This is Not a Novel and Other Novels
Page 9
What’s this? Can’t spare an hour and a half? Wait, wait. Our matinee special, today only! Watch Professor Bloom eviscerate the Pears-McGuinness translation of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus—eight minutes and twenty-nine seconds flat! Guaranteed.
Mine eyes have seen the glory
Of Rabindranath Tagore.
Paul Celan’s visit to Todtnauberg.
Galileo died blind.
Journalist: May I see Georgia O’Keeffe?
Georgia O’Keeffe: You have.
Samuel Johnson, on criticism:
A fly, Sir, may sting a stately horse and make him wince, but one is but an insect, and the other is a horse still.
Gentes and laitymen, fullstoppers and semicolonials, hybreds and lubberds!
Louis Sockalexis was an epileptic.
Alfred Stieglitz died of a stroke.
The Samuel Butler who wrote Hudibras died in poverty.
A Latin translation of Marco Polo once belonging to Christopher Columbus is extant in Seville. With seventy marginal notes in Columbus’s handwriting.
Mainly in regard to the whereabouts of treasure.
Jim Thorpe died of a heart attack.
Allowed out of his steel military cage at Pisa for exercise, Ezra Pound sometimes swung a broom handle as if it were a baseball bat.
Who do you make believe is pitching to you, Uncle Ez?
Can’t you see Dizzy Dean out there, soldier?
From Suetonius, a description of Vespasian:
Habitually wearing the expression of someone who is straining at stool.
Meyer Lansky was a subscriber to the Book-of-the-Month Club.
Photography is not an art.
Writer talking to himself again.
As did Hölderlin, in addition to Yeats.
Writer suspects Hesoid likewise, even if long beyond any possibility of verification.
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.
Cortés. 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.
Ceci n’est pas un conte. Diderot, 1772.
Ceci n’est pas une pipe. 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.<
br />
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 Mallarmé 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 raisonné.
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.
Anaïs 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 à la William Tell.
The Egyptian Book of the Dead. From papyri and pyramid inscriptions dated as early as 1580 BC.
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.
Stockholm, Greta Garbo’s ashes were buried near.
They’re going to cut a street through.
They would, Bill said.
Plutarch says that to force himself to study oratory, Demosthenes once shaved half his head—so that he would be too embarrassed to leave his house.
Though with Writer also now recalling the refrain from Dunbar’s Lament for the Makers, about the deaths of such as Chaucer and Lydgate and Henryson and Gower:
Timor mortis conturbat me.
The fear of death distresses me.
And what is the use of a book, thought Alice, without pictures or conversations?
There is no such thing as a great movie. A Rembrandt is great. Mozart chamber music.
Said Marlon Brando.
Eliot died of emphysema in conjunction with a damaged heart.
Pound died of a blocked intestine.
Being less than surprised that Rouault began his career working at stained-glass windows.
She said he was a village explainer, excellent if you were a village, but if you were not, not.
Otello. Verdi was seventy-four.
Falstaff. Verdi was eighty.
Office of the Dead.
The friendship of John Donne and Isaak Walton.
Rudolph Valentino died of a perforated ulcer.
Trollope, as remembered by a schoolmate at Harrow:
Without exception the most slovenly and dirty boy I ever met.
Ben Shahn died of a heart attack after surgery.
Andy Warhol died after gallbladder surgery.
East Coker, for Eliot’s ashes.
Roman Jakobson, in opposition to a novelist, namely Nabokov, teaching literature at Harvard:
Should an elephant teach zoology?
Arnold Schoenberg and George Gershwin were tennis partners.
John Donne. Anne Donne. Undone.
Camoëns died unknown and penniless in a plague.
Don’t think we fear their vast numbers, Sire. They’ll not stand the stink of goat that clings to us.
For centuries, in England:
The burial of a suicide under a high road, ideally at a crossroads.
And with a wooden stake driven into his/her heart.
Bertolt Brecht wrote a poem about one of the Dempsey-Tunney fights.
Xanthippe was a shrew.
Living with her teaches me to get along with the rest of the world, Socrates said.
Gershwin died of a brain tumor.
Edward MacDowell died mad, probably from syphilis.
Manolete. Islero. Linares.
The wife of Johann Strauss, Jr., once asked Brahms for an autograph. Brahms sketched out the opening notations for the Blue Danube.
And signed them Alas, not by Johannes Brahms.
Ronsard me célébrait du temps que j’étais belle.
Wolfgang Pauli: You probably think these ideas are crazy.
Niels Bohr: Unfortunately they are not crazy enough.
Katyn.
Nanking.
Kyd’s scene in The Spanish Tragedy where Hieronimo finds the corpse of his son hanged from a tree in his garden.
Luciano Pavarotti’s inability to read music.