Fare Forward: Letters from David Markson

by David Markson

  For instance, if one has read Wittgenstein’s Mistress (Dalkey Archive Press, 1988), the book just before Reader’s Block, one knows that Kate, the narrator, is, or believes herself to be, the last creature on earth.

  In the beginning, sometimes I left messages on the street.

  Somebody is living in the Louvre, certain of the messages would say. Or in the National Gallery.

  …

  Nobody came, of course. Eventually I stopped leaving the messages. (WM, 7)

  But her loneliness also echoes through the subsequent books, in each narrator’s different, but similar solitude:

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls. (RB, 11)

  Someone will call. Surely someone will call. (RB, 24)

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls. (TINN, 186)

  Nothing happens, nobody comes, nobody goes, it’s awful!

  Says Estragon. (VP, 68)

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls. (VP, 162)

  Novelist’s isolation—ever increasing as the years pass also.

  Days on which he is aware of speaking to no one at all, for example, except perhaps a checkout clerk, or his letter carrier, or some basically anonymous fellow tenant in the elevator. (TLN, 28)

  Nobody comes. Nobody calls. (TLN, 56)

  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. (TLN, 58)

  For those who have not paid close enough attention. Kate of Wittgenstein’s Mistress comes to a poignant realization one day:

  …one curious thing that might sooner or later cross the woman’s mind would be that she had paradoxically been practically as alone before all of this had happened as she was now, incidentally.

  …

  One manner of being alone simply being different from another manner of being alone, being all that she would finally decide this came down to, as well.

  Which is to say that even when one’s telephone still does function one can be as alone as when it does not. (WM, 231)

  As if predicting the narrators of Markson’s future, pacing about in their populated worlds, waiting for the phone to ring.

  *

  But in another sense, Markson’s narrators are not alone:

  Rilke wrote standing up.

  Lewis Carroll wrote standing up.

  Thomas Wolfe wrote standing up.

  Robert Lowell and Truman Capote wrote lying down.

  Writer sits. (TINN, 81)

  Voila: a community on the page, one that defies both space and time. Furthermore, Markson, in conjuring this unorthodox community, also creates a great monument to art itself, and to the art-makers who have sustained one another (by criticizing, praising, studying, quoting, and copying one another) through time.

  If we consider the books as monuments, then, it justifies Writer’s suggestion in This Is Not a Novel to call them “Book[s] of the Dead”—especially considering that death is a pervasive focus of the tetralogy.

  Where are those who were in this world before us? Go to the cemetery and look at them.

  Said Anon. in the twelfth century. (VP, 183)

  And, on opening any of the books randomly:

  Camus died in a car crash.

  …

  Charmian and Iras committed suicide when Cleopatra did. (RB, 64-5)

  *

  Wallace Stegner died after an automobile crash.

  Bradley died of blood poisoning.

  …

  Pablo Neruda died of leukemia. (TINN, 104-5)

  *

  Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen.

  The last one that Borges asked to hear before his death.

  October 17, 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann died on. (TLN, 170)

  In absence of an overarching plot, these deaths are crucial events. In most novels, one may find a death or two at the end to neatly tie up a linear plot—but here we have a whole field of deaths on which to gaze, a whole regiment of “linear plots” tidily concluded. One might look at these lines as headstones in a cemetery, which is beautiful in its own right as a work of art, and which appears literally in Markson’s Reader’s Block, as part of the minimal (hypothetical) setting:

  Protagonist living near a disused cemetery, perhaps? (RB, 14)

  Below, Reader of Reader’s Block considers the blankness of snow covering this cemetery:

  With snow, the ranks of still white stone can assume an almost occult unreality. (RB, 98)

  Watching abstractedly among the ancient oaks as the entire cemetery commences to disappear. (RB, 99)

  The cemetery framed beyond the window in January light. The skull, lower left foreground, a redundant nearer memento mori. (RB, 164)

  The eschatology of the still white stones in snow. (RB, 165)

  What is instantly obvious is the moribund significance of this scene: this is Reader’s own end, the erasure of the world, the end of the human race, and of everything.

