This is Not a Novel

by David Markson

A daughter of Theodor Herzl’s died in Theresienstadt.

  A daughter of Theodor Herzl’s.

  One of Edvard Munch’s sisters went mad.

  Hogarth died of a ruptured artery.

  I owe the discovery that I was a Jew more to Gentiles than Jews, Einstein said.

  A public meeting was held in Florence in 1504 to decide on the placement of Michelangelo’s David. Detailed minutes still exist showing that Leonardo, Piero di Cosimo, Filippino Lippi, Sansovino, Botticelli, Lorenzo di Credi, and Perugino all had something to say.

  The decision was finally left to Michelangelo.

  A blessed thing.

  Said Elizabeth Barrett Browning, of opium.

  Half in love with easeful Death.

  Vaslav Nijinsky died of kidney failure after decades of insanity.

  O. Henry died penniless.

  The North Sea, Karl Marx’s ashes were scattered in.

  Djuna Barnes Drive. Anne Sexton Street.

  Calcutta, Thackeray was born in. Bombay, Kipling was.

  Gaspara Stampa died of what may have been cancer of the womb.

  Ovid left twice as much work as any other Roman poet. And said he had destroyed endless pages more, as unsatisfactory.

  Henry Purcell died of consumption.

  Francis Thompson died of consumption.

  Richard Savage died in debtors’ prison.

  The volume of Sophocles from Shelley’s pocket when he was drowned is in the Bodleian Library at Oxford. The Keats was burned with his corpse at Viareggio.

  The Keats had been borrowed from Leigh Hunt.

  Alejo Carpentier died of throat cancer.

  Kant was never in his life in the vicinity of a mountain. It appears probable that he never saw the ocean either.

  Venus clerk, Ovyde, That hath ysowen wonder wyde The grete god of Loves name.

  Marilyn Home’s tale that the first time she was asked to sing Semiramide the only way she could get her hands on a score was to steal it from the Los Angeles Public Library.

  In the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?

  Asked Sydney Smith in 1819.

  Melville’s father died mad.

  Schopenhauer’s father jumped out of a window.

  The long martyrdom of being trampled to death by geese, Kierkegaard called reading one’s reviews.

  Berchtesgaden.

  Juden raus!

  The God that holds you over the pit of Hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked.

  Milo of Crotona.

  The greatest painter of our era, Magritte called Giorgio de Chirico.

  Unsurprisingly.

  Jacob Epstein died of heart failure.

  Carl Gustav Jung died of heart failure.

  Every morning the author of Faust and Werther kisses me. In the afternoon I play for him for about two hours. Noted Felix Mendelssohn, at twelve.

  Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon! Eftsoons his hand dropt he.

  Derek Lindsay was who?

  Longfellow died of peritonitis.

  Frank Norris died of peritonitis.

  Selma Lagerlof died of peritonitis.

  Es inevitable la muerta del Papa.

  Bela Bartók died of leukemia.

  Charles Peguy was killed leading a charge in the first battle of the Marne.

  Alexander, young, broke Bucephalus—whom no one else could sit—simply by perceiving that he balked at his own shadow and riding him into the sun.

  Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

  Self-evident enough to scarcely need Writer’s say-so.

  Obstinately cross-referential and of cryptic intercon-nective syntax.

  Here perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.

  Ulrich Friedrich Richard von Wilamowitz-Moellendorf.

  Laurence Sterne died of pleurisy, after years of lung hemorrhages.

  Rousseau died of a stroke.

  The Private Papers of Henry Ryecroft.

  Gilles de Rais. Who was a marshal of France at twenty-five.

  And fought by Joan’s side at Orleans. And.

  Baudelaire often wore pink gloves.

  Martha Constantine, a handsome young woman, was treated with great indecency and cruelty by several of the troops, who first ravished, and then killed her by cutting off her breasts. These they fried, and set before some of their comrades, who ate them without knowing what they were.

  Records Fox’s Book of Martyrs.

  Clausewitz died of cholera.

  The Prince, the King, the Emperor, the God Almighty of novelists.

  Wilkie Collins called Walter Scott.

