are dead.

  Assumed John Stuart Mill.

  Charlotte has been writing a book, and it is much better than likely.

  Announced the Reverend Patrick Brontë, in the mid-1840s, to his other offspring.

  Karl Marx was for some years a London correspondent for Horace Greeley’s New York Tribune.

  Attempting to detour the young Thomas Aquinas from a career in the church, his family once arranged for a seductive woman to be sent to his rooms.

  Whom he chased off with a flaming brand from his hearth.

  Maid of Athens, ere we part,

  Give, oh give me back my heart!

  For a time, Rilke and Cocteau had apartments in the same Paris building — evidently without ever becoming acquainted.

  Every passenger in the non-smoking section of a plane that crashed off Norway in 1948 was killed.

  Bertrand Russell had been smoking — and was one of those able to swim to safety.

  Ravel once composed music for Diaghilev that Diaghilev never used.

  And which almost led to a duel between them.

  April 23, 1554, Gaspara Stampa died on.

  I don’t very much enjoy looking at paintings in general. I know too much about them.

  Said Georgia O’Keeffe.

  Harvard was founded in 1636.

  The University of Mexico — in 1553.

  One of the most illiterate books of any merit ever published.

  Edmund Wilson called This Side of Paradise.

  Not a lovable man.

  John O’Hara said of Scott Fitzgerald himself.

  Occasions on which one has seen it transliterated as Theodor Dostoievsky.

  A tea-time bore.

  Dylan Thomas called Wordsworth.

  A son of Einstein’s died in a mental institution at fifty-five — having been confined there for a third of a century.

  The relatively recent revelation that Einstein had also had an illegitimate daughter.

  Unhesitatingly specifying Pound’s anti-Semitism as the reason, Yevgeny Yevtushenko once refused to appear on the same podium with him at a literary event.

  Teddy Dostoievsky?

  The Duccio Madonna and Child purchased by the Metropolitan Museum in 2004 for more than $45,000,000.

  Which is eight inches wide and eleven inches high.

  Jan Peerce. Leonard Warren. Richard Tucker. Robert Merrill.

  The Lower East Side. The Bronx. Williamsburg. Williamsburg.

  Jacques Derrida failed his entrance exams to the École Normal Supérieure. Twice.

  People are exasperated by poetry which they do not understand, and contemptuous of poetry which they understand without effort.

  Said Eliot.

  We cease to wonder at what we understand.

  Said Johnson.

  Sir Thomas Beecham once told an orchestra that a certain passage in Mozart should sound innocent — quote — like a breath of spring. It should float on the air like a voice from another world.

  When the musicians stared emptily:

  Oh, well, anyway, play it legato.

  A real good guy.

  William Carlos Williams called Emily Dickinson.

  A bitchy little spinster.

  Denise Levertov saw her as instead.

  Géricault’s intensity when at work on The Raft of the Medusa:

  The mere sound of a smile could prevent him from painting, someone said.

  Ingres’ judgment that the finished version ought to have been removed from the Louvre or even hidden away altogether:

  Is it in such horrors that we should find pleasure? Art should teach us nothing but the Beautiful!

  If English was good enough for Jesus Christ, it’s good enough for us.

  Said a 1920s Texas governor opposed to the teaching of foreign languages.

  Persia, as it was still then called, Doris Lessing was born in.

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

  Because bookshops are among the very few plac
es where one can spend time without spending any money, George Orwell noted, any number of practically certifiable lunatics are guaranteed to be regularly found in most of them.

  I’ve finished that chapel I was painting. The Pope is quite satisfied.

  Wrote Michelangelo to his father, after four years’ effort — and with no further need to let fall brooms or lumber.

  So impoverished was Linnaeus as a university student that the closest he could come to repairing worn-out shoes was to stuff the holes with paper.

  The general acceptance that it was Antonello da Messina who taught Venice the Flemish method of painting with oils rather than with tempera.

  Venice — and thus Italy.

  More floggings than meals.

  Haydn remembered from his childhood.

  Trying to imagine E. M. Forster, who found Ulysses indecorous, at a London performance of Lenny Bruce — to which in fact he was once taken.

  Trying to imagine the same for a time-transported Nathaniel Hawthorne — who during his first visit to Europe was even shocked at the profusion of naked statues.

  January 22, 1945, Else Lasker-Schüler died on.

  Raskolnikov. Minus the last two letters, the word translates as dissenter.

  While the pseudonym Gorky means the bitter.

  Fifty years after combat in World War I, David Jones could still be momentarily panicked by an unexpected explosive sound like that of a backfiring truck.

  And now we three in Euston waiting-room.

  Latin, Greek, Italian, and German, George Eliot read.

  Latin, Greek, Italian, and French — Mary Shelley.

  Hindi, not English, Rudyard Kipling’s first language was.

  People who pronounce the word ask as if it were spelled with an x.

  As for that matter it was, until the late sixteenth century.

  If God had not created breasts, I would not have become a painter.

  Renoir once unseriously announced.

  A woman’s breast or a commonplace milk bottle — my feelings remained the same when painting either.

  Corot soberly insisted.

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls —

  Which Novelist after a moment realizes may sound like a line of Beckett’s, but is actually something he himself has said in an earlier book.

  The name Copperfield came from a sign Dickens had noticed on a shop in a London slum.

  Chuzzlewit likewise.