This is Not a Novel

by David Markson

  In a book without characters.

  As noted, not being a character but the author, here.

  We are and we are not. Said Heraclitus.

  Even with innumerable obvious likes and/or dislikes and certain self-evident preoccupations.

  How frequently was Anon, a woman?

  Marcel Duchamp died of prostate cancer.

  Already condemned by lung cancer, Duke Ellington died of pneumonia.

  The word ghetto originally meant f oundry. Until the Jews of Venice were forced to live on an island that had previously been the site of one.

  Knowledge is not intelligence. Heraclitus additionally said.

  Thales, solving the height of the pyramids: Simply by measuring their shadows precisely when his own shadow matched his height.

  The legend that as a young man Leonardo was so strong he could straighten a horseshoe with his bare hands.

  Robert Capa was killed by a land mine in Vietnam.

  Fray Luis de Leon, returning to his Salamanca classroom after five years of imprisonment by the Inquisition: As I was saying…

  Hey, Dad, hot this for me, please?

  A tavern chair is the throne of human felicity, Johnson said.

  Disgusting eating habits, there or elsewhere, Boswell says Johnson had.

  Roald Dahl died of leukemia.

  There can be no doubt that there is something peculiar in the condition of the English retina.

  Said Taine, viewing a first exhibition of Pre-Raphaelite art.

  I hear a white horse on the way.

  G. K. Chesterton died of heart failure.

  Hilaire Belloc died, senile, at eighty-three, when he set his clothing on fire by spilling coal from a grate.

  Hardy’s father was a stonemason.

  Turner’s mother died mad.

  Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

  On radio, the opening lines of Verlaine’s Chanson d’automne:

  Being the signal to the European underground that the D-Day invasion was underway.

  Jane! Jane! Jane!

  Filippo Lippi died of quinsy.

  Account for Joan of Arc.

  According to Vasari, ordinary citizens in Florence were so impressed by a Madonna of Cimabue’s that it was actually carried in a procession from his workshop to Santa Trinita.

  Heralded by trumpets.

  It is an aspect of probability that many improbable things will happen.

  Aristotle says Agathon said.

  A likely impossibility is always preferable to an unconvincing possibility.

  Aristotle himself added, re tragedy.

  Wittgenstein had nephews fighting on both sides in World Warn.

  Meyerhold was executed by the Soviets.

  He dug a grave of the same length as Pakhom’s form from head to heels—three Russian ells—and buried him.

  Ruben Dario died of cirrhosis of the liver.

  Diderot died of coronary thrombosis while sitting at dinner.

  I used to say to them, Go boldly in among the English, and then I used to go boldly in myself. Said Joan.

  He could not get rid of the idea that he was damned, and he would have drowned himself if he had not been prevented by force.

  Says a chronicle from the monastery where Hugo van der Goes was a lay brother.

  He was known to drink, which made things worse. Says the same.

  This is even a disquisition on the maladies of the life of art, if Writer says so.

  Wanhope.

  John Reed died of typhus.

  Louise Bryant died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Not even to a philosopher could old age be easy in the depths of poverty, Cicero said.

  Nor could a fool find it anything but burdensome even amid ample wealth.

  Maria Jeritza was the first Tosca to sing Vissi d’arte while lying on the floor.

  Only because she had been elbowed off a couch by accident.

  It was from God, Puccini decided.

  Though with Jeritza also flaunting far too much obvious posterior, put in Geraldine Farrar.

  Venus Callipyge.

  Louise O’Murphy.

  Tiepolo and Francesco Guardi were brothers-in-law.

  Richard Wright died of a heart attack.

  The question of Mikhail Sholokhov’s authorship of The Quiet Don.

  The question of Dmitri Shostakovich’s authorship of his Memoirs.

  St. Teresa of Lisieux knew The Imitation of Christ by heart.

  John Masefield died of gangrene at eighty-eight when he refused to have an injured leg amputated.

  Schopenhauer played the flute.

  He has no insight into character. And no dramatic talent. His dialogue hardens to wood and stone.