  But Kate of Wittgenstein’s Mistress, who finds herself truly alone at the end of the world, describes an inherent possibility in the snow’s draping effect. Here she depicts the wintertime beach, covered in snow:

  Here, when the snows come, the trees write a strange calligraphy against the whiteness. The sky itself is often white, and the dunes are hidden, and the beach is white down to the water’s edge, as well.

  In a manner of speaking almost everything I am able to see, then, is like that nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of gesso. (WM, 37)

  What begins as an obliteration of the world by snow, similar to that which takes place in Reader’s Block, ends with the image of a blank canvas, thus the possibility of new creation. In the next sentence, Kate “draws” on the blank space: “Now and again I build fires along the beach.” (WM, 37)

  She returns to this very description of the wintertime beach towards the end of the book; her attitude towards the scene, however, has changed:

  Still, on the morning after [the snow] fell, the trees were writing a strange calligraphy against the whiteness.

  For that matter the sky was white, too, and the dunes were hidden, and the beach was white all the way down to the water’s edge.

  So that almost everything I was able to see, then, was like that old lost nine-foot canvas of mine, with its opaque four white coats of gesso.

  Making it almost as if one could have newly painted the entire world one’s self, and in any manner one wished. (WM, 233)

  It’s doubtful that Kate will “paint the entire world [her]self, … in any manner [she] wished”; given her situation, her qualified language is understandable. “Almost as if” and “one could have” indicate her realistic ambivalence about her ability and desire to undertake the task. She has that in common with Reader; both of them lean closer to reading annihilation into the blanked-out landscape, and with good reason. In both characters’ cases, the futility of making any new mark on the world becomes overwhelming—why should Kate, as the last human on earth?

  And why should Reader, at the end of his life, wholly alone, bother to leave something new behind?

  Reader thinks about the end of the world, and about his protagonist courting his own end:

  In the interim, what more for the elderly man in the house at the cemetery but to pause at his accustomed window one afternoon, and gaze for a time abstractedly at the ranks of still white stone beyond, and then turn unremarkably to the gas? (RB, 192)

  And as for Reader:

  And Reader? And Reader?

  In the end one experiences only one’s self.

  Said Nietzsche.

  Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

  Wastebasket. (RB, 193)

  Which ends the book and discards it simultaneously, as if Reader, by following his preferred description of the book with the image of the “wastebasket,” wipes out the work he has done in one fell swoop, in much the same way that the snow erases the cemetery stones, erasing even the memo
rial to humankind’s presence on earth.

  But this reading, despite its negative power, cannot extinguish the possibility inherent in the scene; the snow may appear to erase the headstones, but as we know, it does not: it merely covers them, creating a canvas of sorts, much like the one to which Kate refers in Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Although neither Kate nor Reader is likely to walk out and paint the world, Markson himself has done so. The very existence of Markson’s books indicates that he has committed a gesture of optimism in having walked out and “newly painted the entire world,” and will continue to do so, not by erasing the world (of fiction) to start from scratch, but by making bold new marks on a canvas that stretches over the ranks of the dead, the representatives of his human and artistic lineage.

  123 This essay appeared in The New England Review, Volume 29, Number 3, 2008.

  WORKS CITED

  Fénéon, Félix. Novels in Three Lines. New York: New York Review of Books, 2007.

  Markson, David. Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1988.

  Markson, David. Reader’s Block. Normal, Illinois: Dalkey Archive Press, 1996.

  Markson, David. This Is Not a Novel. Washington, D.C.: Counterpoint, 2001.

  Markson, David. Vanishing Point. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2004.

  Markson, David. The Last Novel. Washington, D.C.: Shoemaker & Hoard, 2007.

  Interview with David Markson 124

  by Laura Sims

  To many readers, even to those of us encountering it almost fifteen years after its publication in 1988, David Markson’s groundbreaking novel Wittgenstein’s Mistress seemed, and still seems, to have come from literature’s future: one that allows for a stripped-down reinvention of character, plot, and narrative while maintaining the emotional intensity and magnetism of the best conventional novels. Markson has refined this alluring combination in the four books that follow Wittgenstein’s Mistress, each one becoming more and more minimal, thus more and more radical, in their use of the traditional elements of fiction. This loosely defined tetralogy (of which each volume can be readily read by itself) consists of: Reader’s Block, This Is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and, most recently, and the occasion for this interview, The Last Novel.