  Robin Vote.

  Vom Kriege.

  Walter Benjamin and Gertrud Kolmar were cousins.

  Monet dropped from the skies on me with a collection of magnificent pictures. I am now lodging two impecunious artists, for Renoir is also here. It’s like a nursing home. I love it.

  Said a letter of Frederic Bazille’s—four years before he was killed at twenty-nine in the Franco-Prussian War.

  Joe Tinker died of diabetes.

  Johnny Evers died of a cerebral hemorrhage. Frank Chance died of tuberculosis.

  The population of Athens at the height of its accomplishments was at best two hundred and seventy-five thousand.

  The population of Dante’s Florence was probably forty thousand.

  Abbotsford.

  Piero della Francesca’s St. Agatha. Tiepolo’s. Zur-baran’s.

  Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s.

  Mary McCarthy died of lung cancer.

  Hermann Prey died of a heart attack.

  A double play gives you two twenty-sevenths of a ball game.

  Pointed out Casey Stengel.

  Harold Bloom’s claim to the New York Times that he could read at a rate of five hundred pages per hour.

  Writer’s arse.

  Spectacular exhibition! Right this way, ladies and gentlemen! See Professor Bloom read the 1961 corrected and reset Random House edition of James Joyce’s Ulysses in one hour and thirty-three minutes. Not one page stinted. Unforgettable!

  Parisian brothels. The only place where one’s shoes were ever properly shined. Said Toulouse-Lautrec.

  Dryden, to a publisher:

  I find all your trade are sharpers.

  Was Plutarch the first, writer ever to counsel kindness to animals?

  The William Wordsworth Funeral Home, in Hollywood, F. Scott Fitzgerald was buried from.

  Leonardo played the lyre.

  So astonishingly well that his patron the Duke of Milan initially admired him more for that than for his art.

  Modigliani and Soutine were once living in such penury that they shared a single cot. Sleeping in shifts.

  A second-rate mind, T. E. Lawrence ranked Shakespeare’s as.

  I bring you back Cathay!

  Edwin Hubble died of a stroke.

  Sir Alexander Fleming died of a heart attack.

  The editor of Novy Mir began to read a prepublication copy of One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich in bed.

  And then found himself so impressed that he not only got up but put on a suit and a necktie to finish with what he felt to be the requisite respect.

  The Samuel Butler who wrote Erewhon died of pernicious anemia.

  There seems to me too much misery in the world, said Darwin.

  Cortes. 1519-1526:

  Three hundred and fifteen soldiers. Sixteen horses. Seven cannon.

  Of all books extant in all kinds, Homer is the first and best, Chapman said.

  The sovereign poet, Dante called him. Without being able to read Greek.

  That fiery splendour of narrative which seems almost to have died out of the world when the Iliad was complete, Gilbert Murray talked of.

  Irving Berlin’s father was a cantor. Al Jolson’s father was a cantor.

  Berlin died at one hundred. Of age alone, evidently.

  George
Santayana died of stomach cancer. Having spent his last years attended by Irish nuns at a convent in Rome.

  Will scholars of relatively recent English literature have any idea three or four centuries from now how differently the names Yeats and Keats were pronounced?

  Suzanne Valadon’s affair with Puvis de Chavannes. He fifty-seven. Valadon seventeen.

  One of Wordsworth’s brothers died in a shipwreck. Another became master of Trinity College, Cambridge.

  A brother of Walt Whitman’s died mad. Another was a lifelong imbecile.

  Fragonard died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Chardin died of dropsy.

  Cavendish, Vermont.

  A pansy with hair on his chest, Zelda Fitzgerald called Hemingway.

  Ninety percent Rotarian, supplied Gertrude Stein,

  George Bernard Shaw died at ninety-four of complications after breaking a hip.

  Valadon died of a stroke.

  Brian Moore died of pulmonary fibrosis.

  Papal censors in 1817 refused to allow the heroine in Rossini’s Cinderella opera to show her bare foot. The libretto had to be rewritten without the glass slippers.

  Conchita Supervia. Teresa Berganza. Cecilia Bartoli.

