This is Not a Novel and Other Novels

by David Markson

  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.

  VANISHING POINT

  For Johanna and Scott

  For Nicole and Jed

  Every so often, a painter has to destroy painting.

  Cézanne did it. Picasso did it with cubism. Then Pollock did it.

  He busted our idea of a picture all to hell.

  —Willem de Kooning

  As we get older we do not get any younger.

  —Henry Reed, Chard Whitlow

  Author has finally started to put his notes into manuscript form.

  A seascape by Henri Matisse was once hung upside down in the Museum of Modern Art in New York—and left that way for a month and a half.

  The speedometer needle after the crash that killed Albert Camus was frozen at 145, in kilometers—meaning roughly ninety miles per hour.

  The driver of another vehicle said the car had passed him going faster than that.

  Leonardo da Vinci’s father had four wives.

  Not one of whom was Leonardo’s mother.

  An early intention was that Hector Berlioz would become a physician.

  Until he went headlong out a hospital window during his first dissection.

  Author had been scribbling the notes on three-by-five-inch index cards. They now come close to filling two shoebox tops taped together end to end.

  Bertrand Russell was twenty-one years older than Wilfred Owen.

  And would still be alive fifty-two years after Owen was machine-gunned in France in World War I.

  Orchestra play like pig.

  Being an Arturo Toscanini explanation of why he would not apologize to his Metropolitan Opera musicians after cursing at them in Italian.

  Twenty-five years after she broke off their relationship, Charles Dickens had a tryst with Maria Beadnell, his still-remembered first love.

  And found her fat and foolishly affected and wholly witless.

  From the earliest biographical note on Rembrandt:

  He could read only the simplest Dutch. And that haltingly.

  Rembrandt.

  Werner Heisenberg was thirty-one when he won the Nobel Prize.

  And nine years earlier had been given a grade of C on his doctoral examinations.

  By his own admission, William Butler Yeats, at twenty-seven, had not yet ever kissed a woman.

  The Bodleian Library at Oxford, in the mid-seventeenth century, exchanged its First Folio Shakespeare for a Third—on the premise that the latter was more complete.

  Actually, Author could have begun to type some weeks ago. For whatever reason, he’s been procrastinating.

  Karl Marx never in his life saw the inside of a factory.

  Visiting Maecenas at Rome, in the decades before the beginning of the common era, Virgil and Horace were able to use his heated swimming pool.

  At thirty-seven, in Key West, Ernest Hemingway badly marked up Wallace Stevens’ face in a never fully explained fistfight.

  Stevens was fifty-seven when it happened.

  One hundred and sixteen thousand viewers had strolled past Le Bateau, the upside-down Matisse, without comment, before it was rehung correctly.

  At the age of seven or eight, Sigmund Freud once deliberately urinated on the floor of his parents’ bedroom.

  Aaron Copland, on listening to Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Fifth Symphony:

  Like staring at a cow for forty-five minutes.

  Mark Twain forgot Becky Thatcher’s name in the eight years between Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn. And called her Bessie Thatcher in the later book.

  Thomas Hardy’s anecdote about looking up a word in the dictionary because he wasn’t certain it existed—and finding that he himself was the only authority cited for its usage.

  Realizing that all of Byron’s closest friends—Shelley, for instance—would have addressed him as my lord.

  Corinna once defeated Pindar five times in a sequence of poetry contests at Thebes.

  Pindar called her a sow.

  Emerson was once quoted as having criticized Swinburne.

  Swinburne called him a toothless baboon.

  Stuff Melville dismissed Emerson as.

  I.e., as in stuff and nonsense.

  Conducting Don Giovanni in Boston in 1913, Felix Weingartner actually set aside his baton and joined in the applause after John McCormack’s II mio tesoro.

  One reason for Author’s procrastination is that he seems not to have had much energy lately, to tell the truth.

  For work, or for much of anything else.

  At seventy-three, Charles Ives won a Pulitzer Prize for his Third Symphony.

  Which he had written when he was thirty.

  Keats. Wondering aloud where Shakespeare was sitting when he wrote To be or not to be.

  Now and again, Picasso utilized the whitewashed walls of rented villas to sketch on. Once, a landlord demanded fifty francs for a fresh coat of paint—

  Leaving for Picasso’s amusement years later the question of what the man had cost himself.

  I can’t listen to music too often. It makes you want to say stupid, nice things.

  Said Lenin.

  The legend that nine months after his death, Dante appeared to one of his sons in a dream and told him where to find the last thirteen cantos of the Paradiso, until then believed to be unwritten.

  Erwin Panofsky was on leave from Hamburg University in 1933, teaching in New York, when he received a telegram stating that as a Jew he was therewith dismissed from his German position.

  Affixed to the message on a separate colored strip: Cordial Easter Greetings, Western Union.

  Tolstoy, to Chekhov:

  You know I can’t stand Shakespeare’s plays, but yours are worse.

