This is Not a Novel

by David Markson

  Eliot died within months of her wedding, after catching a cold at a concert.

  The kingdom of heaven, as described to Rilke by Marina Tsvetayeva after a lifetime of deprivation: Never again to sweep floors.

  Pascal died of abdominal convulsions.

  Valery died of throat cancer.

  La Guerre de Troie riaura pas lieu.

  But I always think as we tumble into bed Of little Willy Wee who is dead, dead, dead.

  De Quincey was less than five feet tall. Hogarth was less than five feet tall. James Stephens was less than five feet tall.

  This is also a kind of verbal fugue, if Writer says so. If still perhaps less than self-evident to the less than attentive.

  B-flat Major, Op. 133.

  The realization that Joan was not canonized until two decades into the twentieth century. Or Thomas More until 1935.

  Jesus did not urinate or move his bowels, said Valentinus.

  Erasmus died of dysentery.

  Luther died of apoplexy.

  Mordecai Anielewicz. April 19,1943-Nine rifles. Fifty-nine pistols.

  These cool blond people make me feel uneasy, said Einstein. In 1914.

  Does Dante want the reader to suspect that Ugolino ate his sons, or not?

  I am getting on with my job, said Bernadette of Lourdes. What is that? Being ill.

  Francois Boucher died at his easel at sixty-seven. Painting a backside of Venus.

  You can never do too much drawing, Tintoretto said.

  In a dramatic, not a narrative form; with incidents arousing pity and terror.

  Nonetheless this is also in many ways even a classic tragedy, if Writer says so.

  He is dead and gone, lady, He is dead and gone.

  Don’t cheer, boys. The poor devils are dying.

  As great an artist as ever lived, Mendelssohn called Jenny Lind.

  The greatest singer of us all, Callas called Rosa Ponselle.

  William Carlos Williams died after a series of strokes.

  John Cheever died of cancer that spread from the kidney to the bone.

  Woodlawn Cemetery, in the Bronx, Melville is buried in.

  Woodlawn Cemetery, in Toledo, Ohio, Addie Joss is buried in.

  Oh, Flask, for one red cherry ere we die!

  Is it nothing to you, all ye that pass by?

  Disraeli was thoroughly convinced that Mozart was a Jew.

  Cagliostro died in a dungeon of the Inquisition.

  German beer music, Nietzsche called Die Meister-singer.

  Sde Boker.

  A. E. Housman died of a heart condition.

  Shostakovich died of a heart condition.

  Cafe Guerbois. The Bateau-Lavoir.

  News that stays news, Pound identified literature as.

  Hectic red.

  Henry Adams died of a stroke.

  Addison died of dropsy.

  In search of Eldorado.

  And of Ophir. Which, still, no one has ever discovered the location of.

  Horace’s father was a manumitted slave. Chekhov’s grandfather was a serf.

  Ivory. Apes. Precious jewels. Peacocks. Sandalwood.

  Bangkok, Thomas Merton died in. After stumbling into an electric fan while wet from a shower.

  Or on the other end of the scale even a volume entitled Writer’s Block—which Writer is willing to wager some petulant soul will have it.

  Depraved May.

  Zeno was a pupil of Parmenides. Who was a pupil of Xenophanes. Who was a pupil of Anaximander. Says Diogenes Laertius.

  Kalidasa was the adopted son of an oxcart driver.

  Yossele Rosenblatt. Jack Dempsey died of a heart attack. Nelson Algren died of a heart attack. Congreve died after a coach accident.

  Why should we honor those that die upon the field of battle, a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.

  Said Yeats.

  February 23, 1821. July 8, 1822. April 19, 1824.

  The calamitous last years of Swift: Labyrinthine vertigo, deafness, paralysis, aphasia, insanity.

  Of Carson McCullers:

  Stroke, paralysis, heart attack, breast cancer, brain hemorrhage.

  Bertrand Russell, at seventy-six, survived an ocean plane crash in which a number of other passengers were killed.

  I know death hath ten thousand several doors For men to take their exits. —Says Webster.

  James Clarence Mangan. Who died of alcohol or opium or poverty or neglect.

  And is alluded to a dozen times in Ulysses.

  Giulio Romano.

  Who is mentioned in The Winter’s Tale.

  Bizet died of heart disease.

  Hobbes died of palsy. At ninety-one.

  Russell died at ninety-eight, of bronchial pneumonia.

  Janacek died of bronchial pneumonia.

  Scott died of the effects of a stroke.

  No one ever lacks a good reason for suicide. Said Cesare Pavese.

  The chimney smokes and I leave the room. Why do you think it a great matter? Asked Marcus Aurelius.

  He was gone in time not to be old.

  Said Henry James of Stevenson’s death at forty-four.

  I have lived long enough: my way of life Is fall’n into the sear, the yellow leaf.

  Smetana died mad. From syphilis.

  James died of a stroke.

  Gainsborough, on his deathbed, to Joshua Reynolds: Goodbye till we meet in the hereafter—we and van Dyck.

  Shaw, Kipling, Housman, and Stanley Baldwin were among Thomas Hardy’s pallbearers.