  Rarely remembering that it was Menander who said Whom the gods love die young.

  Charles Brockden Brown sent Thomas Jefferson an inscribed copy of Wieland.

  Telemann was Carl Philipp Emanuel Bach’s godfather.

  It is noteworthy that on the whole children love their parents less than their parents love them. Perceived Hegel.

  Richard Burton died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Death-of-the-Month-Club.

  Ensor died at eighty-nine.

  Having done every bit of his significant work before he was forty.

  Thomas Wolfe died of tuberculosis which had spread to the brain.

  Clutching the stern of one of the withdrawing Persian galleys at Marathon, a brother of Aeschylus was killed when his hand was chopped off by an ax.

  Giacomo Leopardi died of cholera.

  C. Wright Mills died of a heart attack.

  Tim the ostler.

  St. Augustine’s admission that even he could not comprehend God’s purpose in creating flies.

  Jan van Eyck died in Bruges in 1441.

  Petrus Christus died in Bruges in 1472 or 1473.

  Hans Memling died in Bruges in 1494.

  Gerard David died in Bruges in 1523.

  Through the dim purple air of Dante fly those who have stained the world with the beauty of their sin. Said Oscar Wilde.

  Dante is not worth the pains necessary to understand him.

  Said Chesterfield.

  Wilde died of encephalitic meningitis, almost certainly connected with syphilis.

  Meg Merrilies.

  Cecin’estpas un conte. Diderot, 1772. Cecin’estpas unepipe. Magritte, 1929.

  Wilbur Wright died of typhoid fever.

  Orville Wright died of a heart attack. Thirty-six years later.

  Melville’s spelling: Don Quixotte.

  August Strindberg was illegitimate.

  Ulysses:

  An illiterate, underbred book it seems to me, the book of a self-taught working man, and we all know how depressing they are.

  Yes, Virginia.

  Port Arthur, Texas, Robert Rauschenberg was born in.

  Thelonious Monk died of a stroke.

  Charles Mingus died of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis.

  The Oresteia. Aeschylus was sixty-seven.

  Orestes. The Bacchae. Euripides was seventy-six and seventy-seven.

  Philoctetes. Oedipus at Colonus. Sophocles was well past eighty.

  Hillerich and Bradsby.

  Gandhi suffered from chronic constipation. Henry James suffered from chronic constipation. Freud suffered from chronic constipation.

  Vixere fortes ante Agamemnona, Horace said. There were brave men living before Agamemnon.

  Aretino died of apoplexy.

  Ariosto died of tuberculosis.

  Le Douanier Rousseau once informed Picasso that they two were the two greatest living painters:

  I in the modern style and you in the Egyptian.

  Nine in the third place indicates:

  The ridge beam sags to the breaking point. Adversity.

  Renoir suffered from extreme rheumatism and threateningly congested lungs, but died of a heart attack.

  Gaetano Donizetti died mad.

  Branwell—Emily—Anne—are gone like dreams—gone as Maria and Elizabeth went twenty years ago. One by one I have watched them fall asleep on my arm.

  Said Charlotte, late along.

  God is necessary and so must exist. Well, that’s all right, then. But I know He doesn’t and can’t. That’s more likely.

  Epis.

  Eleven of Ernest Rutherford’s students became winners of the Nobel Prize.

  Hermann Hesse died in his sleep at eighty-five.

  Catullus died at thirty.

  Pascal wrote certain of the Provincial Letters twelve times.

  Tolstoy did nine versions of his Kreutzer Sonata.

  Le Douanier played the violin.

  Patrick White died of bronchial collapse resulting from pleurisy.

  Manet and Mallarme spent time together virtually every afternoon for twenty years.

  Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was evidently the first person in England ever to receive a ticket for speeding.

  Das Glasperlenspiel.

  Wittgenstein, it is you who are creating all the confusion!

  Suzette Gontard died of tuberculosis.

  Thoreau:

  How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book?

  Marie Bashkirtseff died of consumption at twenty-four.

  August Macke was killed in France in the first weeks of World War I.

  Keith Douglas was killed by a mortar fragmentation bomb three days after the start of the Normandy Invasion.