  In this latest book, one can detect Markson’s singular voice as well as another defining feature of Markson’s work: The Last Novel speaks to its predecessors through a plethora of literary/artistic/athletic/operatic/you-name-it allusions, and through self-reflexive comments on structure, such as: “Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.” This interconnectedness is most noticeable in the last four books, but one can trace the tendency in all of Markson’s books, from the recently re-released early “entertainments,” Epitaph for a Tramp and Epitaph for a Dead Beat, to the more seriously literary Springer’s Progress and Going Down.

  Although the mainstream literary world has been far too slow in fully appreciating Markson’s work, this May, the American Academy of Arts & Letters honored Markson with an Award for Excellence in Literature. Perhaps it’s a sign that the world is catching up, becoming prepared for Markson’s inventive fiction; we can hope that his readership will markedly increase as he gains more much-deserved attention. In any case, whether the world-at-large is ready or not, Markson will continue to court innovation in the book(s) that will follow The Last Novel. As he explains in the interview, he is determined to reinvent his narrative modus operandi yet again; The Last Novel may mark the end of what has become one of contemporary literature’s most exciting and accomplished series of novels, but it marks a new beginning in Markson’s endlessly pioneering career.

  —Laura Sims

  Laura Sims: In Vanishing Point, your protagonist speaks about “shuffling and rearranging” his index cards, by way of explaining his method of composition. What does this say about how you yourself go about it, at least in regard to your more recent books? I mean of course those that are crammed with intellectual bits and pieces?

  David Markson: It says a great deal, actually. Though in fact my books have always been filled with that sort of material, even if I had to handle it differently, earlier on. Springer, in Springer’s Progress, Kate, in Wittgenstein’s Mistress—they’re both walking repositories of intellectual trivia. But in those instances, the stuff simply fell as it occurred to them, meaning where it was called for in the narrative. But in these last four volumes—where that material is the books—the approach had to be new. All my life I’ve been an inveterate checker-off-in-margins, but in recent years, writing Reader’s Block and the rest, I simply began to copy out the stuff that interested me instead. And where better than on three-by-five cards?

  LS: But doesn’t that become unwieldy? After all, there must be thousands for each book, finally.

  DM: Do I describe this or don’t I, I can’t remember? I file them one behind the other, in the tops of shoe boxes, ultimately two of those taped end to end. So it comes to about two feet per book, I’d guess. But even as the stacks are expanding, I’m shuffling and rearranging repeatedly, as you quoted a minute ago.

  LS: Be more specific.

  DM: Oh, well—an item about Dante, let’s say. If that one seems to go relatively near the front here, then where does this other Dante go? Oh, but now wait, this Guido Cavalcanti on the same theme, which of the two do I connect that one with? And before or after? And how nearby, so the connection might be spotted? Et cetera, et cetera. Obviously, because of the numbers alone, it’s far more complicated than that. And on top of which, this is going on for a couple of years also, starting with the lonely very first few cards, and then with each additional one being dropped into one tentative spot or another as I keep on adding.

  LS: But even at the end, surely a lot of it still has to be somewhat random?

  DM: Of course. There are hundreds of things that I find intrinsically interesting, or that echo different themes, but which have to simply fall where they may. Nonetheless, as I said, those other placements are all generally much more intricate and interconnected than I’ve indicated, and often pretty subtle. I’m also aware that a fairly high percentage of my readers are conscious of very little of it all.

  LS: But good readers are?

  DM: Naturally, sure. In fact, an amusing story. Even before he finished the first of them, Kurt Vonnegut called me. “David, what sort of computer did you use to juggle all that stuff?” I had to tell him I didn’t own one—I still don’t, incidentally—and that it all came out of my aging and rapidly deteriorating brain. Plus of course those ubiquitous index cards.

  LS: Why are you suddenly laughing?

  DM: More to the same story, actually. That first of the series, Reader’s Block, is the one in which I mention all those suicides, everybody from Empedocles to Sappho to Hart Crane to Sylvia Plath, there must be a hundred and fifty of them scattered through. Well, and of course also my central figure, Reader himself, at the conclusion. So in any case Kurt called me back a little later, when he’d actually finished. This time it was, “David, I worry about your mental condition.”