  Said Emerson about its author after reading Oliver Twist.

  Camille Saint-Saens talked with a lisp.

  Mahler, discovering that Alma was having an affair with Walter Gropius.

  And spending an entire day discussing it with Freud.

  Is Macbeth impotent?

  Hans Memling. That very model of a major minor master, as Erwin Panofsky had it.

  The legend that as an impoverished, wounded soldier, Memling had begun to paint in gratitude to monks who sheltered him.

  Edward Arlington Robinson died of pancreatic cancer.

  Warren’s Blacking. 30, Strand.

  Carl Maria von Weber died of tuberculosis.

  Ambrose Bierce fought at Shiloh, Stones River, and Chickamauga. And was wounded at Kenesaw Mountain.

  The History of Rome Hanks and Kindred Matters.

  Leonidas and the Three Hundred, who would perish at Thermopylae.

  Only men who had already fathered sons to leave behind had been permitted to join the command.

  Said of George Washington, at the height of the war with the British:

  He sometimes throws and catches a ball for whole hours with his aides-de-camp.

  Nabokov appears to have died of an infection caught in a hospital where he was being treated for the flu.

  Paul Bowles died of a heart attack.

  Jane Bowles died after a stroke.

  Friday is on their island with Robinson Crusoe for thirteen out of Crusoe’s twenty-eight years.

  Why does Defoe not let him ever learn to speak more than pidgin English?

  Why does Stephen Crane never actually state that the battle in The Red Badge of Courage is Chancellorsville?

  La Scala was severely bombed in World War II.

  The Vienna Staatsoper was severely bombed in World War II.

  There are so few people who know how to make art. —Julian Schnabel.

  One less than he thinks. —Robert Hughes.

  In Coriolanus, Shakespeare allows someone to mention Cato.

  Three centuries ahead of time.

  And I will come out to meet you

  As far as Cho-fu-Sa.

  Pericles died of plague.

  Stefan Lochner purchased a house in Cologne in 1442. Konrad Witz purchased a house in Basel in 1443. Martin Schongauer purchased a house in Colmar in 1477.

  Hans Baldung Grien purchased a house in Strasbourg in 1527.

  Paganini died of what was evidently cancer of the larynx.

  Walter Pater died of gout.

  It is written in a careless and humble style, in the vulgar tongue, which even housewives speak. Said Dante of the Comedy.

  William Etty.

  The Axion Esti.

  All through the night Rome went burning. Put that in the noontide and it loses some of its age-old significance, does it not?

  Archaeological evidence for the historical reality of Gilgamesh.

  Pergolesi died of consumption at twenty-six.

  Laborare est Orare. Work is Worship. Said the old monks.

  Benedetto Croce died of a stroke.

  Robert Schumann died mad, probably from syphilis.

  Behold, this dreamer cometh.

  Sophocles’ father manufactured swords.

  John Dos Passos died of con
gestive heart failure.

  Tyndale was permitted the indulgence of being strangled at the stake before they set fire to him.

  A Farewell to Aims:

  1590, George Peele’s version dating from.

  Trying to imagine the shape of the modern world if Charles Martel had been defeated at Tours.

  Simone Weil’s final hospitalization was ostensibly for tuberculosis and exhaustion. Nevertheless a coroner’s report labeled her death suicide by starvation.

  The woman was mad, de Gaulle said.

  Mantegna used a corpse as the model for one of his Crucifixions.

  Gericault used several while painting The Raft of the Medusa.

  Veit Stoss died blind. And destitute.

  The almost unparalleled contemporary popularity of Euripides.

  Greek soldiers captured and held as slaves after the disastrous expedition at Syracuse were actually given their freedom if they could teach passages from his plays from memory.

  Which many could.

  George Eliot translated Spinoza. Emma Lazarus translated Judah Halevi.

  Willem de Kooning’s father was a beer distributor.

  An incidental notation of Malcolm Lowry’s, while describing a visit to a room used by De Quincey in the Lake District:

  Smoking Prohibited.