  Catalogue raisonne.

  The scene in Hades in Odyssey XI where Odysseus tells Achilles of the extraordinary nervousness inside the Trojan Horse.

  Except for Achilles’ own son Neoptolemus, who cannot wait to attack.

  The assumption, even in much of antiquity itself, that the mythic Horse had actually been some sort of engineer’s device to breach the walls.

  Arturo Toscanini died of a stroke.

  Guido Cantelli died in an air crash.

  Needing a few seconds to remember that it will be that same Neoptolemus who flings Hector’s infant son from the battlements after the Greek victory.

  Anais Nin died of cardiorespiratory arrest while enduring metastatic vaginal cancer.

  Robert Frost died of a pulmonary embolism while enduring metastatic prostate cancer.

  What interests me is the anguish of van Gogh, Picasso said.

  Sir James Frazer died blind.

  Thoreau died of tuberculosis.

  Turner left a serious fortune to a fund for indigent artists. Relatives fought the will and won the money for themselves.

  Why does Writer sometimes seem to admire Ulysses even more when he is thinking about it than when he is actually reading it?

  A grace to say before reading Elie Wiesel’s Night? Before Celan’s Todesfuge?.

  Swinburne died of pneumonia.

  Joseph Heller died of a heart attack.

  Puccini and Mascagni were once roommates. Mascagni would become a supporter of Mussolini. And finish his life in disgrace in a seedy Rome hotel.

  Robert Burns was said to have died of alcoholism and/or venereal disease.

  A hundred years later the symptoms were reread as those of heart disease stemming from childhood rheumatic fever.

  Jean Armour.

  John Bunyan died of an undiagnosed fever after being caught on horseback in a storm.

  Kepler died of an undiagnosed fever after a considerable journey on horseback to collect money he was owed.

  Whistler died of a heart condition.

>   Jack Kerouac died of a gastrointestinal hemorrhage from cirrhosis of the liver.

  The grave’s a fine and private place, But none, I think, do there embrace.

  Astyanax.

  As a Marine pilot in Korea, Ted Williams several times flew as Colonel John Glenn’s wing man.

  Sophocles played ball with great skill, it says in Athenaeus.

  He alters and retouches the same phrases incessantly, and paces up and down like a madman. Reported a pupil of Chopin’s.

  Stanislaus Joyce died of a heart condition at seventy. On Bloomsday.

  James Thurber died of a brain tumor.

  Beau Brummell died mad.

  Antoine Roquentin.

  Thomas Hobbes did translations of Homer into English in his late eighties. Not particularly well.

  Eight Miles of Books.

  Aristotle, asked what grows old most swiftly: Gratitude.

  The Boudreau Shift.

  Hobbes played the bass viol.

  Ignazio Silone’s parents died in an earthquake.

  James Laughlin once changed a flat tire for Gertrude Stein.

  Samuel Beckett once sat through a New York vs. Houston doubleheader at Shea Stadium.

  I could die to-day, if I wished, merely by making a little effort, if I could wish, if I could make an effort.

  Blake’s insistence that at the age of four he had seen God watching him through a window.

  Amy Lowell died of a stroke.

  Vesalius was condemned to death by the Inquisition for dissecting humans. But was permitted to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land in penance instead.

  And then died en route home of overexposure after a shipwreck.

  Sestos. Abydos.

  St. Francis of Assisi probably died of malaria.

  How vain it is, and how futile, to lament the dead. Said Stesichorus.

  William Burroughs killed his wife while trying to shoot a glass perched on her head a la William Tell.

  The Egyptian Book of the Dead. From papyri and pyramid inscriptions dated as early as 1580 B.C.

  Or a contemporary variant on the latter, if Writer says so.

  Writer incidentally doing his best here—insofar as his memory allows—not to repeat things he has included in his earlier work.

  Meaning in this instance the four hundred and fifty or more deaths that were mentioned in his last book also.

  Burroughs died of heart failure.

  Grover’s Corners, New Hampshire.

  Your last novel was a flop.

  All of this preoccupation implying little more, presumably, than that Writer is turning older.