  A Joshua Reynolds self-portrait—with a bust of Michelangelo in the background.

  A Hogarth—with his dog.

  Basic research is what I am doing when I don’t know what I am doing.

  Determined Wernher von Braun.

  Nikolay Gogol’s possessions at the time of his death were little better than those of a pauper.

  But did include a gold watch that had been Pushkin’s.

  In the week before his suicide at seventeen, Thomas Chatterton is known to have lived on a single loaf of stale bread—stale to begin with, being all he could get on credit.

  Shakespeare’s first child, his daughter Susanna, was born one day less than six months after his and Anne Hathaway’s marriage license was issued.

  Shakespeare’s twins, Hamnet and Judith, were born less than two years later—a little less than three months before he turned twenty-one.

  Mozart’s marital infidelities.

  The suspicion re Constanze’s.

  Author assumes that much of his lack of energy is simply a matter of age. But it’s been excessive, most recently.

  Saint Anselm was said to have frequently excused himself from critical church meetings—to sit and read.

  Vivaldi was said to have several times abruptly left the altar in the middle of saying Mass—to scribble down musical notations.

  Queen Victoria once wrote to Lewis Carroll, at Oxford, asking for a copy of his next book—

  And received an inscribed edition of An Elementary Treatise on Determinants.

  I do at least three paintings a day in my head. What’s the use of spoiling canvas when nobody will buy anything?

  Said Modigliani, penniless in Paris in his mid-twenties.

  Anna Akhmatova’s memoir, fifty-four years later, of her affair with Modigliani in 1911. Sitting in the rain under an unreliable umbrella in the Luxembourg Gardens and reciting Verlaine to each other—unable to afford anything grander.

  Bessie Smith may have been left to bleed to death at a Mississippi roadside after an automobile accident when an ambulance first took away a less seve
rely injured white woman.

  Or did she die en route to a second hospital after having been refused admittance at a first?

  Winston Churchill failed Latin at Harrow.

  As did Napoleon at Brienne.

  Living in a single attic room in The Hague for the last seven years before his death at forty-four, Spinoza was known to sometimes go as long as three full months without once stepping out of doors.

  Occasions on which the Nazis returned the ashes of murdered prisoners to their families.

  Via parcel post.

  From an early New York Times review of Prokofiev:

  There are a few passages, but only a very few, that bear recognizable kinship with what has hitherto been considered music.

  Balzac’s first noteworthy mistress was twenty-two years older than he.

  And the mother of seven children.

  Except in music, Beethoven had no schooling whatever after the age of eleven.

  Having cut, burned, punctured, and tormented the patient, the physician then demands a fee that he does not deserve.

  Said Heraclitus, twenty-five hundred years ago.

  Equally long ago—when Xenophanes called it unjust that athletes were more highly honored than teachers.

  Al Jolson’s first performances, when young and often hungry:

  Singing Rosie, You Are My Posy in a Bowery saloon—for a free meal.

  Then again, Author doesn’t feel he’s lost much time by not typing, since he’s done a good deal of shuffling and re-arranging of the index cards. Author is pretty sure that most of them are basically in the sequence he wants.

  The greatest work of art ever, Karlheinz Stockhausen called the destruction of the World Trade Center.

  On the wall in Gerhard Richter’s studio at the time also—a photo of the same event.

  If you want to know how you really feel about someone, take note of the impression an unexpected letter from him makes on you when you first see it on the doormat.

  Said Schopenhauer.

  Alexander Pope, who was denied burial in the Poets’ Corner at Westminster Abbey:

  Having been Catholic.

  Byron, likewise:

  Having been Byron.

  Nothing preposterous can ever be said that hasn’t already been said by one of the philosophers.

  Said Cicero.

  The nunnery that was shut down in England in 1520 because—quote—of the dissolute disposition and incontinence of the religious women of the house, by reason of the vicinity of Cambridge University

  All four of Richard Wright’s grandparents were former slaves.

  Juvenal, explaining the impossibility of living in a second-century Rome rife with vulgarity, noise, theft, myriad nightmare dangers such as fires and/or roofs collapsing, et cetera:

  Not to add poets endlessly reading their work even in the worst heat of August.

  I ain’t got no quarrel with the Viet Cong. No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.

  Said Muhammad Ali.

  What cause have I to war at thy decree?

  The distant Trojans never injured me.

  Says Achilles, in Pope’s translation of the Iliad.

  Marthe Boursin, whom Pierre Bonnard used as his model for Blue Nude in 1899.

  And for Nude in the Bath—finished in 1946.

  Charles Darwin was known to slice a fat book in half, to make it easier to handle.

  Or to rip out any sections he was not interested in.

  According to a friend who was in the room, Schubert composed his setting for Goethe’s Erlkonig in virtually less time than it had taken him to read the poem.

  Scholars who are convinced that Shakespeare must certainly have been a military man. Or a lawyer. Or closely associated with royalty. Or even a Jew.