  She only said, My life is dreary

  He cometh not, she said; She said, I am aweary, aweary

  I would that I were dead.

  Cousin Ruddy was habitually foul-mouthed.

  Flannery O’Connor died of lupus.

  In the century after their deaths, Ben Jonson’s name appeared in print three times as often as Shakespeare’s.

  Salathiel Pavy.

  Why does Joyce let Leopold Bloom think Saverio Mercadante was Jewish?

  April 26, 1937. A Monday.

  Which was also Guernica’s market day, drawing peasants in from the nearby countryside.

  No matter how frequently, always given pause at remembering there is no color whatsoever in the canvas.

  A little, plain, provincial, sickly-looking old maid. Being Charlotte Bronte, as seen by George Henry Lewes.

  Robert Southey died of—quote—softening of the brain.

  And what should they know of England who only England know?

  Gauguin once tried to kill himself with arsenic. But vomited.

  Do you think up that material when you’re drunk? Asked a cousin of Faulkner’s.

  Dittersdorf, you’re not in tune.

  Tintoretto died of what appears to have been stomach cancer.

  Trollope died of a stroke.

  Milledgeville, Georgia.

  Tracts free as the Lord supplies the funds.

  Frank Lloyd Wright died of a heart attack after surgery.

  Hilda Doolittle died of the flu, though already assaulted by a heart attack and a stroke.

  Even after Einstein on the Beach had been performed at the Metropolitan Opera, Philip Glass was driving a taxi in New York City.

  Hypatia, who was battered to death by Christian fanatics.

  Tantum religio potuit suadere maloram, Lucretius said.

  Such are the evils that religion prompts.

  Emotion recollected in tranquility.

  The best words in the best order.

  Vivaldi died of no one knows what. Of internal fire, the 1741 Vienna church registry having poetically settled for.

  A social and moral pervert, Theodore Roosevelt called Tolstoy.

  Roosevelt on Henry James: A miserable little snob.

  On Thomas Paine: A filthy little atheist.

  Spinoza’s tomb. At the Nieuwe Kerk in The Hague.

  It was falling, too, upon every part of the lonely churchyard on the hill where Michael Furey lay buried.

  S. Y. Agnon died of a heart attack.

  Dostoievsky’s second wife, Anna, adding a note of charm to a recollection of Dostoievsky pawning something:

  He sat there for over an hour—my poor, poor Fedya. So sweet, and so brilliant and altogether fine, and he had to sit and wait among a lot of Jews.

  Stuck-groove music.

  When the canvas is on the floor, I feel closer to it. Said Jackson Pollock.

  Marie Corelli was Charles Mackay’s daughter. Marcia Davenport was Alma Gluck’s.

  Robert Penn Warren died of prostate cancer.

  Joshua Reynolds died blind.

  After having been deaf through most of his life.

  Only when the world itself is destroyed will the verses of Lucretius perish. Said Ovid.

  Richard Brinsley Sheridan died profoundly in debt. Yet was granted a spectacular Westminster Abbey funeral.

  Moliere died after bursting a blood vessel in a convulsive tubercular coughing fit and choking on his own blood.

  Panta rei, ouden menel

  It is very difficult to understand and appreciate the generation that follows you, Matisse said.

  I only know that summer sang in me A little while, that in me sings no more.

  The candle-end was flickering out in the battered candlestick, dimly lighting up in the poverty-stricken room the murderer and the harlot who had so strangely been reading together in the eternal book.

  The friendship of Byron and Stendhal.

  According to Herodotus, Xerxes literally ordered that the Hellespont be given three hundred lashes when a storm washed away a bridge he had only then constructed for his invasion of the West.

  And as an incidental afterthought also ordered his chief engineers beheaded.

  Gary Cooper died of lung cancer.

  Wilhelm Reich died in Lewisburg Penitentiary.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day marry Shelley.

  Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin died after giving birth to the infant girl who would one day write Frankenstein.

  Fanny Brawne’s mother died in an accident in which her clothing caught on fire.

  Things from which one would avert one’s eyes even in a brothel.