  Chaucer may have died of plague.

  Sir Philip Sidney died of a sword wound in the thigh.

  Consider Phlebas, who was once handsome and tall as you.

  Lautreamont died of tuberculosis at twenty-four.

  Bonington died of tuberculosis at twenty-six.

  Delacroix died of what began as a neglected cold.

  Wittgenstein played the clarinet. Lowry played the ukulele.

  Emmy Destinn died of a stroke at fifty-one. Toscanini, Puccini, and Caruso had all been in love with her.

  Hie jacet Arthurus Rex, quondam Rex que futurus.

  The last book Freud read before his death was La Peau de chagrin by Balzac.

  The last book Kafka read before his death was Verdi by Franz Werfel.

  A man without feet, walking on his ankles. Someone insisted having seen at Hiroshima.

  There is no drinking after death. Say Beaumont and Fletcher.

  We shall receive no letters in the grave. Said Johnson.

  Samuel Richardson died of a stroke.

  Henry Fielding died of dropsy.

  There he stood, suffering embarrassment for the mistake of thinking that one may pluck a single leaf from the laurel tree of art without paying for it with his life.

  And if thou wilt, remember, And if thou wilt, forget.

  Georges Seurat died of what was probably meningitis.

  Does Writer still have headaches? And/or backaches?

  As from the start, affording no more than renewed verification that he exists.

  In a book without characters.

  Not being a character but the author, here.

  Turning older or no.

  Writer is writing, is all. Still.

  Chi son? Chi son? Son un poeta. Che cosa facciol Scrivo.

  The act of painting transforms the painter’s mind into something similar to the mind of God. Said Leonardo.

  God, that other craftsman. Said Picasso.

  I am God. Said Matisse.

  —And who are you? said he.—Don’t puzzle me; said I.

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

  Copernicus died of apoplexy.

  Rimbaud died of cancer of the bone. Or of syphilis.

  Farewell and be kind.

  Say the last words of the original edition of The Anatomy of Melancholy.

  Farewell as many as wish me well.

  Say the last words of
The Unfortunate Traveler.

  El Greco was buried in a Toledo monastery in 1614. Four years later, for reasons not recorded, his body was removed from its vault.

  To where, no one has learned since.

  Did you ever see anyone die? Well, then I pity you, poor Severn.

  Everywhere have I sought peace and found it only in a corner with a book.

  Said Thomas a Kempis.

  Protagoras died in a shipwreck.

  Frater, ave atque vale.

  Charleville.

  Also there is Writer’s tendonitis.

  Likewise again merely serving to ratify his existence.

  Ben Jonson died partly paralyzed from strokes. And in penury.

  Jane Austen died of what was called neuralgia. More recent speculation leaning toward lymphoma.

  Escritor. Schttore. Ecrivain. Sciiptor.

  Hugh of Lincoln. Simon of Trent.

  Six centuries after Marathon, Pausanias was still able to read the names of the Greek dead engraved on columns at the site.

  Eight centuries after the death of Pindar he was able to visit his tomb in Thebes, still then extant.

  And death shall have no dominion.

  Grover Cleveland Alexander died alone in a Nebraska rooming house.

  R Scott Fitzgerald, as seen by John O’Hara in the year or two before his death:

  A prematurely little old man haunting bookshops unrecognized.

  Madame, all stories, if continued far enough, end in death.

  Said Hemingway.

  Longfellow, Emerson, James Russell Lowell, Oliver Wendell Holmes, and Franklin Pierce were among Nathaniel Hawthorne’s pallbearers.

  Timor mortis conturbat me. The fear of death distresses me.

  Emerson also later attended Longfellow’s funeral, but after his own lights had dimmed:

  The gentleman we have just been burying was a sweet and beautiful soul; but I forget his name.

  Life consists in what a man is thinking of all day.

  Watching the burning of Carthage in the Third Punic War, Scipio the Younger quoted Homer on the fall of Troy—and then wept.

  At realization of Rome’s own mortality, Polybius says.

  Longevity all too often means not a long life, but a long death.

  Said Democritus.

  We ought to leave when the play grows wearisome. Said Cicero.

  Likewise Writer’s pinched nerve.

  We always find something, eh Didi, to give us the impression we exist?

  I am real! said Alice, and began to cry.

  Cervantes died of diabetes. Or of cirrhosis of the liver.

  Blake died of gallstones.

  Scipio the Younger having been a grandson, not a son.

  The hearsay, first recorded by a Stratford vicar fifty years later, that Shakespeare died of a fever after a night’s carousing with Jonson and Michael Drayton.

  Dostoievsky died of a lung hemorrhage.

  Tolstoy died of pneumonia, with a nudge from age.

  Sir Thomas Browne’s will asked that his copy of Horace be placed on his coffin in the grave.

  Botticelli spent his last years on crutches. And on charity.

  Botticelli.

  Niels Bohr died of a stroke.

  Why is there no explanation in Deuteronomy for Moses being made to die after Pisgah and not being permitted to cross over into the Promised Land?

