This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

by David Markson

  Herman Melville Boulevard is where, in Manhattan?

  Twelve blocks north from the wishful-thinking intersection of Mark Rothko Road and Hart Crane Place.

  The poetical fame of Ausonius condemns the taste of his age, Gibbon said.

  But specially his wife lay sore upon him to attempt the thing, as she that was very ambitious, burning in unquenchable desire to bear the name of a Queen.

  —Adding up to the sum total of what Shakespeare found in Holinshed from which he created Lady Macbeth.

  The friendship of Paula Becker and Clara Westhoff.

  Claudia Muzio was illegitimate.

  Jenny Lind was illegitimate.

  Voltaire’s second wife was his own sister’s daughter.

  A passing thought of Kurt Vonnegut’s, re Princess Diana:

  Do we know if she ever read a book?

  Title of an unfinished composition by Charles Ives:

  Giants vs. Cubs, August 1907, Polo Grounds.

  Ives died of heart disease compounded by diabetes.

  Well, Bourrienne, you too will be immortal.

  Why, General Bonaparte?

  Are you not my secretary?

  Tell me the name of Alexander’s.

  Hm, that is not bad, Bourrienne.

  Haydn’s father was a wheelwright.

  The legend that Donatello almost supernaturally refused to die until his commonplace crucifix could be replaced by one carved by Brunelleschi.

  But go, and if you listen she will call.

  Eight people appeared at Robert Musil’s funeral.

  F. Scott Fitzgerald died of a sequence of heart attacks.

  His most recent royalty statement showed seven copies of The Great Gatsby sold during the preceding six months.

  The claim that John Wesley preached more than forty thousand sermons.

  Marc Blitzstein. Elliott Carter. Aaron Copland. David Diamond. Roy Harris. Walter Piston. Roger Sessions. Virgil Thomson.

  All studied with Nadia Boulanger at Fontainebleau.

  Dave Brubeck studied with Arnold Schoenberg and with Darius Milhaud.

  Corbière died of tuberculosis at thirty.

  Novalis died of tuberculosis at twenty-eight.

  Laforgue was twenty-seven.

  Basically every justification for persecution on the part of the Inquisition was at hand in St. Augustine.

  As anyone’s justification for censorship is ready in Plato.

  J. R. R. Tolkien died of a chest infection while hospitalized for something else.

  Ausonius once composed a poem to his writing paper.

  The literary fame of The Bonfire of the Vanities condemns the taste of its age.

  Mary Mapes Dodge.

  Index Librorum Prohibitorum.

  Don’t come to us with your troubles. If you can’t make enough money to live on, you can jump out the window or drown yourself.

  Which Maria Callas vehemently denied having said to her mother.

  The vasty hall of death.

  Émile Verhaeren died in a fall under a train.

  Arcangelo Corelli owned paintings by Bruegel and Poussin.

  Adrienne Lecouvreur died of what was apparently rectal cancer.

  Though in the Cilèa opera is poisoned, which had been a rumor.

  But in either event was buried by torchlight in a field beside the Seine—as an actress, forbidden sanctified ground.

  Maria Caniglia. Magda Olivero. Renata Tebaldi.

  One of St. Teresa of Ávila’s grandfathers was Jewish.

  Jongkind died mad.

  Hugo Wolf died mad.

  Blake, at their only meeting, re Constable’s pencil sketches: Why, this is not drawing, but inspiration.

  I always meant it for drawing, Constable said.

  The peculiar immortality of Sulpicia.

  Six love poems, totaling only forty lines, and customarily tacked onto the collected work of Tibullus.

  For two full thousand years.

  Callas died in Paris, of a heart attack.

  And was buried from a Greek Orthodox church on the rue Georges Bizet.

  Tatiana Troyanos died of cervical cancer.

  Writer’s pleasure in realizing that the translation of Rabelais he most recently read was done by the father of Tanaquil LeClercq.

  The Hay Wain.

  Billie Holiday died of a kidney infection after years of heroin abuse.

  Mornings, when the leaves are dewy, some of them are like jewels where the earliest sunlight glistens.

  Who but my darling Greensleeves?

  And Arthur was so bloody, that by his shield there might no man know him, for all was blood and brains on his sword.

  Sir Thomas Urquhart. Peter Motteux.

  Did Miss Linda Stillwagon ever see the poem?

  John Singer Sargent died reading Voltaire.

  Please, sir, I want some more.

  Does Temple Drake ever go back and graduate from the University of Mississippi?

  Merle Hapes. Junie Hovious.

  Is it in The Merry Wives of Windsor, where Greensleeves is mentioned? Even twice?

  Gluck died after a series of strokes.