  To which Ellen Terry: Or surely a woman.

  Michelangelo once criticized the fact that Raphael was unfailingly accompanied by an entourage of pupils and admirers, saying he went parading about like a general—

  To which Raphael: And you go about alone like a hangman.

  Not that rearranging his notes means that Author has any real idea where the book is headed, on the other hand.

  Ideally, in fact, it will wind up someplace that will surprise even Author himself.

  Among the graffiti at Pompeii: Sarnius, Cornelio, suspendere.

  Samius to Cornelius—Go hang yourself.

  As an avowed admirer, Benjamin Franklin greatly hoped to meet Edward Gibbon. Gibbon declined.

  Unwilling, he said, to socialize with someone who had revolted against his king.

  A woman named Lorna Wilmott, who once let Dylan Thomas borrow her London flat. And returned to find that he had pawned her typewriter, her phonograph, the silver and her fur coat.

  Maxim Gorky was the grandson of a Volga boatman.

  A last castrato could still be heard in the Sistine Chapel choir into the second decade of the twentieth century.

  The world goeth fast from bad to worse, said John Gower. Ca. 1375.

  Richard Wagner’s pink underwear.

  William Blake, at thirty, witnessed the death from consumption of his younger brother Robert—

  And insisted he had seen Robert’s soul rising through the ceiling and clapping its hands for joy.

  Maurice Utrillo was in and out of insane asylums repeatedly, commencing as early as at eighteen.

  A mass of soapsuds and whitewash, said a critic of a Turner painting of a storm at sea.

  I wonder what they think the sea’s like, said Turner.

  Shelley wrote most of Prometheus Unbound perched high up on the overgrown ruins of the Baths of Caracalla.

  One hundred and seventy years too early to have found himself in an ideal seat for the first concert of the Three Tenors.

  Nonlinear. Discontinuous. Collage-like. An assemblage.

  As is already more than self-evident.

  I am I because my little dog knows me.

  Said Gertrude Stein.

  Dope makes me come out all over in spots.

  Allen Ginsberg says Dame Edith Sitwell said.

  The first two publishers to whom Anne Frank’s father submitted her diary—turned it down.

  Bysshe, everyone knew him as.

  Momentarily startled to note that Luther’s wife was an ex-nun.

  Then again recollecting that Luther in turn was an ex-monk.

  Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were held in such esteem that in the century after their deaths Athens maintained official versions of their plays on file—and made it contrary to law to alter a single word in new productions.

  Victor Hugo could never get past page four of Le Rouge et le Noir.

  As he grew older, W. H. Auden was known for living in extraordinary filth. His own brother acknowledged that he frequently urinated in his kitchen sink.

  He is the dirtiest man I have ever liked, Stravinsky said of him.

  Was it Menander who announced that his new play was finished—all he had to do was write it?

  A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel.

  This presumably by now self-evident also.

  The Egyptians appear never in their history to have enjoyed one day of freedom.

  Said Josephus, ca. 95 AD.

  Beguiled by the romance of Gauguin’s removal to Tahiti.

  Until remembering that the man deserted a wife and four young children at home.

  I suppose all my books are gone.

  Some, Dilly said. We had to.

  Boccaccio’s last years were spent in enervating poverty.

  In his will, Petrarch left him his own best heavy coat with which to confront the Tuscan winters.

  Bach was once involved in a brawl in which he precipitously drew his sword.

  Handel, the same. Though in both instances sensibleness prevailed.

  Thomas Gainsborough, while an art student in London:

  Deeply read in petticoats I am.

  Dissection of corpses was
not only illegal in Renaissance Florence, but punishable by death.

  Leonardo managed to cleave into some thirty-odd nonetheless.

  In his youth, Michelangelo performed some of his with a kitchen knife and household scissors.

  Leonardo was also assiduous in attending executions—presumably to study the muscular contortions of the hanged.

  Christopher Marlowe died at twenty-nine, leaving behind four younger sisters in Canterbury. All four probably had to make their mark instead of writing their name when signing a document.

  The Captain Thomas Hardy—a relative—who was in command of Nelson’s flagship at Trafalgar.

  The Marshal Ludwig Wittgenstein—not related—who was the youngest of the opposition commanders during Napoleon’s Russian campaign.

  How many things there are in this world that I do not want.

  Said Socrates, strolling through a marketplace in Athens.

  There was no English translation of Oedipus Rex until a full century after the death of Shakespeare.

  Sydney, Australia, Nellie Melba died in.

  A mention of Henry David Thoreau in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s diary: Mr. Thorow.

  Ugly as sin, the same entry calls him.

  T. S. Eliot was afraid of cows.

  Actually, in addition to not knowing where things might be headed, Author has to wonder whether his very typewriter will get there in the process. His less and less dependable forty-plus-year-old manual portable.

  Particularly with the once ubiquitous neighborhood repair shop seeming no longer to exist.