  How many People of Israel were there, in the Exodus?

  Picasso died of heart failure, in part brought on by acutely congested lungs.

  Matisse died after years as an invalid following operations for duodenal cancer.

  La Derelitta.

  But no man knoweth of his sepulchre unto this day.

  Beethoven died of dropsy, after having gone through pneumonia and jaundice.

  Franz Grillparzer wrote Beethoven’s eulogy. Schubert participated in the funeral.

  Twenty months later Grillparzer wrote Schubert’s epitaph.

  Schwanengesang.

  The Giosse Fuge.

  The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne.

  So many are dead that were young.

  Or yet again, Writer’s sciatica.

  Plato died at eighty or eighty-one, while attending a wedding.

  The sun is larger than the Peloponnesus. Allowed Anaxagoras.

  This story of Jesus has helped us a lot. Allowed Pope Leo X.

  Or sometimes of course even a comedy of a sort, if Writer says so.

  Death’s Jest-Book.

  Only three people followed Stendhal’s bier. His longest obituary contained three lines. One misspelled his name.

  Three.

  There is no contemporary reference to Francois Villon after January of 1463, when he was thirty-two and had already at least twice been arrested for having killed.

  Nothing has ever modified the assumption that he died either at blade thrust or on a gallows, however.

  Francois Villon.

  Some few decades after its opening, the bones of Voltaire and Rousseau were stolen from the Pantheon. And discarded no one knows where.

  St. Teresa of Lisieux died of tuberculosis.

  St. Teresa of Avila died of a lung hemorrhage.

  Telmetale of stem or stone. Beside the rivering waters of, hither and thithering waters of.

  Or even his synthetic personal Finnegans Wake, if Writer so decides.

  If only by way of it fitting no other category anyone might suggest.

  Timor mortis conturbat me.

  It is difficult to find those places today, and you would be no better off if you did, because no one lives there. Said Strabo of the lost past.

  Possibly even then thinking of Ophir.

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls.

  Goethe died of what began as a chest cold.

  Emily Dickinson died of Bright’s disease.

  And how dieth the wise man? As the fool.

  Writer’s silent heart attack.

  The legend that Pythagoras starved himself to death.

  The legend that Diogenes committed suicide simply by holding his breath.

  Only against Death shall he call for aid in vain. Says an Antigone chorus re man’s estate.

  It seems to us that spring has gone out of the year. Said Pericles, honoring war dead.

  Dante probably died of malaria.

  Raphael died of an unsolved fever. Or more probably from excessive bloodletting by his physicians.

  Ille hie est Raphael.

  Virgil was known to cough blood, presumably from tuberculosis.

  Which is almost certainly what killed him.

  Sunt lacrimae rerum et mentem mortalia tangunt.

  —Says Aeneid I. There are tears for passing things, and things mortal touch the mind.

  Requiem. Threnody. Dead march.

  Dickens died of a paralytic stroke. At dinner.

  Mozart died of renal failure from nephritis. Or of a streptococcal infection. Or of rheumatic fever. Or of a cerebral hemorrhage. Or of mercury poisoning. Or of arsenic poisoning. Or of exhaustion.

  Or of possible miscalculated bloodletting, like Raphael.

  Like Byron.

  What artists do cannot be called work.

  Wanhope.

  Only one person, his secretary, attended Liebniz’s funeral.

  One.

  Writer’s right-lung lobectomy and resected ribs.

  The sound of water escaping from mill-dams, willows, old rotten planks, slimy posts, and brickwork, I love such things. These things made me a painter, and I am grateful. Said Constable.

  The little Marcel died of bronchial pneumonia, in addition to his eternal asthma.

  Bach died of a stroke.

  Donne died of consumption.

  When the city I extol shall have perished, when the men to whom I sing shall have faded into oblivion, my words shall remain.

  Said Pindar.

  Non omnis moriar. I shall not wholly die. Said Horace.

  Per saecula omnia vivam. I shall live
forever. Said Ovid.

  Yis-ga-dal v’yis-ka-dash sh’may rab-bo.

  Tell me, I pray thee, how fares the human race? If new roofs be risen in the ancient cities? Whose empire is it that now sways the world?

  —Asked one of the fourth-century desert monks, the names of most forever unrecorded.

  The time is close when you will have forgotten all things; and when all things will have forgotten you. Said Marcus Aurelius.

  Western wind, when will thou blow The small rain down can rain?

  It is the business of the novelist to create characters. Said Alphonse Daudet.

  Action and plot may play a minor part in a modern novel, but they cannot be entirely dispensed with. Said Ortega.

  If you can do it, it ain’t bragging.

  Or was it possibly nothing more than a fundamentally recognizable genre all the while, no matter what Writer averred?

  Nothing more or less than a read!

  Simply an unconventional, generally melancholy though sometimes even playful now-ending read?

  About an old man’s preoccupations.

  Dizzy Dean died of a heart attack.

  Writer’s cancer.

  Christ, if my love were in my arms

  And I in my bed again!

  Then I go out at night to paint the stars. Says a van Gogh letter.

  Farewell and be kind.