  Said Aretino in a letter to Michelangelo condemning The Last Judgment.

  Which at least three different popes subsequently came close to having removed.

  Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Music hath charms to soothe the savage breast.

  Rarely remembering that it was Congreve who said Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned. In the same play.

  People none of whose business it is repeatedly excising the Hughes from the Yorkshire gravestone inscribed Sylvia Plath Hughes.

  Moses Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

  Felix Mendelssohn died of a stroke.

  Slabtown, Tennessee, Grace Moore was born in.

  If on a winter’s night with no other source of warmth Writer were to burn a Roy Lichtenstein—qualms?

  Qualmless.

  Kierkegaard was regularly beaten up by his schoolmates. Yeats aussL

  Christina Rossetti died while praying.

  Se una notte d’inverno un viaggiatore.

  The Muses’ darling, Peele called Marlowe.

  O Rare Ben Jonson.

  So it befell in that affray that the said Ingram, in defence of his life, with the dagger aforesaid of the value of 12d. gave the said Christopher then & there a mortal wound over his right eye of the depth of two inches & of the width of one inch; of which mortal wound the aforesaid Christopher Morley then & there instantly died.

  Negative capability.

  Sartre died blind. Having been strabismic.

  Like Menander.

  Splendid rooms and elegant furnishings are for people who have no thoughts, Goethe said.

  Even in a palace it is possible to live well, said Marcus Aurelius.

  If you’ve got no passport you’re officially dead.

  Ludwig Boltzmann took piano lessons from Anton Bruckner.

  Eleanor Bull’s. Deptford Strand.

  Andrew Marvell died of what was called tertian ague. Probably meaning malaria.

  Which his physician misdiag
nosed.

  Thackeray died of what was called a cerebral effusion. Meaning either a brain hemorrhage or a stroke.

  Jacob Barsimson. New Amsterdam, August 1654.

  Lasse Viren.

  No one, in any language, has ever written a novel that equals or even approaches Clarissa, said Rousseau.

  On a shelf with the Bible, Euripides, and Sophocles, said Diderot of the same book.

  Hannah Arendt died of a heart attack.

  Watteau died of tuberculosis.

  The little Marcel, at fourteen, asked to name life’s greatest unhappiness:

  To be separated from maman.

  Dear Sir:

  I am sitting in the smallest room of my house. Your review is before me. Shortly it will be behind me.

  Did the American Indian not have the wheel?

  Dies Irae.

  A presumptuous mediocrity, Tchaikovsky called Brahms.

  Undoubtedly the best woman poet of our time, Hardy called Charlotte Mew.

  How does Gertrude know all of the physical details of Ophelia’s death with such exactness?

  Soldiers! An innocent man is being degraded! Soldiers! An innocent is dishonored! Long live France!

  Zola never met Dreyfus.

  Max Reger.

  Petrarch’s copy of Virgil, with a marginal note in his own handwriting about the death of Laura in the Black Death, is still extant in a library in Milan.

  The graves stood tenantless, and the sheeted dead Did squeak and jibber in the Roman streets.

  Or an ersatz prose alternative to The Waste Land, if Writer so suggests.

  William of Ockham also died in the Black Death.

  Robert Burns had nine illegitimate children.

  Goya had nineteen legitimate children, by one wife. And several others otherwise.

  Augustus John’s habit of patting every passing London youngster on the head: In case it is one of mine.

  Brainsick. Troilus’s word for Cassandra in Troilus and Cressida.

  Lowell, Massachusetts, James McNeill Whistler was born in.

  Lowell, Massachusetts, Jack Kerouac was born in.

  Dies irae, dies ilia Solvet saeclum in favilla.

  In one of his reincarnations, Pythagoras was a fish. And in another a bird. He said.

  Met him pike hoses.

  In 1537, Francois Rabelais taught a course on Hippocrates at the school of medicine in Montpellier. In Greek.

  Diego Rivera’s affair with Paulette Goddard. Diego Rivera’s affair with Louise Nevelson.

  Arrangement in Grey and Black No. 1: The Artist’s Mother.

  To be precise.