  LS: Presumably you reassured him?

  DM: I’m still extant.

  LS: But sadly as of recently he isn’t, alas. Meanwhile—

  DM: Wait. Listen. Under the circumstances, would another Vonnegut recollection or two be out of place here?

  LS: Of course not. Do, yes.

  DM: Both anecdotes that come to mind involve me anyhow. The first goes back to when I was trying to find a publisher for Wittgenstein’s Mistress. Or rather when my agent was. Elaine, my ex-wife.

  LS: And you had fifty-four rejections. For the work most people consider your most important. It’s still beyond belief.

  DM: The most dismal part of it wasn’t the number of turn-downs, but rather the reasoning behind them. Editors who truly admired the thing, but then announced that it was too intellectual or too offbeat for most readers to handle. Or worse, places where the editor was, in fact, willing to take a chance, but then the sal
es clucks vetoed it. Trust me, it got to be pretty draining, after a while. This was back in the mid-1980s, by the way. And in any case, somewhere back along in there, there was this major international PEN conference here in New York, writers from all over the world. In recent years I’ve pretty much ceased to be a PEN member, but at that time I went uptown to sit in on some of the sessions. And at one juncture I was wandering down a corridor in the hotel—I forget which hotel it was—and out of the corner of my eye I spotted Kurt, backed against a sort of cul-de-sac wall, and literally surrounded by admirers—at least twenty or more. You know, probably younger writers from everywhere to hell and gone, getting a chance to exchange a word or two with someone they had previously only been able to admire from a distance. Anyhow, I just kept on walking. But then after half a minute, no more, Kurt caught up to me and led me on down the hall—urgently, almost. I don’t know what sort of excuse he’d made, to bolt that way. And what did he want? As soon as he found us a quiet alcove—“David, tell me what’s happening with that manuscript?” I didn’t even remember having spoken to him about the problems. But there he was, that concerned. Now maybe he’d been famous for long enough so that basking in all that adulation was something he could easily wave aside—but still, I found it extraordinary. Who the hell was I? Practically nobody at that entire convention had ever heard my name, at that juncture. But this was Kurt, who he was.

  LS: All of us should have friends like that.

  DM: But that’s part of the point there too. He and I weren’t even ever that close, though it would turn out that I’d see a good deal more of him in subsequent years. He was always that way. That second incident I had in mind was only three years ago or so. He was doing a gig at that enormous Barnes and Noble in Union Square. And the place was just mobbed, I mean to the extent that they’d actually had to lock the front doors some hours before it started. I was sitting a little behind and to the side of him, with a couple of others, waiting to go to dinner afterward, and I had a classic view of the kids lined up to get books signed, and it was utterly astonishing. They were being rushed through by the security people, guards snatching their books and slapping them down for Kurt to autograph, no conversation permitted, no requesting please make it “For Evelyn,” just snatch, slap, accept it back, and down the nearby escalator you go. But I kept gauging their faces. As I said, again relatively young people, most of them. And it wasn’t the predictable look of excitement or admiration you’d see with virtually any other famous author, or even awe, but I swear, there was something almost religious-seeming in it. Is that a ridiculous exaggeration? The more reasonable word I’m looking for is “devotion,” maybe. Which probably comes closest to what they felt for him. At any rate, this had been going on for an eternity, and with Kurt eventually in a state of near exhaustion, when a voice came wafting back up from the escalator well, one of the women who’d been shunted down by security: “God bless you, Mr. Vonnegut!” It was unimaginably moving. Not just the sentiment, but the allusion to that title of Kurt’s also. Then a while later, when we ourselves were finally leaving—in our case, via an elevator—I asked Kurt if he’d heard it. And when he said he hadn’t, and I started to tell him about it, he immediately cut me off. “Wait, listen, that reminds me—“ and he commenced to tell me about something kind he’d heard someone say about one of my books. How do you match that? Believe me, there may have been better writers in his time than Kurt—well, we know there were—but surely there couldn’t have been many more generous human beings.