  Worms feed on Hector brave.

  Siegfried Sassoon threw his Military Cross into the Mersey in disgust with the waste of war.

  Mina Loy, already suffering advanced spinal osteoarthritis, died of pneumonia.

  In one of his less balanced periods, Robert Lowell penciled in some revisions in Milton’s Lycidas.

  And insisted he was the author of the entire poem.

  An anthology of extraordinary suicide notes.

  Or of any suicide notes. Is there such?

  Dorothy Parker died of a heart attack.

  Kenneth Tynan died of emphysema.

  He doesn’t want me to have a life of my own.

  Says Sonia Tolstoy’s Diary.

  Machiavelli died of unidentified stomach spasms.

  Addie Joss died of tubercular meningitis.

  Are we ever told what Addie Bundren dies of?

  Lawrence Durrell was found dead in a bathroom.

  Paulette Goddard died of heart failure.

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

  Augustus Montague Toplady.

  Ignorant asses, John Webster repudiated the Elizabethan theater audience as.

  Get thee to a brewery.

  Sailing the circumference of Lake Geneva, Byron and Shelley took time to pay homage at the house in Lausanne where Gibbon had written a great deal of The Decline and Fall.

  Hey, Dad, sharp this for me, please?

  Theodore Watts-Dunton was said to sometimes hide Swinburne’s shoes—as a way of keeping him from drinking.

  From the King James Ecclesiastes:

  One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh: but the earth abideth for ever.

  From the Revised Standard Version:

  A generation goes and a generation comes, but the earth remains forever.

  From the King James Song of Solomon:

  Our vines have tender grapes.

  From the Revised Standard:

  Our vineyards are in blossom.

  James Baldwin died of cancer of the esophagus.

  Michael Harrington died of cancer of the esophagus.

  S. S. Orizaba.

  You never have music here, do you.

  It makes me nervous.

  Mozart was addicted to billiards.

  Frances Farmer died of throat cancer.

  Martha Argerich.

  André Breton died of heart failure precipitated by massive asthma attacks.

  Eddie Poe, Edgar Allan was commonly called.

  Leslie Howard died in a plane shot down by the Germans in World War II.

  William Gaddis died of prostate cancer.

  Velázquez was unconditionally dismissive of Raphael as a painter.

  George Meredith died of what was called a chill.

/>   Arrigo Boito died after catching the same in church.

  John Gay died of what was called colic but was most probably stomach cancer.

  Wallace Stevens once worked briefly as a newspaper reporter.

  And was assigned to cover Stephen Crane’s funeral.

  Zane Grey was a dentist.

  This skull is Helen.

  Divinités du Styx.

  Art which is not propaganda is not art, said Diego Rivera.

  Writer’s arse.

  Edgairpo.

  For a time as young men Delacroix and Bonington shared a studio.

  Tony Lazzeri died in a fall down a flight of stairs during an epileptic seizure.

  Early in the morning I go to the rear blackboard and draw a small dollar sign. No one notices. The janitor who washes the blackboards every night must surely guess why it’s there.

  Rachel Carson died of breast cancer.

  St. Perpetua. Requesting a pin to fasten her hair—before guiding the gladiator’s sword to her throat in the arena at Carthage.

  Thomas More. Jesting on the scaffold and lifting aside his beard—before being beheaded.

  Was Bede the first historian to date events BC and AD?

  Lotte Lenya died of abdominal cancer.

  Teresa Stratas had essentially camped out at her bedside for weeks, so that she would not die alone.

  I shall not cease to fear Carthage until I know it is utterly destroyed, Cato said.

  A son of Ring Lardner’s died fighting with the Lincoln Brigade in Spain in 1938.

  A son of Ring Lardner’s died as a correspondent when his jeep hit a mine in World War II.

  Sibelius died of a cerebral hemorrhage.

  Pauline Viardot. Who sang the first performance of Brahms’ Alto Rhapsody.

  And may have had an illegitimate child by Turgenev.

  Johann Uhr, the Royal Armorer.

  Ford Madox Ford died of heart failure.

  The Cartesian Soul of Frank Sinatra.

  Having been the subtitle of an actual academic paper delivered at Hofstra University in 1998.

  Dear God! the very houses seemed asleep.

  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 Horne’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 Lagerlöf died of peritonitis.

  Es inevitable la muerta del Papa.

  Béla Bartók died of leukemia.

  Charles Péguy 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 interconnective 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 Frédéric 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. Zurbarán’s.

  Ambrogio Lorenzetti’s.

  Mary McCarthy died of lung cancer.

  Hermann Prey died of a heart attack.

&
nbsp; 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.